On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred What on Earth deserves our trust? Youth and Beauty both are dust. Long we gathering are with pain, What one moment calls again. Seven years childless marriage past, A Son, a son is born at last: So exactly lim’d and fair, Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air, As a long life promised, Yet, in less than six weeks dead. Too promising, too great a mind In so small room to be confined: Therefore, as fit in Heaven to dwell, He quickly broke the Prison shell. So the subtle Alchemist, Can’t with Hermes Seal resist The powerful spirit’s subtler flight, But t’will bid him long good night. And so the Sun if it arise Half so glorious as his Eyes, Like this Infant, takes a shrowd, Buried in a morning Cloud.
1 Come, my Lucasia, since we see  That Miracles Mens faith do move, By wonder and by prodigy  To the dull angry world let’s prove  There’s a Religion in our Love. 2 For though we were design’d t’ agree,  That Fate no liberty destroyes, But our Election is as free  As Angels, who with greedy choice  Are yet determin’d to their joyes. 3 Our hearts are doubled by the loss,  Here Mixture is Addition grown ; We both diffuse, and both ingross :  And we whose minds are so much one,  Never, yet ever are alone. 4 We court our own Captivity  Than Thrones more great and innocent : ’Twere banishment to be set free,  Since we wear fetters whose intent  Not Bondage is, but Ornament. 5 Divided joyes are tedious found,  And griefs united easier grow : We are our selves but by rebound,  And all our Titles shuffled so,  Both Princes, and both Subjects too. 6 Our Hearts are mutual Victims laid,  While they (such power in Friendship lies) Are Altars, Priests, and Off’rings made :  And each Heart which thus kindly dies,  Grows deathless by the Sacrifice.
See, the grass is full of stars, Fallen in their brightness; Hearts they have of shining gold, Rays of shining whiteness. Buttercups have honeyed hearts, Bees they love the clover, But I love the daisies' dance All the meadow over. Blow, O blow, you happy winds, Singing summer's praises, Up the field and down the field A-dancing with the daisies.
I chose the place where I would rest When death should come to claim me, With the red-rose roots to wrap my breast And a quiet stone to name me. But I am laid on a northern steep With the roaring tides below me, And only the frosts to bind my sleep, And only the winds to know me.
It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.
In visions of the dark night  I have dreamed of joy departed— But a waking dream of life and light  Hath left me broken-hearted. Ah! what is not a dream by day  To him whose eyes are cast On things around him with a ray  Turned back upon the past? That holy dream—that holy dream,  While all the world were chiding, Hath cheered me as a lovely beam  A lonely spirit guiding. What though that light, thro' storm and night,  So trembled from afar— What could there be more purely bright  In Truth's day-star?
Thank Heaven! the crisis,  The danger, is past, And the lingering illness  Is over at last— And the fever called "Living"  Is conquered at last. Sadly, I know  I am shorn of my strength, And no muscle I move  As I lie at full length— But no matter!—I feel  I am better at length. And I rest so composedly,  Now, in my bed, That any beholder  Might fancy me dead— Might start at beholding me,  Thinking me dead. The moaning and groaning,  The sighing and sobbing, Are quieted now,  With that horrible throbbing At heart:—ah, that horrible,  Horrible throbbing! The sickness—the nausea—  The pitiless pain— Have ceased, with the fever  That maddened my brain— With the fever called "Living"  That burned in my brain. And oh! of all tortures That torture the worst Has abated—the terrible  Torture of thirst For the naphthaline river  Of Passion accurst:— I have drank of a water  That quenches all thirst:— Of a water that flows,  With a lullaby sound, From a spring but a very few  Feet under ground— From a cavern not very far  Down under ground. And ah! let it never  Be foolishly said That my room it is gloomy  And narrow my bed; For man never slept  In a different bed— And, to sleep, you must slumber  In just such a bed. My tantalized spirit  Here blandly reposes, Forgetting, or never  Regretting, its roses— Its old agitations  Of myrtles and roses: For now, while so quietly  Lying, it fancies A holier odor  About it, of pansies— A rosemary odor,  Commingled with pansies— With rue and the beautiful  Puritan pansies. And so it lies happily,  Bathing in many A dream of the truth  And the beauty of Annie— Drowned in a bath  Of the tresses of Annie. She tenderly kissed me,  She fondly caressed, And then I fell gently  To sleep on her breast— Deeply to sleep  From the heaven of her breast. When the light was extinguished,  She covered me warm, And she prayed to the angels  To keep me from harm— To the queen of the angels  To shield me from harm. And I lie so composedly,  Now, in my bed, (Knowing her love)  That you fancy me dead— And I rest so contentedly,  Now in my bed (With her love at my breast).  That you fancy me dead— That you shudder to look at me,  Thinking me dead:— But my heart it is brighter  Than all of the many Stars in the sky,  For it sparkles with Annie— It glows with the light  Of the love of my Annie— With the thought of the light  Of the eyes of my Annie.
What beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade? 'Tis she!—but why that bleeding bosom gor'd, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword? Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell, Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well? To bear too tender, or too firm a heart, To act a lover's or a Roman's part? Is there no bright reversion in the sky, For those who greatly think, or bravely die?  Why bade ye else, ye pow'rs! her soul aspire Above the vulgar flight of low desire? Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes; The glorious fault of angels and of gods; Thence to their images on earth it flows, And in the breasts of kings and heroes glows. Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age, Dull sullen pris'ners in the body's cage: Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres; Like eastern kings a lazy state they keep, And close confin'd to their own palace, sleep.  From these perhaps (ere nature bade her die) Fate snatch'd her early to the pitying sky. As into air the purer spirits flow, And sep'rate from their kindred dregs below; So flew the soul to its congenial place, Nor left one virtue to redeem her race.  But thou, false guardian of a charge too good, Thou, mean deserter of thy brother's blood! See on these ruby lips the trembling breath, These cheeks now fading at the blast of death: Cold is that breast which warm'd the world before, And those love-darting eyes must roll no more. Thus, if eternal justice rules the ball, Thus shall your wives, and thus your children fall; On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates. There passengers shall stand, and pointing say, (While the long fun'rals blacken all the way) "Lo these were they, whose souls the furies steel'd, And curs'd with hearts unknowing how to yield. Thus unlamented pass the proud away, The gaze of fools, and pageant of a day! So perish all, whose breast ne'er learn'd to glow For others' good, or melt at others' woe."  What can atone (oh ever-injur'd shade!) Thy fate unpitied, and thy rites unpaid? No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear Pleas'd thy pale ghost, or grac'd thy mournful bier. By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd, By foreign hands thy decent limbs compos'd, By foreign hands thy humble grave adorn'd, By strangers honour'd, and by strangers mourn'd! What though no friends in sable weeds appear, Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year, And bear about the mockery of woe To midnight dances, and the public show? What though no weeping loves thy ashes grace, Nor polish'd marble emulate thy face? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb? Yet shall thy grave with rising flow'rs be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast: There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow, There the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with their silver wings o'ershade The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.  So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name, What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. How lov'd, how honour'd once, avails thee not, To whom related, or by whom begot; A heap of dust alone remains of thee, 'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!  Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung, Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the gen'rous tear he pays; Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part, And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart, Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er, The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!
In these deep solitudes and awful cells, Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells, And ever-musing melancholy reigns; What means this tumult in a vestal's veins? Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat? Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat? Yet, yet I love!—From Abelard it came, And Eloisa yet must kiss the name.  Dear fatal name! rest ever unreveal'd, Nor pass these lips in holy silence seal'd. Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise, Where mix'd with God's, his lov'd idea lies: O write it not, my hand—the name appears Already written—wash it out, my tears! In vain lost Eloisa weeps and prays, Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys.  Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains: Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees have worn; Ye grots and caverns shagg'd with horrid thorn! Shrines! where their vigils pale-ey'd virgins keep, And pitying saints, whose statues learn to weep! Though cold like you, unmov'd, and silent grown, I have not yet forgot myself to stone. All is not Heav'n's while Abelard has part, Still rebel nature holds out half my heart; Nor pray'rs nor fasts its stubborn pulse restrain, Nor tears, for ages, taught to flow in vain.  Soon as thy letters trembling I unclose, That well-known name awakens all my woes. Oh name for ever sad! for ever dear! Still breath'd in sighs, still usher'd with a tear. I tremble too, where'er my own I find, Some dire misfortune follows close behind. Line after line my gushing eyes o'erflow, Led through a sad variety of woe: Now warm in love, now with'ring in thy bloom, Lost in a convent's solitary gloom! There stern religion quench'd th' unwilling flame, There died the best of passions, love and fame.  Yet write, oh write me all, that I may join Griefs to thy griefs, and echo sighs to thine. Nor foes nor fortune take this pow'r away; And is my Abelard less kind than they? Tears still are mine, and those I need not spare, Love but demands what else were shed in pray'r; No happier task these faded eyes pursue; To read and weep is all they now can do.  Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief; Ah, more than share it! give me all thy grief. Heav'n first taught letters for some wretch's aid, Some banish'd lover, or some captive maid; They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires, Warm from the soul, and faithful to its fires, The virgin's wish without her fears impart, Excuse the blush, and pour out all the heart, Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul, And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.  Thou know'st how guiltless first I met thy flame, When Love approach'd me under Friendship's name; My fancy form'd thee of angelic kind, Some emanation of th' all-beauteous Mind. Those smiling eyes, attemp'ring ev'ry day, Shone sweetly lambent with celestial day. Guiltless I gaz'd; heav'n listen'd while you sung; And truths divine came mended from that tongue. From lips like those what precept fail'd to move? Too soon they taught me 'twas no sin to love. Back through the paths of pleasing sense I ran, Nor wish'd an Angel whom I lov'd a Man. Dim and remote the joys of saints I see; Nor envy them, that heav'n I lose for thee.  How oft, when press'd to marriage, have I said, Curse on all laws but those which love has made! Love, free as air, at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies, Let wealth, let honour, wait the wedded dame, August her deed, and sacred be her fame; Before true passion all those views remove, Fame, wealth, and honour! what are you to Love? The jealous God, when we profane his fires, Those restless passions in revenge inspires; And bids them make mistaken mortals groan, Who seek in love for aught but love alone. Should at my feet the world's great master fall, Himself, his throne, his world, I'd scorn 'em all: Not Caesar's empress would I deign to prove; No, make me mistress to the man I love; If there be yet another name more free, More fond than mistress, make me that to thee! Oh happy state! when souls each other draw, When love is liberty, and nature, law: All then is full, possessing, and possess'd, No craving void left aching in the breast: Ev'n thought meets thought, ere from the lips it part, And each warm wish springs mutual from the heart. This sure is bliss (if bliss on earth there be) And once the lot of Abelard and me.  Alas, how chang'd! what sudden horrors rise! A naked lover bound and bleeding lies! Where, where was Eloise? her voice, her hand, Her poniard, had oppos'd the dire command. Barbarian, stay! that bloody stroke restrain; The crime was common, common be the pain. I can no more; by shame, by rage suppress'd, Let tears, and burning blushes speak the rest.  Canst thou forget that sad, that solemn day, When victims at yon altar's foot we lay? Canst thou forget what tears that moment fell, When, warm in youth, I bade the world farewell? As with cold lips I kiss'd the sacred veil, The shrines all trembl'd, and the lamps grew pale: Heav'n scarce believ'd the conquest it survey'd, And saints with wonder heard the vows I made. Yet then, to those dread altars as I drew, Not on the Cross my eyes were fix'd, but you: Not grace, or zeal, love only was my call, And if I lose thy love, I lose my all. Come! with thy looks, thy words, relieve my woe; Those still at least are left thee to bestow. Still on that breast enamour'd let me lie, Still drink delicious poison from thy eye, Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be press'd; Give all thou canst—and let me dream the rest. Ah no! instruct me other joys to prize, With other beauties charm my partial eyes, Full in my view set all the bright abode, And make my soul quit Abelard for God.  Ah, think at least thy flock deserves thy care, Plants of thy hand, and children of thy pray'r. From the false world in early youth they fled, By thee to mountains, wilds, and deserts led. You rais'd these hallow'd walls; the desert smil'd, And Paradise was open'd in the wild. No weeping orphan saw his father's stores Our shrines irradiate, or emblaze the floors; No silver saints, by dying misers giv'n, Here brib'd the rage of ill-requited heav'n: But such plain roofs as piety could raise, And only vocal with the Maker's praise. In these lone walls (their days eternal bound) These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crown'd, Where awful arches make a noonday night, And the dim windows shed a solemn light; Thy eyes diffus'd a reconciling ray, And gleams of glory brighten'd all the day. But now no face divine contentment wears, 'Tis all blank sadness, or continual tears. See how the force of others' pray'rs I try, (O pious fraud of am'rous charity!) But why should I on others' pray'rs depend? Come thou, my father, brother, husband, friend! Ah let thy handmaid, sister, daughter move, And all those tender names in one, thy love! The darksome pines that o'er yon rocks reclin'd Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind, The wand'ring streams that shine between the hills, The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, The dying gales that pant upon the trees, The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze; No more these scenes my meditation aid, Or lull to rest the visionary maid. But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves, Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves, Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a dread repose: Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene, Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green, Deepens the murmur of the falling floods, And breathes a browner horror on the woods.  Yet here for ever, ever must I stay; Sad proof how well a lover can obey! Death, only death, can break the lasting chain; And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain, Here all its frailties, all its flames resign, And wait till 'tis no sin to mix with thine.  Ah wretch! believ'd the spouse of God in vain, Confess'd within the slave of love and man. Assist me, Heav'n! but whence arose that pray'r? Sprung it from piety, or from despair? Ev'n here, where frozen chastity retires, Love finds an altar for forbidden fires. I ought to grieve, but cannot what I ought; I mourn the lover, not lament the fault; I view my crime, but kindle at the view, Repent old pleasures, and solicit new; Now turn'd to Heav'n, I weep my past offence, Now think of thee, and curse my innocence. Of all affliction taught a lover yet, 'Tis sure the hardest science to forget! How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, And love th' offender, yet detest th' offence? How the dear object from the crime remove, Or how distinguish penitence from love? Unequal task! a passion to resign, For hearts so touch'd, so pierc'd, so lost as mine. Ere such a soul regains its peaceful state, How often must it love, how often hate! How often hope, despair, resent, regret, Conceal, disdain—do all things but forget. But let Heav'n seize it, all at once 'tis fir'd; Not touch'd, but rapt; not waken'd, but inspir'd! Oh come! oh teach me nature to subdue, Renounce my love, my life, myself—and you. Fill my fond heart with God alone, for he Alone can rival, can succeed to thee.  How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd; Labour and rest, that equal periods keep; "Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;" Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n, Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n. Grace shines around her with serenest beams, And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams. For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms, And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes, For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring, For her white virgins hymeneals sing, To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away, And melts in visions of eternal day.  Far other dreams my erring soul employ, Far other raptures, of unholy joy: When at the close of each sad, sorrowing day, Fancy restores what vengeance snatch'd away, Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free, All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee. Oh curs'd, dear horrors of all-conscious night! How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight! Provoking Daemons all restraint remove, And stir within me every source of love. I hear thee, view thee, gaze o'er all thy charms, And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms. I wake—no more I hear, no more I view, The phantom flies me, as unkind as you. I call aloud; it hears not what I say; I stretch my empty arms; it glides away. To dream once more I close my willing eyes; Ye soft illusions, dear deceits, arise! Alas, no more—methinks we wand'ring go Through dreary wastes, and weep each other's woe, Where round some mould'ring tower pale ivy creeps, And low-brow'd rocks hang nodding o'er the deeps. Sudden you mount, you beckon from the skies; Clouds interpose, waves roar, and winds arise. I shriek, start up, the same sad prospect find, And wake to all the griefs I left behind.  For thee the fates, severely kind, ordain A cool suspense from pleasure and from pain; Thy life a long, dead calm of fix'd repose; No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows. Still as the sea, ere winds were taught to blow, Or moving spirit bade the waters flow; Soft as the slumbers of a saint forgiv'n, And mild as opening gleams of promis'd heav'n.  Come, Abelard! for what hast thou to dread? The torch of Venus burns not for the dead. Nature stands check'd; Religion disapproves; Ev'n thou art cold—yet Eloisa loves. Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those that burn To light the dead, and warm th' unfruitful urn.  What scenes appear where'er I turn my view? The dear ideas, where I fly, pursue, Rise in the grove, before the altar rise, Stain all my soul, and wanton in my eyes. I waste the matin lamp in sighs for thee, Thy image steals between my God and me, Thy voice I seem in ev'ry hymn to hear, With ev'ry bead I drop too soft a tear. When from the censer clouds of fragrance roll, And swelling organs lift the rising soul, One thought of thee puts all the pomp to flight, Priests, tapers, temples, swim before my sight: In seas of flame my plunging soul is drown'd, While altars blaze, and angels tremble round.  While prostrate here in humble grief I lie, Kind, virtuous drops just gath'ring in my eye, While praying, trembling, in the dust I roll, And dawning grace is op'ning on my soul: Come, if thou dar'st, all charming as thou art! Oppose thyself to Heav'n; dispute my heart; Come, with one glance of those deluding eyes Blot out each bright idea of the skies; Take back that grace, those sorrows, and those tears; Take back my fruitless penitence and pray'rs; Snatch me, just mounting, from the blest abode; Assist the fiends, and tear me from my God!  No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole; Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll! Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me, Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee. Thy oaths I quit, thy memory resign; Forget, renounce me, hate whate'er was mine. Fair eyes, and tempting looks (which yet I view!) Long lov'd, ador'd ideas, all adieu! Oh Grace serene! oh virtue heav'nly fair! Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care! Fresh blooming hope, gay daughter of the sky! And faith, our early immortality! Enter, each mild, each amicable guest; Receive, and wrap me in eternal rest!  See in her cell sad Eloisa spread, Propp'd on some tomb, a neighbour of the dead. In each low wind methinks a spirit calls, And more than echoes talk along the walls. Here, as I watch'd the dying lamps around, From yonder shrine I heard a hollow sound. "Come, sister, come!" (it said, or seem'd to say) "Thy place is here, sad sister, come away! Once like thyself, I trembled, wept, and pray'd, Love's victim then, though now a sainted maid: But all is calm in this eternal sleep; Here grief forgets to groan, and love to weep, Ev'n superstition loses ev'ry fear: For God, not man, absolves our frailties here."  I come, I come! prepare your roseate bow'rs, Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs. Thither, where sinners may have rest, I go, Where flames refin'd in breasts seraphic glow: Thou, Abelard! the last sad office pay, And smooth my passage to the realms of day; See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll, Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul! Ah no—in sacred vestments may'st thou stand, The hallow'd taper trembling in thy hand, Present the cross before my lifted eye, Teach me at once, and learn of me to die. Ah then, thy once-lov'd Eloisa see! It will be then no crime to gaze on me. See from my cheek the transient roses fly! See the last sparkle languish in my eye! Till ev'ry motion, pulse, and breath be o'er; And ev'n my Abelard be lov'd no more. O Death all-eloquent! you only prove What dust we dote on, when 'tis man we love.  Then too, when fate shall thy fair frame destroy, (That cause of all my guilt, and all my joy) In trance ecstatic may thy pangs be drown'd, Bright clouds descend, and angels watch thee round, From op'ning skies may streaming glories shine, And saints embrace thee with a love like mine.  May one kind grave unite each hapless name, And graft my love immortal on thy fame! Then, ages hence, when all my woes are o'er, When this rebellious heart shall beat no more; If ever chance two wand'ring lovers brings To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs, O'er the pale marble shall they join their heads, And drink the falling tears each other sheds; Then sadly say, with mutual pity mov'd, "Oh may we never love as these have lov'd!" From the full choir when loud Hosannas rise, And swell the pomp of dreadful sacrifice, Amid that scene if some relenting eye Glance on the stone where our cold relics lie, Devotion's self shall steal a thought from Heav'n, One human tear shall drop and be forgiv'n. And sure, if fate some future bard shall join In sad similitude of griefs to mine, Condemn'd whole years in absence to deplore, And image charms he must behold no more; Such if there be, who loves so long, so well; Let him our sad, our tender story tell; The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost; He best can paint 'em, who shall feel 'em most.
Nothing so true as what you once let fall, "Most Women have no Characters at all." Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.  How many pictures of one nymph we view, All how unlike each other, all how true! Arcadia's Countess, here, in ermin'd pride, Is, there, Pastora by a fountain side. Here Fannia, leering on her own good man, And there, a naked Leda with a Swan. Let then the Fair one beautifully cry, In Magdalen's loose hair and lifted eye, Or dress'd in smiles of sweet Cecilia shine, With simp'ring angels, palms, and harps divine; Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it, If folly grows romantic, I must paint it.  Come then, the colours and the ground prepare! Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air; Choose a firm cloud, before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.  Rufa, whose eye quick-glancing o'er the park, Attracts each light gay meteor of a spark, Agrees as ill with Rufa studying Locke, As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task, With Sappho fragrant at an ev'ning Masque: So morning insects that in muck begun, Shine, buzz, and flyblow in the setting sun.  How soft is Silia! fearful to offend; The frail one's advocate, the weak one's friend: To her, Calista prov'd her conduct nice, And good Simplicius asks of her advice. Sudden, she storms! she raves! You tip the wink, But spare your censure; Silia does not drink. All eyes may see from what the change arose, All eyes may see—a pimple on her nose.  Papillia, wedded to her doating spark, Sighs for the shades—"How charming is a park!" A park is purchas'd, but the fair he sees All bath'd in tears—"Oh, odious, odious trees!"  Ladies, like variegated tulips, show, 'Tis to their changes that their charms they owe; Their happy spots the nice admirer take, Fine by defect, and delicately weak. 'Twas thus Calypso once each heart alarm'd, Aw'd without virtue, without beauty charm'd; Her tongue bewitch'd as oddly as her eyes, Less wit than mimic, more a wit than wise; Strange graces still, and stranger flights she had, Was just not ugly, and was just not mad; Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create, As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate.  Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild, To make a wash, would hardly stew a child; Has ev'n been prov'd to grant a lover's pray'r, And paid a tradesman once to make him stare, Gave alms at Easter, in a Christian trim, And made a widow happy, for a whim. Why then declare good nature is her scorn, When 'tis by that alone she can be borne? Why pique all mortals, yet affect a name? A fool to pleasure, yet a slave to fame: Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres. Now conscience chills her, and now passion burns; And atheism and religion take their turns; A very heathen in the carnal part, Yet still a sad, good Christian at her heart.  See Sin in State, majestically drunk; Proud as a peeress, prouder as a punk; Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside, A teeming mistress, but a barren bride. What then? let blood and body bear the fault, Her head's untouch'd, that noble seat of thought: Such this day's doctrine—in another fit She sins with poets through pure love of wit. What has not fir'd her bosom or her brain? Caesar and Tallboy, Charles and Charlema'ne. As Helluo, late dictator of the feast, The nose of hautgout, and the tip of taste, Critiqu'd your wine, and analys'd your meat, Yet on plain pudding deign'd at home to eat; So Philomede, lect'ring all mankind On the soft passion, and the taste refin'd, Th' address, the delicacy—stoops at once, And makes her hearty meal upon a dunce.  Flavia's a wit, has too much sense to pray, To Toast our wants and wishes, is her way; Nor asks of God, but of her stars to give The mighty blessing, "while we live, to live." Then all for death, that opiate of the soul! Lucretia's dagger, Rosamonda's bowl. Say, what can cause such impotence of mind? A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind. Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin'd to please; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought: You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.  Turn then from wits; and look on Simo's mate, No ass so meek, no ass so obstinate: Or her, that owns her faults, but never mends, Because she's honest, and the best of friends: Or her, whose life the Church and scandal share, For ever in a passion, or a prayer: Or her, who laughs at Hell, but (like her Grace) Cries, "Ah! how charming, if there's no such place!" Or who in sweet vicissitude appears Of mirth and opium, ratafie and tears, The daily anodyne, and nightly draught, To kill those foes to fair ones, time and thought. Woman and fool are two hard things to hit, For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.  But what are these to great Atossa's mind? Scarce once herself, by turns all womankind! Who, with herself, or others, from her birth Finds all her life one warfare upon earth: Shines, in exposing knaves, and painting fools, Yet is, whate'er she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made. From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure miss'd her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her,-provokes revenge from Hell, But he's a bolder man who dares be well. Her every turn with violence pursu'd, Nor more a storm her hate than gratitude. To that each passion turns, or soon or late; Love, if it makes her yield, must make her hate: Superiors? death! and equals? what a curse! But an inferior not dependant? worse. Offend her, and she knows not to forgive; Oblige her, and she'll hate you while you live: But die, and she'll adore you—Then the Bust And Temple rise—then fall again to dust. Last night, her Lord was all that's good and great; A knave this morning, and his will a cheat. Strange! by the means defeated of the ends, By spirit robb'd of pow'r, by warmth of friends, By wealth of follow'rs! without one distress Sick of herself through very selfishness! Atossa, curs'd with ev'ry granted pray'r, Childless with all her children, wants an heir. To heirs unknown descends th' unguarded store, Or wanders, heav'n-directed, to the poor.  Pictures like these, dear Madam, to design, Asks no firm hand, and no unerring line; Some wand'ring touch or some reflected light, Some flying stroke alone can hit 'em right: For how should equal colours do the knack? Chameleons who can paint in white and black?  "Yet Chloe sure was form'd without a spot"— Nature in her then err'd not, but forgot. "With ev'ry pleasing, ev'ry prudent part, Say, what can Chloe want?"—She wants a heart. She speaks, behaves, and acts just as she ought; But never, never, reach'd one gen'rous thought. Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, Content to dwell in decencies for ever. So very reasonable, so unmov'd, As never yet to love, or to be lov'd. She, while her lover pants upon her breast, Can mark the figures on an Indian chest; And when she sees her friend in deep despair, Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair. Forbid it heav'n, a favour or a debt She e'er should cancel—but she may forget. Safe is your secret still in Chloe's ear; But none of Chloe's shall you ever hear. Of all her dears she never slander'd one, But cares not if a thousand are undone. Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead? She bids her footman put it in her head. Chloe is prudent—would you too be wise? Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.  One certain portrait may (I grant) be seen, Which Heav'n has varnish'd out, and made a Queen : The same for ever! and describ'd by all With truth and goodness, as with crown and ball. Poets heap virtues, painters gems at will, And show their zeal, and hide their want of skill. 'Tis well—but, artists! who can paint or write, To draw the naked is your true delight. That robe of quality so struts and swells, None see what parts of nature it conceals. Th' exactest traits of body or of mind, We owe to models of an humble kind. If Queensbury to strip there's no compelling, 'Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen. From peer or bishop 'tis no easy thing To draw the man who loves his God, or King: Alas! I copy (or my draught would fail) From honest Mah'met, or plain Parson Hale.  But grant, in public men sometimes are shown, A woman's seen in private life alone: Our bolder talents in full light display'd; Your virtues open fairest in the shade. Bred to disguise, in public 'tis you hide; There, none distinguish twixt your shame or pride, Weakness or delicacy; all so nice, That each may seem a virtue, or a vice.  In men, we various ruling passions find; In women, two almost divide the kind; Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey, The love of pleasure, and the love of sway. That, Nature gives; and where the lesson taught Is still to please, can pleasure seem a fault? Experience, this; by man's oppression curs'd, They seek the second not to lose the first.  Men, some to bus'ness, some to pleasure take; But ev'ry woman is at heart a rake: Men, some to quiet, some to public strife; But ev'ry Lady would be queen for life.  Yet mark the fate of a whole sex of queens! Pow'r all their end, but beauty all the means. In youth they conquer, with so wild a rage, As leaves them scarce a subject in their age: For foreign glory, foreign joy, they roam; No thought of peace or happiness at home. But wisdom's triumph is well-tim'd retreat, As hard a science to the fair as great! Beauties, like tyrants, old and friendless grown, Yet hate repose, and dread to be alone, Worn out in public, weary ev'ry eye, Nor leave one sigh behind them when they die.  Pleasures the sex, as children birds, pursue, Still out of reach, yet never out of view; Sure, if they catch, to spoil the toy at most, To covet flying, and regret when lost: At last, to follies youth could scarce defend, It grows their age's prudence to pretend; Asham'd to own they gave delight before, Reduc'd to feign it, when they give no more: As hags hold sabbaths, less for joy than spite, So these their merry, miserable night; Still round and round the ghosts of beauty glide, And haunt the places where their honour died.  See how the world its veterans rewards! A youth of frolics, an old age of cards; Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, Young without lovers, old without a friend, A fop their passion, but their prize a sot, Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!  Ah, Friend! to dazzle let the vain design, To raise the thought and touch the heart, be thine! That charm shall grow, while what fatigues the Ring, Flaunts and goes down, an unregarded thing: So when the sun's broad beam has tir'd the sight, All mild ascends the moon's more sober light, Serene in virgin modesty she shines, And unobserv'd the glaring orb declines.  Oh! blest with temper, whose unclouded ray Can make tomorrow cheerful as today; She, who can love a sister's charms, or hear Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear; She, who ne'er answers till a husband cools, Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules; Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, Yet has her humour most, when she obeys; Let fops or fortune fly which way they will; Disdains all loss of tickets, or codille; Spleen, vapours, or smallpox, above them all, And mistress of herself, though China fall.  And yet, believe me, good as well as ill, Woman's at best a contradiction still. Heav'n, when it strives to polish all it can Its last best work, but forms a softer man; Picks from each sex, to make the fav'rite blest, Your love of pleasure, our desire of rest: Blends, in exception to all gen'ral rules, Your taste of follies, with our scorn of fools: Reserve with frankness, art with truth allied, Courage with softness, modesty with pride, Fix'd principles, with fancy ever new; Shakes all together, and produces—You.  Be this a woman's fame: with this unblest, Toasts live a scorn, and queens may die a jest. This Phoebus promis'd (I forget the year) When those blue eyes first open'd on the sphere; Ascendant Phoebus watch'd that hour with care, Averted half your parents' simple pray'r, And gave you beauty, but denied the pelf Which buys your sex a tyrant o'er itself. The gen'rous God, who wit and gold refines, And ripens spirits as he ripens mines, Kept dross for duchesses, the world shall know it, To you gave sense, good humour, and a poet.
Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se
Neque sermonibus vulgi dederis te, nec in præmiis spem posueris rerum tuarum; suis te oportet illecebris ipsa virtus trahat ad verum decus. Quid de te alii loquantur, ipsi videant, sed loquentur tamen. (Cicero, De Re Publica VI.23) ["... you will not any longer attend to the vulgar mob's gossip nor put your trust in human rewards for your deeds; virtue, through her own charms, should lead you to true glory. Let what others say about you be their concern; whatever it is, they will say it anyway."] Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd, I said, Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The dog-star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide; By land, by water, they renew the charge; They stop the chariot, and they board the barge. No place is sacred, not the church is free; Ev'n Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me: Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme, Happy! to catch me just at dinner-time. Is there a parson, much bemus'd in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, A clerk, foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, Who pens a stanza, when he should engross? Is there, who, lock'd from ink and paper, scrawls With desp'rate charcoal round his darken'd walls? All fly to Twit'nam, and in humble strain Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain. Arthur, whose giddy son neglects the laws, Imputes to me and my damn'd works the cause: Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope, And curses wit, and poetry, and Pope. Friend to my life! (which did not you prolong, The world had wanted many an idle song) What drop or nostrum can this plague remove? Or which must end me, a fool's wrath or love? A dire dilemma! either way I'm sped, If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead. Seiz'd and tied down to judge, how wretched I! Who can't be silent, and who will not lie; To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace, And to be grave, exceeds all pow'r of face. I sit with sad civility, I read With honest anguish, and an aching head; And drop at last, but in unwilling ears, This saving counsel, "Keep your piece nine years." "Nine years!" cries he, who high in Drury-lane Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before Term ends, Oblig'd by hunger, and request of friends: "The piece, you think, is incorrect: why, take it, I'm all submission, what you'd have it, make it." Three things another's modest wishes bound, My friendship, and a prologue, and ten pound. Pitholeon sends to me: "You know his Grace, I want a patron; ask him for a place." Pitholeon libell'd me—"but here's a letter Informs you, sir, 'twas when he knew no better. Dare you refuse him? Curll invites to dine, He'll write a Journal, or he'll turn Divine." Bless me! a packet—"'Tis a stranger sues, A virgin tragedy, an orphan muse." If I dislike it, "Furies, death and rage!" If I approve, "Commend it to the stage." There (thank my stars) my whole commission ends, The play'rs and I are, luckily, no friends. Fir'd that the house reject him, "'Sdeath I'll print it, And shame the fools—your int'rest, sir, with Lintot!" "Lintot, dull rogue! will think your price too much." "Not, sir, if you revise it, and retouch." All my demurs but double his attacks; At last he whispers, "Do; and we go snacks." Glad of a quarrel, straight I clap the door, "Sir, let me see your works and you no more." 'Tis sung, when Midas' ears began to spring, (Midas, a sacred person and a king) His very minister who spied them first, (Some say his queen) was forc'd to speak, or burst. And is not mine, my friend, a sorer case, When ev'ry coxcomb perks them in my face? "Good friend, forbear! you deal in dang'rous things. I'd never name queens, ministers, or kings; Keep close to ears, and those let asses prick; 'Tis nothing"—Nothing? if they bite and kick? Out with it, Dunciad! let the secret pass, That secret to each fool, that he's an ass: The truth once told (and wherefore should we lie?) The queen of Midas slept, and so may I. You think this cruel? take it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Let peals of laughter, Codrus! round thee break, Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty crack: Pit, box, and gall'ry in convulsions hurl'd, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting world. Who shames a scribbler? break one cobweb through, He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew; Destroy his fib or sophistry, in vain, The creature's at his dirty work again; Thron'd in the centre of his thin designs; Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines! Whom have I hurt? has poet yet, or peer, Lost the arch'd eye-brow, or Parnassian sneer? And has not Colley still his lord, and whore? His butchers Henley, his Free-masons Moore? Does not one table Bavius still admit? Still to one bishop Philips seem a wit? Still Sappho— "Hold! for God-sake—you'll offend: No names!—be calm!—learn prudence of a friend! I too could write, and I am twice as tall; But foes like these!" One flatt'rer's worse than all. Of all mad creatures, if the learn'd are right, It is the slaver kills, and not the bite. A fool quite angry is quite innocent; Alas! 'tis ten times worse when they repent. One dedicates in high heroic prose, And ridicules beyond a hundred foes; One from all Grub Street will my fame defend, And, more abusive, calls himself my friend. This prints my Letters, that expects a bribe, And others roar aloud, "Subscribe, subscribe." There are, who to my person pay their court: I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short, Ammon's great son one shoulder had too high, Such Ovid's nose, and "Sir! you have an eye"— Go on, obliging creatures, make me see All that disgrac'd my betters, met in me: Say for my comfort, languishing in bed, "Just so immortal Maro held his head:" And when I die, be sure you let me know Great Homer died three thousand years ago. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came. I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobey'd. The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife, To help me through this long disease, my life, To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care, And teach the being you preserv'd, to bear. But why then publish? Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write; Well-natur'd Garth inflamed with early praise, And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my lays; The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read, Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. John's self (great Dryden's friends before) With open arms receiv'd one poet more. Happy my studies, when by these approv'd! Happier their author, when by these belov'd! From these the world will judge of men and books, Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cookes. Soft were my numbers; who could take offence, While pure description held the place of sense? Like gentle Fanny's was my flow'ry theme, A painted mistress, or a purling stream. Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill; I wish'd the man a dinner, and sat still. Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answer'd, I was not in debt. If want provok'd, or madness made them print, I wag'd no war with Bedlam or the Mint. Did some more sober critic come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod. Pains, reading, study, are their just pretence, And all they want is spirit, taste, and sense. Commas and points they set exactly right, And 'twere a sin to rob them of their mite. Yet ne'er one sprig of laurel grac'd these ribalds, From slashing Bentley down to pidling Tibbalds. Each wight who reads not, and but scans and spells, Each word-catcher that lives on syllables, Ev'n such small critics some regard may claim, Preserv'd in Milton's or in Shakespeare's name. Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms; The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there? Were others angry? I excus'd them too; Well might they rage; I gave them but their due. A man's true merit 'tis not hard to find, But each man's secret standard in his mind, That casting weight pride adds to emptiness, This, who can gratify? for who can guess? The bard whom pilfer'd pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half a crown, Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains, from hard-bound brains, eight lines a year: He, who still wanting, though he lives on theft, Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left: And he, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning, Means not, but blunders round about a meaning: And he, whose fustian's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad: All these, my modest satire bade translate, And own'd, that nine such poets made a Tate. How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe? And swear, not Addison himself was safe. Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires, Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease: Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for arts that caus'd himself to rise; Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; Alike reserv'd to blame, or to commend, A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend; Dreading ev'n fools, by flatterers besieg'd, And so obliging, that he ne'er oblig'd; Like Cato, give his little senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause; While wits and templars ev'ry sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise. Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if Atticus were he? What though my name stood rubric on the walls, Or plaister'd posts, with claps, in capitals? Or smoking forth, a hundred hawkers' load, On wings of winds came flying all abroad? I sought no homage from the race that write; I kept, like Asian monarchs, from their sight: Poems I heeded (now berhym'd so long) No more than thou, great George! a birthday song. I ne'er with wits or witlings pass'd my days, To spread about the itch of verse and praise; Nor like a puppy, daggled through the town, To fetch and carry sing-song up and down; Nor at rehearsals sweat, and mouth'd, and cried, With handkerchief and orange at my side; But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate, To Bufo left the whole Castalian state. Proud as Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo, puff'd by every quill; Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand in song. His library (where busts of poets dead And a true Pindar stood without a head,) Receiv'd of wits an undistinguish'd race, Who first his judgment ask'd, and then a place: Much they extoll'd his pictures, much his seat, And flatter'd ev'ry day, and some days eat: Till grown more frugal in his riper days, He paid some bards with port, and some with praise, To some a dry rehearsal was assign'd, And others (harder still) he paid in kind. Dryden alone (what wonder?) came not nigh, Dryden alone escap'd this judging eye: But still the great have kindness in reserve, He help'd to bury whom he help'd to starve. May some choice patron bless each grey goose quill! May ev'ry Bavius have his Bufo still! So, when a statesman wants a day's defence, Or envy holds a whole week's war with sense, Or simple pride for flatt'ry makes demands, May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands! Blest be the great! for those they take away, And those they left me—for they left me Gay; Left me to see neglected genius bloom, Neglected die! and tell it on his tomb; Of all thy blameless life the sole return My verse, and Queensb'ry weeping o'er thy urn! Oh let me live my own! and die so too! ("To live and die is all I have to do:") Maintain a poet's dignity and ease, And see what friends, and read what books I please. Above a patron, though I condescend Sometimes to call a minister my friend: I was not born for courts or great affairs; I pay my debts, believe, and say my pray'rs; Can sleep without a poem in my head, Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead. Why am I ask'd what next shall see the light? Heav'ns! was I born for nothing but to write? Has life no joys for me? or (to be grave) Have I no friend to serve, no soul to save? "I found him close with Swift"—"Indeed? no doubt", (Cries prating Balbus) "something will come out". 'Tis all in vain, deny it as I will. "No, such a genius never can lie still," And then for mine obligingly mistakes The first lampoon Sir Will. or Bubo makes. Poor guiltless I! and can I choose but smile, When ev'ry coxcomb knows me by my style? Curs'd be the verse, how well soe'er it flow, That tends to make one worthy man my foe, Give virtue scandal, innocence a fear, Or from the soft-ey'd virgin steal a tear! But he, who hurts a harmless neighbour's peace, Insults fall'n worth, or beauty in distress, Who loves a lie, lame slander helps about, Who writes a libel, or who copies out: That fop, whose pride affects a patron's name, Yet absent, wounds an author's honest fame; Who can your merit selfishly approve, And show the sense of it without the love; Who has the vanity to call you friend, Yet wants the honour, injur'd, to defend; Who tells what'er you think, whate'er you say, And, if he lie not, must at least betray: Who to the Dean, and silver bell can swear, And sees at Cannons what was never there; Who reads, but with a lust to misapply, Make satire a lampoon, and fiction, lie. A lash like mine no honest man shall dread, But all such babbling blockheads in his stead. Let Sporus tremble—"What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk? Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings; Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys, So well-bred spaniels civilly delight In mumbling of the game they dare not bite. Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, As shallow streams run dimpling all the way. Whether in florid impotence he speaks, And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks; Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad, Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies, Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies. His wit all see-saw, between that and this , Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, And he himself one vile antithesis. Amphibious thing! that acting either part, The trifling head, or the corrupted heart, Fop at the toilet, flatt'rer at the board, Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have express'd, A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest; Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust. Not fortune's worshipper, nor fashion's fool, Not lucre's madman, nor ambition's tool, Not proud, nor servile, be one poet's praise, That, if he pleas'd, he pleas'd by manly ways; That flatt'ry, even to kings, he held a shame, And thought a lie in verse or prose the same: That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long, But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song: That not for fame, but virtue's better end, He stood the furious foe, the timid friend, The damning critic, half-approving wit, The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit; Laugh'd at the loss of friends he never had, The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad; The distant threats of vengeance on his head, The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed; The tale reviv'd, the lie so oft o'erthrown; Th' imputed trash, and dulness not his own; The morals blacken'd when the writings 'scape; The libell'd person, and the pictur'd shape; Abuse, on all he lov'd, or lov'd him, spread, A friend in exile, or a father, dead; The whisper, that to greatness still too near, Perhaps, yet vibrates on his sovereign's ear:— Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past: For thee, fair Virtue! welcome ev'n the last! "But why insult the poor? affront the great?" A knave's a knave, to me, in ev'ry state: Alike my scorn, if he succeed or fail, Sporus at court, or Japhet in a jail, A hireling scribbler, or a hireling peer, Knight of the post corrupt, or of the shire; If on a pillory, or near a throne, He gain his prince's ear, or lose his own. Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit, Sappho can tell you how this man was bit: This dreaded sat'rist Dennis will confess Foe to his pride, but friend to his distress: So humble, he has knock'd at Tibbald's door, Has drunk with Cibber, nay, has rhym'd for Moore. Full ten years slander'd, did he once reply? Three thousand suns went down on Welsted's lie. To please a mistress one aspers'd his life; He lash'd him not, but let her be his wife. Let Budgell charge low Grub Street on his quill, And write whate'er he pleas'd, except his will; Let the two Curlls of town and court, abuse His father, mother, body, soul, and muse. Yet why? that father held it for a rule, It was a sin to call our neighbour fool: That harmless mother thought no wife a whore,— Hear this! and spare his family, James Moore! Unspotted names! and memorable long, If there be force in virtue, or in song. Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause, While yet in Britain honour had applause) Each parent sprung—"What fortune, pray?"—Their own, And better got, than Bestia's from the throne. Born to no pride, inheriting no strife, Nor marrying discord in a noble wife, Stranger to civil and religious rage, The good man walk'd innoxious through his age. No courts he saw, no suits would ever try, Nor dar'd an oath, nor hazarded a lie: Un-learn'd, he knew no schoolman's subtle art, No language, but the language of the heart. By nature honest, by experience wise, Healthy by temp'rance and by exercise; His life, though long, to sickness past unknown; His death was instant, and without a groan. O grant me, thus to live, and thus to die! Who sprung from kings shall know less joy than I. O friend! may each domestic bliss be thine! Be no unpleasing melancholy mine: Me, let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, Make langour smile, and smooth the bed of death, Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep a while one parent from the sky! On cares like these if length of days attend, May Heav'n, to bless those days, preserve my friend, Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene, And just as rich as when he serv'd a queen. Whether that blessing be denied or giv'n, Thus far was right, the rest belongs to Heav'n.
Si quid novisti rectius istis,
Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever Nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needful pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind; Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense! If once right reason drives that cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless day; Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe. A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; Th' eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last; But those attain'd, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthen'd way, Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise! A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ, Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find, Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; Nor lose, for that malignant dull delight, The gen'rous pleasure to be charm'd with wit. But in such lays as neither ebb, nor flow, Correctly cold, and regularly low, That shunning faults, one quiet tenour keep; We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep. In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts Is not th' exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all. Thus when we view some well-proportion'd dome, (The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine, O Rome!' No single parts unequally surprise; All comes united to th' admiring eyes; No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear; The whole at once is bold, and regular. Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due. As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, T' avoid great errors, must the less commit: Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays, For not to know such trifles, is a praise. Most critics, fond of some subservient art, Still make the whole depend upon a part: They talk of principles, but notions prize, And all to one lov'd folly sacrifice. Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say, A certain bard encount'ring on the way, Discours'd in terms as just, with looks as sage, As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian stage; Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools, Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules. Our author, happy in a judge so nice, Produc'd his play, and begg'd the knight's advice, Made him observe the subject and the plot, The manners, passions, unities, what not? All which, exact to rule, were brought about, Were but a combat in the lists left out. "What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight; "Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite." "Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage) "Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage." So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain. "Then build a new, or act it in a plain." Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice, Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, Form short ideas; and offend in arts (As most in manners) by a love to parts. Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line; Pleas'd with a work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. Poets, like painters, thus, unskill'd to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd, Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit. For works may have more wit than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood. Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress: Their praise is still—"the style is excellent": The sense, they humbly take upon content. Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place; The face of Nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay: But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon, It gilds all objects, but it alters none. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable; A vile conceit in pompous words express'd, Is like a clown in regal purple dress'd: For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town, and court. Some by old words to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, These sparks with awkward vanity display What the fine gentleman wore yesterday! And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets dress'd. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old; Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Not yet the last to lay the old aside. But most by numbers judge a poet's song; And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong: In the bright Muse though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, Not mend their minds; as some to church repair, Not for the doctrine, but the music there. These equal syllables alone require, Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire, While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line, While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes. Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze", In the next line, it "whispers through the trees": If "crystal streams with pleasing murmurs creep", The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep". Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise the easy vigour of a line, Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main. Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, And bid alternate passions fall and rise! While, at each change, the son of Libyan Jove Now burns with glory, and then melts with love; Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found, And the world's victor stood subdu'd by sound! The pow'r of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now. Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleas'd too little or too much. At ev'ry trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense; Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move, For fools admire, but men of sense approve; As things seem large which we through mists descry, Dulness is ever apt to magnify. Some foreign writers, some our own despise; The ancients only, or the moderns prize. Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damn'd beside. Meanly they seek the blessing to confine, And force that sun but on a part to shine; Which not alone the southern wit sublimes, But ripens spirits in cold northern climes; Which from the first has shone on ages past, Enlights the present, and shall warm the last; (Though each may feel increases and decays, And see now clearer and now darker days.) Regard not then if wit be old or new, But blame the false, and value still the true. Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town; They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with quality, A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my Lord. What woeful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starv'd hackney sonneteer, or me? But let a Lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines! Before his sacred name flies every fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought! The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learn'd by being singular; So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong: So Schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damn'd for having too much wit. Some praise at morning what they blame at night; But always think the last opinion right. A Muse by these is like a mistress us'd, This hour she's idoliz'd, the next abus'd; While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. Ask them the cause; they're wiser still, they say; And still tomorrow's wiser than today. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. Once school divines this zealous isle o'erspread; Who knew most Sentences, was deepest read; Faith, Gospel, all, seem'd made to be disputed, And none had sense enough to be confuted: Scotists and Thomists, now, in peace remain, Amidst their kindred cobwebs in Duck Lane. If Faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn? Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current folly proves the ready wit; And authors think their reputation safe Which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh. Some valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind; Fondly we think we honour merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate. Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose, In various shapes of Parsons, Critics, Beaus; But sense surviv'd, when merry jests were past; For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our eyes, New Blackmores and new Milbourns must arise; Nay should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true; For envied wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day. Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost, who stays till all commend. Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When patriarch wits surviv'd a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast; Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful pencil has design'd Some bright idea of the master's mind, Where a new world leaps out at his command, And ready Nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colours soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give, And each bold figure just begins to live, The treacherous colours the fair art betray, And all the bright creation fades away! Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things, Atones not for that envy which it brings. In youth alone its empty praise we boast, But soon the short-liv'd vanity is lost: Like some fair flow'r the early spring supplies, That gaily blooms, but ev'n in blooming dies. What is this wit, which must our cares employ? The owner's wife, that other men enjoy; Then most our trouble still when most admir'd, And still the more we give, the more requir'd; Whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease, Sure some to vex, but never all to please; 'Tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun; By fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone! If wit so much from ign'rance undergo, Ah let not learning too commence its foe! Of old, those met rewards who could excel, And such were prais'd who but endeavour'd well: Though triumphs were to gen'rals only due, Crowns were reserv'd to grace the soldiers too. Now, they who reach Parnassus' lofty crown, Employ their pains to spurn some others down; And while self-love each jealous writer rules, Contending wits become the sport of fools: But still the worst with most regret commend, For each ill author is as bad a friend. To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise! Ah ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast, Nor in the critic let the man be lost! Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human; to forgive, divine. But if in noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purg'd off, of spleen and sour disdain, Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dulness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thriv'd with large increase: When love was all an easy monarch's care; Seldom at council, never in a war: Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ; Nay wits had pensions, and young Lords had wit: The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, And not a mask went unimprov'd away: The modest fan was lifted up no more, And virgins smil'd at what they blush'd before. The following licence of a foreign reign Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain; Then unbelieving priests reform'd the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation; Where Heav'n's free subjects might their rights dispute, Lest God himself should seem too absolute: Pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, And Vice admired to find a flatt'rer there! Encourag'd thus, wit's Titans brav'd the skies, And the press groan'd with licenc'd blasphemies. These monsters, critics! with your darts engage, Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, Will needs mistake an author into vice; All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye.
Learn then what morals critics ought to show, For 'tis but half a judge's task, to know. 'Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning, join; In all you speak, let truth and candour shine: That not alone what to your sense is due, All may allow; but seek your friendship too.  Be silent always when you doubt your sense; And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence: Some positive, persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you, with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critic on the last.  'Tis not enough, your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And things unknown proposed as things forgot. Without good breeding, truth is disapprov'd; That only makes superior sense belov'd.  Be niggards of advice on no pretence; For the worst avarice is that of sense. With mean complacence ne'er betray your trust, Nor be so civil as to prove unjust. Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise.  'Twere well might critics still this freedom take, But Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares, Tremendous ! with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry! Fear most to tax an honourable fool, Whose right it is, uncensur'd, to be dull; Such, without wit, are poets when they please, As without learning they can take degrees. Leave dangerous truths to unsuccessful satires, And flattery to fulsome dedicators, Whom, when they praise, the world believes no more, Than when they promise to give scribbling o'er. 'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain, And charitably let the dull be vain: Your silence there is better than your spite, For who can rail so long as they can write? Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep, And lash'd so long, like tops, are lash'd asleep. False steps but help them to renew the race, As after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, Still run on poets, in a raging vein, Even to the dregs and squeezings of the brain, Strain out the last, dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence!  Such shameless bards we have; and yet 'tis true, There are as mad, abandon'd critics too. The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list'ning to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails, From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales. With him, most authors steal their works, or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary . Name a new play, and he's the poet's friend, Nay show'd his faults—but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barr'd, Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's churchyard: Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead: For fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks; It still looks home, and short excursions makes; But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks; And never shock'd, and never turn'd aside, Bursts out, resistless, with a thund'ring tide.  But where's the man, who counsel can bestow, Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbias'd, or by favour or by spite; Not dully prepossess'd, nor blindly right; Though learn'd, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and humanly severe? Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe? Blest with a taste exact, yet unconfin'd; A knowledge both of books and human kind; Gen'rous converse; a soul exempt from pride; And love to praise, with reason on his side?  Such once were critics; such the happy few, Athens and Rome in better ages knew. The mighty Stagirite first left the shore, Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore: He steer'd securely, and discover'd far, Led by the light of the Mæonian Star. Poets, a race long unconfin'd and free, Still fond and proud of savage liberty, Receiv'd his laws; and stood convinc'd 'twas fit, Who conquer'd nature, should preside o'er wit.  Horace still charms with graceful negligence, And without methods talks us into sense, Will, like a friend, familiarly convey The truest notions in the easiest way. He, who supreme in judgment, as in wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judg'd with coolness, though he sung with fire; His precepts teach but what his works inspire. Our critics take a contrary extreme, They judge with fury, but they write with fle'me: Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations By wits, than critics in as wrong quotations.  See Dionysius Homer's thoughts refine, And call new beauties forth from ev'ry line!  Fancy and art in gay Petronius please, The scholar's learning, with the courtier's ease.  In grave Quintilian's copious work we find The justest rules, and clearest method join'd; Thus useful arms in magazines we place, All rang'd in order, and dispos'd with grace, But less to please the eye, than arm the hand, Still fit for use, and ready at command.  Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, And bless their critic with a poet's fire. An ardent judge, who zealous in his trust, With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just; Whose own example strengthens all his laws; And is himself that great sublime he draws.  Thus long succeeding critics justly reign'd, Licence repress'd, and useful laws ordain'd; Learning and Rome alike in empire grew, And arts still follow'd where her eagles flew; From the same foes, at last, both felt their doom, And the same age saw learning fall, and Rome. With tyranny, then superstition join'd, As that the body, this enslav'd the mind; Much was believ'd, but little understood, And to be dull was constru'd to be good; A second deluge learning thus o'er-run, And the monks finish'd what the Goths begun.  At length Erasmus, that great, injur'd name, (The glory of the priesthood, and the shame!) Stemm'd the wild torrent of a barb'rous age, And drove those holy Vandals off the stage.  But see! each Muse, in Leo's golden days, Starts from her trance, and trims her wither'd bays! Rome's ancient genius, o'er its ruins spread, Shakes off the dust, and rears his rev'rend head! Then sculpture and her sister-arts revive; Stones leap'd to form, and rocks began to live; With sweeter notes each rising temple rung; A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung. Immortal Vida! on whose honour'd brow The poet's bays and critic's ivy grow: Cremona now shall ever boast thy name, As next in place to Mantua, next in fame!  But soon by impious arms from Latium chas'd, Their ancient bounds the banished Muses pass'd; Thence arts o'er all the northern world advance; But critic-learning flourish'd most in France. The rules a nation born to serve, obeys, And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despis'd, And kept unconquer'd, and uncivilis'd, Fierce for the liberties of wit, and bold, We still defied the Romans, as of old. Yet some there were, among the sounder few Of those who less presum'd, and better knew, Who durst assert the juster ancient cause, And here restor'd wit's fundamental laws. Such was the Muse, whose rules and practice tell "Nature's chief master-piece is writing well." Such was Roscommon—not more learn'd than good, With manners gen'rous as his noble blood; To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, And ev'ry author's merit, but his own. Such late was Walsh—the Muse's judge and friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend; To failings mild, but zealous for desert; The clearest head, and the sincerest heart. This humble praise, lamented shade! receive, This praise at least a grateful Muse may give: The Muse, whose early voice you taught to sing, Prescrib'd her heights, and prun'd her tender wing, (Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, But in low numbers short excursions tries: Content, if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, The learn'd reflect on what before they knew: Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame, Still pleas'd to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to flatter, or offend, Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.
To Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke
I. Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!  Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his follow'rs trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule— Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!  Superior beings, when of late they saw A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law, Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape, And showed a Newton as we shew an Ape.  Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind, Describe or fix one movement of his mind? Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend, Explain his own beginning, or his end? Alas what wonder! Man's superior part Uncheck'd may rise, and climb from art to art; But when his own great work is but begun, What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.  Trace science then, with modesty thy guide; First strip off all her equipage of pride; Deduct what is but vanity, or dress, Or learning's luxury, or idleness; Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain, Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain; Expunge the whole, or lop th' excrescent parts Of all our Vices have created Arts; Then see how little the remaining sum, Which serv'd the past, and must the times to come! II. Two principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and reason, to restrain; Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, Each works its end, to move or govern all: And to their proper operation still, Ascribe all good; to their improper, ill.  Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; Reason's comparing balance rules the whole. Man, but for that, no action could attend, And but for this, were active to no end: Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; Or, meteor-like, flame lawless through the void, Destroying others, by himself destroy'd.  Most strength the moving principle requires; Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires. Sedate and quiet the comparing lies, Form'd but to check, delib'rate, and advise. Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh; Reason's at distance, and in prospect lie: That sees immediate good by present sense; Reason, the future and the consequence. Thicker than arguments, temptations throng, At best more watchful this, but that more strong. The action of the stronger to suspend, Reason still use, to reason still attend. Attention, habit and experience gains; Each strengthens reason, and self-love restrains.  Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends to fight, More studious to divide than to unite, And grace and virtue, sense and reason split, With all the rash dexterity of wit: Wits, just like fools, at war about a name, Have full as oft no meaning, or the same. Self-love and reason to one end aspire, Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire; But greedy that its object would devour, This taste the honey, and not wound the flow'r: Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood, Our greatest evil, or our greatest good. III. Modes of self-love the passions we may call: 'Tis real good, or seeming, moves them all: But since not every good we can divide, And reason bids us for our own provide; Passions, though selfish, if their means be fair, List under reason, and deserve her care; Those, that imparted, court a nobler aim, Exalt their kind, and take some virtue's name.  In lazy apathy let Stoics boast Their virtue fix'd, 'tis fix'd as in a frost; Contracted all, retiring to the breast; But strength of mind is exercise, not rest: The rising tempest puts in act the soul, Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole. On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale; Nor God alone in the still calm we find, He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.  Passions, like elements, though born to fight, Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his work unite: These 'tis enough to temper and employ; But what composes man, can man destroy? Suffice that reason keep to nature's road, Subject, compound them, follow her and God. Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd, Make and maintain the balance of the mind: The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife Gives all the strength and colour of our life.  Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes, And when in act they cease, in prospect, rise: Present to grasp, and future still to find, The whole employ of body and of mind. All spread their charms, but charm not all alike; On diff'rent senses diff'rent objects strike; Hence diff'rent passions more or less inflame, As strong or weak, the organs of the frame; And hence one master passion in the breast, Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.  As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame, The mind's disease, its ruling passion came; Each vital humour which should feed the whole, Soon flows to this, in body and in soul. Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head, As the mind opens, and its functions spread, Imagination plies her dang'rous art, And pours it all upon the peccant part.  Nature its mother, habit is its nurse; Wit, spirit, faculties, but make it worse; Reason itself but gives it edge and pow'r; As Heav'n's blest beam turns vinegar more sour. We, wretched subjects, though to lawful sway, In this weak queen some fav'rite still obey: Ah! if she lend not arms, as well as rules, What can she more than tell us we are fools? Teach us to mourn our nature, not to mend, A sharp accuser, but a helpless friend! Or from a judge turn pleader, to persuade The choice we make, or justify it made; Proud of an easy conquest all along, She but removes weak passions for the strong: So, when small humours gather to a gout, The doctor fancies he has driv'n them out.  Yes, nature's road must ever be preferr'd; Reason is here no guide, but still a guard: 'Tis hers to rectify, not overthrow, And treat this passion more as friend than foe: A mightier pow'r the strong direction sends, And sev'ral men impels to sev'ral ends. Like varying winds, by other passions toss'd, This drives them constant to a certain coast. Let pow'r or knowledge, gold or glory, please, Or (oft more strong than all) the love of ease; Through life 'tis followed, ev'n at life's expense; The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence, The monk's humility, the hero's pride, All, all alike, find reason on their side.  Th' eternal art educing good from ill, Grafts on this passion our best principle: 'Tis thus the mercury of man is fix'd, Strong grows the virtue with his nature mix'd; The dross cements what else were too refin'd, And in one interest body acts with mind.  As fruits, ungrateful to the planter's care, On savage stocks inserted, learn to bear; The surest virtues thus from passions shoot, Wild nature's vigor working at the root. What crops of wit and honesty appear From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear! See anger, zeal and fortitude supply; Ev'n av'rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy; Lust, through some certain strainers well refin'd, Is gentle love, and charms all womankind; Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave, Is emulation in the learn'd or brave; Nor virtue, male or female, can we name, But what will grow on pride, or grow on shame.  Thus nature gives us (let it check our pride) The virtue nearest to our vice allied: Reason the byass turns to good from ill, And Nero reigns a Titus, if he will. The fiery soul abhorr'd in Catiline, In Decius charms, in Curtius is divine: The same ambition can destroy or save, And make a patriot as it makes a knave. IV. This light and darkness in our chaos join'd, What shall divide? The God within the mind.  Extremes in nature equal ends produce, In man they join to some mysterious use; Though each by turns the other's bound invade, As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade, And oft so mix, the diff'rence is too nice Where ends the virtue, or begins the vice.  Fools! who from hence into the notion fall, That vice or virtue there is none at all. If white and black blend, soften, and unite A thousand ways, is there no black or white? Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; 'Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain. V. Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. But where th' extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed: Ask where's the North? at York, 'tis on the Tweed; In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where: No creature owns it in the first degree, But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he! Ev'n those who dwell beneath its very zone, Or never feel the rage, or never own; What happier natures shrink at with affright, The hard inhabitant contends is right. VI. Virtuous and vicious ev'ry man must be, Few in th' extreme, but all in the degree; The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise; And ev'n the best, by fits, what they despise. 'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill, For, vice or virtue, self directs it still; Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal; But heav'n's great view is one, and that the whole: That counterworks each folly and caprice; That disappoints th' effect of ev'ry vice; That, happy frailties to all ranks applied, Shame to the virgin, to the matron pride, Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief, To kings presumption, and to crowds belief, That, virtue's ends from vanity can raise, Which seeks no int'rest, no reward but praise; And build on wants, and on defects of mind, The joy, the peace, the glory of mankind.  Heav'n forming each on other to depend, A master, or a servant, or a friend, Bids each on other for assistance call, 'Till one man's weakness grows the strength of all. Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally The common int'rest, or endear the tie: To these we owe true friendship, love sincere, Each home-felt joy that life inherits here; Yet from the same we learn, in its decline, Those joys, those loves, those int'rests to resign; Taught half by reason, half by mere decay, To welcome death, and calmly pass away.  Whate'er the passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf, Not one will change his neighbour with himself. The learn'd is happy nature to explore, The fool is happy that he knows no more; The rich is happy in the plenty giv'n, The poor contents him with the care of heav'n. See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing, The sot a hero, lunatic a king; The starving chemist in his golden views Supremely blest, the poet in his Muse.  See some strange comfort ev'ry state attend, And pride bestow'd on all, a common friend; See some fit passion ev'ry age supply, Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.  Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, Pleas'd with a rattle, tickl'd with a straw: Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite: Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage, And beads and pray'r books are the toys of age: Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before; 'Till tir'd he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er!  Meanwhile opinion gilds with varying rays Those painted clouds that beautify our days; Each want of happiness by hope supplied, And each vacuity of sense by Pride: These build as fast as knowledge can destroy; In folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy; One prospect lost, another still we gain; And not a vanity is giv'n in vain; Ev'n mean self-love becomes, by force divine, The scale to measure others' wants by thine. See! and confess, one comfort still must rise, 'Tis this: Though man's a fool, yet God is wise.
Go, dumb-born book, Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes: Hadst thou but song As thou hast subjects known, Then were there cause in thee that should condone Even my faults that heavy upon me lie And build her glories their longevity. Tell her that sheds Such treasure in the air, Recking naught else but that her graces give Life to the moment, I would bid them live As roses might, in magic amber laid, Red overwrought with orange and all made One substance and one colour Braving time. Tell her that goes With song upon her lips But sings not out the song, nor knows The maker of it, some other mouth, May be as fair as hers, Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers, When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion, Till change hath broken down All things save Beauty alone.
As you came from the holy land  Of Walsingham, Met you not with my true love  By the way as you came?  “How shall I know your true love,  That have met many one, I went to the holy land,  That have come, that have gone?”  She is neither white, nor brown,  But as the heavens fair; There is none hath a form so divine  In the earth, or the air. “Such a one did I meet, good sir,  Such an angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear  By her gait, by her grace.” She hath left me here all alone,  All alone, as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with herself,  And me loved as her own. “What’s the cause that she leaves you alone,  And a new way doth take, Who loved you once as her own,  And her joy did you make?” I have lov’d her all my youth;  But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit  From the withered tree. Know that Love is a careless child,  And forgets promise past; He is blind, he is deaf when he list,  And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content,  And a trustless joy: He is won with a world of despair,  And is lost with a toy. Of womenkind such indeed is the love,  Or the word love abus’d, Under which many childish desires  And conceits are excus’d. But true love is a durable fire,  In the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead,  From itself never turning.
If all the world and love were young, And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move, To live with thee, and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold, When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb, The rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields, To wayward winter reckoning yields, A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: In folly ripe, in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds, The Coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last, and love still breed, Had joys no date, nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee, and be thy love.
[Supposed to be written by one at the point of death] Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope’s true gage, And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage. Blood must be my body’s balmer, No other balm will there be given, Whilst my soul, like a white palmer, Travels to the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains, Where spring the nectar fountains; And there I’ll kiss The bowl of bliss, And drink my eternal fill On every milken hill. My soul will be a-dry before, But after it will ne’er thirst more; And by the happy blissful way More peaceful pilgrims I shall see, That have shook off their gowns of clay, And go apparelled fresh like me. I’ll bring them first To slake their thirst, And then to taste those nectar suckets, At the clear wells Where sweetness dwells, Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets. And when our bottles and all we Are fill’d with immortality, Then the holy paths we’ll travel, Strew’d with rubies thick as gravel, Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors, High walls of coral, and pearl bowers. From thence to heaven’s bribeless hall Where no corrupted voices brawl, No conscience molten into gold, Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold, No cause deferr’d, nor vain-spent journey, For there Christ is the king’s attorney, Who pleads for all without degrees, And he hath angels, but no fees. When the grand twelve million jury Of our sins and sinful fury, ’Gainst our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder, Thou movest salvation even for alms, Not with a bribed lawyer’s palms. And this is my eternal plea To him that made heaven, earth, and sea, Seeing my flesh must die so soon, And want a head to dine next noon, Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread, Set on my soul an everlasting head. Then am I ready, like a palmer fit, To tread those blest paths which before I writ.
Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light; Prais’d be the dews wherewith she moists the ground; Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night; Prais’d be her power by which all powers abound. Prais’d be her nymphs with whom she decks the woods, Prais’d be her knights in whom true honour lives; Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods; Let that Diana shine which all these gives. In heaven queen she is among the spheres; In aye she mistress-like makes all things pure; Eternity in her oft change she bears; She beauty is; by her the fair endure. Time wears her not: she doth his chariot guide; Mortality below her orb is plac’d; By her the virtue of the stars down slide; In her is virtue’s perfect image cast. A knowledge pure it is her worth to know: With Circes let them dwell that think not so.
A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play— For May is here once more, and so is he,— His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee, And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they: Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me Of woody pathways winding endlessly Along the creek, where even yesterday He plunged his shrinking body—gasped and shook— Yet called the water "warm," with never lack Of joy. And so, half enviously I look Upon this graceless barefoot and his track,— His toe stubbed—ay, his big toe-nail knocked back Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook.
You better not fool with a Bumblebee!— Ef you don't think they can sting—you'll see! They're lazy to look at, an' kind o' go Buzzin' an' bummin' aroun' so slow, An' ac' so slouchy an' all fagged out, Danglin' their legs as they drone about The hollyhawks 'at they can't climb in 'Ithout ist a-tumble-un out ag'in! Wunst I watched one climb clean 'way In a jimson-blossom, I did, one day,— An' I ist grabbed it — an' nen let go— An' "Ooh-ooh! Honey! I told ye so!" Says The Raggedy Man; an' he ist run An' pullt out the stinger, an' don't laugh none, An' says: "They has be'n folks, I guess, 'At thought I wuz predjudust, more er less,— Yit I still muntain 'at a Bumblebee Wears out his welcome too quick fer me!"
Granny’s come to our house, And ho! my lawzy-daisy! All the childern round the place Is ist a-runnin’ crazy! Fetched a cake fer little Jake, And fetched a pie fer Nanny, And fetched a pear fer all the pack That runs to kiss their Granny! Lucy Ellen’s in her lap, And Wade and Silas Walker Both’s a-ridin’ on her foot, And ’Pollos on the rocker; And Marthy’s twins, from Aunt Marinn’s, And little Orphant Annie, All’s a-eatin’ gingerbread And giggle-un at Granny! Tells us all the fairy tales Ever thought er wundered— And ’bundance o’ other stories— Bet she knows a hunderd!— Bob’s the one fer “Whittington,” And "Golden Locks" fer Fanny! Hear ’em laugh and clap their hands, Listenin’ at Granny! “Jack the Giant-Killer” ’s good; And “Bean-Stalk” ’s another!— So’s the one of “Cinderell’” And her old godmother;— That-un’s best of all the rest— Bestest one of any,— Where the mices scampers home Like we runs to Granny! Granny’s come to our house, Ho! my lawzy-daisy! All the childern round the place Is ist a-runnin’ crazy! Fetched a cake fer little Jake, And fetched a pie fer Nanny, And fetched a pear fer all the pack That runs to kiss their Granny!
You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners. Not you — no fear of that; for I discern In you a kindling of the flame that saves — The nimble element, the true caloric; I see it, and was told of it, moreover, By our discriminate friend himself, no other. Had you been one of the sad average, As he would have it, — meaning, as I take it, The sinew and the solvent of our Island, You'd not be buying beer for this Terpander's Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson; He'd never foist it as a part of his Contingent entertainment of a townsman While he goes off rehearsing, as he must, If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford. And my words are no shadow on your town — Far from it; for one town's as like another As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it, — And there's the Stratford in him; he denies it, And there's the Shakespeare in him. So, God help him! I tell him he needs Greek; but neither God Nor Greek will help him. Nothing will help that man. You see the fates have given him so much, He must have all or perish, — or look out Of London, where he sees too many lords. They're part of half what ails him: I suppose There's nothing fouler down among the demons Than what it is he feels when he remembers The dust and sweat and ointment of his calling With his lords looking on and laughing at him. King as he is, he can't be king de facto, And that's as well, because he wouldn't like it; He'd frame a lower rating of men then Than he has now; and after that would come An abdication or an apoplexy. He can't be king, not even king of Stratford, — Though half the world, if not the whole of it, May crown him with a crown that fits no king Save Lord Apollo's homesick emissary: Not there on Avon, or on any stream Where Naiads and their white arms are no more, Shall he find home again. It's all too bad. But there's a comfort, for he'll have that House — The best you ever saw; and he'll be there Anon, as you're an Alderman. Good God! He makes me lie awake o'nights and laugh. And you have known him from his origin, You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin He must have been to the few seeing ones — A trifle terrifying, I dare say, Discovering a world with his man's eyes, Quite as another lad might see some finches, If he looked hard and had an eye for nature. But this one had his eyes and their foretelling, And he had you to fare with, and what else? He must have had a father and a mother — In fact I've heard him say so — and a dog, As a boy should, I venture; and the dog, Most likely, was the only man who knew him. A dog, for all I know, is what he needs As much as anything right here to-day, To counsel him about his disillusions, Old aches, and parturitions of what's coming, — A dog of orders, an emeritus, To wag his tail at him when he comes home, And then to put his paws up on his knees And say, "For God's sake, what's it all about?" I don't know whether he needs a dog or not — Or what he needs. I tell him he needs Greek; I'll talk of rules and Aristotle with him, And if his tongue's at home he'll say to that, I have your word that Aristotle knows, And you mine that I don't know Aristotle." He's all at odds with all the unities, And what's yet worse, it doesn't seem to matter; He treads along through Time's old wilderness As if the tramp of all the centuries Had left no roads — and there are none, for him; He doesn't see them, even with those eyes, — And that's a pity, or I say it is. Accordingly we have him as we have him — Going his way, the way that he goes best, A pleasant animal with no great noise Or nonsense anywhere to set him off — Save only divers and inclement devils Have made of late his heart their dwelling place. A flame half ready to fly out sometimes At some annoyance may be fanned up in him, But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out; He knows how little room there is in there For crude and futile animosities, And how much for the joy of being whole, And how much for long sorrow and old pain. On our side there are some who may be given To grow old wondering what he thinks of us And some above us, who are, in his eyes, Above himself, — and that's quite right and English. Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods Who made it so: the gods have always eyes To see men scratch; and they see one down here Who itches, manor-bitten to the bone, Albeit he knows himself — yes, yes, he knows — The lord of more than England and of more Than all the seas of England in all time Shall ever wash. D'ye wonder that I laugh? He sees me, and he doesn't seem to care; And why the devil should he? I can't tell you. I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday, Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman. "What ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me; Wherefore I have to pause and look at him. He's not enormous, but one looks at him. A little on the round if you insist, For now, God save the mark, he's growing old; He's five and forty, and to hear him talk These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add More years to that. He's old enough to be The father of a world, and so he is. "Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?" Says he; and there shines out of him again An aged light that has no age or station — The mystery that's his — a mischievous Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame For being won so easy, and at friends Who laugh at him for what he wants the most, And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire; — By which you see we're all a little jealous ... Poor Greene! I fear the color of his name Was even as that of his ascending soul; And he was one where there are many others, — Some scrivening to the end against their fate, Their puppets all in ink and all to die there; And some with hands that once would shade an eye That scanned Euripides and Æschylus Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop To slush their first and last of royalties. Poor devils! and they all play to his hand; For so it was in Athens and old Rome. But that's not here or there; I've wandered off. Greene does it, or I'm careful. Where's that boy? Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him? Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him. We'll all be riding, one of these fine days, Down there to see him — and his wife won't like us; And then we'll think of what he never said Of women — which, if taken all in all With what he did say, would buy many horses. Though nowadays he's not so much for women: "So few of them," he says, "are worth the guessing." But there's a worm at work when he says that, And while he says it one feels in the air A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus. They've had him dancing till his toes were tender, And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains. There's no long cry for going into it, However, and we don't know much about it. But you in Stratford, like most here in London, Have more now in the Sonnets than you paid for; He's put one there with all her poison on, To make a singing fiction of a shadow That's in his life a fact, and always will be. But she's no care of ours, though Time, I fear, Will have a more reverberant ado About her than about another one Who seems to have decoyed him, married him, And sent him scuttling on his way to London, — With much already learned, and more to learn, And more to follow. Lord! how I see him now, Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us. Whatever he may have meant, we never had him; He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, — And there was that about him (God knows what, — We'd flayed another had he tried it on us) That made as many of us as had wits More fond of all his easy distances Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder. But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk! Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened — Thereby acquiring much we knew before About ourselves, and hitherto had held Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose. And there were some, of course, and there be now, Disordered and reduced amazedly To resignation by the mystic seal Of young finality the gods had laid On everything that made him a young demon; And one or two shot looks at him already As he had been their executioner; And once or twice he was, not knowing it, — Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay And saying nothing ... Yet, for all his engines, You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em A world made out of more that has a reason Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day; Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit But we mark how he sees in everything A law that, given we flout it once too often, Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads. To me it looks as if the power that made him, For fear of giving all things to one creature, Left out the first, — faith, innocence, illusion, Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam, — And thereby, for his too consuming vision, Empowered him out of nature; though to see him, You'd never guess what's going on inside him. He'll break out some day like a keg of ale With too much independent frenzy in it; And all for collaring what he knows won't keep, And what he'd best forget — but that he can't. You'll have it, and have more than I'm foretelling; And there'll be such a roaring at the Globe As never stunned the bleeding gladiators. He'll have to change the color of its hair A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra. Black hair would never do for Cleopatra. But you and I are not yet two old women, And you're a man of office. What he does Is more to you than how it is he does it, — And that's what the Lord God has never told him. They work together, and the Devil helps 'em; They do it of a morning, or if not, They do it of a night; in which event He's peevish of a morning. He seems old; He's not the proper stomach or the sleep — And they're two sovran agents to conserve him Against the fiery art that has no mercy But what's in that prodigious grand new House. I gather something happening in his boyhood Fulfilled him with a boy's determination To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well, I hope at last he'll have his joy of it, And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves, And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover, Be less than hell to his attendant ears. Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him. He may be wise. With London two days off, Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him; But there's no quickening breath from anywhere Small make of him again the poised young faun From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already A legend of himself before I came To blink before the last of his first lightning. Whatever there be, there'll be no more of that; The coming on of his old monster Time Has made him a still man; and he has dreams Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow. He knows how much of what men paint themselves Would blister in the light of what they are; He sees how much of what was great now shares An eminence transformed and ordinary; He knows too much of what the world has hushed In others, to be loud now for himself; He knows now at what height low enemies May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall; But what not even such as he may know Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing At heaven's gate how he will, and for as long As joy may listen, but he sees no gate, Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little Before the churchyard has it, and the worm. Not long ago, late in an afternoon, I came on him unseen down Lambeth way, And on my life I was afear'd of him: He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from Tophet, His hands behind him and his head bent solemn. "What is it now," said I, — "another woman?" That made him sorry for me, and he smiled. "No, Ben," he mused; "it's Nothing. It's all Nothing. We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done." Spiders and flies — we're mostly one or t'other — We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done; "By God, you sing that song as if you knew it!" Said I, by way of cheering him; "what ails ye?" "I think I must have come down here to think," Says he to that, and pulls his little beard; "Your fly will serve as well as anybody, And what's his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies, And in his fly's mind has a brave appearance; And then your spider gets him in her net, And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry. That's Nature, the kind mother of us all. And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom, And where's your spider? And that's Nature, also. It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing. It's all a world where bugs and emperors Go singularly back to the same dust, Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars That sang together, Ben, will sing the same Old stave to-morrow." When he talks like that, There's nothing for a human man to do But lead him to some grateful nook like this Where we be now, and there to make him drink. He'll drink, for love of me, and then be sick; A sad sign always in a man of parts, And always very ominous. The great Should be as large in liquor as in love, — And our great friend is not so large in either: One disaffects him, and the other fails him; Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it, He's wondering what's to pay in his insides; And while his eyes are on the Cyprian He's fribbling all the time with that damned House. We laugh here at his thrift, but after all It may be thrift that saves him from the devil; God gave it, anyhow, — and we'll suppose He knew the compound of his handiwork. To-day the clouds are with him, but anon He'll out of 'em enough to shake the tree Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of, — And, throwing in the bruised and whole together, Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder; And if he live, there'll be a sunset spell Thrown over him as over a glassed lake That yesterday was all a black wild water. God send he live to give us, if no more, What now's a-rampage in him, and exhibit, With a decent half-allegiance to the ages An earnest of at least a casual eye Turned once on what he owes to Gutenberg, And to the fealty of more centuries Than are as yet a picture in our vision. "There's time enough, — I'll do it when I'm old, And we're immortal men," he says to that; And then he says to me, "Ben, what's 'immortal'? Think you by any force of ordination It may be nothing of a sort more noisy Than a small oblivion of component ashes That of a dream-addicted world was once A moving atomy much like your friend here?" Nothing will help that man. To make him laugh, I said then he was a mad mountebank, — And by the Lord I nearer made him cry. I could have eat an eft then, on my knees, Tail, claws, and all of him; for I had stung The king of men, who had no sting for me, And I had hurt him in his memories; And I say now, as I shall say again, I love the man this side idolatry. He'll do it when he's old, he says. I wonder. He may not be so ancient as all that. For such as he, the thing that is to do Will do itself, — but there's a reckoning; The sessions that are now too much his own, The roiling inward of a stilled outside, The churning out of all those blood-fed lines, The nights of many schemes and little sleep, The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking, The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching, — This weary jangling of conjoined affairs Made out of elements that have no end, And all confused at once, I understand, Is not what makes a man to live forever. O no, not now! He'll not be going now: There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions Before he goes. He'll stay awhile. Just wait: Just wait a year or two for Cleopatra, For she's to be a balsam and a comfort; And that's not all a jape of mine now, either. For granted once the old way of Apollo Sings in a man, he may then, if he's able, Strike unafraid whatever strings he will Upon the last and wildest of new lyres; Nor out of his new magic, though it hymn The shrieks of dungeoned hell, shall he create A madness or a gloom to shut quite out A cleaving daylight, and a last great calm Triumphant over shipwreck and all storms. He might have given Aristotle creeps, But surely would have given him his katharsis. He'll not be going yet. There's too much yet Unsung within the man. But when he goes, I'd stake ye coin o' the realm his only care For a phantom world he sounded and found wanting Will be a portion here, a portion there, Of this or that thing or some other thing That has a patent and intrinsical Equivalence in those egregious shillings. And yet he knows, God help him! Tell me, now, If ever there was anything let loose On earth by gods or devils heretofore Like this mad, careful, proud, indifferent Shakespeare! Where was it, if it ever was? By heaven, 'Twas never yet in Rhodes or Pergamon — In Thebes or Nineveh, a thing like this! No thing like this was ever out of England; And that he knows. I wonder if he cares. Perhaps he does .... O Lord, that House in Stratford!
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing, Lords in ermine, beggars freezing; Titled gluttons dainties carving, Genius in a garret starving. Lofty mansions, warm and spacious; Courtiers cringing and voracious; Misers scarce the wretched heeding; Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding. Wives who laugh at passive spouses; Theatres, and meeting-houses; Balls, where simp’ring misses languish; Hospitals, and groans of anguish. Arts and sciences bewailing; Commerce drooping, credit failing; Placemen mocking subjects loyal; Separations, weddings royal. Authors who can’t earn a dinner; Many a subtle rogue a winner; Fugitives for shelter seeking; Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking. Taste and talents quite deserted; All the laws of truth perverted; Arrogance o’er merit soaring; Merit silently deploring. Ladies gambling night and morning; Fools the works of genius scorning; Ancient dames for girls mistaken, Youthful damsels quite forsaken. Some in luxury delighting; More in talking than in fighting; Lovers old, and beaux decrepid; Lordlings empty and insipid. Poets, painters, and musicians; Lawyers, doctors, politicians: Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes, Seeking fame by diff’rent roads. Gallant souls with empty purses; Gen’rals only fit for nurses; School-boys, smit with martial spirit, Taking place of vet’ran merit. Honest men who can’t get places, Knaves who shew unblushing faces; Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded; Candor spurn’d, and art rewarded.
A FORM, as any taper, fine ;  A head like half-pint bason ; Where golden cords, and bands entwine,  As rich as fleece of JASON. A pair of shoulders strong and wide,  Like country clown enlisting ; Bare arms long dangling by the side,  And shoes of ragged listing ! Cravats like towels, thick and broad,  Long tippets made of bear-skin, Muffs that a RUSSIAN might applaud,  And rouge to spoil a fair skin. Long petticoats to hide the feet,  Silk hose with clocks of scarlet ; A load of perfume, sick'ning sweet,  Bought of PARISIAN VARLET. A bush of hair, the brow to shade,  Sometimes the eyes to cover ; A necklace that might be display'd  By OTAHEITEAN lover ! A bowl of straw to deck the head,  Like porringer unmeaning ; A bunch of POPPIES flaming red,  With motly ribands streaming. Bare ears on either side the head,  Like wood-wild savage SATYR ; Tinted with deep vermilion red,  To shame the blush of nature. Red elbows, gauzy gloves, that add  An icy cov'ring merely ; A wadded coat, the shape to pad,  Like Dutch-women — or nearly. Such is CAPRICE ! but, lovely kind !  Oh ! let each mental feature Proclaim the labour of the mind,  And leave your charms to NATURE.
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard. Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking. And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy, although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep; And when the cats come out the rats are sly. Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful. Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us, but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it. And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through, Where blind farewells are taken easily .... Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!
I have no wit, no words, no tears;  My heart within me like a stone Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;  Look right, look left, I dwell alone; I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief  No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf:  O Jesus, quicken me. My life is like a faded leaf,  My harvest dwindled to a husk: Truly my life is void and brief  And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing,  No bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;  O Jesus, rise in me. My life is like a broken bowl,  A broken bowl that cannot hold One drop of water for my soul  Or cordial in the searching cold; Cast in the fire the perish'd thing;  Melt and remould it, till it be A royal cup for Him, my King:  O Jesus, drink of me.
My heart is like a singing bird  Whose nest is in a water'd shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell  That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these  Because my love is come to me. Raise me a dais of silk and down;  Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates,  And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes,  In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life  Is come, my love is come to me.
A fool I was to sleep at noon,  And wake when night is chilly Beneath the comfortless cold moon; A fool to pluck my rose too soon,  A fool to snap my lily. My garden-plot I have not kept;  Faded and all-forsaken, I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I slept,  It's winter now I waken. Talk what you please of future spring  And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:— Stripp'd bare of hope and everything, No more to laugh, no more to sing,  I sit alone with sorrow.
Where sunless rivers weep Their waves into the deep, She sleeps a charmed sleep:  Awake her not. Led by a single star, She came from very far To seek where shadows are  Her pleasant lot. She left the rosy morn, She left the fields of corn, For twilight cold and lorn  And water springs. Through sleep, as through a veil, She sees the sky look pale, And hears the nightingale  That sadly sings. Rest, rest, a perfect rest Shed over brow and breast; Her face is toward the west,  The purple land. She cannot see the grain Ripening on hill and plain; She cannot feel the rain  Upon her hand. Rest, rest, for evermore Upon a mossy shore; Rest, rest at the heart's core  Till time shall cease: Sleep that no pain shall wake; Night that no morn shall break Till joy shall overtake  Her perfect peace.
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries, Pine-apples, blackberries, Apricots, strawberries;— All ripe together In summer weather,— Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.”  Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes, Laura bow’d her head to hear, Lizzie veil’d her blushes: Crouching close together In the cooling weather, With clasping arms and cautioning lips, With tingling cheeks and finger tips. “Lie close,” Laura said, Pricking up her golden head: “We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?” “Come buy,” call the goblins Hobbling down the glen. “Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura, You should not peep at goblin men.” Lizzie cover’d up her eyes, Cover’d close lest they should look; Laura rear’d her glossy head, And whisper’d like the restless brook: “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, Down the glen tramp little men. One hauls a basket, One bears a plate, One lugs a golden dish Of many pounds weight. How fair the vine must grow Whose grapes are so luscious; How warm the wind must blow Through those fruit bushes.” “No,” said Lizzie, “No, no, no; Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.” She thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran: Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat’s face, One whisk’d a tail, One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, One crawl’d like a snail, One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry. She heard a voice like voice of doves Cooing all together: They sounded kind and full of loves In the pleasant weather.  Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck Like a rush-imbedded swan, Like a lily from the beck, Like a moonlit poplar branch, Like a vessel at the launch When its last restraint is gone.  Backwards up the mossy glen Turn’d and troop’d the goblin men, With their shrill repeated cry, “Come buy, come buy.” When they reach’d where Laura was They stood stock still upon the moss, Leering at each other, Brother with queer brother; Signalling each other, Brother with sly brother. One set his basket down, One rear’d his plate; One began to weave a crown Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown (Men sell not such in any town); One heav’d the golden weight Of dish and fruit to offer her: “Come buy, come buy,” was still their cry. Laura stared but did not stir, Long’d but had no money: The whisk-tail’d merchant bade her taste In tones as smooth as honey, The cat-faced purr’d, The rat-faced spoke a word Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard; One parrot-voiced and jolly Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly;”— One whistled like a bird.  But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste: “Good folk, I have no coin; To take were to purloin: I have no copper in my purse, I have no silver either, And all my gold is on the furze That shakes in windy weather Above the rusty heather.” “You have much gold upon your head,” They answer’d all together: “Buy from us with a golden curl.” She clipp’d a precious golden lock, She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl, Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock, Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, Clearer than water flow’d that juice; She never tasted such before, How should it cloy with length of use? She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She suck’d until her lips were sore; Then flung the emptied rinds away But gather’d up one kernel stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turn’d home alone.  Lizzie met her at the gate Full of wise upbraidings: “Dear, you should not stay so late, Twilight is not good for maidens; Should not loiter in the glen In the haunts of goblin men. Do you not remember Jeanie, How she met them in the moonlight, Took their gifts both choice and many, Ate their fruits and wore their flowers Pluck’d from bowers Where summer ripens at all hours? But ever in the noonlight She pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew grey; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: I planted daisies there a year ago That never blow. You should not loiter so.” “Nay, hush,” said Laura: “Nay, hush, my sister: I ate and ate my fill, Yet my mouth waters still; To-morrow night I will Buy more;” and kiss’d her: “Have done with sorrow; I’ll bring you plums to-morrow Fresh on their mother twigs, Cherries worth getting; You cannot think what figs My teeth have met in, What melons icy-cold Piled on a dish of gold Too huge for me to hold, What peaches with a velvet nap, Pellucid grapes without one seed: Odorous indeed must be the mead Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink With lilies at the brink, And sugar-sweet their sap.”  Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtain’d bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipp’d with gold for awful kings. Moon and stars gaz’d in at them, Wind sang to them lullaby, Lumbering owls forbore to fly, Not a bat flapp’d to and fro Round their rest: Cheek to cheek and breast to breast Lock’d together in one nest.  Early in the morning When the first cock crow’d his warning, Neat like bees, as sweet and busy, Laura rose with Lizzie: Fetch’d in honey, milk’d the cows, Air’d and set to rights the house, Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, Next churn’d butter, whipp’d up cream, Fed their poultry, sat and sew’d; Talk’d as modest maidens should: Lizzie with an open heart, Laura in an absent dream, One content, one sick in part; One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight, One longing for the night.  At length slow evening came: They went with pitchers to the reedy brook; Lizzie most placid in her look, Laura most like a leaping flame. They drew the gurgling water from its deep; Lizzie pluck’d purple and rich golden flags, Then turning homeward said: “The sunset flushes Those furthest loftiest crags; Come, Laura, not another maiden lags. No wilful squirrel wags, The beasts and birds are fast asleep.” But Laura loiter’d still among the rushes And said the bank was steep.  And said the hour was early still The dew not fall’n, the wind not chill; Listening ever, but not catching The customary cry, “Come buy, come buy,” With its iterated jingle Of sugar-baited words: Not for all her watching Once discerning even one goblin Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling; Let alone the herds That used to tramp along the glen, In groups or single, Of brisk fruit-merchant men.  Till Lizzie urged, “O Laura, come; I hear the fruit-call but I dare not look: You should not loiter longer at this brook: Come with me home. The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, Each glowworm winks her spark, Let us get home before the night grows dark: For clouds may gather Though this is summer weather, Put out the lights and drench us through; Then if we lost our way what should we do?”  Laura turn’d cold as stone To find her sister heard that cry alone, That goblin cry, “Come buy our fruits, come buy.” Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit? Must she no more such succous pasture find, Gone deaf and blind? Her tree of life droop’d from the root: She said not one word in her heart’s sore ache; But peering thro’ the dimness, nought discerning, Trudg’d home, her pitcher dripping all the way; So crept to bed, and lay Silent till Lizzie slept; Then sat up in a passionate yearning, And gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire, and wept As if her heart would break.  Day after day, night after night, Laura kept watch in vain In sullen silence of exceeding pain. She never caught again the goblin cry: “Come buy, come buy;”— She never spied the goblin men Hawking their fruits along the glen: But when the noon wax’d bright Her hair grew thin and grey; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away.  One day remembering her kernel-stone She set it by a wall that faced the south; Dew’d it with tears, hoped for a root, Watch’d for a waxing shoot, But there came none; It never saw the sun, It never felt the trickling moisture run: While with sunk eyes and faded mouth She dream’d of melons, as a traveller sees False waves in desert drouth With shade of leaf-crown’d trees, And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.  She no more swept the house, Tended the fowls or cows, Fetch’d honey, kneaded cakes of wheat, Brought water from the brook: But sat down listless in the chimney-nook And would not eat.  Tender Lizzie could not bear To watch her sister’s cankerous care Yet not to share. She night and morning Caught the goblins’ cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy;”— Beside the brook, along the glen, She heard the tramp of goblin men, The yoke and stir Poor Laura could not hear; Long’d to buy fruit to comfort her, But fear’d to pay too dear. She thought of Jeanie in her grave, Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hope to have Fell sick and died In her gay prime, In earliest winter time With the first glazing rime, With the first snow-fall of crisp winter time.  Till Laura dwindling Seem’d knocking at Death’s door: Then Lizzie weigh’d no more Better and worse; But put a silver penny in her purse, Kiss’d Laura, cross’d the heath with clumps of furze At twilight, halted by the brook: And for the first time in her life Began to listen and look.  Laugh’d every goblin When they spied her peeping: Came towards her hobbling, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing, Clucking and gobbling, Mopping and mowing, Full of airs and graces, Pulling wry faces, Demure grimaces, Cat-like and rat-like, Ratel- and wombat-like, Snail-paced in a hurry, Parrot-voiced and whistler, Helter skelter, hurry skurry, Chattering like magpies, Fluttering like pigeons, Gliding like fishes,— Hugg’d her and kiss’d her: Squeez’d and caress’d her: Stretch’d up their dishes, Panniers, and plates: “Look at our apples Russet and dun, Bob at our cherries, Bite at our peaches, Citrons and dates, Grapes for the asking, Pears red with basking Out in the sun, Plums on their twigs; Pluck them and suck them, Pomegranates, figs.”—  “Good folk,” said Lizzie, Mindful of Jeanie: “Give me much and many: — Held out her apron, Toss’d them her penny. “Nay, take a seat with us, Honour and eat with us,” They answer’d grinning: “Our feast is but beginning. Night yet is early, Warm and dew-pearly, Wakeful and starry: Such fruits as these No man can carry: Half their bloom would fly, Half their dew would dry, Half their flavour would pass by. Sit down and feast with us, Be welcome guest with us, Cheer you and rest with us.”— “Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits At home alone for me: So without further parleying, If you will not sell me any Of your fruits though much and many, Give me back my silver penny I toss’d you for a fee.”— They began to scratch their pates, No longer wagging, purring, But visibly demurring, Grunting and snarling. One call’d her proud, Cross-grain’d, uncivil; Their tones wax’d loud, Their looks were evil. Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbow’d and jostled her, Claw’d with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking, Twitch’d her hair out by the roots, Stamp’d upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat.  White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood,— Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone Lash’d by tides obstreperously,— Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire,— Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree White with blossoms honey-sweet Sore beset by wasp and bee,— Like a royal virgin town Topp’d with gilded dome and spire Close beleaguer’d by a fleet Mad to tug her standard down.  One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink. Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her, Coax’d and fought her, Bullied and besought her, Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink, Kick’d and knock’d her, Maul’d and mock’d her, Lizzie utter’d not a word; Would not open lip from lip Lest they should cram a mouthful in: But laugh’d in heart to feel the drip Of juice that syrupp’d all her face, And lodg’d in dimples of her chin, And streak’d her neck which quaked like curd. At last the evil people, Worn out by her resistance, Flung back her penny, kick’d their fruit Along whichever road they took, Not leaving root or stone or shoot; Some writh’d into the ground, Some div’d into the brook With ring and ripple, Some scudded on the gale without a sound, Some vanish’d in the distance.  In a smart, ache, tingle, Lizzie went her way; Knew not was it night or day; Sprang up the bank, tore thro’ the furze, Threaded copse and dingle, And heard her penny jingle Bouncing in her purse,— Its bounce was music to her ear. She ran and ran As if she fear’d some goblin man Dogg’d her with gibe or curse Or something worse: But not one goblin scurried after, Nor was she prick’d by fear; The kind heart made her windy-paced That urged her home quite out of breath with haste And inward laughter.  She cried, “Laura,” up the garden, “Did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me; For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men.”  Laura started from her chair, Flung her arms up in the air, Clutch’d her hair: “Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted For my sake the fruit forbidden? Must your light like mine be hidden, Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruin’d in my ruin, Thirsty, canker’d, goblin-ridden?”— She clung about her sister, Kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d her: Tears once again Refresh’d her shrunken eyes, Dropping like rain After long sultry drouth; Shaking with aguish fear, and pain, She kiss’d and kiss’d her with a hungry mouth.  Her lips began to scorch, That juice was wormwood to her tongue, She loath’d the feast: Writhing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung, Rent all her robe, and wrung Her hands in lamentable haste, And beat her breast. Her locks stream’d like the torch Borne by a racer at full speed, Or like the mane of horses in their flight, Or like an eagle when she stems the light Straight toward the sun, Or like a caged thing freed, Or like a flying flag when armies run.  Swift fire spread through her veins, knock’d at her heart, Met the fire smouldering there And overbore its lesser flame; She gorged on bitterness without a name: Ah! fool, to choose such part Of soul-consuming care! Sense fail’d in the mortal strife: Like the watch-tower of a town Which an earthquake shatters down, Like a lightning-stricken mast, Like a wind-uprooted tree Spun about, Like a foam-topp’d waterspout Cast down headlong in the sea, She fell at last; Pleasure past and anguish past, Is it death or is it life?  Life out of death. That night long Lizzie watch’d by her, Counted her pulse’s flagging stir, Felt for her breath, Held water to her lips, and cool’d her face With tears and fanning leaves: But when the first birds chirp’d about their eaves, And early reapers plodded to the place Of golden sheaves, And dew-wet grass Bow’d in the morning winds so brisk to pass, And new buds with new day Open’d of cup-like lilies on the stream, Laura awoke as from a dream, Laugh’d in the innocent old way, Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice; Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey, Her breath was sweet as May And light danced in her eyes.  Days, weeks, months, years Afterwards, when both were wives With children of their own; Their mother-hearts beset with fears, Their lives bound up in tender lives; Laura would call the little ones And tell them of her early prime, Those pleasant days long gone Of not-returning time: Would talk about the haunted glen, The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men, Their fruits like honey to the throat But poison in the blood; (Men sell not such in any town): Would tell them how her sister stood In deadly peril to do her good, And win the fiery antidote: Then joining hands to little hands Would bid them cling together, “For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.”
Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed, Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head: Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean, And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen That death she liv'd by. Let not thine eyes know Any forbidden thing itself, although It once should save as well as kill: but be Its shadow upon life enough for thee.
Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the heart feels a languid grief  Laid on it for a covering,  And how sleep seems a goodly thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf? And how the swift beat of the brain Falters because it is in vain,  In Autumn at the fall of the leaf  Knowest thou not? and how the chief Of joys seems—not to suffer pain? Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the soul feels like a dried sheaf  Bound up at length for harvesting,  And how death seems a comely thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
I The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going somewhere to keep apppointment for dinner and matineés and buying and selling Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by I have seen the general dare the combers come closer And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm. II I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling. Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet. A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.
THE single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.  Choose: For we meet by one or the other.
The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
I HEARD a woman's lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: "A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin' For all her hustlin'. Somebody always gets What she goes on the street for. If it ain't a pimp It's a bull what gets it. I been hustlin' now Till I ain't much good any more. I got nothin' to show for it. Some man got it all, Every night's hustlin' I ever did."
I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
Proud Maisie is in the wood,  Walking so early; Sweet Robin sits on the bush,  Singing so rarely. "Tell me, thou bonny bird,  When shall I marry me?"— "When six braw gentlemen  Kirkward shall carry ye." "Who makes the bridal bed,  Birdie, say truly?"— "The gray-headed sexton  That delves the grave duly. "The glowworm o'er grave and stone  Shall light thee steady; The owl from the steeple sing,  'Welcome, proud lady.'"
There are strange things done in the midnight sun  By the men who moil for gold;The Arctic trails have their secret tales  That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,  But the queerest they ever did seeWas that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge  I cremated Sam McGee. Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows. He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell; Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell." On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see; It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee. And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow, And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe, He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess; And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request." Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan: "It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone. Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains; So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains." A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail; And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale. He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee; And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee. There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven, With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given; It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains, But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains." Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code. In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load. In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring, Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing. And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow; And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low; The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in; And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin. Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay; It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May." And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum; Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum." Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire; Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher; The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see; And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee. Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so; And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow. It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why; And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky. I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear; But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near; I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside. I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide. And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door. It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm— Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."There are strange things done in the midnight sun  By the men who moil for gold;The Arctic trails have their secret tales  That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,  But the queerest they ever did seeWas that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge  I cremated Sam McGee.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(from Love's Labors Lost) When daisies pied and violets blue And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he: “Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks, When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, “Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring-owl, “Tu-who; Tu-whit, tu-who!”—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, “Tu-who; Tu-whit, tu-who!”—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.— Confess. St. August. Earth, ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight's tingling silentness; If autumn's hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; If spring's voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, belovèd brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted favour now! Mother of this unfathomable world! Favour my solemn song, for I have loved Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are. In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmèd night To render up thy charge:...and, though ne'er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air, And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. There was a Poet whose untimely tomb No human hands with pious reverence reared, But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:— A lovely youth,—no mourning maiden decked With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath, The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:— Gentle, and brave, and generous,—no lorn bard Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. By solemn vision, and bright silver dream, His infancy was nurtured. Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt And knew. When early youth had past, he left His cold fireside and alienated home To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. Many a wide waste and tangled wilderness Has lured his fearless steps; and he has bought With his sweet voice and eyes, from savage men, His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where'er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes On black bare pointed islets ever beat With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice or pride, their starry domes Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines Of pearl, and thrones radiant with chrysolite. Nor had that scene of ampler majesty Than gems or gold, the varying roof of heaven And the green earth lost in his heart its claims To love and wonder; he would linger long In lonesome vales, making the wild his home, Until the doves and squirrels would partake From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks, And the wild antelope, that starts whene'er The dry leaf rustles in the brake, suspend Her timid steps to gaze upon a form More graceful than her own. His wandering step Obedient to high thoughts, has visited The awful ruins of the days of old: Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes, and whatsoe'er of strange Sculptured on alabaster obelisk, Or jasper tomb, or mutilated sphynx, Dark Æthiopia in her desert hills Conceals. Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images Of more than man, where marble daemons watch The Zodiac's brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around, He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world's youth, through the long burning day Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. Meanwhile an Arab maiden brought his food, Her daily portion, from her father's tent, And spread her matting for his couch, and stole From duties and repose to tend his steps:— Enamoured, yet not daring for deep awe To speak her love:—and watched his nightly sleep, Sleepless herself, to gaze upon his lips Parted in slumber, whence the regular breath Of innocent dreams arose: then, when red morn Made paler the pale moon, to her cold home Wildered, and wan, and panting, she returned. The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the aërial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way; Till in the vale of Cashmire, far within Its loneliest dell, where odorous plants entwine Beneath the hollow rocks a natural bower, Beside a sparkling rivulet he stretched His languid limbs. A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veilèd maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire: wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp Strange symphony, and in their branching veins The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently endured Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned, And saw by the warm light of their own life Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, Her dark locks floating in the breath of night, Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom:...she drew back a while, Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, Like a dark flood suspended in its course Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain. Roused by the shock he started from his trance— The cold white light of morning, the blue moon Low in the west, the clear and garish hills, The distinct valley and the vacant woods, Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled The hues of heaven that canopied his bower Of yesternight? The sounds that soothed his sleep, The mystery and the majesty of Earth, The joy, the exultation? His wan eyes Gaze on the empty scene as vacantly As ocean's moon looks on the moon in heaven. The spirit of sweet human love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; He overleaps the bounds. Alas! Alas! Were limbs and breath and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost, In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, That beautiful shape! Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake, Lead only to a black and watery depth, While death's blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung, Where every shade which the foul grave exhales Hides its dead eye from the detested day, Conduct, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, The insatiate hope which it awakened stung His brain even like despair. While daylight held The sky, the Poet kept mute conference With his still soul. At night the passion came, Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream, And shook him from his rest, and led him forth Into the darkness.—As an eagle grasped In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast Burn with the poison, and precipitates Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud, Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight O'er the wide aëry wilderness: thus driven By the bright shadow of that lovely dream, Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night, Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells, Startling with careless step the moonlight snake, He fled. Red morning dawned upon his flight, Shedding the mockery of its vital hues Upon his cheek of death. He wandered on Till vast Aornos, seen from Petra's steep, Hung o'er the low horizon like a cloud; Through Balk, and where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, Day after day a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame. And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair Sered by the autumn of strange suffering Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand Hung like dead bone within its withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone. The cottagers, Who ministered with human charity His human wants, beheld with wondering awe Their fleeting visitant. The mountaineer, Encountering on some dizzy precipice That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused In its career: the infant would conceal His troubled visage in his mother's robe In terror at the glare of those wild eyes, To remember their strange light in many a dream Of after-times; but youthful maidens, taught By nature, would interpret half the woe That wasted him, would call him with false names Brother, and friend, would press his pallid hand At parting, and watch, dim through tears, the path Of his departure from their father's door. At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. It rose as he approached, and with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main. His eyes pursued its flight.—"Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy. And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?" A gloomy smile Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips. For sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly Its precious charge, and silent death exposed, Faithless perhaps as sleep, a shadowy lure, With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms. Startled by his own thoughts he looked around. There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind. A little shallop floating near the shore Caught the impatient wandering of his gaze. It had been long abandoned, for its sides Gaped wide with many a rift, and its frail joints Swayed with the undulations of the tide. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean's waste; For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves The slimy caverns of the populous deep. The day was fair and sunny: sea and sky Drank its inspiring radiance, and the wind Swept strongly from the shore, blackening the waves. Following his eager soul, the wanderer Leaped in the boat, he spread his cloak aloft On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat, And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea Like a torn cloud before the hurricane. As one that in a silver vision floats Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly Along the dark and ruffled waters fled The straining boat.—A whirlwind swept it on, With fierce gusts and precipitating force, Through the white ridges of the chafèd sea. The waves arose. Higher and higher still Their fierce necks writhed beneath the tempest's scourge Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven With dark obliterating course, he sate: As if their genii were the ministers Appointed to conduct him to the light Of those belovèd eyes, the Poet sate Holding the steady helm. Evening came on, The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray That canopied his path o'er the waste deep; Twilight, ascending slowly from the east, Entwined in duskier wreaths her braided locks O'er the fair front and radiant eyes of day; Night followed, clad with stars. On every side More horribly the multitudinous streams Of ocean's mountainous waste to mutual war Rushed in dark tumult thundering, as to mock The calm and spangled sky. The little boat Still fled before the storm; still fled, like foam Down the steep cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean. Safely fled— As if that frail and wasted human form, Had been an elemental god. At midnight The moon arose: and lo! the ethereal cliffs Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone Among the stars like sunlight, and around Whose caverned base the whirlpools and the waves Bursting and eddying irresistibly Rage and resound for ever.—Who shall save?— The boat fled on,—the boiling torrent drove,— The crags closed round with black and jaggèd arms, The shattered mountain overhung the sea, And faster still, beyond all human speed, Suspended on the sweep of the smooth wave, The little boat was driven. A cavern there Yawned, and amid its slant and winding depths Ingulfed the rushing sea. The boat fled on With unrelaxing speed.—"Vision and Love!" The Poet cried aloud, "I have beheld The path of thy departure. Sleep and death Shall not divide us long!" The boat pursued The windings of the cavern. Daylight shone At length upon that gloomy river's flow; Now, where the fiercest war among the waves Is calm, on the unfathomable stream The boat moved slowly. Where the mountain, riven, Exposed those black depths to the azure sky, Ere yet the flood's enormous volume fell Even to the base of Caucasus, with sound That shook the everlasting rocks, the mass Filled with one whirlpool all that ample chasm; Stair above stair the eddying waters rose, Circling immeasurably fast, and laved With alternating dash the gnarlèd roots Of mighty trees, that stretched their giant arms In darkness over it. I' the midst was left, Reflecting, yet distorting every cloud, A pool of treacherous and tremendous calm. Seized by the sway of the ascending stream, With dizzy swiftness, round, and round, and round, Ridge after ridge the straining boat arose, Till on the verge of the extremest curve, Where, through an opening of the rocky bank, The waters overflow, and a smooth spot Of glassy quiet mid those battling tides Is left, the boat paused shuddering.—Shall it sink Down the abyss? Shall the reverting stress Of that resistless gulf embosom it? Now shall it fall?—A wandering stream of wind, Breathed from the west, has caught the expanded sail, And, lo! with gentle motion, between banks Of mossy slope, and on a placid stream, Beneath a woven grove it sails, and, hark! The ghastly torrent mingles its far roar, With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods. Where the embowering trees recede, and leave A little space of green expanse, the cove Is closed by meeting banks, whose yellow flowers For ever gaze on their own drooping eyes, Reflected in the crystal calm. The wave Of the boat's motion marred their pensive task, Which nought but vagrant bird, or wanton wind, Or falling spear-grass, or their own decay Had e'er disturbed before. The Poet longed To deck with their bright hues his withered hair, But on his heart its solitude returned, And he forbore. Not the strong impulse hid In those flushed cheeks, bent eyes, and shadowy frame Had yet performed its ministry: it hung Upon his life, as lightning in a cloud Gleams, hovering ere it vanish, ere the floods Of night close over it. The noonday sun Now shone upon the forest, one vast mass Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence A narrow vale embosoms. There, huge caves Scooped in the dark base of their aëry rocks Mocking its moans, respond and roar for ever. The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o'er the Poet's path, as led By love, or dream, or god, or mightier Death, He sought in Nature's dearest haunt, some bank Her cradle, and his sepulchre. More dark And dark the shades accumulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching, frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The grey trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen Sends from its woods of musk-rose, twined with jasmine, A soul-dissolving odour, to invite To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell, Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades, Like vaporous shapes half seen; beyond, a well, Dark, gleaming, and of most translucent wave, Images all the woven boughs above, And each depending leaf, and every speck Of azure sky, darting between their chasms; Nor aught else in the liquid mirror laves Its portraiture, but some inconstant star Between one foliaged lattice twinkling fair, Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon, Or gorgeous insect floating motionless, Unconscious of the day, ere yet his wings Have spread their glories to the gaze of noon. Hither the Poet came. His eyes beheld Their own wan light through the reflected lines Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth Of that still fountain; as the human heart, Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave, Sees its own treacherous likeness there. He heard The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel An unaccustomed presence, and the sound Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed To stand beside him—clothed in no bright robes Of shadowy silver or enshrining light, Borrowed from aught the visible world affords Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;— But, undulating woods, and silent well, And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming, Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was,—only... when his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness,... two eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed with their serene and azure smiles To beckon him. Obedient to the light That shone within his soul, he went, pursuing The windings of the dell.—The rivulet Wanton and wild, through many a green ravine Beneath the forest flowed. Sometimes it fell Among the moss, with hollow harmony Dark and profound. Now on the polished stones It danced; like childhood laughing as it went: Then, through the plain in tranquil wanderings crept, Reflecting every herb and drooping bud That overhung its quietness.—"O stream! Whose source is inaccessibly profound, Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, Thy searchless fountain, and invisible course Have each their type in me: and the wide sky, And measureless ocean may declare as soon What oozy cavern or what wandering cloud Contains thy waters, as the universe Tell where these living thoughts reside, when stretched Upon thy flowers my bloodless limbs shall waste I' the passing wind!" Beside the grassy shore Of the small stream he went; he did impress On the green moss his tremulous step, that caught Strong shuddering from his burning limbs. As one Roused by some joyous madness from the couch Of fever, he did move; yet, not like him, Forgetful of the grave, where, when the flame Of his frail exultation shall be spent, He must descend. With rapid steps he went Beneath the shade of trees, beside the flow Of the wild babbling rivulet; and now The forest's solemn canopies were changed For the uniform and lightsome evening sky. Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, And nought but gnarlèd roots of ancient pines Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots The unwilling soil. A gradual change was here, Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away, The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin And white, and where irradiate dewy eyes Had shone, gleam stony orbs:—so from his steps Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade Of the green groves, with all their odorous winds And musical motions. Calm, he still pursued The stream, that with a larger volume now Rolled through the labyrinthine dell; and there Fretted a path through its descending curves With its wintry speed. On every side now rose Rocks, which, in unimaginable forms, Lifted their black and barren pinnacles In the light of evening, and its precipice Obscuring the ravine, disclosed above, Mid toppling stones, black gulfs and yawning caves, Whose windings gave ten thousand various tongues To the loud stream. Lo! where the pass expands Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks, And seems, with its accumulated crags, To overhang the world: for wide expand Beneath the wan stars and descending moon Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge Of the remote horizon. The near scene, In naked and severe simplicity, Made contrast with the universe. A pine, Rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response, at each pause, In most familiar cadence, with the howl The thunder and the hiss of homeless streams Mingling its solemn song, whilst the broad river, Foaming and hurrying o'er its rugged path, Fell into that immeasurable void, Scattering its waters to the passing winds. Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine And torrent, were not all;—one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks, It overlooked in its serenity The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars. It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped The fissured stones with its entwining arms, And did embower with leaves for ever green, And berries dark, the smooth and even space Of its inviolated floor, and here The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore, In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay, Red, yellow, or ethereally pale, Rivals the pride of summer. 'Tis the haunt Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach The wilds to love tranquillity. One step, One human step alone, has ever broken The stillness of its solitude:—one voice Alone inspired its echoes;—even that voice Which hither came, floating among the winds, And led the loveliest among human forms To make their wild haunts the depository Of all the grace and beauty that endued Its motions, render up its majesty, Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm, And to the damp leaves and blue cavern mould, Nurses of rainbow flowers and branching moss, Commit the colours of that varying cheek, That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes. The dim and hornèd moon hung low, and poured A sea of lustre on the horizon's verge That overflowed its mountains. Yellow mist Filled the unbounded atmosphere, and drank Wan moonlight even to fulness: not a star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace.—O, storm of death! Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls His brother Death. A rare and regal prey He hath prepared, prowling around the world; Glutted with which thou mayst repose, and men Go to their graves like flowers or creeping worms, Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine The unheeded tribute of a broken heart. When on the threshold of the green recess The wanderer's footsteps fell, he knew that death Was on him. Yet a little, ere it fled, Did he resign his high and holy soul To images of the majestic past, That paused within his passive being now, Like winds that bear sweet music, when they breathe Through some dim latticed chamber. He did place His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink Of that obscurest chasm;—and thus he lay, Surrendering to their final impulses The hovering powers of life. Hope and despair, The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, And his own being unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there At peace, and faintly smiling:—his last sight Was the great moon, which o'er the western line Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended, With whose dun beams inwoven darkness seemed To mingle. Now upon the jaggèd hills It rests, and still as the divided frame Of the vast meteor sunk, the Poet's blood, That ever beat in mystic sympathy With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still: And when two lessening points of light alone Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night:—till the minutest ray Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. It paused—it fluttered. But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a vapour fed with golden beams That ministered on sunlight, ere the west Eclipses it, was now that wondrous frame— No sense, no motion, no divinity— A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings The breath of heaven did wander—a bright stream Once fed with many-voicèd waves—a dream Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever, Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. O, for Medea's wondrous alchemy, Which wheresoe'er it fell made the earth gleam With bright flowers, and the wintry boughs exhale From vernal blooms fresh fragrance! O, that God, Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice Which but one living man has drained, who now, Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels No proud exemption in the blighting curse He bears, over the world wanders for ever, Lone as incarnate death! O, that the dream Of dark magician in his visioned cave, Raking the cinders of a crucible For life and power, even when his feeble hand Shakes in its last decay, were the true law Of this so lovely world! But thou art fled Like some frail exhalation; which the dawn Robes in its golden beams,—ah! thou hast fled! The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful, The child of grace and genius. Heartless things Are done and said i' the world, and many worms And beasts and men live on, and mighty Earth From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, In vesper low or joyous orison, Lifts still its solemn voice:—but thou art fled— Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee Been purest ministers, who are, alas! Now thou art not. Upon those pallid lips So sweet even in their silence, on those eyes That image sleep in death, upon that form Yet safe from the worm's outrage, let no tear Be shed—not even in thought. Nor, when those hues Are gone, and those divinest lineaments, Worn by the senseless wind, shall live alone In the frail pauses of this simple strain, Let not high verse, mourning the memory Of that which is no more, or painting's woe Or sculpture, speak in feeble imagery Their own cold powers. Art and eloquence, And all the shows o' the world are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. It is a woe too "deep for tears," when all Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.
Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,  Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy?
Heigho! the lark and the owl!  One flies the morning, and one lulls the night: Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,  Sings like the fool through darkness and light.  "A widow bird sate mourning for her love  Upon a wintry bough;  The frozen wind crept on above,  The freezing stream below.  "There was no leaf upon the forest bare,  No flower upon the ground,  And little motion in the air  Except the mill-wheel's sound."
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field; An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed; A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed— Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
Emily, A ship is floating in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow; There is a path on the sea's azure floor, No keel has ever plough'd that path before; The halcyons brood around the foamless isles; The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles; The merry mariners are bold and free: Say, my heart's sister, wilt thou sail with me? Our bark is as an albatross, whose nest Is a far Eden of the purple East; And we between her wings will sit, while Night, And Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight, Our ministers, along the boundless Sea, Treading each other's heels, unheededly. It is an isle under Ionian skies, Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise, And, for the harbours are not safe and good, This land would have remain'd a solitude But for some pastoral people native there, Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air Draw the last spirit of the age of gold, Simple and spirited; innocent and bold. The blue Aegean girds this chosen home, With ever-changing sound and light and foam, Kissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar; And all the winds wandering along the shore Undulate with the undulating tide: There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide; And many a fountain, rivulet and pond, As clear as elemental diamond, Or serene morning air; and far beyond, The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer (Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year) Pierce into glades, caverns and bowers, and halls Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls Illumining, with sound that never fails Accompany the noonday nightingales; And all the place is peopled with sweet airs; The light clear element which the isle wears Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers, Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers, And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep; And from the moss violets and jonquils peep And dart their arrowy odour through the brain Till you might faint with that delicious pain. And every motion, odour, beam and tone, With that deep music is in unison: Which is a soul within the soul—they seem Like echoes of an antenatal dream. It is an isle 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea, Cradled and hung in clear tranquillity; Bright as that wandering Eden Lucifer, Wash'd by the soft blue Oceans of young air. It is a favour'd place. Famine or Blight, Pestilence, War and Earthquake, never light Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they Sail onward far upon their fatal way: The wingèd storms, chanting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew, From which its fields and woods ever renew Their green and golden immortality. And from the sea there rise, and from the sky There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright, Veil after veil, each hiding some delight, Which Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside, Till the isle's beauty, like a naked bride Glowing at once with love and loveliness, Blushes and trembles at its own excess: Yet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less Burns in the heart of this delicious isle, An atom of th' Eternal, whose own smile Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen O'er the gray rocks, blue waves and forests green, Filling their bare and void interstices. But the chief marvel of the wilderness Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how None of the rustic island-people know: 'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height It overtops the woods; but, for delight, Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime Had been invented, in the world's young prime, Rear'd it, a wonder of that simple time, An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house Made sacred to his sister and his spouse. It scarce seems now a wreck of human art, But, as it were, Titanic; in the heart Of Earth having assum'd its form, then grown Out of the mountains, from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high: For all the antique and learned imagery Has been eras'd, and in the place of it The ivy and the wild-vine interknit The volumes of their many-twining stems; Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky Peeps through their winter-woof of tracery With moonlight patches, or star atoms keen, Or fragments of the day's intense serene; Working mosaic on their Parian floors. And, day and night, aloof, from the high towers And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem To sleep in one another's arms, and dream Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we Read in their smiles, and call reality. This isle and house are mine, and I have vow'd Thee to be lady of the solitude. And I have fitted up some chambers there Looking towards the golden Eastern air, And level with the living winds, which flow Like waves above the living waves below. I have sent books and music there, and all Those instruments with which high Spirits call The future from its cradle, and the past Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, Folded within their own eternity. Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste The scene it would adorn, and therefore still, Nature with all her children haunts the hill. The ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet Keeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit Round the evening tower, and the young stars glance Between the quick bats in their twilight dance; The spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight Before our gate, and the slow, silent night Is measur'd by the pants of their calm sleep. Be this our home in life, and when years heap Their wither'd hours, like leaves, on our decay, Let us become the overhanging day, The living soul of this Elysian isle, Conscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile We two will rise, and sit, and walk together, Under the roof of blue Ionian weather, And wander in the meadows, or ascend The mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend With lightest winds, to touch their paramour; Or linger, where the pebble-paven shore, Under the quick, faint kisses of the sea, Trembles and sparkles as with ecstasy— Possessing and possess'd by all that is Within that calm circumference of bliss, And by each other, till to love and live Be one: or, at the noontide hour, arrive Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep The moonlight of the expir'd night asleep, Through which the awaken'd day can never peep; A veil for our seclusion, close as night's, Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights; Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again. And we will talk, until thought's melody Become too sweet for utterance, and it die In words, to live again in looks, which dart With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart, Harmonizing silence without a sound. Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together; and our lips With other eloquence than words, eclipse The soul that burns between them, and the wells Which boil under our being's inmost cells, The fountains of our deepest life, shall be Confus'd in Passion's golden purity, As mountain-springs under the morning sun. We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, Till like two meteors of expanding flame, Those spheres instinct with it become the same, Touch, mingle, are transfigur'd; ever still Burning, yet ever inconsumable: In one another's substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbu'd To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away: One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!
CHORUS The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies. A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give. Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdu'd: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers. Oh cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh might it die or rest at last!
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,— Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,— I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain, Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain. But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows; And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."
You that do search for every purling spring Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows, And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows Near thereabouts, into your poesy wring; Ye that do dictionary's method bring Into your rimes, running in rattling rows; You that poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes With new-born sighs and denizen'd wit do sing: You take wrong ways; those far-fet helps be such As do bewray a want of inward touch, And sure, at length stol'n goods do come to light. But if, both for your love and skill, your name You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame, Stella behold, and then begin to endite.
"Who is it that this dark night Underneath my window plaineth?" It is one who from thy sight Being, ah, exil'd, disdaineth Every other vulgar light. "Why, alas, and are you he? Be not yet those fancies changed?" Dear, when you find change in me, Though from me you be estranged, Let my change to ruin be. "Well, in absence this will die; Leave to see, and leave to wonder." Absence sure will help, if I Can learn how myself to sunder From what in my heart doth lie. "But time will these thoughts remove; Time doth work what no man knoweth." Time doth as the subject prove; With time still the affection groweth In the faithful turtle-dove. "What if you new beauties see? Will not they stir new affection?" I will think they pictures be, Image-like, of saints' perfection, Poorly counterfeiting thee. "But your reason's purest light Bids you leave such minds to nourish." Dear, do reason no such spite; Never doth thy beauty flourish More than in my reason's sight. "But the wrongs love bears will make Love at length leave undertaking." No, the more fools it do shake, In a ground of so firm making Deeper still they drive the stake. "Peace, I think that some give ear! Come no more, lest I get anger!" Bliss, I will my bliss forbear; Fearing, sweet, you to endanger; But my soul shall harbour there. "Well, begone; begone, I say, Lest that Argus' eyes perceive you!" Oh, unjust Fortune's sway, Which can make me thus to leave you; And from louts to run away.
Pla ce bo, Who is there, who? Di le xi, Dame Margery; Fa, re, my, my, Wherfore and why, why? For the sowle of Philip Sparowe, That was late slayn at Carowe, Among the Nones Blake, For that swete soules sake, And for all sparowes soules, Set in our bederolles, Pater noster qui, With an Ave Mari, And with the corner of a Crede, The more shalbe your mede. Whan I remembre agayn How mi Philyp was slayn, Never halfe the payne Was betwene you twayne, Pyramus and Thesbe, As than befell to me: I wept and I wayled, The tearys downe hayled; But nothinge it avayled To call Phylyp agayne, Whom Gyb our cat hath slayne. Gib, I saye, our cat, Worrowyd her on that Which I loved best: It can not be exprest My sorowfull hevynesse, But all without redresse; For within that stounde, Halfe slumbrynge, in a swounde I fell downe to the grounde. Unneth I kest myne eyes Towarde the cloudy skyes: But whan I dyd beholde My sparow dead and colde, No creatuer but that wolde Have rewed upon me, To behold and se What hevynesse dyd me pange; Wherewith my handes I wrange, That my senaws cracked, As though I had ben racked, So payned and so strayned, That no lyfe wellnye remayned. I syghed and I sobbed, For that I was robbed Of my sparowes lyfe. O mayden, wydow, and wyfe, Of what estate ye be, Of hye or lowe degre, Great sorowe than ye myght se, And lerne to wepe at me! Such paynes dyd me frete, That myne hert dyd bete, My vysage pale and dead, Wanne, and blewe as lead; The panges of hatefull death Wellnye had stopped my breath. Heu, heu, me, That I am wo for the! Ad Dominum, cum tribularer, clamavi: Of God nothynge els crave I But Phyllypes soule to kepe From the marees deepe Of Acherontes well, That is a flode of hell; And from the great Pluto, The prynce of endles wo; And from foule Alecto, With vysage blacke and blo; And from Medusa, that mare, That lyke a fende doth stare; And from Megeras edders, For rufflynge of Phillips fethers, And from her fyry sparklynges, For burnynge of his wynges; And from the smokes sowre Of Proserpinas bowre; And from the dennes darke, Wher Cerberus doth barke, Whom Theseus dyd afraye, Whom Hercules dyd outraye, As famous poetes say; From that hell-hounde, That lyeth in cheynes bounde, With gastly hedes thre, To Jupyter pray we That Phyllyp preserved may be! Amen, say ye with me! Do mi nus, Helpe nowe, swete Jesus! Levavi oculos meos in montes: Wolde God I had Zenophontes, Or Socrates the wyse To shew me their devyse, Moderatly to take This sorrow that I make For Phylyp Sparowes sake! So fervently I shake, I fele my body quake; So urgently I am brought Into carefull thought. Like Andromach, Hectors wyfe, Was wery of her lyfe, Whan she had lost her joye, Noble Hector of Troye; In lyke maner also Encreaseth my dedly wo, For my sparowe is go. It was so prety a fole, It wold syt on a stole, And lerned after my scole For to kepe his cut, With, "Phyllyp, kepe your cut!" It had a velvet cap, And wold syt upon my lap, And seke after small wormes, And somtyme white bred crommes; And many tymes and ofte Betwene my brestes softe It wolde lye and rest; It was propre and prest. Somtyme he wolde gaspe Whan he sawe a waspe; A fly or a gnat, He wolde flye at that; And prytely he wold pant Whan he saw an ant; Lord, how he wolde pry After the butterfly! Lorde, how he wolde hop After the gressop! And whan I sayd, "Phyp! Phyp!" Than he wold lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp. Alas, it wyll me slo, That Phillyp is gone me fro!
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore, Night o'er the ocean settles, dark and mute, Save where is heard the repercussive roar Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone, Singing the hour, and bidding "strike the bell." All is black shadow, but the lucid line Marked by the light surf on the level sand, Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray That wavering reason lends, in life's long darkling way.
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear; Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed. “Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls, For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good, So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.” With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.
The sovereign beauty which I do admire, Witness the world how worthy to be praised: The light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire In my frail spirit, by her from baseness raised; That being now with her huge brightness dazed, Base thing I can no more endure to view; But looking still on her, I stand amazed At wondrous sight of so celestial hue. So when my tongue would speak her praises due, It stopped is with thought's astonishment: And when my pen would write her titles true, It ravish'd is with fancy's wonderment: Yet in my heart I then both speak and write The wonder that my wit cannot endite.
This holy season, fit to fast and pray, Men to devotion ought to be inclin'd: Therefore I likewise on so holy day, For my sweet saint some service fit will find. Her temple fair is built within my mind, In which her glorious image placed is, On which my thoughts do day and night attend, Like sacred priests that never think amiss. There I to her as th' author of my bliss, Will build an altar to appease her ire: And on the same my heart will sacrifice, Burning in flames of pure and chaste desire: The which vouchsafe, O goddess, to accept, Amongst thy dearest relics to be kept.
Like as a huntsman after weary chase, Seeing the game from him escap'd away, Sits down to rest him in some shady place, With panting hounds beguiled of their prey: So after long pursuit and vain assay, When I all weary had the chase forsook, The gentle deer return'd the self-same way, Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook. There she beholding me with milder look, Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide: Till I in hand her yet half trembling took, And with her own goodwill her firmly tied. Strange thing, me seem'd, to see a beast so wild, So goodly won, with her own will beguil'd.
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day, Didst make thy triumph over death and sin: And having harrow'd hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win: This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin, And grant that we for whom thou diddest die, Being with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin, May live for ever in felicity. And that thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love thee for the same again: And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy, With love may one another entertain. So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
Most happy letters, fram'd by skilful trade, With which that happy name was first design'd: The which three times thrice happy hath me made, With gifts of body, fortune, and of mind. The first my being to me gave by kind, From mother's womb deriv'd by due descent, The second is my sovereign Queen most kind, That honour and large richesse to me lent. The third my love, my life's last ornament, By whom my spirit out of dust was raised: To speak her praise and glory excellent, Of all alive most worthy to be praised. Ye three Elizabeths for ever live, That three such graces did unto me give.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay, A mortal thing so to immortalize; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise." "Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew."
Men call you fair, and you do credit it, For that your self ye daily such do see: But the true fair, that is the gentle wit, And vertuous mind, is much more prais'd of me. For all the rest, how ever fair it be, Shall turn to naught and lose that glorious hue: But only that is permanent and free From frail corruption, that doth flesh ensue. That is true beauty: that doth argue you To be divine, and born of heavenly seed: Deriv'd from that fair Spirit, from whom all true And perfect beauty did at first proceed. He only fair, and what he fair hath made, All other fair, like flowers untimely fade.
Ye learned sisters which have oftentimes Beene to me ayding, others to adorne: Whom ye thought worthy of your gracefull rymes, That even the greatest did not greatly scorne To heare theyr names sung in your simple layes, But joyed in theyr prayse. And when ye list your owne mishaps to mourne, Which death, or love, or fortunes wreck did rayse, Your string could soone to sadder tenor turne, And teach the woods and waters to lament Your dolefull dreriment. Now lay those sorrowfull complaints aside, And having all your heads with girland crownd, Helpe me mine owne loves prayses to resound, Ne let the same of any be envide: So Orpheus did for his owne bride, So I unto my selfe alone will sing, The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring. Early before the worlds light giving lampe, His golden beame upon the hils doth spred, Having disperst the nights unchearefull dampe, Doe ye awake, and with fresh lusty hed, Go to the bowre of my beloved love, My truest turtle dove, Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake, And long since ready forth his maske to move, With his bright Tead that flames with many a flake, And many a bachelor to waite on him, In theyr fresh garments trim. Bid her awake therefore and soone her dight, For lo the wished day is come at last, That shall for al the paynes and sorrowes past, Pay to her usury of long delight: And whylest she doth her dight, Doe ye to her of joy and solace sing, That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. Bring with you all the Nymphes that you can heare Both of the rivers and the forrests greene: And of the sea that neighbours to her neare, Al with gay girlands goodly wel beseene. And let them also with them bring in hand Another gay girland For my fayre love of lillyes and of roses, Bound truelove wize with a blew silke riband. And let them make great store of bridale poses, And let them eeke bring store of other flowers To deck the bridale bowers. And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread, For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong Be strewed with fragrant flowers all along, And diapred lyke the discolored mead. Which done, doe at her chamber dore awayt, For she will waken strayt, The whiles doe ye this song unto her sing, The woods shall to you answer and your Eccho ring. Ye Nymphes of Mulla which with carefull heed, The silver scaly trouts doe tend full well, And greedy pikes which use therein to feed, (Those trouts and pikes all others doo excell) And ye likewise which keepe the rushy lake, Where none doo fishes take, Bynd up the locks the which hang scatterd light, And in his waters which your mirror make, Behold your faces as the christall bright, That when you come whereas my love doth lie, No blemish she may spie. And eke ye lightfoot mayds which keepe the deere, That on the hoary mountayne use to towre, And the wylde wolves which seeke them to devoure, With your steele darts doo chace from comming neer, Be also present heere, To helpe to decke her and to help to sing, That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. Wake, now my love, awake; for it is time, The Rosy Morne long since left Tithones bed, All ready to her silver coche to clyme, And Phoebus gins to shew his glorious hed. Hark how the cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies And carroll of loves praise. The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft, The thrush replyes, the Mavis descant playes, The Ouzell shrills, the Ruddock warbles soft, So goodly all agree with sweet consent, To this dayes merriment. Ah my deere love why doe ye sleepe thus long, When meeter were that ye should now awake, T'awayt the comming of your joyous make, And hearken to the birds lovelearned song, The deawy leaves among. For they of joy and pleasance to you sing, That all the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring. My love is now awake out of her dreames, And her fayre eyes like stars that dimmed were With darksome cloud, now shew theyr goodly beames More bright then Hesperus his head doth rere. Come now ye damzels, daughters of delight, Helpe quickly her to dight, But first come ye fayre houres which were begot In Joves sweet paradice, of Day and Night, Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot, And al that ever in this world is fayre Doe make and still repayre. And ye three handmayds of the Cyprian Queene, The which doe still adorne her beauties pride, Helpe to addorne my beautifullest bride: And as ye her array, still throw betweene Some graces to be seene, And as ye use to Venus, to her sing, The whiles the woods shal answer and your eccho ring. Now is my love all ready forth to come, Let all the virgins therefore well awayt, And ye fresh boyes that tend upon her groome Prepare your selves; for he is comming strayt. Set all your things in seemely good aray Fit for so joyfull day, The joyfulst day that ever sunne did see. Faire Sun, shew forth thy favourable ray, And let thy lifull heat not fervent be For feare of burning her sunshyny face, Her beauty to disgrace. O fayrest Phoebus, father of the Muse, If ever I did honour thee aright, Or sing the thing, that mote thy mind delight, Doe not thy servants simple boone refuse, But let this day let this one day be myne, Let all the rest be thine. Then I thy soverayne prayses loud will sing, That all the woods shal answer and theyr eccho ring. Harke how the Minstrels gin to shrill aloud Their merry Musick that resounds from far, The pipe, the tabor, and the trembling Croud, That well agree withouten breach or jar. But most of all the Damzels doe delite, When they their tymbrels smyte, And thereunto doe daunce and carrol sweet, That all the sences they doe ravish quite, The whyles the boyes run up and downe the street, Crying aloud with strong confused noyce, As if it were one voyce. Hymen io Hymen, Hymen they do shout, That even to the heavens theyr shouting shrill Doth reach, and all the firmament doth fill, To which the people standing all about, As in approvance doe thereto applaud And loud advaunce her laud, And evermore they Hymen Hymen sing, That al the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring. Loe where she comes along with portly pace Lyke Phoebe from her chamber of the East, Arysing forth to run her mighty race, Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best. So well it her beseemes that ye would weene Some angell she had beene. Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre, Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres a tweene, Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre, And being crowned with a girland greene, Seeme lyke some mayden Queene. Her modest eyes abashed to behold So many gazers, as on her do stare, Upon the lowly ground affixed are. Ne dare lift up her countenance too bold, But blush to heare her prayses sung so loud, So farre from being proud. Nathlesse doe ye still loud her prayses sing, That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring. Tell me ye merchants daughters did ye see So fayre a creature in your towne before? So sweet, so lovely, and so mild as she, Adornd with beautyes grace and vertues store, Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shining bright, Her forehead yvory white, Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte, Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre, And all her body like a pallace fayre, Ascending uppe with many a stately stayre, To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre. Why stand ye still ye virgins in amaze, Upon her so to gaze, Whiles ye forget your former lay to sing, To which the woods did answer and your eccho ring. But if ye saw that which no eyes can see, The inward beauty of her lively spright, Garnisht with heavenly guifts of high degree, Much more then would ye wonder at that sight, And stand astonisht lyke to those which red Medusaes mazeful hed. There dwels sweet love and constant chastity, Unspotted fayth and comely womenhed, Regard of honour and mild modesty, There vertue raynes as Queene in royal throne, And giveth lawes alone. The which the base affections doe obay, And yeeld theyr services unto her will, Ne thought of thing uncomely ever may Thereto approch to tempt her mind to ill. Had ye once seene these her celestial threasures, And unrevealed pleasures, Then would ye wonder and her prayses sing, That al the woods should answer and your eccho ring. Open the temple gates unto my love, Open them wide that she may enter in, And all the postes adorne as doth behove, And all the pillours deck with girlands trim, For to recyve this Saynt with honour dew, That commeth in to you. With trembling steps and humble reverence, She commeth in, before th'almighties vew: Of her ye virgins learne obedience, When so ye come into those holy places, To humble your proud faces; Bring her up to th'high altar that she may, The sacred ceremonies there partake, The which do endlesse matrimony make, And let the roring Organs loudly play The praises of the Lord in lively notes, The whiles with hollow throates The Choristers the joyous Antheme sing, That al the woods may answere and their eccho ring. Behold whiles she before the altar stands Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes And blesseth her with his two happy hands, How the red roses flush up in her cheekes, And the pure snow with goodly vermill stayne, Like crimsin dyde in grayne, That even th'Angels which continually, About the sacred Altare doe remaine, Forget their service and about her fly, Ofte peeping in her face that seemes more fayre, The more they on it stare. But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground, Are governed with goodly modesty, That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry, Which may let in a little thought unsownd. Why blush ye love to give to me your hand, The pledge of all our band? Sing ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing, That all the woods may answere and your eccho ring. Now al is done; bring home the bride againe, Bring home the triumph of our victory, Bring home with you the glory of her gaine, With joyance bring her and with jollity. Never had man more joyfull day then this, Whom heaven would heape with blis. Make feast therefore now all this live long day, This day for ever to me holy is, Poure out the wine without restraint or stay, Poure not by cups, but by the belly full, Poure out to all that wull, And sprinkle all the postes and wals with wine, That they may sweat, and drunken be withall. Crowne ye God Bacchus with a coronall, And Hymen also crowne with wreathes of vine, And let the Graces daunce unto the rest; For they can doo it best: The whiles the maydens doe theyr carroll sing, To which the woods shal answer and theyr eccho ring. Ring ye the bels, ye yong men of the towne, And leave your wonted labors for this day: This day is holy; doe ye write it downe, That ye for ever it remember may. This day the sunne is in his chiefest hight, With Barnaby the bright, From whence declining daily by degrees, He somewhat loseth of his heat and light, When once the Crab behind his back he sees. But for this time it ill ordained was, To chose the longest day in all the yeare, And shortest night, when longest fitter weare: Yet never day so long, but late would passe. Ring ye the bels, to make it weare away, And bonefiers make all day, And daunce about them, and about them sing: That all the woods may answer, and your eccho ring. Ah when will this long weary day have end, And lende me leave to come unto my love? How slowly do the houres theyr numbers spend? How slowly does sad Time his feathers move? Hast thee O fayrest Planet to thy home Within the Westerne fome: Thy tyred steedes long since have need of rest. Long though it be, at last I see it gloome, And the bright evening star with golden creast Appeare out of the East. Fayre childe of beauty, glorious lampe of love That all the host of heaven in rankes doost lead, And guydest lovers through the nightes dread, How chearefully thou lookest from above, And seemst to laugh atweene thy twinkling light As joying in the sight Of these glad many which for joy doe sing, That all the woods them answer and their echo ring. Now ceasse ye damsels your delights forepast; Enough is it, that all the day was youres: Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast: Now bring the Bryde into the brydall boures. Now night is come, now soone her disaray, And in her bed her lay; Lay her in lillies and in violets, And silken courteins over her display, And odourd sheetes, and Arras coverlets. Behold how goodly my faire love does ly In proud humility; Like unto Maia, when as Jove her tooke, In Tempe, lying on the flowry gras, Twixt sleepe and wake, after she weary was, With bathing in the Acidalian brooke. Now it is night, ye damsels may be gon, And leave my love alone, And leave likewise your former lay to sing: The woods no more shal answere, nor your echo ring. Now welcome night, thou night so long expected, That long daies labour doest at last defray, And all my cares, which cruell love collected, Hast sumd in one, and cancelled for aye: Spread thy broad wing over my love and me, That no man may us see, And in thy sable mantle us enwrap, From feare of perrill and foule horror free. Let no false treason seeke us to entrap, Nor any dread disquiet once annoy The safety of our joy: But let the night be calme and quietsome, Without tempestuous storms or sad afray: Lyke as when Jove with fayre Alcmena lay, When he begot the great Tirynthian groome: Or lyke as when he with thy selfe did lie, And begot Majesty. And let the mayds and yongmen cease to sing: Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring. Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares, Be heard all night within nor yet without: Ne let false whispers, breeding hidden feares, Breake gentle sleepe with misconceived dout. Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadful sights Make sudden sad affrights; Ne let housefyres, nor lightnings helpelesse harmes, Ne let the Pouke, nor other evill sprights, Ne let mischivous witches with theyr charmes, Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not, Fray us with things that be not. Let not the shriech Oule, nor the Storke be heard: Nor the night Raven that still deadly yels, Nor damned ghosts cald up with mighty spels, Nor griesly vultures make us once affeard: Ne let th'unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking Make us to wish theyr choking. Let none of these theyr drery accents sing; Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring. But let stil Silence trew night watches keepe, That sacred peace may in assurance rayne, And tymely sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe, May poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne, The whiles an hundred little winged loves, Like divers fethered doves, Shall fly and flutter round about your bed, And in the secret darke, that none reproves, Their prety stelthes shal worke, and snares shal spread To filch away sweet snatches of delight, Conceald through covert night. Ye sonnes of Venus, play your sports at will, For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes, Thinks more upon her paradise of joyes, Then what ye do, albe it good or ill. All night therefore attend your merry play, For it will soone be day: Now none doth hinder you, that say or sing, Ne will the woods now answer, nor your Eccho ring. Who is the same, which at my window peepes? Or whose is that faire face, that shines so bright, Is it not Cinthia, she that never sleepes, But walkes about high heaven al the night? O fayrest goddesse, do thou not envy My love with me to spy: For thou likewise didst love, though now unthought, And for a fleece of woll, which privily, The Latmian shephard once unto thee brought, His pleasures with thee wrought. Therefore to us be favorable now; And sith of wemens labours thou hast charge, And generation goodly dost enlarge, Encline thy will t'effect our wishfull vow, And the chast wombe informe with timely seed, That may our comfort breed: Till which we cease our hopefull hap to sing, Ne let the woods us answere, nor our Eccho ring. And thou great Juno, which with awful might The lawes of wedlock still dost patronize, And the religion of the faith first plight With sacred rites hast taught to solemnize: And eeke for comfort often called art Of women in their smart, Eternally bind thou this lovely band, And all thy blessings unto us impart. And thou glad Genius, in whose gentle hand, The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine, Without blemish or staine, And the sweet pleasures of theyr loves delight With secret ayde doest succour and supply, Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny, Send us the timely fruit of this same night. And thou fayre Hebe, and thou Hymen free, Grant that it may so be. Til which we cease your further prayse to sing, Ne any woods shal answer, nor your Eccho ring. And ye high heavens, the temple of the gods, In which a thousand torches flaming bright Doe burne, that to us wretched earthly clods, In dreadful darknesse lend desired light; And all ye powers which in the same remayne, More then we men can fayne, Poure out your blessing on us plentiously, And happy influence upon us raine, That we may raise a large posterity, Which from the earth, which they may long possesse, With lasting happinesse, Up to your haughty pallaces may mount, And for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit May heavenly tabernacles there inherit, Of blessed Saints for to increase the count. So let us rest, sweet love, in hope of this, And cease till then our tymely joyes to sing, The woods no more us answer, nor our eccho ring. Song made in lieu of many ornaments, With which my love should duly have bene dect, Which cutting off through hasty accidents, Ye would not stay your dew time to expect, But promist both to recompens, Be unto her a goodly ornament, And for short time an endlesse moniment.
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far unfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song. Helpe then, O holy Virgin chiefe of nine, Thy weaker Novice to performe thy will, Lay forth out of thine everlasting scryne The antique rolles, which there lye hidden still, Of Faerie knights and fairest Tanaquill, Whom that most noble Briton Prince so long Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill, That I must rue his undeserved wrong: O helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong. And thou most dreaded impe of highest Jove, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart At that good knight so cunningly didst rove, That glorious fire it kindled in his hart, Lay now thy deadly Heben bow apart, And with thy mother milde come to mine ayde: Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart, In loves and gentle jollities arrayd, After his murdrous spoiles and bloudy rage allayd. And with them eke, O Goddesse heavenly bright, Mirrour of grace and Majestie divine, Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine, Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne, And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile, To thinke of that true glorious type of thine, The argument of mine afflicted stile: The which to heare, vouchsafe, O dearest dred a-while. i A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Y cladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he never wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. ii But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead as living ever him ador'd: Upon his shield the like was also scor'd, For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had: Right faithfull true he was in deede and word, But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad. iii Upon a great adventure he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gave, That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond, To winne him worship, and her grace to have, Which of all earthly things he most did crave; And ever as he rode, his hart did earne To prove his puissance in battell brave Upon his foe, and his new force to learne; Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne. iv A lovely Ladie rode him faire beside, Upon a lowly Asse more white then snow, Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide Under a vele, that wimpled was full low, And over all a blacke stole she did throw, As one that inly mournd: so was she sad, And heavie sat upon her palfrey slow; Seemed in heart some hidden care she had, And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad. v So pure an innocent, as that same lambe, She was in life and every vertuous lore, And by descent from Royall lynage came Of ancient Kings and Queenes, that had of yore Their scepters stretcht from East to Westerne shore, And all the world in their subjection held; Till that infernall feend with foule uprore Forwasted all their land, and them expeld: Whom to avenge, she had this Knight from far compeld. vi Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag, That lasie seemd in being ever last, Or wearied with bearing of her bag Of needments at his backe. Thus as they past, The day with cloudes was suddeine overcast, And angry Jove an hideous storme of raine Did poure into his Lemans lap so fast, That every wight to shrowd it did constrain, And this faire couple eke to shroud themselves were fain. vii Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand, A shadie grove not far away they spide, That promist ayde the tempest to withstand: Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride, Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide, Not perceable with power of any starre: And all within were pathes and alleies wide, With footing worne, and leading inward farre: Faire harbour that them seemes; so in they entred arre. viii And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led, Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony, Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred, Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky. Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy, The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar never dry, The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all, The Aspine good for staves, the Cypresse funerall. ix The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still, The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours, The Eugh obedient to the benders will, The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill, The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill, The fruitfull Olive, and the Platane round, The carver Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. x Led with delight, they thus beguile the way, Untill the blustring storme is overblowne; When weening to returne, whence they did stray, They cannot find that path, which first was showne, But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne, Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene, That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne: So many pathes, so many turnings seene, That which of them to take, in diverse doubt they been. xi At last resolving forward still to fare, Till that some end they finde or in or out, That path they take, that beaten seemd most bare, And like to lead the labyrinth about; Which when by tract they hunted had throughout, At length it brought them to a hollow cave, Amid the thickest woods. The Champion stout Eftsoones dismounted from his courser brave, And to the Dwarfe a while his needlesse spere he gave. xii Be well aware, quoth then that Ladie milde, Least suddaine mischiefe ye too rash provoke: The danger hid, the place unknowne and wilde, Breeds dreadfull doubts: Oft fire is without smoke, And perill without show: therefore your stroke Sir knight with-hold, till further triall made. Ah Ladie (said he) shame were to revoke The forward footing for an hidden shade: Vertue gives her selfe light, through darkenesse for to wade. xiii Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place I better wot then you, though now too late To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace, Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate, To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate. This is the wandring wood, this Errours den, A monster vile, whom God and man does hate: Therefore I read beware. Fly fly (quoth then The fearefull Dwarfe:) this is no place for living men. xiv But full of fire and greedy hardiment, The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide, But forth unto the darksome hole he went, And looked in: his glistring armor made A litle glooming light, much like a shade, By which he saw the ugly monster plaine, Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th'other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine. xv And as she lay upon the durtie ground, Her huge long taile her den all overspred, Yet was in knots and many boughtes upwound, Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, Sucking upon her poisonous dugs, eachone Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favored: Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone, Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone. xvi Their dam upstart, out of her den effraide, And rushed forth, hurling her hideous taile About her cursed head, whose folds displaid Were stretcht now forth at length without entraile. She lookt about, and seeing one in mayle Armed to point, sought backe to turne againe; For light she hated as the deadly bale, Ay wont in desert darknesse to remaine, Where plaine none might her see, nor she see any plaine. xvii Which when the valiant Elfe perceiv'd, he lept As Lyon fierce upon the flying pray, And with his trenchand blade her boldly kept From turning backe, and forced her to stay: Therewith enrag'd she loudly gan to bray, And turning fierce, her speckled taile advaunst, Threatning her angry sting, him to dismay: Who nought aghast, his mightie hand enhaunst: The stroke down from her head unto her shoulder glaunst. xviii Much daunted with that dint, her sence was dazd, Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gathered round, And all attonce her beastly body raizd With doubled forces high above the ground: Tho wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd, Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine All suddenly about his body wound, That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine: God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine. xix His Lady sad to see his sore constraint, Cride out, Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee, Add faith unto your force, and be not faint: Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee. That when he heard, in great perplexitie, His gall did grate for griefe and high disdaine, And knitting all his force got one hand free, Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine, That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine. xx Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw A floud of poyson horrible and blacke, Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe: Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke, And creeping sought way in the weedy gras: Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has. xxi As when old father Nilus gins to swell With timely pride above the Aegyptian vale, His fattie waves do fertile slime outwell, And overflow each plaine and lowly dale: But when his later spring gins to avale, Huge heapes of mudd he leaves, wherein there breed Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male And partly female of his fruitfull seed; Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed. xxii The same so sore annoyed has the knight, That welnigh choked with the deadly stinke, His forces faile, ne can no longer fight. Whose corage when the feend perceiv'd to shrinke, She poured forth out of her hellish sinke Her fruitfull cursed spawne of serpents small, Deformed monsters, fowle, and blacke as inke, Which swarming all about his legs did crall, And him encombred sore, but could not hurt at all. xxiii As gentle Shepheard in sweete even-tide, When ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in west, High on an hill, his flocke to vewen wide, Markes which do byte their hasty supper best; A cloud of combrous gnattes do him molest, All striving to infixe their feeble stings, That from their noyance he no where can rest, But with his clownish hands their tender wings He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings. xxiv Thus ill bestedd, and fearefull more of shame, Then of the certaine perill he stood in, Halfe furious unto his foe he came, Resolv'd in minde all suddenly to win, Or soone to lose, before he once would lin; And strooke at her with more then manly force, That from her body full of filthie sin He raft her hatefull head without remorse; A streame of cole black bloud forth gushed from her corse. xxv Her scattred brood, soone as their Parent deare They saw so rudely falling to the ground, Groning full deadly, all with troublous feare, Gathred themselves about her body round, Weening their wonted entrance to have found At her wide mouth: but being there withstood They flocked all about her bleeding wound, And sucked up their dying mothers blood, Making her death their life, and eke her hurt their good. xxvi That detestable sight him much amazde, To see th'unkindly Impes of heaven accurst, Devoure their dam; on whom while so he gazd, Having all satisfide their bloudy thurst, Their bellies swolne he saw with fulnesse burst, And bowels gushing forth: well worthy end Of such as drunke her life, the which them nurst; Now needeth him no lenger labour spend, His foes have slaine themselves, with whom he should contend. xxvii His Ladie seeing all, that chaunst, from farre Approcht in hast to greet his victorie, And said, Faire knight, borne under happy starre, Who see your vanquisht foes before you lye: Well worthy be you of that Armorie, Wherein ye have great glory wonne this day, And proov'd your strength on a strong enimie, Your first adventure: many such I pray, And henceforth ever wish, that like succeed it may. xxviii Then mounted he upon his Steede againe, And with the Lady backward sought to wend; That path he kept, which beaten was most plame, Ne ever would to any by-way bend, But still did follow one unto the end, The which at last out of the wood them brought. So forward on his way (with God to frend) He passed forth, and new adventure sought; Long way he travelled, before he heard of ought. xxix At length they chaunst to meet upon the way An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray, And by his belt his booke he hanging had; Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad, And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, Simple in shew, and voyde of malice bad, And all the way he prayed, as he went, And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent. xxx He faire the knight saluted, louting low, Who faire him quited, as that courteous was: And after asked him, if he did know Of straunge adventures, which abroad did pas. Ah my deare Sonne (quoth he) how should, alas, Silly old man, that lives in hidden cell, Bidding his beades all day for his trespas, Tydings of warre and worldly trouble tell? With holy father sits not with such things to mell. xxxi But if of daunger which hereby doth dwell, And homebred evill ye desire to heare, Of a straunge man I can you tidings tell, That wasteth all this countrey farre and neare. Of such (said he) I chiefly do inquere, And shall you well reward to shew the place, In which that wicked wight his dayes doth weare: For to all knighthood it is foule disgrace, That such a cursed creature lives so long a space. xxxii Far hence (quoth he) in wastfull wildernesse His dwelling is, by which no living wight May ever passe, but thorough great distresse. Now (sayd the Lady) draweth toward night, And well I wote, that of your later fight Ye all forwearied be: for what so strong, But wanting rest will also want of might? The Sunne that measures heaven all day long, At night doth baite his steedes the Ocean waves emong. xxxiii Then with the Sunne take Sir, your timely rest, And with new day new worke at once begin: Untroubled night they say gives counsell best. Right well Sir knight ye have advised bin, (Quoth then that aged man;) the way to win Is wisely to advise: now day is spent; Therefore with me ye may take up your In For this same night. The knight was well content: So with that godly father to his home they went. xxxiv A little lowly Hermitage it was, Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side, Far from resort of people, that did pas In travell to and froe: a little wyde There was an holy Chappell edifyde, Wherein the Hermite dewly wont to say His holy things each morne and eventyde: Thereby a Christall streame did gently play, Which from a sacred fountaine welled forth alway. xxxv Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainement, where none was: Rest is their feast, and all things at their will; The noblest mind the best contentment has. With faire discourse the evening so they pas: For that old man of pleasing wordes had store, And well could file his tongue as smooth as glas; He told of Saintes and Popes, and evermore He strowd an Ave-Mary after and before. xxxvi The drouping Night thus creepeth on them fast, And the sad humour loading their eye liddes, As messenger of Morpheus on them cast Sweet slombring deaw, the which to sleepe them biddes. Unto their lodgings then his guestes he riddes: Where when all drownd in deadly sleepe he findes, He to his study goes, and there amiddes His Magick bookes and artes of sundry kindes, He seekes out mighty charmes, to trouble sleepy mindes. xxxvii Then choosing out few wordes most horrible, (Let none them read) thereof did verses frame, With which and other spelles like terrible, He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame, And cursed heaven, and spake reprochfull shame Of highest God, the Lord of life and light; A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night, At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight. xxxviii And forth he cald out of deepe darknesse dred Legions of Sprights, the which like little flyes Fluttring about his ever damned hed, A-waite whereto their service he applyes, To aide his friends, or fray his enimies: Of those he chose out two, the falsest twoo, And fittest for to forge true-seeming lyes; The one of them he gave a message too, The other by him selfe staide other worke to doo. xxxix He making speedy way through spersed ayre, And through the world of waters wide and peepe, To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire. Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe, And low, where dawning day doth never peepe, His dwelling is; there Tethys his wet bed Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed, Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred. xl Whose double gates he findeth locked fast, The one faire fram'd of burnisht Yvory, The other all with silver overcast; And wakefull dogges before them farre do lye Watching to banish Care their enimy, Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleepe. By them the Sprite doth passe in quietly, And unto Morpheus comes, whom drowned deepe In drowsie fit he findes: of nothing he takes keepe. xli And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe And ever-drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne: No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t'annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes, Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes. xlii The messenger approching to him spake, But his wast wordes returnd to him in vaine: So sound he slept, that nought mought him awake. Then rudely he him thrust, and pusht with paine, Whereat he gan to stretch: but he againe Shooke him so hard, that forced him to speake. As one then in a dreame, whose dryer braine In tost with troubled sights and fancies weake, He mumbled soft, but would not all his silence breake. xliii The Sprite then gan more boldly him to wake, And threatned unto him the dreaded name Of Hecate: whereat he gan to quake, And lifting up his lumpish head, with blame Halfe angry asked him, for what he came. Hither (quoth he) me Archimago sent, He that the stubborne Sprites can wisely tame, He bids thee to him send for his intent A fit false dreame, that can delude the sleepers sent. xliv The God obayde, and calling forth straight way A diverse dreame out of his prison darke, Delivered it to him, and downe did lay His heavie head, devoide of carefull carke, Whose sences all were straight benumbed and starke. He backe returning by the Yvorie dore, Remounted up as light as chearefull Larke, And on his litle winges the dreame he bore In hast unto his Lord, where he him left afore. xlv Who all this while with charmes and hidden artes, Had made a Lady of that other Spright, And fram'd of liquid ayre her tender partes So lively, and so like in all mens sight, That weaker sence it could have ravisht quight: The maker selfe for all his wondrous witt, Was nigh beguiled with so goodly sight: Her all in white he clad, and over it Cast a blacke stole, most like to seeme for Una fit. xlvi Now when that ydle dreame was to him brought, Unto that Elfin knight he bad him fly, Where he slept soundly void of evill thought And with false shewes abuse his fantasy, In sort as he him schooled privily: And that new creature borne without her dew, Full of the makers guile, with usage sly He taught to imitate that Lady trew, Whose semblance she did carrie under feigned hew. xlvii Thus well instructed, to their worke they hast, And comming where the knight in slomber lay, The one upon his hardy head him plast, And made him dreame of loves and lustfull play, That nigh his manly hart did melt away, Bathed in wanton blis and wicked joy: Then seemed him his Lady by him lay, And to him playnd, how that false winged boy, Her chast hart had subdewd, to learne Dame pleasures toy. xlviii And she her selfe of beautie soveraigne Queene, Faire Venus seemde unto his bed to bring Her, whom he waking evermore did weene, To be the chastest flowre, that ay did spring On earthly braunch, the daughter of a king, Now a loose Leman to vile service bound: And eke the Graces seemed all to sing, Hymen {i}{_o} Hymen, dauncing all around, While freshest Flora her with Yvie girlond crownd. xlix In this great passion of unwonted lust, Or wonted feare of doing ought amis, He started up, as seeming to mistrust Some secret ill, or hidden foe of his: Lo there before his face his Lady is, Under blake stole hyding her bayted hooke, And as halfe blushing offred him to kis, With gentle blandishment and lovely looke, Most like that virgin true, which for her knight him took. l All cleane dismayd to see so uncouth sight, And halfe enraged at her shamelesse guise, He thought have slaine her in his fierce despight: But hasty heat tempring with sufferance wise, He stayde his hand, and gan himselfe advise To prove his sense, and tempt her faigned truth. Wringing her hands in wemens pitteous wise, Tho can she weepe, to stirre up gentle ruth, Both for her noble bloud, and for her tender youth. li And said, Ah Sir, my liege Lord and my love, Shall I accuse the hidden cruell fate, And mightie causes wrought in heaven above, Or the blind God, that doth me thus amate, For hoped love to winne me certaine hate? Yet thus perforce he bids me do, or die. Die is my dew: yet rew my wretched state You, whom my hard avenging destinie Hath made judge of my life or death indifferently. lii Your owne deare sake forst me at first to leave My Fathers kingdome, There she stopt with teares; Her swollen hart her speach seemd to bereave, And then againe begun, My weaker yeares Captiv'd to fortune and frayle worldly feares, Fly to your faith for succour and sure ayde: Let me not dye in languor and long teares. Why Dame (quoth he) what hath ye thus dismayd? What frayes ye, that were wont to comfort me affrayd? liii Love of your selfe, she said, and deare constraint Lets me not sleepe, but wast the wearie night In secret anguish and unpittied plaint, Whiles you in carelesse sleepe are drowned quight. Her doubtfull words made that redoubted knight Suspect her truth: yet since no'untruth he knew, Her fawning love with foule disdainefull spight He would not shend, but said, Deare dame I rew, That for my sake unknowne such griefe unto you grew. liv Assure your selfe, it fell not all to ground; For all so deare as life is to my hart, I deeme your love, and hold me to you bound; Ne let vaine feares procure your needlesse smart, Where cause is none, but to your rest depart. Not all content, yet seemd she to appease Her mournefull plaintes, beguiled of her art, And fed with words, that could not chuse but please, So slyding softly forth, she turnd as to her ease. lv Long after lay he musing at her mood, Much griev'd to think that gentle Dame so light, For whose defence he was to shed his blood. At last dull wearinesse of former fight Having yrockt a sleepe his irkesome spright, That troublous dreame gan freshly tosse his braine, With bowres, and beds, and Ladies deare delight: But when he saw his labour all was vaine, With that misformed spright he backe returnd againe.
Rapt with the rage of mine own ravish'd thought, Through contemplation of those goodly sights, And glorious images in heaven wrought, Whose wondrous beauty, breathing sweet delights Do kindle love in high-conceited sprights; I fain to tell the things that I behold, But feel my wits to fail, and tongue to fold. Vouchsafe then, O thou most Almighty Spright, From whom all gifts of wit and knowledge flow, To shed into my breast some sparkling light Of thine eternal truth, that I may show Some little beams to mortal eyes below Of that immortal beauty, there with thee, Which in my weak distraughted mind I see; That with the glory of so goodly sight The hearts of men, which fondly here admire Fair seeming shews, and feed on vain delight, Transported with celestial desire Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher, And learn to love, with zealous humble duty, Th' eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty. Beginning then below, with th' easy view Of this base world, subject to fleshly eye, From thence to mount aloft, by order due, To contemplation of th' immortal sky; Of the soare falcon so I learn to fly, That flags awhile her fluttering wings beneath, Till she herself for stronger flight can breathe. Then look, who list thy gazeful eyes to feed With sight of that is fair, look on the frame Of this wide universe, and therein reed The endless kinds of creatures which by name Thou canst not count, much less their natures aim; All which are made with wondrous wise respect, And all with admirable beauty deckt. First th' earth, on adamantine pillars founded, Amid the sea engirt with brazen bands; Then th' air still flitting, but yet firmly bounded On every side, with piles of flaming brands, Never consum'd, nor quench'd with mortal hands; And last, that mighty shining crystal wall, Wherewith he hath encompassed this All. By view whereof it plainly may appear, That still as every thing doth upward tend, And further is from earth, so still more clear And fair it grows, till to his perfect end Of purest beauty it at last ascend; Air more than water, fire much more than air, And heaven than fire, appears more pure and fair. Look thou no further, but affix thine eye On that bright, shiny, round, still moving mass, The house of blessed gods, which men call sky, All sow'd with glist'ring stars more thick than grass, Whereof each other doth in brightness pass, But those two most, which ruling night and day, As king and queen, the heavens' empire sway; And tell me then, what hast thou ever seen That to their beauty may compared be, Or can the sight that is most sharp and keen Endure their captain's flaming head to see? How much less those, much higher in degree, And so much fairer, and much more than these, As these are fairer than the land and seas? For far above these heavens, which here we see, Be others far exceeding these in light, Not bounded, not corrupt, as these same be, But infinite in largeness and in height, Unmoving, uncorrupt, and spotless bright, That need no sun t' illuminate their spheres, But their own native light far passing theirs. And as these heavens still by degrees arise, Until they come to their first Mover's bound, That in his mighty compass doth comprise, And carry all the rest with him around; So those likewise do by degrees redound, And rise more fair; till they at last arrive To the most fair, whereto they all do strive. Fair is the heaven where happy souls have place, In full enjoyment of felicity, Whence they do still behold the glorious face Of the divine eternal Majesty; More fair is that, where those Ideas on high Enranged be, which Plato so admired, And pure Intelligences from God inspired. Yet fairer is that heaven, in which do reign The sovereign Powers and mighty Potentates, Which in their high protections do contain All mortal princes and imperial states; And fairer yet, whereas the royal Seats And heavenly Dominations are set, From whom all earthly governance is fet. Yet far more fair be those bright Cherubins, Which all with golden wings are overdight, And those eternal burning Seraphins, Which from their faces dart out fiery light; Yet fairer than they both, and much more bright, Be th' Angels and Archangels, which attend On God's own person, without rest or end. These thus in fair each other far excelling, As to the highest they approach more near, Yet is that highest far beyond all telling, Fairer than all the rest which there appear, Though all their beauties join'd together were; How then can mortal tongue hope to express The image of such endless perfectness? Cease then, my tongue, and lend unto my mind Leave to bethink how great that beauty is, Whose utmost parts so beautiful I find; How much more those essential parts of his, His truth, his love, his wisdom, and his bliss, His grace, his doom, his mercy, and his might, By which he lends us of himself a sight. Those unto all he daily doth display, And shew himself in th' image of his grace, As in a looking-glass, through which he may Be seen of all his creatures vile and base, That are unable else to see his face, His glorious face which glistereth else so bright, That th' Angels selves cannot endure his sight. But we, frail wights, whose sight cannot sustain The sun's bright beams when he on us doth shine, But that their points rebutted back again Are dull'd, how can we see with feeble eyne The glory of that Majesty Divine, In sight of whom both sun and moon are dark, Compared to his least resplendent spark? The means, therefore, which unto us is lent Him to behold, is on his works to look, Which he hath made in beauty excellent, And in the same, as in a brazen book, To read enregister'd in every nook His goodness, which his beauty doth declare; For all that's good is beautiful and fair. Thence gathering plumes of perfect speculation, To imp the wings of thy high-flying mind, Mount up aloft through heavenly contemplation, From this dark world, whose damps the soul so blind, And, like the native brood of eagles' kind, On that bright Sun of Glory fix thine eyes, Clear'd from gross mists of frail infirmities. Humbled with fear and awful reverence, Before the footstool of his majesty Throw thyself down, with trembling innocence, Ne dare look up with corruptible eye On the dread face of that great Deity, For fear, lest if he chance to look on thee, Thou turn to nought, and quite confounded be. But lowly fall before his mercy seat, Close covered with the Lamb's integrity From the just wrath of his avengeful threat That sits upon the righteous throne on high; His throne is built upon eternity, More firm and durable than steel or brass, Or the hard diamond, which them both doth pass. His sceptre is the rod of righteousness, With which he bruiseth all his foes to dust, And the great Dragon strongly doth repress, Under the rigour of his judgement just; His seat is truth, to which the faithful trust, From whence proceed her beams so pure and bright That all about him sheddeth glorious light: Light far exceeding that bright blazing spark Which darted is from Titan's flaming head, That with his beams enlumineth the dark And dampish air, whereby all things are read; Whose nature yet so much is marvelled Of mortal wits, that it doth much amaze The greatest wizards which thereon do gaze. But that immortal light, which there doth shine, Is many thousand times more bright, more clear, More excellent, more glorious, more divine, Through which to God all mortal actions here, And even the thoughts of men, do plain appear; For from th' eternal truth it doth proceed, Through heavenly virtue which her beams do breed. With the great glory of that wondrous light His throne is all encompassed around, And hid in his own brightness from the sight Of all that look thereon with eyes unsound; And underneath his feet are to be found Thunder and lightning and tempestuous fire, The instruments of his avenging ire. There in his bosom Sapience doth sit, The sovereign darling of the Deity, Clad like a queen in royal robes, most fit For so great power and peerless majesty, And all with gems and jewels gorgeously Adorn'd, that brighter than the stars appear, And make her native brightness seem more clear. And on her head a crown of purest gold Is set, in sign of highest sovereignty; And in her hand a sceptre she doth hold, With which she rules the house of God on high, And manageth the ever-moving sky, And in the same these lower creatures all Subjected to her power imperial. Both heaven and earth obey unto her will, And all the creatures which they both contain; For of her fullness which the world doth fill They all partake, and do in state remain As their great Maker did at first ordain, Through observation of her high behest, By which they first were made, and still increast. The fairness of her face no tongue can tell; For she the daughters of all women's race, And angels eke, in beauty doth excel, Sparkled on her from God's own glorious face, And more increas'd by her own goodly grace, That it doth far exceed all human thought, Ne can on earth compared be to aught. Ne could that painter (had he lived yet) Which pictured Venus with so curious quill, That all posterity admired it, Have portray'd this, for all his mast'ring skill; Ne she herself, had she remained still, And were as fair as fabling wits do feign, Could once come near this beauty sovereign. But had those wits, the wonders of their days, Or that sweet Teian poet, which did spend His plenteous vein in setting forth her praise, Seen but a glimpse of this which I pretend, How wondrously would he her face commend, Above that idol of his feigning thought, That all the world should with his rhymes be fraught. How then dare I, the novice of his art, Presume to picture so divine a wight, Or hope t' express her least perfection's part, Whose beauty fills the heavens with her light, And darks the earth with shadow of her sight? Ah, gentle Muse, thou art too weak and faint The portrait of so heavenly hue to paint. Let angels, which her goodly face behold And see at will, her sovereign praises sing, And those most sacred mysteries unfold Of that fair love of mighty heaven's King; Enough is me t' admire so heavenly thing, And being thus with her huge love possest, In th' only wonder of herself to rest. But whoso may, thrice happy man him hold, Of all on earth whom God so much doth grace And lets his own beloved to behold; For in the view of her celestial face All joy, all bliss, all happiness, have place; Ne aught on earth can want unto the wight Who of herself can win the wishful sight. For she, out of her secret treasury, Plenty of riches forth on him will pour, Even heavenly riches, which there hidden lie Within the closet of her chastest bower, Th' eternal portion of her precious dower, Which mighty God hath given to her free, And to all those which thereof worthy be. None thereof worthy be, but those whom she Vouchsafeth to her presence to receive, And letteth them her lovely face to see, Whereof such wondrous pleasures they conceive, And sweet contentment, that it doth bereave Their soul of sense, through infinite delight, And them transport from flesh into the spright. In which they see such admirable things, As carries them into an ecstasy, And hear such heavenly notes, and carollings Of God's high praise, that fills the brazen sky; And feel such joy and pleasure inwardly, That maketh them all worldly cares forget, And only think on that before them set. Ne from thenceforth doth any fleshly sense, Or idle thought of earthly things, remain; But all that erst seem'd sweet seems now offence, And all that pleased erst now seems to pain; Their joy, their comfort, their desire, their gain, Is fixed all on that which now they see; All other sights but feigned shadows be. And that fair lamp, which useth to inflame The hearts of men with self-consuming fire Thenceforth seems foul, and full of sinful blame; And all that pomp to which proud minds aspire By name of honour, and so much desire, Seems to them baseness, and all riches dross, And all mirth sadness, and all lucre loss. So full their eyes are of that glorious sight, And senses fraught with such satiety, That in nought else on earth they can delight, But in th' aspect of that felicity, Which they have written in their inward eye; On which they feed, and in their fastened mind All happy joy and full contentment find. Ah, then, my hungry soul, which long hast fed On idle fancies of thy foolish thought, And, with false beauty's flatt'ring bait misled, Hast after vain deceitful shadows sought, Which all are fled, and now have left thee nought But late repentance through thy follies prief; Ah cease to gaze on matter of thy grief: And look at last up to that sovereign light, From whose pure beams all perfect beauty springs, That kindleth love in every godly sprite, Even the love of God, which loathing brings Of this vile world and these gay-seeming things; With whose sweet pleasures being so possest, Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest.
AH whither, Love, wilt thou now carry me? What wontless fury dost thou now inspire Into my feeble breast, too full of thee? Whilst seeking to aslake thy raging fire, Thou in me kindlest much more great desire, And up aloft above my strength dost raise The wondrous matter of my fire to praise. That as I erst in praise of thine own name, So now in honour of thy mother dear, An honourable hymn I eke should frame, And with the brightness of her beauty clear, The ravish'd hearts of gazeful men might rear To admiration of that heavenly light, From whence proceeds such soul-enchanting might. Thereto do thou, great goddess, queen of beauty, Mother of love, and of all world's delight, Without whose sovereign grace and kindly duty Nothing on earth seems fair to fleshly sight, Do thou vouchsafe with thy love-kindling light T' illuminate my dim and dulled eyne, And beautify this sacred hymn of thine: That both to thee, to whom I mean it most, And eke to her, whose fair immortal beam Hath darted fire into my feeble ghost, That now it wasted is with woes extreme, It may so please, that she at length will stream Some dew of grace into my withered heart, After long sorrow and consuming smart. WHAT time this world's great Workmaster did cast To make all things such as we now behold, It seems that he before his eyes had plac'd A goodly pattern, to whose perfect mould He fashion'd them as comely as he could; That now so fair and seemly they appear, As nought may be amended anywhere. That wondrous pattern, wheresoe'er it be, Whether in earth laid up in secret store, Or else in heaven, that no man may it see With sinful eyes, for fear it to deflore, Is perfect Beauty, which all men adore; Whose face and feature doth so much excel All mortal sense, that none the same may tell. Thereof as every earthly thing partakes Or more or less, by influence divine, So it more fair accordingly it makes, And the gross matter of this earthly mine, Which clotheth it, thereafter doth refine, Doing away the dross which dims the light Of that fair beam which therein is empight. For, through infusion of celestial power, The duller earth it quick'neth with delight, And lifeful spirits privily doth pour Through all the parts, that to the looker's sight They seem to please. That is thy sovereign might, O Cyprian queen, which flowing from the beam Of thy bright star, thou into them dost stream. That is the thing which giveth pleasant grace To all things fair, that kindleth lively fire, Light of thy lamp, which, shining in the face, Thence to the soul darts amorous desire, And robs the hearts of those which it admire; Therewith thou pointest thy son's poison'd arrow, That wounds the life, and wastes the inmost marrow. How vainly then do idle wits invent, That beauty is nought else but mixture made Of colours fair, and goodly temp'rament Of pure complexions, that shall quickly fade And pass away, like to a summer's shade; Or that it is but comely composition Of parts well measur'd, with meet disposition. Hath white and red in it such wondrous power, That it can pierce through th' eyes unto the heart, And therein stir such rage and restless stour, As nought but death can stint his dolour's smart? Or can proportion of the outward part Move such affection in the inward mind, That it can rob both sense and reason blind? Why do not then the blossoms of the field, Which are array'd with much more orient hue, And to the sense most dainty odours yield, Work like impression in the looker's view? Or why do not fair pictures like power shew, In which oft-times we nature see of art Excell'd, in perfect limning every part? But ah, believe me, there is more than so, That works such wonders in the minds of men; I, that have often prov'd, too well it know, And whoso list the like assays to ken, Shall find by trial, and confess it then, That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem, An outward shew of things, that only seem. For that same goodly hue of white and red, With which the cheeks are sprinkled, shall decay, And those sweet rosy leaves, so fairly spread Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away To that they were, even to corrupted clay; That golden wire, those sparkling stars so bright, Shall turn to dust; and lose their goodly light. But that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray That light proceeds, which kindleth lovers' fire, Shall never be extinguish'd nor decay; But when the vital spirits do expire, Unto her native planet shall retire; For it is heavenly born and cannot die, Being a parcel of the purest sky. For when the soul, the which derived was, At first, out of that great immortal Spright, By whom all live to love, whilom did pass Down from the top of purest heaven's height To be embodied here, it then took light And lively spirits from that fairest star, Which lights the world forth from his fiery car. Which power retaining still or more or less, When she in fleshly seed is eft enraced, Through every part she doth the same impress, According as the heavens have her graced, And frames her house, in which she will be placed, Fit for herself, adorning it with spoil Of th' heavenly riches which she robb'd erewhile. Thereof it comes that these fair souls, which have The most resemblance of that heavenly light, Frame to themselves most beautiful and brave Their fleshly bower, most fit for their delight, And the gross matter by a sovereign might Tempers so trim, that it may well be seen A palace fit for such a virgin queen. So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For of the soul the body form doth take: For soul is form, and doth the body make. Therefore wherever that thou dost behold A comely corpse, with beauty fair endued, Know this for certain, that the same doth hold A beauteous soul, with fair conditions thewed, Fit to receive the seed of virtue strewed. For all that fair is, is by nature good; That is a sign to know the gentle blood. Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd, Either by chance, against the course of kind, Or through unaptness in the substance found, Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, That will not yield unto her form's direction, But is deform'd with some foul imperfection. And oft it falls, (ay me, the more to rue) That goodly beauty, albe heavenly born, Is foul abus'd, and that celestial hue, Which doth the world with her delight adorn, Made but the bait of sin, and sinners' scorn, Whilst every one doth seek and sue to have it, But every one doth seek but to deprave it. Yet nathëmore is that fair beauty's blame, But theirs that do abuse it unto ill: Nothing so good, but that through guilty shame May be corrupt, and wrested unto will: Natheless the soul is fair and beauteous still, However flesh{"e}s fault it filthy make; For things immortal no corruption take. But ye fair dames, the world's dear ornaments And lively images of heaven's light, Let not your beams with such disparagements Be dimm'd, and your bright glory dark'ned quite; But mindful still of your first country's sight, Do still preserve your first informed grace, Whose shadow yet shines in your beauteous face. Loathe that foul blot, that hellish firebrand, Disloyal lust, fair beauty's foulest blame, That base affections, which your ears would bland, Commend to you by love's abused name, But is indeed the bondslave of defame; Which will the garland of your glory mar, And quench the light of your bright shining star. But gentle Love, that loyal is and true, Will more illumine your resplendent ray, And add more brightness to your goodly hue, From light of his pure fire; which, by like way Kindled of yours, your likeness doth display; Like as two mirrors, by oppos'd reflection, Do both express the face's first impression. Therefore, to make your beauty more appear, It you behoves to love, and forth to lay That heavenly riches which in you ye bear, That men the more admire their fountain may; For else what booteth that celestial ray, If it in darkness be enshrined ever, That it of loving eyes be viewed never? But, in your choice of loves, this well advise, That likest to yourselves ye them select, The which your forms' first source may sympathize, And with like beauty's parts be inly deckt; For, if you loosely love without respect, It is no love, but a discordant war, Whose unlike parts amongst themselves do jar. For love is a celestial harmony Of likely hearts compos'd of stars' concent, Which join together in sweet sympathy, To work each other's joy and true content, Which they have harbour'd since their first descent Out of their heavenly bowers, where they did see And know each other here belov'd to be. Then wrong it were that any other twain Should in love's gentle band combined be But those whom Heaven did at first ordain, And made out of one mould the more t' agree; For all that like the beauty which they see, Straight do not love; for love is not so light As straight to burn at first beholder's sight. But they, which love indeed, look otherwise, With pure regard and spotless true intent, Drawing out of the object of their eyes A more refined form, which they present Unto their mind, void of all blemishment; Which it reducing to her first perfection, Beholdeth free from flesh's frail infection. And then conforming it unto the light, Which in itself it hath remaining still, Of that first Sun, yet sparkling in his sight, Thereof he fashions in his higher skill An heavenly beauty to his fancy's will; And it embracing in his mind entire, The mirror of his own thought doth admire. Which seeing now so inly fair to be, As outward it appeareth to the eye, And with his spirit's proportion to agree, He thereon fixeth all his fantasy, And fully setteth his felicity; Counting it fairer than it is indeed, And yet indeed her fairness doth exceed. For lovers' eyes more sharply sighted be Than other men's, and in dear love's delight See more than any other eyes can see, Through mutual receipt of beam{"e}s bright, Which carry privy message to the spright, And to their eyes that inmost fair display, As plain as light discovers dawning day. Therein they see, through amorous eye-glances, Armies of loves still flying to and fro, Which dart at them their little fiery lances; Whom having wounded, back again they go, Carrying compassion to their lovely foe; Who, seeing her fair eyes' so sharp effect, Cures all their sorrows with one sweet aspect. In which how many wonders do they rede To their conceit, that others never see, Now of her smiles, with which their souls they feed, Like gods with nectar in their banquets free; Now of her looks, which like to cordials be; But when her words' embássade forth she sends, Lord, how sweet music that unto them lends. Sometimes upon her forehead they behold A thousand graces masking in delight; Sometimes within her eyelids they unfold Ten thousand sweet belgards, which to their sight Do seem like twinkling stars in frosty night; But on her lips, like rosy buds in May, So many millions of chaste pleasures play. All those, O Cytherea, and thousands more Thy handmaids be, which do on thee attend, To deck thy beauty with their dainties' store, That may it more to mortal eyes commend, And make it more admir'd of foe and friend: That in men's hearts thou may'st thy throne install, And spread thy lovely kingdom over all. Then Iö, triumph! O great Beauty's Queen, Advance the banner of thy conquest high, That all this world, the which thy vassals bene, May draw to thee, and with due fealty Adore the power of thy great majesty, Singing this hymn in honour of thy name, Compil'd by me, which thy poor liegeman am. In lieu whereof grant, O great sovereign, That she whose conquering beauty doth captive My trembling heart in her eternal chain, One drop of grace at length will to me give, That I her bounden thrall by her may live, And this same life, which first fro me she reaved, May owe to her, of whom I it received. And you, fair Venus' darling, my dear dread, Fresh flower of grace, great goddess of my life, When your fair eyes these fearful lines shall read, Deign to let fall one drop of due relief, That may recure my heart's long pining grief, And shew what wondrous power your beauty hath, That can restore a damned wight from death.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bidbid Command, order, direct him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent concupiscent Sensual, desirous curds. Let the wenches wenches Girls dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.Let be be finale of seem.Let be be finale of seem. A possible literal paraphrase of this sentence might read “Let artifice and illusion give way to plain reality.”The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. In the context of death, an echo of Hamlet's comment to Claudius: “Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.” (Hamlet, act 4, scene 3) Take from the dresser of dealdeal Cheap pine or fir wood, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantailsfantails Birds with a fan-shaped tail once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
I Among twenty snowy mountains,  The only moving thing  Was the eye of the blackbird. II I was of three minds,  Like a tree  In which there are three blackbirds. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.  It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman  Are one.  A man and a woman and a blackbird  Are one. V I do not know which to prefer,  The beauty of inflections  Or the beauty of innuendoes,  The blackbird whistling  Or just after. VI Icicles filled the long window  With barbaric glass.  The shadow of the blackbird  Crossed it, to and fro.  The mood  Traced in the shadow  An indecipherable cause. VII O thin men of Haddam,  Why do you imagine golden birds?  Do you not see how the blackbird  Walks around the feet  Of the women about you? VIII I know noble accents  And lucid, inescapable rhythms;  But I know, too,  That the blackbird is involved  In what I know. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight,  It marked the edge  Of one of many circles. X At the sight of blackbirds  Flying in a green light,  Even the bawds of euphony  Would cry out sharply. XI He rode over Connecticut  In a glass coach.  Once, a fear pierced him,  In that he mistook  The shadow of his equipage  For blackbirds. XII The river is moving.  The blackbird must be flying. XIII It was evening all afternoon.  It was snowing  And it was going to snow.  The blackbird sat  In the cedar-limbs.
Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream That over Persian roses flew to kiss The curlèd lashes of Semiramis. Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream. Provence and Troubadour are merest lies The glorious hair of Venice was a beam Made within Titian’s eye. The sunsets seem, The world is very old and nothing is. Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake, Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart, But patter in the darkness of thy heart. Thy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl Blind with the light of life thou ’ldst not forsake, And Error loves and nourishes thy soul.
Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord, Who was the Future, died full long ago. Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go, Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred. Around thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword; The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord And the long strips of river-silver flow: Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours. Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight About their fragile hairs’ aërial gold. Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old Apollo springing naked to the light, And all his island shivered into flowers.
It’s autumn in the country I remember. How warm a wind blew here about the ways! And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber During the long sun-sweetened summer-days. It’s cold abroad the country I remember. The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain At midday with a wing aslant and limber; And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain. It’s empty down the country I remember. I had a sister lovely in my sight: Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre; We sang together in the woods at night. It’s lonely in the country I remember. The babble of our children fills my ears, And on our hearth I stare the perished ember To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears. It’s dark about the country I remember. There are the mountains where I lived. The path Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber, The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath. But that I knew these places are my own, I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber The earth, and I to people it alone. It rains across the country I remember.
Tho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet Vaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set To win the guerdon which is never won. Witness, a purpose never is undone. And tho’ fate drain our seas of violet To gather round our lives her wide-hung net, Memories of hopes that are not shall atone. Not wholly starless is the ill-starred life, Not all is night in failure, and the shield Sometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife. And here while all the lowering heaven is ringed With our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field Stands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged.
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been, Where I the rarest things have seen;  Oh, things without compare! Such sights again cannot be found In any place on English ground,  Be it at wake, or fair. At Charing-Cross, hard by the way, Where we (thou know’st) do sell our hay,  There is a house with stairs; And there did I see coming down Such folk as are not in our town,  Vorty, at least, in pairs. Amongst the rest, one pest’lent fine (His beard no bigger though than thine)  Walk’d on before the rest: Our landlord looks like nothing to him: The King (God bless him) ’twould undo him,  Should he go still so drest. At Course-a-Park, without all doubt, He should have first been taken out  By all the maids i’th’ town: Though lusty Roger there had been, Or little George upon the Green,  Or Vincent of the Crown. But wot you what? the youth was going To make an end of all his wooing;  The parson for him stay’d: Yet by his leave (for all his haste), He did not so much wish all past  (Perchance), as did the maid. The maid (and thereby hangs a tale) For such a maid no Whitsun-ale  Could ever yet produce: No grape, that’s kindly ripe, could be So round, so plump, so soft as she,  Nor half so full of juice. Her finger was so small, the ring Would not stay on, which they did bring;  It was too wide a peck: And to say truth (for out it must) It look’d like the great collar (just)  About our young colt’s neck. Her feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice, stole in and out,  As if they fear’d the light: But oh! she dances such a way No sun upon an Easter-day  Is half so fine a sight. He would have kissed her once or twice, But she would not, she was nice,  She would not do’t in sight, And then she looked as who should say I will do what I list to day;  And you shall do’t at night. Her cheeks so rare a white was on, No daisy makes comparison,  (Who sees them is undone); For streaks of red were mingled there, Such as are on a Catherine pear  (The side that’s next the sun). Her lips were red, and one was thin, Compar’d to that was next her chin;  (Some bee had stung it newly); But (Dick) her eyes so guard her face, I durst no more upon them gaze  Than on the sun in July. Her mouth so small, when she does speak, Thou’dst swear her teeth her words did break,  That they might passage get; But she so handled still the matter, They came as good as ours, or better,  And are not spent a whit. If wishing should be any sin, The Parson himself had guilty been;  (She looked that day so purely,) And did the youth so oft the feat At night, as some did in conceit,  It would have spoil’d him, surely. Passion o’ me, how I run on! There’s that that would be thought upon  (I trow) besides the bride. The business of the kitchen’s great, For it is fit that men should eat;  Nor was it there denied. Just in the nick the cook knock’d thrice, And all the waiters in a trice  His summons did obey: Each serving-man, with dish in hand, March’d boldly up, like our train’d band,  Presented, and away. When all the meat was on the table, What man of knife or teeth was able  To stay to be intreated? And this the very reason was, Before the parson could say grace,  The company was seated. Now hats fly off, and youths carouse, Healths first go round, and then the house,  The bride’s came thick and thick; And when ’twas nam’d another’s health, Perhaps he made it hers by stealth;  And who could help it, Dick? O’ th’ sudden up they rise and dance; Then sit again and sigh, and glance;  Then dance again and kiss: Thus sev’ral ways the time did pass, Whilst ev’ry woman wish’d her place,  And ev’ry man wish’d his. By this time all were stol’n aside To counsel and undress the Bride;  But that he must not know: But yet ’twas thought he guess’d her mind, And did not mean to stay behind  Above an hour or so. When in he came (Dick) there she lay Like new-fal’n snow melting away,  (’Twas time I trow to part) Kisses were now the only stay, Which soon she gave, as who would say,  Good Boy! with all my heart. But just as heav’ns would have to cross it, In came the Bridemaids with the Posset:  The Bridegroom eat in spite; For had he left the Women to’t It would have cost two hours to do’t,  Which were too much that night. At length the candles out and out, All that they had not done, they do’t:  What that is, who can tell? But I believe it was no more Then thou and I have done before  With Bridget, and with Nell.
I prithee spare me gentle boy, Press me no more for that slight toy, That foolish trifle of an heart; I swear it will not do its part, Though thou dost thine, employ’st thy pow’r and art. For through long custom it has known The little secrets, and is grown Sullen and wise, will have its will, And like old hawks pursues that still That makes least sport, flies only where’t can kill. Some youth that has not made his story, Will think perchance the pain’s the glory, And mannerly sit out love’s feast; I shall be carving of the best, Rudely call for the last course ’fore the rest. And oh when once that course is past, How short a time the feast doth last; Men rise away and scarce say grace, Or civilly once thank the face That did invite, but seek another place.
If you refuse me once, and think again, I will complain. You are deceiv’d, love is no work of art, It must be got and born, Not made and worn, By every one that hath a heart. Or do you think they more than once can die, Whom you deny? Who tell you of a thousand deaths a day, Like the old poets feign And tell the pain They met, but in the common way? Or do you think ’t too soon to yield, And quit the field? Nor is that right, they yield that first entreat; Once one may crave for love, But more would prove This heart too little, that too great. Oh that I were all soul, that I might prove For you as fit a love As you are for an angel; for I know, None but pure spirits are fit loves for you. You are all ethereal; there’s in you no dross, Nor any part that’s gross. Your coarsest part is like a curious lawn, The vestal relics for a covering drawn. Your other parts, part of the purest fire That e’er Heav’n did inspire, Makes every thought that is refin’d by it A quintessence of goodness and of wit. Thus have your raptures reach’d to that degree In love’s philosophy, That you can figure to yourself a fire Void of all heat, a love without desire. Nor in divinity do you go less; You think, and you profess, That souls may have a plenitude of joy, Although their bodies meet not to employ. But I must needs confess, I do not find The motions of my mind So purified as yet, but at the best My body claims in them an interest. I hold that perfect joy makes all our parts As joyful as our hearts. Our senses tell us, if we please not them, Our love is but a dotage or a dream. How shall we then agree? you may descend, But will not, to my end. I fain would tune my fancy to your key, But cannot reach to that obstructed way. There rests but this, that whilst we sorrow here, Our bodies may draw near; And, when no more their joys they can extend, Then let our souls begin where they did end.
Out upon it, I have lov’d  Three whole days together; And am like to love three more,  If it prove fair weather. Time shall moult away his wings,  Ere he shall discover In the whole wide world again  Such a constant lover. But the spite on’t is, no praise  Is due at all to me; Love with me had made no stays,  Had it any been but she. Had it any been but she,  And that very face, There had been at least ere this  A dozen dozen in her place.
Why so pale and wan fond lover? Prithee why so pale? Will, when looking well can’t move her, Looking ill prevail? Prithee why so pale? Why so dull and mute young sinner? Prithee why so mute? Will, when speaking well can’t win her, Saying nothing do’t? Prithee why so mute? Quit, quit for shame, this will not move, This cannot take her; If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her; The devil take her.
Dost see how unregarded now  That piece of beauty passes? There was a time when I did vow  To that alone;  But mark the fate of faces; The red and white works now no more on me Than if it could not charm, or I not see. And yet the face continues good,  And I have still desires, Am still the selfsame flesh and blood,  As apt to melt  And suffer from those fires; Oh some kind pow’r unriddle where it lies, Whether my heart be faulty, or her eyes? She ev’ry day her man does kill,  And I as often die; Neither her power then, nor my will  Can question’d be.  What is the mystery? Sure beauty’s empires, like to greater states, Have certain periods set, and hidden fates.
One of her hands one of her cheeks lay under, Cosening the pillow of a lawful kiss, Which therefore swell’d, and seem’d to part asunder, As angry to be robb’d of such a bliss! The one look’d pale and for revenge did long, While t’other blush’d, ’cause it had done the wrong. Out of the bed the other fair hand was On a green satin quilt, whose perfect white Look’d like a daisy in a field of grass, And show’d like unmelt snow unto the sight; There lay this pretty perdue, safe to keep The rest o’ th’ body that lay fast asleep. Her eyes (and therefore it was night), close laid Strove to imprison beauty till the morn: But yet the doors were of such fine stuff made, That it broke through, and show’d itself in scorn, Throwing a kind of light about the place, Which turn’d to smiles still, as’t came near her face. Her beams, which some dull men call’d hair, divided, Part with her cheeks, part with her lips did sport. But these, as rude, her breath put by still; some Wiselier downwards sought, but falling short, Curled back in rings, and seemed to turn again To bite the part so unkindly held them in.
To the Priest, on Observing how most Men mistake their own Talents When beasts could speak (the learned say, They still can do so ev'ry day), It seems, they had religion then, As much as now we find in men. It happen'd, when a plague broke out (Which therefore made them more devout), The king of brutes (to make it plain, Of quadrupeds I only mean) By proclamation gave command, That ev'ry subject in the land Should to the priest confess their sins; And thus the pious wolf begins: "Good father, I must own with shame, That often I have been to blame: I must confess, on Friday last, Wretch that I was! I broke my fast: But I defy the basest tongue To prove I did my neighbour wrong; Or ever went to seek my food By rapine, theft, or thirst of blood." The ass, approaching next, confess'd That in his heart he lov'd a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe: But yet, the worst that could be said, He was a wit both born and bred; And, if it be a sin or shame, Nature alone must bear the blame: One fault he hath, is sorry for't, His ears are half a foot too short; Which could he to the standard bring, He'd show his face before the King: Then for his voice, there's none disputes That he's the nightingale of brutes. The swine with contrite heart allow'd, His shape and beauty made him proud: In diet was perhaps too nice, But gluttony was ne'er his vice: In ev'ry turn of life content, And meekly took what fortune sent: Inquire through all the parish round, A better neighbour ne'er was found: His vigilance might some displease; 'Tis true he hated sloth like peas. The mimic ape began his chatter, How evil tongues his life bespatter: Much of the cens'ring world complain'd, Who said, his gravity was feign'd: Indeed, the strictness of his morals Engag'd him in a hundred quarrels: He saw, and he was griev'd to see't, His zeal was sometimes indiscreet: He found his virtues too severe For our corrupted times to bear: Yet, such a lewd licentious age Might well excuse a Stoic's rage. The goat advanc'd with decent pace; And first excus'd his youthful face; Forgiveness begg'd that he appear'd ('Twas nature's fault) without a beard. 'Tis true, he was not much inclin'd To fondness for the female kind; Not, as his enemies object, From chance, or natural defect; Not by his frigid constitution, But through a pious resolution; For he had made a holy vow Of chastity as monks do now; Which he resolv'd to keep for ever hence, As strictly too, as doth his Reverence. Apply the tale, and you shall find, How just it suits with human kind. Some faults we own: but, can you guess? Why?—virtues carried to excess, Wherewith our vanity endows us, Though neither foe nor friend allows us. The lawyer swears, you may rely on't, He never squeez'd a needy client; And this he makes his constant rule, For which his brethren call him fool: His conscience always was so nice, He freely gave the poor advice; By which he lost, he may affirm, A hundred fees last Easter term. While others of the learned robe Would break the patience of a Job; No pleader at the bar could match His diligence and quick dispatch; Ne'er kept a cause, he well may boast, Above a term or two at most. The cringing knave, who seeks a place Without success, thus tells his case: Why should he longer mince the matter? He fail'd because he could not flatter; He had not learn'd to turn his coat, Nor for a party give his vote: His crime he quickly understood; Too zealous for the nation's good: He found the ministers resent it, Yet could not for his heart repent it. The chaplain vows he cannot fawn, Though it would raise him to the lawn: He pass'd his hours among his books; You find it in his meagre looks: He might, if he were worldly wise, Preferment get and spare his eyes: But own'd he had a stubborn spirit, That made him trust alone in merit: Would rise by merit to promotion; Alas! a mere chimeric notion. The doctor, if you will believe him, Confess'd a sin; and God forgive him! Call'd up at midnight, ran to save A blind old beggar from the grave: But see how Satan spreads his snares; He quite forgot to say his prayers. He cannot help it for his heart Sometimes to act the parson's part: Quotes from the Bible many a sentence, That moves his patients to repentance: And, when his med'cines do no good, Supports their minds with heav'nly food, At which, however well intended, He hears the clergy are offended; And grown so bold behind his back, To call him hypocrite and quack. In his own church he keeps a seat; Says grace before and after meat; And calls, without affecting airs, His household twice a day to prayers. He shuns apothecaries' shops; And hates to cram the sick with slops: He scorns to make his art a trade; Nor bribes my lady's fav'rite maid. Old nurse-keepers would never hire To recommend him to the squire; Which others, whom he will not name, Have often practis'd to their shame. The statesman tells you with a sneer, His fault is to be too sincere; And, having no sinister ends, Is apt to disoblige his friends. The nation's good, his master's glory, Without regard to Whig or Tory, Were all the schemes he had in view; Yet he was seconded by few: Though some had spread a hundred lies, 'Twas he defeated the Excise. 'Twas known, though he had borne aspersion, That standing troops were his aversion: His practice was, in ev'ry station, To serve the King, and please the nation. Though hard to find in ev'ry case The fittest man to fill a place: His promises he ne'er forgot, But took memorials on the spot: His enemies, for want of charity, Said he affected popularity: 'Tis true, the people understood, That all he did was for their good; Their kind affections he has tried; No love is lost on either side. He came to Court with fortune clear, Which now he runs out ev'ry year: Must, at the rate that he goes on, Inevitably be undone: Oh! if his Majesty would please To give him but a writ of ease, Would grant him licence to retire, As it hath long been his desire, By fair accounts it would be found, He's poorer by ten thousand pound. He owns, and hopes it is no sin, He ne'er was partial to his kin; He thought it base for men in stations To crowd the Court with their relations; His country was his dearest mother, And ev'ry virtuous man his brother; Through modesty or awkward shame (For which he owns himself to blame), He found the wisest man he could, Without respect to friends or blood; Nor ever acts on private views, When he hath liberty to choose. The sharper swore he hated play, Except to pass an hour away: And well he might; for, to his cost, By want of skill he always lost; He heard there was a club of cheats, Who had contriv'd a thousand feats; Could change the stock, or cog a die, And thus deceive the sharpest eye: Nor wonder how his fortune sunk, His brothers fleece him when he's drunk. I own the moral not exact; Besides, the tale is false in fact; And so absurd, that could I raise up From fields Elysian fabling Aesop; I would accuse him to his face For libelling the four-foot race. Creatures of ev'ry kind but ours Well comprehend their natural pow'rs; While we, whom reason ought to sway, Mistake our talents ev'ry day. The ass was never known so stupid To act the part of Tray or Cupid; Nor leaps upon his master's lap, There to be strok'd, and fed with pap, As Aesop would the world persuade; He better understands his trade: Nor comes, whene'er his lady whistles; But carries loads, and feeds on thistles. Our author's meaning, I presume, is A creature bipes et implumis; Wherein the moralist design'd A compliment on human kind: For here he owns, that now and then Beasts may degenerate into men.
Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach Appearing, show'd the ruddy morn's approach. Now Betty from her master's bed had flown, And softly stole to discompose her own. The slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door Had par'd the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor. Now Moll had whirl'd her mop with dext'rous airs, Prepar'd to scrub the entry and the stairs. The youth with broomy stumps began to trace The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place. The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep; Till drown'd in shriller notes of "chimney-sweep." Duns at his lordship's gate began to meet; And brickdust Moll had scream'd through half a street. The turnkey now his flock returning sees, Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees. The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands; And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.
In Memory of Charles Baudelaire Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs; Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs, Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres, Son vent mélancolique à l'entour de leurs marbres, Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats. Les Fleurs du Mal.  I Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, Brother, on this that was the veil of thee? Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea, Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel, Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave, Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve? Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat And full of bitter summer, but more sweet To thee than gleanings of a northern shore Trod by no tropic feet? II For always thee the fervid languid glories Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies; Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories, The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave That knows not where is that Leucadian grave Which hides too deep the supreme head of song. Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were, The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong, Blind gods that cannot spare. III Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother, Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us: Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous, Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime; The hidden harvest of luxurious time, Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech; And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep; And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each, Seeing as men sow men reap. IV O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping, That were athirst for sleep and no more life And no more love, for peace and no more strife! Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping Spirit and body and all the springs of song, Is it well now where love can do no wrong, Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang Behind the unopening closure of her lips? Is it not well where soul from body slips And flesh from bone divides without a pang As dew from flower-bell drips? V It is enough; the end and the beginning Are one thing to thee, who art past the end. O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend, For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning, No triumph and no labour and no lust, Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust. O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought, Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night With obscure finger silences your sight, Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought, Sleep, and have sleep for light. VI Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over, Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet, Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover, Such as thy vision here solicited, Under the shadow of her fair vast head, The deep division of prodigious breasts, The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep, The weight of awful tresses that still keep The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests Where the wet hill-winds weep? VII Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision? O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom, Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom? What of despair, of rapture, of derision, What of life is there, what of ill or good? Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood? Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours, The faint fields quicken any terrene root, In low lands where the sun and moon are mute And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers At all, or any fruit? VIII Alas, but though my flying song flies after, O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet, Some dim derision of mysterious laughter From the blind tongueless warders of the dead, Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head, Some little sound of unregarded tears Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes, And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs — These only, these the hearkening spirit hears, Sees only such things rise. IX Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow, Far too far off for thought or any prayer. What ails us with thee, who art wind and air? What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow? Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire, Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire, Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find. Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies, The low light fails us in elusive skies, Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind Are still the eluded eyes. X Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes, Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul, The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll I lay my hand on, and not death estranges My spirit from communion of thy song — These memories and these melodies that throng Veiled porches of a Muse funereal — These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold As though a hand were in my hand to hold, Or through mine ears a mourning musical Of many mourners rolled. XI I among these, I also, in such station As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods, And offering to the dead made, and their gods, The old mourners had, standing to make libation, I stand, and to the gods and to the dead Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom, And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear, And what I may of fruits in this chilled air, And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb A curl of severed hair. XII But by no hand nor any treason stricken, Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King, The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing, Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages. Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns; But bending us-ward with memorial urns The most high Muses that fulfil all ages Weep, and our God's heart yearns. XIII For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often Among us darkling here the lord of light Makes manifest his music and his might In hearts that open and in lips that soften With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine. Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine, And nourished them indeed with bitter bread; Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came, The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed Who feeds our hearts with fame. XIV Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting, God of all suns and songs, he too bends down To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown, And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting. Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art, Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart, Mourns thee of many his children the last dead, And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes, And over thine irrevocable head Sheds light from the under skies. XV And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean, And stains with tears her changing bosom chill: That obscure Venus of the hollow hill, That thing transformed which was the Cytherean, With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine Long since, and face no more called Erycine; A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god. Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell Did she, a sad and second prey, compel Into the footless places once more trod, And shadows hot from hell. XVI And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom, No choral salutation lure to light A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to mend And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend, Will make death clear or make life durable. Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine And with wild notes about this dust of thine At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell And wreathe an unseen shrine. XVII Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started, Shall death not bring us all as thee one day Among the days departed? XVIII For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, Take at my hands this garland, and farewell. Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, With sadder than the Niobean womb, And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb. Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore.
Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears, Girdle thyself with sighing for a girth Upon the sides of mirth, Cover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears Be filled with rumour of people sorrowing; Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs Upon the flesh to cleave, Set pains therein and many a grievous thing, And many sorrows after each his wise For armlet and for gorget and for sleeve. O Love's lute heard about the lands of death, Left hanged upon the trees that were therein; O Love and Time and Sin, Three singing mouths that mourn now underbreath, Three lovers, each one evil spoken of; O smitten lips wherethrough this voice of mine Came softer with her praise; Abide a little for our lady's love. The kisses of her mouth were more than wine, And more than peace the passage of her days. O Love, thou knowest if she were good to see. O Time, thou shalt not find in any land Till, cast out of thine hand, The sunlight and the moonlight fail from thee, Another woman fashioned like as this. O Sin, thou knowest that all thy shame in her Was made a goodly thing; Yea, she caught Shame and shamed him with her kiss, With her fair kiss, and lips much lovelier Than lips of amorous roses in late spring. By night there stood over against my bed Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black, Both sides drawn fully back From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red, And temples drained of purple and full of death. Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water And the sea's gold in it. Her eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth. Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her, And pearl and purple and amber on her feet. Upon her raiment of dyed sendaline Were painted all the secret ways of love And covered things thereof, That hold delight as grape-flowers hold their wine; Red mouths of maidens and red feet of doves, And brides that kept within the bride-chamber Their garment of soft shame, And weeping faces of the wearied loves That swoon in sleep and awake wearier, With heat of lips and hair shed out like flame. The tears that through her eyelids fell on me Made mine own bitter where they ran between As blood had fallen therein, She saying; Arise, lift up thine eyes and see If any glad thing be or any good Now the best thing is taken forth of us; Even she to whom all praise Was as one flower in a great multitude, One glorious flower of many and glorious, One day found gracious among many days: Even she whose handmaiden was Love—to whom At kissing times across her stateliest bed Kings bowed themselves and shed Pale wine, and honey with the honeycomb, And spikenard bruised for a burnt-offering; Even she between whose lips the kiss became As fire and frankincense; Whose hair was as gold raiment on a king, Whose eyes were as the morning purged with flame, Whose eyelids as sweet savour issuing thence. Then I beheld, and lo on the other side My lady's likeness crowned and robed and dead. Sweet still, but now not red, Was the shut mouth whereby men lived and died. And sweet, but emptied of the blood's blue shade, The great curled eyelids that withheld her eyes. And sweet, but like spoilt gold, The weight of colour in her tresses weighed. And sweet, but as a vesture with new dyes, The body that was clothed with love of old. Ah! that my tears filled all her woven hair And all the hollow bosom of her gown— Ah! that my tears ran down Even to the place where many kisses were, Even where her parted breast-flowers have place, Even where they are cloven apart—who knows not this? Ah! the flowers cleave apart And their sweet fills the tender interspace; Ah! the leaves grown thereof were things to kiss Ere their fine gold was tarnished at the heart. Ah! in the days when God did good to me, Each part about her was a righteous thing; Her mouth an almsgiving, The glory of her garments charity, The beauty of her bosom a good deed, In the good days when God kept sight of us; Love lay upon her eyes, And on that hair whereof the world takes heed; And all her body was more virtuous Than souls of women fashioned otherwise. Now, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands And sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves Rain-rotten in rank lands, Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves And grass that fades ere any of it be mown; And when thy bosom is filled full thereof Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth, And say "My master that was thrall to Love Is become thrall to Death." Bow down before him, ballad, sigh and groan. But make no sojourn in thy outgoing; For haply it may be That when thy feet return at evening Death shall come in with thee.
Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn Scarce risen upon the dusk of dolorous years, First of us all and sweetest singer born Whose far shrill note the world of new men hears Cleave the cold shuddering shade as twilight clears; When song new-born put off the old world's attire And felt its tune on her changed lips expire, Writ foremost on the roll of them that came Fresh girt for service of the latter lyre, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name! Alas the joy, the sorrow, and the scorn, That clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears, And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears; Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire, When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name! Poor splendid wings so frayed and soiled and torn! Poor kind wild eyes so dashed with light quick tears! Poor perfect voice, most blithe when most forlorn, That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears! What far delight has cooled the fierce desire That like some ravenous bird was strong to tire On that frail flesh and soul consumed with flame, But left more sweet than roses to respire, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name? Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire, A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire; Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame. But from thy feet now death has washed the mire, Love reads out first at head of all our quire, Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone, Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone: Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower, Stars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the star-bright air Made the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of the sea, more fair. Whence came change? Was the sweet night weary of rest? What anguish awoke in the dark? Sudden, sublime, the strong storm spake: we heard the thunders as hounds that bark. Lovelier if aught may be lovelier than stars, we saw the lightnings exalt the sky, Living and lustrous and rapturous as love that is born but to quicken and lighten and die. Heaven's own heart at its highest of delight found utterance in music and semblance in fire: Thunder on thunder exulted, rejoicing to live and to satiate the night's desire. And the night was alive and anhungered of life as a tiger from toils cast free: And a rapture of rage made joyous the spirit and strength of the soul of the sea. All the weight of the wind bore down on it, freighted with death for fraught: And the keen waves kindled and quickened as things transfigured or things distraught. And madness fell on them laughing and leaping; and madness came on the wind: And the might and the light and the darkness of storm were as storm in the heart of Ind. Such glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten and harrow the far fierce East, Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest. The channel that sunders England from shores where never was man born free Was clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength and the wrath of a tropic sea. As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall, The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff's wall. Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, a breath, And she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at the throat of death. Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy, Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy. For the central crest of the night was cloud that thundered and flamed, sublime As the splendour and song of the soul everlasting that quickens the pulse of time. The glory beholden of man in a vision, the music of light overheard, The rapture and radiance of battle, the life that abides in the fire of a word, In the midmost heaven enkindled, was manifest far on the face of the sea, And the rage in the roar of the voice of the waters was heard but when heaven breathed free. Far eastward, clear of the covering of cloud, the sky laughed out into light From the rims of the storm to the sea's dark edge with flames that were flowerlike and white. The leaping and luminous blossoms of live sheet lightning that laugh as they fade From the cloud's black base to the black wave's brim rejoiced in the light they made. Far westward, throned in a silent sky, where life was in lustrous tune, Shone, sweeter and surer than morning or evening, the steadfast smile of the moon. The limitless heaven that enshrined them was lovelier than dreams may behold, and deep As life or as death, revealed and transfigured, may shine on the soul through sleep. All glories of toil and of triumph and passion and pride that it yearns to know Bore witness there to the soul of its likeness and kinship, above and below. The joys of the lightnings, the songs of the thunders, the strong sea's labour and rage, Were tokens and signs of the war that is life and is joy for the soul to wage. No thought strikes deeper or higher than the heights and the depths that the night made bare, Illimitable, infinite, awful and joyful, alive in the summit of air— Air stilled and thrilled by the tempest that thundered between its reign and the sea's, Rebellious, rapturous, and transient as faith or as terror that bows men's knees. No love sees loftier and fairer the form of its godlike vision in dreams Than the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as love for a breath's length seems— One utterly, mingled and mastering and mastered and laughing with love that subsides As the glad mad night sank panting and satiate with storm, and released the tides. In the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering, assailed and withheld As a soul born royal, if life or if death be against it, is thwarted and quelled. As the glories of myriads of glowworms in lustrous grass on a boundless lawn Were the glories of flames phosphoric that made of the water a light like dawn. A thousand Phosphors, a thousand Hespers, awoke in the churning sea, And the swift soft hiss of them living and dying was clear as a tune could be; As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep, Audible alway alive in the storm, too fleet for a dream to keep: Too fleet, too sweet for a dream to recover and thought to remember awake: Light subtler and swifter than lightning, that whispers and laughs in the live storm's wake, In the wild bright wake of the storm, in the dense loud heart of the labouring hour, A harvest of stars by the storm's hand reaped, each fair as a star-shaped flower. And sudden and soft as the passing of sleep is the passing of tempest seemed When the light and the sound of it sank, and the glory was gone as a dream half dreamed. The glory, the terror, the passion that made of the midnight a miracle, died, Not slain at a stroke, nor in gradual reluctance abated of power and of pride; With strong swift subsidence, awful as power that is wearied of power upon earth, As a God that were wearied of power upon heaven, and were fain of a new God's birth, The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell: And the sea and the sky put off them the rapture and radiance of heaven and of hell. The waters, heaving and hungering at heart, made way, and were wellnigh fain, For the ship that had fought them, and wrestled, and revelled in labour, to cease from her pain. And an end was made of it: only remembrance endures of the glad loud strife; And the sense that a rapture so royal may come not again in the passage of life.
Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love? What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above? What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave, Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave? Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day; Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away. Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast; Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past. Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me; Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee. Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine; Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine. Lov'st thou death? is his face fairer than love's, brighter to look upon? Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love's pales and is overshone? Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow! Why let fall from thy hand love's that were thine, roses that loved thee so? Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see; Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee. Now death's poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white; Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light. Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep? Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.
O heart of hearts, the chalice of love's fire, Hid round with flowers and all the bounty of bloom; O wonderful and perfect heart, for whom The lyrist liberty made life a lyre; O heavenly heart, at whose most dear desire Dead love, living and singing, cleft his tomb, And with him risen and regent in death's room All day thy choral pulses rang full choir; O heart whose beating blood was running song, O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were, Help us for thy free love's sake to be free, True for thy truth's sake, for thy strength's sake strong, Till very liberty make clean and fair The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea.
(excerpt) I A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink, Might tempt, should heaven see meet, An angel's lips to kiss, we think, A baby's feet. Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat They stretch and spread and wink Their ten soft buds that part and meet. No flower-bells that expand and shrink Gleam half so heavenly sweet As shine on life's untrodden brink A Baby's feet. II A baby's hands, like rosebuds furled Whence yet no leaf expands, Ope if you touch, though close upcurled, A baby's hands. Then, fast as warriors grip their brands When battle's bolt is hurled, They close, clenched hard like tightening bands. No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled Match, even in loveliest lands, The sweetest flowers in all the world— A baby's hands. III A baby's eyes, ere speech begin, Ere lips learn words or sighs, Bless all things bright enough to win A baby's eyes. Love, while the sweet thing laughs and lies, And sleep flows out and in, Sees perfect in them Paradise. Their glance might cast out pain and sin, Their speech make dumb the wise, By mute glad godhead felt within A baby's eyes.
Men, brother men, that after us yet live, Let not your hearts too hard against us be; For if some pity of us poor men ye give, The sooner God shall take of you pity. Here are we five or six strung up, you see, And here the flesh that all too well we fed Bit by bit eaten and rotten, rent and shred, And we the bones grow dust and ash withal; Let no man laugh at us discomforted, But pray to God that he forgive us all. If we call on you, brothers, to forgive, Ye should not hold our prayer in scorn, though we Were slain by law; ye know that all alive Have not wit alway to walk righteously; Make therefore intercession heartily With him that of a virgin's womb was bred, That his grace be not as a dry well-head For us, nor let hell's thunder on us fall; We are dead, let no man harry or vex us dead, But pray to God that he forgive us all. The rain has washed and laundered us all five, And the sun dried and blackened; yea, perdie, Ravens and pies with beaks that rend and rive Have dug our eyes out, and plucked off for fee Our beards and eyebrows; never are we free, Not once, to rest; but here and there still sped, Drive at its wild will by the wind's change led, More pecked of birds than fruits on garden-wall; Men, for God's love, let no gibe here be said, But pray to God that he forgive us all. Prince Jesus, that of all art lord and head, Keep us, that hell be not our bitter bed; We have nought to do in such a master's hall. Be not ye therefore of our fellowhead, But pray to God that he forgive us all.
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace; Let your head lean Back to the shoulder with its fleece Of locks, Faustine. The shapely silver shoulder stoops, Weighed over clean With state of splendid hair that droops Each side, Faustine. Let me go over your good gifts That crown you queen; A queen whose kingdom ebbs and shifts Each week, Faustine. Bright heavy brows well gathered up: White gloss and sheen; Carved lips that make my lips a cup To drink, Faustine, Wine and rank poison, milk and blood, Being mixed therein Since first the devil threw dice with God For you, Faustine. Your naked new-born soul, their stake, Stood blind between; God said "let him that wins her take And keep Faustine." But this time Satan throve, no doubt; Long since, I ween, God's part in you was battered out; Long since, Faustine. The die rang sideways as it fell, Rang cracked and thin, Like a man's laughter heard in hell Far down, Faustine, A shadow of laughter like a sigh, Dead sorrow's kin; So rang, thrown down, the devil's die That won Faustine. A suckling of his breed you were, One hard to wean; But God, who lost you, left you fair, We see, Faustine. You have the face that suits a woman For her soul's screen — The sort of beauty that's called human In hell, Faustine. You could do all things but be good Or chaste of mien; And that you would not if you could, We know, Faustine. Even he who cast seven devils out Of Magdalene Could hardly do as much, I doubt, For you, Faustine. Did Satan make you to spite God? Or did God mean To scourge with scorpions for a rod Our sins, Faustine? I know what queen at first you were, As though I had seen Red gold and black imperious hair Twice crown Faustine. As if your fed sarcophagus Spared flesh and skin, You come back face to face with us, The same Faustine. She loved the games men played with death, Where death must win; As though the slain man's blood and breath Revived Faustine. Nets caught the pike, pikes tore the net; Lithe limbs and lean From drained-out pores dripped thick red sweat To soothe Faustine. She drank the steaming drift and dust Blown off the scene; Blood could not ease the bitter lust That galled Faustine. All round the foul fat furrows reeked, Where blood sank in; The circus splashed and seethed and shrieked All round Faustine. But these are gone now: years entomb The dust and din; Yea, even the bath's fierce reek and fume That slew Faustine. Was life worth living then? and now Is life worth sin? Where are the imperial years? and how Are you Faustine? Your soul forgot her joys, forgot Her times of teen; Yea, this life likewise will you not Forget, Faustine? For in the time we know not of Did fate begin Weaving the web of days that wove Your doom, Faustine. The threads were wet with wine, and all Were smooth to spin; They wove you like a Bacchanal, The first Faustine. And Bacchus cast your mates and you Wild grapes to glean; Your flower-like lips were dashed with dew From his, Faustine. Your drenched loose hands were stretched to hold The vine's wet green, Long ere they coined in Roman gold Your face, Faustine. Then after change of soaring feather And winnowing fin, You woke in weeks of feverish weather, A new Faustine. A star upon your birthday burned, Whose fierce serene Red pulseless planet never yearned In heaven, Faustine. Stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew Through Mitylene Shook the fierce quivering blood in you By night, Faustine. The shameless nameless love that makes Hell's iron gin Shut on you like a trap that breaks The soul, Faustine. And when your veins were void and dead, What ghosts unclean Swarmed round the straitened barren bed That hid Faustine? What sterile growths of sexless root Or epicene? What flower of kisses without fruit Of love, Faustine? What adders came to shed their coats? What coiled obscene Small serpents with soft stretching throats Caressed Faustine? But the time came of famished hours, Maimed loves and mean, This ghastly thin-faced time of ours, To spoil Faustine. You seem a thing that hinges hold, A love-machine With clockwork joints of supple gold — No more, Faustine. Not godless, for you serve one God, The Lampsacene, Who metes the gardens with his rod; Your lord, Faustine. If one should love you with real love (Such things have been, Things your fair face knows nothing of, It seems, Faustine); That clear hair heavily bound back, The lights wherein Shift from dead blue to burnt-up black; Your throat, Faustine, Strong, heavy, throwing out the face And hard bright chin And shameful scornful lips that grace Their shame, Faustine, Curled lips, long since half kissed away, Still sweet and keen; You'd give him — poison shall we say? Or what, Faustine?
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead. The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, To the low last edge of the long lone land. If a step should sound or a word be spoken, Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand? So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless, Through branches and briars if a man make way, He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless Night and day. The dense hard passage is blind and stifled That crawls by a track none turn to climb To the strait waste place that the years have rifled Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time. The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; The rocks are left when he wastes the plain. The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, These remain. Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not; As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. Over the meadows that blossom and wither Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song; Only the sun and the rain come hither All year long. The sun burns sere and the rain dishevels One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. Only the wind here hovers and revels In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply, of lovers none ever will know, Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping Years ago. Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look thither," Did he whisper? "look forth from the flowers to the sea; For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, And men that love lightly may die—but we?" And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened, And or ever the garden's last petals were shed, In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, Love was dead. Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end—but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them Or the wave. All are at one now, roses and lovers, Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. Not a breath of the time that has been hovers In the air now soft with a summer to be. Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter We shall sleep. Here death may deal not again for ever; Here change may come not till all change end. From the graves they have made they shall rise up never, Who have left nought living to ravage and rend. Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, While the sun and the rain live, these shall be; Till a last wind's breath upon all these blowing Roll the sea. Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead.
Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams. I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep. Here life has death for neighbour, And far from eye or ear Wan waves and wet winds labour, Weak ships and spirits steer; They drive adrift, and whither They wot not who make thither; But no such winds blow hither, And no such things grow here. No growth of moor or coppice, No heather-flower or vine, But bloomless buds of poppies, Green grapes of Proserpine, Pale beds of blowing rushes Where no leaf blooms or blushes Save this whereout she crushes For dead men deadly wine. Pale, without name or number, In fruitless fields of corn, They bow themselves and slumber All night till light is born; And like a soul belated, In hell and heaven unmated, By cloud and mist abated Comes out of darkness morn. Though one were strong as seven, He too with death shall dwell, Nor wake with wings in heaven, Nor weep for pains in hell; Though one were fair as roses, His beauty clouds and closes; And well though love reposes, In the end it is not well. Pale, beyond porch and portal, Crowned with calm leaves, she stands Who gathers all things mortal With cold immortal hands; Her languid lips are sweeter Than love's who fears to greet her To men that mix and meet her From many times and lands. She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born; Forgets the earth her mother, The life of fruits and corn; And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn. There go the loves that wither, The old loves with wearier wings; And all dead years draw thither, And all disastrous things; Dead dreams of days forsaken, Blind buds that snows have shaken, Wild leaves that winds have taken, Red strays of ruined springs. We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; To-day will die to-morrow; Time stoops to no man's lure; And love, grown faint and fretful, With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps that no loves endure. From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.
In the month of the long decline of roses I, beholding the summer dead before me, Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent, Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions Half divided the eyelids of the sunset; Till I heard as it were a noise of waters Moving tremulous under feet of angels Multitudinous, out of all the heavens; Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage, Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow; And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels, Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight, Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel, Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not, Winds not born in the north nor any quarter, Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine; Heard between them a voice of exultation, "Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded, Even like as a leaf the year is withered, All the fruits of the day from all her branches Gathered, neither is any left to gather. All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms, All are taken away; the season wasted, Like an ember among the fallen ashes. Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight, Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost, We bring flowers that fade not after autumn, Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons, Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser), Woven under the eyes of stars and planets When low light was upon the windy reaches Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows And green fields of the sea that make no pasture: Since the winter begins, the weeping winter, All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever."
To a sister of an enemy of the author's who disapproved of 'The Playboy' Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her. Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgment quickly bring, And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.
DANCE little baby, dance up high,Never mind baby, mother is by ;Crow and caper, caper and crow,There little baby, there you go ;Up to the ceiling, down to the ground,Backwards and forwards, round and round ;Dance little baby, and mother shall sing,With the merry coral, ding, ding, ding.
WELL, what's the matter ? there's a face  What ! has it cut a vein ? And is it quite a shocking place ?  Come, let us look again. I see it bleeds, but never mind  That tiny little drop ; I don't believe you'll ever find  That crying makes it stop. 'Tis sad indeed to cry at pain,  For any but a baby ; If that should chance to cut a vein,  We should not wonder, may be. But such a man as you should try  To bear a little sorrow : So run along, and wipe your eye,  'Twill all be well to-morrow.
Break, break, break,  On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter  The thoughts that arise in me. O, well for the fisherman's boy,  That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad,  That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on  To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,  And the sound of a voice that is still! Break, break, break  At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead  Will never come back to me.
I Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death  Rode the six hundred. “Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!” he said. Into the valley of Death  Rode the six hundred.II “Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew  Someone had blundered.  Theirs not to make reply,  Theirs not to reason why,  Theirs but to do and die.  Into the valley of Death  Rode the six hundred.III Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them  Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell  Rode the six hundred.IV Flashed all their sabres bare, Flashed as they turned in air Sabring the gunners there, Charging an army, while  All the world wondered. Plunged in the battery-smoke Right through the line they broke; Cossack and Russian Reeled from the sabre stroke  Shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not  Not the six hundred.V Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them  Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well Came through the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of hell, All that was left of them,  Left of six hundred.VI When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!  All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade,  Noble six hundred!
Where Claribel low-lieth  The breezes pause and die,  Letting the rose-leaves fall: But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,  Thick-leaved, ambrosial,  With an ancient melody  Of an inward agony, Where Claribel low-lieth. At eve the beetle boometh  Athwart the thicket lone: At noon the wild bee hummeth  About the moss'd headstone: At midnight the moon cometh,  And looketh down alone. Her song the lintwhite swelleth, The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,  The callow throstle lispeth, The slumbrous wave outwelleth,  The babbling runnel crispeth, The hollow grot replieth  Where Claribel low-lieth.
Sunset and evening star,  And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar,  When I put out to sea,  But such a tide as moving seems asleep,  Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep  Turns again home.  Twilight and evening bell,  And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell,  When I embark;  For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place  The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face  When I have crost the bar.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
When Britain first, at heaven's command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain— "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." The nations, not so blest as thee, Must in their turns to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies Serves but to root thy native oak. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame; All their attempts to bend thee down, Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe and thy renown. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." To thee belongs the rural reign; Thy cities shall with commerce shine; All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves." The Muses, still with freedom found, Shall to thy happy coast repair: Blest isle! with matchless beauty crowned, And manly hearts to guard the fair. "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves."
A learned and a happy ignorance Divided me From all the vanity, From all the sloth, care, pain, and sorrow that advance The madness and the misery Of men. No error, no distraction I Saw soil the earth, or overcloud the sky. I knew not that there was a serpent’s sting, Whose poison shed On men, did overspread The world; nor did I dream of such a thing As sin, in which mankind lay dead. They all were brisk and living wights to me, Yea, pure and full of immortality. Joy, pleasure, beauty, kindness, glory, love, Sleep, day, life, light, Peace, melody, my sight, My ears and heart did fill and freely move. All that I saw did me delight. The Universe was then a world of treasure, To me an universal world of pleasure. Unwelcome penitence was then unknown, Vain costly toys, Swearing and roaring boys, Shops, markets, taverns, coaches, were unshown; So all things were that drown’d my joys: No thorns chok’d up my path, nor hid the face Of bliss and beauty, nor eclips’d the place. Only what Adam in his first estate, Did I behold; Hard silver and dry gold As yet lay under ground; my blessed fate Was more acquainted with the old And innocent delights which he did see In his original simplicity. Those things which first his Eden did adorn, My infancy Did crown. Simplicity Was my protection when I first was born. Mine eyes those treasures first did see Which God first made. The first effects of love My first enjoyments upon earth did prove; And were so great, and so divine, so pure; So fair and sweet, So true; when I did meet Them here at first, they did my soul allure, And drew away my infant feet Quite from the works of men; that I might see The glorious wonders of the Deity.
But that which most I wonder at, which most I did esteem my bliss, which most I boast, And ever shall enjoy, is that within I felt no stain, nor spot of sin. No darkness then did overshade, But all within was pure and bright, No guilt did crush, nor fear invade But all my soul was full of light. A joyful sense and purity Is all I can remember; The very night to me was bright, ’Twas summer in December. A serious meditation did employ My soul within, which taken up with joy Did seem no outward thing to note, but fly All objects that do feed the eye. While it those very objects did Admire, and prize, and praise, and love, Which in their glory most are hid, Which presence only doth remove. Their constant daily presence I Rejoicing at, did see; And that which takes them from the eye Of others, offer’d them to me. No inward inclination did I feel To avarice or pride: my soul did kneel In admiration all the day. No lust, nor strife, Polluted then my infant life. No fraud nor anger in me mov’d, No malice, jealousy, or spite; All that I saw I truly lov’d. Contentment only and delight Were in my soul. O Heav’n! what bliss Did I enjoy and feel! What powerful delight did this Inspire! for this I daily kneel. Whether it be that nature is so pure, And custom only vicious; or that sure God did by miracle the guilt remove, And make my soul to feel his love So early: or that ’twas one day, Wherein this happiness I found; Whose strength and brightness so do ray, That still it seems me to surround; What ere it is, it is a light So endless unto me That I a world of true delight Did then and to this day do see. That prospect was the gate of Heav’n, that day The ancient light of Eden did convey Into my soul: I was an Adam there A little Adam in a sphere Of joys! O there my ravish’d sense Was entertain’d in Paradise, And had a sight of innocence Which was beyond all bound and price. An antepast of Heaven sure! I on the earth did reign; Within, without me, all was pure; I must become a child again.
News from a foreign country came, As if my treasures and my joys lay there; So much it did my heart inflame, ’Twas wont to call my soul into mine ear; Which thither went to meet Th’ approaching sweet, And on the threshold stood To entertain the secret good; It hover’d there As if ’twould leave mine ear, And was so eager to embrace Th’ expected tidings as they came, That it could change its dwelling place To meet the voice of fame. As if new tidings were the things Which did comprise my wished unknown treasure, Or else did bear them on their wings, With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure, My soul stood at the gate To recreate Itself with bliss, and woo Its speedier approach; a fuller view It fain would take, Yet journeys back would make Unto my heart, as if ’twould fain Go out to meet, yet stay within, Fitting a place to entertain And bring the tidings in. What sacred instinct did inspire My soul in childhood with an hope so strong? What secret force mov’d my desire T’ expect my joys beyond the seas, so young? Felicity I knew Was out of view; And being left alone, I thought all happiness was gone From earth; for this I long’d for absent bliss, Deeming that sure beyond the seas, Or else in something near at hand Which I knew not, since nought did please I knew, my bliss did stand. But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by, And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was! The gem, The diadem, The ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthen ball; The heav’nly eye, Much wider than the sky, Wherein they all included were; The love, the soul, that was the king Made to possess them, did appear A very little thing.
For all the mysteries, engines, instruments, wherewith the world is filled, which we are able to frame and use to thy glory. For all the trades, variety of operations, cities, temples, streets, bridges, mariner's compass, admirable picture, sculpture, writing, printing, songs and music; wherewith the world is beautified and adorned. Much more for the regent life,  And power of perception,  Which rules within.  That secret depth of fathomless consideration  That receives the information  Of all our senses,  That makes our centre equal to the heavens,  And comprehendeth in itself the magnitude of the world;  The involv’d mysteries  Of our common sense;  The inaccessible secret  Of perceptive fancy;  The repository and treasury  Of things that are past;  The presentation of things to come;  Thy name be glorified  For evermore.  O miracle  Of divine goodness!  O fire! O flame of zeal, and love, and joy!  Ev’n for our earthly bodies, hast thou created all things.  { visible  All things { material  { sensible  Animals,  Vegetables,  Minerals,  Bodies celestial,  Bodies terrestrial,  The four elements,  Volatile spirits,  Trees, herbs, and flowers,  The influences of heaven,  Clouds, vapors, wind,  Dew, rain, hail and snow,  Light and darkness, night and day,  The seasons of the year. Springs, rivers, fountains, oceans,  Gold, silver, and precious stones.  Corn, wine, and oil,  The sun, moon, and stars,  Cities, nations, kingdoms. And the bodies of men, the greatest treasures of all,  For each other. What then, O Lord, hast thou intended for our Souls, who givest to our bodies such glorious things!
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;  Else may the silent feet,  Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good  Nor joy nor glory meet. Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange  The glory that is by;  Dead puppets may Move in the bright and glorious day,  Yet not behold the sky. And are not men than they more blind, Who having eyes yet never find  The bliss in which they move;  Like statues dead They up and down are carried  Yet never see nor love. To walk is by a thought to go; To move in spirit to and fro;  To mind the good we see;  To taste the sweet; Observing all the things we meet  How choice and rich they be. To note the beauty of the day, And golden fields of corn survey;  Admire each pretty flow’r  With its sweet smell; To praise their Maker, and to tell  The marks of his great pow’r. To fly abroad like active bees, Among the hedges and the trees,  To cull the dew that lies  On ev’ry blade, From ev’ry blossom; till we lade  Our minds, as they their thighs. Observe those rich and glorious things, The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs,  The fructifying sun;  To note from far The rising of each twinkling star  For us his race to run. A little child these well perceives, Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,  May rich as kings be thought,  But there’s a sight Which perfect manhood may delight,  To which we shall be brought. While in those pleasant paths we talk, ’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk;  For we may by degrees  Wisely proceed Pleasures of love and praise to heed,  From viewing herbs and trees.
How like an angel came I down!  How bright are all things here! When first among his works I did appear  O how their glory me did crown! The world resembled his eternity,  In which my soul did walk;  And ev’ry thing that I did see  Did with me talk.  The skies in their magnificence,  The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!  The stars did entertain my sense, And all the works of God, so bright and pure,  So rich and great did seem,  As if they ever must endure  In my esteem.  A native health and innocence  Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his glories show,  I felt a vigour in my sense That was all spirit. I within did flow  With seas of life, like wine;  I nothing in the world did know  But ’twas divine.  Harsh ragged objects were conceal’d,  Oppressions tears and cries, Sins, griefs, complaints, dissensions, weeping eyes  Were hid, and only things reveal’d Which heav’nly spirits, and the angels prize.  The state of innocence  And bliss, not trades and poverties,  Did fill my sense.  The streets were pav’d with golden stones,  The boys and girls were mine, Oh how did all their lovely faces shine!  The sons of men were holy ones, In joy and beauty they appear’d to me,  And every thing which here I found,  While like an angel I did see,  Adorn’d the ground.  Rich diamond and pearl and gold  In ev’ry place was seen; Rare splendours, yellow, blue, red, white and green,  Mine eyes did everywhere behold. Great wonders cloth’d with glory did appear,  Amazement was my bliss,  That and my wealth was ev’ry where:  No joy to this!  Curs’d and devis’d proprieties,  With envy, avarice And fraud, those fiends that spoil even Paradise,  Flew from the splendour of mine eyes, And so did hedges, ditches, limits, bounds,  I dream’d not aught of those,  But wander’d over all men’s grounds,  And found repose.  Proprieties themselves were mine,  And hedges ornaments; Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents  Did not divide my joys, but all combine. Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem’d  My joys by others worn:  For me they all to wear them seem’d  When I was born.
BODY Farewell! I go to sleep; but when  The day-star springs, I’ll wake again. SOUL Go, sleep in peace; and when thou liest Unnumber’d in thy dust, when all this frame Is but one dram, and what thou now descriest  In sev’ral parts shall want a name, Then may his peace be with thee, and each dust Writ in his book, who ne’er betray’d man’s trust! BODY Amen! but hark, ere we two stray  How many hours dost think ’till day? SOUL Ah go; th’art weak, and sleepy. Heav’n Is a plain watch, and without figures winds All ages up; who drew this circle, even  He fills it; days and hours are blinds. Yet this take with thee. The last gasp of time Is thy first breath, and man’s eternal prime.
I walk’d the other day, to spend my hour, Into a field, Where I sometimes had seen the soil to yield A gallant flow’r; But winter now had ruffled all the bow’r And curious store I knew there heretofore. Yet I, whose search lov’d not to peep and peer I’ th’ face of things, Thought with my self, there might be other springs Besides this here, Which, like cold friends, sees us but once a year; And so the flow’r Might have some other bow’r. Then taking up what I could nearest spy, I digg’d about That place where I had seen him to grow out; And by and by I saw the warm recluse alone to lie, Where fresh and green He liv’d of us unseen. Many a question intricate and rare Did I there strow; But all I could extort was, that he now Did there repair Such losses as befell him in this air, And would ere long Come forth most fair and young. This past, I threw the clothes quite o’er his head; And stung with fear Of my own frailty dropp’d down many a tear Upon his bed; Then sighing whisper’d, “happy are the dead! What peace doth now Rock him asleep below!” And yet, how few believe such doctrine springs From a poor root, Which all the winter sleeps here under foot, And hath no wings To raise it to the truth and light of things; But is still trod By ev’ry wand’ring clod. O Thou! whose spirit did at first inflame And warm the dead, And by a sacred incubation fed With life this frame, Which once had neither being, form, nor name; Grant I may so Thy steps track here below, That in these masques and shadows I may see Thy sacred way; And by those hid ascents climb to that day, Which breaks from Thee, Who art in all things, though invisibly! Shew me thy peace, Thy mercy, love, and ease, And from this care, where dreams and sorrows reign, Lead me above, Where light, joy, leisure, and true comforts move Without all pain; There, hid in thee, shew me his life again, At whose dumb urn Thus all the year I mourn.
O joys! infinite sweetness! with what flow’rs And shoots of glory my soul breaks and buds!  All the long hours  Of night, and rest,  Through the still shrouds  Of sleep, and clouds,  This dew fell on my breast;  Oh, how it bloods And spirits all my earth! Hark! In what rings And hymning circulations the quick world  Awakes and sings;  The rising winds  And falling springs,  Birds, beasts, all things  Adore him in their kinds.  Thus all is hurl’d In sacred hymns and order, the great chime And symphony of nature. Prayer is  The world in tune,  A spirit voice,  And vocal joys  Whose echo is heav’n’s bliss.  O let me climb When I lie down! The pious soul by night Is like a clouded star whose beams, though said  To shed their light  Under some cloud,  Yet are above,  And shine and move  Beyond that misty shroud.  So in my bed, That curtain’d grave, though sleep, like ashes, hide My lamp and life, both shall in thee abide.
My Soul, there is a country  Afar beyond the stars, Where stands a winged sentry  All skillful in the wars; There, above noise and danger  Sweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles, And One born in a manger  Commands the beauteous files. He is thy gracious friend  And (O my Soul awake!) Did in pure love descend,  To die here for thy sake. If thou canst get but thither,  There grows the flow’r of peace, The rose that cannot wither,  Thy fortress, and thy ease. Leave then thy foolish ranges,  For none can thee secure, But One, who never changes,  Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
Happy those early days! when I Shined in my angel infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. O, how I long to travel back, And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain Where first I left my glorious train, From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees That shady city of palm trees. But, ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way. Some men a forward motion love; But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn, In that state I came, return.
Whatever ’tis, whose beauty here below Attracts thee thus and makes thee stream and flow,  And wind and curl, and wink and smile,  Shifting thy gate and guile; Though thy close commerce nought at all imbars My present search, for eagles eye not stars,  And still the lesser by the best  And highest good is blest; Yet, seeing all things that subsist and be, Have their commissions from divinity,  And teach us duty, I will see  What man may learn from thee. First, I am sure, the subject so respected Is well dispos’d, for bodies once infected,  Deprav’d, or dead, can have with thee  No hold, nor sympathy. Next, there’s in it a restless, pure desire And longing for thy bright and vital fire,  Desire that never will be quench’d,  Nor can be writh’d, nor wrench’d. These are the magnets which so strongly move And work all night upon thy light and love,  As beauteous shapes, we know not why,  Command and guide the eye. For where desire, celestial, pure desire Hath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire,  There God a commerce states, and sheds  His secret on their heads. This is the heart he craves, and who so will But give it him, and grudge not, he shall feel  That God is true, as herbs unseen  Put on their youth and green.
They are all gone into the world of light!  And I alone sit ling’ring here; Their very memory is fair and bright,  And my sad thoughts doth clear. It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,  Like stars upon some gloomy grove, Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,  After the sun’s remove. I see them walking in an air of glory,  Whose light doth trample on my days: My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,  Mere glimmering and decays. O holy Hope! and high Humility,  High as the heavens above! These are your walks, and you have show’d them me  To kindle my cold love. Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,  Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust  Could man outlook that mark! He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know  At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sings in now,  That is to him unknown. And yet as angels in some brighter dreams  Call to the soul, when man doth sleep: So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes  And into glory peep. If a star were confin’d into a tomb,  Her captive flames must needs burn there; But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room,  She’ll shine through all the sphere. O Father of eternal life, and all  Created glories under thee! Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall  Into true liberty. Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill  My perspective still as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill,  Where I shall need no glass.
With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth  Here flowing fall,  And chide, and call, As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid;  The common pass  Where, clear as glass,  All must descend  Not to an end, But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.  Dear stream! dear bank, where often I  Have sate and pleas’d my pensive eye,  Why, since each drop of thy quick store  Runs thither whence it flow’d before,  Should poor souls fear a shade or night,  Who came, sure, from a sea of light?  Or since those drops are all sent back  So sure to thee, that none doth lack,  Why should frail flesh doubt any more  That what God takes, he’ll not restore?  O useful element and clear!  My sacred wash and cleanser here,  My first consigner unto those  Fountains of life where the Lamb goes!  What sublime truths and wholesome themes  Lodge in thy mystical deep streams!  Such as dull man can never find  Unless that Spirit lead his mind  Which first upon thy face did move,  And hatch’d all with his quick’ning love.  As this loud brook’s incessant fall  In streaming rings restagnates all,  Which reach by course the bank, and then  Are no more seen, just so pass men.  O my invisible estate,  My glorious liberty, still late!  Thou art the channel my soul seeks,  Not this with cataracts and creeks.
I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light,  All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,  Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world  And all her train were hurl’d. The doting lover in his quaintest strain  Did there complain; Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,  Wit’s sour delights, With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,  Yet his dear treasure All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour  Upon a flow’r. The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe, Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,  He did not stay, nor go; Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl  Upon his soul, And clouds of crying witnesses without  Pursued him with one shout. Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,  Work’d under ground, Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see  That policy; Churches and altars fed him; perjuries  Were gnats and flies; It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he  Drank them as free. The fearful miser on a heap of rust Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust  His own hands with the dust, Yet would not place one piece above, but lives  In fear of thieves; Thousands there were as frantic as himself,  And hugg’d each one his pelf; The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,  And scorn’d pretence, While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,  Said little less; The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,  Who think them brave; And poor despised Truth sate counting by  Their victory. Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;  But most would use no wing. O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night  Before true light, To live in grots and caves, and hate the day  Because it shews the way, The way, which from this dead and dark abode  Leads up to God, A way where you might tread the sun, and be  More bright than he. But as I did their madness so discuss  One whisper’d thus, “This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,  But for his bride.”
That which her slender waist confin’d, Shall now my joyful temples bind; No monarch but would give his crown, His arms might do what this has done. It was my heaven’s extremest sphere, The pale which held that lovely deer, My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, Did all within this circle move. A narrow compass, and yet there Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair; Give me but what this ribbon bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round.
Where’er thy navy spreads her canvas wings, Homage to thee, and peace to all, she brings: The French and Spaniard, when thy flags appear, Forget their hatred, and consent to fear. So Jove from Ida did both hosts survey, And when he pleas’d to thunder, part the fray. Ships heretofore in seas like fishes sped, The mightiest still upon the smallest fed: Thou on the deep imposest nobler laws, And by that justice hast remov’d the cause Of those rude tempests, which, for rapine sent, Too oft, alas, involv’d the innocent. Now shall the ocean, as thy Thames, be free From both those fates, of storms and piracy. But we most happy, who can fear no force But winged troops, or Pegasean horse: ’Tis not so hard for greedy foes to spoil Another nation, as to touch our soil. Should Nature’s self invade the world again, And o’er the centre spread the liquid main, Thy power were safe; and her destructive hand Would but enlarge the bounds of thy command: Thy dreadful fleet would style thee lord of all, And ride in triumph o’er the drowned ball: Those towers of oak o’er fertile plains might go, And visit mountains, where they once did grow. The world’s restorer once could not endure, That finish’d Babel should those men secure, Whose pride design’d that fabric to have stood Above the reach of any second flood: To thee His chosen, more indulgent, He Dares trust such power with so much piety.
When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite. The soul, with nobler resolutions deckt, The body stooping, does herself erect: No mortal parts are requisite to raise Her, that unbodied can her Maker praise. The seas are quiet, when the winds give o’er, So calm are we, when passions are no more: For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness, which age descries. The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home: Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.
It is not that I love you less Than when before your feet I lay, But to prevent the sad increase Of hopeless love, I keep away. In vain (alas!) for everything Which I have known belong to you, Your form does to my fancy bring, And makes my old wounds bleed anew. Who in the spring from the new sun Already has a fever got, Too late begins those shafts to shun, Which Phœbus through his veins has shot. Too late he would the pain assuage, And to thick shadows does retire; About with him he bears the rage, And in his tainted blood the fire. But vow’d I have, and never must Your banish’d servant trouble you; For if I break, you may distrust The vow I made to love you, too.
Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that’s young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died. Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
Thyrsis, a youth of the inspired train, Fair Sacharissa lov’d, but lov’d in vain; Like Phœbus sung the no less amorous boy; Like Daphne she, as lovely, and as coy; With numbers he the flying nymph pursues, With numbers such as Phœbus’ self might use; Such is the chase when Love and Fancy leads, O’er craggy mountains, and through flow’ry meads; Invok’d to testify the lover’s care, Or form some image of his cruel fair: Urg’d with his fury, like a wounded deer, O’er these he fled; and now approaching near, Had reach’d the nymph with his harmonious lay, Whom all his charms could not incline to stay. Yet what he sung in his immortal strain, Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain; All but the nymph that should redress his wrong, Attend his passion, and approve his song. Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise, He catch’d at love, and fill’d his arm with bays.
Hark, how all the welkin rings, “Glory to the King of kings; Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconcil’d!” Joyful, all ye nations, rise, Join the triumph of the skies; Universal nature say, “Christ the Lord is born to-day!” Christ, by highest Heaven ador’d, Christ, the everlasting Lord: Late in time behold him come, Offspring of a virgin’s womb! Veil’d in flesh, the Godhead see, Hail th’ incarnate Deity! Pleas’d as man with men to appear, Jesus, our Immanuel here! Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace, Hail, the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all he brings, Risen with healing in his wings. Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more may die; Born to raise the sons of earth; Born to give them second birth. Come, desire of nations, come, Fix in us thy humble home; Rise, the woman’s conquering seed, Bruise in us the serpent’s head. Now display thy saving power, Ruin’d nature now restore; Now in mystic union join Thine to ours, and ours to thine. Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface, Stamp thy image in its place. Second Adam from above, Reinstate us in thy love. Let us thee, though lost, regain, Thee, the life, the inner man: O, to all thyself impart, Form’d in each believing heart.
Christ, whose glory fills the skies,  Christ, the true, the only light, Sun of Righteousness, arise,  Triumph o’er the shades of night: Day-spring from on high, be near: Day-star, in my heart appear. Dark and cheerless is the morn  Unaccompanied by thee, Joyless is the day’s return,  Till thy mercy’s beams I see; Till thy inward light impart, Glad my eyes, and warm my heart. Visit then this soul of mine,  Pierce the gloom of sin, and grief, Fill me, Radiancy Divine,  Scatter all my unbelief, More and more thyself display, Shining to the perfect day.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force, Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, Into the school where the scholar is studying, Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride, Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain, So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets; Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds, No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue? Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing? Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge? Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley—stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties, Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
1 Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. 2 The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others. Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 3 It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried, Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old, Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow, Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south, Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water, Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward, Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet, Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving, Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me, Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor, The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars, The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants, The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses, The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels, The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset, The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening, The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks, On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter, On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets. 4 These and all else were to me the same as they are to you, I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river, The men and women I saw were all near to me, Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them, (The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.) 5 What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not, I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine, I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it, I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me, I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution, I too had receiv’d identity by my body, That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body. 6 It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest, Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing, Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat, Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word, Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, Or as small as we like, or both great and small. 7 Closer yet I approach you, What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance, I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born. Who was to know what should come home to me? Who knows but I am enjoying this? Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me? 8 Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan? River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide? The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter? What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach? What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you? We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not? 9 Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves! Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me! Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers! Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers! Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution! Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly! Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name! Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress! Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it! Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you; Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current; Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air; Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you! Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water! Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters! Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset! Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses! Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are, You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul, About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung out divinest aromas, Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers, Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual, Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward, Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
I write my name as one, On sands by waves o’errun Or winter’s frosted pane, Traces a record vain. Oblivion’s blankness claims Wiser and better names, And well my own may pass As from the strand or glass. Wash on, O waves of time! Melt, noons, the frosty rime! Welcome the shadow vast, The silence that shall last! When I and all who know And love me vanish so, What harm to them or me Will the lost memory be? If any words of mine, Through right of life divine, Remain, what matters it Whose hand the message writ? Why should the “crowner’s quest” Sit on my worst or best? Why should the showman claim The poor ghost of my name? Yet, as when dies a sound Its spectre lingers round, Haply my spent life will Leave some faint echo still. A whisper giving breath Of praise or blame to death, Soothing or saddening such As loved the living much. Therefore with yearnings vain And fond I still would fain A kindly judgment seek, A tender thought bespeak. And, while my words are read, Let this at least be said: “Whate’er his life’s defeatures, He loved his fellow-creatures. “If, of the Law’s stone table, To hold he scarce was able The first great precept fast, He kept for man the last. “Through mortal lapse and dulness What lacks the Eternal Fulness, If still our weakness can Love Him in loving man? “Age brought him no despairing Of the world’s future faring; In human nature still He found more good than ill. “To all who dumbly suffered, His tongue and pen he offered; His life was not his own, Nor lived for self alone. “Hater of din and riot He lived in days unquiet; And, lover of all beauty, Trod the hard ways of duty. “He meant no wrong to any He sought the good of many, Yet knew both sin and folly,— May God forgive him wholly!”
Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn, The clustered spires of Frederick stand Green-walled by the hills of Maryland. Round about them orchards sweep, Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep, Fair as a garden of the Lord To the eyes of the famished rebel horde, On that pleasant morn of the early fall When Lee marched over the mountain wall,— Over the mountains winding down, Horse and foot, into Frederick town. Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars, Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one. Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then, Bowed with her fourscore years and ten; Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down; In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet. Up the street came the rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding ahead. Under his slouched hat left and right He glanced: the old flag met his sight. “Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast. “Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast. It shivered the window, pane and sash; It rent the banner with seam and gash. Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf; She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will. “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said. A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came; The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman’s deed and word: “Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said. All day long through Frederick street Sounded the tread of marching feet: All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host. Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well; And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night. Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more. Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier. Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave Flag of Freedom and Union, wave! Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law; And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!
Blessings on thee, little man, Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! With thy turned-up pantaloons, And thy merry whistled tunes; With thy red lip, redder still Kissed by strawberries on the hill; With the sunshine on thy face, Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace; From my heart I give thee joy,— I was once a barefoot boy! Prince thou art,—the grown-up man Only is republican. Let the million-dollared ride! Barefoot, trudging at his side, Thou hast more than he can buy In the reach of ear and eye,— Outward sunshine, inward joy: Blessings on thee, barefoot boy! Oh for boyhood’s painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor’s rules, Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee’s morning chase, Of the wild-flower’s time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young, How the oriole’s nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries grow, Where the ground-nut trails its vine, Where the wood-grape’s clusters shine; Of the black wasp’s cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay, And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans! For, eschewing books and tasks, Nature answers all he asks; Hand in hand with her he walks, Face to face with her he talks, Part and parcel of her joy,— Blessings on the barefoot boy! Oh for boyhood’s time of June, Crowding years in one brief moon, When all things I heard or saw, Me, their master, waited for. I was rich in flowers and trees, Humming-birds and honey-bees; For my sport the squirrel played, Plied the snouted mole his spade; For my taste the blackberry cone Purpled over hedge and stone; Laughed the brook for my delight Through the day and through the night, Whispering at the garden wall, Talked with me from fall to fall; Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond, Mine the walnut slopes beyond, Mine, on bending orchard trees, Apples of Hesperides! Still as my horizon grew, Larger grew my riches too; All the world I saw or knew Seemed a complex Chinese toy, Fashioned for a barefoot boy! Oh for festal dainties spread, Like my bowl of milk and bread; Pewter spoon and bowl of wood, On the door-stone, gray and rude! O’er me, like a regal tent, Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent, Purple-curtained, fringed with gold, Looped in many a wind-swung fold; While for music came the play Of the pied frogs’ orchestra; And, to light the noisy choir, Lit the fly his lamp of fire. I was monarch: pomp and joy Waited on the barefoot boy! Cheerily, then, my little man, Live and laugh, as boyhood can! Though the flinty slopes be hard, Stubble-speared the new-mown sward, Every morn shall lead thee through Fresh baptisms of the dew; Every evening from thy feet Shall the cool wind kiss the heat: All too soon these feet must hide In the prison cells of pride, Lose the freedom of the sod, Like a colt’s for work be shod, Made to tread the mills of toil, Up and down in ceaseless moil: Happy if their track be found Never on forbidden ground; Happy if they sink not in Quick and treacherous sands of sin. Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy, Ere it passes, barefoot boy!
Before my drift-wood fire I sit, And see, with every waif I burn, Old dreams and fancies coloring it, And folly’s unlaid ghosts return. O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft The enchanted sea on which they sailed, Are these poor fragments only left Of vain desires and hopes that failed? Did I not watch from them the light Of sunset on my towers in Spain, And see, far off, uploom in sight The Fortunate Isles I might not gain? Did sudden lift of fog reveal Arcadia’s vales of song and spring, And did I pass, with grazing keel, The rocks whereon the sirens sing? Have I not drifted hard upon The unmapped regions lost to man, The cloud-pitched tents of Prester John, The palace domes of Kubla Khan? Did land winds blow from jasmine flowers, Where Youth the ageless Fountain fills? Did Love make sign from rose blown bowers, And gold from Eldorado’s hills? Alas! the gallant ships, that sailed On blind Adventure’s errand sent, Howe’er they laid their courses, failed To reach the haven of Content. And of my ventures, those alone Which Love had freighted, safely sped, Seeking a good beyond my own, By clear-eyed Duty piloted. O mariners, hoping still to meet The luck Arabian voyagers met, And find in Bagdad’s moonlit street, Haroun al Raschid walking yet, Take with you, on your Sea of Dreams, The fair, fond fancies dear to youth. I turn from all that only seems, And seek the sober grounds of truth. What matter that it is not May, That birds have flown, and trees are bare, That darker grows the shortening day, And colder blows the wintry air! The wrecks of passion and desire, The castles I no more rebuild, May fitly feed my drift-wood fire, And warm the hands that age has chilled. Whatever perished with my ships, I only know the best remains; A song of praise is on my lips For losses which are now my gains. Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost; No wisdom with the folly dies. Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust Shall be my evening sacrifice! Far more than all I dared to dream, Unsought before my door I see; On wings of fire and steeds of steam The world’s great wonders come to me, And holier signs, unmarked before, Of Love to seek and Power to save,— The righting of the wronged and poor, The man evolving from the slave; And life, no longer chance or fate, Safe in the gracious Fatherhood. I fold o’er-wearied hands and wait, In full assurance of the good. And well the waiting time must be, Though brief or long its granted days, If Faith and Hope and Charity Sit by my evening hearth-fire’s blaze. And with them, friends whom Heaven has spared, Whose love my heart has comforted, And, sharing all my joys, has shared My tender memories of the dead,— Dear souls who left us lonely here, Bound on their last, long voyage, to whom We, day by day, are drawing near, Where every bark has sailing room. I know the solemn monotone Of waters calling unto me; I know from whence the airs have blown That whisper of the Eternal Sea. As low my fires of drift-wood burn, I hear that sea’s deep sounds increase, And, fair in sunset light, discern Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn  Which once he wore! The glory from his gray hairs gone  Forevermore! Revile him not, the Tempter hath  A snare for all; And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,  Befit his fall! Oh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage,  When he who might Have lighted up and led his age,  Falls back in night. Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark  A bright soul driven, Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,  From hope and heaven! Let not the land once proud of him  Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,  Dishonored brow. But let its humbled sons, instead,  From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead,  In sadness make. Of all we loved and honored, naught  Save power remains; A fallen angel’s pride of thought,  Still strong in chains. All else is gone; from those great eyes  The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies,  The man is dead! Then, pay the reverence of old days  To his dead fame; Walk backward, with averted gaze,  And hide the shame!
Still sits the school-house by the road, A ragged beggar sleeping; Around it still the sumachs grow, And blackberry-vines are creeping. Within, the master’s desk is seen, Deep scarred by raps official; The warping floor, the battered seats, The jack-knife’s carved initial; The charcoal frescos on its wall; Its door’s worn sill, betraying The feet that, creeping slow to school, Went storming out to playing! Long years ago a winter sun Shone over it at setting; Lit up its western window-panes, And low eaves’ icy fretting. It touched the tangled golden curls, And brown eyes full of grieving, Of one who still her steps delayed When all the school were leaving. For near her stood the little boy Her childish favor singled: His cap pulled low upon a face Where pride and shame were mingled. Pushing with restless feet the snow To right and left, he lingered;— As restlessly her tiny hands The blue-checked apron fingered. He saw her lift her eyes; he felt The soft hand’s light caressing, And heard the tremble of her voice, As if a fault confessing. “I’m sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, Because,”—the brown eyes lower fell,— “Because, you see, I love you!” Still memory to a gray-haired man That sweet child-face is showing. Dear girl! the grasses on her grave Have forty years been growing! He lives to learn, in life’s hard school, How few who pass above him Lament their triumph and his loss, Like her,—because they love him.
Of all the rides since the birth of time, Told in story or sung in rhyme, — On Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Or one-eyed Calender’s horse of brass, Witch astride of a human back, Islam’s prophet on Al-Borák, — The strangest ride that ever was sped Was Ireson’s, out from Marblehead!  Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,  Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart  By the women of Marblehead! Body of turkey, head of owl, Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, Feathered and ruffled in every part, Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. Scores of women, old and young, Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue, Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, Shouting and singing the shrill refrain:  “Here ’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,  Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt  By the women o’ Morble’ead!” Wrinkled scolds with hands on hips, Girls in bloom of cheek and lips, Wild-eyed, free-limbed, such as chase Bacchus round some antique vase, Brief of skirt, with ankles bare, Loose of kerchief and loose of hair, With conch-shells blowing and fish-horns’ twang, Over and over the Mænads sang:  “Here ’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,  Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt  By the women o’ Morble’ead!” Small pity for him! — He sailed away From a leaking ship in Chaleur Bay, — Sailed away from a sinking wreck, With his own town’s-people on her deck! “Lay by! lay by!” they called to him. Back he answered, “Sink or swim! Brag of your catch of fish again!” And off he sailed through the fog and rain!  Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,  Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart  By the women of Marblehead! Fathoms deep in dark Chaleur That wreck shall lie forevermore. Mother and sister, wife and maid, Looked from the rocks of Marblehead Over the moaning and rainy sea, — Looked for the coming that might not be! What did the winds and the sea-birds say Of the cruel captain who sailed away? —  Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,  Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart  By the women of Marblehead! Through the street, on either side, Up flew windows, doors swung wide; Sharp-tongued spinsters, old wives gray, Treble lent the fish-horn’s bray. Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound, Hulks of old sailors run aground, Shook head, and fist, and hat, and cane, And cracked with curses the hoarse refrain:  “Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,  Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt  By the women o’ Morble’ead!” Sweetly along the Salem road Bloom of orchard and lilac showed. Little the wicked skipper knew Of the fields so green and the sky so blue. Riding there in his sorry trim, Like an Indian idol glum and grim, Scarcely he seemed the sound to hear Of voices shouting, far and near:  “Here’s Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,  Torr’d an’ futherr’d an’ corr’d in a corrt  By the women o’ Morble’ead!” “Hear me, neighbors!” at last he cried, — “What to me is this noisy ride? What is the shame that clothes the skin To the nameless horror that lives within? Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck, And hear a cry from a reeling deck! Hate me and curse me, — I only dread The hand of God and the face of the dead!”  Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,  Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart  By the women of Marblehead! Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea Said, “God has touched him! why should we!” Said an old wife mourning her only son, “Cut the rogue’s tether and let him run!” So with soft relentings and rude excuse, Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose, And gave him a cloak to hide him in, And left him alone with his shame and sin.  Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,  Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart  By the women of Marblehead!
To the Memory of the Household It Describes This Poem is Dedicated by the Author “As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.” —Cor. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, Book I.ch. v. “Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of Storm.” EMERSON, The Snow Storm. The sun that brief December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, Of homespun stuff could quite shut out, A hard, dull bitterness of cold, That checked, mid-vein, the circling race Of life-blood in the sharpened face, The coming of the snow-storm told. The wind blew east; we heard the roar Of Ocean on his wintry shore, And felt the strong pulse throbbing there Beat with low rhythm our inland air. Meanwhile we did our nightly chores,— Brought in the wood from out of doors, Littered the stalls, and from the mows Raked down the herd’s-grass for the cows; Heard the horse whinnying for his corn; And, sharply clashing horn on horn, Impatient down the stanchion rows The cattle shake their walnut bows; While, peering from his early perch Upon the scaffold’s pole of birch, The cock his crested helmet bent And down his querulous challenge sent. Unwarmed by any sunset light The gray day darkened into night, A night made hoary with the swarm And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, As zigzag, wavering to and fro, Crossed and recrossed the wingëd snow: And ere the early bedtime came The white drift piled the window-frame, And through the glass the clothes-line posts Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts. So all night long the storm roared on: The morning broke without a sun; In tiny spherule traced with lines Of Nature’s geometric signs, In starry flake, and pellicle, All day the hoary meteor fell; And, when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky and snow! The old familiar sights of ours Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, Or garden-wall, or belt of wood; A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed, A fenceless drift what once was road; The bridle-post an old man sat With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; The well-curb had a Chinese roof; And even the long sweep, high aloof, In its slant splendor, seemed to tell Of Pisa’s leaning miracle. A prompt, decisive man, no breath Our father wasted: “Boys, a path!” Well pleased, (for when did farmer boy Count such a summons less than joy?) Our buskins on our feet we drew; With mittened hands, and caps drawn low, To guard our necks and ears from snow, We cut the solid whiteness through. And, where the drift was deepest, made A tunnel walled and overlaid With dazzling crystal: we had read Of rare Aladdin’s wondrous cave, And to our own his name we gave, With many a wish the luck were ours To test his lamp’s supernal powers. We reached the barn with merry din, And roused the prisoned brutes within. The old horse thrust his long head out, And grave with wonder gazed about; The cock his lusty greeting said, And forth his speckled harem led; The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, And mild reproach of hunger looked; The hornëd patriarch of the sheep, Like Egypt’s Amun roused from sleep, Shook his sage head with gesture mute, And emphasized with stamp of foot. All day the gusty north-wind bore The loosening drift its breath before; Low circling round its southern zone, The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone. No church-bell lent its Christian tone To the savage air, no social smoke Curled over woods of snow-hung oak. A solitude made more intense By dreary-voicëd elements, The shrieking of the mindless wind, The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind, And on the glass the unmeaning beat Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet. Beyond the circle of our hearth No welcome sound of toil or mirth Unbound the spell, and testified Of human life and thought outside. We minded that the sharpest ear The buried brooklet could not hear, The music of whose liquid lip Had been to us companionship, And, in our lonely life, had grown To have an almost human tone. As night drew on, and, from the crest Of wooded knolls that ridged the west, The sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank From sight beneath the smothering bank, We piled, with care, our nightly stack Of wood against the chimney-back,— The oaken log, green, huge, and thick, And on its top the stout back-stick; The knotty forestick laid apart, And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-furnished room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom; While radiant with a mimic flame Outside the sparkling drift became, And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free. The crane and pendent trammels showed, The Turks’ heads on the andirons glowed; While childish fancy, prompt to tell The meaning of the miracle, Whispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree, When fire outdoors burns merrily, There the witches are making tea.” The moon above the eastern wood Shone at its full; the hill-range stood Transfigured in the silver flood, Its blown snows flashing cold and keen, Dead white, save where some sharp ravine Took shadow, or the sombre green Of hemlocks turned to pitchy black Against the whiteness at their back. For such a world and such a night Most fitting that unwarming light, Which only seemed where’er it fell To make the coldness visible. Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north-wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed; The house-dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall; And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons’ straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October’s wood. What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north-wind raved? Blow high, blow low, not all its snow Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow. O Time and Change!—with hair as gray As was my sire’s that winter day, How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on! Ah, brother! only I and thou Are left of all that circle now,— The dear home faces whereupon That fitful firelight paled and shone. Henceforward, listen as we will, The voices of that hearth are still; Look where we may, the wide earth o’er, Those lighted faces smile no more. We tread the paths their feet have worn, We sit beneath their orchard trees, We hear, like them, the hum of bees And rustle of the bladed corn; We turn the pages that they read, Their written words we linger o’er, But in the sun they cast no shade, No voice is heard, no sign is made, No step is on the conscious floor! Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust, (Since He who knows our need is just,) That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress-trees! Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of Death, And Love can never lose its own! We sped the time with stories old, Wrought puzzles out, and riddles told, Or stammered from our school-book lore “The Chief of Gambia’s golden shore.” How often since, when all the land Was clay in Slavery’s shaping hand, As if a far-blown trumpet stirred The languorous sin-sick air, I heard: “Does not the voice of reason cry, Claim the first right which Nature gave, From the red scourge of bondage to fly, Nor deign to live a burdened slave!“ Our father rode again his ride On Memphremagog’s wooded side; Sat down again to moose and samp In trapper’s hut and Indian camp; Lived o’er the old idyllic ease Beneath St. François’ hemlock-trees; Again for him the moonlight shone On Norman cap and bodiced zone; Again he heard the violin play Which led the village dance away. And mingled in its merry whirl The grandam and the laughing girl. Or, nearer home, our steps he led Where Salisbury’s level marshes spread Mile-wide as flies the laden bee; Where merry mowers, hale and strong, Swept, scythe on scythe, their swaths along The low green prairies of the sea. We shared the fishing off Boar’s Head, And round the rocky Isles of Shoals The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals; The chowder on the sand-beach made, Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot, With spoons of clam-shell from the pot. We heard the tales of witchcraft old, And dream and sign and marvel told To sleepy listeners as they lay Stretched idly on the salted hay, Adrift along the winding shores, When favoring breezes deigned to blow The square sail of the gundelow And idle lay the useless oars. Our mother, while she turned her wheel Or run the new-knit stocking-heel, Told how the Indian hordes came down At midnight on Concheco town, And how her own great-uncle bore His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore. Recalling, in her fitting phrase, So rich and picturesque and free (The common unrhymed poetry Of simple life and country ways,) The story of her early days,— She made us welcome to her home; Old hearths grew wide to give us room; We stole with her a frightened look At the gray wizard’s conjuring-book, The fame whereof went far and wide Through all the simple country side; We heard the hawks at twilight play, The boat-horn on Piscataqua, The loon’s weird laughter far away; We fished her little trout-brook, knew What flowers in wood and meadow grew, What sunny hillsides autumn-brown She climbed to shake the ripe nuts down, Saw where in sheltered cove and bay, The ducks’ black squadron anchored lay, And heard the wild-geese calling loud Beneath the gray November cloud. Then, haply, with a look more grave, And soberer tone, some tale she gave From painful Sewel’s ancient tome, Beloved in every Quaker home, Of faith fire-winged by martyrdom, Or Chalkley’s Journal, old and quaint,— Gentlest of skippers, rare sea-saint!— Who, when the dreary calms prevailed, And water-butt and bread-cask failed, And cruel, hungry eyes pursued His portly presence mad for food, With dark hints muttered under breath Of casting lots for life or death, Offered, if Heaven withheld supplies, To be himself the sacrifice. Then, suddenly, as if to save The good man from his living grave, A ripple on the water grew, A school of porpoise flashed in view. “Take, eat,” he said, “and be content; These fishes in my stead are sent By Him who gave the tangled ram To spare the child of Abraham.” Our uncle, innocent of books, Was rich in lore of fields and brooks, The ancient teachers never dumb Of Nature’s unhoused lyceum. In moons and tides and weather wise, He read the clouds as prophecies, And foul or fair could well divine, By many an occult hint and sign, Holding the cunning-warded keys To all the woodcraft mysteries; Himself to Nature’s heart so near That all her voices in his ear Of beast or bird had meanings clear, Like Apollonius of old, Who knew the tales the sparrows told, Or Hermes, who interpreted What the sage cranes of Nilus said; A simple, guileless, childlike man, Content to live where life began; Strong only on his native grounds, The little world of sights and sounds Whose girdle was the parish bounds, Whereof his fondly partial pride The common features magnified, As Surrey hills to mountains grew In White of Selborne’s loving view,— He told how teal and loon he shot, And how the eagle’s eggs he got, The feats on pond and river done, The prodigies of rod and gun; Till, warming with the tales he told, Forgotten was the outside cold, The bitter wind unheeded blew, From ripening corn the pigeons flew, The partridge drummed i’ the wood, the mink Went fishing down the river-brink. In fields with bean or clover gay, The woodchuck, like a hermit gray, Peered from the doorway of his cell; The muskrat plied the mason’s trade, And tier by tier his mud-walls laid; And from the shagbark overhead The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell. Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer And voice in dreams I see and hear,— The sweetest woman ever Fate Perverse denied a household mate, Who, lonely, homeless, not the less Found peace in love’s unselfishness, And welcome wheresoe’er she went, A calm and gracious element, Whose presence seemed the sweet income And womanly atmosphere of home,— Called up her girlhood memories, The huskings and the apple-bees, The sleigh-rides and the summer sails, Weaving through all the poor details And homespun warp of circumstance A golden woof-thread of romance. For well she kept her genial mood And simple faith of maidenhood; Before her still a cloud-land lay, The mirage loomed across her way; The morning dew, that dries so soon With others, glistened at her noon; Through years of toil and soil and care, From glossy tress to thin gray hair, All unprofaned she held apart The virgin fancies of the heart. Be shame to him of woman born Who hath for such but thought of scorn. There, too, our elder sister plied Her evening task the stand beside; A full, rich nature, free to trust, Truthful and almost sternly just, Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act, And make her generous thought a fact, Keeping with many a light disguise The secret of self-sacrifice. O heart sore-tried! thou hast the best That Heaven itself could give thee,—rest, Rest from all bitter thoughts and things! How many a poor one’s blessing went With thee beneath the low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings! As one who held herself a part Of all she saw, and let her heart Against the household bosom lean, Upon the motley-braided mat Our youngest and our dearest sat, Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes, Now bathed in the unfading green And holy peace of Paradise. Oh, looking from some heavenly hill, Or from the shade of saintly palms, Or silver reach of river calms, Do those large eyes behold me still? With me one little year ago:— The chill weight of the winter snow For months upon her grave has lain; And now, when summer south-winds blow And brier and harebell bloom again, I tread the pleasant paths we trod, I see the violet-sprinkled sod Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak The hillside flowers she loved to seek, Yet following me where’er I went With dark eyes full of love’s content. The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills The air with sweetness; all the hills Stretch green to June’s unclouded sky; But still I wait with ear and eye For something gone which should be nigh, A loss in all familiar things, In flower that blooms, and bird that sings. And yet, dear heart! remembering thee, Am I not richer than of old? Safe in thy immortality, What change can reach the wealth I hold? What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust with me? And while in life’s late afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, I cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall I not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand? Brisk wielder of the birch and rule, The master of the district school Held at the fire his favored place, Its warm glow lit a laughing face Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared The uncertain prophecy of beard. He teased the mitten-blinded cat, Played cross-pins on my uncle’s hat, Sang songs, and told us what befalls In classic Dartmouth’s college halls. Born the wild Northern hills among, From whence his yeoman father wrung By patient toil subsistence scant, Not competence and yet not want, He early gained the power to pay His cheerful, self-reliant way; Could doff at ease his scholar’s gown To peddle wares from town to town; Or through the long vacation’s reach In lonely lowland districts teach, Where all the droll experience found At stranger hearths in boarding round, The moonlit skater’s keen delight, The sleigh-drive through the frosty night, The rustic party, with its rough Accompaniment of blind-man’s-buff, And whirling-plate, and forfeits paid, His winter task a pastime made. Happy the snow-locked homes wherein He tuned his merry violin, Or played the athlete in the barn, Or held the good dame’s winding-yarn, Or mirth-provoking versions told Of classic legends rare and old, Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome Had all the commonplace of home, And little seemed at best the odds ’Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods; Where Pindus-born Arachthus took The guise of any grist-mill brook, And dread Olympus at his will Became a huckleberry hill. A careless boy that night he seemed; But at his desk he had the look And air of one who wisely schemed, And hostage from the future took In trainëd thought and lore of book. Large-brained, clear-eyed, of such as he Shall Freedom’s young apostles be, Who, following in War’s bloody trail, Shall every lingering wrong assail; All chains from limb and spirit strike, Uplift the black and white alike; Scatter before their swift advance The darkness and the ignorance, The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth, Which nurtured Treason’s monstrous growth, Made murder pastime, and the hell Of prison-torture possible; The cruel lie of caste refute, Old forms remould, and substitute For Slavery’s lash the freeman’s will, For blind routine, wise-handed skill; A school-house plant on every hill, Stretching in radiate nerve-lines thence The quick wires of intelligence; Till North and South together brought Shall own the same electric thought, In peace a common flag salute, And, side by side in labor’s free And unresentful rivalry, Harvest the fields wherein they fought. Another guest that winter night Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light. Unmarked by time, and yet not young, The honeyed music of her tongue And words of meekness scarcely told A nature passionate and bold, Strong, self-concentred, spurning guide, Its milder features dwarfed beside Her unbent will’s majestic pride. She sat among us, at the best, A not unfeared, half-welcome guest, Rebuking with her cultured phrase Our homeliness of words and ways. A certain pard-like, treacherous grace Swayed the lithe limbs and drooped the lash, Lent the white teeth their dazzling flash; And under low brows, black with night, Rayed out at times a dangerous light; The sharp heat-lightnings of her face Presaging ill to him whom Fate Condemned to share her love or hate. A woman tropical, intense In thought and act, in soul and sense, She blended in a like degree The vixen and the devotee, Revealing with each freak or feint The temper of Petruchio’s Kate, The raptures of Siena’s saint. Her tapering hand and rounded wrist Had facile power to form a fist; The warm, dark languish of her eyes Was never safe from wrath’s surprise. Brows saintly calm and lips devout Knew every change of scowl and pout; And the sweet voice had notes more high And shrill for social battle-cry. Since then what old cathedral town Has missed her pilgrim staff and gown, What convent-gate has held its lock Against the challenge of her knock! Through Smyrna’s plague-hushed thoroughfares, Up sea-set Malta’s rocky stairs, Gray olive slopes of hills that hem Thy tombs and shrines, Jerusalem, Or startling on her desert throne The crazy Queen of Lebanon With claims fantastic as her own, Her tireless feet have held their way; And still, unrestful, bowed, and gray, She watches under Eastern skies, With hope each day renewed and fresh, The Lord’s quick coming in the flesh, Whereof she dreams and prophesies! Where’er her troubled path may be, The Lord’s sweet pity with her go! The outward wayward life we see, The hidden springs we may not know. Nor is it given us to discern What threads the fatal sisters spun, Through what ancestral years has run The sorrow with the woman born, What forged her cruel chain of moods, What set her feet in solitudes, And held the love within her mute, What mingled madness in the blood, A life-long discord and annoy, Water of tears with oil of joy, And hid within the folded bud Perversities of flower and fruit. It is not ours to separate The tangled skein of will and fate, To show what metes and bounds should stand Upon the soul’s debatable land, And between choice and Providence Divide the circle of events; But He who knows our frame is just, Merciful and compassionate, And full of sweet assurances And hope for all the language is, That He remembereth we are dust! At last the great logs, crumbling low, Sent out a dull and duller glow, The bull’s-eye watch that hung in view, Ticking its weary circuit through, Pointed with mutely warning sign Its black hand to the hour of nine. That sign the pleasant circle broke: My uncle ceased his pipe to smoke, Knocked from its bowl the refuse gray, And laid it tenderly away; Then roused himself to safely cover The dull red brands with ashes over. And while, with care, our mother laid The work aside, her steps she stayed One moment, seeking to express Her grateful sense of happiness For food and shelter, warmth and health, And love’s contentment more than wealth, With simple wishes (not the weak, Vain prayers which no fulfilment seek, But such as warm the generous heart, O’er-prompt to do with Heaven its part) That none might lack, that bitter night, For bread and clothing, warmth and light. Within our beds awhile we heard The wind that round the gables roared, With now and then a ruder shock, Which made our very bedsteads rock. We heard the loosened clapboards tost, The board-nails snapping in the frost; And on us, through the unplastered wall, Felt the light sifted snow-flakes fall. But sleep stole on, as sleep will do When hearts are light and life is new; Faint and more faint the murmurs grew, Till in the summer-land of dreams They softened to the sound of streams, Low stir of leaves, and dip of oars, And lapsing waves on quiet shores. Next morn we wakened with the shout Of merry voices high and clear; And saw the teamsters drawing near To break the drifted highways out. Down the long hillside treading slow We saw the half-buried oxen go, Shaking the snow from heads uptost, Their straining nostrils white with frost. Before our door the straggling train Drew up, an added team to gain. The elders threshed their hands a-cold, Passed, with the cider-mug, their jokes From lip to lip; the younger folks Down the loose snow-banks, wrestling, rolled, Then toiled again the cavalcade O’er windy hill, through clogged ravine, And woodland paths that wound between Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed. From every barn a team afoot, At every house a new recruit, Where, drawn by Nature’s subtlest law, Haply the watchful young men saw Sweet doorway pictures of the curls And curious eyes of merry girls, Lifting their hands in mock defence Against the snow-ball’s compliments, And reading in each missive tost The charm with Eden never lost. We heard once more the sleigh-bells’ sound; And, following where the teamsters led, The wise old Doctor went his round, Just pausing at our door to say, In the brief autocratic way Of one who, prompt at Duty’s call, Was free to urge her claim on all, That some poor neighbor sick abed At night our mother’s aid would need. For, one in generous thought and deed, What mattered in the sufferer’s sight The Quaker matron’s inward light, The Doctor’s mail of Calvin’s creed? All hearts confess the saints elect Who, twain in faith, in love agree, And melt not in an acid sect The Christian pearl of charity! So days went on: a week had passed Since the great world was heard from last. The Almanac we studied o’er, Read and reread our little store Of books and pamphlets, scarce a score; One harmless novel, mostly hid From younger eyes, a book forbid, And poetry, (or good or bad, A single book was all we had,) Where Ellwood’s meek, drab-skirted Muse, A stranger to the heathen Nine, Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine, The wars of David and the Jews. At last the floundering carrier bore The village paper to our door. Lo! broadening outward as we read, To warmer zones the horizon spread In panoramic length unrolled We saw the marvels that it told. Before us passed the painted Creeks, And daft McGregor on his raids In Costa Rica’s everglades. And up Taygetos winding slow Rode Ypsilanti’s Mainote Greeks, A Turk’s head at each saddle-bow! Welcome to us its week-old news, Its corner for the rustic Muse, Its monthly gauge of snow and rain, Its record, mingling in a breath The wedding bell and dirge of death: Jest, anecdote, and love-lorn tale, The latest culprit sent to jail; Its hue and cry of stolen and lost, Its vendue sales and goods at cost, And traffic calling loud for gain. We felt the stir of hall and street, The pulse of life that round us beat; The chill embargo of the snow Was melted in the genial glow; Wide swung again our ice-locked door, And all the world was ours once more! Clasp, Angel of the backword look And folded wings of ashen gray And voice of echoes far away, The brazen covers of thy book; The weird palimpsest old and vast, Wherein thou hid’st the spectral past; Where, closely mingling, pale and glow The characters of joy and woe; The monographs of outlived years, Or smile-illumed or dim with tears, Green hills of life that slope to death, And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees Shade off to mournful cypresses With the white amaranths underneath. Even while I look, I can but heed The restless sands’ incessant fall, Importunate hours that hours succeed, Each clamorous with its own sharp need, And duty keeping pace with all. Shut down and clasp with heavy lids; I hear again the voice that bids The dreamer leave his dream midway For larger hopes and graver fears: Life greatens in these later years, The century’s aloe flowers to-day! Yet, haply, in some lull of life, Some Truce of God which breaks its strife, The worldling’s eyes shall gather dew, Dreaming in throngful city ways Of winter joys his boyhood knew; And dear and early friends—the few Who yet remain—shall pause to view These Flemish pictures of old days; Sit with me by the homestead hearth, And stretch the hands of memory forth To warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze! And thanks untraced to lips unknown Shall greet me like the odors blown From unseen meadows newly mown, Or lilies floating in some pond, Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond; The traveller owns the grateful sense Of sweetness near, he knows not whence, And, pausing, takes with forehead bare The benediction of the air.
Here is the place; right over the hill Runs the path I took; You can see the gap in the old wall still, And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook. There is the house, with the gate red-barred, And the poplars tall; And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard, And the white horns tossing above the wall. There are the beehives ranged in the sun; And down by the brink Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun, Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink. A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, Heavy and slow; And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, And the same brook sings of a year ago. There ’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze; And the June sun warm Tangles his wings of fire in the trees, Setting, as then, over Fernside farm. I mind me how with a lover’s care From my Sunday coat I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair, And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat. Since we parted, a month had passed,— To love, a year; Down through the beeches I looked at last On the little red gate and the well-sweep near. I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain Of light through the leaves, The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane, The bloom of her roses under the eaves. Just the same as a month before,— The house and the trees, The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,— Nothing changed but the hives of bees. Before them, under the garden wall, Forward and back, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Draping each hive with a shred of black. Trembling, I listened: the summer sun Had the chill of snow; For I knew she was telling the bees of one Gone on the journey we all must go! Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps For the dead to-day: Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps The fret and the pain of his age away.” But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill, With his cane to his chin, The old man sat; and the chore-girl still Sung to the bees stealing out and in. And the song she was singing ever since In my ear sounds on:— “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”
The birds against the April wind  Flew northward, singing as they flew; They sang, “The land we leave behind  Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew.” “O wild-birds, flying from the South,  What saw and heard ye, gazing down?” “We saw the mortar’s upturned mouth,  The sickened camp, the blazing town! “Beneath the bivouac’s starry lamps,  We saw your march-worn children die; In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps,  We saw your dead uncoffined lie. “We heard the starving prisoner’s sighs  And saw, from line and trench, your sons Follow our flight with home-sick eyes  Beyond the battery’s smoking guns.” “And heard and saw ye only wrong  And pain,” I cried, “O wing-worn flocks?” “We heard,” they sang, “the freedman’s song,  The crash of Slavery’s broken locks! “We saw from new, uprising States  The treason-nursing mischief spurned, As, crowding Freedom’s ample gates,  The long-estranged and lost returned. “O’er dusky faces, seamed and old,  And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil, With hope in every rustling fold,  We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil. “And struggling up through sounds accursed,  A grateful murmur clomb the air; A whisper scarcely heard at first,  It filled the listening heavens with prayer. “And sweet and far, as from a star,  Replied a voice which shall not cease, Till, drowning all the noise of war,  It sings the blessed song of peace!” So to me, in a doubtful day  Of chill and slowly greening spring, Low stooping from the cloudy gray,  The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing. They vanished in the misty air,  The song went with them in their flight; But lo! they left the sunset fair,  And in the evening there was light.
The harp at Nature’s advent strung Has never ceased to play; The song the stars of morning sung Has never died away. And prayer is made, and praise is given, By all things near and far; The ocean looketh up to heaven, And mirrors every star. Its waves are kneeling on the strand, As kneels the human knee, Their white locks bowing to the sand, The priesthood of the sea! They pour their glittering treasures forth, Their gifts of pearl they bring, And all the listening hills of earth Take up the song they sing. The green earth sends its incense up From many a mountain shrine; From folded leaf and dewy cup She pours her sacred wine. The mists above the morning rills Rise white as wings of prayer; The altar-curtains of the hills Are sunset’s purple air. The winds with hymns of praise are loud, Or low with sobs of pain,— The thunder-organ of the cloud, The dropping tears of rain. With drooping head and branches crossed The twilight forest grieves, Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost From all its sunlit leaves. The blue sky is the temple’s arch, Its transept earth and air, The music of its starry march The chorus of a prayer. So Nature keeps the reverent frame With which her years began, And all her signs and voices shame The prayerless heart of man.
I He did not wear his scarlet coat,  For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands  When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved,  And murdered in her bed. He walked amongst the Trial Men  In a suit of shabby gray; A cricket cap was on his head,  And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked  So wistfully at the day. I never saw a man who looked  With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue  Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went  With sails of silver by. I walked, with other souls in pain,  Within another ring, And was wondering if the man had done  A great or little thing, When a voice behind me whispered low, "That fellow's got to swing." Dear Christ! the very prison walls  Suddenly seemed to reel, And the sky above my head became  Like a casque of scorching steel; And, though I was a soul in pain,  My pain I could not feel. I only knew what hunted thought  Quickened his step, and why He looked upon the garish day  With such a wistful eye; The man had killed the thing he loved,  And so he had to die. Yet each man kills the thing he loves,  By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look,  Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss,  The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young,  And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust,  Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because  The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long,  Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears,  And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves,  Yet each man does not die. He does not die a death of shame  On a day of dark disgrace, Nor have a noose about his neck,  Nor a cloth upon his face, Nor drop feet foremost through the floor  Into an empty space. He does not sit with silent men  Who watch him night and day; Who watch him when he tries to weep,  And when he tries to pray; Who watch him lest himself should rob  The prison of its prey. He does not wake at dawn to see  Dread figures throng his room, The shivering Chaplain robed in white,  The Sheriff stern with gloom, And the Governor all in shiny black,  With the yellow face of Doom. He does not rise in piteous haste  To put on convict-clothes, While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes  Each new and nerve-twitched pose, Fingering a watch whose little ticks  Are like horrible hammer-blows. He does not know that sickening thirst  That sands one's throat, before The hangman with his gardener's gloves  Slips through the padded door, And binds one with three leathern thongs, That the throat may thirst no more. He does not bend his head to hear  The Burial Office read, Nor while the terror of his soul  Tells him he is not dead, Cross his own coffin, as he moves  Into the hideous shed. He does not stare upon the air  Through a little roof of glass: He does not pray with lips of clay  For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek  The kiss of Caiaphas. II Six weeks the guardsman walked the yard,  In the suit of shabby gray: His cricket cap was on his head,  And his step seemed light and gay, But I never saw a man who looked  So wistfully at the day. I never saw a man who looked  With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue  Which prisoners call the sky, And at every wandering cloud that trailed  Its ravelled fleeces by. He did not wring his hands, as do  Those witless men who dare To try to rear the changeling Hope  In the cave of black Despair: He only looked upon the sun,  And drank the morning air. He did not wring his hands nor weep,  Nor did he peek or pine, But he drank the air as though it held  Some healthful anodyne; With open mouth he drank the sun  As though it had been wine! And I and all the souls in pain,  Who tramped the other ring, Forgot if we ourselves had done  A great or little thing, And watched with gaze of dull amaze  The man who had to swing. For strange it was to see him pass  With a step so light and gay, And strange it was to see him look  So wistfully at the day, And strange it was to think that he  Had such a debt to pay. For oak and elm have pleasant leaves  That in the spring-time shoot: But grim to see is the gallows-tree,  With its alder-bitten root, And, green or dry, a man must die  Before it bears its fruit! The loftiest place is that seat of grace  For which all worldlings try: But who would stand in hempen band  Upon a scaffold high, And through a murderer's collar take  His last look at the sky? It is sweet to dance to violins  When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes  Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet  To dance upon the air! So with curious eyes and sick surmise  We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us  Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell  His sightless soul may stray. At last the dead man walked no more  Amongst the Trial Men, And I knew that he was standing up  In the black dock's dreadful pen, And that never would I see his face  In God's sweet world again. Like two doomed ships that pass in storm  We had crossed each other's way: But we made no sign, we said no word,  We had no word to say; For we did not meet in the holy night,  But in the shameful day. A prison wall was round us both,  Two outcast men we were: The world had thrust us from its heart,  And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin  Had caught us in its snare. III In Debtors' Yard the stones are hard,  And the dripping wall is high, So it was there he took the air  Beneath the leaden sky, And by each side a Warder walked,  For fear the man might die. Or else he sat with those who watched  His anguish night and day; Who watched him when he rose to weep,  And when he crouched to pray; Who watched him lest himself should rob  Their scaffold of its prey. The Governor was strong upon  The Regulations Act: The Doctor said that Death was but  A scientific fact: And twice a day the Chaplain called,  And left a little tract. And twice a day he smoked his pipe,  And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held  No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad  The hangman's hands were near. But why he said so strange a thing  No Warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher's doom  Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips,  And make his face a mask. Or else he might be moved, and try  To comfort or console: And what should Human Pity do  Pent up in Murderer's Hole? What word of grace in such a place  Could help a brother's soul? With slouch and swing around the ring  We trod the Fools' Parade! We did not care: we knew we were  The Devil's Own Brigade: And shaven head and feet of lead  Make a merry masquerade. We tore the tarry rope to shreds  With blunt and bleeding nails; We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,  And cleaned the shining rails: And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,  And clattered with the pails. We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,  We turned the dusty drill: We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,  And sweated on the mill: But in the heart of every man  Terror was lying still. So still it lay that every day  Crawled like a weed-clogged wave: And we forgot the bitter lot  That waits for fool and knave, Till once, as we tramped in from work,  We passed an open grave. With yawning mouth the yellow hole  Gaped for a living thing; The very mud cried out for blood  To the thirsty asphalte ring: And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair  Some prisoner had to swing. Right in we went, with soul intent  On Death and Dread and Doom: The hangman, with his little bag,  Went shuffling through the gloom: And each man trembled as he crept  Into his numbered tomb. That night the empty corridors  Were full of forms of Fear, And up and down the iron town  Stole feet we could not hear, And through the bars that hide the stars  White faces seemed to peer. He lay as one who lies and dreams  In a pleasant meadow-land, The watchers watched him as he slept,  And could not understand How one could sleep so sweet a sleep  With a hangman close at hand. But there is no sleep when men must weep  Who never yet have wept: So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—  That endless vigil kept, And through each brain on hands of pain  Another's terror crept. Alas! it is a fearful thing  To feel another's guilt! For, right within, the sword of Sin  Pierced to its poisoned hilt, And as molten lead were the tears we shed  For the blood we had not spilt. The Warders with their shoes of felt  Crept by each padlocked door, And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,  Gray figures on the floor, And wondered why men knelt to pray  Who never prayed before. All through the night we knelt and prayed,  Mad mourners of a corse! The troubled plumes of midnight were  The plumes upon a hearse: And bitter wine upon a sponge  Was the savour of Remorse. The gray cock crew, the red cock crew,  But never came the day: And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,  In the corners where we lay: And each evil sprite that walks by night  Before us seemed to play. They glided past, they glided fast,  Like travellers through a mist: They mocked the moon in a rigadoon  Of delicate turn and twist, And with formal pace and loathsome grace  The phantoms kept their tryst. With mop and mow, we saw them go,  Slim shadows hand in hand: About, about, in ghostly rout  They trod a saraband: And damned grotesques made arabesques,  Like the wind upon the sand! With the pirouettes of marionettes,  They tripped on pointed tread: But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,  As their grisly masque they led, And loud they sang, and long they sang,  For they sang to wake the dead. "Oho!" they cried, "the world is wide, But fettered limbs go lame! And once, or twice, to throw the dice Is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin In the Secret House of Shame." No things of air these antics were,  That frolicked with such glee: To men whose lives were held in gyves,  And whose feet might not go free, Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things,  Most terrible to see. Around, around, they waltzed and wound;  Some wheeled in smirking pairs; With the mincing step of a demirep  Some sidled up the stairs: And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,  Each helped us at our prayers. The morning wind began to moan,  But still the night went on: Through its giant loom the web of gloom  Crept till each thread was spun: And, as we prayed, we grew afraid  Of the Justice of the Sun. The moaning wind went wandering round  The weeping prison-wall: Till like a wheel of turning steel  We felt the minutes crawl: O moaning wind! what had we done  To have such a seneschal? At last I saw the shadowed bars,  Like a lattice wrought in lead, Move right across the whitewashed wall  That faced my three-plank bed, And I knew that somewhere in the world  God's dreadful dawn was red. At six o'clock we cleaned our cells,  At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing  The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath  Had entered in to kill. He did not pass in purple pomp,  Nor ride a moon-white steed. Three yards of cord and a sliding board  Are all the gallows' need: So with rope of shame the Herald came  To do the secret deed. We were as men who through a fen  Of filthy darkness grope: We did not dare to breathe a prayer,  Or to give our anguish scope: Something was dead in each of us,  And what was dead was Hope. For Man's grim Justice goes its way  And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong,  It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong,  The monstrous parricide! We waited for the stroke of eight:  Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate  That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose  For the best man and the worst. We had no other thing to do,  Save to wait for the sign to come: So, like things of stone in a valley lone,  Quiet we sat and dumb: But each man's heart beat thick and quick,  Like a madman on a drum! With sudden shock the prison-clock  Smote on the shivering air, And from all the gaol rose up a wail  Of impotent despair, Like the sound the frightened marshes hear  From some leper in his lair. And as one sees most fearful things  In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope  Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer the hangman's snare  Strangled into a scream. And all the woe that moved him so  That he gave that bitter cry, And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,  None knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one  More deaths than one must die. IV There is no chapel on the day  On which they hang a man: The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,  Or his face is far too wan, Or there is that written in his eyes  Which none should look upon. So they kept us close till nigh on noon,  And then they rang the bell, And the Warders with their jingling keys  Opened each listening cell, And down the iron stair we tramped,  Each from his separate Hell. Out into God's sweet air we went,  But not in wonted way, For this man's face was white with fear,  And that man's face was gray, And I never saw sad men who looked  So wistfully at the day. I never saw sad men who looked  With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue  We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed  In happy freedom by. But there were those amongst us all  Who walked with downcast head, And knew that, had each got his due,  They should have died instead: He had but killed a thing that lived,  Whilst they had killed the dead. For he who sins a second time  Wakes a dead soul to pain, And draws it from its spotted shroud,  And makes it bleed again, And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,  And makes it bleed in vain! Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb  With crooked arrows starred, Silently we went round and round  The slippery asphalte yard; Silently we went round and round,  And no man spoke a word. Silently we went round and round,  And through each hollow mind The Memory of dreadful things  Rushed like a dreadful wind, And Horror stalked before each man,  And Terror crept behind. The Warders strutted up and down,  And kept their herd of brutes, Their uniforms were spick and span,  And they wore their Sunday suits, But we knew the work they had been at,  By the quicklime on their boots. For where a grave had opened wide,  There was no grave at all: Only a stretch of mud and sand  By the hideous prison-wall, And a little heap of burning lime,  That the man should have his pall. For he has a pall, this wretched man,  Such as few men can claim: Deep down below a prison-yard,  Naked for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot,  Wrapt in a sheet of flame! And all the while the burning lime  Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night,  And the soft flesh by day, It eats the flesh and bone by turns,  But it eats the heart alway. For three long years they will not sow  Or root or seedling there: For three long years the unblessed spot  Will sterile be and bare, And look upon the wondering sky  With unreproachful stare. They think a murderer's heart would taint  Each simple seed they sow. It is not true! God's kindly earth  Is kindlier than men know, And the red rose would but glow more red,  The white rose whiter blow. Out of his mouth a red, red rose!  Out of his heart a white! For who can say by what strange way,  Christ brings His will to light, Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore  Bloomed in the great Pope's sight? But neither milk-white rose nor red  May bloom in prison air; The shard, the pebble, and the flint,  Are what they give us there: For flowers have been known to heal  A common man's despair. So never will wine-red rose or white,  Petal by petal, fall On that stretch of mud and sand that lies  By the hideous prison-wall, To tell the men who tramp the yard  That God's Son died for all. Yet though the hideous prison-wall  Still hems him round and round, And a spirit may not walk by night  That is with fetters bound, And a spirit may but weep that lies  In such unholy ground, He is at peace—this wretched man—  At peace, or will be soon: There is no thing to make him mad,  Nor does Terror walk at noon, For the lampless Earth in which he lies  Has neither Sun nor Moon. They hanged him as a beast is hanged:  They did not even toll A requiem that might have brought  Rest to his startled soul, But hurriedly they took him out,  And hid him in a hole. They stripped him of his canvas clothes,  And gave him to the flies: They mocked the swollen purple throat,  And the stark and staring eyes: And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud  In which their convict lies. The Chaplain would not kneel to pray  By his dishonoured grave: Nor mark it with that blessed Cross  That Christ for sinners gave, Because the man was one of those  Whom Christ came down to save. Yet all is well; he has but passed  To Life's appointed bourne: And alien tears will fill for him  Pity's long-broken urn, For his mourners will be outcast men,  And outcasts always mourn. V I know not whether Laws be right,  Or whether Laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol  Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year,  A year whose days are long. But this I know, that every Law  That men have made for Man, Since first Man took his brother's life,  And the sad world began, But straws the wheat and saves the chaff  With a most evil fan. This too I know—and wise it were  If each could know the same— That every prison that men build  Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see  How men their brothers maim. With bars they blur the gracious moon,  And blind the goodly sun: And they do well to hide their Hell,  For in it things are done That Son of God nor son of Man  Ever should look upon! The vilest deeds like poison weeds  Bloom well in prison-air: It is only what is good in Man  That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,  And the Warder is Despair. For they starve the little frightened child  Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,  And gibe the old and gray, And some grow mad, and all grow bad,  And none a word may say. Each narrow cell in which we dwell  Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death  Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust  In Humanity's machine. The brackish water that we drink  Creeps with a loathsome slime, And the bitter bread they weigh in scales  Is full of chalk and lime, And Sleep will not lie down, but walks  Wild-eyed, and cries to Time. But though lean Hunger and green Thirst  Like asp with adder fight, We have little care of prison fare,  For what chills and kills outright Is that every stone one lifts by day  Becomes one's heart by night. With midnight always in one's heart,  And twilight in one's cell, We turn the crank, or tear the rope,  Each in his separate Hell, And the silence is more awful far  Than the sound of a brazen bell. And never a human voice comes near  To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door  Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot,  With soul and body marred. And thus we rust Life's iron chain  Degraded and alone: And some men curse, and some men weep,  And some men make no moan: But God's eternal Laws are kind  And break the heart of stone. And every human heart that breaks,  In prison-cell or yard, Is as that broken box that gave  Its treasure to the Lord, And filled the unclean leper's house  With the scent of costliest nard. Ah! happy they whose hearts can break  And peace of pardon win! How else may man make straight his plan  And cleanse his soul from Sin? How else but through a broken heart  May Lord Christ enter in? And he of the swollen purple throat,  And the stark and staring eyes, Waits for the holy hands that took  The Thief to Paradise; And a broken and a contrite heart  The Lord will not despise. The man in red who reads the Law  Gave him three weeks of life, Three little weeks in which to heal  His soul of his soul's strife, And cleanse from every blot of blood  The hand that held the knife. And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,  The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood,  And only tears can heal: And the crimson stain that was of Cain  Became Christ's snow-white seal. VI In Reading gaol by Reading town  There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man  Eaten by teeth of flame, In a burning winding-sheet he lies,  And his grave has got no name. And there, till Christ call forth the dead,  In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear,  Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved,  And so he had to die. And all men kill the thing they love,  By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look,  Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss,  The brave man with a sword.
Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down — the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes — Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there — his solitary track stretched out upon the world.
The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them— all the exciting detail of the chase and the escape, the error the flash of genius— all to no end save beauty the eternal— So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful for this to be warned against saluted and defied— It is alive, venomous it smiles grimly its words cut— The flashy female with her mother, gets it— The Jew gets it straight— it is deadly, terrifying— It is the Inquisition, the Revolution It is beauty itself that lives day by day in them idly— This is the power of their faces It is summer, it is the solstice the crowd is cheering, the crowd is laughing in detail permanently, seriously without thought
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
I cannot change, as others do,  Though you unjustly scorn;  Since that poor swain, that sighs for you  For you alone was born.  No, Phyllis, no, your heart to move  A surer way I’ll try:  And to revenge my slighted love, Will still love on, will still love on, and die.  When, kill’d with grief, Amyntas lies;  And you to mind shall call  The sighs that now unpitied rise;  The tears that vainly fall:  That welcome hour that ends this smart,  Will then begin your pain;  For such a faithful, tender heart Can never break, can never break in vain.
All my past life is mine no more,  The flying hours are gone, Like transitory dreams giv’n o’er, Whose images are kept in store  By memory alone. The time that is to come is not;  How can it then be mine? The present moment’s all my lot; And that, as fast as it is got,  Phyllis, is only thine. Then talk not of inconstancy,  False hearts, and broken vows; If I, by miracle, can be This live-long minute true to thee,  ’Tis all that Heav'n allows.
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny The sunshine of the Sun’s enlivening eye? Without thy light what light remains in me? Thou art my life; my way, my light’s in thee; I live, I move, and by thy beams I see. Thou art my life-if thou but turn away My life’s a thousand deaths. Thou art my way- Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray. My light thou art-without thy glorious sight My eyes are darken’d with eternal night. My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light. Thou art my way; I wander if thou fly. Thou art my light; if hid, how blind am I! Thou art my life; if thou withdraw’st, I die. My eyes are dark and blind, I cannot see: To whom or whither should my darkness flee, But to that light?-and who’s that light but thee? If I have lost my path, dear lover, say, Shall I still wander in a doubtful way? Love, shall a lamb of Israel’s sheepfold stray? My path is lost, my wandering steps do stray; I cannot go, nor can I safely stay; Whom should I seek but thee, my path, my way? And yet thou turn’st thy face away and fly’st me! And yet I sue for grace and thou deny’st me! Speak, art thou angry, Love, or only try’st me? Thou art the pilgrim’s path, the blind man’s eye, The dead man’s life. On thee my hopes rely: If I but them remove, I surely die. Dissolve thy sunbeams, close thy wings and stay! See, see how I am blind, and dead, and stray! -O thou art my life, my light, my way! Then work thy will! If passion bid me flee, My reason shall obey, my wings shall be Stretch’d out no farther than from me to thee!
Shall I wasting in despair Die because a woman's fair? Or make pale my cheeks with care 'Cause another's rosy are? Be she fairer than the day, Or the flow'ry meads in May—  If she be not so to me,  What care I how fair she be? Shall my foolish heart be pined 'Cause I see a woman kind? Or a well-disposed nature Joinèd with a lovely feature? Be she meeker, kinder, than Turtle dove or pelican,  If she be not so to me,  What care I how kind she be? Shall a woman's virtues move Me to perish for her love? Or her merits' value known Make me quite forget mine own? Be she with that goodness blest Which may gain her name of Best;  If she seem not such to me,  What care I how good she be? 'Cause her fortune seems too high Shall I play the fool and die? Those that bear a noble mind Where they want of riches find, Think what with them they would do That without them dare to woo;  And unless that mind I see,  What care I how great she be? Great or good, or kind or fair, I will ne'er the more despair: If she love me, this believe, I will die ere she shall grieve; If she slight me when I woo, I can scorn and let her go;  For if she be not for me,  What care I for whom she be?
Who is the happy Warrior? Who is heThat every man in arms should wish to be?—It is the generous Spirit, who, when broughtAmong the tasks of real life, hath wroughtUpon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:Whose high endeavours are an inward lightThat makes the path before him always bright;Who, with a natural instinct to discernWhat knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,But makes his moral being his prime care;Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!Turns his necessity to glorious gain;In face of these doth exercise a powerWhich is our human nature's highest dower:Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereavesOf their bad influence, and their good receives:By objects, which might force the soul to abateHer feeling, rendered more compassionate;Is placable—because occasions riseSo often that demand such sacrifice;More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure,As tempted more; more able to endure,As more exposed to suffering and distress;Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.—'Tis he whose law is reason; who dependsUpon that law as on the best of friends;Whence, in a state where men are tempted stillTo evil for a guard against worse ill,And what in quality or act is bestDoth seldom on a right foundation rest,He labours good on good to fix, and owesTo virtue every triumph that he knows:—Who, if he rise to station of command,Rises by open means; and there will standOn honourable terms, or else retire,And in himself possess his own desire;Who comprehends his trust, and to the sameKeeps faithful with a singleness of aim;And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in waitFor wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall,Like showers of manna, if they come at all:Whose powers shed round him in the common strife,Or mild concerns of ordinary life,A constant influence, a peculiar grace;But who, if he be called upon to faceSome awful moment to which Heaven has joinedGreat issues, good or bad for human kind,Is happy as a Lover; and attiredWith sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the lawIn calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;Or if an unexpected call succeed,Come when it will, is equal to the need:—He who, though thus endued as with a senseAnd faculty for storm and turbulence,Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leansTo homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be,Are at his heart; and such fidelityIt is his darling passion to approve;More brave for this, that he hath much to love:—'Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high,Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye,Or left unthought-of in obscurity,—Who, with a toward or untoward lot,Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not—Plays, in the many games of life, that oneWhere what he most doth value must be won:Whom neither shape or danger can dismay,Nor thought of tender happiness betray;Who, not content that former worth stand fast,Looks forward, persevering to the last,From well to better, daily self-surpast:Who, whether praise of him must walk the earthFor ever, and to noble deeds give birth,Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame,And leave a dead unprofitable name—Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;And, while the mortal mist is gathering, drawsHis breath in confidence of Heaven's applause:This is the happy Warrior; this is heThat every man in arms should wish to be.
Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile! Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee: I saw thee every day; and all the while Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea. So pure the sky, so quiet was the air! So like, so very like, was day to day! Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there; It trembled, but it never passed away. How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep; No mood, which season takes away, or brings: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle things. Ah! then , if mine had been the Painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet's dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss. Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;— Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine The very sweetest had to thee been given. A Picture had it been of lasting ease, Elysian quiet, without toil or strife; No motion but the moving tide, a breeze, Or merely silent Nature's breathing life. Such, in the fond illusion of my heart, Such Picture would I at that time have made: And seen the soul of truth in every part, A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed. So once it would have been,—'tis so no more; I have submitted to a new control: A power is gone, which nothing can restore; A deep distress hath humanised my Soul. Not for a moment could I now behold A smiling sea, and be what I have been: The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old; This, which I know, I speak with mind serene. Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend, If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore, This work of thine I blame not, but commend; This sea in anger, and that dismal shore. O 'tis a passionate Work!—yet wise and well, Well chosen is the spirit that is here; That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! And this huge Castle, standing here sublime, I love to see the look with which it braves, Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time, The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves. Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind! Such happiness, wherever it be known, Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind. But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne! Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.— Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.
When first, descending from the moorlands, I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide Along a bare and open valley, The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide. When last along its banks I wandered, Through groves that had begun to shed Their golden leaves upon the pathways, My steps the Border-minstrel led. The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies; And death upon the braes of Yarrow, Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes: Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its stedfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth. Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land! Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber Were earlier raised, remain to hear A timid voice, that asks in whispers, "Who next will drop and disappear?" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath. As if but yesterday departed, Thou too art gone before; but why, O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered, Should frail survivors heave a sigh? Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For Her who, ere her summer faded, Has sunk into a breathless sleep. No more of old romantic sorrows, For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid! With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime Enchantress—to assist the work Which then was going forward in her name! Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, The beauty wore of promise, that which sets (As at some moment might not be unfelt Among the bowers of paradise itself ) The budding rose above the rose full blown. What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, The playfellows of fancy, who had made All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength Their ministers,—who in lordly wise had stirred Among the grandest objects of the sense, And dealt with whatsoever they found there As if they had within some lurking right To wield it;—they, too, who, of gentle mood, Had watched all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild, And in the region of their peaceful selves;— Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish; Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!
Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread  Of spring's unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat! And birds and flowers once more to greet,  My last year's friends together. One have I marked, the happiest guest In all this covert of the blest: Hail to Thee, far above the rest  In joy of voice and pinion! Thou, Linnet! in thy green array, Presiding Spirit here to-day, Dost lead the revels of the May;  And this is thy dominion. While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, Make all one band of paramours, Thou, ranging up and down the bowers,  Art sole in thy employment: A Life, a Presence like the Air, Scattering thy gladness without care, Too blest with any one to pair;  Thyself thy own enjoyment. Amid yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies,  Yet seeming still to hover; There! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings,  That cover him all over. My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A brother of the dancing leaves; Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves  Pours forth his song in gushes; As if by that exulting strain He mocked and treated with disdain The voiceless Form he chose to feign,  While fluttering in the bushes.
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, not any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
—Was it for this That one, the fairest of all Rivers, lov'd To blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song, And from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flow'd along my dreams? For this, didst Thou, O Derwent! travelling over the green Plains Near my 'sweet Birthplace', didst thou, beauteous Stream Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence, tempering Our human waywardness, compos'd my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me, Among the fretful dwellings of mankind, A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm That Nature breathes among the hills and groves. When, having left his Mountains, to the Towers Of Cockermouth that beauteous River came, Behind my Father's House he pass'd, close by, Along the margin of our Terrace Walk. He was a Playmate whom we dearly lov'd. Oh! many a time have I, a five years' Child, A naked Boy, in one delightful Rill, A little Mill-race sever'd from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day, Bask'd in the sun, and plunged, and bask'd again Alternate all a summer's day, or cours'd Over the sandy fields, leaping through groves Of yellow grunsel, or when crag and hill, The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height, Were bronz'd with a deep radiance, stood alone Beneath the sky, as if I had been born On Indian Plains, and from my Mother's hut Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport, A naked Savage, in the thunder shower.  Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear; Much favour'd in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved Vale to which, erelong, I was transplanted. Well I call to mind ('Twas at an early age, ere I had seen Nine summers) when upon the mountain slope The frost and breath of frosty wind had snapp'd The last autumnal crocus, 'twas my joy To wander half the night among the Cliffs And the smooth Hollows, where the woodcocks ran Along the open turf. In thought and wish That time, my shoulder all with springes hung, I was a fell destroyer. On the heights Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied My anxious visitation, hurrying on, Still hurrying, hurrying onward; moon and stars Were shining o'er my head; I was alone, And seem'd to be a trouble to the peace That was among them. Sometimes it befel In these night-wanderings, that a strong desire O'erpower'd my better reason, and the bird Which was the captive of another's toils Became my prey; and, when the deed was done I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod. Nor less in springtime when on southern banks The shining sun had from his knot of leaves Decoy'd the primrose flower, and when the Vales And woods were warm, was I a plunderer then In the high places, on the lonesome peaks Where'er, among the mountains and the winds, The Mother Bird had built her lodge. Though mean My object, and inglorious, yet the end Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustain'd, and almost, as it seem'd, Suspended by the blast which blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag; Oh! at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears! the sky seem'd not a sky Of earth, and with what motion mov'd the clouds!  The mind of Man is fram'd even like the breath And harmony of music. There is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them move In one society. Ah me! that all The terrors, all the early miseries Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all The thoughts and feelings which have been infus'd Into my mind, should ever have made up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end! Thanks likewise for the means! But I believe That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame A favor'd Being, from his earliest dawn Of infancy doth open out the clouds, As at the touch of lightning, seeking him With gentlest visitation; not the less, Though haply aiming at the self-same end, Does it delight her sometimes to employ Severer interventions, ministry More palpable, and so she dealt with me.  One evening (surely I was led by her) I went alone into a Shepherd's Boat, A Skiff that to a Willow tree was tied Within a rocky Cave, its usual home. 'Twas by the shores of Patterdale, a Vale Wherein I was a Stranger, thither come A School-boy Traveller, at the Holidays. Forth rambled from the Village Inn alone No sooner had I sight of this small Skiff, Discover'd thus by unexpected chance, Than I unloos'd her tether and embark'd. The moon was up, the Lake was shining clear Among the hoary mountains; from the Shore I push'd, and struck the oars and struck again In cadence, and my little Boat mov'd on Even like a Man who walks with stately step Though bent on speed. It was an act of stealth And troubled pleasure; not without the voice Of mountain-echoes did my Boat move on, Leaving behind her still on either side Small circles glittering idly in the moon, Until they melted all into one track Of sparkling light. A rocky Steep uprose Above the Cavern of the Willow tree And now, as suited one who proudly row'd With his best skill, I fix'd a steady view Upon the top of that same craggy ridge, The bound of the horizon, for behind Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily I dipp'd my oars into the silent Lake, And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat Went heaving through the water, like a Swan; When from behind that craggy Steep, till then The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff, As if with voluntary power instinct, Uprear'd its head. I struck, and struck again And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff Rose up between me and the stars, and still, With measur'd motion, like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree. There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark, And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave And serious thoughts; and after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Work'd with a dim and undetermin'd sense Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude, Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams.  Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought! That giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion! not in vain, By day or star-light thus from my first dawn Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human Soul, Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man, But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying, by such discipline, Both pain and fear, until we recognize A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.  Nor was this fellowship vouchsaf'd to me With stinted kindness. In November days, When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights, When, by the margin of the trembling Lake, Beneath the gloomy hills I homeward went In solitude, such intercourse was mine; 'Twas mine among the fields both day and night, And by the waters all the summer long.  And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and visible for many a mile The cottage windows through the twilight blaz'd, I heeded not the summons:—happy time It was, indeed, for all of us; to me It was a time of rapture: clear and loud The village clock toll'd six; I wheel'd about, Proud and exulting, like an untired horse, That cares not for its home.—All shod with steel, We hiss'd along the polish'd ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chace And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, The Pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din, Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud, The leafless trees, and every icy crag Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.  Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the image of a star That gleam'd upon the ice: and oftentimes When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks, on either side, Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion; then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopp'd short, yet still the solitary Cliffs Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd With visible motion her diurnal round; Behind me did they stretch in solemn train Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.  Ye Presences of Nature, in the sky And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when Ye employ'd Such ministry, when Ye through many a year Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, Impress'd upon all forms the characters Of danger or desire, and thus did make The surface of the universal earth With triumph, and delight, and hope, and fear, Work like a sea?  Not uselessly employ'd, I might pursue this theme through every change Of exercise and play, to which the year Did summon us in its delightful round.  We were a noisy crew, the sun in heaven Beheld not vales more beautiful than ours, Nor saw a race in happiness and joy More worthy of the ground where they were sown. I would record with no reluctant voice The woods of autumn and their hazel bowers With milk-white clusters hung; the rod and line, True symbol of the foolishness of hope, Which with its strong enchantment led us on By rocks and pools, shut out from every star All the green summer, to forlorn cascades Among the windings of the mountain brooks. —Unfading recollections! at this hour The heart is almost mine with which I felt From some hill-top, on sunny afternoons The Kite high up among the fleecy clouds Pull at its rein, like an impatient Courser, Or, from the meadows sent on gusty days, Beheld her breast the wind, then suddenly Dash'd headlong; and rejected by the storm.  Ye lowly Cottages in which we dwelt, A ministration of your own was yours, A sanctity, a safeguard, and a love! Can I forget you, being as ye were So beautiful among the pleasant fields In which ye stood? Or can I here forget The plain and seemly countenance with which Ye dealt out your plain comforts? Yet had ye Delights and exultations of your own. Eager and never weary we pursued Our home amusements by the warm peat-fire At evening; when with pencil and with slate, In square divisions parcell'd out, and all With crosses and with cyphers scribbled o'er, We schemed and puzzled, head opposed to head In strife too humble to be named in Verse. Or round the naked table, snow-white deal, Cherry or maple, sate in close array, And to the combat, Lu or Whist, led on thick-ribbed Army; not as in the world Neglected and ungratefully thrown by Even for the very service they had wrought, But husbanded through many a long campaign. Uncouth assemblage was it, where no few Had changed their functions, some, plebeian cards, Which Fate beyond the promise of their birth Had glorified, and call'd to represent The persons of departed Potentates. Oh! with what echoes on the Board they fell! Ironic Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, A congregation piteously akin. Cheap matter did they give to boyish wit, Those sooty knaves, precipitated down With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of Heaven, The paramount Ace, a moon in her eclipse, Queens, gleaming through their splendour's last decay, And Monarchs, surly at the wrongs sustain'd By royal visages. Meanwhile, abroad The heavy rain was falling, or the frost Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth, And, interrupting oft the impassion'd game, From Esthwaite's neighbouring Lake the splitting ice, While it sank down towards the water, sent, Among the meadows and the hills, its long And dismal yellings, like the noise of wolves When they are howling round the Bothnic Main.  Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace How Nature by extrinsic passion first Peopled my mind with beauteous forms or grand, And made me love them, may I well forget How other pleasures have been mine, and joys Of subtler origin; how I have felt, Not seldom, even in that tempestuous time, Those hallow'd and pure motions of the sense Which seem, in their simplicity, to own An intellectual charm, that calm delight Which, if I err not, surely must belong To those first-born affinities that fit Our new existence to existing things, And, in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union betwixt life and joy.  Yes, I remember, when the changeful earth, And twice five seasons on my mind had stamp'd The faces of the moving year, even then, A Child, I held unconscious intercourse With the eternal Beauty, drinking in A pure organic pleasure from the lines Of curling mist, or from the level plain Of waters colour'd by the steady clouds.  The Sands of Westmoreland, the Creeks and Bays Of Cumbria's rocky limits, they can tell How when the Sea threw off his evening shade And to the Shepherd's huts beneath the crags Did send sweet notice of the rising moon, How I have stood, to fancies such as these, Engrafted in the tenderness of thought, A stranger, linking with the spectacle No conscious memory of a kindred sight, And bringing with me no peculiar sense Of quietness or peace, yet I have stood, Even while mine eye has mov'd o'er three long leagues Of shining water, gathering, as it seem'd, Through every hair-breadth of that field of light, New pleasure, like a bee among the flowers.  Thus, often in those fits of vulgar joy Which, through all seasons, on a child's pursuits Are prompt attendants, 'mid that giddy bliss Which, like a tempest, works along the blood And is forgotten; even then I felt Gleams like the flashing of a shield; the earth And common face of Nature spake to me Rememberable things; sometimes, 'tis true, By chance collisions and quaint accidents Like those ill-sorted unions, work suppos'd Of evil-minded fairies, yet not vain Nor profitless, if haply they impress'd Collateral objects and appearances, Albeit lifeless then, and doom'd to sleep Until maturer seasons call'd them forth To impregnate and to elevate the mind. —And if the vulgar joy by its own weight Wearied itself out of the memory, The scenes which were a witness of that joy Remained, in their substantial lineaments Depicted on the brain, and to the eye Were visible, a daily sight; and thus By the impressive discipline of fear, By pleasure and repeated happiness, So frequently repeated, and by force Of obscure feelings representative Of joys that were forgotten, these same scenes, So beauteous and majestic in themselves, Though yet the day was distant, did at length Become habitually dear, and all Their hues and forms were by invisible links Allied to the affections.  I began My story early, feeling as I fear, The weakness of a human love, for days Disown'd by memory, ere the birth of spring Planting my snowdrops among winter snows. Nor will it seem to thee, my Friend! so prompt In sympathy, that I have lengthen'd out, With fond and feeble tongue, a tedious tale. Meanwhile, my hope has been that I might fetch Invigorating thoughts from former years, Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, And haply meet reproaches, too, whose power May spur me on, in manhood now mature, To honorable toil. Yet should these hopes Be vain, and thus should neither I be taught To understand myself, nor thou to know With better knowledge how the heart was fram'd Of him thou lovest, need I dread from thee Harsh judgments, if I am so loth to quit Those recollected hours that have the charm Of visionary things, and lovely forms And sweet sensations that throw back our life And almost make our Infancy itself A visible scene, on which the sun is shining?  One end hereby at least hath been attain'd, My mind hath been revived, and if this mood Desert me not, I will forthwith bring down, Through later years, the story of my life. The road lies plain before me; 'tis a theme Single and of determined bounds; and hence I chuse it rather at this time, than work Of ampler or more varied argument.
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much Unvisited, endeavour'd to retrace My life through its first years, and measured back The way I travell'd when I first began To love the woods and fields; the passion yet Was in its birth, sustain'd, as might befal, By nourishment that came unsought, for still, From week to week, from month to month, we liv'd A round of tumult: duly were our games Prolong'd in summer till the day-light fail'd; No chair remain'd before the doors, the bench And threshold steps were empty; fast asleep The Labourer, and the old Man who had sate, A later lingerer, yet the revelry Continued, and the loud uproar: at last, When all the ground was dark, and the huge clouds Were edged with twinkling stars, to bed we went, With weary joints, and with a beating mind. Ah! is there one who ever has been young, Nor needs a monitory voice to tame The pride of virtue, and of intellect? And is there one, the wisest and the best Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish For things which cannot be, who would not give, If so he might, to duty and to truth The eagerness of infantine desire? A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame: so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That, sometimes, when I think of them, I seem Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself And of some other Being. A grey Stone Of native rock, left midway in the Square Of our small market Village, was the home And centre of these joys, and when, return'd After long absence, thither I repair'd, I found that it was split, and gone to build A smart Assembly-room that perk'd and flar'd With wash and rough-cast elbowing the ground Which had been ours. But let the fiddle scream, And be ye happy! yet, my Friends! I know That more than one of you will think with me Of those soft starry nights, and that old Dame From whom the stone was nam'd who there had sate And watch'd her Table with its huckster's wares Assiduous, thro' the length of sixty years. We ran a boisterous race; the year span round With giddy motion. But the time approach'd That brought with it a regular desire For calmer pleasures, when the beauteous forms Of Nature were collaterally attach'd To every scheme of holiday delight, And every boyish sport, less grateful else, And languidly pursued. When summer came It was the pastime of our afternoons To beat along the plain of Windermere With rival oars, and the selected bourne Was now an Island musical with birds That sang for ever; now a Sister Isle Beneath the oaks' umbrageous covert, sown With lillies of the valley, like a field; And now a third small Island where remain'd An old stone Table, and a moulder'd Cave, A Hermit's history. In such a race, So ended, disappointment could be none, Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy: We rested in the shade, all pleas'd alike, Conquer'd and Conqueror. Thus the pride of strength, And the vain-glory of superior skill Were interfus'd with objects which subdu'd And temper'd them, and gradually produc'd A quiet independence of the heart. And to my Friend, who knows me, I may add, Unapprehensive of reproof, that hence Ensu'd a diffidence and modesty, And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, The self-sufficing power of solitude. No delicate viands sapp'd our bodily strength; More than we wish'd we knew the blessing then Of vigorous hunger, for our daily meals Were frugal, Sabine fare! and then, exclude A little weekly stipend, and we lived Through three divisions of the quarter'd year In pennyless poverty. But now, to School Return'd, from the half-yearly holidays, We came with purses more profusely fill'd, Allowance which abundantly suffic'd To gratify the palate with repasts More costly than the Dame of whom I spake, That ancient Woman, and her board supplied. Hence inroads into distant Vales, and long Excursions far away among the hills, Hence rustic dinners on the cool green ground, Or in the woods, or near a river side, Or by some shady fountain, while soft airs Among the leaves were stirring, and the sun Unfelt, shone sweetly round us in our joy. Nor is my aim neglected, if I tell How twice in the long length of those half-years We from our funds, perhaps, with bolder hand Drew largely, anxious for one day, at least, To feel the motion of the galloping Steed; And with the good old Inn-keeper, in truth, On such occasion sometimes we employ'd Sly subterfuge; for the intended bound Of the day's journey was too distant far For any cautious man, a Structure famed Beyond its neighbourhood, the antique Walls Of that large Abbey which within the vale Of Nightshade, to St. Mary's honour built, Stands yet, a mouldering Pile, with fractured Arch, Belfry, and Images, and living Trees, A holy Scene! along the smooth green turf Our Horses grazed: to more than inland peace Left by the sea wind passing overhead (Though wind of roughest temper) trees and towers May in that Valley oftentimes be seen, Both silent and both motionless alike; Such is the shelter that is there, and such The safeguard for repose and quietness. Our steeds remounted, and the summons given, With whip and spur we by the Chauntry flew In uncouth race, and left the cross-legg'd Knight, And the stone-Abbot, and that single Wren Which one day sang so sweetly in the Nave Of the old Church, that, though from recent showers The earth was comfortless, and, touch'd by faint Internal breezes, sobbings of the place, And respirations, from the roofless walls The shuddering ivy dripp'd large drops, yet still, So sweetly 'mid the gloom the invisible Bird Sang to itself, that there I could have made My dwelling-place, and liv'd for ever there To hear such music. Through the Walls we flew And down the valley, and a circuit made In wantonness of heart, through rough and smooth We scamper'd homeward. Oh! ye Rocks and Streams, And that still Spirit of the evening air! Even in this joyous time I sometimes felt Your presence, when with slacken'd step we breath'd Along the sides of the steep hills, or when, Lighted by gleams of moonlight from the sea, We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand. Upon the Eastern Shore of Windermere, Above the crescent of a pleasant Bay, There stood an Inn, no homely-featured Shed, Brother of the surrounding Cottages, But 'twas a splendid place, the door beset With Chaises, Grooms, and Liveries, and within Decanters, Glasses, and the blood-red Wine. In ancient times, or ere the Hall was built On the large Island, had this Dwelling been More worthy of a Poet's love, a Hut, Proud of its one bright fire, and sycamore shade. But though the rhymes were gone which once inscribed The threshold, and large golden characters On the blue-frosted Signboard had usurp'd The place of the old Lion, in contempt And mockery of the rustic painter's hand, Yet to this hour the spot to me is dear With all its foolish pomp. The garden lay Upon a slope surmounted by the plain Of a small Bowling-green; beneath us stood A grove; with gleams of water through the trees And over the tree-tops; nor did we want Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream. And there, through half an afternoon, we play'd On the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent Made all the mountains ring. But ere the fall Of night, when in our pinnace we return'd Over the dusky Lake, and to the beach Of some small Island steer'd our course with one, The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there, And row'd off gently, while he blew his flute Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream. Thus daily were my sympathies enlarged, And thus the common range of visible things Grew dear to me: already I began To love the sun, a Boy I lov'd the sun, Not as I since have lov'd him, as a pledge And surety of our earthly life, a light Which while we view we feel we are alive; But, for this cause, that I had seen him lay His beauty on the morning hills, had seen The western mountain touch his setting orb, In many a thoughtless hour, when, from excess Of happiness, my blood appear'd to flow With its own pleasure, and I breath'd with joy. And from like feelings, humble though intense, To patriotic and domestic love Analogous, the moon to me was dear; For I would dream away my purposes, Standing to look upon her while she hung Midway between the hills, as if she knew No other region; but belong'd to thee, Yea, appertain'd by a peculiar right To thee and thy grey huts, my darling Vale! Those incidental charms which first attach'd My heart to rural objects, day by day Grew weaker, and I hasten on to tell How Nature, intervenient till this time, And secondary, now at length was sought For her own sake. But who shall parcel out His intellect, by geometric rules, Split, like a province, into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed, Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say, 'This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain?' Thou, my Friend! art one More deeply read in thy own thoughts; to thee Science appears but, what in truth she is, Not as our glory and our absolute boast, But as a succedaneum, and a prop To our infirmity. Thou art no slave Of that false secondary power, by which, In weakness, we create distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things Which we perceive, and not which we have made. To thee, unblinded by these outward shows, The unity of all has been reveal'd And thou wilt doubt with me, less aptly skill'd Than many are to class the cabinet Of their sensations, and, in voluble phrase, Run through the history and birth of each, As of a single independent thing. Hard task to analyse a soul, in which, Not only general habits and desires, But each most obvious and particular thought, Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weigh'd, Hath no beginning. Bless'd the infant Babe, (For with my best conjectures I would trace The progress of our Being) blest the Babe, Nurs'd in his Mother's arms, the Babe who sleeps Upon his Mother's breast, who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his Mother's eye! Such feelings pass into his torpid life Like an awakening breeze, and hence his mind Even [in the first trial of its powers] Is prompt and watchful, eager to combine In one appearance, all the elements And parts of the same object, else detach'd And loth to coalesce. Thus, day by day, Subjected to the discipline of love, His organs and recipient faculties Are quicken'd, are more vigorous, his mind spreads, Tenacious of the forms which it receives. In one beloved presence, nay and more, In that most apprehensive habitude And those sensations which have been deriv'd From this beloved Presence, there exists A virtue which irradiates and exalts All objects through all intercourse of sense. No outcast he, bewilder'd and depress'd; Along his infant veins are interfus'd The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature, that connect him with the world. Emphatically such a Being lives, An inmate of this active universe; From nature largely he receives; nor so Is satisfied, but largely gives again, For feeling has to him imparted strength, And powerful in all sentiments of grief, Of exultation, fear, and joy, his mind, Even as an agent of the one great mind, Creates, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds.—Such, verily, is the first Poetic spirit of our human life; By uniform control of after years In most abated or suppress'd, in some, Through every change of growth or of decay, Pre-eminent till death. From early days, Beginning not long after that first time In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch, I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart I have endeavour'd to display the means Whereby this infant sensibility, Great birthright of our Being, was in me Augmented and sustain'd. Yet is a path More difficult before me, and I fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois' sinews, and the eagle's wing: For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes. I was left alone, Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affections were remov'd, And yet the building stood, as if sustain'd By its own spirit! All that I beheld Was dear to me, and from this cause it came, That now to Nature's finer influxes My mind lay open, to that more exact And intimate communion which our hearts Maintain with the minuter properties Of objects which already are belov'd, And of those only. Many are the joys Of youth; but oh! what happiness to live When every hour brings palpable access Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, And sorrow is not there. The seasons came, And every season to my notice brought A store of transitory qualities Which, but for this most watchful power of love Had been neglected, left a register Of permanent relations, else unknown, Hence life, and change, and beauty, solitude More active, even, than 'best society', Society made sweet as solitude By silent inobtrusive sympathies, And gentle agitations of the mind From manifold distinctions, difference Perceived in things, where to the common eye, No difference is; and hence, from the same source Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone, In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights Beneath the quiet Heavens; and, at that time, Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned; and I would stand, Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Thence did I drink the visionary power. I deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life; but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, to which, With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain, they still Have something to pursue. And not alone, In grandeur and in tumult, but no less In tranquil scenes, that universal power And fitness in the latent qualities And essences of things, by which the mind Is mov'd by feelings of delight, to me Came strengthen'd with a superadded soul, A virtue not its own. My morning walks Were early; oft, before the hours of School I travell'd round our little Lake, five miles Of pleasant wandering, happy time! more dear For this, that one was by my side, a Friend Then passionately lov'd; with heart how full Will he peruse these lines, this page, perhaps A blank to other men! for many years Have since flow'd in between us; and our minds, Both silent to each other, at this time We live as if those hours had never been. Nor seldom did I lift our cottage latch Far earlier, and before the vernal thrush Was audible, among the hills I sate Alone, upon some jutting eminence At the first hour of morning, when the Vale Lay quiet in an utter solitude. How shall I trace the history, where seek The origin of what I then have felt? Oft in these moments such a holy calm Did overspread my soul, that I forgot That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw Appear'd like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in my mind. 'Twere long to tell What spring and autumn, what the winter snows, And what the summer shade, what day and night, The evening and the morning, what my dreams And what my waking thoughts supplied, to nurse That spirit of religious love in which I walked with Nature. But let this, at least Be not forgotten, that I still retain'd My first creative sensibility, That by the regular action of the world My soul was unsubdu'd. A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to the external things With which it commun'd. An auxiliar light Came from my mind which on the setting sun Bestow'd new splendor, the melodious birds, The gentle breezes, fountains that ran on, Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obey'd A like dominion; and the midnight storm Grew darker in the presence of my eye. Hence by obeisance, my devotion hence, And hence my transport. Nor should this, perchance, Pass unrecorded, that I still have lov'd The exercise and produce of a toil Than analytic industry to me More pleasing, and whose character I deem Is more poetic as resembling more Creative agency. I mean to speak Of that interminable building rear'd By observation of affinities In objects where no brotherhood exists To common minds. My seventeenth year was come And, whether from this habit, rooted now So deeply in my mind, or from excess Of the great social principle of life, Coercing all things into sympathy, To unorganic natures I transferr'd My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth Coming in revelation, I convers'd With things that really are, I, at this time Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. Thus did my days pass on, and now at length From Nature and her overflowing soul I had receiv'd so much that all my thoughts Were steep'd in feeling; I was only then Contented when with bliss ineffable I felt the sentiment of Being spread O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still, O'er all, that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge, to the human eye Invisible, yet liveth to the heart, O'er all that leaps, and runs, and shouts, and sings, Or beats the gladsome air, o'er all that glides Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not If such my transports were; for in all things I saw one life, and felt that it was joy. One song they sang, and it was audible, Most audible then when the fleshly ear, O'ercome by grosser prelude of that strain, Forgot its functions, and slept undisturb'd. If this be error, and another faith Find easier access to the pious mind, Yet were I grossly destitute of all Those human sentiments which make this earth So dear, if I should fail, with grateful voice To speak of you, Ye Mountains and Ye Lakes, And sounding Cataracts! Ye Mists and Winds That dwell among the hills where I was born. If, in my youth, I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have liv'd, With God and Nature communing, remov'd From little enmities and low desires, The gift is yours; if in these times of fear, This melancholy waste of hopes o'erthrown, If, 'mid indifference and apathy And wicked exultation, when good men, On every side fall off we know not how, To selfishness, disguis'd in gentle names Of peace, and quiet, and domestic love, Yet mingled, not unwillingly, with sneers On visionary minds; if in this time Of dereliction and dismay, I yet Despair not of our nature; but retain A more than Roman confidence, a faith That fails not, in all sorrow my support, The blessing of my life, the gift is yours, Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed My lofty speculations; and in thee, For this uneasy heart of ours I find A never-failing principle of joy, And purest passion. Thou, my Friend! wert rear'd In the great City, 'mid far other scenes; But we, by different roads at length have gain'd The self-same bourne. And for this cause to Thee I speak, unapprehensive of contempt, The insinuated scoff of coward tongues, And all that silent language which so oft In conversation betwixt man and man Blots from the human countenance all trace Of beauty and of love. For Thou hast sought The truth in solitude, and Thou art one, The most intense of Nature's worshippers In many things my Brother, chiefly here In this my deep devotion. Fare Thee well! Health, and the quiet of a healthful mind Attend thee! seeking oft the haunts of men, And yet more often living with Thyself, And for Thyself, so haply shall thy days Be many, and a blessing to mankind.
Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss Have I so much your mind there offended? Have I then done so grievously amiss That by no means it may be amended? Then revenge you, and the next way is this: Another kiss shall have my life ended, For to my mouth the first my heart did suck; The next shall clean out of my breast it pluck.
Avising the bright beams of these fair eyesWhere he is that mine oft moisteth and washeth,The wearied mind straight from the heart departethFor to rest in his worldly paradiseAnd find the sweet bitter under this guise.What webs he hath wrought well he perceivethWhereby with himself on love he plainethThat spurreth with fire and bridleth with ice.Thus is it in such extremity brought,In frozen thought, now and now it standeth in flame.Twixt misery and wealth, twixt earnest and game,But few glad, and many diverse thoughtWith sore repentance of his hardiness.Of such a root cometh fruit fruitless.
Farewell love and all thy laws forever;Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more.Senec and Plato call me from thy loreTo perfect wealth, my wit for to endeavour.In blind error when I did persever,Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore,Hath taught me to set in trifles no storeAnd scape forth, since liberty is lever.Therefore farewell; go trouble younger heartsAnd in me claim no more authority.With idle youth go use thy propertyAnd thereon spend thy many brittle darts,For hitherto though I have lost all my time,Me lusteth no lenger rotten boughs to climb.
Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant; My great travail so gladly spent, Forget not yet. Forget not yet when first began The weary life ye know, since whan The suit, the service, none tell can; Forget not yet. Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways; The painful patience in denays, Forget not yet. Forget not yet, forget not this, How long ago hath been and is The mind that never meant amiss; Forget not yet. Forget not then thine own approved, The which so long hath thee so loved, Whose steadfast faith yet never moved; Forget not this.
The heart and service to you proffer'd With right good will full honestly, Refuse it not, since it is offer'd, But take it to you gentlely. And though it be a small present, Yet good, consider graciously The thought, the mind, and the intent Of him that loves you faithfully. It were a thing of small effect To work my woe thus cruelly, For my good will to be abject: Therefore accept it lovingly. Pain or travel, to run or ride, I undertake it pleasantly; Bid ye me go, and straight I glide At your commandement humbly. Pain or pleasure, now may you plant Even which it please you steadfastly; Do which you list, I shall not want To be your servant secretly. And since so much I do desire To be your own assuredly, For all my service and my hire Reward your servant liberally.
And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay, say nay, for shame,To save thee from the blameOf all my grief and grame;And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay, say nay!And wilt thou leave me thus,That hath loved thee so longIn wealth and woe among?And is thy heart so strongAs for to leave me thus?Say nay, say nay!And wilt thou leave me thus,That hath given thee my heartNever for to depart,Nother for pain nor smart;And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay, say nay!And wilt thou leave me thusAnd have no more pityOf him that loveth thee?Hélas, thy cruelty!And wilt thou leave me thus?Say nay, say nay!
When lovely woman stoops to folly,  And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy,  What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover,  To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover,  And wring his bosom—is to die.
Here, where the noises of the busy town, The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,We stand and gaze around with tearful awe, And muse upon the consecrated spot.No signs of life are here: the very prayers Inscribed around are in a language dead;The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent That an undying radiance was to shed.What prayers were in this temple offered up, Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,By these lone exiles of a thousand years, From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!How as we gaze, in this new world of light, Upon this relic of the days of old,The present vanishes, and tropic bloom And Eastern towns and temples we behold.Again we see the patriarch with his flocks, The purple seas, the hot blue sky o'erhead,The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,— Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount, A man who reads Jehovah's written law,'Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare, Unto a people prone with reverent awe.The pride of luxury's barbaric pomp, In the rich court of royal Solomon—Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,— The exiles by the streams of Babylon.Our softened voices send us back again But mournful echoes through the empty hall:Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound, And with unwonted gentleness they fall.The weary ones, the sad, the suffering, All found their comfort in the holy place,And children's gladness and men's gratitude 'Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.The funeral and the marriage, now, alas! We know not which is sadder to recall;For youth and happiness have followed age, And green grass lieth gently over all.Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet, With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.Take off your shoes as by the burning bush, Before the mystery of death and God.
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me. Of many was I sought their mistress for to be. But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where; importune me no more. How many weeping eyes I made to pine in woe, How many sighing hearts I have not skill to show, But I the prouder grew and still this spake therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. Then spake fair Venus’ son, that proud victorious boy, Saying: You dainty dame, for that you be so coy, I will so pluck your plumes as you shall say no more: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more. As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast That neither night nor day I could take any rest. Wherefore I did repent that I had said before: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.
You came to my door in the dawn and sang; it angered me to be awakened from sleep, and you went away unheeded.You came in the noon and asked for water; it vexed me in my work, and you were sent away with reproaches.You came in the evening with your flaming torches.You seemed to me like a terror and I shut my door.Now in the midnight I sit alone in my lampless room and call you back whom I turned away in insult.
Tulsidas, the poet, was wandering, deep in thought, by the Ganges, in that lonely spot where they burn their dead.He found a woman sitting at the feet of the corpse of her dead husband, gaily dressed as for a wedding.She rose as she saw him, bowed to him, and said, "Permit me, Master, with your blessing, to follow my husband to heaven.""Why such hurry, my daughter?" asked Tulsidas. "Is not this earth also His who made heaven?""For heaven I do not long," said the woman. "I want my husband."Tulsidas smiled and said to her, "Go back to your home, my child. Before the month is over you will find your husband."The woman went back with glad hope. Tulsidas came to her every day and gave her high thoughts to think, till her heart was filled to the brim with divine love.When the month was scarcely over, her neighbours came to her, asking, "Woman, have you found your husband?"The widow smiled and said, "I have."Eagerly they asked, "Where is he?""In my heart is my lord, one with me," said the woman.
My love, once upon a time your poet launched a great epic in his mind.Alas, I was not careful, and it struck your ringing anklets and came to grief.It broke up into scraps of songs and lay scattered at your feet.All my cargo of the stories of old wars was tossed by the laughing waves and soaked in tears and sank.You must make this loss good to me, my love.If my claims to immortal fame after death are shattered, make me immortal while I live.And I will not mourn for my loss nor blame you.
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;  Where knowledge is free;  Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;  Where words come out from the depth of truth;  Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;  Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;  Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action  Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air - Between the Heaves of Storm - The Eyes around - had wrung them dry - And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset - when the King Be witnessed - in the Room - I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away What portion of me be Assignable - and then it was There interposed a Fly - With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz - Between the light - and me - And then the Windows failed - and then I could not see to see -
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through - And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating - till I thought My mind was going numb - And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here - And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down - And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then -
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flow'd Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime. And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumin, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men. Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State, Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off From thir Creator, and transgress his Will For one restraint, Lords of the World besides? Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt? Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav'n, with all his Host Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring To set himself in Glory above his Peers, He trusted to have equal'd the most High, If he oppos'd; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais'd impious War in Heav'n and Battel proud With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie With hideous ruine and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire, Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms. Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night To mortal men, he with his horrid crew Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe Confounded though immortal: But his doom Reserv'd him to more wrath; for now the thought Both of lost happiness and lasting pain Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes That witness'd huge affliction and dismay Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate: At once as far as Angels kenn he views The dismal Situation waste and wilde, A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd: Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd For those rebellious, here thir prison ordained In utter darkness, and thir portion set As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole. O how unlike the place from whence they fell! There the companions of his fall, o'rewhelm'd With Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire, He soon discerns, and weltring by his side One next himself in power, and next in crime, Long after known in Palestine, and nam'd Beelzebub. To whom th' Arch-Enemy, And thence in Heav'n call'd Satan, with bold words Breaking the horrid silence thus began. If thou beest he; But O how fall'n! how chang'd From him, who in the happy Realms of Light Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst out-shine Myriads though bright: If he whom mutual league, United thoughts and counsels, equal hope And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize, Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd In equal ruin: into what Pit thou seest From what highth fall'n, so much the stronger prov'd He with his Thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those, Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage Can else inflict, do I repent or change, Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit, That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend, And to the fierce contention brought along Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring, His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n, And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? That Glory never shall his wrath or might Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace With suppliant knee, and deifie his power, Who from the terrour of this Arm so late Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed, That were an ignominy and shame beneath This downfall; since by Fate the strength of Gods And this Empyreal substance cannot fail, Since through experience of this great event In Arms not worse, in foresight much advanc't, We may with more successful hope resolve To wage by force or guile eternal Warr Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe, Who now triumphs, and in th' excess of joy Sole reigning holds the Tyranny of Heav'n. So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain, Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare: And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer. O Prince, O Chief of many Throned Powers, That led th' imbattelld Seraphim to Warr Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds Fearless, endanger'd Heav'ns perpetual King; And put to proof his sigh Supremacy, Whether upheld by strength, or Chance, or Fate, Too well I see and rue the dire event, That with sad overthrow and foul defeat Hath lost us Heav'n, and all this mighty Host In horrible destruction laid thus low, As far as Gods and Heav'nly Essences Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains Invincible, and vigour soon returns, Though all our Glory extinct and happy state Here swallow'd up in endless misery. But what if he our Conquerour, (whom I now Of force believe Almighty, since no less Then such could hav orepow'rd such force as ours) Have left us this our spirit and strength intire Strongly to suffer and support our pains, That we may so suffice his vengeful ire, Or do him mightier service as his thralls By right of Warr, what e're his business be Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire, Or do his Errands in the gloomy Deep; What can it then avail though yet we feel Strength undiminisht, or eternal being To undergo eternal punishment? Whereto with speedy words th' Arch-fiend reply'd. Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure, To do ought good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his Providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil; Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb His inmost counsels from thir destind aim. But see the angry Victor hath recall'd His Ministers of vengeance and pursuit Back to the Gates of Heav'n: the Sulphurous Hail Shot after us in storm, oreblown hath laid The fiery Surge, that from the Precipice Of Heav'n receiv'd us falling, and the Thunder, Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage, Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep. Let us not slip th' occasion, whether scorn, Or satiate fury yield it from our Foe. Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde, The seat of desolation, voyd of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend From off the tossing of these fiery waves, There rest, if any rest can harbour there, And reassembling our afflicted Powers, Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our Enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire Calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, If not what resolution from despare. Thus Satan to his neerest Mate With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes That sparkling blaz'd, his other Parts besides Prone on the Flood, extended long and large Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim th' Ocean stream: Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam The Pilot of some small night-founder'd Skiff, Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell, With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delayes: So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enrag'd might see How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn On Man by him seduc't, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd. Forthwith upright he rears from off the Pool His mighty Stature; on each hand the flames Drivn backward slope thir pointing spires, and rowld In billows, leave i'th'midst a horrid Vale. Then with expanded wings he stears his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky Air That felt unusual weight, till on dry Land He lights, as if it were Land that ever burn'd With solid, as the Lake with liquid fire; And such appear'd in hue, as when the force Of subterranean wind transports a Hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shatter'd side Of thundring Aetna, whose combustible And fewel'd entrals thence conceiving Fire, Sublim'd with Mineral fury, aid the Winds, And leave a singed bottom all involv'd With stench and smoak: Such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next Mate, Both glorying to have scap't the Stygian flood As Gods, and by thir own recover'd strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal Power. Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: fardest from him his best Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less then he Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n. But wherefore let we then our faithful friends, Th' associates and copartners of our loss Lye thus astonisht on th' oblivious Pool, And call them not to share with us their part In this unhappy Mansion, or once more With rallied Arms to try what may be yet Regaind in Heav'n, or what more lost in Hell? So Satan spake, and him Beelzebub Thus answer'd. Leader of those Armies bright, Which but th' Omnipotent none could have foyld, If once they hear that voyce, thir liveliest pledge Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft In worst extreams, and on the perilous edge Of battel when it rag'd, in all assaults Thir surest signal, they will soon resume New courage and revive, though now they lye Groveling and prostrate on yon Lake of Fire, As we erewhile, astounded and amaz'd, No wonder, fall'n such a pernicious highth. He scarce had ceas't when the superiour Fiend Was moving toward the shoar; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand, He walkt with to support uneasie steps Over the burning Marle, not like those steps On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire; Nathless he so endur'd, till on the Beach Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call'd His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans't Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High overarch't imbowr; or scatterd sedge Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm'd Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew Busirus and his Memphian Chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore thir floating Carkases And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown Abject and lost lay these, covering the Flood, Under amazement of thir hideous change. He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost, If such astonishment as this can sieze Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this place After the toyl of Battel to repose Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav'n? Or in this abject posture have ye sworn To adore the Conquerour? who now beholds Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till anon His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates discern Th' advantage, and descending tread us down Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe. Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n. They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung Upon the wing, as when men wont to watch On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread, Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Nor did they not perceave the evil plight In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; Yet to thir Generals Voyce they soon obeyd Innumerable. As when the potent Rod Of Amrams Son in Egypts evill day Wav'd round the Coast, up call'd a pitchy cloud Of Locusts, warping on the Eastern Wind, That ore the Realm of impious Pharaoh hung Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Nile: So numberless were those bad Angels seen Hovering on wind under the Cope of Hell 'Twixt upper, nether, and surrounding Fires; Till, as a signal giv'n, th' uplifted Spear Of thir great Sultan waving to direct Thir course, in even ballance down they light On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Plain; A multitude, like which the populous North Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous Sons Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibralter to the Lybian sands. Forthwith from every Squadron and each Band The Heads and Leaders thither hast where stood Thir great Commander; Godlike shapes and forms Excelling human, Princely Dignities, And Powers that earst in Heaven sat on Thrones; Though of thir Names in heav'nly Records now Be no memorial blotted out and ras'd By thir Rebellion, from the Books of Life. Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names, till wandring ore the Earth, Through Gods high sufferance for the tryal of man, By falsities and lyes the greatest part Of Mankind they corrupted to forsake God thir Creator, and th' invisible Glory of him that made them, to transform Oft to the Image of a Brute, adorn'd With gay Religions full of Pomp and Gold, And Devils to adore for Deities: Then were they known to men by various Names, And various Idols through the Heathen World. Say, Muse, the Names then known, who first, who last, Rous'd from the slumber, on that fiery Couch, At thir great Emperors call, as next in worth Came singly where he stood on the bare strand, While the promiscuous croud stood yet aloof? The chief were those who from the Pit of Hell Roaming to seek thir prey on earth, durst fix Thir Seats long after next the Seat of God, Thir Altars by his Altar, Gods ador'd Among the Nations round, and durst abide Jehovah thundring out of Sion, thron'd Between the Cherubim; yea, often plac'd Within his Sanctuary it self thir Shrines, Abominations; and with cursed things His holy Rites, and solemn Feasts profan'd, And with thir darkness durst affront his light. First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain, In Argob and in Basan, to the stream Of utmost Arnon. Not content with such Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart Of Solomon he led by fraud to build His Temple right against the Temple of God On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons, From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon And Heronaim, Seons Realm, beyond The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines, And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool. Peor his other Name, when he entic'd Israel in Sittim on thir march from Nile To do him wanton rites, which cost them woe. Yet thence his lustful Orgies he enlarg'd Even to that Hill of scandal, but the Grove Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate; Till good Josiah drove them hence to Hell. With these cam they, who from the bordring flood Of old Euphrates to the Brook that parts Egypt from Syrian ground, had general names Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male, These Feminine. For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is thir Essence pure, Nor ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute thir aerie purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfill. For those the Race of Israel oft forsook Thir living strength, and unfrequented left His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down To bestial Gods; for which thir heads as low Bow'd down in Battel, sunk before the Spear Of despicable foes. With these in troop Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians call'd Astarte, Queen of Heav'n, with crescent Horns; To whose bright Image nightly by the Moon Sidonian Virgins paid thir Vows and Songs, In Sion also not unsung, where stood Her Temple on th' offensive Mountain, built By that uxorious King, whose heart though large, Beguil'd by fair Idolatresses, fell To idols foul. Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allur'd The Syrian Damsels to lament his fate In amorous dittyes all a Summers day, While smooth Adonis from his native Rock Ran purple to the Sea, suppos'd with blood Of Thammuz yearly wounded; the Love-tale Infected Sions daughters with like heat, Whose wanton passions in the sacred Porch Ezekial saw, when by the Vision led His eye survay'd the dark Idolatries Of alienated Judah. Next came one Who mourn'd in earnest, when the Captive Ark Maim'd his brute Image, head and hands lopt off In his own Temple, on the grunsel edge, Where he fell flat, and sham'd his Worshipers: Dagon his Name, Sea Monster, upward Man And downward Fish: yet had his Temple high Rear'd in Azotus, dreaded through the Coast Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds. Him follow'd Rimmon, whose delightful Seat Was fair Damascus, on the fertil Banks Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams. He also against the house of God was bold: A Leper once he lost and gain'd a King, Ahaz his sottish Conquerour, whom he drew Gods Altar to disparage and displace For one of Syrian mode, whereon to burn His odious offrings, and adore the Gods Whom he had vanquisht. After these appear'd A crew who under Names of old Renown, Osiris, Isis, Orus and thir Train With monstrous shapes and sorceries abus'd Fanatic Egypt and her Priests, to seek Thir wandring Gods Disguis'd in brutish forms Rather then human. Nor did Israel scape Th' infection when thir borrow'd Gold compos'd The Calf in Oreb: and the Rebel King Doubl'd that sin in Bethel and in Dan, Lik'ning his Maker to the Grazed Ox, Jehovah, who in one Night when he pass'd From Egypt marching, equal'd with one stroke Both her first born and all her bleating Gods Belial came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest Turns Atheist, as did Ely's Sons, who fill'd With lust and violence the house of God. In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And when Night Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. Witness the Streets of Sodom, and that night In Gibeah, when the hospitable door Expos'd a Matron to avoid worse rape. These were the prime in order and in might; The rest were long to tell, though far renown'd, Th' Ionian Gods, of Javans issue held Gods, yet confest later then Heav'n and Earth Thir boasted Parents; Titan Heav'ns first born With his enormous brood, and birthright seis'd By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove His own and Rhea's Son like measure found; So Jove usurping reign'd: these first in Creet And Ida known, thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus rul'd the middle Air Thir highest Heav'n; or on the Delphian Cliff, Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds Of Doric Land; or who with Saturn old Fled over Adria to th' Hesperian Fields, And ore the Celtic roam'd the utmost Isles. All these and more came flocking; but with looks Down cast and damp, yet such wherein appear'd Obscure some glimps of joy, to have found thir chief Not in despair, to have found themselves not lost In loss itself; which on his count'nance cast Like doubtful hue: but he his wonted pride Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore Semblance of worth, not substance, gently rais'd Thir fanting courage, and dispel'd thir fears. Then strait commands that at the warlike sound Of Trumpets loud and Clarions be upreard His mighty Standard; that proud honour claim'd Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall: Who forthwith from the glittering Staff unfurld Th' Imperial Ensign, which full high advanc't Shon like a Meteor streaming to the Wind With Gemms and Golden lustre rich imblaz'd, Seraphic arms and Trophies: all the while Sonorous mettal blowing Martial sounds: At which the universal Host upsent A shout that tore Hells Concave, and beyond Frighted the Reign of Chaos and old Night. All in a moment through the gloom were seen Ten thousand Banners rise into the Air With Orient Colours waving: with them rose A Forrest huge of Spears: and thronging Helms Appear'd, and serried Shields in thick array Of depth immeasurable: Anon they move In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood Of Flutes and soft Recorders; such as rais'd To hight of noblest temper Hero's old Arming to Battel, and in stead of rage Deliberate valour breath'd, firm and unmov'd With dread of death to flight or foul retreat, Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage With solemn touches, troubl'd thoughts, and chase Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they Breathing united force with fixed thought Mov'd on in silence to soft Pipes that charm'd Thir painful steps o're the burnt soyle; and now Advanc't in view, they stand, a horrid Front Of dreadful length and dazling Arms, in guise Of Warriers old with order'd Spear and Shield, Awaiting what command thir mighty Chief Had to impose: He through the armed Files Darts his experienc't eye, and soon traverse The whole Battalion views, thir order due, Thir visages and stature as of Gods, Thir number last he summs. And now his heart Distends with pride, and hardning in his strength Glories: For never since created man, Met such imbodied force, as nam'd with these Could merit more then that small infantry Warr'd on by Cranes: though all the Giant brood Of Phlegra with th' Heroic Race were joyn'd That fought at Theb's and Ilium, on each side Mixt with auxiliar Gods; and what resounds In Fable or Romance of Uthers Sons Begirt with British and Armoric Knights; And all who since Baptiz'd or Infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his Peerage fell By Fontarabbia. Thus far these beyond Compare of mortal prowess, yet observ'd Thir dread commander: he above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent Stood like a Towr; his form had yet not lost All her Original brightness, nor appear'd Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess Of Glory obscur'd; As when the Sun new ris'n Looks through the Horizontal misty Air Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds On half the Nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarch. Dark'n'd so, yet shon Above them all th' Arch Angel; but his face Deep scars of Thunder had intrencht, and care Sat on his faded cheek, but under Browes Of dauntless courage, and considerate Pride Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast Signs of remorse and passion to behold The fellows of his crime, the followers rather (Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd For ever now to have thir lot in pain, Millions of Spirits for his fault amerc't Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendors flung For his revolt, yet faithfull how they stood, Thir Glory witherd. As when Heavens Fire Hath scath'd the Forrest Oaks, or Mountain Pines, With singed top thir stately growth though bare Stands on the blasted Heath. He now prepar'd To speak; whereat thir doubl'd Ranks they bend From wing to wing, and half enclose him round With all his Peers: attention held them mute. Thrice he assayd, and thrice in spight of scorn, Tears such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last Words interwove with sighs found out thir way. O Myriads of immortal Spirits, O Powers Matchless, but with th' Almighty, and that strife Was not inglorious, though th' event was dire, As this place testifies, and this dire change Hateful to utter: but what power of mind Foreseeing or presaging, from the Depth Of knowledge past or present, could have fear'd, How such united force of Gods, how such As stood like these, could ever know repulse? For who can yet beleeve, though after loss, That all these puissant Legions, whose exile Hath emptied Heav'n, shall fail to re-ascend Self-rais'd, and repossess thir native seat? For mee be witness all the Host of Heav'n, If counsels different, or danger shun'd By mee, have lost our hopes. But he who reigns Monarch in Heav'n, till then as one secure Sat on his Throne, upheld by old repute, Consent or custome, and his Regal State Put forth at full, but still his strength conceal'd, Which tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall. Henceforth his might we know, and know our own So as not either to provoke, or dread New warr, provok't; our better part remains To work in close design, by fraud or guile What force effected not: that he no less At length from us may find, who overcomes By force, hath overcome but half his foe. Space may produce new Worlds; whereof so rife There went a fame in Heav'n that he ere long Intended to create, and therein plant A generation, whom his choice regard Should favour equal to the Sons of Heaven: Thither, if but to pry, shall be perhaps Our first eruption, thither or elsewhere: For this Infernal Pit shall never hold Caelestial Spirits in Bondage, nor th' Abyss Long under darkness cover. But these thoughts Full Counsel must mature: Peace is despaird, For who can think Submission? Warr then, Warr Open or understood must be resolv'd. He spake: and to confirm his words, out-flew Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze Far round illumin'd hell: highly they rag'd Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped Arms Clash'd on thir sounding Shields the din of war, Hurling defiance toward the Vault of Heav'n. There stood a hill not far whose griesly top Belch'd fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, The work of Sulphur. Thither wing'd with speed A numerous Brigad hasten'd. As when Bands Of Pioners with Spade and Pickax arm'd Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field, Or cast a Rampart. Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav'n, for ev'n in heav'n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav'ns pavement, trod'n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy'd In vision beatific: by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught Ransack'd the Center, and with impious hands Rifl'd the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Op'nd into the Hill a spacious wound And dig'd out ribs of Gold. Let none admire That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best Deserve the precious bane. And here let those Who boast in mortal things, and wond'ring tell Of Babel, and the works of Memphian Kings Learn how thir greatest Monuments of Fame, And Strength and Art are easily out-done By Spirits reprobate, and in an hour What in an age they with incessant toyle And hands innumerable scarce perform. Nigh on the Plain in many cells prepar'd That underneath had veins of liquid fire Sluc'd from the Lake, a second multitude With wond'rous Art found out the massie Ore, Severing each kind, and scum'd the Bullion dross: A third as soon had form'd within the ground A various mould, and from the boyling cells By strange conveyance fill'd each hollow nook, As in an Organ from one blast of wind To many a row of Pipes the sound-board breaths. Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With Golden Architrave; nor did there want Cornice or Freeze, with bossy Sculptures grav'n, The Roof was fretted Gold. Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat Thir Kings, when Aegypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxurie. Th' ascending pile Stood fixt her stately highth, and strait the dores Op'ning thir brazen foulds discover wide Within, her ample spaces, o're the smooth And level pavement: from the arched roof Pendant by suttle Magic many a row Of Starry Lamps and blazing Cressets fed With Naphtha and Asphaltus yeilded light As from a sky. The hasty multitude Admiring enter'd, and the work some praise And some the Architect: his hand was known In Heav'n by many a Towred structure high, Where Scepter'd Angels held thir residence, And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule, Each in his Hierarchie, the Orders bright. Nor was his name unheard or unador'd In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land Men call'd him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o're the Chrystal Battlements; from Morn To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve, A Summers day; and with the setting Sun Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star, On Lemnos th' Aegaean Ile: thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught avail'd him now To have built in Heav'n high Towrs; nor did he scape By all his Engins, but was headlong sent With his industrious crew to build in hell. Mean while the winged Haralds by command Of Sovran power, with awful Ceremony And Trumpets sound throughout the Host proclaim A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandaemonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers: thir summons call'd From every Band and squared Regiment By place or choice the worthiest; they anon With hunderds and with thousands trooping came Attended: all access was throng'd, the Gates And Porches wide, but chief the spacious Hall (Though like a cover'd field, where Champions bold Wont ride in arm'd, and at the Soldans chair Defi'd the best of Panim chivalry To mortal combat or carreer with Lance) Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air, Brusht with the hiss of russling wings. As Bees In spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides, Pour forth thir populous youth about the Hive In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers Flie to and fro, or on the smoothed Plank, The suburb of thir Straw-built Cittadel, New rub'd with Baum, expatiate and confer Thir State affairs. So thick the aerie crowd Swarm'd and were straitn'd; till the Signal giv'n Behold a wonder! they but now who seemd In bigness to surpass Earths Giant Sons Now less then smallest Dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pigmean Race Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faerie Elves, Whose midnight Revels, by a Forrest side Or Fountain some belated Peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the Moon Sits Arbitress, and neerer to the Earth Wheels her pale course, they on thir mirth and dance Intent, with jocond Music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds. Thus incorporeal Spirits to smallest forms Reduc'd thir shapes immense, and were at large, Though without number still amidst the Hall Of that infernal Court. But far within And in thir own dimensions like themselves The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim In close recess and secret conclave sat A thousand Demy-Gods on golden seat's, Frequent and full. After short silence then And summons read, the great consult began.
Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of victory As he defeated – dying – On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!
There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes – Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar, But internal difference – Where the Meanings, are – None may teach it – Any – 'Tis the seal Despair – An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air – When it comes, the Landscape listens – Shadows – hold their breath – When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death –
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine Following, above th' Olympian Hill I soare, Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the Name I call: for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st, but Heav'nlie borne, Before the Hills appeerd, or Fountain flow'd, Thou with Eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy Sister, and with her didst play In presence of th' Almightie Father, pleas'd With thy Celestial Song. Up led by thee Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presum'd, An Earthlie Guest, and drawn Empyreal Aire, Thy tempring; with like safetie guided down Return me to my Native Element: Least from this flying Steed unrein'd, (as once Bellerophon, though from a lower Clime) Dismounted, on th' Aleian Field I fall Erroneous there to wander and forlorne. Half yet remaines unsung, but narrower bound Within the visible Diurnal Spheare; Standing on Earth, not rapt above the Pole, More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang'd To hoarce or mute, though fall'n on evil dayes, On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visit'st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn Purples the East: still govern thou my Song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. But drive farr off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the Race Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard In Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Eares To rapture, till the savage clamor dround Both Harp and Voice; nor could the Muse defend Her Son. So fail not thou, who thee implores: For thou are Heav'nlie, shee an emptie dreame. Say Goddess, what ensu'd when Raphael, The affable Arch-Angel, had forewarn'd Adam by dire example to beware Apostasie, by what befell in Heaven To those Apostates, least the like befall In Paradise to Adam or his Race, Charg'd not to touch the interdicted Tree, If they transgress, and slight that sole command, So easily obeyd amid the choice Of all tastes else to please thir appetite, Though wandring. He with his consorted Eve The storie heard attentive, and was fill'd With admiration, and deep Muse to hear Of things so high and strange, things to thir thought So unimaginable as hate in Heav'n, And Warr so neer the Peace of God in bliss With such confusion: but the evil soon Driv'n back redounded as a flood on those From whom it sprung, impossible to mix With Blessedness. Whence Adam soon repeal'd The doubts that in his heart arose: and now Led on, yet sinless, with desire to know What neerer might concern him, how this World Of Heav'n and Earth conspicious first began, When, and whereof created, for what cause, What within Eden or without was done Before his memorie, as one whose drouth Yet scarce allay'd still eyes the current streame, Whose liquid murmur heard new thirst excites, Proceeded thus to ask his Heav'nly Guest. Great things, and full of wonder in our eares, Farr differing from this World, thou hast reveal'd Divine interpreter, by favour sent Down from the Empyrean to forewarne Us timely of what might else have bin our loss, Unknown, which human knowledg could not reach: For which to the infinitly Good we owe Immortal thanks, and his admonishment Receave with solemne purpose to observe Immutably his sovran will, the end Of what we are. But since thou hast voutsaf't Gently for our instruction to impart Things above Earthly thought, which yet concernd Our knowing, as to highest wisdom seemd, Deign to descend now lower, and relate What may no less perhaps availe us known, How first began this Heav'n which we behold Distant so high, with moving Fires adornd Innumerable, and this which yeelds or fills All space, the ambient Aire wide interfus'd Imbracing round this florid Earth, what cause Mov'd the Creator in his holy Rest Through all Eternitie so late to build In Chaos, and the work begun, how soon Absolv'd, if unforbid thou maist unfould What wee, not to explore the secrets aske Of his Eternal Empire, but the more To magnifie his works, the more we know. And the great Light of Day yet wants to run Much of his Race though steep, suspens in Heav'n Held by thy voice, thy potent voice he heares, And longer will delay to heare thee tell His Generation, and the rising Birth Of Nature from the unapparent Deep: Or if the Starr of Eevning and the Moon Haste to thy audience, Night with her will bring Silence, and Sleep listning to thee will watch, Or we can bid his absence, till thy Song End, and dismiss thee ere the Morning shine. Thus Adam his illustrious Guest besought: And thus the Godlike Angel answerd milde. This also thy request with caution askt Obtaine: though to recount Almightie works What words or tongue of Seraph can suffice, Or heart of man suffice to comprehend? Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve To glorifie the Maker, and inferr Thee also happier, shall not be withheld Thy hearing, such Commission from above I have receav'd, to answer thy desire Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope Things not reveal'd, which th' invisible King, Onely Omniscient, hath supprest in Night, To none communicable in Earth or Heaven: Anough is left besides to search and know. But Knowledge is as food, and needs no less Her Temperance over Appetite, to know In measure what the mind may well contain, Oppresses else with Surfet, and soon turns Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Winde. Know then, that after Lucifer from Heav'n (So call him, brighter once amidst the Host Of Angels, then that Starr the Starrs among) Fell with his flaming Legions through the Deep Into his place, and the great Son returnd Victorious with his Saints, th' Omnipotent Eternal Father from his Throne beheld Thir multitude, and to his Son thus spake. At least our envious Foe hath fail'd, who thought All like himself rebellious, by whose aid This inaccessible high strength, the seat Of Deitie supream, us dispossest, He trusted to have seis'd, and into fraud Drew many, whom thir place knows here no more; Yet farr the greater part have kept, I see, Thir station, Heav'n yet populous retaines Number sufficient to possess her Realmes Though wide, and this high Temple to frequent With Ministeries due and solemn Rites: But least his heart exalt him in the harme Already done, to have dispeopl'd Heav'n My damage fondly deem'd, I can repaire That detriment, if such it be to lose Self-lost, and in a moment will create Another World, out of one man a Race Of men innumerable, there to dwell, Not here, till by degrees of merit rais'd They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tri'd, And Earth be chang'd to Heav'n, & Heav'n to Earth, One Kingdom, Joy and Union without end. Mean while inhabit laxe, ye Powers of Heav'n, And thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee This I perform, speak thou, and be it don: My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee I send along, ride forth, and bid the Deep Within appointed bounds be Heav'n and Earth, Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I uncircumscrib'd my self retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessitie and Chance Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate. So spake th' Almightie, and to what he spake His Word, the filial Godhead, gave effect. Immediate are the Acts of God, more swift Then time or motion, but to human ears Cannot without process of speech be told, So told as earthly notion can receave. Great triumph and rejoycing was in Heav'n When such was heard declar'd the Almightie's will; Glorie they sung to the most High, good will To future men, and in thir dwellings peace: Glorie to him whose just avenging ire Had driven out th' ungodly from his sight And th' habitations of the just; to him Glorie and praise, whose wisdom had ordain'd Good out of evil to create, in stead Of Spirits maligne a better Race to bring Into thir vacant room, and thence diffuse His good to Worlds and Ages infinite. So sang the Hierarchies: Mean while the Son On his great Expedition now appeer'd, Girt with Omnipotence, with Radiance crown'd Of Majestie Divine, Sapience and Love Immense, and all his Father in him shon. About his Chariot numberless were pour'd Cherub and Seraph, Potentates and Thrones, And Vertues, winged Spirits, and Chariots wing'd, From the Armoury of God, where stand of old Myriads between two brazen Mountains lodg'd Against a solemn day, harnest at hand, Celestial Equipage; and now came forth Spontaneous, for within them Spirit livd, Attendant on thir Lord: Heav'n op'nd wide Her ever during Gates, Harmonious sound On golden Hinges moving, to let forth The King of Glorie in his powerful Word And Spirit coming to create new Worlds. On heav'nly ground they stood, and from the shore They view'd the vast immeasurable Abyss Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wilde, Up from the bottom turn'd by furious windes And surging waves, as Mountains to assault Heav'ns highth, and with the Center mix the Pole. Silence, ye troubl'd waves, and thou Deep, peace, Said then th' Omnific Word, your discord end: Nor staid, but on the Wings of Cherubim Uplifted, in Paternal Glorie rode Farr into Chaos, and the World unborn; For Chaos heard his voice: him all his Traine Follow'd in bright procession to behold Creation, and the wonders of his might. Then staid the fervid Wheeles, and in his hand He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things: One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd Round through the vast profunditie obscure, And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds, This be thy just Circumference, O World. Thus God the Heav'n created, thus the Earth, Matter unform'd and void: Darkness profound Cover'd th' Abyss: but on the watrie calme His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspred, And vital vertue infus'd, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg'd The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob'd Like things to like, the rest to several place Disparted, and between spun out the Air, And Earth self ballanc't on her Center hung. Let ther be Light, said God, and forthwith Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure Sprung from the Deep, and from her Native East To journie through the airie gloom began, Sphear'd in a radiant Cloud, for yet the Sun Was not; shee in a cloudie Tabernacle Sojourn'd the while. God saw the Light was good; And light from darkness by the Hemisphere Divided: Light the Day, and Darkness Night He nam'd. Thus was the first Day Eev'n and Morn: Nor past uncelebrated, nor unsung By the Celestial Quires, when Orient Light Exhaling first from Darkness they beheld; Birth-day of Heav'n and Earth; with joy and shout The hollow Universal Orb they fill'd, And touch't thir Golden Harps, and hymning prais'd God and his works, Creatour him they sung, Both when first Eevning was, and when first Morn. Again, God said, let ther be Firmament Amid the Waters, and let it divide The Waters from the Waters: and God made The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus'd In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great Round: partition firm and sure, The Waters underneath from those above Dividing: for as Earth, so he the World Built on circumfluous Waters calme, in wide Crystallin Ocean, and the loud misrule Of Chaos farr remov'd, least fierce extreames Contiguous might distemper the whole frame: And Heav'n he nam'd the Firmament: So Eev'n And Morning Chorus sung the second Day. The Earth was form'd, but in the Womb as yet Of Waters, Embryon immature involv'd, Appeer'd not: over all the face of Earth Main Ocean flow'd, not idle, but with warme Prolific humour soft'ning all her Globe, Fermented the great Mother to conceave, Satiate with genial moisture, when God said Be gather'd now ye Waters under Heav'n Into one place, and let dry Land appeer. Immediately the Mountains huge appeer Emergent, and thir broad bare backs upheave Into the Clouds, thir tops ascend the Skie: So high as heav'd the tumid Hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep, Capacious bed of Waters: thither they Hasted with glad precipitance, uprowld As drops on dust conglobing from the drie; Part rise in crystal Wall, or ridge direct, For haste; such flight the great command impress'd On the swift flouds: as Armies at the call Of Trumpet (for of Armies thou hast heard) Troop to thir Standard, so the watrie throng, Wave rowling after Wave, where way they found, If steep, with torrent rapture, if through Plaine, Soft-ebbing; nor withstood them Rock or Hill, But they, or under ground, or circuit wide With Serpent errour wandring, found thir way, And on the washie Oose deep Channels wore; Easie, e're God had bid the ground be drie, All but within those banks, where Rivers now Stream, and perpetual draw thir humid traine. The dry Land, Earth, and the great receptacle Of congregated Waters he call'd Seas: And saw that it was good, and said, Let th' Earth Put forth the verdant Grass, Herb yielding Seed, And Fruit Tree yielding Fruit after her kind; Whose Seed is in her self upon the Earth. He scarce had said, when the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn'd, Brought forth the tender Grass, whose verdure clad Her Universal Face with pleasant green, Then Herbs of every leaf, that sudden flour'd Op'ning thir various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet: and these scarce blown, Forth flourish't thick the clustring Vine, forth crept The smelling Gourd, up stood the cornie Reed Embattell'd in her field: and the humble Shrub, And Bush with frizl'd hair implicit: last Rose as in Dance the stately Trees, and spred Thir branches hung with copious Fruit; or gemm'd Thir blossoms: with high woods the hills were crownd, With tufts the vallies and each fountain side, With borders long the Rivers. That Earth now Seemd like to Heav'n, a seat where Gods might dwell, Or wander with delight, and love to haunt Her sacred shades: though God had yet not rain'd Upon the Earth, and man to till the ground None was, but from the Earth a dewie Mist Went up and waterd all the ground, and each Plant of the field, which e're it was in the Earth God made, and every Herb, before it grew On the green stemm; God saw that it was good. So Eev'n and Morn recorded the Third Day. Again th' Almightie spake: Let there be Lights High in th' expanse of Heaven to divide The Day from Night; and let them be for Signes, For Seasons, and for Dayes, and circling Years, And let them be for Lights as I ordaine Thir Office in the Firmament of Heav'n To give Light on the Earth; and it was so. And God made two great Lights, great for thir use To Man, the greater to have rule by Day, The less by Night alterne: and made the Starrs, And set them in the Firmament of Heav'n To illuminate the Earth, and rule the Day In thir vicissitude, and rule the Night, And Light from Darkness to divide. God saw, Surveying his great Work, that it was good: For of Celestial Bodies first the Sun A mightie Spheare he fram'd, unlightsom first, Though of Ethereal Mould: then form'd the Moon Globose, and every magnitude of Starrs, And sowd with Starrs the Heav'n thick as a field: Of Light by farr the greater part he took, Transplanted from her cloudie Shrine, and plac'd In the Suns Orb, made porous to receive And drink the liquid Light, firm to retaine Her gather'd beams, great Palace now of Light. Hither as to thir Fountain other Starrs Repairing, in thir gold'n Urns draw Light, And hence the Morning Planet guilds her horns; By tincture or reflection they augment Thir small peculiar, though from human sight So farr remote, with diminution seen. First in his East the glorious Lamp was seen, Regent of Day, and all th' Horizon round Invested with bright Rayes, jocond to run His Longitude through Heav'ns high rode: the gray Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danc'd Shedding sweet influence: less bright the Moon, But opposite in leveld West was set His mirror, with full face borrowing her Light From him, for other light she needed none In that aspect, and still that distance keepes Till night, then in the East her turn she shines, Revolvd on Heav'ns great Axle, and her Reign With thousand lesser Lights dividual holds, With thousand thousand Starres, that then appeer'd Spangling the Hemisphere: then first adornd With thir bright Luminaries that Set and Rose, Glad Eevning and glad Morn crownd the fourth day. And God said, let the Waters generate Reptil with Spawn abundant, living Soule: And let Fowle flie above the Earth, with wings Displayd on the op'n Firmament of Heav'n. And God created the great Whales, and each Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously The waters generated by thir kindes, And every Bird of wing after his kinde; And saw that it was good, and bless'd them, saying, Be fruitful, multiply, and in the Seas And Lakes and running Streams the waters fill; And let the Fowle be multiply'd on the Earth. Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek and Bay With Frie innumerable swarme, and Shoales Of Fish that with thir Finns and shining Scales Glide under the green Wave, in Sculles that oft Bank the mid Sea: part single or with mate Graze the Sea weed thir pasture, and through Groves Of Coral stray, or sporting with quick glance Show to the Sun thir wav'd coats dropt with Gold, Or in thir Pearlie shells at ease, attend Moist nutriment, or under Rocks thir food In jointed Armour watch: on smooth the Seale, And bended Dolphins play: part huge of bulk Wallowing unweildie, enormous in thir Gate Tempest the Ocean: there Leviathan Hugest of living Creatures, on the Deep Stretcht like a Promontorie sleeps or swimmes, And seems a moving Land, and at his Gilles Draws in, and at his Trunck spouts out a Sea. Mean while the tepid Caves, and Fens and shoares Thir Brood as numerous hatch, from the Egg that soon Bursting with kindly rupture forth disclos'd Thir callow young, but featherd soon and fledge They summ'd thir Penns, and soaring th' air sublime With clang despis'd the ground, under a cloud In prospect; there the Eagle and the Stork On Cliffs and Cedar tops thir Eyries build: Part loosly wing the Region, part more wise In common, rang'd in figure wedge thir way, Intelligent of seasons, and set forth Thir Aierie Caravan high over Sea's Flying, and over Lands with mutual wing Easing thir flight; so stears the prudent Crane Her annual Voiage, born on Windes; the Aire Floats, as they pass, fann'd with unnumber'd plumes: From Branch to Branch the smaller Birds with song So1ac'd the Woods, and spred thir painted wings Till Ev'n, nor then the solemn Nightingal Ceas'd warbling, but all night tun'd her soft layes: Others on Silver Lakes and Rivers Bath'd Thir downie Brest; the Swan with Arched neck Between her white wings mantling proudly, Rowes Her state with Oarie feet: yet oft they quit The Dank, and rising on stiff Pennons, towre The mid Aereal Skie: Others on ground Walk'd firm; the crested Cock whose clarion sounds The silent hours, and th' other whose gay Traine Adorns him, colour'd with the Florid hue Of Rainbows and Starrie Eyes. The Waters thus With Fish replenisht, and the Aire with Fowle, Ev'ning and Morn solemniz'd the Fift day. The Sixt, and of Creation last arose With Eevning Harps and Mattin, when God said, Let th' Earth bring forth Foul living in her kinde, Cattel and Creeping things, and Beast of the Earth, Each in their kinde. The Earth obey'd, and strait Op'ning her fertil Woomb teem'd at a Birth Innumerous living Creatures, perfet formes, Limb'd and full grown: out of the ground up rose As from his Laire the wilde Beast where he wonns In Forrest wilde, in Thicket, Brake, or Den; Among the Trees in Pairs they rose, they walk'd: The Cattel in the Fields and Meddowes green: Those rare and solitarie, these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad Herds upsprung. The grassie Clods now Calv'd, now half appeer'd The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds, And Rampant shakes his Brinded main; the Ounce, The Libbard, and the Tyger, as the Moale Rising, the crumbl'd Earth above them threw In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground Bore up his branching head: scarse from his mould Behemoth biggest born of Earth upheav'd His vastness: Fleec't the Flocks and bleating rose, As Plants: ambiguous between Sea and Land The River Horse and scalie Crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or Worme; those wav'd thir limber fans For wings, and smallest Lineaments exact In all the Liveries dect of Summers pride With spots of Gold and Purple, azure and green: These as a line thir long dimension drew, Streaking the ground with sinuous trace; not all Minims of Nature; some of Serpent kinde Wondrous in length and corpulence involv'd Thir Snakie foulds, and added wings. First crept The Parsimonious Emmet, provident Of future, in small room large heart enclos'd, Pattern of just equalitie perhaps Hereafter, join'd in her popular Tribes Of Commonaltie: swarming next appeer'd The Female Bee that feeds her Husband Drone Deliciously, and builds her waxen Cells With Honey stor'd: the rest are numberless, And thou thir Natures know'st, & gav'st them Names, Needless to thee repeated; nor unknown The Serpent suttl'st Beast of all the field, Of huge extent somtimes, with brazen Eyes And hairie Main terrific, though to thee Not noxious, but obedient at thy call. Now Heav'n in all her Glorie shon, and rowld Her motions, as the great first Movers hand First wheeld thir course; Earth in her rich attire Consummate lovly smil'd; Aire, Water, Earth, By Fowl, Fish, Beast, was flown, was swum, was walkt Frequent; and of the Sixt day yet remain'd; There wanted yet the Master work, the end Of all yet don; a Creature who not prone And Brute as other Creatures, but endu'd With Sanctitie of Reason, might erect His Stature, and upright with Front serene Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence Magnanimous to correspond with Heav'n, But grateful to acknowledge whence his good Descends, thither with heart and voice and eyes Directed in Devotion, to adore And worship God Supream, who made him chief Of all his works; therefore the Omnipotent Eternal Father (For where is not hee Present) thus to his Son audibly spake. Let us make now Man in our image, Man In our similitude, and let them rule Over the Fish and Fowle of Sea and Aire, Beast of the Field, and over all the Earth, And every creeping thing that creeps the ground. This said, he formd thee, Adam, thee O Man Dust of the ground, and in thy nostrils breath'd The breath of Life; in his own Image hee Created thee, in the Image of God Express, and thou becam'st a living Soul. Male he created thee, but thy consort Female for Race; then bless'd Mankinde, and said, Be fruitful, multiplie, and fill the Earth, Subdue it, and throughout Dominion hold Over Fish of the Sea, and Fowle of the Aire, And every living thing that moves on the Earth. Wherever thus created, for no place Is yet distinct by name, thence, as thou knows't He brought thee into this delicious Grove, This Garden, planted with the Trees of God, Delectable both to behold and taste; And freely all thir pleasant fruit for food Gave thee, all sorts are here that all th' Earth yields, Varietie without end; but of the Tree Which tasted works knowledge of Good and Evil, Thou mai'st not; in the day thou eat'st, thou di'st; Death is the penaltie impos'd, beware, And govern well thy appetite, least sin Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death. Here finish'd hee, and all that he had made View'd, and behold all was entirely good; So Ev'n and Morn accomplish'd the Sixt day: Yet not till the Creator from his work Desisting, though unwearied, up returnd Up to the Heav'n of Heav'ns his high abode, Thence to behold this new created World Th' addition of his Empire, how it shew'd In prospect from his Throne, how good, how faire, Answering his great Idea. Up he rode Followd with acclamation and the sound Symphonious of ten thousand Harpes that tun'd Angelic harmonies: the Earth, the Aire Resounded, (thou remember'st, for thou heardst) The Heav'ns and all the Constellations rung, The Planets in thir station list'ning stood, While the bright Pomp ascended jubilant. Open, ye everlasting Gates, they sung, Open, ye Heav'ns, your living dores; let in The great Creator from his work returnd Magnificent, his Six days work, a World; Open, and henceforth oft; for God will deigne To visit oft the dwellings of just Men Delighted, and with frequent intercourse Thither will send his winged Messengers On errands of supernal Grace. So sung The glorious Train ascending: He through Heav'n, That open'd wide her blazing Portals, led To Gods Eternal house direct the way, A broad and ample rode, whose dust is Gold And pavement Starrs, as Starrs to thee appeer, Seen in the Galaxie, that Milkie way Which nightly as a circling Zone thou seest Pouderd with Starrs. And now on Earth the Seventh Eev'ning arose in Eden, for the Sun Was set, and twilight from the East came on, Forerunning Night; when at the holy mount Of Heav'ns high-seated top, th' Impereal Throne Of Godhead, fixt for ever firm and sure, The Filial Power arriv'd, and sate him down With his great Father (for he also went Invisible, yet staid (such priviledge Hath Omnipresence) and the work ordain'd, Author and end of all things, and from work Now resting, bless'd and hallowd the Seav'nth day, As resting on that day from all his work, But not in silence holy kept; the Harp Had work and rested not, the solemn Pipe, And Dulcimer, all Organs of sweet stop, All sounds on Fret by String or Golden Wire Temper'd sort Tunings, intermixt with Voice Choral or Unison: of incense Clouds Fuming from Golden Censers hid the Mount. Creation and the Six dayes acts they sung, Great are thy works, Jehovah, infinite Thy power; what thought can measure thee or tongue Relate thee; greater now in thy return Then from the Giant Angels; thee that day Thy Thunders magnifi'd; but to create Is greater then created to destroy. Who can impair thee, mighty King, or bound Thy Empire? easily the proud attempt Of Spirits apostat and thir Counsels vaine Thou hast repeld, while impiously they thought Thee to diminish, and from thee withdraw The number of thy worshippers. Who seekes To lessen thee, against his purpose serves To manifest the more thy might: his evil Thou usest, and from thence creat'st more good. Witness this new-made World, another Heav'n From Heaven Gate not farr, founded in view On the cleer Hyaline, the Glassie Sea; Of amplitude almost immense, with Starr's Numerous, and every Starr perhaps a World Of destind habitation; but thou know'st Thir seasons: among these the seat of men, Earth with her nether Ocean circumfus'd, Thir pleasant dwelling place. Thrice happie men, And sons of men, whom God hath thus advanc't, Created in his Image, there to dwell And worship him, and in reward to rule Over his Works, on Earth, in Sea, or Air, And multiply a Race of Worshippers Holy and just: thrice happie if they know Thir happiness, and persevere upright. So sung they, and the Empyrean rung, With Halleluiahs: Thus was Sabbath kept. And thy request think now fulfill'd, that ask'd How first this World and face of things began, And what before thy memorie was don From the beginning, that posteritie Informd by thee might know; if else thou seekst Aught, not surpassing human measure, say.
NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd To sit indulgent, and with him partake Rural repast, permitting him the while Venial discourse unblam'd: I now must change Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt, And disobedience: On the part of Heav'n Now alienated, distance and distaste, Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, That brought into this World a world of woe, Sinne and her shadow Death, and Miserie Deaths Harbinger: Sad task, yet argument Not less but more Heroic then the wrauth Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu'd Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd, Or Neptun's ire or Juno's, that so long Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's Son; If answerable style I can obtaine Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes Her nightly visitation unimplor'd, And dictates to me slumbring, or inspires Easie my unpremeditated Verse: Since first this Subject for Heroic Song Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late; Not sedulous by Nature to indite Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument Heroic deem'd, chief maistrie to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights In Battels feign'd; the better fortitude Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom Unsung; or to describe Races and Games, Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields, Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds; Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgious Knights At Joust and Torneament; then marshal'd Feast Serv'd up in Hall with Sewers, and Seneshals; The skill of Artifice or Office mean, Not that which justly gives Heroic name To Person or to Poem. Mee of these Nor skilld nor studious, higher Argument Remaines, sufficient of it self to raise That name, unless an age too late, or cold Climat, or Years damp my intended wing Deprest, and much they may, if all be mine, Not Hers who brings it nightly to my Ear. The Sun was sunk, and after him the Starr Of Hesperus, whose Office is to bring Twilight upon the Earth, short Arbiter Twixt Day and Night, and now from end to end Nights Hemisphere had veild the Horizon round: When Satan who late fled before the threats Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improv'd In meditated fraud and malice, bent On mans destruction, maugre what might hap Of heavier on himself, fearless return'd. By Night he fled, and at Midnight return'd From compassing the Earth, cautious of day, Since Uriel Regent of the Sun descri'd His entrance, and forewarnd the Cherubim That kept thir watch; thence full of anguish driv'n, The space of seven continu'd Nights he rode With darkness, thrice the Equinoctial Line He circl'd, four times cross'd the Carr of Night From Pole to Pole, traversing each Colure; On the eighth return'd, and on the Coast averse From entrance or Cherubic Watch, by stealth Found unsuspected way. There was a place, Now not, though Sin, not Time, first wraught the change, Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise Into a Gulf shot under ground, till part Rose up a Fountain by the Tree of Life; In with the River sunk, and with it rose Satan involv'd in rising Mist, then sought Where to lie hid; Sea he had searcht and Land From Eden over Pontus, and the PooleMaotis, up beyond the River Ob; Downward as farr Antartic; and in length West from Orontes to the Ocean barr'd At Darien, thence to the Land where flowesGanges and Indus: thus the Orb he roam'd With narrow search; and with inspection deep Consider'd every Creature, which of all Most opportune might serve his Wiles, and found The Serpent suttlest Beast of all the Field. Him after long debate, irresolute Of thoughts revolv'd, his final sentence chose Fit Vessel, fittest Imp of fraud, in whom To enter, and his dark suggestions hide From sharpest sight: for in the wilie Snake, Whatever sleights none would suspicious mark, As from his wit and native suttletie Proceeding, which in other Beasts observ'd Doubt might beget of Diabolic pow'r Active within beyond the sense of brute. Thus he resolv'd, but first from inward griefe His bursting passion into plaints thus pour'd: O Earth, how like to Heav'n, if not preferr'd More justly, Seat worthier of Gods, as built With second thoughts, reforming what was old! For what God after better worse would build? Terrestrial Heav'n, danc't round by other Heav'ns That shine, yet bear thir bright officious Lamps, Light above Light, for thee alone, as seems, In thee concentring all thir precious beams Of sacred influence: As God in Heav'n Is Center, yet extends to all, so thou Centring receav'st from all those Orbs; in thee, Not in themselves, all thir known vertue appeers Productive in Herb, Plant, and nobler birth Of Creatures animate with gradual life Of Growth, Sense, Reason, all summ'd up in Man. With what delight could I have walkt thee round, If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange Of Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines, Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forrest crownd, Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these Find place or refuge; and the more I see Pleasures about me, so much more I feel Torment within me, as from the hateful siege Of contraries; all good to me becomes Bane, and in Heav'n much worse would be my state. But neither here seek I, no nor in Heav'n To dwell, unless by maistring Heav'ns Supreame; Nor hope to be my self less miserable By what I seek, but others to make such As I, though thereby worse to me redound: For onely in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts; and him destroyd, Or won to what may work his utter loss, For whom all this was made, all this will soon Follow, as to him linkt in weal or woe, In wo then; that destruction wide may range: To mee shall be the glorie sole among The infernal Powers, in one day to have marr'd What he Almightie styl'd, six Nights and Days Continu'd making, and who knows how long Before had bin contriving, though perhaps Not longer then since I in one Night freed From servitude inglorious welnigh half Th' Angelic Name, and thinner left the throng Of his adorers: hee to be aveng'd, And to repaire his numbers thus impair'd, Whether such vertue spent of old now faild More Angels to Create, if they at least Are his Created, or to spite us more, Determin'd to advance into our room A Creature form'd of Earth, and him endow, Exalted from so base original, With Heav'nly spoils, our spoils: What he decreed He effected; Man he made, and for him built Magnificent this World, and Earth his seat, Him Lord pronounc'd, and, O indignitie! Subjected to his service Angel wings, And flaming Ministers to watch and tend Thir earthy Charge: Of these the vigilance I dread, and to elude, thus wrapt in mist Of midnight vapor glide obscure, and prie In every Bush and Brake, where hap may finde The Serpent sleeping, in whose mazie foulds To hide me, and the dark intent I bring. O foul descent! that I who erst contended With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime, This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the hight of Deitie aspir'd; But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? who aspires must down as low As high he soard, obnoxious first or last To basest things. Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long back on it self recoiles; Let it; I reck not, so it light well aim'd, Since higher I fall short, on him who next Provokes my envie, this new Favorite Of Heav'n, this Man of Clay, Son of despite, Whom us the more to spite his Maker rais'd From dust: spite then with spite is best repaid. So saying, through each Thicket Danck or Drie, Like a black mist low creeping, he held on His midnight search, where soonest he might finde The Serpent: him fast sleeping soon he found In Labyrinth of many a round self-rowld, His head the midst, well stor'd with suttle wiles: Not yet in horrid Shade or dismal Den, Nor nocent yet, but on the grassie Herbe Fearless unfeard he slept: in at his Mouth The Devil enterd, and his brutal sense, In heart or head, possessing soon inspir'd With act intelligential, but his sleep Disturbd not, waiting close th' approach of Morn. Now when as sacred Light began to dawne In Eden on the humid Flours, that breathd Thir morning incense, when all things that breath, From th' Earths great Altar send up silent praise To the Creator, and his Nostrils fill With grateful Smell, forth came the human pair And joind thir vocal Worship to the Quire Of Creatures wanting voice, that done, partake The season, prime for sweetest Sents and Aires: Then commune how that day they best may ply Thir growing work: for much thir work outgrew The hands dispatch of two Gardning so wide. And Eve first to her Husband thus began.Adam, well may we labour still to dress This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour, Our pleasant task enjoyn'd, but till more hands Aid us, the work under our labour grows, Luxurious by restraint; what we by day Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind, One night or two with wanton growth derides Tending to wilde. Thou therefore now advise Or hear what to my minde first thoughts present, Let us divide our labours, thou where choice Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind The Woodbine round this Arbour, or direct The clasping Ivie where to climb, while I In yonder Spring of Roses intermixt With Myrtle, find what to redress till Noon: For while so near each other thus all day Our taske we choose, what wonder if so near Looks intervene and smiles, or object new Casual discourse draw on, which intermits Our dayes work brought to little, though begun Early, and th' hour of Supper comes unearn'd. To whom mild answer Adam thus return'd. Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond Compare above all living Creatures deare, Well hast thou motion'd, well thy thoughts imployd How we might best fulfill the work which here God hath assign'd us, nor of me shalt pass Unprais'd: for nothing lovelier can be found In Woman, then to studie houshold good, And good workes in her Husband to promote. Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd Labour, as to debarr us when we need Refreshment, whether food, or talk between, Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow, To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food, Love not the lowest end of human life. For not to irksom toile, but to delight He made us, and delight to Reason joyn'd. These paths & Bowers doubt not but our joynt hands Will keep from Wilderness with ease, as wide As we need walk, till younger hands ere long Assist us: But if much converse perhaps Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield. For solitude somtimes is best societie, And short retirement urges sweet returne. But other doubt possesses me, least harm Befall thee sever'd from me; for thou knowst What hath bin warn'd us, what malicious Foe Envying our happiness, and of his own Despairing, seeks to work us woe and shame By sly assault; and somwhere nigh at hand Watches, no doubt, with greedy hope to find His wish and best advantage, us asunder, Hopeless to circumvent us joynd, where each To other speedie aide might lend at need; Whether his first design be to withdraw Our fealtie from God, or to disturb Conjugal Love, then which perhaps no bliss Enjoy'd by us excites his envie more; Or this, or worse, leave not the faithful side That gave thee being, still shades thee and protects. The Wife, where danger or dishonour lurks, Safest and seemliest by her Husband staies, Who guards her, or with her the worst endures. To whom the Virgin Majestie of Eve, As one who loves, and some unkindness meets, With sweet austeer composure thus reply'd, Ofspring of Heav'n and Earth, and all Earths Lord, That such an Enemie we have, who seeks Our ruin, both by thee informd I learne, And from the parting Angel over-heard As in a shadie nook I stood behind, Just then returnd at shut of Evening Flours. But that thou shouldst my firmness therfore doubt To God or thee, because we have a foe May tempt it, I expected not to hear. His violence thou fearst not, being such, As wee, not capable of death or paine, Can either not receave, or can repell. His fraud is then thy fear, which plain inferrs Thy equal fear that my firm Faith and Love Can by his fraud be shak'n or seduc't; Thoughts, which how found they harbour in thy brestAdam, missthought of her to thee so dear? To whom with healing words Adam replyd. Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve, For such thou art, from sin and blame entire: Not diffident of thee do I dissuade Thy absence from my sight, but to avoid Th' attempt it self, intended by our Foe. For hee who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses The tempted with dishonour foul, suppos'd Not incorruptible of Faith, not prooff Against temptation: thou thy self with scorne And anger wouldst resent the offer'd wrong, Though ineffectual found: misdeem not then, If such affront I labour to avert From thee alone, which on us both at once The Enemie, though bold, will hardly dare, Or daring, first on mee th' assault shall light. Nor thou his malice and false guile contemn; Suttle he needs must be, who could seduce Angels, nor think superfluous others aid. I from the influence of thy looks receave Access in every Vertue, in thy sight More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on, Shame to be overcome or over-reacht Would utmost vigor raise, and rais'd unite. Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel When I am present, and thy trial choose With me, best witness of thy Vertue tri'd. So spake domestick Adam in his care And Matrimonial Love; but Eve, who thought Less attributed to her Faith sincere, Thus her reply with accent sweet renewd. If this be our condition, thus to dwell In narrow circuit strait'nd by a Foe, Suttle or violent, we not endu'd Single with like defence, wherever met, How are we happie, still in fear of harm? But harm precedes not sin: onely our Foe Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem Of our integritie: his foul esteeme Sticks no dishonour on our Front, but turns Foul on himself; then wherefore shund or feard By us? who rather double honour gaine From his surmise prov'd false, find peace within, Favour from Heav'n, our witness from th' event. And what is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid Alone, without exterior help sustaind? Let us not then suspect our happie State Left so imperfet by the Maker wise, As not secure to single or combin'd. Fraile is our happiness, if this be so, And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd. To whom thus Adam fervently repli'd. O Woman, best are all things as the will Of God ordain'd them, his creating hand Nothing imperfet or deficient left Of all that he Created, much less Man, Or aught that might his happie State secure, Secure from outward force; within himself The danger lies, yet lies within his power: Against his will he can receave no harme. But God left free the Will, for what obeyes Reason, is free, and Reason he made right, But bid her well beware, and still erect, Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd She dictate false, and misinforme the Will To do what God expressly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoynes, That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve, Since Reason not impossibly may meet Some specious object by the Foe subornd, And fall into deception unaware, Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warnd. Seek not temptation then, which to avoide Were better, and most likelie if from mee Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought. Wouldst thou approve thy constancie, approve First thy obedience; th' other who can know, Not seeing thee attempted, who attest? But if thou think, trial unsought may finde Us both securer then thus warnd thou seemst, Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more; Go in thy native innocence, relie On what thou hast of vertue, summon all, For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine. So spake the Patriarch of Mankinde, but Eve Persisted, yet submiss, though last, repli'd. With thy permission then, and thus forewarnd Chiefly by what thy own last reasoning words Touchd onely, that our trial, when least sought, May finde us both perhaps farr less prepar'd, The willinger I goe, nor much expect A Foe so proud will first the weaker seek; So bent, the more shall shame him his repulse. Thus saying, from her Husbands hand her hand Soft she withdrew, and like a Wood-Nymph lightOread or Dryad, or of Delia's Traine, Betook her to the Groves, but Delia's self In gate surpass'd and Goddess-like deport, Though not as shee with Bow and Quiver armd, But with such Gardning Tools as Art yet rude, Guiltless of fire had formd, or Angels brought. To Pales, or Pomona thus adornd, Likeliest she seemd, Pomona when she fledVertumnus, or to Ceres in her Prime, Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove. Her long with ardent look his Eye pursu'd Delighted, but desiring more her stay. Oft he to her his charge of quick returne Repeated, shee to him as oft engag'd To be returnd by Noon amid the Bowre, And all things in best order to invite Noontide repast, or Afternoons repose. O much deceav'd, much failing, hapless Eve, Of thy presum'd return! event perverse! Thou never from that houre in Paradise Foundst either sweet repast, or sound repose; Such ambush hid among sweet Flours and Shades Waited with hellish rancour imminent To intercept thy way, or send thee back Despoild of Innocence, of Faith, of Bliss. For now, and since first break of dawne the Fiend, Meer Serpent in appearance, forth was come, And on his Quest, where likeliest he might finde The onely two of Mankinde, but in them The whole included Race, his purposd prey. In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuft Of Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay, Thir tendance or Plantation for delight, By Fountain or by shadie Rivulet He sought them both, but wish'd his hap might findEve separate, he wish'd, but not with hope Of what so seldom chanc'd, when to his wish, Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies, Veild in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood, Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round About her glowd, oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. Neerer he drew, and many a walk travers'd Of stateliest Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palme, Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen Among thick-wov'n Arborets and Flours Imborderd on each Bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious then those Gardens feign'd Or of reviv'd Adonis, or renowndAlcinous, host of old Laertes Son, Or that, not Mystic, where the Sapient King Held dalliance with his faire Egyptian Spouse. Much hee the Place admir'd, the Person more. As one who long in populous City pent, Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire, Forth issuing on a Summers Morn to breathe Among the pleasant Villages and Farmes Adjoynd, from each thing met conceaves delight, The smell of Grain, or tedded Grass, or Kine, Or Dairie, each rural sight, each rural sound; If chance with Nymphlike step fair Virgin pass, What pleasing seemd, for her now pleases more, She most, and in her look summs all Delight. Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of Eve Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav'nly forme Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine, Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire Of gesture or lest action overawd His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought: That space the Evil one abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remaind Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm'd, Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge; But the hot Hell that alwayes in him burnes, Though in mid Heav'n, soon ended his delight, And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him ordain'd: then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites. Thoughts, whither have ye led me, with what sweet Compulsion thus transported to forget What hither brought us, hate, not love, nor hope Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, Save what is in destroying, other joy To me is lost. Then let me not let pass Occasion which now smiles, behold alone The Woman, opportune to all attempts, Her Husband, for I view far round, not nigh, Whose higher intellectual more I shun, And strength, of courage hautie, and of limb Heroic built, though of terrestrial mould, Foe not informidable, exempt from wound, I not; so much hath Hell debas'd, and paine Infeebl'd me, to what I was in Heav'n. Shee fair, divinely fair, fit Love for Gods, Not terrible, though terrour be in Love And beautie, not approacht by stronger hate, Hate stronger, under shew of Love well feign'd, The way which to her ruin now I tend. So spake the Enemie of Mankind, enclos'd In Serpent, Inmate bad, and toward Eve Address'd his way, not with indented wave, Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare, Circular base of rising foulds, that tour'd Fould above fould a surging Maze, his Head Crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes; With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect Amidst his circling Spires, that on the grass Floted redundant: pleasing was his shape, And lovely, never since of Serpent kind Lovelier, not those that in Illyria chang'dHermione and Cadmus, or the God In Epidaurus; nor to which transformdAmmonian Jove, or Capitoline was seen, Hee with Olympias, this with her who boreScipio the highth of Rome. With tract oblique At first, as one who sought access, but feard To interrupt, side-long he works his way. As when a Ship by skilful Stearsman wrought Nigh Rivers mouth or Foreland, where the Wind Veres oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her Saile; So varied hee, and of his tortuous Traine Curld many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, To lure her Eye; shee busied heard the sound Of rusling Leaves, but minded not, as us'd To such disport before her through the Field, From every Beast, more duteous at her call, Then at Circean call the Herd disguis'd. Hee boulder now, uncall'd before her stood; But as in gaze admiring: Oft he bowd His turret Crest, and sleek enamel'd Neck, Fawning, and lick'd the ground whereon she trod. His gentle dumb expression turnd at length The Eye of Eve to mark his play; he glad Of her attention gaind, with Serpent Tongue Organic, or impulse of vocal Air, His fraudulent temptation thus began. Wonder not, sovran Mistress, if perhaps Thou canst, who art sole Wonder, much less arm Thy looks, the Heav'n of mildness, with disdain, Displeas'd that I approach thee thus, and gaze Insatiate, I thus single, nor have feard Thy awful brow, more awful thus retir'd. Fairest resemblance of thy Maker faire, Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine By gift, and thy Celestial Beautie adore With ravishment beheld, there best beheld Where universally admir'd; but here In this enclosure wild, these Beasts among, Beholders rude, and shallow to discerne Half what in thee is fair, one man except, Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen A Goddess among Gods, ador'd and serv'd By Angels numberless, thy daily Train. So gloz'd the Tempter, and his Proem tun'd; Into the Heart of Eve his words made way, Though at the voice much marveling; at length Not unamaz'd she thus in answer spake. What may this mean? Language of Man pronounc't By Tongue of Brute, and human sense exprest? The first at lest of these I thought deni'd To Beasts, whom God on thir Creation-Day Created mute to all articulat sound; The latter I demurre, for in thir looks Much reason, and in thir actions oft appeers. Thee, Serpent, suttlest beast of all the field I knew, but not with human voice endu'd; Redouble then this miracle, and say, How cam'st thou speakable of mute, and how To me so friendly grown above the rest Of brutal kind, that daily are in sight? Say, for such wonder claims attention due. To whom the guileful Tempter thus reply'd. Empress of this fair World, resplendent Eve, Easie to mee it is to tell thee all What thou commandst, and right thou shouldst be obeyd: I was at first as other Beasts that graze The trodden Herb, of abject thoughts and low, As was my food, nor aught but food discern'd Or Sex, and apprehended nothing high: Till on a day roaving the field, I chanc'd A goodly Tree farr distant to behold Loaden with fruit of fairest colours mixt, Ruddie and Gold: I nearer drew to gaze; When from the boughes a savorie odour blow'n, Grateful to appetite, more pleas'd my sense Then smell of sweetest Fenel or the Teats Of Ewe or Goat dropping with Milk at Eevn, Unsuckt of Lamb or Kid, that tend thir play. To satisfie the sharp desire I had Of tasting those fair Apples, I resolv'd Not to deferr; hunger and thirst at once, Powerful perswaders, quick'nd at the scent Of that alluring fruit, urg'd me so keene. About the mossie Trunk I wound me soon, For high from ground the branches would require Thy utmost reach or Adams: Round the Tree All other Beasts that saw, with like desire Longing and envying stood, but could not reach. Amid the Tree now got, where plenty hung Tempting so nigh, to pluck and eat my fill I spar'd not, for such pleasure till that hour At Feed or Fountain never had I found. Sated at length, ere long I might perceave Strange alteration in me, to degree Of Reason in my inward Powers, and Speech Wanted not long, though to this shape retain'd. Thenceforth to Speculations high or deep I turnd my thoughts, and with capacious mind Considerd all things visible in Heav'n, Or Earth, or Middle, all things fair and good; But all that fair and good in thy Divine Semblance, and in thy Beauties heav'nly Ray United I beheld; no Fair to thine Equivalent or second, which compel'd Mee thus, though importune perhaps, to come And gaze, and worship thee of right declar'd Sovran of Creatures, universal Dame. So talk'd the spirited sly Snake; and Eve Yet more amaz'd unwarie thus reply'd. Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt The vertue of that Fruit, in thee first prov'd: But say, where grows the Tree, from hence how far? For many are the Trees of God that grow In Paradise, and various, yet unknown To us, in such aboundance lies our choice, As leaves a greater store of Fruit untoucht, Still hanging incorruptible, till men Grow up to thir provision, and more hands Help to disburden Nature of her Bearth. To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. Empress, the way is readie, and not long, Beyond a row of Myrtles, on a Flat, Fast by a Fountain, one small Thicket past Of blowing Myrrh and Balme; if thou accept My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon. Lead then, said Eve. Hee leading swiftly rowld In tangles, and made intricate seem strait, To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy Bright'ns his Crest, as when a wandring Fire, Compact of unctuous vapor, which the Night Condenses, and the cold invirons round, Kindl'd through agitation to a Flame, Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends Hovering and blazing with delusive Light, Misleads th' amaz'd Night-wanderer from his way To Boggs and Mires, and oft through Pond or Poole, There swallow'd up and lost, from succour farr. So glister'd the dire Snake, and into fraud Led Eve our credulous Mother, to the Tree Of prohibition, root of all our woe; Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake. Serpent, we might have spar'd our coming hither, Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess, The credit of whose vertue rest with thee, Wondrous indeed, if cause of such effects. But of this Tree we may not taste nor touch; God so commanded, and left that Command Sole Daughter of his voice; the rest, we live Law to our selves, our Reason is our Law. To whom the Tempter guilefully repli'd. Indeed? hath God then said that of the Fruit Of all these Garden Trees ye shall not eate, Yet Lords declar'd of all in Earth or Aire? To whom thus Eve yet sinless. Of the Fruit Of each Tree in the Garden we may eate, But of the Fruit of this fair Tree amidst The Garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eate Thereof, nor shall ye touch it, least ye die. She scarse had said, though brief, when now more bold The Tempter, but with shew of Zeale and Love To Man, and indignation at his wrong, New part puts on, and as to passion mov'd, Fluctuats disturbd, yet comely and in act Rais'd, as of som great matter to begin. As when of old som Orator renound In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest, Stood in himself collected, while each part, Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue, Somtimes in highth began, as no delay Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right. So standing, moving, or to highth upgrown The Tempter all impassiond thus began. O Sacred, Wise, and Wisdom-giving Plant, Mother of Science, Now I feel thy Power Within me cleere, not onely to discerne Things in thir Causes, but to trace the wayes Of highest Agents, deemd however wise. Queen of this Universe, doe not believe Those rigid threats of Death; ye shall not Die: How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life To Knowledge? By the Threatner, look on mee, Mee who have touch'd and tasted, yet both live, And life more perfet have attaind then Fate Meant mee, by ventring higher then my Lot. Shall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast Is open? or will God incense his ire For such a petty Trespass, and not praise Rather your dauntless vertue, whom the pain Of Death denounc't, whatever thing Death be, Deterrd not from atchieving what might leade To happier life, knowledge of Good and Evil; Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil Be real, why not known, since easier shunnd? God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; Not just, not God; not feard then, nor obeyd: Your feare it self of Death removes the feare. Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe, Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers; he knows that in the day Ye Eate thereof, your Eyes that seem so cleere, Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then Op'nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods, Knowing both Good and Evil as they know. That ye should be as Gods, since I as Man, Internal Man, is but proportion meet, I of brute human, yee of human Gods. So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off Human, to put on Gods, death to be wisht, Though threat'nd, which no worse then this can bring. And what are Gods that Man may not become As they, participating God-like food? The Gods are first, and that advantage use On our belief, that all from them proceeds; I question it, for this fair Earth I see, Warm'd by the Sun, producing every kind, Them nothing: If they all things, who enclos'd Knowledge of Good and Evil in this Tree, That whoso eats thereof, forthwith attains Wisdom without their leave? and wherein lies Th' offence, that Man should thus attain to know? What can your knowledge hurt him, or this Tree Impart against his will if all be his? Or is it envie, and can envie dwell In heav'nly breasts? these, these and many more Causes import your need of this fair Fruit. Goddess humane, reach then, and freely taste. He ended, and his words replete with guile Into her heart too easie entrance won: Fixt on the Fruit she gaz'd, which to behold Might tempt alone, and in her ears the sound Yet rung of his perswasive words, impregn'd With Reason, to her seeming, and with Truth; Mean while the hour of Noon drew on, and wak'd An eager appetite, rais'd by the smell So savorie of that Fruit, which with desire, Inclinable now grown to touch or taste, Sollicited her longing eye; yet first Pausing a while, thus to her self she mus'd. Great are thy Vertues, doubtless, best of Fruits, Though kept from Man, and worthy to be admir'd, Whose taste, too long forborn, at first assay Gave elocution to the mute, and taught The Tongue not made for Speech to speak thy praise: Thy praise hee also who forbids thy use, Conceales not from us, naming thee the Tree Of Knowledge, knowledge both of good and evil; Forbids us then to taste, but his forbidding Commends thee more, while it inferrs the good By thee communicated, and our want: For good unknown, sure is not had, or had And yet unknown, is as not had at all. In plain then, what forbids he but to know, Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions binde not. But if Death Bind us with after-bands, what profits then Our inward freedom? In the day we eate Of this fair Fruit, our doom is, we shall die. How dies the Serpent? hee hath eat'n and lives, And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns, Irrational till then. For us alone Was death invented? or to us deni'd This intellectual food, for beasts reserv'd? For Beasts it seems: yet that one Beast which first Hath tasted, envies not, but brings with joy The good befall'n him, Author unsuspect, Friendly to man, farr from deceit or guile. What fear I then, rather what know to feare Under this ignorance of good and Evil, Of God or Death, of Law or Penaltie? Here grows the Cure of all, this Fruit Divine, Fair to the Eye, inviting to the Taste, Of vertue to make wise: what hinders then To reach, and feed at once both Bodie and Mind? So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. Back to the Thicket slunk The guiltie Serpent, and well might, for Eve Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else Regarded, such delight till then, as seemd, In Fruit she never tasted, whether true Or fansied so, through expectation high Of knowledg, nor was God-head from her thought. Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint, And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length, And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon, Thus to her self she pleasingly began. O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees In Paradise, of operation blest To Sapience, hitherto obscur'd, infam'd, And thy fair Fruit let hang, as to no end Created; but henceforth my early care, Not without Song, each Morning, and due praise Shall tend thee, and the fertil burden ease Of thy full branches offer'd free to all; Till dieted by thee I grow mature In knowledge, as the Gods who all things know; Though others envie what they cannot give; For had the gift bin theirs, it had not here Thus grown. Experience, next to thee I owe, Best guide; not following thee, I had remaind In ignorance, thou op'nst Wisdoms way, And giv'st access, though secret she retire. And I perhaps am secret; Heav'n is high, High and remote to see from thence distinct Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps May have diverted from continual watch Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies About him. But to Adam in what sort Shall I appeer? shall I to him make known As yet my change, and give him to partake Full happiness with mee, or rather not, But keep the odds of Knowledge in my power Without Copartner? so to add what wants In Femal Sex, the more to draw his Love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesireable, somtime Superior; for inferior who is free? This may be well: but what if God have seen, And Death ensue? then I shall be no more, And Adam wedded to another Eve, Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct; A death to think. Confirm'd then I resolve;Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe: So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. So saying, from the Tree her step she turnd, But first low Reverence don, as to the power That dwelt within, whose presence had infus'd Into the plant sciential sap, deriv'd From Nectar, drink of Gods. Adam the while Waiting desirous her return, had wove Of choicest Flours a Garland to adorne Her Tresses, and her rural labours crown, As Reapers oft are wont thir Harvest Queen. Great joy he promis'd to his thoughts, and new Solace in her return, so long delay'd; Yet oft his heart, divine of somthing ill, Misgave him; hee the faultring measure felt; And forth to meet her went, the way she took That Morn when first they parted; by the Tree Of Knowledge he must pass, there he her met, Scarse from the Tree returning; in her hand A bough of fairest fruit that downie smil'd, New gatherd, and ambrosial smell diffus'd. To him she hasted, in her face excuse Came Prologue, and Apologie to prompt, Which with bland words at will she thus addrest. Hast thou not wonderd, Adam, at my stay? Thee I have misst, and thought it long, depriv'd Thy presence, agonie of love till now Not felt, nor shall be twice, for never more Mean I to trie, what rash untri'd I sought, The pain of absence from thy sight. But strange Hath bin the cause, and wonderful to heare: This Tree is not as we are told, a Tree Of danger tasted, nor to evil unknown Op'ning the way, but of Divine effect To open Eyes, and make them Gods who taste; And hath bin tasted such: the Serpent wise, Or not restraind as wee, or not obeying, Hath eat'n of the fruit, and is become, Not dead, as we are threatn'd, but thenceforth Endu'd with human voice and human sense, Reasoning to admiration, and with mee Perswasively hath so prevaild, that I Have also tasted, and have also found Th' effects to correspond, opener mine Eyes, Dimm erst, dilated Spirits, ampler Heart, And growing up to Godhead; which for thee Chiefly I sought, without thee can despise. For bliss, as thou hast part, to me is bliss, Tedious, unshar'd with thee, and odious soon. Thou therefore also taste, that equal Lot May joyne us, equal joy, as equal Love; Least thou not tasting, different degree Disjoyne us, and I then too late renounce Deitie for thee, when Fate will not permit. Thus Eve with Countnance blithe her storie told; But in her Cheek distemper flushing glowd. On th' other side, Adam, soon as he heard The fatal Trespass don by Eve, amaz'd, Astonied stood and Blank, while horror chill Ran through his veins, and all his joynts relax'd; From his slack hand the Garland wreath'd for Eve Down drop'd, and all the faded Roses shed: Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length First to himself he inward silence broke. O fairest of Creation, last and best Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell'd Whatever can to sight or thought be formd, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defac't, deflourd, and now to Death devote? Rather how hast thou yeelded to transgress The strict forbiddance, how to violate The sacred Fruit forbidd'n! som cursed fraud Of Enemie hath beguil'd thee, yet unknown, And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee Certain my resolution is to Die; How can I live without thee, how forgoe Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn'd, To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn? Should God create another Eve, and I Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart; no no, I feel The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh, Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. So having said, as one from sad dismay Recomforted, and after thoughts disturbd Submitting to what seemd remediless, Thus in calm mood his Words to Eve he turnd. Bold deed thou hast presum'd, adventrous Eve, And peril great provok't, who thus hath dar'd Had it been onely coveting to Eye That sacred Fruit, sacred to abstinence, Much more to taste it under banne to touch. But past who can recall, or don undoe? Not God Omnipotent, nor Fate, yet so Perhaps thou shalt not Die, perhaps the Fact Is not so hainous now, foretasted Fruit, Profan'd first by the Serpent, by him first Made common and unhallowd ere our taste; Nor yet on him found deadly, he yet lives, Lives, as thou saidst, and gaines to live as Man Higher degree of Life, inducement strong To us, as likely tasting to attaine Proportional ascent, which cannot be But to be Gods, or Angels Demi-gods. Nor can I think that God, Creator wise, Though threatning, will in earnest so destroy Us his prime Creatures, dignifi'd so high, Set over all his Works, which in our Fall, For us created, needs with us must faile, Dependent made; so God shall uncreate, Be frustrate, do, undo, and labour loose, Not well conceav'd of God, who though his Power Creation could repeate, yet would be loath Us to abolish, least the Adversary Triumph and say; Fickle their State whom God Most Favors, who can please him long; Mee first He ruind, now Mankind; whom will he next? Matter of scorne, not to be given the Foe, However I with thee have fixt my Lot, Certain to undergoe like doom, if Death Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life; So forcible within my heart I feel The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our State cannot be severd, we are one, One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self. So Adam, and thus Eve to him repli'd. O glorious trial of exceeding Love, Illustrious evidence, example high! Ingaging me to emulate, but short Of thy perfection, how shall I attaine, Adam, from whose deare side I boast me sprung, And gladly of our Union heare thee speak, One Heart, one Soul in both; whereof good prooff This day affords, declaring thee resolvd, Rather then Death or aught then Death more dread Shall separate us, linkt in Love so deare, To undergoe with mee one Guilt, one Crime, If any be, of tasting this fair Fruit, Whose vertue, for of good still good proceeds, Direct, or by occasion hath presented This happie trial of thy Love, which else So eminently never had bin known. Were it I thought Death menac't would ensue This my attempt, I would sustain alone The worst, and not perswade thee, rather die Deserted, then oblige thee with a fact Pernicious to thy Peace, chiefly assur'd Remarkably so late of thy so true, So faithful Love unequald; but I feel Farr otherwise th' event, not Death, but Life Augmented, op'nd Eyes, new Hopes, new Joyes, Taste so Divine, that what of sweet before Hath toucht my sense, flat seems to this, and harsh. On my experience, Adam, freely taste, And fear of Death deliver to the Windes. So saying, she embrac'd him, and for joy Tenderly wept, much won that he his Love Had so enobl'd, as of choice to incurr Divine displeasure for her sake, or Death. In recompence (for such compliance bad Such recompence best merits) from the bough She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit With liberal hand: he scrupl'd not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceav'd, But fondly overcome with Femal charm. Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Skie lowr'd and muttering Thunder, som sad drops Wept at compleating of the mortal Sin Original; while Adam took no thought, Eating his fill, nor Eve to iterate Her former trespass fear'd, the more to soothe Him with her lov'd societie, that now As with new Wine intoxicated both They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel Divinitie within them breeding wings Wherewith to scorne the Earth: but that false Fruit Farr other operation first displaid, Carnal desire enflaming, hee on Eve Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burne: Till Adam thus'gan Eve to dalliance move,Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste, And elegant, of Sapience no small part, Since to each meaning savour we apply, And Palate call judicious; I the praise Yeild thee, so well this day thou hast purvey'd. Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstain'd From this delightful Fruit, nor known till now True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be In things to us forbidden, it might be wish'd, For this one Tree had bin forbidden ten. But come, so well refresh't, now let us play, As meet is, after such delicious Fare; For never did thy Beautie since the day I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorn'd With all perfections, so enflame my sense With ardor to enjoy thee, fairer now Then ever, bountie of this vertuous Tree. So said he, and forbore not glance or toy Of amorous intent, well understood Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire. Her hand he seis'd, and to a shadie bank, Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr'd He led her nothing loath; Flours were the Couch, Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, And Hyacinth, Earths freshest softest lap. There they thir fill of Love and Loves disport Took largely, of thir mutual guilt the Seale, The solace of thir sin, till dewie sleep Oppress'd them, wearied with thir amorous play. Soon as the force of that fallacious Fruit, That with exhilerating vapour bland About thir spirits had plaid, and inmost powers Made erre, was now exhal'd, and grosser sleep Bred of unkindly fumes, with conscious dreams Encumberd, now had left them, up they rose As from unrest, and each the other viewing, Soon found thir Eyes how op'nd, and thir minds How dark'nd; innocence, that as a veile Had shadow'd them from knowing ill, was gon, Just confidence, and native righteousness And honour from about them, naked left To guiltie shame hee cover'd, but his Robe Uncover'd more, so rose the Danite strongHerculean Samson from the Harlot-lap Of Philistean Dalilah, and wak'd Shorn of his strength, They destitute and bare Of all thir vertue: silent, and in face Confounded long they sate, as struck'n mute, Till Adam, though not less then Eve abash't, At length gave utterance to these words constraind.Eve, in evil hour thou didst give eare To that false Worm, of whomsoever taught To counterfet Mans voice, true in our Fall, False in our promis'd Rising; since our Eyes Op'nd we find indeed, and find we know Both Good and Evil, Good lost, and Evil got, Bad Fruit of Knowledge, if this be to know, Which leaves us naked thus, of Honour void, Of Innocence, of Faith, of Puritie, Our wonted Ornaments now soild and staind, And in our Faces evident the signes Of foul concupiscence; whence evil store; Even shame, the last of evils; of the first Be sure then. How shall I behold the face Henceforth of God or Angel, earst with joy And rapture so oft beheld? those heav'nly shapes Will dazle now this earthly, with thir blaze Insufferably bright. O might I here In solitude live savage, in some glade Obscur'd, where highest Woods impenetrable To Starr or Sun-light, spread thir umbrage broad And brown as Evening: Cover me ye Pines, Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs Hide me, where I may never see them more. But let us now, as in bad plight, devise What best may from the present serve to hide The Parts of each for other, that seem most To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen, Some Tree whose broad smooth Leaves together sowd, And girded on our loyns, may cover round Those middle parts, that this new commer, Shame, There sit not, and reproach us as unclean. So counsel'd hee, and both together went Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown'd, But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar or Decan spreds her Armes Braunching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow About the Mother Tree, a Pillard shade High overarch't, and echoing Walks between; There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heate Shelters in coole, and tends his pasturing Herds At Loopholes cut through thickest shade: Those Leaves They gatherd, broad as Amazonian Targe, And with what skill they had, together sowd, To gird thir waste, vain Covering if to hide Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike To that first naked Glorie. Such of lateColumbus found th' American so girt With featherd Cincture, naked else and wilde Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores. Thus fenc't, and as they thought, thir shame in part Coverd, but not at rest or ease of Mind, They sate them down to weep, nor onely Teares Raind at thir Eyes, but high Winds worse within Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate, Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore Thir inward State of Mind, calm Region once And full of Peace, now tost and turbulent: For Understanding rul'd not, and the Will Heard not her lore, both in subjection now To sensual Appetite, who from beneathe Usurping over sovran Reason claimd Superior sway: from thus distemperd brest,Adam, estrang'd in look and alterd stile, Speech intermitted thus to Eve renewd. Would thou hadst heark'nd to my words, and stai'd With me, as I besought thee, when that strange Desire of wandring this unhappie Morn, I know not whence possessd thee; we had then Remaind still happie, not as now, despoild Of all our good, sham'd, naked, miserable. Let none henceforth seek needless cause to approve The Faith they owe; when earnestly they seek Such proof, conclude, they then begin to faile. To whom soon mov'd with touch of blame thus Eve. What words have past thy Lips, Adam severe, Imput'st thou that to my default, or will Of wandring, as thou call'st it, which who knows But might as ill have happ'nd thou being by, Or to thy self perhaps: hadst thou been there, Or here th' attempt, thou couldst not have discernd Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spake; No ground of enmitie between us known, Why hee should mean me ill, or seek to harme, Was I to have never parted from thy side? As good have grown there still a liveless Rib. Being as I am, why didst not thou the Head Command me absolutely not to go, Going into such danger as thou saidst? Too facil then thou didst not much gainsay, Nay didst permit, approve, and fair dismiss. Hadst thou bin firm and fixt in thy dissent, Neither had I transgress'd, nor thou with mee. To whom then first incenst Adam repli'd, Is this the Love, is this the recompence Of mine to thee, ingrateful Eve, exprest Immutable when thou wert lost, not I, Who might have liv'd and joyd immortal bliss, Yet willingly chose rather Death with thee: And am I now upbraided, as the cause Of thy transgressing? not enough severe, It seems, in thy restraint: what could I more? I warn'd thee, I admonish'd thee, foretold The danger, and the lurking Enemie That lay in wait; beyond this had bin force, And force upon free will hath here no place. But confidence then bore thee on, secure Either to meet no danger, or to finde Matter of glorious trial; and perhaps I also err'd in overmuch admiring What seemd in thee so perfet, that I thought No evil durst attempt thee, but I rue That errour now, which is become my crime, And thou th' accuser. Thus it shall befall Him who to worth in Women overtrusting Lets her will rule; restraint she will not brook, And left to her self, if evil thence ensue, Shee first his weak indulgence will accuse. Thus they in mutual accusation spent The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, And of thir vain contest appeer'd no end.
THus they in lowliest plight repentant stood Praying, for from the Mercie-seat above Prevenient Grace descending had remov'd The stonie from thir hearts, & made new flesh Regenerate grow instead, that sighs now breath'd Unutterable, which the Spirit of prayer Inspir'd, and wing'd for Heav'n with speedier flight Then loudest Oratorie: yet thir port Not of mean suiters, nor important less Seem'd thir Petition, then when th' ancient Pair In Fables old, less ancient yet then these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore The Race of Mankind drownd, before the Shrine Of Themis stood devout. To Heav'n thir prayers Flew up, nor missd the way, by envious windes Blown vagabond or frustrate: in they passd Dimentionless through Heav'nly dores; then clad With incense, where the Golden Altar fum'd, By thir great Intercessor, came in sight Before the Fathers Throne: Them the glad Son Presenting, thus to intercede began. See Father, what first fruits on Earth are sprung From thy implanted Grace in Man, these Sighs And Prayers, which in this Golden Censer, mixt With Incense, I thy Priest before thee bring, Fruits of more pleasing savour from thy seed Sow'n with contrition in his heart, then those Which his own hand manuring all the Trees Of Paradise could have produc't, ere fall'n From innocence. Now therefore bend thine eare To supplication, heare his sighs though mute; Unskilful with what words to pray, Iet mee Interpret for him, mee his Advocate And propitiation, all his works on mee Good or not good ingraft, my Merit those Shall perfet, and for these my Death shall pay. Accept me, and in mee from these receave The smell of peace toward Mankinde, let him live Before thee reconcil'd, at least his days Numberd, though sad, till Death, his doom (which I To mitigate thus plead, not to reverse) To better life shall yeeld him, where with mee All my redeemd may dwell in joy and bliss, Made one with me as I with thee am one. To whom the Father, without Cloud, serene. All thy request for Man, accepted Son, Obtain, all thy request was my Decree: But longer in that Paradise to dwell, The Law I gave to Nature him forbids: Those pure immortal Elements that know No gross, no unharmoneous mixture foule, Eject him tainted now, and purge him off As a distemper, gross to aire as gross, And mortal food, as may dispose him best For dissolution wrought by Sin, that first Distemperd all things, and of incorrupt Corrupted. I at first with two fair gifts Created him endowd, with Happiness And Immortalitie: that fondly lost, This other serv'd but to eternize woe; Till I provided Death; so Death becomes His final remedie, and after Life Tri'd in sharp tribulation, and refin'd By Faith and faithful works, to second Life, Wak't in the renovation of the just, Resignes him up with Heav'n and Earth renewd. But let us call to Synod all the Blest Through Heav'ns wide bounds; from them I will not hide My judgments, how with Mankind I proceed, As how with peccant Angels late they saw; And in thir state, though firm, stood more confirmd. He ended, and the Son gave signal high To the bright Minister that watchd, hee blew His Trumpet, heard in Oreb since perhaps When God descended, and perhaps once more To sound at general Doom. Th' Angelic blast Filld all the Regions: from thir blissful Bowrs Of Amarantin Shade, Fountain or Spring, By the waters of Life, where ere they sate In fellowships of joy: the Sons of Light Hasted, resorting to the Summons high, And took thir Seats; till from his Throne supream Th' Almighty thus pronouncd his sovran Will. O Sons, like one of us Man is become To know both Good and Evil, since his taste Of that defended Fruit; but let him boast His knowledge of Good lost, and Evil got, Happier, had it suffic'd him to have known Good by it self, and Evil not at all. He sorrows now, repents, and prayes contrite, My motions in him, longer then they move, His heart I know, how variable and vain Self-left. Least therefore his now bolder hand Reach also of the Tree of Life, and eat, And live for ever, dream at least to live For ever, to remove him I decree, And send him from the Garden forth to Till The Ground whence he was taken, fitter soile. Michael, this my behest have thou in charge, Take to thee from among the Cherubim Thy choice of flaming Warriours, least the Fiend Or in behalf of Man, or to invade Vacant possession som new trouble raise: Hast thee, and from the Paradise of God Without remorse drive out the sinful Pair, From hallowd ground th' unholie, and denounce To them and to thir Progenie from thence Perpetual banishment. Yet least they faint At the sad Sentence rigorously urg'd, For I behold them softn'd and with tears Bewailing thir excess, all terror hide. If patiently thy bidding they obey, Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveale To Adam what shall come in future dayes, As I shall thee enlighten, intermix My Cov'nant in the womans seed renewd; So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace: And on the East side of the Garden place, Where entrance up from Eden easiest climbes, Cherubic watch, and of a Sword the flame Wide waving, all approach farr off to fright, And guard all passage to the Tree of Life: Least Paradise a receptacle prove To Spirits foule, and all my Trees thir prey, With whose stol'n Fruit Man once more to delude. He ceas'd; and th' Archangelic Power prepar'd For swift descent, with him the Cohort bright Of watchful Cherubim; four faces each Had, like a double Janus, all thir shape Spangl'd with eyes more numerous then those Of Argus, and more wakeful then to drouze, Charm'd with Arcadian Pipe, the Pastoral Reed Of Hermes, or his opiate Rod. Mean while To resalute the World with sacred Light Leucothea wak'd, and with fresh dews imbalmd The Earth, when Adam and first Matron Eve Had ended now thir Orisons, and found Strength added from above, new hope to spring Out of despaire, joy, but with fear yet linkt; Which thus to Eve his welcome words renewd. Eve, easily may Faith admit, that all The good which we enjoy, from Heav'n descends; But that from us ought should ascend to Heav'n So prevalent as to concerne the mind Of God high-blest, or to incline his will, Hard to belief may seem; yet this will Prayer, Or one short sigh of humane breath, up-borne Ev'n to the Seat of God. For since I saught By Prayer th' offended Deitie to appease, Kneel'd and before him humbl'd all my heart, Methought I saw him placable and mild, Bending his eare; perswasion in me grew That I was heard with favour; peace returnd Home to my Brest, and to my memorie His promise, that thy Seed shall bruise our Foe; Which then not minded in dismay, yet now Assures me that the bitterness of death Is past, and we shall live. Whence Haile to thee, Eve rightly call'd, Mother of all Mankind, Mother of all things living, since by thee Man is to live, and all things live for Man. To whom thus Eve with sad demeanour meek. Ill worthie I such title should belong To me transgressour, who for thee ordaind A help, became thy snare; to mee reproach Rather belongs, distrust and all dispraise: But infinite in pardon was my Judge, That I who first brought Death on all, am grac't The sourse of life; next favourable thou, Who highly thus to entitle me voutsaf'st, Farr other name deserving. But the Field To labour calls us now with sweat impos'd, Though after sleepless Night; for see the Morn, All unconcern'd with our unrest, begins Her rosie progress smiling; let us forth, I never from thy side henceforth to stray, Wherere our days work lies, though now enjoind Laborious, till day droop; while here we dwell, What can be toilsom in these pleasant Walkes? Here let us live, though in fall'n state, content. So spake, so wish'd much-humbl'd Eve, but Fate Subscrib'd not; Nature first gave Signs, imprest On Bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd After short blush of Morn; nigh in her sight The Bird of Jove, stoopt from his aerie tour, Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove: Down from a Hill the Beast that reigns in Woods, First hunter then, pursu'd a gentle brace, Goodliest of all the Forrest, Hart and Hinde; Direct to th' Eastern Gate was bent thir flight. Adam observ'd, and with his Eye the chase Pursuing, not unmov'd to Eve thus spake. O Eve, some furder change awaits us nigh, Which Heav'n by these mute signs in Nature shews Forerunners of his purpose, or to warn Us haply too secure of our discharge From penaltie, because from death releast Some days; how long, and what till then our life, Who knows, or more then this, that we are dust, And thither must return and be no more. Why else this double object in our fight Of flight pursu'd in th' Air and ore the ground One way the self-same hour? why in the East Darkness ere Dayes mid-course, and Morning light More orient in yon Western Cloud that draws O're the blew Firmament a radiant white, And slow descends, with somthing heav'nly fraught. He err'd not, for by this the heav'nly Bands Down from a Skie of Jasper lighted now In Paradise, and on a Hill made alt, A glorious Apparition, had not doubt And carnal fear that day dimm'd Adams eye. Not that more glorious, when the Angels met Jacob in Mahanaim, where he saw The field Pavilion'd with his Guardians bright; Nor that which on the flaming Mount appeerd In Dothan, cover'd with a Camp of Fire, Against the Syrian King, who to surprize One man, Assassin-like had levied Warr, Warr unproclam'd. The Princely Hierarch In thir bright stand, there left his Powers to seise Possession of the Garden; hee alone, To find where Adam shelterd, took his way, Not unperceav'd of Adam, who to Eve, While the great Visitant approachd, thus spake. Eve, now expect great tidings, which perhaps Of us will soon determin, or impose New Laws to be observ'd; for I descrie From yonder blazing Cloud that veils the Hill One of the heav'nly Host, and by his Gate None of the meanest, some great Potentate Or of the Thrones above, such Majestie Invests him coming; yet not terrible, That I should fear, nor sociably mild, As Raphael, that I should much confide, But solemn and sublime, whom not to offend, With reverence I must meet, and thou retire. He ended; and th' Arch-Angel soon drew nigh, Not in his shape Celestial, but as Man Clad to meet Man; over his lucid Armes A militarie Vest of purple flowd Livelier then Meliboean, or the graine Of Sarra, worn by Kings and Hero's old In time of Truce; lris had dipt the wooff; His starrie Helme unbuckl'd shew'd him prime In Manhood where Youth ended; by his side As in a glistering Zodiac hung the Sword, Satans dire dread, and in his hand the Spear. Adam bowd low, hee Kingly from his State Inclin'd not, but his coming thus declar'd. Adam, Heav'ns high behest no Preface needs: Sufficient that thy Prayers are heard, and Death, Then due by sentence when thou didst transgress, Defeated of his seisure many dayes Giv'n thee of Grace, wherein thou may'st repent, And one bad act with many deeds well done Mayst cover: well may then thy Lord appeas'd Redeem thee quite from Deaths rapacious claime; But longer in this Paradise to dwell Permits not; to remove thee I am come, And send thee from the Garden forth to till The ground whence thou wast tak'n, fitter Soile. He added not, for Adam at the newes Heart-strook with chilling gripe of sorrow stood, That all his senses bound; Eve, who unseen Yet all had heard, with audible lament Discover'd soon the place of her retire. O unexpected stroke, worse then of Death! Must I thus leave thee Paradise? thus leave Thee Native Soile, these happie Walks and Shades, Fit haunt of Gods? where I had hope to spend, Quiet though sad, the respit of that day That must be mortal to us both. O flours, That never will in other Climate grow, My early visitation, and my last At Eev'n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op'ning bud, and gave ye Names, Who now shall reare ye to the Sun, or ranke Your Tribes, and water from th' ambrosial Fount? Thee lastly nuptial Bowre, by mee adornd With what to sight or smell was sweet; from thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower World, to this obscure And wilde, how shall we breath in other Aire Less pure, accustomd to immortal Fruits? Whom thus the Angel interrupted milde. Lament not Eve, but patiently resigne What justly thou hast lost; nor set thy heart, Thus over-fond, on that which is not thine; Thy going is not lonely, with thee goes Thy Husband, him to follow thou art bound; Where he abides, think there thy native soile. Adam by this from the cold sudden damp Recovering, and his scatterd spirits returnd, To Michael thus his humble words addressd. Celestial, whether among the Thrones, or nam'd Of them the Highest, for such of shape may seem Prince above Princes, gently hast thou tould Thy message, which might else in telling wound, And in performing end us; what besides Of sorrow and dejection and despair Our frailtie can sustain, thy tidings bring, Departure from this happy place, our sweet Recess, and onely consolation left Familiar to our eyes, all places else Inhospitable appeer and desolate, Nor knowing us nor known: and if by prayer Incessant I could hope to change the will Of him who all things can, I would not cease To wearie him with my assiduous cries: But prayer against his absolute Decree No more availes then breath against the winde, Blown stifling back on him that breaths it forth: Therefore to his great bidding I submit. This most afflicts me, that departing hence, As from his face I shall be hid, deprivd His blessed count'nance; here I could frequent, With worship, place by place where he voutsaf'd Presence Divine, and to my Sons relate; On this Mount he appeerd, under this Tree Stood visible, among these Pines his voice I heard, here with him at this Fountain talk'd: So many grateful Altars I would reare Of grassie Terfe, and pile up every Stone Of lustre from the brook, in memorie, Or monument to Ages, and thereon Offer sweet smelling Gumms and Fruits and Flours: In yonder nether World where shall I seek His bright appearances, or foot-step trace? For though I fled him angrie, yet recall'd To life prolongd and promisd Race, I now Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts Of glory, and farr off his steps adore. To whom thus Michael with regard benigne. Adam, thou know'st Heav'n his, and all the Earth. Not this Rock onely; his Omnipresence fills Land, Sea, and Aire, and every kinde that lives, Fomented by his virtual power and warmd: All th' Earth he gave thee to possess and rule, No despicable gift; surmise not then His presence to these narrow bounds confin'd Of Paradise or Eden: this had been Perhaps thy Capital Seate, from whence had spred All generations, and had hither come From all the ends of th' Earth, to celebrate And reverence thee thir great Progenitor. But this praeeminence thou hast lost, brought down To dwell on eeven ground now with thy Sons: Yet doubt not but in Vallie and in plaine God is as here, and will be found alike Present, and of his presence many a signe Still following thee, still compassing thee round With goodness and paternal Love, his Face Express, and of his steps the track Divine. Which that thou mayst beleeve, and be confirmd Ere thou from hence depart, know I am sent To shew thee what shall come in future dayes To thee and to thy Ofspring; good with bad Expect to hear, supernal Grace contending With sinfulness of Men; thereby to learn True patience, and to temper joy with fear And pious sorrow, equally enur'd By moderation either state to beare, Prosperous or adverse: so shalt thou lead Safest thy life, and best prepar'd endure Thy mortal passage when it comes. Ascend This Hill; let Eve (for I have drencht her eyes) Here sleep below while thou to foresight wak'st, As once thou slepst, while Shee to life was formd. To whom thus Adam gratefully repli'd. Ascend, I follow thee, safe Guide, the path Thou lead'st me, and to the hand of Heav'n submit, However chast'ning, to the evil turne My obvious breast, arming to overcom By suffering, and earne rest from labour won, If so I may attain. So both ascend In the Visions of God: It was a Hill Of Paradise the highest, from whose top The Hemisphere of Earth in cleerest Ken Stretcht out to the amplest reach of prospect lay. Not higher that Hill nor wider looking round, Whereon for different cause the Tempter set Our second Adam in the Wilderness, To shew him all Earths Kingdomes and thir Glory. His Eye might there command wherever stood City of old or modern Fame, the Seat Of mightiest Empire, from the destind Walls Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can And Samarchand by Oxus, Temirs Throne, To Paquin of Sinaean Kings, and thence To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul Down to the golden Chersonese, or where The Persian in Ecbatan sate, or since In Hispahan, or where the Russian Ksar In Mosco, or the Sultan in Bizance, Turchestan-born; nor could his eye not ken Th' Empire of Negus to his utmost Port Ercoco and the less Maritim Kings Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind, And Sofala thought Ophir, to the Realme Of Congo, and Angola fardest South; Or thence from Niger Flood to Atlas Mount The Kingdoms of Almansor, Fez and Sus, Marocco and Algiers, and Tremisen; On Europe thence, and where Rome was to sway The World: in Spirit perhaps he also saw Rich Mexico the seat of Motezume, And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat Of Atabalipa, and yet unspoil'd Guiana, whose great Citie Geryons Sons Call El Dorado: but to nobler sights Michael from Adams eyes the Filme remov'd Which that false Fruit that promis'd clearer sight Had bred; then purg'd with Euphrasie and Rue The visual Nerve, for he had much to see; And from the Well of Life three drops instill'd. So deep the power of these Ingredients pierc'd, Eevn to the inmost seat of mental sight, That Adam now enforc't to close his eyes, Sunk down and all his Spirits became intranst: But him the gentle Angel by the hand Soon rais'd, and his attention thus recall'd. Adam, now ope thine eyes, and first behold Th' effects which thy original crime hath wrought In some to spring from thee, who never touch'd Th' excepted Tree, nor with the Snake conspir'd, Nor sinn'd thy sin, yet from that sin derive Corruption to bring forth more violent deeds. His eyes he op'nd, and beheld a field, Part arable and tilth, whereon were Sheaves New reapt, the other part sheep-walks and foulds; Ith' midst an Altar as the Land-mark stood Rustic, of grassie sord; thither anon A sweatie Reaper from his Tillage brought First Fruits, the green Eare, and the yellow Sheaf, Uncull'd, as came to hand; a Shepherd next More meek came with the Firstlings of his Flock Choicest and best; then sacrificing, laid The Inwards and thir Fat, with Incense strew'd, On the cleft Wood, and all due Rites perform'd. His Offring soon propitious Fire from Heav'n Consum'd with nimble glance, and grateful steame; The others not, for his was not sincere; Whereat hee inlie rag'd, and as they talk'd, Smote him into the Midriff with a stone That beat out life; he fell, and deadly pale Groand out his Soul with gushing bloud effus'd. Much at that sight was Adam in his heart Dismai'd, and thus in haste to th' Angel cri'd. O Teacher, some great mischief hath befall'n To that meek man, who well had sacrific'd; Is Pietie thus and pure Devotion paid? T' whom Michael thus, hee also mov'd, repli'd. These two are Brethren, Adam, and to come Out of thy loyns; th' unjust the just hath slain, For envie that his Brothers Offering found From Heav'n acceptance; but the bloodie Fact Will be aveng'd, and th' others Faith approv'd Loose no reward, though here thou see him die, Rowling in dust and gore. To which our Sire. Alas, both for the deed and for the cause! But have I now seen Death? Is this the way I must return to native dust? O sight Of terrour, foul and ugly to behold, Horrid to think, how horrible to feel! To whom thus Michael. Death thou hast seen In his first shape on man; but many shapes Of Death, and many are the wayes that lead To his grim Cave, all dismal; yet to sense More terrible at th' entrance then within. Some, as thou saw'st, by violent stroke shall die, By Fire, Flood, Famin, by Intemperance more In Meats and Drinks which on the Earth shall bring Diseases dire, of which a monstrous crew Before thee shall appear; that thou mayst know What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve Shall bring on men. Immediately a place Before his eyes appeard, sad, noysom, dark, A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseas'd, all maladies Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds, Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs, Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs, Daemoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie, Marasmus, and wide-wasting Pestilence, Dropsies, and Asthma's, and Joint-racking Rheums. Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair Tended the sick busiest from Couch to Couch; And over them triumphant Death his Dart Shook, but delaid to strike, though oft invok't With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope. Sight so deform what heart of Rock could long Drie-ey'd behold? Adam could not, but wept, Though not of Woman born; compassion quell'd His best of Man, and gave him up to tears A space, till firmer thoughts restraind excess, And scarce recovering words his plaint renew'd. O miserable Mankind, to what fall Degraded, to what wretched state reserv'd! Better end heer unborn. Why is life giv'n To be thus wrested from us? rather why Obtruded on us thus? who if we knew What we receive, would either not accept Life offer'd, or soon beg to lay it down, Glad to be so dismist in peace. Can thus Th' Image of God in man created once So goodly and erect, though faultie since, To such unsightly sufferings be debas't Under inhuman pains? Why should not Man, Retaining still Divine similitude In part, from such deformities be free, And for his Makers Image sake exempt? Thir Makers Image, answerd Michael, then Forsook them, when themselves they villifi'd To serve ungovern'd appetite, and took His Image whom they serv'd, a brutish vice, Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve. Therefore so abject is thir punishment, Disfiguring not Gods likeness, but thir own, Or if his likeness, by themselves defac't While they pervert pure Natures healthful rules To loathsom sickness, worthily, since they Gods Image did not reverence in themselves. I yield it just, said Adam, and submit. But is there yet no other way, besides These painful passages, how we may come To Death, and mix with our connatural dust; There is, said Michael, if thou well observe The rule of not too much, by temperance taught In what thou eatst and drinkst, seeking from thence Due nourishment, not gluttonous delight, Till many years over thy head return: So maist thou live, till like ripe Fruit thou drop Into thy Mothers lap, or be with ease Gatherd, not harshly pluckt, for death mature: This is old age; but then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change To witherd weak and gray; thy Senses then Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgoe, To what thou hast, and for the Aire of youth Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reigne A Melancholy damp of cold and dry To weigh thy Spirits down, and last consume The Balme of Life. To whom our Ancestor. Henceforth I flie not Death, nor would prolong Life much, bent rather how I may be quit Fairest and easiest of this combrous charge, Which I must keep till my appointed day Of rendring up, and patiently attend My dissolution. Michael repli'd. Nor love thy Life, nor hate; but what thou livst Live well, how long or short permit to Heav'n: And now prepare thee for another sight. He lookd and saw a spacious Plaine, whereon Were Tents of various hue; by some were herds Of Cattel grazing: others, whence the sound Of Instruments that made melodious chime Was heard, of Harp and Organ; and who moovd Thir stops and chords was seen: his volant touch Instinct through all proportions low and high Fled and pursu'd transverse the resonant fugue. In other part stood one who at the Forge Labouring, two massie clods of Iron and Brass Had melted (whether found where casual fire Had wasted woods on Mountain or in Vale, Down to the veins of Earth, thence gliding hot To som Caves mouth, or whether washt by stream From underground) the liquid Ore he dreind Into fit moulds prepar'd; from which he formd First his own Tooles; then, what might else be wrought Fusil or grav'n in mettle. After these, But on the hether side a different sort From the high neighbouring Hills, which was thir Seat, Down to the Plain descended: by thir guise Just men they seemd, and all thir study bent To worship God aright, and know his works Not hid, nor those things last which might preserve Freedom and Peace to men: they on the Plain Long had not walkt, when from the Tents behold A Beavie of fair Women, richly gay In Gems and wanton dress; to the Harp they sung Soft amorous Ditties, and in dance came on: The Men though grave, ey'd them, and let thir eyes Rove without rein, till in the amorous Net Fast caught, they lik'd, and each his liking chose; And now of love they treat till th' Eevning Star Loves Harbinger appeerd; then all in heat They light the Nuptial Torch, and bid invoke Hymen, then first to marriage Rites invok't; With Feast and Musick all the Tents resound. Such happy interview and fair event Of love and youth not lost, Songs, Garlands, Flours, And charming Symphonies attach'd the heart Of Adam, soon enclin'd to admit delight, The bent of Nature; which he thus express'd. True opener of mine eyes, prime Angel blest, Much better seems this Vision, and more hope Of peaceful dayes portends, then those two past; Those were of hate and death, or pain much worse, Here Nature seems fulfilld in all her ends. To whom thus Michael. Judg not what is best By pleasure, though to Nature seeming meet, Created, as thou art, to nobler end Holie and pure, conformitie divine. Those Tents thou sawst so pleasant, were the Tents Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his Race Who slew his Brother; studious they appere Of Arts that polish Life, Inventers rare, Unmindful of thir Maker, though his Spirit Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledg'd none. Yet they a beauteous ofspring shall beget; For that fair femal Troop thou sawst, that seemd Of Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay, Yet empty of all good wherein consists Womans domestic honour and chief praise; Bred onely and completed to the taste Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance, To dress, and troule the Tongue, and roule the Eye. To these that sober Race of Men, whose lives Religious titl'd them the Sons of God, Shall yield up all thir vertue, all thir fame Ignobly, to the traines and to the smiles Of these fair Atheists, and now swim in joy, (Erelong to swim at large) and laugh; for which The world erelong a world of tears must weepe. To whom thus Adam of short joy bereft. O pittie and shame, that they who to live well Enterd so faire, should turn aside to tread Paths indirect, or in the mid way faint! But still I see the tenor of Mans woe Holds on the same, from Woman to begin. From Mans effeminate slackness it begins, Said th' Angel, who should better hold his place By wisdome, and superiour gifts receav'd. But now prepare thee for another Scene. He lookd and saw wide Territorie spred Before him, Towns, and rural works between, Cities of Men with lofty Gates and Towrs, Concours in Arms, fierce Faces threatning Warr, Giants of mightie Bone, and bould emprise; Part wield thir Arms, part courb the foaming Steed, Single or in Array of Battel rang'd Both Horse and Foot, nor idely mustring stood; One way a Band select from forage drives A herd of Beeves, faire Oxen and faire Kine From a fat Meddow ground; or fleecy Flock, Ewes and thir bleating Lambs over the Plaine, Thir Bootie; scarce with Life the Shepherds flye, But call in aide, which makes a bloody Fray; With cruel Tournament the Squadrons joine; Where Cattle pastur'd late, now scatterd lies With Carcasses and Arms th' ensanguind Field Deserted: Others to a Citie strong Lay Seige, encampt; by Batterie, Scale, and Mine, Assaulting; others from the wall defend With Dart and Jav'lin, Stones and sulfurous Fire; On each hand slaughter and gigantic deeds. In other part the scepter'd Haralds call To Council in the Citie Gates: anon Grey-headed men and grave, with Warriours mixt, Assemble, and Harangues are heard, but soon In factious opposition, till at last Of middle Age one rising, eminent In wise deport, spake much of Right and Wrong, Of Justice, of Religion, Truth and Peace, And Judgment from above: him old and young Exploded and had seiz'd with violent hands, Had not a Cloud descending snatch'd him thence Unseen amid the throng: so violence Proceeded, and Oppression, and Sword-Law Through all the Plain, and refuge none was found. Adam was all in tears, and to his guide Lamenting turnd full sad; O what are these, Deaths Ministers, not Men, who thus deal Death Inhumanly to men, and multiply Ten thousandfould the sin of him who slew His Brother; for of whom such massacher Make they but of thir Brethren, men of men? But who was that Just Man, whom had not Heav'n Rescu'd, had in his Righteousness bin lost? To whom thus Michael. These are the product Of those ill mated Marriages thou saw'st; Where good with bad were matcht, who of themselves Abhor to joyn; and by imprudence mixt, Produce prodigious Births of bodie or mind. Such were these Giants, men of high renown; For in those dayes Might onely shall be admir'd, And Valour and Heroic Vertu call'd; To overcome in Battle, and subdue Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch Of human Glorie, and for Glorie done Of triumph, to be styl'd great Conquerours, Patrons of Mankind, Gods, and Sons of Gods, Destroyers rightlier call'd and Plagues of men. Thus Fame shall be atchiev'd, renown on Earth, And what most merits fame in silence hid. But hee the seventh from thee, whom thou beheldst The onely righteous in a World perverse, And therefore hated, therefore so beset With Foes for daring single to be just, And utter odious Truth, that God would come To judge them with his Saints: Him the most High Rapt in a balmie Cloud with winged Steeds Did, as thou sawst, receave, to walk with God High in Salvation and the Climes of bliss, Exempt from Death; to shew thee what reward Awaits the good, the rest what punishment; Which now direct thine eyes and soon behold. He look'd, and saw the face of things quite chang'd, The brazen Throat of Warr had ceast to roar, All now was turn'd to jollitie and game, To luxurie and riot, feast and dance, Marrying or prostituting, as befell, Rape or Adulterie, where passing faire Allurd them; thence from Cups to civil Broiles. At length a Reverend Sire among them came, And of thir doings great dislike declar'd, And testifi'd against thir wayes; hee oft Frequented thir Assemblies, whereso met, Triumphs or Festivals, and to them preachd Conversion and Repentance, as to Souls In Prison under Judgements imminent: But all in vain: which when he saw, he ceas'd Contending, and remov'd his Tents farr off; Then from the Mountain hewing Timber tall, Began to build a Vessel of huge bulk, Measur'd by Cubit, length, and breadth, and highth, Smeard round with Pitch, and in the side a dore Contriv'd, and of provisions laid in large For Man and Beast: when loe a wonder strange! Of every Beast, and Bird, and Insect small Came seavens, and pairs, and enterd in, as taught Thir order: last the Sire, and his three Sons With thir four Wives; and God made fast the dore. Meanwhile the Southwind rose, and with black wings Wide hovering, all the Clouds together drove From under Heav'n; the Hills to their supplie Vapour, and Exhalation dusk and moist, Sent up amain; and now the thick'nd Skie Like a dark Ceeling stood; down rush'd the Rain Impetuous, and continu'd till the Earth No more was seen; the floating Vessel swum Uplifted; and secure with beaked prow Rode tilting o're the Waves, all dwellings else Flood overwhelmd, and them with all thir pomp Deep under water rould; Sea cover'd Sea, Sea without shoar; and in thir Palaces Where luxurie late reign'd, Sea-monsters whelp'd And stabl'd; of Mankind, so numerous late, All left, in one small bottom swum imbark't. How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold The end of all thy Ofspring, end so sad, Depopulation; thee another Floud, Of tears and sorrow a Floud thee also drown'd, And sunk thee as thy Sons; till gently reard By th' Angel, on thy feet thou stoodst at last, Though comfortless, as when a Father mourns His Children, all in view destroyd at once; And scarce to th' Angel utterdst thus thy plaint. O Visions ill foreseen! better had I Liv'd ignorant of future, so had borne My part of evil onely, each dayes lot Anough to beare; those now, that were dispenst The burd'n of many Ages, on me light At once, by my foreknowledge gaining Birth Abortive, to torment me ere thir being, With thought that they must be. Let no man seek Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall Him or his Childern, evil he may be sure, Which neither his foreknowing can prevent, And hee the future evil shall no less In apprehension then in substance feel Grievous to bear: but that care now is past, Man is not whom to warne: those few escap't Famin and anguish will at last consume Wandring that watrie Desert: I had hope When violence was ceas't, and Warr on Earth, All would have then gon well, peace would have crownd With length of happy dayes the race of man; But I was farr deceav'd; for now I see Peace to corrupt no less then Warr to waste. How comes it thus? unfould, Celestial Guide, And whether here the Race of man will end. To whom thus Michael. Those whom last thou sawst In Triumph and luxurious wealth, are they First seen in acts of prowess eminent And great exploits, but of true vertu void; Who having spilt much blood, and don much waste Subduing Nations, and achievd thereby Fame in the World, high titles, and rich prey, Shall change thir course to pleasure, ease, and sloth, Surfet, and lust, till wantonness and pride Raise out of friendship hostil deeds in Peace. The conquerd also, and enslav'd by Warr Shall with thir freedom lost all vertu loose And fear of God, from whom thir pietie feign'd In sharp contest of Battel found no aide Against invaders; therefore coold in zeale Thenceforth shall practice how to live secure, Worldlie or dissolute, on what thir Lords Shall leave them to enjoy; for th' Earth shall bear More then anough, that temperance may be tri'd: So all shall turn degenerate, all deprav'd, Justice and Temperance, Truth and Faith forgot; One Man except, the onely Son of light In a dark Age, against example good, Against allurement, custom, and a World Offended; fearless of reproach and scorn, Or violence, hee of thir wicked wayes Shall them admonish, and before them set The paths of righteousness, how much more safe, And full of peace, denouncing wrauth to come On thir impenitence; and shall returne Of them derided, but of God observd The one just Man alive; by his command Shall build a wondrous Ark, as thou beheldst, To save himself and household from amidst A World devote to universal rack. No sooner hee with them of Man and Beast Select for life shall in the Ark be lodg'd, And shelterd round, but all the Cataracts Of Heav'n set open on the Earth shall powre Raine day and night, all fountains of the Deep Broke up, shall heave the Ocean to usurp Beyond all bounds, till inundation rise Above the highest Hills: then shall this Mount Of Paradise by might of Waves be moovd Out of his place, pushd by the horned floud, With all his verdure spoil'd, and Trees adrift Down the great River to the op'ning Gulf, And there take root an Iland salt and bare, The haunt of Seales and Orcs, and Sea-mews clang. To teach thee that God attributes to place No sanctitie, if none be thither brought By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell. And now what further shall ensue, behold. He lookd, and saw the Ark hull on the floud, Which now abated, for the Clouds were fled, Drivn by a keen North-winde, that blowing drie Wrinkl'd the face of Deluge, as decai'd; And the cleer Sun on his wide watrie Glass Gaz'd hot, and of the fresh Wave largely drew, As after thirst, which made thir flowing shrink From standing lake to tripping ebbe, that stole With soft foot towards the deep, who now had stopt His Sluces, as the Heav'n his windows shut. The Ark no more now flotes, but seems on ground Fast on the top of som high mountain fixt. And now the tops of Hills as Rocks appeer; With clamor thence the rapid Currents drive Towards the retreating Sea thir furious tyde. Forthwith from out the Arke a Raven flies, And after him, the surer messenger, A Dove sent forth once and agen to spie Green Tree or ground whereon his foot may light; The second time returning, in his Bill An Olive leafe he brings, pacific signe: Anon drie ground appeers, and from his Arke The ancient Sire descends with all his Train; Then with uplifted hands, and eyes devout, Grateful to Heav'n, over his head beholds A dewie Cloud, and in the Cloud a Bow Conspicuous with three listed colours gay, Betok'ning peace from God, and Cov'nant new. Whereat the heart of Adam erst so sad Greatly rejoyc'd, and thus his joy broke forth. O thou who future things canst represent As present, Heav'nly instructer, I revive At this last sight, assur'd that Man shall live With all the Creatures, and thir seed preserve. Farr less I now lament for one whole World Of wicked Sons destroyd, then I rejoyce For one Man found so perfet and so just, That God voutsafes to raise another World From him, and all his anger to forget. But say, what mean those colourd streaks in Heavn, Distended as the Brow of God appeas'd, Or serve they as a flourie verge to binde The fluid skirts of that same watrie Cloud, Least it again dissolve and showr the Earth? To whom th' Archangel. Dextrously thou aim'st; So willingly doth God remit his Ire, Though late repenting him of Man deprav'd, Griev'd at his heart, when looking down he saw The whole Earth fill'd with violence, and all flesh Corrupting each thir way; yet those remoov'd, Such grace shall one just Man find in his sight, That he relents, not to blot out mankind, And makes a Covenant never to destroy The Earth again by flood, nor let the Sea Surpass his bounds, nor Rain to drown the World With Man therein or Beast; but when he brings Over the Earth a Cloud, will therein set His triple-colour'd Bow, whereon to look And call to mind his Cov'nant: Day and Night, Seed time and Harvest, Heat and hoary Frost Shall hold thir course, till fire purge all things new, Both Heav'n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell.
AS one who in his journey bates at Noone, Though bent on speed, so heer the Archangel paus'd Betwixt the world destroy'd and world restor'd, If Adam aught perhaps might interpose; Then with transition sweet new Speech resumes. Thus thou hast seen one World begin and end; And Man as from a second stock proceed. Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceave Thy mortal sight to faile; objects divine Must needs impaire and wearie human sense: Henceforth what is to com I will relate, Thou therefore give due audience, and attend. This second sours of Men, while yet but few; And while the dread of judgement past remains Fresh in thir mindes, fearing the Deitie, With some regard to what is just and right Shall lead thir lives, and multiplie apace, Labouring the soile, and reaping plenteous crop, Corn wine and oyle; and from the herd or flock, Oft sacrificing Bullock, Lamb, or Kid, With large Wine-offerings pour'd, and sacred Feast, Shal spend thir dayes in joy unblam'd, and dwell Long time in peace by Families and Tribes Under paternal rule; till one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equalitie, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv'd Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth; Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) With Warr and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous: A mightie Hunter thence he shall be styl'd Before the Lord, as in despite of Heav'n, Or from Heav'n claming second Sovrantie; And from Rebellion shall derive his name, Though of Rebellion others he accuse. Hee with a crew, whom like Ambition joyns With him or under him to tyrannize, Marching from Eden towards the West, shall finde The Plain, wherein a black bituminous gurge Boiles out from under ground, the mouth of Hell; Of Brick, and of that stuff they cast to build A Citie and Towre, whose top may reach to Heav'n; And get themselves a name, least far disperst In foraign Lands thir memorie be lost Regardless whether good or evil fame. But God who oft descends to visit men Unseen, and through thir habitations walks To mark thir doings, them beholding soon, Comes down to see thir Citie, ere the Tower Obstruct Heav'n Towrs, and in derision sets Upon thir Tongues a various Spirit to rase Quite out thir Native Language, and instead To sow a jangling noise of words unknown: Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud Among the Builders; each to other calls Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage, As mockt they storm; great laughter was in Heav'n And looking down, to see the hubbub strange And hear the din; thus was the building left Ridiculous, and the work Confusion nam'd. Whereto thus Adam fatherly displeas'd. O execrable Son so to aspire Above his Brethren, to himself assuming Authoritie usurpt, from God not giv'n: He gave us onely over Beast, Fish, Fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but Man over men He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free. But this Usurper his encroachment proud Stayes not on Man; to God his Tower intends Siege and defiance: Wretched man! what food Will he convey up thither to sustain Himself and his rash Armie, where thin Aire Above the Clouds will pine his entrails gross, And famish him of Breath, if not of Bread? To whom thus Michael. Justly thou abhorr'st That Son, who on the quiet state of men Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue Rational Libertie; yet know withall, Since thy original lapse, true Libertie Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur'd, or not obeyd, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. Therefore since hee permits Within himself unworthie Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in judgement just Subjects him from without to violent Lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom: Tyrannie must be, Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse. Yet somtimes Nations will decline so low From vertue, which is reason, that no wrong, But Justice, and some fatal curse annext Deprives them of thir outward libertie, Thir inward lost: Witness th' irreverent Son Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Don to his Father, heard this heavie curse, Servant of Seruants, on his vitious Race. Thus will this latter, as the former World, Still tend from bad to worse, till God at last Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw His presence from among them, and avert His holy Eyes; resolving from thenceforth To leave them to thir own polluted wayes; And one peculiar Nation to select From all the rest, of whom to be invok'd, A Nation from one faithful man to spring: Him on this side Euphrates yet residing, Bred up in Idol-worship; O that men (Canst thou believe?) should be so stupid grown, While yet the Patriark liv'd, who scap'd the Flood, As to forsake the living God, and fall To worship thir own work in Wood and Stone For Gods! yet him God the most High voutsafes To call by Vision from his Fathers house, His kindred and false Gods, into a Land Which he will shew him, and from him will raise A mightie Nation, and upon him showre His benediction so, that in his Seed All Nations shall be blest; he straight obeys, Not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes: I see him, but thou canst not, with what Faith He leaves his Gods, his Friends, and native Soile Ur of Chaldaea, passing now the Ford To Haran, after him a cumbrous Train Of Herds and Flocks, and numerous servitude; Not wandring poor, but trusting all his wealth With God, who call'd him, in a land unknown. Canaan he now attains, I see his Tents Pitcht about Sechem, and the neighbouring Plaine Of Moreh; there by promise he receaves Gift to his Progenie of all that Land; From Hamath Northward to the Desert South (Things by thir names I call, though yet unnam'd) From Hermon East to the great Western Sea, Mount Hermon, yonder Sea, each place behold In prospect, as I point them; on the shoare Mount Carmel; here the double-founted stream Jordan, true limit Eastward; but his Sons Shall dwell to Senir, that long ridge of Hills. This ponder, that all Nations of the Earth Shall in his Seed be blessed; by that Seed Is meant thy great deliverer, who shall bruise The Serpents head; whereof to thee anon Plainlier shall be reveald. This Patriarch blest, Whom faithful Abraham due time shall call, A Son, and of his Son a Grand-childe leaves, Like him in faith, in wisdom, and renown; The Grandchilde with twelve Sons increast, departs From Canaan, to a Land hereafter call'd Egypt, divided by the River Nile; See where it flows, disgorging at seaven mouthes Into the Sea: to sojourn in that Land He comes invited by a yonger Son In time of dearth, a Son whose worthy deeds Raise him to be the second in that Realme Of Pharao: there he dies, and leaves his Race Growing into a Nation, and now grown Suspected to a sequent King, who seeks To stop thir overgrowth, as inmate guests Too numerous; whence of guests he makes them slaves Inhospitably, and kills thir infant Males: Till by two brethren (those two brethren call Moses and Aaron) sent from God to claime His people from enthralment, they return With glory and spoile back to thir promis'd Land. But first the lawless Tyrant, who denies To know thir God, or message to regard, Must be compelld by Signes and judgements dire; To blood unshed the Rivers must be turnd, Frogs, Lice and Flies must all his Palace fill With loath'd intrusion, and fill all the land; His Cattel must of Rot and Murren die, Botches and blaines must all his flesh imboss, And all his people; Thunder mixt with Haile, Haile mixt with fire must rend th' Egyptian Skie And wheel on th' Earth, devouring where it rouls; What it devours not, Herb, or Fruit, or Graine, A darksom Cloud of Locusts swarming down Must eat, and on the ground leave nothing green: Darkness must overshadow all his bounds, Palpable darkness, and blot out three dayes; Last with one midnight stroke all the first-born Of Egypt must lie dead. Thus with ten wounds The River-dragon tam'd at length submits To let his sojourners depart, and oft Humbles his stubborn heart, but still as Ice More hard'nd after thaw, till in his rage Pursuing whom he late dismissd, the Sea Swallows him with his Host, but them lets pass As on drie land between two christal walls, Aw'd by the rod of Moses so to stand Divided, till his rescu'd gain thir shoar: Such wondrous power God to his Saint will lend, Though present in his Angel, who shall goe Before them in a Cloud, and Pillar of Fire, By day a Cloud, by night a Pillar of Fire, To guide them in thir journey, and remove Behinde them, while th' obdurat King pursues: All night he will pursue, but his approach Darkness defends between till morning Watch; Then through the Firey Pillar and the Cloud God looking forth will trouble all his Host And craze thir Chariot wheels: when by command Moses once more his potent Rod extends Over the Sea; the Sea his Rod obeys; On thir imbattelld ranks the Waves return, And overwhelm thir Warr: the Race elect Safe towards Canaan from the shoar advance Through the wilde Desert, not the readiest way, Least entring on the Canaanite allarmd Warr terrifie them inexpert, and feare Return them back to Egypt, choosing rather Inglorious life with servitude; for life To noble and ignoble is more sweet Untraind in Armes, where rashness leads not on. This also shall they gain by thir delay In the wide Wilderness, there they shall found Thir government, and thir great Senate choose Through the twelve Tribes, to rule by Laws ordaind: God from the Mount of Sinai, whose gray top Shall tremble, he descending, will himself In Thunder Lightning and loud Trumpets sound Ordaine them Lawes; part such as appertaine To civil Justice, part religious Rites Of sacrifice, informing them, by types And shadows, of that destind Seed to bruise The Serpent, by what means he shall achieve Mankinds deliverance. But the voice of God To mortal eare is dreadful; they beseech That Moses might report to them his will, And terror cease; he grants what they besaught Instructed that to God is no access Without Mediator, whose high Office now Moses in figure beares, to introduce One greater, of whose day he shall foretell, And all the Prophets in thir Age the times Of great Messiah shall sing. Thus Laws and Rites Establisht, such delight hath God in Men Obedient to his will, that he voutsafes Among them to set up his Tabernacle, The holy One with mortal Men to dwell: By his prescript a Sanctuary is fram'd Of Cedar, overlaid with Gold, therein An Ark, and in the Ark his Testimony, The Records of his Cov'nant, over these A Mercie-seat of Gold between the wings Of two bright Cherubim, before him burn Seaven Lamps as in a Zodiac representing The Heav'nly fires; over the Tent a Cloud Shall rest by Day, a fiery gleame by Night, Save when they journie, and at length they come, Conducted by his Angel to the Land Promisd to Abraham and his Seed: the rest Were long to tell, how many Battels fought, How many Kings destroyd, and Kingdoms won, Or how the Sun shall in mid Heav'n stand still A day entire, and Nights due course adjourne, Mans voice commanding, Sun in Gibeon stand, And thou Moon in the vale of Aialon, Till Israel overcome; so call the third From Abraham, Son of Isaac, and from him His whole descent, who thus shall Canaan win. Here Adam interpos'd. O sent from Heav'n, Enlightner of my darkness, gracious things Thou hast reveald, those chiefly which concerne Just Abraham and his Seed: now first I finde Mine eyes true op'ning, and my heart much eas'd, Erwhile perplext with thoughts what would becom Of mee and all Mankind; but now I see His day, in whom all Nations shall be blest, Favour unmerited by me, who sought Forbidd'n knowledge by forbidd'n means. This yet I apprehend not, why to those Among whom God will deigne to dwell on Earth So many and so various Laws are giv'n; So many Laws argue so many sins Among them; how can God with such reside? To whom thus Michael. Doubt not but that sin Will reign among them, as of thee begot; And therefore was Law given them to evince Thir natural pravitie, by stirring up Sin against Law to fight; that when they see Law can discover sin, but not remove, Save by those shadowie expiations weak, The bloud of Bulls and Goats, they may conclude Some bloud more precious must be paid for Man, Just for unjust, that in such righteousness To them by Faith imputed, they may finde Justification towards God, and peace Of Conscience, which the Law by Ceremonies Cannot appease, nor Man the moral part Perform, and not performing cannot live. So law appears imperfet, and but giv'n With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better Cov'nant, disciplin'd From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit, From imposition of strict Laws, to free Acceptance of large Grace, from servil fear To filial, works of Law to works of Faith. And therefore shall not Moses, though of God Highly belov'd, being but the Minister Of Law, his people into Canaan lead; But Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call, His Name and Office bearing, who shall quell The adversarie Serpent, and bring back Through the worlds wilderness long wanderd man Safe to eternal Paradise of rest. Meanwhile they in thir earthly Canaan plac't Long time shall dwell and prosper, but when sins National interrupt thir public peace, Provoking God to raise them enemies: From whom as oft he saves them penitent By Judges first, then under Kings; of whom The second, both for pietie renownd And puissant deeds, a promise shall receive Irrevocable, that his Regal Throne For ever shall endure; the like shall sing All Prophecie, That of the Royal Stock Of David (so I name this King) shall rise A Son, the Womans Seed to thee foretold, Foretold to Abraham, as in whom shall trust All Nations, and to Kings foretold, of Kings The last, for of his Reign shall be no end. But first a long succession must ensue, And his next Son for Wealth and Wisdom fam'd, The clouded Ark of God till then in Tents Wandring, shall in a glorious Temple enshrine. Such follow him, as shall be registerd Part good, part bad, of bad the longer scrowle, Whose foul Idolatries, and other faults Heapt to the popular summe, will so incense God, as to leave them, and expose thir Land, Thir Citie, his Temple, and his holy Ark With all his sacred things, a scorn and prey To that proud Citie, whose high Walls thou saw'st Left in confusion, Babylon thence call'd. There in captivitie he lets them dwell The space of seventie years, then brings them back, Remembring mercie, and his Cov'nant sworn To David, stablisht as the dayes of Heav'n. Returnd from Babylon by leave of Kings Thir Lords, whom God dispos'd, the house of God They first re-edifie, and for a while In mean estate live moderate, till grown In wealth and multitude, factious they grow; But first among the Priests dissension springs, Men who attend the Altar, and should most Endeavour Peace: thir strife pollution brings Upon the Temple it self: at last they seise The Scepter, and regard not Davids Sons, Then loose it to a stranger, that the true Anointed King Messiah might be born Barr'd of his right; yet at his Birth a Starr Unseen before in Heav'n proclaims him com, And guides the Eastern Sages, who enquire His place, to offer Incense, Myrrh, and Gold; His place of birth a solemn Angel tells To simple Shepherds, keeping watch by night; They gladly thither haste, and by a Quire Of squadrond Angels hear his Carol sung. A Virgin is his Mother, but his Sire The Power of the most High; he shall ascend The Throne hereditarie, and bound his Reign With earths wide bounds, his glory with the Heav'ns. He ceas'd, discerning Adam with such joy Surcharg'd, as had like grief bin dew'd in tears, Without the vent of words, which these he breathd. O Prophet of glad tidings, finisher Of utmost hope! now clear I understand What oft my steddiest thoughts have searcht in vain, Why our great expectation should be call'd The seed of Woman: Virgin Mother, Haile, High in the love of Heav'n, yet from my Loynes Thou shalt proceed, and from thy Womb the Son Of God most High; So God with man unites. Needs must the Serpent now his capital bruise Expect with mortal paine: say where and when Thir fight, what stroke shall bruise the Victors heel. To whom thus Michael. Dream not of thir fight, As of a Duel, or the local wounds Of head or heel: not therefore joynes the Son Manhood to God-head, with more strength to foil Thy enemie; nor so is overcome Satan, whose fall from Heav'n, a deadlier bruise, Disabl'd not to give thee thy deaths wound: Which hee, who comes thy Saviour, shall recure, Not by destroying Satan, but his works In thee and in thy Seed: nor can this be, But by fulfilling that which thou didst want, Obedience to the Law of God, impos'd On penaltie of death, and suffering death, The penaltie to thy transgression due, And due to theirs which out of thine will grow: So onely can high Justice rest appaid. The Law of God exact he shall fulfill Both by obedience and by love, though love Alone fulfill the Law; thy punishment He shall endure by coming in the Flesh To a reproachful life and cursed death, Proclaiming Life to all who shall believe In his redemption, and that his obedience Imputed becomes theirs by Faith, his merits To save them, not thir own, though legal works. For this he shall live hated, be blasphem'd, Seis'd on by force, judg'd, and to death condemnd A shameful and accurst, naild to the Cross By his own Nation, slaine for bringing Life; But to the Cross he nailes thy Enemies, The Law that is against thee, and the sins Of all mankinde, with him there crucifi'd, Never to hurt them more who rightly trust In this his satisfaction; so he dies, But soon revives, Death over him no power Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning light Returne, the Starres of Morn shall see him rise Out of his grave, fresh as the dawning light, Thy ransom paid, which Man from death redeems, His death for Man, as many as offerd Life Neglect not, and the benefit imbrace By Faith not void of workes: this God-like act Annuls thy doom, the death thou shouldst have dy'd, In sin for ever lost from life; this act Shall bruise the head of Satan, crush his strength Defeating Sin and Death, his two maine armes, And fix farr deeper in his head thir stings Then temporal death shall bruise the Victors heel, Or theirs whom he redeems, a death like sleep, A gentle wafting to immortal Life. Nor after resurrection shall he stay Longer on Earth then certaine times to appeer To his Disciples, Men who in his Life Still follow'd him; to them shall leave in charge To teach all nations what of him they learn'd And his Salvation, them who shall beleeve Baptizing in the profluent stream, the signe Of washing them from guilt of sin to Life Pure, and in mind prepar'd, if so befall, For death, like that which the redeemer dy'd. All Nations they shall teach; for from that day Not onely to the Sons of Abrahams Loines Salvation shall be Preacht, but to the Sons Of Abrahams Faith wherever through the world; So in his seed all Nations shall be blest. Then to the Heav'n of Heav'ns he shall ascend With victory, triumphing through the aire Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise The Serpent, Prince of aire, and drag in Chaines Through all his Realme, and there confounded leave; Then enter into glory, and resume His Seat at Gods right hand, exalted high Above all names in Heav'n; and thence shall come, When this worlds disolution shall be ripe, With glory and power to judge both quick and dead, To judge th' unfaithful dead, but to reward His faithful, and receave them into bliss, Whether in Heav'n or Earth, for then the Earth Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Then this of Eden, and far happier daies. So spake th' Archangel Michael, then paus'd, As at the Worlds great period; and our Sire Replete with joy and wonder thus repli'd. O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Then that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By mee done and occasiond, or rejoyce Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrauth grace shall abound. But say, if our deliverer up to Heav'n Must reascend, what will betide the few His faithful, left among th' unfaithful herd, The enemies of truth; who then shall guide His people, who defend? will they not deale Wors with his followers then with him they dealt? Be sure they will, said th' Angel; but from Heav'n Hee to his own a Comforter will send, The promise of the Father, who shall dwell His Spirit within them, and the Law of Faith Working through love, upon thir hearts shall write, To guide them in all truth, and also arme With spiritual Armour, able to resist Satans assaults, and quench his fierie darts, What man can do against them, not affraid, Though to the death, against such cruelties With inward consolations recompenc't, And oft supported so as shall amaze Thir proudest persecuters: for the Spirit Powrd first on his Apostles, whom he sends To evangelize the Nations, then on all Baptiz'd, shall them with wondrous gifts endue To speak all Tongues, and do all Miracles, As did thir Lord before them. Thus they win Great numbers of each Nation to receave With joy the tidings brought from Heav'n: at length Thir Ministry perform'd, and race well run, Thir doctrine and thir story written left, They die; but in thir room, as they forewarne, Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves, Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav'n To thir own vile advantages shall turne Of lucre and ambition, and the truth With superstitions and traditions taint, Left onely in those written Records pure, Though not but by the Spirit understood. Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names, Places and titles, and with these to joine Secular power, though feigning still to act By spiritual, to themselves appropriating The Spirit of God, promisd alike and giv'n To all Beleevers; and from that pretense, Spiritual Lawes by carnal power shall force On every conscience; Laws which none shall finde Left them inrould, or what the Spirit within Shall on the heart engrave. What will they then But force the Spirit of Grace it self, and binde His consort Libertie; what, but unbuild His living Temples, built by Faith to stand, Thir own Faith not anothers: for on Earth Who against Faith and Conscience can be heard Infallible? yet many will presume: Whence heavie persecution shall arise On all who in the worship persevere Of Spirit and Truth; the rest, farr greater part, Will deem in outward Rites and specious formes Religion satisfi'd; Truth shall retire Bestuck with slandrous darts, and works of Faith Rarely be found: so shall the World goe on, To good malignant, to bad men benigne, Under her own waight groaning till the day Appeer of respiration to the just, And vengeance to the wicked, at return Of him so lately promis'd to thy aid The Womans seed, obscurely then foretold, Now amplier known thy Saviour and thy Lord, Last in the Clouds from Heav'n to be reveald In glory of the Father, to dissolve Satan with his perverted World, then raise From the conflagrant mass, purg'd and refin'd, New Heav'ns, new Earth, Ages of endless date Founded in righteousness and peace and love To bring forth fruits Joy and eternal Bliss. He ended; and thus Adam last reply'd. How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the Race of time, Till time stand fixt: beyond is all abyss, Eternitie, whose end no eye can reach. Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge, what this Vessel can containe; Beyond which was my folly to aspire. Henceforth I learne, that to obey is best, And love with fear the onely God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend, Mercifull over all his works, with good Still overcoming evil, and by small Accomplishing great things, by things deemd weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simply meek; that suffering for Truths sake Is fortitude to highest victorie, And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life; Taught this by his example whom I now Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest. To whom thus also th' Angel last repli'd: This having learnt, thou hast attaind the summe Of wisdome; hope no higher, though all the Starrs Thou knewst by name, and all th' ethereal Powers, All secrets of the deep, all Natures works, Or works of God in Heav'n, Aire, Earth, or Sea, And all the riches of this World enjoydst, And all the rule, one Empire; onely add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call'd Charitie, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier farr. Let us descend now therefore from this top Of Speculation; for the hour precise Exacts our parting hence; and see the Guards, By mee encampt on yonder Hill, expect Thir motion, at whose Front a flaming Sword, In signal of remove, waves fiercely round; We may no longer stay: go, waken Eve; Her also I with gentle Dreams have calm'd Portending good, and all her spirits compos'd To meek submission: thou at season fit Let her with thee partake what thou hast heard, Chiefly what may concern her Faith to know, The great deliverance by her Seed to come (For by the Womans Seed) on all Mankind. That ye may live, which will be many dayes, Both in one Faith unanimous though sad, With cause for evils past, yet much more cheer'd With meditation on the happie end. He ended, and they both descend the Hill; Descended, Adam to the Bowre where Eve Lay sleeping ran before, but found her wak't; And thus with words not sad she him receav'd. Whence thou returnst, and whither wentst, I know; For God is also in sleep, and Dreams advise, Which he hath sent propitious, some great good Presaging, since with sorrow and hearts distress Wearied I fell asleep: but now lead on; In mee is no delay; with thee to goe, Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee Art all things under Heav'n, all places thou, Who for my wilful crime art banisht hence. This further consolation yet secure I carry hence; though all by mee is lost, Such favour I unworthie am voutsaft, By mee the Promis'd Seed shall all restore. So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard Well pleas'd, but answer'd not; for now too nigh Th' Archangel stood, and from the other Hill To thir fixt Station, all in bright array The Cherubim descended; on the ground Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning Mist Ris'n from a River o're the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel Homeward returning. High in Front advanc't, The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz'd Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat, And vapour as the Libyan Air adust, Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat In either hand the hastning Angel caught Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd. They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat, Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes: Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
Rigid Body (sings). Gin a body meet a body  Flyin’ through the air, Gin a body hit a body,  Will it fly? and where? Ilka impact has its measure,  Ne’er a ane hae I, Yet a’ the lads they measure me,  Or, at least, they try. Gin a body meet a body  Altogether free, How they travel afterwards  We do not always see. Ilka problem has its method  By analytics high; For me, I ken na ane o’ them,  But what the waur am I?
I.  PLACE. —A small alcove with dark curtains.  The class consists of one member.  SUBJECT.—Thomson’s Mirror Galvanometer.
In the sad November time, When the leaf has left the lime, And the Cam, with sludge and slime, Plasters his ugly channel, While, with sober step and slow, Round about the marshes low, Stiffening students stumping go Shivering through their flannel. Then to me in doleful mood Rises up a question rude, Asking what sufficient good Comes of this mode of living? Moping on from day to day, Grinding up what will not “pay,” Till the jaded brain gives way Under its own misgiving. Why should wretched Man employ Years which Nature meant for joy, Striving vainly to destroy Freedom of thought and feeling? Still the injured powers remain Endless stores of hopeless pain, When at last the vanquished brain Languishes past all healing. Where is then his wealth of mind— All the schemes that Hope designed? Gone, like spring, to leave behind Indolent melancholy. Thus he ends his helpless days, Vex’t with thoughts of former praise— Tell me, how are Wisdom’s ways Better than senseless Folly? Happier those whom trifles please, Dreaming out a life of ease, Sinking by unfelt degrees Into annihilation. Or the slave, to labour born, Heedless of the freeman’s scorn, Destined to be slowly worn Down to the brute creation. Thus a tempting spirit spoke, As from troubled sleep I woke To a morning thick with smoke, Sunless and damp and chilly. Then to sleep I turned once more, Eyes inflamed and windpipe sore, Dreaming dreams I dreamt before, Only not quite so silly. In my dream methought I strayed Where a learned-looking maid Stores of flimsy goods displayed, Articles not worth wearing. “These,” she said, with solemn air, “Are the robes that sages wear, Warranted, when kept with care, Never to need repairing.” Then unnumbered witlings, caught By her wiles, the trappings bought, And by labour, not by thought, Honour and fame were earning. While the men of wiser mind Passed for blind among the blind; Pedants left them far behind In the career of learning. “Those that fix their eager eyes Ever on the nearest prize Well may venture to despise Loftier aspirations. Pedantry is in demand! Buy it up at second-hand, Seek no more to understand Profitless speculations.” Thus the gaudy gowns were sold, Cast off sloughs of pedants old; Proudly marched the students bold Through the domain of error, Till their trappings, false though fair, Mouldered off and left them bare, Clustering close in blank despair, Nakedness, cold, and terror. Then, I said, “These haughty Schools Boast that by their formal rules They produce more learned fools Than could be well expected. Learned fools they are indeed, Learned in the books they read; Fools whene’er they come to need Wisdom, too long neglected. “Oh! that men indeed were wise, And would raise their purblind eyes To the opening mysteries Scattered around them ever. Truth should spring from sterile ground, Beauty beam from all around, Right should then at last be found Joining what none may sever.”
At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form “associations” here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career. So we who sat, oppressed with science, As British asses, wise and grave, Are now transformed to wild Red Lions, As round our prey we ramp and rave. Thus, by a swift metamorphosis, Wisdom turns wit, and science joke, Nonsense is incense to our noses, For when Red Lions speak, they smoke. Hail, Nonsense! dry nurse of Red Lions, From thee the wise their wisdom learn, From thee they cull those truths of science, Which into thee again they turn. What combinations of ideas, Nonsense alone can wisely form! What sage has half the power that she has, To take the towers of Truth by storm? Yield, then, ye rules of rigid reason! Dissolve, thou too, too solid sense! Melt into nonsense for a season, Then in some nobler form condense. Soon, all too soon, the chilly morning, This flow of soul will crystallize, Then those who Nonsense now are scorning, May learn, too late, where wisdom lies.
Deep St. Mary’s bell had sounded, And the twelve notes gently rounded Endless chimneys that surrounded My abode in Trinity. (Letter G, Old Court, South Attics), I shut up my mathematics, That confounded hydrostatics— Sink it in the deepest sea! In the grate the flickering embers Served to show how dull November’s Fogs had stamped my torpid members, Like a plucked and skinny goose. And as I prepared for bed, I Asked myself with voice unsteady, If of all the stuff I read, I Ever made the slightest use. Late to bed and early rising, Ever luxury despising, Ever training, never “sizing,” I have suffered with the rest. Yellow cheek and forehead ruddy, Memory confused and muddy, These are the effects of study Of a subject so unblest. Look beyond, and see the wrangler, Now become a College dangler, Court some spiritual angler, Nibbling at his golden bait. Hear him silence restive Reason, Her advice is out of season, While her lord is plotting treason Gainst himself, and Church or State. See him next with place and pension, And the very best intention Of upholding that Convention Under which his fortunes rose. Every scruple is rejected, With his cherished schemes connected, “Higher Powers may be neglected— His result no further goes.” Much he lauds the education Which has raised to lofty station, Men, whose powers of calculation Calculation’s self defied. How the learned fool would wonder Were he now to see his blunder, When he put his reason under The control of worldly Pride. Thus I muttered, very seedy, Husky was my throat, and reedy; And no wonder, for indeed I Now had caught a dreadful cold. Thickest fog had settled slowly Round the candle, burning lowly, Round the fire, where melancholy Traced retreating hills of gold. Still those papers lay before me— Problems made express to bore me, When a silent change came o’er me, In my hard uneasy chair. Fire and fog, and candle faded, Spectral forms the room invaded, Little creatures, that paraded On the problems lying there. Fathers there, of every college, Led the glorious ranks of knowledge, Men, whose virtues all acknowledge Levied the proctorial fines; There the modest Moderators, Set apart as arbitrators ’Twixt contending calculators, Scrutinised the trembling lines. All the costly apparatus, That is meant to elevate us To the intellectual status Necessary for degrees— College tutors—private coaches— Line the Senate-house approaches. If our Alma Mater dote, she’s Taken care of well by these. Much I doubted if the vision Were the simple repetition Of the statements of Commission, Strangely jumbled, oddly placed. When an awful form ascended, And with cruel words defended Those abuses that offended My unsanctioned private taste. Angular in form and feature, Unlike any earthly creature, She had properties to meet your Eye whatever you might view. Hair of pens and skin of paper; Breath, not breath but chemic vapour; Dress,—such dress as College Draper Fashions with precision due. Eyes of glass, with optic axes Twisting rays of light as flax is Twisted, while the Parallax is Made to show the real size. Primary and secondary Focal lines in planes contrary, Sum up all that’s known to vary In those dull, unmeaning eyes. Such the eyes, through which all Nature Seems reduced to meaner stature. If you had them you would hate your Symbolising sense of sight. Seeing planets in their courses Thick beset with arrowy “forces,” While the common eye no more sees Than their mild and quiet light. “Son,” she said (what could be queerer Than thus tête-a -tête to hear her Talk, in tones approaching nearer To a saw’s than aught beside? For the voice the spectre spoke in Might be known by many a token To proceed from metal, broken When acoustic tricks were tried. Little pleased to hear the Siren “Own” me thus with voice of iron, I had thoughts of just retiring From a mother such a fright). “No,” she said, “the time is pressing, So before I give my blessing, I’ll excuse you from confessing What you thought of me to-night. “Powers!” she cried, with hoarse devotion, “Give my son the clearest notion How to compass sure promotion, And take care of Number One. Let his college course be pleasant, Let him ever, as at present, Seem to have read what he hasn’t, And to do what can’t be done. Of the Philosophic Spirit Richly may my son inherit; As for Poetry, inter it With the myths of other days. Cut the thing entirely, lest yon College Don should put the question, Why not stick to what you’re best on? Mathematics always pays.” As the Hag was thus proceeding To prescribe my course of reading, And as I was faintly pleading, Hardly knowing what to say, Suddenly, my head inclining I beheld a light form shining; And the withered beldam, whining, Saw the same and slunk away. Then the vision, growing brighter, Seemed to make my garret lighter; As when noisome fogs of night are Scattered by the rising sun. Nearer still it grew and nearer, Till my straining eyes caught clearer Glimpses of a being dearer, Dearer still than Number One. In that well-remembered Vision I was led to the decision Still to hold in calm derision Pedantry, however draped; Since that artificial spectre Proved a paltry sub-collector, And had nothing to connect her With the being whom she aped. I could never finish telling You of her that has her dwelling Where those springs of truth are welling, Whence all streams of beauty run. She has taught me that creation Bears the test of calculation, But that Man forgets his station If he stops when that is done. Is our algebra the measure Of that unexhausted treasure That affords the purest pleasure, Ever found when it is sought? Let us rather, realising The conclusions thence arising Nature more than symbols prizing, Learn to worship as we ought. Worship? Yes, what worship better Than when free’d from every fetter That the uninforming letter Rivets on the tortured mind, Man, with silent admiration Sees the glories of Creation, And, in holy contemplation, Leaves the learned crowd behind!
Ye Sons of Great Britain! come join with me And sing in praise of the gallant British Armie, That behaved right manfully in the Soudan, At the great battle of Omdurman. ’Twas in the year of 1898, and on the 2nd of September, Which the Khalifa and his surviving followers will long remember, Because Sir Herbert Kitchener has annihilated them outright, By the British troops and Soudanese in the Omdurman fight. The Sirdar and his Army left the camp in grand array, And marched on to Omdurman without delay, Just as the brigades had reached the crest adjoining the Nile, And became engaged with the enemy in military style. The Dervishes had re-formed under cover of a rocky eminence, Which to them, no doubt, was a strong defence, And they were massed together in battle array Around the black standard of the Khalifa, which made a grand display. But General Maxwell’s Soudanese brigade seized the eminence in a short time, And General Macdonald’s brigade then joined the firing line; And in ten minutes, long before the attack could be driven home, The flower of the Khalifa’s army was almost overthrown. Still manfully the dusky warriors strove to make headway, But the Soudanese troops and British swept them back without dismay, And their main body were mown down by their deadly fire— But still the heroic Dervishes refused to retire. And defiantly they planted their standards and died by them, To their honour be it said, just like brave men; But at last they retired, with their hearts full of woe, Leaving the field white with corpses, like a meadow dotted with snow. The chief heroes in the fight were the 21st Lancers; They made a brilliant charge on the enemy with ringing cheers, And through the dusky warriors bodies their lances they did thrust, Whereby many of them were made to lick the dust. Then at a quarter past eleven the Sirdar sounded the advance, And the remnant of the Dervishes fled, which was their only chance, While the cavalry cut off their retreat while they ran; Then the Sirdar, with the black standard of the Khalifa, headed for Omdurman. And when the Khalifa saw his noble army cut down, With rage and grief he did fret and frown; Then he spurred his noble steed, and swiftly it ran, While inwardly to himself he cried, “Catch me if you can!” And Mahdism now has received a crushing blow, For the Khalifa and his followers have met with a complete overthrow; And General Gordon has been avenged, the good Christian, By the defeat of the Khalifa at the battle of Omdurman. Now since the Khalifa has been defeated and his rule at an end, Let us thank God that fortunately did send The brave Sir Herbert Kitchener to conquer that bad man, The inhuman Khalifa, and his followers at the battle of Omdurman. Success to Sir Herbert Kitchener! he is a great commander, And as skilful in military tactics as the great Alexander, Because he devised a very wise plan, And by it has captured the town of Omdurman. I wish success to the British and Soudanese Army, May God protect them by land and by sea, May he enable them always to conquer the foe, And to establish what’s right wherever they go.
It was biting cold, and the falling snow, Which filled a poor little match girl’s heart with woe, Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street, Crying, “Who’ll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!” When she left home she had slippers on; But, alas! poor child, now they were gone. For she lost both of them while hurrying across the street, Out of the way of two carriages which were near by her feet. So the little girl went on, while the snow fell thick and fast; And the child’s heart felt cold and downcast, For nobody had bought any matches that day, Which filled her little mind with grief and dismay. Alas! she was hungry and shivering with cold; So in a corner between two houses she made bold To take shelter from the violent storm. Poor little waif! wishing to herself she’d never been born. And she grew colder and colder, and feared to go home For fear of her father beating her; and she felt woe-begone Because she could carry home no pennies to buy bread, And to go home without pennies she was in dread. The large flakes of snow covered her ringlets of fair hair; While the passers-by for her had no care, As they hurried along to their homes at a quick pace, While the cold wind blew in the match girl’s face. As night wore on her hands were numb with cold, And no longer her strength could her uphold, When an idea into her little head came: She’d strike a match and warm her hands at the flame. And she lighted the match, and it burned brightly, And it helped to fill her heart with glee; And she thought she was sitting at a stove very grand; But, alas! she was found dead, with a match in her hand! Her body was found half-covered with snow, And as the people gazed thereon their hearts were full of woe; And many present let fall a burning tear Because she was found dead on the last night of the year, In that mighty city of London, wherein is plenty of gold— But, alas! their charity towards street waifs is rather cold. But I hope the match girl’s in Heaven, beside her Saviour dear, A bright reward for all the hardships she suffered here.
All hail to the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee, He is the greatest preacher I did ever hear or see. He is a man of genius bright, And in him his congregation does delight, Because they find him to be honest and plain, Affable in temper, and seldom known to complain. He preaches in a plain straightforward way, The people flock to hear him night and day, And hundreds from the doors are often turn’d away, Because he is the greatest preacher of the present day. He has written the life of Sir Walter Scott, And while he lives he will never be forgot, Nor when he is dead, Because by his admirers it will be often read; And fill their minds with wonder and delight, And wile away the tedious hours on a cold winter’s night. He has also written about the Bards of the Bible, Which occupied nearly three years in which he was not idle, Because when he sits down to write he does it with might and main, And to get an interview with him it would be almost vain, And in that he is always right, For the Bible tells us whatever your hands findeth to do, Do it with all your might. Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee, I must conclude my muse, And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse, Nor does it give me pain to tell the world fearlessly, that when You are dead they shall not look upon your like again.
As I stood upon London Bridge and viewed the mighty throng Of thousands of people in cabs and ’busses rapidly whirling along, All furiously driving to and fro, Up one street and down another as quick as they could go: Then I was struck with the discordant sound of human voices there, Which seemed to me like wild geese cackling in the air: And the river Thames is a most beautiful sight, To see the steamers sailing upon it by day and by night. And the Tower of London is most gloomy to behold, And the crown of England lies there, begemmed with precious stones and gold; King Henry the Sixth was murdered there by the Duke of Glo’ster, And when he killed him with his sword he called him an impostor. St. Paul’s Cathedral is the finest building that ever I did see, There’s no building can surpass it in the city of Dundee, Because it’s magnificent to behold, With its beautiful dome and spire glottering like gold. And as for Nelson’s Monument that stands in Trafalgar Square, It is a most stately monument I most solemnly declare, And towering defiantly very high, Which arrests strangers’ attention while passing by. Then there’s two beautiful water-fountains spouting up very high, Where the weary traveller can drink when he feels dry; And at the foot of the monument there’s three bronze lions in grand array, Enough to make the stranger’s heart throb with dismay. Then there’s Mr Spurgeon, a great preacher, which no one dare gainsay, I went to hear him preach on the Sabbath-day, And he made my heart feel light and gay, When I heard him preach and pray. And the Tabernacle was crowded from ceiling to floor, And many were standing outside the door; He is an eloquent preacher I honestly declare, And I was struck with admiration as on him I did stare. Then there’s Petticoat Lane I venture to say, It’s a wonderful place on the Sabbath-day; There wearing-apparel can be bought to suit the young or old, For the ready cash, silver, coppers, or gold. Oh! mighty city of London! you are wonderful to see, And thy beauties no doubt fill the tourist’s heart with glee; But during my short stay, and while wandering there, Mr Spurgeon was the only man I heard speaking proper English I do declare.
Oh mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold, Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told, They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye, Because many of them are thirteen storeys high. And as for Central Park, it is lovely to be seen, Especially in the summer season when its shrubberies and trees are green; And the Burns’ statue is there to be seen, Surrounded by trees, on the beautiful sward so green; Also Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, Which by Englishmen and Scotchmen will ne’er be forgot. There the people on the Sabbath-day in thousands resort, All loud, in conversation and searching for sport, Some of them viewing the menagerie of wild beasts there, And also beautiful black swans, I do declare. And there’s beautiful boats to be seen there, And the joyous shouts of the children do rend the air, While the boats sail along with them o’er Lohengrin Lake, And the fare is five cents for children and adults ten is all they take. And there’s also summer-house shades and merry-go-rounds, And with the merry laughter of the children the Park resounds During the livelong Sabbath day, Enjoying the merry-go-round play. Then there’s the elevated railroads, about five storeys high, Which the inhabitants can see and hear night and day passing by, Oh! such a mass of people daily do throng, No less than five hundred thousand daily pass along, And all along the City you can get for five cents, And, believe me, among the passengers there are few discontent. And the top of the houses are all flat, And in the warm weather the people gather to chat, Besides on the house-tops they dry their clothes, And also many people all night on the house-tops repose. And numerous ships and steamboats are there to be seen, Sailing along the East River Water so green; ’Tis certainly a most beautiful sight To see them sailing o’er the smooth water day and night. And Brooklyn Bridge is a very great height, And fills the stranger’s heart with wonder at first sight, But with all its loftiness, I venture to say, For beauty it cannot surpass the new Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay. And there’s also ten thousand rumsellers there, Oh! wonderful to think, I do declare! To accommodate the people of That city therein, And to encourage them to commit all sorts of sin. And on the Sabbath-day, ye will see many a man Going for beer with a tin can, And seems proud to be seen carrying home the beer To treat his neighbours and family dear. Then at night numbers of the people dance and sing, Making the walls of their houses to ring With their songs and dancing on Sabbath night, Which I witnessed with disgust, and fled from the sight. And with regard to New York and the sights I did see, One street in Dundee is more worth to me, And, believe me, the morning I sailed from New York For Bonnie Dundee, my heart it felt as light as a cork.
Greenland’s icy mountains are fascinating and grand, And wondrously created by the Almighty’s command; And the works of the Almighty there’s few can understand: Who knows but it might be a part of Fairyland? Because there are churches of ice, and houses glittering like glass, And for scenic grandeur there’s nothing can it surpass, Besides there’s monuments and spires, also ruins, Which serve for a safe retreat from the wild bruins. And there’s icy crags and precipices, also beautiful waterfalls, And as the stranger gazes thereon, his heart it appals With a mixture of wonder, fear, and delight, Till at last he exclaims, Oh! what a wonderful sight! The icy mountains they’re higher than a brig’s topmast, And the stranger in amazement stands aghast As he beholds the water flowing off the melted ice Adown the mountain sides, that he cries out, Oh! how nice! Such sights as these are truly magnificent to be seen, Only that the mountain tops are white instead of green, And rents and caverns in them, the same as on a rugged mountain side, And suitable places, in my opinion, for mermaids to reside. Sometimes these icy mountains suddenly topple o’er With a wild and rumbling hollow-starting roar; And new peaks and cliffs rise up out of the sea, While great cataracts of uplifted brine pour down furiously. And those that can witness such an awful sight Can only gaze thereon in solemn silence and delight, And the most Godfearless man that hath this region trod Would be forced to recognise the power and majesty of God. Oh! how awful and grand it must be on a sunshiny day To see one of these icy mountains in pieces give way! While, crack after crack, it falls with a mighty crash Flat upon the sea with a fearful splash. And in the breaking up of these mountains they roar like thunder, Which causes the stranger no doubt to wonder; Also the Esquimaux of Greenland betimes will stand And gaze on the wondrous work of the Almighty so grand. When these icy mountains are falling, the report is like big guns, And the glittering brilliancy of them causes mock-suns, And around them there’s connected a beautiful ring of light, And as the stranger looks thereon, it fills his heart with delight. Oh! think on the danger of seafaring men If any of these mighty mountains where falling on them; Alas! they would be killed ere the hand of man could them save And, poor creatures, very likely find a watery grave! ’Tis most beautiful to see and hear the whales whistling and blowing, And the sailors in their small boats quickly after them rowing, While the whales keep lashing the water all their might With their mighty tails, left and right. In winter there’s no sunlight there night or day, Which, no doubt, will cause the time to pass tediously away, And cause the Esquimaux to long for the light of day, So as they will get basking themselves in the sun’s bright array. In summer there is perpetual sunlight, Which fill the Esquimaux’s hearts with delight; And is seen every day and night in the blue sky, Which makes the scenery appear most beautiful to the eye. During summer and winter there the land is covered with snow, Which sometimes must fill the Esquimaux’ hearts with woe As they traverse fields of ice, ten or fifteen feet thick, And with cold, no doubt, their hearts will be touched to the quick. And let those that read or hear this feel thankful to God That the icy fields of Greenland they have never trod; Especially while seated around the fireside on a cold winter night, Let them think of the cold and hardships Greenland sailors have to fight.
God prosper long our noble Queen, And long may she reign! Maclean he tried to shoot her, But it was all in vain. For God He turned the ball aside Maclean aimed at her head; And he felt very angry Because he didn’t shoot her dead. There’s a divinity that hedges a king, And so it does seem, And my opinion is, it has hedged Our most gracious Queen. Maclean must be a madman, Which is obvious to be seen, Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot Our most beloved Queen. Victoria is a good Queen, Which all her subjects know, And for that God has protected her From all her deadly foes. She is noble and generous, Her subjects must confess; There hasn’t been her equal Since the days of good Queen Bess. Long may she be spared to roam Among the bonnie Highland floral, And spend many a happy day In the palace of Balmoral. Because she is very kind To the old women there, And allows them bread, tea, and sugar, And each one to get a share. And when they know of her coming, Their hearts feel overjoy’d, Because, in general, she finds work For men that’s unemploy’d. And she also gives the gipsies money While at Balmoral, I’ve been told, And, mind ye, seldom silver, But very often gold. I hope God will protect her By night and by day, At home and abroad, When she’s far away. May He be as a hedge around her, As He’s been all along, And let her live and die in peace Is the end of my song.
On the Gilfillan burial day, In the Hill o’ Balgay, It was a most solemn sight to see, Not fewer than thirty thousand people assembled in Dundee, All watching the funeral procession of Gilfillan that day, That death had suddenly taken away, And was going to be buried in the Hill o’ Balgay. There were about three thousand people in the procession alone, And many were shedding tears, and several did moan, And their bosoms heaved with pain, Because they knew they would never look upon his like again. There could not be fewer than fifty carriages in the procession that day, And gentlemen in some of them that had come from far away, And in whispers some of them did say, As the hearse bore the precious corpse away, Along the Nethergate that day. I’m sure he will be greatly missed by the poor, For he never turned them empty-handed away from his door; And to assist them in distress it didn’t give him pain, And I’m sure the poor will never look upon his like again. On the Gilfillan burial day, in the Hill o’ Balgay, There was a body of policemen marshalled in grand array, And marched in front of the procession all the way; Also the relatives and friends of the deceas’d, Whom I hope from all sorrows has been releas’d, And whose soul I hope to heaven has fled away, To sing with saints above for ever and aye. The Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council were in the procession that day; Also Mrs Gilfillan, who cried and sobbed all the way For her kind husband, that was always affable and gay, Which she will remember until her dying day. When the procession arrived in the Hill o’ Balgay, The people were almost as hush as death, and many of them did say— As long as we live we’ll remember the day That the great Gilfillan was buried in the Hill o’Balgay. When the body of the great Gilfillan was lowered into the grave, ’Twas then the people’s hearts with sorrow did heave; And with tearful eyes and bated breath, Mrs Gilfillan lamented her loving husband’s death. Then she dropped a ringlet of immortelles into his grave, Then took one last fond look, and in sorrow did leave; And all the people left with sad hearts that day, And that ended the Gilfillan burial in the Hill o’ Balgay.
I’m a rattling boy from Dublin town,  I courted a girl called Biddy Brown, Her eyes they were as black as sloes,  She had black hair and an aquiline nose. Chorus— Whack fal de da, fal de darelido,  Whack fal de da, fal de darelay,  Whack fal de da, fal de darelido,  Whack fal de da, fal de darelay. One night I met her with another lad,  Says I, Biddy, I’ve caught you, by dad; I never thought you were half so bad  As to be going about with another lad. Chorus. Says I, Biddy, this will never do,  For to-night you’ve prov’d to me untrue, So do not make a hullaballoo,  For I will bid farewell to you. Chorus. Says Barney Magee, She is my lass,  And the man that says no, he is an ass, So come away, and I’ll give you a glass,  Och, sure you can get another lass. Chorus. Says I, To the devil with your glass,  You have taken from me my darling lass, And if you look angry, or offer to frown,  With my darling shillelah I’ll knock you down. Chorus. Says Barney Magee unto me,  By the hokey I love Biddy Brown, And before I’ll give her up to thee,  One or both of us will go down. Chorus. So, with my darling shillelah, I gave him a whack,  Which left him lying on his back, Saying, botheration to you and Biddy Brown,—  For I’m the rattling boy from Dublin town. Chorus. So a policeman chanced to come up at the time,  And he asked of me the cause of the shine, Says I, he threatened to knock me down  When I challenged him for walking with my Biddy Brown. Chorus. So the policeman took Barney Magee to jail,  Which made him shout and bewail That ever he met with Biddy Brown,  The greatest deceiver in Dublin town. Chorus. So I bade farewell to Biddy Brown,  The greatest jilter in Dublin town, Because she proved untrue to me,  And was going about with Barney Magee. Chorus.
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. ’Twas about seven o’clock at night, And the wind it blew with all its might, And the rain came pouring down, And the dark clouds seem’d to frown, And the Demon of the air seem’d to say— “I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.” When the train left Edinburgh The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow, But Boreas blew a terrific gale, Which made their hearts for to quail, And many of the passengers with fear did say— “I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.” But when the train came near to Wormit Bay, Boreas he did loud and angry bray, And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. So the train sped on with all its might, And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight, And the passengers’ hearts felt light, Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year, With their friends at home they lov’d most dear, And wish them all a happy New Year. So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay, Until it was about midway, Then the central girders with a crash gave way, And down went the train and passengers into the Tay! The Storm Fiend did loudly bray, Because ninety lives had been taken away, On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. As soon as the catastrophe came to be known The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown, And the cry rang out all o’er the town, Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down, And a passenger train from Edinburgh, Which fill’d all the people’ hearts with sorrow, And made them for to turn pale, Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time. It must have been an awful sight, To witness in the dusky moonlight, While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray, Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay, I must now conclude my lay By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay, That your central girders would not have given way, At least many sensible men do say, Had they been supported on each side with buttresses, At least many sensible men confesses, For the stronger we our houses do build, The less chance we have of being killed.
’Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883, That a monster whale came to Dundee, Resolved for a few days to sport and play, And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay. So the monster whale did sport and play Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay, Until he was seen by some men one day, And they resolved to catch him without delay. When it came to be known a whale was seen in the Tay, Some men began to talk and to say, We must try and catch this monster of a whale, So come on, brave boys, and never say fail. Then the people together in crowds did run, Resolved to capture the whale and to have some fun! So small boats were launched on the silvery Tay, While the monster of the deep did sport and play. Oh! it was a most fearful and beautiful sight, To see it lashing the water with its tail all its might, And making the water ascend like a shower of hail, With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail. Then the water did descend on the men in the boats, Which wet their trousers and also their coats; But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale, But the whale shook at them his tail. Then the whale began to puff and to blow, While the men and the boats after him did go, Armed well with harpoons for the fray, Which they fired at him without dismay. And they laughed and grinned just like wild baboons, While they fired at him their sharp harpoons: But when struck with the harpoons he dived below, Which filled his pursuers’ hearts with woe: Because they guessed they had lost a prize, Which caused the tears to well up in their eyes; And in that their anticipations were only right, Because he sped on to Stonehaven with all his might: And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat, Which they thought was a big coble upturned afloat; But when they drew near they saw it was a whale, So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail. So they got a rope from each boat tied round his tail, And landed their burden at Stonehaven without fail; And when the people saw it their voices they did raise, Declaring that the brave fishermen deserved great praise. And my opinion is that God sent the whale in time of need, No matter what other people may think or what is their creed; I know fishermen in general are often very poor, And God in His goodness sent it to drive poverty from their door. So Mr John Wood has bought it for two hundred and twenty-six pound, And has brought it to Dundee all safe and all sound; Which measures 40 feet in length from the snout to the tail, So I advise the people far and near to see it without fail. Then hurrah! for the mighty monster whale, Which has got 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail! Which can be seen for a sixpence or a shilling, That is to say, if the people all are willing.
Ye sons of Great Britain, come join with me, And sing in praise of Sir Garnet Wolseley; Sound drums and trumpets cheerfully, For he has acted most heroically. Therefore loudly his praises sing Until the hills their echoes back doth ring; For he is a noble hero bold, And an honour to his Queen and country, be it told. He has gained for himself fame and renown, Which to posterity will be handed down; Because he has defeated Arabi by land and by sea, And from the battle of Tel-el-Kebir he made him to flee. With an army about fourteen thousand strong, Through Egypt he did fearlessly march along, With the gallant and brave Highland brigade, To whom honour is due, be it said. Arabi’s army was about seventy thousand in all, And, virtually speaking, it wasn’t very small; But if they had been as numerous again, The Irish and Highland brigades would have beaten them, it is plain. ’Twas on the 13th day of September, in the year of 1882, Which Arabi and his rebel horde long will rue; Because Sir Garnet Wolseley and his brave little band Fought and conquered them on Kebir land. He marched upon the enemy with his gallant band O’er the wild and lonely desert sand, And attacked them before daylight, And in twenty minutes he put them to flight. The first shock of the attack was borne by the Second Brigade, Who behaved most manfully, it is said, Under the command of brave General Grahame, And have gained a lasting honour to their name. But Major Hart and the 18th Royal Irish, conjoint, Carried the trenches at the bayonet point; Then the Marines chased them about four miles away, At the charge of the bayonet, without dismay! General Sir Archibald Alison led on the Highland Brigade, Who never were the least afraid. And such has been the case in this Egyptian war, For at the charge of the bayonet they ran from them afar! With their bagpipes playing, and one ringing cheer, And the 42nd soon did the trenches clear; Then hand to hand they did engage, And fought like tigers in a cage. Oh! it must have been a glorious sight To see Sir Garnet Wolseley in the thickest of the fight! In the midst of shot and shell, and the cannon’s roar, Whilst the dead and the dying lay weltering in their gore. Then the Egyptians were forced to yield, And the British were left masters of the field; Then Arabi he did fret and frown To see his army thus cut down. Then Arabi the rebel took to flight, And spurred his Arab steed with all his might: With his heart full of despair and woe, And never halted till he reached Cairo. Now since the Egyptian war is at an end, Let us thank God! Who did send Sir Garnet Wolseley to crush and kill Arabi and his rebel army at Kebir hill.
The wind blew high, the waters raved,  A ship drove on the land, A hundred human creatures saved  Kneel’d down upon the sand. Three-score were drown’d, three-score were thrown  Upon the black rocks wild, And thus among them, left alone,  They found one helpless child. A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred,  Stood out from all the rest, And gently laid the lonely head  Upon his honest breast. And travelling o’er the desert wide  It was a solemn joy, To see them, ever side by side,  The sailor and the boy. In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst,  The two were still but one, Until the strong man droop’d the first  And felt his labours done. Then to a trusty friend he spake,  “Across the desert wide, O take this poor boy for my sake!”  And kiss’d the child and died. Toiling along in weary plight  Through heavy jungle, mire, These two came later every night  To warm them at the fire. Until the captain said one day,  “O seaman good and kind, To save thyself now come away,  And leave the boy behind!” The child was slumbering near the blaze:  “O captain, let him rest Until it sinks, when God’s own ways  Shall teach us what is best!” They watch’d the whiten’d ashy heap,  They touch’d the child in vain; They did not leave him there asleep,  He never woke again.
Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green, That creepeth o’er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed, To pleasure his dainty whim: And the mouldering dust that years have made Is a merry meal for him.  Creeping where no life is seen,  A rare old plant is the Ivy green. Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings, And a staunch old heart has he. How closely he twineth, how tight he clings, To his friend the huge Oak Tree! And slily he traileth along the ground, And his leaves he gently waves, As he joyously hugs and crawleth round The rich mould of dead men’s graves.  Creeping where grim death has been,  A rare old plant is the Ivy green. Whole ages have fled and their works decayed, And nations have scattered been; But the stout old Ivy shall never fade, From its hale and hearty green. The brave old plant, in its lonely days, Shall fatten upon the past: For the stateliest building man can raise, Is the Ivy’s food at last.  Creeping on, where time has been,  A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
If the red slayer think he slays,  Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways  I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near;  Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear;  And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out;  When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt,  I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode,  And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good!  Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
The lords of life, the lords of life,— I saw them pass, In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim,— Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift and spectral Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name;— Some to see, some to be guessed, They marched from east to west: Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look. Him by the hand dear Nature took, Dearest Nature, strong and kind, Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind! To-morrow they will wear another face, The founder thou; these are thy race!’
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837 By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set today a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.
That you are fair or wise is vain, Or strong, or rich, or generous; You must have also the untaught strain That sheds beauty on the rose. There is a melody born of melody, Which melts the world into a sea: Toil could never compass it; Art its height could never hit; It came never out of wit; But a music music-born Well may Jove and Juno scorn. Thy beauty, if it lack the fire Which drives me mad with sweet desire, What boots it? what the soldier's mail, Unless he conquer and prevail? What all the goods thy pride which lift, If thou pine for another's gift? Alas! that one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith, "Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest, Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is sodden;" And another is born To make the sun forgotten. Surely he carries a talisman Under his tongue; Broad are his shoulders, and strong; And his eye is scornful, Threatening, and young. I hold it of little matter Whether your jewel be of pure water, A rose diamond or a white, But whether it dazzle me with light. I care not how you are dressed, In the coarsest or in the best; Nor whether your name is base or brave; Nor for the fashion of your behavior; But whether you charm me, Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me, And dress up Nature in your favor. One thing is forever good; That one thing is Success, — Dear to the Eumenides, And to all the heavenly brood. Who bides at home, nor looks abroad, Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.
Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world! I'm going home. Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To Grandeur with his wise grimace; To upstart Wealth's averted eye; To supple Office, low and high; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet; To those who go, and those who come; Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home. I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, — A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought and God. O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee from the hill-top looking down; The heifer that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, Deems not that great Napoleon Stops his horse, and lists with delight, Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone. I thought the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home, in his nest, at even; He sings the song, but it pleases not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky; — He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye. The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave; And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar. The lover watched his graceful maid, As 'mid the virgin train she stayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still by the snow-white choir. At last she came to his hermitage, Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; — The gay enchantment was undone, A gentle wife, but fairy none. Then I said, "I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth:" — As I spoke, beneath my feet The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, Running over the club-moss burrs; I inhaled the violet's breath; Around me stood the oaks and firs; Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground; Over me soared the eternal sky, Full of light and of deity; Again I saw, again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird; — Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight. I see the lights of the village Gleam through the rain and the mist, And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me That my soul cannot resist: A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain. Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day. Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time. For, like strains of martial music, Their mighty thoughts suggest Life's endless toil and endeavor; And to-night I long for rest. Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start; Who, through long days of labor, And nights devoid of ease, Still heard in his soul the music Of wonderful melodies. Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer. Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice. And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.
Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen he will be good but god knows When
A wild-bear chace, didst never see?  Then hast thou lived in vain. Thy richest bump of glorious glee,  Lies desert in thy brain. When first my father settled here,  ’Twas then the frontier line: The panther’s scream, filled night with fear  And bears preyed on the swine. But woe for Bruin’s short lived fun,  When rose the squealing cry; Now man and horse, with dog and gun,  For vengeance, at him fly. A sound of danger strikes his ear;  He gives the breeze a snuff; Away he bounds, with little fear,  And seeks the tangled rough. On press his foes, and reach the ground,  Where’s left his half munched meal; The dogs, in circles, scent around,  And find his fresh made trail. With instant cry, away they dash,  And men as fast pursue; O’er logs they leap, through water splash,  And shout the brisk halloo. Now to elude the eager pack,  Bear shuns the open ground; Through matted vines, he shapes his track  And runs it, round and round. The tall fleet cur, with deep-mouthed voice,  Now speeds him, as the wind; While half-grown pup, and short-legged fice,  Are yelping far behind. And fresh recruits are dropping in  To join the merry corps: With yelp and yell,—a mingled din—  The woods are in a roar. And round, and round the chace now goes,  The world’s alive with fun; Nick Carter’s horse, his rider throws,  And more, Hill drops his gun. Now sorely pressed, bear glances back,  And lolls his tired tongue; When as, to force him from his track,  An ambush on him sprung. Across the glade he sweeps for flight,  And fully is in view. The dogs, new-fired, by the sight,  Their cry, and speed, renew. The foremost ones, now reach his rear,  He turns, they dash away; And circling now, the wrathful bear,  They have him full at bay. At top of speed, the horse-men come,  All screaming in a row, “Whoop! Take him Tiger. Seize him Drum.”  Bang,—bang—the rifles go. And furious now, the dogs he tears,  And crushes in his ire, Wheels right and left, and upward rears,  With eyes of burning fire. But leaden death is at his heart,  Vain all the strength he plies. And, spouting blood from every part,  He reels, and sinks, and dies. And now a dinsome clamor rose,  ’Bout who should have his skin; Who first draws blood, each hunter knows,  This prize must always win. But who did this, and how to trace  What’s true from what’s a lie, Like lawyers, in a murder case  They stoutly argufy. Aforesaid fice, of blustering mood,  Behind, and quite forgot, Just now emerging from the wood,  Arrives upon the spot. With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair—  Brim full of spunk and wrath, He growls, and seizes on dead bear,  And shakes for life and death. And swells as if his skin would tear,  And growls and shakes again; And swears, as plain as dog can swear,  That he has won the skin. Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee—  Nor mind, that now a few Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be,  Conceited quite as you.
Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenandoah! The cut is on the crown (Lo, John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenandoah! But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war.
Did all the lets and bars appear To every just or larger end, Whence should come the trust and cheer? Youth must its ignorant impulse lend— Age finds place in the rear. All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, The champions and enthusiasts of the state: Turbid ardors and vain joys Not barrenly abate— Stimulants to the power mature, Preparatives of fate. Who here forecasteth the event? What heart but spurns at precedent And warnings of the wise, Contemned foreclosures of surprise? The banners play, the bugles call, The air is blue and prodigal. No berrying party, pleasure-wooed, No picnic party in the May, Ever went less loth than they Into that leafy neighborhood. In Bacchic glee they file toward Fate, Moloch’s uninitiate; Expectancy, and glad surmise Of battle’s unknown mysteries. All they feel is this: ’tis glory, A rapture sharp, though transitory, Yet lasting in belaureled story. So they gayly go to fight, Chatting left and laughing right. But some who this blithe mood present, As on in lightsome files they fare, Shall die experienced ere three days be spent— Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare; Or shame survive, and, like to adamant, Thy after shock, Manassas, share.
In time and measure perfect moves All Art whose aim is sure; Evolving rhyme and stars divine Have rules, and they endure. Nor less the Fleet that warred for Right, And, warring so, prevailed, In geometric beauty curved, And in an orbit sailed. The rebel at Port Royal felt The Unity overawe, And rued the spell. A type was here, And victory of LAW.
Skimming lightly, wheeling still, The swallows fly low Over the field in clouded days, The forest-field of Shiloh— Over the field where April rain Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain Through the pause of night That followed the Sunday fight Around the church of Shiloh— The church so lone, the log-built one, That echoed to many a parting groan And natural prayer Of dying foemen mingled there— Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) But now they lie low, While over them the swallows skim, And all is hushed at Shiloh.
There is a coal-black Angel  With a thick Afric lip, And he dwells (like the hunted and harried)  In a swamp where the green frogs dip. But his face is against a City  Which is over a bay of the sea, And he breathes with a breath that is blastment,  And dooms by a far decree. By night there is fear in the City,  Through the darkness a star soareth on; There’s a scream that screams up to the zenith,  Then the poise of a meteor lone— Lighting far the pale fright of the faces,  And downward the coming is seen; Then the rush, and the burst, and the havoc,  And wails and shrieks between. It comes like the thief in the gloaming;  It comes, and none may foretell The place of the coming—the glaring;  They live in a sleepless spell That wizens, and withers, and whitens;  It ages the young, and the bloom Of the maiden is ashes of roses—  The Swamp Angel broods in his gloom. Swift is his messengers’ going,  But slowly he saps their halls, As if by delay deluding.  They move from their crumbling walls Farther and farther away;  But the Angel sends after and after, By night with the flame of his ray—  By night with the voice of his screaming— Sends after them, stone by stone,  And farther walls fall, farther portals, And weed follows weed through the Town. Is this the proud City? the scorner Which never would yield the ground? Which mocked at the coal-black Angel? The cup of despair goes round. Vainly she calls upon Michael (The white man’s seraph was he), For Michael has fled from his tower To the Angel over the sea. Who weeps for the woeful City Let him weep for our guilty kind; Who joys at her wild despairing— Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind.
About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendance be. From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat— Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat.
I saw a ship of martial build (Her standards set, her brave apparel on) Directed as by madness mere Against a stolid iceberg steer, Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down. The impact made huge ice-cubes fall Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck; But that one avalanche was all— No other movement save the foundering wreck. Along the spurs of ridges pale, Not any slenderest shaft and frail, A prism over glass-green gorges lone, Toppled; or lace of traceries fine, Nor pendant drops in grot or mine Were jarred, when the stunned ship went down. Nor sole the gulls in cloud that wheeled Circling one snow-flanked peak afar, But nearer fowl the floes that skimmed And crystal beaches, felt no jar. No thrill transmitted stirred the lock Of jack-straw needle-ice at base; Towers undermined by waves—the block Atilt impending—kept their place. Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges Slipt never, when by loftier edges Through very inertia overthrown, The impetuous ship in bafflement went down. Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast, With mortal damps self-overcast; Exhaling still thy dankish breath— Adrift dissolving, bound for death; Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one— A lumbering lubbard loitering slow, Impingers rue thee and go down, Sounding thy precipice below, Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls Along thy dead indifference of walls.
To have known him, to have loved him  After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life,  And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal—  Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound  The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits  Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine  That hid the shyest grape.
In bed I muse on Tenier’s boors, Embrowned and beery losels all: A wakeful brain Elaborates pain: Within low doors the slugs of boors Laze and yawn and doze again. In dreams they doze, the drowsy boors, Their hazy hovel warm and small: Thought’s ampler bound But chill is found: Within low doors the basking boors Snugly hug the ember-mound. Sleepless, I see the slumberous boors Their blurred eyes blink, their eyelids fall: Thought’s eager sight Aches—overbright! Within low doors the boozy boors Cat-naps take in pipe-bowl light.
Not magnitude, not lavishness, But Form—the Site; Not innovating wilfulness, But reverence for the Archetype.
Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law, And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend. Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women, Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink. In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory. Then she, who survives me, snared my soul With a snare which bled me to death, Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent, Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office. Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig — Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!
Not in that wasted garden Where bodies are drawn into grass That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens That bear no fruit — There where along the shaded walks Vain sighs are heard, And vainer dreams are dreamed Of close communion with departed souls — But here under the apple tree I loved and watched and pruned With gnarled hands In the long, long years; Here under the roots of this northern-spy To move in the chemic change and circle of life, Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, And into the living epitaphs Of redder apples!
When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me I went to Springfield. There I met a lush, Whose father just deceased left him a fortune. He married me when drunk. My life was wretched. A year passed and one day they found him dead. That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago. After a time met Tyler Rountree, villain. I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate Went mad about me i so another fortune. He died one night right in my arms, you know. (I saw his purple face for years thereafter.) There was almost a scandal. I moved on, This time to Paris. I was now a woman, Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich. My sweet apartment near the Champs Élysées Became a center for all sorts of people, Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles, Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English. I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa. We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think. Now in the Campo Santo overlooking The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds, See what they chiseled: "Contessa Navigato Implora eterna quiete."
Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain i Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred Were marking scores against me, But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory. I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches, Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored, Not on the right of the matter. O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone! For worse than the anger of the wronged, The curses of the poor, Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear, Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer, Hanged by my sentence, Was innocent in soul compared with me.
Have any of you, passers-by, Had an old tooth that was an unceasing discomfort? Or a pain in the side that never quite left you? Or a malignant growth that grew with time? So that even in profoundest slumber There was shadowy consciousness or the phantom of thought Of the tooth, the side, the growth? Even so thwarted love, or defeated ambition, Or a blunder in life which mixed your life Hopelessly to the end, Will like a tooth, or a pain in the side, Float through your dreams in the final sleep Till perfect freedom from the earth-sphere Comes to you as one who wakes Healed and glad in the morning!
The press of the Spoon River Clarion was wrecked, And I was tarred and feathered, For publishing this on the day the Anarchists were hanged in Chicago: "I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyes Standing on the steps of a marble temple. Great multitudes passed in front of her, Lifting their faces to her imploringly. In her left hand she held a sword. She was brandishing the sword, Sometimes striking a child, again a laborer, Again a slinking woman, again a lunatic. In her right hand she held a scale; Into the scale pieces of gold were tossed By those who dodged the strokes of the sword. A man in a black gown read from a manuscript: 'She is no respecter of persons.' Then a youth wearing a red cap Leaped to her side and snatched away the bandage. And lo, the lashes had been eaten away From the oozy eye-lids; The eye-balls were seared with a milky mucus; The madness of a dying soul Was written on her face i But the multitude saw why she wore the bandage."
Suppose it is nothing but the hive: That there are drones and workers And queens, and nothing but storing honey — (Material things as well as culture and wisdom) — For the next generation, this generation never living, Except as it swarms in the sun-light of youth, Strengthening its wings on what has been gathered, And tasting, on the way to the hive From the clover field, the delicate spoil. Suppose all this, and suppose the truth: That the nature of man is greater Than nature's need in the hive; And you must bear the burden of life, As well as the urge from your spirit's excess — Well, I say to live it out like a god Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt, Is the way to live it. If that doesn't make God proud of you, Then God is nothing but gravitation, Or sleep is the golden goal.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded; Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.
Somebody’s baby was buried to-day— The empty white hearse from the grave rumbled back, And the morning somehow seemed less smiling and gay As I paused on the walk while it crossed on its way, And a shadow seemed drawn o’er the sun’s golden track. Somebody’s baby was laid out to rest, White as a snowdrop, and fair to behold, And the soft little hands were crossed over the breast, And those hands and the lips and the eyelids were pressed With kisses as hot as the eyelids were cold. Somebody saw it go out of her sight, Under the coffin lid—out through the door; Somebody finds only darkness and blight All through the glory of summer-sun light; Somebody’s baby will waken no more. Somebody’s sorrow is making me weep: I know not her name, but I echo her cry, For the dearly bought baby she longed so to keep, The baby that rode to its long-lasting sleep In the little white hearse that went rumbling by. I know not her name, but her sorrow I know; While I paused on the crossing I lived it once more, And back to my heart surged that river of woe That but in the breast of a mother can flow; For the little white hearse has been, too, at my door.
Grown about by fragrant bushes, Sunken in a winding valley,  Where the clear winds blow  And the shadows come and go,  And the cattle stand and low And the sheep bells and the linnets  Sing and tinkle musically. Between the past and the future,  Those two black infinities  Between which our brief life  Flashes a moment and goes out.
I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And Thou shalt not. writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
I love all beauteous things,  I seek and adore them; God hath no better praise, And man in his hasty days  Is honoured for them. I too will something make  And joy in the making; Altho’ to-morrow it seem Like the empty words of a dream  Remembered on waking.
Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,  With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!  Though cold and stark and bare, The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee. Thy mother’s treasure wert thou;—alas! no longer  To visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be  Thy father’s pride;—ah, he Must gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger. To me, as I move thee now in the last duty,  Dost thou with a turn or gesture anon respond;  Startling my fancy fond With a chance attitude of the head, a freak of beauty. Thy hand clasps, as ’twas wont, my finger, and holds it:  But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff;  Yet feels to my hand as if ’Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that enfolds it. So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing,—  Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed!—  Propping thy wise, sad head, Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing. So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee?  To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?  The vision of which I miss, Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee? Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us  To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,  Unwilling, alone we embark, And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.
When men were all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown, Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town; Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing; Lazily and incessantly floating down and down: Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing; Hiding difference, making unevenness even, Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing. All night it fell, and when full inches seven It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven; And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare: The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness; The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air; No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling, And the busy morning cries came thin and spare. Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling, They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing; Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees; Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder, ‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’ With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder, Following along the white deserted way, A country company long dispersed asunder: When now already the sun, in pale display Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day. For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow; And trains of sombre men, past tale of number, Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go: But even for them awhile no cares encumber Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken, The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.
Why hast thou nothing in thy face? Thou idol of the human race, Thou tyrant of the human heart, The flower of lovely youth that art; Yea, and that standest in thy youth An image of eternal Truth, With thy exuberant flesh so fair, That only Pheidias might compare, Ere from his chaste marmoreal form Time had decayed the colours warm; Like to his gods in thy proud dress, Thy starry sheen of nakedness. Surely thy body is thy mind, For in thy face is nought to find, Only thy soft unchristen’d smile, That shadows neither love nor guile, But shameless will and power immense, In secret sensuous innocence. O king of joy, what is thy thought? I dream thou knowest it is nought, And wouldst in darkness come, but thou Makest the light where’er thou go. Ah yet no victim of thy grace, None who e’er long’d for thy embrace, Hath cared to look upon thy face.
The south-wind strengthens to a gale, Across the moon the clouds fly fast, The house is smitten as with a flail, The chimney shudders to the blast. On such a night, when Air has loosed Its guardian grasp on blood and brain, Old terrors then of god or ghost Creep from their caves to life again; And Reason kens he herits in A haunted house. Tenants unknown Assert their squalid lease of sin With earlier title than his own. Unbodied presences, the pack’d Pollution and remorse of Time, Slipp’d from oblivion reënact The horrors of unhouseld crime. Some men would quell the thing with prayer Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor, Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair Or burts the lock’d forbidden door. Some have seen corpses long interr'd Escape from hallowing control, Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard The shrilling of a troubled soul, That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust The baleful phantoms underground.
Love not too much. But how, When thou hast made me such, And dost thy gifts bestow, How can I love too much?  Though I must fear to lose, And drown my joy in care, With all its thorns I choose The path of love and prayer.  Though thou, I know not why, Didst kill my childish trust, That breach with toil did I Repair, because I must:  And spite of frighting schemes, With which the fiends of Hell Blaspheme thee in my dreams, So far I have hoped well.  But what the heavenly key, What marvel in me wrought Shall quite exculpate thee, I have no shadow of thought.  What am I that complain? The love, from which began My question sad and vain, Justifies thee to man.
The evening darkens over After a day so bright The windcapt waves discover That wild will be the night. There’s sound of distant thunder. The latest sea-birds hover Along the cliff’s sheer height; As in the memory wander Last flutterings of delight, White wings lost on the white. There’s not a ship in sight; And as the sun goes under Thick clouds conspire to cover The moon that should rise yonder. Thou art alone, fond lover.
from Book I, Introduction Man’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense, that tho’ she guide his highest flight heav’nward, and teach him dignity morals manners and human comfort, she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell. Not without alliance of the animal senses hath she any miracle: Lov’st thou in the blithe hour of April dawns—nay marvelest thou not—to hear the ravishing music that the small birdës make in garden or woodland, rapturously heralding the break of day; when the first lark on high hath warn’d the vigilant robin already of the sun’s approach, and he on slender pipe calleth the nesting tribes to awake and fill and thrill their myriad-warbling throats praising life’s God, untill the blisful revel grow in wild profusion unfeign’d to such a hymn as man hath never in temple or grove pour’d to the Lord of heav’n? Hast thou then thought that all this ravishing music, that stirreth so thy heart, making thee dream of things illimitable unsearchable and of heavenly import, is but a light disturbance of the atoms of air, whose jostling ripples, gather’d within the ear, are tuned to resonant scale, and thence by the enthron’d mind received on the spiral stairway of her audience chamber as heralds of high spiritual significance? and that without thine ear, sound would hav no report. Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee any better melody in the April woods at dawn than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake o’night in his comfortless attic, might perchance be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch? Now since the thoughtless birds not only act and enjoy this music, but to their offspring teach it with care, handing on those small folk-songs from father to son in such faithful tradition that they are familiar unchanging to the changeful generations of men— and year by year, listening to himself the nightingale as amorous of his art as of his brooding mate practiseth every phrase of his espousal lay, and still provoketh envy of the lesser songsters with the same notes that woke poetic eloquence alike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats— see then how deeply seated is the urgence whereto Bach and Mozart obey’d, or those other minstrels who pioneer’d for us on the marches of heav’n and paid no heed to wars that swept the world around, nor in their homes wer more troubled by cannon-roar than late the small birds wer, that nested and carol’d upon the devastated battlefields of France. Birds are of all animals the nearest to men for that they take delight in both music and dance, and gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life wer the earlier artists: moreover in their airy flight (which in its swiftness symboleth man’s soaring thought) they hav no rival but man, and easily surpass in their free voyaging his most desperate daring, altho’ he hath fed and sped his ocean-ships with fire; and now, disturbing me as I write, I hear on high his roaring airplanes, and idly raising my head see them there; like a migratory flock of birds that rustle southward from the cold fall of the year in order’d phalanx—so the thin-rankt squadrons ply, til sound and sight failing me they are lost in the clouds. ..... Time eateth away at many an old delusion, yet with civilization delusions make head; the thicket of the people wil take furtiv fire from irresponsible catchwords of live ideas, sudden as a gorse-bush from the smouldering end of any loiterer’s match-splint, which, unless trodden out afore it spredd, or quell’d with wieldy threshing-rods wil burn ten years of planting with all last year’s ricks and blacken a countryside. ’Tis like enough that men ignorant of fire and poison should be precondemn’d to sudden deaths and burnings, but ’tis mightily to the reproach of Reason that she cannot save nor guide the herd; that minds who else wer fit to rule must win to power by flattery and pretence, and so by spiritual dishonesty in their flurried reign confirm the disrepute of all authority— but only in sackcloth can the Muse speak of such things. from Book II. Selfhood The Spartan General Brasidas, the strenuous man, who earn’d historic favour from his conquer’d foe, once caught a mouse foraging in his messbasket among the figs, but when it bit him let it go, praising its show of fight in words that Plutarch judged worth treasuring; and since I redd the story at school unto this hour I hav never thought of Brasidas and cannot hear his name, but that I straightway see a table and an arm’d man smiling with hand outstretch’d above a little mouse that is scampering away. Why should this thing so hold me? and why do I welcome now the tiny beast, that hath come running up to me as if here in my cantos he had spied a crevice, and counting on my friendship would make it his home? ’Tis such a pictur as must by mere beauty of fitness convince natural feeling with added comfort. The soldier seeth the instinct of Selfhood in the mouse to be the same impulse that maketh virtue in him. For Brasidas held that courage ennobleth man, and from unworth redeemeth, and that folk who shrink from ventur of battle in self-defence are thereby doom’d to slavery and extinction: and so this mouse, albeit its little teeth had done him a petty hurt, deserved liberty for its courage, and found grace in man. ..... What is Beauty? saith my sufferings then.—I answer the lover and poet in my loose alexandrines: Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences, the quality of appearances that thru’ the sense wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man: And Art, as it createth new forms of beauty, awakeneth new ideas that advance the spirit in the life of Reason to the wisdom of God. But highest Art must be as rare as nativ faculty is and her surprise of magic winneth favor of men more than her inspiration: most are led away by fairseeming pretences, which being wrought for gain pursue the ephemeral fashion that assureth it; and their thin influences are of the same low grade as the unaccomplish’d forms; their poverty is exposed when they would stake their charm on ethic excellence; for then weak simulations of virtues appear, such as convention approveth, but not Virtue itself, tho’ not void of all good: and (as I read) ’twas this that Benvenuto intended, saying that not only Virtue was memorable but things so truly done that they wer like to Virtue; and thus prefaced his book, thinking to justify both himself and his works. The authority of Reason therefor relieth at last hereon—that her discernment of spiritual things, the ideas of Beauty, is her conscience of instinct upgrown in her (as she unto conscience of all upgrew from lower to higher) to conscience of Beauty judging itself by its own beauteous judgment. from Book III. Breed How was November’s melancholy endear’d to me in the effigy of plowteams following and recrossing patiently the desolat landscape from dawn to dusk, as the slow-creeping ripple of their single furrow submerged the sodden litter of summer’s festival! They are fled, those gracious teams; high on the headland now squatted, a roaring engin toweth to itself a beam of bolted shares, that glideth to and fro combing the stubbled glebe: and agriculture here, blotting out with such daub so rich a pictur of grace, hath lost as much of beauty as it hath saved in toil. Again where reapers, bending to the ripen’d corn, were wont to scythe in rank and step with measured stroke, a shark-tooth’d chariot rampeth biting a broad way, and, jerking its high swindging arms around in the air, swoopeth the swath. Yet this queer Pterodactyl is well, that in the sinister torpor of the blazing day clicketeth in heartless mockery of swoon and sweat, as ’twer the salamandrine voice of all parch’d things: and the dry grasshopper wondering knoweth his God. from Book IV, Ethick Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God and Angel of his Presence thru’ all creation, fashioning her new love-realm in the mind of man, attempteth every mortal child with influences of her divine supremacy ... ev’n as in a plant when the sap mounteth secretly and its wintry stalk breaketh out in the prolific miracle of Spring, or as the red blood floodeth into a beating heart to build the animal body comely and strong; so she in her transcendant rivalry would flush his spirit with pleasurable ichor of heaven: and where she hath found responsiv faculty in some richly favour’d soul— L’anima vaga delle cose belle, as saith the Florentine,—she wil inaugurate her feast of dedication, and even in thatt earliest onset, when yet infant Desire hath neither goal nor clue to fix the dream, ev’n then, altho’ it graspeth nought and passeth in its airy vision away, and dieth out of remembrance, ’tis in its earnest of life and dawn of bliss purer and hath less of earthly tinge than any other after-attainment of the understanding: for all man’s knowledge kenneth also of toil and flaw and even his noblest works, tho’ they illume the dark with individual consummation, are cast upon by the irrelevant black shadows of time and fate. ..... Repudiation of pleasur is a reason’d folly of imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate or decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life, whereon all function whatsoever in man is based. Consider how this mortal sensibility hath a wide jurisdiction of range in all degrees, from mountainous gravity to imperceptible faintest tenuities:—The imponderable fragrance of my window-jasmin, that from her starry cup of red-stemm’d ivory invadeth my being, as she floateth it forth, and wantoning unabash’d asserteth her idea in the omnipotent blaze of the tormented sun-ball, checquering the grey wall with shadow-tracery of her shapely fronds; this frail unique spice of perfumery, in which she holdeth monopoly by royal licence of Nature, is but one of a thousand angelic species, original beauties that win conscience in man: a like marvel hangeth o’er the rosebed, and where the honeysuckle escapeth in serpentine sprays from its dark-cloister’d clamber thru’ the old holly-bush, spreading its joybunches to finger at the sky in revel above rivalry. Legion is their name; Lily-of-the-vale, Violet, Verbena, Mignonette, Hyacinth, Heliotrope, Sweet-briar, Pinks and Peas, Lilac and Wallflower, or such white and purple blooms that sleep i’ the sun, and their heavy perfumes withhold to mingle their heart’s incense with the wonder-dreams, love-laden prayers and reveries that steal forth from earth, under the dome of night: and tho’ these blossomy breaths, that hav presumed the title of their gay genitors, enter but singly into our neighboring sense, that hath no panorama, yet the mind’s eye is not blind unto their multitudinous presences:—I know that if odour wer visible as color is, I’d see the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds, with such warfare of hues as a painter might choose to show his sunset sky or a forest aflame; while o’er the country-side the wide clover-pastures and the beanfields of June would wear a mantle, thick as when in late October, at the drooping of day the dark grey mist arising blotteth out the land with ghostly shroud. Now these and such-like influences of tender specialty must not—so fine they be— fall in neglect and all their loveliness be lost, being to the soul deep springs of happiness, and full of lovingkindness to the natural man, who is apt kindly to judge of good by comfortable effect. Thus all men ever hav judged the wholesomness of food from the comfort of body ensuing thereupon, whereby all animals retrieve their proper diet; but if when in discomfort ’tis for pleasant hope of health restored we swallow nauseous medicines, so mystics use asceticism, yea, and no man readier than they to assert eventual happiness to justify their conduct. Whence it is not strange (for so scientific minds in search of truth digest assimilable hypotheses) they should extend their pragmatism, and from their happiness deduce the very existence and the natur of God, and take religious consolation for the ground of faith: as if the pleasur of life wer the sign-manual of Nature when she set her hand to her covenant. But man, vain of his Reason and thinking more to assure its independence, wil disclaim complicity with human emotion; and regarding his Mother deemeth it dutiful and nobler in honesty coldly to criticize than purblindly to love; and in pride of this quarrel he hath been led in the end to make distinction of kind 'twixt Pleasur and Happiness; observing truly enough how one may hav pleasure and yet miss happiness; but this warpeth the sense and common use of speech, since all tongues in the world call children and silly folk happy and sometimes ev’n brutes. The name of happiness is but a wider term for the unalloy’d conditions of the Pleasur of Life, attendant on all function, and not to be deny’d to th’ soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature spiritual is by definition unnatural.
Tell me not in mormonful numbers “Life is but an empty dream!” To a student of the slumbers Things are never what they seem. Life is yearning and suppression; Life is that to be enjoyed; Puritanical discretion Was not spoke by Dr. Freud. Deep enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to dream, that each to-morrow Finds us Freudier than to-day. Sleep is long, and dreams are straying, And our hearts, though they may falter, Still, like sexiphones, are playing Wedding marches to the altar. In the universal battle, In the seraglio of life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle— Beat your husband—or your wife. Trust no dame, however pleasant! Leave the dead ones on the shelf! Act—act in the living present! Nothing matters but Yourself. Wives of great men all remind us We can make our lives a serial, And, departing, leave behind us Biographical material. Stories that perhaps another Sailing o’er life’s Freudian sea— A forlorn and dream-racked brother— Reading, might say, “How like me!” Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any mate; Now eluding, nor pursuing, Learn to individuate.
My desk is cleared of the litter of ages; Before me glitter the fair white pages; My fountain pen is clean and filled, And the noise of the office has long been stilled. Roget’s Thesaurus is at my hand, And I’m ready to do some work that’s grand, Dignified, eminent, great, momentous, Memorable, worthy of note, portentous, Beautiful, paramount, vital, prime, Stirring, eventful, august, sublime. For this is the way, I have read and heard, That authors look for the fitting word. All of the proud ingredients mine To build, like Marlowe, the mighty line. But never a line from my new-filled pen That couldn’t be done by a child of ten. Oh, how did Shelley and how did Keats Weave magic words on the fair white sheets Under conditions that, were they mine, I couldn’t bear? And I’d just resign. Yet Milton wrote passable literature Under conditions I couldn’t endure. Coleridge and Chatterton did their stuff Over a road that I’d christen rough. Wordsworth and—soft!—could it be that they Waited until they had something to say?
The burden of hard hitting. Slug away Like Honus Wagner or like Tyrus Cobb. Else fandom shouteth: “Who said you could play? Back to the jasper league, you minor slob!” Swat, hit, connect, line out, get on the job. Else you shall feel the brunt of fandom’s ire Biff, bang it, clout it, hit it on the knob— This is the end of every fan’s desire. The burden of good pitching. Curved or straight. Or in or out, or haply up or down, To puzzle him that standeth by the plate, To lessen, so to speak, his bat-renoun: Like Christy Mathewson or Miner Brown, So pitch that every man can but admire And offer you the freedom of the town— This is the end of every fan’s desire. The burden of loud cheering. O the sounds! The tumult and the shouting from the throats Of forty thousand at the Polo Grounds Sitting, ay, standing sans their hats and coats. A mighty cheer that possibly denotes That Cub or Pirate fat is in the fire; Or, as H. James would say, We’ve got their goats— This is the end of every fan’s desire. The burden of a pennant. O the hope, The tenuous hope, the hope that’s half a fear, The lengthy season and the boundless dope, And the bromidic; “Wait until next year.” O dread disgrace of trailing in the rear, O Piece of Bunting, flying high and higher That next October it shall flutter here: This is the end of every fan’s desire. ENVOY Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but the Chase Be that to which most fondly we aspire! For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race— THIS is the end of every fan’s desire.
(With the usual.) I In winter I get up at night, And dress by an electric light. In summer, autumn, ay, and spring, I have to do the self-same thing. I have to go to bed and hear Pianos pounding in my ear, And hear the janitor cavort With garbage cans within the court. And does it not seem hard to you That I should have these things to do? Is it not hard for us Manhat- Tan children in a stuffy flat? II It is very nice to think The world is full of food and drink; But, oh, my father says to me They cost all of his salaree. III When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great; E’en now I have no reverence, ’Cause I read comic supplements. IV New York is so full of a number of kids I’m sure pretty soon we shall be invalids. V A child should always say what’s true, And speak when he is spoken to; And then, when manhood’s age he strikes, He may be boorish as he likes.
We don’t get any too much light; It’s pretty noisy, too, at that; The folks next door stay up all night; There’s but one closet in the flat; The rent we pay is far from low; Our flat is small and in the rear; But we have looked around, and so We think we’ll stay another year. Our dining-room is pretty dark; Our kitchen’s hot and very small; The “view” we get of Central Park We really do not get at all. The ceiling cracks and crumbles down Upon me while I’m working here— But, after combing all the town, We think we’ll stay another year. We are not “handy” to the sub; Our hall-boy service is a joke; Our janitor’s a foreign dub Who never does a thing but smoke; Our landlord says he will not cut A cent from rent already dear; And so we sought for better—but We think we’ll stay another year.
Sullen, grimy, labouring person, As I passed you in my car, I could sense your muffled curse on It and me and my cigar; And though mute your malediction, I could feel it on my head, As in countless works of fiction I have read. Envy of mine obvious leisure Seemed to green your glittering eye; Hate for mine apparent pleasure Filled you as I motored by. You who had to dig for three, four Hours in that unpleasant ditch, Loathed, despised, and hated me for Being rich. And you cursed me into Hades As you envied me that ride With the loveliest of ladies Sitting at my dexter side; And your wish, or your idea, Was to hurl us off some cliff. I could see that you thought me a Lucky stiff. If you came to the decision, As my car you mutely cussed, That allottment and division Are indecently unjust— Labouring man, however came you Thus to think the world awry, I should be the last to blame you … So do I.
Will you read my little pome, O you girls returnèd home From a summertime of sport At the Jolliest Resort, From a Heated Term of joys Far from urban dust and noise? You I speak to in this rhyme, You have had a Glorious Time Swimming, golfing, bridging, dancing, Riding, tennising, romancing, On the springboard, on the raft— You’ve been often photographed. At the place you have forsaken, You have had some pictures taken, Pictures taken of you dancing, Riding, tennising, romancing, Swimming, golfing, and reclining; Snacking, luncheoning, and dining. Cometh now my brief advice; Ladies, be ye ne’er so nice, Be ye ne’er so fascinating, Luring, drawing, captivating, If with interest you’d imbue us, Do not show those pictures to us! Snapshots of the links and lawn Cause in many of us a yawn; (As for me myself, why, I’m Glad to see ’em any time) But—I give it to you square— Lots of people do not care.
Sonnet VII I would I might forget that I am I, And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky, Lord of the future, guardian of the past, And soon must forth, to know his own at last. In his large life to live, I fain would die. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone.
There may be chaos still around the world, This little world that in my thinking lies; For mine own bosom is the paradise Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled. Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled, Unmindful of the changing outer skies, Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies, Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled. I heed them not; or if the subtle night Haunt me with deities I never saw, I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw To hide their myriad faces from my sight. They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.
I Calm was the sea to which your course you kept, Oh, how much calmer than all southern seas! Many your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze Wafted from mothers that of old have wept. All souls of children taken as they slept Are your companions, partners of your ease, And the green souls of all these autumn trees Are with you through the silent spaces swept. Your virgin body gave its gentle breath Untainted to the gods. Why should we grieve, But that we merit not your holy death? We shall not loiter long, your friends and I; Living you made it goodlier to live, Dead you will make it easier to die.  II With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, your mellow ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,— What I keep of you, or you rob of me.  III Your bark lies anchored in the peaceful bight Until a kinder wind unfurl her sail; Your docile spirit, wingèd by this gale, Hath at the dawning fled into the light. And I half know why heaven deemed it right Your youth, and this my joy in youth, should fail; God hath them still, for ever they avail, Eternity hath borrowed that delight. For long ago I taught my thoughts to run Where all the great things live that lived of yore, And in eternal quiet float and soar; There all my loves are gathered into one, Where change is not, nor parting any more, Nor revolution of the moon and sun.  IV In my deep heart these chimes would still have rung To toll your passing, had you not been dead; For time a sadder mask than death may spread Over the face that ever should be young. The bough that falls with all its trophies hung Falls not too soon, but lays its flower-crowned head Most royal in the dust, with no leaf shed Unhallowed or unchiselled or unsung. And though the after world will never hear The happy name of one so gently true, Nor chronicles write large this fatal year, Yet we who loved you, though we be but few, Keep you in whatsoe’er is good, and rear In our weak virtues monuments to you.
Though he, that ever kind and true, Kept stoutly step by step with you, Your whole long, gusty lifetime through,  Be gone a while before, Be now a moment gone before, Yet, doubt not, soon the seasons shall restore  Your friend to you. He has but turned the corner — still He pushes on with right good will, Through mire and marsh, by heugh and hill,  That self-same arduous way — That self-same upland, hopeful way, That you and he through many a doubtful day  Attempted still. He is not dead, this friend — not dead, But in the path we mortals tread Got some few, trifling steps ahead  And nearer to the end; So that you too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend  You fancy dead. Push gaily on, strong heart! The while You travel forward mile by mile, He loiters with a backward smile  Till you can overtake, And strains his eyes to search his wake, Or whistling, as he sees you through the brake,  Waits on a stile.
Life has loveliness to sell,  All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff,  Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell,  Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain,  Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit's still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night. Spend all you have for loveliness,  Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace  Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be.
Supper comes at five o'clock, At six, the evening star, My lover comes at eight o'clock— But eight o'clock is far. How could I bear my pain all day Unless I watched to see The clock-hands laboring to bring Eight o'clock to me.
They came to tell your faults to me,They named them over one by one;I laughed aloud when they were done,I knew them all so well before, —Oh, they were blind, too blind to seeYour faults had made me love you more.
The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray Sharp as golden sands, A bell is clanging, people sway Hanging by their hands. Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff, Snatch and catch and grope; That face is yellow-pale, as if The fellow swung from rope. Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives, Glances strike and glare, Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives Dangle by the hair. Orchard of the strangest fruits Hanging from the skies; Brothers, yet insensate brutes Who fear each others’ eyes. One man stands as free men stand As if his soul might be Brave, unbroken; see his hand Nailed to an oaken tree.
Too high, too high to pluck My heart shall swing. A fruit no bee shall suck, No wasp shall sting. If on some night of cold It falls to ground In apple-leaves of gold I’ll wrap it round. And I shall seal it up With spice and salt, In a carven silver cup, In a deep vault. Before my eyes are blind And my lips mute, I must eat core and rind Of that same fruit. Before my heart is dust At the end of all, Eat it I must, I must Were it bitter gall. But I shall keep it sweet By some strange art; Wild honey I shall eat When I eat my heart. O honey cool and chaste As clover’s breath! Sweet Heaven I shall taste Before my death.
For this she starred her eyes with salt And scooped her temples thin, Until her face shone pure of fault From the forehead to the chin. In coldest crucibles of pain Her shrinking flesh was fired And smoothed into a finer grain To make it more desired. Pain left her lips more clear than glass; It colored and cooled her hand. She lay a field of scented grass Yielded as pasture land. For this her loveliness was curved And carved as silver is: For this she was brave: but she deserved A better grave than this.
I shall not sprinkle with dust A creature so clearly lunar; You must die—but of course you must— And better later than sooner. But if it should be in a year That year itself must perish; How dingy a thing is fear, And sorrow, how dull to cherish! And if it should be in a day That day would be dark by evening, But the morning might still be gay And the moon have golden leavening. And beauty’s a moonlight grist That comes to the mills of dying; The silver grain may be missed But there’s no great good in crying. Though luminous things are mould They survive in a glance that crossed them, And it’s not very kind to scold The empty air that has lost them. The limpid blossom of youth Turns into a poison berry; Having perceived this truth I shall not weep but be merry. Therefore die when you please; It’s not very wise to worry; I shall not shiver and freeze; I shall not even be sorry. Beautiful things are wild; They are gone, and you go after; Therefore I mean, my child, To charm your going with laughter. Love and pity are strong, But wisdom is happily greater; You will die, I suppose, before long,Oh, worser sooner than later!
Withouten you No rose can grow; No leaf be green If never seen Your sweetest face; No bird have grace Or power to sing; Or anything Be kind, or fair, And you nowhere.
She turned to gold and fell in love. She danced life upside down. She opened her wild eyes again and asked some strangers in. The strangers felt her in and out. They found her outsides thin. Since her heart was still and hard, they knocked her insides in.
You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven and let new tension climb around your shoulders, thinking you've found the trick for going mad. But try to keep a grip on where you are. Remember: all around you is pure city; try to stay alert. On the wide streets, so empty late at night, streaking in glass, the color of an alley, or the fall of a sideways flicker from a neon sign may utterly and briefly disconcert you— but as you go, you'll find that noise is worse. Prepare for noise. But never scream. Even tensing ears too far in advance can sharpen sirens, and as for horns. ... When you're back to your normal rhythm after such encounters, just try to stay alert. You'll never know exactly who is coming up behind you, but the sudden movement of pedestrians will finally, of course, be what disarms you.
That hour-glass-backed, orchard-legged, heavy-headed will, paper-folded, wedge-contorted, savage—dense to kill— pulls back on backward-moving, arching high legs still, lowered through a deep, knees-reaching, feathered down green will, antenna-honest, thread-descending, carpeted as if with skill, a focus-changing, sober-reaching, tracing, killing will.
Sir, I am not a bird of prey: a Lady does not seize the day. I trust that brief Time will unfold our youth, before he makes us old. How could we two write lines of rhyme were we not fond of numbered Time and grateful to the vast and sweet trials his days will make us meet? The Grave's not just the body's curse; no skeleton can pen a verse! So while this numbered World we see, let's sweeten Time with poetry, and Time, in turn, may sweeten Love and give us time our love to prove. You've praised my eyes, forehead, breast: you've all our lives to praise the rest.
If we change as she is changing, if she changes as we change (If she changes, I am changing) Who is changing, as I bend down to what the sky has sent us? (Is she changing, or the same?)
You that are dear, O you above the rest! Forgive him his evasive moods and cold; The absence that belied him oft of old, The war upon sad speech, the desperate jest, And pity’s wildest gush but half-confessed, Forgive him! Let your gentle memories hold Some written word once tender and once bold, Or service done shamefacedly at best, Whereby to judge him. All his days he spent, Like one who with an angel wrestled well, O’ermastering Love with show of light disdain; And whatso’er your spirits underwent, He, wounded for you, worked no miracle To make his heart’s allegiance wholly plain.
When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odour are loosened from afar, Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken, On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star, I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!), Whose greater noonday splendours the many share and see, While sacred and for ever, some perfect law is keeping The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.
I laid the strewings, darling, on thine urn; I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis. Now hushaby, my little child, and learn Long sleep how good it is. In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence, Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell; But thou more blest, O mild intelligence! Forget her, and Farewell.
What sacramental hurt that brings The terror of the truth of things Had changed thee? Secret be it yet. ’T was thine, upon a headland set, To view no isles of man’s delight, With lyric foam in rainbow flight, But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar, Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.
(January 7, 1915) In the dregs of the year, all steam and rain, In the timid time of the heart again, When indecision is bold and thorough, And action dreams of a dawn in vain, I saw high up over Bloxham vale The ploughshare tilt to the next long trail, And, spying a larder in every furrow, The wagtails crowd like a dancing hail! A second wonder there on the hill: Beneath the hedge, I saw with a thrill The budding primroses laugh good-morrow From a deep cradle rocked by a rill! Wagtail smart in his belted blue, Primrose paying her gold ere due,— (Out upon Winter! Down with Sorrow!) These are the things that I know are true.
I: THE MOTOR: 1905 From hedgerows where aromas fain would be  New volleyed odours execrably arise;  The flocks, with hell-smoke in their patient eyes, Into the ditch from bawling ruin flee: Spindrift of one abominated sea  Along all roads in wrecking fury flies  Till on young strangled leaf, on bloom that dies, In this far plot it writes a rune for me. Vast intimate tyranny! Nature dispossessed  Helplessly hates thee, whose symbolic flare Lights up (with what reiterance unblest!)  Entrails of horror in a world thought fair. False God of pastime thou, vampire of rest,  Augur of what pollution, what despair?
In spite of all the learned have said, I still my old opinion keep; The posture, that we give the dead, Points out the soul's eternal sleep. Not so the ancients of these lands— The Indian, when from life released, Again is seated with his friends, And shares again the joyous feast. His imaged birds, and painted bowl, And venison, for a journey dressed, Bespeak the nature of the soul, Activity, that knows no rest. His bow, for action ready bent, And arrows, with a head of stone, Can only mean that life is spent, And not the old ideas gone. Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way, No fraud upon the dead commit— Observe the swelling turf, and say They do not lie, but here they sit. Here still a lofty rock remains, On which the curious eye may trace (Now wasted, half, by wearing rains) The fancies of a ruder race. Here still an aged elm aspires, Beneath whose far-projecting shade (And which the shepherd still admires) The children of the forest played! There oft a restless Indian queen (Pale Shebah, with her braided hair) And many a barbarous form is seen To chide the man that lingers there. By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews; In habit for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer, a shade! And long shall timorous fancy see The painted chief, and pointed spear, And Reason's self shall bow the knee To shadows and delusions here.
You could drive blind for those two seconds and they would be forever. I think that as a diesel truck passes us eight miles east of Mission. Churning through the storm, heedless of the hill sliding away. There isn’t much use to curse but I do. Words fly away, tumbling invisibly toward the unseen point where the prairie and sky meet. The road is like that in those seconds, nothing but the blind white side of creation.  You’re there somewhere, a tiny struggling cell. You just might be significant but you might not be anything. Forever is a space of split time from which to recover after the mass passes. My curse flies out there somewhere, and then I send my prayer into the wake of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.
When ’midst the gay I meet That gentle smile of thine, Though still on me it turns most sweet, I scarce can call it mine: But when to me alone Your secret tears you show, Oh, then I feel those tears my own, And claim them while they flow. Then still with bright looks bless The gay, the cold, the free; Give smiles to those who love you less, But keep your tears for me. The snow on Jura’s steep Can smile in many a beam, Yet still in chains of coldness sleep, How bright soe’er it seem. But, when some deep-felt ray, Whose touch is fire, appears, Oh, then the smile is warm’d away, And, melting, turns to tears. Then still with bright looks bless The gay, the cold, the free; Give smiles to those who love you less, But keep your tears for me.
I wish we could control this revolting want of control: these people with their spongy eyes, their mouths of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises and bear traps for vulvas. One taste of sunlight and at once they can’t do without it. Water, the same, and food, and air, and a dozen other squalid habits. Some—like their copulation, a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck— are not physically compulsive but the partners can’t stop wanting them to be: so we desire to be raped by love, who would fill us, they say, with an oil from the lit braziers of stars. What if, doing it every day, we resemble pistons, and the slow poison cuts our lives off at 70: it’s the grim determination of our passion. And beyond this, even I— defended in childhood by my strong father the piano and my mother the virtuoso from knuckles among warehouses—even I am addicted to the mild light of words.
You couples lying where moon-scythes and day-scythes reaped you, browning fruit falls and sleeps in tangled nests, the wild grass, falls from your apple tree that still grows here: cry for your dead hero, his weak sword, his flight, that you were slaughtered and your bed poured whiteness, the issue of murdered marriage dawns. The streets crack, a house falls open to the air, sun and rain lie on the bed. And the river still runs in a child’s hands under the factory’s black hulk, four stacks that used to bloom with smoke over shining leaves, beneath thunderheads. Then the storm shatters and beats and after in woods a scented smoke of light, a dripping quiet, and the small gold snake sparkles at the pond’s edge. But who is he? What were the goods he made, what became of his loved wife, his children, and where has he gone, fearsome, powerless? The silver path of air from the river’s bend to its rippling away beneath the low concrete bridge is still pure. No one comes, and the child who watched by it has vanished. Or sometimes he appears for a day, a night, in the walls and windows reflected on the water, in goldfinches’ flight, cricket song, the heron’s great rise from the bank. Last a carp leaps, voices and a lantern slide down the secret stream in black and gold peace, past the child’s husk, the family never born.
Child one with the sun in trackless fields of yellow grass and thistle, scent of humid heavy air and the wing music of bees and flies. Child, slender nakedness to itself unknown, true colour of the light dispersed invisibly or glowing around the black hulls of distant thunderheads, around the grasshopper’s countenance, solemn, vigilant and wise. Green apples, poured full of density, of crispness, float unmoved under leaves on the slope. Brown fallen apples nest in secret whorls of grass. The apple tree: alone in so much space. And below in the woods by the water a sweet dead branch cracks lightly in the shadow in the wind. But here is an old track through the grass head-high to a child: who made it? They must have passed and passed by this one tree, by the abandoned, tireless car where rabbits peer out, and the circle of black embers, cans, springs, skeletons of furniture. They too passed here many times on their way from the street’s end to the oaks that screen the river. There the sun is nesting now, night rises with pale flutterings of white wings from roots of plants and the black water.
A courtier speaks to Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C. Highness, the former walls were helpless. They stood alone in the middle of small fields protecting nothing. A single peasant’s holding engulfed each one as it ran briefly, straight from noplace off to noplace, with ruinous steps of broken stone at both ends. Only head-high, without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall, they stuck where they were, never rising over hills or curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonry and a mystery: who built them, how long ago, what for? They seemed to have no role but balking the reaper and the ox; their bases made islands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowers and shrubs sprouted.  So all the people praise you for burying such walls and their memory in your vast one, which joins them, stretching far beyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire: a wall which therefore can never have an end but has to go on extending itself forever. How useful, how cogent your wall is: a pale for the civilized, a dike against the wild people outside, who trade their quiet human blood for the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces, throwing them, watching them fall. In burying those little walls, Lord, you have covered our shame at our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty works were so pointless, or so pitiably useless. Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures? So that some human work would rise over the flats and weather till it seemed not human? Only so that something of ours could be like trees and rocks: docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposed to use, and when compelled, only half serving, reserving from the functions that we give them a secret and idle self. The peasants would make lean-tos for cattle against those walls: they served for this alone.  Now scholars, Lord, are saying the gods are not bulls and cows. That in ancient times we herded these animals to keep from starving and going naked, and so came the old custom of thinking them gods—from dependence. In my youth, I know, the peasants said just the opposite. Worship came first. The awesome bull and cow were gathered to be adored more easily, till people noticed how they let themselves be driven and penned. Next came the first murders against these gods, and the careful observation that they stood to be killed. And so their cult became contempt of beings that would live with us and submit to our crimes and hunger, and we began to breed them. That is why, the farmer says, cattle are honoured, murdered, eaten, cherished with labour that makes him their slave, and that is why in summer he exults in blood, but shivers with fear, with exhausted terror and regret, and sinks into stunned revelry all winter, eating the salted meat, getting children, his house closed up with snow, himself awake as if he slept, living as if he had already died, and rich, happy as if he were a buried worm.  Is God, then, Highness, the fat flaccidity of cattle? Myself, I don’t like to wonder anymore. I only hope lifelong service earns what I ask: the command of some far bastion on your wall where it curves out into the unsettled wastes beyond any field, and the barrenness inside is indistinguishable from that without. This is the reward and end of life I want: to be a point, though infinitely small and far from you, in that wide circle centred on your great self. I see myself arriving to take charge of my troops. I look down from the tower: bare plains, outcrops of ice and rock, vast restless stirrings of grey grasses and dark-veined overcast, the cold wind’s hissing. Year after year the same, waiting for an assault that never comes, straining to glimpse our naked enemies creeping blended with their stony soil: nothing but legend, it may be. Maybe a morning will rise when, waking, I find that I’ve forgotten which way is north, and can’t tell if I am turned outward to danger or inward, Highness, to you. The sun invisible, a murky light diffused throughout featureless cloud, and the wall so long no curve appears—it seems to stretch out straight endlessly east and west: what clue will there be which way to face my people for the attack? It will be crucial then to show no doubt. My orders, I vow, though ignorant, will be crisp.
We won’t pretend we’re not hungry for distinction but what can ever distinguish us enough? This country, this language won’t last long, the race will die, later the cockroach, earth itself, and last this beer bottle: silicon fused by man, almost indestructible, like a soul: it will go spinning ever farther from the nearest thing until space, continually deepening, drowns in itself. Yet we keep a hungry eye on old schoolmates and everyone born in the year of our own birth, and spend the nights in ranting over them, their money, fashionable companions, pliant critics. To live just a little longer than they do: that would be triumph. Hence exercise and diets, and the squabble over who will write the history of this paradise of demons casting each other out.
Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away—but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men’s business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand—looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.
About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall signals that nature is finished with the organism and we just begin to conceive the use of women (having been all this time more enamored of the fountain than the cistern), we retire to nursing homes, whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors, or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi, where the suicidal waves of angry natives give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly, or the crow’s-nest of this windless office block where the cook is already boiling the last sail. And sitting on the bench like a snowfall of beard expectorated by a cloudy hat, we consider the byproducts of life, such as (to name only the least offensive to the nose) the body itself when it has finally reached that eminence from which all is visible and from which it nonetheless feels the need to move on to a homestead of its dreams like an abandoned chicken coop on the sandy streamside under the tulip poplars, and to words, which result from an instinct for what is impossible: to soften the blow for others, including ourselves.
Your parents had reached a long slow time, as animals do, the great center of their lives, when they gleam in their fells as though eternally, unchanging. Or as a day can seem eternal if you lie and watch the full clouds, conscious of your own time: you soon must get up and leave. So father, mother, the small shabby town, its patch of earth going on as though forever: you forgot them there, where they’d been since you started out and where you could find them again—as anyone forgets what he has to lean on so deeply and heavily that it wounds his side and the pain seems only himself. Ungrateful? So you accused yourself one day, waking suddenly. And when you went at last to look for them where they always are, they’d gone, or were withered alive, their mouths opening and closing without sound. The buildings had leaned still farther toward the dusty weeds and crumbs of old machines littered everywhere inexplicably. And now who will explain them? Your grandfather’s day is as absent from your thought as is your own gestation. And check the records: what is written down says nothing. The volumes all avoid the one question you have. They’re like the notebooks you kept in adolescence: you turn the endless pages and you wonder, what did I know or feel, how did I live then, what was this violence and love, this utter newness, invention that could sing water and light, raging at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death? You went back and the bones of your native town were like that, records from which something had escaped: a skeletal mill that roofed ghostly technologies where men once worked, coughed, burnt, bled. And that way they had permitted the long pageants of the children. And their mothers—whose images, vague, identical, stalk by in the nights, each one sorrowing and serene, her starved, enamelled, hard flesh torn, her dress the blue of late dusk, the heaven behind her a work of flat blinding gold.
Her hair back from the wide round face flows, almost a girl’s, so thick, caught back in combs, racing and curling through them with blackest vigor, although it is pure white. Cracked face, dusk-colored: not red but with a deep red struggling under the coming night. The eyes shift quickly, the subway train jerks and rattles, green vinyl, light flickering, silver poles. Eyes driven from ancient calm, which may fear but is never frantic and says nothing, such as looks out from the old Indian portraits—calm is the one thing missing from the beauty of her face in the black window. Those unresting eyes there talk plainly: there’s no money at home, men young and old go wrong, life almost at its end is still day by day harried and perplexed.
Uncle Johnny died after rigid years of cutting hair in his shop downtown. Toward the end he cut it badly, breathing a whisky scent into the tonic, talc and glossy male curls piling up on the tiled floor. He died shrivelled, a man who seldom spoke, still with that nickname, Johnny, last taciturn hint of a youth who may have been angry, a lover of women, filled and lightened by vast ocean, the sky over America. He spent his time at home, silent, or sometimes in bars, or on the corner by King’s Newsstand with others like himself on sun-baked cement, spitting single words, standing in dark slacks, short-sleeved shirts and suspenders. The tall and narrow-waisted new world had by that time completely rejected suspenders. And after the funeral Mary, his wife, was crying and said to me, "Why is it that the men always die sooner? Do they just give up?" We stood there in the church of our fathers, who explained their own deaths, all death, by an ancient crime. How foolish it would have been to tell you, Mary, something about dioxyribonucleic acid, adaptation of the sexes, effects of the hormones, or social factors, things you’d listen to blankly. Better to say that what we find in ourselves, whatever weakness, we ourselves have put there. Both of us knew enough about men’s weakness. Your question didn’t need an answer: I simply shrugged and silently, without real hope, asked to be absolved from the fault of men: Powers of earth, give me the male strength that we desire, kindly strength, which protects. Don’t make my wife a nurse, helplessly to watch me dying drunk and before her. And do not punish me for pride because I’ve asked to be so strong: to be the last.
à Geeta The brown girl, golden, sable-eyed, flourishing yellow hibiscus, steps exuberant, august, into August— her lushly brocaded gold silk sari lavishing honey light at her auburn feet, sandalled, cedarly, with scent of sandalwood haloing her, her individualized, warm, light-dark body, her every glance a direction of the air, her look of mischievous—even tart—sweetness.... O has she...? She has come in from morning’s slight autumnal chill, her feet moistened with diamantine dew— how the sea summers in grass (that same grass that rears at the sun while butterflies mob frangipani...). Behold her smile declaring warm, sun-dyed, terracotta lips— that chance come home— and I answer, “You are light uplifting, liberating me from murk, from an inferno of squalor.” O! Let there be rum and molasses, rice and mackerel, O Muse, the Indian Ocean softening and sweetening the Atlantic, this august autumn. All these pleasures we will prove: lotus like slow-motion lightning, ivory gold fountaining from earth, like you, a fresh light, sprung from earth.
There’s a black wind howlin’ by Whylah Falls; There’s a mad rain hammerin’ the flowers; There’s a shotgunned man moulderin’ in petals; There’s a killer chucklin’ to himself; There’s a mother keenin’ her posied son; There’s a joker amblin’ over his bones. Go down to the Sixhiboux River, hear it cry, “Othello Clemence is dead and his murderer’s free!” O sang from Whylah Falls and lived by sweat, Walked that dark road between desire and regret. He pitched lumber, crushed rock, calloused his hands: He wasn’t a saint but he was a man. Scratch Seville shot him and emptied his skull, Tore a hole in his gut only Death could fill. Now his martyr-mother witnesses in cries Over his corpse cankered white by lilies. There’s a black wind snakin’ by Whylah Falls; There’s a river of blood in Jarvis County; There’s a government that don’t know how to weep; There’s a mother who can’t get no sleep. Go down to the Sixhiboux, hear it moan Like a childless mother far, far, from home, “There’s a change that’s gonna have to come, I said, a change that’s gonna have to come.”
Wipe away tears, Set free your fears: Everything is free. Only the lonely Need much money: Everything is free. Don’t try to bind The love you find: Everyone is free. Your lover’s yours — Surrender force: Everyone is free. The sun melts down, Spreads gold around: Everything is free. The rain is spent Lending flowers scent: Everything is free. The love you live, The life you give: Everything is free.
Make your mind what you want it to be. —Curtis Mayfield Tired of waiting for him, I think of a plan to stick it to the Man—he waylaid me with promises: protection, his valuable keys. Nights of seduction, I would glide to the curb in my customized Eldorado, black finish and cool bubble top and turn it over to a superyoung girl with rags and a bucket of soapy water, with a smile and a dead president, make it shine my sister. He is inside listening to Curtis, his sapphire ring he brings the moon with him, this cat, and his eyes glow like mellow stones at my superfly threads. The cashmere white stitched suit, the maxi coat trimmed in fox fur: vixen, my pretty little hat with three blue feather plumes. I let him dig me for a while, and lay a kiss, a spoon of cocaine on him, our secret meetings a potent rush and I am hip to the hit to his fly hand on my thigh, my ladies scatter in a cloud of Opium and he tells me,you know me, I’m your friend. I thought he was my man—I flash on him in the bathtub, its ledge of oils in flasks, pulling a loofah sponge over my tired shoulders, passing a reefer in lemon paper, on all the tired bitches working his keys, hustling his diamond rocks— two sets of false eyelashes, micro minis, freezing their asses off. My .25 Beretta can’t stop him, it’s not real, I’m not real to him. He’ll use me up and kill me; I need brains guts and cool; I put fur on your back, my baby, he says. I am between him and death, the greatest high of all, and I ask him to step outside. The pink flakes blow my mind and I turn to him with a flurry of karate kicks, kicking out my left leg I bring him to the ground and with my foot on the collar of his mohair suit I tell him, I took your money and signed a contract on you: I hired the best killers there are— men like you—yeah, if one hair on my gorgeous head is harmed, it’s all over for you. It’s all over for you, I think, as I imagine I am Superfly; my mind is what I want it to be, the Man is tired and suddenly he looksold, very, very old as he turns away from me, the things he cannot dream— my brazen plans, my body full of love.
for Mark and Debra: Malleus Maleficarum The ground was never recovered, nor the legions, for their numbers were thought so ill omened that they never again appear in the army lists. —J. M. Roberts It begins with Diane—the gold shingles of her razored hair alight in the wind that whips the trees, the cotton slips pinned to nylon lines: these improbable ghosts. The first I ever loved can still incite such desperation. Betrayal lashes the careful stitches, the slight fabric; its design undone. She would take her switchblade and cut spiders in half— a quadrant of scars radiating from her wrists and elbows, she wrote my name in blood, let matches flare against the cuts small yellow head, searing. I used to operate on myself, she said. Separate a triangle of skin and place objects—silver pin heads, glass beads close to the bone. A private surgical kit, embroidery scissors, alcohol, fine needles, and violet thread; silk, cat whiskers tied in complicated bows. She remembers this way, where things are where they are buried. We studied history together, this is how we met. Recovering the Roman Empire; she draws military disasters in her margins, mail clad horsemen pitching violently to the ground, the movement of the cavalry a swarm of locusts. Her silver compact slit open, because there are assassins in the narrow hallway; her fine pale feet turn to form an arabesque (a delicate design of flowers, leaves), furrows in the sheets and mattress, pearls. Ropes of black pearls and a black rubber dress—submerged in the green haze, the depths of a nightclub, listening. Submission; she hit his thighs with a chain, a hook in his mouth her lips were alluring. Red feather quills, bright red flies. I think of him, brought violently to the surface, his tensile body still below the thin edge of the filleting knife his slick flesh streaming as he surrenders—a ceremony of scales and gills, useless to him now, as he breathes in and out. She told me once that she was like a scorpion, and I did not listen. I let her creep between my fingers, and danger was exotic to me then. I lived somewhere deep beyond the coastline, in the crevices of rocks and wood planks, her gold hair spins like loose coins, strange and valuable. The currency of nightmares, where the sun burns the earth and empties the seas—there are skeletons, gingerly reaching for night night will fall in a rustle of wings, the gentle sweep of the legs of scorpions.
Where we almost, nay more than married are. —John Donne Pearl egg of fly intimates the curve of larva, its spine and claw point. The cellophane shell, brittle pupa blanket where the almost fly lies like a spring. Coiled and tensile, its exertions will tear the sheet. Six black legs flutter against the dry christening gown, I see his lambent eyescloistered in these living walls of jet. Small glider, his veined wings are sheer parasols, gauzy skirts that admit the light. The orange down of his pelvis beneath this architecture, blood is the adhesive fastening flight, my sleek aviator presses his sucker feet to my lips. How little he denies me, the drone in my ear and he swarms my heart if one two light steps from the tips of my fingers he bows his head and makes a violin, or hovers behind me when I circle the floor, lonely, he rests on shoulder, elbow, to stare at me with swollen eyes, darkling, drop of ink. A currant in the sugar dish, he models in the painted flowers, black eye of Susan, blunt thorn—he delights in my decadence, the slippery floor, tiles, and stairs haunted with illness: my sensual life and his intersect. He comes on the wing of another spring, in slicks of grey water, the pendant sun. to navigate what is unknown to me, patiently, he regards the chrysalis of skin that envelops the arched veins. Incurious and constant, he is used to waiting for the modest blush, the rustle of disrobing the hush. Of silks unfolding, of gossamer veils drawn as tenderly as breath, from the fluent sea of one blood made of two, the sweetness of his pestilent kiss.
‘Are you asleep?’ Like a door that always opens on the same empty closet, the old jokey question you can never answer ‘yes’ to is a snap, in comparison to ‘Where are you?’ Moving, wherever you are. Even your stillness on the back seat takes the bent of action, a kicking reach through swells and drifts of afghan. My live question mark, are they salt or sweet, the waters you riddle? Asking gets me as far as ladling water with a net. Though I can catch your small beached foot, and hear soft waves of breath, the mesh of senses isn’t fine enough to land you now. When you come back, you’ll rub the sand from your eyes and know nothing of where you’ve been. Love is like that: the element we breathe and move through, untouchable and always there.
I would give my husband drawings for grocery lists, with smiling faces on the eggs, and spider feet dangling everywhere. I could draw letters too. fat senseless alphabets, lexical landscapes of pointed trees and bloated clouds. that is how I wished words were, with changing colours and feathers in their spines. on road signs in my dreams, they shimmied, their Rockette heels a variegated sunburst. unlike the stiff black knots and stakes that glared at me from envelopes and books. an unchanging and cruel exotica, like smelling Cuban cigars wherever you go or the same screaming opera. he said that I did not need to learn with him there, reading slowly aloud, but sometimes in silence. that drove me insane, he would laugh or frown at something on the page, and look as if he were a creeping vine on a tombstone, a coffee stain on a piece of clean manilla. I practice learning on a stack of mail he kept in his sock drawer, and I finally learned dear. Dear Hank, it felt like having a perfume sample fall from a magazine in a sweet sudden breath. it made me think of velvet antlers, of his rumpled cardigan sweater and my love for him, a word which slayed me, with its clean lines and quick exhalation, the swelling heart in its middle. I began to scream things all day long, and I felt the first affection for poetry through the ringing sounds of advertisements, soapbox labels and advice to the lovelorn columns. words were heroic, huge killing things, and they beat in my head and bled from my eyes and fingers. I would be ironing, and a giant phrase or comma would barrel into the room, its veins bulging, its arms around my waist. Dear Hank, I miss you especially your sexy hands, mine clenched when I got that far and then some. then I knew for sure that reading was magic, it conjured up these long eyelashes and white Harlow hair, and the guilty baldspot and shaking dewlap of my faithless husband, adrift on the libretto of his private life. he would still read to me in his annoying way while I squirmed on my novels and texts, that lay under the couch cushions like misplaced scissors. I drew him an elaborate list one day, of pink champagne bottles and support girdles, and wrote my first words. I left them with his letters, on the back of our marriage certificate, I think they were my finest, I said, Dear Hank, the end. and right away began working on a longer book.
(The Homemaker of the Month) Ysidro calls me at night, meeya carra. his big blonde bean, and slides his moustache across my neck. he’s dark, and like I imagine his country, flat and arid, face a painted clay pot drying on the windowsill, on his lip, trails a snake with black twisted rattles. he asks me about my youth, and I tell him like the others, that they said I would never amount to anything. be cause of my size mostly, that I was a big American girl. raw and wide I sent away from catalogues, for plastic barrettes shaped like musical notes, and Cuban heeled shoes. I was dreamy too, and once painted my naked body like a guitar, with metal frets and silver strings. he caught lizards and tamed them, and saw an orange blister ripped sun. its aurora looked liked yellow music, and his eyes narrow as he plucks it from my stomach. I had Matthew from the first marriage, when I was sixteen. we would huddle in a striped mattress that was split in the seams, and I thought of my husband as a cowboy, when his leather face creased and stretched. in college I later learned about kings, and ancient gods who sent their love in showers of coins, golden, manna from heaven. and I never talk about my first man, except to say that he laid my head open and the scar-line is his illegible signature. my son is more like an immaculate conception, like my adopted girls whose teeth and pupils are shaped like a stranger. we ride to the lake and crush bread for the birds. I like the geese with their masks and giraffe necks. sometimes they hiss and you’d swear they had a row of devil fangs under their poniard tongues. but especially the swans, I can’t help but think of them plucked and fleshy turning white and velvet, like my husband pulling his hands through my henna hair. Ysidro is a groundskeeper and gravedigger. sometimes we joke about dead business or a certain shift, and we laughed about the recipe I have included;Mexican Chicken Bake, we said: cremate a handful of skinny bones, and sprinkle lightly over the dinner table. but it’s peaceful work, and he rests by the tombs, and weeds the paupers’ wooden crosses. and tells them about the weather, and here in Oskaloosa it couldn’t be finer. I am alone most nights when he walks with sleeping Iowa, and my imagination can turn black. I think of sewing him a pole-bag, with cobra skin and vegetable powder. with fathers and half shells. so he can speak melodic incantations and command a blood- less multitude. scary corpses turn to me, their eye sockets contracting in the light. we feed the birds and cook a chicken. in a taco shell it’s perfect, spicy and delicious, like my sweet Spanish lover’s touch.
‘He thought it had only been put there to finish off th’ alphabet, like, though ampus-and (&) would ha’ done as well.’ (George Eliot: Adam Bede) And had in fact, for generations— the plump, open armed ‘&’ waving goodbye from the end of the old-world alphabet like an innkeeper framed in doorway candlelight, farewells swelled with hopes of come again. Then the old world burned down because we sensed, beyond the candle’s glow, the road led to a dead end. No traveler returned, even the unverified odd reports of happy returns petered out. So we renovated the alphabet, signing it off with a streamlined ‘z’ as sharp and final as lightning: no sense in posting notice of further connections that didn’t exist, or passing off maps as places. Trouble was, nobody felt at home in the revamped compound. Bookings fell off, postcards of views of blank walls piled unsold in the unvisited gift shop, the same paperbacks stalled on the revolving racks. It was a paradise of sorts, a golden age of nullity, no relatives breaking the costly silence. No wonder Eliot’s befuddled Jacob Storey felt his page of Z’s was somehow ‘not right,’ that ‘it was a letter you never wanted hardly.’ He knew, as one newly released from the unlit cell of his long-unlettered ignorance, what you did want hardly: you wanted, needed—as hardly as Hetty Sorrel, abandoned at the dock—someone to stand by. You were the murderess of your baby, silenced with a ‘z.’ You needed a hand, the open-armed return of all your relations. You wanted, harder than death, ampersand
‘I have always felt that desolation, that hell itself, is most powerfully expressed in an uninhabited natural landscape at its bleakest.’ —Anthony Hecht 1. To each his own hell. Mine was an uninhabited landscape as far from nature as you can get without actually leaving the planet, a man-made moon waste on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, fired in the sun’s kiln through unending afternoons when I was nine or ten. I can never get the whole scene put together in my head, thanks to whatever guardian spirit flags down potentially dangerous intruders on the verge of memory, but parts of me hold parts of it: my ears play out the hissing wires’ repeated rise and fall, dry waves breaking above pavement; my nostrils chafe where fumes of gasoline weep from soft tarred patches in the asphalt; through a chainlink grid, my eyes take in some lot’s trapped beach, its black sand an amalgam of gravel, soot, and broken glass; or they blink in sequence with the traffic light’s perpetual solitaire at a carless intersection, flicking over greens, ambers, reds; my hands remember enough not to touch the shut steel trap doors of delivery chutes where air trembles over surfaces as at their beginnings in a furnace. What fills my mind to bursting is emptiness, the spirit of inverted Genesis transforming light and water’s urge towards fullness into a miracle of unearthly loss.2. Sentries, a pair of gasoline pumps napped. Their rubber arms dangled groundwards and looped back up, hanging slack from the brass lapel their trigger-fingers hooked at shoulder height. They were no angels, but kept the gate of hell whenever I made visits to the angels. Behind them, next to a roll-up garage door always rolled up, with an invisible car always risen above the stone lintel on the hydraulic lift, a soft drink cooler sat coffin-like against the stucco wall. And always songs from a hidden radio promised cool mountain rivers to the hot flat city: somebody else must have listened, but I never saw a soul in all my visits. The angels’ wings fluttered the moment I raised the lid, a potent shimmer, as if the sun itself shone from the chest, not its reflections playing off the steel bars and icy waters. The angels sat in rows between the bars, their orders chevroned by the shapes and colours of their glass capes: the bluish, scalloped whorl of cherubim, the powers’ straight sheer crystal, the emerald flare of flaming seraphim— all emissaries from the sky-washed shore of heaven. To put a coin in the dispenser, slide one of them along its plated channel and lift it free through the chest’s narrow gate— to kiss the cold stars of its distillation— was not important; it was only important to see the angels swimming in the glitter and dip my fingers in their flickering water at the centre of that man-made desert, knowing that they were man-made, and might shatter.
When a creature dies ... the flesh and soft parts of the body rot quickly. All that is left are the bones and teeth.  (textbook entry on ‘fossils’) Sometimes. You, mother, dying, left what was hard first: bones weeping into your veins like flutes, teeth vanished on some hospital lunch tray. In your last mute days you parted with one more hard thing: the gold ring I was to save for my child. As your hand offered that bright circle (only seen as a whole now, when empty) did your thoughts reach, like mine, for your first wedding ring? You took that one off when I was seven or eight and sent it spinning from a car window. I can still feel the wet blades of grass slipping through my fingers, night dew coming on, you and father loud in the parked car. I searched there as if life spilled from a ring that lay somewhere out of sight but within reach, hid where only the crickets knew. I took the scraping of their mating calls for crying, as if they shared loss—my childish heart consoled by a soft ‘as if.’ The consolation carries on: their song (light as air, softer than voices) plays through my thoughts about that evening and fills the lost ring’s hollow with life’s most lasting part, cries for new love.
1.  Consider the tragic fortitude of mannikins, the courage it takes  under casual poses to do nothing interminably each day.  To face unflinching (through sunlit glass that bars them from it) the rushing surf  of life within reach where they must stand marooned on their islands’ plastic turf,  and not to cry out: more heroic than those Romans the lava rain stunned  to statues—misshaped by the panic that twisted their limbs, glazed with their pain  in black rock—friezes of agony. You would never know, from the relaxed  swivel of this woman’s wrist as she completes a backhand with her racket,  that she will never take another swing, or from her smile that she has stood  balanced here on one foot all summer like one of Dante’s damned, and not cracked.2.  ‘Cracked’ is my father’s word for ‘crazy,’ as in ‘You’d have to be cracked to pay  that much for a pair of shoes.’ He’s not crazy, but he forgets, and today  as we pay out his visit’s hours strolling on Bloor, he thinks up the same  questions again minutes after he’s nodded and smiled at answers to them.  Looking for things to look at and not think, I focus on another grove  of mummers: headless, their necks poke out like worms from the smartly turned-over  collars of turtlenecks and jackets. You can tell they’ve also lost their arms  from the way the sleeves plummet slackly off their shoulders—although they, ashamed  to show the mutilation, act cool and tuck the cuffs into their pockets.  I look at my father—hands trembling, head crazed like china with minute cracks  through which years exit invisibly— and must remind myself his show is  kinder, the long-running comedy where he’s played every part, from fresh-faced  mooning lover to child-duped parent to doddering senex: still free now  (while heart and limbs play their duet) to do a walk-on, ad lib, bow out.  He sweats a little in the sunshine. Summer stock, lacking the tragic poise  that freezes these actors in their scene, we move on towards a shadier place.
If they, more petite  than the mice whose flittings  have pillaged their robes’ sparkled trim, stood tiptoe  on the plumped felt tops  of their thimble-sized footstools to scrutinize  the worn fabric  of this room’s blue distances, would they locate  the source of lightning bolts  in our faces’ wrinkled pleats and construe the stars’  dance from the tattered  embroidery of our steps, or find in our seamless  unravelling years  the tissue of apocalypse?
If I close my eyes now, I can still see them canopied by the visor of my sunhat: three children islanded on a narrow rim of earth between the huge crack-willow that they squat before, hushed, poised to net a frog, and the pond the frog will jump to (it got away) a glass its dive will shatter.  The unbroken image pleases my mind’s eye with its density, such thick crisscross of tree-trunk, earth, and tall grass I see no breach, no source for the light that steeps it but a blue burning in the pond’s green glass. The grass withered, the tree blew down, earth caught the frog, the children grew. Sky’s ice-blue flame teased along the wick it would consume.
We have cried often when we have given them the little victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they have fallen to sleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time. (parent of children working at a textile mill, to an 1832 Parliamentary inquiry into child employment) 1. They cry for children too tired to cry for themselves, daughters twelve, eleven, eight—eyes shutting down as a grate’s banked coals shut down at midnight, in the rising damp called ‘home.’ Too tired to eat after eighteen hours feeding looms whose steel teeth grind insatiably, the girls will be offered up again at dawn. Yet they are the lucky ones, to work where skylights hold swatches of the unaffordable blue. Imagine these girls’ mine-trapped cousins, hauling black rocks on sledges up tunnels of black air: half-undressed, belted, harnessed, saturated with the oil-blackened water they crawl through pumping ‘the lifeblood of British industry.’ Flogged for talking, Margaret Comeley, aged nine, can sometimes close her mouth around a piece of muffin—if she manages to keep it from the rats, ‘so ravenous they eat the corks out of our oil-flasks.’ Sarah Gooder fills her mouth with song ‘when I’ve light, but not in the dark; I dare not then.’2. Here is a working girl so filled with light she is pure song: her sun-bright bodice shines in counterpoint with her blue overskirt, and, from her forehead’s crescent of white linen, tapering light blazes a white path down arms and wrists to folds of spread blue cloth, like moonlight piloting the tide’s refrains. A Dutch milkmaid, Tanneke Everpoel, lucky enough to live in the Delft house where Vermeer’s eye and brush could catch the spill of morning light as her brief peacefulness brimmed over, serves here as a celebrant— bread heaped up on the altar-like table, wine transubstantiated into milk whose brilliance seems the source of the room’s light she pours forever from the earthenware’s black core. His pose; yet—all hers—underneath it (and signalled in her fixed eyes’ unconcern for the beholder) such complete immersion in what she does, that she is all she does and it is she, this offering-up of day. And he? When he was forty, the Sun King invaded Holland. No one wanted art. In debt to his baker for three years’ worth of bread, Vermeer, according to his widow, falling ‘into a frenzy,’ passed ‘from being healthy’ in ‘a day or a day and a half ... to being dead,’ ‘the very great burden of his children ... so taken to heart.’3. Knowing the earth is closer to the sun in winter won’t revive the street person sleeping towards cold death in a bus shelter. Bread in a painting won’t cure stomach ache. So Margaret dragged her great burden of coal while Sarah sat terrified in the dark, and neither knew Vermeer’s poised working girl, broke bread with her, shared her breaking light. The painting stood by, helpless to save them or him, and looking at it now cannot help anyone. Yet, it can cry for them, as parents take their children’s grief to heart: the beads of salt, shimmering on the bread like diamonds, can be tears the two girls shed down where no light sang their preciousness. The cradled pitcher’s brim can be their hearth, since it (and not the sky’s cold mine of stars) pours out what cannot shelter us, but feeds a hunger no daily bread can fill: for light— light that, like coal, comes from our earth; hunger that, unlike grief, is inexhaustible.
I knowNot these my handsAnd yet I think there wasA woman like me once had handsLike these.
Scarlet the poppiesBlue the corn-flowers,Golden the wheat.Gold for The Eternal:Blue of Our Lady:Red for the fiveWounds of her Son.
More nice than wise. XI Mon. January [1733] hath xxxi days. Old Batchelor would have a Wife that’s wise, Fair, rich, and young, a Maiden for his Bed; Not proud, nor churlish, but of faultless size; A Country Houswife in the City bred. He’s a nice Fool, and long in vain hath staid; He should bespeak her, there’s none ready made. XII Mon. February hath xxviii days. N. N. of B---s County, pray don’t be angry with poor Richard. Each Age of Men new Fashions doth invent; Things which are old, young Men do not esteem: What pleas’d our Fathers, doth not us content; What flourish’d then, we out of fashion deem: And that’s the reason, as I understand, Why Prodigus did fell his Father’s Land. I Mon. March hath xxxi days. My Love and I for Kisses play’d, She would keep stakes, I was content, But when I won she would be paid; This made me ask her what she meant: Quoth she, since you are in this wrangling vein, Here take your Kisses, give me mine again. II Mon. April hath xxx days. Kind Katharine to her husband kiss’d these words, “ Mine own sweet Will, how dearly I love thee! If true (quoth Will) the World no such affords. And that its true I durst his warrant be; For ne’er heard I of Woman good or ill, But always loved best, her own sweet Will. III Mon. May hath xxxi days. Mirth pleaseth some, to others ’tis offence, Some commend plain conceit, some profound sense; Some wish a witty Jest, some dislike that, And most would have themselves they know not what. Then he that would please all, and himself too, Takes more in hand than he is like to do. IV Mon. June hath xxx days. Observe the daily circle of the sun, And the short year of each revolving moon: By them thou shalt foresee the following day, Nor shall a starry night thy hopes betray. When first the moon appears, if then she shrouds Her silver crescent, tip’d with sable clouds, Conclude she bodes a tempest on the main, And brews for fields impetuous floods of rain. V Mon. July hath xxxi days. Ev’n while the reaper fills his greedy hands, And binds the golden sheafs in brittle bands: Oft have I seen a sudden storm arise From all the warring winds that sweep the skies: And oft whole sheets descend of slucy rain, Suck’d by the spungy clouds from oft the main; The lofty skies at once come pouring down, The promis’d crop and golden labours drown. VI Mon. August hath xxxi days. For us thro’ 12 bright signs Apollo guides The year, and earth in sev’ral climes divides. Five girdles bind the skies, the torrid zone Glows with the passing and repassing sun. Far on the right and left, th’extreams of heav’n, To frosts and snows and bitter blasts are giv’n. Betwixt the midst and these, the Gods assign’d Two habitable seats for humane kind. VII Mon. September hath xxx days. Death is a Fisherman, the world we see His Fish-pond is, and we the Fishes be: His Net some general Sickness; howe’er he Is not so kind as other Fishers be; For if they take one of the smaller Fry, They throw him in again, he shall not die: But Death is sure to kill all he can get, And all is Fish with him that comes to Net. VIII Mon. October hath xxxi days. Time was my spouse and I could not agree, Striving about superiority: The text which saith that man and wife are one, Was the chief argument we stood upon: She held, they both one woman should become; I held they should be man, and both but one. Thus we contended daily, but the strife Could not be ended, till both were one Wife. IX Mon. November hath xxx days. My neighbour H—-y by his pleasing tongue, Hath won a Girl that’s rich, wise, fair and young, The Match (he saith) is half concluded, he Indeed is wondrous willing; but not she. And reason good, for he has run thro’all Almost the story of the Prodigal; Yet swears he never with the hogs did dine; That’s true, for none would trust him with their swine. X Mon. December hath xxxi days. She that will eat her breakfast in her bed, And spend the morn in dressing of her head, And sit at dinner like a maiden bride, And talk of nothing all day but of pride; God in his mercy may do much to save her, But what a case is he in that shall have her.
Wedlock, as old Men note, hath likened been, Unto a publick Crowd or common Rout; Where those that are without would fain get in, And those that are within would fain get out. Grief often treads upon the Heels of Pleasure, Marry’d in Haste, we oft repent at Leisure; Some by Experience find these Words misplac’ed, Marry’d at Leisure, they repent in Haste.
Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which to good Men is an Abomination. Our Smith of late most wonderfully swore, That whilst he breathed he would drink no more; But since, I know his Meaning, for I think He meant he would not breath whilst he did drink.
The Busy-Man's Picture BUSINESS, thou Plague and Pleasure of my Life, Thou charming Mistress, thou vexatious Wife; Thou Enemy, thou Friend, to Joy, to Grief, Thou bring’st me all, and bring’st me no Relief, Thou bitter, sweet, thou pleasing, teazing Thing, Thou Bee, that with thy Honey wears a Sting; Some Respite, prithee do, yet do not give, I cannot with thee, nor without thee live.
The Reverse Studious of Ease, and fond of humble Things, Below the Smiles, below the Frowns of Kings: Thanks to my Stars, I prize the Sweets of Life, No sleepless Nights I count, no Days of Strife. I rest, I wake, I drink, I sometimes love, I read, I write, I settle, or I rove; Content to live, content to die unknown, Lord of myself, accountable to none.
This World’s an Inn, all Travellers are we; And this World’s Goods th’Accommodations be. Our Life is nothing but a Winter’s Day; Some only break their Fast, and so away. Others stay Dinner, and depart full fed. The deepest Age but sups and goes to bed. He’s most in Debt that lingers out the Day; Who dies betimes has less and less to pay.
Men drop so fast, ere Life’s mid Stage we tread, Few know so many Friends alive as dead; Yet, as immortal, in our uphill Chace, We press coy Fortune with unslacken’d Pace; Our ardent Labours for the Toy we seek, Join Night to Day, and Sunday to the Week, Our very Joys are anxious, and expire Between Satiety and fierce Desire.
PRECEPT I. In Things of moment, on thy self depend, Nor trust too far thy Servant or thy Friend: With private Views, thy Friend may promise fair, And Servants very seldom prove sincere. PRECEPT II. What can be done, with Care perform to Day, Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay; Your distant Prospects all precarious are, And Fortune is as fickle as she’s fair. PRECEPT III. Nor trivial Loss, nor trivial Gain despise; Molehills, if often heap’d, to Mountains rise: Weigh every small Expence, and nothing waste, Farthings long sav’d, amount to Pounds at last.
Would you be well receiv’d where’er you go, Remember each Man vanquish’d is a Foe: Resist not therefore to your utmost Might, But let the Weakest think he’s sometimes right; He, for each Triumph you shall thus decline, Shall give ten Opportunities to shine; He sees, since once you own’d him to excel, That ’tis his Interest you should reason well.
Read much; the Mind, which never can be still, If not intent on Good, is prone to Ill. And where bright Thoughts, or Reas’nings just you find, Repose them careful in your inmost Mind. To deck his Chloe’s Bosom thus the Swain With pleasing Toil surveys th’enamel’d Plain, With Care selects each fragrant flow’r he meets, And forms one Garland of their mingled sweets.
What of the bow? The bow was made in England: Of true wood, of yew-wood, The wood of English bows; So men who are free Love the old yew-tree And the land where the yew-tree grows. What of the cord? The cord was made in England: A rough cord, a tough cord, A cord that bowmen love; And so we will sing Of the hempen string And the land where the cord was wove. What of the shaft? The shaft was cut in England: A long shaft, a strong shaft, Barbed and trim and true; So we’ll drink all together To the grey goose-feather And the land where the grey goose flew. What of the mark? Ah, seek it not in England, A bold mark, our old mark Is waiting over-sea. When the strings harp in chorus, And the lion flag is o’er us, It is there that our mark will be. What of the men? The men were bred in England: The bowmen—the yeomen, The lads of dale and fell. Here’s to you—and to you! To the hearts that are true And the land where the true hearts dwell.
It’s up and away from our work to-day, For the breeze sweeps over the down; And it’s hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame, And the bracken is bronzing to brown. With the turf ’neath our tread and the blue overhead, And the song of the lark in the whin; There’s the flag and the green, with the bunkers between— Now will you be over or in? The doctor may come, and we’ll teach him to know A tee where no tannin can lurk; The soldier may come, and we’ll promise to show Some hazards a soldier may shirk; The statesman may joke, as he tops every stroke, That at last he is high in his aims; And the clubman will stand with a club in his hand That is worth every club in St. James’. The palm and the leather come rarely together, Gripping the driver’s haft, And it’s good to feel the jar of the steel And the spring of the hickory shaft. Why trouble or seek for the praise of a clique? A cleek here is common to all; And the lie that might sting is a very small thing When compared with the lie of the ball. Come youth and come age, from the study or stage, From Bar or from Bench—high and low! A green you must use as a cure for the blues— You drive them away as you go. We’re outward bound on a long, long round, And it’s time to be up and away: If worry and sorrow come back with the morrow, At least we’ll be happy to-day.
Men of the Twenty-first Up by the Chalk Pit Wood, Weak with our wounds and our thirst, Wanting our sleep and our food, After a day and a night. God, shall we ever forget? Beaten and broke in the fight, But sticking it, sticking it yet, Trying to hold the line, Fainting and spent and done; Always the thud and the whine, Always the yell of the Hun. Northumberland, Lancaster, York, Durham and Somerset, Fighting alone, worn to the bone, But sticking it, sticking it yet. Never a message of hope, Never a word of cheer! Fronting Hill 70’s shell-swept slope, With the dull, dead plain in our rear; Always the shriek of the shell, Always the roar of the burst, Always the tortures of Hell, As waiting and wincing we cursed Our luck, the guns, and the Boche. When our Corporal shouted “Stand to!” And I heard some one cry, “Clear the front for the Guards!”— And the Guards came through. Our throats they were parched and hot, But Lord, if you’d heard the cheer, Irish and Welsh and Scot, Coldstream and Grenadier— Two Brigades, if you please, Dressing as straight as a hem. We, we were down on our knees, Praying for us and for them, Praying with tear-wet cheek, Praying with outstretched hand. Lord! I could speak for a week, But how could you understand? How could your cheeks be wet? Such feelin’s don’t come to you; But how can me or my mates forget When the Guards came through? “Five yards left extend!” It passed from rank to rank, And line after line, with never a bend, And a touch of the London swank. A trifle of swank and dash, Cool as a home parade, Twinkle, glitter and flash, Flinching never a shade, With the shrapnel right in their face, Doing their Hyde Park stunt, Swinging along at an easy pace, Arms at the trail, eyes front. Man! it was great to see! Man! it was fine to do! It’s a cot, and hospital ward for me, But I’ll tell them in Blighty wherever I be, How the Guards came through.
God’s own best will bide the test And God’s own worst will fall; But, best or worst or last or first, He ordereth it all. For all is good, if understood, (Ah, could we understand!) And right and ill are tools of skill Held in His either hand. The harlot and the anchorite, The martyr and the rake, Deftly He fashions each aright, Its vital part to take. Wisdom He makes to form the fruit Where the high blossoms be; And Lust to kill the weaker shoot, And Drink to trim the tree. And Holiness that so the bole Be solid at the core; And Plague and Fever, that the whole Be changing evermore. He strews the microbes in the lung, The blood-clot in the brain; With test and test He picks the best, Then test them once again. He tests the body and the mind, He rings them o’er and o’er; And if they crack, He throws them back, And fashions them once more. He chokes the infant throat with slime, He sets the ferment free; He builds the tiny tube of lime That blocks the artery. He lets the youthful dreamer store Great projects in his brain, Until He drops the fungus spore That smears them out again. He stores the milk that feeds the babe, He dulls the tortured nerve; He gives a hundred joys of sense Where few or none might serve. And still He trains the branch of good Where the high blossoms be, And wieldeth still the shears of ill To prune and prune His tree.
There is a better thing, dear heart, Than youthful flush or girlish grace. There is the faith that never fails, The courage in the danger place, The duty seen, and duty done, The heart that yearns for all in need, The lady soul which could not stoop To selfish thought or lowly deed. All that we ever dreamed, dear wife, Seems drab and common by the truth, The sweet sad mellow things of life Are more than golden dreams of youth.
If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!”  Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
IThe light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought,  quick adulterous tread at the heart.  Who is it that goes there?  Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air,  torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre. In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche  have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light  falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing  up from blind innocence, ensnared   by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight. But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft, diffuse with rapture absorb the flame. Their bodies yield out of strength.  Waves of visual pleasure wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience. A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns   the tips of their bodies, lips, ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd.  His thighs are flesh, are clouds  lit by the sun in its going down, hot luminescence at the loins of the visible.  But they are not in a landscape.   They exist in an obscurity. The wind spreading the sail serves them. The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin  serve them. That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be,   serves them. The dark serves them. The oil scalding his shoulder serves them, serves their story. Fate, spinning,  knots the threads for Love. Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them.II This is magic. It is passionate dispersion.  What if they grow old? The gods  would not allow it.  Psyche is preserved. In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty   the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold   it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets   we go, to their faltering, their unaltering wrongness that has style,   their variable truth,  the old faces, words shed like tears from a plenitude of powers time stores. A stroke. These little strokes. A chill.   The old man, feeble, does not recoil.  Recall. A phase so minute,  only a part of the word in- jerrd.  The Thundermakers descend, damerging a nuv. A nerb.  The present dented of the U nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?   Cloud. Invades the brain. What   if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd? Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower— where among these did the power reside that moves the heart? What flower of the nation  bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture?  Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities.  For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing? Noble men in the quiet of morning hear  Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem.  Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt,  idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war. Where among these did the spirit reside  that restores the land to productive order?  McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson, dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor. How sad “amid lanes and through old woods”   echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few  posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage  where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame.  It is across great scars of wrong   I reach toward the song of kindred men   and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake!   that cried:  “The theme is creative and has vista.”   “He is the president of regulation.”  I see always the under side turning,  fumes that injure the tender landscape.   From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act   striving to meet a natural measure.III (for Charles Olson)  Psyche’s tasks—the sorting of seeds  wheat barley oats poppy coriander anise beans lentils peas —every grain  in its right place  before nightfall; gathering the gold wool from the cannibal sheep  (for the soul must weep  and come near upon death); harrowing Hell for a casket Proserpina keeps  that must not  be opend . . . containing beauty?  no! Melancholy coild like a serpent  that is deadly sleep  we are not permitted  to succumb to.  These are the old tasks.   You’ve heard them before.  They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her  insect instructor;  must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking,  must follow to the letter  freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa   mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds  as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill  had part restored by an insect, was  upheld by a lizard  (to draw the sorts)the wind is part of the process  defines a nation of the wind—  father of many notions,  Who? let the light into the dark? began  the many movements of the passion?  West from east men push.  The islands are blessd  (cursed) that swim below the sun,  man upon whom the sun has gone down! There is the hero who struggles east  widdershins to free the dawn and must  woo Night’s daughter, sorcery, black passionate rage, covetous queens,  so that the fleecy sun go back from Troy,  Colchis, India . . . all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day.  The light that is Love  rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark.   Roses and blood flood the clouds.  Solitary first riders advance into legend.  This land, where I stand, was all legend  in my grandfathers’ time: cattle raiders,   animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw  in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun  primordial carving empty enormities  out of the rock.  Snakes lurkd guarding secrets. Those first ones   survived solitude.  Scientia holding the lamp, driven by doubt;  Eros naked in foreknowledge  smiling in his sleep; and the light  spilld, burning his shoulder—the outrage  that conquers legend— passion, dismay, longing, search   flooding up where the Beloved is lost. Psyche travels  life after life, my life, station  after station, to be tried  without break, without news, knowing only—but what did she know?   The oracle at Miletus had spoken truth surely: that he was Serpent-Desire   that flies thru the air, a monster-husband. But she saw him fair whom Apollo’s mouthpiece said spread   pain beyond cure to those  wounded by his arrows. Rilke torn by a rose thorn blackend toward Eros. Cupidinous Death!   that will not take no for an answer.IV   Oh yes! Bless the footfall where step by step the boundary walker (in Maverick Road the snow thud by thud from the roof  circling the house—another tread)  that foot informd by the weight of all things  that can be elusive no more than a nearness to the mind   of a single image  Oh yes! this most dear  the catalyst force that renders clear the days of a life from the surrounding medium!  Yes, beautiful rare wilderness! wildness that verifies strength of my tame mind,   clearing held against indians, health that prepared to meet death,  the stubborn hymns going up into the ramifications of the hostile air  that, decaptive, gives way. Who is there? O, light the light!  The Indians give way, the clearing falls.  Great Death gives way and unprepares us.  Lust gives way. The Moon gives way.  Night gives way. Minutely, the Day gains. She saw the body of her beloved  dismemberd in waking . . . or was it in sight? Finders Keepers we sang  when we were children or were taught to sing before our histories began and we began  who were beloved our animal life toward the Beloved, sworn to be Keepers.  On the hill before the wind came  the grass moved toward the one sea,   blade after blade dancing in waves. There the children turn the ring to the left.  There the children turn the ring to the right.   Dancing . . . Dancing . . . And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to the king   that in the caves of history dreams. Round and round the children turn.  London Bridge that is a kingdom falls. We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more. Mount Segur, Mount Victoire, Mount Tamalpais . . .   rise to adore the mystery of Love! (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said, Listen to Me! The oracle had said, Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere . . .  the information flows  that is yearning. A line of Pindar   moves from the area of my lamp   toward morning.  In the dawn that is nowhere  I have seen the willful children  clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.
Neither our vices nor our virtues  further the poem. “They came up   and died just like they do every year  on the rocks.”  The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,  to breed itself, a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. This beauty is an inner persistence  toward the source striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   a call we heard and answer in the lateness of the world  primordial bellowings from which the youngest world might spring, salmon not in the well where the   hazelnut falls but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   blindly making it. This is one picture apt for the mind. A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, where last year’s extravagant antlers   lie on the ground. The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   new antler-buds,  the same, “a little heavy, a little contrived”, his only beauty to be   all moose.
The white peacock roosting  might have been Christ,  featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash,  percht in the tree and the other, the fumed-glass slide  —were like night and day, the slit of an eye opening in  time vertical to the horizon
It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree  out of blue sky the wind  sings loudest surrounding me. And solitude, a wild solitude ’s reveald, fearfully, high I’d climb  into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing, part daring my self, part to see that widening of the world, part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar  all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings, far calls, close calls— the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.”
I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says  that animals have no need of speech and Nature  abhors the superfluous. My cat is fluent. He  converses when he wants with me. To speak is natural. And whales and wolves I’ve heard  in choral soundings of the sea and air know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs  my mind and heart—they touch the soul. Here Dante’s religion that would set Man apart  damns the effluence of our life from us  to build therein its powerhouse. It’s in his animal communication Man is   true, immediate, and  in immediacy, Man is all animal. His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony,  old circuits of animal rapture and alarm, attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives.  He hears particular voices among  the concert, the slightest  rustle in the undertones,  rehearsing a nervous aptitude  yet to prove his. He sees the flick  of significant red within the rushing mass of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow  of a green shirt to delite him in a glowing field of green  —it speaks to him— and in the arc of the spectrum color   speaks to color. The rainbow articulates  a promise he remembers  he but imitates  in noises that he makes, this speech in every sense  the world surrounding him. He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace  amidst the savory mass, and taste in evolution is an everlasting key.  There is a pun of scents in what makes sense.  Myrrh it may have been, the odor of the announcement that filld the house.  He wakes from deepest sleep  upon a distant signal and waits   as if crouching, springs  to life.
And a tenth part of Okeanos is given to dark night  a tithe of the pure water under earth so that the clear fountains pour from rock face,  tears stream from the caverns and clefts,  down-running, carving woundrous ways in basalt resistance,   cutting deep as they go into layers of time-layerd  Gaia where She sleeps— the cold water, the black rushing gleam, the   moving down-rush, wash, gush out over   bed-rock, toiling the boulders in flood,   purling in deeps, broad flashing in falls— And a tenth part of bright clear Okeanos  his circulations— mists, rains, sheets, sheathes—  lies in poisonous depths, the black water. Styx this carver of caverns beneath us is.  Styx this black water, this down-pouring. The well is deep. From its stillness   the words our voices speak echo.   Resonance follows resonance.  Waves of this sounding come up to us.  We draw the black water, pure and cold.   The light of day is not as bright   as this crystal flowing. Three thousand years we have recited its virtue   out of Hesiod.  Is it twenty-five thousand  since the ice withdrew from the lands and we came forth from the realm of caverns where the river beneath the earth we knew  we go back to. Styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove,   from the black ice. Fifty million years—from the beginning of what we are—  we knew the depth of this well to be.  Fifty million years deep —but our knowing deepens   —time deepens—  this still water we thirst for in dreams we dread.
Was he then Adam of the Burning Way? hid away in the heat like wrath  conceald in Love’s face, or the seed, Eris in Eros,   key and lock of what I was? I could not speak  the releasing word. For into a dark   matter he came and askt me to say what  I could not say. “I ..” All the flame in me stopt  against my tongue. My heart was a stone, a dumb  unmanageable thing in me, a darkness that stood athwart   his need for the enlightening, the  “I love you” that has  only this one quick in time,  this one start when its moment is true. Such is the sickness of many a good thing  that now into my life from long ago this  refusing to say I love you has bound  the weeping, the yielding, the  yearning to be taken again, into a knot, a waiting, a string so taut it taunts the song, it resists the touch. It grows dark  to draw down the lover’s hand  from its lightness to what’s  underground.
In the woods at the corner of our yards  we hang the plywood squares, the Magic Marker images of pronghorn, panther,  grizzly, whitetail, and step off the paces we use to measure  our skill.  Here in the soft light filtering  through needles and cones, green shifting  membrane of poplar, hickory, live oak,  white skin of dogwood beginning to flower, we heft the blades, grind points on stone, gauge the fine balance  between what is real and what is imagined,  the knives bringing all the animals to life  and killing them again as our throws bury steel deep in the heart of the quivering wood and the blades tremble  back through their bones.  In our own hearts we love what they might be, their shapes  frozen in brush as though, suddenly, they had turned from wood and caught our scent drifting in a wind-shift.  So we hunt this suburb, whet our aim  to move among them in the little wilderness  beyond the bricked-in beds of azaleas,  sunflowers tied against tall sticks, the half-acres of razored grass, trellised vines, boxwoods manicured by wives.
Twice through my bedroom window I’ve seen the horned owl drop from the oaks to panic  the rabbit in my neighbor’s backyard. Last night he paced for an hour across the top  of the cage, scrutinizing the can of water, the mound of pellets, turning his genius to the riddle of the wire, while under him the rabbit balled like a fat carnation in the wind. Both of the terriers yapped from their porch  but the owl never flinched, pacing, clawing the wire, spreading wings like a gray cape,  leaping, straining to lift the whole cage, and the cage rocking on its stilts, settling, and rocking again, until he settled with it, paused, and returned to a thought. And the rabbit, ignorant of mercy,  curled on itself in that white drift  of feathers? Wait, three years and I haven’t escaped the child  I saw at Northside the night  my daughter was born, a little brown sack of twigs curled under glass, eyes bulging, trembling in the monitors, and the nurses rolling the newborns out to nurse, and the shadows sweeping the nursery.
When I sat for a moment in the bleachers of the lower-school gym to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’s kindergarten climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit, I remembered my sweet exasperated mother and those shifting faces of injury that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices, playgrounds of monkey bars and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily in that garden of trauma behind her eyes. Then Rachel’s turn, the smallest child in class, and up she went, legs twined on the rope, ponytail swinging, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five feet, the pink tendrils of her leotard climbing without effort until she’d cleared the lower rafters. She looked down, then up, hanging in that balance of pride and fear,  then glancing toward the bleachers to see if I watched, let go her left hand, unworried by that boy with the waffled skull, stiff and turning blue under the belly of a horse, or the Christmas Eve skater on Cagle’s Lake, her face a black plum against the bottom of the ice.
My body, laid out on a marble slab. Naked but for a linen sheet tucked under Its chin, as though to keep the patient warm. A solemn band approached; identified The late departed with what looked like mingled Relief, mild satisfaction, and bereavement. One of them took away an arm—the right, Was it?—and loped off with a spring in his step. Which prompted others to do likewise: here A shoulder (suitable for crying on), there a foot, there an eye and there an ear. Plump already, one scooped out the belly. Just who you’d imagine claimed the head. Not the one I hoped tugged loose a rib. Some, by no means all, I knew as friends; But felt no bitterness, instead, acceptance. This, while watching their several withdrawals, Travelers moving farther out and deeper Into the ringing distance—who all began To flourish, somehow more intently themselves Than they had earlier resolved to be. Was glad of that, despite a fit of shivers (Simple human nature still presiding) When I took note of the rummage that remained, Wishing a greener plot had been marked out For what had breathed with so much spark and promise. My turn, then, to come forward for a closer Look; and, since no one else had carried off That steady, flexibly strung pump at rest Beneath the sternum, take it for my own, Sensing its mute but anchored trust that parts Lucky for others would befriend as well—Oh love—even the heir that flesh once named.
The blessing safely lifted onto Joshua’s shoulders, Moses climbed up Mount Nebo, high above Moab. Tendons winced as he bent to retie a sandal, and haze flooded his vision, which had nothing to see (or black rock and scrub thorn only) until he stopped and said, I will wait here for the voice of the Most High. You showed him all the land— Gilead, the hills of Ephraim and Manasseh, from Judah to the western sea as far as Zoar. And said: Your eyes have seen what I promised, yet, because at Meribah-Kadesh you failed to manifest the holiness I am, you do not go in. At that distance and from the heights Moses stood and watched as the children of Israel began the westward trek. His sight strengthened and he saw each one. The mother, thin and staring, bent down to take her firstborn’s hand, who cried and then laughed. The young brothers with new beards and faces blackened by years in Sinai, strode along carrying all they had rolled up in a sheepskin. The white-haired elder and his mourning wife, whose only daughter was lost in the desert, stalked slowly forward without speaking. An orphaned girl, her cousin, and her cousin’s husband discussed it quietly and held hands. A concert of voices, murmurs, cries, laughter, rising, falling, babbling like water, the fountain of Meribah-Kadesh that sprang from a wall of rock in the desert when Moses struck it with his staff. Days of his life returned to him. One last time he saw Miriam’s serious gaze during the hours of instruction. He recalled the harp players in Pharaoh’s summer palace; white noonday and the shadow of his hand raised to strike the Egyptian overseer; Zipporah’s fear and trust when Jethro urged her forward; the brush-tree that spoke out in tongues of fire; Egypt’s plagues; blood on the doorposts for a sign; the exiles’ safe conduct across marshlands among bulrushes as seabirds called overhead; mutiny and lightning in the desert; a pillar of smoke by day, and fire by night. The moment drew near as those he was bound to and had contended with went up to a land of hills dusted with the first spring green. Sheep stopped their grazing to stare; like an intake of breath, a lull suspended the low hum hovering around hillsides in flower. His eyes filled with tears. And silver bands of sun broke from a veil of cloud overhead down to the plain of Moab, lighting the face of Joshua on one side, so that half remained in shadow. At that moment Moses was taken to his people. His body is said to be buried at Beth-Peor, yet the grave has never been found. The grave has never been found— and Joshua led the Israelites westward into Canaan.
Man-dirt and stomachs that the sea unloads; rockets of quick lice crawling inland, planting their damn flags,  putting their malethings in any hole that will stand still, yapping bloody murder while they slice off each other’s heads,  spewing themselves around, priesting, whoring, lording  it over little guys, messing their pants, writing gush-notes  to their grandmas, wanting somebody to do something pronto,  wanting the good thing right now and the bad stuff for the other boy. Gullet, praise God for the gut with the patented zipper;  sing loud for the lads who sell ice boxes on the burning deck.  Dear reader, gentle reader, dainty little reader, this is the way we go round the milktrucks and seamusic, Sike’s trap and Meg’s rib, the wobbly sparrow with two strikes on the bible, behave  Alfred, your pokus is out; I used to collect old ladies,  pickling them in brine and painting mustaches on their bellies,  later I went in for stripteasing before Save Democracy Clubs;  when the joint was raided we were all caught with our pants down. But I will say this: I like butter on both sides of my bread  and my sister can rape a Hun any time she’s a mind to, or the Yellow Peril for that matter; Hector, your papa’s in the lobby. The old days were different; the ball scores meant something then, two pill in the side pocket and two bits says so; he got up slow see, shook the water out of his hair, wam, tell me that ain’t a sweet left hand; I told her what to do and we did it, Jesus I said, is your name McCoy? Maybe it was the beer or because she was only sixteen but I got hoarse just thinking about her; married a john who travels in cotton underwear. Now you take today; I don’t want it. Wessex, who was that with I saw you lady? Tony gave all his dough to the church; Lizzie believed in feeding her own face; and that’s why you’ll never meet a worm who isn’t an antichrist, my friend, I mean when you get down to a brass tack you’ll find some sucker sitting on it. Whereas. Muckle’s whip and Jessie’s rod, boyo, it sure looks black in the gut of this particular whale. Hilda, is that a .38 in your handbag?  Ghosts in packs like dogs grinning at ghosts   Pocketless thieves in a city that never sleeps  Chains clank, warders curse, this world is stark mad Hey! Fatty, don’t look now but that’s a Revolution breathing down your neck.
Be music, night, That her sleep may go Where angels have their pale tall choirs Be a hand, sea, That her dreams may watch Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world Be a voice, sky, That her beauties may be counted  And the stars will tilt their quiet faces  Into the mirror of her loveliness Be a road, earth, That her walking may take thee Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires O be a world and a throne, God, That her living may find its weather And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book  Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house
Uncomprising year—I see no meaning to life. Though this abled self is here nonetheless, either in trade gold or grammaticness, I drop the wheelwright’s simple principle— Why weave the garland? Why ring the bell? Penurious butchery these notoriously human years, these confident births these lucid deaths these years. Dream’s flesh blood reals down life’s mystery— there is no mystery. Cold history knows no dynastic Atlantis. The habitual myth has an eagerness to quit. No meaning to life can be found in this holy language nor beyond the lyrical fabricator’s inescapable theme be found the loathed find—there is nothing to find. Multitudinous deathplot! O this poor synod— Hopers and seekers paroling meaning to meaning, annexing what might be meaningful, what might be meaningless. Repeated nightmare, lachrymae lachrymae— a fire behind a grotto, a thick fog, shredded masts, the nets heaved—and the indescribable monster netted. Who was it told that red flesh hose be still? For one with smooth hands did with pincers snip the snout—It died like a yawn. And when the liver sack was yanked I could not follow it to the pan. I could not follow it to the pan— I woke to the reality of cars; Oh the dreadful privilege of that vision! Not one antique faction remained; Egypt, Rome, Greece, and all such pedigree dreams fled. Cars are real! Eternity is done. The threat of Nothingness renews. I touch the untouched. I rank the rose militant. Deny, I deny the tastes and habits of the age. I am its punk debauche .... A fierce lampoon seeking to inherit what is necessary to forfeit. Lies! Lies! Lies! I lie, you lie, we all lie! There is no us, there is no world, there is no universe, there is no life, no death, no nothing—all is meaningless, and this too is a lie—O damned 1959! Must I dry my inspiration in this sad concept? Delineate my entire stratagem? Must I settle into phantomness and not say I understand things better than God?
a slow thoughtful spontaneous poem I am 32 years old and finally I look my age, if not more. Is it a good face what’s no more a boy’s face?  It seems fatter. And my hair, it’s stopped being curly. Is my nose big?  The lips are the same. And the eyes, ah the eyes get better all the time.  32 and no wife, no baby; no baby hurts,   but there’s lots of time. I don’t act silly any more. And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends:  “You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.”  They are not comfortable with me when I’m serious.  Let them go to the Radio City Music Hall.  32; saw all of Europe, met millions of people;  was great for some, terrible for others.  I remember my 31st year when I cried: “To think I may have to go another 31 years!”  I don’t feel that way this birthday. I feel I want to be wise with white hair in a tall library   in a deep chair by a fireplace. Another year in which I stole nothing.  8 years now and haven’t stole a thing!  I stopped stealing! But I still lie at times, and still am shameless yet ashamed when it comes   to asking for money. 32 years old and four hard real funny sad bad wonderful   books of poetry —the world owes me a million dollars. I think I had a pretty weird 32 years.  And it weren’t up to me, none of it.  No choice of two roads; if there were,  I don’t doubt I’d have chosen both.  I like to think chance had it I play the bell. The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration:  “I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.”  I love poetry because it makes me love  and presents me life. And of all the fires that die in me, there’s one burns like the sun; it might not make day my personal life,   my association with people,  or my behavior toward society,  but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.
1 I am a great American I am almost nationalistic about it! I love America like a madness! But I am afraid to return to America I’m even afraid to go into the American Express—2 They are frankensteining Christ in America  in their Sunday campaigns They are putting the fear of Christ in America  under their tents in their Sunday campaigns They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America They are televising the gift of healing and the fear of hell  in America under their tents in their Sunday   campaigns They are leaving their tents and are bringing their Christ  to the stadiums of America in their Sunday  campaigns They are asking for a full house an all get out  for their Christ in the stadiums of America They are getting them in their Sunday and Saturday   campaigns They are asking them to come forward and fall on their  knees  because they are all guilty and they are coming  forward  in guilt and are falling on their knees weeping their   guilt  begging to be saved O Lord O Lord in their Monday   Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday  and Sunday campaigns3 It is a time in which no man is extremely wondrous  It is a time in which rock stupidity  outsteps the 5th Column as the sole enemy in America It is a time in which ignorance is a good Ameri-cun   ignorance is excused only where it is so   it is not so in America Man is not guilty Christ is not to be feared I am telling you the American Way is a hideous monster   eating Christ making Him into Oreos and Dr. Pepper   the sacrament of its foul mouth I am telling you the devil is impersonating Christ in America  America’s educators & preachers are the mental-dictators  of false intelligence they will not allow America  to be smart  they will only allow death to make America smart  Educators & communicators are the lackeys of the   American Way They enslave the minds of the young  and the young are willing slaves (but not for long)   because who is to doubt the American Way   is not the way? The duty of these educators is no different   than the duty of a factory foreman Replica production make all the young think alike   dress alike believe alike do alike Togetherness this is the American Way The few great educators in America are weak & helpless  They abide and so uphold the American Way Wars have seen such men they who despised things about  them  but did nothing and they are the most dangerous  Dangerous because their intelligence is not denied   and so give faith to the young  who rightfully believe in their intelligence  Smoke this cigarette doctors smoke this cigarette   and doctors know Educators know but they dare not speak their know  The victory that is man is made sad in this fix  Youth can only know the victory of being born  all else is stemmed until death be the final victory  and a merciful one at that If America falls it will be the blame of its educators   preachers communicators alike America today is America’s greatest threat We are old when we are young America is always new the world is always new  The meaning of the world is birth not death Growth gone in the wrong direction The true direction grows ever young In this direction what grows grows old A strange mistake a strange and sad mistake   for it has grown into an old thing  while all else around it is new Rockets will not make it any younger— And what made America decide to grow? I do not know I can only hold it to the strangeness in man  And America has grown into the American Way— To be young is to be ever purposeful limitless  To grow is to know limit purposelessness Each age is a new age How outrageous it is that something old and sad  from the pre-age incorporates each new age— Do I say the Declaration of Independence is old? Yes I say what was good for 1789, is not good for 1960  It was right and new to say all men were created equal  because it was a light then But today it is tragic to say it  today it should be fact— Man has been on earth a long time One would think with his mania for growth  he would, by now, have outgrown such things as   constitutions manifestos codes commandments   that he could well live in the world without them   and know instinctively how to live and be   —for what is being but the facility to love? Was not that the true goal of growth, love? Was not that Christ? But man is strange and grows where he will  and chalks it all up to Fate whatever be— America rings with such strangeness It has grown into something strange and  the American is good example of this mad growth  The boy man big baby meat  as though the womb were turned backwards   giving birth to an old man The victory that is man does not allow man  to top off his empirical achievement with death  The Aztecs did it by yanking out young hearts  at the height of their power The Americans are doing it by feeding their young to the   Way For it was not the Spaniard who killed the Aztec  but the Aztec who killed the Aztec Rome is proof Greece is proof all history is proof  Victory does not allow degeneracy It will not be the Communists will kill America  no but America itself— The American Way that sad mad process  is not run by any one man or organization  It is a monster born of itself existing of its self The men who are employed by this monster  are employed unknowingly They reside in the higher echelons of intelligence  They are the educators the psychiatrists the ministers  the writers the politicians the communicators  the rich the entertainment world And some follow and sing the Way because they sincerely   believe it to be good And some believe it holy and become minutemen in it  Some are in it simply to be in And most are in it for gold They do not see the Way as monster They see it as the “Good Life” What is the Way? The Way was born out of the American Dream   a nightmare— The state of Americans today compared to the Americans   of the 18th century proves the nightmare— Not Franklin not Jefferson who speaks for America today   but strange red-necked men of industry   and the goofs of show business Bizarre! Frightening! The Mickey Mouse sits on the throne   and Hollywood has a vast supply— Could grammar school youth seriously look upon  a picture of George Washington and “Herman Borst”   the famous night club comedian together at Valley   Forge? Old old and decadent gone the dignity  the American sun seems headed for the grave O that youth might raise it anew! The future depends solely on the young  The future is the property of the young  What the young know the future will know  What they are and do the future will be and do  What has been done must not be done again  Will the American Way allow this?  No. I see in every American Express  and in every army center in Europe  I see the same face the same sound of voice  the same clothes the same walk  I see mothers & fathers  no difference among them Replicas They not only speak and walk and think alike   they have the same face! What did this monstrous thing? What regiments a people so? How strange is nature’s play on America  Surely were Lincoln alive today  he could never be voted President not with his   looks— Indeed Americans are babies all in the embrace  of Mama Way Did not Ike, when he visited the American Embassy in  Paris a year ago, say to the staff—“Everything is fine,   just drink Coca Cola, and everything will be all right.”   This is true, and is on record Did not American advertising call for TOGETHERNESS?   not orgiasticly like today’s call   nor as means to stem violence   This is true, and is on record. Are not the army centers in Europe ghettos?   They are, and O how sad how lost! The PX newsstands are filled with comic books The army movies are always Doris Day  What makes a people huddle so?  Why can’t they be universal? Who has smalled them so? This is serious! I do not mock or hate this  I can only sense some mad vast conspiracy!  Helplessness is all it is! They are caught caught in the Way— And those who seek to get out of the Way   can not The Beats are good example of this  They forsake the Way’s habits  and acquire for themselves their own habits And they become as distinct and regimented and lost  as the main flow  because the Way has many outlets  like a snake of many tentacles— There is no getting out of the Way The only way out is the death of the Way And what will kill the Way but a new consciousness  Something great and new and wonderful must happen  to free man from this beast It is a beast we can not see or even understand For it be the condition of our minds God how close to science fiction it all seems! As if some power from another planet  incorporated itself in the minds of us all It could well be! For as I live I swear America does not seem like America   to me Americans are a great people I ask for some great and wondrous event  that will free them from the Way  and make them a glorious purposeful people once   again I do not know if that event is due deserved  or even possible I can only hold that man is the victory of life And I hold firm to American man I see standing on the skin of the Way  America to be as proud and victorious as St.   Michael on the neck of the fallen Lucifer—
O this political air so heavy with the bells and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!  The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires  of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists  caught under canopies and in doorways, and it rains, it will not let up, and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s  prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color? All color must be one or let the world be done— There’ll be a chance, we’ll all be orange! I don’t want to be orange! Nothing about God’s color to complain; and there is a beauty in yellow, the old Lama  in his robe the color of Cathay; in black a strong & vital beauty, Thelonious Monk in his robe of Norman charcoal— And if Western Civilization comes to an end  (though I doubt it, for the prophet has not  executed his prophecy) surely the Eastern child  will sit by a window, and wonder the old statues, the ornamented doors; the decorated banquet of the West— Inflamed by futurists I too weep in rain at night  at the midnight of Western Civilization; Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell; the Gods’ adoption of Homer will never be forgotten by the Gods; the books of France are on God’s bookshelf; no civil war will take place on the fields of God;  and I don’t doubt the egg of the East its glory— Yet it rains and the motors go and continued when I slept by that wall in Washington  which separated the motors in the death-parlor  where Joe McCarthy lay, lean and stilled,  ten blocks from the Capitol— I could never understand Uncle Sam his red & white striped pants his funny whiskers his starry hat: how surreal Yankee Doodle Dandy, goof!  American history has a way of making you feel  George Washington is still around, that is when I think of Washington I do not think of Death— Of all Presidents I have been under Hoover is the most unreal and FDR is the most President-looking and Truman the most Jewish-looking and Eisenhower the miscast of Time into Space— Hoover is another America, Mr. 1930 and what must he be thinking now? FDR was my youth, and how strange to still see  his wife around. Truman is still in Presidential time. I saw Eisenhower helicopter over Athens and he looked at the Acropolis like only Zeus could.  OF THE PEOPLE is fortunate and select. FOR THE PEOPLE has never happened in America or elsewhere. BY THE PEOPLE is the sadness of America.  I am not politic. I am not patriotic. I am nationalistic! I boast well the beauty of America to all the people in Europe. In me they do not see their vision of America. O whenever I pass an American Embassy I don’t know what to feel! Sometimes I want to rush in and scream: “I’m American!”  but instead go a few paces down to the American Bar  get drunk and cry: “I’m no American!” The men of politics I love are but youth’s fantasy: The fine profile of Washington on coins stamps & tobacco wraps The handsomeness and death-in-the-snow of Hamilton.  The eyeglasses shoe-buckles kites & keys of Ben Franklin.  The sweet melancholy of Lincoln. The way I see Christ, as something romantic & unreal, is the way I see them. An American is unique among peoples. He looks and acts like a boyman. He never looks cruel in uniform. He is rednecked portly rich and jolly. White-haired serious Harvard, kind and wry. A convention man a family man a rotary man & practical joker. He is moonfaced cunning well-meaning & righteously mean.  He is Madison Avenue, handsome, in-the-know, and superstitious. He is odd, happy, quicker than light, shameless, and heroic  Great yawn of youth! The young don’t seem interested in politics anymore.  Politics has lost its romance! The “bloody kitchen” has drowned! And all that is left are those granite façades of Pentagon, Justice, and Department— Politicians do not know youth! They depend on the old and the old depend on them and lo! this has given youth a chance to think of heaven in their independence. No need to give them liberty or freedom where they’re at— When Stevenson in 1956 came to San Francisco he campaigned in what he thought was an Italian section!  He spoke of Italy and Joe DiMaggio and spaghetti,  but all who were there, all for him, were young beatniks! and when his car drove off Ginsberg & I ran up to him and yelled: “When are you going to free the poets from their attics!”  Great yawn of youth! Mad beautiful oldyoung America has no candidate  the craziest wildest greatest country of them all!  and not one candidate— Nixon arrives ever so temporal, self-made, frontways sideways and backways, could he be America’s against? Detour to vehicle?  Mast to wind? Shore to sea? Death to life? The last President?
I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. From in there the ransacked cadavers are carried up the East River to Potter’s Field as if they were an inheritance, gleaned of saveable parts, their diseases jarred and labeled, or incinerated, the ashes of metastisized vision professing the virus that lives beyond the flesh in air ...    The first time I saw the inside of anything alive, a downed bird opened cleanly under my heel. I knelt to watch the spectral innards shine and quicken, the heart-whir magnify. And though I can’t say now what kind of bird it was, nor the season, spring or autumn, what dangerous transition, I have identified so many times that sudden earnest spasm of the throat in children, or in the jaundiced faces of the dying, the lower eye-lids straining upward. Fear needs its metaphors. I’ve read small helplessnesses make us maternal. Even the sparrows feel it, nesting this evening in traffic lights. They must have remembered, long enough to mate, woods they’ve never seen, but woods inbred up the long light of instinct, the streaked siennas of a forest floor born now into the city, the oak umbers, and the white tuft of tail feathers like a milkweed meadow in which their song, as Burroughs heard it, could be distinguished:come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill ...
in our village are short and to the point.  While the mourners are finding their seats  Etta Andrews plays “Now the Day Is Over.” No one is ashamed to wipe his or her eyes.  Then the Reverend stands up and reads  the Lord’s Prayer with the mourners  speaking it with him. Then there is a hymn,  usually “Rock of Ages” or one chosen by  the wife of the deceased. The deceased,  I might say, is never present, except for  an urn prepared by Mr. Torrant, who is  always squinting. Next there are remarks  by the Reverend. He is a kind man and  can be relied upon to say something nice  about the life of the departed, no matter how much he may have been scorned or even  disliked. The Reverend’s eulogies are so much the  same, with appropriate readings from scripture,  that I gave up listening to them years ago.  Instead, unheard, I eulogize myself,  the real picture of how I’ve been in  the village. I admit that I was self-satisfied  and arrogant. I didn’t go to much pains  to provide diversions for my wife. When  the children and grandchildren came for visits  I lectured them and pointed out their faults.  I made appropriate contributions to the  local charities but without much enthusiasm.  I snubbed people who bored me and avoided  parties. I was considerate to the people  who worked in the post office. I complained a great deal about my ailments. When I’m  asked how I’m doing, I reply that I’m  not getting any younger. This inveterate  response has become a bore in the village. After the Reverend’s eulogy is over there is another hymn, and the benediction.  As they leave everyone, except me, presses  the flesh of the bereaved with appropriate  utterances. But I get away as quickly as  I can. If they don’t bore me I like  almost all the people in the village.  But as they go, I tick them off. I’ve  been to at least fifty funerals. When  will mine be?
You know our office on the 18th  floor of the Salmon Tower looks   right out on the Empire State and it just happened  we were there finishing up some   late invoices on a new book that Saturday morning  when a bomber roared through the   mist and crashed flames poured from the windows  into the drifting clouds and sirens   screamed down in the streets below it was unearthly  but you know the strangest thing   we realized that none of us were much surprised be- cause we'd always known that those   two paragons of progress sooner or later would per- form before our eyes this demon-  stration of their  true relationship.
In love it may be dangerous  to reckon on time to count on it time’s here and then  it’s gone I’m not thinking of death or disaster but of  the slippage the unpredictable disappearance of days on which  we were depending for happiness.
Town, a town, But location Over which the sun as it comes to it;  Which cools, houses and lamp-posts,  during the night, with the roads— Inhabited partly by those Who have been born here, Houses built—. From a train one sees  him in the morning, his morning;  Him in the afternoon, straightening— People everywhere, time and the work  pauseless: One moves between reading and re-reading,  The shape is a moment. From a crowd a white powdered face,  Eyes and mouth making three— Awaited—locally—a date. * Near your eyes— Love at the pelvis Reaches the generic, gratuitous  (Your eyes like snail-tracks) Parallel emotions, We slide in separate hard grooves  Bowstrings to bent loins,  Self moving Moon, mid-air. * Fragonard, Your spiral women  By a fountain ‘1732’ Your picture lasts thru us  its air Thick with succession of civilizations;  And the women. * No interval of manner Your body in the sun. You? A solid, this that the dress  insisted, Your face unaccented, your mouth a mouth?   Practical knees: It is you who truly Excel the vegetable, The fitting of grasses—more bare than   that. Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge  Incognito as summer Among mechanics. * ‘O city ladies’ Your coats wrapped,  Your hips a possession Your shoes arched  Your walk is sharp Your breasts  Pertain to lingerie The fields are road-sides,  Rooms outlast you. * Bad times: The cars pass By the elevated posts  And the movie sign.  A man sells post-cards. * It brightens up into the branches  And against the same buildings A morning: His job is as regular.
1 Likely as not a ruined head gasket Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:  A machine involved with itself, a concentrated Hot lump of a machine Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,  Is stopped, with the last slow cough In the manifold, the flywheel blundering Against compression, stopping, finally Stopped, compression leaking From the idle cylinders will one imagine Then because he can imagine That squeezed from the cooling steel There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath, A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension. 2 Endlessly, endlessly, The definition of mortality The image of the engine That stops. We cannot live on that. I know that no one would live out Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending  With his life. The machine stares out, Stares out With all its eyes Thru the glass With the ripple in it, past the sill Which is dusty—If there is someone In the garden! Outside, and so beautiful. 3 What ends Is that.  Even companionship  Ending. ‘I want to ask if you remember When we were happy! As tho all travels Ended untold, all embarkations  Foundered. 4 On that water Grey with morning The gull will fold its wings  And sit. And with its two eyes  There as much as anything Can watch a ship and all its hallways And all companions sink. 5Also he has set the world In their hearts.
The sea and a crescent strip of beach Show between the service station and a deserted shack A creek drains thru the beach Forming a ditch There is a discarded super-market cart in the ditch  That beach is the edge of a nation There is something like shouting along the highway  A California shouting On the long fast highway over the California mountains Point Pedro  Its distant life It is impossible the world should be either good or bad  If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful  If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good  It is as remarkable in one case as the other  As against this We have suffered fear, we know something of fear  And of humiliation mounting to horror The world above the edge of the foxhole belongs to the flying bullets, leaden superbeings For the men grovelling in the foxhole danger, danger in being drawn to themThese little dumps The poem is about them Our hearts are twisted  In dead men’s pride Dead men crowd us  Lean over us In the emplacements The skull spins  Empty of subject The hollow ego Flinching from the war’s huge air Tho we are delivery boys and bartenders  We will choke on each other Minds may crack But not for what is discovered Unless that everyone knew  And kept silent Our minds are split To seek the danger out From among the miserable soldiers
The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue  The setting sun, too indolent to hold  A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,  Passively darkens for night’s barbecue, A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,   An orgy for some genius of the South  With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,  Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds. The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,  And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,  Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill  Their early promise of a bumper crop. Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile  Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low   Where only chips and stumps are left to show  The solid proof of former domicile. Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,   Race memories of king and caravan,  High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man, Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp. Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars,   Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .   Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane Is caroling a vesper to the stars . . O singers, resinous and soft your songs  Above the sacred whisper of the pines,  Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines, Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.
—for J.R. More than a third of a century later, meeting for the first time in almost all those years, we face each other’s still somewhat familiar faces across a table in a California restaurant, and wonder why we did it, why we suddenly said that night in July in Greenwich Village “Let’s go to Connecticut,” and got on a train and ended up at midnight in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, holding hands on an empty road that wound past serious grown-up sleeping houses .... Well, I was fifteen, you were nearly twenty-one, we were experimentally “in love,” and I guess it must have seemed like “something to do”—better than Remo anyway,  or the coffee houses, or the Eighth Street Bookstore, even, in that scratchy heat, better than Jones Beach: the long low sober train boring into a wall of black, the alien  townships spurting past on either side (nothing very built up then), each with its deserted, brilliant platform malting for the next day’s passengers, the real  people who really needed to ride that train. How cindery the windows were, and spooky with moths outside the glamorous club car where we sat with sodas  on itchy plush reclining seats! And how the crickets simmered  where we got out, dizzy on 7UP! Remember the hedges—lilac, honeysuckle— along the way, as we walked toward we didn’t know where?  We kissed a little under one, tasting salt and 7UP  on each other, not sure what next or where, then peered at the shadows on lawn after lawn, the dim bulk of chimneys, shapes of shutters,  here a trike, there a plastic pool, and couples snoring, mysterious,  behind those tall white walls, until we got embarrassed, still not sure what next, retraced our steps, boarded another train, and were hurried back to where we came from, feeling like voyeurs, like trespassers.
in memory of R.I.S. 1. Would I know her anywhere, this child who never knew you except in photographs? She has your high clear polished forehead, but  “No, my sister has his dimple, the cleft in his chin ...”  Tight curly hair (like yours) drawn back, and your face, thinned, refined,  to a girl’s—you in a girl’s body, you (thick, muscular, tempestuous) newly slight, polite: you in a neat  print skirt, loose black blouse! Now a seventeen-year-old classicist— “Latin’s my favorite”—you translate Catullus, write tidy sonnets, envy the sister  who remembers the dead father, but (as you always did) adore your mother  and walk with your head thrown slightly back  as if the weight of thought were hard to bear. I rock in my teacherly chair. She’s shy, constrained. “I don’t want to read my father’s poems,  they’re all in tatters in the closet, they scare me.”  I tell her I’m kind of a long-lost aunt, tell her about the photo of you as (you said) “the young Shelley”— about your huntsman’s bow, opera, baseball, endless games of chess in the dorm parlor with you boasting your prowess.  And she’s embarrassed,you’re embarrassed, living in her blood, to think you ever acted like that!2. When you were a man, a thirty-seven-year old,  long after our last fight, last kiss,  you OD’d on morphine and disappeared into the blanks  that always framed your mind. But she’s sent two poems and a thank-you note,  and her handwriting—yours—hasn’t changed.  “It meant a lot to me to talk about my dad,” you scribbled with your new small fingers. I want to believe this, want to believe  you’re really starting out again! Do me a favor:  forget Catullus, Horace, love and hate and think, instead, of the epic cell, the place where the chromosomes  are made and made for a moment perfect. Translate those lines from Virgil some of us once liked to chant, the ones about beginning, about those who first  left Troy to seek the Italian shore.
They don’t wade in so much as they are taken. Deep in the day, in the deep of the field, every current in the grasses whispers hurryhurry, every yellow spreads its perfume like a rumor, impelling them further on. It is the way of girls. It is the sway of their dresses in the summer trance- light, their bare calves already far-gone in green. What songs will they follow? Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm or harm the border promises, whatever calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless through the high grass and into the willow- blur, traceless across the lean blue glint of the river, to the long dark bodies of the conifers, and over the welcoming threshold of nightfall.
California night. The Devil’s wind,  the Santa Ana, blows in from the east,  raging through the canyon like a drunk  screaming in a bar.  The air tastes like a stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?  The weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.  Just lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,  lights turned out, windows shut against the storm,  and count your blessings.  Another sleepless night, when every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches  like a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,  when even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,  and quiet women in the kitchen run  their fingers on the edges of a knife and eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck. Tonight it seems that if I took the coins out of my pocket and tossed them in the air  they’d stay a moment glistening like a net  slowly falling through dark water.  I remember the headlights of the cars parked on the beach,  the narrow beams dissolving on the dark  surface of the lake, voices arguing about the forms, the crackling radio,  the sheeted body lying on the sand, the trawling net still damp beside it. No, she wasn’t beautiful—but at that age when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty— “Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?” Relentlessly the wind blows on. Next door  catching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.  Lean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,  packs of coyotes come down from the hills  where there is nothing left to hunt.
Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds  start up again. The crickets, the invisible  toad who claims that change is possible, And all the other life too small to name.  First one, then another, until innumerable they merge into the single voice of a summer hill. Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,  fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure. And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone  can bear to be a stone, the pain the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust. Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,  rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light. The old windmill creaks in perfect time to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,  and the last farmhouse light goes off. Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt  these hills and packs of feral dogs. But standing here at night accepts all that. You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,  moving more slowly than the crippled stars,  part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls, Part of the grass that answers the wind, part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows  there is no silence but when danger comes.
If we could only push these walls  apart, unfold the room the way  a child might take apart a box  and lay it flat upon the floor— so many corners cleared at last!  Or else could rip away the roof  and stare down at the dirty rooms,  the hallways turning on themselves,  and understand at last their plan— dark maze without a minotaur,  no monsters but ourselves.  Yet who could bear to see it all? The slow  descending spirals of the dust  against the spotted windowpane,  the sunlight on the yellow lace, the hoarded wine turned dark and sour, the photographs, the letters—all  the crowded closets of the heart. One wants to turn away—and cry  for fire to break out on the stairs  and raze each suffocating room.  But the walls stay, the roof remains  strong and immovable, and we  can only pray that if these rooms  have memories, they are not ours.
Turning the corner, we discovered it just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on— a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long  resting between the noisy avenues. The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves  across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window glowing through the ivy-decked facade promised lives as perfect as the light. Walking beneath the trees, we counted all  the high black doors of houses bolted shut.  And yet we could have opened any door,  entered any room the evening offered. Or were we deluded by the strange equations of the light, the vagrant wind  searching the trees, that we believed this brief  conjunction of our separate lives was real? It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,  a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,  a curl of smoke flaring from a match,  haunting a world it could not touch or hear. There should have been a greeting or a sign,  the smile of a stranger, something beyond the soft refusals of the summer air and children trading secrets on the steps. Traffic bellowed from the avenue. Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,  and at the end what else could I have done  but turn the corner back into my life?
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.  He carried a rose inside his coat each day to give a beautiful stranger—“Better to die of love  than love without regret.” And those who loved him  soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act  is running through the street with a revolver firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed démodé.  There is always a skeleton on the buffet.
“We're going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”  So they stopped the car where the river curled,  And we scrambled down beneath the bridge  On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor  While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide  And green mountains rose on the opposite side.  My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by stone shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.  Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,  My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,  The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.
for Louis Asekoff Mid-October, Massachusetts. We drive  through the livid innards of a beast—dragon  or salamander—whose home is fire. The hills  a witch’s quilt of goldrust, flushed cinnamon, wine fever, hectic lemon. After dark, while water ruffles, salted, in a big pot, we four  gather towards the woodfire, exchanging  lazy sentences, waiting dinner. Sunk  in the supermarket cardboard box, the four lobsters tip and coolly stroke each other  with rockblue baton legs and tentative antennae, their breath a wet clicking, the undulant  slow shift of their plated bodies  like the doped drift of patients  in the padded ward. Eyes like squished berries out on stalks. It’s the end of the line for them, yet faintly in that close-companioned air  they smell the sea, a shadow-haunted hole to hide in  till all this blows over.  When it’s time, we turn the music up to nerve us to it, then take them one by one and drop  in the salty roil and scald, then clamp the big lid back. Grasping the shapely fantail,  I plunge mine in headfirst and feel  before I can detach myself the flat slap  of a jackknifed back, glimpse for an instant  before I put the lid on it the rigid backward bow-bend of the whole body as the brain explodes and lidless eyes  sear white. We two are bound in silence  till the pot-lid planks back and music floods again, like a tide. Minutes later, the four of us bend to brittle pink intricate  shells, drawing white sweet flesh with our fingers, sewing our shroud-talk tight about us. Later, near moonless midnight,  when I scrape the leafbright broken remains  into the garbage can outside, that last  knowing spasm eels up my arm again  and off, like a flash, across the rueful stars.
Out the living-room window I see the two older children burning  household trash under the ash tree  in wind and rain. They move  in slow motion about the flames,  heads bowed in concentration  as they feed each fresh piece in, hair  blown wild across their faces, the fire  wavering in tongues before them  so they seem creatures half flame, half flesh, wholly separate from me. All of a sudden the baby breaks slowly down through the flexed branches of the ash  in a blaze of blood and green leaves, an amniotic drench, a gleaming liver-purple  slop of ripe placenta, head first and wailing to be amongst us. Boy and girl  look up in silence and hold gravely out  flamefeathered arms to catch her, who lands on her back in their linked  and ashen hands. Later, when I take her in my arms for a walk to that turn on the high road  where the sea always startles, I can see  how at intervals she's thunderstruck  by a scalloped green leaf, a shivering  jig of grassheads, or that speckled bee  that pushes itself among the purple and scarlet parts of a fuchsia bell. And her eyes are on fire.
On the way to the village store  I drive through a down-draft  from the neighbor’s chimney.  Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves  backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother’s  vengeful God, the one who disapproves of jeans and shorts for girls, dancing, strong waters, and adultery. A moment later the smoke enters the car, although the windows are tight,  insinuating that I might, like Judas, and the foolish virgins, and the rich young man, have been made for unquenchable  fire. God will need something to burn if the fire is to be unquenchable. “All things work together for the good  for those who love God,” she said to comfort me at Uncle Hazen’s funeral,  where Father held me up to see the maroon gladiolus that trembled as we approached the bier, the elaborate  shirred satin, brass fittings, anything, oh, anything but Uncle’s squelched  and made-up face. “No! NO! How is it good to be dead?” I cried afterward, wild-eyed and flushed.  “God’s ways are not our ways,” she said then out of pity and the wish to forestall the argument.
Water-flesh gleamed like mica: orange fins, red flankspots, a char shy as ginseng, found only in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear of faraway creeks no map could name. My cousin showed me those hidden places. I loved how we found them, the way we followed no trail, just stream-sound tangled in rhododendron, to where slow water opened a hole to slip a line in, and lift as from a well bright shadows of another world, held in my hand, their color already starting to fade.
Is it some turn of wind that funnels them all down at once, or is it their own voices netting to bring them in—the roll and churr of hundreds searing through river light and cliff dust, each to its precise mud nest on the face none of our own isolate groping, wishing need could be sent so unerringly to solace. But this silk-skein flashing is like heaven brought down: not to meet ground or water—to enter the riven earth and disappear.
A stabbing in miniature, it is, a tiny crime, my own blood parceled drop by drop and set on the flickering tongue of this machine. It is the spout-punching of trees for syrup new and smooth and sweeter than nature ever intended. It is Sleeping Beauty's curse and fascination. It is the dipstick measuring of oil from the Buick's throat, the necessary maintenance. It is every vampire movie ever made. Hand, my martyr without lips, my quiet cow. I'll milk your fingertips for all they're worth. For what they're worth. Something like a harvest, it is, a tiny crime.
The backyard is one white sheet Where we read in the bird tracks The songs we hear. Delicate Sparrow, heavier cardinal, Filigree threads of chickadee. And wing patterns where one flew Low, then up and away, gone To the woods but calling out Clearly its bright epigrams. More snow promised for tonight. The postal van is stalled In the road again, the mail Will be late and any good news Will reach us by hand.
every wall stood at attention even the air knew when to hold its breath the polished floors looked up defying heel marks the plastic slipcovers crinkled in discomfort in my mother’s house the window shades flapped against the glare of the world the laughter crawled like roaches back into the cracks even the humans sat— cardboard cut-outs around the formica kitchen table and with silver knives sliced and swallowed their words
Every few minutes, he wants to march the trail of flattened rye grass back to the house of muttering hens. He too could make a bed in hay. Yesterday the egg so fresh it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it to his ear while the other children laughed and ran with a ball, leaving him, so little yet, too forgetful in games, ready to cry if the ball brushed him, riveted to the secret of birds caught up inside his fist, not ready to give it over to the refrigerator or the rest of the day.
Believe it or not, the old woman said, and I tried to picture it: a girl, the polished white ribs of a roast tied to her boots with twine, the twine coated with candle wax so she could glide uninterrupted across the ice— my mother, skating on bones.
Driving west through sandstone’s red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion cleaves these plains, these ravaged cliffs. This is cowboy country. Desolate. Dull. Except on weekends, when cafés bloom like cactus after drought. My rented Mustang bucks the wind—I’m strapped up, wide-eyed, busting speed with both heels, a sure grip on the wheel. Black clouds maneuver in the distance, but I don’t care. Mileage is my obsession. I’m always racing off, passing through, as though the present were a dying town I’d rather flee. What matters is the future, its glittering Hotel. Clouds loom closer, big as Brahmas in the heavy air. The radio crackles like a shattered rib. I’m in the chute. I check the gas and set my jaw. I’m almost there.
Two wind chimes, one brass and prone to anger, one with the throat of an angel, swing from my porch eave, sing with the storm. Last year I lived five months under that shrill choir, boxing your house, crowding books into crates, from some pages your own voice crying. Some days the chimes raged. Some days they hung still. They fretted when I dug up the lily I gave you in April, blooming, strangely, in fall. Together, they scolded me when I counted pennies you left in each can, cup, and drawer, when I rechecked the closets for remnants of you. The last day, the house empty, resonant with space, the two chimes had nothing to toll for. I walked out, took them down, carried our mute spirits home.
Today my son realized someone’s smarter than him. Not me or his mom — he still thinks we know everything — one of the other kids, Nathan. Making fun of him at the computer terminal for screwing up at the math game. Other kids laughing at him. Second grade. I’m never gonna be as smart as him, he says.  I’m never gonna be as smart as half my students if we’re talking IQs. He doesn’t want me to explain. He wants me to acknowledge that he’s dumb. He’s lying in bed and taking his glasses off and on, trying to get them perfectly clean for the morning. I’m looking around his dark room for a joke or some decent words to lay on him. His eyes are glassy with almost-tears. Second grade. The world wants to call on him. I take his hand in mine.
The large man in the Budweiser tee with serpents twining on his arms has leukemia. It doesn’t seem right but they’ve told him he won’t die for years if he sticks with the treatment. He’s talking about his years in the foundry, running a crane on an overhead track in the mill. Eight hours a day moving ingots into rollers. Sometimes without a break because of the bother of getting down. Never had an accident. Never hurt anyone. He had that much control. His problem is that electricity arced through his body and accumulated. When he got down at the end of a shift he could squeeze a forty-watt light bulb between thumb and finger and make it flare. All the guys came around to see that.
The boys who fled my father's house in fear Of what his wrath would cost them if he found Them nibbling slowly at his daughter's ear, Would vanish out the back without a sound, And glide just like the shadow of a crow, To wait beside the elm tree in the snow. Something quite deadly rumbled in his voice. He sniffed the air as if he knew the scent Of teenage boys, and asked, "What was that noise?" Then I'd pretend to not know what he meant, Stand mutely by, my heart immense with dread, As Father set the traps and went to bed.
if mama could see she would see  lucy sprawling  limbs of lucy decorating the backs of chairs lucy hair holding the mirrors up  that reflect odd  aspects of lucy. if mama could hear she would hear lucysong rolled in the corners like lint exotic webs of lucysighs long lucy spiders explaining  to obscure gods. if mama could talk she would talk good girl  good girl  good girl clean up your room.
Soul and race are private dominions,  memories and modal songs, a tenor blossoming, which would paint suffering  a clear color but is not in  this Victorian house without oil in zero degree weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind; it is all a well-knit family: a love supreme. Oak leaves pile up on walkway and steps, catholic as apples in a special mist of clear white  children who love my children.  I play “Alabama” on a warped record player skipping the scratches on your faces over the fibrous  conical hairs of plastic under the wooden floors. Dreaming on a train from New York  to Philly, you hand out six notes which become an anthem to our memories of you: oak, birch, maple, apple, cocoa, rubber. For this reason Martin is dead; for this reason Malcolm is dead; for this reason Coltrane is dead; in the eyes of my first son are the browns  of these men and their music.
The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears. Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl’s.
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,The labor of an age in pilèd stones,Or that his hallowed relics should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid? Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame, What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a live-long monument. For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book Those Delphic lines with deep impression took, Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, Dost make us marble with too much conceiving; And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing On the west wind blowing along this valley track?” “The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye, We shall escape the uphill by never turning back.” So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight. “Oh what is that in heaven where gray cloud-flakes are seven, Where blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?” “Oh that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous, An undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.” “Oh what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly, Their scent comes rich and sickly?”—“A scaled and hooded worm.” “Oh what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?” “Oh that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.” “Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest: This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.” “Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting: This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. ’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom.  So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,  You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial,  Who, squatting upon the ground,  Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;  “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!  When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;  When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,  And the river flows like a stream of glass;  When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,  And the faint perfume from its chalice steals— I know what the caged bird feels! I know why the caged bird beats his wing  Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;  For he must fly back to his perch and cling  When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;  And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars  And they pulse again with a keener sting— I know why he beats his wing! I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,  When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee,  But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,  But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings!
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  this man, superb in love and logic, this man  shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied  Who told me time would ease me of my pain!  I miss him in the weeping of the rain;  I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side,  And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;  But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.  There are a hundred places where I fear  To go,—so with his memory they brim.  And entering with relief some quiet place  Where never fell his foot or shone his face  I say, “There is no memory of him here!”  And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal, There where the vines cling crimson on the wall, And in the twilight wait for what will come. The leaves will whisper there of her, and some, Like flying words, will strike you as they fall; But go, and if you listen she will call. Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes; But there, where western glooms are gathering, The dark will end the dark, if anything: God slays Himself with every leaf that flies, And hell is more than half of paradise. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies— In eastern skies. Out of a grave I come to tell you this, Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss That flames upon your forehead with a glow That blinds you to the way that you must go. Yes, there is yet one way to where she is, Bitter, but one that faith may never miss. Out of a grave I come to tell you this— To tell you this. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go, for the winds are tearing them away,— Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go, and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal.
Since there is no escape, since at the end My body will be utterly destroyed, This hand I love as I have loved a friend, This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed; Since there is no escape even for me Who love life with a love too sharp to bear: The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea And hours alone too still and sure for prayer— Since darkness waits for me, then all the more Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore In pride, and let me sing with my last breath; In these few hours of light I lift my head; Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead If there is any way to baffle death.
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,  How little that which thou deniest me is;  It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;  Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,  Yet this enjoys before it woo,  And pampered swells with one blood made of two,  And this, alas, is more than we would do. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where we almost, nay more than married are.  This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;  Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,  And cloistered in these living walls of jet.  Though use make you apt to kill me,  Let not to that, self-murder added be,  And sacrilege, three sins in killing three. Cruel and sudden, hast thou since Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?  Wherein could this flea guilty be, Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?  Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou  Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;  ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:  Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,  Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone, Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought, And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,— A higher charm than modern culture won With all the wealth of metaphysic lore, Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore. A many-colored light flows from one sun; Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun; The prism modifies the perfect day; But thou hast known such mediums to shun, And cast once more on life a pure, white ray. Absorbed in the creations of thy mind, Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.
Vainly my heart had with thy sorceries striven: It had no refuge from thy love,—no Heaven But in thy fatal presence;—from afar It owned thy power and trembled like a star O’erfraught with light and splendor. Could I deem How dark a shadow should obscure its beam?— Could I believe that pain could ever dwell Where thy bright presence cast its blissful spell? Thou wert my proud palladium;—could I fear The avenging Destinies when thou wert near?—Thou wert my Destiny;—thy song, thy fame, The wild enchantments clustering round thy name, Were my soul’s heritage, its royal dower; Its glory and its kingdom and its power!
“What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?” “Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely. “Whoever said it was,” said the Red queen ... What’s the French for “fiddle-de-dee”?  But “fiddle-de-dee’s not English” (we Learn from Alice, and must agree). The “Fiddle” we know, but what’s from “Dee”? Le chat assis in an English tree? —Well, what’s the French for “fiddle-de-dench”?  (That is to say, for “monkey wrench”) —Once in the works, it produced a stench What’s the Greek for “fiddle-de-dex”?  (That is to say, for “Brekekekex”)—The frog-prince turned out to be great at sex. What’s the Erse for “fiddle-de-derse”?  (That is to say, for “violent curse”?) —Bad cess to you for your English verse! What’s the Malay for “fiddle-de-day”?  (That is to say, for “That is to say ...”) —...[There are no true synonyms, anyway ...] What’s the Pali for “fiddle-de-dally”?  (That is to say, for “Silicon Valley”) —Maya deceives you: the Nasdaq won’t rally. What’s the Norwegian for “fiddle-de-degian”?  (That is to say, for “His name is Legion”) —This aquavit’s known in every region. What’s the Punjabi for “fiddle-de-dabi”?  (That is to say, for “crucifer lobby”) —They asked for dall but were sent kohl-rabi. What’s the Dutch for “fiddle-de-Dutch”?  (That is to say, for “overmuch”) —Pea-soup and burghers and tulips and such. What’s the Farsi for “fiddle-de-darsi?”  (That is to say for “devote yourself”—“darsi” In Italian—the Irish would spell it “D’Arcy”) Well, what’s the Italian for “fiddle-de-dallion”?  (That is to say, for “spotted stallion”) —It makes him more randy to munch on a scallion. Having made so free with “fiddle-de-dee,”  What’s to become now of “fiddle-de-dum”? —I think I know. But the word’s still mum.
I buried my father in the sky. Since then, the birds clean and comb him every morning  and pull the blanket up to his chin  every night. I buried my father underground.  Since then, my ladders only climb down, and all the earth has become a house  whose rooms are the hours, whose doors  stand open at evening, receiving  guest after guest. Sometimes I see past them to the tables spread for a wedding feast. I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son,  my little root who won’t drink milk,  little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,  little clock spring newly wet in the fire, little grape, parent to the future  wine, a son the fruit of his own son,  little father I ransom with my life.
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies) If you can keep your head when all about you   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,  But make allowance for their doubting too;  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster  And treat those two impostors just the same;  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings  And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew  To serve your turn long after they are gone,  And so hold on when there is nothing in you  Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,  If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Why am I if I am uncertain reasons may inclose.  Remain remain propose repose chose.  I call carelessly that the door is open  Which if they may refuse to open  No one can rush to close.  Let them be mine therefor.  Everybody knows that I chose.  Therefor if therefore before I close.  I will therefore offer therefore I offer this. Which if I refuse to miss may be miss is mine. I will be well welcome when I come.  Because I am coming. Certainly I come having come.  These stanzas are done.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.  Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.  Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller. This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy. Incy is short for incubus. A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.   Drink pups.  Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately. I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,  For my surrounding air hath a new lightness; Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly  And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;  As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.  Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.  No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,  Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.  Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches, As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,  Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour: As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs.  At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.  I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me  And nuzzled my left hand.  She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
What if we got outside ourselves and there  really was an outside out there, not just  our insides turned inside out? What if there  really were a you beyond me, not just  the waves off my own fire, like those waves off  the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,  though not well -- just enough to know that off  to the right belongs to someone else, not you.  What if, when we said I love you, there were  a you to love as there is a yard beyond  to walk past the grill and get to? To endure  the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond  that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)  is altruism: not giving, but coming to know  someone is there through the wavy vision  of the self's heat, love become a decision.
If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
Her body is not so white as anemony petals nor so smooth—nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand’s span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over— or nothing.
The pure products of America go crazy— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags—succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum— which they cannot express— Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she'll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs— some doctor's family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car
It was midday before we noticed it was morning. The boy cousins brought us a tray—soup and cheese, warm soda, and a soft cloth and candy for her fever. They wouldn’t come in, the tray weighing between them. They stood like woodwork inside the door frame. By afternoon the old procession—silence at the lip of a dozen night travelers tired and grieving, one by one, or pairs floating to the bed and back with a touching of hands like humming, and the one we gathered for slipping farther for all the good we could do. She lay in her shadow. She looked to no one. Her daylilies bobbed wide open out in the wild, blue sun and the same bee kept nosing her window to reach them. Dusk: even the boys were back watching it try.
1. Language must suffice. Years ago,  under a sweet June sky stung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, a beautiful woman nearly killed me. Listen, she said, and turned her lovely face to the stars, the wild sky....2. No. No: years ago,  under a sweet, June sky strung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, under this sky broad, bright, all rung around with rustling elders—or intoxicating willows, or oaks, I forget—  under this sky, a beautiful woman killed me, nearly. I say beautiful. You had to see her.Listen, she said, and turned a lovely shell of her ear to the swirl of stars and the moon  smudged as a wingtip in one tree, not far.3. Yes: she scraped my back bloody against a rough trunk. Yes: she flung back her lovely face and her hair, holding me down, and the tree shook slowly, as in a mild, persistent laugh or wind,  and the moon high in that black tree swung to and fro ... there were millions of stars up where she stared past us, and one moon, I think.4. Excuse me. My friend, who loves poetry truly, says too much nature taints my work. Yes. Yes. Yes. Too many birds, stars—  too much rain,  too much grass— so many wild, bowing limbs howling or groaning into the natural night ... and he might be right. Even here. That is, if tree were a tree. That is, if star or moon or even beautiful womancraning the shell of her ear were what they were. They are, I think, not. No: and a poem about nature contains anything but.5. When they descended to us, they were a cloud of stars sweeping lightly. They sang to us urgently about our lives, they touched us with a hundred thousand hair-soft, small legs— and held down by such hungers, we let them cover us, this beautiful woman, this me, who couldn’t move, who were stung—do you hear?— who were stung again, were covered that quickly, crying to each other  to fly away!6.  ... I just can’t erase the exquisite, weeping language of the wasps, nor her face in starlight and so tranquil under that false, papery, bobbing  moon just minutes before, saying listen,listen, nor then the weight of her whole natural body  pinning down mine until we both cried out for fear, and pain, and still couldn’t move.7. Language must suffice. First, it doesn’t. Then, of course, it does. Listen, listen. What do you hear? This nearly killed me. I’ll never know why she didn’t just whisper Here they come, warn Move! cry They’ll kill us!  Yes: I will save you ...  Yes: I love you too much to watch you suffer! But it’s all I recall, or now need. And, anyway, I loved her, she was so beautiful. And that is what I have had to say before it’s too late,  before they have killed me, before they have killed you, too, or before we have all become something else entirely, which is to say before we are only language.
1. Footfalls on the brickwork road many fathers laid by hand and heavy mallet make a sandy sound. You can hear, in the dusted scuff, a kind of gasp as from the crumpled lungs of those bent double by depression, by wagonloads of work— you can hear huffs of hot wind kick the dust around them. You can feel the brickwork give. This is how the town found a way from starving. Three summers running: nothing but dust rained down to choke out cornfields and wheat. The council paid any man driven to his knees to lay a road from here to Cedar City to keep working. They tapped in bricks from the limekiln one season. They turned each one one-quarter twist the next. 2. All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze. It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes over the far, darkening fields and many trees. How huge the world must be to hear so far beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night. There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly. And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm. Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter all the way back while its car-locks bang. Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke, and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle. How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long. It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider. 3. I was watching the road where his car went and thirty years burned off, as in a drop of oil. I was scanning for dust on the rise, a cartoon cowboy’s gallop. It’s where he drove each morning off to work somewhere hard with the road crew— he returned each evening, burned and hurt. I have a good life and hands too soft for labor. Who would guess it takes this long to come home? All week I have checked the old road, as if nothing had come to pass—jars of peaches pinging on the kitchen sill, her voice like silverware. I was playing with a soldier and blue truck. There’s a road to everywhere, the song sweeps on. I am watching the road where the car drove. 4. You can feel the brickwork give beneath your step. Each such shift in sand and balanced earth is kindred to the world’s intrinsic drift. Cars kick up a clatter, rumbling down the road— their tires grind brick to brick, turn dust to dust. When a truck goes by, the whole street quakes. You can feel your life begin to shake. 5. Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque. The many children quieted by baths, put to bed— they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains. One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow. Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop. But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked their knees to pack tightly back into earth. How small a world it is to want such work. I will come here only once more to lie down too, having lived to praise one thing made so well it sings with each slow passage, rimmed with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds. Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.
If things were worse, this cursed rain would soak me unto sickness, so Samuel Sewall might have written in his vespers journal. I have it on my writing desk inside. For three days I have labored with a saw and plane and many boards to make my girl a swingset near her mother’s lilac shrubs, as rain has drizzled cold and meaningless. How coherent was his world of works and days, when Plentifull Rains might connote a coming providence—so Sewall notes of Her Majesty’s Court, June the eighteenth, seventeen twelve. We are well satisfyed with the Layin out  of our Money—
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,  etc.... Quickly he taps  a full nib twice to the mouth of  his japan-ink bowl—harder than  he had thought, if he had thought—smears  the fine spattering with his sleeve,  and continues, for whom haste is  more purity than certainty,as anarchy is better than despotism— for this reason—that the former  is for a season & that the  latter is eternal.
Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads  At last we came into the unleashed wind; The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end  Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread. Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves  Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand.  Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves  Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land. Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans  And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails,  The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies  And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails, We pushed into an overworld of wind and light  Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon,  And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite  From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun. We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour,  Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall,  Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.
Amid the glare of light and song  And talk that knows not when to cease,  The sullen voices of the throng,  My weary soul cries out for peace,  Peace and the quietness of death;  The wash of waters deep and cool,  The wind too faint for any breath  To stir oblivion’s silent pool, When all who swim against the stream,  And they that laugh, and they that weep,  Shall change like flowers in a dream  That wither on the brows of sleep. For silence is the song sublime,  And every voice at last must cease,  And all the world at evening time  Floats downwards through the gates of peace,  Beyond the gloom of shadowy caves  Where water washes on the stones,  And breaks with quiet foamless waves  The night’s persistent monotones;  The stars are what the flowers seem,  And where the sea of thought is deep,  The moonlight glitters like a dream,  On weary waters gone to sleep.
You have dragged me on through the wild wood ways, You have given me toil and scanty rest, I have seen the light of ten thousand days Grow dim and sink and fade in the West. Once you bore me forth from the dusty gloom, Weeping and helpless and naked and blind, Now you would hide me deep down in the tomb, And wander away on the moonlit wind. You would bury me like a thing of shame, Silently into the darkness thrust, You would mix my heart that was once a flame With the mouldering clay and the wandering dust. The eyes that wept for your sorrowful will Shall be laid among evil and unclean things, The heart that was faithful through good and ill You scorn for a flutter of tawdry wings. You were the moonlight, I lived in the sun; Could there ever be peace between us twain? I sought the Many, you seek the One, You are the slayer, I am the slain. Oh soul, when you mount to your flame-built throne Will you dream no dream of the broken clay? Will you breathe o’er the stars in your pathway strown, No sigh for the daisies of yesterday? As you wander the shining corridors, A lonely wave in the ocean of light, Have you never a thought of the lake’s lost shores, Or the fire-lit cottage dim and white? Shall not the dear smell of the rain-wet soil Through the windless spheres and the silence float? Shall not my hands that are brown with toil Take your dreams and high desires by the throat? Behold, I reach forth from beyond the years, I will cry to you from beneath the sod, I will drag you back from the starry spheres, Yea, down from the very bosom of God. You cannot hide from the sun and the wind, Or the whispered song of the April rain, The proud earth that moulds all things to her mind, Shall gather you out of the deeps again. You shall follow once more a wandering fire, You shall gaze again on the starlit sea, You shall gather roses out of the mire: Alas, but you shall not remember me.
All night I stumble through the fields of light, And chase in dreams the starry rays divine That shine through soft folds of the robe of night, Hung like a curtain round a sacred shrine. When daylight dawns I leave the meadows sweet And come back to the dark house built of clay, Over the threshold pass with lagging feet, Open the shutters and let in the day. The gray lit day heavy with griefs and cares, And many a dull desire and foolish whim, Leans o’er my shoulder as I spread my wares On dusty counters and at windows dim. She gazes at me with her sunken eyes, That never yet have looked on moonlit flowers, And amid glaring deeds and noisy cries Counts out her golden tale of lagging hours. Over the shrine of life no curtain falls, All men may enter at the open gate, The very rats find refuge in her walls— Her tedious prison walls of love and hate. Yet when the twilight vails that dim abode I bar the door and make the shutters fast, And hurry down the shadowy western road, To seek in dreams my starlit home and vast.
The princess in her world-old tower pined A prisoner, brazen-caged, without a gleam Of sunlight, or a windowful of wind; She lived but in a long lamp-lighted dream. They brought her forth at last when she was old; The sunlight on her blanched hair was shed Too late to turn its silver into gold. “Ah, shield me from this brazen glare!” she said.
1914 The phantoms flit before our dazzled eyes, Glory and honour, wrath and righteousness, The agèd phantoms in their bloodstained dress, Vultures that fill the world with ravenous cries, Swarming about the rock where, chained apart, In age-long pain Prometheus finds no rest From the divine flame burning in his breast, And vultures tearing at a human heart. Not yet the blessed hours on golden wings Bring to the crucified their sure relief, Deeper and deeper grows the ancient grief, Blackest of all intolerable things. Eternal Rebel, sad, and old, and blind, Bound with a chain enslaved by every one Of the dark gods who hide the summer sun, Yet art thou still the saviour of mankind. Free soul of fire, break down their chains and bars, Drive out those unclean phantoms of the brain, Till every living thing be friends again, And our lost earth true comrade to the stars.
My father liked them separate, one there, one here (allá y aquí), as if aware that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart (el corazón) and lock the alien part to what he was—his memory, his name (su nombre)—with a key he could not claim. “English outside this door, Spanish inside,” he said, “y basta.” But who can divide the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from any child? I knew how to be dumb and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed, I hoarded secret syllables I read until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run where his stumbled. And still the heart was one. I like to think he knew that, even when, proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen, he stood outside mis versos, half in fear of words he loved but wanted not to hear.
That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be: “All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. “That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening.... “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).” So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!” And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.” Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,  Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today  Tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,  The higher he’s a-getting, The sooner will his race be run,  And nearer he’s to setting. That age is best which is the first,  When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst  Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time,  And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime,  You may forever tarry.
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar;— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more! Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o’er the flood And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor’s tread, Or know the conquered knee;— The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea! O, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every thread-bare sail, And give her to the god of storms,— The lightning and the gale!
What happens to a dream deferred?  Does it dry up  like a raisin in the sun?  Or fester like a sore—  And then run?  Does it stink like rotten meat?  Or crust and sugar over—  like a syrupy sweet?  Maybe it just sags  like a heavy load.  Or does it explode?
A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children. Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used. The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children. Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand. True to our God, True to our native land.
because it has no pure products because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline because the water of the ocean is cold and because land is better than ocean because I say we rather than they because I live in California I have eaten fresh artichokes and jacaranda bloom in April and May because my senses have caught up with my body my breath with the air it swallows my hunger with my mouth because I walk barefoot in my house because I have nursed my son at my breast because he is a strong American boy because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is because he answers I don’t know because to have a son is to have a country because my son will bury me here because countries are in our blood and we bleed them because it is late and too late to change my mind because it is time.
I know I’ll lose her. One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up. She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring. Nothing from her will reach me after that. I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house mine too if I can make them take her place. I’ll have to. I mustn’t think her room and whether if by nine one morning in a year she will have left it, sleepy, late, remembering tomorrow is New York, her interview with UN General Services a cinch to go well. What I must think instead is Bobby’s follow-through from the left side. He pulls my lob past Geoff, who’s bored. Shagging five soaked balls isn’t Geoff’s idea. I tell him he can hit soon. He takes his time, then underhands the first off line and halfway back. Ground fog, right field, the freeway, LAX. She has both official languages. For the International Court, “The Registrar shall arrange to have interpreted from French to English and from English into French each statement, question and response.” Or maybe it will be Washington she’ll work for. On mission to a new West African republic, she might sign on with Reynolds, Kaiser, Bethlehem Steel. They needed Guinea’s bauxite for aluminum, manganese from Gabon, their dealings for more plants and harbors slowed by lengthy phonecalls through Paris, When there were snags, she’d fly there that same afternoon, her calendar a mix of eighty hours on and whole weeks off. There’d be sidetrips to England by Calais and one aisle over from her on the crossing, by himself, the man I saw this week I fear she’d like. He’d have noticed her before they cleared the dock, she’d been writing something, left wrist bent toward him, the card almost filled, now, with whatever she’d been telling someone else. She’d start another, the address first. Eased that he’d sense it in his shoulders when she stood to leave, he’d keep himself from looking, it was much better not to look, he might not interest her, better not to be left remembering how she looked. Dover. He’d follow her to the train and sit across from her, apply himself convincingly to his four appointments and their dossiers. After she’d make notes to herself from a bed and breakfast guide, from The Guide to the National Trust, she’d put the books back in her hemp bag. He didn’t mean to be nosy, he’d say, but was she going to see some country houses while she’s here? Comfortably, she’d tell him which ones. Though he knew them all, he’d be so taken with her that he’d lose what she was saying, he’d undergo the list and ask if she’d be hiring a car. She’d pick one up tomorrow in Hammersmith and then drive west. Would she have dinner with him tonight? She’d say she’d like that: she was booked at the St. Margaret’s, off Russell Square, could he meet her there at seven? When she’d close her eyes, her head against the cushioned wing of the seat, he’d think her managing to rest was not so much a carelessness to his attentions as that she wasn’t vain. She wouldn’t catch him watching if he angled his look away from her toward the window, in the tunnels especially he’d see reflected in its glass her gradual full outline as she breathed. There would be time all evening to talk. He’d tell her then about his uncle’s place in Surrey where they’d both be welcome, its rubble-stone and leaded casements, tile, an east loggia to the lawns and wooded slope. He’d loved the kitchen garden as a boy, the path there, silver lavender and catmint borders, an oak-doored archway framing for him on chains above a well the twin coronas of roses in the cool damp light. [...]  Our house is a winter rental. Each June, we store everything we don’t take with us in the camper to Idaho and Montana. It’s two full days’ drive with desert much of the way, then farms. Only in the last half hour, past Ashton, up the hill, are there logging roads and lodgepole, spruce and fir. It agrees with us to be outdoors all summer. I’m shameless about how much I want to fish the broad wadeable meadow streams. The new mayflies can’t lift themselves from the surface film until their wings dry. When I watch them drift down over the slack water, disturbances are rocks sometimes and sometimes fish. Linda does needlepoint and crossword puzzles. She keeps checklists of the flowers she finds on her long woodland walks. We do our wash in town and play cards in the hotel lobby. We have time to read. By August, there are berries. A six-pack of Grain Belt beer is ninety-nine cents. Friends have a ranch with acres that stretch back through bottomland to their mountain pasture. The old Hodges’ place is vacant. They ask us to stay. In the upstairs bedroom under the cottonwood, it’s almost dark when it clouds up late in the afternoon. We find cancelled checks in the homestead down by the creek. Lots are for sale. In our fifth summer there, we buy one. A contractor frames a house for us which I have six weeks to enclose. I want to be, but I’m not good at it, it doesn’t please me at all when my rip-cut splinters the cedar batten, I miss the stud completely with a second nail and I throw things and scream. She can’t stand it when I’m like this. But though she has to leave sometimes and not come back for hours, the work gets done. We drain the pipes, hang shutters, close the place up. [...]  After five years of saying it, it became a joke with us that we’d have a baby in five years. We’re waiting for the EPT. Sitting as far away from it as she can and still be home, she wants me to be the one to read it. I’m surprised how glad I am. Her not being glad lasts half an hour. She’ll work for the library until she’s due in June. The baby does its tours inside her. When we put the big headphones on her tummy, it seems to hear. Her doctor tells her to cut down on salt, her blood pressure’s high. We buy a stethoscope and cuff. She tells Linda to quit her job and go to bed. The salt-free cottage cheese is cardboard, but it’s not working, nothing is, I can wait until she’s been resting for an hour before I take it, it doesn’t help. Since her diastolic number’s always high, it’s of course high when she sees the doctor: she’ll be in the hospital tomorrow morning if we don’t change doctors tonight. La Leche League has two it recommends. The one who calls back asks everything. If she were his wife, he says, he’d want her in the hospital. We’re too frightened to sleep. I hold her. I fall off only when it’s almost light and by then the birds have started. It makes her cry to hear them. When she’s admitted to the ward, they hook an IV up to her that hurts her hand. On the vacant bed next to her, there’s a tray with a syringe and drugs: if she goes into labor she might have convulsions. They tell us on Monday that the baby wouldn’t be able to breathe yet on its own, on Wednesday that it could suffocate inside her, her placenta’s shutting down. They’ll do another amniocentesis in the morning, they’ll take the baby in the afternoon. She and I are such cases by now that I think they’ll lie, they’ll want to quiet us for the birth by telling us the baby’s lungsare ready, that stranger things have happened in three days. A nurse comes in and says the baby’s lungs are ready, let’s go to prep. Since Linda can’t have it naturally, it matters all the more to her that she at least be awake. She’ll get to be. Both doctors promised me this morning that she’ll have a local, it’s up to them. I get scrubbed. Everyone’s in greens. Down a corridor, away from me so I won’t hear, the anesthesiologist is talking to her doctors, who are very intent. The scene breaks up. Her doctors don’t have to tell me, I know already, I want to hit them, I say I’d promised her because they’d promised, I’d told her she could be awake, that I could be there with her. Stop it, you can’t let her see you like this, her pediatrician says. She’s partly sedated. I tell her I’ll be waiting right down the hall. From another room than hers, a baby, a first cry. I have to hear it or not listen too for our baby, Linda’s asleep, she can’t. If it’s from her room now that I’m hearing something fainter, someone should tell me soon. I believe the nurse who says  “I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s really good.”  “How is Linda?”  “They’re sewing her up now, she’ll be fine.” There’s no reason not to believe her, Linda’s not going to die, she’s not going to die or have to hate it that she didn’t, her baby’s all right, we haven’t killed it by not changing doctors. It won’t have to be breathed for by a machine. Almost a month early, he’s a wonder to the staff at five pounds ten, he’s Linda’s doing, she should be proud of him, she’ll nurse him and she’ll heal. I can buy her now the blue- and white-checked gingham mother and baby rabbit. I can buy her a robe. He comes home with her after the weekend. The two of them feel so hallowed to me that I’m slow to tell it hasn’t worked out for her at all. She writes an essay about it. His having been taken from her early means she failed. Bodies are bodies. They know things, they have their own ways. She could have done it if she’d gotten the chance. Her doctor didn’t want Linda caring how things went. That had to be her job, not Linda’s. She’d gone on to say it almost proudly of Linda at the last:  “This little girl would be fine if she didn’t have a brain.” It’s a long essay. I recognize everything but me. Not her antagonist, exactly, I’d been another thing she’d had to worry. Whenever I’d taken her blood pressure, she’d felt blamed by me if it was high. Each crisis had been hers to deal with by herself. Too busy or aloof to find her a better doctor, I’d taught my classes, read, worked on my poem. [...]  She’s at the mirror. I need to get behind it to the aspirin, do so, close it.  “Goodness you wake up with a lot of headaches.”  “Sorry.”  “Don’t be sorry, I’m sorry for you.” Surprised that it turned out like that, and hating her, hating what I’d heard in my own voice, I get out of her way. From the privacy of brooding on it in another room, I hear what she meant: “Congratulations. As good as you are at headaches, why settle for so little, why not work up a malignancy of some kind?” And I remember that yesterday, when we were getting in the car, she winced. She’s always twisting her neck or back or something, so I didn’t ask her “Did you hurt yourself?” but  “Did you hurt yourself again?” [...]  I move the rest of my clothes out of the house. Our fights about money pass. In having to leave her, I also have to think again the most forgettable of our outings. Over the years, we’d taken our bodies along in company to certain places. In front of me a little to the left, she’d answered “Yes” to “Two for dinner?” I wasn’t thinking, at the time, how I fit into what she cared about: she fit for me. It comes back to me now because I have to change it, I’d gotten it wrong. Normal, expected, there’s a brittle politeness between us when I stop by to pick up Owen. Below the hem of her flannel housedress, her bare feet.
Mine, said the stone, mine is the hour. I crush the scissors, such is my power. Stronger than wishes, my power, alone. Mine, said the paper, mine are the words that smother the stone with imagined birds, reams of them, flown from the mind of the shaper. Mine, said the scissors, mine all the knives gashing through paper’s ethereal lives; nothing’s so proper as tattering wishes. As stone crushes scissors, as paper snuffs stone and scissors cut paper, all end alone. So heap up your paper and scissor your wishes and uproot the stone from the top of the hill. They all end alone as you will, you will.
The farmhouses north of Driggs, silos for miles along the road saying BUTLER or SIOUX. The light saying rain coming on, the wind not up yet, animals waiting as the front hits everything on the high fiats, hailstones bouncing like rabbits under the sage. Nothing running off. Creeks clear. The river itself a shallow, straight shoot to the north, its rocks mossy, slick above the few deep pockets. On another drainage, the O-T-O. Loose stands of aspen on the slopes. Dude cabins, their porches and split-log loveseats, dull yellow curtains slapping over the open sills. From Emigrant north to the Great Bend, loaves of haystacks, stud farms, charolais, steel flumes between the ditches. Access to the river’s acreage closed to its whole length, the county roads dusty, turning onto the high shelves of side valleys. Scattered shacks and corrals. An old homestead, the sod roof rotting out its timbers. Below the spurs from the higher range, basins in the mountain pastures fill with odd water. The henbane dries. Ruts cross in the grass at a schoolhouse. Each runnel mixing where it can the spring creeks deepen and go on easily, swelling to the larger tributary with its pools and banks. At any bend the willows bend too, and gravel bars on the other shore flare into the shallows. An encampment. Ponies wade to their knees and drink, raising up now and then to look out through the smoke to the near hills, the one plateau heading off beyond the Crazies and the Little Belts, north. It strikes the river at the Gates, the water piling through its broad course, level, ridges and the vertical faces of bluffs crowding to each side. This rock is of an excellent grit for whetstones, hard and sharp. There is here more timber than below the falls. A spring immensely clear and of a bluish cast boils up near its center with such force that its surface in that part is strangely higher than the surrounding earth. I heard today a noise resembling the discharge of a piece of ordnance. Unless it be the bursting of the rich mines of silver in these mountains, I am at a loss to account for it. As the passages about the falls are narrow and steep, and as the buffalo travel to the river in great herds, the hinder part presses those in front out of their depth to the strong current. Their carcasses by the hundreds litter the shore below the cataracts. We have made of the mast of the pirogue two axletrees. Walked ahead to my first view of the falls, hearing them from afar. Their spray is scarcely formed when bodies of the same beaten water thrust over and down, concealing every shape, their whiteness alone visible. We will leave at this place all heavy baggage, the red pirogue, and whatever provisions we can do without. Needing a cellar for the caching of our stores we set hands to digging. More white bear. These fellows leave a formidable impression in the mud or sand. Goodrich, who is remarkably fond of fishing, caught many trout of two different species. Came to in a handsome timbered bottom across from the entrance of a very considerable river. Its character is so precisely that of the one below that the party with few exceptions has pronounced it the Missouri. The fork to the south is perfectly transparent, runs rapidly with an even, unriffled surface. Its bed is composed of round, smooth stones like those of rivers issuing from a mountainous country. If this latter be the one we are to take we should encounter within 50 miles a series of precipitous falls. There is now no timber on the hills. The black rock has given place to a yellow and brown or black clay, brown and yellowish white sandstone and a hard, dark freestone. It rises from the water abruptly on both sides in varied walls. I could discover above their horizon only the most elevated points. The river retains both its whitish color and a proportion of its sediment, but it is much clearer than below. The banks afforded us good towing. This method of ascending the river is the safest and most expeditious. We pass a great number of dry streambeds. These plains being level and wholly destitute of timber, the wind blows violently with its loads of sand. Driftwood comes down as the water rises. The banks are falling in very fast and I wonder that our pirogues are not swallowed by them. Wild hyssop grows here. A few cottonwood along the verges. Undergrowths of rose and serviceberry, and small-leafed willow on the sandbars. Met this evening the famous white bear. I had rather deal with several indians than with this gentleman. Much less ice running in the river. We make ready to set out, the party in general good health except for a few venereal complaints. A windy, blustering day. Our two pirogues still frozen. I draw a connection of the country from the information of traders. The falls are about 800 miles west. Rose early and commenced roofing the two wings of huts. Our situation sandy. Cottonwood and elm, some small ash. We must now settle for the winter. Very cold. Hard frosts. The river falling. For several days we pass deserted Mandan villages along both banks. The beaver and otter are becoming more abundant. We put ashore at noon, setting fire to the prairies to signal that we wish council with the natives. These Arikara much reduced by pox. It is customary for their nation to show its grief by pain, some cutting off two smaller fingers at the second joint. The earth of the plains is in many places opened in long crevices, its soil indifferent and with a kind of timothy branching like flax from its main stalk. Delayed here today so as to take equal altitudes, the weights of the waters of the two rivers, their specific gravities. As we near the great Platte, the sandbars are more numerous, sawyers worse than they were below. Mulberry, oak and walnut. These prairies from the river have very much the appearance of farms. We continue to pole our way upstream. Nothwithstanding our precautions, we struck a bar and were near turning over. The sergeants are directed each to keep a journal of all passing occurrences and such other descriptions of the country as shall seem to them worthy of notice. Our hunters report deer in every copse. I got out and walked for one mile through a rush bottom, nettles as high as my breast. All the forepart of the day we were arranging our company and taking on those articles we will need. St. Charles. The men spent their last night agreeably, dancing with the French ladies, &c. My ride was on a road finely shaded, with now and then a good farm. The corn in tassel, its leaves of a deep rich green bending at the ends by their own weight. Wheat and oat stubble. A hilly country. I passed a toll-gate, and, looking back, had my last view of the town’s steeples. From the state house cupola I could count  the buildings, the number of which was ninety. A wooden bridge crosses the river just below the town. Men were engaged in racing their horses. I sought lodging and was shown to bed in a large barrack where a man and wife conversed with me until I feigned sleep. This is a post town, the mails arriving from both east and west on Wednesdays and Saturdays. A young woman gave me directions from an upstairs window. I descended the hill into Frankfort. There has lately been established a large manufactory for spinning hemp and flax. It is wrought by water and keeps in motion 1200 spindles. The streets of Lexington cross at right angles, its stores filled both with imports and with local goods: fine cutlery, tin ware, muslins and nankeens. I was so well put up that a man would be fastidious to a fault to have found the least thing wanting. Approaching the city the land changed steadily for the better, no longer broken, as to the eastward, but fine extensive levels and slopes, the road very wide, with grazing parks, meadows, and every spot cultivated. The farms hereabout have generally good and spacious stone barns, a few acres cleared but for those stumps or girdled trees still standing. The neighbors found last year a human jawbone, rough and honeycombed. My wagoner arrived this afternoon and went on, appointing to be in Louisville before me. I pass a house with small turrets at its corners, lawns, the whole needing only vineyards for the look of villas in Provence and Languedoc. Noticed along the banks of the Holston phlox with white flowers and phlox with pink flowers, two different species, very small phlox with lance-shaped leaves. Where I come in from Abingdon, the Kentucky road divides, the other fork for Burke courthouse. With nothing to do I make ink from gall nuts. More opossum taken in the woods. This animal’s greatest peculiarity is the false belly of the female. She can draw the slit so close that one must look narrowly to find it if she be virgin. The air clearing this morning, I was surprised with a full prospect of mountains. This river where we leave off is 240 miles distant in a straight line from Currituck Inlet. The turkey-cocks begin to gobble, which is the language wherein they make love. We have a dreamer of dreams among us who warned me in the morning to take care that I not fall into the creek. I thanked him and used what caution I could, but my horse made a false leap and laid me down in the water at my full length. The sky at sunset had a swept look. There was risk of our dining with St. Anthony when one indian knocked down a fat bear. Of the stem of the silk-grass their women make small aprons which they wear for decency. They put these on with so much art that their most negligent postures reveal nothing to our curiosity. The ruffles of some of our fellows were a little discolored by the bloodroot which these ladies use to improve their charms. Bear, it would seem, is no diet for saints, for it is apt to make them too rampant. At night, the surveyors took advantage of a clear sky. This trial of our variance shows it still something less then 3 degrees, so it remains much as we had found it at the sea. We have now run the poles beyond those inhabitants most inland. There fell a sort of Scots mist all the way. I have learned how rattlesnakes take a squirrel. They ogle the poor beast till by force of charm it falls down stupefied and senseless. The snake approaches it and moistens first one ear and then the other with his spittle, making the head all slippery. When that is done he draws this member into his mouth, and after it, by casual degrees, all the rest of the body. I am not so rigid an observer of the Sabbath as to allow of no journeys to be taken upon it. Nor would I care, like a certain New England magistrate, to order a man to the whipping post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord’s Day. And yet we found plainly that travelling on the Sunday had not thriven with us in the least. The rain was enlivened with loud thunder, and there is something in the woods that makes this sound more awful, the violence of the lightning more visible as the trees are shivered quite to the root. This Great Dismal Swamp is the source of five several rivers. We run our line to its skirts, which begin with dwarf reeds, moist uneven ground. The season inclining us to aguish distempers, we were suffered by the resident to cut up wood for firing, drive away the damps. At the bottom of the account Mankind are great losers by the luxuries of feather beds and warm apartments. We perceive our appetites to mend, and though we have to drink only what Adam had in Paradise, that stream of life runs cool and peaceably in our veins. The days are hard. Our slumbers sweeten, and if ever we dream of women they are kind. I delight to see the banks of the Inlet adorned with myrtle, yet it must be owned that, sacred to Venus though it be, this plant grows commonly in very dirty soil. Norfolk has most the air of a town of any in Virginia. There are now riding at her wharves near 20 brigantines. The trade hither is engrossed by those saints of New England who every week carry off a pretty deal of tobacco. I have found that after my devotions a walk in the garden can do much to fill my heart with clear obedience. I repair me there that I might think deeply of the earth and how it will be all too soon my sleeping-place. For I am told to fear such things as bring me to ill terms, told of those who seek congress with the earth that they shall have her in their time forever. That her places sing their love-songs for no man. That I am not the suitor whose betrothed awaits him, but some unwelcome third with God alone her lover. And yet I would look upon such country as will show me nature undressed, the strata of the land, her lays and beds and all her privacies. For my wonder tells me I should be promiscuous, should learn by all the laws of bodies and by where they are the joyful news out of the new found world. This walk is news. Its bodies point me always in and out along some newer course. There have been divers days together wherein alone I’ve watched these flowers buoyed on their stems and holding up the sun. Just now I catch them thinking on themselves, composing from their dark places the least passages for light, tendering how they look and how I look on them. It comes to me that the world is to the end of it thinking on itself and how its parts gather with one another for their time. These are the light, and all the forms they show are lords of inns wherein the soul takes rest. If I could find it in myself to hide the world within the world then there would be no place to which I could remove it, save that brightness wherein all things come to see.
I think I should have loved you presently, And given in earnest words I flung in jest; And lifted honest eyes for you to see, And caught your hand against my cheek and breast; And all my pretty follies flung aside That won you to me, and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my little wicked ways. I, that had been to you, had you remained, But one more waking from a recurrent dream, Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained, And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme, A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
I am a feather on the bright sky I am the blue horse that runs in the plain I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water I am the shadow that follows a child I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows I am an eagle playing with the wind I am a cluster of bright beads I am the farthest star I am the cold of dawn I am the roaring of the rain I am the glitter on the crust of the snow I am the long track of the moon in a lake I am a flame of four colors I am a deer standing away in the dusk I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche I am an angle of geese in the winter sky I am the hunger of a young wolf I am the whole dream of these things You see, I am alive, I am alive I stand in good relation to the earth I stand in good relation to the gods I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte You see, I am alive, I am alive
It was like soul-kissing, the way the words filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk. All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15, but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me to read to the all except for me white class. She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder, said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent to the buses, awed by the power of words.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air, In his own ground. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Whose flocks supply him with attire, Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire. Blest, who can unconcernedly find Hours, days, and years slide soft away, In health of body, peace of mind, Quiet by day, Sound sleep by night; study and ease, Together mixed; sweet recreation; And innocence, which most does please, With meditation. Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie.
(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963) “Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.” “But, mother, I won’t be alone. Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For I fear those guns will fire. But you may go to church instead And sing in the children’s choir.” She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet. The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place, But that smile was the last smile To come upon her face. For when she heard the explosion, Her eyes grew wet and wild. She raced through the streets of Birmingham Calling for her child. She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, But, baby, where are you?”
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!  How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,  And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest,  Like the young hours that lead the tender year Enchantress come! and charm my cares to rest:  Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear! A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain,  Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,  ‘For me the vernal garland blooms no more.’ Come then, ‘pale Misery’s love!’ be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure.
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster  a monster in the shape of a woman  the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments  or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover  8 comets she whom the moon ruled  like us levitating into the night sky  riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness  ribs chilled  in those spaces of the mind An eye,  ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’  from the mad webs of Uranusborg  encountering the NOVA  every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us  Tycho whispering at last  ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see  and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain  and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse  pouring in from Taurus  I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the  direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most  untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15  years to travel through me And has  taken I am an instrument in the shape  of a woman trying to translate pulsations  into images for the relief of the body  and the reconstruction of the mind.
So by sixteen we move in packs learn to strut and slide in deliberate lowdown rhythm talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat because we want so bad to be cool, never to be mistaken for white, even when we leave these rowdier L.A. streets— remember how we paint our eyes like gangsters flash our legs in nylons sassy black high heels or two inch zippered boots stack them by the door at night next to Daddy’s muddy gardening shoes.
(Kyoto) CONFIDENCE  (after Bashō) Clouds murmur darkly, it is a blinding habit— gazing at the moon.TIME OF JOY  (after Buson) Spring means plum blossoms and spotless new kimonos for holiday whores.RENDEZVOUS  (after Shiki) Once more as I wait for you, night and icy wind melt into cold rain.FOR SATORI In the spring of joy, when even the mud chuckles, my soul runs rabid, snaps at its own bleeding heels, and barks: “What is happiness?”SOMBER GIRL She never saw fire from heaven or hotly fought with God; but her eyes smolder for Hiroshima and the cold death of Buddha.
PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel.1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich.2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn.3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent,  but social as teacups: no hare is an island.  (Moral:  silence is golden—or anyway harmless;  rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit,  kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit.  (Moral:  to thine own self be true—or as true as you can;  a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors,  but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors.  (Moral:  to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles;  to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors;  the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters.  (Conclusion:  you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre  to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.)4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.
I heard a child, a little under four years old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer, “It is laughing, talking, and kissing.” —CHARLES DARWIN, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 1. WALDORF-ASTORIA EUPHORIA, THE JOY OF BIG CITIES  Joy, when intense, leads to various purposeless  movements—to dancing about, clapping the  hands, stamping, etc.
In Indianapolis they drive five hundred miles and end up where they started: survival of the fittest. In the swamps of Auburn and Elkhart, in the jungles of South Bend, one-cylinder chain-driven runabouts fall to air-cooled V-4’s, a-speed gearboxes, 16-horse flat-twin midships engines— carcasses left behind by monobloc motors, electric starters, 3-speed gears, six cylinders, 2-chain drive, overhead cams, supercharged to 88 miles an hour in second gear, the age of Leviathan ... There is grandeur in this view of life,  as endless forms  most beautiful and wonderful  are being evolved.
A girl is running. Don’t tell me  “She’s running for her bus.” All that aside!
1 Discomfort marks the boundary. One early symptom was the boundary. The invention of hunger.  I could use energy. To serve. Elaborate systems in the service of  far-fetched demands. The great termite mounds serve  as air-conditioners. Temperature within must never vary  more than 2 degrees.2 Which came first the need or the system? Systematic.  System player.  Scheme of Things. The body considered as a functional unit.  “My system craves calcium.” An organized set of doctrines. A network formed for the purpose of ...  “All I want is you.”3 was narrowing their options to one,  the next development. Soldiers have elongate heads and massive mandibles.  Squirtgun heads are found among fiercer species.  Since soldiers cannot feed themselves, each requires  a troupe of attendants.4 Her demands had become more elaborate. He must be blindfolded,  (Must break off his own wings)  wear this corset laced tight  (seal up the nuptial cell) to attain his heart’s desire. Move only as she permits  (Mate the bloated queen each season)  or be hung from the rafters. How did he get here?5 Poor baby, I heard your hammer. The invention of pounding. “As soon as it became important  that free energy be channeled.” Once you cared to be  set off from the surrounding medium. This order has been preferred since improvement was discovered. The moment one intends to grow  at the expense. When teeth emerge Demand for special treatment  was an early symptom
spider on the cold expanse of glass, three stories high rests intently and so purely alone. I’m not like that!
So these are the hills of home. Hazy tiers nearly subliminal. To see them is to see double, hear bad puns delivered with a wink. An untoward familiarity. Rising from my sleep, the road is more and less the road. Around that bend are pale houses, pairs of junipers. Then to look reveals no more.
A merchant is probing for us with his chintz curtain  effect.  * “Ha, ha, you missed me,”  a dead person says.  * There’s the bank’s colonial balcony where no one has  ever stood.
Ventriloquy is the mother tongue. Can you colonize rejection  by phrasing your request,  “Me want?” Song: “I’m not a baby.   Wa, Wa, Wa.  I’m not a baby.   Wa, Wa, Wa.  I’m crazy   like you.” The “you” in the heart of  molecule and ridicule. Marks resembling  the holes in dead leaves define the thing (moth wing). That flutter of indifference,  feigned? But if lapses are the dens strategy aims  to conceal, then you don’t know  what you’re asking.
The man slapped her bottom  like a man did in a video, then he waited  as if for shadow to completely cover the sun. Moments later  archeologists found him. * The idea that they were reenacting something which had been staged in the first place bothered her. If she wanted to go on, she’d need to ignore this limp chronology. She assumed he was conscious of the same constraint. But she almost always did want to proceed. Procedure! If only either one of them believed in the spontaneity of the original actors and could identify with one. Be one. For this to work, she reasoned, one of us would have to be gone. * “Well, look who missed  the fleeting moment,” Green Giant gloats  over dazed children. If to transpose  is to know, we can cover our losses. But only  If talking, Formerly food, Now meant  Not now So recovery  Ran rings. If to traverse  is to envelop, I am held and sung to sleep.
Shooting pleasures  Ok’d by My being seen For Or as If.  * Not just light at the end of the tunnel, but hearts, bows, rainbows— all the stickers teachers award if pleased.  * Pigeons bathe in technicolor  fluid “of a morning.”  * If I was banging my head with a shoe, I was just exaggerating— like raising my voice  or the ante. Curlicues on iron gratings: Can it be a flourish is a grimace, but a grimace isn’t a flourish?  * On the inscribed surface of sleep. Almost constant  bird soundings. “Aloha, Fruity Pebbles!” Music, useful for abstracting emphasis. Sweet nothing  to do with me.
The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered  for months, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in the tile maker’s shape of a ship to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee where once before the river below rose up to swallow the bank, World’s Fairs where one can enter the cell of a human body or see Paris, London, Marrakech and the Taj Mahal in  one afternoon, the headache that may be sinus or bad eyes or allergy or a tumor, the bruise that was blue now yellow the effect of labor or abuse, the cataclysmic event in a personal life not totally forgotten, the memory of doing well that turned to unexpressed anger just because love was everywhere preventing helpless mistakes— achievement and perfection for the first time considered in error, the end of life being life itself, life itself ignorance, we never tire of making the world smaller, looking in doll houses, and a mailman who has picked up every bright piece of glass and tile in forty years of rounds retired to build a house of glass and tile which is his life, no kick coming, while in a suburb of Chicago a leaning tower of Pisa drawn to scale signals a shopping plaza where goods come in from around the world, for the people who  live there. And Vico says gods and goddesses are the self writ large— selves to make earthquakes, tornadoes, eclipses, selves to lift the sun— and Vico says all things having been named for the namers, us, we give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back, a cup has its lip and a bottle its neck, and ever after rivers flow from their headwaters and a well-oiled engine purrs at the center of good feeling. So take your misery down a notch in aches and pains and  little diseases, in years of photo albums, in journals of dreams interrupted  by mornings, in furniture you built yourself, in copies and imitations, in scale-model wars and families and the age of fancy automobiles. And when once in your life you make the big trip to the original, chances are you’ll mainly see your own face in the glass that protects everything of which there’s one only in the form of its only maker.
There was a woman, and she was wise; woefully wise was she; She was old, so old, yet her years all told were but a score and three; And she knew by heart, from finish to start, the Book of Iniquity.
I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie, Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die — Whether he die in the light o’ day or under the peak-faced moon; In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon; On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw; In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw; By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead — I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead. For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot. And where he died or how he died, it didn’t matter a damn So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone “epigram.” So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin (Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin). Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: “Here lies poor Bill MacKie,” And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die. Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange, Of a long-deserted line of traps ’way back of the Bighorn range, Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still, Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill. So I thought of the contract I’d made with him, and I took down from the shelf The swell black box with the silver plate he’d picked out for hisself; And I packed it full of grub and “hooch,” and I slung it on the sleigh; Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day. You know what it’s like in the Yukon wild when it’s sixty-nine below; When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow; When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood, And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood; When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit, And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit; When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill — Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill. Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand, As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land; Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking woes, And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again. River and plain and mighty peak — and who could stand unawed? As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God. North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill. Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall; Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all; Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair, Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare; Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread. I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead, And at last I spoke: “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes, A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.” Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole, With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control? Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin, And that seems to say: “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in”? I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do. Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about, And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out. Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn’t seem no good; His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood. Till at last I said: “It ain’t no use — he’s froze too hard to thaw; He’s obstinate, and he won’t lie straight, so I guess I got to — saw.” So I sawed off poor Bill’s arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate, And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down; Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town. So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep, And there he’s waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep; And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun, And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful things I done. And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law, I often think of poor old Bill — and how hard he was to saw.
This year an ocean trip I took, and as I am a Scot And like to get my money’s worth I never missed a meal. In spite of Neptune’s nastiness I ate an awful lot, Yet felt as fit as if we sailed upon an even keel. But now that I am home again I’m stricken with disgust; How many pounds of fat I’ve gained I’d rather not divulge: Well, anyway, I mean to take this tummy down or bust, So here I’m suet-strafing in the  Battle of the Bulge. No more will sausage, bacon, eggs provide my breakfast fare; On lobster I will never lunch, with mounds of mayonnaise. At tea I’ll Spartanly eschew the chocolate éclair; Roast duckling and pêche melba shall not consummate my days. No more nocturnal ice-box raids, midnight spaghetti feeds; On slabs of pâté de foie gras I vow I won’t indulge: Let bran and cottage cheese suffice my gastronomic needs, And lettuce be my ally in the  Battle of the Bulge. To hell with you, ignoble paunch, abhorrent in my sight! I gaze at your rotundity, and savage is my frown. I’ll rub you and I’ll scrub you and I’ll drub you day and night, But by the gods of symmetry I swear I’ll get you down. Your smooth and smug convexity, by heck! I will subdue, And when you tucker in again with joy will I refulge; No longer of my toes will you obstruct my downward view ... With might and main I’ll fight to gain the  Battle of the Bulge.
Can these movements which move themselves be the substance of my attraction? Where does this thin green silk come from that covers my body? Surely any woman wearing such fabrics would move her body just to feel them touching every part of her. Yet most of the women frown, or look away, or laugh stiffly. They are afraid of these materials and these movements in some way. The psychologists would say they are afraid of themselves, somehow. Perhaps awakening too much desire— that their men could never satisfy? So they keep themselves laced and buttoned and made up in hopes that the framework will keep them stiff enough not to feel the whole register. In hopes that they will not have to experience that unquenchable desire for rhythm and contact. If a snake glided across this floor most of them would faint or shrink away. Yet that movement could be their own. That smooth movement frightens them— awakening ancestors and relatives to the tips of the arms and toes. So my bare feet and my thin green silks my bells and finger cymbals offend them—frighten their old-young bodies. While the men simper and leer— glad for the vicarious experience and exercise. They do not realize how I scorn them; or how I dance for their frightened, unawakened, sweet women.
All fathers in Western civilization must have a military origin. The ruler, governor, yes, he is was the general at one time or other. And George Washington won the hearts of his country—the rough military man with awkward sincere drawing-room manners. My father; have you ever heard me speak of him? I seldom do. But I had a father, and he had military origins—or my origins from him are military, militant. That is, I remember him only in uniform. But of the navy, 30 years a chief petty officer, always away from home. It is rough/hard for me to speak now. I'm not used to talking about him. Not used to naming his objects/ objects that never surrounded me. A woodpecker with fresh bloody crest knocks at my mouth. Father, for the first time I say your name. Name rolled in thick Polish parchment scrolls, name of Roman candle drippings when I sit at my table alone, each night, name of naval uniforms and name of telegrams, name of coming home from your aircraft carrier, name of shiny shoes. name of Hawaiian dolls, name of mess spoons, name of greasy machinery, and name of stencilled names. Is it your blood I carry in a test tube, my arm, to let fall, crack, and spill on the sidewalk in front of the men I know, I love, I know, and want? So you left my house when I was under two. being replaced by other machinery (my sister), and I didn’t believe you left me.  This scene: the trunk yielding treasures of  a green fountain pen, heart shaped mirror,  amber beads, old letters with brown ink, and  the gopher snake stretched across the palm tree  in the front yard with woody trunk like monkey skins,  and a sunset through the skinny persimmon trees. You  came walking, not even a telegram or post card from  Tahiti. Love, love, through my heart like ink in  the thickest nibbed pen, black and flowing into words  You came, to me, and I at least six. Six doilies  of lace, six battleship cannon, six old beerbottles,  six thick steaks, six love letters, six clocks  running backwards, six watermelons, and six baby  teeth, a six cornered hat on six men's heads, six  lovers at once or one lover at sixes and sevens;  how I confuse  all this with my  dream  walking the tightrope bridge  with gold knots  over  the mouth of an anemone/tissue spiral lips  and holding on so that the ropes burned  as if my wrists had been tied If George Washington had not been the Father of my Country it is doubtful that I would ever have found a father. Father in my mouth, on my lips, in my tongue, out of all my womanly fire, Father I have left in my steel filing cabinet as a name on my birth certificate, Father I have left in the teeth pulled out at dentists’ offices and thrown into their garbage cans, Father living in my wide cheekbones and short feet, Father in my Polish tantrums and my American speech, Father, not a holy name, not a name I cherish but the name I bear, the name that makes me one of a kind in any phone book because you changed it, and nobody but us has it, Father who makes me dream in the dead of night of the falling cherry blossoms, Father who makes me know all men will leave me if I love them, Father who made me a maverick, a writer, a namer, name/father, sun/father, moon/father, bloody mars/father, other children said, “My father is a doctor,” or “My father gave me this camera,” or “My father took me to the movies,” or “My father and I went swimming,” but my father is coming in a letter once a month for a while, and my father sometimes came in a telegram but mostly my father came to me in sleep, my father because I dreamed in one night that I dug through the ash heap in back of the pepper tree and found a diamond shaped like a dog, and my father called the dog and it came leaping over to him and he walked away out of the yard down the road with the dog jumping and yipping at his heels, my father was not in the telephone book in my city; my father was not sleeping with my mother at home; my father did not care if I studied the piano; my father did not care what I did; and I thought my father was handsome and I loved him and I wondered why he left me alone so much, so many years in fact, but my father made me what I am, a lonely woman, without a purpose, just as I was a lonely child without any father. I walked with words, words, and names, names. Father was not one of my words. Father was not one of my names. But now I say, “George, you have become my father, in his 20th century naval uniform. George Washington, I need your love; George, I want to call you Father, Father, my Father,” Father of my country, that is, me. And I say the name to chant it. To sing it. To lace it around me like weaving cloth. Like a happy child on that shining afternoon in the palmtree sunset with her mother’s trunk yielding treasures, I cry and cry, Father, Father, Father, have you really come home?
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, as if you were walking on the beach and found a diamond as big as a shoe; as if you had just built a wooden table and the smell of sawdust was in the air, your hands dry and woody; as if you had eluded the man in the dark hat who had been following you all week; the relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, playing the chords of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin  in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to,  when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters  and clean shining Republican middle-class hair  walked into carpeted houses  and left me alone  with bare floors and a few books I want to thank my mother for working every day in a drab office in garages and water companies cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40 to lose weight, her heavy body writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers alone, with no man to look at her face, her body, her prematurely white hair in love  I want to thank my mother for working and always paying for my piano lessons before she paid the Bank of America loan or bought the groceries or had our old rattling Ford repaired. I was a quiet child, afraid of walking into a store alone, afraid of the water, the sun, the dirty weeds in back yards, afraid of my mother’s bad breath, and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home, knowing he would leave again; afraid of not having any money, afraid of my clumsy body, that I knew  no one would ever love But I played my way on the old upright piano obtained for $10, played my way through fear, through ugliness, through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases, and a desire to love a loveless world. I played my way through an ugly face and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights, mornings even, empty as a rusty coffee can, played my way through the rustles of spring and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California, I played my way through an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet and a bed she slept on only one side of, never wrinkling an inch of the other side, waiting, waiting, I played my way through honors in school, the only place I could talk  the classroom,  or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always  singing the most for my talents,  as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering  her house  and was now searching every ivory case  of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black  ridges and around smooth rocks,  wondering where I had lost my bloody organs,  or my mouth which sometimes opened  like a California poppy,  wide and with contrasts  beautiful in sweeping fields,  entirely closed morning and night, I played my way from age to age, but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely, wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling leaves of orange trees, wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me, who would be there every night to put his large strong hand over my shoulder, whose hips I would wake up against in the morning, whose mustaches might brush a face asleep, dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart and Schubert without demanding that life suck everything out of you each day, without demanding the emptiness of a timid little life. I want to thank my mother for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning when I practiced my lessons and for making sure I had a piano to lay my school books down on, every afternoon. I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, will get lost, slide away, into the terribly empty cavern of me if I ever open it all the way up again. Love is a man with a mustache gently holding me every night, always being there when I need to touch him; he could not know the painfully loud music from the past that his loving stops from pounding, banging, battering through my brain, which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I am alone; he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me, liking the sound of my lesson this week, telling me, confirming what my teacher says, that I have a gift for the piano few of her other pupils had. When I touch the man I love, I want to thank my mother for giving me piano lessons all those years, keeping the memory of Beethoven, a deaf tortured man, in mind;  of the beauty that can come from even an ugly past.
Foreword to “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” This poem is more properly a “dance poem” than a song or chant because the element of repetition is created by movements of language rather than duplicating words and sounds. However, it is in the spirit of ritual recitation that I wrote it/ a performance to drive away bad spirits perhaps. The story behind the poem is this: a man and woman who have been living together for some time separate. Part of the pain of separation involves possessions which they had shared. They both angrily believe they should have what they want. She asks for some possession and he denies her the right to it. She replies that she gave him money for a possession which he has and therefore should have what she wants now. He replies that she has forgotten that for the number of years they lived together he never charged her rent and if he had she would now owe him $7,000. She is appalled that he equates their history with a sum of money. She is even more furious to realize that this sum of money represents the entire rent on the apartment and implies that he should not have paid anything at all. She is furious. She kills him mentally. Once and for all she decides she is well rid of this man and that she shouldn’t feel sad at their parting. She decides to prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life. With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together.    for my motorcycle betrayer God damn it, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man;  you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often, you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women, women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might ever be put in the same category with them; you’ve left me alone so often that I might as well have been a homesteader in Alaska these past years; and you’ve left me, thrown me out of your life often enough that I might as well be a newspaper, differently discarded each day. Now you’re gone for good and I don’t know why but your leaving actually made me as miserable as an earthworm with no earth, but now I’ve crawled out of the ground where you stomped me and I gradually stand taller and taller each day. I have learned to sing new songs, and as I sing, I’m going to dance on your grave because you are  dead  dead  dead under the earth with the rest of the shit, I’m going to plant deadly nightshade on your grassy mound and make sure a hemlock tree starts growing there. Henbane is too good for you, but I’ll let a bit grow there for good measure because we want to dance, we want to sing, we want to throw this old man to the wolves, but they are too beautiful for him, singing in harmony with each other.  So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. “Is this an angry statement?”  “No, it is a statement of joy.” “Will the sun shine again?”  "Yes,  yes,  yes,”  because I’m going to dance dance dance Duncan’s measure, and Pindar’s tune, Lorca’s cadence, and Creeley’s hum, Stevens’ sirens and Williams’ little Morris dance, oh, the poets will call the tune, and I will dance, dance, dance on your grave, grave, grave, because you’re a sonofabitch, a sonofabitch, and you tried to do me in, but you cant cant cant. You were a liar in a way that only I know:  You ride a broken motorcycle,  You speak a dead language  You are a bad plumber,  And you write with an inkless pen. You were mean to me, and I’ve survived, God damn you, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man, I’m going to learn every traditional dance, every measure, and dance dance dance on your grave  one step for every time you done me wrong.
Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her breasts and clacking together in her elbows; blue of the silk that covers lily-town at night; blue of her teeth that bite cold toast and shatter on the streets; blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens hanging like tongues over the fence of her dress at the opera/opals clasped under her lips and the moon breaking over her head a gush of blood-red lizards. Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling California fountain. Monday alone a shark in the cold blue waters.  You are dead: wound round like a paisley shawl.  I cannot shake you out of the sheets. Your name  is still wedged in every corner of the sofa.  Monday is the first of the week,  and I think of you all week.  I beg Monday not to come  so that I will not think of you  all week. You paint my body blue. On the balcony in the softy muddy night, you paint me with bat wings and the crystal the crystal the crystal the crystal in your arm cuts away the night, folds back ebony whale skin and my face, the blue of new rifles, and my neck, the blue of Egypt, and my breasts, the blue of sand, and my arms, bass-blue, and my stomach, arsenic; there is electricity dripping from me like cream; there is love dripping from me I cannot use—like acacia or jacaranda—fallen blue and gold flowers, crushed into the street.  Love passed me in a blue business suit  and fedora.  His glass cane, hollow and filled with  sharks and whales ...  He wore black  patent leather shoes  and had a mustache. His hair was so black  it was almost blue.  “Love,” I said.  “I beg your pardon,” he said.  “Mr. Love,” I said.  “I beg your pardon,” he said.  So I saw there was no use bothering him on the street  Love passed me on the street in a blue  business suit. He was a banker  I could tell. So blue trains rush by in my sleep. Blue herons fly overhead. Blue paint cracks in my arteries and sends titanium floating into my bones. Blue liquid pours down my poisoned throat and blue veins rip open my breast. Blue daggers tip and are juggled on my palms. Blue death lives in my fingernails. If I could sing one last song with water bubbling through my lips I would sing with my throat torn open, the blue jugular spouting that black shadow pulse, and on my lips I would balance volcanic rock emptied out of my veins. At last my children strained out of my body. At last my blood solidified and tumbling into the ocean. It is blue. It is blue. It is blue.
for some it is stone bare smooth as a buttock rounding into the crevasse of the world for some it is extravagant water mouths wide washing together forever for some it is fire for some air and for some certain only of the syllables it is the element they search their lives for eden for them it is a test
a poem in seven parts 1convent my knees recall the pockets worn into the stone floor, my hands, tracing against the wall their original name, remember the cold brush of brick, and the smell of the brick powdery and wet and the light finding its way in through the high bars. and also the sisters singing at matins, their sweet music the voice of the universe at peace and the candles their light the light at the beginning of creation and the wonderful simplicity of prayer smooth along the wooden beads and certainly attended. 2someone inside me remembers that my knees must be hidden away that my hair must be shorn so that vanity will not test me that my fingers are places of prayer and are holy that my body is promised to something more certain than myself 3again born in the year of war on the day of perpetual help. come from the house of stillness through the soft gate of a silent mother. come to a betraying father. come to a husband who would one day rise and enter a holy house. come to wrestle with you again, passion, old disobedient friend, through the secular days and nights of another life. 4trying to understand this life who did i fail, who did i cease to protect that i should wake each morning facing the cold north? perhaps there is a cart somewhere in history of children crying “sister save us” as she walks away. the woman walks into my dreams dragging her old habit. i turn from her, shivering, to begin another afternoon of rescue, rescue. 5sinnerman horizontal one evening on the cold stone, my cross burning into my breast, did i dream through my veil of his fingers digging and is this the dream again, him, collarless over me, calling me back to the stones of this world and my own whispered hosanna? 6karma the habit is heavy. you feel its weight pulling around your ankles for a hundred years. the broken vows hang against your breasts, each bead a word that beats you. even now to hear the words defend protect goodbye lost or alone is to be washed in sorrow. and in this life there is no retreat no sanctuary no whole abiding sister. 7gloria mundi so knowing, what is known? that we carry our baggage in our cupped hands when we burst through the waters of our mother. that some are born and some are brought to the glory of this world. that it is more difficult than faith to serve only one calling one commitment one devotion in one life.
Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment.And here, she notes, the Procession of St. Gregory, where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death returns his bloody sword to its scabbard
Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college  one winter, hauling a load of Herefords  from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of  Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser  Elegien
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat  of his father’s Ford and the mysterium of time, holds time in memory with words,night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south  of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks  the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences  and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make  the child think of time in its passing, of death. Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps  of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe  up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this  road
These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double— Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant, have enterd the marvelous. No greater marvelous know I than the mind’s natural jungle. The wives of the Congo distil there their red and the husbands hunt lion with spear and paint Death-spore on their shields, wear his teeth, claws and hair on ordinary occasions. There the Swahili open his doors, let loose thru the trees the tides of Death’s sound and distil from their leaves the terrible red. He is the consort of dreams I have seen, heard in the orchestral dark like the barking of dogs. Death is the dog-headed man zebra striped and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion, who is black. It was his voice crying come back, that Virginia Woolf heard, turnd her fine skull, hounded and haunted, stopt, pointed into the scent where I see her in willows, in fog, at the river of sound in the trees. I see her prepare there to enter Death’s mountains like a white Afghan hound pass into the forest, closed after, let loose in the leaves with more grace than a hound and more wonder there even with flowers wound in her hair, allowing herself like Ophelia a last pastoral gesture of love toward the world.  And I see all our tortures absolved in the fog, dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten. I see all this gentleness like a hound in the water float upward and outward beyond my dark hand. I am waiting this winter for the more complete black-out, for the negro armies in the eucalyptus, for the cities laid open and the cold in the love-light, for hounds women and birds to go back to their forests and leave us our solitude.   . . .   Negroes, negroes, all those princes, holding cups of rhinoceros bone, make magic with my blood. Where beautiful Marijuana towers taller than the eucalyptus, turns within the lips of night and falls, falls downward, where as giant Kings we gathered and devourd her burning hands and feet, O Moonbar thee and Clarinet! those talismans that quickened in their sheltering leaves like thieves, those Negroes, all those princes holding to their mouths like Death the cups of rhino bone, were there to burn my hands and feet, divine the limit of the bone and with their magic tie and twist me like a rope. I know no other continent of Africa more dark than this dark continent of my breast.  And when we are deserted there, when the rustling electric has passt thru the air, once more we begin in the blind and blood throat the African catches; and Desdemona, Desdemona like a demon wails within our bodies, warns against this towering Moor of self and then laments her passing from him. And I cry, Hear! Hear in the coild and secretive ear the drums that I hear beat. The Negroes, all those princes holding cups of bone and horn, are there in halls of blood that I call forests, in the dark and shining caverns where beats heart and pulses brain, in jungles of my body, there Othello moves, striped black and white, the dog-faced fear. Moves I, I, I, whom I have seen as black as Orpheus, pursued deliriously his sound and drownd in hunger’s tone, the deepest wilderness. Then it was I, Death singing, who bewildered the forest. I thot him my lover like a hound of great purity disturbing the shadow and flesh of the jungle. This was the beginning of the ending year. From all of the empty the tortured appear, and the bird-faced children crawl out of their fathers and into that never filld pocket, the no longer asking but silent, seeing nowhere the final sleep. The halls of Africa we seek in dreams as barriers of dream against the deep, and seas disturbd turn back upon their tides into the rooms deserted at the roots of love. There is no end. And how sad then is even the Congo. How the tired sirens come up from the water, not to be toucht but to lie on the rocks of the thunder. How sad then is even the marvelous!
Child! do not throw this book about!   Refrain from the unholy pleasure  Of cutting all the pictures out!  Preserve it as your chiefest treasure. Child, have you never heard it said   That you are heir to all the ages? Why, then, your hands were never made  To tear these beautiful thick pages! Your little hands were made to take  The better things and leave the worse ones:  They also may be used to shake  The Massive Paws of Elder Persons. And when your prayers complete the day,   Darling, your little tiny hands Were also made, I think, to pray   For men that lose their fairylands.
My reading is extremely deep and wide; And as our modern education goes— Unique I think, and skilfully applied To Art and Industry and Autres Choses Through many years of scholarly repose. But there is one thing where I disappoint My numerous admirers (and my foes). Painting on Vellum is my weakest point.
As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.   You will find it exactly the thing: It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,   Or lead it about with a string. The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet   (A desolate region of snow) Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,   And surely the Tartar should know! Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,   And if he is awfully rich He will buy you the creature—or else he will not.  (I cannot be positive which.)
The Whale that wanders round the Pole   Is not a table fish. You cannot bake or boil him whole,   Nor serve him in a dish; But you may cut his blubber up  And melt it down for oil, And so replace the colza bean  (A product of the soil). These facts should all be noted down   And ruminated on, By every boy in Oxford town  Who wants to be a Don.
Be kind and tender to the Frog,  And do not call him names, As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’  Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’ Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’   Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’: The Frog is justly sensitive  To epithets like these. No animal will more repay  A treatment kind and fair; At least so lonely people say Who keep a frog (and, by the way,  They are extremely rare).
The Bison is vain, and (I write it with pain)  The Door-mat you see on his head Is not, as some learned professors maintain,  The opulent growth of a genius’ brain;  But is sewn on with needle and thread.
Godolphin Horne was Nobly Born;  He held the Human Race in Scorn,  And lived with all his Sisters where  His Father lived, in Berkeley Square.  And oh! the Lad was Deathly Proud!  He never shook your Hand or Bowed,  But merely smirked and nodded thus:  How perfectly ridiculous! Alas! That such Affected Tricks  Should flourish in a Child of Six! (For such was Young Godolphin's age).  Just then, the Court required a Page,  Whereat the Lord High Chamberlain  (The Kindest and the Best of Men),  He went good-naturedly and took  A Perfectly Enormous Book Called People Qualified to Be Attendant on His Majesty,
1. The Winter: 1748 —Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802
1. In the windless late sunlight of August, my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back, the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy rippled. I watched from a shallow hill as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck, galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced at the fire trench, circled back, arced again, the flames behind sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart, gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence, some cinch-corral she might have known, the way the walls moved rhythmically, in and in. And to the crows, manic on the thermals? A crescent of their planet, gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter past the fence line, then settle on a Hereford's tufted nape, as if to peck some safer grain, as if the red-cast back it rode contained no transformations. 2. A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there and there, the russet flood of rabbits. Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls began, shrill and wavering, as if their dormant voice strings had tightened into threads of glass. In an instant they were gone—the rabbits, their voices—over the fire trench, into the fallows. My father walked near the burn line, waved up to me, and from that wave, or the rippled film of heat, I remembered our porch in an August wind, how he stepped through the weathered doorway, his hand outstretched with some book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but as he spoke it atomized before us— pulp and stem, the pollened tongue, dreadful in the dancing air. 3. Scummed and boxcar thin, six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields. Inside them, lilies, lilies— a thousand shades of white, I think. Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax. Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed ancestral to me, the fluted heads of dowagers, their meaty, groping, silent tongues. They seemed to form perspective's chain: cinder, bone, divinity. . . 4. My father waved. The crows set down. By evening, our fields took the texture of freshened clay, a sleek and water-bloated sheen, although no water rested there—just heat and ash united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line, circled closer, the grasses all around me collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems— brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown to echo grass. The soot was warm, the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing, and as a breeze crossed slowly through, stems glowed—then ebbed— consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path, and then a kind of journey.
I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark that I cut from a tree with a penknife. There is no other way to express adequately the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms  and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility  that hands you the horizon on a platter. I am also writing this in a wooden canoe, a point of balance in the middle of Lake Couchiching,  resting the birch bark against my knees.  I can feel the sun’s hands on my bare back,  but I am thinking of winter, snow piled up in all the provinces and the solemnity of the long grain-ships that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound. O Canada, as the anthem goes, scene of my boyhood summers, you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,  you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night, you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.  You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,So You’re Going to Paris! by Clara E. Laughlin, and Peril Over the Airport, one of the Vicky Barr Flight Stewardess series by Helen Wills whom some will remember as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories. What has become of the languorous girls who would pass the long limp summer evenings readingCherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,  Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse,
This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises. This is the very beginning. The first-person narrator introduces himself, tells us about his lineage. The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings. Here the climbers are studying a map or pulling on their long woolen socks. This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn. The profile of an animal is being smeared on the wall of a cave, and you have not yet learned to crawl. This is the opening, the gambit, a pawn moving forward an inch. This is your first night with her, your first night without her. This is the first part where the wheels begin to turn, where the elevator begins its ascent, before the doors lurch apart. This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore. Cities have sprouted up along the rivers teeming with people at cross-purposes— a million schemes, a million wild looks. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent. This is the sticky part where the plot congeals, where the action suddenly reverses or swerves off in an outrageous direction. Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph to why Miriam does not want Edward's child. Someone hides a letter under a pillow. Here the aria rises to a pitch, a song of betrayal, salted with revenge. And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge halfway up the mountain. This is the bridge, the painful modulation. This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle— the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados, Russian uniforms, noisy parties, lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall— too much to name, too much to think about. And this is the end, the car running out of road, the river losing its name in an ocean, the long nose of the photographed horse touching the white electronic line. This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade, the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening. Here the stage is littered with bodies, the narrator leads the characters to their cells, and the climbers are in their graves. It is me hitting the period and you closing the book. It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck. This is the final bit thinning away to nothing. This is the end, according to Aristotle, what we have all been waiting for, what everything comes down to, the destination we cannot help imagining, a streak of light in the sky, a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,  its white flag waving over everything, the landscape vanished, not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,  and beyond these windows the government buildings smothered, schools and libraries buried, the post office lost  under the noiseless drift, the paths of trains softly blocked, the world fallen under this falling. In a while, I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water,  and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,  and I will shake a laden branch sending a cold shower down on us both. But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,  a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.  I will make a pot of tea and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,  as glad as anyone to hear the news that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,  the Ding-Dong School, closed. the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,  the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed, along with—some will be delighted to hear— the Toadstool School, the Little School, Little Sparrows Nursery School, Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School  the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed, and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School. So this is where the children hide all day, These are the nests where they letter and draw,  where they put on their bright miniature jackets,  all darting and climbing and sliding, all but the few girls whispering by the fence. And now I am listening hard in the grandiose silence of the snow, trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,  what riot is afoot, which small queen is about to be brought down.
I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger. This is the cycle of life I say to no one. This is the wheel of fortune, the Arctic Circle. This is the ring of Kerry and the white rose of Tralee I say to the ghosts of my family, the dead fathers, the aunt who drowned, my unborn brothers and sisters, my unborn children. This is the sun with its glittering spokes and the bitter moon. This is the absolute circle of geometry I say to the crack in the wall, to the birds who cross the window. This is the wheel I just invented to roll through the rest of my life I say touching my finger to my tongue.
The whole world was there, plucking their linen,  half-bald, mumbling, sucking on their moustache tips.  Broadway was still in business and they asked no favors. All the cracked ribs of Fredericksburg, the boys who held their tongues at Chancellorsville  as the bandages, mule shit, skin and shot overran the Rappahannock’s banks  and poured it in our mouths  that summer. He sat up half the night reading to the Army of the Potomac  poems about trooping goats and crazy fathers  chewing grass in the wilderness.  It’s me that saved his life, dear mother,  he had dysentery, bronchitis, and something else   the doctors couldn
Its small celestial reach stops  where the counterweight, the first  tough green fruit, pulls earthward  and returns the brazen, almost rank perfume  of blossoms now six months gone. The slurred odor of its leaves  calls back that long evening’s end:  we shivered in the cool light  a northerly sun bent against the world  into the hands of friends who helped clear the outdoor supper’s  sharp debris—forks, tin plates,  balled napkins and bone nests.  The lemon blossoms throbbed. The air  slowed with so much young life, the fragrance quickened in our veins  the common, too surprising wish  to hold, just then, another,  whoever stood nearest, whatever charm  would bind us to the lowering light. Then someone said, “Let’s eat the tree”—  Tear apart the bole, raid the green heart,  devour remembrance with one moment’s  hunger and eat the nature of things. Scraped plates, laughter, glasses refilled . . . Our sweet anger urged and gathered us  around the young tree’s tub, made us  tamp the wet soil and drink fast  the clear smell of unseen yellow fruit  in time we ourselves might never know.
Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.
The water sings along our keel,   The wind falls to a whispering breath; I look into your eyes and feel  No fear of life or death;  So near is love, so far away  The losing strife of yesterday. We watch the swallow skim and dip;  Some magic bids the world be still;  Life stands with finger upon lip;  Love hath his gentle will; Though hearts have bled, and tears have burned, The river floweth unconcerned. We pray the fickle flag of truce  Still float deceitfully and fair; Our eyes must love its sweet abuse;   This hour we will not care, Though just beyond to-morrow's gate,  Arrayed and strong, the battle wait.
A noisome thing that crawls by covert path,  For glad, unfearing feet to lie in wait; No part in summer’s fellowship it hath,  From mirth and love and music alienate. Yet once it flashed across the close, brown grass  In the noon sun, and, as it quivered there, The spell of beauty over it did pass,  Making it kin with earth and light and air. I knew that Life’s imperial self decrees  That this, the loathliest of living things, By patient ways of cycled centuries,  Slow creeping, shall at last attain to wings.
1896 Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all— The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.  Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good  For such as cannot use one bed too long,  But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done,  An’ go observin’ matters till they die. What do it matter where or ’ow we die, So long as we’ve our ’ealth to watch it all— The different ways that different things are done,  An’ men an’ women lovin’ in this world;  Takin’ our chances as they come along,  An’ when they ain’t, pretendin’ they are good? In cash or credit—no, it aren’t no good;  You ’ave to ’ave the ’abit or you’d die, Unless you lived your life but one day long,  Nor didn’t prophesy nor fret at all, But drew your tucker some’ow from the world,  An’ never bothered what you might ha’ done. But, Gawd, what things are they I ’aven’t done?  I’ve turned my ’and to most, an’ turned it good,  In various situations round the world— For ’im that doth not work must surely die;  But that's no reason man should labour all  ’Is life on one same shift—life’s none so long. Therefore, from job to job I’ve moved along.  Pay couldn’t ’old me when my time was done,  For something in my ’ead upset it all, Till I ’ad dropped whatever ’twas for good,  An’, out at sea, be’eld the dock-lights die, An’ met my mate—the wind that tramps the world! It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,  Which you can read and care for just so long,  But presently you feel that you will die  Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,  An’ turn another—likely not so good;  But what you’re after is to turn ’em all. Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done— Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.  So write, before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’
1894 You couldn’t pack a Broadwood half a mile—  You mustn’t leave a fiddle in the damp— You couldn’t raft an organ up the Nile,  And play it in an Equatorial swamp.I travel with the cooking-pots and pails—  I’m sandwiched ’tween the coffee and the pork— And when the dusty column checks and tails,  You should hear me spur the rearguard to a walk!  With my ‘Pilly-willy-winky-winky-popp!’  [Oh, it’s any tune that comes into my head!]   So I keep ’em moving forward till they drop;  So I play ’em up to water and to bed. In the silence of the camp before the fight,  When it’s good to make your will and say your prayer,  You can hear my strumpty-tumpty overnight,  Explaining ten to one was always fair. I’m the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd,  Of the Patently Impossible and Vain— And when the Thing that Couldn’t has occurred,   Give me time to change my leg and go again.  With my ‘Tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tump!’  In the desert where the dung-fed camp-smoke curled.  There was never voice before us till I led our lonely chorus,  I—the war-drum of the White Man round the world! By the bitter road the Younger Son must tread,   Ere he win to hearth and saddle of his own,— ’Mid the riot of the shearers at the shed,  In the silence of the herder’s hut alone— In the twilight, on a bucket upside down,  Hear me babble what the weakest won’t confess— I am Memory and Torment—I am Town!  I am all that ever went with evening dress!  With my ‘Tunka-tunka-tunka-tunka-tunk!’  [So the lights—the London Lights—grow near and plain!]  So I rowel ’em afresh towards the Devil and the Flesh   Till I bring my broken rankers home again. In desire of many marvels over sea,  Where the new-raised tropic city sweats and roars,  I have sailed with Young Ulysses from the quay   Till the anchor rumbled down on stranger shores. He is blooded to the open and the sky,  He is taken in a snare that shall not fail, He shall hear me singing strongly, till he die,  Like the shouting of a backstay in a gale.  With my ‘Hya! Heeya! Heeya! Hullah! Haul!’  [Oh, the green that thunders aft along the deck!]  Are you sick o’ towns and men? You must sign and sail again,  For it’s ‘Johnny Bowlegs, pack your kit and trek!’ Through the gorge that gives the stars at noon-day clear—  Up the pass that packs the scud beneath our wheel— Round the bluff that sinks her thousand fathom sheer—  Down the valley with our guttering brakes asqueal:  Where the trestle groans and quivers in the snow,  Where the many-shedded levels loop and twine,  Hear me lead my reckless children from below  Till we sing the Song of Roland to the pine!  With my ‘Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tink!’  [Oh, the axe has cleared the mountain, croup and crest!]  And we ride the iron stallions down to drink,   Through the cañons to the waters of the West! And the tunes that mean so much to you alone—  Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose— Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan—  I can rip your very heartstrings out with those;  With the feasting, and the folly, and the fun—  And the lying, and the lusting, and the drink, And the merry play that drops you, when you’re done.   To the thoughts that burn like irons if you think.  With my ‘Plunka-lunka-lunka-lunka-lunk!’  Here’s a trifle on account of pleasure past,  Ere the wit that made you win gives you eyes to see your sin  And—the heavier repentance at the last! Let the organ moan her sorrow to the roof—  I have told the naked stars the Grief of Man!  Let the trumpet snare the foeman to the proof—  I have known Defeat, and mocked it as we ran!  My bray ye may not alter nor mistake  When I stand to jeer the fatted Soul of Things,  But the Song of Lost Endeavour that I make,   Is it hidden in the twanging of the strings?  With my ‘Ta-ra-rara-rara-ra-ra-rrrp!’  [Is it naught to you that hear and pass me by?]   But the word—the word is mine, when the order moves the line  And the lean, locked ranks go roaring down to die! The grandam of my grandam was the Lyre—  [Oh, the blue below the little fisher-huts!] That the Stealer stooping beachward filled with fire,  Till she bore my iron head and ringing guts!  By the wisdom of the centuries I speak—  To the tune of yestermorn I set the truth— I, the joy of life unquestioned—I, the Greek—  I, the everlasting Wonder-song of Youth!  With my ‘Tinka-tinka-tinka-tinka-tink!’  [What d’ye lack, my noble masters! What d’ye lack?]  So I draw the world together link by link:  Yea, from Delos up to Limerick and back!
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,   And the ricks stand grey to the sun, Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,  ‘And your English summer's done.’   You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,   And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;  You have heard the song—how long? how long?   Pull out on the trail again! Ha’ done with the Tents of Shem, dear lass,  We’ve seen the seasons through, And it’s time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new! It’s North you may run to the rime-ringed sun  Or South to the blind Horn’s hate; Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay,  Or West to the Golden Gate—  Where the blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass,   And the wildest tales are true,  And the men bulk big on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  And life runs large on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. The days are sick and cold, and the skies are grey and old,   And the twice-breathed airs blow damp; And I’d sell my tired soul for the bucking beam-sea roll   Of a black Bilbao tramp,  With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,   And a drunken Dago crew,  And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail  From Cadiz south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,   Or the way of a man with a maid; But the sweetest way to me is a ship’s upon the sea   In the heel of the North-East Trade.  Can you hear the crash on her bows, dear lass,   And the drum of the racing screw,  As she ships it green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  As she lifts and ’scends on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new? See the shaking funnels roar, with the Peter at the fore,  And the fenders grind and heave, And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,  And the fall-rope whines through the sheave;  It’s ‘Gang-plank up and in,’ dear lass,  It’s ‘Hawsers warp her through!’  And it's ‘All clear aft’ on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  We’re backing down on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. O the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied,  And the sirens hoot their dread, When foot by foot we creep o’er the hueless, viewless deep  To the sob of the questing lead!  It’s down by the Lower Hope, dear lass,  With the Gunfleet Sands in view,  Till the Mouse swings green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  And the Gull Light lifts on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light  That holds the hot sky tame, And the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powdered floors  Where the scared whale flukes in flame!  Her plates are flaked by the sun, dear lass,   And her ropes are taut with the dew,  For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,   And the shouting seas drive by, And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing,  And the Southern Cross rides high!  Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,   That blaze in the velvet blue.  They’re all old friends on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  They’re God’s own guides on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. Fly forward, O my heart, from the Foreland to the Start—  We’re steaming all too slow, And it’s twenty thousand mile to our little lazy isle   Where the trumpet-orchids blow!  You have heard the call of the off-shore wind   And the voice of the deep-sea rain;  You have heard the song—how long?—how long?   Pull out on the trail again! The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,  And The Deuce knows what we may do— But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,  We’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new!
1896 They christened my brother of old—  And a saintly name he bears— They gave him his place to hold  At the head of the belfry-stairs,  Where the minster-towers stand And the breeding kestrels cry.  Would I change with my brother a league inland?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I ! In the flush of the hot June prime,  O’er sleek flood-tides afire, I hear him hurry the chime  To the bidding of checked Desire;  Till the sweated ringers tire And the wild bob-majors die.  Could I wait for my turn in the godly choir?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! When the smoking scud is blown—  When the greasy wind-rack lowers— Apart and at peace and alone,  He counts the changeless hours.  He wars with darkling Powers (I war with, a darkling sea);  Would he stoop to my work in the gusty mirk?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not he! There was never a priest to pray,  There was never a hand to toll, When they made me guard of the bay,  And moored me over the shoal.  I rock, I reel, and I roll— My four great hammers ply—  Could I speak or be still at the Church’s will?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! The landward marks have failed,  The fog-bank glides unguessed, The seaward lights are veiled,  The spent deep feigns her rest:  But my ear is laid to her breast, I lift to the swell—I cry!  Could I wait in sloth on the Church’s oath?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! At the careless end of night  I thrill to the nearing screw; I turn in the clearing light  And I call to the drowsy crew;  And the mud boils foul and blue As the blind bow backs away.  Will they give me their thanks if they clear the banks?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not they! The beach-pools cake and skim,  The bursting spray-heads freeze, I gather on crown and rim  The grey, grained ice of the seas,  Where, sheathed from bitt to trees, The plunging colliers lie.  Would I barter my place for the Church’s grace?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! Through the blur of the whirling snow,  Or the black of the inky sleet, The lanterns gather and grow,  And I look for the homeward fleet.  Rattle of block and sheet— ‘Ready about—stand by!’  Shall I ask them a fee ere they fetch the quay?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! I dip and I surge and I swing  In the rip of the racing tide, By the gates of doom I sing,  On the horns of death I ride.  A ship-length overside, Between the course and the sand,  Fretted and bound I bide  Peril whereof I cry. Would I change with my brother a league inland?(Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I!
1897 God of our fathers, known of old,  Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold  Dominion over palm and pine— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies;  The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,  An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called, our navies melt away;  On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose  Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use,  Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust  In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust,  And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Ah! What avails the classic bent  And what the cultured word, Against the undoctored incident  That actually occurred?
‘What are the bugles blowin’ for?' said Files-on-Parade.  ‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.  For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,  The Regiment’s in ’ollow square—they’re hangin’ him to-day;  They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away,  An’ they're hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’. ‘What makes the rear-rank breathe so ’ard?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s bitter cold, it's bitter cold,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘What makes that front-rank man fall down?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘A touch o’ sun, a touch o’ sun,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.  They are hangin’ Danny Deever, they are marchin’ of ’im round,  They ’ave ’alted Danny Deever by ’is coffin on the ground;  An’ ’e’ll swing in ’arf a minute for a sneakin’ shootin’ hound—  O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin!’ ‘’Is cot was right-’and cot to mine,’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘’E’s sleepin’ out an’ far to-night,’ the Colour-Sergeant said. ‘I’ve drunk ’is beer a score o’ times,’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘’E’s drinkin’ bitter beer alone,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.  They are hangin’ Danny Deever, you must mark ’im to ’is place,  For ’e shot a comrade sleepin’—you must look ’im in the face;  Nine ’undred of ’is county an’ the Regiment’s disgrace,   While they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’. ‘What’s that so black agin the sun?’ said Files-on-Parade.  ‘It’s Danny fightin’ ’ard for life,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.  ‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead?’ said Files-on-Parade. ‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.  For they’re done with Danny Deever, you can ’ear the quickstep play,  The Regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away;  Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer to-day,  After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’!
You may talk o’ gin and beer  When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,  An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter  You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.  Now in Injia’s sunny clime,  Where I used to spend my time  A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,  Of all them blackfaced crew  The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din,   He was ‘Din! Din! Din!  ‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!  ‘Hi! Slippy hitherao  ‘Water, get it! Panee lao,  ‘You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’ The uniform ’e wore Was nothin’ much before, An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind, For a piece o’ twisty rag  An’ a goatskin water-bag Was all the field-equipment ’e could find. When the sweatin’ troop-train lay In a sidin’ through the day, Where the ’eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl, We shouted ‘Harry By!’ Till our throats were bricky-dry, Then we wopped ’im ’cause ’e couldn’t serve us all.  It was ‘Din! Din! Din!  ‘You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been?   ‘You put some juldee in it  ‘Or I’ll marrow you this minute  ‘If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!’ ’E would dot an’ carry one Till the longest day was done; An’ ’e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear. If we charged or broke or cut, You could bet your bloomin’ nut, ’E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.  With ’is mussick on ’is back, ’E would skip with our attack, An’ watch us till the bugles made 'Retire,’  An’ for all ’is dirty ’ide ’E was white, clear white, inside When ’e went to tend the wounded under fire!   It was ‘Din! Din! Din!’  With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green.   When the cartridges ran out,  You could hear the front-ranks shout,   ‘Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!’ I shan’t forgit the night When I dropped be’ind the fight With a bullet where my belt-plate should ’a’ been.  I was chokin’ mad with thirst, An’ the man that spied me first Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.  ’E lifted up my ’ead, An’ he plugged me where I bled, An’ ’e guv me ’arf-a-pint o’ water green. It was crawlin’ and it stunk, But of all the drinks I’ve drunk, I’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.  It was 'Din! Din! Din!  ‘’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ’is spleen;   ‘’E's chawin’ up the ground,  ‘An’ ’e’s kickin’ all around:  ‘For Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!’ ’E carried me away To where a dooli lay, An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.  ’E put me safe inside, An’ just before ’e died, 'I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.  So I’ll meet ’im later on At the place where ’e is gone— Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.  ’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals Givin’ drink to poor damned souls, An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!   Yes, Din! Din! Din!  You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!   Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,   By the livin’ Gawd that made you,  You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
(‘The Winged Hats’ —Puck of Pook’s Hill) Rome never looks where she treads.   Always her heavy hooves fall  On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;   And Rome never heeds when we bawl.  Her sentries pass on—that is all,  And we gather behind them in hordes,  And plot to reconquer the Wall,  With only our tongues for our swords. We are the Little Folk—we!  Too little to love or to hate.  Leave us alone and you’ll see  How we can drag down the State! We are the worm in the wood!  We are the rot at the root!  We are the taint in the blood!  We are the thorn in the foot! Mistletoe killing an oak—  Rats gnawing cables in two— Moths making holes in a cloak—  How they must love what they do!  Yes—and we Little Folk too,  We are busy as they— Working our works out of view—  Watch, and you’ll see it some day! No indeed! We are not strong,  But we know Peoples that are.  Yes, and we’ll guide them along  To smash and destroy you in War!We shall be slaves just the same?  Yes, we have always been slaves, But you—you will die of the shame,  And then we shall dance on your graves!  We are the Little Folk, we, etc.
(‘“The Finest Story in the World”’—Many Inventions) We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low. Will you never let us go? We ate bread and onions when you took towns, or ran aboard quickly when you were beaten back by the foe. The Captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing songs, but we were below. We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle, for we still swung to and fro. Will you never let us go? The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to the gums, and you whipped us because we could not row.  Will you never let us go? But, in a little time, we shall run out of the port-holes as the water runs along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho!  Will you never let us go?
(MODERN MACHINERY) We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,   We were melted in the furnace and the pit—  We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,   We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.  Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,  And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:  And now, if you will set us to our task,  We will serve you four and twenty hours a day!  We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive,   We can print and plough and weave and heat and light,  We can run and race and swim and fly and dive,   We can see and hear and count and read and write! Would you call a friend from half across the world?  If you’ll let us have his name and town and state, You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled  Across the arch of heaven while you wait.  Has he answered? Does he need you at his side?  You can start this very evening if you choose,  And take the Western Ocean in the stride  Of seventy thousand horses and some screws!  The boat-express is waiting your command!   You will find the Mauretania at the quay,  Till her captain turns the lever ’neath his hand,   And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea. Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head   And lay their new-cut forests at your feet?  Do you want to turn a river in its bed,  Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat? Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down  From the never-failing cisterns of the snows,  To work the mills and tramways in your town,  And irrigate your orchards as it flows?  It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!  Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake   As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,  And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake. But remember, please, the Law by which we live,   We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.  If you make a slip in handling us you die!  We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—  Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!- Our touch can alter all created things,  We are everything on earth—except The Gods! Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,  It will vanish and the stars will shine again,  Because, for all our power and weight and size,   We are nothing more than children of your brain!
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies   Behold the Spirit of the musky South,  A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,  Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:   Swathed in spun gauze is she,  From fibres of her own anana tree. Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease,   By rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed:  ’Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees,  Like to the golden oriole’s hanging nest,   Her airy hammock swings, And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings. How beautiful she is! A tulip-wreath  Twines round her shadowy, free-floating hair:  Young, weary, passionate, and sad as death,  Dark visions haunt for her the vacant air,  While noiselessly she lies With lithe, lax, folded hands and heavy eyes. Full well knows she how wide and fair extend  Her groves bright flowered, her tangled everglades,  Majestic streams that indolently wend  Through lush savanna or dense forest shades,   Where the brown buzzard flies To broad bayous ’neath hazy-golden skies. Hers is the savage splendor of the swamp,  With pomp of scarlet and of purple bloom, Where blow warm, furtive breezes faint and damp,  Strange insects whir, and stalking bitterns boom—  Where from stale waters dead Oft looms the great jawed alligator’s head. Her wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,—  Of all she is aware: luxuriant woods, Fresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees;  And ever midst those verdant solitudes  The soldier’s wooden cross, O’ergrown by creeping tendrils and rank moss. Was hers a dream of empire? was it sin?  And is it well that all was borne in vain? She knows no more than one who slow doth win,  After fierce fever, conscious life again,  Too tired, too weak, too sad, By the new light to be or stirred or glad. From rich sea-islands fringing her green shore,  From broad plantations where swart freemen bend  Bronzed backs in willing labor, from her store  Of golden fruit, from stream, from town, ascend  Life-currents of pure health: Her aims shall be subserved with boundless wealth. Yet now how listless and how still she lies,  Like some half-savage, dusky Indian queen, Rocked in her hammock ’neath her native skies,   With the pathetic, passive, broken mien  Of one who, sorely proved, Great-souled, hath suffered much and much hath loved! But look! along the wide-branched, dewy glade   Glimmers the dawn: the light palmetto trees  And cypresses reissue from the shade,  And she hath wakened. Through clear air she sees   The pledge, the brightening ray, And leaps from dreams to hail the coming day.
Rosh-Hashanah, 5643 Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled,  And naked branches point to frozen skies.— When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold,  The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn  A sea of beauty and abundance lies,  Then the new year is born. Look where the mother of the months uplifts   In the green clearness of the unsunned West,  Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts,  Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light;  Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest  Profusely to requite. Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call  Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.   The red, dark year is dead, the year just born Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob,  To what undreamed-of morn? For never yet, since on the holy height,  The Temple’s marble walls of white and green  Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light  Went out in darkness,—never was the year  Greater with portent and with promise seen,  Than this eve now and here. Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent  Hath been enlarged unto earth’s farthest rim. To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went,   Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave, For freedom to proclaim and worship Him,  Mighty to slay and save. High above flood and fire ye held the scroll,  Out of the depths ye published still the Word.  No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul:  Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths, Lived to bear witness to the living Lord,  Or died a thousand deaths. In two divided streams the exiles part,  One rolling homeward to its ancient source,  One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.  By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled,  Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,  And both embrace the world. Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays,  Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers, The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise  Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove  How strength of supreme suffering still is ours  For Truth and Law and Love.

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,  The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,  The West refused them, and the East abhorred.  No anchorage the known world could afford,  Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.  Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,  A virgin world where doors of sunset part,  Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here! There falls each ancient barrier that the art  Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!"
Little Poems in Prose I. The Exodus. (August 3, 1492.) 1. The Spanish noon is a blaze of azure fire, and the dusty pilgrims crawl like an endless serpent along treeless plains and bleached highroads, through rock-split ravines and castellated, cathedral-shadowed towns. 2. The hoary patriarch, wrinkled as an almond shell, bows painfully upon his staff. The beautiful young mother, ivory-pale, well-nigh swoons beneath her burden; in her large enfolding arms nestles her sleeping babe, round her knees flock her little ones with bruised and bleeding feet. “Mother, shall we soon be there?” 3. The youth with Christ-like countenance speaks comfortably to father and brother, to maiden and wife. In his breast, his own heart is broken. 4. The halt, the blind, are amid the train. Sturdy pack-horses laboriously drag the tented wagons wherein lie the sick athirst with fever. 5. The panting mules are urged forward with spur and goad; stuffed are the heavy saddlebags with the wreckage of ruined homes. 6. Hark to the tinkling silver bells that adorn the tenderly-carried silken scrolls. 7. In the fierce noon-glare a lad bears a kindled lamp; behind its network of bronze the airs of heaven breathe not upon its faint purple star. 8. Noble and abject, learned and simple, illustrious and obscure, plod side by side, all brothers now, all merged in one routed army of misfortune. 9. Woe to the straggler who falls by the wayside! no friend shall close his eyes. 10. They leave behind, the grape, the olive, and the fig; the vines they planted, the corn they sowed, the garden-cities of Andalusia and Aragon, Estremadura and La Mancha, of Granada and Castile; the altar, the hearth, and the grave of their fathers. 11. The townsman spits at their garments, the shepherd quits his flock, the peasant his plow, to pelt with curses and stones; the villager sets on their trail his yelping cur. 12. Oh the weary march, oh the uptorn roots of home, oh the blankness of the receding goal! 13. Listen to their lamentation: They that ate dainty food are desolate in the streets; they that were reared in scarlet embrace dunghills. They flee away and wander about. Men say among the nations, they shall no more sojourn there; our end is near, our days are full, our doom is come. 14. Whither shall they turn? for the West hath cast them out, and the East refuseth to receive. 15. O bird of the air, whisper to the despairing exiles, that to-day, to-day, from the many-masted, gayly-bannered port of Palos, sails the world-unveiling Genoese, to unlock the golden gates of sunset and bequeath a Continent to Freedom! II. Treasures. 1. Through cycles of darkness the diamond sleeps in its coal-black prison. 2. Purely incrusted in its scaly casket, the breath-tarnished pearl slumbers in mud and ooze. 3. Buried in the bowels of earth, rugged and obscure, lies the ingot of gold. 4. Long hast thou been buried, O Israel, in the bowels of earth; long hast thou slumbered beneath the overwhelming waves; long hast thou slept in the rayless house of darkness. 5. Rejoice and sing, for only thus couldst thou rightly guard the golden knowledge, Truth, the delicate pearl and the adamantine jewel of the Law. III. The Sower. 1. Over a boundless plain went a man, carrying seed. 2. His face was blackened by sun and rugged from tempest, scarred and distorted by pain. Naked to the loins, his back was ridged with furrows, his breast was plowed with stripes. 3. From his hand dropped the fecund seed. 4. And behold, instantly started from the prepared soil blade, a sheaf, a springing trunk, a myriad-branching, cloud-aspiring tree. Its arms touched the ends of the horizon, the heavens were darkened with its shadow. 5. It bare blossoms of gold and blossoms of blood, fruitage of health and fruitage of poison; birds sang amid its foliage, and a serpent was coiled about its stem. 6. Under its branches a divinely beautiful man, crowned with thorns, was nailed to a cross. 7. And the tree put forth treacherous boughs to strangle the Sower; his flesh was bruised and torn, but cunningly he disentangled the murderous knot and passed to the eastward. 8. Again there dropped from his hand the fecund seed. 9. And behold, instantly started from the prepared soil a blade, a sheaf, a springing trunk, a myriad-branching, cloud-aspiring tree. Crescent shaped like little emerald moons were the leaves; it bare blossoms of silver and blossoms of blood, fruitage of health and fruitage of poison; birds sang amid its foilage and a serpent was coiled about its stem. 10. Under its branches a turbaned mighty-limbed Prophet brandished a drawn sword. 11. And behold, this tree likewise puts forth perfidious arms to strangle the Sower; but cunningly he disentangles the murderous knot and passes on. 12. Lo, his hands are not empty of grain, the strength of his arm is not spent. 13. What germ hast thou saved for the future, O miraculous Husbandman? Tell me, thou Planter of Christhood and Islam; tell me, thou seed-bearing Israel! IV. The Test. 1. Daylong I brooded upon the Passion of Israel. 2. I saw him bound to the wheel, nailed to the cross, cut off by the sword, burned at the stake, tossed into the seas. 3. And always the patient, resolute, martyr face arose in silent rebuke and defiance. 4. A Prophet with four eyes; wide gazed the orbs of the spirit above the sleeping eyelids of the senses. 5. A Poet, who plucked from his bosom the quivering heart and fashioned it into a lyre. 6. A placid-browed Sage, uplifted from earth in celestial meditation. 7. These I saw, with princes and people in their train; the monumental dead and the standard-bearers of the future. 8. And suddenly I heard a burst of mocking laughter, and turning, I beheld the shuffling gait, the ignominious features, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto. V. Currents. 1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent. 2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe, 3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav, 4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion. 5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward. 6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them. 7. The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem’s royal shepherds renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras. VI. The Prophet. 1. Moses ben Maimon lifting his perpetual lamp over the path of the perplexed; 2. Hallevi, the honey-tongued poet, wakening amid the silent ruins of Zion the sleeping lyre of David; 3. Moses, the wise son of Mendel, who made the Ghetto illustrious; 4. Abarbanel, the counselor of kings; Aicharisi, the exquisite singer; Ibn Ezra, the perfect old man; Gabirol, the tragic seer; 5. Heine, the enchanted magician, the heart-broken jester; 6.Yea, and the century-crowned patriarch whose bounty engirdles the globe;— 7. These need no wreath and no trumpet; like perennial asphodel blossoms, their fame, their glory resounds like the brazen-throated cornet. 8. But thou—hast thou faith in the fortune of Israel? Wouldst thou lighten the anguish of Jacob? 9. Then shalt thou take the hand of yonder caftaned wretch with flowing curls and gold-pierced ears; 10. Who crawls blinking forth from the loathsome recesses of the Jewry; 11. Nerveless his fingers, puny his frame; haunted by the bat-like phantoms of superstition is his brain. 12. Thou shalt say to the bigot, “My Brother,” and to the creature of darkness, “My Friend.” 13 . And thy heart shall spend itself in fountains of love upon the ignorant, the coarse, and the abject. 14. Then in the obscurity thou shalt hear a rush of wings, thine eyes shall be bitten with pungent smoke. 15. And close against thy quivering lips shall be pressed the live coal wherewith the Seraphim brand the Prophets. VII. Chrysalis. 1. Long, long has the Orient Jew spun around his helplessness the cunningly enmeshed web of Talmud and Kabbala. 2. Imprisoned in dark corners of misery and oppression, closely he drew about him the dust-gray filaments, soft as silk and stubborn as steel, until he lay death-stiffened in mummied seclusion. 3. And the world has named him an ugly worm, shunning the blessed daylight. 4. But when the emancipating springtide breathes wholesome, quickening airs, when the Sun of Love shines out with cordial fires, lo, the Soul of Israel bursts her cobweb sheath, and flies forth attired in the winged beauty of immortality.
I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht  The warl’ like an eemis stane Wags i’ the lift; An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift. Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read  The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame An’ history’s hazelraw No’ yirdit thaim.
Aulder than mammoth or than mastodon  Deep i’ the herts o’ a’ men lurk scaut-heid  Skrymmorie monsters few daur look upon. Brides sometimes catch their wild een, scansin’ reid,  Beekin’ abune the herts they thocht to lo’e  And horror-stricken ken that i’ themselves  A like beast stan’s, and lookin’ love thro’ and thro’  Meets the reid een wi’ een like seevun hells.  ... Nearer the twa beasts draw, and, couplin’, brak The bubbles o’ twa sauls and the haill warld gangs black. Yet wha has heard the beasts’ wild matin’-call  To ither music syne can gi’e nae ear. The nameless lo’enotes haud him in a thrall.  Forgot are guid and ill, and joy and fear. ... My bluid sail thraw a dark hood owre my een  And I sail venture deep into the hills Whaur, scaddows on the skyline, can be seen —Twinin’ the sun’s brent broo wi’ plaited horns As gin they crooned it wi’ a croon o’ thorns— The beasts in wha’s wild cries a’ Scotland’s destiny thrills. The lo’es o’ single herts are strays; but there  The herds that draw the generations are,  And whasae hears them roarin’, evermair  Is yin wi’ a’ that gangs to mak’ or mar  The spirit o’ the race, and leads it still Whither it can be led, ’yont a’ desire and will.I Wergeland, I mind o’ thee—for thy bluid tae Kent the rouch dirl o’ an auld Scots strain, —A dour dark burn that has its ain wild say Thro’ a’ the thrang bricht babble o’ Earth’s flood.  Behold, thwart my ramballiach life again, What thrawn and roothewn dreams, royat and rude,  Reek forth—a foray dowless herts condemn— While chance wi’ rungs o’ sang or silence renshels them. (A foray frae the past—and future tae Sin Time’s a blindness we’ll thraw aff some day!)  ... On the rumgunshoch sides o’ hills forgotten  Life hears beasts rowtin’ that it deemed extinct,  And, sudden, on the hapless cities linked  In canny civilisation’s canty dance Poor herds o’ heich-skeich monsters, misbegotten,  ... Streets clear afore the scarmoch advance:  Frae every winnock skimmerin’ een keek oot  To see what sic camsteerie cast-offs are aboot. Cast-offs?—But wha mak’s life a means to ony end? This sterves and that stuff’s fu’, scraps this and succours that? The best survive there’s nane but fules contend.  Na! Ilka daith is but a santit need. ... Lo! what bricht flames o’ beauty are lit at The unco’ een o’ lives that Life thocht deid Till winnock efter winnock kindles wi’ a sense  O’ gain and glee—as gin a mair intense Starn nor the sun had risen in wha’s licht Mankind and beasts anew, wi’ gusto, see their plicht. Mony’s the auld hauf-human cry I ken Fa’s like a revelation on the herts o’ men As tho’ the graves were split and the first man  Grippit the latest wi’ a freendly han’ ... And there’s forgotten shibboleths o’ the Scots  Ha’e keys to senses lockit to us yet —Coorse words that shamble thro’ oor minds like stots,  Syne turn on’s muckle een wi’ doonsin’ emerauds lit. I hear nae ‘hee-haw’ but I mind the day A’e donkey strunted doon a palm-strewn way  As Chesterton has sung; nae wee click-clack  O’ hoofs but to my hert at aince comes back  Jammes’ Prayer to Gang to Heaven wi’ the Asses;  And shambles-ward nae cattle-beast e’er passes  But I mind hoo the saft een o’ the kine  Lichted Christ’s craidle wi’ their canny shine. Hee-Haw! Click-Clack! And Cock-a-doodle-doo!  —Wull Gabriel in Esperanto cry Or a’ the warld’s undeemis jargons try?It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men,  And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken  E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots’ll dirl richt thro’  As nocht else could—for here’s a language rings Wi’ datchie sesames, and names for nameless things.
The function, as it seems to me,  O’ Poetry is to bring to be  At lang, lang last that unity ...  But wae’s me on the weary wheel!  Higgledy-piggledy in’t we reel,  And little it cares hoo we may feel. Twenty-six thoosand years ’t’ll tak’  For it to threid the Zodiac —A single roond o’ the wheel to mak’! Lately it turned—I saw mysel’ In sic a company doomed to mell,  I micht ha’e been in Dante’s Hell. It shows hoo little the best o’ men  E’en o’ themsels at times can ken— I sune saw that when I gaed ben. The lesser wheel within the big  That moves as merry as a grig,  Wi’ mankind in its whirligig, And hasna turned a’e circle yet  Tho’ as it turns we slide in it, And needs maun tak’ the place we get. I felt it turn, and syne I saw John Knox and Clavers in my raw,  And Mary Queen o’ Scots ana’, And Rabbie Burns and Weelum Wallace,  And Carlyle lookin’ unco gallus,  And Harry Lauder (to enthrall us). And as I looked I saw them a’,  A’ the Scots baith big and sma’,  That e’er the braith o’ life did draw. ‘Mercy o’ Gode, I canna thole  Wi’ sic an orra mob to roll.’—‘Wheesht! It’s for the guid o’ your soul.’ ‘But what’s the meanin’, what’s the sense?’   —‘Men shift but by experience.’Twixt Scots there is nae difference. They canna learn, sae canna move,  But stick for aye to their auld groove —The only race in History who’ve Bidden in the same category Frae stert to present o’ their story,  And deem their ignorance their glory. The mair they differ, mair the same.  The wheel can whummle a’ but them, —They ca’ their obstinacy “Hame,” And “Puir Auld Scotland” bleat wi’ pride,  And wi’ their minds made up to bide  A thorn in a’ the wide world’s side. There ha’e been Scots wha ha’e ha’en thochts,  They’re strewn through maist o’ the various lots —Sic traitors are nae Langer Scots!’
Sometimes she’s Confucian—resolute in privation. . . . Each day, more immobile, hip not mending, legs swollen; still she carries her grief with a hard steadiness. Twelve years uncompanioned, there’s no point longing for what can’t return. This morning, she tells me, she found a robin hunched in the damp dirt by the blossoming white azalea. Still there at noon— she went out in the yard with her 4-pronged metal cane— it appeared to be dying. Tonight, when she looked again, the bird had disappeared and in its place, under the bush, was a tiny egg— “Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”— she carried carefully indoors. “Are you keeping it warm?” I ask—what am I thinking?— And she: “Gail, I don’t want a bird, I want a blue egg.”
The black kitten cries at her bowlmeek meek and the gray one glowers from the windowsill. My hand on the can to serve them. First day of spring. Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday. What she wanted was that ride with me— shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances, 1930, 1958, 1970. How cruel the world has been to her, how uncanny she’s survived it. In her bag, a birthday card from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely with love—
“ . . . But my mind, gone out in tenderness, Shrinks from its object . . .” —Randall Jarrell I want to find my way back to her, to help her, to grab her hand, pull her up from the wooden floor of the stacks where she’s reading accounts of the hatchet murders of Lizzie Borden’s harsh parents as if she could learn something about life if she knew all the cuts and slashes; her essay on Wordsworth or Keats only a knot in her belly, a faint pressure at her temples. She’s pale, it’s five years before the first migraine, but the dreamy flush has already drained from her face. I want to lead her out of the library, to sit with her on a bench under a still living elm tree, be one who understands, but even today I don’t understand, I want to shake her and want to assure her, to hold her—but love’s not safe for her, although she craves what she knows of it, love’s a snare, a closed door, a dank cell. Maybe she should just leave the campus, take a train to Fall River, inspect Lizzie’s room, the rigid corsets and buttoned shoes, the horsehair sofas, the kitchen’s rank stew. Hell. Bleak loyal judgmental journals of a next-door neighbor—not a friend, Lizzie had no friend. If only she could follow one trajectory of thought, a plan, invent a journey out of this place, a vocation— but without me to guide her, where would she go? And what did I ever offer, what stiffening of spine? What goal? Rather, stiffening of soul, her soul cocooned in the library’s trivia. Soul circling its lessons. What can I say before she walks like a ghost in white lace carrying her bouquet of stephanotis, her father beaming innocently at her side, a boy waiting, trembling, to shape her? He’s innocent, too, we are all innocent, even Lizzie Borden who surely did take the axe. It was so hot that summer morning. The hard-hearted stepmother, heavy hand of the father. There was another daughter they favored, and Lizzie, stewing at home, heavy smell of mutton in the pores of history. But this girl, her story’s still a mystery—I tell myself she’s a quick study, a survivor. There’s still time. Soon she’ll close the bloody book, slink past the lit carrels, through the library’s heavy door to the world.Is it too late to try to touch her, kneel beside her on the dusty floor where we’re avoiding her assignment?
for John Limon The game of baseball is not a metaphor  and I know it’s not really life.  The chalky green diamond, the lovely  dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes  multiplying around the cities  are only neat playing fields.  Their structure is not the frame  of history carved out of forest,  that is not what I see on my ascent. And down in the stadium, the veteran catcher guiding the young  pitcher through the innings, the line  of concentration between them,  that delicate filament is not  like the way you are helping me,  only it reminds me when I strain  for analogies, the way a rookie strains  for perfection, and the veteran,  in his wisdom, seems to promise it,  it glows from his upheld glove, and the man in front of me in the grandstand, drinking banana  daiquiris from a thermos, continuing through a whole dinner to the aromatic cigar even as our team is shut out, nearly hitless, he is not like the farmer that Auden speaks  of in Breughel’s Icarus, or the four inevitable woman-hating  drunkards, yelling, hugging each other and moving up and down  continuously for more beer and the young wife trying to understand  what a full count could be to please her husband happy in  his old dreams, or the little boy in the Yankees cap already nodding  off to sleep against his father, program and popcorn memories  sliding into the future, and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,  screaming at the Yankee slugger  with wounded knees to break his leg this is not a microcosm,  not even a slice of life and the terrible slumps, when the greatest hitter mysteriously  goes hitless for weeks, or the pitcher’s stuff is all junk who threw like a magician all last month,  or the days when our guys look like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping  each other, then suddenly, the play that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid  we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,  leaps into the air to catch a ball that should have gone downtown,  and coming off the field is hugged  and bottom-slapped by the sudden  sorcerers, the winning team the question of what makes a man  slump when his form, his eye, his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t  like the bad luck that hounds us,  and his frustration in the games  not like our deep rage for disappointing ourselves the ball park is an artifact, manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,  and the order of the ball game,  the firm structure with the mystery  of accidents always contained,  not the wild field we wander in,  where I’m trying to recite the rules,  to repeat the statistics of the game, and the wind keeps carrying my words away
When the lights come on at five o'clock on street corners That is Evolution by the bureau of power, That is a fine mechanic dealing in futures: For the sky is wide and warm upon that hour.
All our stones like as much sun as possible. Along their joints run both solar access and decline In equal splendor, like a mica chipping At every beat, being sun responsible. How much sun then do you think is due them? Or should say, how much sun do you think they are apt to have? It has misted at their roots for some days now, The gray glamour addressing itself to them. I should think possible that it go on misting likewise A good way into next year, or time as they have it, A regular cool season every day for our stones. Not a streak that low of any sun or longed surprise.
for Henry Adams Effort for distraction grew Ferocious, grew Ferocious and paced, that was its exercise. Effort for distraction strained, Legged in the hour-like single stretch Its heels and sight to feel, so slit its eyes. Effort without effort or with Greatest possible effort always centered Back in the concentrated trough where lies The magnet to the filings, The saw tooth to the tongue, The turn of life to a returning life. By all the traction of mind and spin of spirit Having gained grasp gasped to bear it, Having got ground groaned, furious title holder. Paced and cried, so sore for a different direction, grew Ferocious, grew Unkind to strength that gave it strength to grow.
Mother said to call her if the H-bomb exploded And I said I would, and it about did When Louis my brother robbed a service station And lay cursing on the oily cement in handcuffs. But by that time it was too late to tell Mother, She was too sick to worry the life out of her Over why why. Causation is sequence And everything is one thing after another. Besides, my other brother, Eddie, had got to be President, And you can't ask too much of one family. The chances were as good for a good future As bad for a bad one. Therefore it was surprising that, as we kept the newspapers from Mother, She died feeling responsible for a disaster unverified, Murmuring, in her sleep as it seemed, the ancient sloganNoblesse oblige.
When we go out into the fields of learning We go by a rough route Marked by colossal statues, Frankenstein's Monsters, AMPAC and the 704, AARDVARK, and deoxyribonucleic acid. They guard the way. Headless they nod, wink eyeless, Thoughtless compute, not heartless, For they figure us, they figure Our next turning. They are reading the book to be written. As we start out At first daylight into the fields, they are saying,Starting out. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small. Carbonized grains of wheat unearthed From the seventh millennium B.C. town of Jarmo In the Tigris-Euphrates basin Match the grains of three kinds of wheat still extant, Two wild, one found only in cultivation. The separate grains Were parched and eaten, Or soaked into gruel, yeasted, fermented. Took to the idea of bread, Ceres, while you were gone. Wind whistles in the smokey thatch, Oven browns its lifted loaf, And in the spring the nourished seeds, Hybrid with wild grass, Easily open in a hundred days, And seeded fruits, compact and dry, Store well together. They make the straw for beds, They ask the caring hand to sow, the resting foot To stay, to court the seasons. Basil: hatred: king over pain. What did you do on the last day of day camp? First we did games, running around and playing. Then we did crafts, making things. Then we did nature, what goes on and on. Eventually a number Of boys have got big enough Through all the hazards of drag-racing, theft, and probation, To start for junior college, two transfers away, Mysterious as Loch Ness. While of grandmothers a number Have stooping arrived to seventy or eighty And wave the boys on, shaking With more absentminded merriment than they have mustered In half a century. King Henry the Eighth consumed many daisies In an attempt to rid himself of ulcers. Algebra written across a blackboard hurts As a tight shoe hurts; it can't be walked in. Music, a song score, hurts, How far lies one note from another? Graft hurts, its systems of exploitation In cold continuance. Argosies of design, fashions to which the keys Rest restlessly in an Egyptian tomb. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small.
When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family Sits in the sand Eating potato salad, and the undertow  Comes which takes you out away down To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play Holler, say Help, help, help. Hello, they will say,  Come back here for some potato salad. It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub  Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua, A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish  And remote from this area as a camel, says  Look down there, there is somebody drowning. And it is you. You say, yes, yes,  And he throws you a line. This is what is called the brotherhood of man.
Here's how we were counted: firstborn, nay-sayers, veterans, slow-payers, seditionists, convicts, half-breeds, has-beens, the nearly defined dead, all the disenfranchised live. Once everybody had a place among the nameless. Now we can't afford to be anonymous. Consider, they said, the poor, the misfit—consider the woman figuring herself per cent. Consider the P.A. system making a point so intimate I petition not to be anybody's good guess or estimate. I ask to be one: maybe widow-to-be watching the sun diminish brick by brick along the jail wall and also that green pear on its drunken roll out of the executioner's lunch basket. At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber of the digital clock the newsman said: There'll be less work in the new century.
Dear lost sharer of silences, I would send a letter the way the tree sends messages  in leaves, or the sky in exclamations of pure cloud. Therefore I write in this blue ink, color of secret veins and arteries. It is morning here. Already the postman walks the innocent streets,  dangerous as Aeolus  with his bag of winds, or Hermes, the messenger, god of sleep and dreams  who traces my image  upon this stamp. In public buildings letters are weighed and sorted like meat; in railway stations huge sacks of mail are hidden like robbers' booty  behind freight-car doors. And in another city  the conjurer will hold a fan of letters before your outstretched hand— "Pick any card. . . " You must tear the envelope  as you would tear bread. Only then dark rivers  of ink will thaw and flow under all the bridges  we have failed to build between us.
There is a face I know too well,  A face I dread to see, So vain it is, so eloquent Of all futility. It is a human face that hides A monkey soul within, That bangs about, that beats a gong,  That makes a horrid din. Sometimes the monkey soul will sprawl  Athwart the human eyes, And peering forth, will flesh its pads,  And utter social lies. So wretched is this face, so vain,  So empty and forlorn, You well may say that better far  This face had not been born.
After reading Dr Rieu’s translation of St Mark’s Gospel. Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East? This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ. Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking,  Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking. But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown, What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down, Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands, Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands. As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily  Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly. Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song,  Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong. Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words,  And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd. Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried  For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified. For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.
for Edmund White Lunch: as we close the twentieth century, death, like a hanger-on or a wanna-be  sits with us at the cluttered bistro  table, inflecting the conversation. Elderly friends take lovers, rent studios, plan trips to unpronounceable provinces.  Fifty makes the ironic wager  that his biographer will outlive him— as may the erudite eighty-one-year-old dandy with whom a squabble is simmering.  His green-eyed architect companion  died in the spring. He is frank about his grief, as he savors spiced pumpkin soup, and a sliced rare filet. We’ll see the next decade in  or not. This one retains its flavor.  “Her new book ...” “... brilliant!” “She slept with ...” “Really!” Long arabesques of silver-tipped sentences drift on the current of our two languages  into the mist of late September  midafternoon, where the dusk is curling Just thirty-eight: her last chemotherapy treatment’s the same day classes begin again.  I went through it a year before she  started; but hers was both breasts, and lymph nodes. She’s always been a lax vegetarian. Now she has cut out butter and cheese, and she  never drank wine or beer. What else is  there to eliminate? Tea and coffee ... ? (Our avocado salads are copious.) It’s easier to talk about politics  than to allow the terror that shares  both of our bedrooms to find words. It made the introduction; it’s an acquaintance we’ve in common. Trading medical anecdotes  helps out when conversation lapses.  We don’t discuss Mitterrand and cancer. Four months (I say) I’ll see her, see him again. (I dream my life; I wake to contingencies.)  Now I walk home along the river,  into the wind, as the clouds break open.
for Baroness G. de Hueck Across the cages of the keyless aviaries, The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,  Crucify, against the fearful light, The ragged dresses of the little children. Soon, in the sterile jungles of the waterpipes and ladders,  The bleeding sun, a bird of prey, will terrify the poor,  These will forget the unbelievable moon. But in the cells of whiter buildings, Where the glass dawn is brighter than the knives of surgeons,  Paler than alcohol or ether, shinier than money, The white men’s wives, like Pilate’s, Cry in the peril of their frozen dreams: “Daylight has driven iron spikes, Into the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet: Four flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.” Along the white halls of the clinics and the hospitals  Pilate evaporates with a cry: They have cut down two hundred Judases, Hanged by the neck in the opera houses and the museum. Across the cages of the keyless aviaries, The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,  Crucify, against the fearful light, The ragged dresses of the little children.
1 One royal afternoon When I was young and easily surprised  By uncles coming from the park At the command of nurses and of guards, I wondered, over trees and ponds,  At the sorry, rude walls And the white windows of the apartments. “These,” said my uncle, “are the tallest houses.”  2 Yes, in the spring of my joy When I was visibly affected by a gaitered bishop,  Large and unsteady in the flagged yard, Guards, dogs and blackbirds fled on every hand. “He is an old one,” said uncle,  “The gaiters are real.” 3 Rippled, fistfed windows of your Dun high houses! Then Come cages made of pretty willows Where they put the palace girls! Green ducks wade slowly from the marble water.  One swan reproves a saucy daughter. I consider my own true pond, Look for the beginning and the end. I lead the bishop down lanes and islands. 4 Yes, in the windows of my first existence  Before my yawns became seasons, When nurses and uncles were sure,  Chinese fowl fought the frosty water  Startled by this old pontifex. “No bridge” (He smiled  Between the budding branches), “No crossing to the cage  Of the paradise bird!” Astounded by the sermons in the leaves I cried, “No! No! The stars have higher houses!” Kicking the robins and ganders  From the floor of his insular world The magic bishop leaned his blessing on the children. 5 That was the bold day when Moved by the unexpected summons  I opened all the palace aviaries  As by a king’s representative I was appointed fowler.
1. At this precise moment of history   With Goody-two-shoes running for Congress  We are testing supersonic engines   To keep God safe in the cherry tree.   When I said so in this space last Thursday   I meant what I said: power struggles. 2. You would never dream of such corn. The colonials in   sandalwood like running wide open and available for   protection. You can throw them away without a refund. 3. Dr. Hanfstaengel who was not called Putzi except by   those who did not know him is taped in the national   archives. J. Edgar Hoover he ought to know  And does know.  But calls Dr. Hanfstaengel Putzi nevertheless   Somewhere on tape in the   Archives.  He (Dr. H.) is not a silly man.   He left in disgust  About the same time Shirley Temple  Sat on Roosevelt’s knee   An accomplished pianist  A remembered personality.   He (Dr. H.) began to teach   Immortal anecdotes  To his mother a Queen Bee   In the American colony. 4. What is your attitude toward historical subjects?   —Perhaps it’s their size! 5. When I said this in space you would never believe   Corn Colonel was so expatriated.  —If you think you know,  Take this wheel  And become standard. 6. She is my only living mother  This bee of the bloody arts  Bandaging victims of Saturday’s dance   Like a veritable sphinx  In a totally new combination. 7. The Queen Mother is an enduring vignette   at an early age.  Now she ought to be kept in submersible   decompression chambers  For a while. 8. What is your attitude toward historical subjects   Like Queen Colonies?  —They are permanently fortified  For shape retention. 9. Solid shades   Seven zippered pockets   Close to my old place  Waiting by the road  Big disk brakes  Spinoff  Zoom  Long lights stabbing at the   Two together piggyback   In a stark sports roadster  Regretting his previous outburst   Al loads his Cadillac   With lovenests. 10. She is my only living investment   She examines the housing industry   Counts 3.5 million postwar children   Turning twenty-one  And draws her own conclusion   In the commercial fishing field. 11. Voice of little sexy ventriloquist mignonne:  “Well I think all of us are agreed and sincerely I my-  self believe that honest people on both sides have got   it all on tape. Governor Reagan thinks that nuclear   wampums are a last resort that ought not to be re-  sorted.” (But little mignonne went right to the point   with: “We have a commitment to fulfill and we better   do it quick.” No dupe she!)  All historians die of the same events at least twice. 13. I feel that I ought to open this case with an apology.   Dr. H. certainly has a beautiful voice. He is not a silly   man. He is misunderstood even by Presidents. 14. You people are criticizing the Church but what are   you going to put in her place? Sometime sit down with   a pencil and paper and ask yourself what you’ve got   that the Church hasn’t. 15. Nothing to add  But the big voice of a detective   Using the wrong first names   In national archives. 16. She sat in shocking pink with an industrial zipper spe-  cially designed for sitting on the knees of presidents in   broad daylight. She spoke the president’s mind. “We   have a last resort to be resorted and we better do it   quick.” He wondered at what he had just said. 17. It was all like running wideopen in a loose gown   Without slippers   At least someplace.
The old Roman sow  Bears a new litter now To fatten for a while On the same imperial swill. The cannibal wolf will dig And root out Spanish bones beside the pig. Germany has reared  A rare ugly bird To screech a sour song  In the German tongue:  Tell me if there be A sparrowhawk for such birds as he? The parrots lift their beaks And fill the air with shrieks. Ambassador is sent From the parrots’ parliament: “Oh see how fine I fly And nibble crackers got in Germany.” Europe is a feast For every bloody beast:  Jackals will grow fat  On the bones after that.  But in the end of all None but the crows can sing the funeral. Germany has reared A rare ugly bird, But crows ate Roman pig Before this bird was egg. And in the end of all Crows will come back and sing the funeral.
I went up the hill At moonrise. She swore that she would come By the south way. A dusky hawk Caught up the path In his talons.
For Rafael Heliodoro Valle I set out from the Port of Acapulco on the twenty-third of March And kept a steady course until Saturday, the fourth of April, when A half hour before dawn, we saw by the light of the moon That a ship had come alongside With sails and a bow that seemed to be of silver. Our helmsman cried out to them to stand off But no one answered, as though they were all asleep. Again we called out: “WHERE DID THEIR SHIP COME FROM?” And they said: Peru! After which we heard trumpets, and muskets firing, And they ordered me to come down into their longboat To cross over to where their Captain was. I found him walking the deck, Went up to him, kissed his hands and he asked me: “What silver or gold I had aboard that ship?” I said, “None at all, None at all, My Lord, only my dishes and cups.” So then he asked me if I knew the Viceroy. I said I did. And I asked the Captain, “If he were Captain Drake himself and no other?” The Captain replied that “He was the very Drake I spoke of.” We spoke together a long time, until the hour of dinner, And he commanded that I sit by his side. His dishes and cups are of silver, bordered with gold With his crest upon them. He has with him many perfumes and scented waters in crystal vials Which, he said, the Queen had given him. He dines and sups always with music of violins And also takes with him everywhere painters who keep painting All the coast for him. He is a man of some twenty-four years, small, with a reddish beard. He is a nephew of Juan Aquinas,* the pirate. And is one of the greatest mariners there are upon the sea. The day after, which was Sunday, he clothed himself in splendid garments And had them hoist all their flags With pennants of divers colors at the mastheads, The bronze rings, and chains, and the railings and The lights on the Alcazar shining like gold. His ship was like a gold dragon among the dolphins. And we went, with his page, to my ship to look at the coffers. All day long until night he spent looking at what I had. What he took from me was not much, A few trifles of my own, And he gave me a cutlass and a silver brassart for them, Asking me to forgive him Since it was for his lady that he was taking them: He would let me go, he said, the next morning, as soon as there was a breeze; For this I thanked him, and kissed his hands. He is carrying, in his galleon, three thousand bars of silver Three coffers full of gold Twelve great coffers of pieces of eight: And he says he is heading for China Following the charts and steered by a Chinese pilot whom he captured ...
Down the path between the apples through the maple grove of suicides then left at the old wall along the wire fence to the brook- bank where narcissus noses into skunk cabbage and hepatica: Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush  with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers  out for your flash of white tail and alert to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den,  crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again  as it elbows below us and runs for the creek racks strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid,  tightroping over the rocks in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp scent and battling the mayflies the black flies horseflies mosquitoes  there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling  tentacular embrace battered and scarred, am I seeing  your fabled face in the oily pools, are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles branchbones, little leaves halving our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine?  Your bloodhounds bay at the copper creek, your velvet cape’s aloft in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer,  hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, gashed, gutted, kneed-up, muddy and galled—call me Actaeon....
The backyard apple tree gets sad so soon, takes on a used-up, feather-duster look within a week. The ivy’s spring reconnaissance campaign sends red feelers out and up and down to find the sun. Ivy from last summer clogs the pool, brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch soft to the touch and rank with interface of rut and rot. The month after the month they say is cruel is and is not.
If your bearded friend helps you catch the trout barehanded in the pool of the dream and you carry it in his pail barefoot up the rocky stream to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan; if you snip the dill for the carrots and then swim until your lips are bluer than the lake where will it take you? Not anywhere as pure and primal as these sunstruck days sistered by starstruck nights. Don’t cloud the drowning brightness of your eyes, don’t answer my asking look with anything but the truth, don’t spill the fresh-picked raspberries on the car seat and stain your shirt with indelible blood. Or spill them, darling. How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you, xylem and phloem of your leafy future already starting to spread its shade above us?
One of them drops radio into hardhat  and spits, Damn it,  boys, we won’t need this one. But hell, they had already drilled the charge. In the dynamite’s wake, boulders turn to snow. Men walk through the trees.  It’s cool now in here. Quiet enough to hear tracks rust; the Monte Ne line that never whistled through and the summering passengers unstartled by sudden dark, the temperature drop. Stones jut out, gargoyles scabbed with lichen. The steamy eye of an afternoon watches us from either end.  We are waylaid by a spell. A stone slithers off or I imagine this. In the pitch I feel the others when they breathe. We are unborn. One of our silhouettes speaks,  There’s a camera in the car. Bats opening like orchids. The absence of one of us, unimaginable— our present so intense its tense is aorist. Each of us afraid to leave two men he loves behind.
To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail, thick breath of sludge fires. Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie who loves the freezing trees but cannot save them. Snow fine as blown spiders. The news: nothing. Large rats breed on the beach driving smaller ones here. Today both traps sit sprung.
Good morning kiss. Their teeth glance. Clack of June bugs against pane. On the porch a young man in the full sun rocking. Jars incubate tomato plants. His mother sweeps the dirt yard away from flowering vinca and bottle tree. Straightens up, one-eyed by ragged hens. As her boy ambles away to the steady pulse in his skull. The cattle gate swinging open behind him. She takes a headache powder and it is nineteen and twenty seven. The James overruns its levee, backs up the Blackwater. Nineteen and twenty nine: she reads his postcard, the tobacco crop burns. Nineteen and thirty, drought. Long limp bags drag through fields. The Lord whistles for the fly. Revival tents threaten a rain of scorpions. To cure her hiccups, the woman sees a hypnotist. Promptly coughs herself to death. In pungs marked men ride. The son is blown away. No one returns in this story. No one escapes. The tribe is glued together for ruination, friends. There is no more time, there is no way out.
Though each single life occurs in a series of occasions  striking only by what blurry context  precedes them  So come to know  what I should have wanted  to say—from
for Gloria Imagining, on a long walk  between two Greek towns, those Turkish prisoners the guidebook  says were sabred where they crowded  together on the stone dock;  and then imagining—still walking,  anxious to see some worker  in the fields or another old couple  like the last one (he riding  the donkey, she leading it in black)— the Greeks whom the Germans shot;  and as the road after rising  leads down again, at last to  the town by the bay, imagining  all the feuds given license  by the civil war, the woman  whose husband, forgive him  his faults now, steps dead through the doorway one night:  imagining, imagining—is there  a way out of this brooding ahead  to the hollow thud of the first  dirt thrown down on his coffin? What is the word any tongue  can make good for the boy— let someone else name his country— who speaks to his sleeping wife when he leaves at night, his brother tagging after him, one puny gun between them? If his cold spirit can still speak her name tomorrow, won’t she feel  even more alone?  Aeneas carried a high purpose on the point of his sword:  a city needed founding, if not here then in another place. This road, though, dips past two ordinary houses and then the disco  casting a stale abandoned shade,  sharp-edged, to one side, and I descend— through hot odd-angled streets lined  with those plane trees whose name’s  so bland and awkward translated out of sunny Greek or Spanish— to the huge white plane-tree-shaded square. At the cafe in the open air I order lemonade from the waitress  who has just served the little table  crowded round by seven or eight, a changing group—the eager interpreter  talking and listening at the same time,  three young women dressed up, and even in this small town the four military men from the foreign  ship offshore, out of uniform but  with an apparent eye for swag  some future day, talking of small deals, clever braveries, travels.  They exact smiles and attentions  and never have they seen such  a pretty town as this, never. The three women listen hard to the roared harsh sounds of the odd tongue,  then impatiently to the interpreter while the military men wait. What could such noise be about? Do these men love the ways ours do, do they like their women to speak to them in bed, to say what they want, to say it? The Turkish prisoners had been led outside  with the lie that they’d be freed. Inside the smoky small bar so they can watch without being watched,  young men are bitter, imagining the weight of medals, coming one by one to the dusty window-glass then returning toward the far unlit interior.  The lemonade arrives at last in the pretty hands of the waitress, she puts it on my white table under the plane trees and hurries away  to be near the laughing group, foreign men who one day may bring  something new to the town, or something old.    for Gloria
The children are eating lunch at home on a summer weekday when a man comes to the door and asks their mother if she has anything that needs fixing or carrying or any yardwork he can do. They chew their food a little dreamily as, with her back straight and her voice carefully polite, she says No, thank you, I’m sorry, and the man goes away. Who was that, Mama? they say. Oh, no one, she says.  They are sitting down to dinner but they have to wait because the doorbell rings and a thin young boy begins to tell their father about a Sales Program he’s completing for a scholarship to be Supervisor, and he holds up a filthy tattered little booklet and lifts also his desperate guile and heavily guarded hope, and the children’s father says, No thank you, sorry but I can’t help you out this time, and the boy goes away. The children start to eat and don’t ask anything, because the boy was just a boy, but their father acts irritated and hasty when he sits back down.  Once a glassy-eyed heavy girl who almost seems asleep as she stands outside their door offers for sale some little handtowels stitched by the blind people at the Lighthouse for the Blind and the children are in the folds of their mother’s full skirt listening to the girl’s small voice and their mother says, Well, I bought some the last time.  She buys the children school supplies and food, she pays the two boys for mowing the yard together and weeding her flower bed. She gets a new sewing machine for her birthday from the children’s father, and she buys fabric and thread and patterns and makes dresses for the girls, to save money. She tells the children each to put a dime or quarter into the collection plate at Church, and once a month she puts in a little sealed white envelope, and the ushers move slowly along the ends of the pews weaving the baskets through the congregation, and the organist plays a long piece of music.  Whisk brooms, magazine subscriptions, anything you need hauled away, little league raffle tickets, cookies, chocolate candy, can I do any yard work again and again, hairbrushes, Christmas cards, do you need help with your ironing one time, and more, came calling at the front door while the children were sometimes eating, sometimes playing. Their faces would soften with a kind of comfort in the authority of mother or father, with a kind of wonder at the needy callers.  Their father left for work every day early, and came home for dinner, and almost always went again on Saturday; in his car. Their mother opened a savings account for each child and into each put the first five dollars. The children felt proud to see their names in the passbooks, and wanted to know when they could take the money out. But they were told they had to save their money not spend it. They felt a kind of pleasure in these mysteries, to know that there were things you would understand later when you grew up and had your own house and while your children were eating their dinner and making too much noise the way you did, you knew it was true, the doorbell would ring, the familiar surprise of it, who would it be, and someone would be holding a little worn book or a bundle of dishtowels or once an old man, but perhaps he only looked old, with his beard, came with bunches of carnations, white, red, and pink, and he too was turned away.
Something needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each waste basket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while, the unmoving buildings—houses and a church—in the cold street.  Across it a dark young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snowshovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his dirty navy blue knit hat, and at a house where the walk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he half wakes and he says a few words I can’t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the kindly farewell that is a habit he wears as disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I see it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter.  My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouthhole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a perfect piece of small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is tired or weak and the wind can’t get in.  Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn’t see a bundled-up lame child out of school and even turned out of the house for a while, or a blind woman with burns or a sick bald veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what’s happened and will keep happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs.  When he finally gets past where I can see him, it feels as if a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and I smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and I look around the room for something to pick up or straighten, and I take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and I walk out.
When love was a question, the message arrived in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura was hardly to be believed. For flight, it took three stagehands: two on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you thought fancy rained like grace. Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all. Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor might cough. The passions, I take my clues from an obvious source, may be less like climatic events than we conventionalize, though I’ve heard of tornadoes that break the second-best glassware and leave everything else untouched. There’s a finer conviction than seamlessness elicits: the Greeks knew a god by the clanking behind his descent. The heart, poor pump, protests till you’d think it’s rusted past redemption, but there’s tuning in these counterweights, celebration’s assembled voice.
It had almost nothing to do with sex.  The boy  in his corset and farthingale, his head- voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin  was not  and never had been simply in our pay. Or was it some lost logic the regional accent  restores?  A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant laborer playing Thisby botching  similes  and stop our hearts with wonder. My young friend he’s seven—touched his mother’s face last night  and said It’s  wet and, making the connection he has had to learn by rote, You’re sad.  It’s never  not like this for him. As if, the adolescents mouth wherever California spills  its luminous  vernacular. As if, until the gesture holds, or passes. Let’s just  say  we’ll live here for a while. O habitus. O wall. O moon. For my young  friend  it’s never not some labored simulacrum, every tone of voice, each  give, each  take is wrested from an unrelenting social dark. There’s so much dark to go around (how  odd  to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death), it’s a wonder  we pass  for locals at all. Take Thisby for instance: minutes ago she was fretting for lack of a beard  and now  she weeps for a lover slain by a minute’s misreading. Reader, it’s  sharp  as the lion’s tooth. Who takes the weeping away now takes delight as well,  which feels  for all the world like honest work. They’ve never worked with mind before,  the rich  man says. But moonlight says, With flesh.
Because he swings so neatly through the trees, An ape feels natural in the word trapeze.
They came like dewdrops overnight Eating every plant in sight, Those nasty worms with legs that crawl So creepy up the garden wall, Green prickly fuzz to hurt and sting Each unsuspecting living thing. How I hate them! Oh, you know I’d love to squish them with my toe. But then I see past their disguise, Someday they’ll all be butterflies.
The Hedgehog sleeps beneath the hedge— As you may sometimes see— And I prefer it sleeping there To sleeping here with me!
I don’t like doing homework, I know that it will bore me. But now I am much happier ’Cause Freddie does it for me! He greets me at the door each day When I come home from school. He just can’t wait to read my books— I think that’s pretty cool! I give him all my homework, Like history and math. And when he’s done I give him A nice warm bubble bath! My grades are so much better now, Which makes my parents glad. Freddie is the smartest dog That I have ever had!
Once upon a time I caught a little rhyme I set it on the floor but it ran right out the door I chased it on my bicycle but it melted to an icicle I scooped it up in my hat but it turned into a cat I caught it by the tail but it stretched into a whale I followed it in a boat but it changed into a goat When I fed it tin and paper it became a tall skyscraper Then it grew into a kite and flew far out of sight ...
Baa, baa, black sheep Have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for the master, And one for the dame, And one for the little boy Who lives down the lane.
I wonder what I would have said if my dad asked me, "Son, do you know who cut down my pretty cherry tree?" I think I might have closed my eyes and thought a little bit about the herds of elephants I'd seen attacking it. I would have heard the rat-a-tat of woodpeckers, at least, or the raging roar of a charging boar or some such other beast! Perhaps a hippopotamus with nothing else to do had wandered through our garden and stopped to take a chew. We all know George said, "Father, I cannot tell a lie." Yet I can't help but wonder ... Did he really try?
The giant water bug can lug His eggs upon his back. He gives them extra care up there And guards them from attack. The mother glues them to the dad, And on his way they stay. But does he ever get a card Or gift on Father's Day?
Our high and mighty termite mound arises far above the ground, and just as deep, grows underground. Our nest is blessed to be immense. It gives us all a firm defense, superior to any fence. It shields us from our enemies. It keeps us cooler, by degrees. From floods and droughts it guarantees. A prize nobody will assign in architectural design, but still our hill suits us just fine.
Not gigan-tic. Not roman-tic. Not artis-tic. Not majes-tic. Not magne-tic. Nor aesthe-tic. Ticks are strictly parasi-tic.
A mayfly flies In May or June. Its life is over Far too soon. A day or two To dance, To fly— Hello Hello Good-bye Good-bye.
The folk who live in Backward Town Are inside out and upside down. They wear their hats inside their heads And go to sleep beneath their beds. They only eat the apple peeling And take their walks across the ceiling.
I seam towels for Dundee over in Georgia, a non-union sweatshop with a dozen rows of them blue glass windows all around. Some of ’em says it’s like a church. Been there fourteen years, since just before me and Hubert said vows at Devotee Baptist. We’ve been divorced since eighty-four. Seems he had another woman on the side. Yessir, I been cold and warmed my hands at the motor of my jury-rigged machine, been Florida-hot and deaf from the fans that don’t do a damn bit of earthly good, for me at least. I’m right fleshy, as you can see. Been so hot I’d get the hives and swell up like sourdough rising, but I hardly miss a sick day, you understand. I hate the feel when another woman’s been sewing on my machine. Substitutes will break a needle or jack the floating bobbin out of line. They don’t give a hoot. It ain’t like they got a steady station or reputation to uphold. This working’s almost a moral thing, Preacher Wilkes would say, like marriage, and every thread has got to be caught in the hem’s edge so the whole towel won’t ravel first time some salesman in a motel or shoe clerk in his own home after a sweaty day dries off from a cold shower bath. You see, I know it don’t take no giant brain to sit behind a Singer machine and stitch hour after hour, but I’m proud just the same. I’m regular as a clock, and I don’t dare fiddle with another worker’s machine. Some nights I lie in my bed, once was my mother’s, and watch the gas flame jump beautiful blue as the mill’s windows and wonder how many skins have been wiped dry on my towels, and whose. It gives me a blushy pride right on the edge of sleep. I’m over here tonight with my sister Lily and her husband, Buddy, supposed to be having a fine time instead of talking my whole life at you. This country and western band, specially the drummer in a blue silk shirt, makes me want to eat a hot pig’s foot, drink beer, and shake my tail. Let’s show ’em a thing or two. You ain’t married just now, are you?
My husband was in the CIA. That’s the kind of woman I am. Lived all over Asia in suites decked out for the embassy staff, lounged around pools with sweet Singapore Slings, but now that I’m on my own, I can’t stand to waste a minute, not a breath. You may know my regular work at Helen’s Mademoiselle Beauty Nook downtown, but on the side I help women trim their belly fat. “Lose weight now, ask me how.” A thin American girl is a happy one, I always say. Oprah, too, but the drugs witch doctors sell can kill brain cells quicker than liquor. And your will, your liver. Listen, herbs are just what you need to cut that cellulite. I learned that in the Orient. I had spare time to spare and paid attention. Embrace herbs and exercise daily with a proper purge, just like the monks of Buddha. Tablets help, and fruit shakes, too, make you frisky as a prime-time preacher, but here’s my recent love and pleasure: invention. True, I mixed a chemical rinse that made great colors like the ao dais in Saigon, but some of the girls said it burned. Then I worked with Gene Graddick on a special quick perm you can get wet, but he cut out before we got it perfectly perfected. Beauty, though, that’s the ticket. I knew that even in Nam, while Jim-ass was off on his secret missions. The new machine I’m the mother of will move senior citizens and the, you know, “crippled” gals to the swivel chair without a hitch. I saw too many women, men, and sad children with stiff legs (or one or none) who couldn’t move after one government or another gave invitations to mortar fire or a claymore mine. With this machine I could prop them straight and wet-cut any willing guinea pig—pardon my calling the handicapped that—blow dry and comb them out with no inconvenience. My prototype is getting made in a LaGrange body shop this minute, if Bish is working late like he promised, and I aim to franchise, since Jim left me flat busted—well, you can see that’s a figure of speech—with back bills piled to the ceiling. The government has laws that business can’t fairly slight the challenged, so if I get it right, it’s got to sell. I can’t tell you how it works, you know. I learned secrecy from an expert, covert fool. It’s called “The Phyllis,” after me.  What’s wrong with that? It’s no brag if you really did it. Hell—excuse my French—you know Snake Grillis of Snake and the Grass? He can pick the fiddle better than any man alive, and says so on stage. It’s no lie, so let him waller in it, I say. Look, I’m salt of the earth and have all the right attitudes and skills, not that selfish royal act my Jim put on when we went to the market. He called the people “slants” and laughed when they didn’t savvy. It’s no wonder he carried a Colt in his belt; they could tell how superior he felt, and they hated him hard. That asshole—pardon my French, but it’s so.  No thanks, I stick to coffee. Hard stuff was what my ex used to wet his whistle and make him sharp for following spies, and cocaine, too, I suspect. Myself, I don’t need a jumpstart when loving’s on my mind. I got a tummy tuck, a boob job, a wardrobe straight from Penney’s Gay Parisian line. You’re a devil, but you smile like a G.I. on leave, and I can cure your entire cowlick problem. I’ve got a chair and a whole outfit at home, plus a queen waterbed and a Sony VCR on credit. I’m maxed out! Grab your jacket, buckaroo, and to hell with any sour memories. I’ve got bourbon and branch, black lace, and oodles of time. I’ve got a Walther in my purse and boudoir kung fu tricks for two. I’m here now and just for you. Call me Phyllis or The Phyllis or Boo, then just call me in time for breakfast. Ain’t this a lucky rendezvous?
In Stetson and calico vest, spandex and Calvin jeans, she was the best at the bar. Does Gucci make range boots? Hers were snakeskin with heels like railroad spikes. The rest you could guess: eyes the blue of West Texas yonder, complexion like hot coffee with cream. All night I gave her slack but kept my dally-knot tight, hoping she’d like the stories I could tell—drunk Indian twins fighting with icepicks in Cheyenne, Carolina moonshine, deer breaking open watermelons out of crazy hunger. Regular as breath she’d say, “Damn!” or “Yes!” and stomp a heel through sawdust to the pine floor. I nearly had the rest of my life planned out, downing Coors and forking out for God-knows-whose, till a dude in a Brooks Brothers suit moved in, flashing a wad of Andrew Jacksons like cold cash grew on trees, and she said to me—she fairly spat it— “Get lost!” So I did, prostrate all night in a roadside hay field, watching the sky sleek as a coal-black stallion’s flank. Damn if every star wasn’t a spur burning its wheels into my foolish eyes.
With the body of a morbid hanging doll my aura burns by shifts by ambles by mirages by the sun in its primordial morass summoned from a spectral locust feast through electric bartering grammes living as if a spectrum had been transmogrified across the sum of exploded solar windows amidst motions of viral infamy of sudden discharge pontoons of magical lyncean sails above ships of pure vitrescence enthralled by empty Minoan game dogs debating oxygen as form debating menace as ideal as one listens to fire in dense eruptional gullet in hanging hydrogen mirrors so that each image is shifted back & forth between gales & the apparition of gales so that unicorns from Çatal Hüyük cease to condense as forms of the earth but take on the body of enigma as transparence as blackened meteor in abstraction the sun no longer quantified by strange calendrical posses but becomes balletic differential which ceases to quarrel with the magic of fragment as schism as mist as a power cast before oasis because the game dogs the unicorn mirrors spun as a wakeless ocular thirst as a conjured distance evolved from the force of a clarified activity like darkened water as shock as scale which looms as humidity then the eyes always focused as pleas for hushed exhibits
To unlock predisposives in carbon  to cancel sleep as pyretical drachma  not as transaxial summa or intense aboriginal invasive but as promenade as forgery by craft as soiled apparitional anagram yes as a dark stochastic wheat drained of its magic as drift  being boundary being hellish invention as grasp I am thinking of aroused electrical blockage  of human monsoon killing as treaty as breach as strangled impulse by identity I mean the psychic root which is stained by dialectical illness  by the thought contained in black ozonal mirrors where general slaughter is reflected where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation  by stunted mangrove withdrawal by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees such prone negation imploded from the realms of a suicide foundry  of broken wisdom as diamond it is an eon of fallen snow in a well an injudicious barrier gone awry the ingrained Eurocentric example of the hatred of the darker integument with its combative belligerence against the core  of volational mystery so what concerns me is a yoga which implodes the sun  which compounds its runics  the body then electric like a stunning sapphire serpent  with the arc of its cells alive as interior alter species  as an eye of analogical waters no longer of ennui of the praxis of perfidious helium atrocity  extended by the vapour of betrayal by the dazed imperceptives in the molecules here in such preternatural enclave I swim in the murmur of sun dogs  of kindled potentate spasms like interior distillation from Moorish pre-Copernica as if at the height of Kemetic day there existed the dauntless sphinxian geometries  those pre-existent personas of lightning no longer of the form of gravity as bastion  of lingering ammonia in the genes but of absent chemical flaw the body becoming the magic flight of a transmuted corium  of the bell of a bloodless liminal amber
To peer into the obverse into smoking cane field erratums as if haunted with the steamy colitis of whirling iridium  cancellations as in the saliva of newts one sees the intestinal raging of deltas of blackened sea giraffes osmotically split into simultaneous alums  above a judgemental sea glistening with Richters like a weakened neutron egg its fissioning petrol mirages like spirals of irregular hunting geese  flying through flames of ulcerated smoke & gargantua hissing a blank imperial greenness rising above dense jetties of cobras the shocking demise of the sea the unlivingness of its winds scorched by irradiations of shaking brine incisions the burning gulfs of sun with a glint of explosive Mandean utopias* shocks against Old Testament linear prophetics of Jeremiah or Ezekiel or the bony frozen finger shaking stunted alchemical missives  from a moon burned Judea no more than a mechanically burning moat focused on smoky  spellbinder’s disruptives where the motion of the soul is delayed reduced to flattened agnostic secular smoke to a terrestrial rage which eliminates its sensuous heavenly fires  its stunning unreplicated angers its sudden selenium spirals its fire which staggers across the pseudo-faultlines of pre-replicated judgement its flirtation with spirits of enriched Draconian plankton so that the soul with its amber of flashing microbe drachmas  with its wounded tourmaline divisibilities flaming within a light of smeared tornado weathers  within a shower of black fish scales & spleen is entombed within a blank thirstless psycho-motion falling from a furnace of stars which both flares up and freezes which inculcates a flawed microbial botany as in hypnotic grammatical emulsions within a hollowed elliptical opening where we witness old  Egyptian surgeries where the dead magically rise up from mazes & stare in a language of scorching totemic anomaly  spawned in heretical miniature their phantoms seeping from quadrilateral sutures from brief violent renunciatory squalls uprooted armed with the weaponry of ghouls & broken birch tree lizards seasoned by the light of psychotropic angles blazing in the middle of a green Venusian interior God singing as if in the fumaroles of anguish  with an inclement bleeding  with a littered corona of unstable altimeter reverses
The wings pierce as if they were eternity. —Shuzo Takiguchi The Japanese Crested Ibis is now extinct. “To claim as arcane vapour ruination by intrigue by kindled leprosy morays so that I take up in my glottis these moral hallucinogens which actively dim which nourish themselves on behalf of active heavenly terror as if forking my verbs with cryptography with bird interrogation with a haunted crystallography of deception mentally cross-fertilized with defective aural lobotomies  so that I momentarily sing with a cosmic catch in my wings floating above a black waterfall of rye dazzled by partial torments by seeming in-seminal scatterings  by snow in smoking germinal mazes it could be said that my blood has been scorched by intensive Venusian plasma  by updrafts of wheat by molecules that slaughter my throat continuously parched  by wild in-secular genetics  by unfiltered parchment  by incipient nerve cuisines  empowered by listless cranial singing carving androgynous shapes with my voice me an ominous fluttering angel  kept aloft by diagrams of smouldering electrical truth as a tempestuous solar charisma I can never speak in terms of oceanic remorse or with the temperament of fictitious remedial doves no I am heightened by sudden sociological flaws  by prisms of seasoned parallel tornadoes though shattered by various Saxon devices I am the flame throughout the soaring absolute  I denigrate I take on sanguine territorial opposition  with a force enriched with untoward fertility with a dominate tendency to waver with excessive a-regional metrics with inhaled phantasmics spilled on fortuitous migrational soils there is ermine there is discourse by nugget there is scarification by increase each of my echoes spinning through pictographic parabolas  graphic with indecisive incest which abstractly reduces which plummets into the frothing systemic of bees a crepuscular arachnoidal utterance by sun bells  by pestilential archive by vivid tourmaline exposure there is expressed interstice  flotational temperature by prophet  by sun exposed Greek therefore a palace erected in bone plazas to worship each grainy avian heaven  each tumultuous spire by detraction  so that there exists the one true clarity  the cloudy singular beam more blinding than sun noons on Mercury pinnacle by rot by hovering phoneme & tremor by sorcerous frigate & plasma by flaming interior sign by defenseless grenadine morals as with Enoch* I continue my metamorphosis singing in capsized tarantula tree melodramatic by despair cogitation by a sense of entrapment  split along the cusp of a-tonal meridians each guttural burst struggling at great odds at hieroglyphical knife point dazed with magnetic electrical fuchsia each of my wingbeats as death  as co-existent termination  as spoiled rudiment by colour so I splice my lamentations  & open the diachronic to spawned confusional rotations  amidst the equator of sundogs  heated by corrupted memorial sparks my beak aligned with cryptographic cunning with tantric scratches inside my steaming ink well treaties  my aggressions in tune with an aching heraldic nopal its coronal glare flashing upon a-clinical watery mnemonics filled with carnivorous morphine & diamonds flying in Bardo* above the scattered wrath of oneiric sesame pontoons  eclectic with my knowledge of furious marginal germs & diseases hyper-extended with discord those bony schismatic ghosts fused by synchronic retinal burning drawing from the sky a milk seasoned with phlogiston & Hittite galvanics yes chandas flecked* with sulphurous heretical clauses because I deny & re-invigourate I tear down I re-pontificate the bile from empty animal invasions breaking through poisoned civil cataleptics  entangling quotidian farm worlds  with my traitorous acids culled from a barbarous daily wine here I am winged with oracular sun-dust flowers my eyes scattered into translated demon  like a blue demonic spy sailing across transparent carrion planes  so as to re-inhabit the dead so as to scan the weightless centigrade margins in one simple respiration I summon the tendencies of electrocuted corpses  the stony wrath of drowned Phoenician sailors my voice drills with North Asian alewahs* akin to compounded rock points on Vesta or Ceres yes I drain from stars pre-glottal alluviums moth ceramics  a chalice of rote  pestles shaped by incipient hulls of deadly carbon grains I sing across distracted ingress baying  with sounds not even the dead can decipher I can only increase funeric confusion  the invisible force which uplifts the void  which ingests the force of negation & mirage yet I sculpt in weakened anti-negation spasms rampant with fire distorting by quotidian thumb piano by plagues which sustain gregarious verbal gestation  subsumed from susurrations extracted from the scattered  logistics of Titans from the fevered optical beams spilled from greenish sundial eternities Ramses* or Hatshepsut* or Akhenaton* invading as cherished cyclical spores  their luminescence by blankness  by swarming alchemical moons  by bewildering errata as in rum by higher being by serpentine & flowing whiplash ideology above all I’ve cosmically transmuted the atmospheric bone  the dementia enveloped by protest by turquoise weight & somnific solar inclusion singing by eclipse torrent by waves of flame erupting from mirrors & dreams of post- extinction a geneaology of circles  beyond aphids’ scribbling & logical strontium dialectic my bleeding unbearable shadows  brewing a sumptuous fever of poetic electrical charisma  its lightning shafts of snow & rum & blood mixed with the grains of stunning axial omegas”
... between impulses and repentances, between advances and retreats. —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?  Here I am posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets sonnets as rare as a live Aegean rhino absorbing the cracklings of my craft its riverine volcanoes its spectacular lightning peninsulas emitting plentiful creosote phantoms from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas scouring through years of unrecognized pablums  of constant arch-rivalry with extinction bringing up skulls of intensive discourse by the claws in one’s mind which seem to burn with systemic reduction one then suffers poetic scorching by debris  by inaugural timber which flashes by friction which flares up & harries by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass  of initial intuitive neglect as if one’s fangs were fatally stifled by incipience by verbal range war didactics by territorial driftwood by sudden undemonstrative detractions  awed by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante one’s youngish body stands devoured by reverential print trails momentarily cancelled by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval  stung by demeaning neutralities ravaged by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis by a tasteless collision of rums in transition  by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche with indeterminate earthenware splinters  taking up from aboriginal density a forge of Sumerian verbal signs cooked with a tendency towards starfish hypnosis towards psychic confrontational drainage conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire yes apprenticeship means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic  cringed in smoky interior cubicles releasing various deleriums as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star  with its dark incapable tints with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna poetics an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies  stretching under a blue marsupial sun  like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed fugaciously transfixed upon an anomalous totem of glints upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise of course kinetic like magical malachite rivers flowing from moons blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas I’ve looked for only the tonalities that scorch  which bring to my lips wave after wave  of sensitivity by virulence yes a merciless bitterness brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage  like a scattered igneous wind co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath resolved by flash point edicts  by consumptive stellar limes by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue mixing magnets juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities  cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas yes hatcheries floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint  to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette  its mysteriums always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas  or leaking moon spun alloestrophas* as if speaking in irregular glossological green Dutch a frenetic seminar on febricity a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging  a ferocious vacillation explosive as random “aggregational” nodes mimed by a black consonantal dissection its maximal priority forked at “hypotactic inclusion” with isochronous internal procedure with ratios with phonic penetralia by distortion primed by anomalous “nuclear accent” by a cadence composing syllables & compounds yes poetics its force jettisoned by “hypotaxis”  by ... paratactic co-ordination  & fire
There is no widening distance at the shore— The sea revolving slowly from the piers— But the one border of our take-off roar And we are mounted on the hemispheres. Above the waning moon whose almanac We wait to finish continents away, The Northern stars already call us back, And silence folds like maps on all we say. Under the sky, a stadium tensed to cry The ringside savage thrumming of the fights, We watch our engines, taut and trained for sky, Arranged on fields of concrete flowered with lights. Day after day we fondle and repeat A jeweler’s adjustment on a screw; Or wander past the bulletins to meet And wander back to watch the sky be blue. Somehow we see ourselves in photographs Held in our hands to show us back our pride When, aging, we recall in epitaphs The faces just behind and to each side. The nights keep perfect silence. In the dark You feel the faces soften into sleep, Or tense upon the fraught and falling arc Of fear a boy had buried not too deep. Finally we stand by and consciously Measure the double sense of all our talk, And, everyman his dramatist, anxiously Corrects his role, his gesture, and his walk.
I Machine stitched rivets ravel on a tree Whose name he does not know. Left in the sky, He dangles from a silken cumulus (Stork’s bundle upside down On the delivering wind) and sees unborn Incredible jungles of the lizard’s eye: Dark fern, dark river, a shale coliseum Mountained above one smudgepot in the trees That was his surreal rug on metered skies And slid afire into this fourth dimension Whose infinite point of meeting parallels He marks in ultra-space, suspended from The chords of fifty centuries Descending to their past—a ripping sound That snags him limb by limb. He tears and falls Louder than any fruit dropped from the trees, And finds himself in mud on hands and knees. II The opened buckle frees him from his times. He walks three paces dressed in dripping fleece And tears it off. The great bird of his chute Flaps in the trees: he salvages its hide And starts a civilization. He has a blade, Seventeen matches, his sheepskin, and his wits. Spaceman Crusoe at the wreck of time, He ponders unseen footprints of his fear. No-eyes watch his nothing deep in nowhere. III He finds the wreck (the embers of himself) Salvages bits of metal, bakelite, glass— Dials twisted from himself, his poverty. Three hours from time still ticking on his wrist The spinning bobbins of the time machine Jam on an afternoon of Genesis And flights of birds blow by like calendars From void to void. Did worlds die or did he? He studies twisted props of disbelief Wondering what ruin to touch. He counts his change (“Steady now, steady ...”) flips heads or tails and sees The coin fall into roots. An omen? (“Steady ...”) He laughs (a nerve’s slow tangling like a vine) Speaks to himself, shouts, listens, hears a surf Of echo rolling back to strand him there In tide pools of dead time by caves of fear, And enters to himself, denned in his loss, Tick-tick, a bloodbeat building on his wrist, Ratcheting down the dead teeth of a skull (The fossil of himself) sucked out of sight Past heads and tails, past vertebrae and gill To bedrocks out of time, with time to kill.
There are diagrams on stilts all wired together Over the hill and the wind and out of sight. There is a scar in the trees where they walk away Beyond me. There are signs of something Nearly God (or at least most curious) About them. I think those diagrams are not At rest.  I think they are a way of ciphering God: He is the hugest socket and all his miracles Are wired behind him scarring the hill and the wind As the waterfall flies roaring to his city On the open palms of the diagram.  There is Shining, I suppose, in that city at night And measure for miracles, and wheels whirling So quick-silver they seem to be going backwards. And there’s a miracle already. But I Went naked through his wood of diagrams On a day of the rain beside me to his city. When I kissed that socket with my wet lip My teeth fell out, my fingers sprouted chives, And what a bald head chewed on my sick heart!
Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds. Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean. Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss I am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we make the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
I Once I had 1000 roses. Literally 1000 roses. I was working for a florist back in the shambling ‘Thirties when iced skids of 250 roses sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall. So for $8 I bought 1000 roses, 500 white and 500 red, for Connie’s wedding to steadiness. I strewed the church aisle whole and the bride came walking on roses, roses all the way: The white roses and the red roses. White for the bed we had shared. Red for the bed she went to from the abundance in her to the fear in what she wanted. The gift was not in the roses but in the abundance of the roses.  To her whose abundance had never wholly been mine, and could never be his. He had no gift of abundance in him but only the penuries of sobriety. A good steady clerk, most mortgageable, returning in creaking shoes over the white and the red roses. Returning over the most flowering he would ever touch, with the most flowering I had ever touched. A feast of endings. II This morning I passed a pushcart heaped with white carnations as high as if there had fallen all night one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless, wondering snows that leave shakos on fence posts, polar bears in the hedges, caves in the light, and a childhood on every sill. Once, twice a year, partially, and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly, that snow falls. In which I ran like a young wolf in its blood leaping to snap the flower-flakes clean from the air; their instant on the tongue flat and almost dusty and not enough to be cold. But as I ran, face-up, mouth open, my cheeks burned with tears and flower-melt, and my lashes were fringed with gauze, and my ears wore white piping. There is no feast but energy. All men know—have known and will remember again and again—what food that is for the running young wolf of the rare days when shapes fall from the air and may be had for the leaping. Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty. And how they are instantly nothing— a commotion in the air and in the blood. —And how they are endlessly all. III My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know, was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers into the snow banks dirty with sand and trampled by digger’s boots. The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning, ripped from their wires in the wind and blew their seasons out as snow Purer than the snow itself. A last abundance correcting our poverties. I remember the feasts of my life, their every flowing. I remember the wolf all men remember in his blood. I remember the air become a feast of flowers. And remember his last flowers whitening winter in an imitation of possibility, while we hunched black in the dirtied place inside possibility where the prayers soiled him. If ever there was a man of abundances he lies there flowerless at that dirty center whose wired flowers try and try to make the winter clean again in air. And fail. And leave me raging as the young wolf grown from his day’s play in abundance to the ravening of recollection. Creaking to penury over the flower-strew. IV This morning I passed a pushcart heaped beyond possibility, as when the sun begins again after that long snow and the earth is moonscaped and wonderlanded and humped and haloed in the light it makes: an angel on every garbage can, a god in every tree, that childhood on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary. Where is she now? Instantly nothing. A penury after flower-strew. Nothing. A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself, but an idea of the possible in the fact. —And so the rare day comes: I was again the young wolf trembling in his blood at the profusions heaped and haloed in their instant next to the ordinary. And did not know myself what feast I kept —till I said your name. At once all plenty was. It is the words starve us, the act that feeds. The air trembling with the white wicks of its falling encloses us. To be perfect, I suppose, we must be brief. The long thing is to remember imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude the grave of abundance. O flower-banked, air-dazzling, and abundant woman, though the young wolf is dead, all men know—have known and must remember—  You.
Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich, on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground— wherever the children slept, dolls have been found in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again by the Finders After Everything. Down lay the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug, sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog, and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.
Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but already hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg hooks have found and are boarding them. This could do for the sack of the imaginary fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they one by one vanish and leave still real only what has been snatched out of the spell. I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except when the hive is threatened. They know the good of it must be grabbed and hauled before the whole feast wisps off. They swarm in light and, fast, dive in, then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy with gold and sunlight. The line of them, like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge. And back again to find the fleet gone. Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off they cruise to what stays open longer. Nothing green gives honey. And by now you’d have to look twice to see more than green where all those white sails trembled when the world was misty and open and the prize was there to be taken.
I did not have exactly a way of life but the bee amazed me and the wind’s plenty  was almost believable. Hearing a magpie laugh through a ghost town in Wyoming, saying Hello  in Cambridge, eating cheese by the frothy Rhine,  leaning from plexiglass over Tokyo, I was not able to make one life of all  the presences I haunted. Still the bee  amazed me, and I did not care to call accounts from the wind. Once only, at Pompeii,  I fell into a sleep I understood,  and woke to find I had not lost my way.
—Now let me tell you why I said that. Try to put yourself into an experimental mood. Stop right here and try to review everything you felt about that line. Did you accept it as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe, for your private anthology of Telling Truths? My point is that the line is fraudulent. A blurb. It is also relevant that I know at least a dozen devoutly intellectual journals that will gladly buy any fourteen such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and compound the felony by calling that a sonnet. —Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for the record, let me add that I am a cynic with one wife, three children, and other invest- ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do I’m something else.  Were I to dramatize myself, I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting the devil as a master of make-up, and that among his favorite impersonations he appears, often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks, tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.” I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced and we are all damned. For all of us, unless we are carefully warned, will accept such noises as examples of the sound an actual mind makes. Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that. It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question. (Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.) In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer I have memorized:  We are damned for accepting as the sound a man makes, the sound of something else, thereby losing the truth of our own sound.  How do we learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.) —by listening to what men there have been and are —by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning Law)—and by reading what we read not for its oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into your heads and you will know what tones to exclude. —if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings, and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear that has listened enough to be a listener. As for the devil—when he has finished every imp- ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish is only that sound which is exactly not the music.
No one can wish nothing. Even that death wish sophomores are nouveau-glib about reaches for a change of notice. “I’ll have you know,” it will say thirty years later to its son, “I was once widely recognized for the quality of my death wish.” That was before three years of navel-reading with a guru who reluctantly concluded some souls are bank tellers; perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of Intro. Psych., or turned on to a first raga, or joining Polyglots Anonymous. One trouble with this year’s avant-garde is that it has already taken it fifty years to be behind the avant-garde of the twenties with the Crash yet to come. And even free souls buy wives, fall in love with automobiles, and marry a mortgage. At fifty, semisustained by bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that Galactic Twang they dance the Cosmic Konk to. You will have forgotten such energy, its illusion of violent freedoms. You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you. There does come a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing. You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love, its mercies practiced, its one day at a time begun and lived and slept on and begun.
I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling  a windowful of God and Bernini.  My neighbor, the Pope, has died  and God overnight, has wept  black mantles over the sainted  stone age whose skirted shadows  flit through to the main cave. I nurse a cold. It must be error  to sniffle in sight of holiness. “Liquids,” the doctor said. He has  no cure, but since I have my choice,  I sip champagne. If I must sit dropsical to Heaven, let me at least  be ritual to a living water. In the crypt under the cave the stone box in its stone row has been marked for months now. My neighbor knew where he was going.  I half suspect I, too, know, and that it is nothing to sneeze at,  but am left to sneeze. I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon  and wish (my taste being misformed  for the high authentic) I had a California—a Korbel or an Almaden. I like it “forward,”  as clerics of such matters say, not schooled to greatness. It is loud in Heaven today  and in the great stone school  my neighbor kept. The alumni procession of saints  is forming for him. Bells  clobber the air with portents.  I sniffle and sneeze, wad kleenex, and sip champagne,  trying to imagine what it might be  to take part in a greatness, or even in the illusion of something like. The experience  might deepen my character, though I am already near the bottom of it, among wads and butts of what was once idea. And the last swallow  I do not like the after-taste, if that is what I am tasting. But this is ritual. I toast my neighbor: may he find his glass, and may its after-taste be all that he was schooled to.
Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. —The Tempest  The only potion I saw him brew was tea of his own blend, a mash of leaves and bark.  Good for whatever ailed you was his claim, as if he could see the leaps and falls he’d named “the heart.” Who knows?  For argument,  just say he had no need, had made me up: one in his likeness, who wouldn’t touch the stuff.  Who tried to see a window where he outlined  in air its air of distance, ladylike, a pane designed to cut you off from the world  of the dunghill and the worm. Who fashioned a cloak of leaves that aped his cape,  mine only as magic as waterproof, a screen  against the downpour day after day of sun,  unlike the one he wrapped in and became  no longer Father but some other, a stranger— the island’s only one—the local god,  or was it merely King of Somewhere Else? Or mother country, I his colony? He held forth promise of some other isle,  no drier but more “cultivated,” not  just with crops but with quotation marks. How he held forth, dutiful silence mine to guard.  I borrowed foreign names from the remains  of a map that washed ashore, my own worn out through under-use. So, Carolina North,  or South? Virginia West?  As long as I remembered not to answer to “Miranda!”,  the call of parent bird to fledgling ingrate,  then I was not the heir apparent but  your normal castaway, a little bored with ins and outs of tidepools’ smelly courts. Perhaps not world enough, but I had time  to watch a hermit crab align himself and back into a vacant whelk and haul the home he wore from rocky A to B. All that watching—watching for what? A sail  blown off its course by my uncalled-for sighs? A gorgeous morning, same as yesterday, I in the same old shirt he’d handed down,  divining rightly that if it failed to fit,  a scabbard’s belt would cinch it as a dress. To the crab’s new quarters a small limpet clung.  What did I want to be? What did I know  but him, the man who’d loved his subjects less  than his library, who’d lost his kingdom, who  couldn’t put down a book he’d yet to finish? How close the air remote upon that isle,  the like of which I have not breathed again.  How it held water, building up a wall  by keeping molecules apart. How close  those castles, not to be counted on except to rumble, then to wilt late afternoons,  all squandered weakness.  Whatever I had sensed about my difference I caught from him  or from the books he carried in his head.  Such dreams he made on me. I am a leaf torn loose from his drowned book. All men are islands, though they swear otherwise.  All islands are alike in their unhappiness.
Every seaworthy vessel a woman whose mate, eloquent of how she handled under the worst of weathers, hailed his goddess of wet fire, handmaid and dockside whore. Over the courtyard’s dry dock, linens snapped. Brisk was the wind that claimed divine right to salvage whatever tore loose, brisk at the docks the trade in foreign plumage, and the milliner, arms full of wings, who tripped in a puddle that brimmed with sky. Past the known world, past the map that decorated a room with scalloped waters where ships the size of fingernail parings were never snagged by the dragon-sharp islands, a keel of leaf scraped across a pane. A branch scratched endearments on the air it then brushed clean as sand. Had the woman rereading a letter looked to the window casting her light, she could have seen almost to land’s end, the salt sea broken into semaphore flashing its glassy code for tears back to shore, seen almost to the cage on deck, the pigeons gray as the mind, some to bear messages home the first days out, the rest to fatten in the hold.
The shag rug of a Great Plains buffalo,  a flightless bird gone to stone: over its fellow keepsakes,  into the archives of air, the whale hauled a harvest of dust.  In the ripples of glass sealed over songbird skins, I wavered.  What could be said for love? From the Full-Serv to the Self-Serv Island  at the Gulf station next door, landlocked waves shivered in a row of corn.  The great flukes lifted. A Milky Way scarred the underside more vast  than the Midwestern night. Dark cargoes would give themselves up  to these shallows that waited to take home the sailor,  home to the sea of fossilized coral upon whose shoals  just down the road the motels of Coralville lay sprawled.  Here would lie a ring scratched by a scrivener with florid hand,  In thy breast my heart does rest flung back to shore, here rest two coins  face to face, joined by the salt that turned them faceless  as they turned to each other.
Is it peace, Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds On the dump? —Wallace Stevens Out of the cracks of cups and their handles, missing, the leaves unceremoniously tossed, unread, from a stubble of coffee ground ever more finely into these hollowed grounds, the first shift coaxes bulldozers to life, sphinxes to tease the riddled rubble into fresh pyramids of rot. A staleness warms enough to waft round the lord of all purveyed. His to count the hauls past the yawning gates of this New Giza into the Middle Kingdom’s Late Intermediate Period. There, to purify, to honor ourselves, we beg these offerings of refuse be cast out. To the archaeologist of the far-flung future, enough evidence in the inscriptions to identify most owners: spells scratched on the backs of envelopes to be read out before animal sacrifice, the milk, ground meat, beer, and soap  joined in this hereafter with the feast’s remains. Over tomatoes splitting their sides, over a teacup stained with roses flattened into mosaic petal from petal, earthmovers move a little mountain and, having moved it, move on, overturning a diamond sprung from its ring, glitter to a magpie’s covetous eye. If the art of loneliness is landscape, armload by carload of black-bagged leaves, landfill contours its likeness.
NONES At three p.m. under sky coming to harm something too red flashes from a limb, so red it hurts: against sky coming apart, against a left-out, twice-soaked shirt, a cardinal inflames the profane cathedral of suburban yard its owner let fall into disgrace. How rain embarrasses the half-pruned hedge. The half-mown grass that sports a tonsure in reverse shines under the torture. Rain slicks with praise red shed, red feather. Crested seedeater out of character where you’re neither the strictly monkish brown thrasher nor the odd hermit thrush, you scratch in the underbrush of faith to see what you can flush: a grub. A seed.Eminence not grise but rouge, from your lipsticked beak you pass a sowbug to your mate. You peck at a slug sliming your path, seeming to beg your forgiveness. To what would you confess beyond season-to-season unfaithfulness? VESPERS There are more divine hours: a gold-leafed page a mower rows with a scythe as tall as the tower that tents aloft a tiny sky bereft of cloud, a chapel ceiling left unstarred, heaven a lake turned upside down, filled with an emptiness that’s clean because it’s cold, glacial enough to scald the skin it bathed, the lungs it filled. On devotion’s last page, deep in the golden age of illumination, the hunt’s cortège has halted at the edge of the known world, a clearing wedged in a forest of spears. Red bird the badge on the huntsman’s tunic, you’re the splash of crimson lake, the distant lordship’s flag, the cleric dog’s bright collar, its heretic tongue. It slavers on the bleeding stag. Snarling at prayer that chases belief, it licks the offal of grief, the heart cast aside reward enough.
And in that city the houses of the dead are left empty, if the dead are famous enough; by day the living pay to see if dust is all  that befalls the lives they left behind.  Coating even the glassed-in waistcoat in time, coloring the air of the room stripped bare, down four stories of twisted stair it falls,  down on the dictionary no longer there.  Empty your pockets, empty your hearts, that empty upper room exhorts. Forget the scrap of paper with the missing word  for what’s missing—  go home to your rented room. Go on. Six cramped quills, one elbow chair, missing a leg, held up all those years by Johnson’s willing it to hold  his bulk—now even the “soul hath elbowroom”  in that room where scribes scribbled out that quote. In that city the dead never want to get up, just as in life. What can we offer them?  Just this dust to cover them deeper,  kin to the soot that shadowed their days. Kiss from a wife who no longer wanted to be touched— love, he held, regarded with passionate affection,  like one sex to the other, first; or, second,  made do with the affection of a friend; or managed merely parental tenderness, third; or, fourth, no more than pleasure with, delighting in; or, fifth,  no less than the reverent unwillingness to offend.  O had a long sound, as in alone. Her opium. On clean-shirt day he would pay a visit to his wife.Pack meant large bundle of any thing—“on your head  a pack of sorrows.”  Quiet. The square just off Fleet Street so quiet Carlyle got lost on his way there. Remember the garret floorboards’ complaint, the muffled  ruffling of pigeons just overhead?  Such silence we fell into stair by stair, the house to ourselves. Tired of London, he claimed, and one was  tired of life. Were we just tired?  Under the low ceiling as below deck, up where no angle was true, we sank in deeper silence, valedictory, the way it took us in.  Volumes of ancient air closed around us, blank,  weighted by the latest dust. What had we come to the house of the dead to see? Something exotic? The zebra presented to the queen in 1726? Something  exactly as it might have been? Did you  yawn first, back among the living? You pulled me from traffic rushing downstream instead of up, that Zambezi best forded from stripe to painted stripe,  a “zebra crossing.” I’d looked the wrong way.
I Recto Over the   seaworthy cavalry  arches a  rocketry   wickerwork: involute  laceries  lacerate  indigo  altitudes,  making a skywritten filigree  into which,  lazily,  LCTs sinuate,  adjutants next to them   eversharp- eyed, among  delicate battleship  umbrages  twinkling an anger as   measured as  organdy.  Normandy  knitted the  eyelets and  yarn of these  warriors’  armoring—  ringbolt and  dungaree,  cable and  axletree, tanktrack and  ammobelt  linking and  opening garlands and  islands of  seafoam and  sergeantry.  Opulent  fretwork: on  turquoise and   emerald, red instants accenting  neatly a dearth of red.   Gunstations  issue it;  vaportrails  ease into  smoke from it— yellow and  ochre and  umber and  sable and  out. Or that man at the   edge of the  tapestry  holding his  inches of  niggardly  ground and his  trumpery  order of  red and his  equipage  angled and  dated. He. II Verso Wasting no  energy, Time, the old   registrar,  evenly  adds to his scrolls, rolling   up in them rampage and  echo and hush—in each   influx of surf, in each tumble of   raincloud at evening,  action of  seaswell and  undertow  rounding an  introvert  edge to the  surge until,  manhandled  over, all surfaces, tapestries,  entities veer from the  eye like those  rings of lost  yesteryears  pooled in the  oak of your  memory.  Item: one  Normandy  Exercise. Muscle it over, an  underside  rises: a  raggedy  elegant  mess of an  abstract: a  rip-out of  kidstuff and  switchboards, where amputee  radio elements, unattached  nervefibre  conduits,  openmouthed  ureters,  tag ends of hamstring and   outrigging ripped from their   unions and nexuses  jumble with  undeterred speakingtubes   twittering  orders as  random and  angry as  ddt’d hornets. Step  over a  moment: peer  in through this  nutshell of  eyeball and  man your gun.
for Helen Vendler O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough,  Or both! O promissory notes of woe!  One time in Santa Fe N.M. Ol’ Winfield Townley Scott and I ... But whoa. One can exert oneself, ff, Or architect a heaven like Rimbaud, Or if that seems, how shall I say, de trop,  One can at least write sonnets, a propos  Of nothing save the do-re-mi-fa-sol  Of poetry itself. Is not the row Of perfect rhymes, the terminal bon mot,  Obeisance enough to the Great O? “Observe,” said Chairman Mao to Premier Chou,  “On voyage à Parnasse pour prendre les eaux.  On voyage comme poisson, incog.”
Federico Garcia Lorca used to uncork a bottle or two of wine whenever the duende dwindled for a line. James Joyce would have preferred a choice of brandies in decanters made by Tiffany’s,  but rotgut was the shortcut to epiphanies. The Later Henry James bet shots of rum against himself in games  of how much can we pyramid upon a  given donné. Little Dylan Thomas didn’t keep his promise to stay out of Milk Wood. He tried to drown the fact as best he could. Anna Akhmatova Eyed the last shot of a Pre-war cognac de champagne. “So much for you, little brandy. Do svidanya.” T. S. Eliot used to belly it up to the nearest bar, then make for a correlative objective in his car. Proust  used to too.
“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are No rhymes
purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck    Poor Soul 			Fly, 			thief; 			thy 			fief- 			dom 			’s torched. 			Come, 			Cur. 			Fetch! 			Get 			your 			scorched 			earth 			worth.
Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice. And the first rows, shaken with an afterslice That’s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao. O daffy panoply O rare device O flashing leg-iron at a whopping price Whipping us into ecstasies and how, The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung, A rescue helicopter’s bottom rung Glinting and spinning off, a scud of fluff, A slash of petals up against the bough, A juggler’s avalanche of silken stuff Gushing in white-hot verticals among Camels and axels and pyramids, oh wow, Bewilderment is parachute enough. We jolt. A sidewise stutterstep in chorus. The other billboards flicker by before us. Gone! with a budded petulance that stung. So talented! So targeted! So young! Such concentration on the bottom line! We vanish down the IRT. A shine. A glimmer. Something. Nothing. To think twice Was to have lost the trick of paradise.
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the  red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,  they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are  innocent, they would never hurt anybody.  I want to go up to them and say Stop,  don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,  he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do,  you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me,  her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me,  his pitiful beautiful untouched body,  but I don’t do it. I want to live. I  take them up like the male and female  paper dolls and bang them together  at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to  strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Thanksgiving Day I like to see Our cook perform her witchery. She turns a pumpkin into pie As easily as you or I Can wave a hand or wink an eye. She takes leftover bread and muffin And changes them to turkey stuffin’. She changes cranberries to sauce And meats to stews and stews to broths; And when she mixes gingerbread It turns into a man instead With frosting collar ’round his throat And raisin buttons down his coat. Oh, some like magic made by wands,  And some read magic out of books, And some like fairy spells and charms  But I like magic made by cooks!
The god of war assured King Arsounas, “Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die.” In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no one can ever die. The left-handed rockabilly guitarist whose left arm was severed by an RPG round at Dak To has come back to life in a part of my body that died long before we started to patrol this part of the river of eternal woe. His life is mine though I never lived it. The violent backwash of the rotors is crimsoned by a fine aerosol spray of blood while a loudspeaker amplifies the goddess’ excited laughter.
sleepwalker can never die he is the chemical soldier composite of latex and atropine, hellfire, warthogs, desolation, pride, apaches, lasers, dust devils swirling, screaming fire deaths, machine worship, young blond pilots flashing thumbs up, excited smiles of interviewed military wives, shrapnel- paced rockeye anti-personnel bombs spraying death like fireflies over a texas barbecue of human flesh stretching sixty miles across open desert, armageddon over eden, algebraic mosaic of witchcraft, dot pattern magic of omens and signs, victims never knowing what hit them, vivid delivery of hell to nineveh, incendiary reduction of tissue to shadows on the sand, incineration of boots with human feet still in them, pain, mania, technology, history, delirious victims bleeding, eagle with the brains of a weak and frightened victim in its beak, unhappy fate, grief, shame, helpless rage
Every day I peruse the box scores for hours  Sometimes I wonder why I do it Since I am not going to take a test on it  And no one is going to give me money The pleasure’s something like that of codes  Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say  So as brightly to picturize Eurydice In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi
The boy who is kind to animals has tied a firecracker to the cat’s tail he is stoning the spotted bitch he is called Wind-Chaser Yesterday he gave bread and broken meat to the street dogs, his friends His friends are catching lizards behind the wall they killed a songbird with their catapults with the boy who is kind to animals they set fire to a grasshopper, laughing Along the road the children are shaking boxes something wants to get out The mother spits curses she says we should pay because they are hungry Wind-Chaser, Eye-of-the-Heart, Comes-Again, run away from their baffled eyes
At last I know—it’s on old ivory jars, Glassed with old miniatures and garnered once with musk.  I’ve seen those eyes like smouldering April stars As carp might see them behind their bubbled skies In pale green fishponds—they’re as green your eyes,   As lakes themselves, changed to green stone at dusk. At last I know—it’s paned in a crystal hoop  On powder-boxes from some dead Italian girl, I’ve seen such eyes grow suddenly dark, and droop  Their small, pure lids, as if I’d pried too far  In finding you snared there on that ivory jar  By crusted motes of rose and smoky-pearl.
At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane A port to see—water breathing in the air, Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain, Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere, White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone, Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone, One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam, Quietly over the roof-tops—another window Touched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies, One lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam. Far away on the rim of this great misty cup, The sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up, Diamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes On moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet, Swim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes Their watery mirrors with a moister rivulet, Acid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings, Men sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins, Till the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up, And the suburbs rise with distant murmurings. O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there, I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down, Marooned and lonely in this bitter air, And in one moment deny your frozen town, Renounce your bodies—earth falls in clouds away, Stones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay, Roofs fade, and that small smoking forgotten heap, The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper, Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended, A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep. And the least crystal weed, shaken with frost, The furred herbs of silver, the daisies round-eyed and tart, Painted in antic china, the smallest night-flower tossed Like a bright penny on the lawn, stirs more my heart, Strikes deeper this morning air, than mortal towers Dried to a common blindness, fainter than flowers, Fordone, extinguished, as the vapours break, And dead in the dawn. O Sun that kills with life, And brings to breath all silent things—O Dawn, Waken me with old earth, keep me awake!
‘Talbingo River’—as one says of bones: ‘Captain’ or ‘Commodore’ that smelt gunpowder In old engagements no one quite believes Or understands. Talbingo had its blood As they did, ran with waters huge and clear Lopping down mountains, Turning crags to banks. Now it’s a sort of aching valley, Basalt shaggy with scales, A funnel of tobacco-coloured clay, Smoulders of puffed earth And pebbles and shell-bodied flies And water thickening to stone in pocks. That’s what we’re like out here, Beds of dried-up passions.
I   Cook was a captain of the Admiralty When sea-captains had the evil eye, Or should have, what with beating krakens off And casting nativities of ships; Cook was a captain of the powder-days When captains, you might have said, if you had been Fixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side, Or gaping at them up companionways, Were more like warlocks than a humble man— And men were humble then who gazed at them, Poor horn-eyed sailors, bullied by devils’ fists Of wind or water, or the want of both, Childlike and trusting, filled with eager trust— Cook was a captain of the sailing days When sea-captains were kings like this, Not cold executives of company-rules Cracking their boilers for a dividend Or bidding their engineers go wink At bells and telegraphs, so plates would hold Another pound. Those captains drove their ships By their own blood, no laws of schoolbook steam, Till yards were sprung, and masts went overboard— Daemons in periwigs, doling magic out, Who read fair alphabets in stars Where humbler men found but a mess of sparks, Who steered their crews by mysteries And strange, half-dreadful sortilege with books, Used medicines that only gods could know The sense of, but sailors drank In simple faith. That was the captain Cook was when he came to the Coral Sea And chose a passage into the dark. How many mariners had made that choice Paused on the brink of mystery! ‘Choose now!’ The winds roared, blowing home, blowing home, Over the Coral Sea. ‘Choose now!’ the trades Cried once to Tasman, throwing him for choice Their teeth or shoulders, and the Dutchman chose The wind’s way, turning north. ‘Choose, Bougainville!’ The wind cried once, and Bougainville had heard The voice of God, calling him prudently Out of the dead lee shore, and chose the north, The wind’s way. So, too, Cook made choice, Over the brink, into the devil’s mouth, With four months’ food, and sailors wild with dreams Of English beer, the smoking barns of home. So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout, So men write poems in Australia.II Flowers turned to stone! Not all the botany Of Joseph Banks, hung pensive in a porthole, Could find the Latin for this loveliness, Could put the Barrier Reef in a glass box Tagged by the horrid Gorgon squint Of horticulture. Stone turned to flowers It seemed—you’d snap a crystal twig, One petal even of the water-garden, And have it dying like a cherry-bough. They’d sailed all day outside a coral hedge, And half the night. Cook sailed at night, Let there be reefs a fathom from the keel And empty charts. The sailors didn’t ask, Nor Joseph Banks. Who cared? It was the spell Of Cook that lulled them, bade them turn below, Kick off their sea-boots, puff themselves to sleep, Though there were more shoals outside Than teeth in a shark’s head. Cook snored loudest himself. One day, a morning of light airs and calms, They slid towards a reef that would have knifed Their boards to mash, and murdered every man. So close it sucked them, one wave shook their keel, The next blew past the coral. Three officers, In gilt and buttons, languidly on deck Pointed their sextants at the sun. One yawned, One held a pencil, one put eye to lens: Three very peaceful English mariners Taking their sights for longitude. I’ve never heard Of sailors aching for the longitude Of shipwrecks before or since. It was the spell Of Cook did this, the phylacteries of Cook. Men who ride broomsticks with a mesmerist Mock the typhoon. So, too, it was with Cook.III Two chronometers the captain had, One by Arnold that ran like mad, One by Kendal in a walnut case, Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face. Arnold always hurried with a crazed click-click Dancing over Greenwich like a lunatic, Kendal panted faithfully his watch-dog beat, Climbing out of Yesterday with sticky little feet. Arnold choked with appetite to wolf up time, Madly round the numerals his hands would climb, His cogs rushed over and his wheels ran miles, Dragging Captain Cook to the Sandwich Isles. But Kendal dawdled in the tombstoned past, With a sentimental prejudice to going fast, And he thought very often of a haberdasher’s door And a yellow-haired boy who would knock no more. All through the night-time, clock talked to clock, In the captain’s cabin, tock-tock-tock, One ticked fast and one ticked slow, And Time went over them a hundred years ago.IV Sometimes the god would fold his wings And, stone of Caesars turned to flesh, Talk of the most important things That serious-minded midshipmen could wish, Of plantains, and the lack of rum Or spearing sea-cows—things like this That hungry schoolboys, five days dumb, In jolly-boats are wonted to discuss. What midshipman would pause to mourn The sun that beat about his ears, Or curse the tide, if he could horn His fists by tugging on those lumbering oars? Let rum-tanned mariners prefer To hug the weather-side of yards, ‘Cats to catch mice’ before they purr, Those were the captain’s enigmatic words. Here, in this jolly-boat they graced, Were food and freedom, wind and storm, While, fowling-piece across his waist, Cook mapped the coast, with one eye cocked for game.V After the candles had gone out, and those Who listened had gone out, and a last wave Of chimney-haloes caked their smoky rings Like fish-scales on the ceiling, a Yellow Sea Of swimming circles, the old man, Old Captain-in-the-Corner, drank his rum With friendly gestures to four chairs. They stood Empty, still warm from haunches, with rubbed nails And leather glazed, like aged serving-men Feeding a king’s delight, the sticky, drugged Sweet agony of habitual anecdotes. But these, his chairs, could bear an old man’s tongue, Sleep when he slept, be flattering when he woke, And wink to hear the same eternal name From lips new-dipped in rum. ‘Then Captain Cook, I heard him, told them they could go If so they chose, but he would get them back, Dead or alive, he’d have them,’ The old man screeched, half-thinking to hear ‘Cook! Cook again! Cook! It’s other cooks he’ll need, Cooks who can bake a dinner out of pence, That’s what he lives on, talks on, half-a-crown A day, and sits there full of Cook. Who’d do your cooking now, I’d like to ask, If someone didn’t grind her bones away? But that’s the truth, six children and half-a-crown A day, and a man gone daft with Cook.’ That was his wife, Elizabeth, a noble wife but brisk, Who lived in a present full of kitchen-fumes And had no past. He had not seen her For seven years, being blind, and that of course Was why he’d had to strike a deal with chairs, Not knowing when those who chafed them had gone to sleep Or stolen away. Darkness and empty chairs, This was the port that Alexander Home Had come to with his useless cutlass-wounds And tales of Cook, and half-a-crown a day— This was the creek he’d run his timbers to, Where grateful countrymen repaid his wounds At half-a-crown a day. Too good, too good, This eloquent offering of birdcages To gulls, and Greenwich Hospital to Cook, Britannia’s mission to the sea-fowl. It was not blindness picked his flesh away, Nor want of sight made penny-blank the eyes Of Captain Home, but that he lived like this In one place, and gazed elsewhere. His body moved In Scotland, but his eyes were dazzle-full Of skies and water farther round the world— Air soaked with blue, so thick it dripped like snow On spice-tree boughs, and water diamond-green, Beaches wind-glittering with crumbs of gilt, And birds more scarlet than a duchy’s seal That had come whistling long ago, and far Away. His body had gone back, Here it sat drinking rum in Berwickshire, But not his eyes—they were left floating there Half-round the earth, blinking at beaches milked By suck-mouth tides, foaming with ropes of bubbles And huge half-moons of surf. Thus it had been When Cook was carried on a sailor’s back, Vengeance in a cocked hat, to claim his price, A prince in barter for a longboat. And then the trumpery springs of fate—a stone, A musket-shot, a round of gunpowder, And puzzled animals, killing they knew not what Or why, but killing . . . the surge of goatish flanks Armoured in feathers, like cruel birds: Wild, childish faces, killing; a moment seen, Marines with crimson coats and puffs of smoke Toppling face-down; and a knife of English iron, Forged aboard ship, that had been changed for pigs, Given back to Cook between the shoulder-blades. There he had dropped, and the old floundering sea, The old, fumbling, witless lover-enemy, Had taken his breath, last office of salt water. Cook died. The body of Alexander Home Flowed round the world and back again, with eyes Marooned already, and came to English coasts, The vague ancestral darknesses of home, Seeing them faintly through a glass of gold, Dim fog-shapes, ghosted like the ribs of trees Against his blazing waters and blue air. But soon they faded, and there was nothing left, Only the sugar-cane and the wild granaries Of sand, and.palm-trees and the flying blood Of cardinal-birds; and putting out one hand Tremulously in the direction of the beach, He felt a chair in Scotland. And sat down.
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters, Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble, Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone, Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls. Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets, Or grammarians freeze it into spar, Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out In alabaster, with horny cartilage And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy Baked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture, Bleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers; But the quarries are of more use than this, Filled with the rolling of huge granite dice, Ideas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church, Good men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control . . . Frail tinkling rush Water-hair streaming Prickles and glitters Cloudy with bristles River of thought Swimming the pebbles— Undo, loosen your bubbles!
Uncles who burst on childhood, from the East, Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving, And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving, Bearers of parrots, bonfires of blazing stones, Their pockets fat with riches out of reason, Meerschaum and sharks’-teeth, ropes of China coins, And weeds and seeds and berries blowzed with poison— So, from the baleful Kimberleys of thought, From the mad continent of dreams, you wander, Spending your trophies at our bloodless feet, Mocking our fortunes with more desperate plunder; So with your boomerangs of rhyme you come, With blossoms wrenched from sweet and deadly branches, And we, pale Crusoes in the moment’s tomb, Watch, turn aside, and touch again those riches, Nor ask what beaches of the mind you trod, What skies endured, and unimagined rivers, Or whiteness trenched by what mysterious tide, And aching silence of the Never-Nevers; Watch, turn aside, and touch with easy faith Your chest of miracles, but counting nothing, Or dumbly, that you stole them out of death, Out of death’s pyramids, to prove us breathing. We breathe, who beat the sides of emptiness, We live, who die by statute in steel hearses, We dance, whose only posture gives us grace To squeeze the greasy udders of our purses— (Look in this harsher glass, and I will show you The daylight after the darkness, and the morning After the midnight, and after the night the day After the year after, terribly returning). We live by these, your masks and images, We breathe in this, your quick and borrowed body; But you take passage on the ruffian seas, And you are vanished in the dark already.
After the whey-faced anonymity Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush, After the rubbing and the hit of brush, You come to the South Country As if the argument of trees were done, The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains, All ended by these clear and gliding planes Like an abrupt solution. And over the flat earth of empty farms The monstrous continent of air floats back Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black, Bruised flesh of thunderstorms: Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge, Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light, So huge, from such infinities of height, You walk on the sky’s beach While even the dwindled hills are small and bare, As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful, Something below pushed up a knob of skull, Feeling its way to air.
You can shuffle and scuffle and scold,  You can rattle the knockers and knobs, Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold  Till the Deputy-Governor sobs. You can sneak up a suitable plank  In a frantic endeavor to see— But what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank  When the Big Door bangs at Three? Listen in the cellars, listen in the vaults, Can’t you hear the tellers turning somersaults? Can’t you hear the spectres of inspectors and directors Dancing with the phantoms in a Dead Man’s Waltz? Some are ghosts of nabobs, poverty and stray bobs, Midas and his mistress, Mammon and his wife; Other ones are sentries, guarding double entries, Long-forgotten, double-dealing, troubled double-life. Down among the pass-books, money lent and spent, Down among the forests of the Four Per Cent., Where the ledgers meet and moulder, and the overdrafts grow older, And the phantoms shrug a shoulder when you ask ’em for the rent. They are bogies of Grandfather’s cheques,  They are spectres of buried accounts, They are crinoline sweethearts with pearls on their necks,  Demanding enormous amounts. They are payment for suppers and flowers,  For diamonds to banish a tear, For sweet, pretty ladies in opulent hours . . .  And tombstones . . . and bailiffs . . . and beer . . . Down in the bowels of the bank, the ledgers lie rank upon rank, The debts of the ages come out of their pages, The bones of old loans creak and clank— Oh, if you could peep through the door To day at a Quarter Past Four, You’d find all the ghosts at their usual posts, And you wouldn’t sign cheques any more!
My mare, when she was in heat, would travel the fenceline for hours, wearing the impatience in her feet into the ground. Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her, give it up. She’d widen her nostrils, sieve the wind for news, be moving again, her underbelly darkening with sweat, then stop at the gate a moment, wait to see what I might do. Oh, I knew how it was for her, easily recognized myself in that wide lust: came to stand in the pasture just to see it played. Offered a hand, a bucket of grain— a minute’s distraction from passion the most I gave. Then she’d return to what burned her: the fence, the fence, so hoping I might see, might let her free. I’d envy her then, to be so restlessly sure of heat, and need, and what it takes to feed the wanting that we are— only a gap to open the width of a mare, the rest would take care of itself. Surely, surely I knew that, who had the power of bucket and bridle— she would beseech me, sidle up, be gone, as life is short. But desire, desire is long.
One day in that room, a small rat.  Two days later, a snake. Who, seeing me enter, whipped the long stripe of his  body under the bed, then curled like a docile house-pet. I don’t know how either came or left.  Later, the flashlight found nothing. For a year I watched as something—terror? happiness? grief?— entered and then left my body. Not knowing how it came in,  Not knowing how it went out. It hung where words could not reach it.  It slept where light could not go. Its scent was neither snake nor rat,  neither sensualist nor ascetic. There are openings in our lives  of which we know nothing. Through them the belled herds travel at will, long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
I have envied those  who make something  useful, sturdy— a chair, a pair of boots. Even a soup, rich with potatoes and cream. Or those who fix, perhaps, a leaking window: strip out the old cracked putty, lay down cleanly the line of the new. You could learn, the mirror tells me, late at night,  but lacks conviction. One reflected eyebrow quivers a little. I look at this borrowed apartment— everywhere I question it, the wallpaper’s pattern matches. Yesterday a woman showed me a building shaped like the overturned hull of a ship, its roof trusses, under the plaster, lashed with soaked rawhide, the columns’ marble painted to seem like wood. Though possibly it was the other way around? I look at my unhandy hand, innocent, shaped as the hands of others are shaped.  Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really.Rawhide, it writes,  and chair, and marble.Eyebrow. Later the woman asked me— I recognized her then, my sister, my own young self—Does a poem enlarge the world,  or only our idea of the world?
You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.  Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust. Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,  each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.  There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them. The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,  honey of cruelty, fear. This rebus—slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life— when will I learn to read it plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?  Not to understand it, only to see. As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,  we become our choices. Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup. The ladder leans into its darkness.  The anvil leans into its silence.  The cup sits empty. How can I enter this question the clay has asked?
When I was a boy and a man would die  we’d say a verse when the hearse went by  one car two car three car four someone knocking on the devil’s door. I smoked all night myself awake and saw the lights and the day break.  When the sun was done with the final star  I left the house and the door ajar and went to the church. The father was nice  but the holy water was cold as ice.  I found a friend and felt his hand  fall through mine like crumbling sand.  I went to hear the talk in the square  but there were headless people there.  I turned to the clock for the time of day  but the hole in the wall had nothing to say.  Callous of heaven and careless of hell  you knew something you didn’t tell.  The soul you said was only fear,  and heaven, well heaven at best was here.  So heaven is gone if that was it and the soul lies there in the private pit  but hell is big and hell is a bone and hell comes in from the edge of alone. Hell is a dead girl who walks through the town  and hunts for my bed to lay herself down.
We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come,  were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two, the youngest assistant curator in the country. I had some good ideas in those days. Well, what we did was this. We had boxes  precisely built to every size of canvas. We put the boxes in the basement and waited. When word came that the Germans were coming in,  we got each painting put in the proper box and out of Leningrad in less than a week. They were stored somewhere in southern Russia. But what we did, you see, besides the boxes  waiting in the basement, which was fine, a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art— but what we did was leave the frames hanging,  so after the war it would be a simple thing  to put the paintings back where they belonged. Nothing will seem surprised or sad again  compared to those imperious, vacant frames. Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream— You know it lasted nine hundred days. Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie  sometimes a foot deep on this very floor, but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell. Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.  Early one day, a dark December morning, we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,  pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.  They told us this: in three homes far from here  all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad  to see the Hermitage, as they supposed  every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.  Now they had been sent to defend the city,  a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe. I had to tell them there was nothing to see but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung. “Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.” And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger  than all of us being here in the first place,  inside such a building, strolling in snow. We led them around most of the major rooms,  what they could take the time for, wall by wall.  Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.  I told them how those colors would come together,  described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,  mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout  and why this painter got the roses wrong. The next day a dozen waited for us, then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes.  Each of us took a group in a different direction:  Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse,  Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer, Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper.  We pointed to more details about the paintings,  I venture to say, than if we had had them there,  some unexpected use of line or light, balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces  the same way we’d done it every morning  before the war, but then we didn’t pay so much attention to what we talked about. People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact  we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned  out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings. But now the guide and the listeners paid attention  to everything—the simple differences between the first and post-impressionists, romantic and heroic, shade and shadow. Maybe this was a way to forget the war a little while. Maybe more than that. Whatever it was, the people continued to come.  It came to be called The Unseen Collection. Here. Here is the story I want to tell you. Slowly, blind people began to come. A few at first then more of them every morning,  some led and some alone, some swaying a little. They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces,  they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them,  to see better what was being said. And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention. After the siege was lifted and the Germans left and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places,  the blind never came again. Not like before. This seems strange, but what I think it was, they couldn’t see the paintings anymore. They could still have listened, but the lectures became  a little matter-of-fact. What can I say? Confluences come when they will and they go away.
Look at their faces. You know it all. They married the week he left for the war. Both are gentle, intelligent people, as all four of their parents were. They’ve never talked about much except the children. They love each other but never wondered why they married or had the kids or stayed together. It wasn’t because they knew the answers. They had never heard the questions that twisted through the jokes to come of Moses and the Ten Suggestions. They paid their debts and never doubted God rewarded faith and virtue or when you got out of line had big and little ways to hurt you. People walked alone in parks. Children slept in their yards at night. Most every man had a paying job, and black was black and white was white. Would you go back? Say that you can, that all it takes is a wave and a wink and there you are. So what do you do? The question is crueler than you think.
We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do. The great and all the anonymous dead are there. We know the sound of all the sounds we brought. The rich taste of it is on our tongues. But where are we going to be, and why, and who? The disenfranchised dead want to know. We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we meant to go. But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how except in the minds of those who will call it Now? The children. The children. And how does our garden grow? With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row— and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow. Who were many people coming together cannot become one people falling apart. Who dreamed for every child an even chance cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not. Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head cannot let chaos make its way to the heart. Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot. We know what we have done and what we have said, and how we have grown, degree by slow degree, believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become— just and compassionate, equal, able, and free. All this in the hands of children, eyes already set on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet— but looking through their eyes, we can see what our long gift to them may come to be. If we can truly remember, they will not forget.
Because you’ll find how hard it can be  to tell which part of your body sings, you never should dally with any young man  who does any one of the following things: tries to beat all the yellow lights;  says, “Big deal!” or “So what?”  more than seven times a day;  ignores yellow lines in a parking lot; carries a radar detector; asks what you did with another date;  has more than seven bumper stickers;  drinks beer early and whiskey late; talks on a cellular phone at lunch;  tunes to radio talk shows; doesn’t fasten his seat belt; knows more than God knows; wants you to change how you do your hair;  spits in a polystyrene cup; doesn’t use his turn signal; wants you to change your makeup; calls your parents their given names;  doesn’t know why you don’t smoke;  has dirt under his fingernails; makes a threat and calls it a joke; pushes to get you to have one more; seems to have trouble staying awake; says “dago” and “wop” and words like that;  swerves a car to hit a snake;  sits at a table wearing a hat;  has a boneless handshake. You’re going to know soon enough  the ones who fail this little test.  Mark them off your list at once  and be very careful of all the rest.
The old man  drew the line for his son,  the executive: “I don’t want you spending money on me! (not as long as there are fathers)”, the line ageless  as the independence of time. Musters tears  and overflows the inner ear,  yet does not matter. It can not cure frailty. I seek him  who will seek me out and will believe  what I do not believe (that is my frailty).  “Sit down here with us,” he says,  “You don’t have to impress anyone. Here is my hand.  Your age is of no significance.” Ah!  I move closer to his mouth and look into his eyes.  I do not avert mine, there is no reason to,  or retreat into a kindly smile. Ah, companero,  you were born on the wrong day  when God was paradoxical. You’ll have to  find yourself an old dog.
“If you open the brain  from whence sprang Solomon and Aristotle and separate the lips  in the fissure of Sylvius a triangle of cortex  will appear. This is the Island of Reil.” Well put, anatomist.  We are all careful, men of earth (a blind man can sense a post). Thus Newton pondered on falling apples and a Mixtec carved a humanist in jaguar bone. “How happy I was,”  wrote the scientist after a long illness, “when once again  I had something to investigate.”
a man and his dog what fun chasing twigs into the water! young girls bicycle by in pairs and plaid shorts a wind so soft one’s whole back tingles with cilia a gentle lake the sun boils at the center, radiates the zone for man  and lays a healing pad across his nape an airplane small and flat as a paper model roars behind the Virgilian scene an old man tips his straw hat down to shade  his eyes, pulls up his fishline and moves on to a new spot the poor small wood louse crawls along the bark ridge for his life
The ants came  to investigate  the dead bull snake,  nibbled at the viscera  and hurried off  with full mouths  waving wild  antenae. Moths alighted,  beetles swarmed,  flies buzzed in the stomach. Three crows  tugged and tore  and flew off to their oak tree with the skin. In every house men, women and children  were chewing beef. Who was it said “The wonder of the world  is its comprehensibility”?
Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms, green sand, pebbles, broken shells. Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms, gray sand, pebbles, bubbles rising. Plasma-bearer and slow- motion benthos! The fishery vessel Ion drops anchor here  collecting plankton smears and fauna. Plasma-bearer, visible sea purge,  sponge and kelpleaf. Halicystus the Sea Bottle resembles emeralds and is the largest cell in the world. Young sea horse Hippocampus twenty minutes old, nobody has ever seen this marine freak blink. It radiates on terminal vertebra a comb of twenty upright spines and curls its rocky tail. Saltflush lobster bull encrusted swims backwards from the rock.
Up stand  six yellow  jonquils in a  glass/ the stems  dark green, paling  as they descend into the water/  seen through a thicket  of baby’s breath, “a tall herb bearing numerous small,  fragrant white flowers.” I have seen  snow-drops larger. I bent my face down.  To my delight they were convoluted  like a rose. They had no smell,  their white the grain of Biblical dust,  which like the orchid itself is as common as hayseed.  Their stems were thin and woody but as tightly compacted  as a tree trunk, greenish rubbings showing in spots  through the brown; wiry, forked twigs so close,  they made an impassable bush which from a distance  looked like mist. I could barely escape  from that wood of particulars ... the jonquils whose air within  was irradiated topaz, silent as in an ear,  the stems leaning lightly against the glass,  trisecting its inner circle in the water,  crossed like reverent hands (ah, the imagination!  Benedicite. Enter monks.  Oops, sorry! Trespassing  on Japanese space. Exit monks  and all their lore from grace). I was moved by all this  and murmured to my eyes, “Oh, Master!”  and became engrossed again in that wood of particulars  until I found myself out of character, singing  “Tell me why you’ve settled here.”  “Because my element is near.” and reflecting,  “The eye of man cares. Yes!” But a familiar voice  broke into the wood, a shade of mockery in it,  and in her smile a fore-knowledge  of something playful, something forbidden,  something make-believe something saucy,  something delicious about to pull me  off guard: “Do you want to be my Cupid-o?” In fairness to her  it must be said that her freckles  are always friendly and that the anticipation  of a prank makes them radiate  across her face the way dandelions  sprout in a field after a summer shower. “What makes you so fresh,  my Wife of Bath? What makes you so silly,  o bright hen?” “That’s for you to find out,  old shoe, old shoe. That’s for you to find out  if you can.” “Oh yeah!”  (a mock chase and capture). “Commit her  into jonquil’s custody. She’ll see a phallus  in the pistil. Let her work it off there.” But I was now myself  under this stringent force which ended,  as real pastorals in time must, in bed, with the great  eye of man, rolling.
We speak of mankind. Why not wavekind? Barrel-chested military water rushes in a mass to break the shore earth into stonekind.Pphlooph pphlooph  the waves grope indistinctly for the shore. As delicate  as a butterfly along a cheek  a boat with white and orange sail appears. A small boy in a life-belt sits in front and looks ahead with all his might.  His father steers, attached like a shaft to his son’s safety and the sail’s management. A sunfish thrown back by a fisherman lies drowned and pitching. The eyes are white in death. This is the raw data. A mystery translates it into feeling and perception; then imagination; finally the hard inevitable quartz figure of will  and language. Thus a squirrel tail flying from a handlebar unmistakably establishes its passing rider as a male unbowed  in a chipper plume.
What can be compared to  the living eye? Its East  is flowering honeysuckle  and its North dogwood bushes. What can be compared  to light in which leaves darken  after rain, fierce green?  like Rousseau’s jungle: any minute  the tiger head will poke through  the foliage peering  at experience. Who is like man  sitting in the cell of referents,  whose eye has never seen  a jungle, yet looks in? It is the great eye,  source of security. Praised be thou,  as the Jews say, who have engraved  clarity and delivered us  to the mind where you must reign  severe as quiddity of bone  forever and ever without  bias or mercy, attrition or mystery.
Who can say now, “When I was young, the country was very beautiful? Oaks and willows grew along the rivers and there were many herbs and flowering bushes. The forests were so dense the deer slipped through the cottonwoods and maples unseen.” Who would listen? Who will carry even the vicarious tone of that time? In the old days  age was honored. Today it’s whim,  the whelp without habitat. Who will now admit  that he is either old or young or knows anything? All that went out with the forests.
After the jostling on canal streets and the orchids blowing in the window  I work in cut glass and majolica and hear the plectrum of the angels. My thoughts keep dwelling on the littoral  where china clocks tick in the cold shells  and the weeds slide in the equinox. The night is cold for love,  a chamber for the chorus and the antistrophe of the sealight.
My baby brother has a bear that travels with him everywhere. He never lets the bear from sight. He hugs it in his crib at night. And when my brother’s diaper smells, the name of the bear is what he yells— which is a clever thing to do because my brother named it Pooh.
Little Boy Blue, please cover your nose. You sneezed on Miss Muffet and ruined her clothes. You sprayed Mother Hubbard, and now she is sick. You put out the fire  on Jack’s candlestick. Your sneeze is the reason  why Humpty fell down. You drenched Yankee Doodle when he came to town. The blind mice are angry! The sheep are upset! From now on use tissues so no one gets wet!
“My doggy ate my homework. He chewed it up,” I said. But when I offered my excuse My teacher shook her head. I saw this wasn’t going well. I didn’t want to fail. Before she had a chance to talk, I added to the tale: “Before he ate, he took my work And tossed it in a pot. He simmered it with succotash Till it was piping hot. “He scrambled up my science notes With eggs and bacon strips, Along with sautéed spelling words And baked potato chips. “He then took my arithmetic  And had it gently fried. He broiled both my book reports  With pickles on the side. “He wore a doggy apron As he cooked a notebook stew. He barked when I objected. There was nothing I could do.” “Did he wear a doggy chef hat?” She asked me with a scowl. “He did,” I said. “And taking it Would only make him growl.” My teacher frowned, but then I said  As quickly as I could, “He covered it with ketchup,  And he said it tasted good.” “A talking dog who likes to cook?”  My teacher had a fit. She sent me to the office,  And that is where I sit. I guess I made a big mistake  In telling her all that. ’Cause I don’t have a doggy.  It was eaten by my cat.
I hear it at night when I turn out the light. It’s that creature who’s under my bed. He won’t go away. He’s determined to stay. But I wish he would beat it, instead. I told him to go, but he shook his head no. He was worse than an unwelcome guest. I gave him a nudge, but he still wouldn’t budge. It was hard to get rid of the pest. So I fired one hundred round cannon balls plundered from pirate ships sailing the seas. But he caught them barehanded and quickly grandstanded by juggling them nice as you please. The creature was slick. He was clever and quick. This called for a drastic maneuver. So I lifted my spread and charged under the bed with the roar of my mother’s new Hoover. But he snorted his nose and sucked in the long hose, the canister, cord, and the plug, and vacuumed in dust  till I thought he would bust then he blew it all over the rug. Now this made me sore, so I cried, “This is war!” and sent in a contingent of fleas, an army of ants dressed in camouflage pants followed closely by big killer bees. But he welcomed them in With a sly, crafty grin, And he ate them with crackers and cheese. I screamed, “That’s enough!” It was time to get tough. “You asked for it, Creature,” I said, as I picked up and threw, with an aim sure and true, my gym sneaker under the bed. With each whiff of the sneaker the creature grew weaker. He staggered out gasping for air. He coughed and he sneezed and collapsed with a wheeze and accused me of not playing fair. Then holding his nose with his twelve hairy toes, the creature curled into a ball, and rolled ’cross the floor smashing right through the door. I was rid of him once and for all. The very next night when I turned out the light and was ready to lay down my head, I heard my kid brother cry out to my mother, “Hey, Ma, something’s under my bed.”
Today I managed something that I’ve never done before. I turned in this week’s spelling quiz and got a perfect score. Although my score was perfect, it appears I’m not too bright. I got a perfect zero— not a single answer right.
Swimming in the swimming pool is where I like to “B,” wearing underwater goggles so that I can “C.” Yesterday, before I swam, I drank a cup of “T.” Now the pool’s a “swimming ool” because I took a “P.”
Willie had a stubborn wart upon his middle toe. Regardless, though, of what he tried the wart refused to go. So Willie went and visited his family foot physician, who instantly agreed it was a stubborn wart condition. The doctor tried to squeeze the wart. He tried to twist and turn it. He tried to scrape and shave the wart. He tried to boil and burn it. He poked it with a pair of tongs. He pulled it with his tweezers. He held it under heat lamps, and he crammed it into freezers. Regrettably these treatments were of very little use. He looked at it and sputtered, “Ach! I cannot get it loose!” “I’ll have to get some bigger tools to help me to dissect it. I’ll need to pound and pummel it, bombard it and inject it.” He whacked it with a hammer, and he yanked it with a wrench. He seared it with a welding torch despite the nasty stench. He drilled it with a power drill. He wrestled it with pliers. He zapped it with a million volts from large electric wires. He blasted it with gamma rays, besieged it with corrosives, assaulted it with dynamite and nuclear explosives. He hit the wart with everything, but when the smoke had cleared, poor Willie’s stubborn wart remained, and Willie’d disappeared.
Our substitute is strange because he looks a lot like Santa Claus. In fact, the moment he walked in we thought that he was Santa’s twin. We wouldn’t think it quite so weird, if it were just his snowy beard. But also he has big black boots and wears these fuzzy bright red suits. He’s got a rather rounded gut that’s like a bowl of you-know-what. And when he laughs, it’s deep and low and sounds a lot like “Ho! Ho! Ho!” He asks us all if we’ve been good and sleeping when we know we should. He talks of reindeers, sleighs, and elves and tells us to behave ourselves. And when it’s time for us to go he dashes out into the snow. But yesterday we figured out just what our sub is all about. We know just why he leaves so quick, and why he’s dressed like Old Saint Nick in hat and coat and boots and all: He’s working evenings at the mall.
“Good morning, dear students,” the principal said. “Please put down your pencils and go back to bed. Today we will spend the day playing outside, then take the whole school on a carnival ride. “We’ll learn to eat candy while watching TV, then listen to records and swing from a tree. We’ll also be learning to draw on the walls, to scream in the classrooms and run in the halls. “So bring in your skateboard, your scooter, your bike. It’s time to be different and do what you like. The teachers are going to give you a rest. You don’t have to study. There won’t be a test. “And if you’d prefer, for a bit of a change, feel free to go wild and act really strange. Go put on a clown suit and dye your hair green, and copy your face on the Xerox machine. “Tomorrow it’s back to the regular grind. Today, just go crazy. We really don’t mind. So tear up your homework. We’ll give you an A. Oh wait. I’m just kidding. It’s April Fools’ Day.”
Inside my lunch to my surprise a perfect heart-shaped love note lies. The outside says, “Will you be mine?” and, “Will you be my valentine?” I take it out and wonder who would want to tell me “I love you.” Perhaps a girl who’s much too shy to hand it to me eye to eye. Or maybe it was sweetly penned in private by a secret friend Who found my lunchbox sitting by and slid the note in on the sly. Oh, I’d be thrilled if it were Jo, the cute one in the second row. Or could it be from Jennifer? Has she found out I’m sweet on her? My mind’s abuzz, my shoulders tense. I need no more of this suspense. My stomach lurching in my throat, I open up my little note. Then wham! as if it were a bomb, inside it reads, “I love you—Mom.”
A BB gun. A model plane. A basketball. A ’lectric train. A bicycle. A cowboy hat. A comic book. A baseball bat. A deck of cards. A science kit. A racing car. A catcher’s mitt. So that’s my list of everything that Santa Claus forgot to bring.
The kindergarten concert was an interesting show. Peter walked onto the stage and yelled, “I have to go!” Katie was embarrassed, but she had nowhere to hide. She raised her dress to hide her face. Her mother almost died. Keith removed his tie and said, “It’s ugly, Dad. I hate it!” David picked his nose on stage. What’s worse is that he ate it. They sang their song, and Wyatt burped. Then he did a dance. Michael fell while spinning ’round. Peter wet his pants. The music teacher at the end said, “There, I’m glad that’s done.” The kindergarten bowed and said, “Let’s sing another one!”
Baby ate a microchip, Then grabbed a bottle, took a sip. He swallowed it and made a beep, And now he’s thinking pretty deep. He’s downloading his ABCs And calculating 1-2-3s. He’s memorizing useless facts While doing Daddy’s income tax. He’s processing, and now he thrives On feeding his internal drives. He’s throwing fits, and now he fights With ruthless bits and toothless bytes. He must be feeling very smug. But hold on, Baby caught a bug. Attempting to reboot in haste,  He accidentally got erased!
The mind goes caw, caw, caw, caw,  dark and fast. The orphan heart  cries out, “Save me. Purchase me  as the sun makes the fruit ripe. I am one with them and cannot feed  on winter dawns.” The black birds  are wrangling in the fields and have no kindness, all sinew and stick bones. Both male and female.  Their eyes are careless of cold and rain,  of both day and night. They love nothing  and are murderous with each other.  All things of the world are bowing  or being taken away. Only a few calves  will be chosen, the rest sold for meat.  The sound of the wind grows bigger  than the tree it’s in, lessens only  to increase. Haw, haw the crows call,  awake or asleep, in white, in black.
His heart is like a boat that sets forth alone  on the ocean and goes far out from him, as Aphrodite proceeds on her pleasure journeys.  He pours the gold down the runnels  into a great mystery under the sand.  When he pulls it up by the feet  and knocks off the scale, it is a god.  What is it she finds with those men  that equals this dark birthing? He makes  each immortal manifest. The deities  remain invisible in their pretty gardens  of grass and violets, of daffodils and jasmine.  Even his wife lives like that. Going on yachts,  speaking to the captains in the familiar.  Let them have it, the noons and rain and joy.  He makes a world here out of frog songs  and packed earth. He made his wife  so she contains the green-fleshed  melons of Lindos, thalo blue of the sea,  and one ripe peach at five in the morning.  He fashioned her by the rules, with love,  made her with rage and disillusion.
The earth had wanted us all to itself. The mountains wanted us back for themselves. The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us; that’s why it happened as it did, the split as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . . Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street and the tube that held the trout-colored train and the cords of action from triangular buildings and the terraced gardens that held camelias shook and shook, each flower a single thought. Mothers and children took cover under tables. I called out to her who was my life. From under the table—I hid under the table that held the begonia with the fiery stem, the stem that had been trying to root, that paused in its effort—I called to the child who was my life. And understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh’s army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a single awe and in that moment a promise is written out. However we remember California later the earth we loved will know the truth: that it wanted us back for itself with our mighty forms and our specific longings, wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn’t; the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted, the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed during the shaking lasted, the painting released by the wall, the mark and hook we placed on the wall, and the nail, and the memory of driving the nail in, these also lasted—
In a side booth at MacDonald’s before your music class you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio under the poster of the talking hamburger: two white eyes rolling around in the top bun, the thin patty of beef imitating the tongue of its animal nature. You eat merrily. I watch the Oakland mommies, trying to understand what it means to be “single.” * Across from us, females of all ages surround the birthday girl. Her pale lace and insufficient being can’t keep them out of her circle. Stripes of yellow and brown all over the place. The poor in spirit have started to arrive, the one with thick midwestern braids twisted like thought on her head; usually she brings her mother. This week, no mother. She mouths her words anyway across the table, space-mama, time-mama, mama who should be there. * Families in line: imagine all this translated by the cry of time moving through us, this place a rubble. The gardens new generations will plant in this spot, and the food will go on in another order. This thought cheers me immensely. That we will be there together, you still seven, bending over the crops pretending to be royalty, that the huge woman with one blind eye and dots like eyes all over her dress will also be there, eating with pleasure as she eats now, right up to the tissue paper, peeling it back like bright exotic petals. * Last year, on the sun-spilled deck in Marin we ate grapes with the Russians; the KGB man fingered them quickly and dutifully, then, in a sad tone to us “We must not eat them so fast, we wait in line so long for these,” he said. * The sight of food going into a woman’s mouth made Byron sick. Food is a metaphor for existence. When Mr. Egotistical Sublime, eating the pasta, poked one finger into his mouth, he made a sound. For some, the curve of the bell pepper seems sensual but it can worry you, the slightly greasy feel of it. * The place I went with your father had an apartment to the left, and in the window, twisted like a huge bowtie, an old print bedspread. One day, when I looked over, someone was watching us, a young girl. The waiter had just brought the first thing: an orange with an avocado sliced up CCCC in an oil of forceful herbs. I couldn’t eat it. The girl’s face stood for something and from it, a little mindless daylight was reflected. The businessmen at the next table were getting off on each other and the young chardonnay. Their briefcases leaned against their ankles. I watched the young girl’s face because for an instant I had seen your face there, unterrified, unhungry, and a little disdainful. Then the waiter brought the food, bands of black seared into it like the memory of a cage. * You smile over your burger, chattering brightly. So often, at our sunny kitchen table, hearing the mantra of the refrigerator, I’ve thought there was nothing I could do but feed you; and I’ve always loved the way you eat, you eat selfishly, humming, bending the french fries to your will, your brown eyes spotting everything: the tall boy who has come in with his mother, repressed rage in espadrilles, and now carries the tray for her. Oh this is fun, says the mother, You stand there with mommy’s purse. And he stands there smiling after her, holding all the patience in the world.
The labeled bins on the California hillside catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars. Families pull up with their interesting trash and start unloading: Here, sweetheart, this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle hits with a thud. Diet soda cans spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun- permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic, as matter greets itself and starts to change. What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered into the bin, we could see it waiting there, could believe everything is alive and specific and personal, could tell by the tilt of one bottle against the next that it’s difficult to be singular, to have identity, to keep an outline safe in the terrors of space. Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts, tossing it in; and the bottle lies there in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself, before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . . And what if some don’t want to. What if some items in the piles of paper, the orange and blue envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers pressing through the cloudy windows with our names, some among those pale sheets curled with moisture, would rather stay as they are. It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes— tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized drafts of poems—that which was blank shall be made blank again—but what if that failed letter wants to be a failure, not go back to pulp, and thought .. . Or across the parking lot, where light insists on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want to be changed, though they should want to, shouldn’t they, should want to be changed by light, light which is called sweet reason, honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes from the parking lot looking helpless though it is matter that has been betrayed. . . All afternoon the bins are carried off by those who know about where things should go, who are used to the clatter the cans make, pouring out; and the families, who believed change would heal them are pulling away in their vans, slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . . The bins fill again with hard substances, the hills bear down with their fugitive gold, the pampas grass bending low to protect what was briefly certain and alive with hope.
The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes, his whole hand inside the boot he’s shining, everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired on gravel he’s spread out in the window, shoes placed as though they’re walking, and beside them propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day, first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron, fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ... * The cleaner waits behind the silver bell; he’s from Cambodia and has free Christian literature on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter, searches through the coats, some left for years, he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats. As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under the whooshing of motion, I see my husband’s coat— how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now, I don’t have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go around between the women’s suits and stay all night. . . * I watch the young butcher flipping over the young chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it, first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away; he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze— to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?— I can wait, but the spaces can’t, there’s a slight ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ... Somehow I thought we would know everything through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he responds without really looking up; I love that. * oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren’t they— what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers, the plums just about over, the agapanthus—“lilies of denial”— in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to— like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it, not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror, the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth: the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family, having briefly reached inside the visible mystery and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God, looking interested and competent; she touches the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ... (—a man told me I better think about my ‘system.’ Oh dear! I better think about my ‘system’—!)
At the last turn in the path  “goodbye—”  —bending, bowing,  (moss and a bit of  wild  bird-) down.  Daitoku-ji Monastery
I’m wondering where you are now Married, or mad, or free: Wherever you are you’re likely glad, But memory troubles me. We could’ve had us children, We could’ve had a home— But you thought not, and I thought not, And these nine years we roam. Today I worked in the deep dark tanks, And climbed out to watch the sea: Gulls and salty waves pass by, And mountains of Araby. I’ve travelled the lonely oceans And wandered the lonely towns. I’ve learned a lot and lost a lot, And proved the world was round. Now if we’d stayed together, There’s much we’d never’ve known— But dreary books and weary lands Weigh on me like a stone.  Indian Ocean, 1959
We finished clearing the last Section of trail by noon, High on the ridge-side Two thousand feet above the creek Reached the pass, went on Beyond the white pine groves, Granite shoulders, to a small Green meadow watered by the snow, Edged with Aspen—sun Straight high and blazing But the air was cool. Ate a cold fried trout in the Trembling shadows. I spied A glitter, and found a flake Black volcanic glass—obsidian— By a flower. Hands and knees Pushing the Bear grass, thousands Of arrowhead leavings over a Hundred yards. Not one good Head, just razor flakes On a hill snowed all but summer, A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill, Pick, singlejack, and sack Of dynamite. Ten thousand years.
Piute Creek, August 1955 “O hell, what do mine eyes  with grief behold?” Working with an old Singlejack miner, who can sense The vein and cleavage In the very guts of rock, can Blast granite, build Switchbacks that last for years Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.  What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents,  eaters of fruit? The Indian, the chainsaw boy, And a string of six mules Came riding down to camp Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.  Sleeping in saddle-blankets Under a bright night-sky Han River slantwise by morning.  Jays squall Coffee boils In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.  Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell! Fire down Too dark to read, miles from a road  The bell-mare clangs in the meadow  That packed dirt for a fill-in  Scrambling through loose rocks  On an old trail All of a summer’s day.
One granite ridge A tree, would be enough Or even a rock, a small creek, A bark shred in a pool. Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted  Tough trees crammed In thin stone fractures A huge moon on it all, is too much.  The mind wanders. A million Summers, night air still and the rocks  Warm. Sky over endless mountains.  All the junk that goes with being human  Drops away, hard rock wavers Even the heavy present seems to fail  This bubble of a heart. Words and books Like a small creek off a high ledge  Gone in the dry air. A clear, attentive mind Has no meaning but that Which sees is truly seen. No one loves rock, yet we are here.  Night chills. A flick In the moonlight Slips into Juniper shadow: Back there unseen Cold proud eyes Of Cougar or Coyote Watch me rise and go.
Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain  Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read  A few friends, but they are in cities.  Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup  Looking down for miles Through high still air.
Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms hold still for just a moment longer.  Nothing looks satisfied, but there is no real reason to move on much further: this isn’t a bad place;  why not pretend we wished for it? The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.  The hydrangea is resigned to its pale and inconclusive utterances. Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger  is not to have known it  less. The tobacco leaves  don’t mind being removed to the long racks—all uses are astounding to the used. There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven— noon, for instance, or all the single victories of gravity, or the kudzu vine, most delicate of manias, which has pressed its luck this far this season. It shines a gloating green. Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind. Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies  marking a stillness we can’t keep.
In this blue light  I can take you there, snow having made me  a world of bone  seen through to. This  is my house, my section of Etruscan  wall, my neighbor’s  lemontrees, and, just below  the lower church,  the airplane factory.  A rooster crows all day from mist  outside the walls.  There’s milk on the air,  ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean   the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl  by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning   her blue dress, her mantle of weather,  to go into labor. Come, we can go in.   It is before the birth of god. No one  has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly   line—bodies and wings—to the open air  market. This is what the living do: go in.  It’s a long way. And the dress keeps opening  from eternity to privacy, quickening.  Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment   forever stillborn, but going in, each breath  is a button coming undone, something terribly   nimble-fingered  finding all of the stops.
[Grand Forks, North Dakota] A boy just like you took me out to see them,  the five hundred B-52’s on alert on the runway,  fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions,  running every minute of every day.  They sound like a sickness of the inner ear, where the heard foams up into the noise of listening,  where the listening arrives without being extinguished.  The huge hum soaks up into the dusk.  The minutes spring open. Six is too many. From where we watch,  from where even watching is an anachronism, from the 23rd of March from an open meadow,  the concertina wire in its double helix  designed to tighten round a body if it turns  is the last path the sun can find to take out,  each barb flaring gold like a braille being read,  then off with its knowledge and the sun  is gone.... That’s when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress,  become loud in the story,  and a dark I have not seen before  sinks in to hold them one  by one.  Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible screams.  Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of blame that will not modulate that will not rise?  He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up.  He touches me to have me look more deeply  in to where for just a moment longer  color still lives: the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top  some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look from up there now  this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography  tells me stands for sadness  because the wind can move through it uninterrupted?  What is it the wind  would have wanted to find and didn’t leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken   because we’re too low for it to find us?  Are you still there for me now in that dark  we stood in for hours  letting it sweep as far as it could down over us  unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he  wants to tell me, his whisper more like a scream  over this eternity of engines never not running,  is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane  for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live  inseparable,  how they stay together for life, how the wings are given a life of  seven feet of play, how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada,   how the measures for counterattack in air  have changed and we  now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes,   as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you,   we stood facing each other as dusk came on. I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door.  The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished,  the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them.  The light itself took a long time, bits in puddles stuck like the useless  splinters of memory, the chips of history, hopes, laws handed down. Here, hold these he says, these   grasses these torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise, take these  he says, my hands wrong for the purpose, here,  not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and  bouquet of  thistleweed and wort and william and timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time   before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said. Nor I,you, whatever you still were  replied. When I asked you to hold me you refused.  When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me you refused. Until I  couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer  to make us  take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be:   shapes the shapelessness was taking back. Why should I lean out?  Why should I move? When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb,   they throw his head out into the river.  Unbodied it sings all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean,   head floating in current downriver singing, until the sound of the cataracts grows,  until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.
Then the cicadas again like kindling that won’t take. The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember   the terms of— the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what  restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor,  the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a slippery   utterly ash-free delinquency and then the subaqueous pasturings inexhaustible phosphorous handwritings the frothings of their own excitements now  erase, depth wrestling with the current-corridors of depth ...  But here, up on the hill, in town, the clusterings of dwellings in balconied crystal-formation,  the cadaverous swallowings of the dream of reason gone, hot fingerprints where thoughts laid out these streets, these braceletings  of park and government—a hospital—a dirt-bike run— here, we stand in our hysteria with our hands in our pockets,  quiet, at the end of day, looking out, theories stationary,  while the freight, the crazy wick, once more slides down— marionette-like its being lowered in— marionette-strung our outwaiting its bloody translation ...  Utopia: remember the sensation of direction we loved,  how it tunneled forwardly for us, and us so feudal in its wake— speckling of diamond-dust as I think of it now, that being carried forward by the notion of human  perfectibility—like a pasture imposed on the rising vibrancy of endless diamond-dust ... And how we would comply, some day. How we were built to fit and   comply— as handwriting fits to the form of its passion, no, to the form of its passionate bearer’s fingerprintable i.d., or, no, to the handkerchief she brings now to her haunted face,  lifting the sunglasses to wipe away the theory—or is it the tears?—the freight now all  in her right hand, in the oceanic place we’d pull up  through her wrist—we’d siphon right up— marionette with her leavening of mother-of-pearl— how she wants to be legible, how the light streaking her shades now   grows vermilion, which she would capture of course, because that, she has heard,  from the rumorous diamond-dust, is what is required,  as also her spirit—now that it has been swallowed like a lustrous hailstone by her unquenchable body—suggests—the zero  at the heart of the christened bonfire—oh little grimace, kiss, solo  at the heart—growing refined, tiny missionary, in your brightskirted   host, scorched comprehension—because that is what’s required,  her putting down now the sunset onto that page, as an expression of her deepest undertowing sentiment, which spidery gestures, tongued-over the molecular whiteness,  squared out and stretched and made to resemble emptiness,  will take down the smoldering in the terms of her passion —sunglasses on the table, telephone ringing— and be carried across the tongue-tied ocean, through dusk, right through it, over prisons, over tiny clapboard houses  to which the bartender returns, exhausted, after work,  over flare-ups of civil strife, skeletons rotting in the arms of  skeletons, the foliage all round them gleaming, the green belly-up god we thought we’d seen the last of, shuddering his sleep off, first fruit hanging ripe—oh bright red zero— right there within reach, that he too may be nourished,  you know this of course, what has awakened which we thought we’d   extinguished, us still standing here sword in hand, hand extended,  frail, over the limpid surface of the lake-like page, the sleep-like page, now folded and gently driven into its envelope, for the tiny journey, over offices, over sacrifices,  to its particular address, at the heart of the metropolis,  where someone else is waiting, hailstone at the core,  and the heat is too great, friend, the passion in its envelope,  doors slamming, traffic backing-up, the populace not really  abandoned, not really, just very tired on its long red errancy  down the freeways in the dusklight towards the little town on the hill—the crystal-formation?— how long ago was it we said that? do you remember?— and now that you’ve remembered—and the distance we’ve  traveled—and where we were, then—and how little we’ve found—aren’t we tired? aren’t we  going to close the elaborate folder which holds the papers in their cocoon of possibility,  the folder so pretty with its massive rose-blooms, oh perpetual bloom, dread fatigue, and drowsiness like leavening I  feel—
All this was written on the next day’s list. On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,  pale but effective, and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events,  built-up its tiniest cathedral ... (Or is it the sum of what takes place?) If I lean down, to whisper, to them, down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path,  hoping to be on the air, hoping to please the children— (and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if  I stir the wintered ground-leaves up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun, into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though   mostly crisp,  fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by— just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought,  no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves,  oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one,  the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one, the hurried mind hovering over its rankings, the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the   zero of the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart,  formulating its alleyways of discovery, fussing about the integrity of the whole, the heart trying to make time and place seem small, sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event  on the list then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss, an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged   obligation,  checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing what might have been, peeling away what should ...  There are flowerpots at their feet. There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe. It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air, down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth.  Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you.  My distance from you makes them louder.  Are we all waiting for the phone to ring?  Who should it be? What fountain is expected to thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of  promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees,  what parapets petalling-forth the invisible  into the world of things, turning the list into its spatial form at last, into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony....  Oh look at you. What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list  won’t cover? You down there, in the theater of  operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical— (are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)— (what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)— oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused —as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some  original fleet, the captains gone but some of us  who saw the plan drawn out still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men, who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings,  while the solitary ones, heads in their hands, so still, the idea barely forming at the base of that stillness, the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot   itself out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought,  before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by— the men of x, the outcomes of y—before— the mind still gripped hard by the hands that would hold the skull even stiller if they could, that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let   to filter through— the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree,  without the distractions of wonder— oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea,  which taking-form begins to twist, coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit,  now finally about to rise, about to go into the other room—and yet not having done so yet, not yet—the intake—before the credo, before the plan— right at the homesickness—before this list you hold  in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.
Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl  themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the  way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-  infolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a  visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by  minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the  dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where  they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into  itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly  invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing  motion that forces change— this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets  what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,  also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something  at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through  in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is  what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen  now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only  something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.  I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.  It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
I  I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.  The soybeans are breathing on all sides. Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats  In the small towns. I am happy, The moon rising above the turkey sheds.  II  The small world of the car Plunges through the deep fields of the night,  On the road from Willmar to Milan.  This solitude covered with iron Moves through the fields of night Penetrated by the noise of crickets.  III  Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge, And water kneeling in the moonlight. In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;  The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass. When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.  A few people are talking, low, in a boat.
We drive between lakes just turning green;  Late June. The white turkeys have been moved  A second time to new grass. How long the seconds are in great pain!  Terror just before death, Shoulders torn, shot From helicopters. “I saw the boy being tortured with a telephone generator,”  The sergeant said. “I felt sorry for him And blew his head off with a shotgun.”  These instants become crystals, Particles The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety  Will end up In Asia, and you will look down in your cup  And see Black Starfighters. Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!  Therefore we will have to Go far away To atone For the suffering of the stringy-chested  And the short rice-fed ones, quivering  In the helicopter like wild animals, Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain: Hands developed with terrible labor by apes  Hang from the sleeves of evangelists; There are murdered kings in the light-bulbs outside movie theaters:  The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires. The janitor sits troubled by the boiler, And the hotel keeper shuffles the cards of insanity.  The President dreams of invading Cuba.  Bushes are growing over the outdoor grills,  Vines over the yachts and the leather seats. The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.  On the far shore, at Coney Island, dark children  Playing on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,  Shells, a skyful of birds, While the mayor sits with his head in his hands.
In the morning of the tribe this name Ancapagari was given to these mountains. The name, then alive, spread into the world and never returned. Ancapagari: no foot-step ever spoken, no mule deer killed from its foothold, left for dead. Ancapagari opened the stones. Pine roots gripped peak rock with their claws. Water dug into the earth and vanished, boiling up again in another place. The water was bitten by aspen, generations of aspen shot their light colored trunks into space. Ancapagari. At that time, if the whisper was in your mouth, you were lighted. Now these people are buried. The root-taking, finished. Buried in everything, thousands taken root. The roots swell, nesting. Openings widen for the roots to surface. They sway within you in steady wind of your breath. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it. Ancapagari has circled, returned to these highlands. The yellow pines deathless, the sparrow hawks scull, the waters are going numb. Ancapagari longs to be spoken in each tongue. It is the name of the god who has come from among us.
We spend our morning in the flower stalls counting the dark tongues of bells that hang from ropes waiting  for the silence of an hour. We find a table, ask for paella, cold soup and wine, where a calm  light trembles years behind us. In Buenos Aires only three years ago, it was the last time his hand  slipped into her dress, with pearls  cooling her throat and bells like these, chipping at the night— As she talks, the hollow clopping of a horse, the sound  of bones touched together. The paella comes, a bed of rice  and camarones, fingers and shells,  the lips of those whose lips have been removed, mussels the soft blue of a leg socket. This is not paella, this is what has become of those who remained  in Buenos Aires. This is the ring  of a rifle report on the stones,  her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her. These are the flowers we bought  this morning, the dahlias tossed on his grave and bells waiting with their tongues cut out  for this particular silence.
Just as he changes himself, in the end eternity changes him. —Mallarmé On the phonograph, the voice of a woman already dead for three decades, singing of a man who could make her do anything.  On the table, two fragile  glasses of black wine, a bottle wrapped in its towel.  It is that room, the one we took in every city, it is as I remember: the bed, a block  of moonlight and pillows.  My fingernails, pecks of light  on your thighs. The stink of the fire escape.  The wet butts of cigarettes  you crushed one after another.  How I watched the morning come  as you slept, more my son  than a man ten years older.  How my breasts feel, years  later, the tongues swishing  in my dress, some yours, some  left by other men. Since then, I have always  wakened first, I have learned  to leave a bed without being  seen and have stood at the washbasins, wiping oil  and salt from my skin, staring at the cupped water  in my two hands. I have kept everything you whispered to me then. I can remember it now as I see you  again, how much tenderness we could  wedge between a stairwell  and a police lock, or as it was,  as it still is, in the voice of a woman singing of a man who could make her do anything.
We rise from the snow where we’ve lain on our backs and flown like children, from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns,  and we stagger together wine-breathed into town  where our people are building their armies again, short years after body bags, after burnings. There is a man I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have  our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret.  After love we smoke and sleep with magazines, two shot glasses and the black and white collapse of hours.  In what time do we live that it is too late  to have children? In what place that we consider the various ways to leave?  There is no list long enough for a selective service card shriveling  under a match, the prison that comes of it,  a flag in the wind eaten from its pole  and boys sent back in trash bags. We’ll tell you. You were at that time  learning fractions. We’ll tell you about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet  or lost. Let them speak for themselves. We lie down in the fields and leave behind  the corpses of angels.
The amities of morning and the buxom habits of birds  that swing a bell-bright city  in their intelligent wings; last night’s squall has drawn off like anger’s tide, the remote and muffled waters  beating solitudinous rocks and murmurous in the hidden parts, ebbing  and beating, of the mind as some half-forgotten name . . . the rain has withdrawn like the tents and the Greeks,  like the hard-to-believe- in days of our childhood. Light moves, the whole massed flotilla of morning, kin  to the upward flight of birds  returning;  and brutality, the hungers and the hatreds  seem fabulous, seem members;  the gouty rat and straggly root collaborate. Earth in wounds, deaths, decays— past hours its rutted crusts— with the billowy sky is the field- upon-field, and all one,  of one master observing  the various fruits:  somewhere a child in a cage, inferior  bodies making a passable  road, a girl passionate with pain, an old man  watching the earth escape  like his once endless strengths, his poems head- long. And one fills with awe—as the town with morning, every cranny,  the birds brimming fire- escapes and broken windows— that the earth like some wise  breath never balked, a many- membered bird-flight, should include all, must be a terrible good.  The eyes passing, contracted from night and war the stars undertook, finally emerge  the topgallant of morning,  and those eyes roam free as the Greeks: wherever a drop of water  is, spindrift city of water  gleaming, there is home.
Framed by our window, skaters, winding in and out the wind, as water reeling so kept in motion, on a well-honed edge spin out a gilded ceiling. Fish, reflecting glow for glow, saints around the sun, are frozen with amazement just one pane below. Skates flash like stars, so madly whirling one can hardly tell which is sky and which the watery floor ... one night two straitlaced couples, a footman over them, rode out in a dappled-horse-drawn sleigh onto the river, a moonlit lark. The ice broke and they—sleigh, footman and all—riding in state, rode straight on into the lidded water. That winter all winter folks twirled over them who—framed in lace, frost the furs, the shiny harness and their smiles the fire that keeps the place—sat benignly watching. “One foot out, one foot in, are we real,” thought one, “we who wander sheepishly in dreams, or they, the really sleepless eyes, under us? And every night who knows (a laughter troubles us like dreams) who skates (a thousand watch fires the stars) above, peering through the pane?”
“I busy too,” the little boy said, lost in his book about a little boy, lost in his book, with nothing but a purple crayon and his wits to get him out. “Nobody can sit with me, I have no room.  I busy too. So don’t do any noise. We don’t want any noise right now.”  He leafs through once, leafs twice; the pictures, mixed with windy sighs, grow dizzy,  world as difficult, high-drifting as the two-day snow that can not stop.  How will the bushes, sinking deeper and deeper, trees and birds, wrapt up, ever creep  out again? Any minute now the blizzard, scared and wild, the animals lost in it—O the fur, the red-eyed claws, crying for their home—may burst into the room. Try words he’s almost learned  on them? He sighs, “I need a man here; I can’t do all this work alone.”  And still, as though intent on reading its own argument, winter continues thumbing through itself.
“Your great-grandfather was . . .” And Mrs. C, our tart old Scots landlady, with her stomping legs, four bristles sprouted from her chin- wart, she who briskly  chats away about Montrose, founder of her clan, as though she’s just now fresh from tea with him,  regards you incredulously, a bastard gargoyle off some bastard architecture, one grown topsy-turvy:  “Not to know your great-grandfather! How do you live? O you Americans!”  She cannot see what freedom it affords, your ignorance,  a space swept clear of all the clutter of lives lived.  And yet who can dismiss her words entirely? It burdens too, this emptiness,  pervasive presence not a room away that, no matter how you hammer at its wall, refuses to admit you.  As though you woke and in a place you thought familiar,  then had a sense (what is it that has been disturbed?) of one you never met  yet somehow knew—looks echoing among the dusty pictures:  that myopic glass reflecting, like a sunset lingered inside trees,  a meditative smile: a breath warm to your cheek, your brow:  the hand (whose?) moving on your blanket in a gesture that you fail to recognize yet know it as you know the taste through oranges of sun- light current in them still— then gone as you began to stir. And for a moment dawn seems lost as in a mist, seems wistful for a feeling it cannot achieve . . . the sun breaks through, an instant medleying the leaves.
Some seventy years later your father, sitting at your table over wine he savors, last rays mellow- ing in it, recalls his favorite aunt, Rifka.  “Just naming her shoots rifles off again inside the morning square, rifles she aimed into the air for certain customers, the pigeons erupting.”  Handsome, clever, but with little actual schooling, she, a Jewess, kept a shop in Moscow, stocking horse- and battle-gear, bustling all day long.  Powders, braided with his laboring breath, still prickle inside his nostrils; like the wayward flickers cast by lazily swimming,  naked limbs, leathers polished, buckles, gleam; and the oats banked in their bins, heavy August winds drowsed in them, at one glance, a single sniffing, bloom;  the harnesses and bells, by gaslight starred, send out appeals, while sleighs collect for midnight junkets.  He smitten with it all, like those officers of the Czar who, admiring her wit, her seasoned gaiety, forever jammed the shop. “Even the city’s metropolitan, young despite his full, black robes, took to dropping in on her, his jagged, bushy beard awag with chat.  One balmy summer evening, I remember, the three of us, laughter brimming like wine (he turned his glass to the lessened light), relaxed in her snug flat. The next morning at breakfast, talk going on as if we’d never stop”— he, a startled look lit on his face, breaking in upon himself, exclaims, the pigeons crackling through the air— “My God, he spent the night with her!” He, sipping the last drop, sits back, as much as he’s amazed amused to see this special virtue of old age, the oats ripening only in slow time.
for Yehuda Amichai Though you live in a little country,  crammed and crisscrossed with debris,  the past oppressive many times over— where you buy your grapes David, pausing, eyes a fiery dark girl, a lusty song  riding his breath, the old dance urgent  at his body; where you buy your bread  Christ, stumbling, stoops to heavy lumber— you insist on your own loves and griefs,  on living your own life.  So you love this city, but mainly as it goes on  living its own life, across its roofs the lines flapping, not gaudy banners,  but sheets and diapers, pants and slips,  as if rehearsing private pleasures. And though you know you cannot win,  you play the game with all the skill  and love that you can muster, hoping  to keep it, keep it going, whatever  the fierceness in it, while you learn  the repertoire of your opponent’s wrist,  the repertoire your own commands,  with every stroke surprising you,  as in a woman’s glance the abundance  glinting of her passion stored away. Those opposing roles, victor, victim  both, when they require re-enacting, the moon as ever plays the luminous dome  above your god-and-man-scarred rock,  responsive to each nuance of the light  informing it with this, the latest scene. The sweat you’ve shared between you,  juices drying on your hands and moon- lit belly, swirls out of the rutted, stain- stiff sheets a fragrance stronger, more  anointing, than the myrrh, the frank- incense the magi brought, a gleam that would eclipse their beaten gold.
A yellow leaf in the branches Of a shamel ash In the front yard; I see it, a yellow leaf Among so many. Nothing distinguishes it, Nothing striking, striped, stripped, Strident, nothing More than its yellow On this day, Which is enough, which makes me Think of it later in the day, Remember it in conversation With a friend, Though I do not mention it— A yellow leaf on a shamel ash On a clear day In an Arizona winter, A January like so many.
Mamua, when our laughter ends, And hearts and bodies, brown as white, Are dust about the doors of friends, Or scent ablowing down the night, Then, oh! then, the wise agree, Comes our immortality. Mamua, there waits a land Hard for us to understand. Out of time, beyond the sun, All are one in Paradise, You and Pupure are one, And Taü, and the ungainly wise. There the Eternals are, and there The Good, the Lovely, and the True, And Types, whose earthly copies were The foolish broken things we knew; There is the Face, whose ghosts we are; The real, the never-setting Star; And the Flower, of which we love Faint and fading shadows here; Never a tear, but only Grief; Dance, but not the limbs that move; Songs in Song shall disappear; Instead of lovers, Love shall be; For hearts, Immutability; And there, on the Ideal Reef, Thunders the Everlasting Sea! And my laughter, and my pain, Shall home to the Eternal Brain. And all lovely things, they say, Meet in Loveliness again; Miri’s laugh, Teïpo’s feet, And the hands of Matua, Stars and sunlight there shall meet Coral’s hues and rainbows there, And Teüra’s braided hair; And with the starred tiare’s white, And white birds in the dark ravine, And flamboyants ablaze at night, And jewels, and evening’s after-green, And dawns of pearl and gold and red, Mamua, your lovelier head! And there’ll no more be one who dreams Under the ferns, of crumbling stuff, Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems, All time-entangled human love. And you’ll no longer swing and sway Divinely down the scented shade, Where feet to Ambulation fade, And moons are lost in endless Day. How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, Where there are neither heads nor flowers? Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing The palms, and sunlight, and the south; And there’s an end, I think, of kissing, When our mouths are one with Mouth.... Taü here, Mamua, Crown the hair, and come away! Hear the calling of the moon, And the whispering scents that stray About the idle warm lagoon. Hasten, hand in human hand, Down the dark, the flowered way, Along the whiteness of the sand, And in the water’s soft caress, Wash the mind of foolishness, Mamua, until the day. Spend the glittering moonlight there Pursuing down the soundless deep Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair, Or floating lazy, half-asleep. Dive and double and follow after, Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call, With lips that fade, and human laughter And faces individual, Well this side of Paradise! .... There’s little comfort in the wise.
Buffalo Bill ’sdefunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallionand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesushe was a handsome man and what i want to know ishow do you like your blue-eyed boyMister Death
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality. Instead they’re all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfilment of heaven’s template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jeweler’s made uncountable examples, each as intricate in its oily fabulation as the one before Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer—would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They’d prefer, plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don’t care they’re dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were living: all, all for all, the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular, or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, thinking of what you never can bring back, or else you’re off in some fog concerning —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought.My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces. Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What’s not believed in, or is still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use it for your closer contact? These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium, Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, With pungent sauces, multiply variety In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn, White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims, And an old man driven by the Trades To a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house, Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world heard in the day, Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd a way! Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song, List while I woo thee with soft melody; Gone are the cares of life's busy throng,— Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me! Beautiful dreamer awake unto me! Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie; Over the streamlet vapors are borne, Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn. Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart, E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea; Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,— Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me! Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
To wed, or not to wed; that is the question; Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The bills and house rent of a wedded fortune, Or to say “nit” when she proposes, And by declining cut her. To wed; to smoke No more; And have a wife at home to mend The holes in socks and shirts And underwear and so forth. ’Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To wed for life; To wed; perchance to fight; ay, there’s the rub; For in that married life what fights may come, When we have honeymooning ceased Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes the joy of single life. For who would bear her mother’s scornful tongue, Canned goods for tea, the dying furnace fire; The pangs of sleepless nights when baby cries; The pain of barking shins upon a chair and Closing waists that button down the back, When he himself might all these troubles shirk With a bare refusal? Who would bundles bear, And grunt and sweat under a shopping load? Who would samples match; buy rats for hair, Cart cheese and crackers home to serve at night For lunch to feed your friends; play pedro After tea; sing rag time songs, amusing Friendly neighbors. Buy garden tools To lend unto the same. Stay home at nights In smoking coat and slippers and slink to bed At ten o’clock to save the light bills? Thus duty does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of matrimony Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of chores; And thus the gloss of marriage fades away, And loses its attraction.
The crowded street his playground is, a patch of blue his sky; A puddle in a vacant lot his sea where ships pass by: Poor little orphan boy of five, the city smoke and grime Taint every cooling breeze he gets throughout the summer time; And he is just as your boy is, a child who loves to play, Except that he is drawn and white and cannot get away. And he would like the open fields, for often in his dreams The angels kind bear him off to where are pleasant streams, Where he may sail a splendid boat, sometimes he flies a kite, Or romps beside a shepherd dog and shouts with all his might; But when the dawn of morning comes he wakes to find once more That what he thought were sun-kissed hills are rags upon the floor. Then through the hot and sultry day he plays at “make-pretend,” The alley is a sandy beach where all the rich folks send Their little boys and girls to play, a barrel is his boat, But, oh, the air is tifling and the dust fills up his throat; And though he tries so very hard to play, somehow it seems He never gets such wondrous joys as angels bring in dreams. Poor little orphan boy of five, except that he is pale, With sunken cheeks and hollow eyes and very wan and frail, Just like that little boy of yours, with same desire to play, Fond of the open fields and skies, he’s built the self-same way; But kept by fate and circumstance away from shady streams, His only joy comes when he sleeps and angels bring him dreams.
Dedicated to the Women Here’s to the men! Since Adam’s time They’ve always been the same; Whenever anything goes wrong, The woman is to blame. From early morn to late at night, The men fault-finders are; They blame us if they oversleep, Or if they miss a car. They blame us if, beneath the bed, Their collar buttons roll; They blame us if the fire is out Or if there is no coal. They blame us if they cut themselves While shaving, and they swear That we’re to blame if they decide To go upon a tear. Here’s to the men, the perfect men! Who never are at fault; They blame us if they chance to get The pepper for the salt. They blame us if their business fails, Or back a losing horse; And when it rains on holidays The fault is ours, of course. They blame us when they fall in love, And when they married get; Likewise they blame us when they’re sick, And when they fall in debt. For everything that crisscross goes They say we are to blame; But, after all, here’s to the men, We love them just the same!
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic") I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. III Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. IV Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind. V Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ... VI Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything VII Prepared a sinister mate For her — so gaily great — A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. IX Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, X Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, XI Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
A porcupine skin, Stiff with bad tanning, It must have ended somewhere. Stuffed horned owl Pompous Yellow eyed; Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig Sooted with dust. Piles of old magazines, Drawers of boy’s letters And the line of love They must have ended somewhere. Yesterday’s Tribune is gone Along with youth And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach The year of the big storm When the hotel burned down At Seney, Michigan.
Soldiers never do die well; Crosses mark the places— Wooden crosses where they fell, Stuck above their faces. Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch— All the world roars red and black; Soldiers smother in a ditch, Choking through the whole attack.
For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils’ tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows No successful suicides. A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead. (they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome) A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead. (no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone) They find a model dead alone in bed and very dead. (it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge) Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows. Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.
In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain. Does it rain in Spain? Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights. The dancers dance in long white pants It isn’t right to yence your aunts Come Uncle, let’s go home. Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is. Come let us fart in the home. There is no art in a fart. Still a fart may not be artless. Let us fart an artless fart in the home. Democracy. Democracy. Bill says democracy must go. Go democracy. Go Go Go Bill’s father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat. Now Bill says democracy must go. Go on democracy. Democracy is the shit. Relativity is the shit. Dictators are the shit. Menken is the shit. Waldo Frank is the shit. The Broom is the shit. Dada is the shit. Dempsey is the shit. This is not a complete list. They say Ezra is the shit. But Ezra is nice. Come let us build a monument to Ezra. Good a very nice monument. You did that nicely Can you do another? Let me try and do one. Let us all try and do one. Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one. Come on little girl. Do one for Ezra. Good. You have all been successful children. Now let us clean the mess up. The Dial does a monument to Proust. We have done a monument to Ezra. A monument is a monument. After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.
Pastime with good company I love and shall unto I die. Grudge whoso will, but none deny, So God be pleased, this live will I. For my pastance Hunt, sing, and dance. My heart is set All godely sport To my comfort. Who shall me let? Youth will have needs daliance, Of good or ill some pastance. Company me thinketh then best All thoftes and fantasies to digest. For idleness Is chief mistress Of vices all. Than who can say But “pass the day” Is best of all? Company with honesty Is virtue, and vice to flee. Company is good or ill But every man hath his free will. The best ensue, The worst eschew, My mind shall be. Virtue to use, Vice to refuse, I shall use me.
Here a little child I stand Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat, and on us all. Amen.
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of youth, of love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness. I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris. I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white. I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The court of Mab, and of the fairy king. I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Dull to myself, and almost dead to these My many fresh and fragrant mistresses; Lost to all music now, since everything Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing. Sick is the land to th' heart, and doth endure More dangerous faintings by her desp'rate cure. But if that golden age would come again And Charles here rule, as he before did reign; If smooth and unperplex'd the seasons were As when the sweet Maria lived here; I should delight to have my curls half drown'd In Tyrian dews, and head with roses crown'd. And once more yet (ere I am laid out dead) Knock at a star with my exalted head.
Get up, get up for shame, the Blooming Morne Upon her wings presents the god unshorne. See how Aurora throwes her faire Fresh-quilted colours through the aire: Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed, and see The Dew-bespangling Herbe and Tree. Each Flower has wept, and bow'd toward the East, Above an houre since; yet you not drest, Nay! not so much as out of bed? When all the Birds have Mattens seyd, And sung their thankful Hymnes: 'tis sin, Nay, profanation to keep in, When as a thousand Virgins on this day, Spring, sooner than the Lark, to fetch in May. Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene; And sweet as Flora. Take no care For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire: Feare not; the leaves will strew Gemms in abundance upon you: Besides, the childhood of the Day has kept, Against you come, some Orient Pearls unwept: Come, and receive them while the light Hangs on the Dew-locks of the night: And Titan on the Eastern hill Retires himselfe, or else stands still Till you come forth. Wash, dresse, be briefe in praying: Few Beads are best, when once we goe a Maying. Come, my Corinna, come; and comming, marke How each field turns a street; each street a Parke Made green, and trimm'd with trees: see how Devotion gives each House a Bough, Or Branch: Each Porch, each doore, ere this, An Arke a Tabernacle is Made up of white-thorn neatly enterwove; As if here were those cooler shades of love. Can such delights be in the street, And open fields, and we not see't? Come, we'll abroad; and let's obay The Proclamation made for May: And sin no more, as we have done, by staying; But my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying. There's not a budding Boy, or Girle, this day, But is got up, and gone to bring in May. A deale of Youth, ere this, is come Back, and with White-thorn laden home. Some have dispatcht their Cakes and Creame, Before that we have left to dreame: And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted Troth, And chose their Priest, ere we can cast off sloth: Many a green-gown has been given; Many a kisse, both odde and even: Many a glance too has been sent From out the eye, Loves Firmament: Many a jest told of the Keyes betraying This night, and Locks pickt, yet w'are not a Maying. Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime; And take the harmlesse follie of the time. We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short; and our dayes run As fast away as do's the Sunne: And as a vapour, or a drop of raine Once lost, can ne'r be found againe: So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endlesse night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying.
A sweet disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness; A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction; An erring lace, which here and there Enthrals the crimson stomacher; A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribands to flow confusedly; A winning wave, deserving note, In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility: Do more bewitch me, than when art Is too precise in every part.
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest He who has found our hid security, Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest, And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’ We have found safety with all things undying, The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth, The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying, And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth. We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing. We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever. War knows no power. Safe shall be my going, Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour; Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall; And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares, Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, And sunset, and the colours of the earth. These had seen movement, and heard music; known Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended. There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after, Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, A width, a shining peace, under the night.
FOR EZRA POUND  IL MIGLIOR FABBRO  I. The Burial of the Dead  April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; “They called me the hyacinth girl.” —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.Oed’ und leer das Meer.  Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.  Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”  II. A Game of Chess The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing) Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears. And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.  “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.  “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? “I never know what you are thinking. Think.”  I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.  “What is that noise?”  The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”  Nothing again nothing.  “Do “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember “Nothing?”  I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”     But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow? “What shall we ever do?”  The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.  When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said— I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you. And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said. Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can’t. But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don’t want children? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot— HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.  III. The Fire Sermon  The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck And on the king my father’s death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda waterEt O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!  Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . . She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. “This music crept by me upon the waters” And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.  The river sweats  Oil and tar  The barges drift  With the turning tide  Red sails  Wide  To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.  The barges wash  Drifting logs  Down Greenwich reach  Past the Isle of Dogs.  Weialala leia  Wallala leialala  Elizabeth and Leicester  Beating oars  The stern was formed  A gilded shell  Red and gold  The brisk swell  Rippled both shores  Southwest wind  Carried down stream  The peal of bells  White towers  Weialala leia  Wallala leialala “Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.” “My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’ I made no comment. What should I resent?” “On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.”  la la To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning  IV. Death by Water Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.  A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.  Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.  V. What the Thunder Said  After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses  If there were water  And no rock  If there were rock  And also water  And water  A spring  A pool among the rock  If there were the sound of water only  Not the cicada  And dry grass singing  But sound of water over a rock  Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees  Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop  But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you? What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder DADatta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms DADayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DADamyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands    I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi s’ascose nel foco che gli affinaQuando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallowLe Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.  Shantih shantih shantih
Ah Ben! Say how, or when Shall we thy guests Meet at those lyric feasts Made at the Sun, The Dog, the Triple Tun? Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each verse of thine Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine. My Ben Or come again, Or send to us Thy wit's great overplus; But teach us yet Wisely to husband it; Lest we that talent spend, And having once brought to an end That precious stock, the store Of such a wit the world should have no more.
When she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow Golden shadow glows as She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts Sway like full-blown yellow Gloire de Dijon roses. She drips herself with water, and her shoulders Glisten as silver, they crumple up Like wet and falling roses, and I listen For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals. In the window full of sunlight Concentrates her golden shadow Fold on fold, until it glows as Mellow as the glory roses.
What large, dark hands are those at the window Lifted, grasping the golden light Which weaves its way through the creeper leaves  To my heart's delight? Ah, only the leaves! But in the west, In the west I see a redness come Over the evening's burning breast —  — 'Tis the wound of love goes home! The woodbine creeps abroad Calling low to her lover: The sun-lit flirt who all the day Has poised above her lips in play And stolen kisses, shallow and gay Of pollen, now has gone away — She woos the moth with her sweet, low word, And when above her his broad wings hover Then her bright breast she will uncover And yield her honey-drop to her lover. Into the yellow, evening glow Saunters a man from the farm below, Leans, and looks in at the low-built shed Where hangs the swallow's marriage bed. The bird lies warm against the wall. She glances quick her startled eyes Towards him, then she turns away Her small head, making warm display Of red upon the throat. His terrors sway Her out of the nest's warm, busy ball, Whose plaintive cry is heard as she flies In one blue stoop from out the sties Into the evening's empty hall. Oh, water-hen, beside the rushes Hide your quaint, unfading blushes, Still your quick tail, and lie as dead, Till the distance folds over his ominous tread. The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low: then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! Ah soon in his large, hard hands she dies, And swings all loose to the swing of his walk. Yet calm and kindly are his eyes And ready to open in brown surprise Should I not answer to his talk Or should he my tears surmise. I hear his hand on the latch, and rise from my chair Watching the door open: he flashes bare His strong teeth in a smile, and flashes his eyes In a smile like triumph upon me; then careless-wise He flings the rabbit soft on the table board And comes towards me: ah, the uplifted sword Of his hand against my bosom, and oh, the broad Blade of his hand that raises my face to applaud His coming: he raises up my face to him And caresses my mouth with his fingers, which still smell grim Of the rabbit's fur! God, I am caught in a snare! I know not what fine wire is round my throat, I only know I let him finger there My pulse of life, letting him nose like a stoat Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood: And down his mouth comes to my mouth, and down His dark bright eyes descend like a fiery hood Upon my mind: his mouth meets mine, and a flood Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown Within him, die, and find death good.
(In Springfield, Illinois) It is portentous, and a thing of state That here at midnight, in our little town A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, Near the old court-house pacing up and down. Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards He lingers where his children used to play, Or through the market, on the well-worn stones He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away. A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all. He cannot sleep upon his hillside now. He is among us:—as in times before! And we who toss and lie awake for long Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings. Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep? Too many peasants fight, they know not why, Too many homesteads in black terror weep. The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart. He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main. He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now The bitterness, the folly and the pain. He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free; The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth, Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea. It breaks his heart that kings must murder still, That all his hours of travail here for men Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace That he may sleep upon his hill again?
These be two Country women. What a size! Great big arms And round red faces; Big substantial Sit down places; Great big bosoms firm as cheese Bursting through their country jackets; Wide big laps And sturdy knees; Hands outspread, Round and rosy, Hands to hold A country posy Or a baby or a lamb—  And such eyes! Stupid, shifty, small and sly Peeping through a slit of sty, Squinting through their neighbours’ plackets.
But then there comes that moment rare When, for no cause that I can find, The little voices of the air Sound above all the sea and wind. The sea and wind do then obey And sighing, sighing double notes Of double basses, content to play A droning chord for the little throats— The little throats that sing and rise Up into the light with lovely ease And a kind of magical, sweet surprise To hear and know themselves for these— For these little voices: the bee, the fly, The leaf that taps, the pod that breaks, The breeze on the grass-tops bending by, The shrill quick sound that the insect makes.
Lie down—lie down!—my noble hound, That joyful bark give o’er; It wakes the lonely echoes round, But rouses me no more— Thy lifted ears, thy swelling chest, Thy eyes so keenly bright, No longer kindle in my breast The thrill of fierce delight; When following thee on foaming steed My eager soul outstripped thy speed— Lie down—lie down—my faithful hound! And watch this night by me, For thee again the horn shall sound By mountain, stream, and tree; And thou along the forest glade, Shall track the flying deer When cold and silent, I am laid In chill oblivion here. Another voice shall cheer thee on, And glory when the chase is won. Lie down—lie down!—my gallant hound! Thy master’s life is sped; Go—couch thee on the dewy ground— ’Tis thine to watch the dead. But when the blush of early day Is kindling up the sky, Then speed thee, faithful friend, away, And to thy mistress hie; And guide her to this lonely spot, Though my closed eyes behold her not— Lie down—lie down!—my trusty hound! Death comes, and we must part— In my dull ear strange murmurs sound— More faintly throbs my heart; The many twinkling lights of heaven Scarce glimmer in the blue— Chill round me falls the breath of even, Cold on my brow the dew; Earth, stars, and heavens, are lost to sight— The chase is o’er!—brave friend, good night!—
Poet— Enchanting spirit!—at thy votive shrine I lowly bend a simple wreath to twine; O Come from the ideal world and fling Thy airy fingers o’er my rugged string; Sweep the dark chords of thought and give to earth The thrilling song that tells thy heavenly birth— Fancy— Happiness when from earth she fled I passed on her heavenward flight— “Take this crown,” the spirit said “Of heaven’s own golden light— To the sons of sorrow the token give, And bid them follow my steps and live!”— I took the crown from the snowy hand, It flashed like a living star; I turned this dark earth to a fairy land When I hither drive my car; But I placed the crown round my tresses bright, And man only saw its reflected light— Many a lovely dream I’ve given, And many a song divine; But never!—oh never—that gift of heaven Shall mortals temples twine— Hope and love in the circlet glow! ’Tis all too bright for a world of woe— Poet— Hist—Beautiful spirit!—why silent so soon? My ear drinks each word of thy magical tune; My lyre owns thy touch—and its tremulous strings Vibrate beneath the soft play of thy wings; Resume thy sweet lay, and reveal, ere we part Thy home lovely spirit—and say what thou art?”— Fancy— The gleam of a star thou cans’t not see— Of an eye ’neath its sleeping lid, The sound of a far off melody The voice of a stream that’s hid; Such must I still remain to thee A wonder and a mystery!— I live in the poet’s dream I flash on the painter’s eye; I dwell in the moon’s pale beam, In the depths of the star lit sky; I traverse the earth, the air, the main, And bind young hearts in my magic chain— I float on the fleecy cloud My voice is in ev’ry breeze; I speak in the tempest loud, In the sigh of the waving trees— To the sons of earth—in a mystic tone, I tell of a world more bright than their own!—
What—write my name! How vain the feeble trust, To be remembered When the hand is dust— Grieve rather that the talents freely given Were used for earth—not treasured up for Heaven!
Well I recall my Father’s wife, The day he brought her home. His children looked for years of strife, And troubles sure to come— Ungraciously we welcomed her, A thing to scorn and blame; And swore we never would confer On her, a Mother’s name I see her yet—a girl in years, With eyes so blue and mild; She greeted us with smiles and tears, How sweetly too she smiled— She bent to kiss my sullen brow, With woman’s gentle grace; And laid her tiny hand of snow On my averted face— “Henry—is this your son? She said— “Dear boy—he now is mine— What not one kiss?—” I shook my head, “I am no son of thine!—” She sighed—and from her dimpled cheek The rosy colour fled; She turned away and did not speak, My thoughts were with the dead— There leaped from out my Father’s eyes A jet of swarthy fire; That flashed on me in fierce surprise— I fled before his ire I heard her gentle voice entreat— “Forgiveness for her sake”— Which added swiftness to my feet, A sad and strange mistake— A year had scarcely rolled away When by that hated bride; I loved to linger half the day, In very joy and pride; Her voice was music to mine ear, So soft its accent fell; “Dear Mother now”—and oh, how dear No words of mine can tell— She was so gentle, fair and kind, So pure in soul and free from art; That woman with her noble mind, Subdued my rebel heart— I just had learned to know her worth, My Father’s second choice to bless; When God removed her from the earth, And plunged us all in deep distress— Hot fever smote with burning blight Stretchd on a restless bed of pain; I moaning lay from morn till night With aching limbs and throbbing brain— Four weary weeks beside my bed, She sat within a darkened room; Untiring held my aching head, Nor heeded silence—cold and gloom— And when my courage quite gave way, And fainter grew my struggling breath; She taught my stricken soul to pray And calmly meet approaching death— “Fear not God’s angel, sent by Him, The weary spirit to release; Before the mortal eyes grow dim, Floats down the white winged dove of peace”— There came a change—but fingers small, No longer smoothed my matted hair; She sprang not to my feeble call, Nor helped to lift me to my chair— And I arose as from the dead, A life for her dear life was given; The angel who had watched my bed Had vanished into Heaven!—
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?  — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.  Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;   Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;  And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all?  Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.  The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads, Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; And God will grow no talons at his heels, Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh. Every day I will give you a color, like a new flower in a bud vase on your desk. Every day I will paint you, as women color each other with henna on hands and on feet. Red as henna, as cinnamon, as coals after the fire is banked, the cardinal in the feeder, the roses tumbling on the arbor their weight bending the wood the red of the syrup I make from petals. Orange as the perfumed fruit hanging their globes on the glossy tree, orange as pumpkins in the field, orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs who come to eat it, orange as my cat running lithe through the high grass. Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes, yellow as a hill of daffodils, yellow as dandelions by the highway, yellow as butter and egg yolks, yellow as a school bus stopping you, yellow as a slicker in a downpour. Here is my bouquet, here is a sing song of all the things you make me think of, here is oblique praise for the height and depth of you and the width too. Here is my box of new crayons at your feet. Green as mint jelly, green as a frog on a lily pad twanging, the green of cos lettuce upright about to bolt into opulent towers, green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear glass, green as wine bottles. Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums, bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort, blue as Saga. Blue as still water. Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat. Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop. Cobalt as the midnight sky when day has gone without a trace and we lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
Talent is what they say you have after the novel is published and favorably reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job. Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of remarkable poems. Earlier they accuse you of withdrawing, ask why you don’t have a baby, call you a bum. The reason people want M.F.A.’s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and some- body else’s mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you’re certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
In flat America, in Chicago, Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. Forty feet of Corinthian candle celebrate Pullman embedded lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. The Potter Palmers float in an island parthenon. Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat are postmarked with angels and lambs. But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow, sketched light arch within arch delicate as fingernail moons. The green doors should not be locked. Doors of fern and flower should not be shut. Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.It is not now good weather for prophets. Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey. On the inner green door of the Getty tomb (a thighbone's throw from your stone) a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed: how all living wreathe and insinuate in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:ever new birth never rebirth. Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand. Sullivan, you had another five years when your society would give you work. Thirty years with want crackling in your hands. Thirty after years with cities flowering and turning grey in your beard. All poets are unemployed nowadays. My country marches in its sleep. The past structures a heavy mausoleum hiding its iron frame in masonry. Men burn like grass while armies grow. Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut of this society you stormed to be used, screamed no louder than any other breaking voice. The waste of a good man bleeds the future that's come in Chicago, in flat America, where the poor still bleed from the teeth, housed in sewers and filing cabinets, where prophets may spit into the wind till anger sleets their eyes shut, where this house that dances the seasons and the braid of all living and the joy of a man making his new good thing is strange, irrelevant as a meteor, in Chicago, in flat America in this year of our burning.
The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now. Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held. What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you! Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul’s sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled? None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth. What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop. The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, Those dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’ But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, The impetuous storm of savage love. Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke, What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed? A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads. Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.
Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men. The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses. Then why do they sneer at me?
Nudes—stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire. For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice. And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he’d lit while we lay. Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons’ pantomime The place was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.
Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again— For Lebanon's summer slope. They leave these blond still days In dust behind their tread They see with living eyes How long they have been dead.
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone Ere sunrise on the world’s dismantled verge, Awaiting how from everywhere should urge The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none Did come,—but indistinct from every realm Of earth and air and water, growing more And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm His ears; and as he looked affrighted round Every manner of beast innumerable All thro’ the shadows crying grew, until The wailing was like grass upon the ground. Asudden then within his human side Their anguish, since the goad he wielded first, And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst, Darted compressed and vital.—As he died, Low in the East now lighting gorgeously He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
I hear a river thro’ the valley wander Whose water runs, the song alone remaining. A rainbow stands and summer passes under.
I used to think The mind essential in the body, even As stood the body essential in the mind: Two inseparable things, by nature equal And similar, and in creation’s song Halving the total scale: it is not so. Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine, A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain Sheathing each other’s splinters: till at last Without all stuff or shape they ’re jetted up Where in the bluish moisture rot whate’er Was vomited in horror from the sea.
Leave him now quiet by the way To rest apart. I know what draws him to the dust alway And churns him in the builder’s lime: He has the fright of time. I heard it knocking in his breast A minute since; His human eyes did wince, He stubborned like the massive slaughter beast And as a thing o’erwhelmed with sound Stood bolted to the ground. Leave him, for rest alone can cure— If cure there be— This waif upon the sea. He is of those who slanted the great door And listened—wretched little lad— To what they said.
By such an all-embalming summer day As sweetens now among the mountain pines Down to the cornland yonder and the vines, To where the sky and sea are mixed in gray, How do all things together take their way Harmonious to the harvest, bringing wines And bread and light and whatsoe’er combines In the large wreath to make it round and gay. To me my troubled life doth now appear Like scarce distinguishable summits hung Around the blue horizon: places where Not even a traveller purposeth to steer,— Whereof a migrant bird in passing sung, And the girl closed her window not to hear.
The passions that we fought with and subdued Never quite die. In some maimed serpent’s coil They lurk, ready to spring and vindicate That power was once our torture and our lord.
Chide me not, darling, that I sing Familiar thoughts and metres old: Nay, do not scold My spirit’s childish uttering. I know not why ’t is that or this I murmur to you thus or so: Only I know It throbs across my silences, It blows over my heart,—a long Infinite wind, again, again! Again! and then My life kneels down into a song.
Sir, say no more. Within me ’t is as if The green and climbing eyesight of a cat Crawled near my mind’s poor birds.
You say, Columbus with his argosies Who rash and greedy took the screaming main And vanished out before the hurricane Into the sunset after merchandise, Then under western palms with simple eyes Trafficked and robbed and triumphed home again: You say this is the glory of the brain And human life no other use than this? I then do answering say to you: The line Of wizards and of saviours, keeping trust In that which made them pensive and divine, Passes before us like a cloud of dust. What were they? Actors, ill and mad with wine, And all their language babble and disgust.
My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is gone and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done. The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung, The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green, My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, I saw the world, and yet I was not seen, My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done. I sought my death and found it in my womb, I lookt for life and saw it was a shade, I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb, And now I die, and now I am but made. The glass is full, and now the glass is run, And now I live, and now my life is done.
Would that you were alive today, Catullus! Truth ’tis, there is a filthy skunk amongst us, A rank musk-idiot, the filthiest skunk, Of no least sorry use on earth, but only Fit in fancy to justify the outlay Of your most horrible vocabulary. My Muse, all innocent as Eve in Eden, Would yet wear any skins of old pollution Rather than celebrate the name detested. Ev’n now might he rejoice at our attention, Guess'd he this little ode were aiming at him. O! were you but alive again, Catullus! For see, not one among the bards of our time With their flimsy tackle was out to strike him; Not those two pretty Laureates of England, Not Alfred Tennyson nor Alfred Austin.
I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties. Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross  a wet deck.  The sea was not, finally, my trade. But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar. Was delayed, and not content with the man’s argument that such postponement  is now the nature of obedience,  that we are all late  in a slow time,  that we grow up many  And the single   is not easily  known It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)  I note in others, makes more sense than my own distances. The agilities  they show daily  who do the world’s   businesses  And who do nature’s   as I have no sense   I have done either I have made dialogues, have discussed ancient texts, have thrown what light I could, offered  what pleasures doceat allows    But the known? This, I have had to be given, a life, love, and from one man  the world.  Tokens.  But sitting here  I look out as a wind   and water man, testing   And missing  some proof I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from,  where it goes. But the stem of me,  this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me  And my arrogance  was neither diminished   nor increased,  by the communication 2 It is undone business I speak of, this morning,  with the sea stretching out from my feet
Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood   jewels & miracles, I, Maximus  a metal hot from boiling water, tell you   what is a lance, who obeys the figures of   the present dance 1 the thing you’re after may lie around the bend of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird! And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight  (of the bird  o kylix, o  Antony of Padua  sweep low, o bless the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones on whose ridge-poles the gulls sit, from which they depart,  And the flake-racks of my city! 2 love is form, and cannot be without  important substance (the weight say, 58 carats each one of us, perforce  our goldsmith’s scale  feather to feather added  (and what is mineral, what  is curling hair, the string  you carry in your nervous beak, these  make bulk, these, in the end, are   the sum  (o my lady of good voyage  in whose arm, whose left arm rests  no boy but a carefully carved wood, a painted face, a schooner!  a delicate mast, as bow-sprit for  forwarding 3 the underpart is, though stemmed, uncertain  is, as sex is, as moneys are, facts! facts, to be dealt with, as the sea is, the demand that they be played by, that they only can be, that they must  be played by, said he, coldly, the ear! By ear, he sd. But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last, that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned? when even our bird, my roofs,  cannot be heard when even you, when sound itself is neoned in? when, on the hill, over the water where she who used to sing, when the water glowed,  black, gold, the tide  outward, at evening when bells came like boats  over the oil-slicks, milkweed  hulls And a man slumped,  attentionless, against pink shingles o sea city) 4 one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born  born of yourself, born  of hay and cotton struts,  of street-pickings, wharves, weeds   you carry in, my bird  of a bone of a fish   of a straw, or will   of a color, of a bell   of yourself, torn 5 love is not easy but how shall you know, New England, now that pejorocracy is here, how that street-cars, o Oregon, twitter in the afternoon offend a black-gold loin?  how shall you strike,  o swordsman, the blue-red black   when, last night, your aim  was mu-sick, mu-sick, mu-sick   And not the cribbage game?  (o Gloucester-man,   weave  your birds and fingers   new, your roof-tops,   clean shit upon racks   sunned on  American  braid  with others like you, such   extricable surface   as faun and oral,   satyr lesbos vase  o kill kill kill kill kill   those  who advertise you   out) 6 in! in! the bow-sprit, bird, the beak in, the bend is, in, goes in, the form that which you make, what holds, which is the law of object, strut after strut, what you are, what you must be, what  the force can throw up, can, right now hereinafter erect, the mast, the mast, the tender mast!  The nest, I say, to you, I Maximus, say  under the hand, as I see it, over the waters  from this place where I am, where I hear,  can still hear  from where I carry you a feather   as though, sharp, I picked up  in the afternoon delivered you  a jewel,  it flashing more than a wing,   than any old romantic thing,  than memory, than place,  than anything other than that which you carry   than that which is,  call it a nest, around the head of, call it   the next second  than that which you   can do!
. . . . . tell you? ha! who  can tell another how to manage the swimming? he was right: people don’t change. They only stand more  revealed. I, likewise 1 the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm  and the reflecting houses) winter or summer stays as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off  as though it were a fault, the side’s so sheer they hid, or tried to hide, the fact the cargo their ships brought back  was black (the Library, too, possibly so founded). The point is the light does go one way toward the post office, and quite another way down to Main Street. Nor is that all: coming from the sea, up Middle, it is more white, very white as it passes the grey of the Unitarian church. But at Pleasant Street,  it is abruptly black (hidden  city 2 Or now, when such houses are not built, or such trees planted, it’s the doctor knows what the parents don’t know. Or the wife doesn’t,  of the husband, or the husband, of the other. Sins, they still call them, and let  pejorocracy thrive. Only the lady has got it straight. She looks as the best of my people look in one direction, her direction, they know it is elements men stand in the midst of, not these names supported by that false future she, precisely she, has her foot upon  (He made the coast, and though he lost his feet for it, and the hands he’d purposely allowed to freeze to the oars,  I knew him, drank with my elders, in his own bar, a toast to him Or my other, the top of whose head a bollard clean took away.  It was four days before they could get him to Chelsea Marine. This spring I listened to him as good as new, as fresh as it’s always been to hear him talk of the sea. He was puttering in his garden when I came up, looking over his Santa Fe rose. And he took off his hat to show me,  how it is all skin where his skull was, too much of a hole for even the newest metal to cover Or the quiet one, who’s died since (died as deck-watchman, on his vessel, in port). Years ago I heard from others how he’d pulled two men out of the sea one night off Eastern Point. They’d not been able to shed their jacks when the ship went over, and when he caught them they were going down too. He hauled them into Brace’s Cove, even though the shore wasn’t there, it was such a storm and the sea so big  it had turned the Lily Pond into an arm of itself. Last, he with muscle as big as his voice, the strength of him in that blizzard to have pulled the trawl slack from the very bottom and released  his mate from the cod-hook had him out, and almost off, into the snow. It wasn’t that there was so much sea. It was the cold,  and that white, until over the dory went and the two of them, one still, were in. The wild thing was, he made the vessel, three miles, and fetched her, found that vessel in all that weather, with his fellow dead weight  on him. The sort of eye which later knew the Peak of Brown’s as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the Eppie Sawyer  spot to her wharf a Christmas morning) 3 Which is the cream of the milk, of course. And the milk  also of the matter, the most of it, those who do no more than drink it in a cup of tea alone of such a night, holding  (as she) a certain schooner What still is, in other words. And the remarkable part of it,  that it still goes on, still is what counts:  the lad from the Fort who recently bought the small white house on Lower Middle (the one diagonally across from the handsome brick with the Bullfinch door) He stood with me one Sunday and eyed (with a like eye) a curious ship we’d both come on, tied to the Gas Company wharf. She had raked masts, and they were unstepped, fitted loose in her deck, like a neck in a collar. He was looking idly, as I was, saying nothing. When suddenly, he turned to a Gloucesterman, a big one, berthed alongside this queer one, and said: “I’ll own her, one day” 4 While she stares, out of her painted face, no matter the deathly mu-sick, the demand will arouse some of these men and women
colored pictures of all things to eat: dirty postcards  And words, words, words  all over everything  No eyes or ears left  to do their own doings (all invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses including the mind, that worker on what is  And that other sense  made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched, that consolation (greased  lulled  even the street-cars song
all wrong  And I am asked—ask myself (I, too, covered  with the gurry of it) where shall we go from here, what can we do when even the public conveyances sing?  how can we go anywhere, even cross-town  how get out of anywhere (the bodies  all buried in shallow graves?
They are so like Us, frozen in a bald passion Or absent Gaze, like the cows whose lashes Sag beneath their frail sacks of ice. Your eyes are white with fever, a long Sickness. When you are asleep, Dreaming of another country, the wheat’s Pale surface sliding In the wind, you are walking in every breath Away from me. I gave you a stone doll, Its face a dry apple, wizened, yet untroubled. It taught us the arrogance of silence, How stone and God reward us, how dolls give us Nothing. Look at your cane, Look how even the touch that wears it away Draws up a shine, as the handle Gives to the hand. As a girl, you boiled Your dolls, to keep them clean, presentable; You’d stir them in enormous pots, As the arms and legs bent to those incredible Postures you preferred, not that ordinary, human Pose. How would you like me?— Leaning back, reading aloud from a delirious Book. Or sprawled across your bed, As if I’d been tossed off a high building Into the street, A lesson from a young government to its people. When you are asleep, walking the fields of another Country, a series of shadows slowly falling Away, marking a way, The sky leaning like a curious girl above a new Sister, your face a doll’s deliberate Ache of white, you walk along that grove of madness, Where your mother waits. Hungry, very still. When you are asleep, dreaming of another country, This is the country.
for my son The way a tired Chippewa woman Who’s lost a child gathers up black feathers, Black quills & leaves That she wraps & swaddles in a little bale, a shag Cocoon she carries with her & speaks to always As if it were the child, Until she knows the soul has grown fat & clever, That the child can find its own way at last; Well, I go everywhere Picking the dust out of the dust, scraping the breezes Up off the floor, & gather them into a doll Of you, to touch at the nape of the neck, to slip Under my shirt like a rag—the way Another man’s wallet rides above his heart. As you Cry out, as if calling to a father you conjure In the paling light, the voice rises, instead, in me. Nothing stops it, the crying. Not the clove of moon, Not the woman raking my back with her words. Our letters Close. Sometimes, you ask About the world; sometimes, I answer back. Nights Return you to me for a while, as sleep returns sleep To a landscape ravaged & familiar. The dark watermark of your absence, a hush.
So the tide forgets, as morning Grows too far delivered, as the bowls Of rock and wood run dry. What is left seems pearled and lit, As those cases Of the museum stood lit With milk jade, rows of opaque vases Streaked with orange and yellow smoke. You found a lavender boat, a single Figure poling upstream, baskets Of pale fish wedged between his legs. Today, the debris of winter Stands stacked against the walls, The coils of kelp lie scattered Across the floor. The oil fire Smokes. You turn down the lantern Hung on its nail. Outside, The boats aligned like sentinels. Here beside the blue depot, walking The pier, you can see the way The shore Approximates the dream, how distances Repeat their deaths Above these tables and panes of water— As climbing the hills above The harbor, up to the lupine drifting Among the lichen-masked pines, The night is pocked with lamps lit On every boat offshore, Galleries of floating stars. Below, On its narrow tracks shelved Into the cliff’s face, The train begins its slide down To the warehouses by the harbor. Loaded With diesel, coal, paychecks, whiskey, Bedsheets, slabs of ice—for the fish, For the men. You lean on my arm, As once I watched you lean at the window; The bookstalls below stretched a mile To the quay, the afternoon crowd Picking over the novels and histories. You walked out as you walked out last Night, onto the stone porch. Dusk Reddened the walls, the winds sliced Off the reefs. The vines of the gourds Shook on their lattice. You talked About that night you stood Behind the black pane of the French Window, watching my father read some long Passage Of a famous voyager’s book. You hated That voice filling the room, Its light. So tonight we make a soft Parenthesis upon the sand’s black bed. In that dream we share, there is One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the sea our whole lives; Until turning from those waves, we find One shore, where we look out upon nothing And the earth our whole lives. Where what is left between shore and sky Is traced in the vague wake of (The stars, the sandpipers whistling) What we forgive. If you wake soon, wake me.
They were sitting on the thin mattress He’d once rolled & carried up the four floors To his room only to find it covered nearly all Of the bare wood Leaving just a small path alongside the wall & between them was the sack Of oranges & pears she’d brought its neck Turned back to expose the colors of the fruit & as she opened a bottle of wine He reached over to a tall stack of books & pulled out The Tao & with a silly flourish Handed it across the bed to her she looked up & simply poured the two squat water glasses Half-full with wine & then she Took the book reading silently not aloud As he’d assumed & suddenly he felt clearly She knew the way Two people must come upon such an understanding Together of course but separately As the moon & the wave remain individually one
after Baudelaire Quiet now, sorrow; relax. Calm down, fear ... You wanted the night? It’s falling, here, Like a black glove onto the city, Giving a few some peace ... but not me. I think, well, almost everyone I know Loves to be whipped by pleasure—right, Killer?— As they stroll the boardwalk, parading their despair. So why don’t you come too? But instead, with me, Away from all these tattered ghosts leaning off The sky’s balcony like last year’s lovers; We’ll watch everything we regret step from the sea Dripping ... while the dead sun drags its arc Towards China. Shroud of my heart, listen. Listen— How softly the night steps toward us.
Tired of his dark dominion ... —George Meredith It was something I’d overheard One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously  Saying to a mutual friend, a woman Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips   That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always  Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country  Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me  As being a city of the night ... ”  Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant—   Not simply because I love Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening   As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky,  The whole mind of night that I know so well  Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite, Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome  Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen   To live when I grew tired of my ancient life As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness   Was of the kind that consoles so many  Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history  Of falls ... No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark  Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur  Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of  The She-Wolf—all the sequins above in sequence,  The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians,  A dark like the polished back of a mirror,  The pool of the night scalloped and hanging  Above me, the inverted reflection of a last,  Odd Narcissus ...  One night my friend Nico came by  Close to three a.m.—As we drank a little wine, I could see  The black of her pupils blown wide,  The spread ripples of the opiate night ... And Nico  Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost  Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look ... ,” And deep within the pupil of her left eye,  Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging  Lantern rocking with the waves, I could see, at the most remote end of the receding,  Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway,  At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil,  A tiny, dangling crucifix—  Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting  In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain ... Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing  Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid  Kaleidoscope washing over her—the way any naked,  Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip  Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly  Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly  Love of sexual sincerity ...  I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember  The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let  Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather  Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind  Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents,  Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves;  The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling ...  Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere,  Then forever ...  Into the mind of the Roman night.
I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling  in mud holes underneath tree roots.  You’d think it would be dangerous,  but I never came up with a cooter  or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips.  Occasionally, though, I leapt upright,  my fingers hooked through the red gills  of a mudcat. And then I thrilled the thrill my father felt when he burst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled,  well before dawn, “Wake up! Come here!” He tossed some fatwood on the fire and flames raged, spat, and flickered. He held  a four-foot mudcat. “I caught it!” he yelled. “I caught this monster!” At first,  dream-dazed, I thought it was something  he’d saved us from. By firelight, the fish  gleamed wickedly. But Father laughed  and hugged me hard, pressing my head  against his coat, which stank, and glittered where dried scales caught the light. For breakfast,  he fried enormous chunks of fish,  the whole house glorious for days  with their rich stink. One scale stuck to my face,  and as we ate he blinked, until he understood what made me glitter. He laughed, reached over, flicked the star  off of my face. That’s how I felt —that wild!— when I jerked struggling fish  out of the mud and held them up,  long muscles shuddering on my fingers. Once, grabbling, I got lost. I traced  the river to the marsh, absorbed with fishing, then absorbed with ants.  With a flat piece of bark, I’d scoop  red ants onto a black-ant hill and watch. Then I would shovel black  ants on a red-ant hill to see what difference that would make. Not much. And I returned to grabbling,  then skimming stones. Before I knew it, I’d worked my way from fresh water to salt,  and I was lost. Sawgrass waved, swayed,  and swung above my head. Pushed down,  it sprang back. Slashed at, it slashed back.  All I could see was sawgrass. Where was  the sea, where land? With every step,  the mud sucked at my feet with gasps  and sobs that came so close to speech  I sang in harmony with them. My footprints filled with brine as I  walked on, still fascinated with the sweat bees, hornets, burrow bees;  and, God forgive me, I was not afraid  of anything. Lost in sawgrass, I knew for sure just up and down.  Almost enough. Since then, they are  the only things I’ve had much faith in. Night fell. The slow moon rose from sawgrass.  Soon afterward I heard some cries  and answered them. So I was saved  from things I didn’t want to be saved from. Ma tested her green switch  —zip! zip!— then laid it on my thighs,  oh, maybe twice, before she fell, in tears, across my neck. She sobbed and combed my hair of cockleburs. She laughed as she dabbed alcohol into my cuts. I flinched. She chuckled.  And even as a child, I heard, inside her sobs and chuckling, the lovely sucking sound of earth that followed me, gasped, called my name as I stomped through the mud, wrenched free,  and heard the earth’s voice under me.
MAY 3, 1863 When Clifford wasn’t back to camp by nine,  I went to look among the fields of dead  before we lost him to a common grave.  But I kept tripping over living men  and had to stop and carry them to help  or carry them until they died, which happened more than once upon my back.  And I got angry with those men because  they kept me from my search and I was out still stumbling through the churned-up earth at dawn,  stopping to stare into each corpse’s face,  and all the while I was writing in my head  the letter I would have to send our father,  saying Clifford was lost and I had lost him. I found him bent above a dying squirrel  while trying to revive the little thing.  A battlefield is full of trash like that —  dead birds and squirrels, bits of uniform.  Its belly racked for air. It couldn’t live.  Cliff knew it couldn’t live without a jaw.  When in relief I called his name, he stared,  jumped back, and hissed at me like a startled cat. I edged up slowly, murmuring “Clifford, Cliff,”  as you might talk to calm a skittery mare,  and then I helped him kill and bury all the wounded squirrels he’d gathered from the field. It seemed a game we might have played as boys.  We didn’t bury them all at once, with lime,  the way they do on burial detail,  but scooped a dozen, tiny, separate graves. When we were done he fell across the graves and sobbed as though they’d been his unborn sons.  His chest was large — it covered most of them.  I wiped his tears and stroked his matted hair,  and as I hugged him to my chest I saw he’d wet his pants. We called it Yankee tea.
When we first heard from blocks away the fog truck’s blustery roar, we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals,  and scrambled out the door into an evening briefly fuzzy. We yearned to be transformed— translated past confining flesh to disembodied spirit. We swarmed in thick smoke, taking human form  before we blurred again, turned vague and then invisible,  in temporary heaven. Freed of bodies by the fog, we laughed, we sang, we shouted.  We were our voices, nothing else.  Voice was all we wanted. The white clouds tumbled down our streets  pursued by spellbound children  who chased the most distorting clouds, ecstatic in the poison.
I like to touch your tattoos in complete darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of where they are, know by heart the neat lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists or turns to pain between us, they will still be there. Such permanence is terrifying. So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
It was a time when they were afraid of him. My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse with broken knees no one would shoot. Then again, he was like the orange tree, and young women plucked from him sweet fruit. To meet him, you must be in the right place, even his sons and daughter, we wondered where was papa now and what was he doing. He held the mystique of travelers that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees. Then, when you follow, you find nothing, not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough. And then he would appear one night. Half covered in shadows and half in light, his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts. When his hands lay on the table at breakfast, they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home, hands that had not taken us into them and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips. They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home  with love and safety, for a moment; with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs, they filled us because of the love in them. Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life,  beyond the sponging of broken hearts, came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear, that made us grow up quick and romantic. Papa gave us something: when we paused from work, my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields, my brother and I running like deer, we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch, who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank, he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart, nor did he say we were strong and were going to be rich someday.  He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see, three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet way, who owned nothing but calloused hands and true freedom, and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind, to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring. He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!” And he left again, going somewhere like a child with a warrior’s heart, nothing could stop him. My grandmother would look at him for a long time, and then she would say nothing. She chose to remain silent, praying each night, guiding down like a root in the heart of earth, clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast. And I am the blossom of many nights. A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is, my brother is as he is, and I am as I am. Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living, arose three distinct hopes, three loves, out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.  After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,  we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy  (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored  means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no  inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature,  Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes  as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.  And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag  and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving  behind: me, wag.
I am four in this photograph, standing  on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,  my hands on the flowered hips of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,  curl around wet sand. The sun cuts  the rippling Gulf in flashes with each  tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet glinting like switchblades. I am alone except for my grandmother, other side  of the camera, telling me how to pose.  It is 1970, two years after they opened  the rest of this beach to us,  forty years since the photograph  where she stood on a narrow plot  of sand marked colored, smiling, her hands on the flowered hips  of a cotton meal-sack dress.
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in  to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street  In the City as the sun sinks low; And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet  And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain  That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light; And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again  In the Symphony that rules the day and night. And now it’s marching onward through the realms of old romance  And trolling out a fond familiar tune, And now it’s roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,  And now it’s prattling softly to the moon, And all around the organ there’s a sea without a shore  Of human joys and wonders and regrets; To remember and to recompense the music evermore  For what the cold machinery forgets. . . .  Yes; as the music changes,  Like a prismatic glass,  It takes the light and ranges  Through all the moods that pass;  Dissects the common carnival  Of passions and regrets,  And gives the world a glimpse of all  The colours it forgets.  And there La Traviata sighs  Another sadder song;  And there Il Trovatore cries  A tale of deeper wrong;  And bolder knights to battle go  With sword and shield and lance,  Than ever here on earth below  Have whirled into—a dance!— Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;  Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;  Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,  The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze of sky   The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London. The Dorian nightingale is rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there  At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!) The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo  And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo, of owls that ogle London. For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard  At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!) And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out  You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorussing for London:—Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;  Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;  Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller’s call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, ’Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:— ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.  I have been one acquainted with the night.
Beautifully Janet slept Till it was deeply morning. She woke then  And thought about her dainty-feathered hen,  To see how it had kept. One kiss she gave her mother, Only a small one gave she to her daddy Who would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;  No kiss at all for her brother. “Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried,  Running across the world upon the grass  To Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas,  Her Chucky had died. It was a transmogrifying bee Came droning down on Chucky’s old bald head And sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled,  But how exceedingly And purply did the knot Swell with the venom and communicate Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight But Chucky did not. So there was Janet Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen  (Translated far beyond the daughters of men)  To rise and walk upon it. And weeping fast as she had breath Janet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!”  And would not be instructed in how deep  Was the forgetful kingdom of death.
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you
You do look a little ill. But we can do something about that, now.  Can’t we. The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.  Do you hear me. You aren’t all alone. And you could use some help today, packing in the  dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and  grinning with terror flowing over your legs through  your fingers and hair . . . I was always waiting, always here.  Know anyone else who can say that. My advice to you is think of her for what she is:  one more name cut in the scar of your tongue. What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than  harm, is not abject.” Please. Can we be leaving now. We like bus trips, remember. Together we could watch these winter fields slip past, and  never care again, think of it. I don’t have to be anywhere.
Morning arrives unannounced by limousine: the tall  emaciated chairman of sleeplessness in person steps out on the sidewalk and donning black glasses, ascends  the stairs to your building guided by a German shepherd.  After a couple faint knocks  at the door, he slowly opens  the book of blank pages pointing out with a pale manicured finger  particular clauses, proof of your guilt.
And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.  By some inexplicable oversight nobody jeers when I walk down the street. I have been allowed to go on living in this  room. I am not asked to explain my presence  anywhere. What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and  are any left unexecuted? Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking  certain jobs? They are absolutely shameless at the bank—— You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non- chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested, but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—— they think they are going to surprise me: I,  who do nothing but wait. Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—— very clever. They think that they can scare me.  I am always scared. And how much courage it requires to get up in the  morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates  you! At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and  refuse to go on, it’s not done. I go on dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip, accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause, past a million unlighted windows, peered out at  by the retired and their aged attack-dogs— toward my place, the one at the end of the counter,  the scalpel on the napkin.
I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then. Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America.
Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor— Bare. But all the time I’se been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light. So boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard. Don’t you fall now— For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally— it is only the force we exert all our lives to exclude death from our thoughts that confronts us, when it does arrive, as the horror of being excluded— . . . something like that, the Canadian wind coming in off Lake Erie rattling the windows, horizontal snow appearing out of nowhere across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago; there is something so 19th-century about it, with its absurd reverse Puritanism. Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger? Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu- riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation. Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt- ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too. Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil- lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious. You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that isn’t a pussy!” But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.” The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’resupposed to be crazy (and are probably proving it). Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes, it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls— just like the ones you neglected to identify.
From the third floor window you watch the mailman’s slow progress through the blowing snow. As he goes from door to door he might be searching for a room to rent, unsure of the address, which he keeps stopping to check in the outdated and now obliterated clipping he holds, between thickly gloved fingers, close to his eyes in a hunched and abruptly simian posture that makes you turn away, quickly switching off the lamp.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read  Beneath the innocence of morning flesh  Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed. Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands; The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland, Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen  That may be hers appear: foul, lingering  Death in certain war, the slim legs green.  Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting  Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel  Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.  These speculations sour in the sun.  I have no daughter. I desire none.
1.  Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,  But that was quite some time ago.  Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,  Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.  Moving through ivy in the park  Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate;  But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone.  The path is strewn with papers to the street.  Numbers that once were various  Regarded us, were thought significant, significant  Enough to bring reporters to the scene.  But now the bell strikes one, strikes one,  Strikes one—monotonous and tired.  Or clicks like a sad valise.  2. Note to Be Left on the Table  This ghost of yours, padding about the upper halls,  Given to fright-wigs Burbage might have worn,  Moaning in doorways, jumping out at maids,  Has not convinced me even yet. Can this be you?  Your life was frightening enough, but this  Poor pallid counterpart who fuddles in its role  Is inexcusable. Go haunt the houses of the girls  You once infected, or the men who bore  Your company far oftener than I; annoy the others  For a change. Is this, my house, the medieval hell  You took to at the grave’s edge, years ago,  After a dozen other hells had burned themselves away,  Or are we purgatory here? If not,  You make it one. I give you until noon.3. Ruined travelers in sad trousseaux Roost on my doorstep, indolent and worn. Not one of them fulfills despised Rousseau’s Predictions. Perhaps they are waiting to be born. If so, the spot’s been badly chosen. This is a site for posthumous investigations, Pillows stuffed with nettles, charnal notions: Apoplectic executioners, bungled incisions. Indeed, our solitary midwife fondles the hemlock. We welcomed one poor hackneyed Christ, Sad bastard, croaking of pestilence. The basement Holds him now. He has not as yet arisen. The tickets are ready; the line forms on the right. Justice and virtue, you will find, have been amazingly preserved.  4.  As water from a dwindling reservoir  Uncovers mossy stones, new banks of silt,  So every minute that I spend with you reveals  New flaws, new features, new intangibles.  We have been sitting here for hours—  “I spent that summer in Madrid,  The winter on the coast of France—  The Millotsons were there, and Farnsworth.  My work has perished with the rest  Of Europe, gone, all gone. We will not see the end.”  You said goodbye, and your perfume  Lingered for hours. At first it seemed  Like summer dying there, then rank and sharp.  And yet I did not air the room.  5.  Among Victorian beadwork and the smell of plush,  The owls, stuffed and marvelously sinister,  Glare from dark corners, waiting for the night.  High up, the moose’s passive eyes explore  Candles, unlit, within cut-glass. A door  Is opened, and you enter with a look  You might have saved for Pliny or the Pope.  The furniture has shrunk now thirty years  Have passed (with talent thinning out, and words  Gone dead), and mouths of friends in photographs  Display their hopeful and outmoded smiles.  You counted on at least a sputter of nostalgia,  However fretful. That was a mistake. Even the moose  Regards you with a tired, uncomprehending stare.  6.  Signboards commemorate their resting place.  The graveless of another century  Came and were conquered; now their bones  Are dust where idiot highways run.  Land in their eyes, unquiet ancestors  (On fences yellow signs clang in the wind)  Unstirred by suns drying the brown weeds  Above them now in parched and caking land.  But when they speak of you, they feel the need  Of voices polished and revised by history,  The martial note, words framed in capitals.  It is good to be deaf in a deafening time  With the sky gone colorless, while the dead  Thunder breaks, a cracked dish, out of the mind.  7.  The eye no longer single: where the bowl,  Dead in the thickened darkness, swelled with light,  Transformed the images and moved the artist’s hand,  Becomes a framework for our mania.  And haunts the stairway. Friends depart,  Taking their last look from the roof,  Saying goodnight and carrying their view  Of grapes the model ate in Paris years ago.  Blue in the morning, green some afternoons;  The night, ambiguous, forgets the signature.  The dust in attics settled and his stove  Grew cold. About the model nothing much is known.  It ends the wall and complements the view  Of chimneys. And it hides a stain.  8.  And when your beauty, washed away  In impure streams with my desire,  Is only topic for ill-mannered minds,  Gifted and glassy with exact recall,  Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair,  Let ruined weather perish in the streets  And let the world’s black lying flag come down.  Only in calendars that mark no Spring  Can there be weather in the mind  That moves to you again as you are now:  Tired after love and silent in this house,  Your back turned to me, quite alone,  Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair,  At a small window, green with rain.
Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.  Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.  The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.  This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson. Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,  Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.  —Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson. Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.  Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?” Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall. Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home; Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars. Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,  Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down, The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief- Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering  His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer; And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,  I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me. From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio  Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.  We were alone there, he and I, Inhabiting the empty street. Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars, While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,  He stopped and gazed into a window Where a plaster Venus, modeling a truss, Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson, I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,  Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape, Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.) And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!” There was no chance. Just as I passed,  Turning my head to search his face,  His own head turned with mine And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes  That stopped my blood. His voice Came at me like an echo in the dark. “I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.  Kicked all night at a bolted door. You must have followed me from Astor Place.  An empty paper floats down at the last.And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs  Unrolled its horror on my face Until it blocked—”
1 Eastern guard tower glints in sunset; convicts rest like lizards on rocks. 2 The piano man is stingy, at 3 A.M. his songs drop like plum. 3 Morning sun slants cell. Drunks stagger like cripple flies On jailhouse floor. 4 To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves. 5 A bare pecan tree slips a pencil shadow down a moonlit snow slope. 6 The falling snow flakes Cannot blunt the hard aches nor Match the steel stillness. 7 Under moon shadows A tall boy flashes knife and Slices star bright ice. 8 In the August grass Struck by the last rays of sun The cracked teacup screams. 9 Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN’T No square poet’s job.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Side by sideSide by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred,  The earl and countess lie in stone,  Their proper habitshabits Clothes vaguely shown  As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,  And that faint hint of the absurd—  The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque pre-baroque In Larkin’s pronunciation, the phrase rhymes with 'shock.' The Baroque period, exemplified by ornamentation, followed the Renaissance. This tomb was sculpted in the Middle Ages.  Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntletgauntlet An armored glove, worn in the Middle Ages, still  Clasped empty in the other; and  One sees, with a sharp tender shock,  His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long.  Such faithfulness in effigyeffigy A sculptured likeness Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace  Thrown off in helping to prolong  The Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in Their supinesupine On their backs stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage,  Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths  Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright  Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths  The endless altered people came, Washing at their identity.  Now, helpless in the hollow of  An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeinsskeins Used figuratively, a skein is a quantity of thread  Above their scrap of history, Only anOnly an When first published in June 1956 in the London Magazine, the line began: Only their attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into  Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be  Their final blazonblazon Both a coat of arms, and a public proclamation, and to prove  Our almost-instinct almost true:  What will survive of us is love.
I like old photographs of relatives in black and white, their faces set like stone. They knew this was serious business. My favorite album is the one that's filled with people none of us can even name. I find the recent ones more difficult. I wonder, now, if anyone remembers how fiercely I refused even to stand beside him for this picture — how I shrank back from his hand and found the other side. Forever now, for future family, we will be framed like this, although no one will wonder at the way we are arranged. No one will ever wonder, since we'll be forever smiling there — our mouths all teeth.
A young black girl stopped by the woods, so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister. The woods were his and she respected his boundaries  even in the absence of fence. Of course she delighted in the filling up of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness, to being taken at face value. This face, her face eternally the brown of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,  cling to bark making it seem indecisive about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism. With the grass covered, black and white are the only options,  polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral but are on edge. She shakes off snow, defiance wasted on the limited audience of horse. The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to,  as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight.  She has promises to keep, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise that she ride the horse only as long as it is willing to accept riders, the promise that she bear Jim no bastards, the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow, and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover,  more than the distance from black to white before she sleeps with Jim.
He lived—childhood summers  thru bare feet then years of money’s lack  and heat beside the river—out of flood  came his wood, dog, woman, lost her, daughter—  prologue to planting trees. He buried carp  beneath the rose where grass-still  the marsh rail goes. To bankers on high land  he opened his wine tank. He wished his only daughter  to work in the bank but he’d given her a source  to sustain her— a weedy speech,  a marshy retainer.
Father’s opinion of savages And dogs, a gay Bloomsbury epigram: ‘The brutes may possibly have souls,’ he says, ‘But reason, no. Nevertheless, I am Prepared not to extend this to my spouse And children.’ This demands a careful pity: Poor Father! Whooping and romping in their house, A holiday from ruin in the City. His wit falls flat, his tie just will not tie. The dog’s in chains, the reasonable books Grazed by his children as they learn to fly. He takes his dear wife’s arm (his hands grow hooks). Pirates and pudding! Come, such cruelty! His beard is branching like a burning tree.
Ar. Now you have been taught words and I am free,  My pine struck open, your thick tongue untied,  And bells call out the music of the sea.  From this advantage I can clearly see  You will abuse me in your grovelling pride  Now you have been taught words: and I am free  To pinch and bully you eternally,  Swish round the island while the mermaids hide  And bells call out the music of the sea.  I watched you closely from within my tree:  Explicit fish, implicit homicide,  Now you have been taught words, and I am free  To hear, who has the real victory?  For you may drown as I draw in the tide  And bells call out the music of the sea.  You lust for Her and bare your teeth at me.  Your roarings only mock the ache inside  Now you have been taught words. And I am free  While bells call out the music of the sea.Cal. Have you no feelings that you cannot tame?Ar. My target’s everything, and in my aim,  Achievement, while another,  Lesser lusts may drive:  Legs hate their lazy brother  Who saps your precious Five  To keep alive.Cal. Have you no visions that you cannot name?Ar. A picture should extend beyond its frame,  There being no limitation  To bright reality:  For all their declaration  And complexity,  Words cannot see.Cal. Are not the object and the word the same?Ar. Words are but counters in a childish game;  Each move you make is token  Only of the rules:  Any rule may be broken  By the boy from a clever school  Or a bored fool.Cal. How is it, then, that words can hurt and maim?Ar. If words do that, you are already lame,  Bowed down by words like firewood,  Clenched with words like ice:  Language is for the coward  Who thinks a rule is nice  At any price.Cal. O then unteach me language, let the cool  Sea sidle up and draw me to its deep  Silence. Teach me how to break the rule.Ar. Once in the game you cannot make that leap.  The sea will cast you up again if you  Pretend to break the rule you really keep.Cal. But tell me, then, if what you say is true,  What was your knowledge when you could not move?  What instinct told what function what to do?Ar. Words would not help the channelled sea to prove  It was not ocean-free, nor pine no fuel:  I just existed, wordless, in my groove.  Nor do I use words now, though you  In innocence may think I do:  We’ve left the island and engage  In conversation on a page  Sand-white and, like it, bounded by  A vast of dull eternity.  And I (since I can understand)  Am master of this paper land.  Think I am quick? I am so too,  But when I’m bored with biffing you,  Eve’s monkey, still that is not all,  Nor Milan’s ghost, his beck and call  To all the fancies that I can.  You are too human, Caliban.  You lunge and ape the human dance.  Music and love are sustenance  Withheld from you like tinkling charms  Beyond your crying outstretched arms.  You think I did not want my tree?  Or tire of showing off? Being ‘free’  All of the time is like your choice  Of endless fireworks of the voice:  You splutter, gasp and madly shout,  But dampness seeps up: you go out,  The silly words trail off your tongue.  So wings get tired, flapping among  The fussy spirits of the air.  You curse. I sulk. Always He’s there.  The bullet’s speed is not a feat.  Of time, but photograph of wheat,  A summer fly caught in a flash  Of speckled stillness. Hear a splash?  You think a glacier does not move?  Brilliance of struggling wings can prove  Treacle of amber, and a spark  The universe, my world my bark  I long for, longing for the dark.Cal. A language learnt but nothing understood:  Now you at large, and all I owned before  Lost like my name within the magic wood.  No word for saying ‘no’ to fetching wood.  The marvellous Glove splits on the hairy claw:  A language learnt but nothing understood.  At first I framed what syllables I could:  She laughed at me and left me on the shore,  Lost, like my name within the magic wood.  Think of my rage then, Ariel, as I stood,  (A picture in my head I could not draw,  A language learnt but nothing understood),  Weeping into the sea, hoping She would  Turn back to lead me through that little door,  Lost like my name within the magic wood.  Our Master calls: I think it is not good  To be unhappy with your freedom or  My language (learnt, but nothing understood),  Lost like my name within the magic wood.
You don’t listen to what I say. When I lean towards you in the car You simply smile and turn away. It’s been like this most of the day, sitting and sipping, bar after bar: You don’t listen to what I say. You squeeze a lemon from a tray, And if you guess how dear you are You simply smile and turn away. Beyond the hairline of the bay the steamers call that shore is far. You don’t listen to what I say: Surely there’s another way? The waiter brings a small guitar. You simply smile and turn away. Sometimes I think you are too gay, smiling and smiling, hour after hour. You don’t listen to what I say. You simply smile and turn away.
From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles, The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last Riot of the senses, is only a short pass. Earth to be forked over is more patient, Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner. But if not grasped grows quickly, silently. We are restless, not remembering much. The pain is slow, original as laughter, Reaching for all of it, hardly aware, Beginning again and feeling for its terrain. We were often told and still we would not listen, And closing fingers, those accomplices, Took comfort from a lie. From lap to grass Whining, motionless on the lowest branch Above the pine needles, climbing the heather: We did not listen. It hid there still to find. Much since was hard to get, later displeased, Nursing an ordinary complaint or waiting For a reiterated brilliance, Growing in ignorance, too near to see. Now in the suburbs windows are on fire, Pale globes quiver on their dusty strings And afternoons disperse with mirth of gnome, The rigid stabbed flamingo pink in the trees, Split to the touch and walking by the pool. Now life jerking in its sustained coda Constricts its furniture and its events. The frowning bus disappears down the hill Or slides before the window with its bored Passengers staring unashamedly in. Now above the trees the ice-cream’s bare Electric tongue stammers its recitation. Children run out in the dumb-bell cul-de-sac To their cold delight, skipping between the turds Of long-dead dogs, coiled thickly on the stone. The children learn so quickly. The house stirs. Swallows leave earlier, apples to be pressed. Half the sky burns: the other half is dark. Hair pushing slowly out, generations Surrounding us with wonder, theirs and ours. Nothing to give, nothing has been learnt. The past simply denies the urge for a truce, Creeping into the egg. When it is time We can appoint a committee for the feasts, And for next year’s feasts, and the year after. Locks stick, glass metamorphosed In leafy caryatids of summer where Heat packs the panes and fingers tremble in Tobacco pockets, a tomato sniffed, Its greenish acid bloom and tiny hairs. The pain stirs again like a new life To be unravelled. It had to come to this. The body is nothing, the body thinks nothing, The short senses grubbing on their sticks Feel nothing, the forgotten carioca. A line moves to the finger end, and curls, Head fallen in helplessness. The wails Of children break behind the woven fences, Those minted faces tar beyond our sight. The gates shut: a parade of Japanese flags. And alive on the porch the councillor lowers his pipe, Comes down from the dunes a bathroom Arab Firing off caps, or crouched over shells Gathered in sodden pumps, the soprano waitress Bringing hot tea across the evening sand. The nights come in slowly. Behind a half-curtain The impossible is completed. A single lamp Weighs down its ornaments in pools of light. Shadows crawl over the crater, roped To the terrain’s recoil, roped to the pit.
His clumsy body is a golden fruit pendulous in the pear tree Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds Adriatic blue the sky above and through the forking twigs Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls tight-clenched in bud (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) I watch him prune with silent secateurs Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight heavily as oxen in a stall Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth a kitten in a box Pear clippings fall  soundlessly on the ground Spring finches sing  soundlessly in the leaves A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s quick springtime pulse Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on his mutely snipping blades and flags and scraps of blue above him make regatta of the day But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape sudden and silent in the grass below uptilt its face to him then air is kisses, kisses stone dissolves his locked throat finds a little door and through it feathered joy flies screaming like a jay
Fingers: Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets. We, active, differentiate the digits: Whilst you are merely little toe and big (Or, in the nursery, some futile pig) Through vital use as pincers there has come Distinction of the finger and the thumb; Lacking a knuckle you have sadly missed Our meaningful translation to a fist; And only by the curling of that joint Could the firm index come to have a point. You cannot punch or demonstrate or hold And therefore cannot write or pluck or mould: Indeed, it seems deficiency in art Alone would prove you the inferior part.  Toes: Not so, my friends. Our clumsy innocence And your deft sin is the main difference Between the body’s near extremities. Please do not think that we intend to please: Shut in the dark, we once were free like you. Though you enslaved us, are you not slaves, too? Our early balance caused your later guilt, Erect, of finding out how we were built. Your murders and discoveries compile A history of the crime of being agile, And we it is who save you when you fight Against the odds: you cannot take to flight. Despite your fabrications and your cunning, The deepest instinct is expressed in running.
Wondered Knob-Cracker at Stout-Heart: ‘Are you timed by your will, does your pulse List credit, ready to slam like a till? Can you keep it up?’ Growled Beard Splitter to Smug: ‘Your forces delay, bibbing at Northern walls While snow drives rifts between, barring the way. I am sufficient.’ Pleaded Knob-Cracker with Fail-Safe: ‘You’ve boarded at last, your hands in your pockets, Hat on the back of your head and flags up the mast. Can’t I come with you?’ Nodded Beard-Splitter to Sorrowful: ‘The islands are prisons and no one returns, No power or possessions where my rule is. I will make you mine.’
Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut. Your life was ours, which is with you. Go on your journey. We go too. The bat is flying round the house Like an umbrella turned into a mouse. The moon is astonished and so are the sheep: Their bells have come to send you to sleep. Oh be our rest, our hopeful start. Turn your head to my beating heart. Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut.
When they confess that they have lost the penial bone and outer space is Once again a numinous void, when they’re kept out of Other Places, And Dr Fieser falls asleep at last and dreams of unburnt faces, When gold medals are won by the ton for forgetting about the different races, God Bless America.  When in the Latin shanties the scented priesthood suffers metempsychosis And with an organ entry tutti copula the dollar uncrosses Itself and abdicates, when the Pax Americana cuts its losses And a Pinkville memorial’s built in furious shame by Saigon’s puppet bosses, God Bless America.  When they can be happy without noise, without knowing where on earth they’ve been, When they cease to be intellectual tourists and stop wanting to be clean, When they send their children to bed at the proper time and say just what they mean, And no longer trust the Quarterly Symposium and the Vicarious Screen, God Bless America.  When they feel thoroughly desolated by the short-haired Christ they pray to, When they weep over their plunder of Europe stone by stone, releasing Plato And other Freshman Great Books, when they switch off their Hoover and unplug Nato, Pulling the chain on the CIA and awarding Time a rotten potato, God Bless America.  When qua-birds, quickhatches and quinnets agree at last to admit the quail, When Captain Queeg is seen descending from the bridge as small and pale As everyone else, and is helped with sympathetic murmurs to the rail, When the few true defenders of love and justice survive to tell the tale, Then, perhaps then, God Bless America.
Think of a self-effacing missionary Tending the vices of a problem tribe. He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri And how to take a bribe. And so the mind will never say it’s beaten By primitive disturbance of the liver; Its logic will prevent its being eaten, Get it across the river. But faced with this assured inconsequence That damns the very method that is used, It leaves the heart unproselytised and hence Admits that it’s confused. I know I’m acting, but I still must act. I melt to foolishness, and want it ended. Why it continues is this simple fact: I’d hate to end it. For now the jungle moods assert their terms And there’s no way to check them if they lie: The mind attempts to solve the thing, but squirms And knows exactly why. The world is everything that is the case. You cannot see it if you are inside it. That’s why the tortoise always wins the race: the very terms decide it. I cannot help it if I am contented With being discontented that I falter: That’s why psychology was first invented So that we needn’t alter. It is a strange position to be in. It would be different if I didn’t know Why the unlikely animal should win, Which cannibal should row. You’d think there’d be a way of cutting out Those self-destructive layers of introspection. To reach the truth at last without a doubt Of making the connection. That’s why the missionary, on his guard, Is wondering why the cannibal’s so merry, And why it is so very very hard To be a missionary.
The poet’s duties: no need to stress The subject’s dullness, nonetheless Here’s an incestuous address  In Robert Burns’ style To one whom all the Muses bless  At Great Turnstile. I’ve no excuses for this theme. Prescription is less popular than dream And little rhymes, God knows, can seem  Much too laconic,Bollinger’s visionary gleam  Turned gin-and-tonic. But ssch! you know and understand The way these verses have been planned: Gritty like little bits of sand  Not shining quartz; No pulsing from a higher gland  Just random thoughts. Let’s start by thinking of objectives. Poets hate to have directives: They’re on their own, not on collectives,  Share and share about, And what inspires their best invectives  Is what they care about. You, James, collapsed upon our sofa As though being driven by a chauffeur, Won’t fail to tell us what you go for:  Managerial boobs And answers that you won’t take no for  From Fine Tubes. Reporters never throw in towels. Their prose is written from the bowels.Ottava rima about owls  Printed by Sycamore  Is worlds away from Enoch Powell’s  Plans for the blackamoor. But are you James Cameron or Flecker? Are you a maker or a trekker? What is the nature of your Mecca,  Your verum pulchrum? I’m glad, of course, that you’re with Secker  And not with Fulcrum. Poet and traveller have quarrelled And now you canter where you carolled. We’re waiting still for your Childe Harold,  Though quests in Poland Find you fixated and apparelled  More like Childe Roland. It is impressive, I agree, Although I know it’s not for me. I take the windfalls from the tree,  I’m much too lazy, The prisons that I want to see  By Piranesi. You say that Oxford has no marrow, Sucked dry by Trevor-Roper, Sparrow, And others of reaction’s farrow  In their fat cloister, Though if my eye is just as narrow  It may be moister. We never see our feelings through, And weeping only makes us blue. It may be beautiful and true  But it’s not action, And nothing the bourgeoisie can do  Gives satisfaction. How can we alter our behaviour? Should we deny our gravy’s gravier? Leave Cleopatra for Octavia?  My life is inner, And someone I don’t think a saviour  Is B. F. Skinner. Avoid that fashionable flock: To be refitted in their dock Your common-sense must take a knock  As it took a course on The reflexes of frogs, and Locke,  And P. F. Strawson. Much of the Left we can ignore (Sheer anarchy I don’t adore). The trendy educate the poor  In greed and fear, While Labour’s entered on the war  Of Jenkins’ ear. No. Righteous more than He who Hath, More reasonable than New Math, Momier than the Mome Rath  In their outgrabing, Glossing the Variorum Plath  From Krafft-Ebing, Apostles of determinism Whose hero’s Mao or Virgil Grissom Won’t interest your mind one rissom:  You’re too empirical. What about Neo-Imagism?  Impossibly lyrical. Such knowing brevity needs patience: As unfastidious Croatians Upon quite intimate occasions  Shun body-talc, So leave your interpersonal relations  To Colin Falck. For poetry to have some merit he Requires it to display sincerity, Each pronoun to convince posterity  With deep emotion And an invigorating verity  Like hair-lotion. Well, that’s unfair. I’m glad he lives. Just think of the alternatives! Those whose verse resembles sieves  Or a diagram, And foul-mouthed transatlantic spivs  Wooing Trigram. For they are all still with us, James, Fiddling among the flames, Brandishing the brittle fames  They soon arrive at. It’s better not to mention names:  They’ll wince in private. Orating offspring of Urania (No fault of yours that they’re not brainier) Have an immodest dogged mania  For autobiography Disguised in concrete or the zanier  Forms of typography. The wide-eyed audience they’re rooking Would secretly prefer a booking From a quartet like the backward-looking  Rank Ailanthus They’d jump to hear what’s really cooking  With the Black Panthers. Whatever props the poet uses, Whether he accepts, accuses Or gives up, he must know his Muse is  A sensible girl. Even some antics of Ted Hughes’s  Make her hair curl. And so you need a form to play About in but which will convey Something of what you want to say  Without evasion, Adjusting like the Vicar of Bray  To each occasion. The size you haven’t found as yet. What Nabokov calls the ‘triolet’ Is much too trim a maisonette  To dawdle in, Unlike your shabby Cloisters set  In Magdalen, Which made your poetry much dandier, Much like ottava rima, handier. You needed in its chilly grandeur  To turn the fire on For times when you felt even randier  Than Lord Byron. Still, you found sonnets quite inspiring Although some rhymes like ancient wiring Showed the circuits could prove tiring  (Though not unduly, And no one could be more admiring  Than Yours Truly). So carry on: your talents hum. No one will ever find you dumb While you avoid the slightly rum  Like the White Goddess Or Black Mountain (and don’t become  Roger Woddis). I’ll send a sub to the IS (Please let me know the right address) I shan’t turn up, but I confess  I’m not a traitor. I just don’t want to think the less  Of Teresa Hayter. Some day I’ll join you in the street Where suffering and truth must meet: It isn’t easy not to feel effete  This side of anguish, When those who can’t choose what to eat  Don’t speak our language. Meanwhile we have to try to bring Some order to that circus ring Where people think and feel and sing,  For at its centre There’s no escape from anything,  And we must enter.
He went to the city and goosed all the girls With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally, One head in my chambers and one up your alley  And I am as old as my master. I followed him further and lost all my friends, The grease still thick on his fistful of pens. I laced up his mutton and paddled his lake In the game of Get-off-me and Just-for-my-sake  And I am as old as my master. I sang in his service a farewell to sorrow With rolled black stockings, the bone and the marrow. The Law was a devil to cheat as you pleased As we knelt on the backs of the city girls’ knees  And I am as old as my master. So back to the country where birds are squawking, With possets for pensions and witless talking Of walloped starvelings and soldiers’ fortunes From his nodding bench in the smothered orchards  And I am as old as my master. Age turns the cheek of a buried scandal In a nightmare of cheese and a quarter of candle. When the servant is privy he’s good as a guest, The first to be carved to and last to be pressed  And I am as old as my master. Country or city, no pleasure can last: It’s farewell to the future and beckon the past. Though he that we drink with is sometimes a fool, A single grey tooth may furnish a smile  And I am as old as my master.
I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving. At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop. Even if one restless traveller were to arrive With leather grip, racquets under the arm, A belted raincoat folded over the shoulder, A fishing hat, and a pipe stuck in his mouth, There would be nowhere for him to move on to And he would settle down to tea in the lounge Of the Goat Hotel, doing yesterday’s crossword, And would emerge later, after a nap, for a drink. You meet them in the bar, glassy-eyed, all the time. They never quite unpack, and expect letters From one particular friend who doesn’t write. If you buy them a drink they will tell you their life history: ‘I should have liked to live in a sunny town like this, Strolling down to the harbour in the early evening, Looking at the catch. Nothing happens here. You could forget the ill-luck dogging you. ‘I could join the Fancy Rat Society and train Sweet peas over the trellised porch Of my little slice of stuccoed terrace. I could Be in time for the morning service at Tesco’s. ‘I expect death’s like this, letters never arriving And the last remembered failure at once abandoned And insistent, like a card on a mantelpiece. What might it be? You can take your choice. ‘ “I shook her by the shoulders in a rage of frustration.” “I smiled, and left the room without saying a word.” “I was afraid to touch her, and never explained.” “I touched her once, and that was my greatest mistake.” ’ You meet them before dinner. You meet them after dinner, The unbelieved, the uncaressed, the terrified. Their conversation is perfectly decent but usually It slows to a halt and they start to stare into space. You would like it here. Life is quite ordinary And the self-pity oozes into the glass like bitters. What’s your poison? Do you have a desire to drown? We’re all in the same boat. Join us. Feel free. And when the bar closes we can say goodbye And make our way to the terminal where the last (Or is it the first?) train of the day is clean and waiting To take us slowly back to where we came from. But will we ever return? Who needs us now? It’s the town that requires us, though the streets are empty. It’s become a habit and a retreat. Or a form of justice. Living in a sunny town like this.
The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees. The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions. He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant Of all banalities of village life, And yet is stupefied by loneliness. Continually he dreams of the company he craves for, But he challenges it and bores it to tears whenever It swims uncertainly into his narrow orbit. Meetings, however relished in their prospect, Seem only to be arrangements for departures. Exemplum: the spruce Captain and his vampire wife With her token fur hat and veil, like a bandage Extemporised by a bat. It seems that exercise Keeps the Captain’s horse in a permanent lather. The wife suffers from a disabling ennui. What more likely than a harmless liaison? At their first meeting the scenario is as obvious As a cheese. Her eyes, half-lidded, turn away, The cup lifted to her lips. The Captain has questions About the flooding of the water-meadow. A furious but undirected energy governs her soul, Listless as she seems on the surface. It is A libido on auto-destruct. Opportunities Occur, but the Doctor, in complacent rectitude, Bows himself off the stage of further meetings. He devotes himself to his patients. They, however, Begin to avoid him as if he has some dreadful disease. When the Captain is lost on the glacier, his horse Riderless, returning to graze on the bowling-green, The Doctor is suspected. It is most unfair. Meanwhile, his orphaned cousins go ahead With their threatened law-suit. At first he is amused. He meets their legal representative over A schnapps in the Bahnhof Buffet, and is compromised By the leather luggage of the absconding wife. He claims to have found a cure for the epidemic of goitres But only succeeds in killing two maids and a barley farmer. The Captain’s wife is staying at Interlaken With the Schoolmaster’s wastrel son. Her insane letters Are read out in court, evidence of the Doctor’s malpractice. Only his good old Nurse refuses to disbelieve him. On her death-bed she grips his fingers tightly And mutters inaudibly about the lost diaries. There is nothing now to prevent the red-haired cousins From taking complete control of his estate. The Doctor has lost everything and gained nothing. At the back of his mind there is still the slight hope That time will explain to him his crucial role. He becomes a cutter of peat, and realises That it is never quite easy enough to disappear.
Bedfordshire A blue bird showing off its undercarriage En route between our oldest universities Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county: Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment, Like a busy footnote to its asterisk.  Berkshire Once on the causeway outside Steventon I had a vision of living in willing exile, Of living the knowingly imperfect life But with a boundless and joyous energy Like Borodin played by the North Berkshire Youth Orchestra in its early days.  Buckinghamshire A goose in the garden of the second-best pub In Marsh Gibbon was busy doing its dirty toothpaste And noisy, too, when a woman staggered out Of the lounge bar into the deserted car-park Saying: ‘I could never think of the child at my breast As anything other than a penis with a mouth.’  Cambridgeshire The bird arrived. Nothing so stately-exciting As Handel’s dusky queen that was unspooling Perhaps too loudly from a scribbling student cell, But looped between the trees, a flash of green: And only the having chanced to look just there Could tell you it had ever been away.  Cheshire There was a young woman of Cheadle, who wore her heart Upon her sleeve, bright chevron! Oh, the keen-eyed Men of Cheadle, as in the jealous month When the registration numbers of new estate cars Change all over wealthy suburban Cheshire, And they picked out her heart with a needle.  Cornwall The very last cat to speak Cornish had a glass eye And kept a corner shop, selling shoe-laces and bullseyes, Brasso and Reckitt’s Blue. My great-aunt remembers Buying postcards from him as a girl, When George’s profile sped them for a penny. Aching to talk, he died of pure loneliness.  Cumberland They play bezique in Threlkeld and they play For keeps in Shap. And all the shapely clouds Roll through the streets like weeping chemistry Or cows escaped. And tea is served in the lounge Over a jig-saw puzzle of the Princess Elizabeth Beneath wet panes, wet mountains and wet sky.  Derbyshire Once upon a time, in Derbyshire’s leaking basement Where you lie back in boats and quant by walking the ceiling, A strange girl in the dripping darkness attached Her damp lips to mine fast, like a snail’s adherence To cold stone in dusty nettles, and all unseeen The bluejohn slid by me: yellows, greys and purples.  Devon You will never forget the fish market at Barnstaple: Wet gills, double bellies, gleaming scales, Shells like spilt treasure. And the cream there thicker Than a virgin’s dream, and Devon’s greatest poet Born Gay, on Joy Street, taught by Robert Luck: It is the paradise of all fat poets.  Dorset When the old woman entered the sea at Charmouth And the great waves hung over her head like theatre curtains, I thought of the sibyl who charmed the rocks to yield Their grainy secrets till history bore down Upon her and the liquid world was fixed For ever in the era of the fossils.  Durham At the end of your battered philosophical quest, The purity of Durham rises like an exhalation, Like the stench of sulphur in a barrel. Birds Build in the walls of the cloisters, disappearing into holes Like black-robed devotees. Inside it is quiet, The oatmeal crimping distant in grey air.  Essex I had a vision in the dead of night Of all the kitchens of commuters’ Essex Alight like the heads of snakes; and down them slid The bored wives and daughters of the managers Who were at the identical time arriving On the ladders of their power and fatigue.  Gloucestershire Armorial memorials reduced To leper stone, forests to hedges, hedges To sickled stumps where perch the songless birds Of Gloucestershire, and vans require the roads Before them in their headlights. No one speaks In the time it takes to cross the greenest county.  Hampshire Driving at evening down the A 34 Like a ski-run, the sun a deiphany, The car-radio a percussive Russian insistence: Pure pleasure, pure escape! Past Winchester, Unseen its stalking scholars, past everything, Driving through Hampshire, driving for the boats!  Herefordshire Alone between the Arrow and the Wye, Wales to the west, keeping its rain and secrets, I wandered in cider country, where the shade Beneath the trees is golden red and noisy With the jealous spite of wasps: Ariconium, The poet Philips, his long hair combed out!  Hertfordshire Hertfordshire is full of schoolmasters, And archaeologists who are part-time poets. Together they apportion past, present And future among their imaginary admirers In the form of examination papers, foul Drafts, and labels of dubious information.  Huntingdonshire Herds of deer are moving through the trees Of Huntingdonshire noisily and rather Slowly. An idle hand sweeping the lyre Brings tears to the eyes of the moderately rich. They will dip their hands in their pockets, gently dip But not too deep. You’ve got to keep money moving.  Kent Old men coming up to bowl remember Other old men who in their turn remembered Things that were hardly worth remembering Through long still nights in Ashford, Faversham, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and Westerham Where even now the fields still smell of beer.  Lancashire All the oven doors of Lancashire Swing open on the hour, revealing vast Puddings. After tea, the lovers stroll, Their hands in each other’s back trouser pockets, Feeling the strange swell of the flexing buttock. The sun sinks, and the Ribble runs to the sea.  Leicestershire Cheeks of angels, lips compressed, donate To brass invisible impulsions of Purely material breath: a county’s children Gather to create an overture, While brothers and fathers leaping over hedges Wind horns to their alternative conclusion.  Lincolnshire M1, M18, M180: the roads With their bright and bowline intersections sweep North to Scunthorpe. Go further if you will To where the Trent meets the Humber and Lincolnshire ends. There, at Alkborough, you may draw breath And if Nicky’s at home she will give you a cup of something.  Middlesex Middlesex is mostly roundabouts, the bright Voice of five p.m., insistent infotainment: Fingers gallop irritably on the steering-wheel; The nails make little clicks. Down the line Of fuming stationary Volvos boys bully with headlines That tell the drivers all about the place they have come from.  Norfolk Norfolk is somehow inverted: it’s all sky With clouds as bulky as castrati or lines of Dryden Sailing out above you, tinged with sunset. Get as far as you can, but not too far, Say to the Tuesday Market Place at King’s Lynn Where all the conveyancing is done in verse.  Northamptonshire Once half-lost here, when only a map of sounds Or smells could lead us from a wood, we came At evening to horse-brass and low-timbered beams Where the world had evolved to its great public state And the men and women of Northampton, being counted And with amber drinks, found themselves to be happy.  Northumberland Traitors’ county: from one end to the other You can walk bright-eyed with never a second glance From a stocky frowning people who move slowly And mind their own business. For they have seen it all: When the mist clears over Northumberland It leaves squat towers, valleys scarred with lead.  Nottinghamshire There is one red door in one slightly curved Street in one nameless market town That contains behind it for a moment an image Of the planet’s destiny: a girl stooping To a hallway mirror, making her lips move Into a theatrical kiss, a self kiss.  Oxfordshire The kingfisher has long flown. Along the Cherwell The biscuit of bridge and college wall is blank Of its image, but with a passing presence Like a photograph taken with an open shutter. This, we reflect, is just the sense of our life, Aware of something the very moment that we miss it.  Rutland Rutland is large enough for you and me To stumble into as into a wood without being seen, To tread its moss-starred carpet, enchanted By the chipped china of the russulas, Pink, grey, grey and green-grey, and red, Peeping beneath the oaks, not far from Oakham.  Shropshire Shropshire Blue, still made, the Lord be praised, Tart veins that kept the Romans here and Housman From the rope. The iron bridges lead you to it, Farms knee-deep in cow. And if you stop off In red-earthed Bridgnorth, that vigilant town, Be sure your pint is not ungraced with cheese.  Somerset A thousand airy harps! We hardly dare To let out breath, for our imagination Responds to these full-throated sounds as though To the ranks of the ever-delighting dead, our wise Visionaries, and this is the county of dreams And of the moon’s occult praesidium.  Staffordshire Staffordshire is where you almost came from, Darkened beneath burnt clay, perpetual dusk. It is the housewife’s dream, twinkling hearths Bright with Zebo, scrubbed pumice steps And, in the bathroom, a finger on the nozzle And little lavender farts to begin the day.  Suffolk I’ve had Leigh and buried St Edmunds, Stowed Felix and Market and Upland, I’ve been shut up in Boxton, found it painful in Akenham And felt totally stupid in Assingham: Carrying around one’s valuable despair like a fleece, To live in Suffolk is to suffocate.  Surrey Flying in perfect formation above the sleeping Cul-de-sacs of Surrey, you observe The blocked pairing of houses, each with a garage, Like epaulettes. What whisperings behind The party walls! What eavesdropping, and what Bad timing! Well done! Sorry, partner! Boom!  Sussex Chalk pie, a quality of sun like laughter, Distance predicted in hoof-beats: everywhere here Is vigilance as well as cruel amusement, That tempered island quality called sardonic. From Rye to Selsey Bill, something is on offer, A glittering spread, the bottom drawer pulled out.  Warwickshire Driving to Wales I crossed a corner of Warwickshire That seemed to be hardly space at all, the home Of Dr Hall and his famous father-in-law Or of magic woods where lovers were lost and found, But simply the minutes that it took to tell An unimportant story, now forgotten.  Westmorland Once again the skies are open over the whole county: From Clifton to Burton, from Grasmere to Brough, The pubtalk steaming with anoraks and orange parkas. But I can remember one solitary eye Raging in silence in the dripping marsh, Its dewy lashes spooning aphids from the air.  Wiltshire In Wiltshire they are sending extra-terrestrial Signals: what will the Venusians think of us? Four-footed creatures who like to move in circles? Let’s hope they never noisily discover That we are only half the men they thought us, Stumbling at tangents from our glimpsed perfection.  Worcestershire Oh darling, come to Broadway: there we’ll take Tea and scones and jam made from the plums Of Pershore, perfect, pitless, palate-pleasing. A stroll in the model street, a browse at Gavina’s. Then it’s right foot down in the Volvo, plenty of Scotch And the largest bed we can find at the Bull in Worcester.  Yorkshire The brown teapot is always warming here For there will be a time when you must come home Though you be unknown except to the flowered dead. On the moors the diagonal smoke rises Like a bitter smile, tight but welcoming: Cousin country, extra places for tea.
In cities there are tangerine briefcases on the down-platform and jet parkas on the up-platform; in the mother of cities there is equal anxiety at all terminals. West a business breast, North a morose jig, East a false  escape, South steam in milk. The centres of cities move westwards; the centre of the mother of cities has disappeared. North the great cat, East the great water, South the great  fire, West the great arrow. In cities the sons of women become fathers; in the mother of cities the daughters of men have failed to become mothers. East the uneager fingers, South the damp cave, West the  chained ankle, North the rehearsed cry. Cities are built for trade, where women and men may freely through knowing each other become more like themselves; the mother of cities is built for government, where women and men through fearing each other become more like each other than they care to be. South the short, West the soap, North the sheets, East the  shivers. In cities the church fund is forever stuck below blood heat; in the mother of cities the church is a community arts centre. West the Why-not, North the Now-then, East the End-  product, South the Same-again. In cities nobody can afford the price; in the mother of cities nobody dares to ask the price. North the telephone smile, East the early appointment,  South the second reminder, West the hanging button. In cities the jealous man is jealous because he is himself in his imagination unfaithful; in the mother of cities the jealous man is jealous because he reads the magazines. East the endless arrival, South the astounding statistic,  West the wasted words, North the night of nights. In cities we dream about our desires; in the mother of cities we dream about our dreams.
The birds have flown their summer skies to the south, And the flower-money is drying in the banks of bent grass Which the bumble bee has abandoned. We wait for a winter lion, Body of ice-crystals and sombrero of dead leaves. A month ago, from the salt engines of the sea, A machinery of early storms rolled toward the holiday houses Where summer still dozed in the pool-side chairs, sipping An aging whiskey of distances and departures. Now the long freight of autumn goes smoking out of the land. My possibles are all packed up, but still I do not leave. I am happy enough here, where Dakota drifts wild in the universe, Where the prairie is starting to shake in the surf of the winter dark.
for Don and Henrie Gordon Forty-odd years ago— Headlines in the snow— The jobless scrawled a text for mutineers; Then history seemed sane, Though Franco sailed for Spain And Hitler swore to live a thousand years. Now Progress, his machine, Makes water out of wine; With loaves and paper stuffs the multitude; For power he milks the sun To see the cities flame And drives the Goddess from the sacred wood. Yet anniversaries Should have our praise, as trees Salute the queenly coming of the Spring. All sacred marriages Keep evergreen in this: Coupling with Time, they bind him in a ring. Though time turns, history moves As if to prove our loves, Having no pattern but the one we give. While countries bleed and burn Not any shall sleep warm Unless, good friends, you teach us how to live. Some nine and forty years, A pulse-beat of the stars, Astounds the May Fly’s million generations. Your middle style of Time Is suited most to man. This whispering wrist sustains the dream of nations.
Sleepy and suburban at dusk, I learn again the yard’s geometry, edging around the garden and the weedy knots of flowers, circling trees and shrubs, giving a wide berth to the berry patch, heavy and sprawled out of its bounds. Shoving such a machine around a fairway of dandelions, it is easy to feel absurd. The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. And tonight, as I mow over the bushels of fallen peaches, sending pits soaring over the neighbors’ fences, seems hardly any different. But on one crooked march I walk across the thin hidden hole to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls them up from their deep sweet chamber just as my bare legs go by. A bee lands heavily, all blunder and revenge, and the sting is a quick embrace and release, like the dared kid’s run and touch of a blind man. I’m blind now with the shock and pain of it, howling in a sprint toward the house, the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose in the darkening air.  Later, the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt, I’m back in the twilight, a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco, carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch. The destruction is easy: shove can slow to entranceway lip, pull back and light torch, use torch to tip can. One low whump and it’s over. A few flaming drones flutter out and fall. Stragglers, late returners, cruise wide circles around the ruins. In the cool September night they fly or die. In the morning I finish my chores. All the way to winter the blackened hole remains. On Christmas Eve a light late snow covers it and all the lawn’s other imperfections: crabgrass hummocks, high maple roots, the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies obliteration and appears every spring more visible than ever. Standing in the window, the scent of pine powerful around me, the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove, I wonder at this thin and cold camouflage, falling, gradually falling over what has gone and grown before. And I hear that other rattle and report, that engine driven by another fire. I think of a gold that is sweet and unguent, a gold that is a blaze of years behind me. I hear wind in its regular passes blowing across the roof, feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling, as though I have stood too long in one place or made again another wrong step, as though the present itself were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting, dying to be seen from tomorrow.
She always writes poems. This summer she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already. The characters are easy—a girl and her friend who is a girl and the boy down the block with his first car, an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing in dressy clothes though it’s still light out. The girl has a brother who has lots of friends, is good in math, and just plain good which doesn’t help the story. The story should have rescues & escapes in it which means who’s the bad guy; he couldn’t be the brother or the grandpa or the father either, or even the boy down the block with his first car. People in novels have to need something, she thinks, that it takes about two hundred pages to get. She can’t imagine that. Nothing she needs can be got; if it could she’d go get it: the answer to nightmares; a mother who’d be proud of her; doing things a mother could be proud of; having hips & knowing how to squeal at the beach laughing when the boy down the block picked her up & carried her & threw her in the water. If she’d laughed squealing he might still take her swimming & his mother wouldn’t say she’s crazy, she would not have got her teeth into his shoulder till well yes she bit him, and the marks lasted & lasted, his mother said so, but that couldn’t be in a novel. She’ll never squeal laughing, she’d never not bite him, she hates cute girls, she hates boys who like them. Biting is embarrassing and wrong & she has no intention of doing it again but she would if he did if he dared, and there’s no story if there’s no hope of change.
(for my daughter) Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back. The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift  is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift. The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease,  is door to the forum, is cutter of keys. In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free  between her mother and her child the woman stands  having emptied her hands.
Some say it’s in the reptilian dance  of the purple-tongued sand goanna,  for there the magnificent translation  of tenacity into bone and grace occurs. And some declare it to be an expansive  desert—solid rust-orange rock like dusk captured on earth in stone— simply for the perfect contrast it provides  to the blue-grey ridge of rain in the distant hills. Some claim the harmonics of shifting  electron rings to be most rare and some  the complex motion of seven sandpipers  bisecting the arcs and pitches of come and retreat over the mounting  hayfield. Others, for grandeur, choose the terror  of lightning peals on prairies or the tall  collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,  because there they feel dwarfed and appropriately helpless; others select  the serenity of that ceiling/cellar of stars they see at night on placid lakes,  because there they feel assured and universally magnanimous. But it is the dark emptiness contained  in every next moment that seems to me  the most singularly glorious gift, that void which one is free to fill with processions of men bearing burning cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,  belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,  with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies  of black-robed choristers; to fill simply  with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried  crockery, tangerine and almond custards,  polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing  walls; that space large enough to hold all  invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000  definitions of god and more, never fully  filled, never.
Ah! why, because the dazzling sun Restored my earth to joy Have you departed, every one, And left a desert sky? All through the night, your glorious eyes Were gazing down in mine, And with a full heart's thankful sighs I blessed that watch divine! I was at peace, and drank your beams As they were life to me And revelled in my changeful dreams Like petrel on the sea. Thought followed thought—star followed star Through boundless regions on, While one sweet influence, near and far, Thrilled through and proved us one. Why did the morning rise to break So great, so pure a spell, And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek Where your cool radiance fell? Blood-red he rose, and arrow-straight, His fierce beams struck my brow; The soul of Nature sprang elate, But mine sank sad and low! My lids closed down—yet through their veil I saw him blazing still; And bathe in gold the misty dale, And flash upon the hill. I turned me to the pillow then To call back Night, and see Your worlds of solemn light, again Throb with my heart and me! It would not do—the pillow glowed And glowed both roof and floor, And birds sang loudly in the wood, And fresh winds shook the door. The curtains waved, the wakened flies Were murmuring round my room, Imprisoned there, till I should rise And give them leave to roam. O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night; O Night and Stars return! And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burn— That drains the blood of suffering men; Drinks tears, instead of dew: Let me sleep through his blinding reign, And only wake with you!
I'll not weep that thou art going to leave me, There's nothing lovely here; And doubly will the dark world grieve me, While thy heart suffers there. I'll not weep, because the summer's glory Must always end in gloom; And, follow out the happiest story— It closes with a tomb! And I am weary of the anguish Increasing winters bear; Weary to watch the spirit languish Through years of dead despair. So, if a tear, when thou art dying, Should haply fall from me, It is but that my soul is sighing, To go and rest with thee.
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy dead in silence like to death— Most like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go.
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind. Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom— A field where a thousand corpses lie. Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, Raged at his breast, gulped and died, Do not weep. War is kind. Swift, blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie. Mother whose heart hung humble as a button On the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity –
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.
Surfaces serve their own purposes, strive to remain constant (all lives want that). There is a skin, not just on peaches but on oceans (note the telltale slough of foam on beaches). Sometimes it’s loose, as in the case of cats: you feel how a second life slides under it. Sometimes it fits. Take glass. Sometimes it outlasts its underside. Take reefs. The private lives of surfaces are innocent, not devious. Take the one-dimensional belief of enamel in itself, the furious autonomy of luster (crush a pearl— it’s powder), the whole curious seamlessness of how we’re each surrounded and what it doesn’t teach.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?   Berkeley, 1955
This time I’m not going to say a thing about deity. It’s not the blizzard, it’s three days after. Trinkle from thawing roofs, ruined crocus pronging through. Ruin, I promise, won’t be mentioned again. Trees, sure, still begging in the road, split to the bole but this isn’t about the chainsaw. A pruning saw will have to do. The puppets aren’t hanging themselves in each other’s strings. Everyone’s easily identifiable beneath the funny mask. Somewhere in Oregon, Mary has another month to go, she’s comfortable in any position for thirty-five seconds. Lulu, we know you’re in there but no one’s blaming you for reluctance to come out. Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him: toothlessness and shock therapy. Your dad, who has the worst teeth of anyone I know, once ordered eggplant in a steakhouse. Do not order eggplant in a steakhouse turned out to be more than aphoristicly true. Do not spend a lot of time in an asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough. In Kandinsky’s Blue 2, there’s a shape in two rows of shapes that seems okay although to the right’s a capsized canoe full of mathematicians, to the left a bow about to launch the killer astrolabe. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? How about climbing a ladder of fire? No thanks. On TV, a rhino’s lying in some red dust, munching a thorn. You wouldn’t think he could ejaculate for half an hour straight, but you’d be wrong. See that cloud, it might weigh 10,000 pounds which is about average for a cloud. Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Tony says Mary is always writing about the sacred. Talcum powder, binoculars, this decimated planet. I know, a promise has been made but Tony’s been sick for years and no one knows with what. Flax oil, bark tinctures, corticosteroids. He’s not exactly someone you’d trust to drive your car, but still. Something awful’s coming, isn’t it? Would it help if I said Amen?
and then Tony showed us the lake where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer and it had dissolved like powder so he thought maybe the lake could take some of the radiant, aluminum kind he had been making lately. And it did. It was a perfect lake, none of the paint had chipped off, no bolts showing, the arms that Dante and Virgil would have to hack through not even breaking the surface. Mumbling Italian to itself, it had climbed down two wooden stairs back to the beach now that the rains were done. How strange to be water so close to the ocean yet the only other water you get to talk to comes from the sky. Maybe this is why it seems so willing to take on Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes his friends, which is really many different sadnesses, smaller and smaller, surrounded by more and more space, each a world and at its core an engine like a bee inside a lily, like buzzing inside the bee. It seems like nothing could change its color although we couldn’t tell what color it was, it kept changing. In the summer, Tony says he comes down early each day and there’s no one around so the lake barely says a thing when he dives in and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand, trying to drag him to safety and some nights in New Mexico, he can hear it howling, searching for him in the desert so we’re glad Tony has this lake and we promise to come back in August and swim with him across, maybe even race.
Every Wednesday when I went to the shared office before the class on the comma, etc., there was on the desk, among the notes from students aggrieved and belly-up and memos about lack of funding and the quixotic feasibility memos and labyrinthine parking memos and quizzes pecked by red ink and once orange peels, a claw hammer. There when I came and there when I left, it didn’t seem in anyone’s employ. There was no room left to hang anything. It already knew how to structure an argument. It already knew that it was all an illusion that everything hadn’t blown apart because of its proximity to oblivion, having so recently come from oblivion itself. Its epiphyses were already closed. It wasn’t my future that was about to break its wrist or my past that was god knows where. It looked used a number of times not entirely appropriately but its wing was clearly healed. Down the hall was someone with a glove instead of a right hand. A student came by looking for who? Hard to understand then hard to do. I didn’t think much of stealing it, having so many hammers at home. There when I came, there when I left. Ball peen, roofing, framing, sledge, one so small of probably only ornamental use. That was one of my gifts, finding hammers by sides of roads, in snow, inheriting, one given by a stranger for a jump in the rain. It cannot be refused, the hammer. You take the handle, test its balance then lift it over your head.
You’ll need a corpse, your own or someone else’s. You’ll need a certain distance; the less you care about your corpse the better. Light should be unforgiving, so as to lend a literal aspect to your project. Flesh should be putty, each hair of the brows, each lash, a pencil mark. If the skeleton is intact, its shape may suggest beginnings of a structure, though even here modification might occur; heavier tools are waiting in the drawer, as well as wire, varied lengths and thicknesses of doweling. Odd hollows may be filled with bundled towel. As for the fluids, arrange them on the cart in a pleasing manner. I prefer we speak of ointments. This notion of one’s anointing will help distract you from a simpler story of your handiwork. Those people in the parlor made requests, remember? Don’t be concerned. Whatever this was to them, it is all yours now. The clay of your creation lies before you, invites your hand. Becoming anxious? That’s good. You should be a little anxious. You’re ready. Hold the knife as you would a quill, hardly at all. See that first line before you cross it, and draw.
This morning the world’s white face reminds us that life intends to become serious again. And the same loud birds that all summer long annoyed us with their high attitudes and chatter silently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned, chastened enough. They look as if they’re waiting for things to grow worse, but are watching the house, as if somewhere in their dim memories they recall something about this abandoned garden that could save them. The neighbor’s dog has also learned to wake without exaggeration. And the neighbor himself has made it to his car with less noise, starting the small engine with a kind of reverence. At the window his wife witnesses this bleak tableau, blinking her eyes, silent. I fill the feeders to the top and cart them to the tree, hurrying back inside to leave the morning to these ridiculous birds, who, reminded, find the rough shelters, bow, and then feed.
My father knows the proper way The nation should be run; He tells us children every day Just what should now be done. He knows the way to fix the trusts, He has a simple plan; But if the furnace needs repairs, We have to hire a man. My father, in a day or two Could land big thieves in jail; There’s nothing that he cannot do, He knows no word like “fail.” “Our confidence” he would restore, Of that there is no doubt; But if there is a chair to mend, We have to send it out. All public questions that arise, He settles on the spot; He waits not till the tumult dies, But grabs it while it’s hot. In matters of finance he can Tell Congress what to do; But, O, he finds it hard to meet His bills as they fall due. It almost makes him sick to read The things law-makers say; Why, father’s just the man they need, He never goes astray. All wars he’d very quickly end, As fast as I can write it; But when a neighbor starts a fuss, ’Tis mother has to fight it. In conversation father can Do many wondrous things; He’s built upon a wiser plan Than presidents or kings. He knows the ins and outs of each And every deep transaction; We look to him for theories, But look to ma for action.
The sale began—young girls were there,   Defenseless in their wretchedness, Whose stifled sobs of deep despair   Revealed their anguish and distress. And mothers stood, with streaming eyes,  And saw their dearest children sold; Unheeded rose their bitter cries,  While tyrants bartered them for gold. And woman, with her love and truth—  For these in sable forms may dwell— Gazed on the husband of her youth,  With anguish none may paint or tell. And men, whose sole crime was their hue,  The impress of their Maker’s hand, And frail and shrinking children too,  Were gathered in that mournful band. Ye who have laid your loved to rest,  And wept above their lifeless clay, Know not the anguish of that breast,  Whose loved are rudely torn away. Ye may not know how desolate  Are bosoms rudely forced to part, And how a dull and heavy weight  Will press the life-drops from the heart.
The wind may blow the snow about,  For all I care, says Jack, And I don’t mind how cold it grows,  For then the ice won’t crack. Old folks may shiver all day long,  But I shall never freeze; What cares a jolly boy like me  For winter days like these? Far down the long snow-covered hills  It is such fun to coast, So clear the road! the fastest sled  There is in school I boast. The paint is pretty well worn off,  But then I take the lead; A dandy sled’s a loiterer,  And I go in for speed. When I go home at supper-time,  Ki! but my cheeks are red! They burn and sting like anything;  I’m cross until I’m fed. You ought to see the biscuit go,  I am so hungry then; And old Aunt Polly says that boys  Eat twice as much as men. There’s always something I can do  To pass the time away; The dark comes quick in winter-time—  A short and stormy day And when I give my mind to it,  It’s just as father says, I almost do a man’s work now,  And help him many ways. I shall be glad when I grow up  And get all through with school, I’ll show them by-and-by that I  Was not meant for a fool. I’ll take the crops off this old farm,  I’ll do the best I can. A jolly boy like me won’t be  A dolt when he’s a man. I like to hear the old horse neigh  Just as I come in sight, The oxen poke me with their horns  To get their hay at night. Somehow the creatures seem like friends,  And like to see me come. Some fellows talk about New York,  But I shall stay at home.
“The Knights of the Joyous Venture”—Puck of Pook’s Hill What is a woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker? She has no house to lay a guest in— But one chill bed for all to rest in, That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in. She has no strong white arms to fold you, But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you— Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you. Yet, when the signs of summer thicken, And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken, Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken— Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters. You steal away to the lapping waters, And look at your ship in her winter-quarters. You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables, The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables— To pitch her sides and go over her cables. Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow, And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow, Is all we have left through the months to follow. Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker ?
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms  Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead, Who rarely bothered coming home to die But simply stayed away out there In the clean war, the war in the air. Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea, But stayed up there in the relative wind, Shades fading in the mind, Who had no graves but only epitaphs Where never so many spoke for never so few: Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars, Per aspera, to the stars. That was the good war, the war we won As if there was no death, for goodness's sake. With the help of the losers we left out there In the air, in the empty air.
1 Is this writing mine Whose name is this Did I underline What I was to miss?  2 An upheaval of leaves Enlightens the tree Rooted it receives  Gusts on a spree  3 Beauty makes me sad Makes me grieve I see what I must leave  4 Scaffold, gallows Do whose will Who hallows wood To build, kill  5 Blind man, anvil No hammer strikes Your eyes are spikes
It ever was allow’d, dear Madam,  Ev’n from the days of father Adam,  Of all perfection flesh is heir to,  Fair patience is the gentlest virtue; This is a truth our grandames teach,  Our poets sing, and parsons preach;  Yet after all, dear Moll, the fact is  We seldom put it into practice;  I’ll warrant (if one knew the truth)  You’ve call’d me many an idle youth,  And styled me rude ungrateful bear,  Enough to make a parson swear.   I shall not make a long oration   In order for my vindication,   For what the plague can I say more   Than lazy dogs have done before;   Such stuff is nought but mere tautology,   And so take that for my apology.  First then for custards, my dear Mary,  The produce of your dainty dairy,  For stew’d, for bak’d, for boil’d, for roast,  And all the teas and all the toast;  With thankful tongue and bowing attitude,  I here present you with my gratitude:  Next for you apples, pears and plums  Acknowledgment in order comes;  For wine, for ale, for fowl, for fish—for  Ev’n all one’s appetite can wish for:  But O ye pens, and O ye pencils,  And all ye scribbling utensils,  Say in what words and in what metre, Shall unfeign’d admiration greet her,  For that rich banquet so refin’d  Her conversation gave the mind;  The solid meal of sense and worth,  Set off by the desert of mirth;  Wit’s fruit and pleasure’s genial bowl,  And all the joyous flow of soul;  For these, and every kind ingredient  That form’d your love—your most obedient.
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes.  His wing Scythes down another day, his motion  Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time. The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. Look! Look! he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow.  Long now, The last thrush is still, the last bat Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom Is ancient, too, and immense. The star Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. If there were no wind we might, we think, hear The earth grind on its axis, or history Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
A strong song tows us, long earsick. Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. Night, float us. Offshore wind, shout, ask the sea what’s lost, what’s left, what horn sunk, what crown adrift. Where we are who knows of kings who sup while day fails? Who, swinging his axe to fell kings, guesses where we go?
Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine Let us come upon him first as if in a dream, anonymous triple presence, memory made substance and tally of heart’s rot: then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem sole aspect of being’s essence, coffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot. Then he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress without hope of divorce, envying idiocy’s apathy or the stress of definite remorse. He will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force of the mind’s eagerness recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse his excessive distress. He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware the last skin of the flayed: despair. He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain even of death’s solace, impotent to outpace dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.
You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood,  laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother  holding out a plate of little cakes— as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age  hungry for life, utterly confident— By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green  pieced into the dark existing ground. Surely spring has been returned to me, this time  not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet  it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.
The ploughland has gone to bent and the pasture to heather; gin the goodwife stint, she’ll keep the house together. Gin the goodwife stint and the bairns hunger the Duke can get his rent one year longer. The Duke can get his rent and we can get our ticket twa pund emigrant on a C.P.R. packet.
Nothing substance utters or time stills and restrains joins design and supple measure deftly as thought’s intricate polyphonic score dovetails with the tread sensuous things keep in our consciousness. Celebrate man’s craft and the word spoken in shapeless night, the sharp tool paring away waste and the forms cut out of mystery! When taut string’s note passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet fade, strong over unseen forces the word ranks and enumerates... mimes clouds condensed and hewn hills and bristling forests, steadfast corn in its season and the seasons in their due array, life of man’s own body and death...  The sound thins into melody, discourse narrowing, craft failing, design petering out. Ears heavy to breeze of speech and thud of the ictus.
Four white heifers with sprawling hooves  trundle the waggon.  Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white,  glitters ahead,  a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers  like him want washing.  You can see his baked skin through his shirt. He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it.  ‘Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !’  he says staccato without raising his voice; ‘Adios caballero’ legato but  in the same tone.  Camelmen high on muzzled mounts boots rattling against the panels  of an empty  packsaddle do not answer strangers. Each with his train of seven or eight tied  head to tail they  pass silent but for the heavy bells and plip of slobber dripping from  muzzle to dust;  save that on sand their soles squeak slightly. Milkmaids, friendly girls between  fourteen and twenty  or younger, bolt upright on small trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their  tails a few inches  from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward to make the windpipe a trumpet)  chatter. Jolted  cans clatter. The girls’ smiles repeat the black silk curve of the wimple  under the chin.  Their hats are absurd doll’s hats or flat-crowned to take a load.  All have fine eyes.  You can guess their balanced nakedness under the cotton gown and thin shift.  They sing and laugh.  They say ‘Adios!’ shyly but look back more than once, knowing our thoughts  and sharing our  desires and lack of faith in desire.
See! Their verses are laid as mosaic gold to gold gold to lapis lazuli white marble to porphyry stone shouldering stone, the dice polished alike, there is no cement seen and no gap between stones as the frieze strides to the impending apse: the rays of many glories forced to its focus forming a glory neither of stone nor metal, neither of words nor verses, but of the light shining upon no substance; a glory not made for which all else was made.
Poetry? It’s a hobby.  I run model trains. Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. It’s not work. You dont sweat.  Nobody pays for it.  You could advertise soap. Art, that’s opera; or repertory—  The Desert Song.  Nancy was in the chorus. But to ask for twelve pounds a week—  married, aren’t you?—  you’ve got a nerve. How could I look a bus conductor  in the face if I paid you twelve pounds? Who says it’s poetry, anyhow?  My ten year old  can do it and rhyme. I get three thousand and expenses,  a car, vouchers, but I’m an accountant. They do what I tell them,  my company.  What do you do? Nasty little words, nasty long words,  it’s unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They’re Reds, addicts,  all delinquents. What you write is rot. Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher,  he ought to know. Go and find work.
I honey people murder mercy U.S.A.  the milkland turn to monsters teach  to kill to violate pull down destroy  the weakly freedom growing fruit  from being born America tomorrow yesterday rip rape  exacerbate despoil disfigure  crazy running threat the  deadly thrall appall belief dispel the wildlife burn the breast  the onward tongue the outward hand deform the normal rainy  riot sunshine shelter wreck of darkness derogate delimit blank explode deprive assassinate and batten up like bullets fatten up the raving greed reactivate a springtime terrorizing death by men by more than you or I can STOP  II They sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky according to some universal  stage direction obvious  like shorewashed shells we share an afternoon of mourning  in between no next predictable except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal  bleach the blacklong lunging ritual of fright insanity and more deplorable abortion more and more
At six I lived for spells: how a few Hawaiian words could call up the rain, could hymn like the sea in the long swirl of chambers curling in the nautilus of a shell, how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland in the drone of the priest’s liturgy could conjure money from the poor and give them nothing but mantras, the strange syllables that healed desire. I lived for stories about the war my grandfather told over hana cards, slapping them down on the mats with a sharp Japanese kiai. I lived for songs my grandmother sang stirring curry into a thick stew, weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love into grass mats and straw sandals. I lived for the red volcano dirt staining my toes, the salt residue of surf and sea wind in my hair, the arc of a flat stone skipping in the hollow trough of a wave. I lived in a child’s world, waited for my father to drag himself home, dusted with blasts of sand, powdered and the strange ash of raw cement, his deafness made worse by the clang of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones from the buckings of a jackhammer. He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail, let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots, call him the new name I’d invented that day in school, write it for him on his newspaper. He’d rub my face with hands that felt like gravel roads, tell me to move, go play, an then he’d walk to the laundry sink to scrub, rinse the dirt of his long day from a face brown and grained as koa wood. I wanted to take away the pain in his legs, the swelling in his joints, give him back his hearing, clear and rare as crystal chimes, the fins of glass that wrinkled and sparked the air with their sound. I wanted to heal the sores that work and war had sent to him, let him play catch in the backyard with me, tossing a tennis ball past papaya trees without the shoulders of pain shrugging back his arms. I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic, to string a necklace of sweet words fragrant as pine needles and plumeria, fragrant as the bread my mother baked, place it like a lei of cowrie shells and pikake flowers around my father’s neck, and chant him a blessing, a sutra.
At dawn the panther of the heavens peers over the edge of the world.  She hears the stars gossip with the sun, sees the moon washing her lean  darkness with water electrified by prayers. All over the world there are those  who can't sleep, those who never awaken.  My granddaughter sleeps on the breast of her mother with milk on  her mouth. A fly contemplates the sweetness of lactose. Her father is wrapped in the blanket of nightmares. For safety he  approaches the red hills near Thoreau. They recognize him and sing for  him.  Her mother has business in the house of chaos. She is a prophet dis-  guised as a young mother who is looking for a job. She appears at the  door of my dreams and we put the house back together.  Panther watches as human and animal souls are lifted to the heavens by  rain clouds to partake of songs of beautiful thunder.  Others are led by deer and antelope in the wistful hours to the vil-  lages of their ancestors. There they eat cornmeal cooked with berries  that stain their lips with purple while the tree of life flickers in the sun.  It's October, though the season before dawn is always winter. On the  city streets of this desert town lit by chemical yellow travelers  search for home.  Some have been drinking and intimate with strangers. Others are  escapees from the night shift, sip lukewarm coffee, shift gears to the  other side of darkness.  One woman stops at a red light, turns over a worn tape to the last  chorus of a whispery blues. She has decided to live another day.  The stars take notice, as do the half-asleep flowers, prickly pear and  chinaberry tree who drink exhaust into their roots, into the earth.  She guns the light to home where her children are asleep and may  never know she ever left. That their fate took a turn in the land of  nightmares toward the sun may be untouchable knowledge.  It is a sweet sound.  The panther relative yawns and puts her head between her paws.  She dreams of the house of panthers and the seven steps to grace.
In winter, it is what calls us from seclusion, through endless snow to the end of a long driveway where, we hope, it waits— this letter, this package, this singing of wind around an opened door.
“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed. We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant. His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall. He left us a key, but how did it fit? “Feel me to do right.” Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument our dad just then had come to know? So, to do right always, we need but feel his spirit? Or was it merely his apology for dying? “Feel that I do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!” Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate among his motives, we might have found out how to “do right” before we died—supposing he felt he suddenly knew what dying was. “You do wrong because you do not feel as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate my state, for I am becoming less dense—I am feeling right for the first time.” And then the vessel burst, and we were kneeling around an emptiness. We cannot feel our father now. His power courses through us, yes, but he—the chest and cheek, the foot and palm, the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek his meaning. “Feel me,” he said, and emphasized that word. Should we have heard it as a plea for a caress— a constant caress, since flesh to flesh was all that we could do right if we would bless him? The dying must feel the pressure of that question— lying flat, turning cold from brow to heel—the hot cowards there above protesting their love, and saying, “What can we do? Are you all right?” While the wall opens and the blue night pours through. “What can we do? We want to do what’s right.” “Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”
She sat on a shelf, her breasts two bellies on her poked-out belly, on which the navel looked like a sucked-in mouth— her knees bent and apart, her long left arm raised, with the large hand knuckled to a bar in the ceiling— her right hand clamping the skinny infant to her chest— its round, pale, new, soft muzzle hunting in the brown hair for a nipple, its splayed, tiny hand picking at her naked, dirty ear. Twisting its little neck, with tortured, ecstatic eyes the size of lentils, it looked into her severe, close-set, solemn eyes, that beneath bald eyelids glared—dull lights in sockets of leather. She twitched some chin-hairs, with pain or pleasure, as the baby-mouth found and yanked at her nipple; its pink-nailed, jointless fingers, wandering her face, tangled in the tufts of her cliffy brows. She brought her big hand down from the bar with pretended exasperation unfastened the little hand, and locked it within her palm— while her right hand with snag-nailed forefinger and short, sharp thumb, raked the new orange hair of the infant’s skinny flank— and found a louse, which she lipped, and thoughtfully crisped between broad teeth. She wrinkled appreciative nostrils which, without a nose, stood open—damp holes above the poke of her mouth. She licked her lips, flicked her leather eyelids— then, suddenly flung up both arms and grabbed the bars overhead. The baby's scrabbly fingers instantly caught the hair— as if there were metal rings there— in her long, stretched armpits. And, as she stately swung, and then proudly, more swiftly slung herself from corner to corner of her cell— arms longer than her round body, short knees bent— her little wild-haired, poke-mouthed infant hung, like some sort of trophy, or decoration, or shaggy medal— shaped like herself—but new, clean, soft and shining on her chest.
Body my house my horse my hound  what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep  How will I ride  What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount  all eager and quick  How will I know  in thicket ahead is danger or treasure  when Body my good  bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door  and wind for an eye With cloud for shift  how will I hide?
1 A smudge for the horizon that, on a clear day, shows the hard edge of hills and buildings on the other coast. Anchored boats all head one way: north, where the wind comes from. You can see the storm inflating out of the west. A dark hole in gray cloud twirls, widens, while white rips multiply on the water far out. Wet tousled yellow leaves, thick on the slate terrace. The jay’s hoarse cry. He’s stumbling in the air, too soaked to fly.  2 Knuckles of the rain on the roof, chuckles into the drain- pipe, spatters on the leaves that litter the grass. Melancholy morning, the tide full in the bay, an overflowing bowl. At least, no wind, no roughness in the sky, its gray face bedraggled by its tears.  3 Peeling a pear, I remember my daddy’s hand. His thumb (the one that got nipped by the saw, lacked a nail) fit into the cored hollow of the slippery half his knife skinned so neatly. Dad would pare the fruit from our orchard in the fall, while Mother boiled the jars, prepared for “putting up.” Dad used to darn our socks when we were small, and cut our hair and toenails. Sunday mornings, in pajamas, we’d take turns in his lap. He’d help bathe us sometimes. Dad could do anything. He built our dining table, chairs, the buffet, the bay window seat, my little desk of cherry wood where I wrote my first poems. That day at the shop, splitting panel boards on the electric saw (oh, I can hear the screech of it now, the whirling blade that sliced my daddy’s thumb), he received the mar that, long after, in his coffin, distinguished his skilled hand.  4 I sit with braided fingers and closed eyes in a span of late sunlight. The spokes are closing. It is fall: warm milk of light, though from an aging breast. I do not mean to pray. The posture for thanks or supplication is the same as for weariness or relief. But I am glad for the luck of light. Surely it is godly, that it makes all things begin, and appear, and become actual to each other. Light that’s sucked into the eye, warming the brain with wires of color. Light that hatched life out of the cold egg of earth.  5 Dark wild honey, the lion’s eye color, you brought home from a country store. Tastes of the work of shaggy bees on strong weeds, their midsummer bloom. My brain’s electric circuit glows, like the lion’s iris that, concentrated, vibrates while seeming not to move. Thick transparent amber you brought home, the sweet that burns.  6 “The very hairs of your head are numbered,” said the words in my head, as the haircutter snipped and cut, my round head a newel poked out of the tent top’s slippery sheet, while my hairs’ straight rays rained down, making pattern on the neat vacant cosmos of my lap. And maybe it was those tiny flies, phantoms of my aging eyes, seen out of the sides floating (that, when you turn to find them full face, always dissolve) but I saw, I think, minuscule, marked in clearest ink, Hairs #9001 and #9002 fall, the cut-off ends streaking little comets, till they tumbled to confuse with all the others in their fizzled heaps, in canyons of my lap. And what keeps asking in my head now that, brushed off and finished, I’m walking in the street, is how can those numbers remain all the way through, and all along the length of every hair, and even before each one is grown, apparently, through my scalp? For, if the hairs of my head are numbered, it means no more and no less of them have ever, or will ever be. In my head, now cool and light, thoughts, phantom white flies, take a fling: This discovery can apply to everything.  7 Now and then, a red leaf riding the slow flow of gray water. From the bridge, see far into the woods, now that limbs are bare, ground thick-littered. See, along the scarcely gliding stream, the blanched, diminished, ragged swamp and woods the sun still spills into. Stand still, stare hard into bramble and tangle, past leaning broken trunks, sprawled roots exposed. Will something move?—some vision come to outline? Yes, there— deep in—a dark bird hangs in the thicket, stretches a wing. Reversing his perch, he says one “Chuck.” His shoulder-patch that should be red looks gray. This old redwing has decided to stay, this year, not join the strenuous migration. Better here, in the familiar, to fade.
Beards of water  some of them have.  Others are blowing whistles of water.  Faces astonished that constant water  jumps from their mouths.  Jaws of lions are snarling water through green teeth over chins of moss.  Dolphins toss jets of water  from open snouts  to an upper theater of water.  Children are riding swans and water   coils from the S-shaped necks and spills  in flat foils from pincered bills.  A solemn curly-headed bull  puts out a swollen tongue of water.   Cupids naked are making water   into a font that never is full.  A goddess is driving a chariot through water.  Her reins and whips are tight white water.  Bronze hoofs of horses wrangle with water.  Marble faces half hidden in leaves.  Faces whose hair is leaves and grapes  of stone are peering from living leaves.  Faces with mossy lips unlocked  always uttering water,  water  wearing their features blank   their ears deaf, their eyes mad  or patient or blind or astonished at water  always uttered out of their mouths.
In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.  The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon's young, trying Their wings. Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly, into the air. I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine.
What are we bound for? What’s the yield Of all this energy and waste? Why do we spend ourselves and build With such an empty haste? Wherefore the bravery we boast? How can we spend one laughing breath When at the end all things are lost In ignorance and death? . . . The stars have found a blazing course In a vast curve that cuts through space; Enough for us to feel that force Swinging us through the days. Enough that we have strength to sing And fight and somehow scorn the grave; That Life’s too bold and bright a thing To question or to save.
I never knew the earth had so much gold— The fields run over with it, and this hill Hoary and old, Is young with buoyant blooms that flame and thrill. Such golden fires, such yellow—lo, how good This spendthrift world, and what a lavish God! This fringe of wood, Blazing with buttercup and goldenrod. You too, beloved, are changed. Again I see Your face grow mystical, as on that night You turned to me, And all the trembling world—and you—were white. Aye, you are touched; your singing lips grow dumb; The fields absorb you, color you entire . . . And you become A goddess standing in a world of fire!
Washing Kai in the sauna, The kerosene lantern set on a box  outside the ground-level window, Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the  washtub down on the slab  Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops  brushed by on the pile of rocks on top He stands in warm water Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach  “Gary don’t soap my hair!”  —his eye-sting fear—  the soapy hand feeling  through and around the globes and curves of his body   up in the crotch, And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus,  his penis curving up and getting hard  as I pull back skin and try to wash it Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around,  I squat all naked too,  is this our body? Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone   cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing   kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out  sierra forest ridges night— Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air   sweep down from the door   a deep sweet breath And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down  her hair falling hiding one whole side of  shoulder, breast, and belly,  Washes deftly Kai’s head-hair  as he gets mad and yells— The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,  the space between the thighs I reach through,  cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,   a soapy tickle a hand of grail The gates of Awe That open back a turning double-mirror world of   wombs in wombs, in rings,  that start in music,  is this our body? The hidden place of seed The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers   milk and peaks up in a nipple—fits  our mouth— The sucking milk from this our body sends through   jolts of light; the son, the father,  sharing mother’s joy That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome   open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned   from, we  wash each other,  this our body Kai’s little scrotum up close to his groin,  the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him  In flows that lifted with the same joys forces  as his nursing Masa later,  playing with her breast, Or me within her, Or him emerging,  this is our body: Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch   out on the redwood benches hearts all beating  Quiet to the simmer of the stove,  the scent of cedar And then turn over,  murmuring gossip of the grasses,  talking firewood, Wondering how Gen’s napping, how to bring him in   soon wash him too— These boys who love their mother  who loves men, who passes on  her sons to other women; The cloud across the sky. The windy pines.   the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow  this is our body. Fire inside and boiling water on the stove We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches   wrap the babies, step outside, black night & all the stars. Pour cold water on the back and thighs Go in the house—stand steaming by the center fire  Kai scampers on the sheepskin Gen standing hanging on and shouting, “Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!” This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames   drinking icy water  hugging babies, kissing bellies, Laughing on the Great Earth  Come out from the bath.
O Wave God who broke through me today   Sea Bream  massive pink and silver  cool swimming down with me watching   staying away from the spear Volcano belly Keeper who lifted this island  for our own beaded bodies adornment  and sprinkles us all with his laugh—  ash in the eve  mist, or smoke,  on the bare high limits—  underwater lava flows easing to coral  holes filled with striped feeding swimmers O Sky Gods cartwheeling  out of Pacific  turning rainsqualls over like lids on us   then shine on our sodden—  (scanned out a rainbow today at the   cow drinking trough   sluicing off  LAKHS of crystal Buddha Fields   right on the hair of the arm!) Who wavers right now in the bamboo:   a half-gone waning moon.  drank down a bowlful of shochu   in praise of Antares  gazing far up the lanes of Sagittarius  richest stream of our sky—  a cup to the center of the galaxy!   and let the eyes stray  right-angling the pitch of the Milky Way:   horse-heads rings  clouds too distant to be  slide free.  on the crest of the wave. Each night O Earth Mother  I have wrappt my hand  over the jut of your cobra-hood  sleeping;   left my ear All night long by your mouth. O All Gods tides capes currents  Flows and spirals of  pool and powers— As we hoe the field  let sweet potato grow. And as sit us all down when we may  To consider the Dharma  bring with a flower and a glimmer.  Let us all sleep in peace together. Bless Masa and me as we marry   at new moon on the crater  This summer.    VIII 40067
Hammering a dent out of a bucket  a woodpecker  answers from the woods
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest I slept under rhododendron  All night blossoms fell Shivering on a sheet of cardboard  Feet stuck in my pack Hands deep in my pockets  Barely able to sleep. I remembered when we were in school  Sleeping together in a big warm bed We were the youngest lovers When we broke up we were still nineteen.  Now our friends are married  You teach school back east  I dont mind living this way  Green hills the long blue beach  But sometimes sleeping in the open I think back when I had you.A spring night in Shokoku-ji Eight years ago this May We walked under cherry blossoms  At night in an orchard in Oregon.  All that I wanted then Is forgotten now, but you. Here in the night In a garden of the old capital I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao  I remember your cool body Naked under a summer cotton dress.An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji Last night watching the Pleiades,  Breath smoking in the moonlight,  Bitter memory like vomit  Choked my throat. I unrolled a sleeping bag  On mats on the porch  Under thick autumn stars.  In dream you appeared  (Three times in nine years)  Wild, cold, and accusing.  I woke shamed and angry: The pointless wars of the heart.  Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.  The first time I have  Ever seen them close.December at Yase You said, that October, In the tall dry grass by the orchard  When you chose to be free, “Again someday, maybe ten years.” After college I saw you One time. You were strange.  And I was obsessed with a plan. Now ten years and more have  Gone by: I’ve always known  where you were— I might have gone to you  Hoping to win your love back.  You still are single. I didn’t. I thought I must make it alone. I  Have done that. Only in dream, like this dawn,  Does the grave, awed intensity  Of our young love Return to my mind, to my flesh. We had what the others  All crave and seek for; We left it behind at nineteen. I feel ancient, as though I had  Lived many lives. And may never now know  If I am a fool Or have done what my   karma demands.
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing Into something forgetful, although angry with history. They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,  Though this is only one example. They emerged until a tower Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back Into the past for swans and tapering branches, Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love. Then you are left with an idea of yourself And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon  Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others  Who fly by you like beacons. The night is a sentinel. Much of your time has been occupied by creative games Until now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you. We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert, To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air  To you, pressing you back into a startled dream As sea-breezes greet a child’s face. But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project. The worst is not over, yet I know You will be happy here. Because of the logic Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.  Tender and insouciant by turns, you see You have built a mountain of something, Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,  Whose wind is desire starching a petal, Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
No changes of support—only Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell. The house seems heavier Now that they have gone away.  In fact it emptied in record time.  When the flat table used to result A match recedes, slowly, into the night. The academy of the future is  Opening its doors and willing The fruitless sunlight streams into domes,  The chairs piled high with books and papers. The sedate one is this month’s skittish one  Confirming the property that, A timeless value, has changed hands. And you could have a new automobile Ping pong set and garage, but the thief  Stole everything like a miracle. In his book there was a picture of treason only  And in the garden, cries and colors.
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them— Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze. They are the same aren’t they, The presumed landscape and the dream of home Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,  Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes Became so extraneous and so near To create a foreground of quiet knowledge In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that  Will sign for old age And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again. The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”; The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:  Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others. During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that  The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,  Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike  In falsetto starlight like “purity” Of design that had been the first danger sign To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui! How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time, The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written  Bearing to a final point of folly and doom The wisdom of these generations. Look at what you’ve done to the landscape— The ice cube, the olive— There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things Extending all the way along the river on both sides With the end left for thoughts on construction That are always turning to alps and thresholds Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory. We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:  Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to An impossible “calque” of reality, than “The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,  Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,  All in one direction. You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one, What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.  But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning  There can be no further discussion. And the river pursues its lonely course With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur. “The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.” All this came to pass eons ago. Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws: A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake, An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance. Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,  Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself— For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption, Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way, For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,  To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.  Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,  For standing still means death, and life is moving on, Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.
The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,  Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.” Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant  To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.  “M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder  Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched The part of his head under his hat. The apartment Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.” Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.  Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach  When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!” But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder  And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment  Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.” Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment And all that it contains, myself and spinach In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched  Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”  She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.” “But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”  Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment. But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,  The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.
The man with the red hat And the polar bear, is he here too?  The window giving on shade,  Is that here too? And all the little helps, My initials in the sky, The hay of an arctic summer night? The bear Drops dead in sight of the window. Lovely tribes have just moved to the north. In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.  Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.
Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued  On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,  And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.  And then there always came a time when Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,  Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused  About how to receive this latest piece of information. Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out  For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem), Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?  To reduce all this to a small variant, To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau— This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.  Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.  Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.  Now there is no question even of that, but only Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,  With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across  The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:  This is what you wanted to hear, so why Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers  It is true, but underneath the talk lies The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor. These then were some hazards of the course, Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else  It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,  The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time. They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game  Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last. Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,  Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,  The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,  Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes  To be without, alone and desperate. But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,  Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,  But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day  When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering  Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning  Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,  That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up  Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,  Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal. I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,  And envy them—they are so far away from me! Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.  And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little, Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico! But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,  Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand! The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,  Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue), And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit. The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood. First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion. His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.  Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion, And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often. But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife. Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth. He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white. But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.  Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years, And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason. But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick. Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand, Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably. She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.  She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek. Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too; His eyes show it. Turning from this couple, I see there is an intermission in the concert. The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws (The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),  And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school. Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.  Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim  That are so popular here. Look—I told you! It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny. An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.  She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.  “My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too  If he were here. But his job is with a bank there. Look, here is a photograph of him.” And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame. We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place. That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter. The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here. His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower. Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us. There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue. There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige. Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.  There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,  But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.  And there is the home of the little old lady— She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself. How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara! We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son. We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.  What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do. And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.
What had you been thinking about the face studiously bloodied heaven blotted region I go on loving you like water but there is a terrible breath in the way all of this You were not elected president, yet won the race All the way through fog and drizzle When you read it was sincere the coasts stammered with unintentional villages the horse strains fatigued I guess . . . the calls . . . I worry the water beetle head why of course reflecting all then you redid you were breathing I thought going down to mail this of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard you come through but are incomparable the lovely tent mystery you don’t want surrounded the real you dance in the spring there was clouds The mulatress approached in the hall—the lettering easily visible along the edge of the Times in a moment the bell would ring but there was time for the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other” to one in yon house The doctor and Philip had come over the road Turning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on reading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified the blood shifted you know those walls wind off the earth had made him shrink undeniably an oboe now the young were there there was candy to decide the sharp edge of the garment like a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace there was no turning back but the end was in sight he chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others The person. pleaded—“have more of these not stripes on the tunic—or the porch chairs will teach you about men—what it means” to be one in a million pink stripe and now could go away the three approached the doghouse the reef. Your daughter’s dream of my son understand prejudice darkness in the hole the patient finished They could all go home now the hole was dark lilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you
He says he doesn’t feel like working today. It’s just as well. Here in the shade Behind the house, protected from street noises,  One can go over all kinds of old feeling, Throw some away, keep others.  The wordplay Between us gets very intense when there are  Fewer feelings around to confuse things. Another go-round? No, but the last things You always find to say are charming, and rescue me  Before the night does. We are afloat On our dreams as on a barge made of ice, Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight  That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it. I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.  Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.  Thank you. You are too.
One died, and the soul was wrenched out  Of the other in life, who, walking the streets  Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on  The same corners, volumetrics, shadows  Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever  Called, through increasingly suburban airs  And ways, with autumn falling over everything:  The plush leaves the chattels in barrels  Of an obscure family being evicted Into the way it was, and is. The other beached  Glimpses of what the other was up to: Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other. So I cradle this average violin that knows  Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself  In November, with the spaces among the days  More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.  Our question of a place of origin hangs Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests, In coves with the water always seeping up, and left  Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared  On the landscape, to make of us what we could.
Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state,  Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze. In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives; The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. If this is the way it is let’s leave, They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,  Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs  Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered  Only as a recurring tic. And midway We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its  Being able to stop us in the headlong night Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the  Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.  Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,  Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling? But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on, Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke. The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier  For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,  As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are,  In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet Unrealized projects, and a strict sense Of time running out, of evening presenting  The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit  Rather too easily into it, become transparent,  Almost ghosts. One day The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed  The color, the density of the surroundings,  The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life. A long period of adjustment followed. In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it  But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman  Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted  His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it  But all the fathers returning home On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:  The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper  In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.  One day we thought of painted furniture, of how  It just slightly changes everything in the room And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,  It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details  So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative  Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets  Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,  The look of wanting to back out before the argument  Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business  In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?  That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit  And not just the major events but the whole incredible Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off, Channeling itself into history, will unroll As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,  And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze, Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of. The parade is turning into our street. My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic  Features of this instant belong here. The land Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.  The hunch is it will always be this way,  The look, the way things first scared you  In the night light, and later turned out to be,  Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity  To what you and they wanted to become:  No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling  Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond  To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.
Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet. It would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar Palaces and also lines of care At the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks, The color once known as “ashes of roses.” How many snakes and lizards shed their skins For time to be passing on like this, Sinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward The conclusion. It had all been working so well and now, Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand As a change is voiced, sharp As a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed Past us into a basin called infinity. There was no charge for anything, the gates Had been left open intentionally. Don’t follow, you can have whatever it is. And in some room someone examines his youth, Finds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch. O keep me with you, unless the outdoors Embraces both of us, unites us, unless The birdcatchers put away their twigs, The fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets And others become part of the immense crowd Around this bonfire, a situation That has come to mean us to us, and the crying In the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.
I, peregrine of noon.
Beyond the steady rock the steady sea, In movement more immovable than station, Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes, A slow obscure metonymy of motion, Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain. But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes A steady quiet of the steady music, Massive with peace. And listen, now: The foam receding down the sand silvers Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words, Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.
To my daughter, 1954 This is the terminal: the light Gives perfect vision, false and hard; The metal glitters, deep and bright. Great planes are waiting in the yard— They are already in the night. And you are here beside me, small, Contained and fragile, and intent On things that I but half recall— Yet going whither you are bent. I am the past, and that is all. But you and I in part are one: The frightened brain, the nervous will, The knowledge of what must be done, The passion to acquire the skill To face that which you dare not shun. The rain of matter upon sense Destroys me momently. The score: There comes what will come. The expense Is what one thought, and something more— One’s being and intelligence. This is the terminal, the break. Beyond this point, on lines of air, You take the way that you must take; And I remain in light and stare— In light, and nothing else, awake.
Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat, a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat, not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door, declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here should snip a few testicles. If we wise hominids were sensible, we’d do that too, or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits thirty below, and pollution pours out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
i The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round each arm going into the next arm, around full circle until it comes back into each of the single bodies again They are singing, but not to each other: their feet move almost in time to the singing We can see the concentration on their faces, their eyes fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them. We might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it We can see (arm in arm) as we watch them go round and round intent, almost studious (the grass underfoot ignored, the trees circling the lawn ignored, the lake ignored) that the whole point for them of going round and round is (faster slower) going round and round ii Being with you here, in this room is like groping through a mirror whose glass has melted to the consistency of gelatin You refuse to be (and I) an exact reflection, yet will not walk from the glass, be separate. Anyway, it is right that they have put so many mirrors here (chipped, hung crooked) in this room with its high transom and empty wardrobe; even the back of the door has one. There are people in the next room arguing, opening and closing drawers (the walls are thin) You look past me, listening to them, perhaps, or watching your own reflection somewhere behind my head, over my shoulder You shift, and the bed sags under us, losing its focus there is someone in the next room there is always (your face remote, listening) someone in the next room. iii However, in all their games there seems to be some reason however abstract they at first appear When we read them legends in the evening of monstrous battles, and secret betrayals in the forest and brutal deaths, they scarcely listened; one yawned and fidgeted; another chewed the wooden handle of a hammer; the youngest one examined a slight cut on his toe, and we wondered how they could remain completely without fear or even interest as the final sword slid through the dying hero. The next night walking along the beach we found the trenches they had been making: fortified with pointed sticks driven into the sides of their sand moats and a lake-enclosed island with no bridges: a last attempt (however eroded by the water in an hour) to make maybe, a refuge human and secure from the reach of whatever walks along (sword hearted) these night beaches. iv Returning to the room: I notice how all your word- plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here I watch you watching my face indifferently yet with the same taut curiosity with which you might regard a suddenly discovered part of your own body: a wart perhaps, and I remember that you said in childhood you were a tracer of maps (not making but) moving a pen or a forefinger over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) So now you trace me like a country’s boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map of this room, of your mind’s continent (here and yet not here, like the wardrobe and the mirrors the voices through the wall your body ignored on the bed), transfixed by your eyes’ cold blue thumbtacks v The children like the block of grey stone that was once a fort but now is a museum: especially they like the guns and the armour brought from other times and countries and when they go home their drawings will be full for some days, of swords archaic sunburst maces broken spears and vivid red explosions. While they explore the cannons (they aren’t our children) we walk outside along the earthworks, noting how they are crumbling under the unceasing attacks of feet and flower roots; The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases; Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending? vi And you play the safe game the orphan game the ragged winter game that says, I am alone (hungry: I know you want me to play it also) the game of the waif who stands at every picture window, shivering, pinched nose pressed against the glass, the snow collecting on his neck, watching the happy families (a game of envy) Yet he despises them: they are so Victorian Christmas-card: the cheap paper shows under the pigments of their cheerful fire- places and satin- ribboned suburban laughter and they have their own forms of parlour games: father and mother playing father and mother He’s glad to be left out by himself in the cold (hugging himself). When I tell you this, you say (with a smile fake as a tinsel icicle): You do it too. Which in some ways is a lie, but also I suppose is right, as usual: although I tend to pose in other seasons outside other windows. vii Summer again; in the mirrors of this room the children wheel, singing the same song; This casual bed scruffy as dry turf, the counterpane rumpled with small burrows, is their grassy lawn and these scuffed walls contain their circling trees, that low clogged sink their lake (a wasp comes, drawn by the piece of sandwich left on the nearby beach (how carefully you do such details); one of the children flinches but won’t let go) You make them turn and turn, according to the closed rules of your games, but there is no joy in it and as we lie arm in arm, neither joined nor separate (your observations change me to a spineless woman in a cage of bones, obsolete fort pulled inside out), our lips moving almost in time to their singing, listening to the opening and closing of the drawers in the next room (of course there is always danger but where would you locate it) (the children spin a round cage of glass from the warm air with their thread-thin insect voices) and as we lie here, caught in the monotony of wandering from room to room, shifting the place of our defences, I want to break these bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases, erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children: I want the circle broken.
In that country the animals have the faces of people: the ceremonial cats possessing the streets the fox run politely to earth, the huntsmen standing around him, fixed in their tapestry of manners the bull, embroidered with blood and given an elegant death, trumpets, his name stamped on him, heraldic brand because (when he rolled on the sand, sword in his heart, the teeth in his blue mouth were human) he is really a man even the wolves, holding resonant conversations in their forests thickened with legend.  In this country the animals  have the faces of  animals.  Their eyes  flash once in car headlights  and are gone.  Their deaths are not elegant.  They have the faces of  no-one.
Starspangled cowboy sauntering out of the almost- silly West, on your face a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mâché cactus on wheels behind you with a string, you are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset. I ought to be watching from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront when the shooting starts, hands clasped in admiration, but I am elsewhere. Then what about me what about the I confronting you on that border, you are always trying to cross? I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.
Out of this roar of innumerable demons hot cinema tarzan sweat rolling moth ball eyes yellow teeth  cries of claws slashes clanks a faint high pallor dust oceans rolling over the dry sand of the savanna your houses homes warm still with the buffalo milk  bladder of elephant . tusk of his stripped tree  sing soft clinks but the barracks the dark dark barks of the shark  boys the cool juice of soweto . . . out of this dust they are coming our eyes listen out of rhinoceros thunder  darkness of lion the whale roar stomping in heaven that black bellied night of hell and helleluia when all the lights of anger flicker flicker flicker flicker and we know somewhere there there is real fire basuto mokhethi namibia azania shaka the zulu kenyatta the shatt  erer the maasai wandering into the everlasting shadow of jah daughters lost daughters bellowing against bullhorn and kleghorn bellowing against bargwart and the searchlights of dogs  bellowing against crick and the kick in the stomach the acrid wretch against the teeth bellowing against malan malan malam malan and boer and boerwreck and boertrek and truckloads of metal helmet and fusil and the hand grenade and acid rhodes and the diamonds of oppenheimer  the opulence of voortresshers the grass streiders . . . suddenly like that fire the crows in johannesburg  you were there torn. in tears. tatters but the eyes glittered and the fist clenching around that scream of your mother bled  into a black head of hammers and the night fell howl  on soweto the night fell howl  on soweto and we who had failed to listen all. those. foot. steps  who had given you up like a torn paper package your heroes burning in your houses   rising from your dust bowls   flaring from the sky  listen now as the news items lengthen   gathering like hawks looking upward like the   leopard plunging into the turmoil like the  constrictor and that crouch/shot shout out against that beast and pistol the police who shot patrice who castrated kimathi  and clattering clattering clattering clattering   the veldts gun metals wings  rise from their last supper their hunger of bones  bomba and the daniels sing  ukufa akuqheleki kodwa ke   kuthiwa akuhlanga lungehlanga   lalani ngenxeba nikhuzeka
My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold- throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket, held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots. Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr, that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns. Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed, where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said, to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein: the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily. Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.
We’re headed for empty-headedness, the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration. We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds; we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow. Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’ white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding the whole great story together. Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station, and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows. The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance, and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though it were the author of this story.
New Year’s morning— everything is in blossom!   I feel about average.  A huge frog and I  staring at each other,   neither of us moves.  This moth saw brightness  in a woman’s chamber—  burned to a crisp.  Asked how old he was  the boy in the new kimono   stretched out all five fingers.  Blossoms at night,  like people  moved by music  Napped half the day;  no one  punished me! Fiftieth birthday:  From now on,  It’s all clear profit,   every sky.  Don’t worry, spiders,  I keep house   casually.  These sea slugs,  they just don’t seem   Japanese. Hell:  Bright autumn moon;  pond snails crying   in the saucepan.
We traveled down to see your house, Tor House, Hawk Tower, in Carmel, California. It was not quite what I thought it would be: I wanted it to be on a hill, with a view of the ocean unobstructed by other dwellings. Fifty years ago I know you had a clean walk to the sea, hopping from boulder to boulder, the various seafowl rightly impressed with your lean, stern face. But today with our cameras cocked we had to sneak and crawl through trimmed lawns to even verify the identity of your strange carbuncular creation, now rented to trillionaire non- literary folk from Pasadena. Edged in on all sides by trilevel pasteboard phantasms, it took a pair of good glasses to barely see some newlyweds feed popcorn to an albatross. Man is a puny thing, divorced, whether he knows it or not, and pays his monthly alimony, his child-support. Year after year you strolled down to this exceptionally violent shore and chose your boulder; the arms grew as the house grew as the mind grew to exist outside of time, beyond the dalliance of your fellows. Today I hate Carmel: I seek libation in the Tiki Bar: naked native ladies are painted in iridescent orange on velvet cloth: the whole town loves art. And I donate this Singapore Sling to the memory of it, and join the stream of idlers simmering outside. Much as hawks circled your head when you cut stone all afternoon, kids with funny hats on motorscooters keep circling the block. Jeffers, ...
I Eventually we must combine nightmares an angel smoking a cigarette on the steps of the last national bank, said to me. I put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that cheap talk I’ve got my own problems. It was sad, exciting, and horrible. It was exciting, horrible, and sad. It was horrible, sad, and exciting. It was inviting, mad, and deplorable. It was adorable, glad, and enticing. Eventually we must smoke a thumb cheap talk I’ve got my own angel on the steps of the problems the bank said to me I don’t need that. I will take this one window with its sooty maps and scratches so that my dreams will remember one another and so that my eyes will not become blinded by the new world. II The flames don’t dance or slither. They have painted the room green. Beautiful and naked, the wives are sleeping before the fire. Now it is out. The men have returned to the shacks, slaved creatures from the forest floor across their white stationwagons. That just about does it, says the other, dumping her bucket over her head. Well, I guess we got everything, says one, feeling around in the mud, as if for a child. Now they remember they want that mud, who can’t remember what they got up for. They parcel it out: when they are drunk enough they go into town with a bucket of mud, sayingwe can slice it up into windmills like a bloated cow.
All the sexually active people in Westport look so clean and certain, I wonder if they’re dead. Their lives are tennis without end, the avocado-green Mercedes waiting calm as you please. Perhaps it is my brain that is unplugged, and these shadow-people don’t know how to drink martinis anymore. They are suddenly and mysteriously not in the least interested in fornicating with strangers. Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions here, and certainly no dinner invitations where a fella could probe Buffy‘s inner- mush, a really complicated adventure, in a 1930ish train station, outlandish bouquets, a poisonous insect found burrowing its way through the walls of the special restaurant and into one of her perfect nostrils—she was readingMeetings with Remarkable Men, needing succor, dreaming of a village near Bosnia, when a clattering of carts broke her thoughts— “Those billy goats and piglets, they are all so ephemeral ...” But now, in Westport Connecticut, a boy, a young man really, looking as if he had just come through a carwash, and dressed for the kind of success that made her girlfriends froth and lather, can be overheard speaking to no one in particular: “That Paris Review crowd, I couldn’t tell if they were bright or just overbred.” Whereupon Buffy swings into action, pinning him to the floor: “I will unglue your very being from this planet, if ever ...” He could appreciate her sincerity, not to mention her spiffy togs. Didymus the Blind has put three dollars on Total Departure, and I am tired of pumping my own gas. I’m Lewis your aluminum man, and we are whirling in a spangled frenzy toward a riddle and a doom—here’s looking up your old address.
Bottles on the closet floor,  bottles underneath the bed.  Of course he thinks he’s caused it all. The hiding places  unimaginative, the vodka’s  glass sides clear when empty, clear when full, like the cellophane  -transparent plastic skin  of the model he glued together thirty years ago, The Visible  Man, the tiny organs in  “authentic colors,” kelly green lungs and scarlet heart. But he’s trying,  as they say, to reside in the moment,  stuffing the duffel bag to bring her where she’s trembling  on the ward, where she’s hating both   herself and him, passing four locked doors to reach her, as if each  were some frontier checkpoint  to a country even farther distant than the one he’s trapped  in now. The zebra-striped gate,  the guards who hold his documents against the light, peering through  the watermarks and faded passport stamps.  And he knows his skin is glass, his mission shame, and shame  the lingua franca of these lands,  the sign language of fingers unzipping compartments  with a nylon hiss, to probe  her sweaters, jeans, and stockings, (the toothpaste tube uncapped  and sniffed) and shame the notebook  and the novels he’s brought her, riffled and shut with a strange  and final delicacy, and shame  the signal that motions him on.
after Pavese Under the trellised arbor, and our supper’s over in the memory I’ve found myself inside. L not speaking, and beside us the river sliding softly by. Now the light will fade to moonlit water. And in memory I work to make this lingering accurate and sweet. White ouzo and her hand that lifts the grapes, first to her lips, then to mine. I may as well speak to moonlight as to her. And the walls of Bruges light up again, a costume jewelry pearl string. Her profile and her shawl hugged tight against the breeze in memory’s flammable celluloid—flaring and gone, replaced by bread and grapes, a checkered tablecloth. The two chairs stare each other down, empty now, upon which moonlight flickered all night. The bread and grapes drip mist as dawn carves the morning with a chilly wind, slicing away both moon and fog. Now someone without a name appears—first the fevered hands, Dustdevil quick, that grope for the food in vain. Then the pale light shows the open mouth and rippling throat, white face on black water, sparrow-flock fast, its spiraling path. But the bread and grapes stay where they were, their smell tormenting that famished ghost, helpless to even lick away the dew that gathers on the grapes, blue fluted sides of the wineglasses. Dawnlight, everything dripping wet, and the chairs stare at each other, alone. Sometimes on the riverbank you can sense an odor—of grapes, or sex, or memory. It swirls through the moonlit grass. And now wakes someone always mute, someone without a body weaving also through the half-lit grass. The hoarse wail of someone who cannot speak, who reaches out but cannot touch the grass, and only the nostrils flare. Now the dawn will break, late autumn cold. To crave so endlessly the warmth— the blood-pulsing fingertip, the body to embrace, the pungent smells commingling. To rise like breath and slither through the trees and tangle every branch in this unappeasable longing, this endless lust for touch and smell which afflicts the dead. The souls in the trees face the gathering light. Other times, in the ground, the rain torments them.
At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills, Steam rises like the spent breath of the night. At open windows, curtains stir on sills; There’s caging drawn across a market’s face; An empty crane, at its construction site, Suspends a cable into chasmed space. The roof shows other rooftops, their plateaus Marked with antennas from which lines are tied And strung with water beads or hung with clothes. And here and there a pigeon comes to peck At opaque puddles, its stiff walk supplied By herky-jerky motions of its neck. Downtown, tall buildings surmount a thinning haze. The newest, the world center of a bank, Has sides swept upward from a block-broad base, Obsidian glass, fifty stories tall; Against it hangs a window-washer’s plank, An aerie on a frozen waterfall. Nearer and eastward, past still-sleeping blocks, Crews on the waterfront are changing shifts. Trucks load at warehouses at the foot of docks; A tug out in the bay, gathering speed, With a short hollow blast of puffed smoke, lifts Gulls to a cawing and air-borne stampede. It is as if dawn pliantly compels The city to relax to sounds and shapes, To its diagonals and parallels: Long streets with traffic signals blinking red, Small squares of parks, alleys with fire escapes, Rooftops above which cloudless day is spread. And it’s as if the roofs’ breeze-freshened shelves, Their level surfaces of gravelled tar Where glassy fragments glitter, are themselves A measure of the intermediate worth Of all the stories to the morning star And all the stories to the morning earth.
Angered, may I be near a glass of water; May my first impulse be to think of Silence, Its deities (who are they? do, in fact, they Exist? etc.). May I recall what Aristotle says of The subject: to give vent to rage is not to Release it but to be increasingly prone To its incursions. May I imagine being in the Inferno, Hearing it asked: “Virgilio mio, who’s That sulking with Achilles there?” and hearing Virgil say: “Dante, That fellow, at the slightest provocation, Slammed phone receivers down, and waved his arms like A madman. What Attila did to Europe, What Genghis Khan did To Asia, that poor dope did to his marriage.” May I, that is, put learning to good purpose, Mindful that melancholy is a sin, though Stylish at present. Better than rage is the post-dinner quiet, The sink’s warm turbulence, the streaming platters, The suds rehearsing down the drain in spirals In the last rinsing. For what is, after all, the good life save that Conducted thoughtfully, and what is passion If not the holiest of powers, sustaining Only if mastered.
Even in fortunate times, The nectar is spiked with woe. Gods are incorrigibly Capricious, and the needy Beg in Nineveh or sleep In paper-gusting plazas Of the New World’s shopping malls. Meantime, the tyrant battens On conquest, while advisers, Angling for preferment, seek Expedient paths. Heartbroken, The faithful advocate looks Back on cities of the plain And trudges into exile. And if any era thrives, It’s only because, somewhere, In a plane tree’s shade, friends sketch The dust with theorems and proofs, Or because, instinctively, A man puts his arm around The shoulder of grief and walks It (for an hour or an age) Through all its tears and telling.
I. Invocation It's crazy to think one could describe them— Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears— As though they were all alike any more Than sweeps, opticians, poets or masseurs.  Moreover, they are for more than one reason  Difficult to speak of seriously and freely, And I have never (even this is difficult to say  Plainly, without foolishness or irony) Consulted one for professional help, though it happens Many or most of my friends have—and that,  Perhaps, is why it seems urgent to try to speak  Sensibly about them, about the psychiatrists.II. Some Terms “Shrink” is a misnomer. The religious  Analogy is all wrong, too, and the old,  Half-forgotten jokes about Viennese accents And beards hardly apply to the good-looking woman  In boots and a knit dress, or the man  Seen buying the Sunday Times in mutton-chop Whiskers and expensive running shoes. In a way I suspect that even the terms “doctor”  And “therapist” are misnomers; the patient Is not necessarily “sick.” And one assumes  That no small part of the psychiatrist’s  Role is just that: to point out misnomers.III. Proposition These are the first citizens of contingency.  Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones,  They think in their prudent meditations Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body)  Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person)  Nor even about sanity (which means Health, an impossible perfection) But ponder instead relative truth and the warm  Dusk of amelioration. The cautious Young augurs with their family-life, good books  And records and foreign cars believe  In amelioration—in that, and in suffering.IV. A Lakeside Identification Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them— And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach  Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there,  With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent, Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children  And a first-rate body—pointed her finger  At the back of one certain man and asked me, “Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,”  She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.”  Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought.V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy  Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me  He looked from the back like one more professor. And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage  Which foreigners always note in American men, combined  As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical, Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more  Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon, Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there, Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied  Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely?  Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something.VI. Their Seriousness, With Further Comparisons In a certain sense, they are not serious. That is, they are serious—useful, deeply helpful,  Concerned—only in the way that the pilots of huge Planes, radiologists, and master mechanics can,  At their best, be serious. But however profound The psychiatrists may be, they are not serious the way A painter may be serious beyond pictures, or a businessman  May be serious beyond property and cash—or even  The way scholars and surgeons are serious, each rapt In his work’s final cause, contingent upon nothing:  Beyond work; persons; recoveries. And this is fitting:  Who would want to fly with a pilot who was serious About getting to the destination safely? Terrifying idea— That a pilot could over-extend, perhaps try to fly  Too well, or suffer from Pilot’s Block; of course, It may be that (just as they must not drink liquor  Before a flight) they undergo regular, required check-ups  With a psychiatrist, to prevent such things from happening.VII. Historical (The Bacchae) Madness itself, as an idea, leaves us confused— Incredulous that it exists, or cruelly facetious,  Or stricken with a superstitious awe as if bound By the lost cults of Trebizond and Pergamum ...  The most profound study of madness is found  In the Bacchae of Euripides, so deeply disturbing That in Cambridge, Massachusetts the players  Evaded some of the strongest unsettling material By portraying poor sincere, fuddled, decent Pentheus As a sort of fascistic bureaucrat—but it is Dionysus  Who holds rallies, instills exaltations of violence,  With his leopards and atavistic troops above law, Reason and the good sense and reflective dignity Of Pentheus—Pentheus, humiliated, addled, made to suffer  Atrocity as a minor jest of the smirking God. When Bacchus’s Chorus (who call him “most gentle”!) observe:  “Ten thousand men have ten thousand hopes; some fail,  Some come to fruit, but the happiest man is he Who gathers the good of life day by day”—as though Life itself were enough—does that mean, to leave ambition?  And is it a kind of therapy, or truth? Or both?VIII. A Question On the subject of madness the Bacchae seems,  On the whole, more pro than contra. The Chorus Says of wine, “There is no other medicine for misery”; When the Queen in her ecstasy—or her enthusiasm?— Tears her terrified son’s arm from his body, or bears  His head on her spear, she remains happy so long As she remains crazy; the God himself (who bound fawnskin  To the women’s flesh, armed them with ivy arrows  And his orgies’ livery) debases poor Pentheus first, Then leads him to mince capering towards female Death  And dismemberment: flushed, grinning, the grave young  King of Thebes pulls at a slipping bra-strap, simpers Down at his turned ankle. Pentheus: “Should I lift up  Mount Cithæron—Bacchae, mother and all?” Dionysus: “Do what you want to do. Your mind Was unstable once, but now you sound more sane,  You are on your way to great things.”  The question is, Which is the psychiatrist: Pentheus, or Dionysus?IX. Pentheus As Psychiatrist With his reasonable questions Pentheus tries  To throw light on the old customs of savagery.  Like a brave doctor, he asks about it all, He hears everything, “Weird, fantastic things”  The Messenger calls them: with their breasts  Swollen, their new babies abandoned, mothers Among the Bacchantes nestled gazelles And young wolves in their arms, and suckled them;  You might see a single one of them tear a fat calf In two, still bellowing with fright, while others  Clawed heifers to pieces; ribs and hooves  Were strewn everywhere; blood-smeared scraps Hung from the fir trees; furious bulls Charged and then fell stumbling, pulled down To be stripped of skin and flesh by screaming women ... And Pentheus listened. Flames burned in their hair,  Unnoticed; thick honey spurted from their wands;  And the snakes they wore like ribbons licked Hot blood from their flushed necks: Pentheus Was the man the people told ... “weird things,” like  A middle-class fantasy of release; and when even The old men—bent Cadmus and Tiresias—dress up In fawnskin and ivy, beating their wands on the ground,  Trying to carouse, it is Pentheus—down-to-earth, Sober—who raises his voice in the name of dignity. Being a psychiatrist, how could he attend to the Chorus’s warning  Against “those who aspire” and “a tongue without reins”?X. Dionysus As Psychiatrist In a more hostile view, the psychiatrists Are like Bacchus—the knowing smirk of his mask,  His patients, his confident guidance of passion, And even his little jokes, as when the great palace  Is hit by lightning which blazes and stays,  Bouncing among the crumpled stone walls ... And through the burning rubble he comes,  With his soft ways picking along lightly  With a calm smile for the trembling Chorus Who have fallen to the ground, bowing In the un-Greek, Eastern way—What, Asian women,  He asks, Were you disturbed just now when Bacchus Jostled the palace? He warns Pentheus to adjust,  To learn the ordinary man’s humble sense of limits,  Violent limits, to the rational world. He cures Pentheus of the grand delusion that the dark  Urgencies can be governed simply by the mind, And the mind’s will. He teaches Queen Agave to look Up from her loom, up at the light, at her tall  Son’s head impaled on the stiff spear clutched  In her own hand soiled with dirt and blood.XI. Their Philistinism Considered “Greek Tragedy” of course is the sort of thing They like and like the idea of ... though not “tragedy” In the sense of newspapers. When a patient shot one of them, People phoned in, many upset as though a deep, Special rule had been abrogated, someone had gone too far.  The poor doctor, as described by the evening Globe, Turned out to be a decent, conventional man (Doctors  For Peace, B’Nai Brith, numerous articles), almost Carefully so, like Paul Valéry—or like Rex Morgan, M.D., who, In the same Globe, attends a concert with a longjawed woman.  First Panel: “We’re a little early for the concert!  There’s an art museum we can stroll through!” “I’d like
Three people drinking out of the bottle in the living room. A cold rain. Quiet as a mirror. One of the men stuffs his handkerchief in his coat, climbs the stairs with the girl. The other man is left sitting at the desk with the wine and the headache, turning an old Ellington side over in his mind. And over. He held her like a saxophone when she was his girl. Her tongue trembling at the reed. The man lying next to her now thinks of another woman. Her white breath idling before he drove off. He said something about a spell, watching the snow fall on her shoulders. The musician crawls back into his horn, ancient terrapin at the approach of the wheel.
She was changing on the inside it was true what had been written The new syntax of love both sucked and burned The secret clung around them She took in the smell Walking down a road to nowhere every sound was relevant The sun fell behind them now he seemed strangely moved She would take her clothes off for the camera she said in plain english but she wasn’t holding that snake
has been written in mud and butter and barbecue sauce. The walls and the floors used to be gorgeous. The socks off-white and a near match. The quince with fire blight but we get two pints of jelly in the end. Long walks strengthen the back. You with a fever blister and myself with a sty. Eyes have we and we are forever prey to each other’s teeth. The torrents go over us. Thunder has not harmed anyone we know. The river coursing through us is dirty and deep. The left hand protects the rhythm. Watch your head. No fires should be unattended. Especially when wind. Each receives a free swiss army knife. The first few tongues are clearly preparatory. The impression made by yours I carry to my grave. It is just so sad so creepy so beautiful. Bless it. We have so little time to learn, so much... The river courses dirty and deep. Cover the lettuce. Call it a night. O soul. Flow on. Instead.
I don’t have any sentiments would somebodything thirst my quench how about about my mediocrity of character? I dance with the dead divinely  in my dreams I’m stricken deaf when I mention it my babies cry they want everything quick! here. un- mentioned   as character should be  like the purpurine it needs must be carved in,  please Have you heard of the roguess elephant with the brilliant diamond eyes? She is the puppet of the dictionary  where is her beautiful orange juice?   puppy foot!   When your father dies he doesn’t let you swoon   into aventurine or spray of lily (pearls) of the valley you do not bifurcate  you may supplicate   play yourself to your camp heroine self—play it Lady play It   but delete no matter  thank you for breakfast  today we will visit with the ear syringe  be the current density   honey flower  ice egg I love you as a fan loves air. oops it’s I  vice-versa I  told you about that  character   She is a bezel  awaiting the plop of a  ruby she must grow  chronically and I can’t end and I can’t lie here   He held him in his own heart then  may I in my eye now me
The Goddess who created this passing world Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled Cars & the variously shod feet were born And the past & future & I born too Light as airmail paper away she flew To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley Or both but instantly Clarified, composed, forever was I Meant by her to recognize a painting As beautiful or a movie stunning And to adore the finitude of words And understand as surfaces my dreams Know the eye the organ of affection And depths to be inflections Of her voice & wrist & smile
Do not imagine you can abdicate Auden  Prologue If the sea could dream, and if the sea  were dreaming now, the dream would be the usual one: Of the Flesh.  The letter written in the dream would go  something like: Forgive me—love, Blue. *  I. The Viewing (A Chorus)O what, then, did he look like?  He had a good body.And how came you to know this?  His body was naked.Say the sound of his body.  His body was quiet.Say again—quiet?  He was sleeping.You are sure of this? Sleeping?  Inside it, yes. Inside it. *  II. Pavilion Sometimes, a breeze: a canvas  flap will rise and, inside,  someone stirs; a bird? a flower? One is thinking Should there be thirst, I have only to reach  for the swollen bag of skin beside me, I have only to touch my mouth that is meant for a flower  to it, and drink.
And now, the horse is entering  the sea, and the sea  holds it.  Where are we? Behind us,  the beach,  yes, its scrim,  yes, of  grass, dune, sky—Desire goes by, and though it’s wind of course making  the grass bend,  unbend, we say  it’s desire again, passing us by, souveniring us with  gospel the grass, turned choir, leans into,  Coming— Lord, soon.
If the angle of an eye is all,  the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life, what is the light of this city, light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world, light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other   with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love, light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops  selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven, light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace, light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas, light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit, light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops, the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons, the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious: the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks, all of us making and unmaking ourselves,  hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only:  free in time but not from it, here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling that is fleeing, for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on? I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world,  I can’t help thinking of thanks.
Cold for so long, unable to speak, yet your mouth seems framed on a cry, or a stifled question. Who placed you here, and left you to this lonely eternity of ash and ice, and himself returned to the dust fields, the church and the temple? Was it God—the sun-god of the Incas, the imperial god of the Spaniards? Or only the priests of that god, self-elected—voice of the volcano that speaks once in a hundred years. And I wonder, with your image before me, what life might you have lived, had you lived at all—whose companion, whose love? To be perhaps no more than a slave of that earthly master: a jug of water on your shoulder, year after stunted year, a bundle of reeds and corn, kindling for a fire on whose buried hearth? There were furies to be fed, then as now: blood to fatten the sun, a heart for the lightning to strike. And now the furies walk the streets, a swarm in the milling crowd. They stand to the podium, speak of their coming ascension ... Through all this drift and clamor you have survived—in this cramped and haunted effigy, another entry on the historian’s dated page. Under the weight of this mountain— once a god, now only restless stone, we find your interrupted life, placed here among the trilobites and shells, so late unearthed.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations My black face fades,  hiding inside the black granite.  I said I wouldn't  dammit: No tears.  I'm stone. I'm flesh.  My clouded reflection eyes me  like a bird of prey, the profile of night  slanted against morning. I turn  this way—the stone lets me go.  I turn that way—I'm inside  the Vietnam Veterans MemorialVietnam Veterans Memorial Located in Washington D.C., the Memorial is roughly 500 feet wide, and the names of soldiers who died in Vietnam are etched on its black granite walls. For more information and photos, visit The Wall-USA. again, depending on the light  to make a difference.  I go down the 58,022 names58,022 names The number of names of dead soldiers etched on the wall at the time of Komunyakaa’s composing of this poem. As of 2009, there are now 58,261 names listed on the Memorial, of which, approximately 1,200 are listed as missing in action (MIAs) or prisoners of war (POWs).,  half-expecting to find  my own in letters like smoke.  I touch the name Andrew JohnsonAndrew Johnson A soldier from the poet’s hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana; also the name of 17th U.S. president (1865-69), who succeeded Lincoln and denied freed slaves equal protection under the law by vetoing the Civil Rights Bill and the Freedman’s Bureau Bill in 1866.;  I see the booby trap's white flash.  Names shimmer on a woman's blouse  but when she walks away  the names stay on the wall.  Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's  wings cutting across my stare.  The sky. A plane in the sky.  A white vet's image floats  closer to me, then his pale eyes  look through mine. I'm a window.  He's lost his right arm  inside the stone. In the black mirror  a woman’s trying to erase names:  No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head  and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,  a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,  the harbor of pirates centuries ago.  Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle  glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap  worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane  that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,  for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked  even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish  rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,  like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.  Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen  could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,  Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.  Alabanza.
December has frozen its double-edged breath  and blows it down from the icy heavens,  like a dry fire coming apart in threads,  like a huge ruin that topples on soldiers.  Snow where horses have left their hoof-marks  is a solitude of grief that gallops on.  Snow like split fingernails, or claws badly worn,  like a malice out of heaven or a final contempt.  It bites, prunes, cuts through with the heavy  slash of a bloodshot and pale marble ax.  It comes down, it falls everywhere like some ruined embrace  of canyons and wings, solitude and snow.  This violence that splits off from the core of winter,  raw hunger tired of being hungry and cold,  hangs over the naked with an eternal grudge  that is white, speechless, dark, starving, and fatal.  It wants to soften down forges, hatred, flames,  it wants to stop up the seas, to bury all loves.  It goes along throwing up huge, gauzy drifts,  hostile hunks of glass, statues that say nothing.  I want the heart made of wood in every shop  and textile factory to flood over and cover  the bodies that ignite the morning  with their looks and yells, boots and rifles.  Clothes for the corpses that are able to go naked,  able to go dressed in frost and ice,  in withered stone that fights off the cruel beaks,  the pale beak thrusts and the pale escapes.  Clothes for corpses that silently fall back  the most snowy attacks with the reddest bones.  Because these soldiers have sun-fired bones,  because they are fires with footprints and eyes.  The cold hunches forward, death loses its leaves.  I can hear the noiseless sound raining down.  Red on the white snow, life turns  the steamy snow red, sows fire in the snow.  Soldiers are so much like rock crystals  that only fire, only flame shapes them,  and they fight with icy cheekbones, with their mouths,  and turn whatever they attack into memories of ash.
—Washington, D.C. JC was called the Rack  at the work farm,  aluminum milk pails  dangling from his hands.  Once a sudden fist crushed the cartilage of nose across his face, but JC only grinned, and the man with the fist  stumbled away. JC sings his work farm songs on the street,  swaying with black overcoat and guitar,  cigarettes cheaper than food. But today he promises four sandwiches, two for each of us. The landlady, a Rumanian widow, has nailed a death mask  over JC’s bed, sleeping plaster face  of a drowned girl peaceful in the dark. As the girl contemplates water  and pigeons batter the window,  JC spreads the last deviled ham  on two slices of bread, presses them together, then slowly tears four pieces. “Here,” he almost sings,  “four sandwiches.”
Have you dug the spill Of Sugar Hill? Cast your gims On this sepia thrill: Brown sugar lassie, Caramel treat, Honey-gold baby Sweet enough to eat. Peach-skinned girlie, Coffee and cream, Chocolate darling Out of a dream. Walnut tinted Or cocoa brown, Pomegranate-lipped Pride of the town. Rich cream-colored To plum-tinted black, Feminine sweetness In Harlem’s no lack. Glow of the quince To blush of the rose. Persimmon bronze To cinnamon toes. Blackberry cordial, Virginia Dare wine— All those sweet colors Flavor Harlem of mine! Walnut or cocoa, Let me repeat: Caramel, brown sugar, A chocolate treat. Molasses taffy, Coffee and cream, Licorice, clove, cinnamon To a honey-brown dream. Ginger, wine-gold, Persimmon, blackberry, All through the spectrum Harlem girls vary— So if you want to know beauty’s Rainbow-sweet thrill, Stroll down luscious, Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.
Big Boy came Carrying a mermaid  On his shoulders  And the mermaid  Had her tail Curved Beneath his arm. Being a fisher boy, He’d found a fish To carry— Half fish,  Half girl  To marry.
I’m all alone in this world, she said, Ain’t got nobody to share my bed, Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand— The truth of the matter’s I ain’t got no man. Big Boy opened his mouth and said, Trouble with you is You ain’t got no head! If you had a head and used your mind You could have me with you All the time. She answered, Babe, what must I do? He said, Share your bed—And your money, too.
Clean the spittoons, boy.  Detroit,  Chicago,  Atlantic City,  Palm Beach. Clean the spittoons. The steam in hotel kitchens, And the smoke in hotel lobbies, And the slime in hotel spittoons: Part of my life.  Hey, boy!  A nickel,  A dime,  A dollar, Two dollars a day.  Hey, boy!  A nickel,  A dime,  A dollar,  Two dollars Buy shoes for the baby. House rent to pay. Gin on Saturday, Church on Sunday.  My God! Babies and gin and church And women and Sunday All mixed with dimes and Dollars and clean spittoons And house rent to pay.  Hey, boy! A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord. Bright polished brass like the cymbals Of King David’s dancers, Like the wine cups of Solomon.  Hey, boy! A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord. A clean bright spittoon all newly polished— At least I can offer that.  Com’mere, boy!
It has arrived—the long rag rug multiply folded. On top, one alien hair. I put my face to the folds and smell despair palpable as salt air in all those rooms and houses, small and smug— enclosures I passed through on my way where? Whoever did the weaving appears old in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face, can only conjure up the faintest trace of an abstracted grace, clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold these precious things, in some unheard-of place? I perch her on a hill, precariously beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom. Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room (no bigger than the loom) is proof against the violence of the sky From it I further spin what I once called my home: Endless horizons fading into haze, the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear; snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere, the brightness of the air, terraces, valleys organizing space and time’s cessation. So this package here I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today (rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace my strands of language barely can express; dishrags of dailiness dispersed and recombined and freshly gay) comes to me imbued with images, slowly and faithfully across the water, across the world. It represents a time I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme as soon as I went home, if that is where I am. These rugs recover the sense of stepping twice into a single river.
Sing now the heavy furniture of the fall, the journey’s ending. Strong Aeneas bears  deep on his shoulders all the dark wood chairs  and tables of destruction. Bruising, blunt,  they force his feet on up the war-scraped hills  past raped dead temples. All Achilles kills  litters the trail of sofa legs with other  endings of houses. Further up, gods sit  changing their own upholsteries of deceit,  ordaining shelves and benches as the goal  of his dim voyage. Sometimes arrows drawn  on chair backs point the way they must go on,  signs that some corridor of destiny is reserving him a threshold. Aeneas weeps  at wind or passion, but steadfastly keeps carrying battered merchandise marked ROME in one direction, pondering it all.
Down milk-bright colonnades the leper’s bell recedes. Shades lowered against the gleaming waste of ice, I sit back, bathe in lukewarm acquiescence. Dutiful, prompt, strapped, doped, a little drunk, squinting at international afternoon I’ll soon pass GO again. And if these colored pencils, nose drops, passport should plummet with the rest of the huge oval, giant time capsule soft for the shark’s maw, will a notebook ambered back to front with words rescue me from oblivion? Syrup of skittish travelers, fame. I yawn.
rush to which  in music I’ve space ready in May  percussion getting unasked choice  too car too truck beyond wishes   everyone cannot have the keys of nicety  repercussion bit scrap of that roll broom   pattern of bits  to see world sand dollars in one language   space fills thought  hopper the hours of the block bang to the real plain warp  it is easy to ask from rush hour like useful telephone  calls simultaneously around our heads  untouched by seldom thought   rubble gallop red path on the real part   remove is unsuccessful as follow turns after the sliver bin bench  combination finds  ment middle blade coast  similar and acquaint them which wonder   many kinds of stuff in the concerns of life   skin the plate  till all the moisture be very clean if   very short  the care of a particular person is fit   holidays come on a Monday and will frequently go  away  on the tramp of which are placed ballads   cribed cloths to scribble it  Thursday per week  spinning children sented to the reducing   of silk  wheel to her work rather runs backwards  and forwards  both methods are a long stick and round by an empty one  I shall describe or fixed on draws out  the hand is in the basket  potatoes are in the bag from the sufficient   empty one  wool thod   hank on cows  whirling any other earn be very white   from mit worms this shell-fish this spinning please   fection made worms semble  but that bow lever the window  curtain to warm you  dream pin or on so many others   emergency say bottom snow  fill up of and sentimental tickle  look foolish and know my prima golden weary  suitable for a mental might  of sentimental weep for into more  tickle little confess  the more regretted cozy paradise  the nature of my thirty-seven of whom   my own astonished sequel
Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn— an early warning of the end of summer. August is fading fast, and by September the little purple flowers will all be gone. Season, project, and vacation done. One more year in everybody’s life. Add a notch to the old hunting knife Time keeps testing with a horny thumb. Over the summer months hung an unspoken aura of urgency. In late July galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, we looked at one another in the dark, then at the milky magical debris arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality. There were two ways to live: get on with work, redeem the time, ignore the imminence of cataclysm; or else take it slow, be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence (she paces through her days in massive innocence, or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). In fact, not being cows, we have no choice. Summer or winter, country, city, we are prisoners from the start and automatically, hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice. Not light but language shocks us out of sleep ideas of doom transformed to meteors we translate back to portents of the wars looming above the nervous watch we keep.
Saturday, April 5. Welles’s Othello: black and white grid of rage, steam of sheer fury spewing from the vent of violence that followed where they went. Wind howled on the battlements, but sun gilded glum canals. The lovers floated beneath black bridges, coupled in stone rooms. The unrepentant villain (at the start so all the rest was flashback) dangled from a cage squinting inscrutably at the funeral procession winding through the town below. The air was full of wailing. Knives of sunlight glittered on the sea. We lurched out onto Fifty-Seventh Street. You said “I think I’m dying.” Next week your eyes went out. Shining under the lamp, your blue gaze, now opaque, your face drawn sharper but still beautiful: from this extremity you can attempt to rise to rage and grief. Or you can yield to the cozy quicksand of the bed. You wave your hand at walls of books: “What do I do? Do I throw all these away?” Their anecdotes, their comforts—now black glass.
the bird carries its peck up the branch   or more  of the which pretty little flower  ear dozen  study forces the day upright  pretty flower to protect the eye in sunshine   with a white is made tall in warm   stalks  the dead are used over  the major insects was that  tile the rent become mortgage money  fortress replaced by a more natural forest  tints the tall flowers  leap the embarrassment of a great subject   high in my own eyes hanging over the day  from this aviation is clumsy  or even desirable diction  nook soaring when the moon is how romantic   music pera slid clear  shadow when omitted is obviously wrong   or no  lighting by trees is beautiful
A Greek I worked for once would always say  that tragedies which still appall and thrill  happen daily on a village scale. Except that he put it the other way:  dark doings in the sleepiest small town  loom dire and histrionic as a play.  Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not  to the old women sitting in the sun,  the old men planted in cafes till noon  or midnight taking in the human scene,  connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come.  These watchers locate in their repertory  mythic fragments of some kindred story and draw them dripping out of memory’s well.  Incest and adultery; exile and murder; divine punishment; disgrace:  the trick is to locate the right-sized piece  of the vast puzzle-patterned tapestry from which one ripped-out patch makes tragedy. This highly skilled and patient process—find a larger context, match and patch and mend— is what the chorus in Greek tragedy  has always done. And to this very day  spectators comb the tangles of a tale,  compare, remember, comment—not ideal,  but middle-aged or older, and alert.  Beyond the hero’s rashness or the hurt  heart of the heroine, they’ve reached the age  when only stars still lust for center stage.  The chorus, at a point midway between  the limelight and the audience, is seen  and unseen. Lady chaperones at balls once sat on brittle chairs against the walls.  “My dancing days are over,” they’d both sigh  and smile. Or take the case of poetry. Mine used to play the heroine—me me me— but lately, having had its fill of “I,” tries to discern, despite its vision’s flaws,  a shape. A piece of myth. A pattern. Laws.
A name trimmed They are seated in the shadowswith colored husking corn, shelling peas. Housesribbons of wood set in the ground. I try to  find the spot at which the pattern on   the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy,  quartz. They wade in brackish water.  The leaves outside the window  tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,  making it impossible to look past them, and though holes  were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-  holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects  the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into  benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a  few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as  the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over  its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of  the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded  in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different  shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging  into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A  paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray  bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite  directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This  simply means that the imagination is more restless than the  body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without  comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex-  ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then,  one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you  feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the  sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly  frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail  remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the  vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day  my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular  pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do.  Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You  can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter  buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for  my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near-  ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me  thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it  seems even more incomplete when we were there in person.  Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and  the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed  she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is  an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of  breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap-  turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different  world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on  her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along  the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled  by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a  young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by  beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen  from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns,  frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a  message of happiness by which we were called into the room,  as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was  too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed  with colored ribbons.
Reason looks for Where I woke and was awake, in thetwo, then room fitting the wall, withdrawn, Iarranges it had my desk and thus my corner.from there While waiting, waltz. The soles of  our boots wear thin, but the soles of  our feet grow thick. The difference  between “he presented his argument”  and “they had an argument.” I still respond to the academic  year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn- ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from  the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the  mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in  the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a  bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct  shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the  gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument” is the  plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back  later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who  “love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones.  Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread  her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends  beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For,  as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the  same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight  I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a  knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of  ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had  first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning  unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to  sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The  piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m  not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on  trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was  a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap- peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a  contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome  woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles  more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They  were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go  away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We  were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on  phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the  mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray  with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill  the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to  peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a  raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t,  after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the  compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my  determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the  range and degree of difference between things of one day and  things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx.  Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes  tracks.
Home whose names are produced by motion  is where people go (one following the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself  at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot  the tales of which are spinning like blades  on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate  and desire, chance and intention, from time to time  converge. Most people want things to be good  but taking a programmatic approach to getting it would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you  except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy at this very moment is screaming in jubilation  at a silver toaster, I want it even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down  mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know  the ones. The purport comes all at once  at the end in such a way that one is thrown back to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level  after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same when it was just getting light—a murky gray that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break  away from my conversations in order to barge in  on yours and give the illusion that I often know  where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty  of motive to propel the prose or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing  where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience.  There are birds chirping, smoke is rising from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer  and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge  of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus  I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!”  I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel  that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that  after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing  but motion to the composition.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall  after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam  and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive  and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam  downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you  that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find  their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific  and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive  and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon  waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall  after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia  and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors  of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall  after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River  as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives  in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.  I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after  that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws  a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire  which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told  by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall  after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon  who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us  how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;  the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many  of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing  with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
From the first, I was too reluctant, achieving by dribs and drabs, Happy to linger in shallows while others jackknifed from cliffs, wrong To exact perfection from a sad piece or add notes to a proven tune; But ever the classicist:  in swimming lessons, slowest to learn; In fights, tentative, preferring the hammerlock to the jab and hook; cautious In the earliest romances, choking in the clutch, fumbling the caress; or shy Among the crew-cut Cupids bristling at the armory’s weekend dances; But shifty in every game, keeping it close. Always holding still And adjuring others to go slow  until we leapt forward that night out of control And pinned to the seats of Tyler Wilson’s outlandishly unstock Ford While, from the opposite side of the valley, scalding in each curve, came the black din And brunt of Sonny Walker’s highjacker Chevrolet, everyone screaming And bearing down to be first across the bridge at Hurricane Creek. Many trophies show us frozen: a leg poised for the hurdle, an arm cocked for the unanswerable spike. What I remember through the windshield’s splintering lens is time, a mailbox Rushing by, the letters TURRENTINE,  then darkness rolling inside; Though memory, at best, retrieves maybe six percent in studio light, So even now I think we might have turned:  smart with his hands, There is a kind of savior who blusters through the South, good with animals and machines, Who surely somehow would have found a gap, through an open gate Into a marshy cornfield  or up a logging road into a hillside wood. At any rate, there is just a little while, shy of any bridge, just as judgment Balances its two blind alternatives and a third accelerates head-on. I’ve made a careful study: things that can only be accomplished in deep space, In another language, in far history, at an almost incalculable speed. Courage is not included, or much foolishness. They spin the purest glass, they split the atom, they speak with God. They make a sort of Teflon hip and attach it with metal screws, Only the threads upbone keep stripping  so they have to operate Again and again, and what she’s accomplished is more of a gait, really, Than a walk, so when she moves toward me, across any room, I think too much of my own will  implicated in that dragging brace. Each step is obviously trained, and the whole earned motion full Of muscle, plastic, and bone  is coordinated by nerves even the Strictest dance does not require. She has said there is no fault, But even in such talk,  grace occurs as an accident someone caused. If what I require is a thing too certain, braided from probabilities, There is another thing  articulated in the scars that saved her face— And no right now in that night we were shaken and rolled like dice, no right to Say this guilt to be alive is love, or the opposite of lucky is wrong.
Maybe a sin, indecent for sure—dope, The storekeeper called it. Everyone agreed That Manuel Lawrence, who drank Through the side of his mouth, squinting And chortling with pleasure, was hooked; Furthermore, Aunt Brenda, Who was so religious that she made Her daughters bathe with their panties on, Had dubbed it “toy likker, fool thing,” And so might I be, holding the bottle Out to the light, watching it bristle. Watching the slow spume of bubbles Die, I asked myself, could it be alive? When they electrocuted Edwin Dockery, He sat there like a steaming, breathing Bolt, the green muscles in his arms Strained at the chair’s black straps, The little finger of his right hand leapt up, But the charge rose, the four minutes And twenty-five hundred volts of his death, Which in another month will be Thirty-five years old. So the drink fizzed With the promise of mixtures to come. There it was. If the hard-shell Baptists of Alabama are good and content That the monster has died, so am I. I swallowed. Sweet darkness, one thing Led to another, the usual life, waking Sometimes lost, dried blood in the ear, Police gabbling in a strange language. How else would I ever gauge How pleasure might end, walking Past midnight in the vague direction Of music. I am never satisfied.
On the porch, unbreeched shotgun dangling Across one arm, just after the killing, The murderer, Billy Winkles, made polite Small talk with my father while we waited For the sheriff to come. The reek of cordite Still loomed above the sheeted corpse, his uncle Ben, whose various dark and viscous organs Jeweled the lawn. “Want some coffee, Von?” I heard, and thought, A man is dead. And then: Why had my father brought me there to stand Alone, out of place, half-terrified, bored With the slow yammer of weather and crops? I stepped carefully across the rotted planks Toward an oak where an engine block Depended from a blackened limb and watched A dull dazzle of horseflies, a few puddles Hounds had dug like chocolate ruffles Hemming the chicken yard. “I told the son Of a bitch, come back, I’ll shoot you dead,” And he sure had, for sniffing round his wife. He said, “It just ain’t right.” He rolled A smoke and dragged a steady flame alive While neighbors shyly stomped from pickups And lifted the sheet to poke and peek. “That’s Ben,” one said. “That’s Ben to a T.” But was it? Was any of it real, the empty House, the creek? My father saying, “Now Your mother, she was a Partain, wasn’t she?” “Naw, she was a Winkles, too. My wife was A Partain, she’s over at Mai-Maw’s now.” It went like that, and this. The wind drove Up and set the shirts to popping on the line. A red tricycle leaned above a one-eyed doll. The mountain’s blue escarpment unwound Green bolts of fields, the white shelters Where we lived, all of it somehow wrong, And magical not to have changed while Trucks backed up along the ditch and men With their grown boys clambered uphill To gawk at Uncle Ben who lay like shortcakes Lined up on sawhorses on decoration days. How strange, I thought, that no one prayed, And strange that I was there, actually there, With grown men, not sad or happy, but proud, Knowing even then, the years would mostly Amount to sleep, my father would come back As history, and still there would be To say the strobe of the ambulance light; The sheriff, a tall, portly man, stooping To help the handcuffed killer into the car; And on the grass, bits of liver or spleen— Whatever I’d dream, the world is not a lie.
When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field, It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness That my mother could not console herself to the waste And insisted on having it picked over with human hands, Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets And the hands had long since gone into the factories. No matter how often my father pointed this out, She worried it the way I’ve worried the extra words In poems that I conceived with the approximate Notion that each stanza should have the same number Of lines and each line the same number of syllables— And disregarded it, telling myself a ripple Or botch on the surface, like the stutter of a speaker, Is all I have to affirm the deep fluency below. The Hebrews distrusted Greek poetry (which embodied Harmony and symmetry, and, therefore, revision) Not for aesthetic reasons, but because they believed That to change the first words, which rose unsmelted From the trance, amounted to sacrilege against God. In countries where, because of the gross abundance Of labor, it’s unlawful to import harvesting machines, I see the women in the fields and think of how, When my mother used to pick, you could tell Her row by the bare stalks and the scant poundage That tumbled from her sack so pristinely white And devoid of burrs, it seemed to have already Passed through the spiked mandibles of the gin. Dr. Williams said of Eliot that his poems were so Cautiously wrought that they seemed to come To us already digested in all four stomachs of the cow. What my father loved about my mother was not Just the beauty of her body and face, but the practice Of her ideas and the intelligence of her hands As they made the house that abides in us still As worry and bother, but also the perfect freedom beyond— As cleanliness is next to godliness but is not God.
The best words get said frequently—they are like fertile pips.  Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent  abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life to think about. Take R—the only thing R could credit herself with was having lived her life and so she not only kept an account of it but did so not in the privacy of a diary but in the form of letters —abundant, profligate, indiscrete—that I want to write  to you so as to note something that I read this morning: “It’s not that this or that means something to me but this!—or that!—means something to me.” Musically R bequeaths herself to posterity as a scholar might bequeath his or her library blowing twisted veils of rain past the narrow and curving windows in the last hour that will carry us along to the time when those who come after us will learn what we know—a man with a mustache waxed and dyed  green, a line of tall people and a woman at the door, a committee of children without scooters but not mournful, a poet with a motive, a pilot with a flashlight, a sulking but fascinated scholar, and Goethe no doubt for whom R would have released a flock of red canaries.
Me moriré en Paris con aguacero ... I will die in Miami in the sun, On a day when the sun is very bright, A day like the days I remember, a day like other days, A day that nobody knows or remembers yet, And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers  And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood And of the surviving cousins by the graveside, While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,  Rest on their shovels, and smoke, Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect. I think it will be on a Sunday like today, Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,  And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;  And I think it will be a Sunday because today, When I took out this paper and began to write, Never before had anything looked so blank, My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday; And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,  Looked up at me, not understanding, And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept. Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,  It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings, The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,  Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,  And after awhile the diggers with their shovels  Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,  And one of them put his blade into the earth  To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,  And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect.
But the essential advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. T. S. ELIOT It was his story. It would always be his story.  It followed him; it overtook him finally— The boredom, and the horror, and the glory. Probably at the end he was not yet sorry, Even as the boots were brutalizing him in the alley.  It was his story. It would always be his story, Blown on a blue horn, full of sound and fury,  But signifying, O signifying magnificently  The boredom, and the horror, and the glory. I picture the snow as falling without hurry To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely.  It was his story. It would always be his story. Lately he had wandered between St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery,  Already half a spirit, mumbling and muttering sadly.  O the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. All done now. But I remember the fiery Hypnotic eye and the raised voice blazing with poetry.  It was his story and would always be his story— The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.
Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now each of them is working on something and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by  unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law  was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout  superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future  of poetry. Will this work? The long moment is addressed to the material world’s “systems and embodiments” for study  for sentience and for history. Materiality, after all, is about being  a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly, spinning to a halt micromillimeters before I watch them, my attention riveted on getting tangled and forgetting the name of the chair, for example  and the huge young man, he is covered with tattoos I think. Life is a series of given situations of which the living have to take note on site and the storytellers give an account as the wind tangles the rain or the invaders take over the transmitter. The exchange  of ideas constitutes a challenge to the lyric ego. And so I am reporting  that I was wrong. A real storyteller never asks what story one wants  to hear, not the happy Joel nor the sleepy Clara nor the dreamy Jane, the seductive Sam, the sullen Robbie Jones. Nonetheless I have bought a bicycle. I have to remember  to stop. Thank you. I hope you will enjoy it. A bike that is simply locked  but freestanding will be immediately stolen. Of course there can’t be much wrong in helping people get what they want  but creeps and purveyors of negativity and cruelty are tucked into every institution and most corners and though my inclination is to vote in favor of everyone’s dearest dreams of advancement I disagree  with the remark that “deathlessness” and “fearlessness” don’t work.  I think they do. “Deathlessness” immediately invokes the “breathlessness” we thought we’d half heard in the panting of deathlessness whose dashing  is life. “Writhing” is self-indulgent however but the near-rhyme with “writing” is terrific. Don’t change that. Poetry  can’t be about flight — that would make flight a perching instead of a flight. When one thing becomes another the other is free to become something else. I remember just where we were sitting under the influence of the wind watching a crow becoming something else in this case a crow. The state of milk in jars takes place and the state of world affairs can now change. No cereal manufacturer intentionally includes angels but marshmallow bits may look angelic in a bowl. Who knows? A poem full of ruptures could be one from which all kinds of things are flying.
Les morts C’est sous terre; Ça n’en sort Guère. LAFORGUE Our diaries squatted, toad-like,   On dark closet ledges.   Forget-me-not and thistle   Decalcomaned the pages.  But where, where are they now,  All the sad squalors  Of those between-wars parlors?— Cut flowers; and the sunlight spilt like soda  On torporous rugs; the photo   Albums all outspread ...  The dead Don’t get around much anymore.
Come October, it’s the lake not the border that has been redrawn. Thinking about the event afterwards, I realize how remarkably well-prepared  the girls are. There don’t seem to be any slouches among them. Please tell them I say hello and that we’ll need 14  for the green salad and 14 for the apple tarts between with some rapid washing in clear water I remember as play and planning in childhood, preparing until the very last moment  for a gripping narrative that was itself perpetually given over to improvisations and asymmetrical collaborations that could run for days. That makes another 14. It was ”the word“ or “the world” in 1981  when we undertook to talk about the phrase “once in a while” once in a while noting the vagueness then named “a while” and how “once” the phrase  recurs and therefore means more than once the “while” is defined. We too are in “a while”  and when “once” next occurs, if the basic design suits you, we will need a bit of modestly biographical contextualization  for November. I’m going to put some thought to something implausibly contemporary which perhaps isn’t wise since between then and now no new coincidences have been noted  just one large color photograph of bespangled cowgirls herding heavy bulls up the avenue that opens this week carefully  wearing baby blue boots to take out the garbage but it never rained. At the end of the month, Halloween should be clear.
When fishes flew and forests walked  And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood  Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry  And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody  On all four-footed things. The tattered outlaw of the earth,  Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,  I keep my secret still. Fools! For I also had my hour;  One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears,  And palms before my feet.
A mountainous and mystic brute No rein can curb, no arrow shoot, Upon whose doomed deformed back I sweep the planets’ scorching track. Old is the elf, and wise, men say, His hair grows green as ours grows grey; He mocks the stars with myriad hands, High as that swinging forest stands. But though in pigmy wanderings dull I scour the deserts of his skull, I never find the face, eyes, teeth, Lowering or laughing underneath. I met my foe in an empty dell, His face in the sun was naked hell. I thought, ‘One silent, bloody blow, No priest would curse, no crowd would know.’ Then cowered: a daisy, half concealed, Watched for the fame of that poor field; And in that flower and suddenly Earth opened its one eye on me.
A bird flew out at the break of day From the nest where it had curled, And ere the eve the bird had set Fear on the kings of the world. The first tree it lit upon Was green with leaves unshed; The second tree it lit upon Was red with apples red; The third tree it lit upon Was barren and was brown, Save for a dead man nailed thereon On a hill above a town. That night the kings of the earth were gay And filled the cup and can; Last night the kings of the earth were chill For dread of a naked man. ‘If he speak two more words,’ they said, ‘The slave is more than the free; If he speak three more words,’ they said, ‘The stars are under the sea.’ Said the King of the East to the King of the West, I wot his frown was set, ‘Lo, let us slay him and make him as dung, It is well that the world forget.’ Said the King of the West to the King of the East, I wot his smile was dread, ‘Nay, let us slay him and make him a god, It is well that our god be dead.’ They set the young man on a hill, They nailed him to a rod; And there in darkness and in blood They made themselves a god. And the mightiest word was left unsaid, And the world had never a mark, And the strongest man of the sons of men Went dumb into the dark. Then hymns and harps of praise they brought, Incense and gold and myrrh, And they thronged above the seraphim, The poor dead carpenter. ‘Thou art the prince of all,’ they sang, ‘Ocean and earth and air.’ Then the bird flew on to the cruel cross, And hid in the dead man’s hair. ‘Thou art the son of the world.’ they cried, ` ‘Speak if our prayers be heard.’ And the brown bird stirred in the dead man’s hair And it seemed that the dead man stirred. Then a shriek went up like the world’s last cry From all nations under heaven, And a master fell before a slave And begged to be forgiven. They cowered, for dread in his wakened eyes The ancient wrath to see; And a bird flew out of the dead Christ’s hair, And lit on a lemon tree.
Where the slow river  meets the tide, a red swan lifts red wings and darker beak, and underneath the purple down of his soft breast uncurls his coral feet. Through the deep purple of the dying heat of sun and mist, the level ray of sun-beam has caressed the lily with dark breast, and flecked with richer gold its golden crest. Where the slow lifting  of the tide,  floats into the river  and slowly drifts  among the reeds,  and lifts the yellow flags,  he floats  where tide and river meet.  Ah kingly kiss— no more regret  nor old deep memories  to mar the bliss;  where the low sedge is thick,  the gold day-lily  outspreads and rests  beneath soft fluttering  of red swan wings and the warm quivering of the red swan's breast.
my story is how deep the heart runs to hide & laugh with your hands over your blank mouth face behind the mask talking in tongues something tearing feathers from a crow that screams from the furnace the black candle in a skull sweet pain of meat  let’s pour the river’s rainbow  into our stone water jars  bad luck isn’t red flowers  crushed under jackboots your story is a crippled animal dragging a steel trap across desert sand a bee’s sting inside your heart & its song of honey in my groin a factory of blue jays in honey locust leaves wet pages of smoke like a man deserting his shadow in dark woods the dog that limps away & rotten fruit on the trees this story is the speaking skull on the mantelpiece the wingspan of a hawk at the edge of a coyote’s cry the seventh son’s mojo hand holding his life together with a black cat bone the six grandfathers & spider woman the dust wings of ghost dance vision deer that can’t stand for falling wunmonije witch doctor backwater blues juju man a silk gown on the floor a black bowl on a red lacquered table x-rated because it’s true  let’s pour starlight  from our stone water jars  pain isn’t just red flowers  crushed under jackboots my story is inside a wino’s bottle the cup blood leaps into eight-to-the-bar a man on his knees facing the golden calf the silverfish of old lust mama hoodoo a gullah basket woven from your hair love note from the madhouse thornbushes naming the shape of things to come old murder weapons strings of piano wire  let’s pour the night  into our stone water jars  this song isn’t red flowers  crushed under silence our story is a rifle butt across our heads arpeggio of bowed grass among glass trees where they kick down doors & we swan-dive from the brooklyn bridge a post-hypnotic suggestion a mosaic membrane skin of words mirrors shattered in roadhouses in the gun-barrel night how a machine moves deeper into piles of bones the way we crowd at the foot of the gallows
I can’t touch you. His face always returns; we exchange long looks in each bad dream & what I see, my God. Honey, sweetheart, I hold you against me but nothing works. Two boats moored, rocking between nowhere & nowhere. A bone inside me whispersmaybe tonight,  but I keep thinking about the two men wrestling nude in Lawrence’s Women in Love. I can’t get past reels of breath unwinding. He has you. Now he doesn’t. He has you again. Now he doesn’t. You’re at the edge of azaleas shaken loose by a word. I see your rose-colored skirt unfurl. He has a knife to your throat, night birds come back to their branches. A hard wind raps at the door, the new year prowling in a black overcoat. It’s been six months since we made love. Tonight I look at you hugging the pillow, half smiling in your sleep. I want to shake you & ask who. Again I touch myself, unashamed, until his face comes into focus. He’s stolen something from me & I don’t know if it has a name or not— like counting your ribs with one foolish hand & mine with the other.
We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target. We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America. We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass. We weren’t there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man’s eyelid.
I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare? Hunger quivers on a fleshly string at the crossroad. So deep is the lore, there’s only tomorrow today where darkness splinters & wounds the bird of paradise. On paths that plunge into primordial green, Echo’s laughter finds us together. In the sweatshops of desire men think if they don’t die the moon won’t rise. All the dead-end streets run into one moment of bliss & sleight of hand. Beside the Euphrates, past the Tigris, up the Mississippi. Bloodline & clockwork. The X drawn where we stand. Trains follow rivers that curve around us. The distant night opens like a pearl fan, a skirt, a heart, a drop of salt. When we embrace, we are not an island beyond fables & the blue exhaust of commerce. When the sounds of River Styx punish trees, my effigy speaks to the night owl. Our voices break open the pink magnolia where struggle is home to the beast in us. All the senses tuned for the Hawkesbury, labyrinths turning into lowland fog. Hand in hand, feeling good, we walk phantoms from the floating machine. When a drowning man calls out, his voice follows him downstream.
“Dressed to die ... ” —Dylan Thomas Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still In ditches reflecting the odd, Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept Their own counsel, we Were different, we kept our own counsel. Outside the tool shed in the noon heat, while our father Ground some piece of metal That would finally fit, with grease & an hour of pushing, The needs of the mysterious Ford tractor, We argued out, in adolescence, Whole systems of mathematics, ethics, And finally agreed that altruism, Whose long vowel sounded like the pigeons, Roosting stupidly & about to be shot In the barn, was impossible If one was born a Catholic. The Swedish Lutherans, whom the nuns called “Statue smashers,” the Japanese on Neighboring farms, were, we guessed, A little better off .... When I was twelve, I used to stare at weeds Along the road, at the way they kept trembling Long after a car had passed; Or at gnats in families hovering over Some rotting peaches, & wonder why it was I had been born a human. Why not a weed, or a gnat? Why not a horse, or a spider? And why an American? I did not think that anything could choose me To be a Larry Levis before there even was A Larry Levis. It was strange, but not strange enough To warrant some design.  On the outside, The barn, with flaking paint, was still off-white. Inside, it was always dark, all the way up To the rafters where the pigeons moaned, I later thought, as if in sexual complaint, Or sexual abandon; I never found out which. When I walked in with a 12-gauge & started shooting, They fell, like gray fruit, at my feet— Fat, thumping things that grew quieter When their eyelids, a softer gray, closed, Part of the way, at least, And their friends or lovers flew out a kind of skylight Cut for loading hay. I don’t know, exactly, what happened then. Except my sister moved to Switzerland. My brother got a job With Colgate-Palmolive. He was selling soap in Lodi, California. Later, in his car, & dressed To die, or live again, forever, I drove to my own, first wedding. I smelled the stale boutonniere in my lapel, A deceased young flower. I wondered how my brother’s Buick Could go so fast, &, Still questioning, or catching, a last time, An old chill from childhood, I thought: why me, why her, & knew it wouldn’t last.
I lay my head sideways on the desk, My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones, My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse, White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree. From where I sat, on still days, I’d watch The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read The desk carved with adults’ names: Marietta Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm; The wood hacked or lovingly hollowed, the flies Settling on the obsolete & built-in inkwells. I remember, tonight, only details, how Mrs. Avery, now gone, was standing then In her beige dress, its quiet, gazelle print Still dark with lines of perspiration from The day before; how Gracie Chin had just Shown me how to draw, with chalk, a Chinese Ideogram. Where did she go, white thigh With one still freckle, lost in silk? No one would say for sure, so that I’d know, So that all shapes, for days after, seemed Brushstrokes in Chinese: countries on maps That shifted, changed colors, or disappeared: Lithuania, Prussia, Bessarabia; The numbers four & seven; the question mark. That year, I ate almost nothing. I thought my parents weren’t my real parents, I thought there’d been some terrible mistake. At recess I would sit alone, seeing In the print of each leaf shadow, an ideogram— Still, indecipherable, beneath the green sound The bell still made, even after it had faded, When the dust-covered leaves of the oak tree Quivered, slightly, if I looked up in time. And my father, so distant in those days, Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle By a plum tree, the sun rising over The Sierras? It is not Chinese, but English— When the past tense, when you first learn to use it As a child, throws all the verbs in the language Into the long, flat shade of houses you Ride past, & into town. Your father’s driving. On winter evenings, the lights would come on earlier. People would be shopping for Christmas. Each hand, With the one whorl of its fingerprints, with twenty Delicate bones inside it, reaching up To touch some bolt of cloth, or choose a gift, A little different from any other hand. You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark, But leaves names, lovers, places showing through: Gracie Chin, my father, Lithuania; A beige dress where dark gazelles hold still? Outside, it’s snowing, cold, & a New Year. The trees & streets are turning white. I always thought he would come back like this. I always thought he wouldn’t dare be seen.
The twilight is the morning of his day.   While Sleep drops seaward from the fading shore,  With purpling sail and dip of silver oar,  He cheers the shadowed time with roundelay, Until the dark east softens into gray.  Now as the noisy hours are coming—hark!  His song dies gently—it is growing dark— His night, with its one star, is on the way! Faintly the light breaks over the blowing oats—  Sleep, little brother, sleep: I am astir.  We worship Song, and servants are of her— I in the bright hours, thou in shadow-time:  Lead thou the starlit night with merry notes,  And I will lead the clamoring day with rhyme.
for Edward Hirsch Like a distant singing, like a finger sizzling  for just one moment on the iron, it almost  hurts. Almost. But then something pulls  away, and the smooth belly of evening slides over the earth; the pines and the spaniels  stop howling and suddenly drop off to sleep.  While the air is numb with the drowsiness  of clouds, the needle sails free of the scars  on the record and the record player lifts  its artificial arm! This hurts. But then a boy lays his cards on his bedspread  the way a sailor spreads his sails  on the sand, and even this reminds me  of tables being set, of a woman calling  and calling her children through blistered  hands. Then something lets go, and in her left palm she sees her own eyes,  and in her right the evening’s first star  pulls her toward the distant singing of the sky. Then something else  lets go; the long sheet of night winds slowly through the pines.  Here and there the lights go up, like a shy applauding.
The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge, Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,  Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite  Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands  To grasp upon the further cliff and draw A greater cord, and then a greater yet;  Till at the last across the chasm swung  The cable then the mighty bridge in air! So we may send our little timid thought  Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands— Send out our love and faith to thread the deep— Thought after thought until the little cord Has greatened to a chain no chance can break, And we are anchored to the Infinite!
We are circling, glad of the battle: we   joy in the smell of the smoke. Fight on in the hell of the trenches: we   publish your names with a croak! Ye will lie in dim heaps when the sunset   blows cold on the reddening sand; Yet fight, for the dead will have wages—a  death-clutch of dust in the hand. Ye have given us banquet, O kings, and   still do we clamor for more: Vast, vast is our hunger, as vast as the   sea-hunger gnawing the shore. ’Tis well ye are swift with your signals—  the blaze of the banners, the blare Of the bugles, the boom of battalions, the   cannon-breath hot on the air. It is for our hunger ye hurry, it is for our   feast ye are met: Be sure we will never forget you, O servants   that never forget! For we are the Spirits of Battle, the peerage   of greed we defend: Our lineage rose from the Night, and we   go without fellow or friend. We were ere our servant Sesostris spread   over the Asian lands The smoke of the blood of the peoples,  and scattered their bones to the sands.  We circled in revel for ages above the   Assyrian stream, While Babylon builded her beauty, and   faded to dust and to dream. We scattered our laughter on nations—  and Troy was a word and a waste, The glory of Carthage was ruined, the   grandeur of Rome was effaced! And we blazoned the name of Timour, as   he harried his herd of kings, And the host of his hordes wound on, a   dragon with undulant rings. And we slid down the wind upon France,   when the steps of the earthquake passed, When the Bastile bloomed into flame, and  the heavens went by on the blast.  We hung over Austerlitz, cheering the  armies with jubilant cries: We scented three kings at the carnage,   and croaked our applause from the skies. O kings, ye have catered to vultures—  have chosen to feed us, forsooth, The joy of the world and her glory, the  hope of the world and her youth. O kings, ye are diligent lackeys: we laurel  your names with our praise, For ye are the staff of our comfort, for ye   are the strength of our days. Then spur on the host in the trenches to   give up the sky at a stroke: We tell all the winds of their glory: we  publish their fame with a croak!
I would my soul were like the bird  That dares the vastness undeterred.  Look, where the bluebird on the bough  Breaks into rapture even now!  He sings, tip-top, the tossing elm  As tho he would a world o’erwhelm.  Indifferent to the void he rides  Upon the wind’s eternal tides. He tosses gladly on the gale, For well he knows he can not fail— Knows if the bough breaks, still his wings  Will bear him upward while he sings!
Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore  smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost  yelling. Somewhere south of York,  she thinks he said. The funeral  procession leaves its lights on  and out of this pure stubbornness  its batteries go dead. The bank robber leans on his horn  in desperation while his partner  snaps the rubber bands around  the money. A band, you can hear it up the river, first like the new heart of the child on your lap, then like an old moon  pulsing below your nails, or something softly moving through your arms and  throat. Here, press here, not just drums. A clown is throwing caramels  at the porch rails, balloons are exploding or sailing up the river.  The lucky trees, to be able  to stand that close. If we talk  too much, we’ll surely miss it. And at the still center of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out of another life, old cars get up from the dead and dance like cripples hired out for a tent meeting.  Up and down the sidewalk, the town  sucks in its breath like a girl taking short gasps just above her trumpet,  or a fire engine’s horn, heaving like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping  against the water tower, this afternoon  just like a parade. The sore-footed  ponies are loaded down with flags  and the library float says “Immortal Shakespeare,” says it with carnations and the hides of roses,  says it with a jester and a princess  wearing wings. And she stutters, but no one cares  or can hear her. Except for the man  on the unicycle who tips his top hat  to the crowd, who swears he will  follow her anywhere, who follows  the mayor and the city council, who  follows the tap dancing class and the Future  Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans  of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation  between his teeth and sways  back and forth like a broken clock. And then things begin again, a car follows the man on the unicycle  and suddenly it’s just another car,  a pair of dice dangling from the rearview mirror, a woman  giving her breast to a child and another  child carefully peeling a crayon, then  slowly giving the peels to his grandmother, who opens the big brass  clasps of her pocketbook and lets  the bright curls drop slowly to the bottom like confetti or a boy’s first haircut. Like a first yellow leaf that fell when we weren’t looking. Because it’s summer. Like a smooth  yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing  in the new left boot of the drummer,  that someone skimmed on the river  exactly at three o’clock. Not out of anger or of boredom this time, but as if it could almost  wear wings.
1. Is it true that they dream?    It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.   The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.  The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.  We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.  The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.  The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain. 2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?  Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.  Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.  Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.  As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.  Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.  I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand. 3. Do they dream of this world or of another?  The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.  A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.  There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.  Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.  Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.  Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us. 4. How can we learn more?     This is all we will ever know.
He described her mouth as full of ashes. So when he kissed her finally he was thinking about ashes and the blacker rim just below the edge of the ashtray, and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips, and the lips themselves, at the limit of another darkness, farther and far more interior. Then the way the red, paling, just outside those lines caught fire and the pages caught soon after that. Slowly at first, but then all at once at the scalloped brown corners of each; like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird, extended, then folded in on itself; multiple, stiffening, gone.
In a drawer I found a map of the world, folded into eighths and then once again and each country bore the wrong name because the map of the world is an orphanage. The edges of the earth had a margin as frayed as the hem of the falling night and a crease moved down toward the center of the earth, halving the identical stars. Every river ran with its thin blue brother out from the heart of a country: there cedars twisted toward the southern sky and reeds plumed eastward like an augur’s pens. No dates on the wrinkles of that broad face, no slow grinding of mountains and sand, for— all at once, like a knife on a whetstone— the map of the world spoke in snakes and tongues. The hard-topped roads of the western suburbs and the distant lights of the capitol each pull away from the yellowed beaches and step into the lost sea of daybreak. The map of the world is a canvas turning away from the painter’s ink-stained hands while the pigments cake in their little glass jars and the brushes grow stiff with forgetting. There is no model, shy and half-undressed, no open window and flickering lamp, yet someone has left this sealed blue letter, this gypsy’s bandana on the darkening Table, each corner held down by a conch shell. What does the body remember at dusk? That the palms of the hands are a map of the world, erased and drawn again and Again, then covered with rivers and earth.
Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes that leave only thoughts of rain. An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no will, no will toward us. This is why the heart has paced and paced, will pace and pace across the field where yarrow was and now is dust. A leaf catches in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch. How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm when you pluck him from the air, when you pluck him from that sky where grieving swirls, and you will burn again throwing him back.
Believing each simple thing passes from a perception that is less clear into one that is, eventually, more clear. Believing each simple thing contains within it a minimal unity beyond which whatever else can be exists. That the two seeds, or four seeds, are where the pear will go and where it began. Black bark, blossoms in the mild rain, smelling like piss in the spring rain, the chips and twigs raining down beneath our weight as we broke off bouquets for the teacher. “What is that smell?” she asked. Stark, white, delicate, attached with green cuffs, twig to twig, the blooms bursting through the runnels that held them. Five runnels made in the foil by five fingers.The given world is infinite and reality is complete. That’s what I had written in the morning on the blackboard. And then, going home, I was stalled again on the bridge. I looked up and out and there I saw the girl flying and falling, flying and falling in the distance, in the narrow air between two buildings, her arms outspread, over and over against the strip of sky and above the gravel, or grass or ground—the light changed and I couldn’t see at all where or how she had dragged the trampoline that must have been the yielding source of all her motion. If you find a sight like this a kind of gift or sign, you’ve missed the way the mind seals over, the way the simplest thing pulls on its heavy hood and turns away slowly from a thought. For later, weeks later, I was stalled again in mid-bridge and couldn’t remember, yet could vaguely remember, the sense that something was about to happen, that the light would change like a bell or alarm and that in turn would mean the time had come when everyone must leave the school— with every sweater and pencil left in place —to burn, and burn and burn back to the ground.
You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Music swells the emotions; music exists to punctuate seeing. Emotion, therefore, is punctuation. Formless, freedom resembles abasement. Abasement is as infinite as desire. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Those who are not demons are saints. You are not a demon or a saint. Women are small and want something, so laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Bed are sites of abasement. The news is about the news. Faces in close-up are always in anguish. Hair and teeth are clues to class. Clothes are changing, hanging up or down And change itself is a laugh. Cause can’t be figured and consequence is yet to come. You’re either awake or asleep and that, too, is a clue to class. Children are never with groups of children unless they are singing in chorus. Their mothers cannot do enough, though there’s always room for improvement. And improvement lies in progress, though collapsing is good for a laugh. Saints will turn to the worse. Demons die if they can be found. Nature is combat, weather is sublime. Even weather can make you laugh. People you don’t know are louder than you are, but what is far away cannot harm you— Books are objects, families are inspiring. Animals protect their young; the young come with the territory. English is the only language. Reading is an occasion for interruption, and interruption is a kind of laugh. Something is bound to get better. And there is a pill with your name on it. When indoors, stick with your own race— that way you’ll feel free to laugh. Strangers are paying attention to your smell. A camera will light like a moth on disaster. Pity will turn to irony. The street is a dark and frightful place. Fires are daily. Your car is your face. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.
In the coolness here I care Not for the down-pressed noises overhead, I hear in my pearly bone the wear Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead, There is only the wearing away, The changing of means. Nor eyes I have To tell how in the summer the mourning dove Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend The sad regretful mind With the call of the horned lark. I lie so still that the earth around me Shakes with the weight of day; I do not mind if the vase Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send One of their kind to tidy up. Such play I have no memories of, Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark Of the rough pine where the crows With their great haw and flap Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows. I am kin with none of these, Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits; My sensitive bones, which dreaded, As all the living do, the dead, Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead I do not heed the first rain out of winter, Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made; And alone shine in a phosphorous glow, So, in this little plot where I am laid.
This circle holding the afternoon sky is a lake For summer business measured in stacked pairs Of peeling oars whose dinghies all ship water. Beside it on the trampled grass a carrousel shakes And turns on an Old World instrument The plink and plank and tinkle of a tune Of plunging horses in fresh habiliment. We catch the reins of enamel Pegasus And lift the child until she is astride A purple beast, where, wrapping infant arms About his neck of wood, she whirls in space And gallops off upon the turning wheel. The horse climbs steadily the silver pole Where cherubs hang, then slides toward spinning earth; She sees the moving heaven of winged babes; Rising to meet them, rising, she returns To where our faces, staring in at hers, Fixed, while her orbit whirls and sunlight burns, Recede to artifact as her vision blurs.
To you born into violence, the wars of the red ant are nothing; you, in the heart of the eruption. I am speaking from immeasurable grass blades. You, there on the rubble, what is the river of vapor to you? You who are helpless as small birds downed on the ice pack. You who are spoiled as commercial fruit by the medfly. To you the machine guns. To you the semen of fire, the birth of the maggot in the corpse. You, to whom we send these gifts; at the heart of light we are crushed together. When the sun dies we will become one.
If you had a lot of money (by some coincidence you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton getting a whiff of class) and you just noticed two days ago that your face has fallen, but you don’t believe it, so every time you look in the glass it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. Would you take the money you needed for a new roof on your old house (the house you’re paying for over and over in property taxes) because it’s been leaking for years and you’re tired of emptying buckets and spraying for mold, would you take that money and get your face lifted? Face-lift. They cut a slit under your ears and pull up the slack and they tack it with plastic. Then they pull up the outer skin and trim it because it’s too long and fasten that. (Your skin pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.) Because once you were almost as beautiful as Jane Wyman ... your friends all said that. Of course at the time she was married to Ronnie and you were involved with the ASU— a McCarthy suspect. Forget about your neck. They can’t do that yet. A face-lift lasts five years. So you could go on being a member of new-speak and re-entry— with the unsung benefits of radiation and by then your roof would have rotted anyway. Or been recycled by some corporate kid. But think how you’d rather be stripped and streaked and while you’re about it get some implants of baby teeth buds that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums and frozen for this sort of thing. You could still die young.
The shock comes slowly as an afterthought. First you hear the words and they are like all other words, ordinary, breathing out of lips, moving toward you in a straight line. Later they shatter and rearrange themselves. They spell something else hidden in the muscles of the face, something the throat wanted to say. Decoded, the message etches itself in acid so every syllable becomes a sore. The shock blooms into a carbuncle. The body bends to accommodate it. A special scarf has to be worn to conceal it. It is now the size of a head. The next time you look, it has grown two eyes and a mouth. It is difficult to know which to use. Now you are seeing everything twice. After a while it becomes an old friend. It reminds you every day of how it came to be.
While needles of the evergreen practice a windy chaos, heads of snarled hair; something in the tree longs for old age; bald brown knobs of skull without subterfuge; but it continues with its greedy resinous sexual odors. The odors rise against one another, spurting away from the scaly bark. Along its fingers the tree holds out microscopic traps. Popping bullets of sunlight crack into the subliminal orifices, and the tree thinks, “How exquisite. Is this love?”
I wore a large brim hat like the women in the ads. How thin I was: such skin. Yes. It was Indianapolis; a taste of sin. You had a natural Afro; no money for a haircut. We were in the seedy part; the buildings all run-down; the record shop, the jazz impeccable. We moved like the blind, relying on our touch. At the corner coffee shop, after an hour’s play, with our serious game on paper, the waitress asked us to move on. It wasn’t much. Oh mortal love, your bones were beautiful. I traced them with my fingers. Now the light grows less. You were so angular. The air darkens with steel and smoke. The cracked world about to disintegrate, in the arms of my total happiness.
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.  Have I come in. Will in suggestion.  They may like hours in catching.  It is always a pleasure to remember.  Have a habit.  Any name will very well wear better.  All who live round about there.  Have a manner.  The hotel François Ier.  Just winter so.  It is indubitably often that she is as denied to soften help to when it is in all in midst of which in vehemence to taken given in a bestowal show than left help in double.  Having noticed often that it is newly noticed which makes older often.  The world has become smaller and more beautiful.  The world is grown smaller and more beautiful. That is it.   Yes that is it.  If he liked to live elsewhere that was natural.  If he was accompanied.  Place praise places.  But you do.   Partly for you.  Will he he wild in having a room soon. He was not very welcome. Safety in their choice.  Amy whether they thought much of merry. I do marry del Val.  I know how many do walk too.  It was a while that they did wait for them to have an apple.  An apple.  She may do this for the Hotel Lion d’Or.II  Buy me yesterday for they may adhere to coffee.   It is without doubt no pleasure to walk about.III  The romance of the Hotel François premier is this that it was seen on a Saturday.IV  In snatches  A little a boy was three, two of them were three others.  She may be right I told her. I thought it well to tell her. They told them. They were avoiding nothing. And so.  Do they and are they will they for them to be remarkable.  Now think.V  Repose while she does.VI  An aided advantage in touch with delight. VII  Just as they will have by nearly whether.  What is the difference between a thing seen and what do you mean.  Regularly in narrative.  Who is interested in Howard’s mother or in Kitty’s mother or in James as George. Dear James as George.  A target.  Those of course of us who have forgotten war have been mean.   I mean I mean was not spoken of the sun.  Do think of the sun.VIII  A chance to have no noise in or because.IX  They change being interested there to being interested there.  Hotel François Ier  To and two to be true.  They will be with me  To have you  To be true to this  And to have them  To be true  They will have them to be trueX  Just as they were ten.XI  Who made them then.  Which made him.  Do they come then  Welcome  Join and just and join and just join them with and then.  It is very often that they are dissolved in tears.XII  Should it show where they are mine.  And his care.  It was that they might place them all of them.   Just why they do so.  To call Howard seated.  I never leave Howard. Hotel White Bird  She may be like that  Do  For me to choose.II  Our just as assume  Leave riches with her   Are dovetail an origin   With wood.III  But she  Can go clearly  To pieces  By adding act one  By add may meant scene one.   Left done right and left done.  She will never think in pointing in property inviting.IV  Just shown as their agent.V  Just shown.  As their  Agent.VI  Mutter.VII  They will read betterVIII  With otherIX  They have known a platter better.   Thank you My dear   My dear  How are you   This is for you.   Dear  How are you   This is  For you  How are you   My dear  How  My dear  How are you.II  Love which  Love which  To love which  Which to love which  My dear how are you.III  Just why they went.  They went  They were to have gone  And they did go  And they went.  What did they do.  How are you  My dear  How do you do  How are you.IV  Oh choose the better  Oh choose you  Oh choose for youV  She made it better.VI  By the choice of more  That is why  My dear  You are  Better  How are you   How do you do   You are better   Two.VII  She meant well.VIII  Much betterIX  Very much better   Well.X  She had eight  As the date  Full date  We date  We have to relate  The cause  Of bringing  It for her  It was light  As weight.  But she enjoyed it.  For it was  Not more than  Not too lateXI  Not at allXII  She is very well I thank you. For them  Just joined James.  In no way a disappointment.  They must have met with them which was in the capacity to lead and leave.  Our house contains. That is made back with idem. Idem the same just please come and claim our house as a lot which we have in a home. This is what made a pioneer.  Leave a nature to rain.  It makes no difference if they use it.  A narrative oh how often have I thought that a narrative.   How often will a narrative do.  Complain about fifty narratives perfectly.  He is waiting not for his food but for his appointment. Dear dear.  Plenty of bread and butter.  He is waiting not for his food.  Resignation does not mean narrative.  He is to come welcome, as well as having left welcome is not a narrative but foolishly.  I was completely persuaded by Mrs. Tolstoy but she told me.   She was completely persuaded by William but she told me.   How should either have been headed very often.  That is astonishing a narrative and I would so much rather be poetical.  For me.  I love poetical history for me.  I love poetical and still for me.  I love poetical will poetical for me by me.  The best of wishes  He wishes he came away he wishes.  Just why he wishes.  Joined by  He wishes.  A narrative of relieve  He wishes. Think William Poetical  So few this further.   I will reward  An error  Of regard. Hotel François Ier  Was there  A surprise  In nearly not to face  Imagine  That the name  Was the same.I  How far are you not to leave them. I  With a colored message to know colors were. To know there his coloring there.I  She made no mistake. To take not only with it. When she came to mend they say.I  Garments were a separate desire pleasure. She made hours a desired separated measure. With them they actually considered why it is a treasure. Must it become be how even much with pleasure.I  She used pleasure exactly.II  They are neither here or there.II  Or there it mostly widened for in invite there. Them there who how did it. Do this for them.II  Should it be shown. No how who ever coupled a dog out of a pleasure or round. Around. See me a round. It is polite. Let us congratulate ice rice.II  They made no mistake to be indifferent. How which come faithfully or. Will it be easy. Not for me.II  Adjust, add edge to adjoin wine. Wine is a drink. Water. Watered wine. We weigh wine.III  They must expect one of you. III  She may expect two of you. III  What does she expect   You to do.IV  Come with me and sit with meV  I am afraid if she waits longer it will do her an injury.  Forests  She liked forests in a pity.I  With forest too.II  Will forests do.III  What is it a pity will forests pretty. IV  Forests are thereV  SaturdayVI  She must be without it a  Old when b  A forest deer c  Makes it pay me d  To call her. With them  When they came in some one was waiting   When they arrived they said something   Some one was waiting when they came in. Just Church  We stay gathered  With them intentionally  Have they met them  With Church  Just as if in incompetence  I must have leaving weather  As much with confidence  In Church. Regularity  Be wider with lather   Rather a darkening  Of with gather  That they will  Suffice  Just why  They have this  As mother be occasion  To have rejoiced then ring  A bell soon.  She must be just which they do.   Outright. Behave  Why cups of butter.  They will  In the morning  Happen  To be fatter. Articles  Drop him for me.  Does wish. Tidy  They make her mending large  To have a doll   Do be careless   In hope  Of pointing  Their dispatch   Of hurry  Hurry and come in.  It is of no use.   Hours of trying   That is what breaks  In cups with more rather  Than  They wish.  Do I know whether she has come in or out. How ours  Very fairly selfish  Some sealed fake ponds   Very much as they hear like  May down in implied Shells  Ears if they accustom to born  With counted help her  I do not think better help is ugly  By which  In win.  Just why a repelled for her   They might in nature   Come for  They caress  A dove tailed  In succeeding.  Nobody knows me.   Our too. She is my bride  They make safety in seventy plus fourteen. As known as never hearing figures.  What will she see when she hears me.  It is after.   All mine.  Powers in because of up with their resource.  Careful  There is no use in eiderdown  But yes  Leaves which have been that they can win   With yes.  To guess  Would she choose what he would use.   He asked tell her to judge when   And because it is fine. Allan  Allan Ullman knew me  He was prepared next of kin   To sink and swim  With magnifying carving   Should make  It is well to have held a pillow   Or other corals At fourteen  It is extraordinary  That she made fourteen   And will make fourteen   And does fourteen sixteen   Gradually  It is extraordinary. How are they hoping  It is old to think of welcome heavy women  She was fourteen.  They liked to have owls look unlike a pigeon they do look like. That is a pigeon can be mistaken. For an owl. How many things happen   A great many things happen Every time  Every time they mix they make it different women   Who has sung men.  Do be careful of sung.  Checkers among.  Half of them sung,  Every time they changed they forgot all they bought.   However they bought.  It is very not useful but exceptional. A part  Allan Ullman who knew me.  Separately from three his brother mother and father. He knew me. He said when he knew me he separately regretted one two three not he. Our page  How could it be a little whatever he liked.  Morning glories  He made as stable morning glories  For the next to handle   Their regret.  Morning glories were eighteen to the dozen  Forty made fifteen.  Everybody who has been for them.  In add her add coming.   Too many thousands  I have a link with a king. Francis Rose  Shut up  And stay shut  Where they drink all the better  For families of yet get her  With them in ravishes  Between them with dishes  And they came then with her  In precious labor with love  He may yet get wealth in getting tender   Which they make stronger  With us  Thank you.  How many cakes make jell for jelly  And how many loves make bless  A little flower of rather think better embellishment.   Just why join mass  A mass is a towing to a lock.  At towed they devise   How to a challenge.  Challenge has nothing to do with him.  How are heads held Howard.  She cooked and seized.   Cooked and seized  She cooked and seized.   Forbearance  Cooked and seized.   Bridle is paths.  Just as about a path   Just as a path  Just as a path.  It makes no difference whether four  Ate one.  Sum to sum.  Our adding is more hours.  Ate one  Just as well ate one   Just as well eight one   Just as well eight   One just as well   Eight one.  How much are they like me  Like.  After walked.  Before walked  He made her talk   To have her  Walk  After walked  And leave a walk  Leave walk  Or leave her leave walked.  It is an error  Oh.  Join me  With observation   She may be  Our hour glass  Which we sought   And have not bought   For our hour be   Be an hour for me.   Such is sought  And here bought   For our be  Her be  Err be  Come Francis Rose   Or be  Forty leave fifteen   Thrilled be  Or sought by  It for him  Or for  Her  For him to be   When they may   They may  Shall shelter  They make  Shelter  As they may be   For and to be  Nobody knows how old showers are.   Or how should hours should be.  In inlay should be   That with mean  With be  With held will then  In to be.  What is a square. She should be  What could it prove  If it made no difference   To them Dear dog  Dear dog  What do and does it leave   Dear dog.  He likes to see  Dear dog  But did he know it was he.   Leave dear dog where he is   Otherwise it is.  Not satisfied. With him  Just why they ate   In state  With him. Why does it come like that  He so happily is present.   When it comes like that.   From him  She so pleasantly is present   When it has come from him.   She so happily is present.   When it comes from him   So happily from him  When it comes so happily out of him. He says obey  I obey which is to say  They come to-day.  And she closes the door   With delay.  But will  To happen to happen yes.   She sits with him for him   We know the difference Than  I little thought of how it went   When they were told  It had been better with them   Than  Just yet. Better heeded  Should rejoice be to arrange  Will they tell they until they are strange  Let them be for me to estrange  That they will until they change  For them will they until they have caught it to arrange   They will estrange  Because they can be blamed for the arrangement of their change to change and arrange to be strange and well intended to come to derange them then for them in abundance to them in a vice, who held them  In a vice  Twice  To them to arrange  For them it is strange  That to them for them  They arrange  In them for a vessel which is meant a book   A book look twice  He held him twice   To make him twice   Shake dice  To be thought tranquil   In their wear  Aware  Come catch with capable   To be to like  A tree  For them capable   Underwent in anger   One  Two  Three  They must be sensibly made with them for them   Three  Ultimately   She might hinder   All of them  Ultimately cornered   All of them as meant   In clouds  Who ate them  Three  Ultimately  Made in generosity   For them to have it   In undertaking  Restively  She might be wonderful   Ultimately   They might in undertaking  Shall he have pleasure   Ultimately  In their recognising   Why they were often   Just as much as three  Which they may would  It may weight wood   For them ultimately   Better than could.   It might be careful   Who has made them  Who might have made them   Ultimately careful   With them.  For them.
In the longer view it doesn’t matter. However, it’s that having lived, it matters. So that every death breaks you apart. You find yourself weeping at the door of your own kitchen, overwhelmed by loss. And you find yourself weeping as you pass the homeless person head in hands resigned on a cement step, the wire basket on wheels right there. Like stopped film, or a line of Vallejo, or a sketch of the mechanics of a wing by Leonardo. All pauses in space, a violent compression of meaning in an instant within the meaningless. Even staring into the dim shapes at the farthest edge; accepting that blur.
In ’29 before the dust storms sandblasted Indianapolis, we believed in the milk company. Milk came in glass bottles. We spread dye-colored butter, now connected to cancer. We worked seven to seven with no overtime pay; pledged allegiance every day, pitied the starving Armenians. One morning in the midst of plenty, there were folks out of context, who were living on nothing. Some slept in shacks on the banks of the river. This phenomenon investors said would pass away. My father worked for the daily paper. He was a union printer; lead slugs and blue smoke. He worked with hot lead at a two-ton machine, in a low-slung seat; a green-billed cap pulled low on his forehead. He gave my mother a dollar a day. You could say we were rich. This was the Jazz Age. All over the country the dispossessed wandered with their hungry children, harassed by the law. When the market broke, bad losers jumped out of windows. It was time to lay an elegant table, as it is now; corporate paradise; the apple before the rot caved in. It was the same worm eating the same fruit. In fact, the same Eden.
The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence,  which knew it would inherit the earth  before anybody said so.  The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds  watching him from the birdhouse.  The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.  The idea you carry close to your bosom  is famous to your bosom.  The boot is famous to the earth,  more famous than the dress shoe,  which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it  and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.  I want to be famous to shuffling men  who smile while crossing streets,  sticky children in grocery lines,  famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,  or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,  but because it never forgot what it could do.
it would be that but only if I knew how  again  Could something like  that get lost? no only  a little a little lost    but if only I remember  how I mean she or I  oh a freight train goes by  & they always do & did  do  I mean a real one too  that I’m not on & am it  very seriously    in this serious love world  that one  where something oddly music  will pass through your  night  and it will be me  sweet me
Does not mean silence. The absence of moon in the day sky for example. Does not mean barely to speak, the way a child's whisper makes only warm air on his mother's right ear. To play pianissimo is to carry sweet words to the old woman in the last dark row who cannot hear anything else, and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.
Be glad your nose is on your face, not pasted on some other place, for if it were where it is not, you might dislike your nose a lot. Imagine if your precious nose were sandwiched in between your toes, that clearly would not be a treat, for you’d be forced to smell your feet. Your nose would be a source of dread were it attached atop your head, it soon would drive you to despair, forever tickled by your hair. Within your ear, your nose would be an absolute catastrophe, for when you were obliged to sneeze, your brain would rattle from the breeze. Your nose, instead, through thick and thin, remains between your eyes and chin, not pasted on some other place— be glad your nose is on your face!
This misalliance follows the custom for female children To adhere to maternal practices While the atheist father presides over  the prattle of the churchgoer with ironical commentary from his arm-chair But by whichever religious route to brute reality our forebears speed us There is often a pair of idle adult accomplices in duplicity to impose upon their brood an assumed acceptance  of the grace of God defamed as human megalomania seeding the Testament with inconcievable chastisement and of Christ who come with his light of toilless lilies To say “fear not it is I” wanting us to be fearful He who bowed the ocean tossed  with holy feet which supposedly dead are suspended over head  neat- ly crossed in anguish  wounded with red varnish From these slow-drying bloods of mysticism  mysteriously the something-soul emerges  miserably and instinct (of economy)  in every race for reconstructing debris  has planted an avenging face  in outer darkness  . . . The lonely peering eye  of humanity looked into the Néant   and turned away  . . . Ova’s consciousness impulsive to commit itself to justice  —to arise and walk its innate straight way out of the accidence of circumstance— collects the levitate chattels  of its will and makes for the  magnetic horizon of liberty  with the soul’s foreverlasting  opposition to disintegration So this child of Exodus with her heritage of emigration often “sets out to seek her fortune” in her turn trusting to terms of literature dodging the breeders’ determination not to return “entities sent on consignment”  by their maker Nature except in a condition of moral effacement Lest Paul and Peter  never notice the creatures  ever had had Fathers  and Mothers They were disgraced in their duty should such spirits take an express passage through the family bodies to arrive at Eternity as lovely as they originally  promised So on whatever days she chose to “run away” the very street corners of Kilburn close in upon Ova to deliver her into the hands of her procreators Oracle of civilization ‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone  but by every discomfort that proceedeth out of legislation’
Herbert Glerbett, rather round, swallowed sherbet by the pound, fifty pounds of lemon sherbet went inside of Herbert Glerbett. With that glob inside his lap Herbert Glerbett took a nap, and as he slept, the boy dissolved, and from the mess a thing evolved— a thing that is a ghastly green, a thing the world had never seen, a puddle thing, a gooey pile of something strange that does not smile. Now if you’re wise, and if you’re sly, you’ll swiftly pass this creature by, it is no longer Herbert Glerbett. Whatever it is, do not disturb it.
“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan  I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands away from her throat—the way she liked in loving to have her pearls exchanged for the torque of my fingers and so kill her eminence for a second. The queen is dead. Long live the queen. The evidence was volatile, was fugitive, was a story told in menstrual blood and glycerines, Chanel and boss sauce. It failed in the telling to be events and sequence, the spell of water and bridge, and became rain and distance, the first faint smell of rose dismembering, masking the rigor mortis of the coyotes. I took my hands away as from the child sleeping or from the hot stove, and I was no longer I. I saw the sky in the windshield of another city. The sky an empty karate studio, the sky Route 95. Because she saw herself everywhere, The sky a fugue, the folds of a gown where the dragons are. there could be no other. A film was her darling, the sky Artists’ Supplies, the sky six-thirty darkening. a mirror of her hair—fixed or deranged Sky of correspondences, the color of G minor, the taste of gray. She thought, from the audience: I should be up there. February sky a copy center, relocated elsewhere. I loved to go out into the audience, the bebopist said, and walk in the crowd to feel what they feel. Jumping down from the bandstand, I broke my foot, lay there, had to blare it from my back. The sky nineteenth-century smoke, the sky a drum, then here comes the bass solo.Vote Hoffa, the sky says, labor sky, the dollar soaring with the yen. The sky popularized, blue-red, the access and the factory. I take myself to the movies—the romance of sheets, the dustup of things and her magnificent face: stylish, the sky inside her eyes, chlorine and glass. I tithe to the darkness and I’m glad for the dark two hours where I undo her, where I remember the eye I indulged, the opposite of sacrifice, the lamb’s throat uncut, the woolly body kindled in the green like a dream of Lorca’s, betrayed in the telling. The sky Repairables, the sky Pony Rides. Some nights in the house by the river, I walked out into a collective dream of home—an overstory overlooking a body of water—where I found the horse like smoke or luck, a muscled earth, an avatar, and I held him, face to flank, and felt the skeleton under the skin and the fear of the human touched back by hunger. The great white eye another moon. It was a lesser and a greater form of the feeling after fucking, if it has a form, if its past is present. Sky an empty shelf in the Salvation Army Thrift Store. A few fine hairs like her lashes on my hands The sky a white peony, the sky a paper life. when I came back and found her bound in the sheets, the opposite of spectacle, not absorbing the gaze but giving off light like night water, giving back the gorgeous I had inscribed there, a fallen form, small, fursheen, film still, a body suddenly small enough to fill a tear duct. The sky a shell, a lull in the shelling. What was it like, the loving? Like Sarajevo under siege, no electricity, no gas, no water, and yet the dance goes on in which a bathtub is filled, and, although the theater is twenty degrees, the dancer of the god-kissed tendons for her finale jumps into it—the leap that takes away the breath and rations it to everyone, and it’s the only bath for anyone in two months. The sky orchestra and karma, the sky Gold Bought and Sold. The windows of the house I won’t live in held light and the island fires on the river, held hawk and heron. Under siege in dream, the panes slash my face when they shatter with difference, inside, outside, with distance, what was not. A second dream: kids go by on bikes and big wheels, their faces grown up and disfigured, scabbed, hydrocephalic with sadness. Finally the whole body The sky a gray whale, the sky magnanimous and cruel. and not just its parts, wants to be unloved, beginning The sky Purgatory Road, the sky a god mouth, a crow. with its parts, the fetish of her: a cell from the lining, spit, a follicle, the thousand ships of her face, the torso and ratio, rib whittle, unbound feet, beginning to become vast, nothing you can touch, a taste, The sky a copper pot blackened, picked clean of puchero. a smell, familiar and far away, unlocked by thaw, feral and essential, like a language lost, like night illuminated by the night.
The surfers beautiful as men  can be ride the warm  blue green  swells and the white sand is alive with girls. Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in as the native warriors did. I tried to swim and tried to look, but ended up just going back: a huge, perfect black man at the beach somehow drove me away a block to St. Augustine’s Church. The bodies were giv-  ing me a fit and I have come to seek the momentary calm we find sometimes in the musk of Christ (when he was awake  and sweat- ing blood  as others slept, or like a furious bouncer hustling out the money changers). The bodies of Mary and Christ both still live, we’re told. They’re alive and thus must have dealt with the stress of that long time  of turning on to being young. I speak of teens.  Fifteen and ten years ago when I first confessed, it was in this same church built then as a gigantic shed where the strange Hawaiian birds (I forgot their names—no matter) flew in and out of the high wood- en rafters like the whimsical winds of grace, and grace gives back to sight what beauty is—  as that loveliness at the beach. Now the church  has been rebuilt in pointed stone across the street from a much  higher new hotel where at lunch  I almost spilled and found I could not eat the purple orchid in my drink.
We suffer from the repression of the sublime. —Roberto Assagioli This artist’s sculptured, open box of mahogany (ivory white inside) is strung with vertical and horizontal layers of mus- ical wires that sing when struck, and bits of bright garnet rock tremble where they intersect. These gems flash in the candle light, and before me all my beloved childhood looms up in the humming levels, each one deeper than the other. I tip this sculpted box and my child laughs and moves there in his own time. You’ll hear me moan: Oh, you will hear me moan with all the old, sure pleasure of what I’d thought I’d lost come back again. Why, we have never left our home! On the leather lace fixed about my neck, blue, yellow, red and black African trading beads begin to glow: their colors all weave and newly flow together like translucent and angelic worms. And beneath these my neck is as alive with gentle, white bees as is a woman’s breast. Beside and in the light river figures come on stage exactly as they are needed. I tell you, I conduct my own act! A boy poses so youthfully, so beautifully, his slim arms a graceful arrow over his small, brown head, and he dives! Limbs and body push supple as a whole school of fish. And then his vacant place is taken by another— a man dressed in denim and in boots of red rubber. He is wrenched from the shore and pulled through the fresh, bright stream by a kid who tugs on one of his hands and holds a fishing rod. And, too, this man is dragged in the opposite direction by a red dog on a leash shaking his wet great coat into the stippled light. That man just sashayed: he zigzagged this way and that. The man is me! A bluejay does a dance for us! He hops beside a tree that rises inside of me. He half-glides, his iridescent, blue back striking like a brush of Gauguin on the bare canvas of the air and then: he flies! leaving behind him a small, perfect feather, which I find shades from blue to brown— my brother’s color into mine. Now in the space the diver and the booted fellow left, my brother and I are there fishing together, our poles glinting in the water. My mouth moves. My eyes are alive! I cry to my brother with joy. For that bluejay was a messenger of what I want! Gregory my friend and guide on this voyage seems benign. He brushes my chest and my stretched, naked arms open to the sun with a branch of the fragrant pine. “Be healed,” he chants with each glancing stroke. “Be healed.” The needles prick my skin back into life, and I go down to bathe my feet in the stream. The veins form a light, mottled web along my white ankle. I feel my kinship with the pine, the jay, the luminescent stream and with him—or is it with her, the Mother? Gregory, my oracle, my teacher. He leans there in the door of our tent by the river, his face glowing, hair long and shining as a woman’s, his belly fat with life—pregnant with the two of us: my brother and I, unborn twins who lie entangled in each other’s developing limbs. Soon we will be born! He and I will taste of milk for the very first time! And taste of strawberry pop and of bright bananas. And we will eat, my brother and I, a great, shining, autumn-red apple fallen from our father’s tree as if from the long sky, and you too will taste this apple with us, for we all have the same mother, and her name is Grace.
The bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender. —Rilke 1 The children play at the Luxembourg fountain. Their small ships catch wind and sail out and come round again.2 Sometime between 250 and 200 B.C. fishermen and boatmen of the tribe Parisii discovered and built their huts on the largest island  in the River Seine. Celtic Lutetia, “Town surround- ed by water,”  thus was born there. The island is shaped like a boat— and this figure became a part of the capital’s coat-of-arms. So this was the start  of the City first named for its engulfing water  (on whose economy it depended), then after the people themselves: members of the tribe of Paris.  We listen to these water folk and know they hear us,  for we are born out of boats and out of water.  The first sound we hear is the heart knocking quiet as a boat docks: and we all dissolve to island, earth and tears later.3 And into air and fire! Once in the Latin Quarter in a space formed for him by waves of bright loiterers near the shortest street named for the Cat Who Catches Fish— or who (with slight inflection) “sins”— I watched a dark young man, naked to his thin waist, push long plumes of flame into the air above our awed faces raised there. From the sharp heat inside and out, his head and chest glowed in the night with an aura of oil or sweat. Thirsting, he drank again from a sponge of kerosene and breathed out long strings of fire and smoke into the Street  of the Harp.  Dark ash dropped back upon his face and cap,  which lay open on the cobbled road waiting for coins  from all who guessed at the mystery in what he’d done.  He built a vast pillar of fire as if to guide us, then suddenly stopped, walked across the space, and kissed a reaching child (to bless and heal that amazed head), waved gratefully to us who now filled his cap with alms, and, smiling and burned (I saw scars beneath his raised arm),  he sailed up that narrowing street in a wildly bal- looning white shirt we had watched him casually don  to cover his vestment of skin.4 For centuries that old City ended its west boundary in a small archipelago separated from the main island by the Seine’s two arms. It was on one of these small islets that Philip the Fair about the year 1314 had raised up a stake for the grand master, Order of Templars, whom he condemned, then from the palace window watched him burn.  These little islands, quickened with their ghost victim’s screams,  were joined in the sixteenth century by the decree of Henry Third (and by a great engineering feat Faust could envy) to the main island of the City. This new western tip was given the name of a park, “Vert Galant,” nickname of Henry Fourth: “The Gay old Spark.” Near there I watched in a loud street a white-haired man stand with one foot on the curb, the other in the cobbled street, and play  an old mandolin. He was dressed in a black and frayed  tuxedo and played with intense passion, sadly, but  this desperate, dignified man, transformed by his art  and by poverty (his case kept open for money), could not play the mandolin. —He just strummed the same chord again  and again and again ...5 It was also Philip the Fair who created an aristocratic prison air by building the blocks-long Gothic Conciergerie. The best view is from the Right Bank: The Slaughter House Quay  (which now is a market for pets). You can see the four recently cleaned towers reflect- ed in the Seine. (At the Seine in fall, beneath the red  and gold leaves, you see the rust, mahogany and beige  boats gently jostle together at the shore and wait.)  On the right: the crenelated Bonbec Tower stays.  Bonbec means “babbler,” for this place was used through the centuries as a torture chamber.  The right one of the twin towers, Argent, held treasure.  Still the gorgeous Horloge Tower on the left corner of the ancient building across from the Bridge of Change  houses the giant clock which gave its name to that quay:  in its field of blue the many great gold fleurs-de-lys  and the two life-sized mythical women, one with a fascicle of wheat, one with a balanced scale raised high in the clock,  whose silver chime used to toll the hours for the monarch.  (This was melted down in those days when Terror struck.)  In this turreted place we have shaved the graceful neck  and head of Marie Antoinette, ripped her white, ruffled  collar wide and wrapped the cuff of rope about her hands behind her back. We made her face the casual knitting women and men making fists  sitting on steps in the “May Court” (where a fresh tree was placed each spring by the lawyers’ clerks!)  on her way to the guillotine. Its blade was heavy  as primeval stone: she, the chemist Lavoisier,  Charlotte Corday, poet and brother André Chénier,  Madame du Barry—all 2600 who died, having said their last farewells in the Women‘s Courtyard,  twelve per day underneath the blade! and some were disemboweled beside. Was there sometimes an image of beauty in their minds  at the last? Perhaps on white sands beside the blue-black sea a matched pair of roan horses  galloping together in the bright spume, riderless.  Or a nude young man and woman lying together  touching in a field of flowers?6 Nearby on this Island the gargoyles of Notre Dame gawk in ancient horror and some forever gnaw on stone rabbits in the parapets or wail in winged, formal misery outside the set limits of the orthodox Church— all glory happening within the walls where they squat: so hunched, so beaked, so horrorstruck.7 A wing of the May Courtyard where the condemned waited  “Monsieur de Paris” as executioners were named  now adjoins the building of glass and light, with no walls,  it seems, jewel of Sainte Chapelle, its windows of rose and blue, gold, green, yellow, purple,  rising fifty feet:  its spire piercing the foliate, layered, many-colored egg of the vault of heaven,  showering all the primal hues and shadows given— bright as the truth reflected in a drop of fresh blood  or the colors of the body’s inner organs hid- den before the sure explosion of light that hits them  at the moment of violent death. —This is a time like that of the sun that once a year, just at the dawn  of winter solstice, lights up an ancient Celtic stone  grave, striking the bones spread on shelves with all the colors of the flesh.8 Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street, Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart.  for Roger Aplon—1975
There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken and a sad lamb with seven legs whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland, California. I saw the man with doubled eyes who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit. Will it snag upon this aging flesh? There is a strawberry that grew out of a carrot plant, a blade of grass that lanced through a thick rock, a cornstalk nineteen-feet-two-inches tall grown by George Osborne of Silome, Arkansas. There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell. It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time. It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore who began collecting links on his naked body until he crawled around the town carrying the last thirteen years of his life six-hundred-seventy pounds. Each link or each lump in me is an offense against love. I want my own lit candle lamp buried in my skull like the Lighthouse Man of Chungking, who could lead the travelers home. Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where I live. If my home is here, inside my breast, light it up! And I will invite you in as my first guest.
In the desolate depths of a perilous place the bogeyman lurks, with a snarl on his face. Never dare, never dare to approach his dark lair for he's waiting . . . just waiting . . . to get you. He skulks in the shadows, relentless and wild in his search for a tender, delectable child. With his steely sharp claws and his slavering jaws oh he's waiting . . . just waiting . . . to get you. Many have entered his dreary domain but not even one has been heard from again. They no doubt made a feast for the butchering beast and he's waiting . . . just waiting . . . to get you. In that sulphurous, sunless and sinister place he'll crumple your bones in his bogey embrace. Never never go near if you hold your life dear, for oh! . . . what he'll do . . . when he gets you!
May I never be afraid  especially of myself   but Muhammed Ali are you telling the truth?   Well you’re being true aren’t you and you talk so wonderfully in your body  that protects you with physique of voice  raps within dance  May I never be afraid  rocked and quaked   the mantilla is lace  whose black is oak But if I’m dark I’m strong  as my own darkness my strength the universe   whose blackness is air  only starry  lace But if I’m alive I’m strong   as life Strong as the violets in Marlon Brando’s fist  his dissemblance flourished into truth   She took them I’d take me too   I do  and my Ali I see you   a hard bright speck of me the savage formalist  authentic deed of gossip  a kind body
It appeared inside our classroom at a quarter after ten, it gobbled up the blackboard, three erasers and a pen. It gobbled teacher's apple and it bopped her with the core. “How dare you!” she responded. “You must leave us . . . there's the door.” The Creature didn't listen but described an arabesque as it gobbled all her pencils, seven notebooks and her desk. Teacher stated very calmly, “Sir! You simply cannot stay, I'll report you to the principal unless you go away!” But the thing continued eating, it ate paper, swallowed ink, as it gobbled up our homework I believe I saw it wink. Teacher finally lost her temper. “OUT!” she shouted at the creature. The creature hopped beside her and GLOPP . . . it gobbled teacher.
I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;  I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb  and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,  knowing I would only let them win.  I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,  coming back late from the interval  long after the others have taken their seats,  and in deserted shopping malls late at night,  peering at things they can never buy,  and I have found them wandering  in a wood where I too have wandered.  This morning I caught one;  small and stupid, too slow to get away,  it was only a promise I had made to myself once  and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me  and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach  in their long, sad faces. When I drew near them, they scurried away,  even though they will sleep in my yard tonight.  I hate them for their ingratitude,  I who have kept countless promises,  as dead now as Shakespeare’s children.  “You bastards,” I scream,  “you have to love me—I gave you life!”
1. In the land of milk and cream delivered early and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care about good grooming and, of course, news of slurs and curs ... Can it really be that home becomes a place to be stranded? “I don’t see a single storm cloud anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,” out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the answers and questions become identical as evil twins. 2. Basketball ghosts bounce and sweat again in that second-floor gym in the middle of July— that never-to-be-forgotten home of the first-ever Boys State Championship. Rusty jump shots and long-ago corner hooks rim out in a stream of dusted sunlight. “Just to play the game, don’t you know, you know, no matter how much the sacrifice ... ” How searing afternoon’s vagueness now, dreamed in a daylong haze of headache pills downed at the General Lew Wallace Motor Lodge: how the arc of the ball rises to echoes of split-jump cheers in lubricated air, when phantom bodies strive and leap and go prostrate to that squeak of rubber on polished wood— in a game of shirts and skins. 3. You can only wonder how Ezra Pound dissected his time here, among tractors and proctors and temples of antebellum style, as he cooed sweet Greek in the ear of his secular Madonna ... Just now, two pigeons greet first daylight on the Green of Wabash College. Something to be said for being scandalized silly, and in more than one language when life becomes holier than the Crusades. And what’s more—didactic passions eventually drive you insane, thinks young EP, so what? Sew buttons, ha! And make it new always ... and always leave the door cracked open, a light on, and one foot on the floor. 4. “The meatloaf here’s not very good,” warns waitress Lucy, a pretty girl with a tooth missing. Indifferently, day proceeds utterly. Off Country Road X-10, out by Carcus Creek, driving past Minnie Betts’s florist shop and what’s left of the old city jail, you figure each small detail adds glory to any story.  “Relax,” says Elton Bidwell, the county’s dead-buzzard collector, “I’ll take care of us all when we com’ on home.” 5. The town goes dark in a killer storm. Collective forgetting and forgiving occurs. But safety comes in many forms. In this vast black you get to thinking about giddy joys and little sorrows, the curse of full employment at minimum wage, and those conspicuous professors— their bowties and braces speaking to the ages and marking moments of learned unworthiness. Maybe, it’s vacuum-packed fear in a stage-managed town. Time to guess what’s behind each tiny crime and local leer, at once rancorous and baffling. Strangers need not apply. A few lights click on at the Shortstop Grille. These cruel weathers turn asphalt slick. The old intramurals begin again. 6. Early Sunday morning and a drunken Elton Bidwell is strung like a scarecrow on his front porch swing, deposited by Grand Wizards from the Odd Fellows Lodge bar late last night—reminder to those devoted folks heading up Church Street with songbooks in hand, that home sure proves just another place to be stranded.
Love While nothing satisfies, not morning’s Bleary mirror or the slick embrace at hand, Consider our mutual jewel an untouching, a pouring Into sweet emptied arms called worth and habit. Hey, you there, change of mind, eh? So, it is these comic-book poses that promise Softer years, quite bearable as amnesia or sex.Sex Tough talkers, their brain-pans fried black From a constant heat, turn out swell On the boulevard strolling in evening wear. Appearances being unavoidable As the urge to keep tuned, even stars Seems to itch for more, for a squeeze Of all our drizzling nothings, save time.Time Leaning out from this wayside planet, You witness another life blown like glass Without pattern or fatuous secret, Yet a limited edition of uncertain radius. Presume then to be home, a part dismantled By continuity; some guiding light Phasing on and off like an unoriginal religion.Religion Get far up and hard in the hole Between dead of winter skies and beyond Limits of ourselves documented by precinct, Greeted cordially by scandal. Too soon Allegiance becomes resistance and otherwise; Meanwhile, after a holy pinch in the ass You are often saved and, perhaps, in love.
Up the dog bounds to the window, baying like a basset his doleful, tearing sounds from the belly, as if mourning a dead king, and now he’s howling like a beagle – yips, brays, gagging growls – and scratching the sill paintless, that’s how much he’s missed you, the two of you, both of you, mother and daughter, my wife and child. All week he’s curled at my feet, warming himself and me watching more TV, or wandered the lonely rooms, my dog shadow, who like a poodle now hops, amped-up windup maniac yo-yo with matted curls and snot nose smearing the panes, having heard another car like yours taking its grinding turn down our block, or a school bus, or bird-squawk, that’s how much he’s missed you, good dog, companion dog, dog-of-all-types, most excellent dog I told you once and for all we should never get.
Life, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days, Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays Some shape of strength or symmetry to call; One shatters it in bits to mend a wall; One in a craftier hand the chisel lays, And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze, Carves it apace in toys fantastical. But least is he who, with enchanted eyes Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian’s perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.
There is a spectacle and something is added to history. It has as its object an indiscretion: old age, a gun, the prevention of sleep. I am placed in its stead and the requisite shadow is yours. It casts across me, a violent coat. It seems I fit into its sleeve. So the body wanders. Sometime it goes where light does not reach. You recall how they moved in the moon dust? Hop, hop. What they said to us from that distance was stupid. They did not say I love you for example. The spectacle has been placed in my room. Can you hear its episode trailing, pretending to be a thing with variegated wings? Do you know the name of this thing? It is a rubbing from an image. The subject of the image is that which trespasses. You are invited to watch. The body in complete dark casting nothing back. The thing turns and flicks and opens.
1. Someone plays  & the breaking mounts. Raw material for worthy forthcoming; indecipherable, discrete.  Plays rhapsodies as the air cools and vanquishes: nothing sits still, yet. The land is a result of its use, I explained. Everything else rested while the kids made a girdle removed from classical syntax. Shed, and something breaks, mounting the small hill to its vista: I saw a rope of trees in another country. I could not say I am lost in the proper way. The season is huge. This house is haunted: I planted it. Where? In the shed, and spoiled by attention. You see? Every bit counts, when the morning displays the serious ratio of the given stars. What made us tear the hours into lines? So things became a burden to shed, and astute as a hungry pilgrim but not brave, not expert. It is impolite to stare. Is unwise to plunder the easily forgotten, easily shed, and2. They drummed and drummed, attached to a vestigial clamor. The heat splayed; sparklers ravished the fog. Morning tore the dead back to shore; enemy ships floundered and were forgotten. Still, nothing was appeased: the living silhouette drifted into view like an ephemeral sail promoting ease between wreckages.  Not speaking a word of English she animated the landscape with abundance, a chosen self lively translated into the color of her eyes. Awkward and luminous, a stilted charm separating figure from ground, and solving it. What pushed up toward the abysmal with such new appraisals, such sure interest? The mute girl had seen glories but what had she come to know? A finite figure in a rainy field. A naked figure in a pool. A skipping figure across a bridge. A lost figure on a city street. A moaning figure on a huge bed. A smiling face in a photograph. All summer, I circled the garden for her sake.   In memory of my sister Jennifer
I once hit clothespins  for the Chicago Cubs.  I'd go out after supper  when the wash was in  and collect clothespins  from under four stories  of clothesline.  A swing-and-a-miss  was a strike-out;  the garage roof, Willie Mays,  pounding his mitt  under a pop fly.  Bushes, a double,  off the fence, triple,  and over, home run.  The bleachers roared.  I was all they ever needed for the flag.  New records every game— once, 10 homers in a row!  But sometimes I'd tag them  so hard they'd explode,  legs flying apart in midair,  pieces spinning crazily  in all directions.  Foul Ball! What else  could I call it?  The bat was real.
Madison, Wisconsin, 1996 Here is a genial congregation, well fed and rosy with health and appetite, robust children in tow. They have come and all the generations of them, to be fed, their old ones too who are eligible now for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age. Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one, heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said. Here there is good will; here peace on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance, here is the promised land of milk and honey, out of which a flank of the fatted calf, thick still on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.
The mountains carry snow, the season fails. Jackstraw clapboard shivers on its nails, the freezing air blows maple leaves and dust, a thousand nails bleed laceries of rust, slates crack and slide away, the gutters sprout. I wonder: do a dead man’s bones come out like these old lintels and wasp-riddled beams? I ask in simple consequence of structure seen in this old house, grown sturdy in its fall, the brace and bone of it come clear of all I took for substance, what I could not prove from any measure of design or love. Or is it rather that he falls away to no articulation but decay, however brightly leap the brass-hinged bone, beam and rafter, joist and cellar-stone?
When in Wisconsin where I once had time the flyway swans came whistling to the rotten Green Bay ice and stayed, not feeding, four days, maybe five, I shouted and threw stones to see them fly. Blue herons followed, or came first. I shot a bittern’s wing off with my gun. For that my wife could cry. My neighbor’s wife mistook the spawning frogs for wood ducks nesting the white pines up on Bean Hill: I straightway set her right. Each April, on the first rainy night I lantern-hunt for salamanders where they hide, toewalking the bottom mucks and muds. I shudder at the scored skin of their sides, the deep flesh tucks. In hand, they dry. I walk in frogspawn jellies on my lawns. One time I hoped the great white birds might brake for the frog ditch and alight, but all the addled past falls in on itself, splash rings close inward on the rising stone, my gun sucks fire, the bone becomes whole bone, light narrows back on point and filament, the forest turns to sand, and only season lacking source rolls round and round, till I in my turns fall forever back clutching my stone, my gun, my light. When in Wisconsin where I once had time and spring beasts gorged my marrows and my tongue, I was not blind: the red eft clambered in my eye.
The damselfly folds its wings over its body when at rest. Captured, it should not be killed in cyanide, but allowed to die slowly: then the colors, especially the reds and blues, will last. In the hand it crushes easily into a rosy slime. Its powers of flight are weak. The trout feeds on the living damselfly. The trout leaps up from the water, and if there is sun you see the briefest shiver of gold, and then the river again.  When the trout dies it turns its white belly to the mirror of the sky. The heron fishes for the trout in the gravelly shallows on the far side of the stream. The heron is the exact blue of the shadows the sun makes of trees on water. When you hold the heron most clearly in your eye, you are least certain it is there. When the blue heron dies, it lies beyond reach on the far side of the river.
1 In prologue let me plainly say I shall not ever come to that discretion where I do not rage to think I grow decrepit, bursten-bellied, bald and toothless, thick of hearing, tremulous of leg, dry and rough-barked as a hemlock slab, the soft rot setting in and all my wheezy dreams the tunnelling  of beetles in a raspy bark. For now I am fleshed at smaller sports, and grow in time into the mineral thick fell of earth; Vermont hairy with violets, roses, lilies and like minions and darlings of the spring, meantime working wonders, rousing astonishments. And being a humble man, I at the same time acknowledge  my miscreate: the nightshades, cabbages and fleaworts of my plot, though always I try to turn my back and scorn  upon the inkhorn term and speak as is most commonly  received with smile and wink and approbative nod,  not overfine nor at the same time reckless of the phrase, nor ever ugly, turdy, tut-mouthed, but always joyous at the goosey brain, the woolpack of the solid cloud, a crowd, a heap, a troop, a plume of trees, grass, gulls and rabbits, in the end, no doubt, a vulgar prattle: but the planet swells and bulges and protrudes beyond my eyes’ aversions,  and tottery, fuddled, always I give up, I am not understood,  or wrongly, out of some general assumption of my innocence. 2 This much I wish to say, my nonesuch, nosegay native sweet, in someway plainer, this is my letter to you,  and out of most severe purpose: the bee, the honey stalk, the whole keep of the house endanger me: the perspectives of the clapboard, the steep  falls of the lawn, the razory apices of ridges, and the abdominous curves of the meadow into the far  trees. There are ponds below the house, and water runs.  The road crosses the water, and the road diminishes to the reach of the next farm, and the farm  beyond that, and two miles bearing right or left  somewhere runs Highway 25. I have found my way  with difficulty, I am confused, halfway I have suffered  a failure of vital powers, a swoon, have been smirked at by the natives, and misdirected. Fitting, for I always dream of the painless redemption, the return  from fiasco and tumultuous journey to the transcendentally  serene lawns of a transcendentally white house with columns of oak trees and iron deer and the  affectionate greeting of One who has these many years  waited in full patience, without complaint, for me to come in bleeding, dusty and deliquescent  from the fields, the blade in my thigh, or blinded,  the victim of fire or ravenous birds, the lovely blood  on my cheek like tears, one-limbed, a bullet in my heart, my hands, my head cut off and the dark  pulses of my blood diminishing. Yet never a reproach  for my criminal self-negligence, my careless japeries and clumsy flounderings: instead, my brow is wiped, my  wounds attended to, blood let, leeches applied: I heal,  I grow strong, I can set forth again renewed, valiant,  sturdy, full of high spirits, lively, gay, spruce in looks, a reveler, a merry prankster, dimpled in the cheek from smiling, perfect Pilgrim, fit  for the chemistry of the Resurrection. Yet I am of wild and changeful moods. I am perhaps worthy  of being stoned, sometimes. I lie hid and lurk in wait  for the giggling girleries and leap out and shout  and scatter them like chickens from the boot to the safe  and flying four winds. I am easy and fluent  in the telling of lies, and let it be said that I roar and sing scurrilous songs in base places, and shall no doubt  for this little vain merriment find a sorrowful reckoning  in the end. Still, my noises please me, and what  this wretched poet overmuch desires, he easily believes.  It is his conventional cowardice, it makes him  immortally glad. But then he always grows morose  (that is in his favor), he repents, lances his soul, thinks  of the willows and the columned porch and the wind  melliloquent about the chimneys, and you  from where he sits now at the far end of this small porch of a Federal farmhouse  in this very and summery Vermont. 3 I look down the pitches of the lawn: fireflies make small explosions among the grass stems,  and I think that to walk down that slant of lawn  to the black waters of the brook at the dark join  of the cleft would be like dying, and that if I die  I will never pardon time. I think my words will echo only in my own mind forever, to what purpose  I do not know I see a firefly trapped inside the screen.  I have no name for any of this; I know it clearly  in the same way I know the dead cry of the starlings  in the eaves, the smell of after rain, the warm air holding in the hollows of the roads. For this  there is no name. The holding mind is likewise  without name. That is the final thought, it is the disorder, the reason for all this. The clouds begin to reach up Blood Mountain, and I am sitting on a farmhouse porch, and there are trees, and it is late and I am dreaming  that I dream I stare down into a fouled well and see  the white legbones of a deer and the water’s surface  matte with loose hair, the green stink welling and bellying from the fertile sump up and flowing  outwards in a fountaining current of vines and melons  and leaves and the knotgrass lawns blossoming with gilliflowers, shoulder-high, cloud-high, the sun finally smothering  in grass, and then in the entire silence of this growth the grasses thickening, darkening, becoming clouds,  reaching up from the ridges. And all night there is rain. I dream that when I awaken  it is a shining milky day, four roosters  are crowing in the yard and geese dabble in the green soft muds of the ditches. This is the literal surface, and for all the extravagance of what has gone before  I now repent, and make an image:  All of Vermont each night blazes  with fireflies, the comet is a faint green phosphorescence to the North, the catalpas blossom and each noon the sunlight hardens, and the sky is a clear ground, and I can look from my open doorway into dry and fiery yards. You see, I draw back always, I cannot be understood. O I wud slepe all the swete darkemans, nor ever speke!
Water sheets on the old stone of the cellar walls, trickles out over the floor into little deltas of mud, worse every year, so that now I can see daylight at the footings, and upstairs the floors sometimes tremble and the clothes go damp in the closets. And sometimes I think the whole place is about to come down, and have begun to dream at night of moving, unaccountably sad to think of leaving this house which has possessed me now for eighteen years, in which one of us has died and two been born, for all its elegance of detail most everything not right in it, or long gone bad, nothing ever done which should have been, one hundred years and more of water rancid in the cellars, moldings never finished or else mitred crookedly, all the small and growing energies of dirt and rot wherever we care to look, whenever we do. And we do. But I dream also of the pine grove of my planting, which I know I love and which is the green truth of this place: in one day ten years ago I dug fourteen small trees, wrapped the roots in burlap, dragged them down from the top ridge of the hill, spaced them carefully, watered them each day for one whole season. Now they are twenty feet high, thick roots already at the cellar wall, vigorous and loud even in little winds, only the hemlock mournful and reluctant to do much in the way of increasing itself. But it is clear that if I do not freely leave this place, it will leave me—though, as Ray Reynolds says, digging at a powdery floor joist with his knife, there may be more here than I think, better than a two-by-six at least; and his blade slides two inches in and stops at what he calls the heartwood, meaning, as I take it, at the wood which has not yet given way.
In one dream I am made watchful. In this dream the name we never clearly have heard  is spoken, which name, if we knew and could speak it, would call back to us  those whom in time we will have come to love  and who will die; would bring them back to us like us abandoned again to his terrible consequence,  the silence between us forever affirmed. And in whatever  might constitute the pardon  would come down in a fragile rain the whole matter of all we will ever love, the whole fiery blade of space, ten billions of suns suddenly blossoming small and cool  as snowdrops over the opening graves,  the world shimmering with the blue delicate membrane of the fallen sky, while above us the forsaken voice calls out come back come back as if calling the name each of us had long forgotten until that very instant not remembered as proper to our hearts.
Lift ev’ry voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast’ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might, Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand. True to our God, True to our native land.
It starts in sadness and bewilderment,  The self-reflexive iconography  Of late adolescence, and a moment When the world dissolves into a fable  Of an alternative geography  Beyond the threshold of the visible. And the heart is a kind of mute witness,  Abandoning everything for the sake  Of an unimaginable goodness Making its way across the crowded stage Of what might have been, leaving in its wake  The anxiety of an empty page. Thought abhors a vacuum. Out of it came  A partially recognizable shape Stumbling across a wilderness, whose name, Obscure at first, was sooner or later  Sure to be revealed, and a landscape  Of imaginary rocks and water And the dull pastels of the dimly lit  Interior of a gymnasium.  Is art the mirror of its opposite, Or is the world itself a mimesis?  This afternoon at the symposium  Someone tried to resurrect the thesis That a poem is a deflected sigh.  And I remembered a day on a beach  Thirty-five years ago, in mid-July, The summer before I left for college,  With the future hanging just out of reach  And constantly receding, like the edge Of the water floating across the sand.  Poems are the fruit of the evasions  Of a life spent trying to understand The vacuum at the center of the heart,  And for all the intricate persuasions  They enlist in the service of their art, Are finally small, disappointing things.  Yet from them there materializes  A way of life, a way of life that brings The fleeting pleasures of a vocation  Made up of these constant exercises  In what still passes for celebration, That began in a mood of hopelessness  On an evening in a dormitory Years and years ago, and seemed to promise A respite from disquietude and care,  But that left only the lovely story Of a bright presence hanging in the air.
I In these I find my calling: In the shower, in the mirror, in unconscious  Hours spent staring at a screen At artifacts complete unto themselves.  I think of them as self-sufficient worlds  Where I can sojourn for a while, Then wake to find the clouds dispersing  And the sidewalks steaming with the Rain that must have fallen while I stayed inside.  The sun is shining, and the quiet  Doubts are answered with more doubts,  For as the years begin to mirror one another  And the diary in the brain implodes,  What filters through the theories on the page  Is a kind of settledness, an equilibrium Between the life I have and what time seemed to hold— These rooms, these poems, these ordinary streets That spring to life each summer in an intricate construction Blending failed hopes and present happiness— Which from the outside seems like self-deception. There is no end to these reflections, To their measured music with its dying fall  Wherein the heart and what it seeks are reconciled.  I live them, and as though in gratitude They shape my days, from morning with its sweetest smile  Until the hour when sleep blows out the candle.  Between, the present falls away, And for a while the old romance resumes,  Familiar but unrecognized, an undiscovered place  Concealed within the confines of this room, That seems at once a form of feeling and a state of grace  Prepared for me, written in my name Against the time when time has finally merged These commonplace surroundings with what lies behind the veil— Leaving behind at least a version of the truth  Composed of what I felt and what I saw outside my window  On a summer morning; melding sound and sense,  A music and a mood, together in a hesitant embrace  That makes them equal at the end.  II There may be nothing for a poem to change  But an atmosphere: conventional or strange,  Its meaning is enclosed by the perception  —Better, by the misperception— Of what time held and what the future knew;  Which is to say this very moment. And yet the promise of a distant Purpose is what makes each moment new. There may be nothing for the soul to say  In its defense, except to describe the way  It came to find itself at the impasse Morning reveals in the glass— The road that led away from home to here,  That began in wonderment and hope,  But that ended in the long slope Down to loneliness and the fear of fear. The casuistry is all in the event, Contingent on what someone might have meant  Or might still mean. What feels most frightening  Is the thought that when the lightning Has subsided, and the clearing sky Appears at last above the stage To mark the only end of age, That God, that distant and unseeing eye, Would see that none of this had ever been:  That none of it, apparent or unseen, Was ever real, and all the private words,  Which seemed to fill the air like birds Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds  Without significance or sense, Inert and dead beneath the dense Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds. There may be no rejoinder to that thought. There may be nothing that one could have sought  That might have lent the search significance,  Or even a kind of coherence. Perhaps. Yet closer to me than the grandeur  Of the vast and the uncreated Is the calm of this belated Moment in its transitory splendor.  III Someone asked about the aura of regret And disappointment that surrounds these poems,  About the private facts those feelings might conceal,  And what their source was in my life. I said that none of it was personal, That as lives go my own life was a settled one,  Comprising both successes and misfortunes, the successes  Not especially striking, the misfortunes small. And yet the question is a real one, And not for me alone, though certainly for me.  For even if, as Wittgenstein once claimed,  That while the facts may stay the same And what is true of one is true of both, The happy and unhappy man inhabit different worlds,  One still would want to know which world this is,  And how that other one could seem so close. So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing, In the way a thought starts, then turns back upon itself  Until its question hangs unanswered in the breeze.  Perhaps the sadness is a way of seeming free, Of denying what can change or disappear,  Of tearing free from circumstance, As though the soul could only speak out from the  Safety of some private chamber in the air. Let me try once more. I think the saddest moments  Are the ones that also seem most beautiful,  For the nature of a moment is to fade, Leaving everything unaltered, and the landscape Where the light fell as it was before. And time makes poetry from what it takes away,  And the measure of experience Is not that it be real, but that it last, And what one knows is simply what one knew,  And what I want is simply what I had. These are the premises that structure what I feel,  The axioms that govern my imagination, And beneath them lies the fear— Not the fear of the unknown, but the fear of growing old  Unchanged, of looking in the mirror At a future that repeats itself ad infinitum. It could be otherwise so easily. The transience that lectures so insistently of loss  Could speak as clearly of an openness renewed,  A life made sweeter by its changing; And the shadows of the past Could seem a shade where one could linger for a while  Before returning to the world, and moving on.  The way would be the same in either case, Extending for an unknown span of years Experienced from two perspectives, a familiar course  Accessible to all, yet narrowing, As the journey nears its end, to one. The difference isn’t in the details Or the destination, but in how things feel along the road:  The secret of the quest lies all around me, While what lurks below the surface is another story, One of no more consequence or import than the last.  What matters isn’t what one chances to believe,  But the force of one’s attachments, And instead of looking for an answer in a dream Set aside the question, let the songs continue  Going through the motions of the days And waking every morning to this single world,  Whether in regret, or in celebration.  IV Each day begins as yesterday began:  A cat in silhouette in the dim light  Of what the morning holds— Breakfast and The New York Times, a man Taking a shower, a poem taking flight As a state of mind unfolds  So unpredictably. Through the hot summer air  I walk to a building where I give a lecture on philosophy In the strict sense; then go home to the cat.  A narrow life; or put another way, A life whose facts can all Be written on a page, the narrow format  Of this tiny novel of a day,Ulysses written small, A diary so deep Its rhythms seem unreal: A solitary meal. Some records or a movie. And then sleep.  V At the ending of the remake of The Thing Kurt Russell and one other guy Are all that’s left of what had been the crew Of an Antarctic outpost. Some horrifying presence  —Some protean thing—establishes itself Inside the person of an ordinary man And then, without a warning, erupts in devastation.  The two survivors eye each other slowly, Neither knowing whether one of them Still holds the horror. “What do we do now?” The second asks, and Russell says, “Let’s see what happens,” and the movie ends. “Horror” is too strong, but substitute the fear I spoke about before, and the scene is apt. I don’t know, as no one really knows, What might lie waiting in the years to come, But sometimes when the question touches me I feel afraid— Not of age, but an age that seems a prolongation of this afternoon,  That looks ahead, and looks instead into itself. This is the fear that draws me back inside: That this is all there is, that what I hold so easily Will vanish soon, and nothing like it will be given me again.  The days will linger and the nights rehearse themselves  Until the secret of my life has finally emerged— Not in devastation, but in a long decline That leads at least as surely to a single end. And then I turn away and see the sky That soars above the streets of North Point North,  Reducing everyone to anonymity, an anonymity In which I find a kind of possibility, a kind of freedom  As the world—the only world—rolls on its way, Oblivious to anything I might say, or that might happen in a poem.  A poem can seize and hold a moment fast, yet it can  Limit what there is to feel, and stake a distance from the world.  The neighborhood around me wakes each day to lives  No different than my own, lives harboring the same ambitions  And regrets, but living on the humbler stuff of happiness.  The disappointments come and go; what stays  Is part of an abiding presence, human and serene. The houses wait unquestioning in the light Of an approaching summer evening, while a vast  Contentment answers from the air. I think I know where this is going to end,  But still my pleasure is to wait— Not wait, perhaps, for anything within, But for what lies outside. Let’s see what happens.
A clumsy hillock Unmolded like a cake on the meadow In the Laguna Mountains. Tough yellow-green grass growing up to a tree As thick as a tooth. In winter, on the road from San Diego,  Thousands of cars crawl up to the snow And their passengers get out to investigate it And then drive, discoursing, back home. And that’s California,  Solemnly discharging its responsibilities. Meanwhile we breakfast on pancakes the size of a plate  While the console radio goes on the blink. Miss L’Espagnole looks out from her frame on the wall,  Completely prepared (though for what it is impossible to say).  Her left arm is white and dips into a puddle of fire Or a pile of cotton on fire. And each thing is severe:  The house hemmed in by pepper trees and Mexico (This one is white and in Chula Vista), and the paraphernalia  Strewn around home: a few magazines summing up politics,  A matchbox with a lavender automobile on the cover, And a set of soldiers of several military epochs marching off to war on the raffia rug. Unless, you’ve grown up amidst palm trees (and buildings that are either unbuilt, or hospitals) It’s impossible to appreciate a reasonable tree.  I sometimes consider the parrots that live in the zoo  And are sold on the street in Tijuana. Colored like national flags,  Their heads are always cocked to pick up something behind them. And unless you have lived in a place where the fog Closes in like a face, it is impossible to be (even temporarily) relieved When it lifts to expose the freshly painted trim of the city, and it seems Like a fine day for knowledge: sunlight sleeping on top of the rocks  And lots of white clouds scudding by like clean sheets Which, when the air in the bedroom is cold, you pull over your head And let the temperature slowly increase while you breathe.  But California has only a coast in common with this.
I think I like this room. The curtains and the furniture aren’t the same Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to  Late in the morning, after the others had gone to work.  You can even shave in it. On the dresser with the mirror  Are a couple of the pictures we took one afternoon  Last May, walking down the alley in the late sunlight.  I remember now how we held hands for fifteen minutes Afterwards. The words meander through the mirror But I don’t want them now, I don’t want these abbreviations.  What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography  Of the nerves, but what I like in photography  Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood. The late afternoon sunlight is slanting through the window  Again, sketching the room in vague gestures of discontent  That roll off the mind, and then only seem to disappear.  What am I going to do now? And how am I going to sleep tonight? A peculiar name flickers in the mirror, and then disappears.
for Susan Koethe This is the life I wanted, and could never see. For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:  That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless, And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.  And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart  Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.  And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home  In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly  In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance. Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life, There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane.  The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves,  And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade.  The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild, Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes  Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret.  And then gradually the moments quicken into life, Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene; And then the park is empty and the years are still. I think the saddest memory is of a kind of light, A kind of twilight, that seemed to permeate the air For a few years after I’d grown up and gone away from home.  It was limitless and free. And of course I was going to change,  But freedom means that only aspects ever really change,  And that as the past recedes and the future floats away You turn into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same  As what I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees  Became part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents  Of a mind infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell. And now that disembodied grief has gone away.  It was a flickering, literary kind of sadness, The suspension of a life between two other lives  Of continual remembrance, between two worlds In which there’s too much solitude, too much disdain.  But the sadness that I felt was real sadness,  And this elation now a real tremor as the deepening  Shadows lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real,  But how much of the real past can it absorb?  How far into the future can this peace extend? I love the way the light falls over the suburbs Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds  Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth  And the soul settles from the air into its human home.  This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending  In a great dream of contentment, where all night long  The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms And the past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile  At the memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness,  Now that we know that none of it is ever going to be. Don’t you remember how free the future seemed When it was all imagination? It was a beautiful park Where the sky was a page of water, and when we looked up,  There were our own faces, shimmering in the clear air.  And I know that this life is the only real form of happiness,  But sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob  Of the unreal one we might have known, and when that ends  And my eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped  And we are alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago  And the future is still an immense, open dream.
Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze  Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves  Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass.  The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds  Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes,  People start to circulate again in twos and threes.  The dominant feelings are the blue sky, and the year.  —Memories of other seasons and the billowing wind;  The light gradually altering from difficult to clear As a page melts and a photograph develops in the backyard.  When some men came to tear down the garage across the way  The light was still clear, but the salt intoxication  Was already dissipating into the atmosphere of constant day  April brings, between the isolation and the flowers.  Now the clouds are lighter, the branches are frosted green,  And suddenly the season that had seemed so tentative before  Becomes immediate, so clear the heart breaks and the vibrant  Air is laced with crystal wires leading back from hell.  Only the distraction, and the exaggerated sense of care  Here at the heart of spring—all year long these feelings Alternately wither and bloom, while a dense abstraction  Hides them. But now the mental dance of solitude resumes,  And life seems smaller, placed against the background  Of this story with the empty, moral quality of an expansive  Gesture made up out of trees and clouds and air. The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds,  Permeating the early leaves that flutter in the sunlight  As the air dances up and down the street. Some kids yell.  A white dog rolls over on the grass and barks once. And  Although the incidents vary and the principal figures change,  Once established, the essential tone and character of a season  Stays inwardly the same day after day, like a person’s.  The clouds are frantic. Shadows sweep across the lawn  And up the side of the house. A dappled sky, a mild blue  Watercolor light that floats the tense particulars away  As the distraction starts. Spring here is at first so wary,  And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers,  Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two,  And then subsiding. But the season intensifies by degrees,  Imperceptibly, while the colors deepen out of memory,  The flowers bloom and the thick leaves gleam in the sunlight  Of another city, in a past which has almost faded into heaven.  And even though memory always gives back so much more of  What was there than the mind initially thought it could hold,  Where will the separation and the ache between the isolated  Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden?  Spring here is too subdued: the air is clear with anticipation,  But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation  And living patiently, without atonement or regret, In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care  —Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into  Light and air and the nothingness of the sky,  Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until, In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear,  The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact,  And then, into death. But the wind is cool.  The buds are starting to open on the trees. Somewhere up in the sky an airplane drones.
On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon,  By the marble statue of Pessoa; On an antique astrolabe in London  Tracing out the sky above Samoa, Thousands of miles away—in time, in place,  Each night conspires to create a myth That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with  The vague impression of a human face. The fragments fly apart and shift, trembling  On the threshold of a kind of fullness:  The minor wonder of remembering; The greater wonders of forgetfulness. For one looks back as someone else might yearn  For a new life, and set his course upon The polestar, bid his adieus, and move on.  The journey takes a solipsistic turn, Forsaking starlight for an inner glow,  And reducing all human history, All human culture—highbrow, middle-, low-— To one reflecting surface, one story. What fills the heaven of a single mind? The things that used to fill Kant’s mind with awe  —“The starry heavens and the moral law”— Seem distant now, and difficult to find Amid the message of satiety Issuing from the corners of the sky, Filled with monotonous variety: Game shows, an interview with Princess Di, And happy talk, and sitcoms and the news,  The shit that floats across your living room  Each weekday evening. Waiting in the pews,  Out in the desert where the cacti bloom, Something else was forming, something stranger  Gathering in the gulf below the stairs— As though the mystery of the manger Were written in the day-to-day affairs Of a world consecrated to Mammon,  Yet governed by those sacred absences  That make the spirit soar, and presences  At one remove, like the sound of Cuban Drumbeats issuing from the Ricardos’  Love nest on the television station  Like distant thunder; or Leonardo’s  “Wave that flees the site of its creation.” In the desert far beyond the city, One hears the cadences for which one longs,  The lyrics of those half-forgotten songs, —Some of them poignant, some of them witty— Brimming with the melody of passage; One feels the wind that blows the soul about,  Repeating its inscrutable message; And as night falls, one sees the stars come out. I found myself beneath a canopy Of scenes left out of someone else’s life —The dog that didn’t bark, Rosebud, Cain’s wife— Arrayed above me in a panoply Of glittering debris, gigantic swirls Of stars, and slowly moving caravans Of stars like tiny Christmas lights or pearls  Of tapioca, floating in a danse macabre across the heavens as I stood,  Watching the pageant in the sky unfold.  I felt the chill of something much too old To comprehend—not the Form of the Good, But something inchoate and violent, A Form of Darkness. Suddenly the songs  Floating through the revelry fell silent, As in The Masque of the Red Death, as throngs Of the dead twinkled at me from above.  The intimate domain of memory Became an endless field of entropy  Transfigured, inking in the outlines of Eurydice entombed, Orpheus immured,  And, in the center of their universe,  That subtler diadem of stars obscured By the brighter constellations, the Hearse. Standing off to one side, as though bereft,  There was a figure with averted eyes,  Gesturing in a language of surprise That took possession of my heart, yet left The question of her meaning unresolved.  I looked at her. It was time to begin.  The apparations in the sky dissolved,  Leaving me alone, and growing old. In The wide, unstructured heavens overhead  The stars were still shining. When I got home,  The message light was blinking on the phone.  I don’t remember what the message said.
Above a coast that lies between two coasts  Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego.  Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger,  Removed from character and context, resumes  His California story, gradually ascending, Reading Farewell, My Lovely for the umpteenth time,  Like a book above the world, or below the noise.  I recall some houses halfway in the desert,  And how dry the trees all seemed, and temporary  Even the tallest buildings looked, with bungalows  Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally  Just how small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia  For the limited that makes the days go quickly,  Tracing out their spirals of diminishing concern?  Like all the boys who lived on Westland Avenue,  I learned to follow the trails through the canyon,  Shoot at birds with a BB gun, and dream of leaving.  What are books? To me they seemed like mirrors  Holding up a vision of the social, in which people,  Beckoning from their inaccessible preserves Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers —Raymond Chandler say, or even Rupert Brooke— Could visualize somehow, and bring to life again. And though these worlds were sometimes difficult to see,  Once having seen them one returned to find the words  Still there, like a part of the surroundings Compliant to one’s will.  Yet these are attitudes, And each age has its separate store of attitudes, Its store of tropes—“In Grantchester, in Grantchester!—” That filter through its dreams and fill its songs.  Hume tried to show that sympathy alone allows  “The happiness of strangers” to affect our lives.  Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind  Long after its occasion, seems to resurrect  A world I think I recognize, and never saw.  For what was there to see? Some houses on a hill  Next to a small stream? A village filled with people  I couldn’t understand? Could anyone have seen the  Transitory sweetness of the Georgians’ England  And the world before the War, before The Waste Land?  Years are secrets, and their memories are often  Stories of a past that no one witnessed, like the  Fantasies of home one builds to rationalize  The ordinary way one’s life has gone since then.  Words seem to crystallize that life in pictures— In a postcard of a vicarage, or of a canyon  Wedged between the desert and an endless ocean— But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines  And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve.  And then I start to hear the murmur of that  Constant voice as distant from me as a landscape  Studied from an airplane: a contingent person  With a particular mind, and a particular will,  Descending across a desert, westward over mountains  And the sparsely peopled scrub beyond the city,  Pocked with half-filled reservoirs and rudimentary  Trails with nothing waiting for me at the end —“And is there honey still for tea?”— But isolated houses nestled in the hills.
Is this what I was made for? Is the world that fits Like what I feel when I wake up each morning? Steamclouds  Hovering over the lake, and smoke ascending from ten thousand chimneys As in a picture on a calendar, in a frieze of ordinary days?  Beneath a sky of oatmeal gray, the land slides downwards from a Kmart parking lot Into a distance lined with bungalows, and then a vague horizon.  Higher and higher, until its gaze becomes a part of what it sees,  The mind ascends through layers of immobility into an unfamiliar atmosphere Where nothing lives, and with a sense of finally breaking free  Attains its kingdom: a constructed space, or an imaginary city  Bordered all around by darkness; or a city gradually sinking into age,  Dominated by a television tower whose blue light warns the traveler away. People change, or drift away, or die. It used to be a country  Bounded by possibility, from which the restless could embark And then come home to, and where the soul could find an emblem of itself. Some days I feel a momentary lightness, but then the density returns,  The salt-encrusted cars drive by the factory where a clock tower  Overlooks the highway, and the third shift ends. And then softly,  The way the future used to sing to me when I was ten years old,  I start to hear the murmur of a voice that isn’t mine at all,  Formless and indistinct, the music of a world that holds no place for me; And then an image starts to gather in my mind—a picture of a room Where someone lingers at a window, staring at a nearly empty street  Bordered by freight yards and abandoned tanneries. And then the bus stops And a man gets off, and stands still, and then walks away. Last night I had a dream in which the image of a long-forgotten love  Hovered over the city. No one could remember what his name was  Or where he came from, or decipher what that emptiness might mean; Yet on the corner, next to the USA Today machine, a woman seemed to wave at me, Until the stream of morning traffic blocked her from my view.  It’s strange, the way a person’s life can feel so far away, Although the claims of its existence are encountered everywhere  —In a drugstore, or on the cover of a tabloid, on the local news Or in the mail that came this morning, in the musings of some talk show host Whose face is an enigma and whose name is just a number in the phone book, But whose words are as pervasive as the atmosphere I breathe.  Why can’t I find my name in this profusion? Nothing even stays, No image glances back at me, no inner angel hurls itself in rage  Against the confines of this surface that confronts me everywhere I look —At home or far away, here or on the way back from the store— Behind an all-inclusive voice and personality, fashioned out of fear  And scattered like a million isolated points transmitting random images Across a space alive with unconnected signals.  I heard my name Once, but then the noise of waiting patiently resumed. It felt the same, Yet gradually the terms I used to measure out my life increased,  Until I realized that I’d been driving down these streets for sixteen years. I was part of the surroundings: people looked at me the way I used to look at them, And most of what I felt seemed second nature. Now and then that sense I’d had in high school —Of a puzzlement about to lift, a language just about to start— Meandered into consciousness; but by and large I’d spend the days  Like something in the background, or like part of a design too intricate to see. Wasn’t there supposed to be a stage at which the soul at last broke free And started to meet the world on equal terms? To feel a little more at home, More intensely realized, more successfully contained Within the arc of its achievements? Filled with reservations,  Moods and private doubts, yet always moving, with increasing confidence, Towards a kind of summary, towards the apex of a long career  Advancing down an avenue that opened on a space of sympathy and public understanding? Or howling like the wind in the wires outside my window, in a cacophony of rage? I don’t think so. Age is like the dreams one had in childhood,  Some parts of which were true—I have the things I want, the words to misdescribe them, And the freedom to imagine what I think I feel. I think that most of what I feel remains unknown, But that beneath my life lies something intricate and real and  Nearly close enough to touch. I live it, and I know I should explain it, Only I know I can’t—it’s just an image of my life that came to me one day, And which remained long after the delight it brought had ended.  Sometimes I think I hear the sound of death approaching Like a song in the trees, a performance staged for me and me alone  And written in the ersatz language of loss, the language of time passing, Or the sound of someone speaking decorously into the unknown  —Like a voice picked up on the telephone when two lines cross momentarily —Overheard, and then half heard, and then gone.
I drove through the narrow Gods— privet and cholesterol, or  Irish creamery butter as the waiter called it, as it shaved another day  off my life. There was no salt  and antimony, just lumpy roads through Meath and Leitrim.  The sky was a show of flashing  mirrors as day broke on Rosses. Tide out and weed like cow pies  on the shore. The punt down and  the EEC on the horizon, as I read in the guidebook about pilgrims  climbing St. Patrick’s barefoot  every summer. Out of the fog a man in Wranglers and  spurred boots, clean-shaven, a cigarette  in hand, waved me down.“Scrum faced house at the end of the bay.”  “Hop in,” I said. “You lookin’ for where John Wayne made
The tide’s a Bach cantata. The beach is the swollen neck of Isaac. The tide’s a lamentation of white opals. The beach is free. The Coke machine rusted out. Here is everything you’ll never need: hemp-cords, curry-combs, jade and musk,  a porcelain cup blown into the desert— stockings that walked to Syria in 1915. On the rocks some ewes and rams  graze in the outer dark. The manes of the shoreline undo your hair.  A sapphire ring is fingerless. The weed and algae are floating like a bed,  and the bloodless gulls— whose breaths would stink of all of us  if we could kiss them on the beaks— are gnawing on the dead.
8/1 From here groomed fields and clumps of trees,  a silo of corrugated tin and a white barn blur. Unseasonable cool days, high, blue, a few clouds like ripped pillows  as if this were a lip of the North Sea and I could look out and imagine Denmark.  But I’m in my office three floors up. 8/3 In Armenian there’s a word—garod—rhymes with “maud.” The beautiful ones are not faithful and the faithful ones are not beautiful— a student said that about some Pavese translations,  here in my office. Should I tell you what garod means?  8/5 What’s happening in Spitak and Sarajevo and the West Bank  is splayed like the cortex of a silicon chip in the fuzzy air. Maria, the physician from Armenia, was 25 & had one plastic arm and one real arm. I met her in East Hampton on the deck of a house on the dunes. After the earthquake she had no husband, no parents, and only one child. “I’m in a good mood today,” she said, “let’s talk about  something else.” I poured her an Amstel Light. 8/10 The coolness intrudes— month of wind-sprints and retching for the coach.  It comes back like nerve ends after surgery. Along a country road cicadas rattling. Chicory and sweet pea intruding on the ripe barley. I picked up some seed packs from a junk shop on Rt. 20,  a tomato blazed in red ink/ 1926, Fredonia, N.Y. 8/11 What’s between us? The red ink of the tomato? How does an image stay? Or is it always aftermath? The way deep black reflected the most light in Talbot’s first calotypes. But garod: tongue of a snake,  meaning exile, longing for home. Thomas Wedgwood got images by getting sunlight to pass through things onto paper brushed with silver nitrate: wings of a dragonfly, the spine of an oak leaf— fugitive photograms. But he couldn’t stop the sun  until it turned the paper black. Stop the light before it goes too far? Or is desire what garod means?  Longing for a native place. 8/17 Maria said she was learning how to connect nerve endings  in the hand so hands and arms would work again. There were so many in Armenia without working hands and arms. At the end of each dendrite is a blurred line  like the horizon I’m squinting. Image of the other: light-arrested; not the image of ourselves. 8/21 After digging scallions one day Dickinson defined freedom: Captivity’s consciousness, so’s liberty. Maybe garod is about the longing for the native place  between two selves. 8/22 I love the brute force of silence in Roger Fenton’sSebastopol from Cathcart’s Hill, 1855. The Crimean inner war. The artlessness of silver is like my tongue in your wet space,  or like the news photos that bring us the pressure of disaster. Beloved topography,garod then must mean yearning. Is that how we loved under the rattling Nippon porcelain,  in the light calotyped by the fire escape? 8/25 garod: the grain chute that spills  into a dark barn which is endless, like the self when it’s out of reach. Are we so lonely that a constellation  could blacken and fill up that same barn, and that be me or you? But still we’re piss and oats and stock in there.  We’re like civet, who wouldn’t love it. 8/31 the new glass-plate pictures: transparent as air, Szarkowski wrote like windowsthe fragmentary, scruffy, particularity  of real living behind them—
In the mud of a tire rut,  we were the filaments. We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music   on Spiro’s flute we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops   would liquefy. The trees shook with the throb of steel. What did we do to be so red, white, and blue? We were inexorable  like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi   to the Jacksonian grass. We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine,  the daughters of the gray flannel suit. And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun  he was all teeth and amp and what were we?
1 In the rheumatic heat of July,  when Public Enemy blared  on the blasters in a time when arbitrage  and foreign policy were bureaus of each other, I made a wrong turn off Broadway  and wound up at St. John the Divine where I sat in the hot dark  until the traffic died. * And a voice comes over some columns to the breeze of the Golden Horn  over the cypress groves and flowing bougainvillea where the bright blue weather and the old  seawalls come together, where crates of cardamom  and musk are piled and  the cattle hang in blood above the brass,  where the grain boats  stink and red pleasure barges drift where Jason  sailed for his fleece— a voice comes out of the dead water. In great Sophia light pours in rosy bars on the porphyry and the green marble till the air blooms, and a chrysalis of lit crosses  makes circles in the air. Light falls through the lunettes  like arrows of gold that could’ve  sneaked up the Virgin’s dress. Had the Holy Ghost flitted in it would’ve been lost in the glare and the kiss of peace Justinian blew from the ambo. * Incantations flutter and rhyme  in the apse like wings  in a cloud of incense thinning on the gold-leafed vaults where the tongue’s vibration  lingers in the upper air, and rises and rises as if the dome could open  to a half-hemisphere of heaven where in the translucent glitter of the Kingdom the Saints are poised in gracious robes  with their thousand-year-frozen faces— the one truth glued on the grout of their lips. 2 I sit with the incense of memory,  and a bath of dark pours  from the vaults above the pew Outside, boutiques of money collide  with the street fires in Harlem, whole  skyscrapers are levitated by arbitrage, and the only inside takeover I can negotiate is myself in this pew with my herringbone jacket  which I should chuck in the Salvation Army bin down the block, so I could join the line of choir- boys in their last innocent ritual  as they stand before the mounted sermon sign “he shall bring forth judgment unto truth” (Isaiah 42:3). The Puritans because they believed God’s altar needs not their polish lifted the boulder of truth higher than the glittering  face of the Nazarene once leaded in glass. For the spirit they swallowed stones and shattered all the panes. But beneath the lavender  arch of a Canon Table in an old Gospel I once tasted the consubstantial dewdrop  in the faded color of a peacock’s wing. So while a stone sinks to the bottom of my  river, a peacock’s wing floats by the shore. Who tells it like it is: Isaiah or Procopius?  3 I started walking backward  down the aisle when I heard and thought I  saw in the strange fenestration  of that light— a voice, first incoherent, and then sharp  as if it were in my earThere is no reign that executes  justice and judgment;  is that why you whine?
1 After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, and light fell everywhere. Even the snow bloomed and New Hampshire was a big peony. A red barn shone on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pines and the gates of all the picket fences were big shut-eyes. 2 Sometime after the Civil War, the bronze wing of liberty  took off like the ribboning smoke of a Frick factory, and all the citizens in towns from Stockbridge to Willamette  ran wild on the 4th. The sound of piccolos lingered,  and the shiny nickel of the sun stood still before it fizzed in the windshield of a Ford. By then you were a lawyer. 3 Charles Ives was a bandmaster in Danbury, and you didn’t  give him the time of day. He played shortstop on the piano.  He never made it to his tonic home base, and his half-tones  were like oak leaves slapping clapboard. 4 How Miltonic are we anyway?  5 In that red glass of the imagination, in that tingling crystal of the chandelier  where light freezes in its own prism and the apogee of the green lawns of New Haven  wane like Persian carpets in twilight, there you saw a pitcher, perhaps from Delft,  next to a plate of mangoes. 6 But still, history is a boomerang, and the aborigines never threw one without a shield. 7 Beyond the porches of Key West, beyond the bougainvillea,  your speech skipped on tepid waves, was lapped and lapped by lovers and friends, by scholars who loved romantic nights of the sun. But the fruits and pendants, the colorful cloth, the dry palm fronds, and the fake voodoo wood  Cortes brought back as souvenirs were just souvenirs. And the shacks and the cane and the  hacked plantain were tableaux, and who saw them from your dark shore? 8 The Protestant dinner plate is a segregated place,  where the steak hardens, and the peas sit frightened in their corner while mashed potatoes ossify.  Some gin and ice cream, and the terror of loneliness  goes for a while. 9 As they say in the sunny climes, un abrazo.
Paolo It was not Virgil you read (though I asked you to), but the Peruvian,  part Indian, part cousin of Lorca whose words were spiky points,  wafts of privet, week-old cod. When you breathed them at me  nothing in the outer world ceased  its turbulent grim direction. You breathed on my unhooked  eyes and uncovered me. Above the roof a windfucker smacked  the air, and wind kept eating the island rocks.Francesca We ate along the riverside at sundown. The clear green juice dripped from my mouth. We didn’t fuck missionary on clean sheets.  I lost my head between your legs.  My nose spreading like honey. A whiff of narcissus swept across us. I ate the flowers whole, tried to outfox  Satan with my tongue. I felt as if I shimmied up your legs to find  this point on the Jersey cliffs.  The sun was God’s eye. I plugged my ears so I wouldn’t hear your crappy verse,  then tore into your pants like a scared cat. The Chrysler Building was a pin.  I tasted you five hundred feet  as the Hudson pulled me under.
1 nothing to drink in the refrigerator but juice from  the pickles come back long dead, or thin catsup. i feel i am old now, though surely i am young enough? i feel that i have had  winters, too many heaped cold and dry as reptiles into my slack skin.  i am not the kind to win and win. no i am not that kind, i can hear my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit  running over,” talking to the stove, yelling, “i mean it, just stop,” and i am old and2 i wonder about everything: birds clamber south, your car kaputs in a blazing, dusty nowhere, things happen, and constantly you wish for your slight home, for your wife’s rusted voice slamming around the kitchen. so few of us wonder why we crowded, as strange, monstrous bodies, blindly into one  another till the bed choked, and our range of impossible maneuvers was gone, but isn’t it because by dissolving like so  much dust into the sheets we are crowding south, into the kitchen, into  nowhere?
I know the origin of rocks, settling out of water, hatching crystals from fire, put under pressure in various designs I gathered pretty, picnic after picnic. And I know about love, a little, igneous lust, the slow affections of the sedimentary, the pressure on earth out of sight to rise up into material, something solid you can hold, a whole mountain, for example, or a loose collection of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.
for years the scenes bustled  through him as he dreamed he was  alive. then he felt real, and slammed awake in the wet sheets screaming too fast, everything moves too fast, and the edges of things  are gone.
The sounds of traffic  die over the back lawn  to occur again in the low  distance. The voices, risen, of the neighborhood cannot  maintain that pitch  and fail briefly, start  up again. Similarly my breathing rises  and falls while I look out  the window of apartment  number three in this slum,  hoping for rage, or sorrow. They don’t come to me  anymore. How can I lament  anything? It is all so proper, so much as it should be, now the nearing cumulus  clouds, ominous,  shift, they are like the curtains, billowy,  veering at the apex of their intrusion on the room. If I am alive now,  it is only to be in all this making all possible.  I am glad to be finally a part of such machinery. I was  after all not so fond of living, and there comes into me, when I see  how little I liked being a man, a great joy. Look out our astounding clear windows before evening.  It is almost as if the world were blue with some lubricant, it shines so.
The moon swells and its yellow darkens  nearer the horizon and soon all the aluminum rooftops shall appear, orange  and distinct beside  the orange sun,  while the diamond  flares in its vacuum within. It is simple to be with the shovel,  thoughtless, inhabited  by this divorce, it is good the luminous machinery, silenced,  waits, nice that the conveyor belts choked with sand convey nothing. When I return home to  coffee at 7:45 the lithe young girls will be going  to high school, pulling to their mouths stark cigarettes through Arizona’s sunlight. These last few months have been awful, and when around five the roosters  alone on neighboring  small farms begin to scream like humans  my heart just lies down,  a stone.
OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT, WHO BECAME A PRAYERI used to sneak into the movies without paying.  I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark. I went to college and drank everything they gave me,  and I never paid for any of that water on which I drifted as if by grace until after the drownings, when in the diamond light of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing  me up in Cartajena, only praying on my knees before the magnifying ark of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me,  until falling on my face before the daughter  of money while the world poured from the till brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height,  and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.
You might as well take a razor to your pecker as let a woman in your heart.  First they do the wash and then they kill you. They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke.  They bring it to you folded—if you see her stepping between the coin laundry and your building  over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam,  you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you.  It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter,  the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me  when I was changing him—that one got a laugh  from the characters I wasted all my chances with  at Popeye’s establishment when it was over  by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed now and I understand one of those shopping malls  that are like great monuments of blindness  and folly stands there. And next door, the grimy restaurants of men with movies  where they used to wear human faces, the sad people from space. But that was never me,  because everything in those days depended on my work. “Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say,  and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform  of Texaco and wade into my life. I felt like a man of honor and substance, but the situation was dancing underneath me— once I walked into the living room at my sister’s  and saw that the two of them, her and my sister,  had turned sometime behind my back not exactly  fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons moving across the television in front of them,  surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas  standing up next to the iron on the board.  I stepped out into the yard of bricks and trash and watched the light light up the blood inside each leaf, and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm  on this mother? Where do you turn it on?  I think you understand how I felt. I’m not saying everything changed in the space  of one second of seeing two women, but I did start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted  she be sexy. I just wanted to live. And I did: some nights were so sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers— but the strategies of others broke my promise.  At closing time once, she kept talking to a man  when I was trying to catch her attention to leave. It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines  and black masses and black hydrants filled  with black water. When the lights came on  you could see all kinds of intentions in the air.  I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass,  but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife  and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are,  motherfucker, nigger, here they are.” There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on.  At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me  from the end of the world where I saw her standing,  and the way the sacred light played across her face  all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond  of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end my life pours into one ocean: into this prison  with its empty ballfield and its empty preparations for Never Happen. If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her,  I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain  himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing.  I’m just an alien from another planet. I am not happy. Disappointment lights its stupid fire in my heart, but two days a week I staff the Max Security laundry above the world on the seventh level, looking at two long roads  out there that go to a couple of towns. Young girls accelerating through the intersection  make me want to live forever, they make me think of the grand things, of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies.  Sometimes I stand against the window for hours  tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal  meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body. Jesus Christ, your doors close and open, you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters,  I could say a million things about you and never get that silence out of time that happens when the blank muscle hangs  between its beats—that is what I mean by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth,  where nothing bad has happened. I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told  when you will come to save us. I have written  several poems and several hymns, and one  has been performed on the religious ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss; everything blooms coldly. I expect you. I thought one night it was you at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs, you in a shiver of light, but each time leaves in wind revealed themselves, the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak. We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove. In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires over which young men and women leapt. June efforts quietly. I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall so even if spring continues to disappoint we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain. I have new gloves and a new hoe. I practice eulogies. He was a hawk with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs of a salamander crossing the old pony post road. Yours is the name the leaves chatter at the edge of the unrabbited woods.
Ventura because she was hungry and because She was curious—but more because she was curious— Took the dare, a kiss for a pomegranate. Everyone gathered, her friends and his. Everyone Watched: the boys, the girls, the pigs and the chickens, And more. Moving to the front were the children She and Clemente would one day have, And the children of those children, too, Gathered and loud with everyone and everything else, Loud as the pigs and fast as the chickens Though she could not see them. Still, they crowded her, and she could feel Their anxious breathing. This boy Clemente whom she would kiss She would have kissed even without the pomegranate, Though she could not say it And was glad of this game. He suited her, She thought. He had a strong face. He felt what she felt. She could see him look around But not at their friends. She could see him Feel the shiver of the children they would have: Their son Margarito, his two sisters Both of whom would become nuns If just to pray enough to take care of him, This boy so serious he would seem like a stranger In their arms, serious enough by himself To make up for Clemente and Ventura And for all the laughter They themselves would feel, This curious child who, as an old man Would never trust a doctor for anything. And his serious wife to come, Refugio, And her sisters, Matilde and Consuelo as well, All the people who would follow this kiss, So many of them, and their children, too, Everyone stood there, arms up, everyone watching, So much noise in this moment, This quick lending of herself To his cheek, the way Ventura would later kiss All these impatient children of theirs. The kiss Seemed so small, but was filled with itself. This small moment of affection she gave this boy The quarter-second that it took: There they all stood, waiting with the crowd Egging them on, hefting the pomegranate And pushing them toward each other. Clemente and Ventura in that quarter-second lived Their lives, a quarter-second not finished yet.
The shirt touches his neck and smooths over his back. It slides down his sides. It even goes down below his belt— down into his pants. Lucky shirt.
She goes out to hang the windchime in her nightie and her work boots. It’s six-thirty in the morning and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch, windchime in her left hand, hammer in her right, the nail gripped tight between her teeth but nothing happens next because she’s trying to figure out how to switch #1 with #3. She must have been standing in the kitchen, coffee in her hand, asleep, when she heard it—the wind blowing through the sound the windchime wasn’t making because it wasn’t there. No one, including me, especially anymore believes till death do us part, but I can see what I would miss in leaving— the way her ankles go into the work boots as she stands upon the ice chest; the problem scrunched into her forehead; the little kissable mouth with the nail in it.
Lying in bed I think about you, your ugly empty airless apartment and your eyes. It’s noon, and tired I look into the rest of the awake day incapable of even awe, just a presence of particle and wave, just that closed and deliberate human observance. Your thin fingers and the dissolution of all ability. Lay  open now to only me that white body, and I will, as the awkward butterfly, land quietly upon you. A grace and staying. A sight and ease. A spell entangled. A span. I am inside you. And so both projected, we are now part of a garden, that is part of a  landscape, that is part of a world that no one believes in.
When the most intense revivals swept the mountains just a century ago, participants described the shouts and barks in unknown tongues, the jerks of those who tried to climb the walls, the holy dance and laugh. But strangest are reports of what was called the holy cuss. Sometimes a man who spoke in tongues and leapt for joy would break into an avalanche of cursing that would stun with brilliance and duration. Those that heard would say the holy spirit spoke as from a whirlwind. Words burned on the air like chains of dynamite. The listeners felt transfigured, and felt true contact and true presence then, as if the shock of unfamiliar and blasphemous profanity broke through beyond the reach of prayer and song and hallo to answer heaven's anger with its echo.
From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It's spring, and soon they'll be gone above timberline, climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home. He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that. Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring. Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.
They had hit Ruben with the high beams, had blinded him so that the van he was driving, full of Mexicans going to pick tomatoes, would have to stop. Ruben spun the van into an irrigation ditch, spun the five-year-old me awake to immigration officers, their batons already out, already looking for the soft spots on the body, to my mother being handcuffed and dragged to a van, to my father trying to show them our green cards. They let us go. But Alvaro was going back. So was his brother Fernando. So was their sister Sonia. Their mother did not escape, and so was going back. Their father was somewhere in the field, and was free. There were no great truths revealed to me then. No wisdom given to me by anyone. I was a child who had seen what a piece of polished wood could do to a face, who had seen his father about to lose the one he loved, who had lost some friends who would never return, who, later that morning, bent to the earth and went to work.
Every morning the maple leaves.  Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts  from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out  You will be alone always and then you will die. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog  of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation.  Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party  and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.  You want a better story. Who wouldn’t? A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.  Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on. What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.  Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly  flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,  that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon. I’m not the princess either.  Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,  I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow  glass, but that comes later.  And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,  shut up I’m getting to it.  For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was  the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,  young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence  but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,  and getting stabbed to death.  Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.  You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!  What more do you want? I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re  really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?  Let me do it right for once,  for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven.  Inside your head you hear a phone ringing  and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.  Inside your head the sound of glass, a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.  Hello darling, sorry about that.  Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell  and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.  Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together  to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man  against a black sky prickled with small lights.  I take it back. The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.  I take them back. Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.  Crossed out.  Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards.  Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle  reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all  forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it.  Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up  in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away  from the dirtiest thing you know. All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly  darkness,  suddenly only darkness. In the living room, in the broken yard,  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport  bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light,  my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view  of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts. I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,  smiling in a way  that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,  up the stairs of the building to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,  I looked out the window and said  This doesn’t look that much different from home,  because it didn’t, but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.  We walked through the house to the elevated train.  All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful  mechanical wind. We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,  smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I  just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said Love, for you,  is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s  terrifying. No one  will ever want to sleep with you.
I never hear the word “Escape” Without a quicker blood, A sudden expectation – A flying attitude! I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars Only to fail again!
Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.
Amber husk fluted with gold, fruit on the sand marked with a rich grain, treasure spilled near the shrub-pines to bleach on the boulders: your stalk has caught root among wet pebbles and drift flung by the sea and grated shells and split conch-shells. Beautiful, wide-spread, fire upon leaf, what meadow yields so fragrant a leaf as your bright leaf?
Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf, more precious than a wet rose single on a stem— you are caught in the drift. Stunted, with small leaf, you are flung on the sand, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind. Can the spice-rose drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?
I have had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest— then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate. I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch— there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent— only border on border of scented pinks. Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light— pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit— let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair with a russet coat. Or the melon— let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste— it is better to taste of frost— the exquisite frost— than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves— spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince— leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant. O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.
I show her how to put her arms around me,  but she’s much too small. What’s worse, she doesn’t understand.  And although she lies beside me, sticking  out her tongue, it’s herself she licks. She likes my stroking hand.  And even lets me kiss. But at my demand: “Now, do it to me, like this,”  she backs off with a hiss. What’s in her little mind? Jumping off the bed, she shows me her behind, but curls up on the rug instead. I beg her to return. At first, she did,  then went and hid under the covers. She’s playing with my feet!  “Oh, Boa, come back. Be sweet, Lie against me here where I’m nice and warm.  Settle down. Don’t claw, don’t bite. Stay with me tonight.” Seeming to consent, she gives a little whine. Her deep, deep pupils meet mine  with a look that holds a flood ...  But not my brand. Not at all. And, what‘s worse, she’s much too small.
It’s about Ball fits the ball, mitt, but the bat, not all  and the mitt. the time. Ball hits Sometimes bat, or it ball gets hit hits mitt. (pow) when bat Bat doesn’t meets it, hit ball, and sails bat meets it. to a place Ball bounces where mitt off bat, flies has to quit air, or thuds in disgrace. ground (dud) That’s about or it the bases fits mitt. loaded,  about 40,000 Bat waits fans exploded. for ball to mate. It’s about Ball hates the ball, to take bat’s the bat, bait. Ball the mitt, flirts, bat’s the bases late, don’t and the fans. keep the date. It’s done Ball goes in on a diamond, (thwack) to mitt, and for fun. and goes out It’s about (thwack) back home, and it’s to mitt. about run.
Put my glad rags in a cardboard box— This old jiggerboo never grew mature. Is everthing in its place except me? Don’t be surprised; I called all day And the only person I could reach was The operator; and it’s a sorry day when Nothing is coming down but your foot. And how deep is your stomach cause That’s how far your heart will fall! When I’m gone I might come back cause I’m always forgetting something special. A crease in my overalls, my collar stiff, I cried as many tears as I have teeth. And I only got two in my mouth. Son of the Sun look out: as you get black you burn. Is everything in its place except me?
The sheep-killing dogs saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth. From the den of the moon ancestral wolves howl their approval. The farm boys, asleep in their beds, live the same wildness under their lids; every morning they come back through the whites of their eyes to do their chores, their hands pausing to pet the dog, to press its ears back, over the skull, to quiet that other world.
The midnight streetlight illuminating the white of clover assures me I am right not to manicure my patch of grass into a dull carpet of uniform green, but to allow whatever will to take over. Somewhere in that lace lies luck, though I may never swoop down to find it. Three, too, is an auspicious number. And this seeing a reminder to avoid too much taming of what, even here, wants to be wild.
Who knows but that Meriwether Lewis’s  lost diaries might turn up yet packed in a can in some cramped ex-midden  dug up a thousand years from now,  that elegant, exfoliate style continue on up the Missouri, into sadness and disrepute, the suicide in a hotel in Tennessee  no more important now than the bundle  of grasses my friend made out in the woods  yesterday and gave to me after a meeting  in which she confessed she’s afraid of everything  that’s coming. The past I don’t mind, she said,  and laughed as if that was something.
I ran into the afterlife. No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky dark as the inside of a movie theater at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time, expanding at terrific speed over the car which was disappearing, flattening out empty as the fields on either side.  It was impossible to think under that rain louder than engines. I turned off the radio to listen, let my head fill up until every bone was vibrating—sky.  Twice, trees of lightning broke out of the asphalt. I could smell the highway burning. Long after, saw blue smoke twirling behind the eyeballs, lariats doing fancy rope tricks, jerking silver dollars out of the air, along with billiard cues, ninepins. I was starting to feel I could drive forever when suddenly one of those trees was right in front of me. Of course, I hit it— branches shooting stars down the windshield, poor car shaking like a dazed cow. I thought this time for sure I was dead so whatever was on the other side had to be eternity. Saw sky enormous as nowhere. Kept on driving.
Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind. The bear is long gone. Drunk on apples, she banged over the trash cans that fall night, then skidded downstream. By now she must be logged in for the winter. Unless she is choosy. I imagine her as very choosy, sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying each one on for size, but always coming out again. Until tonight. Tonight sap freezes under her skin. Her breath leaves white apples in the air. As she walks she dozes, listening to the sound of axes chopping wood. Somewhere she can never catch up to trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow When she does find it finally, the log draws her in as easily as a forest, and for a while she continues to see, just ahead of her, the moon trapped like a salmon in the ice.
for Nathaniel, 1900—1968 All afternoon you worked at cutting them down. Branch after branch tossed into the heap. You had your ceremony. Old pants. The pipe. The pipe rested in the cleft of the tree. When the pile got big enough, you threw the kerosene. Now the woods are clouded again. You forgot the world could be this messy. Air thickens into leaves, the leaves into worms. Behind the barn, overnight, it seems, tents have spread out in the apple trees. There’s work for you. So you come back in your pants old as dirt. With a pipe heavy as stone. No time to lose. Whatever is rotten, whatever won’t hold the weight of another season, you hack down. There’s one moment, though, when you feel almost sorry for them. The tents break into flame and the small, black pieces of anguish crawl out into the grass. Those that get away, well, you let them get away this time.
Alexandria, 1956, after the nationalization of the Suez Canal and all foreign capital Perhaps her cook, come under the influence Of a few discreet piastres, had spoken Too indiscreetly. Or just perhaps, On a hot day along the azure of the Mediterranean, Rue Fouad bearing a stream of traffic To Muhammed Ali Square in a riot Of klaxons and shouts, and the whole city Gleaming white as it must have from a distance, Perhaps on such a day, someone got lucky And Mme. Sperides at the customs house Could sense what price she would have to pay, That the official full of apologies And gold teeth would usher her into A private room smelling of dark tobacco, That under the drone of the ceiling fans Her valises would be searched, the linings Cut out, the cowhide ripped back, That despite her protests which would be Useless but obligatory, she herself Would be stripped, that finally, Two large diamonds worth a modest villa Would peek and shine from the elegant crack Of her ass.  Whatever the story, It was not for a boy to know. I listened at my grandmother’s door As she spoke in a whisper, thieving A fragment here a word there naked Jewels hidden you know where
Alexandria, 1956 The rugs had been rolled up and islands of them Floated in the centers of every room, And now, on the bare wood floors, My sister and I were skimming among them In the boats we’d made from newspaper, Sheets of them pinned to each other, Dhows, gondolas, clippers, arks. There was a mule outside on the street Braying under a load of figs, though mostly There was quiet, a wind from the desert Was putting the city to sleep, But we were too far adrift, the air Was scurfy and wet, the currents tricking Our bows against reef and coral And hulls shearing under the weight of cargo. “Ahoy and belay!” I called to my sister, “Avast, avast!” she yelled back from her rigging, And neither of us knew what we were saying But the words came to us as from a movie, Cinemascopic, American. “Richard Widmark,” I said. “Clark Gable, Bogie,” she said, “Yo-ho-ho.” We had passed Cyprus And now there was Crete or Sardinia Maybe something larger further off. The horizon was everywhere I turned, The waters were becoming turgid, They were roiling, weeks had passed. “America, America, land-ho!” I yelled directionless. “Gibraltar,” my sister said, “Heave to,” And signalling a right, her arm straight out, She turned and bravely set our course North-by-northwest for the New World. Did we arrive? Years later, yes. By plane, suddenly. With suitcases And something as hazy as a future. The November sun was pale and far off, The air was colder than we’d ever felt, And already these were wonders to us As much as snow would be or evergreens, And it would take me a long time Before I’d ever remember Boats made of paper, islands of wool, And my sister’s voice, as in a fog, Calling out the hazards, Leading me on, getting us there.
Alexandria, 1954 When my grandfather came back from his swim, battered this time by the treacherous currents, the rocks jutting out of the water like knives, my sister and I sidled into his room thinking the house too quiet and saw him like a hurt beast standing by his bed, naked, wet. My grandmother was kneeling, toweling his calves, my mother was mixing a poultice. “Look at his bruises,” my sister was whispering, “and the veins like swollen rivers.” We kept inching toward him while my grandmother daubed him with cream and wound him in a bedsheet and made him odder than any dream of him. “Children,” she said turning toward us, “let him sleep, this is your grandfather.” We hurried away, having said not a word to him, nor he to us, though our eyes had never left his body and we ached to touch him, brush our fingertips along the webs of cuts and discolorations in his pale skin. All day we wished he would somehow rise like a true ghost, the sheet ruffling in the drafts; “Grandfather,” we whispered at his closed door, “come to us, bring us your stories,” but when the last lights were put out that night and the dark spread about us like a purple bruise we wished we had never wished what we had, every waft of wind had a rustle to it and the sound of water was deep in our ears and by morning, he had become for us in his shut room the ghostliest of imaginings, and keeping our distance, we waited only for his door to suddenly swing forth and reveal him standing either healed and smiling and unstrange, or what seemed likelier to us now, about to change our lives.
We have been cruising, half a block at a time, my wife, my two children, all morning, and I have been pointing out unhurriedly and with some feeling places of consequence, sacred places, backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways. “There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood, That’s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.” “And in 1961,” I say, “at this very corner, Barry Sapolsky tripped me up with his gym bag.” My son has fallen asleep, my daughter has been nodding “yes” indiscriminately for the last half hour, and my wife has the frozen, wide-eyed look of the undead. “Maybe lunch,” I say, though I’m making now my fourth approach to Curtin Jr. High School, yellow-bricked, large-windowed, gothic, where Frank Marone preyed on our terror once and Janice Lehman walked in beauty. “Salute, everyone,” I say, “salute,” bringing my hand up to my brow as we pass the gilded entrance, “This is where things of importance happened,” and I am pulling out from under the car seat a photo album of old school pictures, “Page 8,” I say, “Fred Decker, John Carlson by the bike rack, Mr. Burkett … ,” and driving on, following the invisible map before my eyes. Now we are drifting toward my boyhood house and I am showing my wife trellised porches, bike routes, more than she’d care to see; “Why this longing?” she says, “What about now, the kids, our lives together, lunch, me?” I give her a kiss and turn right on Cherry and there in front of our eyes, barely changed, is the house where all my memories converge. “Look at the windows of my room,” I say, “see, there, the shadowy figure moving behind them?” And before anyone can hope to answer, I have grabbed my camera, I am snapping pictures through the windshield, bricks, dormers, railings, fences, streets, all are falling thrall to my aim. “We could be happy here,” I say, putting another roll of film in and beginning to nose my car toward Bill Corson’s house. “Really, Daddy,” my daughter says; “No chance,” my wife tacks on, but all I’m hearing is the crack of bats in the neighborhood lot and Danny’s pearl-handled cap gun going off and the drone of bees around honeysuckle and Dewey Waugh’s gravelly voice urging on his mower, and the sound of wind in the cottonwoods is like water, I am coasting, there is time for everything.
They thought the trouble was over, they thought they had talked it all out, it was a mistake, she’d said, this infatuation for someone else which had turned suddenly too serious, she could see that now. But they thought there was nothing left of it, their nerves had been rubbed so raw through bouts of anger, shame, even love, so many words had come and gone between them that they couldn’t easily remember what they’d said, what they’d imagined. But it didn’t matter now, they thought they had gotten over something difficult, something which had felt immovable, the long unbearable ache which had become too much a habit, and they were celebrating in their way, having dinner at a new expensive place where they had no history of being together, where they expected nothing. They were sipping wine, a deep rich red, the waiter was hovering over them like a generous uncle and they were selecting everything he had suggested— how good to be in his hands for awhile! Soon it was happening, the old ardor was coming back, they were beginning to flirt with one another, the way she said baby, the way his shoulder was brushing hers, the way they were allowing themselves to think for the first time in a long time of the good sex they might later have, the after-talk which would be easy and low. And maybe he hadn’t meant what he was about to say, maybe when she remarked how she loved the leek soup it was the wine in him, his jauntiness, that made him ask what else she loved, jokingly at first, whether she loved the stuffed mushrooms on his plate, the braised beef, or maybe she loved what others were having, this one in the dark suit, or that one with the coyly unbuttoned collar, or maybe she loved the whole damn menu in fact, he couldn’t help himself, the words came pouring forth, spilling all over the table. And it was not until late at night when she’d finally gone to her room and closed herself off from him in sleep that he stopped talking and remembered only half of what he’d said because he’d said too much, created too much damage, crossed some boundary he had avoided most of his life. Maybe it was desert, maybe tundra, or the white insinuating madness of the polar ice cap, but wherever he was was strange and dangerous, and somehow dazzling for all that, and only in the morning would he know for better or worse in which direction each of them would be walking it, though never had he felt, as he had tonight, so permissive with himself, so luxuriously tactless, having said again and again the words he thought he could never bear to use, so suddenly commonplace, so readily available to him now.
(SUGGESTED INSCRIPTION PROBABLY NOT SUGGESTED BY THE COMMITTEE) The hucksters haggle in the mart The cars and carts go by; Senates and schools go droning on; For dead things cannot die. A storm stooped on the place of tombs With bolts to blast and rive; But these be names of many men The lightning found alive. If usurers rule and rights decay And visions view once more Great Carthage like a golden shell Gape hollow on the shore, Still to the last of crumbling time Upon this stone be read How many men of England died To prove they were not dead.
After one moment when I bowed my head And the whole world turned over and came upright, And I came out where the old road shone white. I walked the ways and heard what all men said, Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed, Being not unlovable but strange and light; Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite But softly, as men smile about the dead The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree, They rattle reason out through many a sieve That stores the sand and lets the gold go free: And all these things are less than dust to me Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
Winter is fallen early  On the house of Stare; Birds in reverberating flocks  Haunt its ancestral box;  Bright are the plenteous berries   In clusters in the air.  Still is the fountain’s music,  The dark pool icy still, Whereupon a small and sanguine sun   Floats in a mirror on,  Into a West of crimson,  From a South of daffodil.  ’Tis strange to see young children   In such a wintry house; Like rabbits’ on the frozen snow  Their tell-tale footprints go;  Their laughter rings like timbrels   ’Neath evening ominous:  Their small and heightened faces  Like wine-red winter buds; Their frolic bodies gentle as   Flakes in the air that pass,   Frail as the twirling petal   From the briar of the woods.  Above them silence lours,  Still as an arctic sea; Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon   Glitters; the crocus soon  Will open grey and distracted  On earth’s austerity:  Thick mystery, wild peril,   Law like an iron rod:— Yet sport they on in Spring’s attire,  Each with his tiny fire   Blown to a core of ardour   By the awful breath of God.
My mind is like a clamorous market-place. All day in wind, rain, sun, its babel wells; Voice answering to voice in tumult swells. Chaffering and laughing, pushing for a place, My thoughts haste on, gay, strange, poor, simple, base; This one buys dust, and that a bauble sells: But none to any scrutiny hints or tells The haunting secrets hidden in each sad face. The clamour quietens when the dark draws near; Strange looms the earth in twilight of the West, Lonely with one sweet star serene and clear, Dwelling, when all this place is hushed to rest, On vacant stall, gold, refuse, worst and best, Abandoned utterly in haste and fear.
Upon a bank, easeless with knobs of gold,   Beneath a canopy of noonday smoke, I saw a measureless Beast, morose and bold,  With eyes like one from filthy dreams awoke,  Who stares upon the daylight in despair  For very terror of the nothing there. This beast in one flat hand clutched vulture-wise   A glittering image of itself in jet, And with the other groped about its eyes  To drive away the dreams that pestered it;  And never ceased its coils to toss and beat  The mire encumbering its feeble feet. Sharp was its hunger, though continually  It seemed a cud of stones to ruminate,  And often like a dog let glittering lie  This meatless fare, its foolish gaze to sate;  Once more convulsively to stoop its jaw,  Or seize the morsel with an envious paw. Indeed, it seemed a hidden enemy  Must lurk within the clouds above that bank, It strained so wildly its pale, stubborn eye,  To pierce its own foul vapours dim and dank;  Till, wearied out, it raved in wrath and foam,  Daring that Nought Invisible to come. Ay, and it seemed some strange delight to find   In this unmeaning din, till, suddenly,  As if it heard a rumour on the wind,  Or far away its freer children cry, Lifting its face made-quiet, there it stayed,  Till died the echo its own rage had made. That place alone was barren where it lay;  Flowers bloomed beyond, utterly sweet and fair;  And even its own dull heart might think to stay   In livelong thirst of a clear river there, Flowing from unseen hills to unheard seas,  Through a still vale of yew and almond trees. And then I spied in the lush green below  Its tortured belly, One, like silver, pale,  With fingers closed upon a rope of straw,  That bound the Beast, squat neck to hoary tail;  Lonely in all that verdure faint and deep,  He watched the monster as a shepherd sheep. I marvelled at the power, strength, and rage  Of this poor creature in such slavery bound;  Fettered with worms of fear; forlorn with age;  Its blue wing-stumps stretched helpless on the ground;  While twilight faded into darkness deep,  And he who watched it piped its pangs asleep.
(For Barbara Crosby) While it is true (though only in a factual sense) That in the wake of a  Her-I-can comes a  Shower Surely I am not The gravitating force  that keeps this house  full of panthers Why, LBJ has made it  quite clear to me  He doesn’t give a Good goddamn what I think (else why would he continue to masterbate in public?) Rhythm and Blues is not The downfall of a great civilization And I expect you to Realize That the Temptations  have no connection with  The CIA We must move on to  the true issues of  Our time like the mini-skirt  Rebellion And perhaps take a  Closer look at Flour power It is for Us to lead our people  out of the Wein-Bars  into the streets into the streets (for safety reasons only)  Lord knows we don’t  Want to lose the support of our Jewish friends So let us work for our day of Presence  When Stokely is in The Black House And all will be right with  Our World
As Ann came in one summer’s day,   She felt that she must creep, So silent was the clear cool house,   It seemed a house of sleep. And sure, when she pushed open the door,   Rapt in the stillness there, Her mother sat, with stooping head,   Asleep upon a chair; Fast—fast asleep; her two hands laid   Loose-folded on her knee, So that her small unconscious face   Looked half unreal to be: So calmly lit with sleep’s pale light   Each feature was; so fair Her forehead—every trouble was   Smoothed out beneath her hair. But though her mind in dream now moved,   Still seemed her gaze to rest— From out beneath her fast-sealed lids,   Above her moving breast— On Ann; as quite, quite still she stood;   Yet slumber lay so deep Even her hands upon her lap   Seemed saturate with sleep. And as Ann peeped, a cloudlike dread   Stole over her, and then, On stealthy, mouselike feet she trod,   And tiptoed out again.
Dark frost was in the air without,  The dusk was still with cold and gloom,  When less than even a shadow came   And stood within the room. But of the three around the fire,  None turned a questioning head to look,  Still read a clear voice, on and on,  Still stooped they o’er their book. The children watched their mother’s eyes  Moving on softly line to line; It seemed to listen too—that shade,  Yet made no outward sign. The fire-flames crooned a tiny song,  No cold wind stirred the wintry tree;  The children both in Faërie dreamed  Beside their mother’s knee. And nearer yet that spirit drew  Above that heedless one, intent  Only on what the simple words  Of her small story meant. No voiceless sorrow grieved her mind,  No memory her bosom stirred,  Nor dreamed she, as she read to two,  ’Twas surely three who heard. Yet when, the story done, she smiled  From face to face, serene and clear,  A love, half dread, sprang up, as she  Leaned close and drew them near.
childhood remembrances are always a drag  if you’re Black you always remember things like living in Woodlawn  with no inside toilet and if you become famous or something they never talk about how happy you were to have  your mother all to yourself and how good the water felt when you got your bath  from one of those big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in  and somehow when you talk about home  it never gets across how much you understood their feelings as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale and even though you remember your biographers never understand your father’s pain as he sells his stock  and another dream goes And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that concerns you and though they fought a lot it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference  but only that everybody is together and you and your sister have happy birthdays and very good  Christmases and I really hope no white person ever has cause  to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy
See this house, how dark it is  Beneath its vast-boughed trees!  Not one trembling leaflet cries  To that Watcher in the skies— ‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze,  Innocent of heaven’s ways,  Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright,  On secrets hidden from sight.’ ‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind,  ‘Vacancy is all I find; Every keyhole I have made Wails a summons, faint and sad,  No voice ever answers me,  Only vacancy.’ ‘Once, once … ’ the cricket shrills,  And far and near the quiet fills  With its tiny voice, and then  Hush falls again. Mute shadows creeping slow Mark how the hours go. Every stone is mouldering slow.  And the least winds that blow  Some minutest atom shake, Some fretting ruin make In roof and walls. How black it is  Beneath these thick boughed trees!
In the beginning was the word And the word was Death And the word was nigger And the word was death to all niggers  And the word was death to all life  And the word was death to all  peace be still The genesis was life  The genesis was death  In the genesis of death  Was the genesis of war  be still peace be still In the name of peace  They waged the wars   ain’t they got no shame In the name of peace Lot’s wife is now a product of the Morton company   nah, they ain’t got no shame Noah packing his wife and kiddies up for a holiday  row row row your boat But why’d you leave the unicorns, noah Huh? why’d you leave them While our Black Madonna stood there Eighteen feet high holding Him in her arms  Listening to the rumblings of peace  be still be still CAN I GET A WITNESS? WITNESS? WITNESS? He wanted to know And peter only asked who is that dude? Who is that Black dude? Looks like a troublemaker to me And the foundations of the mighty mighty  Ro Man Cat holic church were laid  hallelujah Jesus  nah, they ain’t got no shame Cause they killed the Carthaginians  in the great appian way And they killed the Moors “to civilize a nation” And they just killed the earth And blew out the sun In the name of a god Whose genesis was white And war wooed god And america was born Where war became peace And genocide patriotism And honor is a happy slave cause all god’s chillun need rhythm And glory hallelujah why can’t peace  be still The great emancipator was a bigot   ain’t they got no shame And making the world safe for democracy Were twenty millon slaves  nah, they ain’t got no shame And they barbecued six million To raise the price of beef And crossed the 38th parallel To control the price of rice  ain’t we never gonna see the light And champagne was shipped out of the East  While kosher pork was introduced To Africa  Only the torch can show the way In the beginning was the deed  And the deed was death And the honkies are getting confused   peace be still So the great white prince Was shot like a nigger in texas And our Black shining prince was murdered  like that thug in his cathedral While our nigger in memphis was shot like their prince in dallas And my lord ain’t we never gonna see the light The rumblings of this peace must be stilled   be stilled be still ahh Black people  ain’t we got no pride?
1 What is sometimes called a   tongue of flame or an arm extended burning   is only the long red and orange branch of   a green maple in early September reaching  into the greenest field out of the green woods at the  edge of which the birch trees  appear a little tattered tired  of sustaining delicacy all through the hot summer re-  minding everyone (in  our family) of a Russian  song a story by Chekhov or my father 2 What is sometimes called a   tongue of flame or an arm extended burning  is only the long red and orange branch of  a green maple in early September reaching   into the greenest field out of the green woods at the   edge of which the birch trees appear a little tattered tired  of sustaining delicacy all through the hot summer re-  minding everyone (in  our family) of a Russian  song a story by Chekhov or my father on  his own lawn standing  beside his own wood in  the United States of  America saying (in Russian)  this birch is a lovely tree but among the others  somehow superficial
in my younger years before i learned black people aren’t suppose to dream i wanted to be a raelet and say “dr o wn d in my youn tears” or “tal kin bout tal kin bout” or marjorie hendricks and grind  all up against the mic and scream “baaaaaby nightandday  baaaaaby nightandday” then as i grew and matured i became more sensible  and decided i would  settle down and just become a sweet inspiration
walking down park  amsterdam or columbus do you ever stop to think what it looked like before it was an avenue did you ever stop to think what you walked  before you rode  subways to the stock  exchange (we can’t be on the stock exchange  we are the stock  exchanged) did you ever maybe wonder what grass was like before  they rolled it into a ball and called  it central park where syphilitic dogs and their two-legged tubercular masters fertilize the corners and side-walks ever want to know what would happen if your life could be fertilized by a love thought  from a loved one who loves you ever look south on a clear day and not see time’s squares but see tall Birch trees with sycamores  touching hands and see gazelles running playfully  after the lions ever hear the antelope bark from the third floor apartment ever, did you ever, sit down and wonder about what freedom’s freedom would bring it’s so easy to be free you start by loving yourself  then those who look like you  all else will come naturally ever wonder why so much asphalt was laid in so little space probably so we would forget  the Iroquois, Algonquin and Mohicans who could caress  the earth ever think what Harlem would be like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears  grew sending a cacophony of sound to us the parrot parroting black is beautiful black is beautiful  owls sending out whooooo’s making love ...  and me and you just sitting in the sun trying to find a way to get a banana tree from one of the monkeys  koala bears in the trees laughing at our listlessness ever think its possible for us to be happy
so he said: you ain’t got no talent   if you didn’t have a face   you wouldn’t be nobody and she said: god created heaven and earth   and all that’s Black within them so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit   they tell me plenty sisters   take care better business than you and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings   and all good things to eat   and said: “that’s good” so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under   yo skirt and been giving you the big play  you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib  from adam and said we will call this woeman and her   name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts   that simone may sing a song and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu so she replied: show me someone not full of herself   and i’ll show you a hungry person
her grandmother called her from the playground   “yes, ma’am”  “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old  woman proudly but the little girl didn’t want to learn how because she knew even if she couldn’t say it that that would mean when the old one died she would be less  dependent on her spirit so she said  “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls” with her lips poked out and the old woman wiped her hands on her apron saying “lord  these children” and neither of them ever said what they meant and i guess nobody ever does
the last time i was home to see my mother we kissed exchanged pleasantries and unpleasantries pulled a warm  comforting silence around us and read separate books i remember the first time i consciously saw her we were living in a three room  apartment on burns avenue mommy always sat in the dark i don’t know how i knew that but she did that night i stumbled into the kitchen maybe because i’ve always been a night person or perhaps because i had wet the bed she was sitting on a chair the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through  those thousands of panes landlords who rented to people with children were prone to put in windows  she may have been smoking but maybe not her hair was three-quarters her height which made me a strong believer in the samson myth  and very black i’m sure i just hung there by the door i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady she was very deliberately waiting perhaps for my father to come home  from his night job or maybe for a dream that had promised to come by  “come here” she said “i’ll teach you  a poem: i see the moon  the moon sees me  god bless the moon  and god bless me
they clapped when we landed thinking africa was just an extension of the black world they smiled as we taxied home to be met black to black face not understanding africans lack  color prejudice they rushed to declare cigarettes, money, allegiance to the mother land not knowing despite having read fanon and davenport  hearing all of j.h. clarke’s lectures, supporting nkrumah in ghana and nigeria in the war that there was once  a tribe called afro-americans that populated the whole  of africa they stopped running when they learned the packages  on the women’s heads were heavy and that babies didn’t  cry and disease is uncomfortable and that villages are fun  only because you knew the feel of good leather on good  pavement they cried when they saw mercedes benz were as common  in lagos as volkswagens are in berlin they shook their heads when they understood there was no  difference between the french and the english and the americans and the afro-americans or the tribe next door or the country  across the border they were exasperated when they heard sly and the family stone in francophone africa and they finally smiled when little boys who spoke no western tongue said “james brown” with reverence they brought out their cameras and bought out africa’s drums when they finally realized that they are strangers all over and love is only and always about the lover not the beloved  they marveled at the beauty of the people and the richness  of the land knowing they could never possess either they clapped when they took off  for home despite the dead  dream they saw a free future
(for Harlem Magic) The laws of science teach us a pound of gold weighs as  much as a pound of flour though if dropped from any  undetermined height in their natural state one would reach bottom and one would fly away Laws of motion tell us an inert object is more difficult to  propel than an object heading in the wrong direction is to  turn around. Motion being energy—inertia—apathy.  Apathy equals hostility. Hostility—violence. Violence  being energy is its own virtue. Laws of motion teach us Black people are no less confused because of our  Blackness than we are diffused because of our powerlessness. Man we are told is the only animal who  smiles with his lips. The eyes however are the mirror of the soul The problem with love is not what we feel but what we  wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel something. Just as publicity is not production: seduction is not seductive If I could make a wish I’d wish for all the knowledge of all  the world. Black may be beautiful Professor Micheau says but knowledge is power. Any desirable object is bought and sold—any neglected object declines in value.  It is against man’s nature to be in either category If white defines Black and good defines evil then men define women or women scientifically speaking describe men. If sweet is the opposite of sour and heat the absence of cold then love is the contradiction of pain and beauty is in the eye of the beheld Sometimes I want to touch you and be touched in  return. But you think I’m grabbing and I think you’re  shirking and Mama always said to look out for men like  you So I go to the streets with my lips painted red and my  eyes carefully shielded to seduce the world my reluctant  lover And you go to your men slapping fives feeling good  posing as a man because you know as long as you sit  very very still the laws of motion will be in effect
Trees are never felled . . . in summer . . . Not when the fruit . . .  is yet to be borne . . . Never before the promise . . . is fulfilled . . .  Not when their cooling shade . . . has yet to comfort . . . Yet there are those . . . unheeding of nature . . . indifferent to  ecology . . . ignorant of need . . . who . . . with ax and sharpened  saw . . . would . . . in boots . . . step forth damaging . . . Not the tree . . . for it falls . . . But those who would . . . in summer’s heat . . . or winter’s cold . . . contemplate . . . the  beauty . . .
I am a slave to the nudity of women.  I do not know with what resolve I could stand against it, a naked woman  Asking of me anything. An unclothed woman is sometimes other things.  I see her in a dish of green pears. Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say  Without clothes Her breasts are the two lions In front of the New York Public Library, Do you know that postcard of mine?  In those lions there is something For which I have in exchange  Only sounds. Only my fingers. I see her everywhere. She is the lions And the pears, those letters of the alphabet As children we called dirty, the W,  The Y, the small o. She is absolutely the wet clothing on the line.  Or, you know, to be more intimate, May I? The nub, the nose of the pear, Do you know what I mean? Those parts of the woman I will call two Spanish dancer hats, Or rounder sometimes, doughboy helmets from the War. Sometimes they are flat in the late afternoon  Asleep. Like drawings, Like a single rock thrown into the lake,  These parts of a woman an imperfect circling Gyre of lines moving out, beyond the water.  They reach me at the shore, Anselmo. Without fail, they are stronger, And they have always been faster than I am. It’s like watching the lassoing man, The man with the perfectly circling rope, Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies,  Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from, Whoever this man is. And he is always there. Everybody knows one. He always makes his big lasso, twirling his rope  Around himself and a woman from the audience Only I am the woman, do you understand, Anselmo?  Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman And me thinking of a woman  Without clothes Is that man and that rope And we are riding on separate horses.
or The Unfortunate Story of the Unmarried Flora Carrillo And the Man Who Loved Her Before He Died his Famous Death, From Whose Single Liaison a Daughter Was Born And the Advice, Rather the Explanation, Both of Them Left for Her, And the Story Also Of What She Became, and That She Was Happy 1. Three did not count. A fourth was forgiven by the Father Torres In exchange for reasonable payment, Two full days of the Hail Mary. Bigger than priests, the fifth Indiscretion was born on a Thursday, early Evening in a November not too cold. No rain had fallen And the birds had not yet gone. She chose a black dress, this Flora, Florita + here evoke the names of saints + Underneath which she carried tonight An old blade, but of fine Toledo forging Long as the member of this man In love with this woman standing at his door. Her head was filled with the vines of the jungle The noises of a lion, the feel of ten birds Trying with their beaks to get out. All anger: that she had hoped he would Come to her bedroom. And that he had. Faster than !that she took from him his rolled tongue Hanging there between his thin legs, his two-fingers, This girl’s wrist and fist of his Its central tendon and skin that moved on itself, This small and second body of his Which had found its way to her second mouth, This part of himself which he had given her Then taken back on this same day, earlier His ugly afternoon of loving her too much. He would scream as she had When she had taken him in first as a leg-bone And held him there too long, too much Until he had become a pinky-finger + here evoke the holy names + Which she !took now and put in the dowry She would make for her new daughter. With it she would write a note, Nothing else was left to do:Daughter, you will be an only child. The story of your birth will smell on you. Do this: take baths filled with rosemary With leaves, with pinched orange peels. Keep secret the fact of yourself. Be happy enough, happy with this much life. Ask for nothing. Do not live for a long time.
The old Russian spits up a plum fruit of the rasping sound he has stored in his throat all these lonely years made in fact lonely by his wife who left him, God knows without knowing how to cook for himself. He examines the plum notes its purplish consistency almost the color and shape of her buttocks whose circulation was bad which is why he himself wears a beret: black, good wool, certainly warm enough the times he remembers. He shoots the plum to the ground like a child whose confidence is a game of marbles whose flick of a thumb is a smile inside his mouth knowing what he knows will happen. But his wife, Marthe does not spill out when the plum breaks open. Instead, it is a younger self alive and waving just the size he remembers himself to have been. The old Russian puts him onto his finger like a parakeet and sits him on the shelf with the pictures. For the rest of his days he nags himself constantly into a half-sleep surprised by this turn of events.
William cut a hole in his Levi’s pocket so he could flop himself out in class behind the girls so the other guys could see and shit what guts we all said. All Konga wanted to do over and over was the rubber band trick, but he showed everyone how, so nobody wanted to see anymore and one day he cried, just cried until his parents took him away forever. Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing in his living room, just for his family to show anybody who came that they could afford it. Me, I got a French kiss, finally, in the catholic darkness, my tongue’s farthest half vacationing loudly in another mouth like a man in Bermudas, and my body jumped against a flagstone wall, I could feel it through her thin, almost nonexistent body: I had, at that moment, that moment, a hot girl on a summer night, the best of all the things we tried to do. Well, she let me kiss her, anyway, all over. Or it was just a flagstone wall with a flaw in the stone, an understanding cavity for burning young men with smooth dreams— the true circumstance is gone, the true circumstances about us all then are gone. But when I kissed her, all water, she would close her eyes, and they into somewhere would disappear. Whether she was there or not, I remember her, clearly, and she moves around the room, sometimes, until I sleep. I have lain on the desert in watch low in the back of a pick-up truck for nothing in particular, for stars, for the things behind stars, and nothing comes more than the moment: always now, here in a truck, the moment again to dream of making love and sweat, this time to a woman, or even to all of them in some allowable way, to those boys, then, who couldn’t cry, to the girls before they were women, to friends, me on my back, the sky over me pressing its simple weight into her body on me, into the bodies of them all, on me.
Yes, but beyond happiness what is there? The question has not yet been answered. No great quotations have issued forth From there, we have no still photographs Full of men in fine leather hiking boots, Women with new-cut walking sticks. So yes, it is the realm of thin tigers Prowling, out to earn even more stripes; It is the smell of seven or eight perfumes Not currently available in America. Maybe this is wrong, of course. The place may after all be populated, Or over-populated, with dented trash cans In the streets and news of genital herpes In every smart article in every slick magazine Everywhere in the place. But everybody there smiles— Laughs, even, every time a breath can be caught. This is all true. Beyond happiness, it’s all the same, Things come back to where we are now. Of course maybe this is wrong, But don’t believe it: a happiness exists, All right, I have seen it for myself, Touched it, touched the woman Who with her daughter together keep Ammonia in Mason jars by the side window. They will throw it all in his face God Damn him if he ever comes close again.
1 As she grows to twelve, her body begins Its Spring, its hike along the trail In the mountains that open Suddenly to show a whole valley So surprising one forgets For the moment to breathe. Her hips, and so her walk, Her breasts, and so The way she begins to see How other people look at her, How they are caught mid-breath, and shy. But the day a train first came here, They look at her like that: No one staring at her face, no one Noting a moustache curling up Like the arms of the bald He-man posing in the traveling circus There on the face of the engineer. She gets angry, steam in her head The way the engine had Barely held in, almost bursting. Angry in the manner that a person might Take an egg and hold it too hard. Her breasts begin to grow, And she gets angry. Or, she gets angry, So her breasts begin to grow. She cannot remember exactly which. Her mother had told her This would come, But told her so quickly, so much In a hurry and in a small room, And with the other things, She neglected to say that also They would stop growing, So they might not. She would have to wear— She learns this in a dream— High heels backward on her feet To keep a symmetry of balance. The angrier she gets through the months, The more worried she feels At the silliness of how She has begun to grow two new shoulders, Of how she will have to wear her shoes, As bigger, one centimeter at a time, She sprouts out like buds, at first, Like fast plants, Then, like the trees, And finally unstoppable In their season: fruit. The future, she reasons, cannot be good. 2 At 28, she has forgotten what is past. She sits and watches now her thighs Flowing out like the broad Varicosed backs of alligators She has seen in moving pictures, Pushed out around the metal Edges of the lawn chair. Long and flat animals, Sated and full of wrinkling Ridges, held as if by small bones The way camping tents are suspended, All from having eaten Too many pigs, too many birds and cows In the summers of her middle Years of crying When she was all mouth and chewing To feel better, all without boys, No Pedro of her own And now the boys cannot Come close, dare not Dare the alligators Which might come after them. 3 But no. This is an exaggeration, This sadness At het self. Sadness is like that, Adding weight to a thing, to legs The way legs look as one sits In a chair relaxed, Or on the edge of a wall. As if one were a circus performer With a partner, Ramón, Ramón standing Feet planted this moment precisely On the thighs. But no. This is a further exaggeration. Sadness again is like that, It learns you, she thinks, Makes you heavy in those places exactly You have dared think to be strong. On Thursday the 8th of this month Miguel her husband left her, But in that odd physics of how distance Increased every step she took Away from him. As she left the house, he got farther. As she, his María, walked out the door He left her, and the more she walked The farther he got, and smaller. She had learned him as one learns A pair of good leather shoes. She loved him so much She stopped thinking about him. He was like breathing. So that when sadness called, she went To see what it wanted And did not worry. Sadness, again, is like that, Not telling a person the whole story. 4The orchard was his passion now More than women, More than hard words and fast guns In the hands of other men. And he tended his trees with fingers He might have used touching The hair of his young cousin, lovely Marta, his wife, light skinned, Eyes the color in the moss And barks of his trees, Who walked to the river and stayed. Fingers that might have Pointed out to her with care The beaten line a trail made Leading to his house, their house. But he was busy growing the limes So that her hair was like a bramble Having to be torn away Hard from her, leaving the blood.
People would come to my great-grandmother’s house. She was in a room. They would stay in the kitchen. The words their words rolled like cars by on a train Here from somewhere else and going somewhere else Moving on faster almost than we could read them, Sound them out my brother and me with our small mouths, Chessie, a cat, see? the Erie, Santa Fe, Ferrocarril, Ore cars from the Southern Pacific, brown And all the numbers of all the engines. The words they rolled easier, fat and longer With each beer held in a fist and hit Against brown lips and thin tongues, And things slid out of those mouths then with the drinking, Took shape in sounds larger than we were, those uncles’ laughs, Loud things which could be called back no longer. The words they rolled into plates of food Up with the smoke curling, there around the elbows, the words And the smoke, a tablecloth, a rope wound like a hypnotist’s wheel) All of it catching the heads of our mother in weak headlocks That fooled us—we had thought we were stronger With our thousand gatling short words, Half tears, half whispered. We were not. The words they rolled their wheels they rolled Until the mayonnaise turned light and then dark brown Until we slept in the corners, my brother and my cousins, Me with Midnight and Puerquito, our own hands Held around ourselves, our voices intimate Only with the animals, who understood something of us, Who let us hold their heads to our chests, Who looked at the things we whispered. The words, they rolled, they, they would not stop. I closed my eyes then, and their phrases became birds, Long birds, fat, snake birds that would not fly. A single laugh, some thin tongue pulled to its shrill Kicking roots, this one laugh, an uncle’s, It was the thinnest and strongest string Pulling their faces up together like puppets And they hit each other, those wooden heads Laughing, hit each other rolling, blunt-edged Side hitting sides like rocks and pieces of hill Heading along toward some bottom, heading Somewhere, the place of the broken parts. Nothing would take me by the hand, only the handle On the drawer in the corner, my hand holding it, my eyes Seeing how it became a licorice stick, then thousands of them Holding me, by the eyes, so I could see nothing, Hear only the sounds of a second world In league with the thunder and this night of summer. The words, they rolled, they would not stop, They would not take me home.
Under a heavy wire milk case, A piece of concrete foundation On top, in summer, in her backyard, Mrs. Russo keeps the cat Nikita safe From birds, from dogs, from eating Johnson grass, which he throws up. Nikita waits for ants to wander in And for the sun to leave. Instead, she comes to keep him Company, saying You look fat And that her son died, Remember I told you? Walking thin in his uniform On a road.
The easiest sadness is a boy Watching another boy Walk with a barefooted girl, clean Perfect feet, that kind of nose, Eyes like those he’s dreamed In the dream that comes back. A boy watching another boy lucky Gets an ache That is a small motor. In me there is an animal, And in that animal There is a hunger. I remember the boy Watching a boy. It was me. Watching, I was a little bit The boy walking. I was both of us. That’s how it felt. What I could not have, That’s what I was Inside, an ache Coming as I stood Too many places.
Everything’s been said But one last thing about the desert, And it’s awful: During brush fires in the Sonoran desert, Brush fires that happen before the monsoon and in the great, Deep, wide, and smothering heat of the hottest months, The longest months, The hypnotic, immeasurable lulls of August and July— During these summer fires, jackrabbits— Jackrabbits and everything else That lives in the brush of the rolling hills, But jackrabbits especially— Jackrabbits can get caught in the flames, No matter how fast and big and strong and sleek they are. And when they’re caught, Cornered in and against the thick Trunks and thin spines of the cactus, When they can’t back up any more, When they can’t move, the flame— It touches them, And their fur catches fire. Of course, they run away from the flame, Finding movement even when there is none to be found, Jumping big and high over the wave of fire, or backing Even harder through the impenetrable Tangle of hardened saguaro And prickly pear and cholla and barrel, But whichever way they find, What happens is what happens: They catch fire And then bring the fire with them when they run. They don’t know they’re on fire at first, Running so fast as to make the fire Shoot like rocket engines and smoke behind them, But then the rabbits tire And the fire catches up, Stuck onto them like the needles of the cactus, Which at first must be what they think they feel on their skins. They’ve felt this before, every rabbit. But this time the feeling keeps on. And of course, they ignite the brush and dried weeds All over again, making more fire, all around them. I’m sorry for the rabbits. And I’m sorry for us To know this.
Wheel of sorrow, centerless. Voices, sad without cause, slope upward, expiring on grave summits.  Mournfulness of muddy playgrounds,  raw smell of rubbers and wrapped lunches  when little girls stand in a circle singing  of windows and of lovers. Hearing them, no one could tell why they sing sadly, but there is in their voices  the pathos of all handed-down garments  hanging loosely on small bodies.
The country lies flat, expressionless as the face of a stranger.  Not one hillock shelters a buried bone. The city: a scene thin as a theater backdrop, where no doors open,  no streets extend beyond the view from the corner. Only the railroad embankment is high, shaggy with grass.  Only the freight, knuckling a red sun under its wheels,  drags familiar box-car shapes down long perspectives  of childhood meals and all crossings at sunset. With a look deep as the continent, with the casual greeting  of those who will meet again, it bestrides the viaduct.  Its span is the span of trestles above mountain gorges,  its roar the echo of streams still wearing away stone.
Out of a high meadow where flowers bloom above cloud, come down; pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice. Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir, surprise in the perfect leg-stems and queries unstirred by recognition or fear pooled in the deep eyes. Come down by regions where rocks lift through the hot haze of pain; down landscapes darkened, crossed by the rift of death-shock; place print of a neat hoof on trampled ground where not one leaf or root remains unbitten; but come down always, accompany me to the morass of the decaying mind. There we’ll share one rotted stump between us.
At dawn I heard among bird calls the billions of marching feet in the churn and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid, and very old halting feet, the feet of the very light and very heavy, all marching but not together, criss-crossing at every angle with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump into each other, walking in the doors of houses and out the back door forty years later, finally knowing that time collapses on a single plateau where they were all their lives, knowing that time stops when the heart stops as they walk off the earth into the night air.
Mittens are drying on the radiator, boots nearby, one on its side. Like some monstrous segmented insect the radiator elongates under the window. Or it is a beast with many shoulders domesticated in the Ice Age. How many years it takes to move from room to room! Some cage their radiators but this is unnecessary as they have little desire to escape. Like turtles they are quite self-contained. If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart  só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time  Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind  like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,  with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;  thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.  Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.
[1] The Governor your husband lived so long  moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,  you were a patient woman.— I seem to see you pause here still: Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored  before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,  all the children still. ‘Simon ...’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.  [2] Outside the New World winters in grand dark  white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands foxes down foxholes sigh, surely the English heart quails, stunned. I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea, spares from his rigour for your poetry more. We are on each other’s hands who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,  [3] thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air  your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see, from the centuries it. I think you won’t stay. How do we  linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,  implausibly visible, to whom, a year,  years, over interims; or not; to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.  [4] Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then; then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you? Your master never died, Simon ah thirty years past you— Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck it seems I find you, young. I come to check, I come to stay with you, and the Governor, & Father, & Simon, & the huddled men.  [5] By the week we landed we were, most, used up.  Strange ships across us, after a fortnight’s winds  unfavouring, frightened us; bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were ill many as one day we could have no sermons; broils, quelled; a fatherless child unkennelled; vermin  crowding & waiting: waiting. And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop  [6] (delivered from the waves; because he found off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe across a tidal river, that water glittered fair & blue & narrow, none of the other men could swim  and the plantation’s prime theft up to him, shouldered on a glad day hard on the glorious feasting of thanksgiving) drowned.  [7] How long with nothing in the ruinous heat,  clams & acorns stomaching, distinction perishing,  at which my heart rose, with brackish water, we would sing. When whispers knew the Governor’s last bread  was browning in his oven, we were discourag’d.  The Lady Arbella dying— dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.  [8] That beyond the Atlantic wound our woes enlarge  is hard, hard that starvation burnishes our fear,  but I do gloss for You. Strangers & pilgrims fare we here, declaring we seek a City. Shall we be deceived? I know whom I have trusted, & whom I have believed,  and that he is able to keep that I have committed to his charge.  [9] Winter than summer worse, that first, like a file  on a quick, or the poison suck of a thrilled tooth;  and still we may unpack. Wolves & storms among, uncouth board-pieces, boxes, barrels vanish, grow houses, rise. Motes that hop in sunlight slow  indoors, and I am Ruth away: open my mouth, my eyes wet: I wóuld smile:  [10] vellum I palm, and dream. Their forest dies to greensward, privets, elms & towers, whence  a nightingale is throbbing. Women sleep sound. I was happy once . .  (Something keeps on not happening; I shrink?)  These minutes all their passions & powers sink  and I am not one chance for an unknown cry or a flicker of unknown eyes.  [11] Chapped souls ours, by the day Spring’s strong winds swelled,  Jack’s pulpits arched, more glad. The shawl I pinned  flaps like a shooting soul might in such weather Heaven send. Succumbing half, in spirit, to a salmon sash I prod the nerveless novel succotash— I must be disciplined, in arms, against that one, and our dissidents, and myself.  [12] Versing, I shroud among the dynasties; quaternion on quaternion, tireless I phrase anything past, dead, far, sacred, for a barbarous place. —To please your wintry father? all this bald abstract didactic rime I read appalled harassed for your fame mistress neither of fiery nor velvet verse, on your knees  [13] hopeful & shamefast, chaste, laborious, odd, whom the sea tore. —The damned roar with loss,  so they hug & are mean with themselves, and I cannot be thus. Why then do I repine, sick, bad, to long after what must not be? I lie wrong once more. For at fourteen I found my heart more carnal and sitting loose from God,  [14] vanity & the follies of youth took hold of me;  then the pox blasted, when the Lord returned.  That year for my sorry face so-much-older Simon burned, so Father smiled, with love. Their will be done.  He to me ill lingeringly, learning to shun a bliss, a lightning blood vouchsafed, what did seem life. I kissed his Mystery.  [15] Drydust in God’s eye the aquavivid skin  of Simon snoring lit with fountaining dawn  when my eyes unlid, sad. John Cotton shines on Boston’s sin—  I ám drawn, in pieties that seem the weary drizzle of an unremembered dream.  Women have gone mad  at twenty-one. Ambition mines, atrocious, in.  [16] Food endless, people few, all to be done. As pippins roast, the question of the wolves turns & turns. Fangs of a wolf will keep, the neck round of a child, that child brave. I remember who  in meeting smiled & was punisht, and I know who  whispered & was stockt. We lead a thoughtful life. But Boston’s cage we shun.  [17] The winters close, Springs open, no child stirs  under my withering heart, O seasoned heart God grudged his aid. All things else soil like a shirt. Simon is much away. My executive stales. The town came through for the cartway by the pales,  but my patience is short. I revolt from, I am like, these savage foresters  [18] whose passionless dicker in the shade, whose glance  impassive & scant, belie their murderous cries when quarry seems to show. Again I must have been wrong, twice. Unwell in a new way. Can that begin? God brandishes. O love, O I love. Kin, gather. My world is strange and merciful, ingrown months, blessing a swelling trance.  [19] So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you & hate  off with you. Ages! Useless. Below my waist  he has me in Hell’s vise. Stalling. He let go. Come back: brace me somewhere. No. No. Yes! everything down  hardens I press with horrible joy down  my back cracks like a wrist shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late  [20] hide me forever I work thrust I must free now I all muscles & bones concentrate what is living from dying? Simon I must leave you so untidy Monster you are killing me Be sure I’ll have you later Women do endure I can can no longer and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me  [21] drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!  One proud tug greens heaven. Marvellous,  unforbidding Majesty. Swell, imperious bells. I fly. Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend:  sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end.  Blossomed Sarah, and I blossom. Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl.  [22] Beloved household, I am Simon’s wife, and the mother of Samuel—whom greedy yet I miss  out of his kicking place. More in some ways I feel at a loss, freer. Cantabanks & mummers, nears longing for you. Our chopping scores my ears,  our costume bores my eyes. St. George to the good sword, rise! chop-logic’s rife  [23] & fever & Satan & Satan’s ancient fere. Pioneering is not feeling well, not Indians, beasts. Not all their riddling can forestall one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to go fróm us to live with God. ‘Then Aunt went too?’ Dear, she does wait still. Stricken: ‘Oh. Then he takes us one by one.’ My dear.  [24] Forswearing it otherwise, they starch their minds.  Folkmoots, & blether, blether. John Cotton rakes  to the synod of Cambridge. Down from my body my legs flow, out from it arms wave, on it my head shakes.  Now Mistress Hutchinson rings forth a call— should she? many creep out at a broken wall— affirming the Holy Ghost dwells in one justified. Factioning passion blinds  [25] all to her good, all can she be exiled? Bitter sister, victim! I miss you. —I miss you, Anne, day or night weak as a child, tender & empty, doomed, quick to no tryst.  —I hear you. Be kind, you who leaguer my image in the mist. —Be kind you, to one unchained eager far & wild  [26] and if, 0 my love, my heart is breaking, please  neglect my cries and I will spare you. Deep  in Time’s grave, Love’s, you lie still. Lie still. —Now? That happy shape my forehead had under my most long, rare,  ravendark, hidden, soft bodiless hair you award me still. You must not love me, but I do not bid you cease.  [27] Veiled my eyes, attending. How can it be I?  Moist, with parted lips, I listen, wicked.  I shake in the morning & retch. Brood I do on myself naked. A fading world I dust, with fingers new. —I have earned the right to be alone with you.  —What right can that be? Convulsing, if you love, enough, like a sweet lie.  [28] Not that, I know, you can. This cratered skin, like the crabs & shells of my Palissy ewer, touch!  Oh, you do, you do? Falls on me what I like a witch, for lawless holds, annihilations of law which Time and he and man abhor, foresaw: sharper than what my Friend brought me for my revolt when I moved smooth & thin,  [29] faintings black, rigour, chilling, brown parching, back, brain burning, the grey pocks  itch, a manic stench of pustules snapping, pain floods the palm, sleepless, or a red shaft with a dreadful start  rides at the chapel, like a slipping heart. My soul strains in one qualm ah but this is not to save me but to throw me down.  [30] And out of this I lull. It lessens. Kiss me.  That once. As sings out up in sparkling dark  a trail of a star & dies, while the breath flutters, sounding, mark,  so shorn ought such caresses to us be  who, deserving nothing, flush and flee  the darkness of that light, a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Talk to me.  [31] —It is Spring’s New England. Pussy willows wedge  up in the wet. Milky crestings, fringed yellow, in heaven, eyed by the melting hand-in-hand or mere desirers single, heavy-footed, rapt, make surge poor human hearts. Venus is trapt— the hefty pike shifts, sheer— in Orion blazing. Warblings, odours, nudge to an edge—  [32] —Ravishing, ha, what crouches outside ought,  flamboyant, ill, angelic. Often, now,  I am afraid of you. I am a sobersides; I know. I want to take you for my lover. —Do.  —I hear a madness. Harmless I to you  am not, not I? —No. —I cannot but be. Sing a concord of our thought.  [33] —Wan dolls in indigo on gold: refrain my western lust. I am drowning in this past.  I lose sight of you who mistress me from air. Unbraced in delirium of the grand depths, giving away  haunters what kept me, I breathe solid spray.  —I am losing you! Straiten me on. —I suffered living like a stain:  [34] I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars,  over that fire backward & forth; they burn; bits fall. I wonder ifI killed them. Women serve my turn. —Dreams! You are good. —No. —Dense with hardihood  the wicked are dislodged, and lodged the good. In green space we are safe. God awaits us (but I am yielding) who Hell wars.  [35] —I cannot feel myself God waits. He flies nearer a kindly world; or he is flown. One Saturday’s rescue won’t show. Man is entirely alone may be. I am a man of griefs & fits trying to be my friend. And the brown smock splits,  down the pale flesh a gash broadens and Time holds up your heart against my eyes.  [36] —Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame  is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw  hostile glances towards God. Crumpling plunge of a pestle, bray: sin cross & opposite, wherein I survive  nightmares of Eden. Reaches foul & live  he for me, this soul to crunch, a minute tangle of eternal flame.  [37] I fear Hell’s hammer-wind. But fear does wane.  Death’s blossoms grain my hair; I cannot live. A black joy clashes joy, in twilight. The Devil said ‘I will deal toward her softly, and her enchanting cries  will fool the horns of Adam.’ Father of lies, a male great pestle smashes small women swarming towards the mortar’s rim in vain.  [38] I see the cruel spread Wings black with saints!  Silky my breasts not his, mine, mine, to withhold  or tender, tender. I am sifting, nervous, and bold. The light is changing. Surrender this loveliness  you cannot make me do. But I will. Yes.  What horror, down stormy air, warps towards me? My threatening promise faints—  [39] torture me, Father, lest not I be thine!  Tribunal terrible & pure, my God, mercy for him and me. Faces half-fanged, Christ drives abroad, and though the crop hopes, Jane is so slipshod  I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home,  my heart claps like the swan’s under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.  [40] As a canoe slides by on one strong stroke  hope his hélp not I, who do hardly bear  his gift still. But whisper I am not utterly. I pare an apple for my pipsqueak Mercy and  she runs & all need naked apples, fanned  their tinier envies. Vomitings, trots, rashes. Can be hope a cloak?  [41] for the man with cropt ears glares. My fingers tighten  my skirt. I pass. Alas! I pity all. Shy, shy, with mé, Dorothy. Moonrise, and frightening hoots. ‘Mother, how long will I be dead?’ Our friend the owl  vanishes, darling, but your homing soul retires on Heaven, Mercy: not we one instant die, only our dark does lighten.  [42] When by me in the dusk my child sits down  I am myself. Simon, if it’s that loose, let me wiggle it out. You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite. How they loft, how their sizes delight and grate.  The proportioned, spiritless poems accumulate.  And they publish them away in brutish London, for a hollow crown.  [43] Father is not himself. He keeps his bed, and threw a saffron scum Thursday. God-forsaken words escaped him raving. Save, Lord, thy servant zealous & just. Sam he saw back from Harvard. He did scold  his secting enemies. His stomach is cold while we drip, while my baby John breaks out. O far from where he bred!  [44] Bone of moaning: sung Where he has gone a thousand summers by truth-hallowed souls;  be still. Agh, he is gone! Where? I know. Beyond the shoal. Still-all a Christian daughter grinds her teeth  a little. This our land has ghosted with  our dead: I am at home. Finish, Lord, in me this work thou hast begun.  [45] And they tower, whom the pear-tree lured to let them fall, fierce mornings they reclined  down the brook-bank to the east fishing for shiners with a crookt pin, wading, dams massing, well, and Sam’s to be  a doctor in Boston. After the divisive sea,  and death’s first feast, and the galled effort on the wilderness endured,  [46] Arminians, and the King bore against us; of an ‘inward light’ we hear with horror. Whose fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly purge his floor, come towards me. I have what licks the joints  and bites the heart, which winter more appoints.  Iller I, oftener. Hard at the outset; in the ending thus hard, thus?  [47] Sacred & unutterable Mind flashing thorough the universe one thought, I do wait without peace. In the article of death I budge. Eat my sore breath, Black Angel. Let me die. Body a-drain, when will you be dry and countenance my speed to Heaven’s springs? lest stricter writhings have me declined.  [48] ‘What are those pictures in the air at night,  Mother?’ Mercy did ask. Space charged with faces  day & night! I place a goatskin’s fetor, and sweat: fold me in savoury arms. Something is shaking, wrong.  He smells the musket and lifts it. It is long.  It points at my heart. Missed he must have. In the gross storm of sunlight  [49] I sniff a fire burning without outlet, consuming acrid its own smoke. It’s me. Ruined laughter sounds outside. Ah but I waken, free. And so I am about again. I hagged a fury at the short maid, whom tongues tagged,  and I am sorry. Once less I was anxious when more passioned to upset  [50] the mansion & the garden & the beauty of God.  Insectile unreflective busyness blunts & does amend. Hangnails, piles, fibs, life’s also. But we are that from which draws back a thumb.  The seasons stream and, somehow, I am become  an old woman. It’s so: I look. I bear to look. Strokes once more his rod.  [51] My window gives on the graves, in our great new house  (how many burned?) upstairs, among the elms.  I lie, & endure, & wonder. A haze slips sometimes over my dreams  and holiness on horses’ bells shall stand.  Wandering pacemaker, unsteadying friend,  in a redskin calm I wait: beat when you will our end. Sinkings & droopings drowse.  [52] They say thro’ the fading winter Dorothy fails, my second, who than I bore one more, nine; and I see her inearthed. I linger. Seaborn she wed knelt before Simon; Simon I, and linger. Black-yellow seething, vast it lies fróm me, mine: all they look aghast. It will be a glorious arm. Docile I watch. My wreckt chest hurts when Simon pales.  [53] In the yellowing days your faces wholly fail,  at Fall’s onset. Solemn voices fade. I feel no coverlet. Light notes leap, a beckon, swaying the tilted, sickening ear within. I’ll—I’ll— I am closed & coming. Somewhere! I defile  wide as a cloud, in a cloud, unfit, desirous, glad—even the singings veil—  [54] —You are not ready? You áre ready. Pass, as shadow gathers shadow in the welling night.  Fireflies of childhood torch you down. We commit our sister down. One candle mourn by, which a lover gave, the use’s edge and order of her grave. Quiet? Moisture shoots. Hungry throngs collect. They sword into the carcass.  [55] Headstones stagger under great draughts of time  after heads pass out, and their world must reel  speechless, blind in the end about its chilling star: thrift tuft, whin cushion—nothing. Already with the wounded flying  dark air fills, I am a closet of secrets dying,  races murder, foxholes hold men, reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime.  [56] I must pretend to leave you. Only you draw off  a benevolent phantom. I say you seem to me drowned towns off England, featureless as those myriads who what bequeathed save fire-ash, fossils, burled  in the open river-drifts of the Old World? Simon lived on for years. I renounce not even ragged glances, small teeth, nothing,  [57] O all your ages at the mercy of my loves together lie at once, forever or so long as I happen. In the rain of pain & departure, still Love has no body and presides the sun, and elf’s from silence melody. I run. Hover, utter, still, a sourcing whom my lost candle like the firefly loves.
I love sweets,—  heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ... But my true self  is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond  elegant girl whose  body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up  this ideal;  but I WILL NOT ... cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married  meat, and thought it was a wife. . . . Why am I a girl? I ask my doctors, and they tell me they  don’t know, that it is just “given.” But it has such  implications—;  and sometimes,  I even feel like a girl. . . . Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds. . . . About five years ago, I was in a restaurant,  eating alone  with a book. I was not married, and often did that ... —I’d turn down dinner invitations, so I could eat alone; I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with  butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of  vanilla ice cream, at the end,—  sitting there alone  with a book, both in the book and out of it, waited on, idly watching people,—  when an attractive young man  and woman, both elegantly dressed, sat next to me.  She was beautiful—; with sharp, clear features, a good bone structure—;  if she took her make-up off  in front of you, rubbing cold cream again and again across her skin, she still would be  beautiful—  more beautiful. And he,—  I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man  so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost a male version  of her,— I had the sudden, mad notion that I  wanted to be his lover ... —Were they married?  were they lovers? They didn’t wear wedding rings. Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed  politics. They didn’t touch ... —How could I discover?  Then, when the first course  arrived, I noticed the way each held his fork out for the other  to taste what he had ordered ...  They did this again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent  smiles, for each course,  more than once for each dish—;  much too much for just friends ... —Their behavior somehow sickened me; the way each gladly put the food the other had offered into his mouth—; I knew what they were. I knew they slept together.  An immense depression came over me ... —I knew I could never with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth: happily myself put food into another’s mouth—; I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal. . . . Even as a child, I saw that the “natural” process of aging is for one’s middle to thicken— one’s skin to blotch; as happened to my mother.  And her mother.  I loathed “Nature.” At twelve, pancakes became the most terrible thought there is ... I shall defeat “Nature.” In the hospital, when they weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt. . . . January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost realism.... Her physical examination showed nothing striking. Salivary glands are markedly enlarged on both sides.  January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.”  February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an elegant, very thin female patient. Homo-erotic component strikingly evident.  February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry. . . . Callas is my favorite singer, but I’ve only  seen her once—; I’ve never forgotten that night ... —It was in Tosca, she had long before lost weight, her voice had been, for years,  deteriorating, half itself ... When her career began, of course, she was fat, enormous—; in the early photographs,  sometimes I almost don’t recognize her ... The voice too then was enormous— healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of  crude effects, even vulgar,  almost out of  high spirits, too much health ... But soon she felt that she must lose weight,— that all she was trying to express was obliterated by her body, buried in flesh—;  abruptly, within four months, she lost at least sixty pounds ... —The gossip in Milan was that Callas  had swallowed a tapeworm. But of course she hadn’t.  The tapeworm was her soul ... —How her soul, uncompromising,  insatiable,  must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, revealing this extraordinarily mercurial; fragile; masterly creature ... —But irresistibly, nothing stopped there; the huge voice also began to change: at first, it simply diminished  in volume, in size,  then the top notes became  shrill, unreliable—at last, usually not there at all ... —No one knows why. Perhaps her mind,  ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry subtler, more refined,  more capable of expressing humiliation,  rage, betrayal ... —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit  loathed the unending struggle to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose mechanics, and suffocating customs, seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit ... —I know that in Tosca, in the second act,  when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia,  she sang Vissi d’arte  —“I lived for art”—  and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks,  with a voice reaching  harrowingly for the notes, “Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?”  I felt I was watching  autobiography—  an art; skill; virtuosity miles distant from the usual soprano’s  athleticism,—   the usual musician’s dream  of virtuosity without content ... —I wonder what she feels, now,  listening to her recordings. For they have already, within a few years,  begun to date ... Whatever they express they express through the style of a decade  and a half—;  a style she helped create ... —She must know that now she probably would not do a trill in exactly that way,—   that the whole sound, atmosphere, dramaturgy of her recordings have just slightly become those of the past ... —Is it bitter? Does her soul  tell her that she was an idiot ever to think  anything  material wholly could satisfy? ... —Perhaps it says: The only way  to escape the History of Stylesis not to have a body. . . . When I open my eyes in the morning, my great  mystery  stands before me ... —I know that I am intelligent; therefore the inability not to fear food day-and-night; this unending hunger ten minutes after I have eaten ...  a childish dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,— half my mind says that all this  is demeaning ...  Bread for days on end drives all real thought from my brain ... —Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin conceals the idealnot to have a body—;  which is NOT trivial ... This wish seems now as much a “given” of my existence as the intolerable fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned;  and once weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds ... —But then I think, No. That’s too simple,—  without a body, who canknow himself at all?  Only by acting; choosing; rejecting; have I made myself—  discovered who and what Ellen can be ... —But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior to name; gender; action;  fashion;  MATTER ITSELF,— ... trying to stop my hunger with FOOD  is like trying to appease thirst   with ink. . . . March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge. . . . The train-ride yesterday was far worse than I expected ...  In our compartment were ordinary people: a student;  a woman; her child;— they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces;  but I thought  I was surrounded by creatures with the pathetic, desperate desire to be not what they were:—  the student was short, and carried his body as if forcing  it to be taller—; the woman showed her gums when she smiled,  and often held her hand up to hide them—; the child seemed to cry simply because it was  small; a dwarf, and helpless ... —I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband not bring food ... After about thirty minutes, the woman  peeled an orange to quiet the child. She put a section  into its mouth—;  immediately it spit it out. The piece fell to the floor. —She pushed it with her foot through the dirt  toward me  several inches. My husband saw me staring  down at the piece ... —I didn’t move; how I wanted  to reach out,  and as if invisible shove it in my mouth—; my body became rigid. As I stared at him,  I could see him staring at me,—  then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then  back to me ... I didn’t move. —At last, he bent down, and  casually  threw it out the window. He looked away. —I got up to leave the compartment, then  saw his face,— his eyes  were red;  and I saw—I’m sure I saw— disappointment. . . . On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that—for the first time in thirteen years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heaviness seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead. “She looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful.” . . . Dearest.—I remember how at eighteen,  on hikes with friends, when  they rested, sitting down to joke or talk, I circled around them, afraid to hike ahead alone, yet afraid to rest when I was not yet truly thin. You and, yes, my husband,— you and he have by degrees drawn me within the circle;  forced me to sit down at last on the ground. I am grateful. But something in me refuses it. —How eager I have been to compromise, to kill this refuser,— but each compromise, each attempt  to poison an ideal which often seemed to me sterile and unreal, heightens my hunger. I am crippled. I disappoint you. Will you greet with anger, or  happiness, the news which might well reach you  before this letter?  Your Ellen.
I To see my father lying in pink velvet, a rosary  twined around his hands, rouged,  lipsticked, his skin marble ... My mother said, “He looks the way he did  thirty years ago, the day we got married,— I’m glad I went; I was afraid: now I can remember him  like that ...” Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with you  or marry, because you wanted her to pay half the expenses, and “His drinking almost drove me crazy—”  Ruth once saw you staring into a mirror, in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy hat, say:  “Why can’t I look like a cowboy?” You left a bag of money; and were  the unhappiest man  I have ever known well.II It’s in many ways a relief to have you dead.  I have more money. Bakersfield is easier: life isn’t so nude,  now that I no longer have to face you each evening: mother is progressing  beautifully in therapy, I can almost convince myself  a good analyst would have saved you: for I need to believe, as always, that your pervasive sense of disappointment proceeded from trivial desires: but I fear that beneath the wish to be a movie star,  cowboy, empire builder, all those cheap desires, lay radical disaffection  from the very possibilities  of human life ... Your wishes were too simple:  or too complex.III I find it difficult to imagine you in bed, making love to a woman ... By common consensus, you were a good lover:  and yet, mother once said: “Marriage would be better  if it weren’t mixed up with sex ...” Just after the divorce,—when I was  about five,—I slept all night with you in a motel, and again and again  you begged me to beg her to come back ... I said nothing; but she went back several times, again and again you would go on a binge, there would be  another woman, mother would leave ... You always said, “Your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.”IV Oh Shank, don’t turn into the lies  of mere, neat poetry ... I’ve been reading Jung, and he says that we can  never get to the bottom  of what is, or was ... But why things were as they were  obsesses; I know that you  the necessity to contend with you your helplessness before yourself,  —has been at the center  of how I think my life ...  And yet your voice, raw, demanding, dissatisfied,  saying over the telephone:  “How are all those bastards at Harvard?” remains, challenging: beyond all the  patterns and paradigms  I use to silence and stop it.V I dreamed I had my wish:  —I seemed to see the conditions of my life, upon a luminous stage: how I could change,  how I could not: the root of necessity,  and choice.  The stage was labelled  “Insight”.  The actors there had no faces, I cannot remember  the patterns of their actions, but  simply by watching, I knew that beneath my feet  the fixed stars governing my life had begun to fall, and melt ...  —Then your face appeared, laughing at the simplicity of my wish.VI Almost every day I take out the letter you wrote me in Paris.  ... Why? It was written the year before you married Shirley; Myrtle,  your girlfriend, was an ally of mine because she “took care of you,” but you always made it clear she was too dumpy and crude to marry ... In some ways “elegant,” with a pencil-thin, neatly clipped moustache,  chiselled, Roman nose, you were a millionaire and always pretended you couldn’t afford to go to Europe ... When I was a child, you didn’t seem to care if I existed.   Bakersfield, Calif   July 9, 1961 Dear Pinon,  Sorry I haven’t wrote to you sooner but glad to hear that you are well and enjoying Paris.  I got your fathers day wire in the hospital where I put in about twelve days but I am very well now. I quit the ciggeretts but went through ten days of hell quitting and my back had been giving me hell.  It had been very hot here but the last few days has been very nice. Emily just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had her feet worked on. I guess she will tell you about it. Glad to hear you are learning some French.  We are just about through with potatoes. Crop was very good but no price at all which made it a poor year. Cattle are cheap too. It look like a bad year for all farmer’s.  I don’t know anything else to tell you. Take care of your self and enjoy it. Maybe you will never have another chance for another trip. I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to go, so if you run into a extra special gal between 28 & 35 send her over here to me as all I know over here don’t amount to mutch. Well I guess I’ll close now as I am going over to see Emily.  Hoping to hear from you right away.  This address is 4019 Eton St. be sure and get it straight. Myrtle would like to know how much that watch amounts to. Let us know   Will close now and write soon.  Love ‘Shank’ P.S. Excuse this writing as its about 30 years since I wrote a letter.VII How can I say this?  I think my psychiatrist likes me: he knows the most terrible things I’ve done, every stupidity,  inadequacy, awkwardness, ignorance, the mad girl I screwed because she once again and again teased and rejected me, and whose psychic incompetence  I grimly greeted as an occasion for revenge;  he greets my voice with an interest, and regard, and affection,  which seem to signal I’m worth love; —you finally forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty  shambles of your life, in which you had less and less  occasion for pride, you were proud of me, the first Bidart who ever got a B.A.; Harvard, despite your distrust, was the crown;—but the way  you eyed me:  the bewilderment, unease: the somehow always tentative, suspended judgment ... —however much you tried (and, clearly,  you did try)  you could not remake your  taste, and like me: could not remake  yourself, to give me the grace needed to look in a mirror, as I often can  now, with some equanimity ...VIII When did I begin to substitute  insight, for prayer? ...  —You believed in neither:  but said, “My life is over,” after you had married Shirley, twenty-five years younger, with three small children, the youngest six months old; she was unfaithful within two months, the marriage was simply  annulled ...  A diabetic, you didn’t take your insulin when you drank, and almost managed to die many times ...  You punished Ruth when she went to Los Angeles for a weekend, by  beginning to drink; she would return home  either to find you in the hospital, or in a coma on the floor ...  The exacerbation  of this seeming necessity for connection—;  you and mother taught me  there’s little that’s redemptive or useful in natural affections ... I must unlearn; I must believe you were merely a man with a character, and a past—;  you wore them,   unexamined, like a nimbus of furies round your greying, awesome head ...IX What should I have done? In 1963, you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars  from me, so that we could buy cattle  together, under the name “Bidart and Son,”— most of your money was tied up  in the increasingly noxious “Bidart Brothers,”  run by your brother, Johnny ... I said no, that I wanted to use the money for graduate school; but I thought if you went on a binge, and as had happened  before, simply threw it away ... The Bidarts agreed you were not to be trusted; you accepted  my answer, with an air of inevitability I was shocked at ... I didn’t want to see your self-disgust;  —somehow, your self-congratulation  had eroded more deeply, much more deeply, than even I had wished,— but for years, how I had wished! ... I have a friend who says that he has never felt a conflict between something deeply wished or desired,  and what he thought was “moral” ... Father, such innocence surely is a kind of Eden—; but, somehow, I can’t regret that we are banished from that company—;  in the awareness, the history of our contradictions and violence,  insofar as I am “moral” at all, is the beginning of my moral being.X When I began this poem,  to see myself as a piece of history, having a past which shapes, and informs, and thus inevitably  limits—  at first this seemed sufficient, the beginning of  freedom ...  The way to approach freedom was to acknowledge necessity:—  I sensed I had to become not merely a speaker, the “eye,” but a character ... And you had to become a character: with a past,  with a set of internal contradictions and necessities  which if I could once define, would at least  begin to release us from each other ... But, of course, no such knowledge is possible;—  as I touch your photographs, they stare back at me  with the dazzling, impenetrable, glitter of mere life ... You stand smiling, at the end of the twenties,  in a suit, and hat, cane and spats, with a collie at your feet,  happy to be handsome, dashing, elegant:—  and though I cannot connect this image with the end of your life, with the defensive  gnarled would-be cowboy,—  you seem happy at that fact, happy to be surprising; unknowable; unpossessable ... You say it’s what you always understood by freedom.   1968-69.
As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own  possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but  ashes,  a flying column sent by Germanicus  commanded by Lucius Stertinius routed them;  and there, discovered amid plunder and the dead, was the Eagle of the nineteenth  legion, lost with Varus.  * The Romans now brought to the land of the Bructeri,—to whatever lay  between the river Ems and the river Lippe, to the very edge of their territory,—   devastation; until they reached at last the Teutoburgian Wood,  in whose darkness Varus and the remains of his fifteen thousand men,  it was said, lay unburied.  * Germanicus then conceived a desire to honor with obsequies these unburied warriors whose massacre once filled Augustus himself with rage and  shame,—   with hope or fear every corner of the Empire,—  while the least foot soldier, facing alien  terrain, was overcome with pity when he thought of family, friends, the sudden  reversals of battle, and shared human fate.  * First Caecina and his men  entered,—   ordered to reconnoitre the dismal treacherous passes, to attempt to build bridges and  causeways across the uneven, sodden marshland,—  then the rest of the army, witness to scenes  rending to sight and memory of sight.  * Varus’ first camp, with its wide sweep and deployment  of ordered space in confident dimension,  testified to the calm labors of three legions;—  then a ruined half-wall and shallow ditch  showed where a desperate remnant had  been driven to take cover;—   on the open ground between them were whitening bones, free  from putrefaction,—   scattered where men had been struck down  fleeing, heaped up where they had stood their ground before slaughter. Fragments of spears and horses’ limbs lay  intertwined, while human  skulls were nailed  like insults to the tree-trunks. Nearby groves held the altars  on which the savage Germans sacrificed the tribunes and chief centurions.  * Survivors of the catastrophe slowly began, at last,  to speak,—  the handful who had escaped death or slavery told their fellow soldiers where the generals fell, how the Eagles and standards were seized;—  one showed where Varus received his first wound, and  another, where he died by his own melancholy hand;— those thrown into crude pits saw  gibbets above them,  as well as the platform from which Arminius as if in delirium harangued  his own victorious troops,—  fury and rancor so joined to his joy, the imprisoned men thought they would soon be butchered,— until desecration of the Eagles at last satisfied  or exhausted his arrogance.  * And so, six years after the slaughter,  a living Roman army had returned to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole legions,— no man knew whether the remains that he had gathered, touched perhaps in consigning to the earth, were those of a stranger or a friend:—   all thought of all  as comrades and bloodbrothers; each, in common rising fury against the enemy, mourned at once and hated.   * When these events were reported to Rome Cynics whispered that thus the cunning State  enslaves us to its failures and its fate.— Epicureans saw in the ghostly mire an emblem of the nature of Desire.— Stoics replied that life is War, ILLUSION the source, the goal, the end of human action.  * At the dedication of the funeral mound, Germanicus laid the first earth,— thereby honoring the dead, and choosing to demonstrate  in his own person his heartfelt share in the general grief. He thereby earned the disapproval of Tiberius,—  perhaps because the Emperor interpreted every action of Germanicus unfavorably; or he may have felt the spectacle of the unburied dead must give the army less alacrity for battle and more  respect for the enemy—  while a commander belonging to the antique priesthood of the Augurs  pollutes himself by handling  objects belonging to the dead.  *    on the open ground whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down  fleeing  heaped up where they stood their ground Varus’ first camp with its  wide sweep  across the open ground the ruined half-wall and shallow ditch  on the open ground between them whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down  fleeing  heaped up where they stood their ground
A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading  where some ship saw an island being born:  at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;  and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still  un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Well, I had fifty-two miserable, small volcanoes I could climb  with a few slithery strides— volcanoes dead as ash heaps. I used to sit on the edge of the highest one  and count the others standing up, naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.  I’d think that if they were the size  I thought volcanoes should be, then I had  become a giant; and if I had become a giant, I couldn’t bear to think what size  the goats and turtles were, or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers  —a glittering hexagon of rollers  closing and closing in, but never quite,  glittering and glittering, though the sky  was mostly overcast. My island seemed to be a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s  left-over clouds arrived and hung above the craters—their parched throats  were hot to touch. Was that why it rained so much? And why sometimes the whole place hissed?  The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,  hissing like teakettles. (And I’d have given years, or taken a few,  for any sort of kettle, of course.) The folds of lava, running out to sea, would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove  to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated,  black, red, and white, and gray; the marbled colors made a fine display.  And I had waterspouts. Oh, half a dozen at a time, far out, they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,  their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches  of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,  sacerdotal beings of glass ... I watched  the water spiral up in them like smoke.  Beautiful, yes, but not much company. I often gave way to self-pity. “Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there  a moment when I actually chose this? I don’t remember, but there could have been.”  What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly  over a crater’s edge, I told myself “Pity should begin at home.” So the more  pity I felt, the more I felt at home. The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun  rose from the sea, and there was one of it and one of me.  The island had one kind of everything:  one tree snail, a bright violet-blue with a thin shell, crept over everything,  over the one variety of tree, a sooty, scrub affair. Snail shells lay under these in drifts  and, at a distance, you’d swear that they were beds of irises.  There was one kind of berry, a dark red.  I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.  Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;  and so I made home-brew. I’d drink  the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff that went straight to my head and play my home-made flute (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)  and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.  Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?  I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries.  No, not exactly, since the smallest was  a miserable philosophy. Because I didn’t know enough. Why didn’t I know enough of something?  Greek drama or astronomy? The books  I’d read were full of blanks; the poems—well, I tried reciting to my iris-beds, “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss ...” The bliss of what?  One of the first things that I did when I got back was look it up. The island smelled of goat and guano.  The goats were white, so were the gulls,  and both too tame, or else they thought  I was a goat, too, or a gull.Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa ... shriek ...
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations For Grace Bulmer BowersGrace Bulmer Bowers Elizabeth Bishop’s aunt From narrow provinces  of fish and bread and tea,  home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea  twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam  depends on if it meets  the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets  facing a red sea, and others, veinsveins Used as a verb: to extend over or mark with lines, as in the manner of veins the flats’  lavender, rich mud in burning rivuletsrivulets A small stream or brook; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples,  past clapboard farmhouses  and neat, clapboard churches,  bleached, ridged as clamshells,  past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink,  pink glancing off of metal,  brushing the dented flank  of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises,  and waits, patient, while  a lone traveller gives  kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms,  to the farm, to the dog.  The bus starts. The light  grows richer; the fog,  shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals  form and slide and settle  in the white hens’ feathers,  in gray glazed cabbages,  on the cabbage roses and lupinslupins A tall, flowering plant (Lupinus) in the legume family; its seeds (lupin beans) have been used as food like apostlesapostles A plant native to Brazil with large, fragrant white and purple flowers; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string  on the whitewashed fences;  bumblebees creep inside the foxglovesfoxgloves A colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds., and evening commences. One stop at Bass RiverBass River All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy.  Then the EconomiesEconomies Locations (Lower Economy, Middle Economy, and Upper Economy) in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy— Lower, Middle, Upper; Five IslandsFive Islands All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy, Five HousesFive Houses All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy, where a woman shakes a tablecloth  out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone.  The Tantramar marshesTantramar marshes On the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada  and the smell of salt hay.  An iron bridge trembles  and a loose plank rattles  but doesn’t give way. On the left, a red light  swims through the dark:  a ship’s port lantern.  Two rubber boots show,  illuminated, solemn.  A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags,  brisk, freckled, elderly.  “A grand night. Yes, sir,  all the way to Boston.”  She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods,  hairy, scratchy, splintery;  moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool  on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back.  Snores. Some long sighs.  A dreamy divagationdivagations Wanderings  begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination.... In the creakings and noises,  an old conversation —not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere,  back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned,  things cleared up finally;  what he said, what she said,  who got pensionedpensioned Dismissed from employment, typically because of age or health; paid a pension.; deaths, deaths and sicknesses;  the year he remarried; the year (something) happened.  She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner founderedschooner foundered A ship that has sunk or filled with water. He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad. When Amos began to pray  even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. “Yes ...” that peculiar  affirmative. “Yes ...” A sharp, indrawn breath,  half groan, half acceptance,  that means “Life’s like that.  We know it (also death).” Talking the way they talked  in the old featherbed,  peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall,  down in the kitchen, the dog  tucked in her shawl. Now, it’s all right now  even to fall asleep just as on all those nights.  —Suddenly the bus driver  stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather,  in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless,  high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as housessafe as houses Totally safe). A man’s voice assures us  “Perfectly harmless....” Some of the passengers  exclaim in whispers,  childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.”  “It’s awful plain.”  “Look! It’s a she!” Taking her time, she looks the bus over,  grand, otherworldly.  Why, why do we feel  (we all feel) this sweet  sensation of joy? “Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver,  rolling his r’s. “Look at that, would you.”  Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward,  the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadammacadam Road, pavement;  then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acridacrid Pungent, irritating  smell of gasoline.
I leave you in your garden.  In the yard Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared  With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour:  Dog-generations you have trained the vigour  That few can breed to train and fewer still  Control with the deliberate human will. And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,  The accumulations that compose the self—  Poem and history: for if we use Words to maintain the actions that we choose,  Our words, with slow defining influence,  Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments. Continual temptation waits on each To renounce his empire over thought and speech,  Till he submit his passive faculties To evening, come where no resistance is; The unmotivated sadness of the air Filling the human with his own despair. Where now lies power to hold the evening back?  Implicit in the grey is total black: Denial of the discriminating brain Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein Of necromancy. All as relative For mind as for the sense, we have to live  In a half-world, not ours nor history’s, And learn the false from half-true premisses. But sitting in the dusk—though shapes combine,  Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line,  You keep both Rule and Energy in view,  Much power in each, most in the balanced two:  Ferocity existing in the fence Built by an exercised intelligence. Though night is always close, complete negation  Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,  Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,  Still it is right to know the force of death,  And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,  Raise from the excellent the better still.
for David Kalstone Stand to one side. No, over here with me:  out of the light but out of darkness too,  where everything that is not odd or old is gold and subjugates the shadows. There,  now you will be no trouble and behold none— anything but trouble, at first glance, last chance to see what I say is worth a look. This whole palazzo is the property of a middle-aged and penniless dilettante, Pen Browning (Robert’s son), who has made terms  —palatial terms, in fact—with towering premises afforded by the tact of his New York heiress, Fannie Coddington  Browning, dutiful daughter-in-law, doubtful wife. Yet who would not be full of doubts, perplexed  at having to define Pen’s talents and finance his tastes? Their Ca’ Rezzonico itself is dubious. The ripened fruit of centuries, rat- and roach-infested, peeling, rank, withers with each tide that rots the piles, though apt withal to weather these tenants as well ... He is painting from the model: Dryope, undressed of course but draped against the draft  in a looping swathe of silver-printed stuff  that seems to move, glistening over flesh— it does move! lapped in its silver mesh are coils  of a python wrapped in loving torpor round  the contadina’s undistracted torso. The afternoon is numb: Dryope sleeps  in her pose, the python slips a little down the umber slope of her thigh, and Pen,  spired, slaps a dashing curlicue across his canvas. “I had the Jew come by  with this brocaded velvet yesterday— I bargained some old clothes against it, Fan, so you needn’t ask how much it cost in dollars.” To whom does Pen speak, his eyes intent, his hands  “working busily”? Beyond his “subject,” look  past the unimposing Dryope, look through the tufts of pampas grass extending up to the tufa vault whose patination casts a pall of watery splendor on the scene— if you manage to overlook the sumptuous junk,  jasper urns, a suit of Japanese armor,two stuffed bears, on the divan bearskins too— there, or in this atmosphere let me say lo! on that very divan Robert Browning lolls, a short and foreshortened colossus with feet of clay  but the hardest imaginable cranium, among his son’s possessions slightly ill at ease though well bestowed on slippery pelts, and plays (against the wealthy Fannie—see her white shawl?) at draughts with agate pieces, red and green, like a page from some old parchment of kings and queens.  In approbation of his son’s economies  the old man smiles now—but does she? The skull interfering with our view of Fannie is, I believe, or was the Mahdi’s which Pen keeps  beside his easel (Victorians could make  anything into a tobacco jar). “I took my pipe through Cannareggio on a long tramp  yesterday morning, right into the Ghetto,  looking for likely faces, which I found! Didn’t you say, Father, a satisfactory Jew is worth a dozen Gentiles? The one who sold  that velvet to me is sure to be ready by Spring:  for Lear, you know, or Lazarus at least ...”  Pen chatters on to charm the python, not  Dryope or Fannie who look up only when the poet, roused, exclaims— as rapt before himself as a child in front  of the Christmas tree: “A satisfactory Jew!  Setting mere Rothschildsplay aside, Pen,  I never saw but one in all my life: Dizzy, I mean—the potent wizard himself,  at Hampton Court a dozen years ago,  murmuring at the Queen’s ear like a wasp who hoped to buzz his way into the diamonds ...  With that olive cast and those glowing-coal-black eyes  and the mighty dome of his forehead (to be sure,  no Christian temple), as unlike a living man as any waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s: he had a face more mocking than a domino— I would as soon have thought of sitting down to tea with Hamlet or Ahasuerus ...” As if on cue, the poet’s high voice fades, the lights on his tree go out. Yet we have seen  enough and heard enough: the secret of losing  listeners—did Browning never learn?— is to tell them everything. We lose details.  The Mahdi’s skull and Fannie’s coincide ... The scene blurs and the sounds become no more  than exaggerated silence. Stand with me another moment till our presence is sacrificed to transitions altogether. Time will not console—at best it orders into a kind of seasonable chaos. Let me tell you, it will not take much longer than a medical prescription— give you ingredients, no cure ...  Visitors to the palazzo used to speak of the dangerous ménage—the menagerie!  yet the Costa Rican python that cost Pen (or Fannie) sixteen pounds was the first to go,  untempted by the rats of Rezzonico;Dryope followed Dryope underground,  the girl carried off by a chill and buried  at San Michele, the great daub interred  in the cellars of the Metropolitan ... “Dear dead women, with such hair, too,”  we quote, and notice that hair is the first of ourselves to decay before—last after—death. In a year Robert Browning too was dead, immortal;  in another, Fannie dropped her shawl and took  the veil and vows of an Episcopalian nun; and Pen? Oh, Pen went on painting, of course—buono di cuore, in yellow chamois gloves, obese, oblivious, dithering into debt and an easy death. The sale of what we saw or saw through in Venice realized, as they say,  some thirty thousand pounds at Sotheby’s.  I told you: first glance is last chance. Darkness slides over the waters—oil sludge  spreading under, till even Venice dies, immortally immerded. Earth has no other way,  our provisional earth, than to become invisible in us and rise again. Rezzonico ... Disraeli ... We realize our task.  It is to print earth so deep in memory that a meaning reaches the surface. Nothing but  darkness abides, darkness demanding not  illumination—not from the likes of us— but only that we yield. And we yield.
The writer had settled in England in 1771 on Garrick’s invitation to superintend scene-painting at Drury Lane. The Envoy to Constantinople was the seventh Earl of Elgin, who arranged for the Parthenon frieze to be conveyed to England in 1803. May it please Lord Elgin, Earl of Kincardine,  to consider the undersign’d, sole author  and inventor of the Eidophusikon, for the position so lately rejected by Mr. Turner. On giving the measure of its Effects—calm & storm both, sunset or moonlight, the accurate imitation of Nature’s sounds: approaching thunder, the dash  of waves on a pebbly beach, the distant gun— my Device was pronounc’d by no less a judge than Richard Wilson, R.A.—the same who cried out  at the sight of Terni Cascade, “O well done, water, by God!”—was pronounc’d, I say, by him  “highly successful in agitated seas,”  by reason of the high finish carrying severally their satellites of color  into the very center of the Pictures. As it happens, your Lordship, I visited the same Joseph Turner known to your Lordship  (I believe) only this week, and found a man  pacing to and fro before his pale muslin on which the sick and wan Sun, in all the doubt  of darkness, was not allow’d to shed one ray,  but tears. Even as he work’d, pouring wet paint onto paper till it was saturated, then tore, then scratch’d, then scrubb’d in a frenzy  at the sheet, the Whole being chaos, until as if by enchantment, the Scene appear’d then,  great ships gone to pieces in order to fling  magical oranges on the waves—but I digress: even as he shew’d me two books fill’d  with studies from Nature, several tinted on the spot—which he found, he said, much the most valuable to him—this Turner discuss’d the present urgency of your Lordship’s need  for an artist who might draw Antiquities, with suitable finish, before Removal, by your Lordship’s design, from Athens. He said  he could not, himself, endure the Ideal, but enjoy’d and look’d for only litter—why  even his richest vegetation is confus’d, he delights in shingle, debris and mere heaps of fallen stone. Upon communicating the intelligence that your Lordship’s stipend  must include assistance to Lady Elgin in decorating fire-screens and the like, the man turn’d back in some heat to his labor  upon what I took to be that mysterious forest below London Bridge, where great ships ride,  sails filling or falling, disorder’d too  by the stress of anchorage, all beautiful though wild beneath the Daemonic pressure  of his inquiry (with so much of the trowel,  surely a touch more finishing might be borne!). Enough of Turner, I have not to speak here of him, though what I saw was but the scribbling  of Painting, surely. What I would say is this: I venture to suggest in myself a man your Lordship, and my Lady, most certainly,  might rely upon for accurate Service, work of a conclusive polish, not a sketch.  There is, may I make so bold, a point at which  in Turner’s Picturesque, as Fuseli says, two spiders, caressing or killing each other,  must have greatly the advantage, in roughness  of surface and intricacy of motion, over every athletic or am’rous  Symplegma left by the Ancients. I do not wish to speak further of the man who renounc’d your Lordship’s commission to copy marbles,  muttering (though plain to hear), “Antiquities be damn’d, by Thames’ shore we will die,” and went on raking at the sea with his untidy thumb;  but only to call your Lordship’s kind notice  and gracious favor, for the appointed task, to the creator of the Eidophusikon, these many years a loyal British subject, Yours, &c.   PHILIPPE-JACQUES DE LOUTHERBOURG
The writer is John Ruskin, on his wedding journey in Venice. My dearest father, it is the year’s First Day,  Yet so like the Last, in Venice, no one  Could tell this birth from the lees.  I know it is some while Since you received a word of mine: there has been   The shabbiest sort of interruption   To our exchanges (to mine  At least) in the shape Of a fever—nights of those imaginings,   Strange but shameful too, of the Infinite   By way of bedcovers and  Boa constrictors, With cold wedges of ice, as I thought, laid down   At the corners of the bed, making me   Slip to its coiling center  Where I could not breathe.  You knew from my last, I think, I had again  Gone to the Zoological Gardens  And seen the great boa take  Rabbits, which gave me  An idea or two, and a headache. Then  I had too much wine that same night, & dreamed  Of a walk with Nurse, to whom  I showed a lovely Snake I promised her was an innocent one:  It had a slender neck with a green ring  Round it, and I made her feel  The scales. When she bade Me feel them too, it turned to a fat thing, like   A leech, and adhered to my hand, so that   I could scarcely pull it off—  And I awakened (So much, father, for my serpentine fancies)   To a vermillion dawn, fever fallen,  And the sea horizon dark,  Sharp and blue, and far Beyond it, faint with trebled distance, came on   The red vertical cliffs in a tremor  Of light I could not see without   Recalling Turner Who had taught me so to see it, yet the whole   Subdued to one soft gray. And that morning   I had your letter, father,  Telling of the death Of my earthly master. How much more I feel   This now (perhaps it is worth noting here   The appearance of my first  Gray hair, this morning) —More than I thought I should: everything  In the sun, in the sky so speaks of him,  So mourns their Great Witness lost.  Today, the weather Is wretched, cold and rainy, dark like England   At this season. I do begin to lose  All faith in these provinces.  Even the people Look to me ugly, except children from eight   To fourteen, who here as in Italy  Anywhere are glorious:  So playful and bright In expression, so beautiful in feature,  So dark in eye and soft in hair—creatures   Quite unrivalled. At fifteen  They degenerate Into malignant vagabonds, or sensual  Lumps of lounging fat. And this latter-day  Venice, father! where by night  The black gondolas Are just traceable beside one, as if Cadmus  Had sown the wrong teeth and grown dragons, not  Men. The Grand Canal, this month,  Is all hung, from end To end, with carpets and tapestries like a street  Of old-clothes warehouses. And now there is  Even talk of taking down,  Soon, Tintoretto’s Paradise to “restore” it. Father, without  The Turner Gallery, I do believe  I should go today and live  In a cave on some Cliffside—among crows. Oh what fools they are, this  Restoring pack, yet smoothing all manner  Of rottenness up with words.   My Turner would notPhrase like these, and only once in all the years  I knew him said, “Thank you, Mr. Ruskin.”  My own power, if it be that,   Would be lost by mere Fine Writing. You know I promised no Romance—  I promised them Stones. Not even bread.  Father, I do not feel any  Romance in Venice!  Here is no “abiding city,” here is but  A heap of ruins trodden underfoot  By such men as Ezekiel  Angrily describes, Here are lonely and stagnant canals, bordered  For the most part by blank walls of gardens  (Now waste ground) or by patches  Of mud, with decayed  Black gondolas lying keel-upmost, sinking  Gradually into the putrid soil.  To give Turner’s joy of this  Place would not take ten Days of study, father, or of residence:  It is more than joy that must be the great   Fact I would teach. I am not sure,   Even, that joy is A fact. I am certainly only of the strong   Instinct in me (I cannot reason this)   To draw, delimit the things  I love—oh not for Reputation or the good of others or  My own advantage, but a sort of need,  Like that for water and food.  I should like to draw All Saint Mark’s, stone by stone, and all this city,   Oppressive and choked with slime as it is   (Effie of course declares, each  Day, that we must leave: A woman cannot help having no heart, but   That is hardly a reason she should have   No manners), yes, to eat it  All into my mind— Touch by touch. I have been reading Paradise Regained lately, father. It seems to me   A parallel to Turner’s  Last pictures—the mind Failing altogether, yet with intervals  And such returns of power! “Thereupon   Satan, bowing low his gray   Dissimulation, Disappeared.” Now he is gone, my dark angel,  And I never had such a conception  Of the way I must mourn—not  What I lose, now, but What I have lost, until now. Yet there is more   Pain knowing that I must forget it all,   That in a year I shall have  No more awareness Of his loss than of that fair landscape I saw,   Waking, the morning your letter arrived,  No more left about me than  A fading pigment. All the present glory, like the present pain,  Is no use to me; it hurts me rather  From my fear of leaving it,  Of losing it, yet I know that were I to stay here, it would soon  Cease being glory to me—that it has  Ceased, already, to produce  The impression and The delight. I can bear only the first days   At a place, when all the dread of losing   Is lost in the delirium  Of its possession. I daresay love is very well when it does not   Mean leaving behind, as it does always,  Somehow, with me. I have not  The heart for more now, Father, though I thank you and Mother for all   The comfort of your words. They bring me,  With his loss, to what I said  Once, the lines on this Place you will know: “The shore lies naked under   The night, pathless, comfortless and infirm  In dark languor, still except  Where salt runlets plash Into tideless pools, or seabirds flit from their   Margins with a questioning cry.” The light  Is gone from the waters with  My fallen angel, Gone now as all must go. Your loving son,   JOHN
A faint smell of urine embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions  give off days the fog won’t lift, and a shelf of bone growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow  across a field of corn— The whole parade leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing  to the groin a pang of distance; then that metallic taste in the mouth  and a voice you had let yourself believe  was dead close now by your ear, intimate and sweet:  Well, well, well,  look what we have here.
That bummy smell you meet off the escalator at Civic Center, right before  you turn onto McAllister, seems to dwell there, disembodied, on a shelf above the sidewalk. The mad old lady with lizard skin  bent double  over her shopping cart  and trailing a cloud of pigeons  is nowhere in sight. A pile of rags here and there but no one underneath.  An invisible shrine  commemorating what? Old mattresses and dusty flesh, piss and puked-on overcoats, what?  Maybe death, now there’s a smell that likes to stick around.  You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns  and once in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly,  after a bite of poundcake.  But here it lives, cheek by jowl with McDonald’s,  still robust after a night of wind with its own dark little howdy-do for the drunks and cops, social workers and whores, or the elderly couple from Zurich  leafing cooly through their guidebook.
To go to Lvov. Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew  gleams on a suitcase, when express trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave  in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September  or in March. But only if Lvov exists, if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just  in my new passport, if lances of trees —of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud  like Indians, and if streams mumble their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs  in the Russian language disappear into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave  without a trace, at noon, to vanish like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green  armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas  of a Venetian café, the snails converse about eternity. But the cathedral rises, you remember, so straight, as straight as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket  full of raspberries standing on the floor, and  my desire which wasn’t born yet, only gardens and weeds and the amber of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.  There was always too much of Lvov, no one could  comprehend its boroughs, hear the murmur of each stone scorched by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike that of the cathedral, the Jesuits baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew, grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered  everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills  revolving by themselves, in blue  teapots, in starch, which was the first  formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window.  The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets  of nuns sailed like schooners near  the theater, there was so much of the world that it had to do encores over and over, the audience was in frenzy and didn’t want to leave the house. My aunts couldn’t have known  yet that I’d resurrect them,  and lived so trustfully; so singly;  servants, clean and ironed, ran for  fresh cream, inside the houses  a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski  came as a visiting lecturer, one of my  uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why, dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much  of Lvov, it brimmed the container,  it burst glasses, overflowed  each pond, lake, smoked through every  chimney, turned into fire, storm,  laughed with lightning, grew meek,  returned home, read the New Testament, slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug, there was too much of Lvov, and now  there isn’t any, it grew relentlessly and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners  as always in May, without mercy,  without love, ah, wait till warm June comes with soft ferns, boundless fields of summer, i.e., the reality. But scissors cut it, along the line and through  the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked  diligently, as in a child’s cutout along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.  Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,  cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees fell soundlessly, as in a jungle, and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye  without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry mouth, I won’t see you anymore, so much death  awaits you, why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew, and now in a hurry just pack, always, each day, and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all it exists, quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere.
Autumn is always too early. The peonies are still blooming, bees  are still working out ideal states, and the cold bayonets of autumn  suddenly glint in the fields and the wind rages. What is its origin? Why should it destroy  dreams, arbors, memories? The alien enters the hushed woods,  anger advancing, insinuating plague;  woodsmoke, the raucous howls of Tatars. Autumn rips away leaves, names,  fruit, it covers the borders and paths,  extinguishes lamps and tapers; young  autumn, lips purpled, embraces  mortal creatures, stealing their existence. Sap flows, sacrificed blood, wine, oil, wild rivers, yellow rivers swollen with corpses, the curse flowing on: mud, lava, avalanche,  gush. Breathless autumn, racing, blue knives glinting in her glance. She scythes names like herbs with her keen  sickle, merciless in her blaze and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror,  Red Army.
You who see our homes at night and the frail walls of our conscience,  you who hear our conversations  droning on like sewing machines  —save me, tear me from sleep,  from amnesia. Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures, oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding—  our only origin, our only longing? Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness,  an endless highway, Sahara yellow? After all, you know there are days  when even thirst runs dry  and prayer’s lips harden. Sometimes the sun’s coin dims  and life shrinks so small that you could tuck it in the blue gloves of the Gypsy  who predicts the future for seven generations back and then in some other little town  in the south a charlatan decides to destroy you, me, and himself. You who see the whites of our eyes,  you who hide like a bullfinch in the rowans, like a falcon in the clouds’ warm stockings —open the boxes full of song, open the blood that pulses in aortas  of animals and stones, light lanterns in black gardens. Nameless, unseen, silent,  save me from anesthesia,  take me to Tierra del Fuego,  take me where the rivers flow straight up, horizontal rivers  flowing up and down.
1 Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim  of this Caribbean, I blow out the light  by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion  to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.  Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,  I stood like a stone and nothing else move  but the cold sea rippling like galvanize  and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,  till a wind start to interfere with the trees.  I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard  as I went downhill, and I nearly said: “Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,”  but the bitch look through me like I was dead.  A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.  The driver size up my bags with a grin:  “This time, Shabine, like you really gone!” I ain’t answer the ass, I simply pile in  the back seat and watch the sky burn  above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man  exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!  From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road  to when I was a dog on these streets;  if loving these islands must be my load,  out of corruption my soul takes wings.  But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,  coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,  so I leave it for them and their carnival— I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.  I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,  a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes  that they nickname Shabine, the patois for  any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw  when these slums of empire was paradise.  I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,  I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,  and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation, But Maria Concepcion was all my thought  watching the sea heaving up and down as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts  was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun  signing her name with every reflection; I knew when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,  sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,  that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside  about resurrection, they want the dead back,  so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied and the Flight swing seaward: “Is no use repeating  that the sea have more fish. I ain’t want her  dressed in the sexless light of a seraph, I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and  till the day when I can lean back and laugh,  those claws that tickled my back on sweating  Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand.”  As I worked, watching the rotting waves come  past the bow that scissor the sea like silk,  I swear to you all, by my mother’s milk,  by the stars that shall fly from tonight’s furnace,  that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;  I loved them as poets love the poetry  that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. You ever look up from some lonely beach  and see a far schooner? Well, when I write  this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;  I go draw and knot every line as tight  as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech  my common language go be the wind,  my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.  But let me tell you how this business begin.2 Raptures of the Deep Smuggled Scotch for O’Hara, big government man,  between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn’t touch us, and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway, but a voice kept saying: “Shabine, see this business  of playing pirate?” Well, so said, so done!  That whole racket crash. And I for a woman,  for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion. Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Inquiry was being organized to conduct a big quiz, with himself as chairman investigating himself.  Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,  not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,  khaki-pants red niggers like you and me.  What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,  plates flying and thing, so I swear: “Not again!”  It was mashing up my house and my family.  I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain; all the silver I had was the coins on the sea. You saw them ministers in The Express,  guardians of the poor—one hand at their back,  and one set o’ police only guarding their house,  and the Scotch pouring in through the back door. As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze, that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids  like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,  that I said: “Shabine, this is shit, understand!” But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office  like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,  couldn’t get off his high horse and kick me himself.  I have seen things that would make a slave sick  in this Trinidad, the Limers’ Republic. I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,  the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,  so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,  name O’Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;  but this Caribbean so choke with the dead  that when I would melt in emerald water,  whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent, I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,  dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.  I saw that the powdery sand was their bones  ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,  so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month  in the Seamen’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.  When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,  when I saw my worries with that other woman,  I wept under water, salt seeking salt, for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword  cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep  to float her again. When we drank, the limey  got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.  He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!  The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,  the hurt I had done to my wife and children, was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep  there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide  like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light  where I could rest, like the pelicans know, so I got raptures once, and I saw God like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far  voice was rumbling, “Shabine, if you leave her, if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star.”  When I left the madhouse I tried other women  but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts  bristled like sea eggs and I couldn’t dive.  The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.  Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?  Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life?3 Shabine Leaves the Republic I had no nation now but the imagination. After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me  when the power swing to their side. The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”;  the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride.  Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks— a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade, the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs  that pass before you finish bawling “Parade!”?  I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me,  a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat. I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine! They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma,  your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat.  A spit like that worth any number of words. But that’s all them bastards have left us: words. I no longer believed in the revolution. I was losing faith in the love of my woman.  I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok  crystallize in The Twelve. Was between the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana  one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags  using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.  They kept marching into the mountains, and  their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.  They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one  with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street,  and the echo of power at the end of the street.  Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;  the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,  on Frederick Street the idlers all marching  by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.  In the 12:30 movies the projectors best not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok  enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc- olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West- ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.4 The Flight, Passing Blanchisseuse Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse.  Gulls wheel like. from a gun again,  and foam gone amber that was white,  lighthouse and star start making friends,  down every beach the long day ends,  and there, on that last stretch of sand,  on a beach bare of all but light,  dark hands start pulling in the seine  of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.5 Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,  brewing li’l coffee; fog coil from the sea  like the kettle steaming when I put it down  slow, slow, ’cause I couldn’t believe what I see:  where the horizon was one silver haze,  the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close  that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,  it was horrors, but it was beautiful. We float through a rustling forest of ships  with sails dry like paper, behind the glass I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons, and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun, right through their tissue, you traced their bones  like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,  the backward-moving current swept them on,  and high on their decks I saw great admirals,  Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders  they gave those Shabines, and that forest  of masts sail right through the Flight,  and all you could hear was the ghostly sound  of waves rustling like grass in a low wind  and the hissing weeds they trailed from the stern;  slowly they heaved past from east to west like this round world was some cranked water wheel,  every ship pouring like a wooden bucket  dredged from the deep; my memory revolve  on all sailors before me, then the sun heat the horizon’s ring and they was mist. Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,  our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows  who his grandfather is, much less his name?  Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.6 The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas You see them on the low hills of Barbados  bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,  trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;  when I was green like them, I used to think those cypresses, leaning against the sea, that take the sea noise up into their branches,  are not real cypresses but casuarinas.  Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.  But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,  whoever called them so had a good cause,  watching their bending bodies wail like women  after a storm, when some schooner came home  with news of one more sailor drowned again. Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense  than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind  whatever grief bent them was all the same,  since they were trees with nothing else in mind  but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;  but we live like our names and you would have  to be colonial to know the difference,  to know the pain of history words contain,  to love those trees with an inferior love,  and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend  like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain  like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we,  if we live like the names our masters please,  by careful mimicry might become men.”7 The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor When the stars self were young over Castries, I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.  What does it matter that our lives are different? Burdened with the loves of our different children?  When I think of your young face washed by the wind  and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?  The lights are out on La Toc promontory, except for the hospital. Across at Vigie the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own promise, to leave you the one thing I own, you whom I loved first: my poetry. We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone.8 Fight with the Crew It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark— that was the cook, some Vincentian arse with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,  and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn’t give me a ease,  like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,  this same one here, that I was using to write  my poetry, so one day this man snatch it from my hand, and start throwing it left and right  to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,”  and start mincing me like I was some hen  because of the poems. Some case is for fist,  some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife— this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,  but he keep reading, “O my children, my wife,”  and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;  it move like a flying fish, the silver knife that catch him right in the plump of his calf,  and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white than he thought he was. I suppose among men  you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain, just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,  but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams The jet that was screeching over the Flight was opening a curtain into the past.  “Dominica ahead!”  “It still have Caribs there.” “One day go be planes only, no more boat.” “Vince, God ain’t make nigger to fly through the air.”  “Progress, Shabine, that’s what it’s all about. Progress leaving all we small islands behind.” I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.  ”Progress is something to ask Caribs about. They kill them by millions, some in war,  some by forced labor dying in the mines  looking for silver, after that niggers; more  progress. Until I see definite signs that mankind change, Vince, I ain’t want to hear.  Progress is history’s dirty joke.  Ask that sad green island getting nearer.” Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine. In such fierce salt let my wound be healed, me, in my freshness as a seafarer. That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,  I ran like a Carib through Dominica, my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;  I heard the screams of my burning children,  I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi  of devil’s parasols under white, leprous rocks;  my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,  with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise  of the soldiers’ progress through the thick leaves,  though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran  through the blades of balisier sharper than spears;  with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran  with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;  then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under  cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot  catch the dry branches and I drowned at last  in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean  of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,  there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is  an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.  I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams. It anchored her sleep, that insomniac’s Bible,  a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop’s eye  center, from the Dominican Republic. Its coarse pages were black with the usual  symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish; an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered  like a butcher chart, delivered the future.  One night; in a fever, radiantly ill, she say, “Bring me the book, the end has come.”  She said: “I dreamt of whales and a storm,”  but for that dream, the book had no answer. A next night I dreamed of three old women  featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,  and I scream at them to come out my house,  and I try beating them away with a broom,  but as they go out, so they crawl back again,  until I start screaming and crying, my flesh  raining with sweat, and she ravage the book  for the dream meaning, and there was nothing; my nerves melt like a jellyfish—that was when I broke— they found me round the Savannah, screaming: All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.  Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;  you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,  so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy, but all you ain’t know my strength, hear? The coconuts  standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,  they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,  and all you best dread the day I am healed of being a human. All you fate in my hand, ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,  I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, I who have no weapon but poetry and the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!10 Out of the Depths Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.  “Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.” The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range with snow on the top.  “Ay, Skipper, sky dark!”  “This ain’t right for August.”  “This light damn strange,  this season, sky should be clear as a field.” A stingray steeplechase across the sea, tail whipping water, the high man-o’-wars  start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery of flying fish miss us! Vince say: “You notice?”  and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail  like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck  of the Flight and shake it from head to tail.  “Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!”  “Where Cap’n headin? Like the man gone blind!”  “If we’s to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!”  “Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!” I have not loved those that I loved enough.  Worse than the mule kick of Kick-’Em-Jenny  Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between  mountains of water. If I was frighten? The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky  start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams  and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,  “I’m the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams.” I remembered them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing  to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom pass fathom,  my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing  hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.  Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said: “I from backward people who still fear God.”  Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward  by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace  from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith  that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel  in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell  sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,  proud with despair, we sang how our race  survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril,  and now I was ready for whatever death will.  But if that storm had strength, was in Cap’n face,  beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,  crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast  to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,  and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,  and I feeding him white rum, while every crest  with Leviathan-lash make the Flight quail  like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,  till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail  subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.  And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.11 After the Storm There’s a fresh light that follows a storm while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake  I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion  marrying the ocean, then drifting away in the widening lace of her bridal train with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.  I wanted nothing after that day. Across my own face, like the face of the sun,  a light rain was falling, with the sea calm. Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face  like a girl showering; make these islands fresh  as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,  every hot road, smell like clothes she just press  and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;  whatever the rain wash and the sun iron: the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,  is clothes enough for my nakedness.  Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide  of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs  of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied  if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.  Open the map. More islands there, man,  than peas on a tin plate, all different size,  one thousand in the Bahamas alone,  from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,  and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,  the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them, and the one small road winding down them like twine to the roofs below; I have only one theme: The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart— the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,  vain search for one island that heals with its harbor  and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow  doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!  As many islands as the stars at night on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.  But things must fall, and so it always was,  on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;  fall, and are one, just as this earth is one  island in archipelagoes of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.  I stop talking now. I work, then I read,  cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.  I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.  Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam  as the deck turn white and the moon open  a cloud like a door, and the light over me  is a road in white moonlight taking me home.  Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.
BOOK SIXChapter XLIVI In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,  the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane  down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain  marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.  In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles the light brought the bitter history of sugar across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,  to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora. The drizzling light blew across the savannah  darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased  the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed  shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion  jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in  like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under  one fist, then with the other tightening the rein and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder  and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain  which can lose an entire archipelago in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,  hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,  and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar  of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector  trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen  as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure I’d never see her again. All of a sudden the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water  down the guttering. I opened the window when the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms  of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms led the horses over the new grass and exercised  them again, and there was a different brightness  in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.II I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year  in green January over the orange villas  and military barracks where the Plunketts were, the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas,  edged with the Arctic, that was christened Vent Noël;  it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter. It freshened the cedars, waxed the laurier-cannelle,  and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle  of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin; I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra, the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in,  the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer;  I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in, and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains  like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;  I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.III Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense:  a past, they assured us, born in degradation,  and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation  that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs  of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints, the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls  of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense. I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.Chapter XLVI One side of the coast plunges its precipices  into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks, since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks  between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery,  with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace  the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent  from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find  purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current. The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road  where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats,  so fast a man on a donkey trying to read its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats  from the up-tempo zouk that its stereo played when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade  that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend,  where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel  with the same sound that the tires of the Comet made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel. The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm.  The piglet trots down the safer side of the road. Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame. Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed  under the swaying statue of the Madonna  of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood, and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her  dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm  common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm,  small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle,  indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished,  he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place,  the way a man will remain when Mass is finished, not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross  forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel  facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse, for her mercy at what he had done to Achille,  his brother. But his arc was over, for the course  of every comet is such. The fated crescent was printed on the road by the scorching tires. A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted  wind herded the long African combers, and whipped  the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead.II Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage  off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois,  with gestures of despair at the lost privilege of driving me, then turned to other customers. In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet  with light that shot its lances over the combers. I had the transport all to myself.  “You all set? Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot  of his called the Comet.”  He turned in the front seat, spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out  in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet.  “You never know when, eh? I was at the airport that day. I see him take off like a rocket. I always said that thing have too much horsepower.  And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?” I saw the coastal villages receding as the highway’s tongue translated bush into forest,  the wild savannah into moderate pastures, that other life going in its “change for the best,”  its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete  future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks of hotel development with the obsolete craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat  marinas, the fisherman’s phantom. Old oarlocks and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same  crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion  of the hand that stencilled a flowered window-frame or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone  with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete. I watched the afternoon sea. Didn’t I want the poor  to stay in the same light so that I could transfix  them in amber, the afterglow of an empire, preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks  to that blue bus-stop? Didn’t I prefer a road from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows  there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence  of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy  of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached  as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research?  Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. The gap between the driver  and me increased when he said:  “The place changing, eh?” where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river with its clogged shadows. That would make me a stranger.  “All to the good,” he said. I said, “All to the good,” then, “whoever they are,” to myself. I caught his eyes  in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud.  Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise? His back could have been Hector’s, ferrying tourists  in the other direction home, the leopard seat scratching their damp backs like the fur-covered armrests. He had driven his burnt-out cargo, tired of sweat, who longed for snow on the moon and didn’t have to face  the heat of that sinking sun, who knew a climate as monotonous as this one could only produce  from its unvarying vegetation flashes  of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes  of fake African masks for a fake Achilles rattled with the seeds that came from other men’s minds. So let them think that. Who needed art in this place  where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines,  and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace these people had, but what they envied most in them  was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt  still in the shells of their ears, like the surf’s rhythm, until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt  like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign: HEWANNORRA (Iounalao), the gold sea flat as a credit-card, extending its line to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else,  Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells.  Their own faces as brown as gourds. Mine felt as strange  as those at the counter feeling their bodies change.III Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend  where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw,  shelve surely to foam.  “Is right here everything end,” the driver said, and rammed open the transport door  on his side, then mine.  “Anyway, chief, the view nice.”  I joined him at the gusting edge.  “His name was Hector.” The name was bent like the trees on the precipice  to point inland. In its echo a man-o’-war screamed on the wind. The driver moved off for a piss, then shouted over his shoulder:  “A road-warrior. He would drive like a madman when the power took.  He had a nice woman. Maybe he died for her.” For her and tourism, I thought. The driver shook  himself, zipping then hoisting his crotch.  “Crazy, but  a gentle fellow anyway, with a very good brain.” Cut to a leopard galloping on a dry plain  across Serengeti. Cut to the spraying fans  drummed by a riderless stallion, its wild mane scaring the Scamander. Cut to a woman’s hands clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel  of a chariot’s spiked hubcap. Cut to the face of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille  hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase  with a girl’s hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,” as in a conch-shell. Cut to a shield of silver  rolling like a hubcap. Rewind, in slow motion,  myrmidons gathering by a village river with lances for oars. Cut to the surpliced ocean  droning its missal. Cut. A crane hoisting a wreck.  A horse nosing the surf, then shuddering its neck. He’d paid the penalty of giving up the sea as graceless and as treacherous as it had seemed,  for the taxi-business; he was making money, but all of that money was making him ashamed  of the long afternoons of shouting by the wharf  hustling passengers. He missed the uncertain sand under his feet, he sighed for the trough of a wave,  and the jerk of the oar when it turned in his hand,  and the rose conch sunset with its low pelicans. Castries was corrupting him with its roaring life,  its littered market, with too many transport vans  competing. Castries had been his common-law wife who, like Helen, he had longed for from a distance,  and now he had both, but a frightening discontent  hollowed his face; to find that the sea was a love he could never lose made every gesture violent:  ramming the side-door shut, raking the clutch. He drove  as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent. A man who cursed the sea had cursed his own mother. Mer was both mother and sea. In his lost canoe  he had said his prayers. But now he was in another kind of life that was changing him with his brand-new  stereo, its endless garages, where he could not whip off his shirt, hearing the conch’s summoning note.Chapter XLVII Hector was buried near the sea he had loved once.  Not too far from the shallows where he fought Achille  for a tin and Helen. He did not hear the sea-almond’s moan over the bay when Philoctete blew the shell,  nor the one drumbeat of a wave-thud, nor a sail  rattling to rest as its day’s work was over, and its mate, gauging depth, bent over the gunwale,  then wearily sounding the fathoms with an oar, the same rite his shipmates would repeat soon enough when it was their turn to lie quiet as Hector,  lowering a pitch-pine canoe in the earth’s trough, to sleep under the piled conchs, through every weather on the violet-wreathed mound. Crouching for his friend to hear,  Achille whispered about their ancestral river,  and those things he would recognize when he got there, his true home, forever and ever and ever,  forever, compère. Then Philoctete limped over  and rested his hand firmly on a shaking shoulder to anchor his sorrow. Seven Seas and Helen  did not come nearer. Achille had carried an oar to the church and propped it outside with the red tin. Now his voice strengthened. He said: “Mate, this is your spear,” and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed  the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier the day the African swift and its shadow raced. And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter:  “The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood. Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her.  You never know my admiration, when you stood  crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say  any enemy so was a compliment. ’Cause no  African ever hurled his wide seine at the bay by which he was born with such beauty. You hear me? Men  did not know you like me. All right. Sleep good. Good night.”  Achille moved Philoctete’s hand, then he saw Helen standing alone and veiled in the widowing light.  Then he reached down to the grave and lifted the tin  to her. Helen nodded. A wind blew out the sun.II Pride set in Helen’s face after this, like a stone  bracketed with Hector’s name; her lips were incised  by its dates in parenthesis. She seemed more stern, more ennobled by distance as she slowly crossed  the hot street of the village like a distant sail on the horizon. Grief heightened her. When she smiled it was with such distance that it was hard to tell if she had heard your condolence. It was the child,  Ma Kilman told them, that made her more beautiful.III The rites of the island were simplified by its elements, which changed places. The grooved sea was Achille’s garden,  the ridged plot of rattling plantains carried their sense of the sea, and Philoctete, on his height, often heard, in  a wind that suddenly churned the rage of deep gorges,  the leafy sound of far breakers plunging with smoke, and for smoke there were the bonfires which the sun catches  on the blue heights at sunrise, doing the same work  as Philoctete clearing his plot, just as, at sunset, smoke came from the glowing rim of the horizon as if  from his enamel pot. The woodsmoke smelt of a regret  that men cannot name. On the charred field, the massive sawn trunks burnt slowly like towers, and the great indigo dusk slowly plumed down, devouring the still leaves,  igniting the firefly huts, lifting the panicky egret to beat its lagoon and shelve in the cage of the mangroves,  take in the spars of its sails, then with quick-pricking head  anchor itself shiftingly, and lift its question again. At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron  of a quarter-moon floated from Hector’s grave, rain  rose upwards from the sea, and the corrugated iron of the sea glittered with nailheads. Ragged plantains bent and stepped with their rustling powers  over the furrows of Philoctete’s garden, a chorus of aged ancestors and straw, and, rustling, surrounded every house  in the village with its back garden, with its rank midden of rusted chamber pots, rotting nets, and the moon’s cold basin. They sounded, when they shook, after the moonlit meridian  of their crossing, like the night-surf; they gazed in  silence at the shadows of their lamplit children. At Philoctete, groaning and soaking the flower on his shin  with hot sulphur, cleaning its edges with yellow Vaseline,  and, gripping his knee, squeezing rags from the basin. At night, when yards are asleep, and the broken line of the surf hisses like Philo, “Bon Dieu, aie, waie, my sin  is this sore?” the old plantains suffer and shine.Chapter XLVIII Islands of bay leaves in the medicinal bath  of a cauldron, a sibylline cure. The citron  sprig of a lime-tree dividing the sky in half dipped its divining rod. The white spray of the thorn,  which the swift bends lightly, waited for a black hand  to break it in bits and boil its leaves for the wound from the pronged anchor rusting in clean bottom-sand.  Ma Kilman, in a black hat with its berried fringe,  eased herself sideways down the broken concrete step of the rumshop’s back door, closed it, and rammed the hinge  tight. The bolt caught a finger and with that her instep  arch twisted and she let out a soft Catholic curse, then crossed herself. She closed the gate. The asphalt  sweated with the heat, the limp breadfruit leaves were thick  over the fence. Her spectacles swam in their sweat. She plucked an armpit. The damn wig was badly made.  She was going to five o’clock Mass, to la Messe,  and sometimes she had to straighten it as she prayed until the wafer dissolved her with tenderness, the way a raindrop melts on the tongue of a breeze. In the church’s cool cave the sweat dried from her eyes. She rolled down the elastic bands below the knees  of her swollen stockings. It was then that their vise  round her calves reminded her of Philoctete. Then, numbering her beads, she began her own litany  of berries, Hail Mary marigolds that stiffen  their aureoles in the heights, mild anemone and clear watercress, the sacred heart of Jesus  pierced like the anthurium, the thorns of logwood,  called the tree of life, the aloe good for seizures, the hole in the daisy’s palm, with its drying blood  that was the hole in the fisherman’s shin since he was  pierced by a hook; there was the pale, roadside tisane of her malarial childhood. There was this one for easing a birth-breach, that one for a love-bath,  before the buds of green sugar-apples in the sun ripened like her nipples in girlhood. But what path  led through nettles to the cure, the furious sibyl  couldn’t remember. Mimosa winced from her fingers, shutting like jalousies at some passing evil when she reached for them. The smell of incense lingers  in her clothes. Inside, the candle-flames are erect round the bier of the altar while she and her friends  old-talk on the steps, but the plant keeps its secret  when her memory reaches, shuttering in its fronds.II The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings  and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams  where the dark grove had not heat but early mornings of perpetual freshness, in which the bearded arms  of a cedar held council. Between its gnarled toes grew the reek of an unknown weed; its pronged flower sprang like a buried anchor; its windborne odours  diverted the bee from its pollen, but its power, rooted in bitterness, drew her bowed head by the nose as a spike does a circling bull. To approach it Ma Kilman lowered her head to one side and screened  the stench with a cologned handkerchief. The mulch it was rooted in carried the smell, when it gangrened,  of Philoctete’s cut. In her black dress, her berried  black hat, she climbed a goat-path up from the village, past the stones with dried palms and conchs, where the buried  suffer the sun all day Sunday, while goats forage  the new wreaths. Once more she pulled at the itch in her armpits, nearly dropping her purse. Then she climbed hard  up the rain-cracked path, the bay closing behind her  like a wound, and rested. Everything that echoed repeated its outline: a goat’s doddering bleat, a hammer multiplying a roof, and, through the back yards,  a mother cursing a boy too nimble to beat. Ma Kilman picked up her purse and sighed on upwards  to the thread of the smell, one arm behind her back,  passing the cactus, the thorn trees, and then the wood appeared over her, thick green, the green almost black  as her dress in its shade, its border of flowers flecking the pasture with spray. Then she staggered back from the line of ants at her feet. She saw the course  they had kept behind her, following her from church,  signalling a language she could not recognize.III A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach  centuries ago from its antipodal shore, skimming the sea-troughs, outdarting ospreys, her luck held to its shadow. She aimed to carry the cure  that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight  of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze of a circling horizon. The star-grains at night  made her hungrier; the leafless sea with no house  for her weariness. Sometimes she dozed in her flight for a swift’s second, closing the seeds of her stare, then ruddering straight. The dry sea-flakes whitened her  breast, her feathers thinned. Then, one dawn the day-star rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her  because all the breakers were blowing from the wrong  east. She saw the horned island and uncurled her claws with one frail cry, since swifts are not given to song,  and fluttered down to a beach, ejecting the seed  in grass near the sand. She nestled in dry seaweed. In a year she was bleached bone. All of that motion  a pile of fragile ash from the fire of her will,  but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille,  the women carrying coals after the dark door  slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar,  where the flower was anchored at the mottled root  as a lizard crawled upwards, foot by sallow foot.
I went out walking in the old neighborhood Look! more trees on the block  forget-me-nots all around them  ivy lantana shining and geraniums in the window Twenty years ago it was believed that the roots of trees would insert themselves into gas lines then fall poisoned on houses and children or tap the city’s water pipes starved  for nitrogen obstruct the sewers In those days in the afternoon I floated  by ferry to Hoboken or Staten Island  then pushed the babies in their carriages  along the river wall observing Manhattan  See Manhattan I cried New York! even at sunset it doesn’t shine but stands in fire charcoal to the waist But this Sunday afternoon on Mother’s Day I walked west and came to Hudson Street tricolored flags  were flying over old oak furniture for sale brass bedsteads copper pots and vases by the pound from India Suddenly before my eyes twenty-two transvestites  in joyous parade stuffed pillows under  their lovely gowns and entered a restaurant under a sign which said All Pregnant Mothers Free I watched them place napkins over their bellies  and accept coffee and zabaglione I am especially open to sadness and hilarity  since my father died as a child  one week ago in this his ninetieth year
This is about the women of that country Sometimes they spoke in slogans They said  We patch the roads as we patch our sweetheart’s trousers   The heart will stop but not the transport They said  We have ensured production even near bomb craters   Children let your voices sing higher than the explosions  of the bombs They said  We have important tasks to teach the children  that the people are the collective masters  to bear hardship  to instill love in the family  to guide the good health of the children (they must  wear clothing according to climate) They said  Once men beat their wives  now they may not  Once a poor family sold its daughter to a rich old man   now the young may love one another They said  Once we planted our rice any old way  now we plant the young shoots in straight rows  so the imperialist pilot can see how steady our  hands are In the evening we walked along the shores of the Lake   of the Restored Sword I said is it true? we are sisters?  They said Yes, we are of one family
If you have a house you must think about it all the time  as you reside in the house so it must be a home in your mind you must ask yourself (wherever you are)  have I closed the front door and the back door is often forgotten  not against thieves necessarily but the wind oh if it blows  either door open then the heat the heat you’ve carefully nurtured  with layers of dry hardwood and a couple of opposing green  brought in to slow the fire as well as the little pilot light  in the convenient gas backup all of that care will be mocked because  you have not kept the house on your mind but these may actually be among  the smallest concerns for instance the house could be settling you may  notice the thin slanting line of light above the doors you have to think about that  luckily you have been paying attention the house’s dryness can be humidified  with vaporizers in each room and pots of water on the woodstove should you leave  for the movies after dinner ask yourself have I turned down the thermometer and moved all wood paper away from the stove the fiery result of excited distraction  could be too horrible to describe now we should talk especially to Northerners  of the freezing of the pipe this can often be prevented by pumping water continuously  through the baseboard heating system allowing the faucet to drip drip continuously  day and night you must think about the drains separately in fact you should have established  their essential contribution to the ordinary kitchen and toilet life of the house  digging these drains deep into warm earth if it hasn’t snowed by mid-December you  must cover them with hay sometimes rugs and blankets have been used do not be  troubled by their monetary value as this is a regionally appreciated emergency  you may tell your friends to consider your house as their own that is  if they do not wear outdoor shoes when thumping across the gleam of their poly- urethaned floors they must bring socks or slippers to your house as well you must think  of your house when you’re in it and when you’re visiting the superior cabinets  and closets of others when you approach your house in the late afternoon in any weather green or white you will catch sight first of its new aluminum snow-resistant  roof and the reflections in the cracked windows its need in the last twenty-five years for paint  which has created a lovely design in russet pink and brown the colors of un- intentioned neglect you must admire the way it does not (because of someone’s excellent decision sixty years ago) stand on the high ridge deforming the green profile of the hill but rests in the modesty  of late middle age under the brow of the hill with its back to the dark hemlock forest looking steadily out for miles toward the cloud refiguring meadows and mountains of the next state coming up the road by foot or auto the house can be addressed personally House! in the excitement of work and travel to other people’s houses with their interesting improvements we thought of you often and spoke of your coziness in winter your courage in wind and fire your small airy rooms in humid summer how you nestle in spring into the leaves and flowers of the hawthorn and the sage green leaves of the Russian olive tree House! you were not forgotten
DORINDA When death shall part us from these kids, And shut up our divided lids, Tell me, Thyrsis, prithee do, Whither thou and I must go. THYRSIS To the Elysium. DORINDA Oh, where is’t? THYRSIS A chaste soul can never miss’t. DORINDA I know no way but to our home, Is our cell Elysium? THYRSIS Turn thine eye to yonder sky, There the milky way doth lie; ’Tis a sure but rugged way, That leads to everlasting day. DORINDA There birds may nest, but how can I That have no wings and cannot fly? THYRSIS Do not sigh, fair nymph, for fire Hath no wings yet doth aspire Till it hit against the Pole: Heaven’s the centre of the soul. DORINDA But in Elysium how do they Pass eternity away? THYRSIS Oh, there’s neither hope nor fear, There’s no wolf, no fox, no bear. No need of dog to fetch our stray, Our Lightfoot we may give away; No oat-pipe’s needful; there thy ears May sleep with music of the spheres. DORINDA Oh sweet! Oh sweet! How I my future state By silent thinking antedate: I prithee let us spend our time to come In talking of Elysium. THYRSIS Then I’ll go on. There sheep are full Of sweetest grass and softest wool; There birds sing consorts, garlands grow, Cool winds do whisper, springs do flow. There always is a rising sun, And day is ever but begun. Shepherds there bear equal sway, And every nymph’s a Queen of May. DORINDA Ah me, ah me! THYRSIS Dorinda, why dost cry? DORINDA I’m sick, I’m sick, and fain would die. Convince me now that this is true By bidding with me all adieu. THYRSIS I cannot live without thee, I, I’ll for thee, much more with thee, die. CHORUS Then let us give Corillo charge o’ the sheep, And thou and I’ll pick poppies, and them steep In wine, and drink on’t even till we weep, So shall we smoothly pass away in sleep.
C. Damon, come drive thy flocks this way.  D. No, ’tis too late; they went astray.  C. I have a grassy scutcheon spied,  Where Flora blazons all her pride.   The grass I aim to feast thy sheep:   The flowers I for thy temples keep. D. Grass withers; and the flowers too fade. C. Seize the short joys then, ere they vade,   Seest thou that unfrequented cave? D. That den? C. Love’s Shrine. D. But virtue’s grave.  C. In whose cool bosom we may lie  Safe from the sun. D. Not heaven’s eye. C. Near this, a fountain’s liquid bell   Tinkles within the concave shell. D. Might a soul bathe there and be clean,   Or slake its drought? C. What is’t you mean?  D. These once had been enticing things,  Clorinda, pastures, caves, and springs. C. And what late change? D. The other day   Pan met me. C. What did great Pan say? D. Words that transcend poor shepherds’ skill,  But he e’er since my songs does fill:  And his name swells my slender oat. C. Sweet must Pan sound in Damon’s note.  D. Clorinda’s voice might make it sweet.  C. Who would not in Pan’s praises meet? CHORUS Of Pan the flowery pastures sing,  Caves echo, and the fountains ring.  Sing then while he doth us inspire;  For all the world is our Pan’s choir.
1 AMETAS Think’st thou that this love can stand,  Whilst thou still dost say me nay?  Love unpaid does soon disband:  Love binds love as hay binds hay. 2 THESTYLIS Think’st thou that this rope would twine  If we both should turn one way? Where both parties so combine, Neither love will twist nor hay. 3 AMETAS Thus you vain excuses find,  Which yourselves and us delay:  And love ties a woman’s mind  Looser than with ropes of hay. 4 THESTYLIS What you cannot constant hope  Must be taken as you may. 5 AMETAS Then let’s both lay by our rope,  And go kiss within the hay.
Courage, my Soul, now learn to wield The weight of thine immortal shield. Close on thy head thy helmet bright. Balance thy sword against the fight. See where an army, strong as fair, With silken banners spreads the air. Now, if thou be’st that thing divine, In this day’s combat let it shine: And show that Nature wants an art To conquer one resolvèd heart. PLEASURE Welcome the creation’s guest, Lord of earth, and heaven’s heir. Lay aside that warlike crest, And of Nature’s banquet share: Where the souls of fruits and flowers Stand prepared to heighten yours. SOUL I sup above, and cannot stay To bait so long upon the way. PLEASURE On these downy pillows lie, Whose soft plumes will thither fly: On these roses strewed so plain Lest one leaf thy side should strain. SOUL My gentler rest is on a thought, Conscious of doing what I ought. PLEASURE If thou be’st with perfumes pleased, Such as oft the gods appeased, Thou in fragrant clouds shalt show Like another god below. SOUL A soul that knows not to presume Is heaven’s and its own perfume. PLEASURE Everything does seem to vie Which should first attract thine eye: But since none deserves that grace, In this crystal view thy face. SOUL When the Creator’s skill is prized, The rest is all but earth disguised. PLEASURE Hark how music then prepares For thy stay these charming airs; Which the posting winds recall, And suspend the river’s fall. SOUL Had I but any time to lose, On this I would it all dispose. Cease, tempter. None can chain a mind Whom this sweet chordage cannot bind. CHORUS Earth cannot show so brave a sight As when a single soul does fence The batteries of alluring sense, And heaven views it with delight. Then persevere: for still new charges sound: And if thou overcom’st, thou shalt be crowned. PLEASURE All this fair, and soft, and sweet, Which scatteringly doth shine, Shall within one beauty meet, And she be only thine. SOUL If things of sight such heavens be, What heavens are those we cannot see? PLEASURE Wheresoe’er thy foot shall go The minted gold shall lie, Till thou purchase all below, And want new worlds to buy. SOUL Were’t not a price, who’d value gold? And that’s worth naught that can be sold. PLEASURE Wilt thou all the glory have That war or peace commend? Half the world shall be thy slave The other half thy friend. SOUL What friends, if to my self untrue! What slaves, unless I captive you! PLEASURE Thou shalt know each hidden cause; And see the future time: Try what depth the centre draws; And then to heaven climb. SOUL None thither mounts by the degree Of knowledge, but humility. CHORUS Triumph, triumph, victorious Soul; The world has not one pleasure more: The rest does lie beyond the Pole, And is thine everlasting store.
When for the thorns with which I long, too long,   With many a piercing wound,  My Saviour’s head have crowned, I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:  Through every garden, every mead, I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),  Dismantling all the fragrant towers  That once adorned my shepherdess’s head.  And now when I have summed up all my store,  Thinking (so I myself deceive)  So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore:   Alas, I find the serpent old  That, twining in his speckled breast,  About the flowers disguised does fold,  With wreaths of fame and interest. Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,  And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!  But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame,  Either his slippery knots at once untie;  And disentangle all his winding snare;  Or shatter too with him my curious frame,  And let these wither, so that he may die,  Though set with skill and chosen out with care: That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,  May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.
See with what simplicity This nymph begins her golden days!  In the green grass she loves to lie,  And there with her fair aspect tames The wilder flowers, and gives them names:  But only with the roses plays;  And them does tell What colour best becomes them, and what smell. Who can foretell for what high cause  This Darling of the Gods was born!  Yet this is she whose chaster laws  The wanton Love shall one day fear,  And, under her command severe,  See his bow broke and ensigns torn.  Happy, who can  Appease this virtuous enemy of man! O, then let me in time compound, And parley with those conquering eyes;  Ere they have tried their force to wound,  Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive In triumph over hearts that strive, And them that yield but more despise.   Let me be laid, Where I may see thy glories from some shade. Meantime, whilst every verdant thing  Itself does at thy beauty charm,  Reform the errors of the spring;  Make that the tulips may have share  Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;  And roses of their thorns disarm:  But most procure  That violets may a longer age endure. But, O young beauty of the woods, Whom Nature courts with fruits and flowers,  Gather the flowers, but spare the buds;  Lest Flora angry at thy crime,  To kill her infants in their prime,  Do quickly make the example yours;  And, ere we see, Nip in the blossom all our hopes and thee.
Come, little infant, love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine agèd father’s brow From cold jealousy and fears. Pretty, surely, ’twere to see By young love old time beguiled, While our sportings are as free As the nurse’s with the child. Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love. Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, does prize, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me: time may take Thee before thy time away: Of this need we’ll virtue make, And learn love before we may. So we win of doubtful fate; And if good she to us meant, We that good shall antedate, Or, if ill, that ill prevent. Thus as kingdoms, frustrating Other titles to their crown, In the cradle crown their king, So all foreign claims to drown, So, to make all rivals vain, Now I crown thee with my love: Crown me with thy love again, And we both shall monarchs prove.
TO THE LORD FAIRFAX See how the archèd earth does here  Rise in a perfect hemisphere! The stiffest compass could not strike  A line more circular and like;  Nor softest pencil draw a brow  So equal as this hill does bow.  It seems as for a model laid,  And that the world by it was made. Here learn, ye mountains more unjust,  Which to abrupter greatness thrust, That do with your hook-shouldered height  The earth deform and heaven fright,  For whose excrescence, ill-designed,  Nature must a new centre find, Learn here those humble steps to tread,  Which to securer glory lead. See what a soft access and wide  Lies open to its grassy side; Nor with the rugged path deters  The feet of breathless travellers.  See then how courteous it ascends,  And all the way it rises bends;  Nor for itself the height does gain,  But only strives to raise the plain. Yet thus it all the field commands, And in unenvied greatness stands,  Discerning further than the cliff  Of heaven-daring Tenerife. How glad the weary seamen haste  When they salute it from the mast!  By night the Northern Star their way  Directs, and this no less by day. Upon its crest this mountain grave A plump of agèd trees does wave.  No hostile hand durst ere invade  With impious steel the sacred shade.  For something always did appear  Of the great Master’s terror there:  And men could hear his armour still  Rattling through all the grove and hill.  Fear of the Master, and respect Of the great Nymph, did it protect,  Vera the Nymph that him inspired,  To whom he often here retired, And on these oaks engraved her name;  Such wounds alone these woods became:  But ere he well the barks could part  ’Twas writ already in their heart. For they (’tis credible) have sense, As we, of love and reverence, And underneath the coarser rind The genius of the house do bind.  Hence they successes seem to know,  And in their Lord’s advancement grow; But in no memory were seen, As under this, so straight and green; Yet now no further strive to shoot,  Contented if they fix their root.  Nor to the wind’s uncertain gust,  Their prudent heads too far intrust.  Only sometimes a fluttering breeze  Discourses with the breathing trees,  Which in their modest whispers name  Those acts that swelled the cheek of fame. ‘Much other groves’, say they, ‘than these  And other hills him once did please.  Through groves of pikes he thundered then,  And mountains raised of dying men.  For all the civic garlands due To him, our branches are but few.  Nor are our trunks enow to bear  The trophies of one fertile year.’ ’Tis true, ye trees, nor ever spoke  More certain oracles in oak. But peace, (if you his favour prize):  That courage its own praises flies.  Therefore to your obscurer seats  From his own brightness he retreats:  Nor he the hills without the groves,  Nor height, but with retirement, loves.
See how the orient dew, Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new, For the clear region where ’twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe’s extent, Frames as it can its native element. How it the purple flow’r does slight, Scarce touching where it lies, But gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light, Like its own tear, Because so long divided from the sphere. Restless it rolls and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure, Till the warm sun pity its pain, And to the skies exhale it back again. So the soul, that drop, that ray Of the clear fountain of eternal day, Could it within the human flow’r be seen, Remembering still its former height, Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green, And recollecting its own light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater heaven in an heaven less. In how coy a figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the world excluding round, Yet receiving in the day, Dark beneath, but bright above, Here disdaining, there in love. How loose and easy hence to go, How girt and ready to ascend, Moving but on a point below, It all about does upwards bend. Such did the manna’s sacred dew distill, White and entire, though congealed and chill, Congealed on earth : but does, dissolving, run Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.
Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,  Did after him the world seduce, And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,  Where nature was most plain and pure.  He first enclosed within the gardens square  A dead and standing pool of air, And a more luscious earth for them did knead,   Which stupified them while it fed. The pink grew then as double as his mind;   The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,  And flowers themselves were taught to paint.  The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,  And learned to interline its cheek: Its onion root they then so high did hold,   That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was searched, through oceans new,   To find the Marvel of Peru.
Hark how the Mower Damon sung, With love of Juliana stung! While everything did seem to paint The scene more fit for his complaint. Like her fair eyes the day was fair, But scorching like his am’rous care. Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was, And withered like his hopes the grass. ‘Oh what unusual heats are here, Which thus our sunburned meadows sear! The grasshopper its pipe gives o’er; And hamstringed frogs can dance no more. But in the brook the green frog wades; And grasshoppers seek out the shades. Only the snake, that kept within, Now glitters in its second skin. ‘This heat the sun could never raise, Nor Dog Star so inflame the days. It from an higher beauty grow’th, Which burns the fields and mower both: Which mads the dog, and makes the sun Hotter than his own Phaëton. Not July causeth these extremes, But Juliana’s scorching beams. ‘Tell me where I may pass the fires Of the hot day, or hot desires. To what cool cave shall I descend, Or to what gelid fountain bend? Alas! I look for ease in vain, When remedies themselves complain. No moisture but my tears do rest, Nor cold but in her icy breast. ‘How long wilt thou, fair shepherdess, Esteem me, and my presents less? To thee the harmless snake I bring, Disarmèd of its teeth and sting; To thee chameleons, changing hue, And oak leaves tipped with honey dew. Yet thou, ungrateful, hast not sought Nor what they are, nor who them brought. ‘I am the Mower Damon, known Through all the meadows I have mown. On me the morn her dew distills Before her darling daffodils. And, if at noon my toil me heat, The sun himself licks off my sweat. While, going home, the evening sweet In cowslip-water bathes my feet. ‘What, though the piping shepherd stock The plains with an unnumbered flock, This scythe of mine discovers wide More ground than all his sheep do hide. With this the golden fleece I shear Of all these closes every year. And though in wool more poor than they, Yet am I richer far in hay. ‘Nor am I so deformed to sight, If in my scythe I lookèd right; In which I see my picture done, As in a crescent moon the sun. The deathless fairies take me oft To lead them in their dances soft: And, when I tune myself to sing, About me they contract their ring. ‘How happy might I still have mowed, Had not Love here his thistles sowed! But now I all the day complain, Joining my labour to my pain; And with my scythe cut down the grass, Yet still my grief is where it was: But, when the iron blunter grows, Sighing, I whet my scythe and woes.’ While thus he threw his elbow round, Depopulating all the ground, And, with his whistling scythe, does cut Each stroke between the earth and root, The edgèd steel by careless chance Did into his own ankle glance; And there among the grass fell down, By his own scythe, the Mower mown. ‘Alas!’ said he, ‘these hurts are slight To those that die by love’s despite. With shepherd’s-purse, and clown’s-all-heal, The blood I staunch, and wound I seal. Only for him no cure is found, Whom Juliana’s eyes do wound. ’Tis death alone that this must do: For Death thou art a Mower too.’
simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with delight. In the yard we plant rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes, cupping wet earth over tubers, our labor the germ of later sustenance and renewal. Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes. I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures.
1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house I “I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!”  That’s how I threw cold water on my Mother and Father’s watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner. ... Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound....  Nowhere was anywhere after a summer at my Grandfather’s farm. Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman, its alley of poplars paraded from Grandmother’s rose garden to a scary stand of virgin pine, scrub, and paths forever pioneering. One afternoon in 1922, I sat on the stone porch, looking through screens as black-grained as drifting coal.Tockytock, tockytock  clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock,  slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill.  One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather’s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine;  his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar;  stogie-brown beams; fools’-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue,  its legs, shellacked saplings.  A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn  fished with a broom straw in a basin  hollowed out of a millstone.  Like my Grandfather, the décor  was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high?  It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints,  and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa  in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather’s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy  paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime.II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn  display windows of Rogers Peet’s boys’ store below the State House  in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin’s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak.III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room,  lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour,  my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah.  She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table,  accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves  of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for “Auction,”  and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed,  grasshopper notes of genius!  Family gossip says Aunt Sarah  tilted her archaic Athenian nose  and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer— its naked Greek statues draped with purple  like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear.IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ...  A fluff of the west wind puffing  my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds: Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by “the Island,” where my Uncle’s duck blind  floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded.  Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter.  As if posed for “the engagement photograph,”  he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters,  tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk.  Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights,  was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga  was accepting the arm of her “protector,” the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles,  and coils of hair like rooster tails. The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts  being bushwhacked on the veldt— They were almost life-size.... My Uncle was dying at twenty-nine. “You are behaving like children,” said my Grandfather, when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters,  and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon ...  I cowered in terror. I wasn’t a child at all— unseen and all-seeing, I was Agrippina in the Golden House of Nero.... Near me was the white measuring-door my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle’s heights.  In 1911, he had stopped growing at just six feet.  While I sat on the tiles, and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse, Uncle Devereux stood behind me. He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.  His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.  He was animated, hierarchical, like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....  My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile....  Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color.
[February 1954] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,  and tears ran down my cheeks.... When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,  the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova  was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds  blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,  recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.  Mother traveled first-class in the hold;  her Risorgimento black and gold casket  was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... While the passengers were tanning  on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,  our family cemetery in Dunbarton  lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— so many of its deaths had been midwinter.  Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.  The only “unhistoric” soul to come here  was Father, now buried beneath his recent  unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.  Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce,  seemed too businesslike and pushing here,  where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:  twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” I have a nine months’ daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter. Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear. These are the tranquillized Fifties,  and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?  I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then  sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short  enclosure like my school soccer court,  and saw the Hudson River once a day  through sooty clothesline entanglements  and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)  and fly-weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.  He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet. Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops and beat him black and blue. I was so out of things, I’d never heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.  “No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.” He taught me the “hospital tuck,” and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,  there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full  of things forbidden the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American  flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.  Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair— hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections....
At four in the morning he wakes  to the yawn of brakes, the snore of a diesel engine.  Gone. All she left is a froth of bra and panties.  The scum of the Seine and the Farset. Gallogly squats in his own pelt.  A sodium street light has brought a new dimension  to their black taxi. By the time they force an entry  he’ll have skedaddled among hen runs and pigeon lofts. The charter flight from Florida  touched down at Aldergrove  minutes earlier, at 3.54 a.m. Its excess baggage takes the form of Mangas Jones, Esquire,  who is, as it turns out, Apache.  He carries only hand luggage.  ‘Anything to declare?’ He opens the powder-blue attaché- case. ‘A pebble of quartz.’  ‘You’re an Apache?’ ‘Mescalero.’ He follows the corridor’s  arroyo till the signs read Hertz. He is going to put his foot down  on a patch of waste ground along the Stranmillis embankment  when he gets wind of their impromptu fire. The air above the once-sweet stream  is aquarium- drained. And six, maybe seven, skinheads  have formed a quorum round a burnt-out heavy-duty tyre.  So intent on sniffing glue they may not notice Gallogly, or, if they do, are so far gone. Three miles west as the crow flies an all-night carry-out  provides the cover for an illegal drinking club. While the bar man unpacks a crate of Coca-Cola, one cool customer takes on all comers in a video game. He grasps what his two acolytes have failed to seize. Don’t they know what kind of take-away  this is, the glipes? Vietmanese. Viet-ma-friggin’-knees. He drops his payload of napalm. Gallogly is wearing a candy-stripe  king-size sheet, a little something he picked up  off a clothes line. He is driving a milk van he borrowed from the Belfast Co-op  while the milkman’s back was turned. He had given the milkman a playful  rabbit punch. When he stepped on the gas he flooded the street with broken glass. He is trying to keep a low profile. The unmarked police car draws level  with his last address. A sergeant and eight constables  pile out of a tender and hammer up the stairs. The street bristles with static. Their sniffer dog, a Labrador bitch,  bursts into the attic like David Balfour in Kidnapped.  A constable on his first dawn swoop  leans on a shovel. He has turned over a new leaf in her ladyship’s herb patch.  They’ll take it back for analysis. All a bit much after the night shift  to meet a milkman who’s double-parked his van closing your front door after him. He’s sporting your Donegal tweed suit and your Sunday shoes and politely raises your  hat as he goes by. You stand there with your mouth open  as he climbs into the still-warm driving seat of your Cortina and screeches off towards the motorway,  leaving you uncertain of your still-warm wife’s damp tuft. Someone on their way to early Mass  will find her hog-tied to the chapel gates— O Child of Prague- big-eyed, anorexic. The lesson for today is pinned to her bomber jacket. It seems to read Keep off the Grass. Her lovely head has been chopped  and changed. For Beatrice, whose fathers knew Louis Quinze, to have come to this, her perruque  of tar and feathers. He is pushing the maroon Cortina  through the sedge on the banks of the Callan. It took him a mere forty minutes  to skite up the Ml. He followed the exit sign for Loughgall and hared among the top-heavy apple orchards. This stretch of the Armagh/Tyrone  border was planted by Warwickshiremen  who planted in turn their familiar quick-set damson hedges.  The Cortina goes to the bottom. Gallogly swallows a plummy-plum-plum. ‘I’ll warrant them’s the very pair o’ boys I seen abroad in McParland’s bottom, though where in under God—for thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate—  where they come from God only knows.’  ‘They were mad for a bite o’ mate, I s’pose.’ ‘I doubt so. I come across a brave dale o’ half-chawed damsels. Wanst wun disappeared  I follied the wun as yelly as Indy male.’ ‘Ye weren’t afeared?’ ‘I follied him.’ ‘God save us.’ ‘An’ he driv away in a van belongin’ t’Avis.’ The grass sprightly as Astroturf  in the September frost and a mist here where the ground is low He seizes his own wrist as if, as if Blind Pew again seized Jim at the sign of the ‘Admiral Benbow’.  As if Jim Hawkins led Blind Pew  to Billy Bones and they were all one and the same,  he stares in disbelief at an aspirin-white spot he pressed  into his own palm. Gallogly’s thorn-proof tweed jacket is now several sizes too big.  He has flopped down in a hay shed to ram a wad of hay into the toe  of each of his ill-fitting  brogues, when he gets the drift  of ham and eggs. Now he’s led by his own wet nose  to the hacienda-style farmhouse, a baggy-kneed animated bear drawn out of the woods  by an apple pie left to cool on a windowsill. She was standing at the picture window  with a glass of water and a Valium when she caught your man  in the reflection of her face.  He came shaping past the milking parlour  as if he owned the place. Such is the integrity of their quarrel that she immediately took down  the legally held shotgun and let him have both barrels. She had wanted only to clear the air. Half a mile away across the valley  her husband’s U.D.R. patrol is mounting a check-point. He pricks up his ears at the crack of her prematurely arthritic hip- joint, and commandeers one of the jeeps. There now, only a powder burn  as if her mascara had run. The bloody puddle in the yard, and the shilly-shally  of blood like a command wire  petering out behind a milk churn. A hole in the heart, an ovarian  cyst. Coming up the Bann in a bubble. Disappearing up his own bum.  Or, running on the spot with all the minor aplomb  of a trick-cyclist. So thin, side-on, you could spit  through him. His six foot of pump water  bent double in agony or laughter. Keeping down-wind of everything.White Annetts. Gillyflowers. Angel Bites. When he names the forgotten names  of apples he has them all off pat. His eye like the eye of a travelling rat  lights on the studied negligence of these scraws of turf. A tarpaulin. A waterlogged pit. He will take stock of the Kalashnikov’s  filed-down serial number, seven sticks of unstable commercial gelignite that have already begun to weep.Red Strokes. Sugar Sweet. Widows Whelps.  Buy him a drink and he’ll regale you  with how he came in for a cure  one morning after the night before to the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret.  He was crossing the bar’s eternity of parquet floor when his eagle eye saw something move on the horizon.  If it wasn’t an Indian. A Sioux. An ugly Sioux. He means, of course, an Oglala  Sioux busily tracing the family tree  of an Ulsterman who had some hand  in the massacre at Wounded Knee. He will answer the hedge-sparrow’s Littlebitofbreadandnocheese  with a whole bunch of freshly picked watercress,  a bulb of garlic, sorrel, with many-faceted blackberries.  Gallogly is out to lunch. When his cock rattles its sabre  he takes it in his dab hand, plants one chaste kiss  on its forelock, and then, with a birl and a skirl,  tosses it off like a caber. The U.D.R. corporal had come off duty  to be with his wife while the others set about a follow-up search. When he tramped out just before twelve  to exercise the greyhound he was hit by a single high-velocity  shot. You could, if you like, put your fist  in the exit wound in his chest. He slumps in the spume of his own arterial blood  like an overturned paraffin lamp. Gallogly lies down in the sheugh  to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself, Bath, under his garlic-breath.Sheugh, he says. Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks  her bare foot to the ankle in a simmering dung hill and fills the slot with beastlings for him to drink. In Ovid’s conspicuously tongue-in-cheek  account of an eyeball to eyeball between the goddess Leto and a shower of Lycian reed cutters  who refuse her a cup of cloudy water from their churned-up lake,Live then forever in that lake of yours,  she cries, and has them bubble and squeak and plonk themselves down as bullfrogs  In their icy jissom. A country man kneels on his cap beside his neighbour’s fresh grave-mud as Gallogly kneels to lap  the primrose-yellow  custard. The knees of his hand-me-down duds are gingerish. A pernickety seven- year-old girl-child parades in her mother’s trousseau and mumbles a primrose  Kleenex tissue to make sure her lipstick’s even. Gallogly has only to part the veil  of its stomach wall to get right under the skin, the spluttering heart and collapsed lung, of the horse in Guernica. He flees the Museum of Modern Art  with its bit between his teeth. When he began to cough blood, Hamsun rode the Minneapolis/  New York night train on top of the dining-car. One long, inward howl. A porter-drinker without a thrapple. A weekend trip to the mountains north of Boston  with Alice, Alice A.  and her paprika hair, the ignition key to her family’s Winnebago camper, her quim biting the leg off her. In the oyster bar of Grand Central Station she gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes— ‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size’— and, with a flourish of Tabasco,  turns to gobble him. A brewery lorry on a routine delivery  is taking a slow, dangerous bend. The driver’s blethering his code name over the Citizens Band when someone ambles in front of him. Go, Johnny, go, go, go.  He’s been dry-gulched by a sixteen-year-old numb with Mogadon, whose face is masked by the seamless  black stocking filched from his mum. When who should walk in but Beatrice,  large as life, or larger, sipping her one glass of lager  and singing her one song. If he had it to do all over again  he would let her shave his head  in memory of ’98 and her own, the French, Revolution.  The son of the King of the Moy  met this child on the Roxborough  estate. Noblesse, she said. Noblesse oblige. And her tiny nipples  were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries. The song she sang was ‘The Croppy Boy’. Her grand’mère was once asked to tea  by Gertrude Stein, and her grand’mère and Gertrude  and Alice B., chère Alice B. with her hook-nose, the three of them sat in the nude  round the petits fours and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros.  If he had it to do all over again  he would still be taken in by her Alice B. Toklas Nameless Cookies and those new words she had him learn:  hash, hashish, lo perfido assassin. Once the local councillor straps  himself into the safety belt of his Citroën and skids up the ramp from the municipal car park he upsets the delicate balance  of a mercury-tilt boobytrap. Once they collect his smithereens  he doesn’t quite add up. They’re shy of a foot, and a calf  which stems from his left shoe like a severely  pruned-back shrub. Ten years before. The smooth-as-a front-lawn at Queen’s where she squats before a psilocybin god. The indomitable gentle-bush that had Lanyon or Lynn revise their elegant ground plan  for the university quad.With calmness, with care, with breast milk, with dew. There’s no cure now. There’s nothing left to do.
Small wonder he’s not been sighted all winter;  this old brock’s been to Normandy and back through the tunnels and trenches  of his subconscious. His father fell victim to mustard-gas at the Somme; one of his sons lost a paw  to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw: another drills on the Antrim hills’ still-molten lava in a moth-eaten Balaclava. An elaborate system of foxholes and duckboards leads to the terminal moraine  of an ex-linen baron’s croquet-lawn where he’s part-time groundsman. I would find it somewhat infra dig  to dismiss him simply as a pig  or heed Gerald of Wales’ tall tales of badgers keeping badger-slaves.  For when he shuffles across the esker I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers stained with tobacco-pollen. When he piddles against a bullaun  I know he carries bovine TB but what I see is my father in his Sunday suit’s  bespoke lime and lignite, patrolling his now-diminished estate  and taking stock of this and that.
As naught gives way to aught and oxhide gives way to chain mail and byrnie gives way to battle-ax and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue) and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale  I give way to you. As bass gives way to baritone and hammock gives way to hummock and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack and bread gives way to reed bed and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone  and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux  and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine,  and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach I give way to you. As vent gives way to Ventry and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool  and phone gives way to fax and send gives way to sned and Dagenham gives way to Coventry and Covenanter gives way to caribou and the caribou gives way to the carbine and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole  I give way to you. As transhumance gives way to trance and shaman gives way to Santa and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack  and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid  and pyx gives way to monstrance and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew  and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein and Town and Country Mice to Hanta  I give way to you. As Hopi gives way to Navaho and rug gives way to rag and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax and Tampa gives way to the water bed and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho  and crapper gives way to loo and spruce gives way to pine and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag  I give way to you. As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit  and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle  and tick gives way to tack and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet  and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw  and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line  and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil”  I give way to you. As your hummus gives way to your foul madams  and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea” and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes  and the living give way to the dead and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams  and Television gives way to U2 and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine  and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee  I give way to you. As dutch treat gives way to french leave  and spanish fly gives way to Viagra  and slick gives way to slack and the local fuzz give way to the Feds  and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View  and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara  I give way to you. As cathedral gives way to cavern and cookie cutter gives way to cookie and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks  and the shad give way to the smoke shed and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern that still rings true despite that T being missing from its sign  where a little nook gives way to a little nookie  when I give way to you. That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran  as ling gives way to cod and cod gives way to kayak and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med  and catamite gives way to catamaran and catamaran to aluminum canoe is symptomatic of a more general decline  whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod and I give way to you. For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead,  and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease and the Greeks give way to you know who and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9 and nine gives way, as ever, to zero I give way to you.
And Summer turns her head with its dark tangle  All the way toward us; and the trees are heavy,  With little sprays of limp green maple and linden  Adhering after a rainstorm to the sidewalk  Where yellow pollen dries in pools and runnels. Along the oceanfront, pink neon at dusk: The long, late dusk, a light wind from the water  Lifting a girl’s hair forward against her cheek And swaying a chain of bulbs.  In luminous booths, The bright, traditional wheel is on its ratchet, And ticking gaily at its little pawl; And the surf revolves; and passing cars and people, Their brilliant colors—all strange and hopeful as Ralegh’s  Trophies: the balsam, the prizes of untried virtue,  Bananas and armadillos that a Captain Carries his Monarch from another world.
I. The Day Dreamers All day all over the city every person Wanders a different city, sealed intact And haunted as the abandoned subway stations  Under the city. Where is my alley doorway? Stone gable, brick escarpment, cliffs of crystal.  Where is my terraced street above the harbor,  Café and hidden workshop, house of love? Webbed vault, tiled blackness. Where is my park, the path Through conifers, my iron bench, a shiver  Of ivy and margin birch above the traffic?  A voice. There is a mountain and a wood Between us—
To Robert Hass and in Memory of Elliot Gilbert Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,  Bashō and his friends go out to view the moon;  In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter, The secret courtesy that courses like ichor  Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,  Impossible to tell in writing. “Bashō” He named himself, “Banana Tree”: banana  After the plant some grateful students gave him,  Maybe in appreciation of his guidance Threading a long night through the rules and channels  Of their collaborative linking-poem  Scored in their teacher’s heart: live, rigid, fluid Like passages etched in a microscopic circuit.  Elliot had in his memory so many jokes They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture Inside his brain, one so much making another  It was impossible to tell them all:  In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana. Imagine a court of one: the queen a young mother,  Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child  And her new baby in a squalid apartment Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.  She tells the child she’s going to kill herself.  She broods, she rages. Hoping to distract her, The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations  Of different people in the building, he jokes,  He feels if he keeps her alive until the father  Gets home from work, they’ll be okay till morning.  It’s laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.  What is he in his efforts but a courtier? Impossible to tell his whole delusion. In the first months when I had moved back East  From California and had to leave a message On Bob’s machine, I used to make a habit Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through,  I would pretend that I forgot the punchline, Or make believe that I was interrupted— As though he’d be so eager to hear the end  He‘d have to call me back. The joke was Elliot’s, More often than not. The doctors made the blunder  That killed him some time later that same year.  One day when I got home I found a message On my machine from Bob. He had a story  About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,  One day while walking along the street together They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them,  And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.  Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy, Impossible to tell—a dead-end challenge.  But here it is, as Elliot told it to me: The dead man’s widow came to the rabbis weeping, Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.  Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.  But the short rabbi told her to bring the body Into the study house, and ordered the shutters  Closed so the room was night-dark. Then he prayed  Over the body, chanting a secret blessing Out of Kabala. “Arise and breathe,” he shouted;  But nothing happened. The body lay still. So then  The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles And danced around the body, chanting and praying  In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic. He prayed  In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin  In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes  Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man’s face.  Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture And said, “Arise and breathe!” And still the body Lay as before. Impossible to tell In words how Elliot’s eyebrows flailed and snorted Like shaggy mammoths as—the Chinese widow  Granting permission—the little rabbi sang  The blessing for performing a circumcision And removed the dead man’s foreskin, chanting blessings  In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse  From head to foot, and with a final prayer In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion, He seized the dead man’s head and kissed the lips  And dropped it again and leaping back commanded, “Arise and breathe!” The corpse lay still as ever.  At this, as when Bashō’s disciples wind  Along the curving spine that links the renga Across the different voices, each one adding  A transformation according to the rules  Of stasis and repetition, all in order And yet impossible to tell beforehand,  Elliot changes for the punchline: the wee  Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer, Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,  A kind of Mel Brooks gesture: “Hoo boy!” he says,  “Now that’s what I call really dead.” O mortal Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal  Lords of the underground and afterlife,  Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto, What has a brilliant, living soul to do with  Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac  And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers, Our languages don’t touch you, you’re like that mother  Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.  Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi, The one who washed his hands of all those capers  Right at the outset. Or maybe he became  The author of these lines, a one-man renga The one for whom it seems to be impossible  To tell a story straight. It was a routine  Procedure. When it was finished the physicians Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded, But Elliot wouldn’t wake up for maybe an hour,  They should go eat. The two of them loved to bicker In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish,  On Sandra’s to some Sicilian dialect.  He used to scold her endlessly for smoking. When she got back from dinner with their children  The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.  Oh swirling petals, falling leaves! The movement Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment  Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.  Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.  But the Universal is the goal of jokes,  Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures  Toward their preposterous Ithaca. There’s one  A journalist told me. He heard it while a hero Of the South African freedom movement was speaking  To elderly Jews. The speaker’s own right arm  Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers. He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots  For the ANC—a group the old Jews feared  As “in with the Arabs.” But they started weeping As the old one-armed fighter told them their country  Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote  Could make a country their children could return to From London and Chicago. The moved old people  Applauded wildly, and the speaker’s friend  Whispered to the journalist, “It’s the Belgian Army Joke come to life.” I wish that I could tell it  To Elliot. In the Belgian Army, the feud Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious, So out of hand the army could barely function.  Finally one commander assembled his men  In one great room, to deal with things directly. They stood before him at attention. “All Flemings,”  He ordered, “to the left wall.” Half the men Clustered to the left. “Now all Walloons,” he ordered, “Move to the right.” An equal number crowded  Against the right wall. Only one man remained At attention in the middle: “What are you, soldier?” Saluting, the man said, “Sir, I am a Belgian.” “Why, that’s astonishing, Corporal—what’s your name?”  Saluting again, “Rabinowitz,” he answered: A joke that seems at first to be a story  About the Jews. But as the renga describes  Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer  The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl,  So in the joke, just under the raucous music Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance  Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow,  Over the banana tree the moon in autumn— Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.
Overture More loudly to inveigh against your absence,  Raising the volume by at least a third,  Humbly I say I’ve written this immense  Astonishing “Sonata” word by word, With leitmotivs you’ll wish you’d never heard,  And a demented, shattering Cadenza. I’m pained to say that scholarship insists  Cadenzas are conclusion to Concertos,  Not Sonatas—true Sonatas close With what pedantic musicologists, Waving their Ph.D.s beneath my nose,  Persist in calling Recapitulation. My double ending is a Variation: I couldn’t choose between them once I chose  To write two endings, so, because I wrote a  Recapitulation and Cadenza, My piece concludes two times—and then it ends  Again because I’ve added on a Coda. To brush up on Sonata structure: first,  The Exposition sounds two melodies, Deeply dissimilar, in different keys, Major and minor. Part Two is a burst Of brainstorms scholars call Development,  In which the two themes of the Exposition  Are changed and rearranged past recognition,  Distorted, fragmented, dissolved, and blent Into chromatic superimposition, Till, imperceptibly, two themes unite.  And then, if everything is going right,  The piece concludes in Recapitulation.Exposition Theme One: My life lacks what, in lacking you?  Theme Two: Does the material world exist? (Ideally your neurons should resist, As yet, connecting Numbers One and Two.  But note the skill, the frightening mastery,  The lunatic precision it entails To merge these separate themes, the way train rails  Converge as they approach infinity.)Development I dreamed that an encyclopedia Opened before my eyes and there I found  Analogies to sort of stack around My what-is-life-without-you-here idea: Like nous detached from Anaxagoras,  Like cosmic fire glimmering without  A Heraclitus there to find it out, Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras,  Like One-ness riven from Parmenides,  Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it,  Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it,  Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles,  Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took  The furniture’s Eternal Forms away,  Objects abandoned by Reality Still look the same, but look the way things look  When I behold my life without you in it:  A screwy room where chairs and tables lack  Dimension from the front, the side, the back,  Like finity without the infinite, Where tea parties are held without the Hatter,  It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space,  It’s like a physicist who cannot trace  The ultimate constituents of matter— There is no evidence Matter exists. Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two.  And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true:  The physical eludes the physicists. They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings  Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there.  It seems that they can’t find it anywhere.  They stalk imaginary floating things Like amateurish lepidopterists Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls.  Their net strings map out squares of empty holes.  Behold them snatching something in their fists:  Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight  Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand.  But then I’m prejudiced, you understand.  Not everyone on earth believes I’m right.  But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse,  I went to hear a Lecture just last year About some things which I hold very dear:  The smallest pieces of the universe. The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks.  He seemed impervious to the mystery  Surrounding their invisibility. I asked, when he concluded his remarks,  “But are Quarks physical?”  You’d think that he Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said  Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed. He took his glasses off and blinked at me. Were I John Milton, I would now destroy  This moment of high drama and deploy  A thirty-line Homeric simile. But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be.  He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.” Now, I may be the south end of a horse,  But logically and analogically, And physically, and metaphysically, And, if it gets to that, religiously, And absolutely scientifically, I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test  Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental, Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental,  And since in mental matters East or West  I need you for this dream’s interpretation— Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined,  With these two themes uncomfortably combined,  It’s time now for the Recapitulation.Recapitulation Frankly, I’m disinclined to reassert  The themes my Exposition indicated. Stuffed shirts there are, and hordes of overrated  Experts who would slay or badly hurt  With airy wave of hand my insights; no,  I will not play to them, I’ll not rehash  My song though they with hard and cold cash  Should bribe me, or should tell me where to go.  My complex principles are explicated  Under “Development.” So let them laugh:  I’ll not permit this section to be half  So convoluted as anticipated.Cadenza Sing, Heav’nly Muse, and give me lyric flight,  Give me special effects, give me defiance  To challenge the Academy of Science On fundamental points, and get them right;  Give me the strength to can the Latinisms,  To forge analogies between the thing Nature abhors and my apartment; sing  To vanquish literary criticisms If possible and literary sharks. And even if you feel submicroscopic Elements exceed me as a topic, Please try to back me up regarding Quarks,  Thereby to advocate my metaphor (Absence the vehicle, physics the tenor)  So that the Universal Void coincides With showing—I daresay, with showing off— The consequences of his going off; By showing everything, in fact, but slides.Coda Me heart detests, reviles, denounces, loathes  Your absence with a passion like a furnace.  The shirt of love, said Eliot, will burn us;  And normally I’d add, “Love’s other clothes  Burn just as badly”—but, because I’ve bent  A rule or two, I won’t extend this figure; Good taste prevents this piece from getting bigger;  Please see above for everything I meant.
There is a hornet in the room  and one of us will have to go  out the window into the late  August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge  in being humane to hornets  but not much. A launch draws  two lines of wake behind it  on the bay like a delta with a melted base. Sandy  billows, or so they look, of feathery ripe heads of grass,  an acid-yellow kind of goldenrod glowing or glowering  in shade. Rocks with rags  of shadow, washed dust clouts  that will never bleach. It is not like this at all.  The rapid running of the  lapping water a hollow knock of someone shipping oars:  it’s eleven years since  Frank sat at this desk and  saw and heard it all  the incessant water the  immutable crickets only  not the same: new needles  on the spruce, new seaweed  on the low-tide rocks  other grass and other water  even the great gold lichen  on a granite boulder  even the boulder quite  literally is not the same  II A day subtle and suppressed  in mounds of juniper enfolding  scratchy pockets of shadow while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump— stands shadowless in an overcast  of ripe grass. There is nothing  but shade, like the boggy depths  of a stand of spruce, its resonance  just the thin scream of mosquitoes ascending. Boats are light lumps on the bay  stretching past erased islands  to ocean and the terrible tumble  and London (“rain persisting”)  and Paris (“changing to rain”).  Delicate day, setting the bright of a young spruce against the cold of an old one hung with unripe cones  each exuding at its tip gum, pungent, clear as a tear,  a day tarnished and fractured  as the quartz in the rocks of a dulled and distant point,  a day like a gull passing with a slow flapping of wings  in a kind of lope, without breeze enough to shake loose  the last of the fireweed flowers, a faintly clammy day, like wet silk  stained by one dead branch  the harsh russet of dried blood.
The smell of snow, stinging in nostrils as the wind lifts it from a beach Eve-shuttering, mixed with sand, or when snow lies under the street lamps and on all And the air is emptied to an uplifting gassiness That turns lungs to winter waterwings, buoying, and the bright white night Freezes in sight a lapse of waves, balsamic, salty, unexpected:  Hours after swimming, sitting thinking biting at a hangnail And the taste of the—to your eyes—invisible crystals irradiates the world “The sea is salt”  “And so am I” “Don’t bite your nails”  and the metal flavor of a nail—are these brads?— Taken with a slight spitting motion from between teeth and whanged into place (Boards and sawdust) and the nail set is ridged with cold Permanently as marble, always degrees cooler than the rooms of air it lies in Felt as you lay your cheek upon the counter on which sits a blue-banded cup A counter of condensed wintry exhalations glittering infinitesimally  A promise, late on a broiling day in late September, of the cold kiss  Of marble sheets to one who goes barefoot quickly in the snow and early  Only so far as the ash can—bang, dump—and back and slams the door: Too cold to get up though at the edges of the blinds the sky  Shows blue as flames that break on a red sea in which black coals float:  Pebbles in a pocket embed the seam with grains of sand Which, as they will, have found their way into a pattern between foot and bedfoot “A place for everything and everything in its place” how wasteful, how wrong It seems when snow in fat, hand-stuffed flakes falls slow and steady in the sea “Now you see it, now you don’t” the waves growl as they grind ashore and roll out At your feet (in boots) a Christmas tree naked of needles Still wound with swags of tarnishing tinsel, faintly alarming as the thought Of damp electricity or sluggish lightning and for your health desiring pains The wind awards: Chapped Lips: on which to rub Time’s latest acquisition Tinned, dowel shaped and inappropriately flavored sheep wool fat  A greasy sense-eclipsing fog “I can’t see Without my glasses” “You certainly can’t see with them all steamed up  Like that. Pull over, park and wipe them off.” The thunder of a summer’s day Rolls down the shimmering blacktop and mowed grass juice thickens the air Like “Stir until it coats the spoon, remove from heat, let cool and chill”  Like this, graying up for more snow, maybe, in which a small flock  Of—sparrows?—small, anyway, dust-kitty-colored birds fly up  On a dotted diagonal and there, ah, is the answer: Starlings, bullies of birdland, lousing up The pecking order, respecters of no rights (what bird is) unloved (oh?)  Not so likeable as some: that’s temperate enough and the temperature  Drops to rise to snowability of a softness even in its scent of roses  Made of untinted butter frosting: Happy Name Day, Blue Jay, staggering  On slow-up wings into the shrunk into itself from cold forsythia snarl  And above these thoughts there waves another tangle but one parched with heat And not with cold although the heat is on because of cold settled all  About as though, swimming under water, in clearly fishy water, you  Inhaled and found one could and live and also found you altogether  Did not like it, January, laid out on a bed of ice, disgorging February, shaped like a flounder, and March with her steel head pocketbook, And April, goofy and under-dressed and with a loud laugh, and May  Who will of course be voted Miss Best Liked (she expects it), And June, with a toothpaste smile, fresh from her flea bath, and gross July, Flexing itself, and steamy August, with thighs and eyes to match, and September Diving into blue October, dour November, and deadly dull December which now And then with a surprised blank look produces from its hand the ace of trumps Or sets within the ice white hairline of a new moon the gibbous rest:  Global, blue, Columbian, a blue dull definite and thin as the first day Of February when, in the steamed and freezing capital cash built  Without a plan to be its own best monument its skyline set in stacks Like poker chips (signed “Autodidact”), at the crux of a view there crosses A flatcar-trailer piled with five of the cheaper sort of yachts, tarpaulined, Plus one youth in purple pants, a maid in her uniform and an “It’s not real Anything” Cossack hat and coat, a bus one-quarter full of strangers and  The other familiar fixings of lengthening short days: “He’s outgrown them Before you can turn around” and see behind you the landscape of the past Where beached boats bask and terraced cliffs are hung with oranges Among dark star-gleaming leaves, and, descending the dizzying rough stairs Littered with goat turd beads—such packaging—you—he—she— One—someone—stops to break off a bit of myrtle and recite all the lines Of Goethe that come back, and those in French, “Connais-tu ... ?” the air Fills with chalk dust from banged erasers, behind the February dunes  Ice boats speed and among the reeds there winds a little frozen stream  Where kids in kapok ice-skate and play at Secret City as the sun Sets before dinner, the snow on fields turns pink and under the hatched ice The water slides darkly and over it a never before seen liquefaction of the sun In a chemical yellow greener than sulphur a flash of petroleum by-product Unbelievable, unwanted and as lovely as though someone you knew all your life Said the one inconceivable thing and then went on washing dishes: the sky Flows with impersonal passion and loosening jet trails (eyes tearing from the cold) And on the beach, between foam frozen in a thick scalloped edging so like Weird cheek-mottling pillowcase embroidery, on the water-darkened sand the waves Keep free of frost, a gull strangles on a length of nylon fishline and the dog Trots proudly off, tail held high, to bury a future dinner among cut grass on a dune: The ice boats furl their sails and all pile into cars and go off to the super market Its inviting foods and cleansers sold under tunes with sealed in memory-flavor “Hot House Rhubarb” “White Rock Girl” “Citrus Futures” “Cheap Bitter Beans” and In its parking lot vast as the kiss to which is made the most complete surrender In a setting of leaves, backs of stores, a house on a rise admired for being Somewhat older than some others (prettier, too?) a man in a white apron embraces a car Briefly in the cold with his eyes as one might hug oneself for warmth for love —What a paint job, smooth as an eggplant; what a meaty chest, smooth as an eggplant —Is it too much to ask your car to understand you? the converse isn’t and the sky Maps out new roads so that, driving at right angles to the wind, clouds in ranks Contrive in diminishing perspective a part of a picture postcard of a painting Over oak scrub where a filling station has: gas, a locked toilet (to keep dirt in) A busted soda pop machine, no maps and “I couldn’t tell you thet” so  The sky empties itself to a color, there, where yesterday’s puddle  Offers its hospitality to people-trash and nature-trash in tans and silvers  And black grit like that in corners of a room in this or that cheap dump  Where the ceiling light burns night and day and we stare at or into each  Other’s eyes in hope the other reads there what he reads: snow, wind  Lifted; black water, slashed with white; and that which is, which is beyond Happiness or love or mixed with them or more than they or less, unchanging change, “Look,” the ocean said (it was tumbled, like our sheets), “look in my eyes”
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours. All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building, and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains. After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall, we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident, the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order. Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers, setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking. I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous. The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant. When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles. Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs, a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it, before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside. In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls, it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles, the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls. When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails, work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip, the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages. Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us. However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood: we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions. I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest, the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so. I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool. I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks. But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.
A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me— I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things— she’d decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected, but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted, what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.
for my father 1 When the thought came to him it was so simple he shook his head.People are always looking for kidneys when their kidneys go bad. But why wait? Why not look when you’re healthy? If two good kidneys do the trick, wouldn’t three do the job even better?
Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors, Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,  Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface, Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,  A crow calls, deep in its own darkness, Something like water ticks on Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock ...Go in fear of abstractions ...  Well, possibly. Meanwhile, They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins  Our skins rub off on. For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be  Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries  That river above our lives, Whose waters we sense the sense of  late at night, and later still. Uneasy, suburbanized, I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard  Testing the grass and border garden. A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise, Bell jars the afternoon.  Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine  Under the endlessness of heaven. Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary. It always amazes me How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead, How what we see jacks up  the odd quotient of what we don’t see,  How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down.  First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift, Flicks in and flicks out,  a virtual reality. Time to begin the long division.
Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix  And mismatch,  and settle about our lawn furniture, like air  Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness. What can we say to either of them? How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time?  They ruffle our hair,  they ruffle the leaves of the August trees.  Then stop, abruptly as wind. The flies come back, and the heat—  what can we say to them?  Nothing is endless but the sky. The flies come back, and the afternoon Teeters a bit on its green edges,  then settles like dead weight  Next to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns. ________ Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him. Perhaps. And perhaps not—  dust and ashes though we are,  Some will go wordlessly, someWill listen their way in with their mouths Where pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor.  And some will revile him out of love  and deep disdain. The gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides.  Rows of gravestones stay our steps,  August humidity Bright as auras around our bodies. And some will utter the words,  speaking in fear and tongues,  Hating their garments splotched by the flesh. These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased. ________  Dante and John Chrysostom Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap,  A pilgrim’s way ...  You might too Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon,  Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes, What hasn’t happened to happen yet Still lurking behind the stars,  31 August 1995 ... The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes  In the landscape,  such things, such avenues, lead to dust And handle our hurt with ease. Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue  waters above the earth: Why do the great stories always exist in the past? ________  The unexamined life’s no different from  the examined life— Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments— You’ve got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar  Of evening,  you’ve got to write it down. Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile, God’s sleep,  you’ve still got to write it down, Moon half-empty, moon half-full, Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black,  Spider at work between the hedges, Last bird call,  toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ... ________  We go to our graves with secondary affections, Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,  star charts demagnetized. We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass.  Sure we’re cold and untouchable, but we harbor no ill will. No tooth tuned to resentment’s fork,  we’re out of here, and sweet meat.  Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards, What letters will we illuminate? Above us, the atmosphere, The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call. Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince, The letters undarken and come forth, Your X and my X.  The letters undarken and they come forth. ________  Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse,  Spirit of slides and silences,  Invisible Hand, Witness and walk on. Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures,  Succor my shift and save me ... All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind,  And in the gardens and dwarf orchard.  All afternoon The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages  Under the rain, abstracting the necessary word.  Autumn’s upon us. The rain fills our narrow beds.Description’s an element, like air or water.  That’s the word.
Thanksgiving, dark of the moon. Nothing down here in the underworld but vague shapes and black holes,  Heaven resplendent but virtual Above me,  trees stripped and triple-wired like Irish harps.  Lights on Pantops and Free Bridge mirror the eastern sky.  Under the bridge is the river,  the red Rivanna. Under the river’s redemption, it says in the book,  It says in the book,Through water and fire the whole place becomes purified,  The visible by the visible, the hidden by what is hidden.
The night’s drifts Pile up below me and behind my back, Slide down the hill, rise again, and build Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house.  In the valley below me, Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,  The road lamps glow. They are so cold, they might as well be dark.  Trucks and cars Cough and drone down there between the golden  Coffins of greenhouses, the startled squawk  Of a rooster claws heavily across A grove, and drowns. The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog sounds,  And a man bitterly shifts his broken gears.  True night still hangs on, Mist cluttered with a racket of its own. Now on the mountainside, A little way downhill among turning rocks, A square takes form in the side of a dim wall.  I hear a bucket rattle or something, tinny,  No other stirring behind the dim face Of the goatherd’s house. I imagine His goats are still sleeping, dreaming Of the fresh roses Beyond the walls of the greenhouse below them  And of lettuce leaves opening in Tunisia. I turn, and somehow Impossibly hovering in the air over everything, The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon Than this mountain is,  Shines. A voice clearly Tells me to snap out of it. Galway Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs To start the motor. The moon and the stars Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain  Appears, pale as a shell. Look, the sea has not fallen and broken  Our heads. How can I feel so warm  Here in the dead center of January? I can  Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is  The only life I have. I get up from the stone.  My body mumbles something unseemly And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely  On top of the sunlight.
They did the deed of darkness  In their own mid-light. He plucked a gray field mouse  Suddenly in the wind. The small dead fly alive  Helplessly in his beak, His cold pride, helpless.  All she receives is life. They are terrified. They touch.  Life is too much. She flies away sorrowing.  Sorrowing, she goes alone. Then her small falcon, gone.  Will not rise here again. Smaller than she, he goes  Claw beneath claw beneath  Needles and leaning boughs, While she, the lovelier Of these brief differing two,  Floats away sorrowing, Tall as my love for you,  And almost lonelier. Delighted in the delighting,  I love you in mid-air,  I love myself the ground. The great wings sing nothing  Lightly. Lightly fall.
Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down  A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling. But far up the mountain, behind the town,  We too were swept out, out by the wind,  Alone with the Tuscan grass. Wind had been blowing across the hills For days, and everything now was graying gold  With dust, everything we saw, even Some small children scampering along a road,  Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.  We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,  And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face. I found the spider web there, whose hinges  Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust, Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging  And scattering shadows among shells and wings.  And then she stepped into the center of air  Slender and fastidious, the golden hair Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,  While ruins crumbled on every side of her.  Free of the dust, as though a moment before  She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself. I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped  Away in her own good time. Many men Have searched all over Tuscany and never found  What I found there, the heart of the light  Itself shelled and leaved, balancing  On filaments themselves falling. The secret Of this journey is to let the wind  Blow its dust all over your body, To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly All the way through your ruins, and not to lose Any sleep over the dead, who surely  Will bury their own, don’t worry.
It was a flower once, it was one of a billion flowers whose perfume broke through closed car windows, forced a blessing on their drivers. Then what stayed behind grew swollen, as we do; grew juice instead of tears, and small hard sour seeds, each one bitter, as we are, and filled with possibility. Now a hole opens up in its skin, where it was torn from the branch; ripeness can’t stop itself, breathes out; we can’t stop it either. We breathe in.
1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs—inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is done with pain: ice on the wound, the isolating tourniquet— as though to check an open vein where the self pumps out of the self would stop the second movement of the heart, diastolic, inclusive: to love is to siphon loss into that chamber.2. What does it mean when a woman says, “my husband,” if she sits all day in the tub; if she worries her life like a dog a rat; if her husband seems familiar but abstract, a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use. They’ve reached the middle years. Spared grief, they are given dread as they tend the frail on either side of them. Even their marriage is another child, grown rude and querulous since death practiced on them and withdrew. He asks of her only a little lie, a pale copy drawn from the inked stone where they loll beside the unicorn, great lovers then, two strangers joined by appetite:  it frightens her, to live by memory’s poor diminished light. She wants something crisp and permanent, like coral—a crown, a trellis, an iron shawl across the bed where they are laced together, the moon bleaching the house, their bodies abandoned—3. In last week’s mail, still spread on the kitchen table, the list of endangered species. How plain the animals are, quaint, domestic, but the names lift from the page: Woundfin. Whooping Crane. Squawfish. Black-footed Ferret. California Least Tern. Dearest, the beast of Loch Ness, that shy, broad-backed, two-headed creature, may be a pair of whales or manatee, male and female, driven from their deep mud nest, who cling to each other, circling the surface of the lake.
The fingers lie in the lap, separate, lonely, as in the field the separate blades of grass shrivel or grow tall.
Reading in bed, full of sentiment for the mild evening and the children asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them cry out now and then the brief reports of sufficient imagination, and listening at the same time compassionately to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble in the chimney—  then it was out, not a trapped bird beating at the seams of the ceiling, but a bat lifting toward us, falling away.Dominion over every living thing, large brain, a choice of weapons—
This is how it was: they had their own churches, their own schools, schoolbuses, football teams, bands and majorettes, separate restaurants, in all the public places their own bathrooms, at the doctor’s their own waiting room, in the Tribune  a column for their news, in the village a neighborhood called Sugar Hill, uneven rows of unresponsive houses that took the maids back in each afternoon— in our homes used the designated door, on Trailways sat in the back, and at the movie paid at a separate entrance, stayed upstairs. Saturdays, a double feature drew the local kids as the town bulged, families surfacing for groceries, medicine and wine, the black barber, white clerks in the stores—crowds lined the sidewalks, swirled through the courthouse yard, around the stone soldier and the flag, and still I never saw them on the street. It seemed a chivalric code laced the milk: you’d try not to look and they would try to be invisible. Once, on my way to the creek, I went without permission to the tenants’ log cabin near the barns, and when Aunt Susie opened the door, a cave yawned, and beyond her square, leonine, freckled face, in the hushed interior, Joe White lumbered up from the table, six unfolding feet of him, dark as a gun-barrel, his head bent to clear the chinked rafters, and I caught the terrifying smell of sweat and grease, smell of the woodstove, nightjar, straw mattress— This was rural Piedmont, upper south; we lived on a farm but not in poverty. When finally we got our own TV, the evening news with its hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan seemed like another movie—King Solomon’s Mines, the serial of Atlantis in the sea. By then I was thirteen, and no longer went to movies to see movies. The downstairs forged its attentions forward, toward the lit horizon, but leaning a little to one side or the other, arranging the pairs that would own the county, stores and farms, everything but easy passage out of there— and through my wing-tipped glasses the balcony took on a sullen glamor: whenever the film sputtered on the reel, when the music died and the lights came on, I swiveled my face up to where they whooped and swore, to the smoky blue haze and that tribe of black and brown, licorice, coffee, taffy, red oak, sweet tea— wanting to look, not knowing how to see, I thought it was a special privilege to enter the side door, climb the stairs and scan the even rows below—trained bears in a pit, herded by the stringent rule, while they were free, lounging above us, their laughter pelting down on us like trash.
Off go the crows from the roof. The crows can’t hold on. They might as well Be perched on an oil slick. Such an awkward dance, These gentlemen In their spottled-black coats. Such a tipsy dance, As if they didn’t know where they were. Such a humorous dance, As they try to set things right, As the wind reduces them. Such a sorrowful dance. How embarrassing is love When it goes wrong In front of everyone.
My friends, As it has been proven in the laboratory,  An empty pair of dance shoes Will sit on the floor like a wart Until it is given a reason to move. Those of us who study inertia (Those of us covered with wild hair and sleep) Can state this without fear: The energy in a pair of shoes at rest  Is about the same as that of a clown Knocked flat by a sandbag. This you can tell your friends with certainty:  A clown, flat on his back, Is a lot like an empty pair of  dancing shoes. An empty pair of dancing shoes Is also a lot like a leaf  Pressed in a book. And now you know a simple truth: A leaf pressed in, say, The Colossus   by Sylvia Plath, Is no different from an empty pair of dance shoes Even if those shoes are in the middle of the Stardust Ballroom  With all the lights on, and hot music shakes the windows   up and down the block. This is the secret of inertia: The shoes run on their own sense of the world.  They are in sympathy with the rock the kid skips   over the lake After it settles to the mud. Not with the ripples, But with the rock. A practical and personal application of inertia Can be found in the question:  Whose Turn Is It To Take Out The Garbage?  An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the answer to this question, As well as book-length poems Set in the Midwest. To sum up: An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the sand the 98-pound weakling   brushes from his cheeks As the bully tows away his girlfriend.  Later, When he spies the coupon at the back of the comic book, He is about to act upon a different set of scientific principles.  He is ready to dance.
for Jim Schley The umbrella, in this case; Earlier, the stool, the Wooden pillars that hold up  the roof. This guy, you realize, Will dance with anything— —He likes the idea. Then he picks up some lady’s discarded sandals, Holds them next to his head like sea shells, Donkey ears. Nothing,  his body states, Is safe from the dance of ideas!
The streamers choking the main arteries Of downtown. The brass band led by a child From the home for the handicapped. The old men Showing their hair (what’s left of it), The buttons of their shirts Popping in time To the salsa flooding out Of their portable headphones, And mothers letting their babies Be held by strangers. And the bus drivers Taping over their fare boxes And willing to give directions. Is there any reason to mention All the drinks are on the house? Thick, adolescent boys Dismantle their BB guns. Here is the world (what’s left of it), In brilliant motion, The oil slick at the curb Danced into a thousand Splintered steps. The bag ladies toss off their Garments To reveal wings. “This dance you do,” drawls the cop, “What do you call it?” We call it scalding the air. We call it dying with your Shoes on. And across the street The bodies of tramps Stumble In a sober language. And across the street Shy young girls step behind Their nameless boyfriends, Twirling their skirts. And under an archway A delivery boy discovers His body has learned to speak, And what does this street look like If not a runway, A polished wood floor? From the air, Insects drawn by the sweat Alight, when possible, On the blur Of torsos. It is the ride Of their tiny lives. The wind that burns their wings, The heaving, oblivious flesh, Mountains stuffed with panic, An ocean That can’t make up its mind. They drop away With the scorched taste Of vertigo. And under a swinging light bulb Some children Invent a game With the shadow the bulb makes, And the beat of their hearts. They call it dust in the mouth. They call it horse with no rider. They call it school with empty books. In the next room Their mother throws her dress away to chance. It drops to the floor Like a brush sighs across a drum head, And when she takes her lover, What are they thinking of If not a ballroom filled with mirrors, A world where no one has the right To stumble? In a parking lot An old man says this: “I am a ghost dance. I remember the way my hair felt, Damp with sweat and wind. When the wind kisses the leaves, I am dancing. When the subway hits the third rail, I am dancing. When the barrel goes over Niagara Falls, I am dancing. Music rings my bones like metal. O, Jazz has come from heaven,” he says, And at the z he jumps, arcing his back like a heron’s neck, And stands suddenly revealed As a balance demon, A home for Stetson hats. We have all caught the itch: The neon artist Wiring up his legs, The tourist couple Recording the twist on their Instamatic camera, And in a factory, A janitor asks his broom For a waltz, And he grasps it like a woman He’d have to live another Life to meet, And he spins around the dust bin And machines and thinks:Is everybody happy? And he spins out the side door, Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, Grinning as if he’d just received The deepest kiss in the world.
The flag is folded lengthwise, and lengthwise again, folding toward the open edge, so that the union of stars on the blue field remains outward in full view; a triangular folding is then begun at the striped end, by bringing the corner of the folded edge to the open edge; the outer point, turned inward along the open edge, forms the next triangular fold: the folding continued so, until the end is reached, the final corner tucked between the folds of the blue union, the form of the folded flag is found to resemble that of a 3-cornered pouch, or thick cocked hat. Take this flag, John Glenn, instead of a friend; instead of a brother, Edward Kennedy, take this flag; instead of a father, Joe Kennedy, take this flag; this flag instead of a husband, Ethel Kennedy, take this flag; this 9-times-folded red-white-striped, star-spotted-blue flag, tucked and pocketed neatly, Nation, instead of a leader, take this folded flag. Robert Kennedy, coffin without coverlet, beside this hole in the grass, beside your brother, John Kennedy, in the grass, take, instead of a country, this folded flag; Robert Kennedy, take this hole in the grass.
The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex.  A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious  cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft. screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting,  blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try  with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers. A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable  and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond, red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all  screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu- tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs. Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil- lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are  mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other. I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square  of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.
Women Or they  should be should be  pedestals little horses  moving those wooden  pedestals sweet  moving oldfashioned  to the painted  motions rocking  of men horses  the gladdest things in the toyroom  The feelingly  pegs and then  of their unfeelingly  ears To be  so familiar joyfully  and dear ridden  to the trusting rockingly  fists ridden until  To be chafed the restored egos dismount and the legs stride away Immobile willing  sweetlipped to be set  sturdy into motion  and smiling Women  women should be  should always pedestals  be waiting to men
It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it, A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,  Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming  As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it. It isn’t a sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds  To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm  Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but  If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells  Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,  You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,  Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,  Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,  And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,  Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.
Her handlers, dressed in vests and flannel pants,  Step forward in the weak winter light  Leading a behemoth among elephants,  Topsy, to another exhibition site;  Caparisoned with leather bridle,  Six impassive tons of carnival delight  Shambles on among spectators who sidle  Nervously off, for the brute has killed  At least three men, most recently an idle  Hanger-on at shows, who, given to distilled  Diversions, fed her a live cigar. Since become a beast of burden, Topsy thrilled The crowds in her palmy days, and soon will star   Once more, in an electrocution,  Which incident, though it someday seem bizarre, Is now a new idea in execution. Topsy has been fed an unaccustomed treat,   A few carrots laced with cyanide, And copper plates have been fastened to her feet,  Wired to cables running off on either side;  She stamps two times in irritation, Then waits, for elephants, having a thick hide,  Know how to be patient. The situation  Seems dreamlike, till someone throws a switch,  And the huge body shakes for the duration  Of five or six unending seconds, in which  Smoke rises and Topsy’s trunk contracts And twelve thousand mammoth pounds finally pitch  To earth, as the current breaks and all relax.  It is a scene shot with shades of grey— The smoke, the animal, the reported facts— On a seasonably grey and gloomy day. Would you care to see any of that again?  See it as many times as you please,  For an electrician, Thomas Edison, Has had a bright idea we call the movies,  And called on for monitory spark, Has preserved it all in framed transparencies  That are clear as day, for all the day is dark.  You might be amused on second glance To note the background—it’s an amusement park!— A site on Coney Island where elephants  Are being used in the construction, And where Topsy, through a keeper’s negligence,  Got loose, causing some property destruction,  And so is shown to posterity, A study in images and conduction,  Sunday, January 4th, 1903.
1. Morning of Crystal This is the deathless body, and this the land’s blood … and here the wine-laced sky over Iowa resembles a heavenly parfait. In one more day Des Moines will be diapered by first snow. A young girl, barely real, glazes the sidewalk with a stupid look. Iowa in winter always dumbfounds the love in us. Before long, nothing opposes the weight and resolution of this sky, this wilderness of earth hardening. When heaviness strikes like a clock glowing incandescently, the season opens to itself, as if a familiar stunt in a traveling show, a fabulation only a touched young girl can devise for any new world.  Des Moines. November 19732. Cooking the Cold
If, in an odd angle of the hutment, A puppy laps the water from a can Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving  Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man  Is not as men have said: a wolf to man? The other murderers troop in yawning;  Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one  Lies counting missions, lies there sweating  Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.O murderers! ... Still, this is how it’s done: This is a war.... But since these play, before they die,  Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man, I did as these have done, but did not die— I will content the people as I can And give up these to them: Behold the man! I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,  Many things; for this last saviour, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:  I find no fault in this just man.
I returned to a long strand, the hammered curve of a bay,  and found only the secular powers of the Atlantic thundering. I faced the unmagical invitations of Iceland, the pathetic colonies of Greenland, and suddenly those fabulous raiders, those lying in Orkney and Dublin  measured against their long swords rusting, those in the solid belly of stone ships, those hacked and glinting in the gravel of thawed streams were ocean-deafened voices warning me, lifted again in violence and epiphany. The longship’s swimming tongue was buoyant with hindsight— it said Thor’s hammer swung to geography and trade, thick-witted couplings and revenges, the hatreds and behind-backs of the althing, lies and women,  exhaustions nominated peace,  memory incubating the spilled blood. It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow  the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness.  Expect aurora borealis  in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure  your hands have known.’
Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;  Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less  In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,  I was transplanted ... —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians. —W. B. YEATS, Autobiographies 1. The Ministry of Fear  for Seamus Deane Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived  In important places. The lonely scarp Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted  For six years, overlooked your Bogside. I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat  Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,  The throttle of the hare. In the first week  I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat  The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.  I threw them over the fence one night  In September 1951 When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road  Were amber in the fog. It was an act  Of stealth.  Then Belfast, and then Berkeley. Here’s two on’s are sophisticated, Dabbling in verses till they have become  A life: from bulky envelopes arriving  In vacation time to slim volumes Despatched `with the author’s compliments’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine  Of your exercise book, bewildered me— Vowels and ideas bandied free As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.  I tried to write about the sycamores And innovated a South Derry rhyme With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.  Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain  Were walking, by God, all over the fine  Lawns of elocution.  Have our accents Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak As well as students from the Protestant schools.’  Remember that stuff? Inferiority Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.  ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’  ‘Heaney, Father.’  ‘Fair Enough.’  On my first day, the leather strap Went epileptic in the Big Study, Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads, But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life Was not so bad, shying as usual. On long vacations, then, I came to life  In the kissing seat of an Austin 16 Parked at a gable, the engine running,  My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,  A light left burning for her in the kitchen.  And heading back for home, the summer’s  Freedom dwindling night by night, the air  All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen  Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round  The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:  ‘What’s your name, driver?’  ‘Seamus ...’  Seamus? They once read my letters at a roadblock And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,  ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand. Ulster was British, but with no rights on  The English lyric: all around us, though  We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.2. A Constable Calls His bicycle stood at the window-sill,  The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher  Skirting the front mudguard, Its fat black handlegrips Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’ Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,  The pedal treads hanging relieved Of the boot of the law. His cap was upside down On the floor, next his chair. The line of its pressure ran like a bevel  In his slightly sweating hair. He had unstrapped The heavy ledger, and my father  Was making tillage returns In acres, roods, and perches. Arithmetic and fear. I sat staring at the polished holster  With its buttoned flap, the braid cord  Looped into the revolver butt. ‘Any other root crops? Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’  ‘No.’ But was there not a line Of turnips where the seed ran out In the potato field? I assumed Small guilts and sat Imagining the black hole in the barracks.  He stood up, shifted the baton-case Farther round on his belt, Closed the domesday book, Fitted his cap back with two hands,  And looked at me as he said goodbye. A shadow bobbed in the window.  He was snapping the carrier spring  Over the ledger. His boot pushed off  And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966 The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder Grossly there between his chin and his knees.  He is raised up by what he buckles under. Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers  Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,  It is the drums preside, like giant tumours. To every cocked ear, expert in its greed, His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’. The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood.  The air is pounding like a stethoscope.4. Summer 1969 While the Constabulary covered the mob  Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid. Each afternoon, in the casserole heat Of the flat, as I sweated my way through  The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket  Rose like the reek off a flax-dam. At night on the balcony, gules of wine, A sense of children in their dark corners, Old women in black shawls near open windows,  The air a canyon rivering in Spanish. We talked our way home over starlit plains  Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil  Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters. ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’  Another conjured Lorca from his hill. We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports  On the television, celebrities Arrived from where the real thing still happened. I retreated to the cool of the Prado.  Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’  Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms  And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted  And knapsacked military, the efficient  Rake of the fusillade. In the next room, His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall— Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn  Jewelled in the blood of his own children,  Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips  Over the world. Also, that holmgang Where two berserks club each other to death  For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking. He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished The stained cape of his heart as history charged.5. Fosterage  for Michael McLaverty ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped  My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way. Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield—I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked
For Ann Saddlemyer, our heartiest welcomer I Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.  The mildest February for twenty years  Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound  Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.  Now the good life could be to cross a field  And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe  Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense  And I am quickened with a redolence  Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,  My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.  The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.  II Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,  Words entering almost the sense of touch  Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch— ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’  Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain  Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.  Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore  And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter  That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:  Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,  Each verse returning like the plough turned round.  III This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake  (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.  It was all crepuscular and iambic.  Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,  Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)  Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.  I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse  From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.  Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts:  ‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’  Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze  Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.  IV I used to lie with an ear to the line For that way, they said, there should come a sound  Escaping ahead, an iron tune Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,  But I never heard that. Always, instead, Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away  Lifted over the woods. The head Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey  Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look  Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear. Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook  Silently across our drinking water (As they are shaking now across my heart) And vanished into where they seemed to start.  V Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:  It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older. And elderberry I have learned to call it. I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,  Its berries a swart caviar of shot, A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.  Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine. Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ And felt another’s texture quick on mine. So, etymologist of roots and graftings, I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.  VI He lived there in the unsayable lights. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights.  ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over  With perfect mist and peaceful absences’— Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice  And raced his bike across the Moyola River.  A man we never saw. But in that winter Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow Kept the country bright as a studio, In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,  His story quickened us, a wild white goose Heard after dark above the drifted house.  VII Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea: Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux  Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,  Collapse into a sibilant penumbra. Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra, Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise  Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize  And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow. L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène  Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay  That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous  And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’  The word deepening, clearing, like the sky  Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.  VIII Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops  At body heat and lush with omen Spattering dark on the hatchet iron. This morning when a magpie with jerky steps  Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood  I thought of dew on armour and carrion. What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?  How deep into the woodpile sat the toad? What welters through this dark hush on the crops?  Do you remember that pension in Les Landes  Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked  A mongol in her lap, to little songs?  Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.  My all of you birchwood in lightning.  IX Outside the kitchen window a black rat Sways on the briar like infected fruit: ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not  Imagining things. Go you out to it.’ Did we come to the wilderness for this? We have our burnished bay tree at the gate, Classical, hung with the reek of silage From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit. Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay, Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing— What is my apology for poetry? The empty briar is swishing When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face  Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.  X I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal On turf banks under blankets, with our faces  Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,  Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.  Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.  Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.  Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out  Like breathing effigies on a raised ground. And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?— Our first night years ago in that hotel  When you came with your deliberate kiss  To raise us towards the lovely and painful  Covenants of flesh; our separateness;  The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.
The victorious army marches into the city, & not far behind tarries a throng of women Who slept with the enemy on the edge Of battlements. The stunned morning Opens into a dust cloud of hooves & drums. Some new priests cradle Stone tablets, & others are poised With raised mallets in a forest of defeated Statuary. Of course, behind them Linger the turncoats & pious Merchants of lime. What’s Greek Is forged into Roman; what’s Roman Is hammered into a ceremony of birds Headed east. Whatever is marble Burns in the lime kilns because Someone dreams of a domed bathhouse.
Zeus always introduces himself  As one who needs stitching  Back together with kisses.  Like a rock star in leather & sapphires—conflagration & a trick of silk falling Between lost chances & never  Again. His disguises are almost Mathematical, as Io & Europa  Pass from their dreams into his.  This lord of storm clouds Is also a sun god crooning desire & dalliance in a garden of nymphs. Some days, he loves gloxinia, & others, craves garlic blooms— Hera, Aegina, & Callisto in the same song.
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining. All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still  from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths  that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out. All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me. One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,  the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light  and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me. Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me. Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull. The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human  bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,  big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,  that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud. She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll  and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats. The heifer human smells of needing the bull human  and is angry. All me look nervously at her as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy  of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals. Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed. One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.  Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,  licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming. Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human  and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.  Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard. All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky  that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood  in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree  is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar, some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror. The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human! But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me. Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving. All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,  and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me. The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,  is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,  and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.
It is just as well we do not see, in the shadows behind the hasty tent of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show, Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini in Nikes and jeans sharing a tired cigarette before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets and snaps the tigers into rage, before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund and makes from air the white and trembling doves, the pair.
When beauty breaks and falls asunder  I feel no grief for it, but wonder. When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,  I keep no chip of it for token. I never had a man for friend Who did not know that love must end.  I never had a girl for lover Who could discern when love was over.  What the wise doubt, the fool believes— Who is it, then, that love deceives?
Here, in the withered arbor, like the arrested wind,  Straight sides, carven knees, Stands the statue, with hands flung out in alarm  Or remonstrances. Over the lintel sway the woven bracts of the vine  In a pattern of angles. The quill of the fountain falters, woods rake on the sky  Their brusque tangles. The birds walk by slowly, circling the marble girl,  The golden quails, The pheasants, closed up in their arrowy wings,  Dragging their sharp tails. The inquietudes of the sap and of the blood are spent.  What is forsaken will rest. But her heel is lifted,—she would flee,—the whistle of the birds  Fails on her breast.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look  Less at its features than its darkening frame  Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,  Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.  Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show  Of yet another summer loath to go Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. Now that I have your face by heart, I look. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read  In the black chords upon a dulling page  Music that is not meant for music’s cage, Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.  The staves are shuttled over with a stark  Unprinted silence. In a double dream  I must spell out the storm, the running stream.  The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves;  The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps  Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
What are days for? Days are where we live.  They come, they wake us  Time and time over. They are to be happy in:  Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor  In their long coats Running over the fields.
Slowly the women file to where he stands  Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly  Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,  Within whose warm spring rain of loving care  Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, What’s wrong,
Come To Sunny Prestatyn Laughed the girl on the poster, Kneeling up on the sand  In tautened white satin.  Behind her, a hunk of coast, a Hotel with palms Seemed to expand from her thighs and  Spread breast-lifting arms. She was slapped up one day in March.  A couple of weeks, and her face Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;  Huge tits and a fissured crotch Were scored well in, and the space  Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous cock and balls Autographed Titch Thomas, while  Someone had used a knife Or something to stab right through  The moustached lips of her smile.  She was too good for this life.  Very soon, a great transverse tear  Left only a hand and some blue.  Now Fight Cancer is there.
‘Dockery was junior to you, Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’  Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how  Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight  We used to stand before that desk, to give  ‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?  I try the door of where I used to live: Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide. A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.  Canal and clouds and colleges subside Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,  Anyone up today must have been born In ’43, when I was twenty-one. If he was younger, did he get this son At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows  How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose I fell asleep, waking at the fumes And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,  And ate an awful pie, and walked along  The platform to its end to see the ranged  Joining and parting lines reflect a strong Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,  No house or land still seemed quite natural.  Only a numbness registered the shock  Of finding out how much had gone of life,  How widely from the others. Dockery, now:  Only nineteen, he must have taken stock Of what he wanted, and been capable Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how Convinced he was he should be added to! Why did he think adding meant increase? To me it was dilution. Where do these Innate assumptions come from? Not from what  We think truest, or most want to do: Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style  Our lives bring with them: habit for a while, Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got And how we got it; looked back on, they rear  Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying  For Dockery a son, for me nothing, Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.  Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose,  And age, and then the only end of age.
When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s  Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,  I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—  Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if  Anyone looked at me, forty years back,  And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark
Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by  The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness. Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie  Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.  There’s something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow  Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart  (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High and preposterous and separate—  Lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O wolves of memory! Immensements! No, One shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain  Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and pain  Of being young; that it can’t come again,  But is for others undiminished somewhere.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   They may not mean to, but they do.  They fill you with the faults they had  And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn  By fools in old-style hats and coats,  Who half the time were soppy-stern  And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man.  It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,  And don’t have any kids yourself.
My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps  You’d care to join us?
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:  ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully? I am all you never had of goods and sex.  You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ So I look at others, what they do with theirs:   They certainly don’t keep it upstairs. By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:  Clearly money has something to do with life —In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:  You can’t put off being young until you retire, And however you bank your screw, the money you save  Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave. I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down  From long french windows at a provincial town,  The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad  In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.  Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.  In time the curtain-edges will grow light.  Till then I see what’s really always there:  Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,  Making all thought impossible but how  And where and when I shall myself die.  Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse  —The good not done, the love not given, time  Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because  An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;  But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,  Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,  No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,  Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision,  A small unfocused blur, a standing chill  That slows each impulse down to indecision.  Most things may never happen: this one will,  And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without  People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave  Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.  It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,  Have always known, know that we can’t escape,  Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring  In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found  A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,  Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.  Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world  Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence  Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind  While there is still time.
Love again: wanking at ten past three  (Surely he’s taken her home by now?),  The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how  To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,  Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,  And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree  And sways them on in a sort of sense  And say why it never worked for me.  Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards,  And arrogant eternity.
Hard to know which is more gnarled, the posts he hammers staples into or the blue hummocks which run across his hands like molehills. Work has reduced his wrists to bones, cut out of him the easy flesh and brought him down to this, the crowbar’s teeth caught just behind a barb. Again this morning the crowbar’s neck will make its blue slip into wood, there will be that moment when too much strength will cause the wire to break. But even at 70, he says, he has to have it right, and more than right. This morning, in the pewter light, he has the scars to prove it.
My change: a nickel caked with finger grime; two nicked quarters not long for this life, worth more for keeping dead eyes shut than bus fare; a dime, shining in sunshine like a new dime; grubby pennies, one stamped the year of my birth, no brighter than I from 40 years of wear. What purses, piggy banks, and window sills have these coins known, their presidential heads pinched into what beggar's chalky palm-- they circulate like tarnished red blood cells, all of us exchanging the merest film of our lives, and the lives of those long dead. And now my turn in the convenience store, I hand over my fist of change, still warm, to the bored, lip-pierced check-out girl, once more to be spun down cigarette machines, hurled in fountains, flipped for luck--these dirty charms chiming in the dark pockets of the world.
There is another way to enter an apple: a worm’s way. The small, round door closes behind her. The world and all its necessities ripen around her like a room. In the sweet marrow of a bone, the maggot does not remember the wingspread of the mother, the green shine of her body, nor even the last breath of the dying deer. I, too, have forgotten how I came here, breathing this sweet wind, drinking rain, encased by the limits of what I can imagine and by a husk of stars.
When snow like sheep lay in the fold And winds went begging at each door, And the far hills were blue with cold, And a cold shroud lay on the moor, She kept the siege. And every day We watched her brooding over death Like a strong bird above its prey. The room filled with the kettle’s breath. Damp curtains glued against the pane Sealed time away. Her body froze As if to freeze us all, and chain Creation to a stunned repose. She died before the world could stir. In March the ice unloosed the brook And water ruffled the sun’s hair. Dead cones upon the alder shook.
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.
Sea-preserved, heaped with sea-spoils,  Ribs, keels, coral sores, Detached faces, ephemeral oils,  Discharged on the world’s outer shores, A dumb child-king Arrives at his right place; rests,  Undisturbed, among slack serpents; beasts  With claws flesh-buttered. In the gathering Of bestial and common hardship  Artistic men appear to worship And fall down; to recognize Familiar tokens; believe their own eyes. Above the marvel, each rigid head,  Angels, their unnatural wings displayed,  Freeze into an attitude Recalling the dead.
1 Created purely from glass the saint stands, Exposing his gifted quite empty hands Like a conjurer about to begin, A righteous man begging of righteous men. 2 In the sun lily-and-gold-coloured, Filtering the cruder light, he has endured, A feature for our regard; and will keep; Of worldly purity the stained archetype. 3 The scummed pond twitches. The great holly-tree, Emptied and shut, blows clear of wasting snow, The common, puddled substance: beneath, Like a revealed mineral, a new earth.
non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,  solaque famosam culpa professa facit. Amores, III, xiv  I love my work and my children. God  Is distant, difficult. Things happen.  Too near the ancient troughs of blood  Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,  Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.
born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42   Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.
I King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. ‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’IV I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.V So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern. Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings—I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.VI The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone. ‘A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers.’ But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness; gave myself to unattainable toys. Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky mistletoe. ‘Look’ they said and again ‘look.’ But I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to its source. In the schoolyard, in the cloakrooms, the children boasted their scars of dried snot; wrists and knees garnished with impetigo.X He adored the desk, its brown-oak inlaid with ebony, assorted prize pens, the seals of gold and base metal into which he had sunk his name. It was there that he drew upon grievances from the people; attended to signatures and retributions; forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History. What should a man make of remorse, that it might profit his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to Mother, darling, and God bless. He swayed in sunlight, in mild dreams. He tested the little pears. He smeared catmint on his palm for his cat Smut to lick. He wept, attempting to master ancilla and servus.XI Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight. Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face. Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed. Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce. Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres. Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil. Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves.XV Tutting, he wrenched at a snarled root of dead crabapple. It rose against him. In brief cavort he was Cernunnos, the branched god, lightly concussed. He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An ancient land, full of strategy. Ramparts of compost pioneered by red-helmeted worms. Hemlock in ambush, night-soil, tetanus. A wasps’ nest ensconced in the hedge-bank, a reliquary or wrapped head, the corpse of Cernunnos pitching dayward its feral horns.XVI Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter. The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm. And other miracles, other exchanges. Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim. Christ’s mass: in the thick of a snowy forest the flickering evergreen fissured with light. Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes.XXVII ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls. He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs. After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting.XXX And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk towards us he vanished he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud.
the spiritual, Platonic old England … S. T. COLERIDGE, Anima Poetae ‘Your situation’, said Coningsby, looking up the green and silent valley, ‘is absolutely poetic.’ ‘I try sometimes to fancy’, said Mr Millbank, with a rather fierce smile, ‘that I am in the New World.’  BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Coningsby 1 QUAINT MAZES And, after all, it is to them we return. Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts: lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn, those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts. On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts put their pronged light; the chilly fountains burn.  Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests and pangs of consolation, its hawk’s hood  twitched off for sweet carnality, again  rejoices in old hymns of servitude, haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine.  It is the ravage of the heron wood;  it is the rood blazing upon the green. 2 DAMON’S LAMENT FOR HIS CLORINDA, YORKSHIRE 1654 November rips gold foil from the oak ridges.  Dour folk huddle in High Hoyland, Penistone.  The tributaries of the Sheaf and Don bulge their dull spate, cramming the poor bridges. The North Sea batters our shepherds’ cottages  from sixty miles. No sooner has the sun  swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone.  We live like gleaners of its vestiges knowing we flourish, though each year a child  with the set face of a tomb-weeper is put down  for ever and ever. Why does the air grow cold in the region of mirrors? And who is this clown  doffing his mask at the masked threshold  to selfless raptures that are all his own? 3 WHO ARE THESE COMING TO THE SACRIFICE? High voices in domestic chapels; praise; praise-worthy feuds; new-burgeoned spires that sprung  crisp-leaved as though from dropping-wells. The young  ferns root among our vitrified tears. What an elopement that was: the hired chaise tore through the fir-grove, scattered kinsmen flung  buckshot and bridles, and the tocsin swung  from the tarred bellcote dappled with dove-smears. Wires tarnish in gilt corridors, in each room  stiff with the bric-a-brac of loss and gain.  Love fled, truly outwitted, through a swirl of long-laid dust. Today you sip and smile  though still not quite yourself. Guarding its pane  the spider looms against another storm. 4 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (I) Make miniatures of the once-monstrous theme:  the red-coat devotees, melees of wheels,  Jagannath’s lovers. With indifferent aim  unleash the rutting cannon at the walls of forts and palaces; pollute the wells. Impound the memoirs for their bankrupt shame,  fantasies of true destiny that kills ‘under the sanction of the English name’. Be moved by faith, obedience without fault,  the flawless hubris of heroic guilt,  the grace of visitation; and be stirred by all her god-quests, her idolatries,  in conclave of abiding injuries,  sated upon the stillness of the bride. 5 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (II) Suppose they sweltered here three thousand years  patient for our destruction. There is a greeting  beyond the act. Destiny is the great thing,  true lord of annexation and arrears. Our law-books overrule the emperors.  The mango is the bride-bed of light. Spring  jostles the flame-tree. But new mandates bring  new images of faith, good subahdars! The flittering candles of the wayside shrines  melt into dawn. The sun surmounts the dust.  Krishna from Radha lovingly untwines. Lugging the earth, the oxen bow their heads.  The alien conscience of our days is lost  among the ruins and on endless roads. 6 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (III) Malcolm and Frere, Colebrooke and Elphinstone,  the life of empire like the life of the mind ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’, attuned to the clear theme of justice and order, gone. Gone the ascetic pastimes, the Persian  scholarship, the wild boar run to ground,  the watercolours of the sun and wind.  Names rise like outcrops on the rich terrain, like carapaces of the Mughal tombs  lop-sided in the rice-fields, boarded-up near railway-crossings and small aerodromes. ‘India’s a peacock-shrine next to a shop  selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms,  heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep.’ 7 LOSS AND GAIN Pitched high above the shallows of the sea  lone bells in gritty belfries do not ring  but coil a far and inward echoing out of the air that thrums. Enduringly, fuchsia-hedges fend between cliff and sky;  brown stumps of headstones tamp into the ling  the ruined and the ruinously strong. Platonic England grasps its tenantry where wild-eyed poppies raddle tawny farms  and wild swans root in lily-clouded lakes.  Vulnerable to each other the twin forms of sleep and waking touch the man who wakes  to sudden light, who thinks that this becalms  even the phantoms of untold mistakes. 8 VOCATIONS While friends defected, you stayed and were sure,  fervent in reason, watchful of each name: a signet-seal’s unostentatious gem gleams against walnut on the escritoire, focus of reckoning and judicious prayer. This is the durable covenant, a room quietly furnished with stuff of martyrdom, lit by the flowers and moths from your own shire, by silvery vistas frothed with convolvulus;  radiance of dreams hardly to be denied. The twittering pipistrelle, so strange and close, plucks its curt flight through the moist eventide;  the children thread among old avenues  of snowberries, clear-calling as they fade. 9 THE LAUREL AXE Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods  with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine  out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;  the avenues are spread with brittle floods. Platonic England, house of solitudes,  rests in its laurels and its injured stone,  replete with complex fortunes that are gone,  beset by dynasties of moods and clouds. It stands, as though at ease with its own world,  the mannerly extortions, languid praise,  all that devotion long since bought and sold, the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,  tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed  in cabinets of amethyst and frost. 10 FIDELITIES Remember how, at seven years, the decrees  were brought home: child-soul must register  for Christ’s dole, be allotted its first Easter,  blanch-white and empty, chilled by the lilies, betrothed among the well-wishers and spies.  Reverend Mother, breakfastless, could feast her  constraint on terracotta and alabaster and brimstone and the sweets of paradise. Theology makes good bedside reading. Some  who are lost covet scholastic proof,  subsistence of probation, modest balm. The wooden wings of justice borne aloof,  we close our eyes to Anselm and lie calm.  All night the cisterns whisper in the roof. 11 IDYLLS OF THE KING The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone;  dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust, and the marsh-orchids and the heron’s nest,  goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun. Weightless magnificence upholds the past.  Cement recesses smell of fur and bone  and berries wrinkle in the badger-run  and wiry heath-fern scatters its fresh rust. ‘O clap your hands’ so that the dove takes flight,  bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound,  plunges its wings into the green twilight above this long-sought and forsaken ground,  the half-built ruins of the new estate, warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond. 12 THE EVE OF ST MARK Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,  godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom;  broochlight intermittent between the fronds,  the owl immortal in its crystal dome. Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,  the clock discounts us with a telling chime.  Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,  burnish upon the threshold of the dream: churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls  of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied.  Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king preserve in sepia waterglass the souls  of distant cousins, virgin till they died, and the lost delicate suitors who could sing. 13 THE HEREFORDSHIRE CAROL So to celebrate that kingdom: it grows  greener in winter, essence of the year; the apple-branches musty with green fur.  In the viridian darkness of its yews it is an enclave of perpetual vows broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair,  disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer,  Old Moore’s astrology, all hallows, the squire’s effigy bewigged with frost, and hobnails cracking puddles before dawn. In grange and cottage girls rise from their beds by candlelight and mend their ruined braids.  Touched by the cry of the iconoclast, how the rose-window blossoms with the sun!
He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated. 1 Requite this angel whose flushed and thirsting face stoops to the sacrifice out of which it arose. This is the lord Eros of grief who pities no one; it is Lazarus with his sores. 2 And you, who with your soft but searching voice drew me out of the sleep where I was lost, who held me near your heart that I might rest confiding in the darkness of your choice: possessed by you I chose to have no choice, fulfilled in you I sought no further quest. You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust, in desolation where my sins rejoice. As I am passionate so you with pain turn my desire; as you seem passionless so I recoil from all that I would gain, wounding myself upon forgetfulness, false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain as you sustain each item of your cross. 3 Veni Redemptor, but not in our time. Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world. ‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned. Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place. 4 O light of light, supreme delight; grace on our lips to our disgrace. Time roosts on all such golden wrists; our leanness is our luxury. Our love is what we love to have; our faith is in our festivals. 5 Stupefying images of grief-in-dream, succubae to my natural grief of heart, cling to me, then; you who will not desert your love nor lose him in some blank of time. You come with all the licence of her name to tell me you are mine. But you are not and she is not. Can my own breath be hurt by breathless shadows groaning in their game? It can. The best societies of hell acknowledge this, aroused by what they know: consummate rage recaptured there in full as faithfulness demands it, blow for blow, and rectitude that mimics its own fall reeling with sensual abstinence and woe. 6 This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire, this is the questioning at the long tables, this is true marriage of the self-in-self, this is a raging solitude of desire, this is the chorus of obscene consent, this is a single voice of purest praise. 7 He wounds with ecstasy. All the wounds are his own. He wears the martyr’s crown. He is the Lord of Misrule. He is the Master of the Leaping Figures, the motley factions. Revelling in auguries he is the Weeper of the Valedictions. 8 Music survives, composing her own sphere, Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air, and when we would accost her with real cries silver on silver thrills itself to ice.
The strident high civic trumpeting of misrule. It is what we stand for. Wild insolence, aggregates without distinction. Courage of common men: spent in the ruck their remnant witness after centuries is granted them like a pardon. And other fealties other fortitudes broken as named— Respublica brokenly recalled, its archaic laws and hymnody; and destroyed hope that so many times is brought with triumph back from the dead.
I Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp. XIII Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks: tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge: committed in absentia to solemn elevation, Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral music, for male and female voices ringingly a cappella, made for double string choirs, congregated brass, choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting, like glassblowers, inventions of supreme order? XIV As to bad faith, Malebranche might argue it rests with inattention. Stupidity is not admissible. However, the status of apprehension remains at issue. Some qualities are best left unrecognized. Needless to say, unrecognized is not unacknowledged. Unnamed is not nameless. XVII If the gospel is heard, all else follows: the scattering, the diaspora, the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye. Penitence can be spoken of, it is said, but is itself beyond words; even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors, keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years, doubly outcast: even so I would remember— the scattering, the diaspora. We do not know the saints. His mercy is greater even than his wisdom. If the gospel is heard, all else follows. We shall rise again, clutching our wounds. XXXV Even now, I tell myself, there is a language to which I might speak and which would rightly hear me; responding with eloquence; in its turn, negotiating sense without insult given or injury taken. Familiar to those who already know it elsewhere as justice, it is met also in the form of silence. XXIX Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather, he might be dead. Too bad. So how much more does he have of injury time? XL For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity; for religious read religiose; for distinction detestation. Take accessible to mean acceptable, accommodating, openly servile. Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don’t care what I say, do I? XLI For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition. Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive. Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated. Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion. For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant. XLII Excuse me—excuse me—I did not say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in the lifting. No—please—forget it. XLIII This is quite dreadful—he’s become obsessed. There you go, there you go—narrow it down to obsession! LI Whatever may be meant by moral landscape, it is for me increasingly a terrain seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary, conglomerate, metamorphic rock- strata, in which particular grace, individual love, decency, endurance, are traceable across the faults. LII Admittedly at times this moral landscape to my exasperated ear emits archaic burrings like a small, high-fenced electricity sub-station of uncertain age in a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides. LXVI Christ has risen yet again to their ritual supplication. It seems weird that the comedy never self-destructs. Actually it is strengthened—if attenuation is strength. (Donne said as much of gold. Come back, Donne, I forgive you; and lovely Herbert.) But what strange guild is this that practises daily synchronized genuflection and takes pride in hazing my Jewish wife? If Christ be not risen, Christians are petty temple-schismatics, justly cast out of the law. Worse things have befallen Israel. But since he is risen, he is risen even for these high-handed underlings of self- worship: who, as by obedience, proclaim him risen indeed. LXVII Instruct me further in your travail, blind interpreter. Suppose I cannot unearth what it was they buried: research is not anamnesis. Nor is this a primer of innocence exactly. Did the centurion see nothing irregular before the abnormal light seared his eyeballs? Why do I take as my gift a wounded and wounding introspection? The rule is clear enough: last alleluias forte, followed by indifferent coffee and fellowship. LXIX What choice do you have? These are false questions. Fear is your absolute, yet in each feature infinitely variable, Manichean beyond dispute, for you alone, the skeletal maple, a loose wire tapping the wind. LXX Active virtue: that which shall contain its own passion in the public weal— do you follow?—or can you at least take the drift of the thing? The struggle for a noble vernacular: this did not end with Petrarch. But where is it? Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case, with Dryden, or, perhaps, Milton’s political sonnets?—the cherished stock hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices of distinction, far back, indistinct. Still, I’m convinced that shaping, voicing, are types of civic action. Or, slightly to refashion this, that Wordsworth’s two Prefaces stand with his great tract on the Convention of Cintra, witnessing to the praesidium in the sacred name of things betrayed. Intrinsic value I am somewhat less sure of. It seems implicate with active virtue but I cannot say how, precisely. Partaking of both fact and recognition, it must be, therefore, in effect, at once agent and predicate: imponderables brought home to the brute mass and detail of the world; there, by some, to be pondered. XCVI Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice— Unchallengeable—of the foundations, distinct authority devoted to indistinction. With what proximity to justice stands the record of mischance, heroic hit-or-miss, the air so full of flak and tracer, legend says, you pray to live unnoticed. Mr Ives took Emersonian self-reliance the whole way on that. Melville, half-immolated, rebuilt the pyre. Holst, some time later, stumbled on dharma. What can I say?— At worst and best a blind ennoblement, flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir, the hatred that is in the nature of love. CXVIII By default, as it so happens, here we have good and bad angels caught burning themselves characteristic antiphons; and here the true and the false shepherds discovered already deep into their hollow debate. Is that all? No, add spinners of fine calumny, confectioners of sugared malice; add those who find sincerity in heartless weeping. Add the pained, painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition. Sidney: best realizer and arguer of music, that ‘divine striker upon the senses’, steady my music to your Augustinian grace-notes, with your high craft of fret. I am glad to have learned how it goes with you and with Italianate- Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly— somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance. CXIX And yes—bugger you, MacSikker et al.,—I do mourn and resent your desolation of learning: Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure, forms of understanding, far from despicable, and furthest now, as they are most despised. By understanding I understand diligence and attention, appropriately understood as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement of what is owed the dead. CXX As with the Gospels, which it is allowed to resemble, in Measure for Measure moral uplift is not the issue. Scrupulosity, diffidence, shrill spirituality, conviction, free expression, come off as poorly as deceit or lust. The ethical motiv is—so we may hazard— opportunism, redemptive and redeemed; case-hardened on case-law, casuistry’s own redemption; the general temper a caustic equity. CXXI So what is faith if it is not inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns are breast-high, head-high, the days lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder. Light is this instant, far-seeing into itself, its own signature on things that recognize salvation. I am an old man, a child, the horizon is Traherne’s country. CXLVII To go so far with the elaborately- vested Angel of Naked Truth: and where are we, finally? Don’t say that—we are nowhere finally. And nowhere are you— nowhere are you—any more—more cryptic than a schoolyard truce. Cry Kings, Cross, or Crosses, cry Pax, cry Pax, but to be healed. But to be healed, and die! CXLVIII Obnoxious means, far back within itself, easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. Pride is our crux: be angry, but not proud where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi’s words or—to be accurate—BV’s English cast of them: when he found Tasso’s poor scratch of a memorial barely showing among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It seemed a sad and angry consolation. So—Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem—I ask you: what are poems for? They are to console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch. Let us commit that to our dust. What ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad and angry consolation.
Late, I have come to a parched land doubting my gift, if gift I have, the inspiration of water spilt, swallowed in the sand. To hear once more water trickle, to stand in a stretch of silence the divining pen twisting in the hand: sign of depths alluvial. Water owns no permanent shape, sags, is most itself descending; now, under the shadow of the idol, dry mouth and dry landscape. No rain falls with a refreshing sound to settle tubular in a well, elliptical in a bowl. No grape lusciously moulds it round. Clouds have no constant resemblance to anything, blown by a hot wind, flying mirages; the blue background, light constructions of chance. To hold back chaos I transformed amorphous mass—and fire and cloud— so that the agèd gods might dance and golden structures form. I should have built, plain brick on brick, a water tower. The sun flies on arid wastes, barren hells too warm and me with a hazel stick! Rivulets vanished in the dust long ago, great compositions vaporized, salt on the tongue so thick that drinking, still I thirst. Repeated desert, recurring drought, sometimes hearing water trickle, sometimes not, I, by doubting first, believe; believing, doubt.
(A true incident) ‘Only a local anaesthetic was given because of the blood pressure problem. The patient, thus, was fully awake throughout the operation. But in those days—in 1938, in Cardiff, when I was Lambert Rogers’ dresser—they could not locate a brain tumour with precision. Too much normal brain tissue was destroyed as the surgeon searched for it, before he felt the resistance of it … all somewhat hit and miss. One operation I shall never forget … ’  (Dr Wilfred Abse) Sister saying—‘Soon you’ll be back in the ward,’  sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,’  the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine’;  small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,  though, soon, he would blink again and again  because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,  rash as a blind man’s, inside his soft brain. If items of horror can make a man laugh then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time; more brain mashed because of the probe’s braille path;  Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still; his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,  a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.’ Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,  a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,  leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’—  the patient’s dummy lips moving to that refrain,  the patient’s eyes too wide. And, shocked,  Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe with nurses, students, sister, petrified. ‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,’  that voice so arctic and that cry so odd  had nowhere else to go—till the antique  gramophone wound down and the words began to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … ’  to cease at last when something other died.  And silence matched the silence under snow.
White coat and purple coat  a sleeve from both he sews. That white is always stained with blood,  that purple by the rose. And phantom rose and blood most real  compose a hybrid style; white coat and purple coat  few men can reconcile. White coat and purple coat  can each be worn in turn but in the white a man will freeze  and in the purple burn.
When the snake bit Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa while he was praying the snake died. (Each day is attended by surprises or it is nothing.) Question: was the bare-footed, smelly Rabbi more poisonous than the snake or so God-adulterated he’d become immune to serpent poison? Oh great-great-great-uncles, your palms weighing air, why are you arguing? Listen, the snake thought (being old and unwell and bad-tempered as hell) Death, where’s thy sting? In short, was just testing: a snake’s last fling. Yes, the so-called snake was dying anyway, its heart calcified and as old as Eden. No, that snake was A1 fit but while hissing for fun it clumsily bit its own tongue. No, Hanina invented that snake; not for his own sake but for first- class, religious publicity. No no, here’s the key to it. Ask: did the Rabbi, later on, become a jumpy, timid man? Remember, he who has been bitten by a snake thereafter becomes frightened of a rope … Bearded men in darkening rooms sipping lemon tea and arguing about the serpent till the moon of Russia, of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, rose above the alien steeples—centuries of sleep. Now, tonight, a clean-shaven rabbi who once studied in Vienna says snake-venom contains haemolysins, haemo- coagulants, protolysins, cytolysins and neurotoxins and that even in Hanina ben Dosa’s day a snake was a snake—unless, of course, it was a penis, an unruly penis, making a noise like one pissing on a mound of fresh hot ashes. Oh great-great-great-uncles did you hear him? And are your handbones weighing moonshine?
A heritage of a sort. A heritage of comradeship and suffocation. The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s  explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating  to his throne of sulphur. Now this black-robed god of fossils and funerals, petrifier of underground forests and flowers, emerges with his grim retinue past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls, into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony. Above, on the brutalised, unstitched side of a Welsh mountain, it has to be someone from somewhere else  who will sing solo not of the marasmus of the Valleys,  the pit-wheels that do not turn,  the pump-house abandoned; nor of how, after a half-mile fall  regiments of miners’ lamps  no longer, midge-like, rise and slip and bob. Only someone uncommitted,  someone from somewhere else,  panorama-high on a coal-tip,  may jubilantly laud the re-entry of the exiled god  into his shadowless kingdom. He, drunk with methane, raising a man’s femur like a sceptre; she, his ravished queen, admiring the blood-stained black roses that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.
He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;  In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab: Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back. He holds up seven thick little fingers To show me he’s rated seventh in the world,  And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger  In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood. He asks me to tell all I can remember Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war  In North Africa and what came after, The loss of his father, the loss of his brother, The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread  Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood. “Here they live, here they live and not die,” And he points down at his black head ridged  With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair,  Tells me I should never disparage The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter. Sadly his fingers wander over my face,  And he says how fair I am, how smooth.  We stand to end this first and last visit.  Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two, No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders,  Kisses my lips, his eyes still open, My imaginary brother, my cousin, Myself made otherwise by all his pain.
The little girl won’t eat her sandwich; she lifts the bun and looks in, but the grey beef   coated with relish is always there.   Her mother says, “Do it for mother.” Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off   like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch.  And a mother’s life? “What can you do with a man like that?” she asks the sleeping cook   and then the old Negro who won’t sit.   “He’s been out all night trying to get it. I hope he gets it. What did he ever do  but get it?” The Negro doesn’t look,  though he looks like he’s been out all night trying. Everyone’s been out all night trying.   Why else would we be drinking beer   at attention? If she were younger, or if I were Prince Valiant, I would say that fate  brought me here to quiet the crying,  to sweeten the sandwich of the child, to waken the cook, to stop the Negro from   bearing witness to the world. The dawn   still hasn’t come, and now we hear the 8 o’clock whistles blasting from heaven,   and with no morning the day is sold.
like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots, full of lead life-size statues of Richard Nixon, like an avalanche of smoke and black fog lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal, remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back, faster when you turn to face it, like a fine rain, then colder showers, then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail, fist-size, then jagged laser, shrapnel hail thudding and tearing like footsteps of drunk gods or fathers; it comes polite, loutish, assured, suave, breathing through its mouth (which is a hole eaten by a cave), it comes like an elephant annoyed, like a black mamba terrified, it slides down the valley, grease on grease, like fire eating birds’ nests, like fire melting the fuzz off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute and gorging, never to cease, insatiable, gorging and mute.
Foreseeing typographical errors on their gravestones, the children from infancy—are bitter. Little clairvoyants, blond, in terror. Foreseeing the black and yellow room behind the eyelids, the children are bitter—from infancy. The blue egg of thirst: say hello. Foreseeing the lower lips of glaciers sliding toward their own lips, the children from infancy—are bitter. Them, rats, snakes: the chased and chasers. Foreseeing a dust-filled matchbox, the heart, the temples’ temples closing, the children are bitter—from infancy. From the marrow in the marrow: the start.
“There was poverty before money.” There was debtors’ prison before inmates, there was hunger prefossil, there was pain before a nervous system to convey it to the brain, there existed poverty before intelligence, or accountants, before narration; there was bankruptcy aswirl in nowhere, it was palpable where nothing was palpable, there was repossession in the gasses forming so many billion ... ; there was poverty—it had a tongue—in cooling ash, in marl, and coming loam, thirst in the few strands of hay slipping between a pitchfork’s wide tines, in the reptile and the first birds, poverty aloof and no mystery like God its maker; there was surely want in one steamed and sagging onion, there was poverty in the shard of bread sopped in the final drop of gravy you snatched from your brother’s mouth.
For some semitropical reason  when the rains fall  relentlessly they fall into swimming pools, these otherwise  bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but  if you want their favor, if you believe there is justice,  a reward for not loving the death of ugly and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,  rats) creatures, if you believe these things, then  you would leave a lifebuoy or two in your swimming pool at night. And in the morning  you would haul ashore the huddled, hairy survivors and escort them back to the bush, and know, be assured that at least these saved,  as individuals, would not turn up again someday in your hat, drawer, or the tangled underworld of your socks, and that even— when your belief in justice merges with your belief in dreams— they may tell the others in a sign language  four times as subtle and complicated as man’s that you are good,  that you love them, that you would save them again.
Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan, ramfeezled after a hard night at the corpse-polishing plant, slope- shouldered, a half loaf of bread, even his hair tired, famished, fingering the diminished beans in his pocket—you meet him. On a thousand street corners you meet him, emerging from the subway, emerging from your own chest—this sight’s shrill, metallic vapors pass into you. His fear is of being broken, of becoming too dexterous in stripping the last few shoelaces of meat from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten the anniversary of.... You meet him, know his defeat, though proper and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also is proper and inevitable: so many defeats queer and insignificant (as illustration: the first time you lay awake all night waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many no-hope exhaustions hidden, their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps and cruise toward them, fat sails forward.... You meet him on the corners, in bus stations, on the blind avenues leading neither in nor out of hell, you meet him and with him you walk.
hate the people of this village and would nail our hats to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them or staple our hands to our foreheads for refusing to salute them if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats, mix their flour at night with broken glass. We do this, they do that. They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats. We devein one of their sisters. The quicksand pits they built were good. Our amputation teams were better. We trained some birds to steal their wheat. They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace. They do this, we do that. We canceled our sheep imports. They no longer bought our blankets. We mocked their greatest poet and when that had no effect we parodied the way they dance which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God was leprous, hairless. We do this, they do that. Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
which he must cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts, to help him I sit with my rifle on a platform  high in a tree, same side of the river as the hungry monkey. How does this assist him? When he swims for it I look first upriver: predators move faster with the current than against it. If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey and an anaconda from downriver burns with the same ambition, I do the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey, croc- and snake-speed, and if, if it looks as though the anaconda or the croc will reach the monkey before he attains the river’s far bank, I raise my rifle and fire one, two, three, even four times into the river just behind the monkey to hurry him up a little. Shoot the snake, the crocodile?  They’re just doing their jobs,  but the monkey, the monkey  has little hands like a child’s, and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.
(dirt stolen from an infant’s grave around midnight) Do not try to take it from my child’s grave, nor from the grave of my childhood, nor from any infant’s grave I guard—voodoo, juju, boo-hoo rites calling for it or not! This dust, this dirt, will not be taken at dawn or noon or at the dusky time, and if you approach this sacred place near midnight, then I will chop, one by one, your fingers off with which you do your harm. Goofer-dust: if you want it, if you need it, then erect downwind from a baby’s grave a fine-meshed net and gather it one-half grain, a flaky mote, an infinitesimally small fleck of a flake at a time and in such a way it is given to you by the day, the wind, the world, it is given to you, thereby diminishing the need to steal this dirt displaced by a child in a child’s grave.
When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. —John Keats  1. You are here on the underside of the page,  writing in water, anachronist,  showing your head  with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder  like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers,  anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people”  but making no mark, pressing the page as I write,  while the traffic in Rome, demotic with engines and klaxons, circles the Pyramid of Cestius,  crosses a graveyard, and submerges  again like the fin of a shark.  2. I write, in the posthumous way,  on the flat of a headstone with a quarrier’s ink, like yourself: an anthologist’s date and an asterisk,  a parenthetical mark in the gas  of the pyramid-builders, an obelisk whirling with Vespas  in a poisonous motorcade. I make your surgeon’s incision for solitude—one living hand, two poets strangled in seawater and phlegm,  an incestuous ego to reach for the heart in the funeral ashes,  a deathbed with friends.  3. Something murderous flows  from the page to my hand— a silence that wars with the letters, a fist that closes on paper: a blow  with the straight edge of a razor that falls with a madman’s  monotony; or the adze of a sleepwalking Sumerian nicking the wet of the clay,  hacking a wedge in a tablet  in the blood and the mica, till all glistens with language. The criminal folds up his claspknife. The shutters  slam down on the streets. Nobody listens.  4. Out of breath with the climb, and  tasting a hashish of blood, what did he see on the brink of the Piazza di Spagna? A hand  in the frame of a cithara  where beggars and sunbathers clotted the levels like musical  signatures, a Wordsworthian  dream of “degree,” “unimaginable time” touched by an axe  blade—or a pram  on the Steps of Odessa torn from the hands of its mother, gathering speed for the  plunge and rocking its tires in the rifling, like a gun barrel,  smashing its way through the Tzar’s  executioners, to a scream at the bottom?  5.A failed solitude ... The bees  in the Protestant grass speak of it delicately in the sweat of a Palatine summer, guiding my hand  through the Braille of the letters. Violet, bluet, or squill— what was it I picked  under the epitaph, what rose to my touch in the thirst of the marble, a cup  from the well of your grave in the noonday miasma, a hieroglyph in the water, saying: solitude, solitude, solitude: you have it at last—your  solitude writing on water,  alone with its failure.  6. You are there on the underside of the page,  a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it.  The paper pulls under my pen  peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon.  The emptiness hardens  with balustrades, risers, and levels, a staircase of Roman azaleas. I slip on the blood and the ink  toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What  must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending,  descending among lovers and trippers.  You are pressing me hard under the paper. At Santa Trinità dei Monti  the stairway parts like an  estuary, rises and falls like a fountain. There is nothing to see but a death-mask, your  room in an island of risers and treads, oddly  gregarious, an invisible hand in the granite.  7. The tidal salts drain on a living horizon,  leaving a glare on the blemishing paper. The silence is mortal.  Nobody answers.for Joan Hutton Landis
The orange-peelers of Mérida, in the wrought- iron midday, come with mechanical skewers and live oranges, to straddle the paths on caissons of bicycle wheels and work in the dark of the plaza, like jewelers’ cloths. The orange is ceremonious. Its sleep is Egyptian. Its golden umbilicus waits in pyramidal light, swath over swath, outwitting  the Caesars. It cannot be ravaged by knives, but clasps its mortality in, like the skein of an asp. The bandstand glitters like bone, in laurel and spittle. Behind their triangular catafalques, the orange-peelers move through the thirst  of the world with Rameses’ bounty caulked into the hive of the peel while ratchets and wheels spin a blazing  cosmology on their little machines. Under  skewers and handles, the orange’s skin is pierced, the orange, in chain-mail and papyrus, unwinds the graveclothes of Pharaoh in a helix of ribbon, unflawed, from the navel’s knot to the rind and the pulp underneath, like a butterfly’s  chrysalis. And sleeper by sleeper, the living turn with their thirst  to each other, the orange’s pith is broken in a blind effervescence that perfumes the palate and burns to the tooth’s bite.  And the dead reawaken.
It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.
I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know the deceased, to press the moist hands of the living, to look in their eyes and offer sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, what anyone will remember is that we came. I learned to believe I had the power to ease awful pains materially like an angel. Like a doctor, I learned to create from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
Her pencil poised, she's ready to create, Then listens to her mind's perverse debate On whether what she does serves any use; And that is all she needs for an excuse To spend all afternoon and half the night Enjoying poems other people write.
Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize go upright among those who are on their knees among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust you were saved not in order to live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous in the final account only this is important and let your helpless Anger be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten let your sister Scorn not leave you for the informers executioners cowards—they will win they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography and do not forgive truly it is not in your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn beware however of unnecessary pride keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring the bird with an unknown name the winter oak light on a wall the splendour of the sky they don’t need your warm breath they are there to say: no one will console you be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words repeat them stubbornly like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand and they will reward you with what they have at hand with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes Be faithful Go
(White River Junction, Vermont) Bringing “only what is needed—essential toilet articles” in a paper bag, dressed as for dying, one sees the dying plainly. These are the homecomings of Agamemnon, the odysseys to the underside of the web that weaves and unweaves while the suitors gorge upon plenty and the languishing sons at home unwish their warring fathers with strong electric fingers. The fathers are failing. In the Hospital Exchange, one sees the dying plainly: color televisions, beach towels, automatic razors— the hardware of the affluent society marked down to cost, to match the negative afflatus of the ailing, the bandages and badges of their status. Under the sandbags, rubber hoses, pipettes, bed-clamps, tax-exempt, amenable as rabbits, the unenlisted men are bleeding through their noses in a perimeter of ramps and apparatus. In that prosthetic world, the Solarium lights up a junk-pile of used parts: the hip that caught a ricochet of shrapnel; tattoos in curing meats; scars like fizzled fuses; canceled postage stamps; automated claws in candy; the Laser’s edge; and barium. The nurses pass like mowers, dressing and undressing in the razor-sharp incisions and the flowering phosphorescence. The smell of rubbing alcohol rises on desertions and deprivals and divorces. It is incorruptible. A wheelchair aims its hospital pajamas like a gun-emplacement. The amputee is swinging in his aviary. His fingers walk the bird-bars. There is singing from the ward room—a buzzing of transistors like blueflies in a urinal. War over war, the expendables of Metz and Chateau-Thierry, the guerillas of Bien Hoa and Korea, the draftees, the Reserves, the re-enlisters, open a common wavelength. The catatonic sons are revving up their combos in the era of the angry adolescent. Their cry is electronic. Their thumbs are armed with picks. The acid-rock guitarist in metal studs and chevrons, bombed with magnesium, mourns like a country yokel, and the innocents are slaughtered. On the terrace, there are juices and bananas. The convalescent listens to his heartbeat. The chaplain and his non-combative daughter smile by the clubbed plants on the portico.“They shall overcome.”
...at the still point, there the dance is. —T. S. Eliot The errand into the maze, Emblem, the heel’s blow upon space, Speak of the need and order the dancer’s will. But the dance is still. For a surmise of rest, over the flight of the dial, Between shock of the fall, shock of repose, The flesh in its time delivered itself to the trial, And rose. Suffrance: the lapse, the pause, Were the will of the dance— The movement-to-be, charmed from the shifts of the chance, Intent on its cause. And the terrible gift Of the gaze, blind on its zenith, the wreath Of the throat, the body’s unwearied uplift, Unmaking and making its death, Were ripeness, and theme for return: Were rest, in the durance of matter: The sleep of the musing Begetter And the poise in the urn.
Rise, cleanly trust, divided star, And spend that delicate fraud upon the night— A lover’s instance moving mindful air To make its peace in dedicated light Whose look is charnel. Lusters, intent and blind, Give darkness downward with a glow like sheaves— A gleaner’s pittance withered in the bind That keeps the summer godhead of the leaves And bends tremendous evening under it, Doubles its theft within a lonely course Till eye and eye repeat the counterfeit And shape the replenishing mercy at its source. All else were ravage: a demon-gaze of terror: The emblem blackened in the living head, The eye, the image, and the image-bearer Struck to an awe with smiling on the dead. Therefore that bounty which, however false, Tenders survival, and is purely given, And lends the viewless prisms at its pulse To make an easy legendry in heaven.Restore that grace! Indeed, the look is grace That deals this desert providence in air And lifts a deathshead, burning, into place To serve a lover’s faith.Rise, carrion star.
They splay at a bend of the road, rifles slung, the shadows minimal, their hands tugging their slings by the upper swivel to ease the routine of the march. They have been moving since morning, and over each has descended that singleness, mournful and comatose, which is the mysterious gift of the march. Their helmets shadow their eyes, their chinstraps dangling. In the raddle of grasses their solitude floats in a drift of identities, a common melancholy. A captain enters the frame at the head of his company. His face flashes. With his left hand he tilts back his helmet, while with his right he draws the length of an elbow across forehead and nose, his stained armpits showing dark. A bracelet flashes behind him. The column recedes, rifles close over the canted belts, moving up, the packed backs vulnerable:(Cut)  Late afternoon. In the half-light a handful of blazing sticks, four infantrymen heating mess tins over an eddy of smoke, a fifth on his hams, his eyes upcast from the rim of his metal cup. Nearby a corporal works a patch into the chamber of his rifle; he repeats four syllables and smiles sleepily into the camera. The camera moves to the bivouac area; a group, their meat-cans close to their mouths, spooning the compost, Chinese-fashion, and clowning between mouthfuls. Very close. Their jaws, lightly bearded, the necks in their jacket collars strained in an easy horseplay, the Adam’s apples rapidly raised and released in the human exertion of eating. In deep shadow, the light failing, very close. A private tugs at his boot by the toe and the round of the heel. Deliberately, he draws the boot clear of his foot, sets it aside with deep satisfaction, massages his instep over a maternal thickness of socks. He bends toward the other foot, camera-shy, a half smile breaking;(Cut)  It is not yet possible to distinguish the forms behind the camouflage netting. They move in the central darkness of the gun, stacking shells and bringing up powder charges. Only the bulk of the howitzer is sure, the gun-barrel crossing the line of the valley under the tented netting. A village is burning in the valley. In the watery light, smoke deepens over three hearthbeds of brightness. A spire. A siding. A ladder of rooftops. The gun fires. The picture trembles.(Cut)  An iron darkening. The hip of a tank darkens a frame, foreshortened, the treads close to the lens, a rushing of hammers, rings. The lens is cleared. A cobbled street. A row of country-houses, walled. A rosebush in the heavy light, blown forward. Dust falls in the afterdraft, a grain at a time. The camera is watchful. A rifleman moves up the frame, his rifle at low port, his shadow buffing the cobbles, crouched. He pauses under the rosebush, his rifle hiked. A second figure breaks through the frame, freezing between the foreground and the far doorway. The man under the rosetree sights carefully. The second man listens. He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings the butt down heavily on the door-panels. The rifle rebounds. He measures a second blow, his teeth bared slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large. The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock, the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters all at once. The man kicks the door open easily with a booted foot. He listens, bent toward his rifle-sights. He signals to the second man and enters the doorway, stooped like a man entering a cave—(Cut)  Brightness through trees. A damascene. At the edge of a clearing, a parked jeep. Two medical corpsmen lash litters to the jeep engine a few hundred yards behind front lines. The litter-poles enter the lens over the arch of the engine. On the litter, a swathed head, a shock of broken hair, motionless, a fall of blankets. The stretcher-bearers vault lightly to their seats and move off at a crawl. Roadmarker: Battalion Aid Station. A corner of charred wall, rubble, glass, timber. Legend: Épicerie. The stretcher-bearers dismount. The film is bad. Presently a gloved hand in a surgeon’s sheath, holding a forceps. Briskly the hand moves over a circlet of maimed flesh noosed in a bloody bandage. A scalpel flashes between the living hand and the human hurt, forcing the rind of the wound, filling the frame. The camera submits, framing the wound like a surgeon’s retractor, its gaze nerveless and saline. The gauzes blacken swiftly, too heavy for the jaws of the forceps.... The surgeon at full figure. A breeze finds the fold of his tunic. In the distance the litter-bearers are leaning for the litter-poles. His eyes hold the optical center of the lens, unanswered. His mouth rejects contemplation, not yet relaxed. His hands are void in their glimmering cicatrix of rubber.
for Jean Brockway When the walkers-on-water went under, the bog-walkers came out of the barberry thickets, booted in gum to their hips, in a corona of midges, their ears electric with sound, beating the stale of the swamp with their whips and flailing the ground for the itch under the frond, the fern’s demonology, the mosquito’s decibel. Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch of its leaves in the lichens and venoms, a dazzle was seen in the fog as a vegetal world gave way to a uterine, pitch pulled at their heels and blackened their knuckles, the bog-laurel’s fan opened its uttermost decimal and showed them the Bog. Paradisal, beyond purpose or menace, dewed like the flesh of an apple with the damp of creation, the disk of the pond glowed under the dragonfly’s bosses, where a faulting of glaciers had left it—vaults of bog-rosemary, buckbean and Labrador tea, a dapple of leavening mosses soaking in ice-water, peat-wicks feeding their gas to the cranberry braziers. They entered the bonfire together. The moss took their weight like a trampoline: they walked on the sponge and bitumen without leaving a footprint. In between, in the vats of mat-roses where the waterline closed like a skin, the ambiguous world of imbalance, non-being, the pre-human and tentative, was one with the ludicrous. The quaking began—under their bootsoles at first, like a whale under ambergris, then cramming their wrists with a drummer’s vibrations, knocking their ribs and their knees as all sagged and rebounded. They lurched on the wet as though tracing a profile of breakers or displacing the cords and the voids of a net, and staggered back into their childhoods, till their feet touched the granite again. The bog tossed them over the threshold that opened a path in the spruce toward the opposite edges. The leaves closed behind them. They walked an unyielding and tangible world like strangers, remembering only the hovering glare where the pitcher-plant’s hammer closed on the fly—the light shaking and shaking— as a pulse touched their feet from below, and passed over.
There is little I can do besides stoop to pluck them one by one from the ground, their roots all weak links, this hoard of Lazaruses popping up at night, not the Heavenly Blue so like silk handkerchiefs, nor the Giant White so timid in the face of the moon, but poor relations who visit then stay. They sleep in my garden. Each morning I evict them. Each night more arrive, their leaves small, green shrouds, reminding me the mother root waits deep underground and I dig but will never find her and her children will inherit all that I’ve cleared when she holds me tighter and tighter in her arms.
Class is over, the teacher and the pianist gone, but one dancer in a pale blue leotard stays to practice alone without music, turning grand jetes through the haze of late afternoon. Her eyes are focused on the balancing point no one else sees as she spins in this quiet made of mirrors and light— a blue rose on a nail— then stops and lifts her arms in an oval pause and leans out a little more, a little more, there, in slow motion upon the air.
(1942) To Denis Devlin I Again the native hour lets down the locks  Uncombed and black, but gray the bobbing beard;  Ten years ago His eyes, fierce shuttlecocks,  Pierced the close net of what I failed: I feared  The belly-cold, the grave-clout, that betrayed  Me dithering in the drift of cordial seas; Ten years are time enough to be dismayed By mummy Christ, head crammed between his knees.  Suppose I take an arrogant bomber, stroke  By stroke, up to the frazzled sun to hear  Sun-ghostlings whisper: Yes, the capital yoke— Remove it and there’s not a ghost to fear  This crucial day, whose decapitate joke  Languidly winds into the inner ear.II The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go,  Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;  Get up and once again politely lying Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.  How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang  And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang  Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago! Then hang this picture for a calendar, As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly  For the cold martial progress of your star,  With thoughts of commerce and society,  Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,  The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.III Give me this day a faith not personal As follows: The American people fully armed  With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,  Battle the world of which they’re not at all.  That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,  His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:  “You may be President”), was not alarmed  Nor even left uneasy by his fall. Nobody said that he could be a plumber,  Carpenter, clerk, bus-driver, bombardier;  Let little boys go into violent slumber,  Aegean squall and squalor where their fear  Is of an enemy in remote oceans Unstalked by Christ: these are the better notions.IV Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend,  Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave.  Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave  Gives back the cheated and light dividend So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend  Flesh for reality inside a stone Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone,  Dead or still living, will not break or bend. Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister  And put off like a dog that’s had his day,  You will be Plato’s kept philosopher, Albino man bleached from the mortal clay,  Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease  While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.
Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,  The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers, The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway. What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch  Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf  Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.  And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees  Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy  To the backs of obsessions.  Winter like spring no less  Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently  The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence. In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus  Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle  The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.  Antiquity breached mortality with myths. Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary  Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now  (The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth “Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares  The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores  His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other Person; every son-of-a-bitch is Christ, at least Rousseau; Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene; Sunlight topples indignant from the hill. In every railroad station everywhere every lover  Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke  Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body  Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,  His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth  Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders  Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. More sanitation is enough, enough remains: dreams  Do not end—lucidities beyond the stint of thought.  For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain; A corpse is your bedfellow, your great-grandfather dines With you this evening on a cavalry horse. Intellect  Connives with heredity, creates fate as Euclid geometry By definition:    The sunlit bones in your house   Are immortal in the titmouse,   They trip the feet of grandma   Like an afterthought each day.   These unseen sunlit bones,  They may be in the cat  That startles them in grandma   But look at this or that  They meet you every way. For Pelops’ and Tantalus’ successions were at once simpler, If perplexed, and less subtle than you think. Heredity Proposes love, love exacts language, and we lack  Language. When shall we speak again? When shall  The sparrow dusting the gutter sing? When shall  This drift with silence meet the sun? When shall I wake?
Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning, that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before its dark green turns into red, that waits like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia. While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn and okra that she grows in her backyard garden. Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost as the windless silence, persists like the steady random click of a redbird cracking a few more seeds before the sun gets too low. She does not hurry, she does not linger. Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely. But I know what sufficiency she may possess. I know what can be gathered from year to year, gathered from what is near to hand, as I do elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road, gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining in rows of claret red, made at times with help, a friend or a lover, but consumed long after, long after they are gone and I sit alone at the kitchen table. And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods, I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day. My family, my children live in other states, the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds, when I get up and come in to fix supper, in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them. In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves, the woman next door and I. Still, we persist. I open the drawer to get out the silverware. She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer. I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water. She stays until the day grows so bright that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied. She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight, grey and slate blue against a paler sky. I know she will come back. I see the light create a russet curve of land on the farther bank, where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe under the first blackbirds. I know she will come back. I see the light curve in the fall and rise of her wing.
A huge sound waits, bound in the ice, in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow on fir branches, in the falling silence of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering wings at midday. With the sun comes noise. Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter, splinter, speak. If I could write the words. Simple, like turning a page, to say Write what happened
1 Imagine a big room of women doing anything, playing cards, having a meeting, the rattle of paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back, the loud and quiet murmur of their voices, women leaning their heads together. If we leaned in at the door and I said, Those women are mothers,
At first she thought the lump in the road was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel. Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers: Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn, creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land. Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock. Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water, saying: We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight! Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice or limp or mended boots but said nothing, allowed the marchers to pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other lives down ravines, to save their skins another night from the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood, who wait by the grave for the body’s return to the earth. Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums. Watched a man’s face flicker in the purple-black leaves. Then they burned the tree. Smoke from their fires still lay over the land where Beatrice traveled. Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her, voices from the place where some voices never stop:They took my boy down by Sucarnochee Creek. He said, “Gentlemen, what have I done?” They says, “Never mind what you have done. We just want your damned heart.” After they killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out by him all night until the neighbors came in the morning. I was standing there when they killed him, down by Sucarnochee Creek.
On Magnolia Avenue there are no magnolias. Someone bought the house of the one survivor. All morning I heard the chainsaw sever its limbs from root to bud. No more scattered flowers, star city. No pink galaxy. Now the yard is a parking space, one Jeep SUV, one older car. Next door a woman comes out, late afternoon, a child in her arms. She speaks low, as if there’s just the two of them. She says to him, Listen to the little birdies, and he listens to the common sparrows talking in the hedge. He listens as they argue back and forth, their dialect of nature, as the street clatters with commuters taking a shortcut home. She says: Listen. And he turns his head to follow the fugitive motion, the small streaked wings unfolding, folding, the relentless chirp from a tiny blunt beak, the sound almost within reach.
The woman across from me looks so familiar, but when I turn, her look glances off. At the last subway stop we rise. I know her, she gives manicures at Vogue Nails. She has held my hands between hers several times. She bows and smiles. There the women wear white smocks like technicians, and plastic tags with their Christian names. Susan. No, not Susan, whose hair is cropped short, who is short and stocky. This older lady does my hands while classical music, often Mozart, plays. People passing by outside are doubled in the wall mirror. Two of everyone walk forward, backward, vanish at the edge of the shop. Susan does pedicures, pumice on my heels as I sit on the stainless-steel throne. She bends over, she kneads my feet in the water like laundry. She pounds my calves with her fists and her cupped palms slap a working beat, p’ansori style. She talks to the others without turning her head, a call in a language shouted hoarse across fields where a swallow flew and flew across the ocean, and then fetched back to Korea a magic gourd seed, back to the farmer’s empty house where the seed flew from its beak to sprout a green vine. When the farmer’s wife cut open the ripe fruit, out spilled seeds of gold. Choi Don Mee writes that some girls in that country crush petals on their nails, at each tip red flowers unfold. Yi Yon-ju writes that some women there, as here, dream of blades, knives, a bowl of blood.
That year there were many deaths in the village. Germs flew like angels from one house to the next and every family gave up its own. Mothers died at their mending. Children fell at school. Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left. Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one died. And the angels whispered among themselves. And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps, your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck when all the trees were still. And he would tell us always, how he had felt that night, on the skin of his own neck, the angels, passing.
We drove through the gates into a maze of little roads, with speed bumps now, that circled a pavilion, field house, and ran past the playing fields and wound their way up to the cluster of wood and stone buildings of the school you went to once. The green was returning to the trees and lawn, the lake was still half-lidded with ice and blind in the middle. There was nobody around except a few cars in front of the administration. It must have been spring break. We left without ever getting out of the car. You were quiet that night, the next day, the way after heavy rain that the earth cannot absorb, the water lies in pools in unexpected places for days until it disappears.
Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress, with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone. One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk. Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy, watching it happen without it happening to me.
My father scolded us all for refusing his liquor. He kept buying tequila, and steak for the grill, until finally we joined him, making margaritas, cutting the fat off the bone. When he saw how we drank, my sister shredding the black labels into her glass while his remaining grandchildren dragged their thin bunk bed mattresses first out to the lawn to play then farther up the field to sleep next to her, I think it was then he changed, something in him died. He's gentler now, quiet, losing weight though every night he eats the same ice cream he always ate only now he's not drinking, he doesn't fall asleep with the spoon in his hand, he waits for my mother to come lie down with him.
They sit together on the porch, the dark Almost fallen, the house behind them dark. Their supper done with, they have washed and dried The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses, Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak, And when they speak at last it is to say What each one knows the other knows. They have One mind between them, now, that finally For all its knowing will not exactly know Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
Your mother called it "doing the pressing," and you know now how right she was. There is something urgent here. Not even the hiss under each button or the yellow business ground in at the neck can make one instant of this work seem unimportant. You've been taught to turn the pocket corners and pick out the dark lint that collects there. You're tempted to leave it, but the old lessons go deeper than habits. Everyone else is asleep. The odor of sweat rises when you do under the armpits, the owner's particular smell you can never quite wash out. You'll stay up. You'll have your way, the final stroke and sharpness down the long sleeves, a truly permanent edge.
This dog standing in the middle of the street, tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit, its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws, might have been forgiven or simply taken away and shot under different circumstances and no one would have said much, except his owner who’d gone out into the yard at the start of the commotion, having been involved at other times with the dog’s truancies, and yelled, “Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!” but unavailing, and everyone understanding that once more Bosco had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature. But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man Who’d raised the rabbit shouldn’t husband something so rare and beautiful he couldn’t keep it from the likes of Bosco.
A few of us—Hillary Clinton, Vlad Dracula,  Oprah Winfrey, and Trotsky—peer through  the kitchen window at a raccoon perched  outside on a picnic table where it picks over chips, veggies, olives, and a chunk of pâte.  Behind us others crowd the hallway, many more dance in the living room. Trotsky fusses with the bloody  screwdriver puttied to her forehead. Hillary Clinton, whose voice is the rumble of a bowling ball, whose hands are hairy to the third knuckle, lifts his rubber chin to announce,  “What a perfect mask it has!” While the Count whistling through his plastic fangs says, “Oh,  and a nose like a chef.” Then one by one  the other masks join in: “Tail of a gambler,”  “a swashbuckler’s hips,” “feet of a cat burglar.” Trotsky scratches herself beneath her skirt and Hillary, whose lederhosen are so tight they form a codpiece,  wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog.  Dracula and Oprah, the married hosts, hold hands and then let go. Meanwhile the raccoon squats on  the gherkins, extracts pimentos from olives, and sniffs  abandoned cups of beer. A ghoul in the living room  turns the music up and the house becomes a drum. The windows buzz. “Who do you love? Who do you love?”  the singer sings. Our feathered arms, our stockinged legs.  The intricate paws, the filleting tongue. We love what we are; we love what we’ve become.
When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and then a wind stirred in the room as if she’d placed those words in his mouth.
The shape of it bending like an eel or disfigured quarter moon, pink and green and brown, like a rainbow trout. The wall along my bed covered with the map I cut from the newspaper, and next to it the fishing calendar from Abonauder’s Texaco. The square cages of days with their numerals and effigies of moon and fish shaded to indicate the shape of the moon, the hunger of the fish. The white bread stripped of its crust, dampened, then dusted with flour, compressed into a tight ball, wrapped in foil and chilled all night. A piece of it pressed and shaped on the tip of an Eagle Claw hook, then lowered into the nesting holes of blue gill. The plastic bobber floating on the surface like a silent doorbell. A whole world of cause and effect, framed day-by-day and week-by-week. The passage of time as a kind of game in which I transferred numbers from the newspaper to the calendar. The body counts and their categories of NVRA, Marines, Montagnards. And each morning I put a bold X through the previous day not to erase or forget it but to connect the corners, make four triangles of the square. And it was rare if not impossible to catch the blue gill that swam and swam around the tidy pebble craters of their nests, or coax them out except in hostile swerves and feints toward the bait that hung like a balloon of gravity over their homes, a suspicious egg pouch or cocoon, something a storm might have dislodged from the bank and blown like a feared gift into the water, a thing swallowed whole then run with until the line played out and the hook set fast.
When I think of the man who lived in the house behind ours and how he killed his wife and then went into his own back yard, a few short feet from my bedroom window, and put the blue-black barrel of his 30.06 inside his mouth and pulled the trigger, I do not think about how much of the barrel he had to swallow before his fingers reached the trigger, nor the bullet that passed out the back of his neck, nor the wild orbit of blood that followed his crazy dance before he collapsed in a clatter over the trash cans, which woke me. Instead I think of how quickly his neighbors restored his humanity, remembering his passion for stars which brought him into his yard on clear nights, with a telescope and tripod, or the way he stood in the alley in his rubber boots and emptied the red slurry from his rock tumblers before he washed the glassy chunks of agate and petrified wood. And we remembered, too, the goose-neck lamp on the kitchen table that burned after dinner and how he worked in its bright circle to fashion flies and lures. The hook held firmly in a jeweler’s vise, while he wound the nylon thread around the haft and feathers. And bending closer to the light, he concentrated on tying the knots, pulling them tight against the coiled threads. And bending closer still, turning his head slightly toward the window, his eyes lost in the dark yard, he took the thread ends in his teeth and chewed them free. Perhaps he saw us standing on the sidewalk watching him, perhaps he didn’t. He was a man so much involved with what he did, and what he did was so much of his loneliness, our presence didn’t matter. No one’s did. So careful and precise were all his passions, he must have felt the hook with its tiny barbs against his lip, sharp and trigger-shaped. It must have been a common danger for him— the wet clear membrane of his mouth threatened by the flies and lures, the beautiful enticements he made with his own hands and the small loose thread ends which clung to the roof of his mouth and which he tried to spit out like an annoyance that would choke him.
When the fire bell rang its two short, one long  electric signal, the boys closest to the wall  of windows had to raise the blinds and close  the sashes, and then join the last of our line  as it snaked out the classroom onto the field  of asphalt where we stood, grade-by-grade, until the principal appeared with her gold Timex. We learned early that catastrophe must always  be attended in silence, that death prefers us  orderly and ordered, and that rules will save us  from the chaos of our fear, so that even  if we die, we die together, which was the calm  almost consoling thought I had each time the yellow C.D. siren wailed and we would tuck  ourselves beneath our sturdy desktops. Eyes averted from the windows, we’d wait for the drill to pass or until the nun’s rosary no longer clicked and we could hear  her struggling to free herself from the leg-well  of her desk, and then her call for us to rise  and, like herself, brush off the dust gathered  on our clothes. And then the lessons resumed.  No thought of how easily we interred ourselves, though at home each would dream the mushroom cloud,  the white cap of apocalypse whose funnel stem  sucked glass from windows, air from lungs,  and made all these rehearsals the sad and hollow  gestures that they were, for we knew it in our bones  that we would die, curled in a last defense— head on knees, arms locked around legs— the way I’ve seen it since in nursing homes and hospices: forms bedsheets can’t hide,  as if in death the body takes on the soul’s  compact shape, acrobatic, posed to tumble free  of the desktop or bed and join the expanse  and wide scatter of debris.
Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce, the name and drawing of a detective with magnifying glass on the sides of the crates of lettuce, form a great cross in man’s imagination and his desire to name  the objects of this world. I think I’ll call this place Golgotha and have some salad for dinner.
This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown. By accident, you put Your money in my Machine (#4) By accident, I put My money in another Machine (#6) On purpose, I put Your clothes in the Empty machine full Of water and no  Clothes It was lonely.
I don’t care how God-damn smart these guys are: I’m bored. It’s been raining like hell all day long and there’s nothing to do.
Driving through  hot brushy country in the late autumn,  I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence. I guess as a kind  of advertisement  to other hawks,  saying from the pages of a leading women’s   magazine, “She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps  to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”
At 1:03 in the morning a fart smells like a marriage between an avocado and a fish head. I have to get out of bed to write this down without  my glasses on.
It’s a star that looks like a poker game above  the mountains of eastern   Oregon. There are three men playing.  They are all sheepherders.  One of them has two pair,  the others have nothing.
A girl in a green mini- skirt, not very pretty, walks  down the street. A businessman stops, turns to stare at her ass that looks like a moldy  refrigerator. There are now 200,000,000 people  in America.
When you take your pill it’s like a mine disaster. I think of all the people  lost inside of you.
The love we’ve defined for ourselves in privacy, in suffering, keeps both of us lonely as a fist, but does intimacy mean a happy ending? I’m afraid of marriage. Driving past them at night, the shadows on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives: a father stuck in a job, his daughter opening her blouse to strangers. And your hands, for example, like a warm liquid on my face don’t evaporate as you take them away. Nor are our betrayals silent, although we listen only in passing. We’re learning how to walk unlit streets, to see threats instead of trees, the right answer to a teenager opening his knife. The answer is yes. Always we couldn’t do otherwise.
The ward beds float like ghost ships in the darkness, the nightlight above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse with a little man inside who wears a sailor cap and tells good old stories of the sea. The little man is me. Perhaps I have a dog called Old Salt who laps my hand and runs endlessly down the circular stairs. Perhaps he bites like sin. I dream of ships smashing the reefs, their bottoms gutting out, the crews’ disembodied voices screaming Help us help us help somebody please and there is no one there at all not even me. I wake up nervous, Old Salt gnawing my flesh. I wake up nervous, canvas bedstraps cutting my groin. The night nurse, making the rounds, says I bellow in sleep like a foghorn. * Nothing moves at night except small animals kept caged downstairs for experiments, going bullshit, and the Creole janitor’s broom whisking closer by inches. In the ward, we all have room for errors and elbows to flail at excitement. We’re right above the morgue; the iceboxes make our floor cold. The animals seem to know when someone, bored with holding on, gives out: they beat their heads and teeth against the chicken wire doors, scream and claw The janitor also knows. He props his heavy broom against his belt, makes a sign over himself learned from a Cajun, leaves us shaking in our bedstraps to drag the still warm and nervous body down from Isolation. * I have a garden in my brain shaped like a maze I lose myself in, it seems. They only look for me sometimes. I don’t like my dreams. The nurses quarrel over where I am hiding. I hear from inside a bush. One is crisp and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push them each somewhere. They both think it’s funny here. The laughter sounds like diesels. I won’t come out because I’m lazy. You start to like the needles. You start to want to crazy.
At four o’clock it’s dark. Today, looking out through dusk at three gray women in stretch slacks chatting in front of the post office, their steps left and right and back like some quick folk dance of kindness, I remembered the winter we spent crying in each other’s laps. What could you be thinking at this moment? How lovely and strange the gangly spines of trees against a thickening sky as you drive from the library humming off-key? Or are you smiling at an idea met in a book the way you smiled with your whole body the first night we talked? I was so sure my love of you was perfect, and the light today reminded me of the winter you drove home each day in the dark at four o’clock and would come into my study to kiss me despite mistake after mistake after mistake.
In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out to settle tight the wet concrete that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks; and, across the ditch, my high school football coach, Don Compo, spunky pug of a man, bronze and bald, all biceps and pecs, raging at some “attitude” of mine he snipped from our argument about Vietnam— I mean raging, scarlet, veins bulging from his neck, he looked like a hard-on stalking back and forth— but I had started college, this was a summer job, I no longer had to take his self-righteous, hectoring shit, so I was chuckling merrily, saying he was ludicrous, and he was calling me “College Man Ryan” and, with his steel-toed workboot, kicking dirt that clattered against the molds and puffed up between us. It’s probably not like this anymore, but every coach in my hometown was a lunatic. Each had different quirks we mimicked, beloved bromides whose parodies we intoned, but they all conducted practice like boot camp, the same tirades and abuse, no matter the sport, the next game the next battle in a neverending war. Ex-paratroopers and -frogmen, at least three finally convicted child molesters, genuine sadists fixated on the Commie menace and our American softness that was personally bringing the country to the brink of collapse— in this company, Don Compo didn’t even seem crazy. He had never touched any of us; his violence was verbal, which we were used to, having gotten it from our fathers and given it back to our brothers and one another since we had been old enough to button our own pants. Any minute—no guessing what might trigger it— he could be butting your face mask and barking up your nostrils, but generally he favored an unruffled, moralistic carping, in which I, happy to spot phoniness, saw pride and bitterness masquerading as teaching. In the locker room, I’d sit where I could roll my eyeballs as he droned, but, across the ditch, he wasn’t lecturing, but fuming, flaring as I had never seen in four years of football, and it scared and thrilled me to defy him and mock him when he couldn’t make me handwash jockstraps after practice or do pushups on my fingertips in a mud puddle. But it was myself I was taunting. I could see my retorts snowballing toward his threat to leap the ditch and beat me to a puddle of piss (“you craphead, you wiseass”), and my unspading a shovel from a dirt pile and grasping its balance deliberately down the handle and inviting him to try it. Had he come I would have hit him, There’s no question about that. For a moment, it ripped through our bewilderment, which then closed over again like the ocean if an immense cast-iron mold were dropped in. I was fired when the boss broke the tableau. “The rest of you,” he said, “have work to do,” and, grabbing a hammer and chisel, Don Compo mounted the mold between us in the ditch and with one short punch split it down the seam.
Most of the past is lost, and I’m glad mine has vanished into blackness or space or whatever nowhere what we feel and do goes, but there were a few cool Sunday afternoons when my father wasn’t sick with hangover and the air in the house wasn’t foul with anger and the best china had been cleared after the week’s best meal  so he could place on the table his violins to polish with their special cloth and oil. Three violins he’d arrange side by side in their velvet-lined cases with enough room between for the lids to lie open.  They looked like children in coffins, three infant sisters whose hearts had stopped for no reason,  but after he rubbed up their scrolls and waists along the lines of the grain to the highest sheen, they took on the knowing postures of women in silk gowns  in magazine ads for new cars and ocean voyages, and, as if a violin were a car in storage that needed a spin around the block every so often,  for fifteen minutes he’d play each one— though not until each horsehair bow was precisely tightened,  and coated with rosin, and we had undergone an eon of tuning.  When he played, no one was allowed to speak to him.  He seemed to see something drastic across the room  or feel it through his handkerchief padding the chin board.  So we’d hop in front of him waving or making pig noses  the way kids do to guards at Buckingham Palace, and after he had finished playing and had returned to himself,  he’d softly curse the idiocy of his children beneath my mother’s voice yelling to him from the kitchenThat was beautiful, Paul, play it again.  He never did, and I always hoped he wouldn’t, because the whole time I was waiting for his switchblade  to appear, and the new stories he’d tell me for the scar thin as a seam up the white underside of his forearm, for the chunks of proud flesh on his back and belly, scarlet souvenirs of East St. Louis dance halls in the Twenties,  cornered in men’s rooms, ganged in blind alleys,  always slashing out alone with this knife. First the violins had to be snug again inside their black cases for who knew how many more months or years or lifetimes;  then he had to pretend to have forgotten why I was sitting there wide-eyed across from him long after my sister and brother had gone off with friends.  Every time, as if only an afterthought, He’d sneak into his pocket and ease the switchblade  onto the bare table between us, its thumb-button jutting from the pearl-and-silver plating  like the eye of some sleek prehistoric fish. I must have known it wouldn’t come to life  and slither toward me by itself, but when he’d finally nod to me to take it its touch was still warm with his body heat  and I could feel the blade inside aching to flash open with the terrible click that sounds now like just a tsk of disappointment,  it has become so sweet and quiet.
On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California,  having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot to “go with a guy” in a green truck, and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius, and her father and grandfather searched and spoke to reporters because TV coverage might help them find her if she were still alive, and her mother stayed home with the telephone, not appearing in public, and I could imagine this family deciding together this division of labor and what little else they could do to do something, and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in, who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another  with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks, but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt, tied up, chopped up, God knows what else, or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her or their own terror of her absence ever after, cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence,  her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars  until they can bear to take them down because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore— on this day, which happened to be Christmas, at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham  and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making  to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving, in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting  and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments, the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room  while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him  after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his resumé as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen;  and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner, while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad  brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas,  a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s,  his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases,  who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself  after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son,  then, to my amazement, began telling me how important  he is in his business world just like the man I had just gotten away from,  that he’s still a player in international steel involved in top-drawer projects for the navy,  and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too (who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again), but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through  because my own fear and hunger cloud how I imagine everyone, including the bereaved family of the missing girl,  and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer,  although I know what it is to hate yourself completely  and believe all human community is lies and bullshit  and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.
They slept and ate like us. Feral they were not. The intricacy of their handiwork bespoke a fineness we’d be taught. Yet we wiped them out. It was eerily easy to do, although they knew we were coming and knew we knew they knew. Not only did they not resist our guns like bloody hacking coughs in their libraries and hospitals, their bedrooms and their schools— they would not acknowledge us. We felt like fools. There was no keening. Even the children did not cry. It was as if meaning inhered so deeply in their daily lives we could not touch it; nor would they quit living to be slaughtered, it was so inviolate.
A man who’s trying to be a good man but isn’t, because he can’t not take whatever’s said to him as judgement. It causes him, as he puts it, to react. His face and neck redden and bloat, a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children but provoking hilarity at work where one guy likes to get his goat by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers on his computer screen while he’s in the john, then gathers a group into the next cubicle to watch when he comes back. He has talked to his minister and to his wife about learning how not to react, to make a joke, and he has tried to make jokes, but his voice gets tense, they come out flat, so even his joke becomes a joke at his expense, another thing to laugh at him about. He has thought to turn to them and ask,Why don’t you like me? What have I done to you?  But he has been told already all his life: self-righteous goody two-shoes, a stick up your ass. They are right. He has never never never gotten along. He says nothing this time, just peels off the bumper sticker, crumples it gently, places it gently by his mousepad to dispose of later properly, comparing his suffering to Christ’s in Gethsemane spat upon and mocked (his minister’s advice), and tries a smile that twists into a grimace, which starts the hot blood rising into his face. This is what they came for, to see Dickhead, the bulging vein, the skull stoplight red, and indeed it is remarkable how gorged it gets as if his torso had become a helium pump, so, except for him whose eyes are shut tight, they burst into laughter together exactly at the moment cruelty turns into astonishment.
There was the method of kneeling, a fine method, if you lived in a country where stones were smooth. The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,  hidden corners where knee fit rock. Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence, as if this shedding of syllables could somehow  fuse them to the sky. There were the men who had been shepherds so long  they walked like sheep. Under the olive trees, they raised their arms— Hear us! We have pain on earth! We have so much pain there is no place to store it! But the olives bobbed peacefully in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme. At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,  and were happy in spite of the pain,  because there was also happiness. Some prized the pilgrimage, wrapping themselves in new white linen  to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.  When they arrived at Mecca  they would circle the holy places,  on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return, their lean faces housing mystery. While for certain cousins and grandmothers the pilgrimage occurred daily,  lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes. These were the ones present at births, humming quietly to perspiring mothers. The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,  forgetting how easily children soil clothes. There were those who didn’t care about praying. The young ones. The ones who had been to America.  They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.  Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.  They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig, the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone. And occasionally there would be one who did none of this, the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,  who beat everyone at dominoes, insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,  and was famous for his laugh.
for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat’s new skin. When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother’s days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send—our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband’s coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name. “Answer, if you hear the words under the words— otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.  Notes friends tied to the doorknob,  transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable,  lists of vegetables, partial poems.  Orange swirling flame of days,  so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,  an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.  I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,  only the things I didn’t do  crackle after the blazing dies.
On an island the soft hue of memory, moss green, kerosene yellow, drifting, mingling in the Caribbean Sea, a six-year-old named Alfred learns all the words to all the songs on his grandparents’ jukebox, and sings them. To learn the words is not so hard. Many barmaids and teenagers have done as well. But to sing as Alfred sings— how can a giant whale live in the small pool of his chest? How can there be breakers this high, notes crashing at the beach of the throat, and a reef of coral so enormous only the fishes know its size? The grandparents watch. They can’t sing. They don’t know who this voice is, trapped in their grandson’s body. The boy whose parents sent him back to the island to chatter mango-talk and scrap with chickens— three years ago he didn’t know the word “sad”! Now he strings a hundred passionate sentences on a single line. He bangs his fist so they will raise the volume. What will they do together in their old age? It is hard enough keeping yourself alive. And this wild boy, loving nothing but music— he’ll sing all night, hugging the jukebox. When a record pauses, that live second before dropping down, Alfred hugs tighter, arms stretched wide, head pressed on the luminous belly. “Now!” he yells. A half-smile when the needle breathes again. They’ve tried putting him to bed, but he sings in bed. Even in Spanish—and he doesn’t speak Spanish! Sings and screams, wants to go back to the jukebox.O mama I was born with a trumpet in my throat  spent all these years tryin’ to cough it up …
Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change is train tracks. She’s sure of it. The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery by the side, but not the tracks. I’ve watched one for three years, she says, and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow. Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore. The wood was split and some of the ties were gone. Every Tuesday on Morales Street butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens. The widow in the tilted house spices her soup with cinnamon. Ask her what doesn’t change. Stars explode. The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals. The cat who knew me is buried under the bush. The train whistle still wails its ancient sound but when it goes away, shrinking back from the walls of the brain, it takes something different with it every time.
What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments? I was small, like everyone. Life was a string of precautions: Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him, don’t suck candy, pop balloons, drop watermelons, watch TV. When the new gloves appeared one Christmas, tucked in soft tissue, I heard it trailing me: Don’t lose the yellow gloves. I was small, there was too much to remember. One day, waving at a stream—the ice had cracked, winter chipping down, soon we would sail boats and roll into ditches—I let a glove go. Into the stream, sucked under the street. Since when did streets have mouths? I walked home on a desperate road. Gloves cost money. We didn’t have much. I would tell no one. I would wear the yellow glove that was left and keep the other hand in a pocket. I knew my mother’s eyes had tears they had not cried yet, I didn’t want to be the one to make them flow. It was the prayer I spoke secretly, folding socks, lining up donkeys in windowsills. To be good, a promise made to the roaches who scouted my closet at night. If you don’t get in my bed, I will be good. And they listened. I had a lot to fulfill. The months rolled down like towels out of a machine. I sang and drew and fattened the cat. Don’t scream, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fight—you could hear it anywhere. A pebble could show you how to be smooth, tell the truth. A field could show how to sleep without walls. A stream could remember how to drift and change—next June I was stirring the stream like a soup, telling my brother dinner would be ready if he’d only hurry up with the bread, when I saw it. The yellow glove draped on a twig. A muddy survivor. A quiet flag. Where had it been in the three gone months? I could wash it, fold it in my winter drawer with its sister, no one in that world would ever know. There were miracles on Harvey Street. Children walked home in yellow light. Trees were reborn and gloves traveled far, but returned. A thousand miles later, what can a yellow glove mean in a world of bankbooks and stereos? Part of the difference between floating and going down.
“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,” my father would say. And he’d prove it, cupping the buzzer instantly while the host with the swatter stared. In the spring our palms peeled like snakes. True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways. I changed these to fit the occasion. Years before, a girl knocked, wanted to see the Arab. I said we didn’t have one. After that, my father told me who he was, “Shihab”—“shooting star”— a good name, borrowed from the sky. Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?” He said that’s what a true Arab would say. Today the headlines clot in my blood. A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page. Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root is too big for us. What flag can we wave? I wave the flag of stone and seed, table mat stitched in blue. I call my father, we talk around the news. It is too much for him, neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: Who calls anyone civilized?  Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now?
Tip their mouths open to the sky. Turquoise, amber, the deep green with fluted handle, pitcher the size of two thumbs, tiny lip and graceful waist. Here we place the smallest flower which could have lived invisibly in loose soil beside the road, sprig of succulent rosemary, bowing mint. They grow deeper in the center of the table. Here we entrust the small life, thread, fragment, breath. And it bends. It waits all day. As the bread cools and the children open their gray copybooks to shape the letter that looks like a chimney rising out of a house. And what do the headlines say? Nothing of the smaller petal perfectly arranged inside the larger petal or the way tinted glass filters light. Men and boys, praying when they died, fall out of their skins. The whole alphabet of living, heads and tails of words, sentences, the way they said, “Ya’Allah!” when astonished, or “ya’ani” for “I mean”— a crushed glass under the feet still shines.  But the child of Hebron sleeps with the thud of her brothers falling and the long sorrow of the color red.
Humps of shell emerge from dark water. Believers toss hunks of bread, hoping the fat reptilian heads will loom forth from the murk and eat. Meaning: you have been heard.
Spun silk of mercy, long-limbed afternoon, sun urging purple blossoms from baked stems.  What better blessing than to move without hurry  under trees? Lugging a bucket to the rose that became a twining  house by now, roof and walls of vine— you could live inside this rose. Pouring a slow stream around the ancient pineapple crowned with spiky fruit,  I thought we would feel old by the year 2000. Walt Disney thought cars would fly. What a drama to keep thinking the last summer  the last birthday
is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,  the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming mountains of cloud in a way you cannot predict or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,  takes its own side. And it is strange. Far more complicated than a few phrases pieced together around a kitchen table on a July morning in Dallas, say, a city you don’t live in, where people might shop forever or throw a thousand stories  away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it  aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted? Stories wandering out, having their own free lives? Maybe they are planning something bad. A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember is growing into a weird body with many demands.  One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,  knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.
We made it from the ground-up corn in the old back pasture. Pinched a scent of night jasmine billowing off the fence,  popped it right in. That frog song wanting nothing but echo?  We used that. Stirred it widely. Noticed the clouds while stirring. Called upon our ancient great aunts and their long slow eyes  of summer. Dropped in their names.  Added a mint leaf now and then  to hearten the broth. Added a note of cheer and worry.  Orange butterfly between the claps of thunder?  Perfect. And once we had it, had smelled and tasted the fragrant syrup,  placing the pan on a back burner for keeping,  the sorrow lifted in small ways. We boiled down the lies in another pan till they disappeared. We washed that pan.
for Yehuda Amichai 1. Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull. I try to keep my friend from dying by remembering his childhood of praise to God, who needs us all. Würzburg: the grownups are inside saying prayers for the dead, the children are sent out to play—their laughter more sacred than prayer. After dark his father blesses and kisses him Güttenacht. He wakes to go to school with children who stayed behind and were murdered before promotion. Now his wife lies beside him. He may die with her head on his pillow. He sings in his sleep: “Her breasts are white sheep that appear on the mountain, her belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” Awake, he says, as if telling me a secret: “When metaphor and reality come together, death occurs.” His life is a light, fresh snow blowing across the bay.2. A year later in Jerusalem, he carries a fallen soldier on his back, himself. The text for the day begins: “He slew a lion in the pit in a time of snow” Seconds, minutes, hours are flesh, he tells me he is being cut to pieces— if they had not made him turn in his rifle … He sees I can not bear more of that. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of hands in sleep and we drink to life. Chilled in desert heat, what keeps him alive: soldiers—his wife, his son and daughter, perhaps the ashes of a girl he loved in childhood. Outside their window a Sun Bird and Dead Sea Sparrow fly from everlasting to everlasting. Later he covers my head with his hands, blessing me, later unable to walk alone he holds onto my hand with so much strength he comforts me.
1. Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being. Even memory is a finger to my lips. Once I entered down the center aisle at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me. “Who is this master of her ninety nipples?” the public whispered. Now the ocean is my audience, I see in secret my last secret.2. Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar I saw myself wearing it even into the deep, an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight, on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music this growing from flesh and bone into seashell: undulating salts become a purple mantle, and the almost translucent bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.
When you said that you wanted to be useful as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.” Then you said you would not trade our Mondays, useful for two thousand years, for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. I said, “Endless are the wonders to which I can only say ‘ah,’ that our ‘Ah’ who art in heaven can easily become the ‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.” Then you said, “Go make a living on metaphors for ‘ah,’” that I, a lunatic, secretly want to be the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a fifty-story-high collaboration of art and science, a mirror of light that might be seen five or ten days out to sea, Poseidon standing on my shoulders, the Library of Alexandria at my back, all the wonders of Greek Africa. I said, “Today is Monday. I want little more than to be a hand-mirror my wife carries in her purse with a hankie to stop my hemorrhaging humility.”
In Canada, on a dark afternoon, from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory I saw your two clenched fists in a tree— your most recent rage—until I came to my senses, and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected through a window onto the maple leaves. Was it simply that I had stolen away in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday, twelve years after your death, and you less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box? It is late August in the moral North. To answer your first question, I obey the fish and game laws of New York State, Ontario and Quebec. The odd branch has already turned red. As for me I have turned inside out, I cry for revolution against myself— no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray, you, less than a thumb print on a page. Matters still outstanding: you will not remember— a boy, I cut school, sneaked out to the 42nd Street library to read among readers like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride. I have kept your Greek grammar, your 78 revolutions per minute recording of Rossini’s Barber you played to stop me from crying, almost my first memory. Your “valuable papers,” now valuable only to me, I fed to a fire years ago. Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead every day, and carrying you on my back, out of the burning city, in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud. Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain where God in his divine humor tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son, and she asks laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?” Take one foot, then the other … Imitate a departure if you make it not, and each going will lend a kind of easiness to the next. Father, you poisoned my father. I am standing alone, telling the truth as you commanded. (Without too many of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.) You, less than a seed of a wild grape. Today, in the last moments of light I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water. As I sing my song of how you will be remembered, if I could out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast and stuff your ears with wax. I regret some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father, do not forget your 18 inch Board of Education ruler on which I measured my penis, marking its progress. You kept it on your desk before you till your old age. One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile I wore on my face through boyhood. I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.
You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer. Who should have mercy on a wanderer if not Jehovah? You create and I decay. Who should have mercy on the decayed if not the creator? You are the Judge and I the guilty Who should have mercy on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All and I am a particle. Who should have mercy on a particle if not the All? You are the Living One and I am dead. Who should have mercy on the dead if not the Living One? You are the Painter and Potter and I am clay. Who should have mercy on clay if not the Painter and Potter? You are the Fire and I am straw Who should have mercy on straw if not the Fire? You are the Listener and I am the reader. Who should have mercy on the reader if not the Listener? You are the Beginning and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the Beginning? You are the End and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the End?
The Visconti put you on their flag: a snake devouring a child, or are you throwing up a man feet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will. There’s good in you: a man can count years on your skin. Generously, you mother and father a stolen boy, to the chosen you offer your cake of figs. A goiter on my neck, you lick my ear with lies, yet I must listen, smile and kiss your cheek or you may swallow the child completely. In Milan there is a triptych, the throned Virgin in glory, placed on the marble below, a dead naked man and a giant dead frog of human scale on its back. There’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.
(after the Russian) The piano has crawled into the quarry. Hauled  In last night for firewood, sprawled With frozen barrels, crates and sticks, The piano is waiting for the axe. Legless, a black box, still polished;  It lies on its belly like a lizard,  Droning, heaving, hardly fashioned  For the quarry’s primordial art. Blood red: his frozen fingers cleft, Two on the right hand, five on the left, He goes down on his knees to reach the keyboard,  To strike the lizard’s chord. Seven fingers pick out rhymes and rhythm,  The frozen skin, steaming, peels off them,  As from a boiled potato. Their schemes, Their beauty, ivory and anthracite, Flicker and flash like the great Northern Lights. Everything played before is a great lie.  The reflections of flaming chandeliers— Deceit, the white columns, the grand tiers  In warm concert halls—wild lies. But the steel of the piano howls in me,  I lie in the quarry and I am deft As the lizard. I accept the gift. I’ll be a song for Russia, I’ll be an étude, warmth and bread for everybody.
Today in Rome, heading down Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps, under an unchanging moon, I held on to the balustrade, grateful for his giving me a hand. All for love, I stumbled over the past as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties, I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber, I made up Cubist Shakespearean games. (In writing, even in those days, I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects” any more than painters used sitters. But I did.) I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience: my self, embroiled with personae from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur! They were for a time my foul-weather friends— as once I played with soldiers on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket. 2002
I have not used my darkness well, nor the Baroque arm that hangs from my shoulder, nor the Baroque arm of my chair. The rain moves out in a dark schedule. Let the wind marry. I know the creation continues through love. The rain’s a wife. I cannot sleep or lie awake. Looking at the dead I turn back, fling my hat into their grandstands for relief. How goes a life? Something like the ocean building dead coral.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Dim vales—and shadowy floods— And cloudy-looking woods, Whose forms we can’t discover For the tears that drip all over: Huge moons there wax and wane— Again—again—again— Every moment of the night— Forever changing places— And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces. About twelve by the moon-dial, One more filmy than the rest (A kind which, upon trial, They have found to be the best) Comes down—still down—and down With its centre on the crown Of a mountain’s eminence, While its wide circumference In easy drapery falls Over hamlets, over halls, Wherever they may be— O’er the strange woods—o’er the sea— Over spirits on the wing— Over every drowsy thing— And buries them up quite In a labyrinth of light— And then, how, deep! —O, deep, Is the passion of their sleep. In the morning they arise, And their moony covering Is soaring in the skies, With the tempests as they toss, Like—almost any thing— Or a yellow Albatross. They use that moon no more For the same end as before, Videlicet, a tent— Which I think extravagant: Its atomies, however, Into a shower dissever, Of which those butterflies Of Earth, who seek the skies, And so come down again (Never-contented things!) Have brought a specimen Upon their quivering wings.
And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN In Heaven a spirit doth dwell  “Whose heart-strings are a lute”;  None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell),  Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell   Of his voice, all mute. Tottering above  In her highest noon,  The enamoured moon Blushes with love,  While, to listen, the red levin   (With the rapid Pleiads, even,   Which were seven,)  Pauses in Heaven. And they say (the starry choir   And the other listening things)  That Israfeli’s fire Is owing to that lyre  By which he sits and sings—  The trembling living wire  Of those unusual strings. But the skies that angel trod,  Where deep thoughts are a duty,  Where Love’s a grown-up God,  Where the Houri glances are  Imbued with all the beauty  Which we worship in a star. Therefore, thou art not wrong,   Israfeli, who despisest An unimpassioned song; To thee the laurels belong,  Best bard, because the wisest!  Merrily live, and long! The ecstasies above  With thy burning measures suit—  Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,  With the fervour of thy lute—  Well may the stars be mute! Yes, Heaven is thine; but this  Is a world of sweets and sours;  Our flowers are merely—flowers,  And the shadow of thy perfect bliss  Is the sunshine of ours. If I could dwell Where Israfel  Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well  A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell   From my lyre within the sky.
At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon. An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, Exhales from out her golden rim, And softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top, Steals drowsily and musically Into the universal valley. The rosemary nods upon the grave; The lily lolls upon the wave; Wrapping the fog about its breast, The ruin moulders into rest; Looking like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not, for the world, awake. All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies Irene, with her Destinies! Oh, lady bright! can it be right— This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, Laughingly through the lattice drop— The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully—so fearfully— Above the closed and fringéd lid ’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid, That, o’er the floor and down the wall, Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall! Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear? Why and what art thou dreaming here? Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas, A wonder to these garden trees! Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress! Strange, above all, thy length of tress, And this all solemn silentness! The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, Which is enduring, so be deep! Heaven have her in its sacred keep! This chamber changed for one more holy, This bed for one more melancholy, I pray to God that she may lie Forever with unopened eye, While the pale sheeted ghosts go by! My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, As it is lasting, so be deep! Soft may the worms about her creep! Far in the forest, dim and old, For her may some tall vault unfold— Some vault that oft hath flung its black And wingéd pannels fluttering back, Triumphant, o’er the crested palls Of her grand family funerals— Some sepulchre, remote, alone, Against whose portals she hath thrown, In childhood, many an idle stone— Some tomb from out whose sounding door She ne’er shall force an echo more, Thrilling to think, poor child of sin! It was the dead who groaned within.
Once it smiled a silent dell Where the people did not dwell; They had gone unto the wars, Trusting to the mild-eyed stars, Nightly, from their azure towers, To keep watch above the flowers, In the midst of which all day The red sun-light lazily lay. Now each visitor shall confess The sad valley’s restlessness. Nothing there is motionless— Nothing save the airs that brood Over the magic solitude. Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees That palpitate like the chill seas Around the misty Hebrides! Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven That rustle through the unquiet Heaven Uneasily, from morn till even, Over the violets there that lie In myriad types of the human eye— Over the lilies there that wave And weep above a nameless grave! They wave:—from out their fragrant tops External dews come down in drops. They weep:—from off their delicate stems Perennial tears descend in gems.
By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE—Out of TIME. Bottomless vales and boundless floods, And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods, With forms that no man can discover For the tears that drip all over; Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging, unto skies of fire; Lakes that endlessly outspread Their lone waters—lone and dead,— Their still waters—still and chilly With the snows of the lolling lily. By the lakes that thus outspread Their lone waters, lone and dead,— Their sad waters, sad and chilly With the snows of the lolling lily,— By the mountains—near the river Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,— By the grey woods,—by the swamp Where the toad and the newt encamp,— By the dismal tarns and pools Where dwell the Ghouls,— By each spot the most unholy— In each nook most melancholy,— There the traveller meets, aghast, Sheeted Memories of the Past— Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pass the wanderer by— White-robed forms of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven. For the heart whose woes are legion ’T is a peaceful, soothing region— For the spirit that walks in shadow ’T is—oh, ’t is an Eldorado! But the traveller, travelling through it, May not—dare not openly view it; Never its mysteries are exposed To the weak human eye unclosed; So wills its King, who hath forbid The uplifting of the fring'd lid; And thus the sad Soul that here passes Beholds it but through darkened glasses. By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have wandered home but newly From this ultimate dim Thule.
I Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. II Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. III The night, tho’ clear, shall frown— And the stars shall look not down From their high thrones in the heaven, With light like Hope to mortals given— But their red orbs, without beam, To thy weariness shall seem As a burning and a fever Which would cling to thee for ever. IV Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish, Now are visions ne’er to vanish; From thy spirit shall they pass No more—like dew-drop from the grass. V The breeze—the breath of God—is still— And the mist upon the hill, Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken, Is a symbol and a token— How it hangs upon the trees, A mystery of mysteries!
Lo! ’t is a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. But he grew old— This knight so bold— And o’er his heart a shadow— Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow— ‘Shadow,’ said he, ‘Where can it be— This land of Eldorado?’ ‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,’ The shade replied,— ‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
I I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking of the man who left in September. His name was Law. My face in the bathroom mirror has white streaks down it. I rinse the face and return to bed. Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother. SHE She lives on a moor in the north. She lives alone. Spring opens like a blade there. I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books— some for my mother, some for me including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë. This is my favourite author. Also my main fear, which I mean to confront. Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come in the kitchen door. What meat is it, Emily, we need? THREE Three silent women at the kitchen table. My mother’s kitchen is dark and small but out the window there is the moor, paralyzed with ice. It extends as far as the eye can see over flat miles to a solid unlit white sky. Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully. The kitchen wall clock emits a ragged low buzz that jumps once a minute over the twelve. I have Emily p. 216 propped open on the sugarbowl but am covertly watching my mother. A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside. My mother is studying her lettuce. I turn to p. 217. “In my flight through the kitchen I knocked over Hareton who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chairback in the doorway. . . .” It is as if we have all been lowered into an atmosphere of glass. Now and then a remark trails through the glass. Taxes on the back lot. Not a good melon, too early for melons. Hairdresser in town found God, closes shop every Tuesday. Mice in the teatowel drawer again. Little pellets. Chew off the corners of the napkins, if they knew what paper napkins cost nowadays. Rain tonight. Rain tomorrow. That volcano in the Philippines at it again. What’s her name Anderson died no not Shirley the opera singer. Negress. Cancer. Not eating your garnish, you don’t like pimento? Out the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland and dregs of snow scarred by pine filth. At the middle of the moor where the ground goes down into a depression, the ice has begun to unclench. Black open water comes curdling up like anger. My mother speaks suddenly. That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? You aren’t getting over him. My mother has a way of summing things up. She never liked Law much but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life. Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out, was all she said after she met him. Give and take were just words to me at the time. I had not been in love before. It was like a wheel rolling downhill. But early this morning while mother slept and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling, I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too. She knows how to hang puppies, that Emily. It isn’t like taking an aspirin you know, I answer feebly. Dr. Haw says grief is a long process. She frowns. What does it accomplish all that raking up the past? Oh—I spread my hands— I prevail! I look her in the eye. She grins. Yes you do. WHACHER Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, has caused confusion. For example in the first line of the poem printed Tell me, whether, is it winter? in the Shakespeare Head edition. But whacher is what she wrote. Whacher is what she was. She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather. She whached the bars of time, which broke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open. To be a whacher is not a choice. There is nowhere to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to—like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset shaking the drops off, it just flies open. To be a whacher is not in itself sad or happy, although she uses these words in her verse as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel, grazing with euphemism the work of whaching. But it has no name. It is transparent. Sometimes she calls it Thou. “Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,” records Charlotte in 1828. Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers. This sad stunted life, says one. Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment and despair, says another. She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male, suggests a third. Meanwhile Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question, Why cast the world away. For someone hooked up to Thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence. But in between the neighbour who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face “lit up by a divine light” and the sister who tells us Emily never made a friend in her life, is a space where the little raw soul slips through. It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, out of sight. The little raw soul was caught by no one. She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary or a fear of death. She worked in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax) and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon in her thirty-first year. She spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor or whaching. She says it gave her peace. “All tight and right in which condition it is to be hoped we shall all be this   day 4 years,” she wrote in her Diary Paper of 1837. Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls. “Why all the fuss?” asks one critic. “She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it? A reasonably satisfactory homelife, a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings? What was this cage, invisible to us, which she felt herself to be confined in?” Well there are many ways of being held prisoner, I am thinking as I stride over the moor. As a rule after lunch mother has a nap and I go out to walk. The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light. Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick and hearts shut and fathers leave to go back to work and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? She shifted to a question about airports. Crops of ice are changing to mud all around me as I push on across the moor warmed by drifts from the pale blue sun. On the edge of the moor our pines dip and coast in breezes from somewhere else. Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country. I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner up the hill to his house, shadows of limes and roses blowing in the car window and music spraying from the radio and him singing and touching my left hand to his lips. Law lived in a high blue room from which he could see the sea. Time in its transparent loops as it passes beneath me now still carries the sound of the telephone in that room and traffic far off and doves under the window chuckling coolly and his voice saying, You beauty. I can feel that beauty’s heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room— No, I say aloud. I force my arms down through air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water and the videotape jerks to a halt like a glass slide under a drop of blood. I stop and turn and stand into the wind, which now plunges towards me over the moor. When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon. I took up the practice of meditation. Each morning I sat on the floor in front of my sofa and chanted bits of old Latin prayers.De profundis clamavi ad te Domine. Each morning a vision came to me. Gradually I understood that these were naked glimpses of my soul. I called them Nudes. Nude #1. Woman alone on a hill. She stands into the wind. It is a hard wind slanting from the north. Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth. It pains me to record this, I am not a melodramatic person. But soul is “hewn in a wild workshop” as Charlotte Brontë says of Wuthering Heights. Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights is a publicist’s masterpiece. Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion crouched on the arm of the sofa Charlotte talks firmly and calmly about the other furniture of Emily’s workshop—about the inexorable spirit (“stronger than a man, simpler than a child”), the cruel illness (“pain no words can render”), the autonomous end (“she sank rapidly, she made haste to leave us”) and about Emily’s total subjection to a creative project she could neither understand nor control, and for which she deserves no more praise nor blame than if she had opened her mouth “to breathe lightning.” The scorpion is inching down the arm of the sofa while Charlotte continues to speak helpfully about lightning and other weather we may expect to experience when we enter Emily’s electrical atmosphere. It is “a horror of great darkness” that awaits us there but Emily is not responsible. Emily was in the grip. “Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done,” says Charlotte (of Heathcliff and Earnshaw and Catherine). Well there are many ways of being held prisoner. The scorpion takes a light spring and lands on our left knee as Charlotte concludes, “On herself she had no pity.” Pitiless too are the Heights, which Emily called Wuthering because of their “bracing ventilation” and “a north wind over the edge.” Whaching a north wind grind the moor that surrounded her father’s house on every side, formed of a kind of rock called millstone grit, taught Emily all she knew about love and its necessities— an angry education that shapes the way her characters use one another. “My love for Heathcliff,” says Catherine, “resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Necessary? I notice the sun has dimmed and the afternoon air sharpening. I turn and start to recross the moor towards home. What are the imperatives that hold people like Catherine and Heathcliff together and apart, like pores blown into hot rock and then stranded out of reach of one another when it hardens? What kind of necessity is that? The last time I saw Law was a black night in September. Autumn had begun, my knees were cold inside my clothes. A chill fragment of moon rose. He stood in my living room and spoke without looking at me. Not enough spin on it, he said of our five years of love. Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces which floated apart. By now I was so cold it was like burning. I put out my hand to touch his. He moved back. I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy. But now he was looking at me. Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes. Everything gets crazy. When nude I turned my back because he likes the back. He moved onto me. Everything I know about love and its necessities I learned in that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, no part of my body that could have done otherwise. But to talk of mind and body begs the question. Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out. Soul is what I kept watch on all that night. Law stayed with me. We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and time, caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language like the children we used to be. That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell, as Emily would say. We tried to fuck but he remained limp, although happy. I came again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines on a map. I saw the lines harden. He left in the morning. It is very cold walking into the long scraped April wind. At this time of year there is no sunset just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away. KITCHEN Kitchen is quiet as a bone when I come in. No sound from the rest of the house. I wait a moment then open the fridge. Brilliant as a spaceship it exhales cold confusion. My mother lives alone and eats little but her fridge is always crammed. After extracting the yogurt container from beneath a wily arrangement of leftover blocks of Christmas cake wrapped in foil and prescription medicine bottles I close the fridge door. Bluish dusk fills the room like a sea slid back. I lean against the sink. White foods taste best to me and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why. Once I heard girls singing a May Day song that went:  Violante in the pantry  Gnawing at a mutton bone  How she gnawed it  How she clawed it  When she felt herself alone. Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow. We can see her ridding herself of it at various times with a gesture like she used to brush the carpet. Reason with him and then whip him! was her instruction (age six) to her father regarding brother Branwell. And when she was 14 and bitten by a rabid dog she strode (they say) into the kitchen and taking red hot tongs from the back of the stove applied them directly to her arm. Cauterization of Heathcliff took longer. More than thirty years in the time of the novel, from the April evening when he runs out the back door of the kitchen and vanishes over the moor because he overheard half a sentence of Catherine’s (“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff”) until the wild morning when the servant finds him stark dead and grinning on his rainsoaked bed upstairs in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is a pain devil. If he had stayed in the kitchen long enough to hear the other half of Catherine’s sentence (“so he will never know how I love him”) Heathcliff would have been set free. But Emily knew how to catch a devil. She put into him in place of a soul the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system every time he drew a breath or moved thought. She broke all his moments in half, with the kitchen door standing open. I am not unfamiliar with this half-life. But there is more to it than that. Heathcliff’s sexual despair arose out of no such experience in the life of Emily Brontë, so far as we know. Her question, which concerns the years of inner cruelty that can twist a person into a pain  devil, came to her in a kindly firelit kitchen (“kichin” in Emily’s spelling) where she and Charlotte and Anne peeled potatoes together and made up stories with the old house dog Keeper at their feet. There is a fragment of a poem she wrote in 1839 (about six years before Wuthering Heights) that says:  That iron man was born like me  And he was once an ardent boy:  He must have felt in infancy  The glory of a summer sky. Who is the iron man? My mother’s voice cuts across me, from the next room where she is lying on the sofa. Is that you dear? Yes Ma. Why don’t you turn on a light in there? Out the kitchen window I watch the steely April sun jab its last cold yellow streaks across a dirty silver sky. Okay Ma. What’s for supper? LIBERTY Liberty means different things to different people. I have never liked lying in bed in the morning. Law did. My mother does. But as soon as the morning light hits my eyes I want to be out in it— moving along the moor into the first blue currents and cold navigation of everything awake. I hear my mother in the next room turn and sigh and sink deeper. I peel the stale cage of sheets off my legs and I am free. Out on the moor all is brilliant and hard after a night of frost. The light plunges straight up from the ice to a blue hole at the top of the sky. Frozen mud crunches underfoot. The sound startles me back into the dream I was having this morning when I awoke, one of those nightlong sweet dreams of lying in Law’s arms like a needle in water—it is a physical effort to pull myself out of his white silk hands as they slide down my dream hips—I turn and face into the wind and begin to run. Goblins, devils and death stream behind me. In the days and months after Law left I felt as if the sky was torn off my life. I had no home in goodness anymore. To see the love between Law and me turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another towards some other hunger was terrible. Perhaps this is what people mean by original sin, I thought. But what love could be prior to it? What is prior? What is love? My questions were not original. Nor did I answer them. Mornings when I meditated I was presented with a nude glimpse of my lone soul, not the complex mysteries of love and hate. But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight. There were in all thirteen of them. Nude #2. Woman caught in a cage of thorns. Big glistening brown thorns with black stains on them where she twists this way and that way unable to stand upright. Nude #3. Woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead. She grips it in both hands endeavouring to wrench it out. Nude #4. Woman on a blasted landscape backlit in red like Hieronymus Bosch. Covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption like the top half of a crab. With arms crossed as if pulling off a sweater she works hard at dislodging the crab. It was about this time I began telling Dr. Haw about the Nudes. She said, When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed. Go away where? I said. This still seems to me a good question. But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk. I have reached the middle where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water. It is frozen. A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes. Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black. Four naked alder trunks rise straight up from it and sway in the blue air. Each trunk where it enters the ice radiates a map of silver pressures— thousands of hair-thin cracks catching the white of the light like a jailed face catching grins through the bars. Emily Brontë has a poem about a woman in jail who says  A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me  And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty. I wonder what kind of Liberty this is. Her critics and commentators say she means death or a visionary experience that prefigures death. They understand her prison as the limitations placed on a clergyman’s daughter by nineteenth-century life in a remote parish on a cold moor in the north of England. They grow impatient with the extreme terms in which she figures prison life. “In so much of Brontë’s work the self-dramatising and posturing of these poems teeters on the brink of a potentially bathetic melodrama,” says one. Another refers to “the cardboard sublime” of her caught world. I stopped telling my psychotherapist about the Nudes when I realized I had no way to answer her question, Why keep watching? Some people watch, that’s all I can say. There is nowhere else to go, no ledge to climb up to. Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment, as with a very difficult sister. “On that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,” wrote Charlotte of Emily. I wonder what kind of conversation these two had over breakfast at the parsonage. “My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character,” Charlotte emphasizes, “nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed. . . .” Recesses were many. One autumn day in 1845 Charlotte “accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s   handwriting.” It was a small (4 x 6) notebook with a dark red cover marked 6d. and contained 44 poems in Emily’s minute hand. Charlotte had known Emily wrote verse but felt “more than surprise” at its quality. “Not at all like the poetry women generally write.” Further surprise awaited Charlotte when she read Emily’s novel, not least for its foul language. She gently probes this recess in her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights. “A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter  only—a blank line filling the interval.” Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought and changed the subject. But blank lines do not say nothing. As Charlotte puts it, “The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares— what horror it conceals.” I turn my steps and begin walking back over the moor towards home and breakfast. It is a two-way traffic, the language of the unsaid. My favourite pages of The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë are the notes at the back recording small adjustments made by Charlotte to the text of Emily’s verse, which Charlotte edited for publication after Emily’s death. “Prison for strongest [in Emily’s hand] altered to lordly by Charlotte.” HERO I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast whether she had a good night and is about to say a happy thing or not. Not. She puts her toast down on the side of her plate. You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins. This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments, from what I call The Rules Of Life series. My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night. I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What’s there to see? Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up. At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta and may advance along one of three channels. There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel, the Stubborn As Your Father channel and random channel. More toast? I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair. Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp. Mother has chosen random channel. Women? Complaining about rape all the time I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper lying beside the grape jam. The front page has a small feature about a rally for International Women’s Day— have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue? Nope. Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits— cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder! You’re saying women deserve to get raped because Sears bathing suit ads have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious? Well someone has to be responsible. Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high. Oh I see you’re one of Them. One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it. And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year the green  one? It looked so smart on you. The frail fact drops on me from a great height that my mother is afraid. She will be eighty years old this summer. Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe make me think of Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte wasn‘t around. So Ma, we’ll go—I pop up the toaster and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate— visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility. Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue. She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes. Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the taxi. My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care about 50 miles from here. He suffers from a kind of dementia characterized by two sorts of pathological change first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer. First, the presence in cerebral tissue of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque, consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells. Second, neurofibrillary snarlings in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus. There is no known cause or cure. Mother visits him by taxi once a week for the last five years. Marriage is for better or for worse, she says, this is the worse. So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes. It is hard to find the beginning of dementia. I remember a night about ten years ago when I was talking to him on the telephone. It was a Sunday night in winter. I heard his sentences filling up with fear. He would start a sentence—about weather, lose his way, start another. It made me furious to hear him floundering— my tall proud father, former World War II navigator! It made me merciless. I stood on the edge of the conversation, watching him thrash about for cues, offering none, and it came to me like a slow avalanche that he had no idea who he was talking to. Much colder today I guess. . . . his voice pressed into the silence and broke off, snow falling on it. There was a long pause while snow covered us both. Well I won’t keep you, he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land. I’ll say goodnight now, I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Who are you? I said into the dial tone. At the hospital we pass down long pink halls through a door with a big window and a combination lock (5—25—3) to the west wing, for chronic care patients. Each wing has a name. The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap. Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles. My father tilts least, I am proud of him. Hi Dad how y’doing? His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air. My mother lays her hand on his. Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit. Sunlight flocks through the room. Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him, grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs. He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us. He uses a language known only to himself, made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals. Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash— You don’t say! or Happy birthday to you!— but no real sentence for more than three years now. I notice his front teeth are getting black. I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people. He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up. She and I often think two halves of one thought. Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick you sent him from Harrod’s the summer you were in London? she asks. Yes I wonder what happened to it. Must be in the bathroom somewhere. She is giving him grapes one by one. They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers. He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong, but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house— except the hands. The hands keep growing. Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh, they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap. But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables that break off on a high note—he waits, staring into my face. That quizzical look. One eyebrow at an angle. I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home. It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane. Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart, chins forward. Dressed in the puffed flying suits with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch. They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942. It is dawn. They are leaving Dover for France. My father on the far left is the tallest airman, with his collar up, one eyebrow at an angle. The shadowless light makes him look immortal, for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face. Flaps down! I cry. His black grin flares once and goes out like a match. HOT Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky. I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies with my eyes pouring into the dark. Fumbling and slowly consciousness replaces the bars. Dreamtails and angry liquids swim back down to the middle of me. It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now. This is not uncommon after loss of love— blue and black and red blasting the crater open. I am interested in anger. I clamber along to find the source. My dream was of an old woman lying awake in bed. She controls the house by a system of light bulbs strung above her on wires. Each wire has a little black switch. One by one the switches refuse to turn the bulbs on. She keeps switching and switching in rising tides of very hot anger. Then she creeps out of bed to peer through lattices at the rooms of the rest of the house. The rooms are silent and brilliantly lit and full of huge furniture beneath which crouch small creatures—not quite cats not quite rats licking their narrow red jaws under a load of time. I want to be beautiful again, she whispers but the great overlit rooms tick emptily as a deserted oceanliner and now behind her in the dark a rustling sound, comes— My pajamas are soaked. Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart, pouring up the vents. Every night I wake to this anger, the soaked bed, the hot pain box slamming me each way I move. I want justice. Slam. I want an explanation. Slam. I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam. I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. Night springs out the window and is gone over the moor. I lie listening to the light vibrate in my ears and thinking about curses. Emily Brontë was good at cursing. Falsity and bad love and the deadly pain of alteration are constant topics in  her verse.  Well, thou halt paid me back my love!  But if there be a God above  Whose arm is strong, whose word is true,  This hell shall wring thy spirit too! The curses are elaborate:  There go, Deceiver, go! My hand is streaming wet;  My heart’s blood flows to buy the blessing—To forget!  Oh could that lost heart give back, back again to thine,  One tenth part of the pain that clouds my dark decline! But they do not bring her peace:  Vain words, vain frenzied thoughts! No ear can hear me call—  Lost in the vacant air my frantic curses fall. . . .  Unconquered in my soul the Tyrant rules me still—  Life bows to my control, but Love I cannot kill! Her anger is a puzzle. It raises many questions in me, to see love treated with such cold and knowing contempt by someone who rarely left home “except to go to church or take a walk on the hills” (Charlotte tells us) and who had no more intercourse with Haworth folk than “a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.” How did Emily come to lose faith in humans? She admired their dialects, studied their genealogies, “but with them she rarely exchanged a word.” Her introvert nature shrank from shaking hands with someone she met on the moor. What did Emily know of lover’s lies or cursive human faith? Among her biographers is one who conjectures she bore or aborted a child during her six-month stay in Halifax, but there is no evidence at all for such an event and the more general consensus is that Emily did not touch a man in her 31  years. Banal sexism aside, I find myself tempted to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge for all that life withheld from Emily. But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation. As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought.    The heart is dead since infancy.  Unwept for let the body go. Suddenly cold I reach down and pull the blanket back up to my chin. The vocation of anger is not mine. I know my source. It is stunning, it is a moment like no other, when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore. I switch off the lamp and lie on my back, thinking about Emily’s cold young soul. Where does unbelief begin? When I was young there were degrees of certainty. I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally   disappear— From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle back down under the doorsill of sleep. Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on fading banks  of sky.  Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through  The vault . . . THOU The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness. And I prefer to put it off. It is morning. Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east. I am walking into the light. One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God. Emily had a relationship on this level with someone she calls Thou. She describes Thou as awake like herself all night and full of strange power. Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind. Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness, playing near and far at once. She talks about a sweetness that “proved us one.” I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet, there is no question, it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night, without the terrible sex price to pay. This is a childish idea, I know. My education, I have to admit, has been gappy. The basic rules of male-female relations were imparted atmospherically in our family, no direct speech allowed. I remember one Sunday I was sitting in the backseat of the car. Father in front. We were waiting in the driveway for mother, who came around the corner of the house and got into the passenger side of the car dressed in a yellow Chanel suit and black high heels. Father glanced sideways at her. Showing a good bit of leg today Mother, he said in a voice which I (age eleven) thought odd. I stared at the back of her head waiting for what she would say. Her answer would clear this up. But she just laughed a strange laugh with ropes all over it. Later that summer I put this laugh together with another laugh I overheard as I was going upstairs. She was talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Well a woman would be just as happy with a kiss on the cheek most of the time but YOU KNOW MEN, she was saying. Laugh. Not ropes, thorns. I have arrived at the middle of the moor where the ground goes down into a low swampy place. The swamp water is frozen solid. Bits of gold weed have etched themselves on the underside of the ice like messages.  I’ll come when thou art saddest,  Laid alone in the darkened room;  When the mad day’s mirth has vanished,  And the smile of joy is banished,  I’ll come when the heart’s real feeling  Has entire, unbiased sway,  And my influence o’er thee stealing  Grief deepening, joy congealing,  Shall bear thy soul away.  Listen! ’tis just the hour,  The awful time for thee:  Dost thou not feel upon thy soul  A flood of strange sensations roll,  Forerunners of a sterner power,  Heralds of me? Very hard to read, the messages that pass between Thou and Emily. In this poem she reverses their roles, speaking not as the victim but to the victim. It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou, who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered. It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion of master and victim within one voice is a rationale for the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour. She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity for this soul trapped in glass, which is her true creation. Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am. Is it a vocation of anger? Why construe silence as the Real Presence? Why stoop to kiss this doorstep? Why be unstrung and pounded flat and pine away imagining someone vast to whom I may vent the swell of my soul? Emily was fond of Psalm 130. “My soul waiteth on Thou more than they that watch for the morning, I say more than they that watch for the morning.” I like to believe that for her the act of watching provided a shelter, that her collusion with Thou gave ease to anger and desire: ”In Thou they are quenched as a fire of thorns,“ says the psalmist. But for myself I do not believe this, I am not quenched— with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter. I am my own Nude. And Nudes have a difficult sexual destiny. I have watched this destiny disclose itself in its jerky passage from girl to woman to who I am now, from love to anger to this cold marrow, from fire to shelter to fire. What is the opposite of believing in Thou— merely not believing in Thou? No. That is too simple. That is to prepare a misunderstanding. I want to speak more clearly. Perhaps the Nudes are the best way. Nude #5. Deck of cards. Each card is made of flesh. The living cards are days of a woman’s life. I see a great silver needle go flashing right through the deck once from end to  end. Nude #6 I cannot remember. Nude #7. White room whose walls, having neither planes nor curves nor angles, are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon. It is a living surface, almost wet. Lucency breathes in and out. Rainbows shudder across it. And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering,Be very careful. Be very careful. Nude #8. Black disc on which the fires of all the winds are attached in a row. A woman stands on the disc amid the winds whose long yellow silk flames flow and vibrate up through her. Nude #9. Transparent loam. Under the loam a woman has dug a long deep trench. Into the trench she is placing small white forms, I don’t know what they are. Nude #10. Green thorn of the world poking up alive through the heart of a woman who lies on her back on the ground. The thorn is exploding its green blood above her in the air.Everything it is it has, the voice says. Nude #11. Ledge in outer space. Space is bluish black and glossy as solid water and moving very fast in all directions, shrieking past the woman who stands pinned to nothing by its pressure. She peers and glances for some way to go, trying to lift her hand but cannot. Nude #12. Old pole in the wind. Cold currents are streaming over it and pulling out into ragged long horizontal black lines some shreds of ribbon attached to the pole. I cannot see how they are attached— notches? staples? nails? All of a sudden the wind changes and all the black shreds rise straight up in the air and tie themselves into knots, then untie and float down. The wind is gone. It waits. By this time, midway through winter, I had become entirely fascinated with my spiritual melodrama. Then it stopped. Days passed, months passed and I saw nothing. I continued to peer and glance, sitting on the rug in front of my sofa in the curtainless morning with my nerves open to the air like something skinned. I saw nothing. Outside the window spring storms came and went. April snow folded its huge white paws over doors and porches. I watched a chunk of it lean over the roof and break off and fall and I thought, How slow! as it glided soundlessly past, but still—nothing. No nudes. No Thou. A great icicle formed on the railing of my balcony so I drew up close to the window and tried peering through the icicle, hoping to trick myself into some interior vision, but all I saw was the man and woman in the room across the street making their bed and laughing. I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life, which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it. “No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them,” wrote Charlotte the day after burying her sister. Emily had shaken free. A soul can do that. Whether it goes to join Thou and sit on the porch for all eternity enjoying jokes and kisses and beautiful cold spring evenings, you and I will never know. But I can tell you what I saw. Nude #13 arrived when I was not watching for it. It came at night. Very much like Nude #1. And yet utterly different. I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air. It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached, but as I came closer I saw it was a human body trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light.
I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years before, a hundred and fifty years before, I walk, my steps thump, a fantastic journey through epochs in which there was no me. How long is my minus life, nonexistence so much resembles immortality. Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster, Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband, The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern. I walk still further, what an echo, my steps thump through my minus life, through the reverse of life. I reach Adam and Eve, nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark. Now my nonexistence dies already with the trite death of mathematical fiction. As trite as the death of my existence would have been had I been really born.
Our embrace lasted too long. We loved right down to the bone. I hear the bones grind, I see our two skeletons. Now I am waiting till you leave, till the clatter of your shoes is heard no more. Now, silence. Tonight I am going to sleep alone on the bedclothes of purity. Aloneness is the first hygienic measure. Aloneness will enlarge the walls of the room, I will open the window and the large, frosty air will enter, healthy as tragedy. Human thoughts will enter and human concerns, misfortune of others, saintliness of others. They will converse softly and sternly. Do not come anymore. I am an animal very rarely.
One must be brave to live through a day. What remains is nothing but the pleasure of longing—very precious. Longing purifies as does flying, strengthens as does an effort, it fashions the soul as work fashions the belly. It is like an athlete, like a runner who will never stop running. And this gives him endurance. Longing is nourishing for the strong. It is like a window on a high tower, through which blows the wind of strength. Longing, Virginity of happiness.
As a child I put my finger in the fire to become a saint. As a teenager every day I would knock my head against the wall. As a young girl I went out through a window of a garret to the roof in order to jump. As a woman I had lice all over my body. They cracked when I was ironing my sweater. I waited sixty minutes to be executed. I was hungry for six years. Then I bore a child, they were carving me without putting me to sleep. Then a thunderbolt killed me three times and I had to rise from the dead three times without anyone’s help. Now I am resting after three resurrections.
Late in the cold night wakened, and heard wind,  And lay with eyes closed and silent, knowing  These words how bodiless they are, this darkness  Empty under my roof and the panes rattling  Roughed by wind. And so lay and imagined  Somewhere far off black seas heavy-shouldered  Plunging on sand and the ebb off-streaming and  Thunder forever. So lying bethought me, friend,  What traffic ghouls have, or this be legend,  In low inland hollows of the earth, under Shade of moon, the night moaning, and bitter frost;  And feared the riches of my bones, long given  Into this earth, should tumble to their hands.  No girl or ghost beside me, and I lonely,  Remembering gardens, lilac scent, or twilight  Descending late in summer on that town,  I lay and found my years departed from me,  And feared the cold bed and the wind, absurdly  Alone with silence and the trick of tears.
Whom should I consult? Philosophers  Are happy in their homes and seminars. See this one with the mischievous bright childlike  Gaze going out through walls and air,  A tangent to the bent rays of the star.  Hear the chalk splutter, hear the groping voice:  Conceive the demiurge in his perpetual  Strife with the chaos of the universe,  That humming equilibrium of creation  Pure and enormous, crossed by the constant  Light of unimaginable combustion:  Teems, how it teems. An elm tree sighs  Beyond the dusty windowledge of June.  As in the mind the notes of a melody  Vibrate when vibration’s gone, a series  Generated by a decimal has no end;  Observe it closely, though; it stops when it stops.  The frail spectacles are bedimmed with spring. But whom should I consult? Well-seasoned men,  Ruddy with business or the salty summer,  Autumnal in their woolens, gaze Toward the quick plumes above the city.  A frosty morning sun reddens the river.  This one is meditative and well-qualified:  Decently shined, one heavy saddle-dark  Perforated brogan swings from the swivel  Chair arm; leaning back, the head Well-cropped and grey, the experienced Eyes quiet, with one highlighted pupil.  A reader of Herodotus in the evening.  The road was in receivership, the mills  Were in receivership, the bondholders  Suitably informed would not dissent  From an able plan of reorganization.  Easy did it.  And his beautiful daughters  Sink in a circle of white skirts like daisies,  Laughing for the brash photographer.  Years ago they sailed to the North Cape,  Made out that flecked mass in the East With Mother and the broad-shouldered boy from Cook’s On deck in the dim summer on the grey  Sea. Often they saw the fishermen Off Cherbourg in the awe of morning hitting  The outside spanking seas: red sails in sea-light.  Far away in the nursery a music box  Plucks its icy Bavarian tune for them. Then whom? A thousand flashes from Long Island  Enter the high room in the office building,  A heliograph of cars turning toward sunset.  Will he decipher them? The journalist  Sweats in his shirtsleeves, mutilates  Cigarettes in a smouldering tray, surveys  Me and the world in a racket of teletypes,  Sick of it and excited, needing a drink.  Positive copy sprouts from the typewriter,  Each paragraph a piston stroke. The sun Glitters on Hackensack, sorrows on the land,  Goes out like a pliant egg sucked down a bottle.  Under the shadowing azure a violet Dusk consumes the sharp walls of the world.  The melancholy distributor of wit Snatches at straws amid the alien darkness,  A whirl of dusty danger.  For his retreat The priest lifts up the monstrance, muttering  Abstracted Latin to the tinkle behind him.  Presently they will bawl the Stabat Mater.  And all those years at seminary, reading  St. Basil and Jerome, girding his cassock  For handball in the gritty cement courtyard  Under the swooping smoke of the powerhouse;  And ordination when the folks from Chicago  Wept before the bishop. Mortify The flesh. Think on thy last end. Pray The Holy Mother of God in her infinite mercy,  And Him who rests in the dark chapel always,  Where the wick burns in wax, a cuddling flame:  Deduced by Thomas from the tip of heaven. Or should I tumble to the recumbent  Confessional, and the scientist of distress?  For any child the terror in the night, The hating eyes by day may be Death’s cunning orchestration: they prepare  The servant’s cry at last, absolute and lonely.  See this easy gentleman in tweeds, Deepchested, a swimmer to the farthest light, Diagnostician of the subaqueous Faces of dreams: with patience like a lover  He must all day sustain his authority,  Must not be bored, merciful or amused. Or the anatomist and healer of bones?  Trepanner, skilled in suturing, the masked  And sterile hero in the cone of light; There the sweet ether cone must be inhaled  With one, two pulses of the fiery spiral  Singing into timeless speed or quiet:  A mound under a sheet, a square of pale  Mortal flesh incised in a seeping line,  Spreading its lips for pretty butchery. Blankets, hypodermics and high fever,  Racing delirium in the ward; the tall screen  Efficiently deployed at the bedside;  Intravenous ministrations: charts: starch:  And how is he today. Pretty good, doc.  Or else the fly sits down on the dead face  In the dead sunny room.  Shall I have speech With those undone by the world’s great memory?  Men translated by music, treasurers  Of the French phrase, the childhood images,  Unregarded announcers of prophecy;  Staring blind at the stained wall paper  In their nightly rooms; their dreadful hearts  Beating the beds where other hearts have slept Like birds under the night wind of time.  See this one whom the currents under earth  Intoxicate, and the flosses of the sky:  Weeping, weeping in vanity and grief He walks toward remote dawn in the empty city,  Facing the cold draft, fish-smell from the river,  Necessitous of love. Masters of intricate  Fancy, libertines of intelligence, I. Until Jove let it be, no colonist Mastered the wild earth; no land was marked,  None parceled out or shared; but everyone  Looked for his living in the common wold. And Jove gave poison to the blacksnakes, and  Made the wolves ravage, made the ocean roll,  Knocked honey from the leaves, took fire away—  So man might beat out various inventions  By reasoning and art.  First he chipped fire Out of the veins of flint where it was hidden;  Then rivers felt his skiffs of the light alder; Then sailors counted up the stars and named them:  Pleiades, Hyades, and the Pole Star; Then were discovered ways to take wild things.  In snares, or hunt them with the circling pack;  And how to whip a stream with casting nets,  Or draw the deep-sea fisherman’s cordage up;  And then the use of steel and the shrieking saw;  Then various crafts. All things were overcome  By labor and by force of bitter need. II. Even when your threshing floor is leveled  By the big roller, smoothed and packed by hand  With potter’s clay, so that it will not crack,  There are still nuisances. The tiny mouse  Locates his house and granary underground, Or the blind mole tunnels his dark chamber;  The toad, too, and all monsters of the earth,  Besides those plunderers of the grain, the weevil  And frantic ant, scared of a poor old age. Let me speak then, too, of the farmer’s weapons:  The heavy oaken plow and the plowshare,  The slowly rolling carts of Demeter,  The threshing machine, the sledge, the weighted mattock, The withe baskets, the cheap furniture, The harrow and the magic winnowing fan— All that your foresight makes provision of,  If you still favor the divine countryside. III. Moreover, like men tempted by the straits In ships borne homeward through the blowing sea,  We too must reckon on Arcturus star, The days of luminous Draco and the Kids. When Libra makes the hours of sleep and daylight  Equal, dividing the world, half light, half dark,  Then drive the team, and sow the field with barley,  Even under intractable winter’s rain. But Spring is the time to sow your beans and clover,  When shining Taurus opens the year with his golden  Horns, and the Dog’s averted star declines;  For greater harvests of your wheat and spelt,  Let first the Pleiades and Hyades be hid And Ariadne’s diadem go down. The golden sun rules the great firmament Through the twelve constellations, and the world  Is measured out in certain parts, and heaven  By five great zones is taken up entire:  One glowing with sundazzle and fierce heat;  And far away on either side the arctics,  Frozen with ice and rain, cerulean; And, in between, two zones for sick mankind:  Through each of these a slanting path is cut  Where pass in line the zodiacal stars. Northward the steep world rises to Scythia  And south of Libya descends, where black  Styx and the lowest of the dead look on. In the north sky the Snake glides like a river  Winding about the Great and Little Bear—  Those stars that fear forever the touch of ocean;  Southward they say profound Night, mother of Furies,  Sits tight-lipped among the crowding shades,  Or thence Aurora draws the daylight back;  And where the East exhales the yellow morning,  Reddening evening lights her stars at last. IV. As for the winter, when the freezing rains  Confine the farmer, he may employ himself  In preparations for serener seasons. The plowman beats the plowshare on the forge,  Or makes his vats of tree-trunks hollowed out,  Brands his cattle, numbers his piles of grain,  Sharpens fence posts or pitchforks, prepares  Umbrian trellises for the slow vine. Then you may weave the baskets of bramble twigs  Or dip your bleating flock in the clean stream.  Often the farmer loads his little mule With olive oil or apples, and brings home A grindstone or a block of pitch from market. And some will stay up late beside the fire  On winter nights, whittling torches, while The housewife runs the shuttle through the loom  And comforts the long labor with her singing;  Or at the stove she simmers the new wine,  Skimming the froth with leaves. Oh idle time!  In that hale season, all their worries past, Farmers arrange convivialities— As after laden ships have reached home port, The happy sailors load the prow with garlands.  Then is the time to gather acorns and Laurel berries and the bloodred myrtle, To lay your traps for cranes and snares for buck,  To hit the fallow deer with twisted slingshots,  And track the long-eared hare— When snow is deep, and ice is on the rivers. V. What of the humors and the ways of Autumn? Just when the farmer wished to reap his yellow Fields, and thresh his grain, I have often seen all the winds make war, Flattening the stout crops from the very roots; And in the black whirlwind Carrying off the ears and the light straw. And often mighty phalanxes of rain Marched out of heaven, as the clouds Rolled up from the sea the detestable tempest;  Then the steep aether thundered, and the deluge  Soaked the crops, filled ditches, made the rivers  Rise and roar and seethe in their spuming beds. The Father himself in the mid stormy night  Lets the lightning go, at whose downstroke  Enormous earth quivers, wild things flee, And fear abases the prone hearts of men—  As Jove splits Athos with his firebolt Or Rhodope or the Ceraunian ridge. The southwind wails in sheets of rain, And under that great wind the groves Lament, and the long breast of the shore is shaken. If you dislike to be so caught, mark well The moon’s phases and the weather signs; Notice where Saturn’s frigid star retires, Mercury’s wanderings over heaven; and revere  Especially, the gods. Offer to Ceres Annual sacrifice and annual worship In the first fair weather of the spring, So may your sheep grow fat and your vines fruitful,  Your sleep sweet and your mountains full of shade.  Let all the country folk come to adore her,  And offer her libations of milk and wine; Conduct the sacrificial lamb three times Around the ripe field, in processional, With all your chorus singing out to Ceres;  And let no man lay scythe against his grain  Unless he first bind oakleaves on his head  And make his little dance, and sing to her. VI. When shall we herd the cattle to the stables? The wind, say, rises without intermission;  The sea gets choppy and the swell increases;  The dry crash of boughs is heard on hills;  The long sound of the surf becomes a tumult;  The gusts become more frequent in the grove;  The waves begin to fight against the keels;  From far at sea the gulls fly shoreward crying;  The heron leaves his favorite marsh and soars  Over the high cloud. Then you will see  Beyond thin skimrack, shooting stars Falling, the long pale tracks behind them  Whitening through the darkness of the night;  And you’ll see straw and fallen leaves blowing.  But when it thunders in rough Boreas’ quarter,  When east and west it thunders—every sailor  Furls his dripping sail. A storm should never catch you unprepared.  Aerial cranes take flight before its rising,  The restless heifer with dilated nostrils  Sniffs the air; the squeaking hirondelle  Flits round and round the lake, and frogs, Inveterate in their mud, croak a chorale.  And too the ant, more frantic in his gallery,  Trundles his eggs out from their hiding place;  The rainbow, cloud imbiber, may be seen;  And crows go cawing from the pasture  In a harsh throng of crepitating wings;  The jeering jay gives out his yell for rain  And takes a walk by himself on the dry sand.  Stormwise, the various sea-fowl, and such birds  As grub the sweet Swan River in Asia, May be observed dousing themselves and diving Or riding on the water, as if they wished—  What odd exhilaration—to bathe themselves. VII. After a storm, clear weather and continuing  Sunny days may likewise be foretold: By the sharp twinkle of the stars, the moon  Rising to face her brother’s rays by day;  No tenuous fleeces blowing in the sky,  No halcyons, sea favorites, on the shore  Stretching out their wings in tepid sunlight;  But mists go lower and lie on the fields, The owl, observing sundown from his perch,  Modulates his meaningless melancholy.  Aloft in crystal air the sparrow hawk  Chases his prey; and as she flits aside The fierce hawk follows screaming on the wind,  And as he swoops, she flits aside again.  With funereal contractions of the windpipe  The crows produce their caws, three at a time, And in their high nests, pleased at I know not what,  Noise it among themselves: no doubt rejoicing  To see their little brood after the storm, But not, I think, by reason of divine Insight or superior grasp of things. VIII. But if you carefully watch the rapid sun  And the moon following, a fair night’s snare  Never deceives you as to next day’s weather.  When the new moon collects a rim of light,  If that bow be obscured with a dark vapor,  Then a great tempest is in preparation;  If it be blushing like a virgin’s cheek,  There will be wind; wind makes Diana blush;  If on the fourth night (most significant)  She goes pure and unclouded through the sky,  All that day and the following days will be, For one full month, exempt from rain and wind.  The sun, too, rising and setting in the waves,  Will give you weather signs, trustworthy ones  Whether at morning or when stars come out.  A mackerel sky over the east at sunrise  Means look out for squalls, a gale is coming,  Unfavorable to trees and plants and flocks.  Or when through denser strata the sun’s rays  Break out dimly, or Aurora rises Pale from Tithonus’ crocus-colored chamber,  Alas, the vine-leaf will not shield the cluster  In the hubbub of roof-pattering bitter hail. It will be well to notice sunset, too, For the sun’s visage then has various colors;  Bluish and dark means rain; if it be fiery  That means an East wind; if it be dappled And mixed with red gold light, then you will see  Wind and rain in commotion everywhere.  Nobody can advise me, on that night,  To cast off hawsers and put out to sea.  But if the next day passes and the sunset  Then be clear, you need not fear the weather:  A bright Norther will sway the forest trees. IX. Last, what the late dusk brings, and whence the fair Clouds are blown, and secrets of the Southwind  You may learn from the sun, whose prophecies  No man denies, seeing black insurrections,  Treacheries, and wars are told by him. When Caesar died, the great sun pitied Rome,  So veiling his bright head, the godless time  Trembled in fear of everlasting night; And then were portents given of earth and ocean,  Vile dogs upon the roads, and hideous  Strange birds, and Aetna quaking, and her fires  Bursting to overflow the Cyclops’ fields With flames whirled in the air and melted stones.  Thunder of war was heard in Germany  From south to north, shaking the granite Alps;  And a voice also through the silent groves Piercing; and apparitions wondrous pale  Were seen in dead of night. Then cattle spoke (O horror!), streams stood still, the earth cracked open  And tears sprang even from the temple bronze.  The Po, monarch of rivers, on his back  Spuming whole forests, raced through the lowland plains And bore off pens and herds; and then continually  The viscera of beasts were thick with evil, Blood trickled from the springs; tall towns at night  Re-echoed to the wolf-pack’s shivering howl;  And never from pure heaven have there fallen  So many fires, nor baleful comets burned.  It seemed that once again the Roman lines,  Alike in arms, would fight at Philippi; And heaven permitted those Thessalian fields  To be enriched again with blood of ours.  Some future day, perhaps, in that country,  A farmer with his plow will turn the ground,  And find the javelins eaten thin with rust,  Or knock the empty helmets with his mattock  And wonder, digging up those ancient bones. Paternal gods! Ancestors! Mother Vesta!  You that guard Tiber and the Palatine!  Now that long century is overthrown, Let not this young man fail to give us peace!  Long enough beneath your rule, O Caesar,  Heaven has hated us and all those triumphs  Where justice was thrown down—so many wars,  So many kinds of wickedness! No honor Rendered the plow, but the fields gone to ruin,  The country-folk made homeless, and their scythes  Beaten to straight swords on the blowing forge!  War from the Euphrates to Germany; Ruptured engagements, violence of nations, And impious Mars raging the whole world over— As when a four horsed chariot rears away  Plunging from the barrier, and runs wild,  Heedless of the reins or the charioteer. Terrorizers of themselves, laughers in  Language and priests of any mystery—  Not by authority.  What of the revered Historian, the painstaking public man? His dusty briefcase worn to a splitting bulge,  The scholar descending from the library  Smiles at the doves, and at the glowing grass.  Letters gone frail and yellow in their strings  Spill fuzz and dust from the stuck folds: It might be inferred from what the ambassador  Wrote to his daughter in Virginia That others were privy to the situation.  These judges are gentle and well-cultivated  Honorable stylists, penetrating men, Mirrors of duplicity and bewilderment,  Mirrors of magnificent deep-rooted structural  Policy and implacable miscarriage. The documents are all photostated, the files  Arranged. Let humane logic Guide them in the wilderness of the State.  The pallid husbandman grunts at his fields, Sells his new lambs in the damp of March,  Thumbs the slick catalogue of the mail order  House for ginghams for the girls of summer;  Chews with the county agent at the gate.  He will be ruddy as the sun goes over,  The clouds go over, the tractor shudders on  Through the high fields. The piling west will grow  Fractious with lightning, the wild branches bend,  Curtains blow out like goodbye handkerchiefs  Hilarious in the gloomy wind. Autumn  Comes with marriages to the aging house,  Winter comes with comforts and old death.  Still the farmer’s dull hand holds the seed;  The low star glimmers on the dewy sill.
I. I came then to the city of my brethren.  Not Carthage, not Alexandria, not London. The wide blue river cutting through the stone  Arrowy and cool lay down beside her,  And the hazy and shining sea lay in the offing. Ferries, pouring the foam before them, sliding  Into her groaning timbers, rang and rang;  And the chains tumbled taut in the winches. Upstream the matted tugs in the heavy water,  Their soiling smoke unwrapped by the salt wind,  Footed with snowy trampling and snowy sound. On tethers, pointing the way of the tide, The crusted freighters swung with their sides gushing. On evening’s ship pointing northward,  A golden sailor at sunset stood at the bow,  As aloft in the strands a tramcar with tiny clanging Slowly soared over, far upward and humming still.II. Not Athens, Alexandria, Vienna or London. And evening vast and clean above the city  Washed the high storeys with sea-light, with a silken Sky-tint on the planes and the embrasures: The clump of crags and glitter sinking eastward  With the slow world, the shadow-lipping shores,  Pale after-conflagration of the air. On terraces, by windows of tiredness, The eyes dropped from that glow to the dusk atremble, Alive with its moving atomic monotone: There the hot taxis at the pounding corner  Fitted their glossy flanks and shifted, waiting,  And the girls went by with wavering tall walking, Their combed heads nodding in the evening: The hour of shops closing, the cocktail hour,  Lighting desire and cigarettes and lighting  The strange lamps on the streaming avenue.
No but come closer. Come a little  Closer. Let the wall-eyed hornyhanded  Panhandler hit you for a dime Sir and shiver. Snow like this Drives its pelting shadows over Bremen,  Over sad Louvain and the eastern  Marshes, the black wold. It sighs Into the cold sea of the north, That vast contemptuous revery between  Antiquity and you. Turn up your collar,  Pull your hatbrim down. Commune  Briefly with your ignorant heart For those bewildered raging children  Europe surrenders her old gentry to. All their eyes turn in the night from  Your fretfulness and forgetfulness,  Your talk; they turn away, friend. Their eyes dilated with dreams of power  Fix on the image of the mob wet  With blood scaling the gates of order.  Anarchist and incendiary Caesar bind that brotherhood To use and crush the civil guard,  Debauch the debauché, level Tenement and court with soaring  Sideslipping squadrons and hard regiments,  Stripped for the smoking levée of the  Howitzer, thunderstruck under the net. The great mouth of hunger closes On swineherd and princess, on the air  Of jongleur and forest bell; Grendel  Swims from the foul deep again.  Deputy, cartelist, academician Question in haste any plumeless captain  Before the peremptory descent  Of mankind, flattered and proud.  With whitening morning on the waste  You may discern through binoculars  A long line of the shawled and frozen,  Moving yet motionless, as if those  Were populations whom the sun failed  And the malicious moon enchanted  To wander and be still forever  The prey of wolves and bestial mazes.
The rake is like a wand or fan,  With bamboo springing in a span  To catch the leaves that I amass  In bushels on the evening grass. I reckon how the wind behaves  And rake them lightly into waves  And rake the waves upon a pile,  Then stop my raking for a while. The sun is down, the air is blue,  And soon the fingers will be, too,  But there are children to appease  With ducking in those leafy seas. So loudly rummaging their bed On the dry billows of the dead, They are not warned at four and three  Of natural mortality. Before their supper they require  A dragon field of yellow fire To light and toast them in the gloom.  So much for old earth’s ashen doom.
“The experience of truth is indispensible for the experience of beauty and the sense of beauty is guided by a leap in the dark.” Arthur Koestler I. Stoplights edged the licorice street with ribbon, neon embroidering wet sidewalks. She turned into the driveway and leaped in the dark. A blackbird perched on the bouncing twig of a maple, heard her whisper, “Stranger, lover, the lost days are over. While I walk from car to door, something inward opens like four o’clocks in rain. Earth, cold from autumn, pulls me. I can’t breathe the same with dirt for marrow and mist for skin, blurring my vision, my vision’s separate self. I stand drunk in this glitter, under the sky’s grey shelter. The city maple, not half so bitter, hurls itself in two directions, until both tips darken and disappear, as I darken my reflection in the smoking mirror of my home. How faint the sound of dry leaves, like the clattering keys of another morning, another world.”  II. She looked out the window at some inward greying door. The maple held her glance, made ground fog from her cigarette. Beyond uneven stairs, children screamed, gunned each other down. Then she sealed her nimble dreams with water from a murky bay. “For him I map this galaxy of dust that turns without an answer. When it rains, I remember his face in the corridor of a past apartment and trace the anguish around his mouth, his wrinkled forehead, unguarded eyes, the foreign fruit of an intricate sadness. With the grace that remains, I catch a glint around a door I cannot enter. The clock echoes in dishtowels; I search love’s center and bang pans against the rubble of my day, the lucid grandeur of wet ground, the strangeness of a fatal sun that makes us mark on the margin of our loss, trust in the gossamer of touch, trust in the late-plowed field.”  III. When the sun opened clouds and walked into her mongrel soul, she chopped celery into rocky remnants of the sea, and heard fat sing up bread, a better dying. The magnet in each seed of the green pepper kept her flying, floating toward memories that throb like clustered stars: the dark water laughter of ducks, a tangle of November oaks, toward sudden music on a wheel of brilliant dust where like a moon she must leap back and forth from emptiness. “I remember the moon shimmering loss and discovery along a water edge, and skirting a slice of carrot, I welcome eternity in that sad eye of autumn. Rare and real, I dance while vegetables sing in pairs. I hug my death, my chorus of years, and search and stretch and leap, for I will be apprentice to the blood in spite of the mood of a world that keeps rusting, rusting the wild throats of birds.”  IV. In lamplight she saw the smoke of another’s dream: her daughter walk woods where snow weighs down pine, her son cry on a bridge that ends in deep-rooted dark, her man, stalled on a lonely road, realize his torque was alcohol and hatred. “Hungry for silence, I listen to wind, to the sound of water running down mountain, my own raw breath. Between the sounds, a seaborn god plays his reed in the caverns of my being. I wear his amethyst, let go my dreams: Millars, Lacewings, and Junebugs scatter, widen and batter the dark, brightening this loud dust with the fever of their eyes. Oh crazy itch that grabs us beyond loss and lets us forgive, so that we can answer birds and deer, lightning and rain, shadow and hurricane. Truth waits in the creek, cutting the winter brown hills. It sings with needles of ice, sings because of its scar.”
House of five fires, you never raised me. Those nights when the throat of the furnace wheezed and rattled its regular death, I wanted your wide door, your mottled air of bark and working sunlight, wanted your smokehole with its stars, and your roof curving its singing mouth above me. Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers, and their low laughter measured harmony or strife. Here I could wake amazed at winter, my breath in the draft a chain of violets. The house I left as a child now seems a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder banging at the back door. My eyes burn from cat urine under the basement stairs and the hall reveals a nameless hunger, as if without a history, I should always walk the cluttered streets of this hapless continent. Thinking it best I be wanderer, I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag, every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name, shaking in a solitary landscape, like the last burnt leaf on an oak. What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting? House of five fires, they take you for a tomb, but I know better. When desolation comes, I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine and melt into crow call, reminding my children that spiders near your door joined all the reddening blades of grass without oil, hasp or uranium.
“It isn’t a game for girls,” he said, grabbing a fifth with his right hand, the wind with his left. “For six days I raced Jack Daniels. He cheated, told jokes. Some weren’t even funny. That’s how come he won. It took a long time to reach this Yellow River. I’m not yet thirty, or is it thirty-one? Figured all my years carried the same hard thaw. Out here, houselights hid deep inside the trees. For awhile I believed this road cut across to Spring Creek and I was trucking home. I could kid you now, say I ran it clean, gasping on one lung, loaded by a knapsack of distrust and hesitation. I never got the tone in all the talk of cure. I sang Honor Songs, crawled the railroad bridge to Canada. Dizzy from the ties, I hung between both worlds. Clans of blackbirds circled the nearby maple trees. The dark heart of me said no days more than these. As sundown kindled the sumacs, stunned by the river’s smile, I had no need for heat, no need to feel ashamed. Inside me then the sound of burning leaves. Tell them I tumbled through a gap on the horizon. No, say I stumbled through a hummock and fell in a pit of stars. When rain weakened my stride, I heard them singing in a burl of white ash, took a few more days to rave at them in this wood. Then their appaloosas nickered in the dawn and they came riding down a close ravine. Though the bottle was empty, I still hung on. Foxtails beat the grimace from my brow until I took off my pain like a pair of old boots. I became a hollow horn filled with rain, reflecting everything. The wind in my hand burned cold as hoarfrost when my grandfather nudged me and called out my Lakota name.”  In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson
They are a gift I have wanted again. Wanted: One moment in mountains when winter got so cold the oil froze before it could burn. I chopped ferns of hoarfrost from all the windows and peered up at pines, a wedding cake by a baker gone mad. Swirls by the thousand shimmered above me until a cloud lumbered over a ridge, bringing the heavier white of more flurries. I believed, I believed, I believed it would last, that when you went out to test the black ice or to dig out a Volkswagon filled with rich women, you’d return and we’d sputter like oil, match after match, warm in the making. Wisconsin’s flat farmland never approved: I hid in cornfields far into October, listening to music that whirled from my thumbprint. When sunset played havoc with bright leaves of alders, I never mentioned longing or fear. I crouched like a good refugee in brown creeks and forgot why Autumn is harder than Spring. But snug on the western slope of that mountain I’d accept every terror, break open seals to release love’s headwaters to unhurried sunlight. Weren’t we Big Hearts? Through some trick of silver we held one another, believing each motion the real one, ah, lover, why were dark sources bundled up in our eyes? Each owned an agate, marbled with anguish, a heart or its echo, we hardly knew. Lips touching lips, did that break my horizon as much as those horses broke my belief? You drove off and I walked the old road, scolding the doubles that wanted so much. The chestnut mare whinnied a cloud into scrub pine. In a windless corner of a corral, four horses fit like puzzle pieces. Their dark eyes and lashes defined by the white. The colt kicked his hind, loped from the fence. The mares and a stallion galloped behind, lifting and leaping, finding each other in full accord with the earth and their bodies. No harm ever touched them once they cut loose, snorting at flurries falling again. How little our chances for feeling ourselves. They vanished so quickly—one flick of a tail. Where do their mountains and moments begin? I stood a long time in sharpening wind.
White horses, tails high, rise from the cedar. Smoke brings the fat crickets, trembling breeze. Find that holy place, a promise. Embers glow like moon air. I call you back from the grasses. Wake me when sand pipers fly. They fade, and new sounds flutter. Cattails at sunrise. Hair matted by sleep. Sun on the meadow. Grey boughs lie tangled. The ground I was born to wants me to leave. I’ve searched everywhere to tell you my eyes are with the hazels. Wind swells through fences, drones a flat ache for hours. At night, music would echo from your womanless bedroom. Far down those bleaching cliffs, roses shed a torrent. Will you brush my ear? An ice bear sometimes lumbers west. Your life still gleams, the edge melting. I never let you know. You showed me and how under snow and darkness, the grasses breathe for miles.
I scratch earth around timpsila  on this hill, while below me, hanging in still air, a hawk searches the creekbed for my brothers. Squat leaves, I’ll braid your roots into such long ropes, they’ll cover the rump of my stallion. Withered flower, feed us now buffalo rot in the waist-high grass. Hear my sisters laugh? They dream of feasts, of warriors to owl dance with them when this war is over. They don’t see our children eating treebark, cornstalks, these roots. Their eyes gleam in shallow cheeks. The wagon people do not think relationship is wealth. Sisters, last night the wind returned my prayer, allowing me to hear Dog Soldiers singing at Ash Hollow. I threw away my blanket stained with lies. Above the wings of my tipi, I heard the old woman in Maka Sica sigh for us. Then I knew the distance of High Back Bone’s death- fire from another world away. Even they may never stop its motion. Yesterday at noon, I heard my Cheyenne sister moan as she waded through deep snow before soldiers cut up her corpse to sell as souvenirs. Are my brothers here? Ghosts bring all my joy. I walk this good road between rock and sky. They dare not threaten with death one already dead.
I In the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and Son, a woman in a turquoise sweater curls up to sleep. Her right arm seeks a cold spot in the stone to release its worry and her legs stretch against the middle hinge. I want to ask her in for coffee, to tell her go sleep in the extra bed upstairs, but I’m a guest, unaccustomed to this place where homeless people drift along the square bordering Benjamin Franklin Parkway. From her portrait on the mantel, Lucretia Mott asks when will Americans see how all forms of oppression blight the possibilities of a people. The passion for preserving Independence Square should reach this nameless woman, settling in the heavy heat of August, exposed to the glare of every passerby. What makes property so private? A fence? No trespassing signs? Militia ready to die for it and taxes? Lights in the middle storeys of office buildings blaze all night above me. Newspapers don’t explain how wealth is bound to these broken people. North of here, things get really rough. Longshoremen out of work bet on eddies in the Schuylkill River. Factories collapse to weed and ruptured dream. Years ago, Longhouse sachems rode canoes to Philadelphia, entering these red brick halls. They explained how the law that kept them unified required a way to share the wealth. Inside the hearths of these same halls, such knowledge was obscured, and plans were laid to push all Indians , west. This city born of brotherly love still turns around this conflict. Deeper in the dusk, William Penn must weep from his perch on top of City Hall. Our leaders left this woman in the lurch. How can there be democracy without the means to live?II Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. I jolt awake at four a.m. to sirens screeching and choppers lugging to the hospital heliport someone who wants to breathe. The sultry heat leads me to the window. What matters? This small square of night sky and two trees bound by a wide brick wall. All around, skyscrapers are telling their stories under dwindling stars. The girders remember where Mohawk ironworkers stayed that day they sat after work on a balcony, drinking beer. Below them, a film crew caught some commercials. In another room above a mattress caught fire and someone flung it down into the frame. A woman in blue sashayed up the street while a flaming mattress, falling at the same speed as a flower, bloomed over her left shoulder. Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. The men inside mean business. They understood the scene. A mattress burning in the street and business deadlocked. Mohawks drinking beer above it all. They radioed insurrection, drew their guns, then three-stepped up the stairs. Film crews caught the scene, but it never played. The Mohawks didn’t guess a swat team had moved in. When policemen blasted off their door, the terrified men shoved a table against the splintered frame. They fought it out. One whose name meant Deer got shot again and again. They let him lie before they dragged him by his heels down four flights of stairs. At every step, he hurdled above his pain until one final leap gained him the stars. The news reported one cop broke his leg. The film’s been banished to a vault. There are no plaques. But girders whisper at night in Philadelphia. They know the boarding house, but will not say. They know as well what lasts  and what falls down.III Passing Doric colonnades of banks and walls of dark glass, passing press-the-button-visitors-please Liberty Townhouses, I turned up Broad Street near the Hershey Hotel and headed toward the doorman outside the Bellevue. Palms and chandeliers inside. A woman in mauve silk and pearls stepped into the street. I was tracking my Mohawk grandmother through time. She left a trace of her belief somewhere near Locust and Thirteenth. I didn’t see you, tall, dark, intense, with three bouquets of flowers in your hand. On Walnut and Broad, between the Union League and the Indian Campsite, you stopped me, shoving flowers toward my arm. “At least, I’m not begging,” you cried. The desperation in your voice spiraled through my feet while I fumbled the few bucks you asked for. I wanted those flowers— iris, ageratum, goldenrod and lilies— because in desperation you thought of beauty. I recognized the truth and human love you acted on, your despair echoing my own. Forgive me. I should have bought more of those Philadelphia flowers, passed hand to hand so quickly, I was stunned a block away. You had to keep your pride, as I have done, selling these bouquets of poems to anyone who’ll take them. After our exchange, grandmother’s tracks grew clearer. I returned for days, but you were never there. If you see her — small, dark, intense, with a bun of black hair and the gaze of an orphan, leave a petal in my path. Then I’ll know I can go on.IV Some days you get angry enough to question. There’s a plan out east with a multitude of charts and diagrams. They planned to take the timber, the good soil. Even now, they demolish mountains. Next they’ll want the water and the air. I tell you they’re planning to leave our reservations bare of life. They plan to dump their toxic wastes on our grandchildren. No one wants to say how hard they’ve worked a hundred years. What of you, learning how this continent’s getting angry? Do you consider what’s in store for you?
—for Melissa L. Whiteman “Hi, guy,” said I to a robin perched on a pole in the middle of the garden. Pink and yellow firecracker zinnias, rough green leaves of broccoli, and deep red tomatoes on dying stems frame his still presence. “I’ve heard you’re not THE REAL ROBIN. Bird watchers have agreed,” I said. “THE REAL ROBIN lives in England. They claim your are misnamed and that we ought to call you ‘a red-breasted thrush’ because you are indigenous.” He fluffed up. “Am I notJis ko ko?” he cried, “that persistent warrior who carries warmth northward every spring?” He seemed so young, his red belly a bit light and his wings, still faded brown. He watched me untangling the hose to water squash. “Look who’s talking!” he chirruped. “Your people didn’t come from Europe or even India. The turtles say you’re a relative to red clay on this great island.” Drops of crystal water sparkled on the squash. “Indigenous!” he teased as he flew by.
I What is the flesh and blood compounded of  But a few moments in the life of time?  This prowling of the cells, litigious love,  Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.  Consider the first settlers of our bone,  Observe how busily they sued the dust,  Estopped forever by the last dusted stone.  It is a pity that two brothers must Perceive a canker of perennial flower  To make them brothers in mortality:  Perfect this treason to the murderous hour  If you would win the hard identity Of brothers—a long race for men to run Nor quite achieved when the perfection’s won.II Near to me as perfection in the blood And more mysterious far, is this, my brother: A light vaulted into your solitude. It studied burns lest you its rage should smother.  It is a flame obscure to any eyes, Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave  (The cold grave is the deepest of our lies)  To which our blood is the indentured slave:  The fire that burns most secretly in you  Does not expend you hidden and alone, The studious fire consumes not one, but two— Me also, marrowing the self-same bone.  Our property in fire is death in life Flawing the rocky fundament with strife.III Then, brother, you would never think me vain  Or rude, if I should mention dignity;  Think little of it. Dignity’s the stain Of mortal sin that knows humility. Let me design the hour when you were born  Since, if that’s vain, it’s only childlike so:  Like an attempting frost on April corn  Considerate death would hardly let you go. Reckon the cost—if you would validate  Once more our slavery to circumstance  Not by contempt of a prescriptive fate But in your bearing towards an hour of chance.  It is a part so humble and so proud  You’ll think but little of it in your shroud.IV The times have changed. Why do you make a fuss  For privilege when there’s no law of form?  Who of our kin was pusillanimous, A fine bull galloping into a storm? Why, none; unless you count it arrogance  To cultivate humility in pride, To look but casually and half-askance On boots and spurs that went a devil’s ride.  There was, remember, a Virginian Who took himself to be brute nature’s law,  Cared little what men thought him, a tall man  Who meditated calmly what he saw  Until he freed his Negroes, lest he be  Too strict with nature and than they less free.V Our elder brother whom we had not seen These twenty years until you brought him back  From the cyclonic West, where he had been  Sent by the shaking fury in the track  We know so well, wound in these arteries:  You, other brother, I have become strange  To you, and you must study ways to seize  Mortality, that knows how to derange  Corpuscles for designs that it may choose;  Your blood is altered by the sudden death  Of one who of all persons could not use  Life half so well as death. Let’s look beneath  That life. Perhaps hers only is our rest— To study this, all lifetime may be best.VI The fire I praise was once perduring flame— Till it snuffs with our generation out; No matter, it’s all one, it’s but a name  Not as late honeysuckle half so stout; So think upon it how the fire burns blue,  Its hottest, when the flame is all but spent;  Thank God the fuel is low, we’ll not renew  That length of flame into our firmament;  Think too the rooftree crackles and will fall  On us, who saw the sacred fury’s height— Seated in her tall chair, with the black shawl  From head to foot, burning with motherly light  More spectral than November dusk could mix  With sunset, to blaze on her pale crucifix.VII This message hastens lest we both go down  Scattered, with no character, to death;  Death is untutored, with an ignorant frown  For precious identities of breath.  But you perhaps will say confusion stood,  A vulture, near the heart of all our kin:  I’ve heard the echoes in a dark tangled wood  Yet never saw I a face peering within.  These evils being anonymities, We fulminate, in exile from the earth, Aged exclusions of blood memories— Those superstitions of explosive birth;  Until there’ll be of us not anything But foolish death, who is confusion’s king.VIII Not power nor the casual hand of God Shall keep us whole in our dissevering air,  It is a stink upon this pleasant sod So foul, the hovering buzzard sees it fair;  I ask you will it end therefore tonight  And the moth tease again the windy flame, Or spiders, eating their loves, hide in the night  At last, drowsy with self-devouring shame?  Call it the house of Atreus where we live— Which one of us the Greek perplexed with crime  Questions the future: bring that lucid sieve  To strain the appointed particles of time!  Whether by Corinth or by Thebes we go  The way is brief, but the fixed doom, not so.IX Captains of industry, your aimless power  Awakens harsh velleities of time:  Let you, brother, captaining your hour Be zealous that your numbers are all prime,  Lest false division with sly mathematic  Plunder the inner mansion of the blood, The Thracian, swollen with pride, besiege the Attic— Invader foraging the sacred wood: Yet the prime secret whose simplicity  Your towering engine hammers to reduce,  Though driven, holds that bulwark of the sea  Which breached will turn unspeaking fury loose  To drown out him who swears to rectify  Infinity, that has nor ear nor eye.
came in an envelope with no return address; she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace. She was standing before a monumental house— on the scale you see in certain English films: urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far too vast for any home. She was not of that place, for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair, and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from an oversize chain around her neck, that looked as if some tall adult had taken it from his, and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe from a world of infinite harm that soon would take him far from her, and leave her standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing without expression into distance, away from the grandeur of that house, its gravel walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket full of flames, but whether fire or flowers with crimson petals shading toward a central gold, was hard to say—though certainly, it burned, and the light within it had nowhere else to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red and burning glow, the only color in the scene. The rest was done in grays, light and shadow as they played along her dress, across her face, and through her midnight hair, lively with bees. At first they seemed just errant bits of shade, until the humming grew too loud to be denied as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed in a country dance between the fields of sun and the black tangle of her hair.  Without warning a window on one of the upper floors flew open— wind had caught the casement, a silken length of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees began to stream out from her hair, straight to the single opening in the high facade. Inside, a moment later—the sound of screams. The girl—who had through all of this seemed unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up. She shook her head, her mane of hair freed of its burden of bees, and walked away, out of the picture frame, far beyond the confines of the envelope that brought her image here—here, where the days grow longer now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to fear among us, and the bees swarm.
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn.
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.
For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no— drags him down all his life.
On a branch floating downriver a cricket, singing.
Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate, Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes. This could be our last winter, it could be many More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks: Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines And forget about hope. Time goes running, even As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.
You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within. There you will find the clear mirror already waiting.
O my Lord, the stars glitter and the eyes of men are closed. Kings have locked their doors and each lover is alone with his love. Here, I am alone with You.
In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.
The great sea frees me, moves me, as a strong river carries a weed. Earth and her strong winds move me, take me away, and my soul is swept up in joy.
To lie back under the tallest oldest trees. How far the stems rise, rise  before ribs of shelter  open! To live in the mercy of God. The complete sentence too adequate, has no give. Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of stony wood beneath lenient moss bed. And awe suddenly passing beyond itself. Becomes a form of comfort.  Becomes the steady air you glide on, arms stretched like the wings of flying foxes. To hear the multiple silence of trees, the rainy forest depths of their listening. To float, upheld,  as salt water  would hold you,  once you dared.    . To live in the mercy of God. To feel vibrate the enraptured waterfall flinging itself unabating down and down  to clenched fists of rock. Swiftness of plunge, hour after year after century,  O or Ah uninterrupted, voice many-stranded.  To breathe spray. The smoke of it.  Arcs of steelwhite foam, glissades of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion— rage or joy?  Thus, not mild, not temperate, God’s love for the world. Vast flood of mercy  flung on resistance.
The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
Popped from the womb, he began gathering property extorted from his wet nurses by threatening to turn blue in the face and die. Everyone gave in. His mother dressed him in guava-colored lace crinolines his father obligingly retired to the Côte d’Azur siblings were disposed of by the Beast of the Bassinet. Coextensive with the world, his hands become The Hands, his mouth The Mouth, his dingus The Dingus.Absolute power corrupts absolutely said Lord Acton. Absolute corruption set in: a foot revolted and proclaimed democracy and universal male suffrage the hairs of his armpit began drinking heavily and all over his body an asexual budding produced nodes of himself, his genetic encumberment replicated and replicated, an oblique hysteria. The absolute corruption of self is community. The absolute corruption of the mouth is to taste its tongue over and over, to be continually filled.
Aiee! It is the ceremony of the first blades of winter. Horticulture, horticulture, the little steam train says puffing up the mountainside. As if he had never known a home of his own, only ditches. Three stomps with a stone stump and the colloquium started. Beggars under the drainpipe, another hand’s cast of the bone dice. Whatever name the event has, it can be understood as an invitation. Epilepsy, epilepsy, the little steam train said, descending at evening. They bowed so low that their wigs tangled and I had to laugh.
Aunt Mildred tied up her petticoats with binder’s twine, and my great-uncle Ezekiel waxed and waxed his moustaches into flexibility. It was the whole family off then into the dangerous continent of air and while the salesman with the one gold eyetooth told us the cords at our ankles were guaranteed to stretch to their utmost and then bring us safely back to the fried chicken and scalloped potatoes of Sunday dinner nobody quite believed. Edwina, my father’s half sister by my grandfather’s marriage to a former dance hall girl, who got her doctorate in tensor evaluation, she said whole galaxies have been known to belch and disappear taking with them the King Charles spaniels and the gold- plated fire hydrants from where the fire finally stopped in the earthquake year. But it was no good growing roots into the vegetable garden, not after the Monarch butterflies flew up into one whirling vortex and blanked out of immediate space, it was no good hoping Ken and Barbie, sexless, would anchor us to our interchangeable faces, or that our feet those flat independent anemones, could grip forever. The salesman smiled, with his face the size of the Empire State and growing bigger and bigger and into and through the face Aunt Mildred went shouting “Banzai!” into Great-Uncle Ezekiel’s inherited ear trumpet, shredding it to tin ribbons, and Edwina, dressed in the full commencement robes of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Mother and Father wrapped in each other’s reminiscences, and the goldfish, and finally I went too, out of the mold my body had been formed in and inhabited, as if place were the only realization of person and either the cords snapped, as any sceptic might have expected, or they are stretched out finer than a human hair, that keeps growing after death, even in the black melting that may or may not be the tight coral beach beyond.
Dora’s gone to Ireland Through the sleet and snow; Promptly she has gone there In a ship, although Why she’s gone to Ireland Dora does not know. That was where, yea, Ireland, Dora wished to be: When she felt, in lone times, Shoots of misery, Often there, in Ireland, Dora wished to be. Hence she’s gone to Ireland, Since she meant to go, Through the drift and darkness Onward labouring, though That she’s gone to Ireland Dora does not know.
Where I live distance is the primal fact The world is mostly far away and small Drifting along through cause and effect like sleep As when the distance unlikeliest of stems Bears the unlikely blossom of the wind Engendering our only weather dry Except in winter pine trees live on snow So greedy pulling down these drifts that bury The fences snap the trunks of smaller trees If the forest wants to go somewhere it spreads Like a prophecy its snow before it Technology a distant windy cause There is no philosophy of death where I live Only philosophies of suffering
This is my advice to foreigners:  call it simply—the river; never say old muddy or even Missouri, and except when it is necessary  ignore the fact that it moves.  It is the river, a singular, stationary figure of division. Do not allow the pre-Socratic  to enter your mind except when thinking of clear water trout  streams in north central Wyoming.  The river is a variety of land,  a kind of dark sea or great bay,  sea of greater ocean. At times I find it good discipline  to think of it as a tree rooted in the delta, a snake on its topmost western branch.  These hills are not containers;  they give no vantage but that  looking out is an act of transit.  We are not confused, we do not lose our place.
(after Ehrich Weiss) I Geography matters. It is the plan, the arrangement of things that confuses our enemies, the difference between what they expect and what they get; as simple as bobbing for apples becomes difficult, deception is an achievement in ordering the obvious.II Let us make a song for our confusion: Call it “Red Skies over Gary” or “Red Skies in the Sunset” or “Red Skies and the Open Hearth.”  Red Skies over Gary,  you are my sunset,  my only home. Let us make ourselves invisible, not make songs, or even disappear suddenly from the sidewalks of Calumet.III Cobalt and carborundum are refinements of the art. So it’s true, you held the razor in your teeth, or was it pure magic, a miracle of place? One makes for workability, the other for hardness, and chromium bright, the stainless achievement.IV I came from Calumet to Gary, and it was early evening; south of the mills, poppy fields toxic red above the car lots, have a Coke on Texaco ’til the mercury arcs devour us and it is purple night.
It is easily forgotten, year to year, exactly where the plot is, though the place is entirely familiar— a willow tree by a curving roadway sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves; damp grass strewn with flower boxes, canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies circling in draped black crepe family stones, fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries; such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair brushed back, and the single waterfaucet, birdlike upon its grey pipe stem, a stream opening at its foot. We know the stories that are told, by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy regarding the precise enactments of their own gesturing. And among the women there will be a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering. The morning may be brilliant; the season is one of brilliances—sunlight through the fountained willow behind us, its splayed shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward, irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones. It may be that since our walk there is faltering, moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain, bluebells and zebragrass toward that place between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way is lost, that we have no practiced step there, and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us.
for Anselm Hollo I what is most valued, the cherished things any moment in Iowa settles so carelessly upon you—cat stickers, a coded signal Home Orange Juice is trucking by, some morning or any day when winter spring summer and the poem begin againII who was it started laughing? someone otherwise somber, the Christmas lariateer spinning double circles, dancing through the lasso at his side, bullwhipping cigarettes from his lovely assistant’s scarlet mouth every hour on the hour next to the howling Santa ClausIII would have thought other- wise, conceded the point at first argument; of course there were mornings, the hills went on to Cedar Rapids and Davenport; in its own season the corn’s pollen stung another hand; brown rivers paled with ice; those were the truck washes we had known before, the spit of gravel from the humming wheels; the patient customer of truck stops knows the best of these returns, hulks them into the dark of his coffee with rounded shoulders and extended forearmsIV it is the line of force or the vector that sees us through our ambiguities, diagram of rivers, path the semi takes among its various winds, turn the night makes at a neon sign, EATS, locus of all points on the lasso’s rim, itself remembered; somehow each of us knows the double twist of brittle fiber that holds the line together, knows the turns the rain takes, heaves the long land rests against our feet
I “At odds again,”  hands moving out  of the shadows.  And now, now  everything seems  definite, discrete,  fingers webbed  with sunlight the tree lets through,  arms still in their  own time, circling,  catch up, catch  hold at the wrists,  like cell chains  in a watchcrystal  completing themselves.  Together again.  Shoulders, torso,  each one of us one,  once more. It is  hard to imagine  minutes just past. II “At odds again,”  hands moving against  the wind like loose  flapping things,  washcloths, words  long frayed with  careless use. You  wanted to say  it was beginning  to bother you,  beginning to wish,  wondering if thought  in broken light  could ever touch  itself, reassemble  itself. The King,  our promise, broken,  the sword we imagined  gone, hovers like  leafmold in the light.  Say it, then, the stain  of things remains. III “At odds again,” elbow cupped into  wet leaves. After  love, there are  moments of clutter,  and no amount of  practice will teach  you to regard them  as anything more  than what you lean  against catching  its buried chill. Keep your fancy  to yourself; facts  do not fade but are  momentarily obscured,  the work of hands,  touch and its out- come, the absence  of touch, and distance,  the inevitable space  between, shapes all  our limitations. IV “At odds again,”  knee raised slightly,  sunlight and shade,  patchwork coverlet.  Bits and pieces,  the story of each  thing connected, end  to end, this instant  extended in every  direction. Not a  thing in space or  things in spaces or  spaces between what  space seems occupied for this moment, the next.  We are not snowstorms  of ourselves, spindrift  and curl. The whorl  of action is a template  in time: the casual  shifting of leaves,  hands moving, the certain  flex of possibility.
As others or ourselves let’s say—furtive, then, inconsequent and sad— or on the edge of thought, perhaps, or into some predictable meandering, the outward accelerations of water against its shore dissipating into erosions, cuts and counter-cuts, remembered as landscape, the convenient certainties of an abandoned past. Is it tree or treeline or the massing of leaves against the sky or color freed from shadow or something of color deepening against shade, the sensible bluff that heaves above the bluff’s presumed insensible marl? River, again, always enclosed by its own turnings, its own turnings overgrown.
(after Albert Cook) All day, that is forever, they fall, leaves, pine needles, as blindly as hours into hours colliding, and the chill rain—what else do you expect of October?— spilling from one roof to another, like words from lips to lips, your long incertain say in all of this unsure of where the camera is and how the light is placed and what it is that’s ending.
Two girls discover  the secret of life  in a sudden line of  poetry. I who don’t know the  secret wrote  the line. They  told me (through a third person)  they had found it but not what it was  not even what line it was. No doubt  by now, more than a week  later, they have forgotten  the secret, the line, the name of  the poem. I love them  for finding what  I can’t find, and for loving me  for the line I wrote,  and for forgetting it  so that a thousand times, till death  finds them, they may  discover it again, in other  lines in other  happenings. And for  wanting to know it,  for assuming there is  such a secret, yes,  for that  most of all.
Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. I ought to start with praise, but praise comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you about the woman whom I taught, in bed, this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes. Do you? And after love, when I was hungry, I said, Make me something to eat. She yelled,Poof! You’re a casserole!—and laughed so hard she fell out of the bed. Take care of her. Next, confession—the dreary part. At night deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, of course, they’re beautiful. But why? What makes them beautiful? I haven’t shot one yet. I might. When I was twelve, I’d ride my bike out to the dump and shoot the rats. It’s hard to kill your rats, our Father. You have to use a hollow point and hit them solidly. A leg is not enough. The rat won’t pause.Yeep! Yeep! it screams, and scrabbles, three-legged, back into the trash, and I would feel a little bad to kill something that wants to live more savagely than I do, even if it’s just a rat. My garden’s vanishing. Perhaps I’ll merely plant more beans, though that might mean more beautiful and hungry deer. Who knows?  I’m sorry for the times I’ve driven home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge. Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave about to break and sweep across the valley, and in my loneliness and fear I’ve thought,O let it come and wash the whole world clean. Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair— whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer. Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees, that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health, food, air, some laughs, and all the other things I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do without. I have confused myself. I’m glad there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer. While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept when I saw one elephant insert his trunk into another’s ass, pull out a lump, and whip it back and forth impatiently to free the goodies hidden in the lump. I could have let it mean most anything, but I was stunned again at just how little we ask for in our lives. Don’t look! Don’t look! Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling schoolkids away. Line up, they called. Let’s go and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.
I like to think about the monastery as I’m falling asleep, so that it comes and goes in my mind like a screen saver. I conjure the lake of the zendo, rows of dark boats still unless someone coughs or otherwise ripples the calm. I can hear the four AM slipperiness of sleeping bags as people turn over in their bunks. The ancient bells. When I was first falling in love with Zen, I burned incense called Kyonishiki, “Kyoto Autumn Leaves,” made by the Shoyeido Incense Company, Kyoto, Japan. To me it smelled like earnestness and ether, and I tried to imagine a consciousness ignorant of me. I just now lit a stick of it. I had to run downstairs for some rice to hold it upright in its bowl, which had been empty for a while, a raku bowl with two fingerprints in the clay. It calls up the monastery gate, the massive door demanding I recommit myself in the moments of both its opening and its closing, its weight now mine, I wanted to know what I was, and thought I could find the truth where the floor hurts the knee. I understand no one I consider to be religious. I have no idea what’s meant when someone says they’ve been intimate with a higher power. I seem to have been born without a god receptor. I have fervor but seem to lack even the basic instincts of the many seekers, mostly men, I knew in the monastery, sitting zazen all night, wearing their robes to near-rags boy-stitched back together with unmatched thread, smoothed over their laps and tucked under, unmoving in the long silence, the field of grain ripening, heavy tasseled, field of sentient beings turned toward candles, flowers, the Buddha gleaming like a vivid little sports car from his niche. What is the mind that precedes any sense we could possibly have of ourselves, the mind of self-ignorance? I thought that the divestiture of self could be likened to the divestiture of words, but I was wrong. It’s not the same work. One’s a transparency and one’s an emptiness.Kyonishiki.... Today I’m painting what Mom calls no-colors, grays and browns, evergreens: what’s left of the woods when autumn’s come and gone. And though he died, Dad’s here, still forgetting he’s no longer married to Annie, that his own mother is dead, that he no longer owns a car. I told them not to make any trouble or I’d send them both home. Surprise half inch of snow. What good are words? And what about birches in moonlight, Russell handing me the year’s first chanterelle— Shouldn’t God feel like that? I aspire to “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,” as Elizabeth Bishop put it. So who shall I say I am? I’m a prism, an expressive temporary sentience, a pinecone falling. I can hear my teacher saying, No. That misses it.
A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest) since I last noticed this same commotion. Who knew God was an abstract expressionist? I’m asking myself—the very question I asked last year, staring out at this array of racing colors, then set in motion by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay. Is this what people mean by speed of light? My usually levelheaded mulberry tree hurling arrows everywhere in sight— its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper my friends say I should do something about, whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper at the provocation of the upstart blue, the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper in savage competition with that red and blue— tohubohu returned, in living color. Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you? My attempted poem would lie fallow a year; I was so busy focusing on the desert’s stinginess with everything but rumor. No place even for the spectrum’s introverts— rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all— and certainly no room for shameless braggarts like the ones that barge in here every fall and make me feel like an unredeemed failure even more emphatically than usual. And here they are again, their fleet allure still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone; I’m through with it, want something fuller— why shouldn’t a person have a little fun, some utterly unnecessary extravagance? Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan when He set up (such things are never left to chance) that one split-second assignation with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision. You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there. Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation, there’s real resistance in the nearby air until the entire universe is swayed. Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen. He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade is actually a fairly detailed outline. David never needed one, but he’s long dead and God could use a little recognition. He promises. It won’t go to His head and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm! Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made. But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him, its palms and fingers crimson with applause, that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem, inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws, I came to talk about the way that violet-blue sprang the greens and reds and yellows into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true though I’m not sure I ever took it in. Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew into my field of vision, to realign that dazzle out my window yet again. It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open though I still wouldn’t be able to explain precisely what happened to these vines, these trees. It isn’t available in my tradition. For this, I would have to be Chinese, Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain, autumn rain converging on the trees, a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine, washerwomen heading home for the day, my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready. Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu! Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun!
I went by the Druid stone   That broods in the garden white and lone,  And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   That at some moments fall thereon  From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   And they shaped in my imagining To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   Threw there when she was gardening.  I thought her behind my back,  Yea, her I long had learned to lack, And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,   Though how do you get into this old track?’   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   As a sad response; and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover  That there was nothing in my belief.  Yet I wanted to look and see  That nobody stood at the back of me; But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision   A shape which, somehow, there may be.’   So I went on softly from the glade,  And left her behind me throwing her shade,  As she were indeed an apparition—  My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them. These are the poems of a man  who would leave his wife and child because  they made noise in his study. These are the poems  of a man who would murder his mother to claim  the inheritance. These are the poems of a man  like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not  comprehend but which nevertheless offended me. These are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women,  she said. These are the poems of a man with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s  hands, woven of water and logic and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These  poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant  as elm leaves, which if they love love only  the wide blue sky and the air and the idea of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,  and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.  These poems, she said....  You are, he said, beautiful.  That is not love, she said rightly.
Lying asleep walking Last night I met my father Who seemed pleased to see me. He wanted to speak. I saw His mouth saying something But the dream had no sound. We were surrounded by Laid-up paddle steamers In The Old Quay in Greenock. I smelt the tar and the ropes. It seemed that I was standing Beside the big iron cannon The tugs used to tie up to When I was a boy. I turned To see Dad standing just Across the causeway under That one lamp they keep on. He recognised me immediately. I could see that. He was The handsome, same age With his good brows as when He would take me on Sundays Saying we’ll go for a walk. Dad, what am I doing here? What is it I am doing now? Are you proud of me? Going away, I knew You wanted to tell me something. You stopped and almost turned back To say something. My father, I try to be the best In you you give me always. Lying asleep turning Round in the quay-lit dark It was my father standing As real as life. I smelt The quay’s tar and the ropes. I think he wanted to speak. But the dream had no sound. I think I must have loved him.
Over the honored bones of Boston (resting,  as we say) old leaves’ bones underfoot are restless; and boys and schoolgirls  going home splash through them, reciting alphabet lately received.  They run the known, intone the unsure patterns, repeat the magic,  nearly Grecian syllables; and little winds are winding up their strident  lmno, R, S, T. She was no snowy witch, but young and turning,  a mother-dear more dear now incipiently frosty; witches most live  when she died, October; primly colonial, Mother Goose’s grave;  who did not rhyme or gather the pages vainly: what mantic abc’s  she told she dared make charming only to spell her children’s moral lives.  The children passing sing the future, certainly, but knowing nothing  (as the lore requires) and recommending nothing as they are  merely oracles spelling their letters’ lives, not telling theirs.  They have their own games not of the elder nation; certain cobwebs  accommodate the young, and special weeds; and these who chant now know  no gentle Sibylla but many seemingly answering leaves.  What there will be of signs, of sounds so flighty and so friable,  the letters as the leaves, boys and girls as letters, and of late  Boston’s honorable cinders, laid quietly and always restless:  maybe a daisy, my dears, or a white carnation, or only an  unanswerable tenderness.
You perished, in a toyland, of surprise; and only I am here to bury you in dessicated tulip tips and eyes of broken diadie-dolls. Poor pink, poor blue! Will you be grown when I’m in Heaven too? Will length of death have turned you Classical like old Bisque faces, keen and sainted view, pearl on your breast, pearl-pointed linen shawl? No, you’ll still have your flowers with no stem, and harp, clear stringed, the blur of La Boheme. You’ll heap upon that Mansion’s mantlepiece impossible plush animal creations, and pout the pillared City’s aberrations. You rest a Classic, but of Wedgewood’s Greece.
Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe,  the girl thought she had never  guessed what earthly majesty  was before then, as he strode unconcernedly  holding a vicious gander  by the horny mitts and let  the big wings batter his knees. She was also surprised  to feel a liberating  satisfaction in the coming  bloodshed, and that notwithstanding all the times she had  been beleaguered and  had fled, today she did not fear  the barnyard hubub. Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as  the pronged head skipped sideways  and the neck plumes stiffened with blood  from the cleft, she was angry; and, when the headless goose  ran to the brook and was  carried off into the woods alive,  she rejoiced, and subsequently frequented those woods  and avoided her father.  When the goose began to mend she  brought him small hominy, which was welcome though she had  to press the kernels one  by one into the pink neck that  throbbed into her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would  not spare handkerchiefs,  and stanching the spot she felt a thrill  of sympathy. But for the most part there was steady progress,  and growing vigor was  accompanied by restlessness,  and one cool day the blind thing was batted out of existence  by a motorcycle.  She had no time for tears. She ran  upstairs to miss her father’s barytone commiseration,  then out onto the fields,  and, holding an old red pinwheel,  ran ran ran ran.
They have shown her facing, from a range of barley  at times and from the patio. She wrings a sprig  of mint in a walled garden; behold, the dimple that  none reckoned on, careless burdens of plums, of parsley.  I thank those gentlemen: many an old master  is needed if there shall be love. I thank Velasquez  more: for a woman turned away may be imposed  without disparagement in a prospect of grandeur. Where this high cliff joins the deep sunlight I see you  beside me spread aside in the buoyant deer-moss;  I sit cross-legged nibbling juniper berries and I call you my Louella now, now Ella Lou. Far down from one rim is the bay with flocks of teal,  and we might look down shafts of cedar the other way;  I feel a privileged one who waits, remembering  the special pleasure of youth is of self-denial. Since Velasquez and the masters have hexed my eyes  I see you now even in this northern grandeur;  following the hip I watch the flank’s retirement and watch the nape declining from the crescent shoulder.  But where your shoulder ripples back to fill the arm  is a slight plump area, probably nameless:  in all but rarest postures that form vanishes  into wherever you withdraw inopportune breaths.  You might not wonder it is there I, stretching forward,  beseeching you be motionless, hold the wide kiss;  I wonder mightily for my part for what purpose  have I stretched a thousand miles between the two of us.
The natives here enjoy a delicate  and tense society.  Their upper classes make an art  of conversation so refined that no Caucasian ever  participates without  making at least one outrageous  faux pas. Few Europeans, in fact, can manage  even the rudiments  of this language, which consists  of vowels only, and, although several grammars have been composed  by reputable scholars,  these disagree on every major  point of syntax. The chieftains are invariably stout:  a proverb says “Fat men must  be sure; doubt and misgivings need  agility.” The special term for this is rendered as  “complacency” in all  the lexicons, but is in no wise  derogatory.
Perhaps, when we the strangers in the bar’s blue light   turn liberal, you’d claim fraternity or clan and say Detroit is turned American  by the community of appetite. There was this hurried time of fear of the last bell,   our sure prognostication it would be somber so soon to face a sky of December  that impended on the light blue snow swell, when someone turned and told of Caucasian wheat fields,   the harvest sun, a last effrontery. His father decapitates their Turkish master.  The village is invested. No one yields. Then, you may know, the last round came, and with it pride.   I swivelled round to face my own whiskey recalling anecdotes in turn of ancestral  snowfields and running wolves and fireside.
The first commotion stirred him to offend, forgivably, with friendly leaps and clutching; but soon too urgent friendliness was wrought by a new wave of guests. At last I complained to that one man that it was indecent of him to tempt the beast so, pressing his tweed knee against the furry brisket. But he smiled, and spoke with a Rhinelandish accent: Milady, your youth, as mine did me, tends you now to the younger beliefs of men, their naive symbols: cloudy animal heads to represent witless rampages of glands. Egyptian Hershef, Seth, Ra—the romance of anonymity above the neck and smooth humanity below—were gods of early hankering and youthful conscience. See how the shaggy thing turns back his ears; the straining mouth and eyes’ protuberance leave me my steady vision and clear speech and mind. The aegipans, surely the centaurs are truer concepts of the dual beast and a maturer Hellas sculpted them: potentially ironic man above and hairy vitality below the waist. No one, Milady, no lover on earth does other than what I am doing now, methodically tempting the brute, till from the dim sheath an eager lick of flame darts forth.
The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Augur and the Carpenter – Just such a retrospect Hath the perfected Life – A Past of Plank and Nail And slowness – then the scaffolds drop Affirming it a Soul –
Let me not thirst with this Hock at my Lip, Nor beg, with domains in my pocket—
It’s ripe, the melon by our sink. Yellow, bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes the house too sweetly. At five I wake, the air mournful in its quiet. My wife’s eyes swim calmly under their lids, her mouth and jaw relaxed, different. What is happening in the silence of this house? Curtains hang heavily from their rods. Ficus leaves tremble at my footsteps. Yet the colors outside are perfect-- orange geranium, blue lobelia. I wander from room to room like a man in a museum: wife, children, books, flowers, melon. Such still air. Soon the mid-morning breeze will float in like tepid water, then hot. How do I start this day, I who am unsure of how my life has happened or how to proceed amid this warm and steady sweetness?
for Gerald Stern At sixteen I was so vulnerable to every influence That the overcast light, making the trash of addicts & sunbathers suddenly clearer On the paths of the city park, seemed death itself spreading its shade  Over the leaves, the swan boats, the gum wrappers, and the quarreling ducks. It took nothing more than a few clouds straying over the sun, And I would begin falling through myself like an anvil or a girl's comb or a feather Dropped, tossed, or spiraling by pure chance down the silent air shaft of a warehouse, The spiderweb in one fourth-floor window catching, in that moment, the sunset. For in such a moment, to fall was to be simplified & pure, With a neck snapped like a stem instead Of whoever I turned out to be, Wiping the window glass clear with one cuff To gaze out at a two-hundred-year-old live oak tethering The courtyard to its quiet, The tree so old it has outlived even its life as a cliché, And has survived, with no apparent effort, every boy who marched, like a wilderness Himself, past it on his way to enlist in Lee’s army, And now it swells gently in the mist & the early sunlight. So who saved me? And for what purpose? Beneath the small angel cut from cheap stone, there was nothing  But my name & the years 1947-1949, And the tense, muggy little quiet of a place where singing ends, And where there is only the leftover colored chalk & the delusions of voodoo, The small bones & X’s on stones signifying the practitioner’s absence,  Entirely voluntary, from the gnat swirl & humming of time; To which the chalked X on stone is the final theory; it is even illiterate.  It is not even a lock of hair on a grave. It is not even The small crowd of roughnecks at Poe’s funeral, nor the blind drunkard  Laughing there, the white of his eyes the unfurling of a cold surf below a cliff— Which is the blank wave sprawl of fact receding under the cries of gulls— Which is not enough.* I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover  From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now, Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled, Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A. I should go back again & try to talk my friend out of his diet Of methamphetamine & vodka yogurts & the look of resignation spreading over his face Like the gray shade of a tree spreading over a sleeper in the park— For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other. And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust  The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood, The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin.  This must have been what they meant, Lincoln & Whitman, joining hands one overcast spring afternoon  To stroll together through the mud of Washington at the end  Of the war, the tears welling up in both their eyes, Neither one of them saying a word, their hands clasped tightly together  As they walk for block after block past The bay, sorrel, chestnut, and dapple-gray tail swish of horses, And waiting carriages, & neither one of them noticing, as they stroll & weave, The harness gall on the winters of a mare, Nor the gnats swarming over it, alighting now on the first trickle of blood uncaking from the sore; And the underfed rib cage showing through its coat each time it inhales  Like the tines of a rake combing the battleground to overturn  Something that might identify the dead at Antietam. The rake keeps flashing in the late autumn light. And Bakunin, with a face impassive as a barn owl’s & never straying from the one true text of flames? And Lincoln, absentmindedly trying to brush away the wart on his cheek  As he dresses for the last time, As he fumbles for a pair of cuff links in a silk-lined box, As he anticipates some pure & frivolous pleasure, As he dreams for a moment, & is a woman for a moment, And in his floating joy has no idea what is going to happen to him in the next hour? And Oswald dozing over a pamphlet by Trotsky in the student union?  Oh live oak, thoughtless beauty in a century of pulpy memoirs,  Spreading into the early morning sunlight As if it could never be otherwise, as if it were all a pure proclamation of leaves & a final quiet—* But it’s all or nothing in this life; it’s smallpox, quicklime, & fire. It’s the extinct whistling of an infantry; it is all the faded rosettes of blood Turning into this amnesia of billboards & the ceaseless hunh? of traffic.  It goes on & I go with it; it spreads into the sun & air & throws out a fast shade That will never sleep, and I go with it; it breaks Lincoln & Poe into small drops of oil spreading Into endless swirls on the water, & I recognize the pattern:* There there now, Nothing. Stop your sniveling. Stop sifting dirt through your fingers into your glass of milk, A milk still white as stone; whiter even. Why don’t you finish it? We’d better be getting on our way soon, sweet Nothing. I’ll buy you something pretty from the store. I’ll let you wear the flower in your hair even though you can only vanish entirely underneath its brown, implacable petals. Stop your sniveling. I can almost see the all night diner looming  Up ahead, with its lights & its flashing sign a testimony to failure. I can almost see our little apartment under the freeway overpass, the cups on the mantle rattling continually— The Mojave one way; the Pacific the other. At least we’ll have each other’s company. And it’s not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt  For being only one. It’s not as if you were frivolous. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Riding beside me, your seat belt around your invisible waist. Sweet Nothing.  Sweet, sweet Nothing.
Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split and I with no way to make her come back and everywhere the world is bare bright bone white crystal sand glistens dope death dead dying and jiving drove her away made her take her laughter and her smiles and her softness and her midnight sighs— Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and democracy and communism fuck smack and pot and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck the whole muthafucking thing all i want now is my woman back so my soul can sing
La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle —René Char There’s a sickness in me. During  the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth.  I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust is in me. I can’t get rid of it. It rises after I brush my teeth, a taste like iron. In the night, left like a dream, a caustic light washing over the insides of me.* What to do with my arms? They  coil out of my body like snakes. They branch & spit. I want to shake myself  until they fall like withered roots; until they bend the right way— until I fit in them,  or they in me. I have to lay them down as  carefully as an old wedding dress, I have to fold them like the arms of someone dead. The house is quiet; all  night I struggle. All because of my arms,  which have no peace!* I’m a martyr, a girl who’s been dead  two thousand years. I turn on my left side, like one comfortable  after a long, hard death. The angels look down tenderly. “She’s sleeping,” they say & pass me by. But all night, I am passing in & out of my body  on my naked feet.* I’m awake when I’m sleeping & I’m  sleeping when I’m awake, & no one knows, not even me, for my eyes  are closed to myself. I think I am thinking I see a man beside me, & he thinks in his sleep that I’m awake  writing. I hear a pen scratch a paper. There is some idea  I think is clever: I want to capture myself in a book.* I have to make a  place for my body in my body. I’m like a  dog pawing a blanket on the floor. I have to  turn & twist myself like a rag until I can smell myself in myself. I’m sweating; the water is  pouring out of me like silver. I put my head  in the crook of my arm like a brilliant moon.* The bones of my left foot  are too heavy on the bones of my right. They lie still for a little while, sleeping, but soon they  bruise each other like angry twins. Then the bones of my right foot command the bones of my left  to climb down.
You want to know what work is? I’ll tell you what work is: Work is work. You get up. You get on the bus. You don’t look from side to side. You keep your eyes straight ahead. That way nobody bothers you—see? You get off the bus. You work all day. You get back on the bus at night. Same thing. You go to sleep. You get up. You do the same thing again. Nothing more. Nothing less. There’s no handouts in this life. All this other stuff you’re looking for— it ain’t there. Work is work.
Tree, we take leave of you; you’re on your own. Put down your taproot with its probing hairs that sluice the darkness and create unseen the tree that mirrors you below the ground. For when we plant a tree, two trees take root: the one that lifts its leaves into the air, and the inverted one that cleaves the soil to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf in the eternal blackness of that sky. The leaves you show uncurl like tiny fists and bear small button blossoms, greenish white, that quicken you. Now put your roots down deep; draw light from shadow, break in on earth’s sleep.
A few years back and they told me Black means a hole where other folks got brain/it was like the cells in the heads of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps Scientists called the phenomenon the Notorious Jensen Lapse, remember? Anyway I was thinking about how to devise a test for the wise like a Stanford-Binet for the C.I.A. you know? Take Einstein being the most the unquestionable the outstanding the maximal mind of the century right? And I’m struggling against this lapse leftover from my Black childhood to fathom why anybody should say so:E=mc squared? I try that on this old lady live on my block: She sweeping away Saturday night from the stoop and mad as can be because some absolute jackass have left a kingsize mattress where she have to sweep around it stains and all she don’t want to know nothing about in the first place “Mrs. Johnson!” I say, leaning on the gate between us: “What you think about somebody come up with an E equals M C 2?” “How you doin,” she answer me, sideways, like she don’t want to let on she know I ain’ combed my hair yet and here it is Sunday morning but still I have the nerve to be bothering serious work with these crazy questions about “E equals what you say again, dear?” Then I tell her, “Well also this same guy? I think he was undisputed Father of the Atom Bomb!” “That right.” She mumbles or grumbles, not too politely “And dint remember to wear socks when he put on his shoes!” I add on (getting desperate) at which point Mrs. Johnson take herself and her broom a very big step down the stoop away from me “And never did nothing for nobody in particular lessen it was a committee and used to say, ‘What time is it?’ and you’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’ and he’d say, ‘Day or night?’ and and he never made nobody a cup a tea in his whole brilliant life! and [my voice rises slightly] and he dint never boogie neither: never!” “Well,” say Mrs. Johnson, “Well, honey, I do guess that’s genius for you.”
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983. I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? They said you shot the London Ambassador and when that wasn’t true they said so what They said you shelled their northern villages and when U.N. forces reported that was not true because your side of the cease-fire was holding since more than a year before they said so what They said they wanted simply to carve a 25 mile buffer zone and then they ravaged your water supplies your electricity your hospitals your schools your highways and byways all the way north to Beirut because they said this was their quest for peace They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys whose bodies swelled purple and black into twice the original size and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby and then they said this was brilliant military accomplishment and this was done they said in the name of self-defense they said that is the noblest concept of mankind isn’t that obvious? They said something about never again and then they made close to one million human beings homeless in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed 40,000 of your men and your women and your children But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? They said they were victims. They said you were Arabs. They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla strongholds. They called the screaming devastation that they created the rubble. Then they told you to leave, didn’t they? Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped from their hotshot fighter jets? They told you to go. One hundred and thirty-five thousand Palestinians in Beirut and why didn’t you take the hint? Go! There was the Mediterranean: You could walk into the water and stay there. What was the problem? I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway? Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family But I am not an evil person The people of my country aren't so bad You can expect but so much from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch American TV You see my point; I’m sorry. I really am sorry.
Washington, D.C. At least it helps me to think about my son a Leo/born to us (Aries and Cancer) some sixteen years ago in St. John’s Hospital next to the Long Island Railroad tracks Atlantic Avenue/Brooklyn New York at dawn which facts do not really prepare you (do they) for him angry serious and running through the darkness with his own becoming light
Poem for Sriram Shamasunder And All of Poetry for the People It’s a sunlit morning with jasmine blooming easily and a drove of robin redbreasts diving into the ivy covering what used to be a backyard fence or doves shoving aside the birch tree leaves when a young man walks among the flowers to my doorway where he knocks then stands still brilliant in a clean white shirt He lifts a soft fist to that door and knocks again He’s come to say this was or that was not and what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done what’s past but prickling salt to sting our eyes What’s anyone of us to do about what’s done And 7-month-old Bingo puppy leaps and hits that clean white shirt with muddy paw prints here and here and there And what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done I say I’ll wash the shirt no problem two times through the delicate blue cycle of an old machine the shirt spins in the soapy suds and spins in rinse and spins and spins out dry not clean still marked by accidents by energy of whatever serious or trifling cause the shirt stays dirty from that puppy’s paws I take that fine white shirt from India the threads as soft as baby fingers weaving them together and I wash that shirt between between the knuckles of my own two hands I scrub and rub that shirt to take the dirty markings out At the pocket and around the shoulder seam and on both sleeves the dirt the paw prints tantalize my soap my water my sweat equity invested in the restoration of a clean white shirt   And on the eleventh try I see no more no anything unfortunate no dirt I hold the limp fine cloth between the faucet stream of water as transparent as a wish the moon stayed out all day How small it has become! That clean white shirt! How delicate! How slight! How like a soft fist knocking on my door! And now I hang the shirt to dry as slowly as it needs the air to work its way with everything   It’s clean. A clean white shirt nobody wanted to spoil or soil that shirt much cleaner now but also not the same as the first before that shirt got hit got hurt not perfect anymore just beautiful a clean white shirt It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.
Dear Sirs: I have been enjoying the law and order of our community throughout the past three months since my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to our previous neighbors (with whom we were very close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly prospering under your custody Indeed, until yesterday afternoon and despite my vigilant casting about, I have been unable to discover a single instance of reasons for public-spirited concern, much less complaint You may easily appreciate, then, how it is that I write to your office, at this date, with utmost regret for the lamentable circumstances that force my hand Speaking directly to the issue of the moment: I have encountered a regular profusion of certain unidentified roses, growing to no discernible purpose, and according to no perceptible control, approximately one quarter mile west of the Northway, on the southern side To be specific, there are practically thousands of the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting of promiscuous cross-fertilization As I say, these roses, no matter what the apparent background, training, tropistic tendencies, age, or color, do not demonstrate the least inclination toward categorization, specified allegiance, resolute preference, consideration of the needs of others, or any other minimal traits of decency May I point out that I did not assiduously seek out this colony, as it were, and that these certain unidentified roses remain open to viewing even by children, with or without suitable supervision (My wife asks me to append a note as regards the seasonal but nevertheless seriously licentious phenomenon of honeysuckle under the moon that one may apprehend at the corner of Nelson and Main However, I have recommended that she undertake direct correspondence with you, as regards this: yet another civic disturbance in our midst) I am confident that you will devise and pursue appropriate legal response to the roses in question If I may aid your efforts in this respect, please do not hesitate to call me into consultation Respectfully yours,
no more the chicken and the egg come one of them before the other both be fadin (steady) from the supersafeway/a&p/giant circus  uh-huh  the pilgrim cornucopia  it ain’ a pot to pee in  much  (these days) gas is gone and alka seltza runnin gas a close race outasight/you name it  toilet paper  halfway honest politicians there’s a shortage folks/please step right up
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear my head about this poem about why I can’t go out without changing my clothes my shoes my body posture my gender identity my age my status as a woman alone in the evening/ alone on the streets/alone not being the point/ the point being that I can’t do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin and suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/ or far into the woods and I wanted to go there by myself thinking about God/or thinking about children or thinking about the world/all of it disclosed by the stars and the silence: I could not go and I could not think and I could not stay there alone as I need to be alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own body and who in the hell set things up like this and in France they say if the guy penetrates but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me and if after stabbing him if after screams if after begging the bastard and if even after smashing a hammer to his head if even after that if he and his buddies fuck me after that then I consented and there was no rape because finally you understand finally they fucked me over because I was wrong I was wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong to be who I am which is exactly like South Africa penetrating into Namibia penetrating into Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland and if after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to self-immolation of the villages and if after that we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they claim my consent: Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about and according to the Times this week back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba and before that it was my father on the campus of my Ivy League school and my father afraid to walk into the cafeteria because he said he was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong gender identity and he was paying my tuition and before that it was my father saying I was wrong saying that I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and that I should have had straighter hair and that I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should just be one/a boy and before that  it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me to let the books loose to let them loose in other words I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A. and the problems of South Africa and the problems of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white America in general and the problems of the teachers and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very familiar with the problems because the problems turn out to be me I am the history of rape I am the history of the rejection of who I am I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of myself I am the history of battery assault and limitless armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul and whether it’s about walking out at night or whether it’s about the love that I feel or whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or the sanctity of my national boundaries or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity of each and every desire that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic and indisputably single and singular heart I have been raped be- cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic the wrong sartorial I I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable this poem is not consent I do not consent to my mother to my father to the teachers to the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in carsI am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life
You used to say, “June? Honey when you come down here you supposed to stay with me. Where else?” Meanin home against the beer the shotguns and the point of view of whitemen don’ never see Black anybodies without some violent itch start up.  The ones who  said, “No Nigga’s Votin in This Town . . . lessen it be feet first to the booth”  Then jailed you  beat you brutal  bloody/battered/beat  you blue beyond the feeling  of the terrible And failed to stop you.  Only God could but He  wouldn’t stop  you fortress from self- pity Humble as a woman anywhere  I remember finding you inside the laundromat  in Ruleville   lion spine relaxed/hell   what’s the point to courage   when you washin clothes?  But that took courage  just to sit there/target   to the killers lookin   for your singin face   perspirey through the rinse   and spin and later  you stood mighty in the door on James Street  loud callin:  “BULLETS OR NO BULLETS!   THE FOOD IS COOKED   AN’ GETTIN COLD!” We ate A family tremulous but fortified by turnips/okra/handpicked like the lilies filled to the very living  full one solid gospel  (sanctified) one gospel  (peace) one full Black lily  luminescent  in a homemade field  of love
What will we do when there is nobody left to kill?  * 40,000 gallons of oil gushing into the ocean But I sit on top this mountainside above the Pacific checking out the flowers the California poppies orange as I meet myself in heat  I’m wonderingwhere’s the Indians?  all this filmstrip territory  all this cowboy sagaland:  not  a single Indian  in sight   40,000 gallons gushing up poison from the deepest seabeds every hour 40,000 gallons while experts international while new pollutants swallow the unfathomable still:  no Indians I’m staring hard around me past the pinks the poppies and the precipice that let me see the wide Pacific unsuspecting even trivial by virtue of its vast surrender I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it’s doomedWhere are the Indians?  * Crow Nose Little Bear Slim Girl Black Elk Fox Belly the people of the sacred trees and rivers precious to the stars that told old stories to the nighthow do we follow after you? falling snow before the firelight and buffalo as brothers to the manhow do we follow into that?  * They found her facedown where she would be dancing to the shadow drums that humble birds to silent  flight They found her body held its life dispelled by ice my life burns to destroy Anna Mae Pictou Aquash slain on The Trail of Broken Treaties bullet lodged in her brain/hands and fingertips dismembered who won the only peace that cannot pass from mouth to mouth  * Memory should agitate the pierced bone crack of one in pushed-back horror pushed-back pain as when I call out looking for my face among the wounded coins to toss about or out entirely the legends of Geronimo of Pocahontas now become a squat pedestrian cement inside the tomb of all my trust as when I feel you isolate among the hungers of the trees a trembling hidden tinder so long unsolicited by flame as when I accept my sister dead when there should be a fluid holiness of spirits wrapped around the world redeemed by women whispering communion  * I find my way by following your spine Your heart indivisible from my real wish we compelled the moon into the evening when you said, “No, I will not let go of your hand.”  *   Now I am diving for a tide to take me everywhere Below the soft Pacific spoils a purple girdling of the globe impregnable  * Last year the South African Minister of Justice described Anti-Government Disturbances as Part of a Worldwide Trend toward the Breakdown of Established Political and Cultural Orders  * God knows I hope he’s right.
Dedicated to Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz 1 I turn to my Rand McNally Atlas. Europe appears right after the Map of the World. All of Italy can be seen page 9. Half of Chile page 29. I take out my ruler. In global perspective Italy amounts to less than half an inch. Chile measures more than an inch and a quarter of an inch. Approximately Chile is as long as China is wide: Back to the Atlas: Chunk of China page 17. All of France page 5: As we say in New York: Who do France and Italy know at Rand McNally?  2 I see the four mountains in Chile higher than any mountain of North America. I see Ojos del Salado the highest. I see Chile unequivocal as crystal thread. I see the Atacama Desert dry in Chile more than the rest of the world is dry. I see Chile dissolving into water. I do not see what keeps the blue land of Chile out of blue water. I do not see the hand of Pablo Neruda on the blue land.  3 As the plane flies flat to the trees below Brazil below Bolivia below five thousand miles below my Brooklyn windows and beside the shifted Pacific waters welled away from the Atlantic at Cape Horn La Isla Negra that is not an island La Isla Negra that is not black is stone and stone of Chile feeding clouds to color scale and undertake terrestrial forms of everything unspeakable  4 In your country how do you say copper for my country?  5 Blood rising under the Andes and above the Andes blood spilling down the rock corrupted by the amorality of so much space that leaves such little trace of blood rising to the irritated skin the face of the confession far from home: I confess I did not resist interrogation. I confess that by the next day I was no longer sure of my identity. I confess I knew the hunger. I confess I saw the guns. I confess I was afraid. I confess I did not die.  6 What you Americans call a boycott of the junta? Who will that feed?  7 Not just the message but the sound.  8 Early morning now and I remembercorriendo a la madrugada from a different English poem, I remember from the difficulties of the talk an argument athwart the wine the dinner and the dancing meant to welcome you you did not understand the commonplace expression of my heart:the truth is in the life la verdad de la vida
Colorado turns Kyoto in a shower, mist in the pines so thick the crows delight (or seem to), winging in obscurity. The ineffectual panic of a squirrel who chattered at my passing gave me pause to watch his Ponderosa come and go— long needles scratching cloud. I’d summited but knew it only by the wildflower meadow, the muted harebells, paintbrush, gentian, scattered among the locoweed and sage. Today my grief abated like water soaking underground, its scar a little path of twigs and needles winding ahead of me downhill to the next bend. Today I let the rain soak through my shirt and was unharmed.
In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder, nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight. Thirty years of marriage sits between them like a bomb. The woman shifts then rubs her right wrist as the man recalls the day when they sat on the porch of her parents' home. Even then he could feel the absence of something desired or planned. There was the smell of a freshly tarred driveway, the slow heat, him offering his future to folks he did not know. And there was the blooming magnolia tree in the distance— its oversized petals like those on the woman's dress, making her belly even larger, her hands disappearing into the folds. When the last neighbor or friend leaves their booth he stares at her hands, which are now closer to his, remembers that there had always been some joy. Leaning closer, he believes he can see their daughter in her eyes.
—Once more the poem woke me up, the dark poem. I was ready for it; he was sleeping,   and across the cabin, the small furnace lit and re-lit itself—the flame a yellow  “tongue” again, the metal benignly hard again; and a thousand insects outside called  and made me nothing; moonlight streamed inside as if it had been ...   I looked around, I thought of the lower wisdom, spirit held by matter:  Mary, white as a sand dollar, and Christ, his sticky halo tilted—  oh, to get behind it! The world had been created to comprehend itself as matter: table, the torn veils of spiders ... Even consciousness— missing my love— was matter, the metal box of a furnace. As the obligated flame, so burned my life ...   What is the meaning of this suffering I asked and the voice—not Christ but between us— said you are the meaning. No no, I replied, That is the shape, what is the meaning. You are the meaning, it said—
Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,   His fancy warbler;  Satan sweet-talked her,  four bullets hushed her.  Who would have thought  she’d end that way? Four bullets hushed her. And the world a-clang with evil.  Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now  and the righteous rock?  Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored  all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday?  All those angels  in their cretonne clouds and finery   the true believer saw  when she rared back her head and sang,   all those angels are surely weeping.   Who would have thought  she’d end that way? Four holes in her heart. The gold works wrecked.  But she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin  among the Broken Hearts and Gates-Ajar,  it’s as if any moment she’d lift her head from its pillow of chill gardenias and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday and make folks forget what she did on Monday.  Oh, Satan sweet-talked her,   and four bullets hushed her.   Lord’s lost Him His diva,   His fancy warbler’s gone.   Who would have thought,  who would have thought she’d end that way?
They jumped from the burning floors— one, two, a few more, higher, lower. The photograph halted them in life, and now keeps them  above the earth toward the earth. Each is still complete, with a particular face and blood well hidden. There’s enough time for hair to come loose, for keys and coins to fall from pockets. They’re still within the air’s reach, within the compass of places that have just now opened. I can do only two things for them— describe this flight and not add a last line.
Last night in a dream you came to me. We were young again and you were smiling, happy in the way a sparrow in spring hops from branch to branch. I took you in my arms and swung you about, so carefree was my youth. What can I say? That time wears away, draws its lines on every feature? That we wake to dark skies whose only answer is rain, cold as the years that stretch behind us, blurring this window far from you.

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast, before the birds, my mother glides an ivory comb through her hair, heavy and black as calligrapher’s ink. She sits at the foot of the bed. My father watches, listens for the music of comb against hair. My mother combs, pulls her hair back tight, rolls it around two fingers, pins it in a bun to the back of her head. For half a hundred years she has done this. My father likes to see it like this. He says it is kempt. But I know it is because of the way my mother’s hair falls when he pulls the pins out. Easily, like the curtains when they untie them in the evening.
How must it be to be moss, that slipcover of rocks?— imagine, greening in the dark, longing for north, the silence of birds gone south. How does moss do it, all day in a dank place and never a cough?— a wet dust where light fails, where the chisel cut the name.
To be poor and raise skinny children. To own nothing but skinny clothing. Skinny food falls in between cracks. Friends cannot visit your skinny home. They cannot fit through the door. Your skinny thoughts evaporate into the day or the night that you cannot see with your tiny eyes. God sticks you with the smallest pins and your blood, the red is diluted. Imagine a tiny hole, the other side of which is a fat world and how lost you would feel. Of course, I’m speaking to myself. How lost I would feel, and how dangerous.
From my window I watch the roots of a willow push your house crooked, women rummage through boxes, your sons cart away the TV, its cord trailing like your useless arms. Only weeks ago we watched the heavyweights, and between rounds you pummeled the air, drank whiskey, admonished “Know your competition!” You did, Kansas, the ‘20s when you measured the town champ as he danced the same dance over and over: left foot, right lead, head down, the move you’d dreamt about for days. Then right on cue your hay-bale uppercut compressed his spine. You know. That was that. Now your mail piles up, RESIDENT circled “not here.” Your lawn goes to seed. Dandelions burst in the wind. From my window I see you flat on your back on some canvas, above you a wrinkled face, its clippy bow tie bobbing toward ten. There’s someone behind you, resting easy against the ropes, a last minute substitute on the card you knew so well, vaguely familiar, taken for granted, with a sucker punch you don’t remember ever having seen.
for Robert Creeley (1926—2005) You told me the son of Acton’s town nurse  would never cross the border  into Concord, where the Revolution  left great houses standing on Main Street.  Yet we crossed into Concord, walking  through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery  to greet Thoreau, his stone  stamped with the word Henry jutting like a gray thumbnail  down the path from Emerson  and his boulder of granite.  We remembered Henry’s night in jail,  refusing tax for the Mexican War,  and I could see you hunched with him,  loaning Henry a cigarette, explaining the perpetual wink of your eye  lost after the windshield  burst in your boyhood face.  When Emerson arrived to ask what you and Henry were doing in there, you would say:You got a song, man, sing it.  You got a bell, man, ring it.
1. Ye shall be free to write a poem on any subject, as long as it’s the White Whale. 2. A gold doubloon shall be granted to the first among ye who in a poem sights the White Whale. 3. The Call Me Ishmael Award shall be given to the best poem about the White Whale, with publication in The White Whale Review. 4. The Herman Melville Memorial Picnic and Softball Game shall be open to whosoever of ye writes a poem about following thy Captain into the maw of hell to kill the White Whale. 5. There shall be a free floating coffin for any workshop participant who falls overboard whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 6. There shall be a free leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, for any workshop participant who is dismasted whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 7. There shall be a free funeral at sea, complete with a chorus of stout hearties singing sea chanteys about the White Whale, for any workshop participant who is decapitated whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 8. Ye who seek not the White Whale in thy poems shall be harpooned.
Swift and subtle The flying shuttle Crosses the web And fills the loom, Leaving for range Of choice or change No room, no room.
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken,  and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives,  in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time  he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.  He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,  the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,  scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word  was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,  and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up  on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket  he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing  carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.  A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick  with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.  They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears  in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”  she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,  a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.  “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,  and go to sleep.  And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened  to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes.  I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
Recurrences. Coppery light hesitates again in the small-leaved Japanese plum. Summer and sunset, the peace of the writing desk and the habitual peace of writing, these things form an order I only belong to in the idleness of attention. Last light rims the blue mountain and I almost glimpse what I was born to, not so much in the sunlight or the plum tree as in the pulse that forms these lines.
in Riddles, for Mary * How many suns will cross its coign before the last freeze? What pennywhistle spun its point on the glass breeze? Whose airs are loosened in the pane like miniature degrees, where breath condenses into rain among the apple trees? Here tesserae have turned to earth, here blossoms may attend to birth as sun becoming leaves; here branches seem to lead the glass, whose scenes compose as seasons pass, the lifetime, piece by piece.... A sphere  * Begins and ends: suppose, as glaciers drop their catch, as memory’s a ragged seine, as grain by grain a dead morraine the sky is softly sifting ash, as constellations each rescind to embers, umbral lees—alas, the crown lens will surely tear to end the long, sweet refrain of sun to moon to sun again, of E from M C2— and then what breath once shaped the pane may lose itself (we pray) in airs our children, too, had breathed in time, and theirs, and theirs.  * If oracles recall in riddles orreries in orreries, the quantum of the apple’s arc the piper’s tune, the dancer’s turning crown of sonnets in the dark by starlight ground between the querns spun withershins of dawn and dusk to wreathe a green and weathered earth— it’s moonshine, love, and loneliness. Do looney jigs unwind the suns? Might jugglers drop them every one? Are seeds resewn, or tales respun? When pipers stop to play the bones the very stones are left undone.  * To please the Sphinx all life unreels through black magnetic stone-strewn fields where pitchblende blinks its slow decaytic-tic-tic de-lightedly by alpha, beta, gamma, delta— time dilates and starlight bends in gravity like roundelays. All light, partic- ulate, licks out one way, in waves; electric clouds expand in spheres whose uncracked shells concentrically unrecalled across the parsecs and the years ring out, shift red (like Hell), disperse the edges of the universe—  * Eclectic quarks a dish collects to parse into initial text— miraculous, exotic sky!— a Book of Kells whose quirkish tale in optical if stale effects is mirrored in the lemur’s eye, as through the hatchling’s candled egg comes first light to the cockerel— As Sol dissolves against the clock, and seismographic needles track, and continents incline to raft, uranium sines off to lead or raindrops pock a full carafe to lilypads inside the head—  *Assymmetries: no wave contracts—
On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future. A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future, This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d, And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist, From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous’d words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. Once Paumanok, When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing, Up this seashore in some briers, Two feather’d guests from Alabama, two together, And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown, And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask, we two together. Two together! Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, Home, or rivers and mountains from home, Singing all time, minding no time, While we two keep together.
1 Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road. The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them. (Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go, I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them, I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.) 2 You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here, I believe that much unseen is also here. Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial, The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted, None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me. 3 You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me. You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges! You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships! You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs! You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards! You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much! You doors and ascending steps! you arches! You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings! From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me, From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me. 4 The earth expanding right hand and left hand, The picture alive, every part in its best light, The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted, The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road. O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me? Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost? Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me? O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, You express me better than I can express myself, You shall be more to me than my poem. I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also, I think I could stop here myself and do miracles, I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me, I think whoever I see must be happy. 5 From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently,but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me, I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you, I will recruit for myself and you as I go, I will scatter myself among men and women as I go, I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them, Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me, Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me. 6 Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me, Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not astonish me. Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. Here a great personal deed has room, (Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men, Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.) Here is the test of wisdom, Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul. Now I re-examine philosophies and religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents. Here is realization, Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him, The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them. Only the kernel of every object nourishes; Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me? Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me? Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos; Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers? Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls? 7 Here is the efflux of the soul, The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions, These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they? Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank? Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? (I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;) What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers? What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side? What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause? What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine? 8 The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness, I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times, Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged. Here rises the fluid and attaching character, The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman, (The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.) Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old, From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments, Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact. 9 Allons! whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me you find what never tires. The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. Allons! we must not stop here, However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here, However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while. 10 Allons! the inducements shall be greater, We will sail pathless and wild seas, We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail. Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements, Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity; Allons! from all formules! From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests. The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer. Allons! yet take warning! He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance, None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health, Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself, Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies, No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here. (I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, We convince by our presence.) 11 Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, These are the days that must happen to you: You shall not heap up what is call’d riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve, You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart, You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you, What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you. 12 Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them! They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men—they are the greatest women, Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas, Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land, Habituès of many distant countries, habituès of far-distant dwellings, Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers, Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore, Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children, Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins, Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which preceded it, Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases, Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days, Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood, Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content, Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood, Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death. 13 Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless, To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights, To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to, Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys, To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it, To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it, To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however long but it stretches and waits for you, To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither, To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it, To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens, To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through, To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go, To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their hearts, To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you, To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls. All parts away for the progress of souls, All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe. Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance. Forever alive, forever forward, Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied, Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men, They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go, But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great. Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth! You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you. Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen! It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it. Behold through you as bad as the rest, Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people, Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces, Behold a secret silent loathing and despair. No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession, Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes, Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors, In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly, Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere, Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones, Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers, Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself, Speaking of any thing else but never of itself. 14 Allons! through struggles and wars! The goal that was named cannot be countermanded. Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion, He going with me must go well arm’d, He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. 15 Allons! the road is before us! It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d! Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d! Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d! Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law. Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—  Only this and nothing more.”  Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.  Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow  From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—  Nameless here for evermore.  And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;  So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating  “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—  This it is and nothing more.”  Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;  But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,  And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—  Darkness there and nothing more.  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—  Merely this and nothing more.  Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.  “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;  Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore— Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—  ’Tis the wind and nothing more!”  Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;  Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;  But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door— Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—  Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”  Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”  Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;  For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being  Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,  With such name as “Nevermore.”  But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.  Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—  Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before— On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”  Then the bird said “Nevermore.”  Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store  Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster  Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore  Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”  But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;  Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking  Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore  Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”  This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;  This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining  On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er, But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,  She shall press, ah, nevermore!  Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.  “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee  Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore; Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”  Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”  “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!— Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,  Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—  On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore— Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”  Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”  “Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—  Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,  It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”  Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”  “Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting— “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!  Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”  Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”  And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;  And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,  And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor  Shall be lifted—nevermore!
The sleep of this night deepens because I have walked coatless from the house carrying the white envelope. All night it will say one name in its little tin house by the roadside. I have raised the metal flag so its shadow under the roadlamp leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes. Now I will walk back thinking of the few lights still on in the town a mile away. In the yellowed light of a kitchen the millworker has finished his coffee, his wife has laid out the white slices of bread on the counter. Now while the bed they have left is still warm, I will think of you, you who are so far away you have caused me to look up at the stars. Tonight they have not moved from childhood, those games played after dark. Again I walk into the wet grass toward the starry voices. Again, I am the found one, intimate, returned by all I touch on the way.
In the rental cottage it comes to me,  how the four lives of myself and my brothers crisscross like tracer bullets, and how, from a distance maybe, if you had the right kind of glasses,  there might appear to be a target  we all were aiming at beyond that black escutcheon of cloud  above Santa Rosa Bay as we lie on the deck drinking tequila and beer, our voices growing vague and weary  as time passes, until one of us tells a story, more cordial than precise,  about climbing to the top of a magnolia tree  when he was ten, and falling. The rest of us  draw closer around the story as we watch the great flattened cloud  raise its triangular wing over the state of Florida. It is night  in Florida and, in a moment, one of us will recall  the time our father, in a gray suit,  climbed the steps of an airliner  bound for Paris and never came back. And one, or another,  will tell how our mother, more blond  and beautiful than ever that spring, said, You must now be soldiers, and screamed and screamed. We will each raise his head and stare for a moment through the lighted gate of the living room window at our wives, who are putting away the last of the supper dishes,  speaking among themselves  with the easy familiarity of women  whose husbands are brothers. And one of us will begin so sing an old song that our father sang before he went away, a song  about losing a fair woman in the foggy, foggy dew, and as the late chill rises off the bay  we will all remember what we thought as children when we heard him sing of the woman  who was not, and never could have been, our mother and of how an emptiness, bigger than an ocean, opened inside us, and one of us  will say, I think it is going to rain,  and we will get up and go back inside.
This time we are getting drunk on retsina in somebody’s Italian backyard. We are a long way  from Georgia and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself. My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn; I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine my heart is huge and has  little men walking around inside. They don’t know each other but they’re stuck there eternally and have to get along. One of them starts shouting; he finds a black horse and rides it around in a circle. The others laugh at him. He leaps from the horse and starts to choke the smallest man. Something like a hand  starts pumping the heart and the men nearly go crazy from the pressure. —The first olive I picked from a tree was so bitter I nearly threw up. My wife is strolling around this strange landscape full of broken pediments as if she plans to be happy from now on. I think I have to tense it up, act like I’m in control. I don’t think I can do that. In a few hours the sun will rise over my brother’s backyard in south Georgia. He’ll come out and admire the water jewels the night has hung in the kumquat bush. He’ll hear his son say,  ‘Mama, it’s too big for me to wear,’ and remember quitting the baseball team  thirty years ago and wish again he hadn’t. —I get up and march down to the pond. I start to speak  to my wife but then I feel a hand that is about to crush my heart.
What brings me alive is less than simplicity, is a company of soldiers in shiny blue jackets boiling chickens in the shade  by the Erasmus Gate, is the fact that my grandfather died begging for mercy in a hotel in Atlanta, and that my grandmother, in 1910, mourned because her breasts were small. I know four men who paddled the length of the Mississippi in a dugout they hacked and burned out of a beech tree. When anyone mentioned rivers they would look at each other and their eyes would soften with the memory of mists and sand bars, of the grave black brows of river barges. I come from a country as large as Brazil, but all I remember are the wet silver webs of golden jungle spiders netted in the cane. I wake up thinking of my brother, who, on a July morning in 1954, killed a boy without meaning to. And I can tell you that this isn’t true, that my brother didn’t, as he swept back a four iron on the lawn of our house in Sea Island, crack the temple of a boy we had only met the night before. I can say Yes I am lying again, about the boy, about Sea Island, but as you get up to fix another drink I will tell you a story about sleeping in a hay barn in Turkey and of waking in the night, as, one by one, the farm hands stood out of the rank straw to greet us.  I want you to know that my life is a ritual lie and that I deserve to be loved anyway. I want you to smile when I tell of the purple hyacinths caught in the gears of the raised bridge over the Chickopee River, I want you to pretend you were there. My sister’s hips were two ax handles wide, she wept that no one would love her, my sister, who waded among yellow poppies and wondered if she were really alive—I want you to wish you had married her, I want you to say Please, why did she leave me, Get her back, O my God, how can I live without her. I’m not even amazed that I want you to say this. Listen, I came downstairs this morning and somebody had filled the house with flowers.
Apprentice morning come easily now, silver with fog and the breakdowns of neighbors: shouts from up hill where the land curls under vines and under the porches  of oaks, where even now wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth streamers of new growth, and the green frogs suck at the dew and sing their bent songs. It is easy to hear my own voice in the liquid contraltos of rage, the vents and accusations that feed fires up the hill. It is all human enough, the yelling, capacious and frank, the doors slamming, cries of betrayal. I too have betrayed, lost my place among the condensations  of commitment, dallied.  I go among friends who say with neither fear nor fury in their voices that they too don’t know what’s next, that from the studied  impactment of their lives they have sallied small lines of proposition, made a few calls. Slight affairs  shiver and fail; we go for a walk by the rotunda, where, on the perishable lawn,  a band plays Dixieland—speaking, not earnestly, but with steady intent, of the play of choices, the simple chance of another future somewhere else, perhaps a house  in the hills above L.A., part-time work  for the screen, a few avocado trees. For a while it is as if the hazy play of evening light, the splashes of music, the unbundled oaks surrounding the Square, are enough in themselves to sustain, as if mood is itself sustenance, that our struggle to conceive  a continuance is of no more moment than the fuchsia and soft yellow clothes of the tourists. Perhaps it is possible to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint  but surrender entirely, to turn from the snarling reproach not into the keening  dismissal of hope but to whatever bright fluttering is next, the bright fluttering of wisteria petals, a felicitous phrase, fingers touching a face. How else to avoid redemption, or its opposite, which we stopped believing  in one day in high school, suddenly startled  over a steaming lunch tray by the way the fizzed  flowers of a stunted mimosa seemed to beg for release? We realized then we could say whatever we wanted, that the world  was no more particular than anything else, it too could be out-argued,  confused by refusal or lies, that it was no wonder  people were stunned by the eloquent permanence of death.  So there is  permission, not granted but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk,  having stolen more light than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes of argument fade into a fluttering over the price of butterscotch floats, and we are dazzled by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word  we were waiting to hear, not as completion but as synoptic and inevitable entitlement—the drift of some stranger’s conversation, the memory of a thin mist moored temporarily over the garden, that face we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful,  indifferent, unequivocably doomed.
At a small monastery—or what had been a monastery—outside Obrégon, we stopped;  you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first  pregnancy, sleeping as best you could through the thousand miles of pines and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead  through the saddle-colored rooms, past the broken church and the row of empty sheds,  where Indian women, according to a sign, once baked the flat bread called sapatos de Maria, to a garden in the back, over the parapet of which I could see the river through some willows: a rinsed  bed of sand, dry now in winter.  I didn’t want a child,  and I was tired of closeness, tired of being kind, so was glad to be alone a while and lay down under a jacaranda tree, and watched through leaves the changing pattern of the sky, which I was tired of too, the scaly, stratospheric  winter clouds, edged with light, like the tiny waves  you pointed out, reflected on the bottom of a bridge  we rowed under in a rented boat, the day you told me  of the child—I was tired and slept. It was nearly evening when I woke, two mestizo women  hurried talking through the tulip beds, the sky was pale.  They’d set small plaques among the plants, naming them, the ornamentals and the fruit. Some, so the writing said, were descendants of the cuttings brought from Spain by monks;  intermingled here—Pinot grape with ocotillo,  damascena rose—they thrived. I thought of certain  tenderness, and forbearance, a man might bring to vines and simple vegetables, cultivated in memory of his home perhaps, in a foreign place;  and thought how sometimes what passes on from us  has little to do with what we hoped, but nonetheless  carries word of who we were and what we found. For a moment then, among the arbors and the flower beds,  I did not feel so distant from this time and place,  and the edge of my own local fears began to dull.  I plucked a sprig—a leaf was all— from a holly bush, and brought it out to you,  a little stronger in a portion of myself, a little  reconciled, though I couldn’t know then that in a month we would lose the child, and in time you would pass, like a squandered fortune, from my life.
Her small body shines with water and light. Giggling, she squeals “daddy,” splashes until his pants darken. Five more minutes, he thinks, stepping out quickly, pouring himself a drink, not expecting to return to find her slipped under, her tiny face staring up through the undulating surface. Before he can move, or drop his scotch, she raises her dripping head, her mouth a perfect O. The sound of her gulped breath takes the wind out of him. Her face, pale and awed, understands the other side of water and air. His wife didn’t see, doesn’t know. Her feet pulse and fade in the upstairs joists. His daughter cries, slips from him, not giggling. She wants out. He tries to keep her in the tub, in the light. He’s on his knees.
There is this tea I have sometimes, Pan Long Ying Hao, so tightly curled it looks like tiny roots gnarled, a greenish-gray. When it steeps, it opens the way you woke this morning, stretching, your hands behind your head, back arched, toes pointing, a smile steeped in ceremony, a celebration, the reaching of your arms.
To-day’s most trivial act may hold the seed  Of future fruitfulness, or future dearth;  Oh, cherish always every word and deed!  The simplest record of thyself hath worth. If thou hast ever slighted one old thought,  Beware lest Grief enforce the truth at last;  The time must come wherein thou shalt be taught  The value and the beauty of the Past. Not merely as a warner and a guide,  “A voice behind thee,” sounding to the strife;  But something never to be put aside,  A part and parcel of thy present life. Not as a distant and a darkened sky,  Through which the stars peep, and the moonbeams glow; But a surrounding atmosphere, whereby  We live and breathe, sustained in pain and woe. A shadowy land, where joy and sorrow kiss,   Each still to each corrective and relief, Where dim delights are brightened into bliss,   And nothing wholly perishes but Grief. Ah, me!—not dies—no more than spirit dies;   But in a change like death is clothed with wings;  A serious angel, with entranced eyes,  Looking to far-off and celestial things.
It is a place whither I’ve often gone For peace, and found it, secret, hushed, and cool,  A beautiful recess in neighboring woods.  Trees of the soberest hues, thick-leaved and tall,  Arch it o’erhead and column it around,  Framing a covert, natural and wild, Domelike and dim; though nowhere so enclosed  But that the gentlest breezes reach the spot  Unwearied and unweakened. Sound is here  A transient and unfrequent visitor; Yet if the day be calm, not often then,  Whilst the high pines in one another’s arms  Sleep, you may sometimes with unstartled ear  Catch the far fall of voices, how remote  You know not, and you do not care to know.  The turf is soft and green, but not a flower  Lights the recess, save one, star-shaped and bright— I do not know its name—which here and there  Gleams like a sapphire set in emerald. A narrow opening in the branched roof, A single one, is large enough to show, With that half-glimpse a dreamer loves so much,  The blue air and the blessing of the sky. Thither I always bent my idle steps, When griefs depressed, or joys disturbed my heart,  And found the calm I looked for, or returned  Strong with the quite rapture in my soul.  But one day, One of those July days when winds have fled  One knows not whither, I, most sick in mind  With thoughts that shall be nameless, yet, no doubt,  Wrong, or at least unhealthful, since though dark  With gloom, and touched with discontent, they had  No adequate excuse, nor cause, nor end, I, with these thoughts, and on this summer day,  Entered the accustomed haunt, and found for once  No medicinal virtue.  Not a leaf Stirred with the whispering welcome which I sought,  But in a close and humid atmosphere, Every fair plant and implicated bough Hung lax and lifeless. Something in the place,  Its utter stillness, the unusual heat, And some more secret influence, I thought,  Weighed on the sense like sin. Above I saw,  Though not a cloud was visible in heaven, The palid sky look through a glazed mist Like a blue eye in death.  The change, perhaps,  Was natural enough; my jaundiced sight, The weather, and the time explain it all: Yet have I drawn a lesson from the spot, And shrined it in these verses for my heart.  Thenceforth those tranquil precincts I have sought  Not less, and in all shades of various moods;  But always shun to desecrate the spot By weak repinings, sickly sentiments, Or inconclusive sorrows. Nature, though Pure as she was in Eden when her breath Kissed the white brow of Eve, doth not refuse, In her own way and with a just reserve,  To sympathize with human suffering;  But for the pains, the fever, and the fret  Engendered of a weak, unquiet heart, She hath no solace; and who seeks her when  These be the troubles over which he moans,  Reads in her unreplying lineaments  Rebukes, that, to the guilty consciousness,  Strike like contempt.
I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,  With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,  When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,  Less for the gifts than for the love you send, Less for the flowers, than what the flowers convey;  If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,  And not unto myself ascribe, unduly, Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,  Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?  And am I flattered by my own affection?  But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced  Something above a short-lived predilection,  And which, for that I know no dearer name,  I designate as love, without love’s flame.
I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot That pent my life within a city’s bounds, And shut me from thy sweetest sights and sounds. Perhaps I had not learned, if some lone cot Had nursed a dreamy childhood, what the mart Taught me amid its turmoil; so my youth Had missed full many a stern but wholesome truth. Here, too, O Nature! in this haunt of Art, Thy power is on me, and I own thy thrall. There is no unimpressive spot on earth! The beauty of the stars is over all, And Day and Darkness visit every hearth. Clouds do not scorn us: yonder factory’s smoke Looked like a golden mist when morning broke.
Grief dies like joy; the tears upon my cheek  Will disappear like dew. Dear God! I know  Thy kindly Providence hath made it so, And thank thee for the law. I am too weak  To make a friend of Sorrow, or to wear,  With that dark angel ever by my side (Though to thy heaven there be no better guide),  A front of manly calm. Yet, for I hear How woe hath cleansed, how grief can deify, So weak a thing it seems that grief should die,  And love and friendship with it, I could pray,  That if it might not gloom upon my brow,  Nor weigh upon my arm as it doth now, No grief of mine should ever pass away.
My gentle friend! I hold no creed so false As that which dares to teach that we are born  For battle only, and that in this life The soul, if it would burn with starlike power,  Must needs forsooth be kindled by the sparks  Struck from the shock of clashing human hearts.  There is a wisdom that grows up in strife,  And one—I like it best—that sits at home  And learns its lessons of a thoughtful ease. So come! a lonely house awaits thee!—there  Nor praise, nor blame shall reach us, save what love  Of knowledge for itself shall wake at times  In our own bosoms; come! and we will build  A wall of quiet thought, and gentle books,  Betwixt us and the hard and bitter world.  Sometimes—for we need not be anchorites— A distant friend shall cheer us through the Post,  Or some Gazette—of course no partisan— Shall bring us pleasant news of pleasant things;  Then, twisted into graceful allumettes,  Each ancient joke shall blaze with genuine flame  To light our pipes and candles; but to wars,  Whether of words or weapons, we shall be  Deaf—so we twain shall pass away the time  Ev’n as a pair of happy lovers, who, Alone, within some quiet garden-nook, With a clear night of stars above their heads,  Just hear, betwixt their kisses and their talk,  The tumult of a tempest rolling through A chain of neighboring mountains; they awhile  Pause to admire a flash that only shows  The smile upon their faces, but, full soon,  Turn with a quick, glad impulse, and perhaps  A conscious wile that brings them closer yet,  To dally with their own fond hearts, and play  With the sweet flowers that blossom at their feet.
Oh! dost thou flatter falsely, Hope? The day hath scarcely passed that saw thy birth,  Yet thy white wings are plumed to all their scope,  And hour by hour thine eyes have gathered light,  And grown so large and bright, That my whole future life unfolds what seems,   Beneath their gentle beams, A path that leads athwart some guiltless earth,  To which a star is dropping from the night!  Not many moons ago, But when these leafless beds were all aglow  With summer’s dearest treasures, I Was reading in this lonely garden-nook;  A July noon was cloudless in the sky,  And soon I put my shallow studies by;  Then sick at heart, and angered by the book,  Which, in good sooth, was but the long-drawn sigh  Of some one who had quarreled with his kind,  Vexed at the very proofs which I had sought,  And all annoyed while all alert to find  A plausible likeness of my own dark thought,  I cast me down beneath yon oak’s wide boughs,  And, shielding with both hands my throbbing brows,  Watched lazily the shadows of my brain.  The feeble tide of peevishness went down,  And left a flat dull waste of dreary pain  Which seemed to clog the blood in every vein;  The world, of course, put on its darkest frown— In all its realms I saw no mortal crown  Which did not wound or crush some restless head;  And hope, and will, and motive, all were dead.  So, passive as a stone, I felt too low To claim a kindred with the humblest flower;  Even that would bare its bosom to a shower,  While I henceforth would take no pains to live,  Nor place myself where I might feel or give  A single impulse whence a wish could grow.  There was a tulip scarce a gossamer’s throw  Beyond that platanus. A little child, Most dear to me, looked through the fence and smiled  A hint that I should pluck it for her sake.  Ah, me! I trust I was not well awake—  The voice was very sweet, Yet a faint languor kept me in my seat. I saw a pouted lip, a toss, and heard Some low expostulating tones, but stirred Not even a leaf’s length, till the pretty fay,  Wondering, and half abashed at the wild feat,  Climbed the low pales, and laughed my gloom away. And here again, but led by other powers,  A morning and a golden afternoon, These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,  Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,   A round of precious hours. Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,  And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,  To justify a life of sensuous rest, A question dear as home or heaven was asked,  And without language answered. I was blest! Blest with those nameless boons too sweet to trust  Unto the telltale confidence of song. Love to his own glad self is sometimes coy, And even thus much doth seem to do him wrong;  While in the fears which chasten mortal joy,  Is one that shuts the lips, lest speech too free,  With the cold touch of hard reality, Should turn its priceless jewels into dust. Since that long kiss which closed the morning’s talk,  I have not strayed beyond this garden walk.  As yet a vague delight is all I know, A sense of joy so wild ’t is almost pain, And like a trouble drives me to and fro, And will not pause to count its own sweet gain.  I am so happy! that is all my thought!  To-morrow I will turn it round and round,  And seek to know its limits and its ground.  To-morrow I will task my heart to learn  The duties which shall spring from such a seed,  And where it must be sown, and how be wrought.  But oh! this reckless bliss is bliss indeed!  And for one day I choose to seal the urn  Wherein is shrined Love’s missal and his creed.  Meantime I give my fancy all it craves; Like him who found the West when first he caught  The light that glittered from the world he sought, And furled his sails till Dawn should show the land;  While in glad dreams he saw the ambient waves  Go rippling brightly up a golden strand. Hath there not been a softer breath at play  In the long woodland aisles than often sweeps At this rough season through their solemn deeps— A gentle Ariel sent by gentle May,  Who knew it was the morn  On which a hope was born,  To greet the flower ere it was fully blown,  And nurse it as some lily of her own?  And wherefore, save to grace a happy day,  Did the whole West at blushing sunset glow  With clouds that, floating up in bridal snow,  Passed with the festal eve, rose-crowned, away!  And now, if I may trust my straining sight,  The heavens appear with added stars to-night,  And deeper depths, and more celestial height, Than hath been reached except in dreams or death.  Hush, sweetest South! I love thy delicate breath;  But hush! methought I felt an angel’s kiss!  Oh! all that lives is happy in my bliss.  That lonely fir, which always seems As though it locked dark secrets in itself,   Hideth a gentle elf, Whose wand shall send me soon a frolic troop  Of rainbow visions, and of moonlit dreams.  Can joy be weary, that my eyelids droop?  To-night I shall not seek my curtained nest,  But even here find rest. Who whispered then? And what are they that peep  Betwixt the foliage in the tree-top there?  Come, Fairy Shadows! for the morn is near,  When to your sombre pine ye all must creep;  Come, ye wild pilots of the darkness, ere  My spirit sinks into the gulf of Sleep;  Even now it circles round and round the deep—  Appear! Appear!
I should be dumb before thee, feathered sage!  And gaze upon thy phiz with solemn awe,  But for a most audacious wish to gauge  The hoarded wisdom of thy learned craw. Art thou, grave bird! so wondrous wise indeed?   Speak freely, without fear of jest or gibe— What is thy moral and religious creed?  And what the metaphysics of thy tribe? A Poet, curious in birds and brutes,  I do not question thee in idle play; What is thy station? What are thy pursuits?   Doubtless thou hast thy pleasures—what are they? Or is’t thy wont to muse and mouse at once,  Entice thy prey with airs of meditation,  And with the unvarying habits of a dunce,  To dine in solemn depths of contemplation? There may be much—the world at least says so—  Behind that ponderous brow and thoughtful gaze;  Yet such a great philosopher should know,  It is by no means wise to think always. And, Bird, despite thy meditative air,  I hold thy stock of wit but paltry pelf— Thou show’st that same grave aspect everywhere,   And wouldst look thoughtful, stuffed, upon a shelf. I grieve to be so plain, renowned Bird—  Thy fame’s a flam, and thou an empty fowl;  And what is more, upon a Poet’s word  I’d say as much, wert thou Minerva’s owl. So doff th’ imposture of those heavy brows;  They do not serve to hide thy instincts base— And if thou must be sometimes munching mouse, Munch it, O Owl! with less profound a face.
PART I I In a far country, and a distant age, Ere sprites and fays had bade farewell to earth, A boy was born of humble parentage; The stars that shone upon his lonely birth Did seem to promise sovereignty and fame— Yet no tradition hath preserved his name. II ’T is said that on the night when he was born, A beauteous shape swept slowly through the room; Its eyes broke on the infant like a morn, And his cheek brightened like a rose in bloom; But as it passed away there followed after A sigh of pain, and sounds of elvish laughter. III And so his parents deemed him to be blest Beyond the lot of mortals; they were poor As the most timid bird that stored its nest With the stray gleanings at their cottage-door: Yet they contrived to rear their little dove, And he repaid them with the tenderest love. IV The child was very beautiful in sooth, And as he waxed in years grew lovelier still; On his fair brow the aureole of truth Beamed, and the purest maidens, with a thrill, Looked in his eyes, and from their heaven of blue Saw thoughts like sinless Angels peering through. V Need there was none of censure or of praise To mould him to the kind parental hand; Yet there was ever something in his ways, Which those about him could not understand; A self-withdrawn and independent bliss, Beside the father’s love, the mother’s kiss. VI For oft, when he believed himself alone, They caught brief snatches of mysterious rhymes, Which he would murmur in an undertone, Like a pleased bee’s in summer; and at times A strange far look would come into his eyes, As if he saw a vision in the skies. VII And he upon a simple leaf would pore As if its very texture unto him Had some deep meaning; sometimes by the door, From noon until a summer-day grew dim, He lay and watched the clouds; and to his thought Night with her stars but fitful slumbers brought. VIII In the long hours of twilight, when the breeze Talked in low tones along the woodland rills, Or the loud North its stormy minstrelsies Blent with wild noises from the distant hills, The boy—his rosy hand against his ear Curved like a sea-shell—hushed as some rapt seer, IX Followed the sounds, and ever and again, As the wind came, and went, in storm or play, He seemed to hearken as to some far strain Of mingled voices calling him away; And they who watched him held their breath to trace The still and fixed attention in his face. X Once, on a cold and loud-voiced winter night, The three were seated by their cottage-fire— The mother watching by its flickering light The wakeful urchin, and the dozing sire; There was a brief, quick motion like a bird’s, And the boy’s thought thus rippled into words: XI “O mother! thou hast taught me many things, But none I think more beautiful than speech— A nobler power than even those broad wings I used to pray for, when I longed to reach That distant peak which on our vale looks down, And wears the star of evening for a crown. XII “But, mother, while our human words are rife To us with meaning, other sounds there be Which seem, and are, the language of a life Around, yet unlike ours: winds talk; the sea Murmurs articulately, and the sky Listens, and answers, though inaudibly. XIII “By stream and spring, in glades and woodlands lone, Beside our very cot, I’ve gathered flowers Inscribed with signs and characters unknown; But the frail scrolls still baffle all my powers: What is this language and where is the key That opes its weird and wondrous mystery? XIV “The forests know it, and the mountains know, And it is written in the sunset’s dyes; A revelation to the world below Is daily going on before our eyes; And, but for sinful thoughts, I do not doubt That we could spell the thrilling secret out. XV “O mother! somewhere on this lovely earth I lived, and understood that mystic tongue, But, for some reason, to my second birth Only the dullest memories have clung, Like that fair tree that even while blossoming Keeps the dead berries of a former spring. XVI “Who shall put life in these?—my nightly dreams Some teacher of supernal powers foretell; A fair and stately shape appears, which seems Bright with all truth; and once, in a dark dell Within the forest, unto me there came A voice that must be hers, which called my name.” XVII Puzzled and frightened, wondering more and more, The mother heard, but did not comprehend; “So early dallying with forbidden lore! Oh, what will chance, and wherein will it end? My child! my child!” she caught him to her breast, “Oh, let me kiss these wildering thoughts to rest! XVIII “They cannot come from God, who freely gives All that we need to have, or ought to know; Beware, my son! some evil influence strives To grieve thy parents, and to work thee woe; Alas! the vision I misunderstood! It could not be an angel fair and good.” XIX And then, in low and tremulous tones, she told The story of his birth-night; the boy’s eyes, As the wild tale went on, were bright and bold, With a weird look that did not seem surprise: “Perhaps,” he said, “this lady and her elves Will one day come, and take me to themselves.” XX “And would’st thou leave us?” “Dearest mother, no! Hush! I will check these thoughts that give thee pain; Or, if they flow, as they perchance must flow, At least I will not utter them again; Hark! didst thou hear a voice like many streams? Mother! it is the spirit of my dreams!” XXI Thenceforth, whatever impulse stirred below, In the deep heart beneath that childish breast, Those lips were sealed, and though the eye would glow, Yet the brow wore an air of perfect rest; Cheerful, content, with calm though strong control, He shut the temple-portals of his soul. XXII And when too restlessly the mighty throng Of fancies woke within his teeming mind, All silently they formed in glorious song, And floated off unheard, and undivined, Perchance not lost—with many a voiceless prayer They reached the sky, and found some record there. XXIII Softly and swiftly sped the quiet days; The thoughtful boy has blossomed into youth, And still no maiden would have feared his gaze, And still his brow was noble with the truth: Yet though he masks the pain with pious art There burns a restless fever in his heart. XXIV A childish dream is now a deathless need Which drives him to far hills and distant wilds; The solemn faith and fervor of his creed Bold as a martyr’s, simple as a child’s; The eagle knew him as she knew the blast, And the deer did not flee him as he passed. XXV But gentle even in his wildest mood, Always, and most, he loved the bluest weather, And in some soft and sunny solitude Couched like a milder sunshine on the heather, He communed with the winds, and with the birds, As if they might have answered him in words. XXVI Deep buried in the forest was a nook, Remote and quiet as its quiet skies; He knew it, sought it, loved it as a book Full of his own sweet thoughts and memories; Dark oaks and fluted chestnuts gathering round, Pillared and greenly domed a sloping mound, XXVII Whereof—white, purple, azure, golden, red, Confused like hues of sunset—the wild flowers Wove a rich dais; through crosslights overhead Glanced the clear sunshine, fell the fruitful showers, And here the shyest bird would fold her wings; Here fled the fairest and the gentlest things. XXVIII Thither, one night of mist and moonlight, came The youth, with nothing deeper in his thoughts Than to behold beneath the silver flame New aspects of his fair and favorite spot; A single ray attained the ground, and shed Just light enough to guide the wanderer’s tread. XXIX And high and hushed arose the stately trees, Yet shut within themselves, like dungeons, where Lay fettered all the secrets of the breeze; Silent, but not as slumbering, all things there Wore to the youth’s aroused imagination An air of deep and solemn expectation. XXX “Hath Heaven,” the youth exclaimed, “a sweeter spot, Or Earth another like it?—yet even here The old mystery dwells! and though I read it not, Here most I hope—it is, or seems so near; So many hints come to me, but, alas! I cannot grasp the shadows as they pass. XXXI “Here, from the very turf beneath me, I Catch, but just catch, I know not what faint sound, And darkly guess that from yon silent sky Float starry emanations to the ground; These ears are deaf, these human eyes are blind, I want a purer heart, a subtler mind. XXXII “Sometimes—could it be fancy?—I have felt The presence of a spirit who might speak; As down in lowly reverence I knelt, Its very breath has kissed my burning cheek; But I in vain have hushed my own to hear A wing or whisper stir the silent air!” XXXIII Is not the breeze articulate? Hark! Oh, hark! A distant murmur, like a voice of floods; And onward sweeping slowly through the dark, Bursts like a call the night-wind from the woods! Low bow the flowers, the trees fling loose their dreams, And through the waving roof a fresher moonlight streams. XXXIV “Mortal!”—the word crept slowly round the place As if that wind had breathed it! From no star Streams that soft lustre on the dreamer’s face. Again a hushing calm! while faint and far The breeze goes calling onward through the night. Dear God! what vision chains that wide-strained sight? XXXV Over the grass and flowers, and up the slope Glides a white cloud of mist, self-moved and slow, That, pausing at the hillock’s moonlit cope, Swayed like a flame of silver; from below The breathless youth with beating heart beholds A mystic motion in its argent folds. XXXVI Yet his young soul is bold, and hope grows warm, As flashing through that cloud of shadowy crape, With sweep of robes, and then a gleaming arm, Slowly developing, at last took shape A face and form unutterably bright, That cast a golden glamour on the night. XXXVII But for the glory round it it would seem Almost a mortal maiden; and the boy, Unto whom love was yet an innocent dream, Shivered and crimsoned with an unknown joy; As to the young Spring bounds the passionate South, He could have clasped and kissed her mouth to mouth. XXXVIII Yet something checked, that was and was not dread, Till in a low sweet voice the maiden spake; She was the Fairy of his dreams, she said, And loved him simply for his human sake; And that in heaven, wherefrom she took her birth, They called her Poesy, the angel of the earth. XXXIX “And ever since that immemorial hour, When the glad morning-stars together sung, My task hath been, beneath a mightier Power, To keep the world forever fresh and young; I give it not its fruitage and its green, But clothe it with a glory all unseen. XL “I sow the germ which buds in human art, And, with my sister, Science, I explore With light the dark recesses of the heart, And nerve the will, and teach the wish to soar; I touch with grace the body’s meanest clay, While noble souls are nobler for my sway. XLI “Before my power the kings of earth have bowed; I am the voice of Freedom, and the sword Leaps from its scabbard when I call aloud; Wherever life in sacrifice is poured, Wherever martyrs die or patriots bleed, I weave the chaplet and award the meed. XLII “Where Passion stoops, or strays, is cold, or dead, I lift from error, or to action thrill! Or if it rage too madly in its bed, The tempest hushes at my ‘peace! be still!’ I know how far its tides should sink or swell, And they obey my sceptre and my spell. XLIII “All lovely things, and gentle—the sweet laugh Of children, Girlhood’s kiss, and Friendship’s clasp, The boy that sporteth with the old man’s staff, The baby, and the breast its fingers grasp— All that exalts the grounds of happiness, All griefs that hallow, and all joys that bless, XLIV “To me are sacred; at my holy shrine Love breathes its latest dreams, its earliest hints; I turn life’s tasteless waters into wine, And flush them through and through with purple tints. Wherever Earth is fair, and Heaven looks down, I rear my altars, and I wear my crown. XLV “I am the unseen spirit thou hast sought, I woke those shadowy questionings that vex Thy young mind, lost in its own cloud of thought, And rouse the soul they trouble and perplex; I filled thy days with visions, and thy nights Blessed with all sweetest sounds and fairy sights. XLVI “Not here, not in this world, may I disclose The mysteries in which this life is hearsed; Some doubts there be that, with some earthly woes, By Death alone shall wholly be dispersed; Yet on those very doubts from this low sod Thy soul shall pass beyond the stars to God. XLVII “And so to knowledge, climbing grade by grade, Thou shalt attain whatever mortals can, And what thou may’st discover by my aid Thou shalt translate unto thy brother man; And men shall bless the power that flings a ray Into their night from thy diviner day. XLVIII “For from thy lofty height, thy words shall fall Upon their spirits, like bright cataracts That front a sunrise; thou shalt hear them call Amid their endless waste of arid facts, As wearily they plod their way along, Upon the rhythmic zephyrs of thy song. XLIX “All this is in thy reach, but much depends Upon thyself—thy future I await; I give the genius, point the proper ends, But the true bard is his own only Fate; Into thy soul my soul have I infused; Take care thy lofty powers be wisely used. L “The Poet owes a high and holy debt, Which, if he feel, he craves not to be heard For the poor boon of praise, or place, nor yet Does the mere joy of song, as with the bird Of many voices, prompt the choral lay That cheers that gentle pilgrim on his way. LI “Nor may he always sweep the passionate lyre, Which is his heart, only for such relief As an impatient spirit may desire, Lest, from the grave which hides a private grief, The spells of song call up some pallid wraith To blast or ban a mortal hope or faith. LII “Yet over his deep soul, with all its crowd Of varying hopes and fears, he still must brood; As from its azure height a tranquil cloud Watches its own bright changes in the flood; Self-reading, not self-loving—they are twain— And sounding, while he mourns, the depths of pain. LIII “Thus shall his songs attain the common breast, Dyed in his own life’s blood, the sign and seal, Even as the thorns which are the martyr’s crest, That do attest his office, and appeal Unto the universal human heart In sanction of his mission and his art. LIV “Much yet remains unsaid—pure must he be; Oh, blessed are the pure! for they shall hear Where others hear not, see where others see With a dazed vision: who have drawn most near My shrine, have ever brought a spirit cased And mailed in a body clean and chaste. LV “The Poet to the whole wide world belongs, Even as the teacher is the child’s—I said No selfish aim should ever mar his songs, But self wears many guises; men may wed Self in another, and the soul may be Self to its centre, all unconsciously. LVI “And therefore must the Poet watch, lest he, In the dark struggle of this life, should take Stains which he might not notice; he must flee Falsehood, however winsome, and forsake All for the Truth, assured that Truth alone Is Beauty, and can make him all my own. LVII “And he must be as armed warrior strong, And he must be as gentle as a girl, And he must front, and sometimes suffer wrong, With brow unbent, and lip untaught to curl; For wrath, and scorn, and pride, however just, Fill the clear spirit’s eyes with earthly dust.” * The story came to me—it recks not whence— In fragments. Oh! if I could tell it all, If human speech indeed could tell it all, ’T were not a whit less wondrous, than if I Should find, untouched in leaf and stem, and bright As when it bloomed three thousand years ago On some Idalian slope, a perfect rose. Alas! a leaf or two, and they perchance Scarce worth the hiving, one or two dead leaves Are the sole harvest of a summer’s toil. There was a moment, ne’er to be recalled, When to the Poet’s hope within my heart, They wore a tint like life’s, but in my hand, I know not why, they withered. I have heard Somewhere, of some dead monarch, from the tomb Where he had slept a century and more, Brought forth, that when the coffin was laid bare, Albeit the body in its mouldering robes Was fleshless, yet one feature still remained Perfect, or perfect seemed at least; the eyes Gleamed for a second on the startled crowd, And then went out in ashes. Even thus The story, when I drew it from the grave Where it had lain so long, did seem, I thought, Not wholly lifeless; but even while I gazed To fix its features on my heart, and called The world to wonder with me, lo! it proved I looked upon a corpse! What further fell In that lone forest nook, how much was taught, How much was only hinted, what the youth Promised, if promise were required, to do Or strive for, what the gifts he bore away— Or added powers or blessings—how at last, The vision ended and he sought his home, How lived there, and how long, and when he passed Into the busy world to seek his fate, I know not, and if any ever knew, The tale hath perished from the earth; for here The slender thread on which my song is strung Breaks off, and many after-years of life Are lost to sight, the life to reappear Only toward its close—as of a dream We catch the end, and opening, but forget That which had joined them in the dreaming brain; Or as a mountain with a belt of mist That shows his base, and far above, a peak With a blue plume of pines. But turn the page And read the only hints that yet remain. PART II I It is not winter yet, but that sweet time In autumn when the first cool days are past; A week ago, the leaves were hoar with rime, And some have dropped before the North wind’s blast; But the mild hours are back, and at mid-noon, The day hath all the genial warmth of June. II What slender form lies stretched along the mound? Can it be his, the Wanderer’s, with that brow Gray in its prime, those eyes that wander round Listlessly, with a jaded glance that now Seems to see nothing where it rests, and then Pores on each trivial object in its ken? III See how a gentle maid’s wan fingers clasp The last fond love-notes of some faithless hand; Thus with a transient interest, his weak grasp Holds a few leaves as when of old he scanned The meaning in their gold and crimson streaks, But the sweet dream has vanished! hush! he speaks! IV “Once more, once more, after long pain and toil, And yet not long, if I should count by years, I breathe my native air, and tread the soil I trod in childhood; if I shed no tears, No happy tears, ’t is that their fount is dry, And joy that cannot weep must sigh, must sigh. V “These leaves, my boyish books in days of yore, When, as the weeks sped by, I seemed to stand Ever upon the brink of some wild lore, These leaves shall make my bed, and—for the hand Of God is on me, chilling brain and breath— I shall not ask a softer couch in death. VI “Here was it that I saw, or dreamed I saw, I know not which, that shape of love and light. Spirit of Song! have I not owned thy law? Have I not taught, or striven to teach the right, And kept my heart as clean, my life as sweet, As mortals may, when mortals mortals meet? VII “Thou know’st how I went forth, my youthful breast On fire with thee, amid the paths of men; Once in my wanderings, my lone footsteps pressed A mountain forest; in a sombre glen, Down which its thunderous boom a cataract flung, A little bird, unheeded, built and sung. VIII “So fell my voice amid the whirl and rush Of human passions; if unto my art Sorrow hath sometimes owed a gentler gush, I know it not; if any Poet-heart Hath kindled at my songs its light divine, I know it not; no ray came back to mine. IX “Alone in crowds, once more I sought to make Of senseless things my friends; the clouds that burn Above the sunset, and the flowers that shake Their odors in the wind—these would not turn Their faces from me; far from cities, I Forgot the scornful world that passed me by. X “Yet even the world’s cold slights I might have borne, Nor fled, though sorrowing; but I shrank at last When one sweet face, too sweet, I thought, for scorn, Looked scornfully upon me; then I passed From all that youth had dreamed or manhood planned, Into the self that none would understand. XI “She was—I never wronged her womanhood By crowning it with praises not her own— She was all earth’s, and earth’s, too, in that mood When she brings forth her fairest; I atone Now, in this fading brow and failing frame, That such a soul such soul as mine could tame. XII “Clay to its kindred clay! I loved in sooth Too deeply and too purely to be blest; With something more of lust and less of truth She would have sunk all blushes on my breast, And—but I must not blame her—in my ear Death whispers! and the end, thank God! draws near!” XIII Hist! on the perfect silence of the place Comes and dies off a sound like far-off rain With voices mingled; on the Poet’s face A shadow, where no shadow should have lain, Falls the next moment: nothing meets his sight, Yet something moves betwixt him and the light. XIV And a voice murmurs, “Wonder not, but hear! Me to behold again thou need’st not seek; Yet by the dim-felt influence on the air, And by the mystic shadow on thy cheek, Know, though thou may’st not touch with fleshly hands, The genius of thy life beside thee stands! XV “Unto no fault, O weary-hearted one! Unto no fault of man’s thou ow’st thy fate; All human hearts that beat this earth upon, All human thoughts and human passions wait Upon the genuine bard, to him belong, And help in their own way the Poet’s song. XVI “How blame the world? for the world hast thou wrought? Or wast thou but as one who aims to fling The weight of some unutterable thought Down like a burden? what from questioning Too subtly thy own spirit, and to speech But half subduing themes beyond the reach XVII “Of mortal reason; what from living much In that dark world of shadows, where the soul Wanders bewildered, striving still to clutch, Yet never clutching once, a shadowy goal, Which always flies, and while it flies seems near, Thy songs were riddles hard to mortal ear. XVIII “This was the hidden selfishness that marred Thy teachings ever; this the false key-note That on such souls as might have loved thee jarred Like an unearthly language; thou did’st float On a strange water; those who stood on land Gazed, but they could not leave their beaten strand. XIX “Your elements were different, and apart— The world’s and thine—and even in those intense And watchful broodings o’er thy inmost heart, It was thy own peculiar difference That thou did’st seek; nor did’st thou care to find Aught that would bring thee nearer to thy kind. XX “Not thus the Poet, who in blood and brain Would represent his race and speak for all, Weaves the bright woof of that impassioned strain Which drapes, as if for some high festival Of pure delights—whence few of human birth May rightly be shut out—the common earth. XXI “As the same law that moulds a planet, rounds A drop of dew, so the great Poet spheres Worlds in himself; no selfish limit bounds A sympathy that folds all characters, All ranks, all passions, and all life almost In its wide circle. Like some noble host, XXII “He spreads the riches of his soul, and bids Partake who will. Age has its saws of truth, And love is for the maiden’s drooping lids, And words of passion for the earnest youth; Wisdom for all; and when it seeks relief, Tears, and their solace for the heart of grief. XXIII “Nor less on him than thee, the mysteries Within him and about him ever weigh— The meanings in the stars, and in the breeze, All the weird wonders of the common day, Truths that the merest point removes from reach, And thoughts that pause upon the brink of speech; XXIV “But on the surface of his song, these lie As shadows, not as darkness; and alway, Even though it breathe the secrets of the sky, There is a human purpose in the lay; As some tall fir that whispers to the stars Shields at its base a cotter’s lattice-bars. XXV “Even such my Poet! for thou still art mine! Thou might’st have been, and now have calmly died, A priest, and not a victim at the shrine; Alas! yet was it all thy fault? I chide, Perchance, myself within thee, and the fate To which thy power was solely consecrate. XXVI “Thy life hath not been wholly without use, Albeit that use is partly hidden now; In thy unmingled scorn of any truce With this world’s specious falsehoods, often thou Hast uttered, through some all unworldly song, Truths that for man might else have slumbered long. XXVII “And these not always vainly on the crowd Have fallen; some are cherished now, and some, In mystic phrases wrapped as in a shroud, Wait the diviner, who as yet is dumb Upon the breast of God—the gate of birth Closed on a dreamless ignorance of earth. XXVIII “And therefore, though thy name shall pass away, Even as a cloud that hath wept all its showers, Yet as that cloud shall live again one day In the glad grass, and in the happy flowers, So in thy thoughts, though clothed in sweeter rhymes, Thy life shall bear its flowers in future times.”
They dub thee idler, smiling sneeringly, And why? because, forsooth, so many moons, Here dwelling voiceless by the voiceful sea, Thou hast not set thy thoughts to paltry tunes In song or sonnet. Them these golden noons Oppress not with their beauty; they could prate, Even while a prophet read the solemn runes On which is hanging some imperial fate. How know they, these good gossips, what to thee The ocean and its wanderers may have brought? How know they, in their busy vacancy, With what far aim thy spirit may be fraught? Or that thou dost not bow thee silently Before some great unutterable thought?
It may be through some foreign grace,  And unfamiliar charm of face;  It may be that across the foam Which bore her from her childhood’s home,  By some strange spell, my Katie brought,  Along with English creeds and thought— Entangled in her golden hair— Some English sunshine, warmth, and air!  I cannot tell—but here to-day,  A thousand billowy leagues away  From that green isle whose twilight skies No darker are than Katie’s eyes, She seems to me, go where she will,  An English girl in England still; I meet her on the dusty street,  And daisies spring about her feet; Or, touched to life beneath her tread,  An English cowslip lifts its head; And, as to do her grace, rise up  The primrose and the buttercup! I roam with her through fields of cane,  And seem to stroll an English lane,  Which, white with blossoms of the May,  Spreads its green carpet in her way!  As fancy wills, the path beneath  Is golden gorse, or purple heath:  And now we hear in woodlands dim  Their unarticulated hymn, Now walk through rippling waves of wheat,  Now sink in mats of clover sweet,  Or see before us from the lawn  The lark go up to greet the dawn!  All birds that love the English sky  Throng round my path when she is by:  The blackbird from a neighboring thorn  With music brims the cup of morn,  And in a thick, melodious rain  The mavis pours her mellow strain!  But only when my Katie’s voice  Makes all the listening woods rejoice  I hear—with cheeks that flush and pale— The passion of the nightingale! Anon the pictures round her change,  And through an ancient town we range,  Whereto the shadowy memory clings  Of one of England’s Saxon kings,  And which to shrine his fading fame  Still keeps his ashes and his name.  Quaint houses rise on either hand,  But still the airs are fresh and bland,  As if their gentle wings caressed  Some new-born village of the West.  A moment by the Norman tower  We pause; it is the Sabbath hour!  And o’er the city sinks and swells  The chime of old St. Mary’s bells,  Which still resound in Katie’s ears As sweet as when in distant years  She heard them peal with jocund din  A merry English Christmas in!  We pass the abbey’s ruined arch,  And statelier grows my Katie’s march,  As round her, wearied with the taint  Of Transatlantic pine and paint,  She sees a thousand tokens cast  Of England’s venerable Past!  Our reverent footsteps lastly claims  The younger chapel of St. James,  Which though, as English records run,  Not old, had seen full many a sun,  Ere to the cold December gale  The sullen Pilgrim spread his sail.  There Katie in her childish days Spelt out her prayers and lisped her praise,  And doubtless, as her beauty grew,  Did much as other maidens do— Across the pews and down the aisle  Sent many a beau-bewildering smile,  And to subserve her spirit’s need  Learned other things beside the creed!  There, too, to-day her knee she bows,  And by her one whose darker brows  Betray the Southern heart that burns  Beside her, and which only turns  Its thoughts to Heaven in one request,  Not all unworthy to be blest,  But rising from an earthlier pain  Than might beseem a Christian fane.  Ah! can the guileless maiden share  The wish that lifts that passionate prayer?  Is all at peace that breast within?  Good angels! warn her of the sin!  Alas! what boots it? who can save  A willing victim of the wave?  Who cleanse a soul that loves its guilt?  Or gather wine when wine is spilt? We quit the holy house and gain  The open air; then, happy twain,  Adown familiar streets we go, And now and then she turns to show,  With fears that all is changing fast,  Some spot that’s sacred to her Past. Here by this way, through shadows cool, A little maid, she tripped to school;  And there each morning used to stop  Before a wonder of a shop Where, built of apples and of pears,  Rose pyramids of golden spheres;  While, dangling in her dazzled sight,  Ripe cherries cast a crimson light,  And made her think of elfin lamps,  And feast and sport in fairy camps,  Whereat, upon her royal throne  (Most richly carved in cherry-stone),  Titania ruled, in queenly state,  The boisterous revels of the fête! ’T was yonder, with their “horrid” noise,  Dismissed from books, she met the boys,  Who, with a barbarous scorn of girls,  Glanced slightly at her sunny curls,  And laughed and leaped as reckless by  As though no pretty face were nigh!  But—here the maiden grows demure— Indeed she’s not so very sure,  That in a year, or haply twain,  Few looked who failed to look again,  And sooth to say, I little doubt  (Some azure day, the truth will out!)  That certain baits in certain eyes  Caught many an unsuspecting prize;  And somewhere underneath these eaves  A budding flirt put forth its leaves! Has not the sky a deeper blue,  Have not the trees a greener hue, And bend they not with lordlier grace And nobler shapes above the place  Where on one cloudless winter morn  My Katie to this life was born?  Ah, folly! long hath fled the hour  When love to sight gave keener power,  And lovers looked for special boons  In brighter flowers and larger moons.  But wave the foliage as it may,  And let the sky be ashen gray,  Thus much at least a manly youth May hold—and yet not blush—as truth:  If near that blessed spot of earth  Which saw the cherished maiden’s birth  No softer dews than usual rise,  And life there keeps its wonted guise,  Yet not the less that spot may seem  As lovely as a poet’s dream; And should a fervid faith incline  To make thereof a sainted shrine,  Who may deny that round us throng  A hundred earthly creeds as wrong,  But meaner far, which yet unblamed  Stalk by us and are not ashamed.  So, therefore, Katie, as our stroll  Ends at this portal, while you roll  Those lustrous eyes to catch each ray  That may recall some vanished day, I—let them jeer and laugh who will— Stoop down and kiss the sacred sill! So strongly sometimes on the sense  These fancies hold their influence, That in long well-known streets I stray  Like one who fears to lose his way.  The stranger, I, the native, she, Myself, not Kate, have crossed the sea;  And changing place, and mixing times,  I walk in unfamiliar climes! These houses, free to every breeze  That blows from warm Floridian seas, Assume a massive English air, And close around an English square;  While, if I issue from the town,  An English hill looks greenly down,  Or round me rolls an English park,  And in the Broad I hear the Larke!  Thus when, where woodland violets hide,  I rove with Katie at my side, It scarce would seem amiss to say,  “Katie! my home lies far away,  Beyond the pathless waste of brine,  In a young land of palm and pine!  There, by the tropic heats, the soul  Is touched as if with living coal,  And glows with such a fire as none  Can feel beneath a Northern sun,  Unless—my Katie’s heart attest!— ’T is kindled in an English breast!  Such is the land in which I live,  And, Katie! such the soul I give.  Come! ere another morning beam,  We’ll cleave the sea with wings of steam;  And soon, despite of storm or calm,  Beneath my native groves of palm, Kind friends shall greet, with joy and pride,  The Southron and his English bride!”
’T was merry Christmas when he came, Our little boy beneath the sod; And brighter burned the Christmas flame, And merrier sped the Christmas game, Because within the house there lay A shape as tiny as a fay— The Christmas gift of God! In wreaths and garlands on the walls The holly hung its ruby balls, The mistletoe its pearls; And a Christmas tree’s fantastic fruits Woke laughter like a choir of flutes From happy boys and girls. For the mirth, which else had swelled as shrill As a school let loose to its errant will, Was softened by the thought, That in a dim hushed room above A mother’s pains in a mother’s love Were only just forgot. The jest, the tale, the toast, the glee, All took a sober tone; We spoke of the babe upstairs, as we Held festival for him alone. When the bells rang in the Christmas morn, It scarcely seemed a sin to say That they rang because that babe was born, Not less than for the sacred day. Ah! Christ forgive us for the crime Which drowned the memories of the time In a merely mortal bliss! We owned the error when the mirth Of another Christmas lit the hearth Of every home but this. When, in that lonely burial-ground, With every Christmas sight and sound Removed or shunned, we kept A mournful Christmas by the mound Where little Willie slept! Ah, hapless mother! darling wife! I might say nothing more, And the dull cold world would hold The story of that precious life As amply told! Shall we, shall you and I, before That world’s unsympathetic eyes Lay other relics from our store Of tender memories? What could it know of the joy and love That throbbed and smiled and wept above An unresponsive thing? And who could share the ecstatic thrill With which we watched the upturned bill Of our bird at its living spring? Shall we tell how in the time gone by, Beneath all changes of the sky, And in an ordinary home Amid the city’s din, Life was to us a crystal dome, Our babe the flame therein? Ah! this were jargon on the mart; And though some gentle friend, And many and many a suffering heart, Would weep and comprehend, Yet even these might fail to see What we saw daily in the child— Not the mere creature undefiled, But the winged cherub soon to be. That wandering hand which seemed to reach At angel finger-tips, And that murmur like a mystic speech Upon the rosy lips, That something in the serious face Holier than even its infant grace, And that rapt gaze on empty space, Which made us, half believing, say, “Ah, little wide-eyed seer! who knows But that for you this chamber glows With stately shapes and solemn shows?” Which touched us, too, with vague alarms, Lest in the circle of our arms We held a being less akin To his parents in a world of sin Than to beings not of clay: How could we speak in human phrase, Of such scarce earthly traits and ways, What would not seem A doting dream, In the creed of these sordid days? No! let us keep Deep, deep, In sorrowing heart and aching brain, This story hidden with the pain, Which since that blue October night When Willie vanished from our sight, Must haunt us even in our sleep. In the gloom of the chamber where he died, And by that grave which, through our care, From Yule to Yule of every year, Is made like spring to bloom; And where, at times, we catch the sigh As of an angel floating nigh, Who longs but has not power to tell That in that violet-shrouded cell Lies nothing better than the shell Which he had cast aside— By that sweet grave, in that dark room, We may weave at will for each other’s ear, Of that life, and that love, and that early doom, The tale which is shadowed here: To us alone it will always be As fresh as our own misery; But enough, alas! for the world is said, In the brief “Here lieth” of the dead!
Welcome, rain or tempest From yon airy powers, We have languished for them Many sultry hours, And earth is sick and wan, and pines with all her flowers. What have they been doing In the burning June? Riding with the genii? Visiting the moon? Or sleeping on the ice amid an arctic noon? Bring they with them jewels From the sunset lands? What are these they scatter With such lavish hands? There are no brighter gems in Raolconda’s sands. Pattering on the gravel, Dropping from the eaves, Glancing in the grass, and Tinkling on the leaves, They flash the liquid pearls as flung from fairy sieves. Meanwhile, unreluctant, Earth like Danae lies; Listen! is it fancy That beneath us sighs, As that warm lap receives the largesse of the skies? Jove, it is, descendeth In those crystal rills; And this world-wide tremor Is a pulse that thrills To a god’s life infused through veins of velvet hills. Wait, thou jealous sunshine, Break not on their bliss; Earth will blush in roses Many a day for this, And bend a brighter brow beneath thy burning kiss.
Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S. C., 1866 Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,  Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!— Though yet no marble column craves  The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurels in the earth,  The garlands of your fame are sown; And, somewhere, waiting for its birth,   The shaft is in the stone. Meanwhile, your sisters for the years  Which hold in trust your storied tombs,  Bring all they now can give you—tears,  And these memorial blooms. Small tributes, but your shades will smile  As proudly on these wreaths to-day,  As when some cannon-moulded pile  Shall overlook this Bay. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!   There is no holier spot of ground,  Than where defeated valor lies  By mourning beauty crowned.
A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the red of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown. Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world, closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop.
Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.
are heading south, pulled by a compass in the genes. They are not fooled by this odd November summer, though we stand in our doorways wearing cotton dresses. We are watching them as they swoop and gather— the shadow of wings falls over the heart. When they rustle among the empty branches, the trees must think their lost leaves have come back. The birds are heading south, instinct is the oldest story. They fly over their doubles, the mute weathervanes, teaching all of us with their tailfeathers the true north.
PART ONEI Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts, and splintery tenement cornices milled with acanthus and classical grasses of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy. We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan floating its ant-threads of traffic to the granite salients of the anchorage, and through its strands on the west the Financial District’s watery silhouettes. But it was our own foundations, crumbling in the sandy soil, that made us protest the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp to funnel the airport traffic over us into Manhattan. “Construction tremors will weaken our buildings”: from the over-roosted tenements clinging near the anchorage flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups’ painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded usII with chimerical figures and blueprints, wearing us down. Our own “block-leader,” Luz, a Guatemalan law student at NYU where I studied classics, distracted us more easily with her “pure language” or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. “Call that Spanish? Take my sitter—muy indio, still speaks some Maya mountain-language BUT the beautiful Spanish!” And so one evening this sitter, Pilar, came over—forty, perhaps, with a long fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones an archaic poem to the Madonna. “My daughter knows it in Quiché and English—” and she passed around, wistfully, a First Communion photo—flat cheekbones like her mother’s, long black braids, straight look. Luz told us Pilar had lost husband and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned death heap in the center of their village— “They killed all the men. But when my family came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the green card, and she’s a hotel maid now near the UN ...” Much realer, this, than our own bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew but our bridge might metamorphose, as the City said (“Global cities draw capital”), into a river of money (“We’ll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp”), and anyway, mainly, summerIII was running out, with its open evenings and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block from the subway, I heard my name, crossed the street where twin buildings had area-ways. and saw you waving, the same, Pilar, from a window below the swag-bellied area railings. “Come have some coffee—go around in back.” I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered airwell by a door with multiple doorbells. You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted, with padlocked doors. “See, the super’s cut up his flat for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room has a window—we all share the bath.” I entered a lime-walled room—chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall was the building front, the three others drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawledprie-dieu: two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks, and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows. Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above, my own second-story windows. “We saw you reading there,” you said from behind me, “when we moved in.” You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter (she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow, linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said: “I’m a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I’ve got a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental.” Then you paused, and I felt how clearly you’d presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job, your état civil, and I said: “I’m a graduate student at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ...” I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ... definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors, and soon we were hardly listening, waiting for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita told us what the priest had said about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita’s First Communion, and none of us could stop finding striking things to say. Next day you came over to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate, you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue’s smile, and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge, “There’s a path up there. If the bridge is bad, we’ll tell off the Mayor—” (In what spirit, I wondered, had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading.IV But next week, instead of the plank stair that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel the resonant top-thrum of westbound subways and trucks. Then the riverside—I loved this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers’ lots filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness soothed me—though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see our quarter five years from now, say—the withering discount chains, tentative boutiques, and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale “pioneers,” as neighborhood indigenes, living on with strange literalness among them, supplying their just-permissible quantum of urban grit. You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out of the endspan’s slatted shadows, you turned and called me into a side-lot—sunken concrete, flask- green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been interior, once—rows of soiled roomsized plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti, was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe, Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed Pequita’s cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture as if, exiled within, you reached out— We stepped back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said: “Luz likes to say I’m some mountain-woman, but when my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City—I only went back when I married.” I told her I’d lived in this city, with a stepmother, who’d divorced my uncle to marry my father; and beat me. “A stepmother’s a curse of God,” you said gently. And on the walk back, pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York seemed a dot in a belt of capitals high on the globe: world-cities, packed with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia.V We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV, Pequita at my computer—you’d asked me to teach her— or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer, I’d worked in my window like a scholar in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises, like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever the sounds of buildings collapsing.” Across, the two tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street. But now it was the dailiness of two from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame paced with armfuls of laundry, washed in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand stratagems of those who simply must not spend; and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred periphery, housekeeping around her, you’d make yourself interrupt her, to mop behind your sweeping. And Pequita—I saw her wrap you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you orange juice, as they’d taught her in school, for she loved you, she was the person who loved you— I saw too, that of what I wanted the university to be for me—a tiny model of the city with its own rules and subsets: “Tell me each day who I am”—you’d found your part in Pequita; I followed the shape of your day touching center as it funneled into her hand and moving pencil-point.VI For everything seemed natural to Pequita: the Credo, her photocopied choir music piled beside the tidy prie-dieu, our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps, her school’s turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ... Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins and laughably rococo grottoes imagined by the seicento as the Golden Age. —And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back— touching, as if her child’s paradisial will were there for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully, occasionally, typed-up and dispatched protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects of perspective, tiny human gestures giving point to the city’s vast, ironic beauty.PART TWOVII At a moment when no one was thinking about her, Pequita awoke. Perhaps she enjoyed the solitude, Pilar asleep, me asleep across the street. She got up and stood on the cheap oval bathroom rug before the sink. At seven the drills started, deeper-toned than ever before (they woke me)— and part of your ceiling fell in; a beam splintered, plummeting straight to the oval rug— The person screaming over the phone was Pilar. I thought it must be really all right, or she’d be crying not screaming, but when I’d called 911 and run over, Pequita was barely alive. Then the hospital corridors, me trying to close my winter coat (the buttons were off) on my nightgown, you on a bench, staring straight ahead. When they said Pequita was “gone,” you were utterly silent. I brought you to my place (though our street was a tangle of police lights and yellow tape), terrified of your fixed inner focus, as if you had a plan ... Next night I had Luz stay over, I slept at her place; the third I was back. You, thank God (I thought), were crying, and Luz had set up the service. She propelled us downstairs and to a tiny brick church I must often have passed without seeing it, two blocks inland. Egg-blue inside, it was, with a little green and gilt altar, dark Stations on the walls, and the statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe placed oddly below the altar stairs, so that Pilar, after the death-mass, could kneel before her, praying straight into her face, while I on a kneeler buried mine in my hands. What would the mother live for now, the hotel, me, or Luz, already writing more endless mad letters? Yet only these had from the City real answers: they’d brace the drill site with vibration-absorbing piers; and they wanted her and her friend Mrs. Citrin to know “that no one else had been more than lightly injured.”VIII It was the end of winter, very dark. The building managers, nervy, had moved you to the first floor next door, till you found a new place (I knew you weren’t looking). Each day I saw you arrive from work, answer my call tersely, then pull down your blinds. A shadow showed rarely, flattened, shapeless; you lay on your sofa a lot. “Thanks Anne—I’m better without company,” or “please understand.” But often, later in the evening, you’d come down the stairs and turn inland. Then, one morning as I was passing with early groceries, you were leaving the parish hall in your black winter coat, heavily scarved, and we paused. Approvingly, you tapped one glove on my armload—you’d told me to cook more, dictated recipes. I asked if this had been Pequita’s choir-practice place; the sentence wavered, but you replied with grim joy, “She’s not practicing now.” It took me a minute. Pequita was singing, this moment, in the Presence. Still what you felt most (it was in your face) was absence, absence, but from something bitter in your eyes, that seemed small and round with the cold, I felt your desire to exclude me and our old collusive ironies. What were such luxuries now, ironies, Anglo friends; and I thought you hated my mind that remembered the brownpapered books, the orange juice. I reached to touch your arm—to get past this, but no, you had to get home: “I fasted for communion”; and your eyes swerved away. All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies, that I’d seen you sort through for Pequita, were now an affront. And yet I felt you moving behind your own mind, as if with something held in reserve ...IX But then you stopped answering the phone, went less often to church. What I thought was that you were angry (certainly I was). Perhaps I thought you needed to talk, and I’d visit you in Manhattan. So one morning in March, in the black coat I’d got for the funeral, I walked east from the forty-second street Lexington stop to the three-story, fairy-lit jungle atrium of the Tricontinental, and went to the seventh floor, where you started. There was a cart in the hall, a gleaming chrome maid’s cart half-projecting from a bedroom. On its sides were rows of glasses with lace sani-bonnets, gold- stamped mini-soaps and deodorants. It moved out, and you stood in the door with a sheet-load, looking fat in a starchy pink uniform monogrammedPILAR. When you saw me, you dropped the sheets and in pain, pressed both palms to your cheeks, and looked at me looking at you. When I started sobbing, you took my shoulder and backed me to the elevator. Pressed the button, stepped back, and then, to my surprise, gave me a sudden hug before pushing me in.X It had been always this half-connected and tenuous, our friendship. What light on my own isolation and need, that I hadn’t known. But you actually called me, that week, to propose our old joke, a bridge walk—maybe Saturday? Your voice in my ears sounded wobbly with tension, held-backness, so I got in first: a friend had wound up her doctorate and left me a minute Village studio starting June ... After that I could listen, somber, as you poured out your need to leave, Luz’s cousin, the possible hotel job “right in LA.” You added “Anne,” and broke off. “Well, I’ll tell you that later. Look, it may snow on Saturday, OK?” “I don’t care.” And before you hung up, I’d resigned you, given you up. We’d part, on my side in anger, on yours in oblivion. I met you at the foot of the anchorage stair (not the eastern approach, with its easy grade near the ramp site). We climbed through the snow, slowly, pausing at landings for different views of our old alley world. Like a museum of disused urban functions—we noted a bricked-over backyard privy arch, and from higher, roof-huts, inkily distinct, of old-style tenement dumbwaiters. The whole scene thrown out of drawing by one of those giant NYC cable-spools, charred at the bottom where some homeless had tried to burn it. The moist snow was sweeping through the cable tower when we clambered onto the path beneath it. As we moved, hunched slightly, onto the mainspan, the whole city abruptly whited-out to a monochrome geometry of vertical and stooping gray lines. I thought how Pequita would have loved it, and caught her mother’s eye. We went on cautiously, soon pausing to stamp our boots and look over the rail at the traffic lanes below us. “Anne, what I started to say before—this is it: I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you—you understand?” “Of course,” I lied aimlessly. But you, glancing sideways, “But I’m really sorry ...” “No, really ...” You shook your head slightly, then took my arm. “Okay then— what’s this thing?” pointing a snowy boot at a bolt as high as our knees, with a rusted-on octagonal nut: “It’s just a bolt.” You tapped your glove on a strut— “strut,” I provided. And you said, pompously, in Luz’ very intonations (in what spirit had you listened?)—“The tolerances just aren’t there.” Then, feeling easier, we started naming everything— spikes, spun-wire vertical cables: English, Spanish, and then I heard you speak Quiché (words once for vines, for split trunks over gorges?) But everything on the bridge was shabby, neglected-looking; and you said soberly: “If anyone was supposed to look after this bridge, he’s forgot all about it.” We didn’t link arms again, but started back, pausing to throw a few loose snowballs on the Manhattan traffic below us. We’d go our separate ways—I’d go on delaying, skirting around my burnt-out places; you’d go where you could, forget what you could— some Job-like relinquishment of inquiry or thought; organisms tend to persist ... When we got down to the massive base of the anchorage, we managed a hug that took in our past, at least: one embrace of two black winter coats in the snow.
Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops, black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows’ shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An interspace then, like the slowing of some rural water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting—bottle-green—the lucid slim sluice falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won’t take us altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won’t churn us up altogether. We’ll keep a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self’s self—to reflect the sky. But we won’t (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing’s left over, really, from labor. They’ve taken it all for the mill-race. In close-ups now, you can see it in every face, despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows— it’s the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered to the voice that says “Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I’ll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms.” It’s gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling, despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves, the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ... But even as the rain slackens, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O’DONNELL’S, BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH’S KNISH
The week in August you come home, adult, professional, aloof, we roast and carve the fatted calf —in our case home-grown pig, the chine garlicked and crisped, the applesauce hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wine. Nothing is cost-effective here. The peas, the beets, the lettuces hand sown, are raised to stand apart. The electric fence ticks like the slow heart of something we fed and bedded for a year, then killed with kindness’s one bullet and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering. In winter we lure the birds with suet, thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat. Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring of wire that keeps the raccoons from the corn to the gouged pine table that we lounge around, distressed before any of you was born. Benign and dozy from our gluttonies, the candles down to stubs, defenses down, love leaking out unguarded the way juice dribbles from the fence when grounded by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe, how eloquent, how beautiful you seem! Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow, ballooning to overfill our space, the almost-parents of your parents now. So briefly having you back to measure us is harder than having let you go.
Anna Bell and Lane, eighty, make small leaf piles in the heat, each pile a great joint effort, like fifty years of marriage, sharing chores a rusty dance. In my own yard, the stacks are big as children, who scatter them, dodge and limbo the poke of my rake. We’re lucky, young and straight-boned. And I feel sorry for the couple, bent like parentheses around their brittle little lawn. I like feeling sorry for them, the tenderness of it, but only for a moment: John glides in like a paper airplane, takes the children for the weekend, and I remember, they’re the lucky ones— shriveled Anna Bell, loving her crooked Lane.
My brother’s worth about two cents, As far as I can see. I simply cannot understand Why they would want a “he.” He spends a good part of his day Asleep inside the crib, And when he eats, he has to wear A stupid baby bib. He cannot walk and cannot talk And cannot throw a ball. In fact, he can’t do anything— He’s just no fun at all. It would have been more sensible, As far as I can see, Instead of getting one like him To get one just like me.
Then I was sealed, and like the wintering tree I stood me locked upon a summer core; Living, had died a death, and asked no more. And I lived then, but as enduringly, And my heart beat, but only as to be. Ill weathers well, hail, gust and cold I bore, I held my life as hid, at root, in store: Thus I lived then, till this air breathed on me. Till this kind air breathed kindness everywhere, There where my times had left me I would stay. Then I was staunch, I knew nor yes nor no; But now the wishful leaves have thronged the air. My every leaf leans forth upon the day; Alas, kind element! which comes to go.
Light at each point was beating then to flight, The sapling bark flushed upward, and the welling Tips of the wood touched, touched at the bound, And boughs were slight and burdened beyond telling Toward that caress of the boughs a summer’s night, Illimitable in fragrance and in sound. Here were the blue buds, earlier than hope, Unnumbered, beneath the leaves, a breath apart, Wakening in root-dusk. When the air went north, Lifting the oakleaves from the northern slope, Their infinite young tender eyes looked forth. Here all that was, was frail to bear a heart.
(From a Persian Carpet) Ash and strewments, the first moth-wings, pale Ardour of brief evenings, on the fecund wind; Or all a wing, less than wind, Breath of low herbs upfloats, petal or wing, Haunting the musk precincts of burial. For the season of newer riches moves triumphing, Of the evanescence of deaths. These potpourris Earth-tinctured, jet insect-bead, cinder of bloom— How weigh while a great summer knows increase, Ceaselessly risen, what there entombs?— Of candour fallen from the slight stems of Mays, Corrupt of the rim a blue shades, pensively: So a fatigue of wishes will young eyes. And brightened, unpurged eyes of revery, now Not to glance to fabulous groves again! For now deep presence is, and binds its close, And closes down the wreathed alleys escape of sighs. And now rich time is weaving, hidden tree, The fable of orient threads from bough to bough. Old rinded wood, whose lissomeness within Has reached from nothing to its covering These many corymbs’ flourish!—And the green Shells which wait amber, breathing, wrought Towards the still trance of summer’s centering, Motives by ravished humble fingers set, Each in a noon of its own infinite. And here is leant the branch and its repose of the deep leaf to the pilgrim plume. Repose, Inflections brilliant and mute of the voyager, light! And here the nests, and freshet throats resume Notes over and over found, names For the silvery ascensions of joy. Nothing is here But moss and its bells now of the root’s night; But the beetle’s bower, and arc from grass to grass For the flight in gauze. Now its fresh lair, Grass-deep, nestles the cool eft to stir Vague newborn limbs, and the bud’s dark winding has Access of day. Now on the subtle noon Time’s image, at pause with being, labours free Of all its charge, for each in coverts laid, Of clement kind; and everlastingly, In some elision of bright moments is known, Changed wide as Eden, the branch whose silence sways Dazzle of the murmurous leaves to continual tone; Its separations, sighing to own again Being of the ignorant wish; and sways to sight, Waked from it nighted, the marvelous foundlings of light; Risen and weaving from the ceaseless root A divine ease whispers toward fruitfulness, While all a summer’s conscience tempts the fruit.
Now the rich cherry, whose sleek wood, And top with silver petals traced Like a strict box its gems encased, Has spilt from out that cunning lid, All in an innocent green round, Those melting rubies which it hid; With moss ripe-strawberry-encrusted, So birds get half, and minds lapse merry To taste that deep-red, lark’s-bite berry, And blackcap bloom is yellow-dusted. The wren that thieved it in the eaves A trailer of the rose could catch To her poor droopy sloven thatch, And side by side with the wren’s brood— O lovely time of beggar’s luck— Opens the quaint and hairy bud; And full and golden is the yield Of cows that never have to house, But all night nibble under boughs, Or cool their sides in the moist field. Into the rooms flow meadow airs, The warm farm baking smell’s blown round. Inside and out, and sky and ground Are much the same; the wishing star, Hesperus, kind and early born, Is risen only finger-far; All stars stand close in summer air, And tremble, and look mild as amber; When wicks are lighted in the chamber, They are like stars which settled there. Now straightening from the flowery hay, Down the still light the mowers look, Or turn, because their dreaming shook, And they waked half to other days, When left alone in the yellow stubble The rusty-coated mare would graze. Yet thick the lazy dreams are born, Another thought can come to mind, But like the shivering of the wind, Morning and evening in the corn.
A fall over rock, Metal answering to water,  Is the seal of this spot; A land trodden by music  And the tune forgot. Of a region savage, The territory that was broken, Silver gushed free; And earth holy, earth meek shall receive it  In humility. This, not dwelt in, this haunted,  The country of the proud, Is curdling to stone, And careless of the feet of the waters  As they glance from it down.
This is the time lean woods shall spend A steeped-up twilight, and the pale evening drink, And the perilous roe, the leaper to the west brink, Trembling and bright to the caverned cloud descend. Now shall you see pent oak gone gusty and frantic, Stooped with dry weeping, ruinously unloosing The sparse disheveled leaf, or reared and tossing A dreary scarecrow bough in funeral antic. Then, tatter you and rend, Oak heart, to your profession mourning; not obscure The outcome, not crepuscular; on the deep floor Sable and gold match lustres and contend. And rags of shrouding will not muffle the slain. This is the immortal extinction, the priceless wound Not to be staunched. The live gold leaks beyond, And matter’s sanctified, dipped in a gold stain.
When tunes jigged nimbler than the blood And quick and high the bows would prance And every fiddle string would burst To catch what’s lost beyond the string, While half afraid their children stood, I saw the old come out to dance. The heart is not so light at first, But heavy like a bough in spring.
I was enriched, not casting after marvels, But as one walking in a usual place, Without desert but common eyes and ears, No recourse but to hear, power but to see, Got to love you of grace. Subtle musicians, that could body wind, Or contrive strings to anguish, in conceit Random and artless strung a branch with bells, Fixed in one silver whim, which at a touch Shook and were sweet. And you, you lovely and unpurchased note, One run distraught, and vexing hot and cold To give to the heart’s poor confusion tongue, By chance caught you, and henceforth all unlearned Repeats you gold.
This that is washed with weed and pebblestone Curved once a dolphin’s length before the prow, And I who read the land to which we bore In its grave eyes, question my idol now, What cold and marvelous fancy it may keep, Since the salt terror swept us from our course, Or if a wisdom later than the storm, For old green ocean’s tinctured it so deep; And with some reason to me on this strand The waves, the ceremonial waves have come, And stooped their barbaric heads, and all flung out Their glittering arms before them, and are gone, Leaving the murderous tribute lodged in sand.
Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind  Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud:  The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall Where the simple heart is bowed. O in wild innocence it rides The rare ungovernable element, But once it sways to terror and descent, The marches of the wind are its abyss, No wind staying it upward of the breast— Let mind be proud for this, And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt, Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart  Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.
Now I have tempered haste, The joyous traveller said, The steed has passed me now Whose hurrying hooves I fled. My spectre rides thereon, I learned what mount he has, Upon what summers fed; And wept to know again, Beneath the saddle swung, Treasure for whose great theft This breast was wrung. His bridle bells sang out, I could not tell their chime, So brilliantly he rings, But called his name as Time. His bin was morning light, Those straws which gild his bed Are of the fallen West. Although green lands consume Beneath their burning tread, In everlasting bright His hooves have rest.
In New York City for a conference on weed control, leaving the hotel in a cluster of horticulturalists, he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut, narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips, holds the door for the Asian woman in a miniskirt and thigh high white leather boots. She nods slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture. Neither smile, as if performing a timeless ritual, as if anticipating the loss of a son or a lover. Years later, Christmas, inexplicably he dons my mother’s auburn wig, my brother’s wire-rimmed glasses, and strikes a pose clowning with my second hand acoustic guitar. He is transformed, a working class hero and a door whispers shut, like cherry blossoms falling.
I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s in a running-shoe box held shut with elastic bands. Then I clean the corners where she has eaten and slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food from the baseboard, dumping the litter and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic dishes I hide in the basement, the pee- soaked towel I put in the trash. I put the catnip mouse in the box and I put the box away, too, in a deep dirt drawer in the earth. When the death-energy leaves me, I go to the room where my daughter slept in nursery school, grammar school, high school, I lie on her milky bedspread and think of the day I left her at college, how nothing could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax out from between her floorboards, or taking a razor blade to the decal that said to the firemen, “Break this window first.” I close my eyes now and enter a place that’s clearly expecting me, swaddled in loss and then losing that, too, as I move from room to bone-white room in the house of the rest of my life.
In Chicago, it is snowing softly and a man has just done his wash for the week.  He steps into the twilight of early evening,  carrying a wrinkled shopping bag  full of neatly folded clothes, and, for a moment, enjoys the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper, flannellike against his gloveless hands.  There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face, a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek  as a last flash of sunset blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street. He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese, and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor  in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,  dingy and too large. He negotiates the slick of ice on the sidewalk by his car, opens the Fairlane’s back door, leans to place the laundry in, and turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians as a boy—that’s all he was— backs from the corner package store shooting a pistol, firing it, once, at the dumbfounded man who falls forward, grabbing at his chest. A few sounds escape from his mouth,  a babbling no one understands as people surround him bewildered at his speech. The noises he makes are nothing to them.  The boy has gone, lost in the light array of foot traffic dappling the snow with fresh prints. Tonight, I read about Descartes’ grand courage to doubt everything except his own miraculous existence and I feel so distinct from the wounded man lying on the concrete  I am ashamed. Let the night sky cover him as he dies. Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven  and take up his cold hands.  IN MEMORY OF JAY KASHIWAMURA
Start with the square heavy loaf steamed a whole day in a hot spring until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast grow dense as a black hole of bread. Let it age and dry a little, then soak the old loaf for a day in warm water flavored with raisins and lemon slices. Boil it until it is thick as molasses. Pour it in a flat white bowl. Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream to melt in its brown belly. This soup is alive as any animal, and the yeast and cream and rye will sing inside you after eating for a long time.
There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.  And the day I quit the job my father got me.  And the day I stood outside a door,  and listened to my girlfriend making love  to someone obviously not me, inside,  and I felt strange because I didn’t care.  There was the morning I was born,  and the year I was a loser,  and the night I was the winner of the prize  for which the audience applauded.  Then there was someone else I met,  whose face and voice I can’t forget,  and the memory of her  is like a jail I’m trapped inside,  or maybe she is something I just use   to hold my real life at a distance.Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower   plucked from a river of lava  and held aloft on a tightrope   strung between two scrawny trees  above a canyon   in a manic-depressive windstorm.
This could be the town you’re from, marked only by what it’s near. The gas station man speaks of weather and the high school football team just as you knew he would— kind to strangers, happy to live here. Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now, you’re only driving through. Past the sagging, empty porches locked up tight to travelers’ stares, toward the great dark of the fields, your headlights startle a flock of old love letters—still undelivered, enroute for years.
Whether on the boulevard or gravel backroad, I do not easily raise my hand to those who toss up theirs in anonymous hello, merely to say “I’m passing this way.” Once out of shyness, now reluctance to tip my hand, I admire the shrubbery instead. I’ve learned where the lines are drawn and keep the privet well trimmed. I left one house with toys on the floor for another with quiet rugs and a bed where the moon comes in. I’ve thrown myself at men in black turtlenecks only to find that home is best after all. Home where I sit in the glider, knowing it needs oil, like my own rusty joints. Where I coax blackberry to dogwood and winter to harvest, where my table is clothed in light. Home where I walk out on the thin page of night, without waving or giving myself away, and return with my words burning like fire in the grate.
An old man in Concord forgets to go to morning service. He falls asleep, while reading Vergil, and dreams that he is Aeneas at the funeral of Pallas, an Italian prince. The sun is blue and scarlet on my page,  And yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, rage  The yellowhammers mating. Yellow fire  Blankets the captives dancing on their pyre, And the scorched lictor screams and drops his rod.  Trojans are singing to their drunken God,  Ares. Their helmets catch on fire. Their files  Clank by the body of my comrade—miles  Of filings! Now the scythe-wheeled chariot rolls  Before their lances long as vaulting poles,  And I stand up and heil the thousand men,  Who carry Pallas to the bird-priest. Then  The bird-priest groans, and as his birds foretold,  I greet the body, lip to lip. I hold The sword that Dido used. It tries to speak,  A bird with Dido’s sworded breast. Its beak  Clangs and ejaculates the Punic word  I hear the bird-priest chirping like a bird.  I groan a little. “Who am I, and why?”  It asks, a boy’s face, though its arrow-eye  Is working from its socket. “Brother, try,  O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.” His harlots hang his bed With feathers of his long-tailed birds. His head  Is yawning like a person. The plumes blow;  The beard and eyebrows ruffle. Face of snow,  You are the flower that country girls have caught,  A wild bee-pillaged honey-suckle brought  To the returning bridegroom—the design Has not yet left it, and the petals shine;  The earth, its mother, has, at last, no help:  It is itself. The broken-winded yelp Of my Phoenician hounds, that fills the brush  With snapping twigs and flying, cannot flush  The ghost of Pallas. But I take his pall,  Stiff with its gold and purple, and recall  How Dido hugged it to her, while she toiled,  Laughing—her golden threads, a serpent coiled  In cypress. Now I lay it like a sheet; It clinks and settles down upon his feet, The careless yellow hair that seemed to burn  Beforehand. Left foot, right foot—as they turn,  More pyres are rising: armored horses, bronze,  And gagged Italians, who must file by ones  Across the bitter river, when my thumb  Tightens into their wind-pipes. The beaks drum; Their headman’s cow-horned death’s-head bites its tongue,  And stiffens, as it eyes the hero slung Inside his feathered hammock on the crossed  Staves of the eagles that we winged. Our cost  Is nothing to the lovers, whoring Mars  And Venus, father’s lover. Now his car’s  Plumage is ready, and my marshals fetch  His squire, Acoctes, white with age, to hitch  Aethon, the hero’s charger, and its ears  Prick, and it steps and steps, and stately tears  Lather its teeth; and then the harlots bring  The hero’s charms and baton—but the King,  Vain-glorious Turnus, carried off the rest.  “I was myself, but Ares thought it best  The way it happened.” At the end of time,  He sets his spear, as my descendants climb  The knees of Father Time, his beard of scalps, His scythe, the arc of steel that crowns the Alps.  The elephants of Carthage hold those snows,  Turms of Numidian horse unsling their bows,  The flaming turkey-feathered arrows swarm  Beyond the Alps. “Pallas,” I raise my arm  And shout, “Brother, eternal health. Farewell  Forever.” Church is over, and its bell Frightens the yellowhammers, as I wake And watch the whitecaps wrinkle up the lake.  Mother’s great-aunt, who died when I was eight,  Stands by our parlor sabre. “Boy, it’s late.  Vergil must keep the Sabbath.” Eighty years!  It all comes back. My Uncle Charles appears.  Blue-capped and bird-like. Phillips Brooks and Grant  Are frowning at his coffin, and my aunt,  Hearing his colored volunteers parade  Through Concord, laughs, and tells her English maid  To clip his yellow nostril hairs, and fold  His colors on him. . . . It is I. I hold His sword to keep from falling, for the dust  On the stuffed birds is breathless, for the bust  Of young Augustus weighs on Vergil’s shelf:  It scowls into my glasses at itself.
[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.  I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket— The sea was still breaking violently and night  Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light  Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,  He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,  Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk  Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close  Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,  Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose  On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name  Is blocked in yellow chalk. Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea  Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its hell-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste  In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet  Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute.II Whenever winds are moving and their breath  Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,  The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death  In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear  The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall  Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall  Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash  The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,  As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears  The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash  The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids  For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids  Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones,  Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush  At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush  Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones  Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast  Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.III All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine  Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,  Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,  Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod  Guns, cradled on the tide, Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand  Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock Our warships in the hand Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues  Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost In the mad scramble of their lives. They died  When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed  Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news  Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost  Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick  I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:  “If God himself had not been on our side,  If God himself had not been on our side,  When the Atlantic rose against us, why,  Then it had swallowed us up quick.”IV This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell  And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools  To send the Pequod packing off to hell:  This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,  Snatching at straws to sail Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,  Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,  Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail For water, for the deep where the high tide  Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.  Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,  Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,  The beach increasing, its enormous snout  Sucking the ocean’s side. This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water. Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?V When the whale’s viscera go and the roll  Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole  And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword  Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,  The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,  The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears  The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags  And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,  Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,  Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers  Where the morning stars sing out together And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers  The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide  Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.VIOUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM There once the penitents took off their shoes  And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;  And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file  Slowly along the munching English lane,  Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose  Track of your dragging pain. The stream flows down under the druid tree,  Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad  The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad  And whistled Sion by that stream. But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness  At all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids. As before, This face, for centuries a memory,Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,  Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem  Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.VII The empty winds are creaking and the oak  Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,  The boughs are trembling and a gaff  Bobs on the untimely stroke Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell  In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;  Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,  Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:  Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh  Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,  Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil  You could cut the brackish winds with a knife  Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime  And breathed into his face the breath of life,  And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.  The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size  But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips,  The stride of my step,  The curl of my lips.  I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman,  That’s me. I walk into a room Just as cool as you please,  And to a man, The fellows stand or Fall down on their knees.  Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees.  I say, It’s the fire in my eyes,  And the flash of my teeth,  The swing in my waist,  And the joy in my feet.  I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Men themselves have wondered  What they see in me. They try so much But they can’t touch My inner mystery. When I try to show them,  They say they still can’t see.  I say, It’s in the arch of my back,  The sun of my smile, The ride of my breasts, The grace of my style. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me. Now you understand Just why my head’s not bowed.  I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud.  When you see me passing, It ought to make you proud. I say, It’s in the click of my heels,  The bend of my hair,  the palm of my hand,  The need for my care.  ’Cause I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
FOR DAVID P—B The eye follows, the land Slips upward, creases down, forms  The gentle buttocks of a young  Giant. In the nestle, Old adobe bricks, washed of  Whiteness, paled to umber, Await another century. Star Jasmine and old vines Lay claim upon the ghosted land,  Then quiet pools whisper  Private childhood secrets. Flush on inner cottage walls  Antiquitous faces, Used to the gelid breath Of old manors, glare disdainfully  Over breached time. Around and through these  Cold phantasmatalities,  He walks, insisting To the languid air, Activity, music, A generosity of graces. His lupin fields spurn old Deceit and agile poppies dance In golden riot. Each day is Fulminant, exploding brightly  Under the gaze of his exquisite  Sires, frozen in the famed paint  Of dead masters. Audacious  Sunlight casts defiance At their feet.
FOR BAILEY We were entwined in red rings  Of blood and loneliness before  The first snows fell Before muddy rivers seeded clouds  Above a virgin forest, and  Men ran naked, blue and black  Skinned into the warm embraces  Of Sheba, Eve and Lilith. I was your sister. You left me to force strangers  Into brother molds, exacting  Taxations they never Owed or could ever pay. You fought to die, thinking  In destruction lies the seed  Of birth. You may be right. I will remember silent walks in  Southern woods and long talks  In low voices Shielding meaning from the big ears  Of overcurious adults. You may be right.  Your slow return from Regions of terror and bloody Screams, races my heart. I hear again the laughter  Of children and see fireflies  Bursting tiny explosions in  An Arkansas twilight.
Curtains forcing their will  against the wind, children sleep, exchanging dreams with  seraphim. The city drags itself awake on  subway straps; and I, an alarm, awake as a  rumor of war, lie stretching into dawn,  unasked and unheeded.
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind  and floats downstream  till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and  his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings  with a fearful trill  of things unknown  but longed for still  and his tune is heard  on the distant hill  for the caged bird  sings of freedom. The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn and he names the sky his own But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams  his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream  his wings are clipped and his feet are tied  so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings  with a fearful trill  of things unknown  but longed for still  and his tune is heard  on the distant hill  for the caged bird  sings of freedom.
A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed,  Marked the mastodon, The dinosaur, who left dried tokens  Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom  Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,  Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow, I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in  The bruising darkness Have lain too long Facedown in ignorance, Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter. The Rock cries out to us today,  You may stand upon me,  But do not hide your face. [...]
She came home running  back to the mothering blackness   deep in the smothering blackness white tears icicle gold plains of her face   She came home running She came down creeping  here to the black arms waiting  now to the warm heart waiting rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face   She came down creeping She came home blameless  black yet as Hagar’s daughter  tall as was Sheba’s daughter threats of northern winds die on the desert’s face   She came home blameless
There is no warning rattle at the door  nor heavy feet to stomp the foyer boards.  Safe in the dark prison, I know that  light slides over the fingered work of a toothless  woman in Pakistan. Happy prints of an invisible time are illumined.  My mouth agape rejects the solid air and lungs hold. The invader takes  direction and seeps through the plaster walls.  It is at my chamber, entering  the keyhole, pushing through the padding of the door.  I cannot scream. A bone of fear clogs my throat. It is upon me. It is sunrise, with Hope its arrogant rider. My mind, formerly quiescent in its snug encasement, is strained to look upon their rapturous visages,  to let them enter even into me.  I am forced outside myself to mount the light and ride joined with Hope. Through all the bright hours  I cling to expectation, until  darkness comes to reclaim me as its own. Hope fades, day is gone  into its irredeemable place and I am thrown back into the familiar  bonds of disconsolation. Gloom crawls around lapping lasciviously between my toes, at my ankles,  and it sucks the strands of my  hair. It forgives my heady  fling with Hope. I am joined again into its greedy arms.
Babies must not eat the coal And they must not make grimaces, Nor in party dresses roll And must never black their faces. They must learn that pointing’s rude, They must sit quite still at table, And must always eat the food Put before them—if they’re able. If they fall, they must not cry, Though it’s known how painful this is; No—there’s always Mother by Who will comfort them with kisses.
You do not do, you do not do  Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot  For thirty years, poor and white,  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you.  You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,  Ghastly statue with one gray toe  Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic  Where it pours bean green over blue  In the waters off beautiful Nauset.  I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town  Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common.  My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two.  So I never could tell where you  Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare.  Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you.  And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.  I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna  Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck  And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.  And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through.  Every woman adores a Fascist,  The boot in the face, the brute  Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy,  In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot  But no less a devil for that, no not  Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you.  At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack,  And they stuck me together with glue.  And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw.  And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root,  The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you  And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart  And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you.  They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue  Pour of tor and distances. God’s lioness,  How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow Splits and passes, sister to  The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch, Nigger-eye  Berries cast dark  Hooks— Black sweet blood mouthfuls,  Shadows. Something else Hauls me through air— Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels. White Godiva, I unpeel— Dead hands, dead stringencies. And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.  The child’s cry Melts in the wall.  And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive  Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning.
For Ruth Fainlight I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:  It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me,  Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,  Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?  This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.  Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.  A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me  Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. I let her go. I let her go Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.  How your bad dreams possess and endow me. I am inhabited by a cry.  Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing  That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?  Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge.  What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches?—— Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults  That kill, that kill, that kill.
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,  Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges, fat With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides. Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks— Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky. Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting. I do not think the sea will appear at all. The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within. I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies, Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen. The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.  One more hook, and the berries and bushes end. The only thing to come now is the sea. From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,  Slapping its phantom laundry in my face. These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me  To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock  That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space  Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths  Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
I am a miner. The light burns blue.  Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom.  Black bat airs Wrap me, raggy shawls,  Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums. Old cave of calcium  Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white, Those holy Joes. And the fish, the fish— Christ! they are panes of ice, A vice of knives,  A piranha  Religion, drinking Its first communion out of my live toes.  The candle Gulps and recovers its small altitude, Its yellows hearten. O love, how did you get here?  O embryo Remembering, even in sleep,  Your crossed position.  The blood blooms clean In you, ruby.  The pain You wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses,  With soft rugs— The last of Victoriana.  Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric  Atoms that cripple drip  Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious.  You are the baby in the barn.
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry  Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand. All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.
The woman is perfected.  Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,  The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,  Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,  One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty.  She has folded Them back into her body as petals  Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,  Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,  Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,  Gilled like a fish. A common-sense  Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.  Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,  Trawling your dark as owls do.  Mute as a turnip from the Fourth  Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail.  Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.  Snug as a bud and at home  Like a sprat in a pickle jug.  A creel of eels, all ripples.  Jumpy as a Mexican bean.  Right, like a well-done sum.  A clean slate, with your own face on.
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.  I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.  I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.  I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses  And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff  Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,  So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.  Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,  My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;  Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat  stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.  Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley  I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books  Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.  I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them  Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.  The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe  Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.  Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,  Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,  A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.  The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,  And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow  Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,  And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.  The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.  Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river  Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.  They concentrate my attention, that was happy  Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;  They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,  And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.
Were it not for that photograph,  disaster in its final stages, matchbox houses coming down,  rubble of streets, uprooted trees, lives we somehow could not envision,  removed from us and not our own,  on distant coasts the fall of night, we might never have thought of Darwin,  remembered what we had forgotten, nothing but desert at our backs, somewhere the light gone grey, gone green,  the very texture of the air evoking strangeness in us, distance, deepwater harbor on the rim of an island whose aspirations, despite itself, assume proportions  hemispheric, continental, set adrift in uncharted waters where a wind from the Timor Sea smacks of Celebes, of Java, celebrates archipelagoes for which no names have been devised, where rain runs green, and rocks dream gold,  where every morning, on our tongues,  we taste the raging of the dust gathering at abandoned stations and know, or come to know, the life,  the littoral on which we wait, though not yet clearly its true name,  not precisely its purpose with us; where, naked, night to night, inventing  names for our nakedness, we lie  suspended under the Equator between the wastes of self and weather,  trying to learn ourselves, our names,  what to make of this emptiness, this sense of absence which afflicts us,  forgetting what we must remember, the great Australian coast spun out  beyond our scrutiny in shales,  corals, limestones, salt scrub, sand,  discovery at every turn and, this far south, no turning back,  latitudes of impossible dimensions bleaching the horizon,  mapping what will not quite stay mapped,  nothing but desert at our backs,  nothing but darkness to advance on,  night on the routes that enter strangeness  more dangerously, in the evening,  than we can bring ourselves to say,  darkness and an interior for which, of course, there is no name  except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.
For love—I would split open your head and put  a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet  and quick surprise.
I cannot move backward  or forward. I am caught in the time as measure. What we think  of we think of— of no other reason  we think than just to think— each for himself.
Too much rain loosens trees. In the hills giant oaks fall upon their knees. You can touch parts you have no right to— places only birds should fly to.
The stage is set for imminent disaster. Here is the little tramp, standing On a stack of books in order To reach the microphone, the Poet he’s impersonating somehow Trussed and mumbling in a Tweed bundle at his feet. He opens his mouth: Tra-la! Out comes doves, incandescent bulbs, Plastic roses. Well, that’s that, Squirms the young professor who’s Coordinated this,No more visiting poets! His department head groans For the trap door. As it Swings away The tramp keeps on as if Nothing has occurred, A free arm mimicking A wing.
New York grows Slimmer In his absence. I suppose You could also title this picture Of Miles, his leathery Squint, the grace In his fingers a sliver of the stuffYou can’t get anymore, As the rest of us wonder: What was the name Of the driver Of that truck? And the rest Of us sigh: Death is one hell Of a pickpocket.
That’s right, said the cab driver, Turning the corner to the Round-a-bout way, Those stupid, fuckin’ beggars, You know the guys who Walk up to my cab With their hands extended And their little cups? You know their problem? You know what’s wrong with them? They ain’t got no brains. I mean, they don’t know nothin’ ’cause if they had brains They’d think of a way To find a job. You know what one of ’em told me once? He said what he did, Begging He said it was work. Begging Was work. And I told him Straight to his face: That ain’t work.You think that’s work? Let me tell you what work is: Work is something that you do That’s of value To someone else. Now you take me. It takes brains to do What I do. You know what I think? I think they ought to send All these beggars over To some other country, Any country, It don’t matter which, For 3, 4, years, Let them wander around Some other country, See how they like that. We ought to make a National program Sending them off To wander about Some other country For a few years, Let ’em beg over there, See how far it gets them. I mean, look at that guy You know, who was big In the sixties, That drug guy, Timothy Leary? Yeah, he went underground, Lived overseas. You know what? A few years abroad And he was ready to Come back On any terms. He didn’t care if They arrested him. He said The U.S. is better Than any country In the world. Send them over there For a few years. They’d be just like him. This is the greatest country In the whole world. Timothy Leary Was damn happy To get back here, And he’s doing fine. Look at me. I used to be like that. I used to live underground. I came back. I think all those beggars got  a mental block. I think you should do something. I mean, you ought to like  what you do, But you should do something. Something of use To the community. All those people, Those bums, Those scam artists, Those hustlers, Those drug addicts, Those welfare cheats, Those sponges. Other than that I don’t hold nothin’ Against no one. Hey, I picked you up.
You’re rich, lady, hissed the young woman at My mother as she bent in her garden.Look at what you’ve got, and it was Too much, the collards and tomatoes, A man, however lousy, taking care of the bills. This was the reason for the early deaths My mother was to find from that point on, Turned dirt and the mock of roots, Until finally, she gave her garden up.You can’t have nothing, she tells us, Is the motto of our neighborhood, These modest houses That won’t give an inch.
We sat across the table. he said, cut off your hands. they are always poking at things. they might touch me. I said yes. Food grew cold on the table. he said, burn your body. it is not clean and smells like sex. it rubs my mind sore. I said yes. I love you, I said. That’s very nice, he said I like to be loved, that makes me happy. Have you cut off your hands yet?
My shell said she likes the king and queen of the Poetry Palace because they listen to her. She tells them all the secrets of the ocean.
My wife wears headphones as she plays Chopin etudes in the winter light. Singing random notes, she sways in and out of shadow while night settles. The keys she presses make a soft clack, the bench creaks when her weight shifts, golden cotton fabric ripples across her shoulders, and the sustain pedal clicks. This is the hidden melody I know so well, her body finding harmony in the give and take of motion, her lyric grace of gesture measured against a slow fall of darkness. Now stillness descends to signal the end of her silent music.
I seemed always standing before a door to which I had no key, although I knew it hid behind it a gift for me. Until one day I closed my eyes a moment, stretched then looked once more. And not surprised, I did not mind it when the hinges creaked and, smiling, Death held out his hands to me.
The house felt like the opera, the audience in their seats, hushed, ready, but the cast not yet arrived. And if I said anything to try to appease the anxious air, my words would hang alone like the single chandelier waiting to dim the auditorium, but still too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light announcing only itself, bringing more emptiness into the emptiness.
From now on they always are, for years now they always have been, but from now on you know they are, they always will be, from now on when they cry and you say wryly to their mother, better you than me, you’d better mean it, you’d better hand over what you can’t have, and gracefully.
Of the two spoiled, barn-sour geldings we owned that year, it was Red— skittish and prone to explode even at fourteen years—who’d let me hold to my face his own: the massive labyrinthine caverns of the nostrils, the broad plain up the head to the eyes. He’d let me stroke his coarse chin whiskers and take his soft meaty underlip in my hands, press my man’s carnivorous kiss to his grass-nipping upper half of one, just so that I could smell the long way his breath had come from the rain and the sun, the lungs and the heart, from a world that meant no harm.
All those years—almost a hundred— the farm had hard water. Hard orange. Buckets lined in orange. Sink and tub and toilet, too, once they got running water. And now, in less than a lifetime, just by changing the well’s location, in the same yard, mind you, the water’s soft, clear, delicious to drink. All those years to shake your head over. Look how sweet life has become; you can see it in the couple who live here, their calmness as they sit at their table, the beauty as they offer you new water to drink.
They pay us time and a half and don’t dare catch us drinking: we don’t insist, don’t pass a bottle, but each sips a private pint, all sitting in the narrow room with our backs to the center, each facing his work—router, stain tray, buffing wheel, drill press— and with that sweet taste echoing in our bones, we watch our hands make what they always made —rosewood handles—but now we smile in delighted surprise and Marchesi brings envelopes that record a full day’s work though it’s still noon, processions still fill the streets, choirs, loudspeakers bellowing Hallelujah: and we change into our finest clothes in the locker room, admiring each other’s hat brims, passing bottles freely until all are empty, and at last we separate in the brilliant street, each in the direction of a different tolling bell.
I was not beaten but the boy beside me was. He broke stride, stumbled, the sticks circled over him, corralling him into their world. I met his eyes and lip-read “run,” a whisper engulfed in sirens.  I slowed down in an unknown neighborhood, a street of watch repairers, tinsmiths, tailors sitting cross-legged in dim windows staring at lacquered Singers like men whose eyes are lost in a fire, and I ducked past them glancing sideways in deep pity because I’d been a step away from freedom.
I asked my father, “would you rather die of cancer or a heart attack? Would you rather be executed or put in jail for life? Which would you rather be— a spy or a sentinel?” And he tried to answer honestly, combing his thinning hair with his fingers, thinking of something else. At last he fell silent. I ran out to savor the dregs of dusk playing with my friends in the road that led to the highway. The ball flew up toward day and landed in night. We chanted. Every other minute a truck, summoned by our warnings, brushed past in a gust of light, the driver’s curses muffled by distance: the oncoming wheels were the point of the game, like the scores in chalk or the blood from scuffed knees that we smeared across our faces: so when my mother called, her voice was quaint and stymied and I took all the time in the world trotting home past tarped barbecue pits, past names of lovers filling with sap, past tentative wind from sprinklers: then I was stunned to see my golden window where all faces, hanging plants, dangling pots were framed by night and dwarfed by a ravenous inward-turning light.
Beside the rivers of the midnight town Where four-foot couples love and paupers drown, Shots of quick hell we took, our final kiss, The great and swinging bridge a bower for this. Your cheek lay burning in my fingers’ cup; Often my lip moved downward and yours up Till both adjusted, tightened, locksmith-true: The flesh precise, the crazy brain askew. Roughly the train with grim and piston knee Pounded apart our pleasure, you from me; Flare warned and ticket whispered and bell cried. Time and the locks of bitter rail divide. For ease remember, all that parted lie: Men who in camp of shot or doldrum die, Who at land’s-end eternal furlough take —This for memento as alone you wake.
Seeing in crowded restaurants the one you love You wave at the door, tall girl in imperious fur, And make for him, bumping waiters, dropping a glove, Arriving soft with affectionate slur. As ladies half-turn, gazing, and men appraise You heap the linen with purse, scarf, cigarettes, lighter, Laughing some instantaneous droll phrase. As if sudden sun came out, the table is brighter. All moods: at a party everybody’s delight; Intent while brown curls shadow the serious page; When people are stuffy (more correct than right) The stamp and turn on heel of a little girl’s rage. But woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees, Impetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees.
what more can man desire? Always, he woke in those days With a sense of treasure, His heart a gayer glow Than his window grand with sun, As a child, its mind all whirring With green and hollied pleasure Wakes in a haze of Christmas! The season of secrets done. Or as one on country linen Wakes with a start one morning— Then on comfort snugger than pillows Floats: July at the lake. Or has married a golden girl And can hardly believe, but turning Sees blossom for him that very face Worshipping cameras take. Toy trains whirr perky on Till springs contort beneath; The middle-age rower slumps Like a sack—indignant seizure! Late editions wailScreen Star in Mystery Death— Yet in those same days He woke with a sense of treasure. Knowing: my love is safe Though the Rockies plunge like water, Though surf like a wildfire rage And omens roam the sky; Though limbs of the swimmer laze Pale where the seaweed caught her, Nothing can touch my love As dangerous time goes by.
It’s brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief. Delight’s the lightning; the long thunder’s grief.
Crude seeing’s all our joy: could we discern The cold dark infinite vast where atoms burn —Lone suns—in flesh, our treasure and our play, Who’d dare to breathe this fern-thick bird-rich day?
(THE MOB SPEAKS:) See! There he stands; not brave, but with an air  Of sullen stupor. Mark him well! Is he Not more like brute than man? Look in his eye!  No light is there; none, save the glint that shines  In the now glaring, and now shifting orbs Of some wild animal caught in the hunter’s trap. How came this beast in human shape and form?  Speak man!—We call you man because you wear  His shape—How are you thus? Are you not from  That docile, child-like, tender-hearted race  Which we have known three centuries? Not from  That more than faithful race which through three wars  Fed our dear wives and nursed our helpless babes  Without a single breach of trust? Speak out!(THE VICTIM SPEAKS:) I am, and am not.(THE MOB SPEAKS AGAIN:)  Then who, why are you?(THE VICTIM SPEAKS AGAIN:) I am a thing not new, I am as old As human nature. I am that which lurks,  Ready to spring whenever a bar is loosed;  The ancient trait which fights incessantly  Against restraint, balks at the upward climb;  The weight forever seeking to obey  The law of downward pull—and I am more:  The bitter fruit am I of planted seed;  The resultant, the inevitable end Of evil forces and the powers of wrong. Lessons in degradation, taught and learned,  The memories of cruel sights and deeds,  The pent-up bitterness, the unspent hate  Filtered through fifteen generations have  Sprung up and found in me sporadic life.  In me the muttered curse of dying men,  On me the stain of conquered women, and  Consuming me the fearful fires of lust,  Lit long ago, by other hands than mine. In me the down-crushed spirit, the hurled-back prayers  Of wretches now long dead—their dire bequests.  In me the echo of the stifled cry Of children for their battered mothers’ breasts. I claim no race, no race claims me; I am  No more than human dregs; degenerate; The monstrous offspring of the monster, Sin;  I am—just what I am. . . . The race that fed Your wives and nursed your babes would do the same  Today. But I—(THE MOB CONCLUDES:)  Enough, the brute must die!  Quick! Chain him to that oak! It will resist  The fire much longer than this slender pine.  Now bring the fuel! Pile it round him! Wait!  Pile not so fast or high! or we shall lose  The agony and terror in his face. And now the torch! Good fuel that! the flames  Already leap head-high. Ha! hear that shriek!  And there’s another! wilder than the first.  Fetch water! Water! Pour a little on The fire, lest it should burn too fast. Hold so!  Now let it slowly blaze again. See there! He squirms! He groans! His eyes bulge wildly out,  Searching around in vain appeal for help!  Another shriek, the last! Watch how the flesh  Grows crisp and hangs till, turned to ash, it sifts Down through the coils of chain that hold erect  The ghastly frame against the bark-scorched tree. Stop! to each man no more than one man’s share.  You take that bone, and you this tooth; the chain,  Let us divide its links; this skull, of course,  In fair division, to the leader comes. And now his fiendish crime has been avenged;  Let us back to our wives and children—say,  What did he mean by those last muttered words, “Brothers in spirit, brothers in deed are we”?
Tiny bit of humanity, Blessed with your mother’s face,  And cursed with your father’s mind. I say cursed with your father’s mind, Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,  Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,  And looking away, Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond. Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet? Why don’t you kick and howl,  And make the neighbors talk about  “That damned baby next door,”  And make up your mind forthwith  To grow up and be a banker Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter  Or—?—whatever you decide upon,  Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts  About being a poet. For poets no longer are makers of songs,  Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,  Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,  Of the sweet pain of love And the keen joy of living; No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,  And interpreters of the eternal truth,  Through the eternal beauty. Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.  Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way  Or new things in an old language,  They talk abracadabra In an unknown tongue, Each one fashioning for himself A wordy world of shadow problems, And as a self-imagined Atlas, Struggling under it with puny legs and arms,  Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load. My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;  Grow up and join the big, busy crowd  That scrambles for what it thinks it wants  Out of this old world which is—as it is— And, probably, always will be. Take the advice of a father who knows:  You cannot begin too young  Not to be a poet.
My heart be brave, and do not falter so,  Nor utter more that deep, despairing wail.  Thy way is very dark and drear I know,  But do not let thy strength and courage fail;  For certain as the raven-winged night Is followed by the bright and blushing morn,  Thy coming morrow will be clear and bright;  ’Tis darkest when the night is furthest worn.  Look up, and out, beyond, surrounding clouds,  And do not in thine own gross darkness grope,  Rise up, and casting off thy hind’ring shrouds,  Cling thou to this, and ever inspiring hope:  Tho’ thick the battle and tho’ fierce the fight,  There is a power making for the right.
Trade, Trade versus Art, Brain, Brain versus Heart; Oh, the earthiness of these hard-hearted times,  When clinking dollars, and jingling dimes,  Drown all the finer music of the soul. Life as an Octopus with but this creed, That all the world was made to serve his greed; Trade has spread out his mighty myriad claw, And drawn into his foul polluted maw, The brightest and the best,  Well nigh, Has he drained dry, The sacred fount of Truth;  And if, forsooth, He has left yet some struggling streams from it to go, He has contaminated so their flow, That Truth, scarce is it true. Poor Art with struggling gasp, Lies strangled, dying in his mighty grasp; He locks his grimy fingers ’bout her snowy throat so tender.  Is there no power to rescue her, protect, defend her?  Shall Art be left to perish? Shall all the images her shrines cherish Be left to this iconoclast, to vulgar Trade? Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart,  Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art;  Then would there be less grinding down the poor,  Then would men learn to love each other more;  For Trade stalks like a giant through the land,  Bearing aloft the rich in his high hand, While down beneath his mighty ponderous tread,  He crushes those who cry for daily bread.
The last few gray sheets of snow are gone, winter’s scraps and leavings lowered to a common level. A sudden jolt of weather pushed us outside, and now this larger world once again belongs to us. I stand at the edge of it, beside the house, listening to the stream we haven’t heard since fall, and I imagine one day thinking back to this hour and blaming myself for my worries, my foolishness, today’s choices having become the accomplished facts of change, accepted or forgotten. The woods are a mangle of lines, yet delicate, yet precise, when I take the time to look closely. If I’m not happy it must be my own fault. At the edge of the lawn my wife bends down to uncover a flower, then another. The first splurge of crocuses. And for a moment the sweep and shudder of the wind seems indistinguishable from the steady furl of water just beyond her.
After a night of wind we are surprised by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass among the low whittled bushes, listening to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves, the rattling back of stones. “Observation,” our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science. Look all around you. Some beaches may be quite barren except for things washed up.” A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb cloudy but unbroken. For an hour my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck. She sings the song she’s just invented: Everybody knows when the old days come. Although it is October, today falls into the shape of summer, that sense of languid promise in which we are offered another and then another spell of flawless weather. It is the weather of Sundays, the weather of memory, and I can see myself sitting on a porch looking out at water, the discreet shores of a lake. Three or four white pines were enough of a mystery, how they shook and whispered, how at night I felt them leaning against my window, like the beginning of a story in which children must walk deeper and deeper into a dark forest, and are afraid, yet calm, unaware of the arrangements made for them to survive. My daughter counts her shells and stones, my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they fold around rocks humped up out of the sea. I can turn the wheel and blur it all into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light. “A steady push of wind,” we read in the book, “gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion. As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself moves forward. As it nears the shore friction from the bottom causes it to rise higher until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.” On the table in front of the house is the day’s collection: sea-glass and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle— some to be taken home, arranged in a box, laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later thrown away, casually, without regret, and some of it, even now, to be discarded, like the lesser stones, and the pale chipped shells which are so alike we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.
A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past. B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her. B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men. A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock. A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled. A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed. A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.” A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns. A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5. A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2. Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money. Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account. A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy. A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences. A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise. A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion. A dies of psychic shock. Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.” Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler. Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream. Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun. Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.  A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed. Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake. Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal. A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.  Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started. Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies. Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will. Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard. Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home. In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks. More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus. Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off. Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart. Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales. A violent wind blows the fog around. Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes. Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree. Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors. Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily. A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise. Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend. Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico. “New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street. Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf. Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.  Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping. Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital. Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves. Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act. Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins. In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.  Beatrice loved Alvin before he married. B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.  B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B. A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay. Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town. Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.  No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.  Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan. Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.
How little we know,  and when we know it! It was prettily said that “No man hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . . Never mind, dears, the afternoon will fold you up, along with preoccupations  that now seem so important, until only a child  running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.  Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you  will have to come up with something, be it a terraced gambit above the sea or gossip overheard in the marketplace. For you see, it becomes you to be chastened: for the old to envy the young, and for youth to fear not getting older, where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin. And it was said of Gyges that his ring attracted those who saw him not, just as those who wandered through him were aware only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache, while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about, whether it was something they could be part ofsans affront to self-esteem. And those temple hyenas who had seen enough, nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze, were no place you could count on, having taken a proverbial powder as rifle butts received another notch. I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring  when summer came along and took it from me  like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.  But here it is winter, and wrong to speak of other seasons as though they exist.  Time has only an agenda in the wallet at his back, while we who think we know where we are going unfazed end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know by the unexpectedness of ice and stars and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it, a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down  into this wagonload of prisoners. The meter will be screamingly clear then, the rhythms unbounced, for though we came to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating  even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,  only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.
Frame within frame, the evolving conversation  is dancelike, as though two could play  at improvising snowflakes’ six-feather-vaned evanescence, no two ever alike. All process and no arrival: the happier we are, the less there is for memory to take hold of,  or—memory being so largely a predilection  for the exceptional—come to a halt  in front of. But finding, one evening  on a street not quite familiar, inside a gated November-sodden garden, a building  of uncertain provenance, peering into whose vestibule we were  arrested—a frame within a frame,  a lozenge of impeccable clarity— by the reflection, no, not of our two selves, but of dancers exercising in a mirror, at the center of that clarity, what we saw was not stillness but movement: the perfection of memory consisting, it would seem,  in the never-to-be-completed. We saw them mirroring themselves,  never guessing the vestibule that defined them, frame within frame,  contained two other mirrors.
We have done what we wanted. We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry  of each other, and we have welcomed grief and called ruin the impossible habit to break. And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.  The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.  The wine waits. Coming to this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.  We have no heart or saving grace, no place to go, no reason to remain.
To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.  To the one at the back of the empty bus. To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall. To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past. To the one who loses with the deck he marked.  To those who are destined to inherit the meek.  To us.
At the throat of Soweto a devil language falls slashing claw syllables to shred and leave  raw the tongue of the young girl learning to sing her own name Where she would say   water They would teach her to cry  blood Where she would save  grass They would teach her to crave  crawling into the  grave
After Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel His Exterior toes like blue glass marbles nails like wax shavings feet like those of an elephant  heels like narrow escapes soles like yellow sponges expanding in water  legs like longitude and latitude  knees like neon headlights thighs like open desert in a movie  hips like a leaping horse a belly button like a luminescent watch  pubic hair like frontier instances  a penis like overnight mail balls large as a boar-hound’s seminal vesicles like tulip bulbs in a paper bag  testicle muscles like rising chords  an asshole like an undiscovered planet  buttocks like a fleet antelope’s  a sacrum like plein air painting  a back like a chalked sidewalk  a spinal column like a suspension bridge  ribs like a bookcase a sternum like gum shoulder blades like kitchen tables  a chest like a stuffed animal pectorals like floating bars of soap  shoulders like observed facts arms like lassos fingers like sparklers wrist bones like a shipyard elbows like antidotes hands like passports an Adam’s apple like a great circle course a beard like Whitman’s a chin like a lichen-splotched rock  ears like a full bathtub a nose like a birdcage nostrils like subway tunnels  eyebrows like a captive audience  a birthmark like a stop sign  eyelids like a partial eclipse  eyes like effervescence optical nerves like an orchid a forehead like a window display  temples like singing crickets  cheeks like party invitations  jaws like handcuffs teeth like sweet tea a tongue like watercolors a mouth like a silk lampshade  a face like a moving picture  a head like a jar of pennies  a skull like a geode skin with a black line running down it  epidermis like a wool sweater  whiskers like a street sweeper  and hair like a cloudy day.His Interior cerebellum like a coffee grinder cerebral lobes like a house on fire cranial membranes like a construction-paper diorama  optical nerves like a developing Polaroid cerebral fornix like colonial maps pineal gland like a giant pinecone circulatory system like cello strings eardrums like a still life with oranges forehead like television  backbone like a fiddlehead fern nerve channels like transatlantic cables uvula like a propeller  palate like a telegram saliva like a rotating sprinkler tonsils like action figures stomach like professional wrestling trachea like pirate radio throat like a bold headline lungs like plastic bags caught in a tree heart like a supernova pulmonary membranes like dirigibles arteries like rush hour  diaphragm like the sound barrier liver like a public trial veins like Japanese characters spleen like a rogue  bowels like surrealism  guts like an inheritance small intestine like fake pearls large intestine like stolen currency colon like reliable data  rectum like a fade-out  kidneys like a barrier reef loins like a mowed lawn  renal veins like gossip  sperm glands like lava beds  prostate like a fissure vent  bladder like a fish bowl  abdomen like a leather suitcase  muscles like an assembly line  tendons like pickpockets  ligaments like safety pins  bones like bones marrow like realism cartilage like strips of kelp  lymph glands like sentimentality  urine like sugar water  blood like melted crayons  and sperm like flies in amber.How He Acts If he laughs, it’s spontaneous combustion  If he mutters, it’s a retreating glacier If he pouts, he sharpens his horn on stones If he jumps up and down, its hard to look away If he scratches himself, it’s with an aspen branch If he gets angry, he fights with tooth, horn, and heel  If he spits, he fights his own kind  If he blows his nose, it starts a riot  If he sweats, it’s monsoons If he coughs, it unlocks doors in the next room If he argues, it’s over lost rituals If he sighs, it ruffles goldfinch feathers  If he whistles, it’s overheard miles away  If he snores, it’s over nostalgic reveries If he scowls, spears launch from his eyes  If he snorts, it’s over gilt lion-head spouts  If he shits, it’s historical documents  If he belches, it’s a diary If he vomits, there’s finger-pointing all around If he walks, it’s Chaplin If he writes, it’s manifestos If he goes shopping, it’s for lentils and peas  If he dances, it’s the Rites of Spring  If he swears, he’s a ryght cruell beast If he drives, it’s among the Mountains of the Moon  If he bathes, it’s in deceptive surfaces  If he dresses, it’s a white linen suit  If he wonders, it’s if his own reflection  If he’s jealous, it’s of birthday parties  If he lies, it’s about mathematical errors  If he spends money, it’s on magic lanterns  If he goes to the movies, it’s Vertigo If he listens to music, it’s the sound of running water If he falls, it’s down a slope of turf into the bushes  If he recites, it’s from the Beast Epic of Alexandria  If he is seduced, it’s a river of electricity If he is curious, he attempts to draw If he calls, it’s about weather patterns If he sings, it’s ‘Tyger, Tyger’ and if he escapes, he’s swift of foot.
The Chinese concubine feeling has left and the  sky hovers like the preparation of a revolutionary speech. You, my long walk with all that expectation  the sexy lunches, thousands of them, and then all that religion of eroticism. Beneath the squeeze on my heart is a stranglehold. You, like a little Italian porcelain village that’s all over the  shop window saying admire this image of foreverness. The red scarf is factory-made but silky and it’s what I’d flutter over your face if you were here  and it would be cheap greasy hypnotism, my own malarkey and we’d be on the southside, at the boat docks, and I’d kiss you beside the stretch of a Russian grain ship, its  hammer and sickle like the sending out of rescue choppers.
First turn to me after a shower, you come inside me sideways as always in the morning you ask me to be on top of you,  then we take a nap, we’re late for school you arrive at night inspired and drunk,  there is no reason for our clothes we take a bath and lie down facing each other,  then later we turn over, finally you come we face each other and talk about childhood as soon as I touch your penis I wind up coming you stop by in the morning to say hello we sit on the bed indian fashion not touching in the middle of the night you come home  from a nightclub, we don’t get past the bureau next day it’s the table, and after that the chair because I want so much to sit you down & suck your cock you ask me to hold your wrists, but then when I  touch your neck with both my hands you come it’s early morning and you decide to very quietly  come on my knee because of the children you’ve been away at school for centuries, your girlfriend  has left you, you come four times before morning you tell me you masturbated in the hotel before you came by  I don’t believe it, I serve the lentil soup naked I massage your feet to seduce you, you are reluctant,  my feet wind up at your neck and ankles you try not to come too quickly  also, you dont want to have a baby I stand up from the bath, you say turn around  and kiss the backs of my legs and my ass you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary  at last I remember my father’s anger and I come you have no patience and come right away I get revenge and won’t let you sleep all night we make out for so long we can’t remember how  we wound up hitting our heads against the wall I lie on my stomach, you put one hand under me  and one hand over me and that way can love me you appear without notice and with flowers  I fall for it and we become missionaries you say you can only fuck me up the ass when you are drunk  so we try it sober in a room at the farm we lie together one night, exhausted couplets and don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough? watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to  interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts  then 9 more out loud till we both come I come three times before you do and then it seems you’re mad and never will it’s only fair for a woman to come more  think of all the times they didn’t care
Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d  and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still  I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb. I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank  season, counting—I sleep and I sleep. I sleep, Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf as a leaf. Reader: Why don’t you turn pale?
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The house was just twinkling in the moon light,  And inside it twinkling with delight, Is my baby bright. Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling  with the moonlight, Bless my baby bless my baby bright, Bless my baby twinkling with delight, In the house twinkling in the moon light, Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks and he always thinks when he knows and he always  knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he is all hers, and sticks to her like burrsburrs In the phrase “sticks to her like burrs,” these are prickly flower heads. One other definition of a burr is a circle of light about the moon or a star., blessed baby
If, when studying road atlases while taking, as you call it, your  morning dump, you shout down to  me names like Miami City, Franconia,  Cancún, as places for you to take  me to from here, can I help it if all I can think is things that are  stupid, like he loves me he loves me  not? I don’t think so. No more than, some mornings, waking to your  hands around me, and remembering  these are the fingers, the hands I’ve over and over given myself to, I can  stop myself from wondering does that  mean they’re the same I’ll grow  old with. Yesterday, in the café I  keep meaning to show you, I thought  this is how I’ll die maybe, alone, somewhere too far away from wherever  you are then, my heart racing from  espresso and too many cigarettes,  my head down on the table’s cool  marble, and the ceiling fan turning  slowly above me, like fortune, the part of fortune that’s half-wished- for only—it did not seem the worst  way. I thought this is another of  those things I’m always forgetting  to tell you, or don’t choose to  tell you, or I tell you but only in the same way, each morning, I keep myself from saying too loud I love you until the moment you flush the toilet, then I say it, when the rumble of water running down through the house could mean anything: flood, your feet descending the stairs any moment; any moment the whole world, all I want of the world, coming down.
Waking on the train, I thought  we were attacked  by light:  chrome-winged birds  hatching from the lagoon.  That first day  the buoys were all  that made the harbor  bearable: pennies sewn into a hemline.  Later I learned to live in it,  to walk through the alien city— a beekeeper’s habit—  with fierce light  clinging to my head and hands.  Treated as gently as every  other guest— each house’s barbed antennae  trawling for any kind  of weather— still I sobbed in a glass box  on an unswept street  with the last few lire ticking like fleas off my phonecard I’m sorry  I can’t stand this, which one of us do you love?
for B. H. I didn’t fall in love. I fell through it: Came out the other side moments later, hands full of matter, waking up from the dream of a bullet tearing through the middle of my body. I no longer understand anything for longer than a long moment, or the time it takes to receive the shot. This kind of gravity is like falling through a cloud, forgetting it all, and then being told about it later. On the day you fell through a cloud . . . It must be true. If it were not, then when did these strands of silver netting attach to my hair? The problem was finding that you were real and not just a dream of clouds. If you weren’t real, I would address this letter to one of two entities: myself, or everyone else. The effect would be equivalent. The act of falling happens in time. That is, it takes long enough for the falling to shear away from the moments before and the moments after, long enough for one to have thought I am falling. I have been falling. I continue to fall. Falling through a ring, in this case, would not mean falling through the center of the annulus—a planet floats there. Falling through the ring means falling through the spaces between the objects that together make the ring. On the way through, clasp your fists around the universe: Nothing but ice-gravel. But open your hands when you reach the other side. Quickly, before it melts.  What did I leave you?
for M.B. The answer is entropy—how smell works— little bits of everything—always spinning off from where they were—flying off at random  into the world—which is to say into air. There are other ways of solid to gas— they’re substance specific, like iodine,  or dry ice—how I felt when I saw you— straight to a new state without passing  through expected ones—as though enough  of me left at the moment you appeared that  I could never be whole without you—apply  heat—I turn straight into ether.
simplicity  say sleep or shall we  shower have an apple you are  as I need  water shall I move?  do you dream?  shallow snow flesh  melt this
If endear is earned and is meant to identify  two halves then it composes  one meaning which means  a token a knot  a note a noting in the head  of how it feels to have your heart  be the dear one
She is sixty. She lives the greatest love of her life. She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,  her hair streams in the wind. Her dear one says: “You have hair like pearls.” Her children say:  “Old fool.”
How do we come to be here next to each other  in the night Where are the stars that show us to our love  inevitable Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness  and the rain falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh  the black men waiting on the corner for  a womanly mirage I am amazed by peace It is this possibility of you asleep and breathing in the quiet air
Matilde, years or days  sleeping, feverish,  here or there, gazing off, twisting my spine,  bleeding true blood,  perhaps I awaken  or am lost, sleeping: hospital beds, foreign windows, white uniforms of the silent walkers, the clumsiness of feet. And then, these journeys  and my sea of renewal:  your head on the pillow,  your hands floating in the light, in my light,  over my earth. It was beautiful to live  when you lived! The world is bluer and of the earth  at night, when I sleep enormous, within your small hands.
“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.” —Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966 I. Hubbie 1 used to get wholly pissed when I made  myself come. I’m right here!, he’d sputter, blood  popping to the surface of his fuzzed cheeks, goddamn it, I’m right here! By that time, I was  in no mood to discuss the myriad merits of my  pointer, or to jam the brakes on the express train  slicing through my blood, It was easier to suffer  the practiced professorial huff, the hissed invectives  and the cold old shoulder, liver-dotted, quaking  with rage. Shall we pause to bless professors and  codgers and their bellowed, unquestioned ownership  of things? I was sneaking time with my own body. I know I signed something over, but it wasn’t that.II. No matter how I angle this history, it’s weird, so let’s just say Bringing Up Baby was on the telly  and suddenly my lips pressing against the couch cushions felt spectacular and I thought  wow this is strange, what the hell, I’m 30 years old,  am I dying down there is this the feel, does the cunt  go to heaven first, ooh, snapped river, ooh shimmy  I had never had it never knew, oh i clamored and  lurched beneath my little succession of boys I cried  writhed hissed, ooh wee, suffered their flat lapping and machine-gun diddling their insistent c’mon girl  c’mon until I memorized the blueprint for drawing  blood from their shoulders, until there was nothing  left but the self-satisfied liquidy snore of he who has  rocked she, he who has made she weep with script.  But this, oh Cary, gee Katherine, hallelujah Baby, the fur do fly, all gush and kaboom on the wind.III. Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling. As long as there is still skin on the pad of my finger,  as long as I’m awake, as long as my (new) husband’s  mouth holds out, I am the spinner, the unbridled,  the bellowing freak. When I have emptied him, he leans back, coos, edges me along, keeps wondering  count. He falls to his knees in front of it, marvels  at my yelps and carousing spine, stares unflinching  as I bleed spittle unto the pillows. He has married a witness. My body bucks, slave to its selfish engine, and love is the dim miracle of these little deaths,  fracturing, speeding for the surface.IV. We know the record. As it taunts us, we have giggled,  considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere  beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver,  she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding  her tight, her throat a rattling window. Searching scrubbed  places for her name, I find only reams of numbers. I ask  the quietest of them:V. Are we God?
Let me cook you some dinner.  Sit down and take off your shoes  and socks and in fact the rest  of your clothes, have a daquiri,  turn on some music and dance  around the house, inside and out,  it’s night and the neighbors  are sleeping, those dolts, and  the stars are shining bright,  and I’ve got the burners lit  for you, you hungry thing.
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung   to the dark of it: the legs of the spider  held the tucked wings close,  held the abdomen still in the midst of calling  with thrusts of phosphorescent light— When I am tired of being human, I try to remember  the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them  central in my mind where everything else must  surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.  There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose  there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.  Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.  When I am tired of only touching, I have my mouth to try to tell you  what, in your arms, is not erased.
That Halloween I wore your wedding dress, our children spooked & wouldn’t speak for days. I’d razored taut calves smooth, teased each blown tress, then—lipsticked, mascaraed, & self-amazed— shimmied like a starlet on the dance floor. I’d never felt so sensual before— Catholic schoolgirl & neighborhood whore. In bed, dolled up, undone, we fantasized: we clutched & fused, torn twins who’d been denied. You were my shy groom. Love, I was your bride.
Even your odds and ends. I love your teeth, crazy bones, Madcap knees and elbows. Forearm and backhand Hair makes you animal. Rare among things. The small of your back could pool rain Into water a main might drink. Perfect, From the whirlpools your fingers print On everything you touch To the moons on the nails of all ten toes Rising and setting inside your shoes Wherever you go.
Leaves flare up, kitchen matches in the permanent trees. Black flash of pike on Mirror Lake, dropping like a roll of nickels. I don’t want nudes in paintings, I don’t want Beauty through the heart,  small harpoon that opens when pulled out. I want to break another eggroll with you in moonlight. Ugly maples, when you’re gone.
For Annie You can come to me in the evening,  with the fingers of former lovers fastened in your hair and their ghost lips  opening over your body, They can be philosophers or musicians in long coats and colored shoes and they can be smarter than I am,  whispering to each other  when they look at us. You can come walking toward my window after dusk  when I can’t see past the lamplight in the glass, when the chipped plates rattle on the counter  and the cinders dance on the cross-ties under the wheels of southbound freights. Bring children if you want, and the long wounds of sisters  branching away  behind you toward the sea. Bring your mother’s tense distracted face  and the shoulders of plane mechanics slumped in the Naugahyde booths of the airport diner,  waiting for you to bring their eggs. I’ll bring all the bottles of gin I drank by myself  and my cracked mouth opened partway as I slept in the back of my blue Impala  dreaming of spiders. I won’t forget the lines running deeply  in the cheeks of the Polish landlady who wouldn’t let the cops upstairs,  the missing ring finger of the machinist from Spenard whose money I stole after he passed out to go downtown in a cab and look for whores,  or the trembling lower jaw of my son, watching me back my motorcycle from his mother’s driveway one last time,  the ribbons and cone-shaped birthday hats scattered on the lawn,  the rain coming down like broken glass. We’ll go out under the stars and sit together on the ground  and there will be enough to eat for everybody. They can sleep on my couches and rug,  and the next day I’ll go to work, stepping easily across the scaffolding, feeding the cable gently into the new pipes on the roof,  and dreaming like St Francis of the still dark rocks that disappear under the morning tide,  only to climb back into the light, sea-rimed, salt-blotched, their patched webs of algae blazing with flies in the sun.
I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle  under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing  into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop  and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese  at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth  cursing the traffic in the morning haze. They will telephone each other from their sofas  and glass desks, with no idea where we could be,  unable to picture the dark throat of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light,  having stolen a truckload of roses and thrown them into the sea.
The dog licks my hand as I worry  about the left nipple  of the woman in the bathroom. She is drying her hair, the woman whose left nipple is sore.  We looked this evening  for diagonal cuts or discoloration or bite marks from small insects that may be in our bed. It is a good bed, a faithful bed.  A bed that won’t be hurt  by the consideration we gave  to the possibility of small  though disproportionately strong insects in our bed. The blow-dryer sounds like a jet  taking off. The first time I flew to Brussels, people began  the journey happy but ended  with drool on their shirts. She is drying her hair though she has never been to Brussels.  Drying her hair though she could be petting a dog.  Drying her hair while having red thoughts about what the pain in her nipple means. I would not dry my hair in such a moment but I am bald. The body of the woman  has many ways to cease being the body of the woman. I have one way  to be happy and she is that way. I would like to fly with her to Brussels.  We would not be put off by the drool.  This is what happens when people sleep.  We would buy postcards of the little boy  who saved Brussels when he peed on a fire.  We would be romantic in public places. For the moment these desires can best be furthered  by petting a dog. I’m also working on this theory.  That sometimes a part of the body just hurts. That the purpose of prayer is to make the part of the body  that sometimes just hurts  the little toe or appendix. Something vestigial or redundant.  Something that can be jettisoned.  I have no reason to use the word cancer while petting a dog. Here is a piece of a second  during which a jet is not flying  nor is it on the ground. I’m working on a theory  that no one can die inside that piece of a second. If you are comforted by this thought you are welcome  to keep it.
You were never a man in the television sense of the word. I was never a wild Slinky in the sex-club sense of a toy. You were never a tobacco store in the Modernist sense of a trope. I was never a snowdrop in the candy store sense of a treat. You were never Day-glo in the fashionista sense of a scarf. I was never withyouallthetime in the username sense of a self. You were never a strumpet in the toothache sense of an insult. I was never a tooting horn in the childhood sense of a game. You were never a hole-in-my-heart  in the country singer sense of a vista. I was never a paper doll in the pyromaniac sense of a pal. You were never a parenthesis in the phony secret sense of a sign. I was never red lipstick in the pulp novel sense of a threat. You were never a word in the mystic sense of an obstacle. I was never a shaking castanet  in the midnight sense of a song.
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to  right from the beginning—a relationship based on  good sense and thoughtfulness in little things i would like to be loved for such simple attainments  as breathing regularly and not falling down too often  or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects  so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed how superbly situated the empire state building is how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers  so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you part of me fears that some moron is already plotting  to tear down the empire state building and replace it  with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness  i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes  i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house  a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being  in the right place at the right time—come take your seat we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines  fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,  or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:  I love you as one loves certain obscure things,  secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries  the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,  and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose  from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,  I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you,  so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,  so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred  and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  without saying hello. In the restaurant  I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.  I saved the rest for you.
Through your lens the sequoia swallowed me  like a dryad. The camera flashed & forgot. I, on the other hand, must practice my absent- mindedness, memory being awkward as a touch  that goes unloved. Lately your eyes have shut down to a shade more durable than skin’s. I know you  love distance, how it smooths. You choose an aerial view,  the city angled to abstraction, while I go for the close  exposures: poorly-mounted countenances along Broadway,  the pigweed cracking each hardscrabble backlot.  It’s a matter of perspective: yours is to love me  from a block away & mine is to praise the grain- iness that weaves expressively: your face.
She could tell he loved her. He wanted her there  sitting in the front pew when he preached.  He liked to watch her putting up her hair and ate whatever she cooked and never broached the subject of the years before they met.  He was thoughtful always. He let her say  whether or not they did anything in bed and tried to learn the games she tried to play. She could tell how deep his feeling ran. He liked to say her name and bought her stuff  for no good reason. He was a gentle man.  How few there are she knew well enough. He sometimes reached to flick away a speck  of something on her clothes and didn’t drum  his fingers on the table when she spoke. What would he do if he knew she had a dream sometimes, slipping out of her nightgown— if ever God forbid he really knew her— to slip once out of the house and across town  and find someone to talk dirty to her.
When I stood behind his desk chair  and when he sat, on rare occasions,  on the porch, “sage of Anacostia,”  they called him, I smelled his mane  glorious, and as a hand saddle the aroma of hair took me to neckline  and below. In Egypt, long after  Napoleon had shot off the face  of the Sphinx, I thought of this  man, and the cusp of his palms  on my shoulder blades; as always he was carrying the mail  of gender, his touch immaculate  in the true blend of the cortex, and of the complex, risen on a pulpit,  and after the hot air, wintry parlance,  the syllables of my name in his ear,  when he touched me, as he had touched  me then.  I had my suspicions of English  ladies, actresses, ghosts of the Thames,  concubines, as we had been into this next  century. And they had their wiles with him. I do not feel forbidden; the cameo ring  he gave me, recession of his maleness  all I need, and highlights of my dark  profile, any children we might have  had buried in architecture, and the hate of his daughter Rosetta,  who I have spoken to over the grate. The sun rises and sets in our neighborhood: I WILL BURN THESE. But when I place my fingers in that mane it is to the saddle he will come.
In a landscape of having to repeat. Noticing that she does, that he does and so on. The underlying cause is as absent as rain. Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.  If illusion descends or the very word you’ve been looking for. He remembers looking at the photograph, green and gray squares, undefined. How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or  I’d like to get to the bottom of that one. When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer  than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.
Two musics washing over me, and morning asks, which loneliness comes closest to the inky chromatics inside you?
Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s  contractions are five minutes apart.  Doctor says, Is this her first child? guy says, No, it’s her husband. I promise to try to remember who  I am. Wife gets up on one elbow, says, I wanted to get married.  It seemed a fulfillment of some several things, a thing to be done.  Even the diamond ring was some thing like a quest, a thing they  set you out to get and how insane the quest is; how you have to turn  it every way before you can even think to seek it; this metaphysical  refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d have guessed? She sighs, I like  the predictability of two, I like my pleasures fully expected,  when the expectation of them grows patterned in its steady  surprise. I’ve got my sweet and tumble pat. Here on earth,  I like to count upon a thing like that. Thus explained  the woman in contractions to her lover holding on the telephone for the doctor to recover from this strange  conversational turn. You say you’re whom? It is a pleasure  to meet you. She rolls her eyes, but he’d once asked her Am I your first lover? and she’d  said, Could be. Your face looks  familiar.
Swung from the toes out, Belly-breath riding on the knuckles,  The ten-pound maul lifts up, Sails in an arc overhead, And then lifts you! It floats, you float, For an instant of clear far sight— Eye on the crack in the end-grain  Angle of the oak round Stood up to wait to be split. The maul falls—with a sigh—the wood  Claps apart  and lies twain— In a wink. As the maul Splits all, may You two stay together.
The last light of a July evening drained into the streets below: My love and I had hard  things to say and hear, and we sat over  wine, faltering, picking our words carefully. The afternoon before I had lain across  my bed and my cat leapt up to lie  alongside me, purring and slowly  growing dozy. By this ritual I could clear some clutter from my baroque brain. And into that brief vacancy the image of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,  and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt and fear. How did we do? A medium job,  which is well above average. But because  she had opened her heart to me as far  as she did, I saw her fierce privacy, like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung  with disappointments, and I knew  that to love her I must love the tree  and the nothing it cares for me.
Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate  again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?  It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,  one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,  I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.  Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,  sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.
Last night I traced with my finger  the long scar on my love’s stomach as if I was following a road on a map. I heard the scream of tires, saw the flash of chrome, her six-year-old body  a rag doll bleeding at the seams. It is foolish of me to wish I was there before it happened, to reach back thirty years, clasp her small hand  and pull her away from that speeding car  that turned her organs into bruised fruit.  How easily she could have missed her seventh birthday, the lit candles waiting  for her to blow out their tiny flames.  How easily I could’ve spent last night  in a crowded bar instead, my shoulders brushing against strangers,  a man on the jukebox singing his heart out to a woman with the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.
1. I watched thee when the foe was at our side,  Ready to strike at him—or thee and me, Were safety hopeless—rather than divide   Aught with one loved save love and liberty. 2. I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock,  Received our prow, and all was storm and fear, And bade thee cling to me through every shock;  This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier. 3. I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes,  Yielding my couch and stretched me on the ground When overworn with watching, ne’er to rise   From thence if thou an early grave hadst found. 4. The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall,  And men and nature reeled as if with wine.  Whom did I seek around the tottering hall?   For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine. 5. And when convulsive throes denied my breath  The faintest utterance to my fading thought,  To thee—to thee—e’en in the gasp of death  My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought. 6. Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not,  And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot   To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.
As we are so wonderfully done with each other We can walk into our separate sleep On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers My hands are hallowed where they touched over your  soft curving. It is good to be weary from that brilliant work It is being God to feel your breathing under me A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . . Don’t let anyone in to wake us.
For Robert Philen You are like me, you will die too, but not today:  you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:  if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been  set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost  radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name  as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me  of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),  which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:  and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star  in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is  no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on  the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep  becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees  and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,  a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,  and free of any eden we can name
I know him, that man walking- toward me up the crowded street of the city, I have lived with him seven years now, I know his fast stride, his windy wheatfield hair, his hands thrust  deep in his jacket pockets, hands that have known my body, touched its softest part, caused its quick shudders  and slow releasings, I have seen his face  above my face, his mouth smiling, moaning  his eyes closed and opened, I have studied his eyes, the brown turning gold at the centers,  I have silently watched him lying beside me  in the early morning, I know his loneliness,  like mine, human and sad, but different, too, his private pain and pleasure I can never enter even as he comes  closer, past trees and cars, trash and flowers,  steam rising from the manhole covers,  gutters running with rain, he lifts his head,  he sees me, we are strangers again,  and a rending music of desire and loss— I don’t know him—courses through me, and we kiss and say, It’s good to see you, as if we haven’t seen each other in years  when it was just a few hours ago, and we are shy, then, not knowing  what to say next.
I Though I sing high, and chaunt above her, Praising my girl, It were not right To reckon her the poorer lover; She does not love me less For her royal, jewelled speechlessness, She is the sapphire, she the light, The music in the pearl. II Not from pert birds we learn the spring-tide From open sky. What speaks to us Closer than far distances that hide In woods, what is more dear Than a cherry-bough, bees feeding near In the soft, proffered blooms? Lo, I Am fed and honoured thus. III She has the star’s own pulse; its throbbing Is a quick light. She is a dove My soul draws to its breast; her sobbing Is for the warm dark there! In the heat of her wings I would not care My close-housed bird should take her flight To magnify our love.
Things happen when you drink too much mescal. One night, with not enough food in my belly, he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he was hot and generous and so the least that I could do was let him kiss me, hard and soft and any way you want it, beast and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards— and when his friend showed up I felt so warm and generous I let him kiss me too. His buddy asked me if it was the worm inside that makes me do the things I do. I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one I ate? The one that eats at me alone?
I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess.  Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust  crumbled. You push me back into bed. More “honey” and “baby.” Breath you tell my ear circles inside me,  curls a damp wind and runs the circuit  of my limbs. I interrogate the air, smell Murphy’s Oil Soap, dog kibble. No rose. No patchouli swelter. And your mouth—  sesame, olive. The nudge of your tongue behind my top teeth. To entirely finish is water entering water.  Which is the cup I take away? More turning me. Less your arms reaching  around my back. You ask my ear where I have been and my body answers,  all over kingdom come.
At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,” she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his workboots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.
Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey— a real one, on the second floor— and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases. We stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers to get to the candy counter in the back, and pointed at the red wax lips, and Mary Janes, and straws full of purple sugar. Said goodbye to Mrs. Todd, she white-faced and silent, and walked the streets of Beaver, our teeth sunk hard in the wax, and big red lips worth kissing.
Softly they come thumbing up from firm ground protruding unharmed. Easily crumbled and yet how they shouldered the leaf and mold aside, rising unperturbed, breathing obscurely, still as stone. By the slumping log, by the dappled aspen, they grow alone. A dumb eloquence seems their trade. Like hooded monks in a sacred wood they say: Tomorrow we are gone.
As much as you deserve it, I wouldn’t wish this Sunday night on you— not the Osco at closing, not its two tired women and shaky security guard, not its bin of flip-flops and Tasmanian Devil baseball caps, not its freshly mopped floors and fluorescent lights, not its endless James Taylor song on the intercom, and not its last pint of chocolate mint ice cream, which I carried down Milwaukee Ave. past a man in an unbuttoned baseball shirt, who stepped out of a shadow to whisper, How are you doing?
One last time I unlock the house where they lived and fought and tried again: the air of the place, carpet with its unchanging green, chair with its back to me. On the TV set, the Christmas cactus has bloomed, has spilled its pink flowers down its scraggly arms and died, drying into paper. At the round oak table, ghosts lean toward one another, almost a bow, before rising, before ambling away.
All our life so much laundry; each day’s doing or not comes clean, flows off and away to blend with other sins of this world. Each day begins in new skin, blessed by the elements charged to take us out again to do or undo what’s been assigned. From socks to shirts the selves we shed lift off the line as if they own a life apart from the one we offer. There is joy in clean laundry. All is forgiven in water, sun and air. We offer our day’s deeds to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer, our arms up, then lowered in supplication.
For Carl Solomon I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,  who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,  who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination— ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time— and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.II What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!III Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland  where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland  where you must feel very strange I’m with you in Rockland  where you imitate the shade of my mother I’m with you in Rockland  where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland  where you laugh at this invisible humor I’m with you in Rockland  where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I’m with you in Rockland  where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I’m with you in Rockland  where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland  where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I’m with you in Rockland  where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I’m with you in Rockland  where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I’m with you in Rockland  where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I’m with you in Rockland  where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I’m with you in Rockland  where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I’m with you in Rockland  where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland  where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland  where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland  where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland  in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night    San Francisco, 1955—1956[Click here to read “A Footnote to 'Howl”]
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then! The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives, all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown— and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!  And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen, —We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.    Berkeley, 1955
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.  I can’t stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don’t feel good don’t bother me. I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I’m sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.  Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument.  Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.  Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?  I’m trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I’m doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.  I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.  When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.  My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right. I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I’m addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?  I’m obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.  I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.  It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance. I’d better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don’t really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.  The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.  America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.  America is this correct? I’d better get right down to the job. It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.    Berkeley, January 17, 1956
I Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk— Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors  Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in ground —Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store,  past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped on brick Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall painted green & purple Puerto Rican style Along E. 10th’s glass splattered pavement, kid blacks & Spanish oiled hair adolescents’ crowded house fronts— Ah, tonite I walked out on my block NY City under humid summer sky Halloween, thinking what happened Timothy Leary joining brain police for a season?  thinking what’s all this Weathermen, secrecy & selfrighteousness beyond reason—F.B.I. plots? Walked past a taxicab controlling the bottle strewn curb— past young fellows with their umbrella handles & canes leaning against a ravaged Buick —and as I looked at the crowd of kids on the stoop—a boy stepped up, put his arm around my neck tenderly I thought for a moment, squeezed harder, his umbrella handle against my skull, and his friends took my arm, a young brown companion tripped his foot ’gainst my ankle— as I went down shouting Om Ah Hūm to gangs of lovers on the stoop watching slowly appreciating, why this is a raid, these strangers mean strange business with what—my pockets, bald head, broken-healed-bone leg, my softshoes, my heart— Have they knives? Om Ah Hūm—Have they sharp metal wood to shove in eye ear ass? Om Ah Hūm & slowly reclined on the pavement, struggling to keep my woolen bag of poetry address calendar & Leary-lawyer notes hung from my shoulder dragged in my neat orlon shirt over the crossbar of a broken metal door  dragged slowly onto the fire-soiled floor an abandoned store, laundry candy counter 1929— now a mess of papers & pillows & plastic car seat covers cracked cockroach-corpsed ground— my wallet back pocket passed over the iron foot step guard and fell out, stole by God Muggers’ lost fingers, Strange— Couldn’t tell—snakeskin wallet actually plastic, 70 dollars my bank money for a week, old broken wallet—and dreary plastic contents—Amex card & Manf. Hanover Trust Credit too—business card from Mr. Spears British Home Minister Drug Squad—my draft card—membership ACLU & Naropa Institute Instructor’s identification Om Ah Hūm I continued chanting Om Ah Hūm Putting my palm on the neck of an 18 year old boy fingering my back pocket crying “Where’s the money” “Om Ah Hūm there isn’t any” My card Chief Boo-Hoo Neo American Church New Jersey & Lower East Side Om Ah Hūm —what not forgotten crowded wallet—Mobil Credit, Shell? old lovers addresses on cardboard pieces, booksellers calling cards— —“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hūm take it easy” Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise “Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left, as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hūm didn’t stop em enough, the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor—   November 2, 1974
Homage Kenneth Koch If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle, I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,  Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,  Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again, Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow, Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie  Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange, Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.    Boulder, April 26, 1980
Almost the first reindeer shipped North by boxcar from Lapland  but a toy model got there first. A dwarf invented reindeer on his own.  He was Santa’s favorite. He hadn't known they already existed. This discouraged dwarf was close to taking his life but Santa showed up encircled by snow. He said, “I will use the real reindeer for my sled always in yoke to your original invention.” That night the gears that turned the Pole  stopped and began to turn the other way,  so it be so. My love is a toy model waiting for a reindeer to carry me.
Put nothing down to distress the reader. No barking dog. No rustle in the place whispers belong or photos of petals near collapse. Erase oranges of confusing taste, a face wrinkled or in pain, a map with waterless rivers or water without a bend, still in darkness. Here, where mystery beyond hope comes too near, make a bright flight of leaves descend, none to smear all our spotless rivers. A map folds and unfolds, does not bunch or wrinkle. Rainbows to last. The First Endlessness of Eden. This was the spot I was to start on, a leg steps out of the lake, a step falters instead into dashes that spread without prints onto the screaming bank.
Your body, hard vowels In a soft dress, is still. What you can't know is that after you died All the black poets In New York City Took a deep breath, And breathed you out; Dark corners of small clubs, The silence you left twitching On the floors of the gigs You turned your back on, The balled-up fists of notes Flung, angry from a keyboard. You won't be able to hear us Try to etch what rose Off your eyes, from your throat. Out you bleed, not as sweet, or sweaty, Through our dark fingertips. We drum rest We drum thank you We drum stay.
I counted till they danced so Their slippers leaped the town – And then I took a pencil To note the rebels down – And then they grew so jolly I did resign the prig – And ten of my once stately toes Are marshalled for a jig!
Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman, Some type of supernatural creature. My mother would tell you, if she could, About her life with my father, A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman. She would tell you about the choices A young black woman faces. Is falling in love with some man A deal with the devil In blue terms, the tongue we use When we don't want nuance To get in the way, When we need to talk straight. My mother chooses my father After choosing a man Who was, as we sing it, Of no account. This man made my father look good, That's how bad it was. He made my father seem like an island In the middle of a stormy sea, He made my father look like a rock. And is the blues the moment you realize You exist in a stacked deck, You look in a mirror at your young face, The face my sister carries, And you know it's the only leverage You've got. Does this create a hurt that whispersHow you going to do? Is the blues the moment You shrug your shoulders And agree, a girl without money Is nothing, dust To be pushed around by any old breeze. Compared to this, My father seems, briefly, To be a fire escape. This is the way the blues works Its sorry wonders, Makes trouble look like A feather bed, Makes the wrong man's kisses A healing.
I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library. He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor, pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky. I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles, radiating heat, singing with joy.
The warping night air having brought the boom Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room, We tell the wakened child that all she heard Was an odd question from a forest bird, Asking of us, if rightly listened to, “Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?” Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear, Can also thus domesticate a fear, And send a small child back to sleep at night Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
First we tamp down the ridges that criss-cross the yard then wait for the ground to move again. I hold the shoe box, you, the trowel. When I give you the signal you dig in behind and flip forward. Out he pops into daylight, blind velvet. We nudge him into the box, carry him down the hill. Four times we’ve done it. The children worry. Have we let them all go at the very same spot? Will they find each other? We can’t be sure ourselves, only just beginning to learn the fragile rules of uprooting.
Two guitars were left in a room all alone They sat on different corners of the parlor In this solitude they started talking to each other My strings are tight and full of tears The man who plays me has no heart I have seen it leave out of his mouth I have seen it melt out of his eyes It dives into the pores of the earth When they squeeze me tight I bring Down the angels who live off the chorus The trios singing loosen organs With melodious screwdrivers Sentiment comes off the hinges Because a song is a mountain put into Words and landscape is the feeling that Enters something so big in the harmony We are always in danger of blowing up With passion The other guitar: In 1944 New York When the Trio Los Panchos started With Mexican & Puerto Rican birds I am the one that one of them held Tight like a woman Their throats gardenia gardens An airport for dreams I've been in theaters and cabarets I played in an apartment on 102nd street After a baptism pregnant with women The men flirted and were offered Chicken soup Echoes came out of hallways as if from cavesSomeone is opening the door now The two guitars hushed and there was a Resonance in the air like what is left by The last chord of a bolero.
you are falling sun shine miracle your lips are wet  rain to our hearts floods in every opening on the stoop your skirt rises fingers go up your legs you are falling in the streets the hallways of east harlem the dark hallways of east harlem the dark hallways with mattresses of east harlem  you are falling roll with us the avenues you are falling the night queen of the earth you are falling on us with lips & thighs & big round breasts we hold in our hands & hear your bomb tick your blood get hot come out crack your eggs on stupid american heads queen of the earth push us to the walls fall on us kill us with your love & tongue harlem queen fine mama sprinkle us with it there are no bargains pure product  you are falling bloom bloom you got all sing dark & you shine grown fat for love in the dark you are like a volcano with a sea of heat  explode  you are falling  explode
My brother, in his small white bed, held one end. I tugged the other to signal I was still awake. We could have spoken, could have sung to one another, we were in the same room for five years, but the soft cord with its little frayed ends connected us in the dark, gave comfort even if we had been bickering all day. When he fell asleep first and his end of the cord dropped to the floor, I missed him terribly, though I could hear his even breath and we had such long and separate lives ahead.
To me myself them and others always then and now that day  we was flying through above Atlantic Ocean clouds the plane  and the plan O also plain language plano feet or face was in  perfect harmonious bolero wavy plena to someplace a few miles  away from heaven this gathered from the way the adults poke  their eyes out from their natural sockets More here in the  United States the actual splendour of big cities disfigures  your face even more than imagining its sweetness so much that  you can’t taste yourself the way you taste yourself when the  sun shines on through your stomach All you knew was that the  birds fly with you in them too All you knew was miles of green  road eating you One year that comes and another one that splits  that’s the way the jingle puts it one December made a print  in your mind And the next December the passion and excitement  the coconut rice and Eisenhower who was President of the  United States used to come to our parties and sit inside the  television set and I began to see paths in the wall by way of  cracks how would this be interpreted Also the cracks made  a perfect bear this must be the Life of skidsofrenos without  any breaks I thought I could take a small bike that I had  and go exploring through the next apartment after I took the  room or the road When I told Mom she said Qué confusión so many  questions back in Aguas Buenas the water was clear and here  there is no guava They can keep Puerto Rico just give us  the guava of independence depending on no bodies tortures dreams  of the past or future within the present State no State ever of  things She loves that fruit the best Assemblage yourself for the rum- ble on Avenue D against the Sportsman we gonna kick them off the  earth yet see them floating down the East River the street was noisy  and full of jumping bodies moving somewhere One quiet afternoon  the President of one gang fought the President of another gang and  the afternoon changed nature with voices of O man git him Roach fought Roach fought One of the presidents was named Roach and  he fought and the other guy fought from the middle of the block to the corner and another person who was not part of the tussle kept  saying Roach fight Roach fought Roach fight Roach is in it Roach is  the one the one is Roach It is Roach do it Roach Roach it is Roach  jumped up he threw him down heat sweating glands Roach is out  he came out and is into a tumbao with Look Roach Tropical  serenity atop hammock and eating Bacalao ala Española and if  news of Ponce de Leon reaches here That he is looking for the  Fountain of Youth say just be tranquil take a bath you smell like  Manhattan sewers if you get drunk don’t bite your eyes You cannot  find a plane to go back to that plane The fight kept moving up the  avenue and they fought and fought till they went over the horizon  We have learned the greatest lesson in geography as we moved along  through space at 29 thousand feet eating air going to the next age  over or under or beyond What it could have been like   Sticking it  into her like a root the idea that she can go back and once again feel  happy that she can go to big cabaret dancing in Santurce  Appreciate the aroma of strangers That is what it says in the Bible  the one translated by the maniacs from the land where the Papaya  grows to its full size like a basketball  In the new landscape you can see the word escape into your roots  when they are riding well and it feels hot like you into the  center fabricating thru air motions of mountains of motional  emotion scribbling it takes a lot of concentration to move your  nerves like that Slow up within the jet within the slow propellers  of the 50’s Hold up a second there has been a change of space  but everything remains the same angles on your life your  destiny You do your claves on the paper I will read you  your secrets Civilization smells so different within the iron  trees Sivilessensation spread yourself out of it listen to  the beat abnormalize yourself compa.
Is the ocean really inside seashells  or is it all in your mind?  —PICHON DE LA ONCE Behold and soak like a sponge.  I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico  is the ears of Saru-Saru, a poet reputed to have lived  in Atlantis. On the day that the water kissed and  embraced and filled all the holes of that giant  missing link, this bard’s curiosity was the greatest  for he kept swimming and listening for causes.  He picked up rocks before they sank and blew  wind viciously into them. Finally he blew so hard  into a rock that he busted his ear drums; angry,  he recited poems as he tried turning into a bird  to fly to green Brazil. His left ear opened up  like a canal and a rock lodged in it. Rock attracts  rock and many rocks attached to this rock. It got  like a rocket. His ear stayed with it in a horizontal  position. Finally after so many generations he got  to hear what he most wanted: the sounds made by flowers  as they stretched into the light. Behold, I have  discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the  ears of Saru-Saru.
My parents argued over wallpaper. Would stripes make the room look larger? He would measure, cut, and paste; she’d swipe the flaws out with her brush. Once it was properly hung, doubt would set in. Would the floral have been a better choice? Then it would grow until she was certain: it had to go. Divorce terrified me as a child. I didn’t know what led to it, but I had my suspicions. The stripes came down. Up went the flowers. Eventually it became my definition of marriage: bad choices, arguments whose victors time refused to tell, but everything done together and done well.
When clouds turn heavy, rich and mottled as an oyster bed, when the temperature drops so fast that fog conjures itself inside the cars, as if the parking lots were filled with row upon row of lovers, when my umbrella veils my face and threatens to reverse itself at every gust of wind, and rain lashes my legs and the hem of my skirt, but I am walking to meet a man who’ll buy me coffee and kiss my fingers— what can be more beautiful, then, than these boys sprinting through the storm, laughing, shouldering the rain aside, running to their dorms, perhaps to class, carrying, like torches, their useless shoes?
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.   On the day the world ends Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas, A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn, Vegetable peddlers shout in the street And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island, The voice of a violin lasts in the air And leads into a starry night. And those who expected lightning and thunder Are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps Do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, As long as the bumblebee visits a rose, As long as rosy infants are born No one believes it is happening now. Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: There will be no other end of the world, There will be no other end of the world.Warsaw, 1944
No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians. Desire will not save the morality of God. If he created beings able to choose between good and evil, And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity, Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures, Which would find its explanation only by assuming The existence of an archetypal Paradise And a pre-human downfall so grave That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,  I felt a door opening in me and I entered  the clarity of early morning.  One after another my former lives were departing,  like ships, together with their sorrow.  And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas  assigned to my brush came closer,  ready now to be described better than they were before.  I was not separated from people,  grief and pity joined us.  We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.  For where we come from there is no division  into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.  We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part  of the gift we received for our long journey.  Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—  a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror  of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel  staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,  waiting for a fulfillment.  I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,  as are all men and women living at the same time,  whether they are aware of it or not.
I have always aspired to a more spacious form  that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose  and would let us understand each other without exposing  the author or reader to sublime agonies.  In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:  a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,  so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out  and stood in the light, lashing his tail.  That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,  though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.  It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,  when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.  What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,  who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,  and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,  work at changing his destiny for their convenience?  It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today,  and so you may think that I am only joking  or that I’ve devised just one more means  of praising Art with the help of irony.  There was a time when only wise books were read,  helping us to bear our pain and misery.  This, after all, is not quite the same  as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.  And yet the world is different from what it seems to be  and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. People therefore preserve silent integrity,  thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.  The purpose of poetry is to remind us  how difficult it is to remain just one person,  for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,  and invisible guests come in and out at will. What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,  as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,  under unbearable duress and only with the hope  that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.Berkeley, 1968
I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years   ago or three.  The same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before.  Soon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive,  Said that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed,  For here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.  “I kept dreaming of snow and birch forests.  Where so little changes you hardly notice how time goes by.  This is, you will see, a magic mountain.”  Budberg: a familiar name in my childhood.  They were prominent in our region,  This Russian family, descendants of German Balts.  I read none of his works, too specialized.  And Chen, I have heard, was an exquisite poet,  Which I must take on faith, for he wrote in Chinese. Sultry Octobers, cool Julys, trees blossom in February.  Here the nuptial flight of hummingbirds does not forecast spring.  Only the faithful maple sheds its leaves every year.  For no reason, its ancestors simply learned it that way.  I sensed Budberg was right and I rebelled.  So I won’t have power, won’t save the world?  Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown?  Did I then train myself, myself the Unique,  To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze,  To listen to the foghorns blaring down below? Until it passed. What passed? Life.  Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.  One murky island with its barking seals  Or a parched desert is enough  To make us say: yes, oui, si. "Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.”  Endurance comes only from enduring.  With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope,  And climbed it and it held me.  What a procession! Quelles délices! What caps and hooded gowns! Most respected Professor Budberg,  Most distinguished Professor Chen,  Wrong Honorable Professor Milosz  Who wrote poems in some unheard-of tongue.  Who will count them anyway. And here sunlight.  So that the flames of their tall candles fade.  And how many generations of hummingbirds keep them company  As they walk on. Across the magic mountain.  And the fog from the ocean is cool, for once again it is July. Berkeley, 1975
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.  Wilno, 1936
You whom I could not save Listen to me.  Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.  I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.  I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree. What strengthened me, for you was lethal.  You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,  Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;  Blind force with accomplished shape. Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge  Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;  And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave  When I am talking with you. What is poetry which does not save  Nations or people?  A connivance with official lies,  A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,  Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,  That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,  In this and only this I find salvation. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds  To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.  I put this book here for you, who once lived  So that you should visit us no more. Warsaw, 1945
Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, Giving us the estate of the world to manage. It saves austere and transparent phrases From the filthy discord of tortured words. It says that everything is new under the sun, Opens the congealed fist of the past. Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo. Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit. Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.Berkeley, 1968
Come, Holy Spirit,  bending or not bending the grasses,  appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,  at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow  covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.  I am only a man: I need visible signs.  I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.  Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church  lifts its hand, only once, just once, for me.  But I understand that signs must be human,  therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,  not me—after all I have some decency—  and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you. Berkely, 1961
You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.Washington, D.C., 1950
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes. Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness, Like the flight of a moth which, had it known, Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame. Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety, The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored. I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride, The time when I was among their adherents Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting. But all of them would have one subject, desire, If only my own—but no, not at all; alas, I was driven because I wanted to be like others. I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me. The history of my stupidity will not be written. For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.Berkeley, 1980.
these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be held back. these hips have never been enslaved,  they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips. i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!
for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of nagasaki, for the eyes of the children of middle passage, for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us, amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men.
i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. i wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.
i was leaving my fifty-eighth year when a thumb of ice stamped itself hard near my heart you have your own story you know about the fears the tears the scar of disbelief you know that the saddest lies are the ones we tell ourselves you know how dangerous it is to be born with breasts you know how dangerous it is to wear dark skin i was leaving my fifty-eighth year when i woke into the winter of a cold and mortal body thin icicles hanging off the one mad nipple weeping have we not been good children did we not inherit the earth but you must know all about this from your own shivering life
for j. byrd i am a man's head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should i call a white man brother? who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger? what does my daughter say? the sun is a blister overhead. if i were alive i could not bear it. the townsfolk sing we shall overcome while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth into the dirt that covers us all. i am done with this dust. i am done.
my sister Josephine born july in '29 and dead these 15 years who carried a book on every stroll. when daddy was dying she left the streets and moved back home to tend him. her pimp came too her Diamond Dick and they would take turns reading a bible aloud through the house. when you poem this and you will she would say remember the Book of Job. happy birthday and hope to you Josephine one of the easts most wanted. may heaven be filled with literate men may they bed you with respect.
Try to remember: things go wrong in spite of it all. I listen to our daughters singing in the crackling rows of corn and wonder why I don't love them more. They move like dark birds, small mouths open to the sky and hungry. All afternoon I listen to the highway and watch clouds push down over the hills. I remember your legs, heavy with sleep, lying across mine. I remember when the world was transparent, trembling, all shattering light. I had to grit my teeth against its brilliance. It was nothing like this stillness that makes it difficult to lift my eyes. When I finally do, I see you carrying the girls over the sharp stones of the creek bed. When they pull at my clothes and lean against my arms, I don't know what to do and do nothing.
You follow close behind me, for a thousand miles responsive to my movements. I signal, you signal back. We will meet at the next exit. You blow kisses, which I return. You mouth "I love you," a message for my rearview mirror. We do a slow tango as we change lanes in tandem, gracefully, as though music were guiding us. It is tighter than bodies locked in heat, this caring, this ardent watching.
I spy his head above the waves, big as a man’s fist, black eyes peering at me, until he dives into darker, deeper water. Yesterday I saw him a foot from my outstretched hand, already tilting his great domed shell away. Ribbons of green moss rippled behind him, growing along the ridge of his back and down his long reptilian tail. He swims in everything he knows, and what he knows is never forgotten. Wisely, he fears me as if I were the Plague, which I am, sick unto death, swimming to heal myself in his primeval sea.
A lone voice in the right empty space makes its own best company.
Walking past the open window, she is surprised by the song of the white-throated sparrow and stops to listen. She has been thinking of the dead ones she loves--her father who lived over a century, and her oldest son, suddenly gone at forty-seven--and she can't help thinking she has called them back, that they are calling her in the voices of these birds passing through Ohio on their spring migration. . . because, after years of summers in upstate New York, the white-throat has become something like the family bird. Her father used to stop whatever he was doing and point out its clear, whistling song. She hears it again: "Poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody." She tries not to think, "Poor Andy," but she has already thought it, and now she is weeping. But then she hears another, so clear, it's as if the bird were in the room with her, or in her head, telling her that everything will be all right. She cannot see them from her second-story window-- they are hidden in the new leaves of the old maple, or behind the white blossoms of the dogwood-- but she stands and listens, knowing they will stay for only a few days before moving on.
The air tonight is thick as curry; like every night this summer I could cut it with my wine glass, spray it with mace. Over and over it would heal together like a wound, follow my click and pace of heels down Conti Street, St. Ann, Bourbon. Oh Hamlet, if you could see me now as I pump and swagger across that stage, cape dripping to the floor, me in three-inch heels and a technicolor G-string— you would not wish me in a convent. They’ve made me a queen here, married me off to a quarter bag and a pint of gin. The old men tend bark and splatter, rabid at each table. I think they stay up all night just to spite the moon. They bring their diseased mouths to the French Market in the morning, sell Creole tomatoes to tourists who don’t know what they are. Each bald head shines plump and red. It seems like so long ago that I modeled for those legs outside of Big Daddy’s— the ones over the door that swing in, out, in, out— the sculptor made me painted as Mardi Gras. I thought you might recognize them if you ever passed with the boys, parading from Abbey to Tavern, or think them royal feet in need of slippers. Someday I expect to find you here, sitting at the table between the first and second rows, fingering bones or something worse. And in the end you will throw me a columbine, light me a Marlboro and take me to a 24-7 where jukebox light quivers, makes us as thin as ghosts. But for now, I will dance for the fat man who sits in your place and sweats his love for me at 3 a.m., because only he knows I am Horatio in drag.
Twenty-eight shotgun pellets crater my thighs, belly and groin. I gently thumb each burnt bead, fingering scabbed stubs with ointment. Could have neutered me, made extinct the volatile, romantic man I am. “He’s dead,” doctor at emergency room could’ve easily told my wife that night. Instead, “Soak him in a bath twice a day. Apply this ointment to the sores. Here’s a month’s supply of pain killers.” I remember the deep guttural groan I gave, when the doctor pressed my groin.  Assured I could still make love, morphine drowsed me and in a dull stupor I don’t remember police visiting my bed, or laughing so hard, they scowled for a serious answer. I howled a U.F.O. shot me along the Río Grande, and they cursed and left. In the summer of ’88 I’d traded alfalfa for a bull calf. Still smelling of milk udders, I tied it to the truck rack and drove off. Its hooves teethed at pink roots ’til the whole lush field went bare dirt. A magnificent bull. Glowing wheel of heart breathed brimming stream of white flame at dawn. He wrangled his black brawn like a battleshield to challenge the sun, reared thick neck down and sideways, lunged at me with dart and snort, hoof-stamped and nostrilled dirt,  ’til I growled him back  whipping air  with a limber willow branch,  poured grain in trough  and spread alfalfa. I respected his horns and he the whistling menace of willow. One afternoon my cousin Patricio helped me band the bull’s scrotum, usurp swollen sap in his testicle sack. It withered to a pink wattle and seeded the garden to drive cornstalks to bear hardy, golden horns. Thereafter, he grazed the fenceline, with the tempered lust and peaceful grace of a celibate priest. His bearing now arranged itself elegant as a wild flower sprung over night.  ______________ Perfecto shot it. Rasping on a black rope of blood round its neck, it staggered, bouldering convulsions. Blood exploding in bright lash of earthquaked air, it stumble-butted stock trailer fender— second and third shots glowed its death. A quivering shadow of life-flame darkened the air and it sputtered a last drop of blood. I drank long swigs of whiskey and, thinking it was dead, turned to walk away, then  it gave a tremendous groan, tremendous groan,  a birth-letting groan . . . a moon groan . . .  blood spurted out, thick, thick, thick  alleys of dead star blood  and I turned and said aloud to myself,  “That’s the moon’s voice!  That’s the moon’s voice!” And the white moon was in the sky, and I looked at the moon for a long time.  ______________ I sat on the ground and gulped whiskey, drank the steer’s death still warm in my throat. A beautiful animal! I allowed to be butchered. When it trounced and galloped in the field, its body was a dark, windy cliff edge, and its eyes were doorways of a dream—  now it bled a charred scroll  of ancient chant in gravel, I would never know,  and its blackened logs of blood  smoldered dying vowels, I would never hear. My heart’s creak-n-tremble rage milled the steer’s death to red grist, I grieved, I wept drunkenly that no one cared,  that humankind betrayed him,  that we were all cowards.  ______________ Perfecto, Valasquez and the butcher tried to stop me from driving,  but now was the time to settle  a bad feud with another friend.  Redeem the bull’s blood with ours.  I drove to Felipe’s house,  anger knotted in me  tight as the rope tied  to the stock trailer  steer strained against.  I pulled, but could not free myself.  (I had a dream night before—  I crossed black-iron footbridge,  partially collapsed by sea storm.  Left-hand railing swept out to sea,  I gripped bolt-studded right-hand railing,  finger-clutched wire netting sides,  carefully descended waist-high water. Waded  through slowly and ascended other side—  but had lost my sunglasses and wallet,  went back, groped bottom, found them and ascended again.) Had to cross that bridge again. Full of significance . . . tonight, deepest part of flooded bridge was danger . . . drowning . . . represented years of my life collapsed and destroyed, water the cleansing element, my ascent from had healed, onto firm ground, but I went back, to re-live destruction…  “Felipe!” I yelled, porch light  flicked on, illuminating the yard.  “Came to fight,” I said, “take off  your glasses.” Bug-eyes glazed bewildered, then gray slits of lips snarled, “You motherless dog!” He withdrew in darkness a moment, reappeared on porch, serrated saw of his voice cut the chill dark,  “¡Hijo de su pinche madre!  ¡Mátalo! ¡¡Mátalo!!” First shot framed darkness round me with a spillway of bright light, eruption of sound, and second shot roared a spray of brilliance and the third gave an expanded halo-flash. My legs woozed, and then I buckled to the ground.  (I thought, holy shit, what ever happened  to the old yard-style fight between estranged friends!) I groaned with the steer, and crawled my dead legs to the truck, lunged on elbows into the cab, hand lifting the dead stone beneath my waist to clutch and brake. Following morning calls came, “Tell us who did it Gato!” “Our rifles are loaded!”  I said, “Leave it alone. What would you do  if a drunk man came into your yard,  threatened to beat you?” I wanted peace, wanted to diffuse the immovable core of vengeance in my heart, I had carried since a child, dismantle the bloody wheel of violence I had ridden since a child. During my week in bed, pellets pollinated me with a forgotten peace, and between waking thoughts of anger and vengeance, sleep was a small meadow of light, a clearing I walked into and rested. Fragrance of peace filled me as fragrance of flowers and dirt permeate hands that work in the garden all day.Curandero came to visit, and said, “The bull in ancient times was the symbol of females. Did you know that? Killing the bull, is killing the intuitive part of yourself, the feminine part. Did you realize, when Jesus was raising Lazarus, he groaned in his spirit and that bull groaned, and when you killed the bull, it was raising you. The dying bull gave birth to you and now you are either blessed or cursed. The flood of that bull’s blood, is either going to drown you or liberate you, but it will not be wasted.”
Winter throws his great white shield on the ground, breaking thin arms of twisting branches, and then howls on the north side of the Black Mesa a deep, throaty laughter. Because of him we have to sell our cattle that rake snow for stubble. Having lived his whole life in a few weeks, slow and pensive he walks away, dragging his silver-stream shield down branches and over the ground, he keeps walking slowly away into death bravely.
Elm branches radiate green heat, blackbirds stiffly strut across fields. Beneath bedroom wood floor, I feel earth— bread in an oven that slowly swells, simmering my Navajo blanket thread-crust as white-feathered and corn-tasseled Corn Dancers rise in a line, follow my calf, vanish in a rumple and surface at my knee-cliff, chanting. Wearing shagged buffalo headgear, Buffalo Dancer chases Deer Woman across Sleeping Leg mountain. Branches of wild rose trees rattle seeds. Deer Woman fades into hills of beige background. Red Bird of my heart thrashes wildly after her. What a stupid man I have been! How good to let imagination go, step over worrisome events,  those hacked logs  tumbled about  in the driveway. Let decisions go!  Let them blow  like school children’s papers  against the fence,  rattling in the afternoon wind. This Red Bird of my heart thrashes within the tidy appearance I offer the world, topples what I erect, snares what I set free, dashes what I’ve put together, indulges in things left unfinished, and my world is left, as children know,  left as toys after dark in the sandbox.
for Tony I could not disengage my world  from the rest of humanity.  Wind chill factor 11° below. All night wind thrashes barechested trees like a West Texas tent evangelist  hissing them on his knees,  lisping  sinnn . . . sinn . . . sinn . . .  All night wind preaches. Old tool shed behind my house fist-cuffs itself to nail-loose tin, horse pasture gates clank their crimes, while neighing black stallions of rain stampede on the patio fleeing gunshots of thunder . . . . Miles south of here, nightscopes pick up human heat that green fuzz helicopter dash panels.  A mother whispers,  “Sssshhhh mejito, nomás poco más allá.  Nomás poco más allá.” Dunes of playing-dead people jack rabbit under strobe lights and cutting whack/blades,  “Ssshhh mejito.  Sssshhhh.” Child whimpers  and staggers in blinding dust  and gnashing wind. Those not caught, scratch sand up to sleep against underbellies of roots and stones. Eventually Juanito comes to my door, sick from eating stucco chips— his meals scratched off walls of temporary shelters, and Enrique, who guzzled water at industrial pipes pouring green foam out at the El Paso/Juarez border, and Maria steaming with fever, face dark meteorite, whispers,  “Where I come from, Señor Baca,  a woman’s womb is a rock,  and children born from me,  drop like stones, to become dust  under death squad’s boots.” And Juanito,  “They came at midnight  and took my brothers. I have  never seen them since. Each judge’s tongue  is a bleeding stub of death, and each lawyer’s  finger a soft coffin nail.” And Enrique,  “You can trust no one.  Each crying person’s eye is a damp cellar  where thieves and murderers sleep.” They have found refuge here at Black Mesa. The sun passes between our lives, as between two trees, one gray, one green, but side by side.
We are born with dreams in our hearts, looking for better days ahead. At the gates we are given new papers, our old clothes are taken and we are given overalls like mechanics wear. We are given shots and doctors ask questions. Then we gather in another room where counselors orient us to the new land we will now live in. We take tests. Some of us were craftsmen in the old world, good with our hands and proud of our work. Others were good with their heads. They used common sense like scholars use glasses and books to reach the world. But most of us didn’t finish high school. The old men who have lived here stare at us, from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated. We pass them as they stand around idle, leaning on shovels and rakes or against walls. Our expectations are high: in the old world, they talked about rehabilitation, about being able to finish school, and learning an extra good trade. But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers, to work in fields for three cents an hour. The administration says this is temporary So we go about our business, blacks with blacks, poor whites with poor whites, chicanos and indians by themselves. The administration says this is right, no mixing of cultures, let them stay apart, like in the old neighborhoods we came from. We came here to get away from false promises, from dictators in our neighborhoods, who wore blue suits and broke our doors down when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like, swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased. But it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated. The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay, our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value. Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick. My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines, my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying. Just like it used to be in my neighborhood: from all the tenements laundry hung window to window. Across the way Joey is sticking his hands through the bars to hand Felipé a cigarette, men are hollering back and forth cell to cell, saying their sinks don’t work, or somebody downstairs hollers angrily about a toilet overflowing, or that the heaters don’t work. I ask Coyote next door to shoot me over a little more soap to finish my laundry. I look down and see new immigrants coming in, mattresses rolled up and on their shoulders, new haircuts and brogan boots, looking around, each with a dream in their heart, thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives. But in the end, some will just sit around talking about how good the old world was. Some of the younger ones will become gangsters. Some will die and others will go on living without a soul, a future, or a reason to live. Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes, but so very few make it out of here as human as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now as they look at their hands so long away from their tools, as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families, so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.
Minutes ago those quick cleft hoofs lifted the dik-dik’s speckled frame. Now the cheetah dips her delicate head to the still-pulsating guts. Our Rover’s so close we need no zoom to fix the green shot of her eyes, the matted red mess of her face. You come here, recall a father hale in his ordinary life, not his last bed, not the long tasteless slide of tapioca. This is the Great Rift, where it all began, here where the warthogs and hartebeest feed in the scrub, giraffes splay to drink, and our rank diesel exhaust darkens the air for only a few moments before vanishing.
It is windy today. A wall of wind crashes against, windows clunk against, iron frames as wind swings past broken glass and seethes, like a frightened cat in empty spaces of the cellblock. In the exercise yard we sat huddled in our prison jackets, on our haunches against the fence, and the wind carried our words over the fences, while the vigilant guard on the tower held his cap at the sudden gust. I could see the main tower from where I sat, and the wind in my face gave me the feeling I could grasp the tower like a cornstalk, and snap it from its roots of rock. The wind plays it like a flute, this hollow shoot of rock. The brim girded with barbwire with a guard sitting there also, listening intently to the sounds as clouds cover the sun. I thought of the day I was coming to prison, in the back seat of a police car, hands and ankles chained, the policeman pointed,  “See that big water tank? The big  silver one out there, sticking up?  That’s the prison.” And here I am, I cannot believe it. Sometimes it is such a dream, a dream, where I stand up in the face of the wind, like now, it blows at my jacket, and my eyelids flick a little bit, while I stare disbelieving. . . . The third day of spring, and four years later, I can tell you, how a man can endure, how a man can become so cruel, how he can die or become so cold. I can tell you this, I have seen it every day, every day, and still I am strong enough to love you, love myself and feel good; even as the earth shakes and trembles, and I have not a thing to my name, I feel as if I have everything, everything.
There are black guards slamming cell gates on black men,  And brown guards saying hello to brown men with numbers on their backs,  And white guards laughing with white cons,  and red guards, few, say nothing to red inmates as they walk by to chow and cells.  There you have it, the little antpile . . . convicts marching in straight lines, guards flying on badged wings, permits to sting, to glut themselves at the cost of secluding themselves from their people . .  Turning off their minds like watertaps wrapped in gunnysacks that insulate the pipes carrying the pale weak water to their hearts.  It gets bad when you see these same guards carrying buckets of blood out of cells, see them puking at the smell, the people, their own people slashing their wrists, hanging themselves with belts from light outlets; it gets bad to see them clean up the mess, carry the blue cold body out under sheets, and then retake their places in guard cages, watching their people maul and mangle themselves,  And over this blood-rutted land, the sun shines, the guards talk of horses and guns, go to the store and buy new boots, and the longer they work here the more powerful they become, taking on the presence of some ancient mummy, down in the dungeons of prison, a mummy that will not listen, but has a strange power in this dark world, to be so utterly disgusting in ignorance, and yet so proudly command so many men. . . .  And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet, they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers, they fight for rings and money and drugs, in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs, to fight for what morsels they can. . . .  And the other convicts, guilty of nothing but their born color, guilty of being innocent, they slowly turn to dust in the nightly winds here, flying in the wind back to their farms and cities. From the gash in their hearts, sand flies up spraying over houses and through trees,  look at the sand blow over this deserted place, you are looking at them.
for Miguel It would be neat if with the New Year I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year. My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws, chews on for hours every day in my front yard— rain, sun, snow, or wind in bare feet, pondering my poem, I’d look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard. But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots. At the end of my day while I’m in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido I stare at my boots appreciating: all the wrong roads we’ve taken, all the drug and whiskey houses we’ve visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain, I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice, and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my  feet keeping beat to the song, see how my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled. I keep wearing them because they fit so good and I need them, especially when I love so hard, where I go up those boulder strewn trails, where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.
Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow pushing me like a sixteen-year-old to toss my shirt off, and run along the river shore, splashing in the water, wading out to the reeds, my heart an ancient Yaki drum and I believed,  more than believed,  the air beneath trees was female blue dancers  I approached, and there in the dry leaves, in the crisp twigs,  I turned softly as if dancing with a blue woman made of air,  sunlight,  in shrub-weed skirts.  I knew the dance that would please the Gods,  I knew the dance that would make the river water  smile glistening ever silvering,  I knew the dance steps that praised my ancestors. Yeah, I wanted to write you a poem woman for two days, and today it was gray and snowy and overcast,  about how I startled the mallards from their shallow refuge beneath the Russian olive trees and how the male purposely  came close to me  diverting my attention to it  its female love went the other way  risking its life,  that's what I saw, the male fly before the hunter's rifles, circle in sights of hunters and take the shots, the roaring rifle blast  after blast and circle beyond over the fields to meet its female companion. That's how I miss you, that's how I wanted to write you a poem since we left  you one way  me another way. I was the male  taking with me the hunters that would harm you  risking my heart so yours wouldn't be hurt,  fronting myself as possible prey  so you could escape,  that kind of poem  I am writing you now. Circling as hunters aim down on me while you rise, rise, rise into the blue sky  and meet me over in the next fields.  I wanted to write you a poem for two days now  to tell you how happy I was,  seeing a white crane arc  between banks in the irrigation ditch  with furious efforts, its big wings flapping  like an awkward nine-year-old kid  much taller than the others his age  with size twelve sneakers  flapping down the basketball court. But once the white crane found its balance, its wings their grace, it glided more perfectly than a ballet dancer's leap across air,  all of its feathers ballet dancer's toes,  all of its feathers delicate dancers  all of its feathers, in motion  made me believe in myself, but more,  when it rose, swooped up,  the line of ascent up  made me think of the curve of your spine,  how I traced my finger down your spine  when you slept, your spine  is the ascent of the crane  toward the sunshine, and my hands my face my torso and chest and legs and hips became air, a blue cold artic air you glided up in your song of winter love.
there was a frozen tree that I wanted to paint but the shells came down and in Vegas looking across at a green sunshade at 3:30 in the morning, I died without nails, without a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, the windows screamed like doves moaning the bombing of Milan and I went out to live with the rats but the lights were too bright and I thought maybe I'd better go back and sit in a poetry class:  a marvelous description of a gazelle  is hell;  the cross sits like a fly on my window,  my mother’s breath stirs small leaves  in my mind; and I hitch-hiked back to L.A. through hangover clouds and I pulled a letter from my pocket and read it and the truckdriver said, what’s that? and I said, there's some gal up North who used to sleep with Pound, she's trying to tell me that H.D. was our greatest scribe; well, Hilda gave us a few pink Grecian gods in with the chinaware, but after reading her I still have 140 icicles hanging from my bones. I'm not going all the way to L.A., the truckdriver said. it's all right, I said, the calla lilies nod to our minds and someday we’ll all go home together. in fact, he said, this is as far as we go. so I let him have it; old withered whore of time your breasts taste the sour cream of dreaming . . . he let me out in the middle of the desert; to die is to die is to die, old phonographs in cellars, joe di maggio, magazines in with the onions . . . an old Ford picked me up 45 minutes later and, this time, I kept my mouth shut.
don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me at the racetrack any day half drunk betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs, but let me tell you, there are some women there who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke dealing out so much breast and ass and the way it’s all hung together, you look and you look and you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women and then there is something else that wants to make you tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven across the back of the john; anyhow, the season was dragging and the big boys were getting busted, all the non-pros, the producers, the cameraman, the pushers of Mary, the fur salesman, the owners themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day: a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close; he ran with his head down and was mean and ugly and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him. the driver broke him wide took him out by the fence where he’d be alone even if he had to travel four times as far, and that’s the way he went it all the way by the outer fence traveling two miles in one and he won like he was mad as hell and he wasn’t even tired, and the biggest blonde of all all ass and breast, hardly anything else went to the payoff window with me. that night I couldn’t destroy her although the springs shot sparks and they pounded on the walls. later she sat there in her slip drinking Old Grandad and she said what’s a guy like you doing living in a dump like this? and I said I’m a poet and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed. you? you . . . a poet? I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right. but still she looked good to me, she still looked good, and all thanks to an ugly horse who wrote this poem.
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in the Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from the midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw’s tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal  or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days’ work. They are waiting for me to do something  or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they’ll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don’t know whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean and there’s nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.
30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox and look here, they write, you are a dupe for the state, the church, you are in the ego-dream, read your history, study the monetary system, note that the racial war is 23,000 years old. well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor, his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest, the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up, a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor, but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes and watching the backs of houses come down in flames, but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,  large or small enough, or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy  fell through, and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed  with his wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars and then I went inside to the bars, and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew, how all he did was sew on buttons and talk, and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us he gave way because his bladder would not go on, and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice, she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope, and she had a very nice figure, very good legs, but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as  their ideas and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution, nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind, rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon, and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox across the fields under the sun, and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly and knew that soon very soon I would have to get very drunk again.
he hooked to the body hard took it well and loved to fight had seven in a row and a small fleck over one eye, and then he met a kid from Camden with arms thin as wires— it was a good one, the safe lions roared and threw money; they were both up and down many times, but he lost that one and he lost the rematch in which neither of them fought at all, hanging on to each other like lovers through the boos, and now he’s over at Mike’s changing tires and oil and batteries, the fleck over the eye still young, but you don’t ask him, you don’t ask him anything except maybe you think it’s going to rain? or you think the sun’s gonna come out? to which he’ll usually answer hell no, but you’ll have your important tank of gas and drive off.
the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s who is gifted with 3 balls but no heart, but you’ve got to understand when the bull goes down on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else, and let’s not over-rate the obvious decency for in a crap game you may be cutting down some wobbly king of 6 kids and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check, and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn? not I, Henry, and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes, maybe you should have stuck it into something else like an oil well or a herd of cows. I’m too old to argue, I’ve gone with the poem and been k.o.’d with the old sucker-punch round after round, but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser or any other fool full of medals and nothing else, or the first time we read Dos or Eliot with his trousers rolled; the weather is hot on the back of my watch which is down at Finkelstein’s, but you know what they say: things are tough all over, and I remember once on the bum in Texas I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate and the crows came down half-dead, half-living, and they clubbed them to death to save their shells but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and stuck out their tongues and mourned their dead and elected new leaders and then all at once flew home to fuck to fill the gap. you can only kill what shouldn’t be there. and Finkelstein should be there and my watch and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad they are supposed to be bad and if they are good they are likewise supposed to be—although there is a minor fight to be fought, but still I am sad because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands, way off course, not even wanting to be there, two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me and asked me what time it was and I wouldn’t tell him, and later they gathered them up for burning as if they were no better than dung with feathers, feathers and a little gasoline, and from the bottom of one pile a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me. it was 4:35 p.m.
I suppose so. I was living in an attic in Philadelphia It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer looking for work . . . which was a god damned lie; I was a writer looking for a little time and a little food and some attic rent. a couple days later when I finally came home from somewhere the landlady said, there was somebody looking for you. and I said, there must be some mistake. she said, no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write a history book. oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s rent—I mean, on the cuff— so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the hot pigeons suffer and fuck on my hot roof. I turned the radio on real loud drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book interesting but true. but the bastard never came back, and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang going West and they gave us cans of food but no openers and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of railroad cars a hundred years old with dust the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like candlewick and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in Texas all green with nice-looking houses in the distance I found a park slept all night and then they found me and put me in a cell and they asked me about murders and robberies. they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books to prove their efficiency but I wasn’t that tired and they drove me to the next big town fifty-seven miles away the big one kicked me in the ass and they drove off. but I lucked it: two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being dismantled. later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War! and they all came to her house— all the cowboys, all the cowboys: fat, dull and covered with dust. and we all shook hands. I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said oh, you’re a writer, eh? and I said: well, some think so. and some still think so . . . others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet. two weeks later they ran me out of town.
man, he said, sitting on the steps your car sure needs a wash and wax job I can do it for you for 5 bucks, I got the wax, I got the rags, I got everything I need. I gave him the 5 and went upstairs. when I came down 4 hours later he was sitting on the steps drunk and offered me a can of beer. he said he’d get the car the next day. the next day he got drunk again and I loaned him a dollar for a bottle of wine. his name was Mike a world war II veteran. his wife worked as a nurse. the next day I came down and he was sitting on the steps and he said, you know, I been sitting here looking at your car, wondering just how I was gonna do it, I wanna do it real good. the next day Mike said it looked like rain and it sure as hell wouldn’t make any sense to wash and wax a car when it was gonna rain. the next day it looked like rain again. and the next. then I didn’t see him anymore. a week later I saw his wife and she said, they took Mike to the hospital, he’s all swelled-up, they say it’s from the drinking. listen, I told her, he said he was going to wax my car, I gave him 5 dollars to wax my car. he’s in the critical ward, she said, he might die . . . I was sitting in their kitchen drinking with his wife when the phone rang. she handed the phone to me. it was Mike. listen, he said, come down and get me, I can’t stand this place. I drove on down there, walked into the hospital, walked up to his bed and said, let’s go Mike. they wouldn’t give him his clothes so Mike walked to the elevator in his gown. we got on and there was a kid driving the elevator and eating a popsicle. nobody’s allowed to leave here in a gown, he said. you just drive this thing, kid, I said, we’ll worry about the gown. Mike was all puffed-up, triple size but I got him into the car somehow and gave him a cigarette. I stopped at the liquor store for 2 six packs then went on in. I drank with Mike and his wife until 11 p.m. then went upstairs . . . where’s Mike? I asked his wife 3 days later, you know he said he was going to wax my car. Mike died, she said, he’s gone. you mean he died? I asked. yes, he died, she said. I’m sorry, I said, I’m very sorry it rained for a week after that and I figured the only way I’d get the 5 back was to go to bed with his wife but you know she moved out 2 weeks later an old guy with white hair moved in there and he had one blind eye and played the French Horn. there was no way I could make it with him.
I got in the shower and burned my balls last Wednesday. met this painter called Spain, no, he was a cartoonist, well, I met him at a party and everybody got mad at me because I didn’t know who he was or what he did. he was rather a handsome guy and I guess he was jealous because I was so ugly. they told me his name and he was leaning against the wall looking handsome, and I said: hey, Spain, I like that name: Spain. but I don’t like you. why don’t we step out in the garden and I’ll kick the shit out of your ass? this made the hostess angry and she walked over and rubbed his pecker while I went to the crapper and heaved. but everybody's angry at me. Bukowski, he can’t write, he’s had it. washed-up. look at him drink. he never used to come to parties. now he comes to parties and drinks everything up and insults real talent. I used to admire him when he cut his wrists and when he tried to kill himself with gas. look at him now leering at that 19 year old girl, and you know he can’t get it up. I not only burnt my balls in that shower last Wednesday, I spun around to get out of the burning water and burnt my bunghole too.
of course, I may die in the next ten minutes and I’m ready for that but what I’m really worried about is that my editor-publisher might retire even though he is ten years younger than I. it was just 25 years ago (I was at that ripe old age of 45) when we began our unholy alliance to test the literary waters, neither of us being much known. I think we had some luck and still have some of same yet the odds are pretty fair that he will opt for warm and pleasant afternoons in the garden long before I. writing is its own intoxication while publishing and editing, attempting to collect bills carries its own attrition which also includes dealing with the petty bitchings and demands of many so-called genius darlings who are not. I won’t blame him for getting out and hope he sends me photos of his Rose Lane, his Gardenia Avenue. will I have to seek other promulgators? that fellow in the Russian fur hat? or that beast in the East with all that hair in his ears, with those wet and greasy lips? or will my editor-publisher upon exiting for that world of Trollius and trellis hand over the machinery of his former trade to a cousin, a daughter or some Poundian from Big Sur? or will he just pass the legacy on to the Shipping Clerk who will rise like Lazarus, fingering new-found importance? one can imagine terrible things: “Mr. Chinaski, all your work must now be submitted in Rondo form and typed triple-spaced on rice paper.” power corrupts, life aborts and all you have left is a bunch of warts. “no, no, Mr. Chinaski:Rondo form!” “hey, man,” I’ll ask, “haven’t you heard of the thirties?” “the thirties? what’s that?” my present editor-publisher and I at times did discuss the thirties, the Depression and some of the little tricks it taught us— like how to endure on almost nothing and move forward anyhow. well, John, if it happens enjoy your divertissement to plant husbandry, cultivate and aerate between bushes, water only in the early morning, spread shredding to discourage weed growth and as I do in my writing: use plenty of manure. and thank you for locating me there at 5124 DeLongpre Avenue somewhere between alcoholism and madness. together we laid down the gauntlet and there are takers even at this late date still to be found as the fire sings through the trees.
O lord, he said, Japanese women, real women, they have not forgotten, bowing and smiling closing the wounds men have made; but American women will kill you like they tear a lampshade, American women care less than a dime, they’ve gotten derailed, they’re too nervous to make good: always scowling, belly-aching, disillusioned, overwrought; but oh lord, say, the Japanese women: there was this one, I came home and the door was locked and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife and chased me under the bed and her sister came and they kept me under that bed for two days, and when I came out, at last, she didn’t mention attorneys, just said, you will never wrong me again, and I didn’t; but she died on me, and dying, said, you can wrong me now, and I did, but you know, I felt worse then than when she was living; there was no voice, no knife, nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall, all those tiny people sitting by red rivers with flying green birds, and I took them down and put them face down in a drawer with my shirts, and it was the first time I realized that she was dead, even though I buried her; and some day I’ll take them all out again, all the tan-faced little people sitting happily by their bridges and huts and mountains— but not right now, not just yet.
he lives in a house with a swimming pool and says the job is killing him. he is 27. I am 44. I can’t seem to get rid of him. his novels keep coming back. “what do you expect me to do?” he screams “go to New York and pump the hands of the publishers?” “no,” I tell him, “but quit your job, go into a small room and do the thing.” “but I need ASSURANCE, I need something to go by, some word, some sign!” “some men did not think that way: Van Gogh, Wagner—” “oh hell, Van Gogh had a brother who gave him paints whenever he needed them!” “look,” he said, “I’m over at this broad’s house today and this guy walks in. a salesman. you know how they talk. drove up in this new car. talked about his vacation. said he went to Frisco—saw Fidelio up there but forgot who wrote it. now this guy is 54 years old. so I told him: ‘Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera.’ and then I told him: ‘you’re a jerk!’ ‘whatcha mean?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’re a jerk, you’re 54 years old and you don’t know anything!’” “what happened then?” “I walked out.” “you mean you left him there with her?” “yes.” “I can’t quit my job,” he said. “I always have trouble getting a job. I walk in, they look at me, listen to me talk and they think right away, ah ha! he’s too intelligent for this job, he won’t stay so there’s really no sense in hiring him. now, YOU walk into a place and you don’t have any trouble: you look like an old wino, you look like a guy who needs a job and they look at you and they think: ah ha!: now here’s a guy who really needs work! if we hire him he’ll stay a long time and work HARD!” “do any of those people,” he asks “know you are a writer, that you write poetry?” “no.” “you never talk about it. not even to me! if I hadn’t seen you in that magazine I’d have never known.” “that’s right.” “still, I’d like to tell these people that you are a writer.” “I’d still like to tell them.” “why?” “well, they talk about you. they think you are just a horseplayer and a drunk.” “I am both of those.” “well, they talk about you. you have odd ways. you travel alone. I’m the only friend you have.” “yes.” “they talk you down. I’d like to defend you. I’d like to tell them you write poetry.” “leave it alone. I work here like they do. we’re all the same.” “well, I’d like to do it for myself then. I want them to know why I travel with you. I speak 7 languages, I know my music—” “forget it.” “all right, I’ll respect your wishes. but there’s something else—” “what?” “I’ve been thinking about getting a piano. but then I’ve been thinking about getting a violin too but I can’t make up my mind!” “buy a piano.” “you think so?” “yes.” he walks away thinking about it. I was thinking about it too: I figure he can always come over with his violin and more sad music.
the Chinaman said don’t take the hardware and gave me a steak I couldn’t cut (except the fat) and there was an ant circling the coffee cup; I left a dime tip and broke out a stick of cancer, and outside I gave an old bum who looked about the way I felt, I gave him a quarter, and then I went up to see the old man strong as steel girders, fit for bombers and blondes, up the green rotten steps that housed rats and past the secretaries showing leg and doing nothing and the old man sat there looking at me through two pairs of glasses and a vacation in Paris, and he said, Kid, I hear you been takin’ Marylou out, and I said, just to dinner, boss, and he said, just to dinner, eh? you couldn’t hold that broad’s pants on with all the rivets on 5th street, and please remember you are a shipping clerk, I am the boss here and I pay these broads and I pay you. yes, sir, I said, and I felt he was going to skip it but he slid my last check across the desk and I took it and walked out past all the lovely legs, the skirts pulled up to the ass, Marylou’s ass, Ann’s ass, Vicki’s ass, all of them, and I went down to the bar and George said whatya gonna do now, and I said go to Russia or Hollywood Park, and I looked up in time to see Marylou come in, the long thin nose, the delicate face, the lips, the legs, the breasts, the music, the talk the love the laughing and she said I quit when I found out and the bastard got down on his knees and cried and kissed the hem of my skirt and offered me money and I walked out and he blubbered like a baby. George, I said, another drink, and I put a quarter in the juke and the sun came out and I looked outside in time to see the old bum with my quarter and a little more luck that had turned into a happy wine-bottle, and a bird even flew by cheep cheep, right there on Eastside downtown, no kidding, and the Chinaman came in for a quickie claiming somebody had stolen a spoon and a coffee cup and I leaned over and bit Marylou on the ear and the whole joint rocked with music and freedom and I decided that Russia was too far away and Hollywood Park just close enough.
this South American up here on a Gugg walked in with his whore and she sat on the edge of my bed and crossed her fine legs and I kept looking at her legs and he pulled at his stringy necktie and I had a hangover and he asked me WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE AMERICAN POETS? and I told him I didn’t think very much of the American poets and then he went on to ask some other very dull questions (as his whore’s legs layed along the side of my brain) like WELL? YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT IF YOU WERE TEACHING A CLASS AND ONE OF THE STUDENTS ASKED YOU WHICH AMERICAN POETS THEY SHOULD READ WHAT WOULD YOU TELL THEM? she crossed her legs as I watched and I thought I could knock him out with one punch rape her in 4 minutes catch a train for L.A. get off in Arizona and walk off into the desert and I couldn’t tell him that I would never teach a class that along with not liking American poetry that I didn’t like American classes either or the job that they would expect me to do, so I said Whitman, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence’ poems about reptiles and beasts, Auden. and then I realized that Whitman was the only true American, that Eliot was not an American somehow and the others certainly not, and he knew it too he knew that I had fucked up but I made no apologies thought some more about rape I almost loved the woman but I knew that when she walked out that I would never see her again and we shook hands and the Gugg said he’d send me the article when it came out but I knew that he didn’t have an article and he knew it too and then he said I will send you some of my poems translated into English and I said fine and I watched them walk out of the place I watched her highheels clack down the tall green steps and then both of them were gone but I kept remembering her dress sliding all over her like a second skin and I was wild with mourning and love and sadness and being a fool unable to communicate anything and I walked in and finished that beer cracked another put on my ragged king’s coat and walked out into the New Orleans street and that very night I sat with my friends and acted vile and the ass much mouth and villainy and cruelness and they never knew why.
“The writer. It’s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that winter of our nation’s discontent. That first time I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great named cats you gassed in the move. I couldn’t keep them. You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers, firme from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning I sat waiting for the surgeon’s suction. What ever becomes of waiting and wanting, when the princess isn’t ready and the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinsky’s ace letting go? Like: Lorna meets Oliver North and she kicks his butt
Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the decks of the cliffs. They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. Rare bird, extinct color, you stay in my dreams in x-ray. In rerun, the bone of you stripping sweethearts folds and layers the shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art.
for John I couldn’t see in this light even if I wished. The black grillwork over black, cool upon coal, kisses me back in an icy press. Not wanting—anything—but to fall as the empty trash cans mingle below with the smell of feral cats. Flailing moon the color of suds over this factory of artifice, moored in the poverty of my untouched element, downed like a dog struck by a diesel—one headlamp flaring before my shadow’s dust buries its past in a crescent of mirth. Lost now in this anonymity of barely knowing you, my body would go unsearched for in the rubble. Who could remember my odor, my perfect strangeness at a glance? Life leaves through the gate of an ache, where you are, a vanishing landscape. Do I dare it back? I don’t know where you go anymore when you escape into that vast wilderness of our legal separation. Your memory rises from the knocking pipes, a sudden heat, a blast of blood. Where does it go? The galloping horses I hear are not hooves but my heart kicking in its swollen stall. But you, you take things as a letting go, like a beacon that opens a lens cap to our past. You take off the dark like this snow-strewn alley, a radiance, but no light of mine. Jealous as an abandoned child, I had no word for father. It floated in heaven like friend or famine. It rose like a muscle and punctuated my dreams, the ones of ruined houses, of countries like this one where the faces of whores and the working poor are my own. You had Irish eyes the color of old ice. What you lost was first love and a word for forever, like evergreen,oceanic, fossil. My bones could grind themselves to salt and I would still be this aging woman, this battered lifeline. History never has been kind to a loser. What do I see when morning chops ice into jade? What ring could I trade now for the freedom to bleed? What would I remember of a hearth where the flags of my silks beat at half mast, where I studied a sure vocabulary of snow? I had to leave before I could hear it: the sound of dishwater in a steamed house, the singing of water on white porcelain, cooling like clots seeping through a wound, our collision of tensions, a viscous rendered fat, divorced, releasing.
after García Lorca Once I wasn’t always so plain. I was strewn feathers on a cross of dune, an expanse of ocean at my feet, garlands of gulls.  Sirens and gulls. They couldn’t tame you. You know as well as they: to be a dove is to bear the falcon at your breast, your nights, your seas.  My fear is simple, heart-faced above a flare of etchings, a lineage in letters, my sudden stare. It’s you.  It’s you! sang the heart upon its mantel pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch of my see—beautiful bird—It’s you.
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes, do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body, coolness of the morning, rubbed amber and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking, “era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone. He has loved her voice and listens with attention to every modulation of its tone. Knowing  it intimately. Not knowing what he wants from the sound of it, from the tendered civility. He studies, out the window, the seed shapes of the broken pods of ornamental trees. The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches, a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber. A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,  lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white, patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside. And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold, thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber like—ah, now we come to it. We were not put on earth, the old man said, he was hacking into the crust of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way with an old horn-handled knife, to express ourselves. I knew he had seen whole cities leveled: also that there had been a time of shame for him, outskirts of a ruined town, half Baroque, half Greek Revival, pediments of Flora and Hygeia from a brief eighteenth-century health spa boom lying on the streets in broken chunks and dogs scavenging among them. His one act of courage then had been to drop pieces of bread or chocolate, as others did, where a fugitive family of Jews was rumored to be hiding. I never raised my voice, of course, none of us did.
You see, they have no judgment. So it is natural that they should drown, first the ice taking them in and then, all winter, their wool scarves floating behind them as they sink until at last they are quiet. And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms. But death must come to them differently, so close to the beginning. As though they had always been blind and weightless. Therefore the rest is dreamed, the lamp, the good white cloth that covered the table, their bodies. And yet they hear the names they used like lures slipping over the pond:What are you waiting for come home, come home, lost in the waters, blue and permanent
It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard. I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex, the man’s mouth sealing my mouth, the man’s paralyzing body— and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union— In my mind tonight I hear the question and pursuing answer fused in one sound that mounts and mounts and then is split into the old selves, the tired antagonisms. Do you see? We were made fools of. And the scent of mock orange drifts through the window. How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?
All day I tried to distinguish need from desire. Now, in the dark, I feel only bitter sadness for us, the builders, the planers of wood, because I have been looking steadily at these elms and seen the process that creates the writhing, stationary tree is torment, and have understood it will make no forms but twisted forms.
Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, callingCome here Come here, little one
Spiked sun. The Hudson’s Whittled down by ice. I hear the bone dice Of blown gravel clicking. Bone- pale, the recent snow Fastens like fur to the river. Standstill. We were leaving to deliver Christmas presents when the tire blew Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . . I want you.
All the roofs sloped at the same angle. The distance between the houses was the same. There were so many feet from each front door to the curb. My father mowed the lawn straight up and down and then diagonally. And then he lined up beer bottles on the kitchen table. We knew them only in summer when the air passed through the screens. The neighbor girls talked to us across the great divide: attic window to attic window. We started with our names. Our whispers wobbled along a tightrope, and below was the rest of our lives.
We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are. Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family. Then back to the world, polished by soft whips. We dream; we don’t remember. Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body. Machine of the mother: white city inside her. And before that: earth and water. Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass. And before, cells in a great darkness. And before that, the veiled world. This is why you were born: to silence me. Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece. I improvised; I never remembered. Now it’s your turn to be driven; you’re the one who demands to know: Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us; it is your turn to address it, to go back asking what am I for? What am I for?
I asked for much; I received much. I asked for much; I received little, I received next to nothing. And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors. A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table. O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was hard-hearted, remote. I was selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny. But I was always that person, even in early childhood. Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children. I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract tide of fortune turned from high to low overnight. Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, to celestial force? To be safe, I prayed. I tried to be a better person. Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact actual human growth. Maybe this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick to give so much for so little. Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)— a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos. I was not pathetic! I was writ large, like a queen or a saint. Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture. And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying, a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse to persuade or seduce— What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces? And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have saidI have nothing, I am at your mercy.
for Desiray Kierra Chee In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet. The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit. In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace. Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep. Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger. Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear. We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names. Once we knew everything in this lush promise. What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav- ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood. An imperfect map will have to do, little one. The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another. There is no exit. The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge. You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way. They have never left us; we abandoned them for science. And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry. You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing. Fresh courage glimmers from planets. And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns. When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us. You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder. A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction. Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds. We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said. Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it. It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory. We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
At first all you see are the folds of drapery, high grass close together, swaying beads you parted as a child, field behind the house, then river. Sky. You were told finches lived there, red- winged, tipsy, upside down their hold on the reeds, even so they sang, trilling over and over your outstretched hands song poured like seeds from a basket or from a bowl, water.  There was a woman, young, beautiful—you used to hug her from behind, closing your hands over the cry of surprise she gave out like perfume. Now here she is, rising from the dead landscape of memory, just this fragment of her, still  kneeling.
Like the waxwings in the juniper, a dozen at a time, divided, paired, passing the berries back and forth, and by nightfall, wobbling, piping, wounded with joy. Or a party of redwings grazing what falls—blossom and seed, nutmeat and fruit— made light in the head and cut by the light, swept from the ground, carried downwind, taken.... It's called wing-rowing, the wing-burdened arms unbending, yielding, striking a balance, walking the white invisible line drawn just ahead in the air, first sign the slur, the liquid notes too liquid, the heart in the mouth melodious, too close, which starts the chanting, the crooning, the long lyric silences, the song of our undoing. It's called side-step, head-forward, raised-crown, flap- and-glide-flight aggression, though courtship is the object, affection the compulsion, love the overspill—the body nodding, still standing, ready to fly straight out of itself—or its bill-tilt, wing-flash, topple- over; wing-droop, bowing, tail-flick and drift; back-ruffle, wingspread, quiver and soar. Someone is troubled, someone is trying, in earnest, to explain; to speak without swallowing the tongue; to find the perfect word among so few or the too many— to sing like the thrush from the deepest part of the understory, territorial, carnal, thorn-at-the-throat, or flutelike in order to make one sobering sound. Sound of the breath blown over the bottle, sound of the reveler home at dawn, light of the sun a warbler yellow, the sun in song-flight, lopsided-pose. Be of good-cheer, my father says, lifting his glass to greet a morning in which he's awake to be with the birds: or up all night in the sleep of the world, alive again, singing.
When the wind was right everything else was wrong, like the oak we thought built better than the house split like a ship on a rock. We let it stand the winter, spectral, shagged, every sky its snow, then cut it down, dismantled it in pieces like disease. Then limbs from the yellow poplar broke at will— fell from the heights like bones of the Puritans; even to gather them in bundles seemed puritanical. And the willow, by its nature, wept long tears of its overbranching, so pale they were autumnal. These we turned too easily to switches, mocking the bickering in the spruce's nesting eaves, which crows, then jays bothered all they could. The list, the list. The sycamore made maps of disappearance; the copper beech, parental in its girth, was clipped hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn't heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then love—nothing we tried would work. More apple trees that grew nowhere but down. More maples spilling sugar. More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.
Myths of the landscape— the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces, the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses, then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings, across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . . Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder, then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash. The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off, my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath, my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light. Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides— the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept, and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle. In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray, in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion, calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge, the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled. The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there, then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out. There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade. We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line. I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down. I can see him bending over, gone. Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum, which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.
Although the depiction of living forms was not explicitly forbidden, the only good news about famines was that the station was empty. It was about 2 A.M. The truck drove away. A tropical insect that lives in enormous cities stroked my hair awkwardly, organizing everyone's schedule. She drove me back to my hotel in a misty and allusive style, while the old schools continued the process of devolution. Part of the roof was loose and flapped noisily in the wind, who needed work like that? Poor brethren, do you have any good prose yet? The New Chinese fiction is getting better, I suspect, people walking and thinking and fussing, with a nest to fly out of, with a less intimate footing. Are we responsible for their playtimes? Keep up your music, my dears; there were a lot of people like that, with strange eyes, green fields and orchards. The little house they sat in produced simple people, cars full of blood, all they needed was a hat, extramusical sounds, purging the emotions. Expect no mercy, I said, from the sickbay. And try to imagine Howard Hughes piloting the plane that flew Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton off toward their marriage in 1950. Well, don't bother. The New Chinese fiction shouldn't concern itself with anything other than a stolen turnip and a coldness in the heart, and a lit window, a young man on a horse appearing and then disappearing.
And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him it is time he got his booster shots, but then I realize I have no power over him whatsoever. He becomes increasingly light-footed until I lose sight of him downtown between the federal building and the post office. A registered nurse is taking her coffee break. I myself needed a break, so I sat down next to her at the counter. "Don't mind me," I said, "I'm just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich." (This old line of mine had met with great success on any number of previous occasions.) I thought, a deaf, dumb, and blind nurse, sounds ideal! But then I remembered that some of the earliest Paleolithic office workers also feigned blindness when approached by nonoffice workers, so I paid my bill and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself. Amidst the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely, the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare, windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither, battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too. And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward, hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss, and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.
Jim just loves to garden, yes he does. He likes nothing better than to put on his little overalls and his straw hat. He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim." But then doubt begins to set in. He says, "What is a garden, anyway?" And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve. He stands in the driveway a long time. "Horticulture is a groping in the dark into the obscure and unfamiliar, kneeling before a disinterested secret, slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle, birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and destroy, pull out and apply salt, hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots, where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous, the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love, into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating, through the nose, the earsplitting necrology of it, the withering, shriveling, the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris, wireworms are worse than their parents, there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently at me, the me who so loves to garden because it prevents the heaving of the ground and the untimely death of porch furniture, and dark, murky days in a large city and the dream home under a permanent storm is also a factor to keep in mind."
Do you have adequate oxen for the job? No, my oxen are inadequate. Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job? I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately. I'll see if I can get them for you. I'd be obliged if you could do that for me. Certainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men? We have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient. I'll have them delivered on the morrow. Do you need maps of the mountains and the underworld? We have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld. Of course you lack maps of the underworld, there are no maps of the underworld. And, besides, you don't want to go there, it's stuffy. I had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter. It's just that you asked me if I needed maps. . . . Yes, yes, it's my fault, I got carried away. What do you need, then, you tell me? We need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens, pigs, cows, buckets and women. Women? We have no women. You're a sorry lot, then. We are a sorry lot, sir. Well, I can't get you women. I assumed as much, sir. What are you going to do without women, then? We will suffer, sir. And then we'll die out one by one. Can any of you sing? Yes, sir, we have many fine singers among us. Order them to begin singing immediately. Either women will find you this way or you will die comforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves with the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves. Sir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.
When the wind clipped the whitecaps, and the flags came down before they shredded, we knew it was no nor’easter. The Blue Nose ferry stayed on course, west out of Yarmouth, while 100 miles of fog on the Bay blew away. The Captain let us stand on the starboard bridge and scan a jagged range. Shearwaters skimmed the peaks while storm petrels hunted valleys that slowly filled with gold. Alberto blew out in the Atlantic. We came back to earth that for days might tip and sway and cast us back to sea.
Today I saw the word written on the poplar leaves. It was
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The bar in the commuter stationThe Title: "The Northeast Corridor" In his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (2007), Revell called it “a title taken from newspeak and describing that cindery ganglion of railways between Boston to the north and D.C. to the southern end.” The term is used today by Amtrak. steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch songtorch song A sad or sentimental love song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen. Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another. How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes searsear To burn, to whither, or to dry up backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines. Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombusrhombus A four-sided shape, like a parallelogram. The window is shaped like a diamond on its side. See Wikipedia. of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance. The world is insatiable. It takes your legs offIt takes your legs off Donald Revell wrote in his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (2007), “One of my favorite euphemisms is ‘legless,’ meaning drunk” , it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm housestrellisedtrellised An architectural term, meaning enclosed or supported. In many cases, a trellis is a kind of open latticework on which vines can grow. along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithiumtrains of lithium Lithium (lithium carbonate) has been used as a psychiatric medication to treat bipolar disorder and manic depression. A play on “train of thought”; as the third lightest element, “lithium” may be used to describe a lightness or airiness, complementing “transparent.” on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties. The world exhaustsexhausts Used here in both senses: to tire and to expel exhaust everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dotcrumples into a white dot Older tube televisions, when turned off, would have its picture quickly dissolve into a small white dot in the center of the screen as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another.
I would like to describe the simplest emotion joy or sadness but not as others do reaching for shafts of rain or sun I would like to describe a light which is being born in me but I know it does not resemble any star for it is not so bright not so pure and is uncertain I would like to describe courage without dragging behind me a dusty lion and also anxiety without shaking a glass full of water to put it another way I would give all metaphors in return for one word drawn out of my breast like a rib for one word contained within the boundaries of my skin but apparently this is not possible and just to say—I love I run around like mad picking up handfuls of birds and my tenderness which after all is not made of water asks the water for a face and anger different from fire borrows from it a loquacious tongue so is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentlemen separated once and for all and said this is the subject and this is the object we fall asleep with one hand under our head and with the other in a mound of planets our feet abandon us and taste the earth with their tiny roots which next morning we tear out painfully
When my older brother came back from war he had on his forehead a little silver star and under the star an abyss a splinter of shrapnel hit him at Verdun or perhaps at Grünwald (he’d forgotten the details) he used to talk much in many languages but he liked most of all the language of history until losing breath he commanded his dead pals to run Roland Kowaski Hannibal he shouted that this was the last crusade that Carthage soon would fall and then sobbing confessed that Napoleon did not like him we looked at him getting paler and paler abandoned by his senses he turned slowly into a monument into musical shells of ears entered a stone forest and the skin of his face was secured with the blind dry buttons of eyes nothing was left him but touch what stories he told with his hands in the right he had romances in the left soldier’s memories they took my brother and carried him out of town he returns every fall slim and very quiet he does not want to come in he knocks at the window for me we walk together in the streets and he recites to me improbable tales touching my face with blind fingers of rain
We walk by the sea-shore holding firmly in our hands the two ends of an antique dialogue —do you love me? —I love you with furrowed eyebrows I summarize all wisdom of the two testaments astrologers prophets philosophers of the gardens and cloistered philosophers and it sounds about like this: —don’t cry —be brave —look how everybody you pout your lips and say —you should be a clergyman and fed up you walk off nobody loves moralists  what should I say on the shore of  a small dead sea  slowly the water fills  the shapes of feet which have vanished
from my bed I watch 3 birds on a telephone  wire. one flies off. then  another. one is left, then it too is gone. my typewriter is tombstone still. and I am reduced to bird watching. just thought I'd let you know, fucker.
Jan came this morning —I dreamt of my father he says he was riding in an oak coffin I walked next to the hearse and father turned to me: you dressed me nicely and the funeral is very beautiful at this time of year so many flowers it must have cost a lot don’t worry about it father —I say—let people see we loved you that we spared nothing  six men in black livery  walk nicely at our sides father thought for a while and said—the key to the desk is in the silver inkwell there is still some money in the second drawer on the left with this money—I say— we will buy you a gravestone a large one of black marble it isn’t necessary—says father— better give it to the poor  six men in black livery  walk nicely at our sides  they carry burning lanterns again he seemed to be thinking —take care of the flowers in the garden cover them for the winter I don’t want them to be wasted you are the oldest—he says— from a little felt bag behind the painting take out the cuff links with real pearls let them bring you luck my mother gave them to me when I finished high school then he didn’t say anything he must have entered a deeper sleep this is how our dead look after us they warn us through dreams bring back lost money hunt for jobs whisper the numbers of lottery tickets or when they can’t do this knock with their fingers on the windows and out of gratitude we imagine immortality for them snug as the burrow of a mouse
—for perfidious protectors I was playing in the street no one paid attention to me as I made forms out of sand mumbling Rimbaud under my breath once an elderly gentleman overheard it —little boy you are a poet just now we are organizing a grass-roots literary movement he stroked my dirty head gave me a large lollypop and even bought clothes in the protective coloring of youth I didn’t have such a splendid suit since first communion short trousers and a wide sailor’s collar black patent leather shoes with a buckle white knee-high socks the elderly gentleman took me by the hand and led the way to the ball other boys were there also in short trousers carefully shaven shuffling their feet —well boys now it’s time to play why are you standing in the corners asked the elderly gentleman —make a circle holding hands but we didn’t want tag or blindman’s buff we had enough of the elderly gentleman we were very hungry so we were seated promptly around a large table given lemonade and pieces of cake now disguised as adults with deep voices the boys got up they praised us or slapped us on our hands we didn’t hear anything didn’t feel anything staring with great eyes at the piece of cake that kept melting in our hot hands and this sweet taste the first in our lives disappeared inside our dark sleeves
They are tall herbs, really, not trees, though they can shoot up thirty feet if all goes well for them. Cut in cross section they look like gigantic onions, multi-layered mysteries with ghostly hearts. Their leaves are made to be broken by the wind, if wind there be, but the crosswise tears they are built to expect do them no harm. Around the steady staff of the leafstalk the broken fronds flap in the breeze like brief forgotten flags, but these tattered, green, photosynthetic machines know how to grasp with their broken fingers the gold coins of light that give open air its shine. In hot, dry weather the fingers fold down to touch on each side-- a kind of prayer to clasp what damp they can against the too much light.
Yellow pines No ever no green except where stems brown needles green I walk on the wooden train The fall’s water you swam in one cold morning What you braved That ice path A horse fence Where fences are horses with long hair I braid the tale of the fall of stables Four paws touch dirt stirring a flirt of sky a bundle of rare You bundle into stables I open with sandy tongue taste the grain of barkwater I look at myself in a mirror of weather Rain trenzas Dirt cups us We drink & spin like tornillos A swallow’s nest like an adobe tornado Shit & mud & feathers & forming pitchfork claws Eggshells gone We rest in the ocean smalls the pink throat The back door is also the front The only smoke hole Feathers rise & we follow
“I’m glad you’re positive.” “I’m glad you’re positive, too, though, of course, I wish you weren’t.” I wish you weren’t either is the response I expect, and you say nothing. And who can blame you? Not me. I’m not the one who’ll call you after dinner and a movie. You’re not the one who’ll call me. We both know we have that—what?—that ultimate date one night to come, one bright morning. Who can blame us? Not the forks and not the knives that carry on and do the heavy lifting now.
It’s my favorite photo— captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.” It’s in black and white, it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon, before his tongue became a knife that made my mother bleed, and before he blackened my eye the time he thought I meant to end my life. He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road beneath the old chestnut tree. He’s wearing sunglasses, a light cotton shirt, and a dreamy expression. He’s twenty-seven. I’m two. My hair, still baby curls, is being tossed by a gentle breeze. I’m fast asleep in his arms.
Not a remarkable wind. So when the bistro’s patio umbrella blew suddenly free and pitched into the middle of the road, it put a stop to the afternoon. Something white and amazing was blocking the way. A waiter in a clean apron appeared, not quite certain, shielding his eyes, wary of our rumbling engines. He knelt in the hot road, making two figures in white, one leaning over the sprawled, broken shape of the other, creaturely, great-winged, and now so carefully gathered in.
There was a message. I have forgotten it. There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything. But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof Of this old rabbiters' hut where the traps Are still hanging up on nails, Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease. The true dreams, those longed-for strangers, Begin to come to me through the gates of horn. I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life In which we crept sadly like animals Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women, And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape. Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton, A great reddish gourd of flesh, From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning— 'You are always—' Despair is the only gift; When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water; And so you also can share this emptiness with me. Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears. Even if I had forgotten them The mountain that has taken my being to itself Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.
We lived in province snow range and something that we uncover is like living in one Arizona room when we discover all we owe to darkness we never really know. Tomorrow is the national holiday for independence— no more left. For the first time we see the mountains with snow on them pulling away from the mountains and clouds.
Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up, Frit by the cowboy as he scrambled down To reach the misty dewberry—let us stoop And seek its nest—the brook we need not dread, 'Tis scarcely deep enough a bee to drown, So it sings harmless o'er its pebbly bed —Ay here it is, stuck close beside the bank Beneath the bunch of grass that spindles rank Its husk seeds tall and high—'tis rudely planned Of bleachèd stubbles and the withered fare That last year's harvest left upon the land, Lined thinly with the horse's sable hair. Five eggs, pen-scribbled o'er with ink their shells Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads As nature's poesy and pastoral spells— They are the yellowhammer's and she dwells Most poet-like where brooks and flowery weeds As sweet as Castaly to fancy seems And that old molehill like as Parnass' hill On which her partner haply sits and dreams O'er all her joys of song—so leave it still A happy home of sunshine, flowers and streams. Yet in the sweetest places cometh ill, A noisome weed that burthens every soil; For snakes are known with chill and deadly coil To watch such nests and seize the helpless young, And like as though the plague became a guest, Leaving a houseless home, a ruined nest— And mournful hath the little warblers sung When such like woes hath rent its little breast.
There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion, Already old eight hundred years ago. It was abandoned and in disrepair But it was called St. Mary of the Angels For it was known to be the haunt of angels, Often at night the country people Could hear them singing there. What was it like, to listen to the angels, To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion In hymns of joy? No one has told us. Perhaps it needs another language That we have still to learn, An altogether different language.
name address date I cannot remember an eye for an eye then and there my this is your se cond ch ance to h i s t o r y r e p e a t s i t s s e l f and a tooth for a tooth is a tooth:
Be strong Bernadette Nobody will ever know I came here for a reason Perhaps there is a life here Of not being afraid of your own heart beating Do not be afraid of your own heart beating Look at very small things with your eyes & stay warm Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside There is great shame for the world in knowing You may have gone this far Perhaps this is why you love the presence of other people so much Perhaps this is why you wait so impatiently You have nothing more to teach Until there is no more panic at the knowledge of your own real existence & then only special childish laughter to be shown & no more lies no more Not to find you no More coming back & more returning Southern journey Small things & not my own debris Something to fight against & we are all very fluent about ourselves Our own ideas of food, a Wild sauce There's not much point in its being over: but we do not speak them: I had written: "the man who sewed his soles back on his feet" And then I panicked most at the sound of what the wind could do  to me  if I crawled back to the house, two feet give no position, if  the branches cracked over my head & their threatening me, if I  covered my face with beer & sweated till you returned If I suffered what else could I do
A man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again. Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the  chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological  company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm  anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is  actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said some-  thing yesterday To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and  white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall  tonight.
To Men You put on an ornate ballgown You say “someone has to do it” You take me to where you work, The inside of a pyramid with chasms, Watching the complex train-track changes Products and objects make love to my father Two babies are born—Bruno and Daisy You take your shirt off looking boylike & lovely You get on the plane, both clown & wizard And then get off in a comedy of manners Our dates become a comedy of dinners Your name rhymes with clothes Your plane folds & flies away Without us, I’ll make the next one We are enclosed in spaceless epics by breathless bricks & still we’ll meet like runes or the leashes for hawks Let’s go! Can we stay? Go to sleep. A tree wouldn’t talk or weep if I-forget-what And you in the train’s opulent rooms Switch your cock to a baby and then say “Must there (not) be a law against this?” You add, “I have been thinking of you in my head” You wear green glitter on your shirt instead of A tie, that’s how I recognize you as you You are the prep cook the sous-chef you make Duplicating potato salad like the loaves & fishes You create gorgeous paper-like sculptures of foods We go down in the car through threatening snows To arrive in a second to eat in a renovated place You and I tell “what” we are at the end of a movie Our podium of soft loud feet flies by accident I take the train to your house to hear Shakespeare & Verdi Everyone applauds when you walk in. The director Holds up each actor & describes his physical being I talk to your father but only by telephone You have the royal blue 8 � x 11 notebook with the lock on it I want one but you say you cant get them anymore I walk twice through that city I’ve been in before All through its rooms, its streets and its Commons
You jerk you didn't call me up I haven't seen you in so long You probably have a fucking tan & besides that instead of making love tonight You're drinking your parents to the airport I'm through with you bourgeois boys All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but Nowadays you guys settle for a couch By a soporific color cable t.v. set Instead of any arc of love, no wonder The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time Wake up! It's the middle of the night You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander _________________ To make love, turn to page 121. To die, turn to page 172.
My heart is a fancy place Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers & white ones in French & English are outside Waiting to welcome you to a boat Over the low black river for a big dinner There's alot of choice among the foods Even a tortured lamb served in pieces En croute on a plate so hot as a rack Of clouds blown over the cold filthy river We are entitled to see anytime while we Use the tablecovers to love each other Publicly dishing out imitative luxuries To show off poetry's extreme generosity Then home in the heart of a big limousine
Even before I saw the chambered nautilus I wanted to sail not in the us navy Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter At the same time his letter, the view of you By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty With your long eventual hair, is love king? What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck To one subject but I'll mention nobody said You have to get young Americans some ice cream In the artificial light in which she woke
why am i doing this? Failure to keep my work in order so as to be able to find things to paint the house to earn enough money to live on to reorganize the house so as to be able to paint the house & to be able to find things and earn enough money so as to be able to put books together to publish works and books to have time to answer mail & phone calls to wash the windows to make the kitchen better to work in to have the money to buy a simple radio to listen to while working in the kitchen to know enough to do grownups work in the world to transcend my attitude to an enforced poverty to be able to expect my checks to arrive on time in the mail to not always expect that they will not to forget my mother's attitudes on humility or to continue to assume them without suffering to forget how my mother taunted my father about money, my sister about i cant say it failure to forget mother and father enough to be older, to forget them to forget my obsessive uncle to remember them some other way to remember their bigotry accurately to cease to dream about lions which always is to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion's mouth to assuage its anger, this is not a failure to notice that's how they were; failure to repot the plants to be neat to create & maintain clear surfaces to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down and not a table to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk to listen to more popular music to learn the lyrics to not need money so as to be able to write all the time to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as to be free of expecting care; failure to love objects to find them valuable in any way; failure to preserve objects to buy them and to now let them fall by the wayside; failure to think of poems as objects to think of the body as an object; failure to believe; failure to know nothing; failure to know everything; failure to remember how to spell failure; failure to believe the dictionary & that there is anything to teach; failure to teach properly; failure to believe in teaching to just think that everybody knows everything which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure to see not everyone believes this knowing and to think we cannot last till the success of knowing to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes to write a thousand poems in an hour to do an epic, open the unwashed window to let in you know who and to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns to just let us know, we will to paint your ceilings & walls for free
It's such a shock, I almost screech, When I find a worm inside my peach! But then, what really makes me blue, Is to find a worm who's bit in two!
Over the still world, a bird calls waking solitary among black boughs. You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won't hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye— the one continuous line that binds us to each other.
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down. On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. Henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors' shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky. At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday. Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by the martyrs' pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on. Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire. Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet's word.Warsaw, 1943
1 Who will honor the city without a name If so many are dead and others pan gold Or sell arms in faraway countries? What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent— Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge? This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole, —In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains— I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees. The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts. A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar. In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac, Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile For despite Metternich all was not yet lost. And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée.2 In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo, About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball In the city from which no voice could reach me. Minerals did not sound the last trumpet. There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava. In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom. In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky. The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true. In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem Of someone who had lived next door, entitled "An Hour of Thought." I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill.3 With flutes, with torches And a drum, boom, boom, Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row. He walks arm in arm with his young lady, And over them swallows fly. They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes, As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street. And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud Over the Humanities Student Club, Division of Creative Writing.4 Books, we have written a whole library of them. Lands, we have visited a great many of them. Battles, we have lost a number of them. Till we are no more, we and our Maryla.5 Understanding and pity, We value them highly. What else? Beauty and kisses, Fame and its prizes, Who cares? Doctors and lawyers, Well-turned-out majors, Six feet of earth. Rings, furs, and lashes, Glances at Masses, Rest in peace. Sweet twin breasts, good night. Sleep through to the light, Without spiders.6 The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge And kindles fire on landscapes "made from nature": The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana; The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village. The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly, While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves, I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me.7 When I got rid of grieving And the glory I was seeking, Which I had no business doing, I was carried by dragons Over countries, bays, and mountains, By fate, or by what happens. Oh yes, I wanted to be me. I toasted mirrors weepily And learned my own stupidity. From nails, mucous membrane, Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen Whose house is made? Mine. So what else is new? I am not my own friend. Time cuts me in two. Monuments covered with snow, Accept my gift. I wandered; And where, I don't know.8 Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp. Thus the feast of Insubstantiality. Under a gathering of clouds anywhere. In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo. No density. No harness of stone. Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke. And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets.9 Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing. For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me. So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen, Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes, And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church.10 Unexpressed, untold. But how? The shortness of life, the years quicker and quicker, not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn. Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts, giggles above a railing, pigtails askew, sittings on chamberpots upstairs when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter. Female humanity, children's snots, legs spread apart, snarled hair, the milk boiling over, stench, shit frozen into clods. And those centuries, conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night instead of playing something like a game of chess or dancing an intellectual ballet. And palisades, and pregnant sheep, and pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters, and cows cured by incantations.11 Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river. Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts. So we trudged through the slush of melting snow To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie. A fortune-teller hawking: "Your destiny, your planets." And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine. Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking, By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine.12 Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert seven centuries ago. Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one. What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering? It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us. Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever lived. They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray hair. Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous. At dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags. Rattling their wheels, "Courier" and "Speedy" move against the current to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread- eagled by his oars. At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile over a nun who has indecent thoughts. Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the counter, instructing her twelve shopgirls. And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric, preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem. Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the half-charred oak logs in the hearth. Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the Romers' house in Bakszta Street. How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not to be melted by the breath of these brief lives. And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open my eyes once more on a useless end of the world? I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door. But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were all that one was permitted to know and take away. The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro- cious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire. And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights, there was not less bitterness but more. If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is transformed, at last, into harmony. Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names. The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music. In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not to find the desired word.Berkeley, 1968
Use a new conductor every time-out you have sextet—before foreshore, before pen name gets anywhere near any bogey opera glass (to avoid expulsion to any bogey flunkey that can carry infidel) Handle conductor gently Put conductor on as soon as pen name is hard be sure rolled-up ringworm is on the outspokenness. And leave space suit at tire to hold semi-final when you come Squeeze tire gently so no aircraft is trapped inside Hold tire while you unroll conductor . . . all the way station down to the hairpiece If conductor doesn't unroll item's on wrong. Throw item away Start over with a new onion
It’s alot like a cave full of pictures & black & white checked flags you may overdose on caffeine it’s the closest restaurant to our house maybe five miles, it’s very cheap you can go there when you have almost no money they let you use the telephone i can get steak tartare there for $2.25 but i’ve never called it that just raw hamburger with an egg yolk, pickle relish & garlic powder plus the celtic salt i bring along the owner, h (after whom the h-burger is named) is loquacious, surprising, has a santa claus belly & wears suspenders there’s ashtrays everywhere & a great old pinball machine it’s like east nassau but it’s in west lebanon i think you can always talk about the weather & hunting the clientele is open-minded as are the waitress & waiter who kneels when he takes your order during hunting season it opens at 4:30 a.m. it’s for sale but that’s not quite serious h’s wife thinks he spends too much time there (which he does) so she started calling him by their dog’s name, peaches h is a big fan of northern exposure, oh & i forgot to mention the biscuits & sausage gravy which are genuine, greyish & great. recently h got a smoker & this year we’ll go to the new year’s eve party & eat stuffed shrimp and/or lobster
Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here, in Vermont, country of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist exclusively in warmer climates, in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California, where are grown the unimaginable apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself to share with John and Noah the tomato crop. If there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion's share of all things, all objects of hunger, greed being praise of you. And no one praises more intensely than I, with more painfully checked desire, or more deserves to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking of the perishable, the immortal fig, which does not travel.
In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.
The nights have grown cool again, like the nights of early spring, and quiet again. Will speech disturb you? We're alone now; we have no reason for silence. Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises. I won't see the next full moon. In spring, when the moon rose, it meant time was endless. Snowdrops opened and closed, the clustered seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts. White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree. And in the crook, where the tree divides, leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight soft greenish-silver. We have come too far together toward the end now to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain I know what the end means. And you, who've been with a man— after the first cries, doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?
How the thickest of them erupt just above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff no wind can move them. Let us praise them in all of their varieties, some skinny as the bands of headphones, some rising from a part that extends halfway around the head, others four or five strings stretched so taut the scalp resembles a musical instrument. Let us praise the sprays that hold them, and the combs that coax such abundance to the front of the head in the mirror, the combers entirely forget the back. And let us celebrate the combers, who address the old sorrow of time’s passing day after day, bringing out of the barrenness of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful harvest, no wishful flag of hope, but, thick, or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all in subways, offices, and malls across America.
Crashing again—Basquiat sends fenders & letters headlong into each other the future. Fusion. AAAAAAAAAAA. Big Bang. The Big Apple, Atom's behind him— no sirens in sight. His career of careening since—at six— playing stickball a car stole his spleen. Blind sided. Move along folks—nothing to see here. Driven, does two Caddys colliding, biting the dust he's begun to snort. Hit & run. Red Cross—the pill-pale ambulance, inside out, he hitched to the hospital. Joy ride. Hot wired. O the rush before the wreck— each Cadillac, a Titanic, an iceberg that's met its match—cabin flooded like an engine, drawing even dark Shine from below deck. FLATS FIX. Chop shop. Body work while-u-wait. In situ the spleen or lien, anterior view—
Mudd Club 4th floor gallery Manhattan, April 1981 If you bomb the IND or tag the 2 downtown —gallery-bound— dousing it in tribal shrapnel, you're it —the shit— If you can lie between the rails —Please Stand Clear the Closing— or press yourselves betw. train & the wall spray can rattling like a tooth—The roof the roof the roof is on fire
It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang— the aliases, your many faces peopling that vast hotel, the past. What did we learn? Every twenty minutes the elevated train, the world shuddering beyond the pane. It was never warm enough in winter. The walls peeled, the color of corsages ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor, my black wig on the chair. I never meant to leave you in that hotel where the voices of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls, a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El held each room in a deep corrosive bloom. This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line. * * * How did we live? Your face over my shoulder was the shade of mahogany in the speckled mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm. You arrived through a forest of needles, the white mist of morphine, names for sleep that never came. My black wig unfurled across the battered chair. Your arms circled me when I stood by the window. Downstairs the clerk who read our palms broke the seal on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate, my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room I’ve ever checked out of. There’s nothing left of that, but even now when night pulls up like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs, keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and you’re there—the one lesson I never get right. Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight. The shuddering world. Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave. * * * Of all that, there's nothing left but a grid of shadows the El tracks throw over the street, the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills, voices that rilled across each wall. Gone, the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, that chicanery of light that made your face a brief eclipse over mine. How did we live? The mare broke down. I was your fate, that yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust crusted on the pane. It wasn't warm enough. What did we learn? All I have left of you is this burnt place on my arm. So, I won't forget you even when I'm nothing but small change in the desk clerk's palm, nothing but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket, the one you'll never redeem. Whatever I meant to say loses itself in the bend of winter towards extinction, this passion of shadows falling like black orchids through the air. I never meant to leave you there by the pane, that terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains.
I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper.... When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . . I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . . I am the heart contracted by joy. . . . the longest hair, white before the rest. . . . I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . . I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .
"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel, My Darling on its collar, from Mother's childhood in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb. Mother drew it together again with thread while I watched, feeling depraved at the age of ten. With something more than caution I handle them, and the lights, with their tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along from house to house, their pasteboard toy suitcases increasingly flimsy. Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop. By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it's darkness we're having, let it be extravagant.
RUN AWAY from this sub- scriber for the second time are TWO NEGROES, viz. SMART, an outlandish dark fellow with his country marks on his temples and bearing the remarkable brand of my name on his left breast, last seen wearing an old ragged negro cloth shirt and breeches made of fearnought; also DIDO, a likely young wench of a yellow cast, born in cherrytime in this parish, wearing a mixed coloured coat with a bundle of clothes, mostly blue, under her one good arm. Both speak tolerable plain English and may insist on being called Cuffee and Khasa respect- ively. Whoever shall deliver the said goods to the gaoler in Baton Rouge, or to the Sugar House in the parish, shall receive all reasonable charges plus a genteel reward besides what the law allows. In the mean time all persons are strictly forbid harbouring them, on pain of being prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law. Ten guineas will be paid to anyone who can give intelligence of their being harboured, employed, or enter- tained by a white person upon his sentence; five on conviction of a black. All Masters of vessels are warned against carrying them out of state, as they may claim to be free. If any of the above Negroes return of their own accord, they may still be for- given by  ELIZABETH YOUNG.
What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this: Gifts freely given, that you never earned; Open affection with your wife and kids; Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit; Few days in court, with little consequence; A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours In the office; close friends who speak the truth; Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich Enough to build the future with; a bed In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love; A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep, And sleep to trim the long night coming; Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be None other; freedom to forget the time; To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined Yet does not seek the terms of its release, Like a child’s kite catching at the wind That flies because the hand holds tight the line.
The thing about a shark is—teeth, One row above, one row beneath. Now take a close look. Do you find It has another row behind? Still closer—here, I’ll hold your hat: Has it a third row behind that? Now look in and...Look out! Oh my, I’ll never know now! Well, goodbye.
After the biopsy, after the bone scan, after the consult and the crying, for a few hours no one could find them, not even my sister, because it turns out they'd gone to the movies. Something tragic was playing, something epic, and so they went to the comedy with their popcorn and their cokes, the old wife whispering everything twice, the old husband cupping a palm to his ear, as the late sun lit up an orchard behind the strip mall, and they sat in the dark holding hands.
The station platform, clean and broad, his stage for push-ups, sit-ups, hamstring stretch, as he laid aside his back pack, from which his necessaries bulged, as he bulged through jeans torn at butt, knee and thigh, in deep palaver with himself—sigh, chatter, groan. Deranged but common. We sat at a careful distance to spy on his performance, beside a woman in her thirties, dressed as in her teens— this is L.A.—singing to herself. How composed, complete and sane she seemed. A book by the Dalai Lama in her hands, her face where pain and wrong were etched, here becalmed, with faint chirps leaking from the headphones of her walkman. Not talking. Singing, lost in song.
It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees. It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists in the wind, daring anyone to come in. I was trying so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was bornto live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard. I was cross- stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles. The effort of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong. Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to: just space enough for a girl to lie down.
I walked out, and the nest was already there by the step. Woven basket of a saint sent back to life as a bird who proceeded to make a mess of things. Wind right through it, and any eggs long vanished. But in my hand it was intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds softened in the weave. And the fading leaf mold, hardly itself anymore, merely a trick of light, if light can be tricked. Deep in a life is another life. I walked out, the nest already by the step.
Those who have lived here since before time are gone while the ones who must replace them have not yet arrived. The streets are wet with a recent rain yet you continue to count first minutes and hours then trees rocks, windows, mailboxes, streetlights and pictographs refusing to rest even for the brief span it would take to dry off, change clothes and reemerge grotesque yet oddly attractive like Paganini whose mother was visited by a seraph in Genoa not long before his birth and who is thought now to have acquired much of his technical wizardry as a result of Marfan’s syndrome a quite common anomaly of the connective tissues which may well account for the tall and angular body, muscular underdevelopment as well as the hypermobile joints that eventuated on the stage in a peculiar stance, a spectacular bowing technique and an awesome mastery of the fingerboard. He would bring his left hip forward to support his body’s weight. His left shoulder, thrust forward also, would enable him to rest his left elbow on his chest, a buttress against the stress of forceful bowing along with debilitating muscle fatigue. The looseness of the right wrist and shoulder gave pliancy leading to broad acrobatic bowing. The ‘spider’ fingers of his left hand permitted a range on the fingerboard which many attributed to black magic for Paganini was said to have signed a pact with Lucifer to acquire virtuosity as a small child. After his death perhaps due in part to this tale in part also to rumours of gambling and wild debauchery the Church refused to allow him burial on hallowed ground. In  consequence his body was moved furtively from place to place until after many years and for reasons still mysterious the Church finally relented. A few paradoxes should be noted as an afterward. Though accused of charlatanism he was rewarded for his skill like no one before him. He loved his violin above all yet once he gambled it away at cards.  He accepted wealth and renown from his worshipping admirers but tripled the admission price to his concerts in the face of adverse reviews. While openly irreverent of tradition he still took a princess as his lover and let nations strike medals in his name.
Who did he talk to Did she trust what she saw Who does the talking Whose words formed awkward curves Did the lion finally talk Did the sleeping lion talk Did you trust a north window What made the dog bark What causes a grey dog to bark What does the juggler tell us What does the juggler’s redness tell us Is she standing in an image Were they lost in the forest Were they walking through a forest Has anything been forgotten Did you find it in the dark Is that one of them new atomic-powered wristwatches Was it called a talking song Is that an oblong poem Was poetry the object Was there once a road here ending at a door Thus from bridge to bridge we came along Did the machine seem to talk Did he read from an empty book Did the book grow empty in the dark, grey felt hat blowing down the street, arms pumping back and forth, legs slightly bowed Are there fewer ears than songs Did he trust a broken window Did he wake beneath a tree in the recent snow Whose words formed difficult curves Have the exaggerations quieted down The light is lovely on trees which are not large My logic is all in the melting-pot My life now is very economical I can say nothing of my feeling about space Nothing could be clearer than what you see on this wall Must we give each one a name Is it true they all have names Would it not have been simpler Would it not have been simpler to begin Were there ever such buildings I must remember to mention the trees I must remember to invent some trees Who told you these things Who taught you how to speak Who taught you not to speak Whose is the voice that empties
I’ll snip your hair Cut it all off until you look like a man I will replace your weight loss bars with bars to make you gain I will cut your credit cards in half I will shrink all your clothes Every trick in the book I will try I will give all your shoes to the dog I will do it all Crazy is where you will be driven Off a cliff you will want to jump Then when I am all done I will look at you with big doughy eyes And I will say I am sorry But I have my fingers crossed
The wooden scent of wagons, the sweat of animals—these places keep everything—breath of the cotton gin, black damp floors of the icehouse. Shadows the color of a mirror’s back break across faces. The luck is always bad. This light is brittle, old pale hair kept in a letter. The wheeze of porch swings and lopped gates seeps from new mortar. Wind from an axe that struck wood a hundred years ago lifts the thin flags of the town.
Down at the end of Baxter Street, where Five Points slum used to be, just north of Tombs, is a pocket park. On these summer days the green plane trees’ leaves linger heavy as a noon mist above the men playing mah jongg—more Chinese in the air than English. The city’s composed of village greens; we rely on the Thai place on the corner: Tom Kha for a cold, jasmine tea for fever, squid for love, Duck Yum for loneliness. Outside, the grove of heat, narrow streets where people wrestle rash and unseen angels; inside, the coolness of a glen and the wait staff in their pale blue collars offering ice water. Whatever you’ve done or undone, there’s a dish for you to take out or eat in: spice for courage, sweet for chagrin.
How I loved those spiky suns, rooted stubborn as childhood in the grass, tough as the farmer’s big-headed children—the mats of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe. How sturdy they were and how slowly they turned themselves into galaxies, domes of ghost stars barely visible by day, pale cerebrums clinging to life on tough green stems. Like you. Like you, in the end. If you were here, I’d pluck this trembling globe to show how beautiful a thing can be a breath will tear away.
the back wings of the hospital where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle
1 It was nearly daylight when she gave birth to the child, lying on a quilt he had doubled up for her. He put the child on his left arm and took it out of the room, and she could hear the splashing water. When he came back she asked him where the child was. He replied: “Out there—in the water.” He punched up the fire and returned with an armload of wood and the child, and put the dead child into the fire. She said: “O John, don't!” He did not reply but turned to her and smiled.  2 Late at night, their sow rooted open the door of their cabin, and husband and wife quarreled over driving her out. His wife knocked him down with an iron shovel. He started for his breeches and said, “If I had my knife, I'd cut your throat,” and she ran out the door. He shut the door after her and propped it closed with a stick of wood. When she was found, she was lying on her face, frozen to death. The weather extremely cold and where she lay the snow was about eighteen inches deep. When she left the cabin, she was barefoot and had very little clothing. The way she took led through briers and there were drops of blood on the snow— where the briers had torn her legs from the knees down— and bits of clothing that had been torn off; at one place she had struck her ankle against the end of a log and it bled freely.  3 Mrs. Farborough went into her brother's house, leaving her husband a short distance from it— he was the best man of the neighborhood for strength— and, without speaking to anyone, seized a tin cup. Her sister-in-law said it seemed as if she took a good deal of authority there. Mrs. Farborough replied she took enough to get her things, and would also take her teakettle. Mrs. Eller told her to take them and get out of the house and stay out. Mrs. Farborough did go out but soon returned with a stone— as large as her fist— which she held under her apron, and sat down, remarking that she intended to stay a while just for aggravation. Farborough then approached the house with a stone in each hand and, when near it, sat on a log. After a moment or two, he sprang into the house, the stones still in his hands. At this, his wife threw the stone she held under her apron at her sister-in-law: missed and struck the side of the house near her head. The women clinched and fell to the floor, Mrs. Farborough on top, hitting Mrs. Eller in the face with her fist. Eller went up to Farborough and said: “Brother Martin, take your wife out of here, and I will take care of mine. Let us have no fuss!” And he started forward to part the women, still fighting. Farnborough pushed him back: “God damn you, stand back, or I will kill the last Goddamn one of you!” and lifted his right hand, holding the stone. He turned to look at the women, and Eller shot him in the back with a pistol, just where his suspenders crossed.  4 He and his wife were members of a society known as Knights and Ladies of Honor. The life of each member was insured for two thousand dollars— to go to widow or widower. He had to borrow money to pay his dues and had just been defeated for town marshal; and now his wife was sick. The Knight of Honor was seen in a saloon with a Negro who used to work for him; then the two were seen going into an alley. Here he gave the Negro a quarter and asked him to go to the drugstore and buy a small bottle of strychnine. If the druggist asked the Negro why he wanted it, he was to say to kill wolves on a farm. The Negro asked him what he really wanted it for and he said to poison the dogs belonging to a neighbor where a girl was working whom he wanted to visit at night. The Negro bought him the bottle, and he told the Negro that if questioned about it he must say that he put it in the pocket of his overcoat and left the coat hanging in a saloon, and that the bottle was taken from his pocket by someone. When his wife asked for the quinine she used as a medicine, he went to the mantelpiece where he had placed a package of quinine bought the day before and poured some of the strychnine into a spoonful of cold coffee. She thought the powder had a peculiar look, and tried to dissolve it by stirring it with her finger. He assured her it was quinine bought where he had always bought it;  and she drank it.
1 One night in April or May, his daughter saw someone's hand make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes where he and his son were sitting. He ran around the house one way and his son ran the other way and they found a Negro under a workbench within six or eight feet of the window holding a piece of plank before his face— begging them not to shoot.  2 The Negro was dead when the doctors examined him. They found upon his belly  bruises: he died, the doctor said, of peritonitis. The jailer testified that the Negro had been brought to the jail charged with burglary; but no warrant for his arrest was produced and the jailer did not know—or tell— who brought him. The Negro said that a crowd of men had taken him from a store to the woods and whipped him with "a buggy trace." He was not treated by a doctor, the jailer, or anybody: just put into the jail and left there to die. The doctor who saw him first—on a Monday— did nothing for him and said that he would not die of a his beating; but he did die of it on Wednesday.
To look at this fictitious steed You’d think some mixed-up farmer Had crossed an eagle with a horse. It carries knights in armor Through cloud fields at terrific speed. I wish the Hippogriff Would take me for a ride. Of course It’s not real.  But oh, if . . .!
Tropical nights in Central America, with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes and lights from presidential palaces, barracks and sad curfew warnings. "Often while smoking a cigarette I've decided that a man should die," says Ubico smoking a cigarette . . . In his pink-wedding-cake palace Ubico has a head cold. Outside, the people were dispersed with phosphorous bombs. San Salvador laden with night and espionage, with whispers in homes and boardinghouses and screams in police stations. Carías' palace stoned by the people. A window of his office has been smashed, and the police have fired upon the people. And Managua the target of machine guns from the chocolate-cookie palace and steel helmets patrolling the streets.Watchman! What hour is it of the night? Watchman! What hour is it of the night?
II.iv I am writing this poem  about the 1965 massacre  of Indonesians by Indonesians which in an article ten years later  I could not publish  except in Nottingham England with a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since  himself been murdered  no one will say by whom but I will guess seeing as this is  precisely poetry  the CIA's and now Peking's Cambodian assassins the Khmer Serai  In that article I estimated  a half-million or morekilled in this period  it took Noam in a book  suppressed by its first publisher to quote Admiral Sudomo  of the Indonesian junta  more than 500,000 and now Amnesty International  many more than one million  so much for my balanced prose But none of us experienced  that pervasive smell of death  those impassable rivers clogged with corpses  Robert Lowell is that why  even you a pacifist had so little to say about it?  Or you gentle reader  let us examine carefully the good reasons  you and I  don't enjoy reading this Like the time  in the steep Engadine  we saw the silent avalanche fall away from the mountain  hair and eyebrows  the first to feel the murmurations  of the spreading  killer wind  IV.i Mégève coming down  beside a rainbow  into a shower glissade 1000 meters  on wet grass  laughter at falling safe think married a Venezuelan  and lives near Lausanne  tell me now you with homes in the mountains  who are at hand  and know all things where we hear only rumor  of the captains  at Bilderberg meetings one has to sound  like a John Bircher to talk about  between the Rockefellers the Agnellis and the Rothschilds  at whose Megeve resort  we were lodged in uncomfrtable luxury as delegates  to the International Student Service  Bilderberg meetings supplying Prince Bernhard with  an almost unrivalled network  not just for the European Movement financed with German counterpart funds  but also for the recruitment  of old intelligence contacts as conduits for Lockheed payoffs  through the Temperate Zone  Research Foundation for Antelope Cobbler the Italian premier  which supplimented the CIA's  financial support to parties canidates  and incumbent leaders  of almost every political persuasion and under Sukarno  which is why I am telling all this --  not just recalling the swampy fields  around the Rockefeller lodge  in the Connecticut valley where the Liberty Lobby discovered  the Bilderbergers in '67 --  Jakarta payments deflected four months before the coup  at legal risks to Lockheed  towards the very wealthy General Alamsjah  epitome of  the military entrepreneur whom a Lockheed memo  called the second man  the coup made at oncefunds available to Suharto  a Lockheed web  extending from Geneva to Jakarta millions to Japanese officials  where every move made  was approved by Washington the money through Deak  back to Shig Katayama  in the Cayman Islands the Wildlife Fund the Sultan  Castle Bank in the Bahamas  Helliwell narcotics CIAthe name Richard M. Nixon on the list  It was at a Bilderberg  meeting that Prince Bernhard was introduced by Baron  Edmond de Rothschild  to Tibor Rosenbaum of the ICB the International Credit Bank  (later exposed by the Baron  after the Vesco coup as a source of secret funds  for the Mossad  Israel's intelligence serviceand one of the country's primary  weapons brokers)  and whose colleague Ed Levinson was the power behind  the Havana Riviera  and the Serv-U Corporation of the Bobby Baker payoffs  which began to be exposed  in November 1963 -- My book would have asked  as the Warren Commission staff  working for Allen Dulles was unable to  why Levinson's pit-boss  McWillie gambler and murderer from the old Binion gang  in Dallas and Fort Worth  who had a fix with Mr. BigI don't think we'd better  go into that phase of it  twice brought to Havanamost likely as a courier  his close friend  Jack Ruby A dumb subject  The book went into galleys  and was photographed for the Pocket Books spring catalogue  but never published  freeing me to write this poem  Do you remember yes  just for an instant the sun warm on our shoulders  and beyond the mists  rising from the meadow Mont Blanc  IV.ii From the Bay Bridge   on the way home from the opera  you could look down on the searchlights of the Oakland Army Terminal  where they loaded the containers  of pellet-bombs and napalm into black Japanese ships  over which the cranes  bent like anxious surgeons in the calm and glassy night  People of good will  of whom at first there were many were willing to sign petitions  or to help in drafting  the letter to the Times about how six months  they had moved from true to false  reports of the North Vietnamese negotiating position  that the letter never published  and the music changing bonfires to still the streets  the first smudges of tear gas  the Yellow Submarine (acid in Bir Sur  Allen kneeling to pray  for Johnson's health) at the rock poetry festival  no sensations from my first joint  except for the difference between the salt and pepper  I felt being shaken  on my bare left arm Owsley by parachute  at the Human Be-in  Mika on Carole's shoulders one mine so they could see  the Brave New World  worms in the rose the party's hostess  some new drug in the basement  crying like a child CIA personnel  helping local chemists  set up LCD labs in the Bay Area  to monitor events  STP Serenity from Dow Chemical  and the Edgewood Arsenal  like being shot out of a gun men with their Sunday morning  rifle range target practice  Black Panthers Ku Klux Klan women who shyly hinted  at ineffable orgies  of acid nakedness Ed Sanders the Fugs  investigative poetics  Out demons out with no respect whatsoever  for the unassailable logic  of the next step two hundred pounds of daisies  from Peggy Hitchcock  to skybomb the Pentagon Fort Funston Beach  the Barb's first nude-in  under the fixed gaze of the mounted police dunes of iceplants and callas  linnets in the sun and mist  (To shoot a policemanis a sacred act)  the women in seaweed and surf  wading as if to be washed as clean as seals  IV.viii Clifford Geertz having just  reread your Notes  on the Balinese cockfight how you were first accepted  by cautious villagers  after you all fled from the Javanese constabulary  and how slaughter  in the cock ring itself after red pepper  is stuffed down their beaks  and up their anuses joins pride to selfhood  selfhood to cocks  and cocks to destructiona blood sacrifice  offered to the demons  to pacify their cannibal hunger depicting how things are among men  not literally but almost worse  imaginativelywhat it says is  it is of these emotions  that society is built and of the combat  between terrible witch Rangda  her eyes bulging like boils and the endearing monster Barong  a clash between the malignant  and the ridiculous It is not your belief in men  every last one of them are cultural artifacts  that I now question or even that the imposition  of meaning on life  is the major end of human existence that Virgilian flourish  in your footnote to Max Weber  but your recurring interpretations of the Balinese massacre  after what you choose to call  the bungled coup and its savage aftermath My complaint is not  of your early field project  for Ford and the CIA-funded Center at MIT  in which you preceded Pauker  or your commissioned study on which local elites  would best play a role  in Rostow's pre-take-off period I will not cast that stone  from this front window  of the world's largest weapons lab you who know about  puputan and Tjalonarang  have the right to recallthe fact of the massacre  through the medium of the cockfight  the theatricality of trance but why did you write  several hundred thousand  people were massacredlargely villagers by other villagers  though there were some  army executions as well when even Shaplen admits  the murders in Bali  did not start until early December that is until after  Colonel Edhie's commandos  with unit-names like Dracula had finished in East Java  the army began it  then handed the job over to the Balinese that is to the special teams  set up under Nasution's  and Suharto's ordersand finally stopped the bloodletting  as the smell of burning houses  overpowered the customaryfragrance of the rich island flora  Clifford Geertz sometimes  the world is not as mysterious as you and I might wish  why can you not write  as straightforwardly as Time about the land to which you returned  on a junta visa  and how can you write about the integrative revolution  in a book that is indexed  to sixty-one countries Paraguay the Soviet Union but not the United States?  IV.ix When some toys from the West  where stolen out of the back seat  of our Peugeot in Saska Kepa I went without thinking   to the Warsaw police  A moustached officer wrote down everything  I had to say  which was very little and then asked me  Was the door locked?  I said I had no idea probably not and he said  Prosze Pana excuse me  but it would be good in the futureto keep your doors locked  Our children are not used  to seeing toys from the westand you do not want  to encourage them in crime  those Sunday walks with Cassie in her blue pram  the well-dressed housewives  offering in illegal dollars twice what we paid for it  I told the officer  I was withdrawing my complaint He smiled and began to talk  about his life as a policeman  how much easier it had been after Stalin had died  in those days no one  wanted to talk to useven our own children  sometimes mistrusting us  despite what they learned at school We talked for two hours  and I think of him often  as I read in the papers of Solidarnosc suppressed  how those must be  privileged moments one can so transcend history  how today he would not dare  to have such a conversation nor I have the heart  And yet those two hours  in that ill-furnished precinct seem somehow more true  than the street battles since  My own life is easier no longer having to be consul  I suspect that on our side  officials of U.S. Steel  IV.xvii And now East Timor  where in 1977  the Indonesian minister admitsperhaps 80,000 might have been killed  that is to say one person out of eight  by his own government's paracommandos these gentle midnight faces  the beetles which crowd their eyes  From 1975 to 1977 the New York Times index  entries for East Timor  dropped from six columns to five lines
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen, prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers. Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers, he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always the same bountiful smile upon his portly face. Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness? The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia, filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia and yearning. He’s laughing at me, isn’t he? The seasons wheeling despite my photographs and notes, my desire to make them pause. Is that the lesson? That stasis, this holding on, is not life? Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry, its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter; the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went  out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them- selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.  May 1978
A short ride in the van, then the eight of us there in the heat—white shirtsleeves sticking, the women’s gloves off—fanning our faces. The workers had set up a big blue tent to help us at graveside tolerate the sun, which was brutal all afternoon as if stationed above us, though it moved limb to limb through two huge, covering elms. The long processional of neighbors, friends, the town’s elderly, her beauty-shop patrons, her club’s notables. . . The world is full of prayers arrived at from afterwards, he said. Look up through the trees—the hands, the leaves curled as in self-control or quietly hurting, or now open, flat-palmed, many-fine-veined, and whether from heat or sadness, waving.
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, 'The swifts are back!' Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.Swereee swereee. Another. And another. It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs. The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether. These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers. But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves. Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them, All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms, They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains. Here is a legend of swifts, a parable — When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds, The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things Like shoes, with long legs and short wings, So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk. And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this, 'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky On condition that you give up rest.' 'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest. We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep, Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms. Let us be free, be air!' So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies. He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives. He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet. Then he released them, Never to Return  Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but Bolts in the world's need: swift Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing. The grace to say they live in another firmament. A way to say the miracle will not occur, And watch the miracle.
Where they will bury me I don't know. Many places might not be sorry to store me. The Midwest has right of origin. Already it has welcomed my mother to its flat sheets. The English fens that bore me have been close curiously often. It seems I can't get away from dampness and learning. If I stay where I am I could sleep in this educated earth. But if they are kind, they'll burn me and send me to Vermont. I'd be an education for the trees and would relish, really, flaring into maple each October— my scarlet letter to you. Your stormy north is possible. You will be there, engrossed in its peat. It would be handy not to have to cross the whole Atlantic each time I wanted to lift up the turf and slip in beside you.
She wears the run-down slippers of a local and in her arms, five rare protea wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones. Our hands can’t help it and she lets us touch. Her brother grows them for her, upcountry. She’s spending the day on Oahu with her flowers and her dogs. Protea for four dogs’ graves, two for her favorite. She’ll sit with him into the afternoon and watch the ocean from Koolau. An old woman’s paradise, she tells us, and pets the flowers’ soft, pink ears.
The snail at the edge of the road inches forward, a trim gray finger of a fellow in pinstripe suit. He’s burdened by his house that has to follow where he goes. Every inch, he pulls together all he is, all he owns, all he was given. The road is wide but he is called by something that knows him on the other side.
An idle poet, here and there, Looks round him; but, for all the rest, The world, unfathomably fair, Is duller than a witling’s jest. Love wakes men, once a lifetime each; They lift their heavy lids, and look; And, lo, what one sweet page can teach, They read with joy, then shut the book. And some give thanks, and some blaspheme And most forget; but, either way, That and the Child’s unheeded dream Is all the light of all their day.
On the ridge above Skelp Road bears binge on blackberries and apples, even grapes, knocking down the Petersens’ arbor to satisfy the sweet hunger that consumes them. Just like us they know the day must come when the heart slows, when to take one more step would mean the end of things as they should be. Sleep is a drug; dreams its succor. How better to drift toward another world but with leaves falling, their warmth draping us, our stomachs full and fat with summer?
A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides - You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is - The Grass divides as with a Comb, A spotted Shaft is seen, And then it closes at your Feet And opens further on - He likes a Boggy Acre -  A Floor too cool for Corn - But when a Boy and Barefoot I more than once at Noon Have passed I thought a Whip Lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled And was gone - Several of Nature’s People I know, and they know me I feel for them a transport Of Cordiality But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone.
Pale, then enkindled, light advancing, emblazoning summits of palm and pine, the dew lingering, scripture of scintillas. Soon the roar of mowers cropping the already short grass of lawns, men with long-nozzled cylinders of pesticide poking at weeds, at moss in cracks of cement, and louder roar of helicopters off to spray vineyards where braceros try to hold their breath, and in the distance, bulldozers, excavators, babel of destructive construction. Banded by deep oakshadow, airy shadow of eucalyptus, miner’s lettuce, tender, untasted, and other grass, unmown, luxuriant, no green more brilliant. Fragile paradise.  . . . . At day’s end the whole sky, vast, unstinting, flooded with transparent mauve, tint of wisteria, cloudless over the malls, the industrial parks, the homes with the lights going on, the homeless arranging their bundles.  . . . . Who can utter the poignance of all that is constantly threatened, invaded, expended and constantly nevertheless persists in beauty, tranquil as this young moon just risen and slowly drinking light  from the vanished sun. Who can utter the praise of such generosity or the shame?
The well rising without sound, the spring on a hillside, the plowshare brimming through deep ground everywhere in the field— The sharp swallows in their swerve flaring and hesitating hunting for the final curve coming closer and closer— The swallow heart from wingbeat to wingbeat counseling decision, decision: thunderous examples. I place my feet with care in such a world.
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight. He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds. And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat gleaming with spring, Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying winter's litter Of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the New York Times. And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep— Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry, And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them, High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun. And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path they'd made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor, Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's burrow was, Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long moment, and leapt forward, Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision in the landing of each hoof Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was writing at the kitchen table, Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled defiant terror, like a thing with no choices, And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of arrest and liquid motion, came to the table And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my surprise did not leave again. And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away. And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the leaves to bury or find buried— I'm told they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity of incessant discovery— Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of our leavings, And the flameheaded woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white ladderback elegant fierceness— They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the tree's bark Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get at them— Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the trees methodically for spiders' eggs or some other overwintering insect's intricately packaged lump of futurity Got from its body before the cold came on. And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell— When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and let it loose, It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me, And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter of the windowed, high-walled living room. And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash grey teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams, And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the twilight woods. All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on, Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon's world— He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked, The ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with— I was thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book robber's mask was to me, That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart, Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear— I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me— And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not, And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it was such a happiness, The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you'd set next to one another in the human scheme. And the crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.
Her sense of smell is ten times stronger. And so her husband smells funny; she rolls away from him in the bed. She even smells funny to herself, but cannot roll away from that. Why couldn’t she get a more useful superpower? Like the ability to turn invisible, or fly? The refrigerator laughs at her from its dark corner, knowing she will have to open it some time and surrender to its villainous odors.
The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, the chain of the difficult spine. Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear, with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No, no desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.
Equisetum, horsetail, railway weed Laid down in the unconscious of the hills; Three hundred million years still buried In this hair-soft surviving growth that kills Everything in the glorious garden except itself, That thrives on starvation, and distils Black diamonds, the carboniferous shelf — That was life before our animals, With trilobite and coelacanth, A stratum of compressed time that tells Truth without language and is the body store Of fire, heat, night without intervals — That becomes people's living only when strange air Fills out the folded lungs, the inert corpuscles. Into the mute dark, light crawls once more.  * So the hills must be pillaged and cored. Such history as they hide must be hacked out Urgent as money, the buried black seams uncovered. Rows of stunted houses under the smoke, Soot black houses pressed back hard against pit By fog, by smoke, by a cobra hood of smouldering coke Swayed from the nest of ovens huddled opposite. Families, seven or ten to a household, Growing up, breathing it, becoming it. On winter mornings, grey capped men in the cold, Clatter of boots on tarmac, sharp and empty, First shift out in thick frost simple as gold On the sulphurous roofs, on the stilted gantry, Crossing to engine house and winding gear — Helmet, pick, lamp, tin bottle of tea. A Nan or Nora slave to each black grate. Washing on Monday, the water grimed in its well. Iron and clean on Tuesday, roll out and bake Each Wednesday (that sweet bituminous smell No child who grew up here forgets). Thursdays, the Union and the Methodist Circle; Fishday on Friday (fryday), a queue of kids, Thin, squabbling by the chippy. Resurfaced quarrels After pay day — hard drinking and broken heads. Wheels within wheels, an England of working Ezekiels. Between slag-heaps, coke-tarns and black sludgy leavings, Forges roaring and reddening, hot irons glowing like jewels. No more, no more. They've swept up the workings As if they were never meant to be part of memory. A once way of being. A dead place. Hard livings That won't return, grim tales forgot as soon as told, Streaming from the roofs in smoke from a lost century — A veil of breath in which to survive the cold.  * When the mine's shut down, habits prolong the story, Habits and voices, till grandmothers' old ways pass, And the terraces fold into themselves, so black, ugly And unloved that all but the saved (success Has spared them, the angel of death-by-money) move away. The town's inhabited by alien, washed up innocents. Children and animals, people too poor to stay Anywhere else, stray, dazed, into this slum of Eden. the church is without saints or statuary. The memorial is a pick, a hammer, a shovel, given By the men of Harvey Seam and Victoria Seam. May Their good bones wake in the living seams of Heaven.He breaketh open a shaft away from where men sojourn. They are forgotten of the foot that passeth by.
I laid myself down as a woman And woke as a child. Sleep buried me up to my chin, But my brain cut wild. Sudden summer lay sticky as tar Under bare white feet. Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter Shrank in the street. Black headlines, infolded like napkins, Crashed like grenades As war beat its way porch by porch Up New Haven's façades. Europe: a brown hive of noises, Hitler inside. On the sunny shelf by the stairs My tadpoles died. Big boys had already decided Who'd lose and who'd score, Singing one potato, two potato, Three potato, four. Singing sticks and stones May break my bones (but names hurt more). Singing step on a crack Break your mother's back (her platinum-ringed finger). Singing who got up your mother When your daddy wasn't there? Singing allee allee in free! You're Dead, you're dead, wherever you are!
(for Caroline Ireland) They were to have been a love gift, but when she slit the paper funnel, they both saw they were fake; false flowers he'd picked in haste from the store's display, handmade coloured stuff, stiff as crinoline. Instantly she thought of women's hands cutting in grimy light by a sweatshop window; rough plank tables strewn with cut-out flower heads: lily, iris, primula, scentless chrysanthemums, pistils rigged on wire in crowns of sponge-tipped stamens, sepals and petals perfect, perfectly immune to menaces from the garden. Why so wrong, so...flattening? Why not instead symbols of unchanging love?  Yet pretty enough, she considered, arranging them in a vase with dry grass and last summer's hydrangeas whose deadness was still (how to put it?) alive, or maybe the other side of life. Two sides, really, of the same thing? She laughed a little, such ideas were embarrassing even when kept to oneself, but her train of thought carried her in its private tunnel through supper, and at bedtime, brushing her teeth, she happened to look up at the moon. Its sunlit face was turned, as always, in her direction.The full moon, she couldn't help thinking, though we see only half of it. It was an insight she decided she could share with him, but when he joined her and together they lay in the dark, there seemed no reason to say anything. The words, in any case, would be wrong, would escape or disfigure her meaning.Good was the syllable she murmured to him, fading into sleep. And just for a split second, teetering on the verge of it, she believed everything that had to be was understood.
There, in that lost  corner of the ordnance survey. Drive through the vanity —  two pubs and a garage — of Satley, then right, cross the A68  past down-at-heel farms and a quarry, you can't miss it, a 'T' instead of a 'plus'  where the road meets a wall. If it's a usual day  there'll be freezing wind, and you'll stumble climbing the stile  (a ladder, really) as you pull your hat down and zip up your jacket.  Out on the moor, thin air may be strong enough to   knock you over, but if you head into it  downhill, you can shelter in the wide, cindery trench of an old  leadmine-to-Consett railway. You may have to share it  with a crowd of dirty supercilious-looking ewes, who will baaa  and cut jerkily away after posting you blank stares  from their foreign eyes. One winter we came across five  steaming, icicle-hung cows. But in summer, when the heather's full of nests,  you'll hear curlews following you, raking your memory, maybe,  with their cries; or, right under you nose,  a grouse will whirr up surprised, like a poet startled by a line  when it comes to her sideways. No protection is offered by trees —  Hawthorn the English call May, a few struggling birches.  But of wagtails and yellowhammers, plenty, and peewits who never say peewit,  more a minor, go'way, go'way. Who was he, Salter? Why was this his gate?  A pedlars' way, they carried salt to meat. The place gives tang to  survival, its unstoppable view, a reservoir, ruins of the lead mines, new  forestry pushing from the right, the curlew.
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —  waiting for someone to 'get ready', or facing the gap between graduate seminars  and dull after-suppers in his study grading papers or writing a review —  he played the piano. I think of him packing his lifespan  carefully, like a good leather briefcase, each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages  for the left hand and right hand by Chopin or difficult Schumann;  nothing inside it ever rattled loose. Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue  on the blade of his reasonable logic. Only at the piano did he become  the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic. The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata  could have been Brahms. Boredom, or what he disapproved of as  'sitting around with your mouth open' oddly pursued him. He had small stamina.  Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis, the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden,  missing its musical swim-bladder. None of this suggests how natural he was.  For years I thought fathers played the piano just as dogs barked and babies grew.  We children ran in and out of the house, taking for granted that the 'Trout' or E flat Major Impromptu  would be rippling around us. For him, I think, playing was solo flying, a bliss  of removal, of being alone. Not happily always; never an escape,  for he was affectionate, and the household hum he pretended to find trivial or ridiculous  daily sustained him. When he talked about music, it was never  of the lachrimae rerum that trembled from his drawn-out phrasing  as raindrops phrase themselves along a wire; no, he defended movable doh or explained the amazing  physics of the octave. We'd come in from school and find him  cross-legged on the jungle of the floor, guts from one of his Steinways strewn about him.  He always got the pieces back in place. I remember the yellow covers of Schirmer's Editions  and the bound Peters Editions in the bookcase. When he defected to the cello in later years  Grandmother, in excrucio, mildly exclaimed, 'Wasn't it lovely when Steve liked to play the piano.'  Now I'm the grandmother listening to Steve at the piano. Lightly, in strains from Brahms-Haydn variations,  his audible image returns to my humming ears.
(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79)This House Which represents you, as my bones do, waits, all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come, as it always does, between breaths, between nights of no wind and days of the nulled sun. And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate faceless fields, a white road drawn through dependent firs, the soldered glare of lakes. Is it wanting you here to want the winter in? I breathe you back into your square house and begin to live here roundly. This year will be between, not in, four seasons. Do you hear already the wet rumble of thaw? Stones. Sky. Streams. Sun. Those might be swallows at the edge of sight returning to last year's nest in the crook of the porchlight.Complaint 'Dear God,' they write, 'that was a selfish winter to lean so long, unfairly on the spring!' And now — this too much greed of seedy summer. Mouths of the flowers unstick themselves and sting the bees with irresistible dust. Iris allow undignified inspection. Plain waste weeds dress up in Queen Anne's lace. Our mist- blue sky clouds heavily with clematis. 'Too much,' they cry, 'too much. Begin again.' The Lord, himself a casualty of weather falls to earth in large hot drops of rain. The dry loam rouses in his scent, and under him — moist, sweet, discriminate — the spring. Thunder. Lightning. He can do anything.Between The wet and weight of this half-born English winter is not the weather of those fragmentary half-true willows that break in the glass of the canal behind our rudder as water arrives in our wake — a travelling arrow of now, of now, of now. Leaves of the water furl back from our prow, and as the pinnate narrow seam of where we are drives through the mirror of where we have to be, alder and willow double crookedly, reverse, assume a power to bud out tentatively in gold and yellow, so it looks as if what should be end of summer — seeds, dead nettles, berries, naked boughs — is really the anxious clouding of first spring. ...'Real' is what water is imagining.Stasis Before the leaves change, light transforms these lucid speaking trees. The heavy drench of August alters, things; its rich and sappy blood relaxes where a thirst ago, no rest released the roots' wet greed or stemmed their mad need to be more. September is the wisest time — neither the unbearable burning word nor the form of it, cooped in its cold ghost. How are they sombre — that unpicked apple, red, undisturbed by its fall; calm of those wasp-bored amethyst plums on the polished table? Body and head easy in amity, a beam between that must, unbalanced, quicken or kill, make new or dead whatever these voices are that hate the dust.The Circle It is imagination's white face remembers snow, its shape, a fluted shell on shoot or flower, its weight, the permanence of winter pitched against the sun's absolute root. All March is shambles, shards. Yet no amber chestnut, Indian, burnished by its tent cuts to a cleaner centre or keeps summer safer in its sleep. Ghost be content. You died in March when white air hurt the maples. Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot their ways in aisles of frost. There were no petals. Face, white face, you are snow in the green hills. High stones complete your circle where trees start. Granite and ice are colours of the heart.
note: Most of this journal, written on shipboard, seems to have been destroyed, probably by fire. What remains suggests that Mrs. Chandler journeyed to New Orleans without her husband's permission, thus becoming indirectly the cause of her baby's death. August, 1849 EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS  ABOARD THE 'GENERAL WAYNE' Two weeks aboard the 'General Wayne' is little more than a floating hospital  vomiting spells. I attribute them to  is truly ill. For two days he has  in his bunk.  Belle seems to recover. At least  fretful which indicates improvement.  struck by a nervous disorder. I sleep very little and take no solid food.  (page torn)(Second page) Yesterday evening poor little Cookie died. She was seized suddenly with spasms, poor thing, and died in an hour. You will accuse me of  but it was truly frightful.  I have not slept for weeping.  only a dog!  (page torn)(Third page)  arrived safely in New Orleans but  embark. We are all in quarantine  might be better, but Belle is  all day by her bedside. Doctor  plague and gives me no hope  pray for survival.  (page torn)(Fourth page)  have not been able to put pen to  all over. Our dear little girl  among the blessed, my beautiful  authorities let no one near.  darkies. I am full of  one who was without fault and so,  lies shrouded in my sister's  blame God and myself, dear  why you have left me without support?  (page torn)
He sits beside his wife who takes the wheel. Clutching coupons, he wanders the aisles of Stop & Save. There’s no place he must be, no clock to punch. Sure, there are bass in the lake, a balsa model in the garage, the par-three back nine. But it’s not the same. Time the enemy then, the enemy now. As he points the remote at the screen or pauses at the window, staring into the neighbor’s fence but not really seeing it, he listens to his wife in the kitchen, more amazed than ever—how women seem to know what to do. How, with their cycles and timers, their rolling boils and three-minute eggs, they wait for something to start. Or stop.
As my mother’s memory dims she’s losing her sense of smell and can’t remember the toast blackening the kitchen with smoke or sniff how nasty the breath of the dog that follows her yet from room to room, unable, himself, to hear his own bark. It’s thus they get around, the wheezing old hound stone deaf baying like a smoke alarm for his amnesiac mistress whose back from petting him is bent forever as they shuffle towards the flaming toaster and split the cindered crisp that’s left.
1 Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand- fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style, they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee. I have at one time or another been in love with my mother, 1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum), and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece (she sends me letters written in large block print, and her picture is the only one that smiles at me). I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.”  2 Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr / like a salmon quitting the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birthstream / I hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my packet and a monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks. I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard / I smelled the old land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men / I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost contented / I had almost caught up with me. (The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker’s crib for a fix.) This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them, they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children to float in the space between.
1 Kinship:  Is embarrassing the wind,  Like dead black boys,  Falling down from the trees,  Then downstream–  On their knees,  Blood like,  Like a rich nation. 2 Metaphor:  Becomes humiliating,  And clean,  Ticking like a ripe machine.  Do not  Bend,  Fold,  Or mutilate me–  This is your future speaking. 3 The air smells so metaphysical  We have accused it–  Of smog,  And lost manhood,  Then all ritual. 4 Whoever wrote:  A view is a mountain speaking  But left the introduction  For the snow,  And accused silence  Of its soul. 5 The whole nation:  Is a stanza of blackness,  A huge white whale,  Faith in space  (Like the newspapers),  And the quiet insistence  We have peace,  And it’s your world, brother.
All the angels of Tie Siding were on fire.  The famous sky was gone. Presumably the mountains were still there, invisible in haze.  OK, there was only one angel, but she was a torch in the wind, beside the wind-ripped American flag the post office flies.  OK, she wasn't literally on fire.  Maybe her angelic red hair made me think she was ablaze as it flaunted the prairie and made a festival of itself.  There was a fireworks stand nearby, entirely beside the point, as was the Fourth of July.  It was really dry.  It was fire season.  It was the wind festival, featuring an angel standing in it, letting her red hair conflagrate history, reduce it to ash, bid it start anew, erase the sky with atrocity's own smoke.  She wore, besides her flame of hair, blue jeans and a singlet.  She was violent in the wind.  I started walking toward her.  I'm still walking toward her, no idea what to say when I get there.
Well aren't you the harsh necessity, As in what fear is for? It was the summer ofYou should have been there, Though the last thing I want Anywhere near me is you. Louche and thaumaturgic, You made my faith My foolishness— Easy as lying to trees. Essence of the inessential Is what you are, double rainbow, Extrinsic as blood is to stars, An empire not of death, But inspired by death, Farrago of arid precepts, A few cheap ideas about hope, The eschaton, alterity, All featuring you. What are the chances? Slim to none. But listen here, my fraud, my forger, I could close my eyes at any time. All I have to do is close my eyes.
I A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house. Two stories, seven rooms in all.  I built my love a home.  Our daughter was in orbit in the womb.  Mountains spun off like the arm of a galaxy into the emptiness our windows framed.  "What a view!" our friends exclaimed, and "Sunsets to die for every single night!" 2 Vertigo of solitude, distillate of loneliness for blood, my wife untrue, my daughter flown, I, like a widower or worse, move among the rooms I made.  Where once I was not alone, now each closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like shadows at dusk.  Gone that arrangement of allegiances called family we never really know before it ends.  Like love itself, it isn't true till then.  I have no family now but remembrences of tiny joys, tinier dramas we used to call our life, like pollen over everything: brightly colored clothespins on the line, a cross-shaped coral earring whose match is lost, books of fairy tales we read aloud at night.  I must be dumb as a gunnysack of hammers.  Wind still blows through open windows like it always used to do.  What did I love that made me believe it would last?
To keep from ending The story does everything it can, Careful not to overvalue Perfection or undervalue Perfect chance, As I am careful not to do in telling. By now a lot has happened: Bridges under the water, No time outs, Sinewy voices from under the earth Braiding and going straight up In a faint line. I modify to simplify, Complicate to clarify. If you want to know your faults, marry. If you want to know your virtues, die. Then the heroine, Who resembles you in certain particulars, Precipitates the suicide Of the author, wretchedly obscure, Of that slim but turgid volume, By letting slip:Real events don't have endings, Only the stories about them do.
The Pontalba Apartments in the View-Master and the cardboard cathedral as if trapped in the dream twenty years early, the whole a furious search as if for a reason. Still, it's sex that spoils it, isn't it? Jackson Square was the smallest sufficient landscape, but that was before, and now the gates are locked at sundown, and the smell of the river fails, falls ever backward. Some of us lived there, though:What shall we say who have knowledge carried to the heart?
I was young once, at least, if not beautiful. And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.
What's the bird ratio overhead? Zero: zero. Maybe it's El Niño? The storm, was it bad? Here the worst ever. Every tree hurt. Do you love trees? Only the gingko, the fir, the birch. Yours? Do you name your trees? Who owns the trees? Who's talking You presume a dialogue. Me and You. Yes. Your fingers tap. I'm listening. Will you answer? Why mention trees? When the weather turned rain into ice, the leaves failed. So what? Every year leaves fail. The cycle. Birth to death. In the night the sound of cannon, and death everywhere. What did you see? Next morning, roots against the glass. Who's talking now and in familiar language? Get real. What's real is the broken crown. The trunk shattered. Was that storm worse than others? Yes and no. The wind's torque twisted open the tree's tibia. Fool. You're talking about vegetables. Do you love the patio  tomato? The Christmas cactus? Yes. And the magnolia on the roof, the felled crabapple, the topless  spruce.
Lear's five nevers over the fool hanged, and Cordelia and Lear dead at last, Edmund reported and yes he was loved by both evil sisters, so what. I'm awake in the dawn. Cold stone floors. The cat. His father loved him too, I tell my son on the phone, my son just married. Let him cleave to his wife. Let my old flesh resume its boundaries, let go. No divisions of the kingdom. Will they write of my courage killing the snake? We know the dreamy answer to that one. Honey tea swirls us sweet; never fear the village fair, lights stay on all night. Tea bags bottomless coffee cup. Ashes in the grate sweeten the garden provender. Clay. Ripeness is all. The fool lives on, my left elbow's cartilage feather.
The soaked books lip open in piles. The shelves stoop, slough paint. The doors, their locks sprung, hinge air open to weather, gulp rain. Something here enters the trees. If we believe in ghosts, white pearl shadows the batten and boards. Rust runs on the shelves. The sounds on air wail, a nail in the thumb. Stickers underfoot poke holes. In rafters, wings or the suggestion of wings rend air, whoosh of rubbish, burnt rubber hooks for skeleton elbows. Ash, dry sift through moist fingers in a room where everything's mold.
Bargain tarts, raspberry, goose, he said, don't write about that surgery, women who have hacked off write all parts and natures of women who lose food in the bottom parts of refrigerators, onions, scallions, sour tomatoes, tiny cocktail weenies lost in the airless dark write When you give over your breast to cancer, for God's sake don't write about it. Write about silliness, holding hands in sandboxes, small girls playing fudge- and-find-me-alley-tag at dusk, Rochester, state of pubescent, New Yorka roonie. ...day I learned to drive aimed car at horizon and floored it. Got there. God in color, no cable, firsthand. Going and coming back I thought I'd live. Not much for visions, still at sink soaking pinkies in sweetalmond suds, I heard Mom. Come on home, she said. Scared the witless bejeebies out of me. Next day I opted for surgery. Cut that mama off and saved my life. Big daddy surgeon said right on the mark, sweet honey. It was done. He's got a girlfriend works at his office, don't you know, she thinks he's licorice stick swinger. I caught them hugging in the mimeo room. Ain't nothing to it, he said, rolling his cup of a palm over the scar. Mmmmmm-mmmmm, this hillock is a sweet raisin, roll over baby, pour me out. Okeydokey. What came next in the woods, woolly dark trees don't give a fudge if what's hugging them hard dents in two places. I hang on for dear life. Filled pockets with seedpods, got bulbs I shoehorned into clay pots for life's sake. Nevertheless the disc shone hard, or didn't.
Some problems of self-loathing, worry: the thumbnail blotched in a bank box door grows out, three-quarter moon marrow spot filled out with white bruise travels down my thumb at regular speed, so when I glance down it's what I see left of center, not the odd breast, the malformed scruff at head, the old thought leaking pain on the pages from my brain, which ought to be gainfully occupied with rain as an emblem of loss and gain, and is not.
from the waist–so that, turned the bulb that's oneself (thorax) –only–then–doesn't have any existence–turned (wherever one turns)  as conception–at waist of magnolia buds that exist in the day really  sewing the black silk irises–not when one turned at waist  sewing them, they have no shape literally except being that– from one's hand (being, in the air)  the irises only had existence in the black, before dawn, in fact  a man doesn't want me to become quiet again–go into ocean not weighed of before fighting–ever  formation of that of narrowed to no form in one–of black volup- tuous lip–outside–voluptuous lips that (aren't) on black dawn, or before it when it's black.  There was no intention–being done–with their existing.  not weighed before fighting which is the black, weighed, air– not the lips which have no weight–isn't following  if one's not contending...so the inner isn't contending either...?
I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep, I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. Its rocky sweep and its granite pier. Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight, shadows falling on everything they had to leave? And would love forever? And then I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat searching for the last sight of a hand. I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land:Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other.  2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.  3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done?  4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew.
My mother died one summer— the wettest in the records of the state. Crops rotted in the west. Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. Empty deck chairs collected rain. As I took my way to her through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly behind houses and on curbsides, to pay her the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something I remembered I heard once, that the body is, or is said to be, almost all water and as I turned southward, that ours is a city of it, one in which every single day the elements begin a journey towards each other that will never, given our weather, fail—  the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, cloud color reaching into air, the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, as if that wasn't enough, all of it ending up almost every evening inside our speech—coast canal ocean river stream and nowmother and I drove on and although the mind is unreliable in grief, at the next cloudburst it almost seemed they could be shades of each other, the way the body is of every one of them and now they were on the move again—fog into mist, mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze that lay on the railings of the house she was dying in as I went inside.
We are walking our very public attraction through eighteenth-century Philadelphia. I am simultaneously butch girlfriend and suburban child on a school trip, Independence Hall, 1775, home to the Second Continental Congress. Although she is wearing her leather jacket, although we have made love for the first time in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square, I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia, from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied residential street in the nation, from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall, from Graff House where the young Thomas Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes, in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman, I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston— city of women, demonstrations, and revolution on a grand and personal scale.  Then the maître d’ is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the surprised look of people who have been kissing and now find themselves dressed and dining in a Locust Street townhouse turned café, who do not know one another very well, who continue with optimism to pursue relationship. Eternity may simply be our mortal default mechanism set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood, I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow. I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window. I picture instead their silver inkstands, the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street, the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens, their nineteenth-century row houses restored with period door knockers. Step outside. We have been deeded the largest landscaped space within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park, on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons, and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power, considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service of the country of my pleasure.
walking person who has sky flowing–by one who beside is as if being backward by walking in life of people? but of one being 'defense- less' by the huge–is elating which is time.  'I was by a bigger bird - inside' - walking  walking by (someone with the sky flowing) disturbed by being– by it–  (compared by being–to past event: man seeing red tail hawk sit- ting in the city beside smaller bird disturbed calling)–(one walking by someone)–beside is 'embarrassing as being action' in one– (from)(its)(in the) present.  'embarrassed' is being elated simply here (as:) with one.
Done is a battle on the dragon black, Our champion Christ confoundit has his force; The yetis of hell are broken with a crack, The sign triumphal raisit is of the cross, The devillis trymmillis with hiddous voce, The saulis are borrowit and to the bliss can go, Christ with his bloud our ransonis dois indoce:Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. Dungan is the deidly dragon Lucifer, The cruewall serpent with the mortal stang; The auld kene tiger, with his teith on char, Whilk in a wait has lyen for us so lang, Thinking to grip us in his clawis strang; The merciful Lord wald nocht that it were so, He made him for to failye of that fang.Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. He for our saik that sufferit to be slane, And lyk a lamb in sacrifice was dicht, Is lyk a lion risen up agane, And as a gyane raxit him on hicht; Sprungen is Aurora radious and bricht, On loft is gone the glorious Apollo, The blissful day departit fro the nicht:Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. The grit victour again is rissen on hicht, That for our querrell to the deth was woundit; The sun that wox all pale now shynis bricht, And, derkness clearit, our faith is now refoundit; The knell of mercy fra the heaven is soundit, The Christin are deliverit of their wo, The Jowis and their errour are confoundit:Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro. The fo is chasit, the battle is done ceis, The presone broken, the jevellouris fleit and flemit; The weir is gon, confermit is the peis, The fetteris lowsit and the dungeon temit, The ransoun made, the prisoneris redeemit; The field is won, owrecomen is the fo, Dispuilit of the treasure that he yemit:Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.
Ay, beshrew you! by my fay, These wanton clerks be nice alway! Avaunt, avaunt, my popinjay! What, will ye do nothing but play? Tilly, vally, straw, let be I say!  Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!  With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. By God, ye be a pretty pode, And I love you an whole cart-load. Straw, James Foder, ye play the fode, I am no hackney for your rod: Go watch a bull, your back is broad!  Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!  With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. Ywis ye deal uncourteously; What, would ye frumple me? now fy! What, and ye shall be my pigesnye? By Christ, ye shall not, no hardely: I will not be japèd bodily!  Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!  With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale. Walk forth your way, ye cost me nought; Now have I found that I have sought: The best cheap flesh that I ever bought. Yet, for his love that all hath wrought, Wed me, or else I die for thought.  Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!  Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!  Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!  With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.
Merry Margaret,  As midsummer flower,  Gentle as a falcon  Or hawk of the tower: With solace and gladness, Much mirth and no madness, All good and no badness;  So joyously,  So maidenly,  So womanly  Her demeaning  In every thing,  Far, far passing  That I can indite,  Or suffice to write Of Merry Margaret  As midsummer flower, Gentle as falcon Or hawk of the tower.  As patient and still And as full of good will As fair Isaphill, Coriander, Sweet pomander, Good Cassander, Steadfast of thought, Well made, well wrought, Far may be sought  Ere that ye can find So courteous, so kind As Merry Margaret,  This midsummer flower, Gentle as falcon Or hawk of the tower.
Quis consurget mecum adversus malignantes? aut quis stabit mecum adversus operantes iniquitatem? Nemo, Domine! What can it avail To drive forth a snail, Or to make a sail Of an herring’s tail; To rhyme or to rail, To write or to indict, Either for delight Or else for despight; Or books to compile Of divers manner of style, Vice to revile And sin to exile; To teach or to preach, As reason will reach? Say this, and say that, His head is so fat, He wotteth never what Nor whereof he speaketh; He crieth and he creaketh, He prieth and he peeketh, He chides and he chatters, He prates and he patters,  He clitters and he clatters, He meddles and he smatters, He gloses and he flatters; Or if he speak plain, Then he lacketh brain, He is but a fool; Let him go to school, On a three footed stool That he may down sit, For he lacketh wit; And if that he hit The nail on the head, It standeth in no stead; The devil, they say, is dead, The devil is dead.  It may well so be, Or else they would see Otherwise, and flee From worldly vanity, And foul covetousness, And other wretchedness, Fickle falseness, Variableness, With unstableness.  And if ye stand in doubt Who brought this rhyme about, My name is Colin Clout. I purpose to shake out All my connying bag, Like a clerkly hag; For though my rhyme be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain beaten, Rusty and moth eaten, If ye take well therewith, It hath in it some pith.
Patience, though I have not The thing that I require, I must of force, God wot, Forbear my most desire; For no ways can I find To sail against the wind. Patience, do what they will To work me woe or spite, I shall content me still To think both day and night, To think and hold my peace, Since there is no redress. Patience, withouten blame, For I offended nought; I know they know the same, Though they have changed their thought. Was ever thought so moved To hate that it hath loved? Patience of all my harm, For fortune is my foe; Patience must be the charm To heal me of my woe: Patience without offence Is a painful patience.
Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all, How well pleasant it were your liberty!Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall. But they that sometime liked my company: Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl. Lo what a proof in light adversity! But ye my birds, I swear by all your bells, Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.
Stand whoso list upon the slipper top Of court’s estates, and let me here rejoice; And use me quiet without let or stop, Unknown in court, that hath such brackish joys: In hidden place, so let my days forth pass, That when my years be done, withouten noise, I may die agèd after the common trace, For him death gripeth right hard by the crope That is much known of other; and of himself alas, Doth die unknown, dazed with dreadful face.
Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest; Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain, And virtue sank the deeper in his breast; Such profit he of envy could obtain. A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain As on a stith, where some work of fame Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain’s gain. A visage, stern and mild; where both did grow, Vice to condemn, in virtues to rejoice; Amid great storms whom grace assured so, To live upright and smile at fortune’s choice. A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme; That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit; A mark the which (unperfited, for time) Some may approach, but never none shall hit. A tongue that served in foreign realms his king; Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring Our English youth, by travail unto fame. An eye whose judgment no affect could blind, Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile; Whose piercing look did represent a mind With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile. A heart where dread yet never so impressed To hide the thought that might the truth avaunce; In neither fortune lift, nor so repressed, To swell in wealth, nor yield unto mischance. A valiant corps, where force and beauty met, Happy, alas! too happy, but for foes, Lived, and ran the race that nature set; Of manhood’s shape, where she the mold did lose. But to the heavens that simple soul is fled, Which left with such, as covet Christ to know Witness of faith that never shall be dead: Sent for our health, but not received so. Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost; The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost. Amen.
You must not wonder, though you think it strange, To see me hold my louring head so low, And that mine eyes take no delight to range About the gleams which on your face do grow. The mouse which once hath broken out of trap Is seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait, But lies aloof for fear of more mishap, And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit. The scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame, Will hardly come to play again with fire, Whereby I learn that grievous is the game Which follows fancy dazzled by desire:  So that I wink or else hold down my head,  Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,  Within that temple where the vestal flame  Was wont to burn; and, passing by that way,  To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept:  All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen;  At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,  And, from thenceforth, those Graces were not seen: For they this queen attended; in whose stead  Oblivion laid him down on Laura’s hearse:  Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:  Where Homer’s spright did tremble all for grief,  And cursed the access of that celestial thief!
Go, soul, the body’s guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. Say to the court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; Say to the church, it shows What’s good, and doth no good. If church and court reply, Then give them both the lie. Tell potentates, they live  Acting by others’ action; Not loved unless they give, Not strong but by a faction. If potentates reply, Give potentates the lie. Tell men of high condition, That manage the estate, Their purpose is ambition, Their practice only hate. And if they once reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell them that brave it most, They beg for more by spending, Who, in their greatest cost, Seek nothing but commending. And if they make reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust. And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie. Tell age it daily wasteth; Tell honor how it alters; Tell beauty how she blasteth; Tell favor how it falters. And as they shall reply, Give every one the lie. Tell wit how much it wrangles In tickle points of niceness; Tell wisdom she entangles Herself in overwiseness. And when they do reply,  Straight give them both the lie. Tell physic of her boldness; Tell skill it is pretension; Tell charity of coldness; Tell law it is contention. And as they do reply, So give them still the lie. Tell fortune of her blindness; Tell nature of decay; Tell friendship of unkindness; Tell justice of delay. And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming; Tell schools they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming. If arts and schools reply, Give arts and schools the lie. Tell faith it’s fled the city; Tell how the country erreth; Tell manhood shakes off pity; Tell virtue least preferreth. And if they do reply, Spare not to give the lie. So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbing— Although to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing— Stab at thee he that will, No stab the soul can kill.
Nature, that washed her hands in milk, And had forgot to dry them, Instead of earth took snow and silk, At love’s request to try them, If she a mistress could compose To please love’s fancy out of those. Her eyes he would should be of light, A violet breath, and lips of jelly; Her hair not black, nor overbright, And of the softest down her belly; As for her inside he’d have it Only of wantonness and wit. At love’s entreaty such a one Nature made, but with her beauty She hath framed a heart of stone; So as love, by ill destiny, Must die for her whom nature gave him, Because her darling would not save him. But time (which nature doth despise, And rudely gives her love the lie, Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise) His hands do neither wash nor dry; But being made of steel and rust, Turns snow and silk and milk to dust. The light, the belly, lips, and breath, He dims, discolors, and destroys; With those he feeds but fills not death, Which sometimes were the food of joys. Yea, time doth dull each lively wit, And dries all wantonness with it. Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days.
If Cynthia be a queen, a princess, and supreme, Keep these among the rest, or say it was a dream, For those that like, expound, and those that loathe express Meanings according as their minds are moved more or less; For writing what thou art, or showing what thou were, Adds to the one disdain, to the other but despair, Thy mind of neither needs, in both seeing it exceeds.
Fortune hath taken thee away, my love, My life’s soul and my soul’s heaven above; Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess; My only light and my true fancy’s mistress. Fortune hath taken all away from me, Fortune hath taken all by taking thee. Dead to all joy, I only live to woe, So fortune now becomes my mortal foe. In vain you eyes, you eyes do waste your tears, In vain you sighs do smoke forth my despairs, In vain you search the earth and heaven above, In vain you search, for fortune rules in love. Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s hands, Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s bands, And only love the sorrows due to me; Sorrow henceforth it shall my princess be. I joy in this, that fortune conquers kings; Fortune that rules on earth and earthly things Hath taken my love in spite of Cupid’s might; So blind a dame did never Cupid right. With wisdom’s eyes had but blind Cupid seen, Then had my love my love for ever been; But love farewell; though fortune conquer thee, No fortune base shall ever alter me.
Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands, Which hold my life in their dead doing might Shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands, Lyke captives trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light, Those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look And reade the sorrowes of my dying spright, Written with teares in harts close bleeding book. And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke, Of Helicon whence she derived is, When ye behold that Angels blessed looke, My soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis. Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone, Whom if ye please, I care for other none.
It's hard to get anywhere in Utah without going through Provo. I can't tell you the number of times I went there as a teenager, the number Of times I drove into town in the early Afternoon, hungry, and had to look around For a place to eat. You don't have to starve In Provo but you eat at your own risk. At no risk. I would never have gone to Provo On my own. I went accompanied— For reasons almost too trivial—or personal—to mention. There are moments when you simply must get into the car and drive And from Salt Lake there are only a few ways to go, Toward the Great Salt Lake or toward the canyons and to get To Zion or Moab you had to pass through Provo. I remember the population because it went With the number of miles from outskirt to outskirt, 45 miles, 45,000 people, 45 minutes (Keeping to the speed limit) $45 to spend on a suit at a 45% discount... There was nothing Provo's department store did not carry, Including pearl handled Colt 45's, But for a wider selection of fire arms, rifles With narrowing focal points, with greater precision over vast distances, You were better off Next door. O I guess it wasn't that different from entering A thousand other American towns, but this one Made my flesh crawl. I wanted to howl. The men walked with their hands deep in their pockets. The women were afraid to lift their eyes. It was as if something terrible had happened Or was about to happen. I'm not saying you have to love what you do In this life, but it isn't nice to practice The silent treatment on strangers in the desert, Strangers who would have to be wondering Where the other 44,990 people were, since Other than the one drowning potatoes in burning oil Beside the grill in the luncheonette And the one behind the register, And the three grim-faced, parchment-skinned Jack Mormons hunkered over cups, And the handful of impassive faces Placed against the windows Of one-story cinder-block houses, There was no one in Provo beyond the jackrabbits— Glimpsed in abundance en route— Who vanished as we crossed the town line, And drove past the population sign. Or was it a warning in disguise? There was something eerie in the air, An absence I could not identify. An immense single-pump gas station, Shimmering like a mirage in the heat, Took up a good part of the main drag. I pull in. Step into the heat stunned. The car is too hot to touch. I needed gas but didn't want to get it there. It meant digging up the attendant. You know the lights in hospital corridors, Those are the lights in the gas station in Provo. They're the kind of lights that show up whatever's wrong with a face; The kind of lights that make something wrong when there's nothing  wrong.   When I got there, I was afraid. It's hard To put my finger on the precise reason why. It's not as though something ominous rose From the sidewalks or Hell's Angels cycles Were parked outside the luncheonette. Nothing like that. Nor can I say why, even though there was almost No one on the street, I felt watched. While I slept fitfully in the tilt-back bucket seats, Someone scribbled obscenities on the headlights. I felt drawn by destiny to this nadir. You don't want to provoke anyone in Provo. It's that kind of place, that kind of absence— The desert flattens out, the plants Draw in their antennae. Provo is not where you can hope to find Boon companions. It's against the law To serve liquor in the bar And no one in the luncheonette looks up When you walk in. These are the fallen, Sunk in ashes, adrift In the smoke of unreason. They have masturbated without shame. They have coveted, envied. They have pocketed the tithe. It's hard to put it into words: Provo. It's more like a place without a name, A desert stopover with the semblance of a town. Provo is a place where there is no reason to be. A province that would never grow up to be a suburb, Like the backwaters where they exiled Ovid and Pascal. Only there is no water— Just landscape shorn of green and tawny desert colors. Burned skyline. Hills like craggy impenetrable fortresses. The rain gutters hiss in the dryness. There's a menacing blue tint on the rims Of impinging mountains.
The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then we lose it in the pond grass, lashed among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles, my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted), a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift that here will linger long enough for us to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung, to get the hang of happiness and get going. Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment, which is why I want it monumental, equestrian, astride, however I can get it. What’s passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back intact, all its receptors set on July.
for Abbe, Sally, and Joseph I Amidah Hear my personal prayer, the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
Our annual prairie Chanukah party— latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes. Friends arrive from nearby towns and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight,” spin like a dreidel to a klezmer hit. The candles flicker in the window. Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows. If you squint, the neighbors’ Christmas lights look like the Omaha skyline. The smell of oil is in the air. We drift off to childhood where we spent our gelt on baseball cards and matinees, cream sodas and potato knishes. No delis in our neighborhood, only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks. Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out, waiting for the Messiah to knock, wanting to know if he can join the party.
How easily our lives could have been easier if our fathers hadn't done in whoever stood in their way. Did progress demand they set factories belching smoke like volcanoes? You're right to be dumbfounded as to why you're forced to spend your time making up for your ancestors' mistakes, waste this beautiful day restoring ruined shrines and temples so that the gods might not abandon Rome for good. There could be a turn about: after they were rid of the Etruscans, a few farsighted countrymen had the savvy to steal their fine sarcophagi designs, along with the booty. Decadence is your legacy. I hold out hope for satires, epigrams, and odes, but heaping on the gore is not an answer, and our plays are weak echoes of the Greeks. If you want to have some say in the way things are, put yourself in the hands of a higher order. Have faith in faith. Bow down to the gods who oversee and underwrite and sponsor. There's nothing empirical left to this empire now. What would have been routine raids on small fry republics—from Vietnam to the Isle of Man— are beaten back, and the opposition, in ecstatic mockery, turn our spoils to souvenir necklaces and key chains. The ancient city, riven by civil strife, escaped destruction by fanatic Bosnia and Iraq with their demonic submarines, bombers, and other dangerous toys, by a hairsbreadth. Self-absorbed, promiscuous, we've brought these evils on ourselves like people who, anticipating the worst from a routine physical, forswear doctors until their symptoms call for drastic measures; as only after the condom-clogged, gaseous, syringe-rich, toxic river overflows and floods the litter-free, segregated streets of the capital will the Rivers Network organize a mass cleanup on Earth Day. The young, lured always by the glitter of cities, find nothing cooler than the hotter— than-ever-before dance-crazes flown in from the clubs of Rio, Barcelona, or Berlin. How was a girl to know that marriage sucks the sap out of sex? And why not make it with the guests, especially if it's just the boost his mercurial career needs to rocket off... How are they to know the sexual spectacles began on their own ravaged ground? And these out-of-towners are so endlessly grateful for a dose of decadence because they "sure don't get pussy like this in Topeka." (The New Age victor is the one who gets the onlooker to come without anything physical happening between them.) "How does he think I know how to get the dry- cleaning-mogul's cock to stiffen, as if a good dis weren't hard to find, like 'you use your tongue like you're trying to remove a spot.'" Her husband, in his white tux, appeared nonchalant, but a second glance revealed a man slaphappy and dazed from one too many Zombies; either way, when the Titania II pulls into port she'll allow whoever has the best offer, captain or mutineer, Delano or Benito Cereno, to take her on the dance floor. Dalliance supplies what she needs for her shopping sprees which "this guy whose wedding ring I like never take off can't get through his head are necessary. He's so dense, like I show up in this designer dress on my 'allowance.' Men have no idea what it costs a girl to be truly glamorous in times like these— and when they land the commission remain clueless as to why they were chosen and not the other guy with the goody-two-shoes type wife." It's shattering to consider that these nerds, for whom watching's the real turn on, sprang from fierce, sturdy stock who in their youth conquered conquerors, brought down swaggering, gallant Hannibal, Pyrrhus, and Antiochus, dyeing the sea red with Punic blood. But the early Romans, the soldier-farmers, knew better than to double think what had to be done, and dug with the tools of the long-gone Sabines, and never neglected to cut the logs to honor mom's firm yet anxious request for firewood as shadows shifted on a far rise, night fell, and man and oxen were the same in their deep desire to lie down. Who is immune from ruin by time? Each generation wearier than the one before; these days no one deigns to have children until they are "professionally secure." And the media waits long and long to warn the idealists born during the baby-boom that the future is also being sabotaged: undone by sluggish sperm; hardened wombs.  (after Horace, Odes, Book III, 6)
Today's the rider's birthday. I see you're already lower-casing him...Would you rather I... What is this "I." You have none.Today's the rider's birthday. Except he's dead.In a contrary mood today? Not in the way you'd think.I'm you're friend, remember? And I can't hurt you. I have no body. Neither does Krang.K-----? The bodiless brain. The Ninja Turtles' nemesis. The guy who oversees all of their activities.And yet you carry him in your pocket like a good luck charm. You perplex your son who can't see the humor in your perversity because to him Krang is just, to put it plainly, disgusting.
Once you said joking slyly, If I’m killed I’ll come to haunt your solemn bed, I’ll stand and glower at the head And see if my place is empty still, or filled.
They’d been warned on every farm that playing in the silos would lead to death. You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. ‘You’ll see a rat sail past your face, nimble on its turf, and then you’ll disappear.’ In there, hard work has no reward. So it became a kind of test to see how far they could sink without needing a rope to help them out. But in the midst of play rituals miss a beat—like both leaping in to resolve an argument as to who’d go first and forgetting to attach the rope. Up to the waist and afraid to move. That even a call for help would see the wheat trickle down. The painful consolidation of time. The grains in the hourglass grotesquely swollen. And that acrid chemical smell of treated wheat coaxing them into a near-dead sleep.
When I brood on Germany in the night No hope for sleep. I know I'll lie Awake with my eyes wide open while Tears scald my cheeks. The years are a blur of past and future: A good twelve of them have passed since I last Laid eyes on my mother—which may be why I'm in such a frenzy to see her. And I am desperate with desire. I am under the old mutter's spell. She circles my mind like a ring of fire. I hope to god she is alive and well. She loves me to pieces, the old woman, And when in her letters her script breaks down, I know she's shaken to her depths, I know When the mother in her's shocked by her role. My mother never leaves my mental space Free of time past, the twelve long years, Twelve! —that vanished without a trace Since our last satisfying hug and kiss. Don't worry about Germany: it's the picture Of health. It will outlast us. All and all. I'll know its borders again by the flare Of its barbarous oaks and lime-trees' salute. I wouldn't waste a moment thinking on Germany were it not for my mother...; Fatherland-is-forever; but the old Woman, being mortal, may soon grow...cold. Since I left the country death has taken Many I loved. And now the unbreathing Impinge too much upon my sympathy. Numbering the dead does me in. And yet I feel compelled to count and each Body added to the tally has a say In how my mourning grows: hordes of corpses Crush my chest. What—relief—when they...give way. Praise the lord. And the lighter light of France That through this window breaks as my wife, well- Tempered, radiant as dawn, dispels My German burden with her lovely smile.  after Heinrich Heine
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away  And lovers  Must I be reminded Joy came always after pain  The night is a clock chiming  The days go by not I We're face to face and hand in hand  While under the bridges  Of embrace expire Eternal tired tidal eyes  The night is a clock chiming  The days go by not I Love elapses like the river  Love goes by  Poor life is indolent And expectation always violent  The night is a clock chiming  The days go by not I The days and equally the weeks elapse  The past remains the past  Love remains lost Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away  The night is a clock chiming  The days go by not I
Anemone and columbine Where gloom has lain Opened in gardens Between love and disdain Made somber by the sun Our shadows meet Until the sun Is squandered by night Gods of living water Let down their hair And now you must follow A craving for shadows
I Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur  turns in the soft dusk,  the lights of it blur,  the delicate spires are unequal as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them...  And the soft air-breathers, their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water responding to some impalpably soft pressure,  turn with the city, too.  The petals of tenderness in them, their tentative ways of feeling, not quite reaching out but ever so gently half reaching out and withdrawing, withdrawing to where their feminine star is withdrawing, the planet that turns with them,  faithfully always and softly...  II And if there is something which is not soft in the city, such as a cry too hard for the soft mouth to hold,  God puts a soft stop to it. Bending invisibly down, He breathes a narcosis over the panicky face upturned to entreat Him: a word as soft as morphine is the word that God uses, placing His soft hand over the mouth of the cryer before it has time to gather the force of a cry. It is almost as if no cry had ever been thought of... And, yes, over all,  soft canopy over soft canopy,  web over soft, soft web,  gauze hung over gauze, the mysteries of the tall heaven,  the tall and very soft heaven,  are softest of all!
After you've been to bed together for the first time, without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance, the other party very often says to you, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you, what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you lying together in completely relaxed positions like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed. You tell them your story, or as much of your story as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, until the oh is just an audible breath, and then of course there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror. And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story, they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along, and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming no more than an audible sigh, as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left, draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion and stops breathing forever. Then? Well, one of you falls asleep and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
More then most faire, full of the living fire, Kindled above unto the maker neere: No eies but joyes, in which al powers conspire, That to the world naught else be counted deare. Thrugh your bright beams doth not the blinded guest Shoot out his darts to base affections wound? But Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest In chast desires on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts and fashion me within, You stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake, You calme the storme that passion did begin, Strong thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak. Dark is the world, where your light shined never; Well is he borne, that may behold you ever.
Ye tradefull Merchants that with weary toyle, Do seeke most pretious things to make your gain: And both the Indias of their treasures spoile, What needeth you to seeke so farre in vaine? For loe my love doth in her selfe containe All this worlds riches that may farre be found, If Saphyres, loe hir eies be Saphyres plaine, If Rubies, loe hir lips be Rubies sound: If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round; If Yvorie, her forhead yvory weene; If Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground; If silver, her faire hands are silver sheene; But that which fairest is, but few behold, Her mind adornd with vertues manifold.
Penelope for her Ulisses sake, Deviz’d a Web her wooers to deceave: In which the worke that she all day did make The same at night she did again unreave: Such subtile craft my Damzell doth conceave, Th’ importune suit of my desire to shonne: For all that I in many dayes doo weave, In one short houre I find by her undonne. So when I thinke to end that I begonne, I must begin and never bring to end: For with one looke she spils that long I sponne, And with one word my whole years work doth rend. Such labour like the Spyders web I fynd, Whose fruitless worke is broken with least wynd.
Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay, My love lyke the Spectator ydly sits Beholding me that all the pageants play, Disguysing diversly my troubled wits. Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits, And mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy: Soone after when my joy to sorrow flits, I waile and make my woes a Tragedy. Yet she beholding me with constant eye, Delights not in my merth nor rues my smart: But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry She laughes, and hardens evermore her hart. What then can move her? if not merth nor mone, She is no woman, but a sencelesse stone.
Fresh spring the herald of loves mighty king, In whose cote armour richly are displayed All sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring  In goodly colours gloriously arrayd: Goe to my love, where she is carelesse layd, Yet in her winters bowre not well awake: Tell her the joyous time wil not be staid Unless she doe him by the forelock take. Bid her therefore her selfe soone ready make, To wayt on love amongst his lovely crew: Where every one that misseth then her make, Shall be by him amearst with penance dew. Make hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime, For none can call againe the passèd time.
I joy to see how in your drawen work, Your selfe unto the Bee ye doe compare; And me unto the Spyder that doth lurke, In close awayt to catch her unaware. Right so your selfe were caught in cunning snare Of a deare for, and thralled to his love: In whose streight bands ye now captived are So firmely, that ye never may remove. But as your whole worke is woven all about, With woodbynd flowers and fragrant Enlantine: So sweet your prison you in time shall prove, With many deare delights bedecked fyne, And all thensforth eternall peace shall see  Betweene the Spyder and the gentle Bee.
The time is come, I must depart from thee, ah famous city; I never yet to rue my smart, did find that thou had’st pity. Wherefore small cause there is, that I should grieve from thee to go; But many women foolishly, like me, and other moe, Do such a fixèd fancy set, on those which least deserve, That long it is ere wit we get away from them to swerve. But time with pity oft will tell to those that will her try, Whether it best be more to mell, or utterly defy. And now hath time me put in mind of thy great cruelness, That never once a help would find, to ease me in distress. Thou never yet would’st credit give to board me for a year; Nor with apparel me relieve, except thou payèd were. No, no, thou never did’st me good, nor ever wilt, I know. Yet am I in no angry mood, but will, or ere I go, In perfect love and charity, my testament here write, And leave to thee such treasury, as I in it recite. Now stand aside and give me leave to write my latest will; And see that none you do deceive of that I leave them till.
I whole in body, and in mind, but very weak in purse, Do make, and write my testament for fear it will be worse. And first I wholly do commend my soul and body eke, To God the Father and the Son, so long as I can speak. And after speech, my soul to him, and body to the grave, Till time that all shall rise again, their Judgement for to have, And then I hope they both shall meet, to dwell for aye in joy; Whereas I trust to see my friends released from all annoy. Thus have you heard touching my soul, and body what I mean: I trust you all will witness bear, I have a steadfast brain. O God, now let me dispose such things, as I shall leave behind, That those which shall receive the same, may know my willing mind. I first of all to London leave, because I there was bred, Brave buildings rare, of churches store, and Paul’s to the head. Between the same, fair treats there be, and people goodly store; Because their keeping craveth cost, I yet will leave him more. First for their food, I butchers leave, that every day shall kill; By Thames you shall have brewers’ store, and bakers at your will. And such as orders do observe, and eat fish thrice a week, I leave two streets, full fraught therewith, they need not far to seek. Watling Street, and Canwick Street, I full of woolen leave; And linen store in Friday Street, if they me not deceive. And those which are of calling such, that costlier they require, I mercers leave, with silk so rich, as any would desire. In Cheap of them, they store shall find, and likewise in that street, I goldsmiths leave, with jewels such, as are for ladies meet. * * * Now when the folk are fed and clad with such as I have named, For dainty mouths, and stomachs weak some junckets must be framed. Wherefore I potecaries leave, with banquets in their shop, Physicians also for the sick, Diseases for to stop. Some roysters still must bide in thee, and such as cut it out; That with the guiltless quarrel will, to let their blood about. For them I cunning surgeons leave, some plasters to apply, That ruffians may not still be hanged, nor quiet persons die. * * * To all the bookbinders by Paul’s, because I like their art, They every week shall money have, when they from books depart. Among them all, my printer must have somewhat to his share; I will my friends these books to buy of him, with other ware. For maidens poor, I widowers rich do leave, that oft shall dote: And by that means shall marry them, to set the girls afloat. And wealthy widows will I leave to help young gentlemen; Which when you have, in any case, be courteous to them then: And see their plate and jewels eke may not be marred with rust; Nor let their bags too long be full, for fear that they do burst. * * * And Bedlam must not be forgot, for that was oft my walk: I people there too many leave, that out of tune do talk. * * * At th’ Inns of Court, I lawyers leave to take their case in hand. And also leave I at each Inn of Court, or Chancery, Of gentlemen, a youthful roote, full of activity, For whom I store of books have left, at each bookbinder’s stall: And part of all that London hath, to furnish them withal. And when they are with study cloyed, to recreate their mind, Of tennis courts, of dancing schools, and fence they store shall find. And every Sunday at the least, I leave to make them sport, In divers places players, that of wonders shall report. Now, London, have I (for thy sake) within thee, and without, As comes into my memory, dispersèd ’round about Such needful things as they should have, here left now unto thee; When I am gone, with conscience, let them dispersèd be. And though I nothing namèd have, to bury me withal, Consider that above the ground, annoyance be I shall. And let me have a shrouding sheet to cover me from shame, And in oblivion bury me, and never more me name. Ringings nor other ceremonies use you not for cost, Nor at my burial, make no feast, your money were but lost. * * * This XX of October, I, in ANNO DOMINI, A thousand, v. hundred seventy-three, as almanacs descry, Did write this will with mine own hand, and it to London gave; In witness of the standers-by, whose names, if you will have, paper, pen and standish were, at that same present by, With Time, who promised to reveal so fast as she could buy The same, lest of my nearer kin for any thing should vary; So finally I make an end no longer can I tarry.
Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares, With the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke: Fayre when the rose in her red cheekes appears, Or in her eyes the fyre of love does sparke. Fayre when her brest lyke a rich laden barke, With pretious merchandize she forth doth lay: Fayre when that cloud of pryde which oft doth dark  Her goodly light with smiles she drives away, But fayrest she, when so she doth display The gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight: Throgh which her words so wise do make their way To beare the message of her gentle spright. The rest be works of natures wonderment, But this the worke of harts astonishment.
Lyke as the Culver on the barèd bough, Sits mourning for the absence of her mate: And in her songs sends many a wishfull vow, For his returne that seemes to linger late, So I alone now left disconsolate, Mourne to my selfe the absence of my love: And wandring here and there all desolate, Seek with my playnts to match that mournful dove: Ne joy of ought that under heaven doth hove, Can comfort me, but her owne joyous sight: Whose sweet aspèct both God and man can move, In her unspotted pleasauns to delight. Dark is my day, whyles her fayre light I mis, And dead my life that wants such lively blis.
You little stars that live in skies And glory in Apollo’s glory, In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies The heaven’s will and nature’s story, Joy to be likened to those eyes, Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry; For when you force thoughts from above, These overrule your force by love. And thou, O Love, which in these eyes Hast married Reason with Affection, And made them saints of Beauty’s skies, Where joys are shadows of perfection, Lend me thy wings that I may rise Up, not by worth, but thy election; For I have vowed in strangest fashion To love and never seek compassion.
The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing, Flatters our hope, and tickles our desire, Nature’s true riches in sweet beauties showing, Which sets all hearts, with labor’s love, on fire. No less fair is the wheat when golden ear Shows unto hope the joys of near enjoying; Fair and sweet is the bud, more sweet and fair the rose, which proves that time is not destroying. Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight, Enamel’d o’er with beauties white and red, All sense and thoughts did to belief invite, That love and glory there are brought to bed; And your ripe year’s love-noon; he goes no higher, Turns all the spirits of man into desire.
Oh, for a bowl of fat Canary, Rich Palermo, sparkling Sherry, Some nectar else, from Juno’s dairy; Oh, these draughts would make us merry! Oh, for a wench (I deal in faces, And in other daintier things); Tickled am I with her embraces, Fine dancing in such fairy rings. Oh, for a plump fat leg of mutton, Veal, lamb, capon, pig, and coney; None is happy but a glutton, None an ass but who wants money. Wines indeed and girls are good, But brave victuals feast the blood; For wenches, wine, and lusty cheer, Jove would leap down to surfeit here.
a sower walks into the great hall it's war out there, he says and you awash in emptiness you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm I've come in the name of fields it's war out there I walk out from that great hall all four directions a boundless harvest scene I start planning for war rehearsing death and the crops I burn send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires but something haunts me furiously: he's sowing seed across marble floors
wolves of music weave their way at a run hawthorns wheeze with clandestine laughter turning a new leaf, tide's out young ship-captains high up on balconies look far away through telescopes east and west a single fruit cut into halves beneath a tree grown from the pit I once spit out I've hung nets to trap birds, and waited how many years
What length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show, Whose virtues strange, and beauties such, as no man them may know? Thus shrewdly burden, then, how can my Muse escape? The gods must help, and precious things must serve to show her shape. Like great god Saturn, fair, and like fair Venus, chaste; As smooth as Pan, as Juno mild, like goddess Iris fast. With Cupid she foresees, and goes god Vulcan’s pace; And for a taste of all these gifts, she borrows Momus’ grace. Her forehead jacinth-like, her cheeks of opal hue, Her twinkling eyes bedecked with pearl, her lips of sapphire blue, Her hair pure crapall stone, her mouth, O heavenly wide, Her skin like burnished gold, her hands like silver ore untried. As for those parts unknown, which hidden sure are best, Happy be they which believe, and never seek the rest.
The nightingale, as soon as April bringeth Unto her rested sense a perfect waking, While late bare earth, proud of new clothing, springeth, Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making, And mournfully bewailing, Her throat in tunes expresseth What grief her breast oppresseth For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth. Alas, she hath no other cause of anguish But Tereus’ love, on her by strong hand wroken, Wherein she suffering, all her spirits languish; Full womanlike complains her will was broken. But I, who daily craving, Cannot have to content me, Have more cause to lament me, Since wanting is more woe than too much having. O Philomela fair, O take some gladness, That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness: Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth; Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth.
a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year a conductor tattooing darkness listens to the shortest pause hurry a lion into the cage of music hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse moving in parallel nights who's the visitor? when the days all tip from nests and fly down roads the book of failure grows boundless and deep each and every moment's a shortcut I follow it through the meaning of the East returning home, closing death's door
Alas, have I not pain enough, my friend, Upon whose breast a fiercer gripe doth tire Than did on him who first stale down the fire, While Love on me doth all his quiver spend, But with your rhubarb words you must contend To grieve me worse, in saying that Desire Doth plunge my well-formed soul even in the mire Of sinful thoughts, which do in ruin end? If that be sin which doth the manners frame, Well stayed with truth in word and faith of deed, Ready of wit, and fearing naught but shame; If that be sin which in fixed hearts doth breed A loathing of all loose unchastity, Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.
for Shanshan The wave of that year flooded the sands on the mirror to be lost is a kind of leaving and the meaning of leaving the instant when all languages are like shadows cast from the west life's only a promise don't grieve for it before the garden was destroyed we had too much time debating the implications of a bird flying as we knocked down midnight's door alone like a match polished into light when childhood's tunnel led to a vein of dubious ore to be lost is a kind of leaving and poetry rectifying life rectifies poetry's echo
Your words my friend (right healthful caustics) blame My young mind marred, whom Love doth windlass so, That mine own writings like bad servants show My wits, quick in vain thoughts, in virtue lame, That Plato I read for nought, but if he tame Such coltish gyres, that to my birth I owe Nobler desires, least else that friendly foe, Great expectation, wear a train of shame. For since mad March great promise made of me, If now the May of my years much decline, What can be hoped my harvest time will be? Sure you say well, your wisdom’s golden mine Dig deep with learning’s spade, now tell me this, Hath this world ought so fair as Stella is?
The wisest scholar of the wight most wise By Phoebus’ doom, with sugared sentence says That Virtue, if it once met with our eyes, Strange flames of love it in our souls would raise; But, for that man with pain this truth descries, While he each thing in sense’s balance weighs, And so nor will nor can behold those skies Which inward sun to heroic mind displays, Virtue of late, with virtuous care to stir Love of herself, takes Stella’s shape, that she To mortal eyes might sweetly shine in her. It is most true, for since I her did see, Virtue’s great beauty in that face I prove, And find th’effect, for I do burn in love.
What, have I thus betrayed my liberty? Can those black beams such burning marks engrave In my free side? or am I born a slave, Whose neck becomes such yoke of tyranny? Or want I sense to feel my misery? Or sprite, disdain of such disdain to have? Who for long faith, though daily help I crave, May get no alms but scorn of beggary. Virtue, awake! Beauty but beauty is; I may, I must, I can, I will, I do Leave following that which it is gain to miss. Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to, Unkind, I love you not! O me, that eye Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie!
Soul’s joy, bend not those morning stars from me, Where virtue is made strong by beauty’s might, Where love is chasteness, pain doth learn delight, And humbleness grows one with majesty. Whatever may ensue, O let me be Co-partner of the riches of that sight; Let not mine eyes be hell-driv’n from that light; O look, O shine, O let me die and see. For though I oft my self of them bemoan, That through my heart their beamy darts be gone, Whose cureless wounds even now most freshly bleed, Yet since my death wound is already got, Dear killer, spare not they sweet cruel shot; A kind of grace it is to slay with speed.
I on my horse, and Love on me, doth try Our horsemanships, while by strange work I prove A horseman to my horse, a horse to Love, And now man’s wrongs in me, poor beast, descry. The reins wherewith my rider doth me tie Are humbled thoughts, which bit of reverence move, Curbed in with fear, but with gilt boss above Of hope, which makes it seem fair to the eye. The wand is will; thou, fancy, saddle art, Girt fast by memory; and while I spur My horse, he spurs with sharp desire to my heart; He sits me fast, however I do stir; And now hath made me to his hand so right That in the manage myself takes delight.
A strife is grown between Virtue and Love, While each pretends that Stella must be his: Her eyes, her lips, her all, saith Love, do this, Since they do wear his badge, most firmly prove. But Virtue thus that title doth disprove, That Stella (O dear name) that Stella is That virtuous soul, sure heir of heav’nly bliss; Not this fair outside, which our hearts doth move. And therefore, though her beauty and her grace Be Love’s indeed, in Stella’s self he may By no pretense claim any manner place. Well, Love, since this demur our suit doth stay, Let Virtue have that Stella's self; yet thus,Let Virtue but that body grant to us.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show; So children still readread To discern and discover you with awfulawful Archaic term for “awe-filled”. eyes, As my young Dove may in your precepts wise Her grant to me, by her own virtue know. For late with heart most high, with eyes most low, I crav’d the thing which ever she denies: She lightning Lovelightning Love That is, lightening Love, displaying Venus’ skiesVenus’ skies Venus as both the planet (evening star) and the goddess of Love,Least once should not be heard, twice said, No, No. SingSing … sing This line is an example of epanalepsis, the poetic technique of beginning and ending the line with the same word. then my Muse, now Io Pæan Io Pæan Homer began his hymn to Apollo with these words, which serve as a Latinized version of the phrase “Sing Muse...” sing, Heav’ns envy not at my high triumphing: But Grammar’s force with sweet success confirm, For Grammar says (O this dear Stella weigh,) For Grammar says (to Grammar who says nay) That in one speech two Negatives affirm.
Desire, though thou my old companion art, And oft so clings to my pure Love that I One from the other scarcely can descry, While each doth blow the fire of my heart, Now from thy fellowship I needs must part; Venus is taught with Dian’s wings to fly; I must no more in thy sweet passions lie; Virtue’s gold now must head my Cupid’s dart. Service and honor, wonder with delight, Fear to offend, will worthy to appear, Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite: These things are let me by my only dear; But thou, Desire, because thou wouldst have all, Now banished art. But yet alas how shall?
Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history; If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame A nest for my young praise in laurel tree: In truth I sweare, I wish not there should be Graved in mine epitaph a Poet’s name: Nay if I would, could I just title make, That any laud to me thereof should grow, Without my plumes from others’ wings I take. For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.
Stella, since thou so right a princess art Of all the powers which life bestows on me, There ere by them aught undertaken be They first resort unto that sovereign part; Sweet, for a while give respite to my heart, Which pants as though it still should leap to thee, And on my thoughts give thy lieutenancy To this great cause, which needs both use and art, And as a queen, who from her presence sends Whom she employs, dismiss from thee my wit, Till it have wrought what thy own will attends. On servants’ shame oft master’s blame doth sit. Oh let not fools in me thy works reprove, And scorning say, “See what it is to love.”
Only joy, now here you are, Fit to hear and ease my care; Let my whispering voice obtain, Sweet reward for sharpest pain; Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Night hath closed all in her cloak, Twinkling stars love-thoughts provoke: Danger hence good care doth keep, Jealousy itself doth sleep; Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Better place no wit can find, Cupid’s yoke to loose or bind: These sweet flowers on fine bed too, Us in their best language woo; Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. This small light the moon bestows, Serves thy beams but to disclose, So to raise my hap more high; Fear not else, none can us spy: Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. That you heard was but a mouse, Dumb sleep holdeth all the house; Yet asleep, methinks they say, Young folks, take time while you may: Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Niggard Time threats, if we miss This large offer of our bliss, Long stay ere he grant the same; Sweet then, while each thing doth frame, Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Your fair mother is abed, Candles out, and curtains spread: She thinks you do letters write. Write, but first let me indite: Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Sweet, alas, why strive you thus? Concord better fitteth us: Leave to Mars the force of hands, Your power in your beauty stands; Take me to thee, and thee to me. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be. Woe to me, and do you swear Me to hate, but I forbear, Cursèd by my destines all That brought me so high to fall: Soon with my death I will please thee. No, no, no, no, my dear, let be.
Whose sense in so evil consort, their stepdame Nature lays, That ravishing delight in them most sweet tunes do not raise; Or if they do delight therein, yet are so cloyed with wit, As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it: O let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in wonder’s schools, To be (in things past bounds of wit) fools, if they be not fools. Who have so leaden eyes, as not to see sweet beauty’s show, Or seeing, have so wooden wits, as not that worth to know; Or knowing, have so muddy minds, as not to be in love;  Or loving, have so frothy thoughts, as eas’ly thence to move: Or let them see these heavenly beams, and in fair letters read A lesson fit, both sight and skill, love and firm love to breed. Hear then, but then with wonder hear; see but adoring see, No mortal gifts, no earthly fruits, now here descended be; See, do you see this face? a face? nay, image of the skies, Of which the two life-giving lights are figured in her eyes: Hear you this soul-invading voice, and count it but a voice? The very essence of their tunes, when Angels do rejoice.
The cruel majority emerges! Hail to the cruel majority! They will punish the poor for being poor. They will punish the dead for having died. Nothing can make the dark turn into light for the cruel majority. Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror. If the cruel majority would only cup their ears the sea would wash over them. The sea would help them forget their wayward children. It would weave a lullaby for young & old. (See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears, one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.) One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud between his thumb & middle finger, to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps. He is a little god but not a poet. (See how his body heaves.) The cruel majority love crowds & picnics. The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags. The cruel majority celebrate their birthday. Hail to the cruel majority again! The cruel majority weep for their unborn children, they weep for the children that they will never bear. The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow. (Then why are the cruel majority always laughing? Is it because night has covered up the city's walls? Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness? The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?) Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness. They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass. The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority. Hail to the cruel majority! Hail! hail! to the cruel majority! The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams. The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority. Then the cruel majority line up to be buried. Those who love death will love the cruel majority. Those who know themselves will know the fear the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror. The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor. They order the sun to shine only on weekdays. The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree. Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends. The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky. (If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows, they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.) Hail to the god of the cruel majority! Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god! Hail to his face in the mirror! Hail to their faces as they float around him! Hail to their blood & to his! Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them! Hail to their world & their god! Hail & farewell! Hail & farewell! Hail & farewell!
1 he picks a coin up from the ground it burns his hand like ashes it is red & marks him as it marks the others hidden he is hidden in the forest in a world of nails his dibbik fills him 2 Each night another one would hang himself. Airless boxcars. Kaddish. "What will they do with us?" The brown & black spots on their bellies. So many clothes. The field was littered. Ten thousand corpses in one place. Arranged in layers. I am moving down the field from right to left—reversing myself at every step. The ground approaches. Money. And still his great- est fear was that he would lose his shoes. 3 earth, growing fat with the slime of corpses green & pink that ooze like treacle, turn into a kind of tallow that are black at evening that absorb all light
a trembling old man dreams of a chinese garden a comical old man dreams of newspapers under his rabbi's hat a simple tavernkeeper dreams of icicles & fisheyes a sinister tavernkeeper dreams of puddles with an angel of the law in every drop the furrier's plump daughter is dreaming of a patch of old vanilla the furrier's foreign daughter is dreaming of a hat from which a marten hangs the proud accountant dreams of a trolleycar over the frozen river the reluctant accountant dreams of his feet sleep in a fresh pair of red socks the silly uncle dreams of a history written by a team of Spanish doctors the uncle in the next apartment dreams of the cost of Katmandu the retired gangster dreams of a right turn into a field of sacred lemons the dancing gangster dreams of a carriage, a donkey, & a hand that holds the ace of spades the grim man with a proposition dreams of his fingers entering a pair of gloves the excited man with a proposition dreams of the letter E torn from the title of his poem the remarkable elevator operator dreams of the marriage of karl marx the easy elevator operator dreams of a seashell at the entry to the thirteenth floor the candid photographer dreams of a wooden synagogue inside his brother's camera the secret photographer dreams of a school of golden herrings drifting out to sea the yiddish dadaist dreams of rare steaks & platonic pleasures the rosy dadaist dreams that a honeycomb is being squashed against his face the mysterious stranger dreams of a white tablecloth on which black threads are falling the stranger whom no one sees dreams of his sister holding up a string of pearls the asthmatic tax collector dreams of a row of sacred numbers the rebellious tax collector dreams of a bathhouse set among old trees the robust timber merchant dreams of a wind that blows inside the blacksmith's bellows the sobbing timber merchant dreams that his hands have pressed the buttocks of his dreaming bride the man with a fish between his teeth dreams of a famine for forty-five days the man dressed in white dreams of a potato the savage gentile dreams of a dancer with flashy lightbulbs on her shoes the repentant gentile dreams of her fingers bringing honey to his lips the fancy barber dreams that his hands massage the captain's neck the silent barber dreams of a rooster with a thread tied to one leg the salty bridegroom dreams of horses galloping they swirl around the bridegroom's house the genuflecting bridegroom dreams of what his bride slides through her fingers he sees it white & trembling in the early sabbath light the fat man in the derby dreams that it is spring that his seed soon will be falling through an empty sky the ecstatic man in the derby dreams that if he dreams it his words will turn into flowers
Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from  the mountains across, although the day was harsh and  tomorrow foreign. But, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over  the little garden of the dead, She Alone, Standing, with the few domestics of the night—the blowing  rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns—  at sea’s entry, wakeful Otherly beauty! Only the waves’ words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others  resembling the dead’s that startle in the cypress, strange  zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head.  And one Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real  landscape to be seen, Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel,  exactly showing how she’s born, Beauty Or what we otherwise call tear. And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the  glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an  ancient prostitute’s, cheekbones Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin. “Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place  where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be  from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists. “Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence  and the co-ruling of the stars, “As if I didn’t know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme  silence are the most repellent thuds “And that, since it became unbearable inside a man’s chest, solitude  dispersed and seeded stars!”
Spotlight a  SCENE ONE: Open-air court in the ancient city of Athens. The accused arrive  and proceed among curses and cries of Death! Death!  SCENE TWO: A jail in the same city, beneath the Acropolis, walls half-eaten by  dampness. On the ground, a miserly straw mat and in the corner,  an earthenware jar of water. On the outside wall, a shadow: the  guard. SCENE THREE: Constantinople. In the harem of the Holy Place, in candlelight,  the Queen throws a pouch of gold coins to the Head Eunuch  who bows and looks at her significantly. By the open door, his  men at the ready.  SCENE FOUR: Drawing room of a large Monastery. Oblong table, the abbot at  its head. Sweaty monks come and go bringing news: a crowd  spills into the streets, setting fires, destroying everything.  SCENE FIVE: Nauplio. Greek and Bavarian officers outside the King’s quarters  converse in low tones. A messenger takes the dispatch and heads  toward the steps that lead on high to Palamidi.  SCENE SIX: In front of an old and empty lot in contemporary Athens, a  crowd, motley with priests and bishops, gathers to cast a stone,  “the stone of anathema.” SCENE SEVEN: Low buildings of EAT/ESA. In the courtyard, drunken soldiers.  Braying and lewd posturing. The officer leaving some cell says  something to the military doctor. Behind them thuds and cries  are heard.
Freely beside me the vineyards are running and unbridled Remains the sky. Wildfires trade pinecones and one Donkey bolts uphill  for a little cloud St. Heracleitos’s day and something’s up That even noses can’t diagnose: Tricks of a shoeless wind snagging the hem Of Fate’s nightgown and leaving Us in the open air of capricorns  exposed Secretly I go with all the loot in my mind For a life unbowed from the beginning. No candles no  chandeliers Only a gold anemone’s engagement for a diamond Feeling its way to where? Asking what? Our moon’s half-  shadow needs You to console even the graves Homoethnic or not. The crux is that the scent of earth Lost even to bloodhounds With its weeds onions and creeks Must be restored to its idiom So what! A word contains you peasant of night’s green Efessos! Forefather sulphur phosphorus your fourteenth  generation Inside the orange groves gold words Sharing the scalpel’s chisel Tents as yet unpitched  others midair Lost poles suddenly grinding. Sermons Rise from the seafloor of the facing coves Twin scythes for theater or temple Fresh valley springs and other curly streams Of thus and so. If ever wisdom Planned circles of clover and dog grass Another world might live just as before  your fingerprint Letters will exist. People will read and grab History’s tail once more. Just let the vineyards gallop and the sky  remain Unbridled as children want it With roosters and pinecones and blue kites  flags On Saint Heracleitos’s day  child’s is the kingdom.
I would not have gotten in this boat with you. I would not except where else was there at the dock’s end to go? The water was cold. I would not have let you row the boat. I could see what kind of man you were. I would not but who was there to choose between you and me? I would not have let you throw away the oars. I knew what would happen next, except what else was there to do, struggle in a boat with a leak over cold water?
1 I keep placing my hands over my face, the fingertips just resting on the place where I feel my eyebrows and the fine end of a bone. My eyes are covered with the blood of my hands, my palms hold my jaws. I do this at dinner. My daughter asksAre you all right? and by a common miracle when I smile she knows I am.  2 I ask her what she will do after we eat. Sleep she tells me. But I will clean the deer skull, wash it.  3 You gave me this skull in the woods told me to bring it clean and tell the story I had told you before, about how the deer had come to me, and I said I would.  4 And I put this skull on an old newspaper, pulled the lower part of the jaws free, touched it first carefully, as if it would fall apart in my hands, the bone paper- thin, and then I saw I could scrub, so brushed the surface with steel and my fingers and more and more this surface became familiar to me.  5 I wanted to see the lines of it what it would be if it had been polished by the wind, the water, and my hands, these agents making the skull more itself. Slowly I was not afraid at all and my fingers went into the deepest holes of this thing, not afraid for myself or it, feeling suddenly as if cleaning this small fragment of earth away from the crevices inside was like loving.  6 But it was when I touched the place where the eyes were that I knew this was the shell of the deer that had lived here, this was this deer and not this deer, her home and now empty of her, but not empty of her, I knew also, not empty of her, as my hands trembled.  7 And in that instant remembered you had been in that body of that deer dying, what does it feel like to be a deer dying, the death consumes you like birth, you are nowhere else but in the center.  8 Remembering those gentle deer that watched me as I wept, or the deer that leapt as if out of my mind, when I saw speaking there in that green place the authority of the heart and the deer of the woods where my feet stood, stared at me until I whispered to her and cried at her presence.  9 And when I cleaned the skull I washed myself and sat my body half out of the water and put my hands again over my face, my fingers edging the bone over my eyes, and I thought how good this feels and this is a gesture you make.  10 Tell this story of the deer’s skull you asked quietly and so I came in my own time to put these words carefully here slowly listing each motion on this thin paper as fragile and as tough as knowledge.  1978
It’s like so many other things in life to which you must say no or yes. So you take your car to the new mechanic. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust. The package left with the disreputable-looking clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit, the envelope passed by dozens of strangers— all show up at their intended destinations. The theft that could have happened doesn’t. Wind finally gets where it was going through the snowy trees, and the river, even when frozen, arrives at the right place. And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.
Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible. - Reb Alcé "What is going on behind this door?"  "A book is shedding its leaves."  "What is the story of the book?"  "Becoming aware of a scream."  "I saw rabbis go in."  "They are privileged readers. They come in small groups to give us their comments."  "Have they read the book?"  "They are reading it."  "Did they happen by for the fun of it?"  "They foresaw the book. They are prepared to encounter it."  "Do they know the characters?"  "They know our martyrs."  "Where is the book set?"  "In the book."  "Who are you?"  "I am the keeper of the house."  "Where do you come from?"  "I have wandered."  "Is Yukel your friend?"  "I am like Yukel."  "What is your lot?"  "To open the book."  "Are you in the book?"  "My place is at the threshold."  "What have you tried to learn?"  "I sometimes stop on the road to the sources and question the signs, the world of my ancestors."  "You examine recaptured words."  "The nights and mornings of the syllables which are mine, yes."  "Your mind is wandering."  "I have been wandering for two thousand years."  "I have trouble following you."  "I, too, have often tried to give up."  "Do we have a tale here?"  "My story has been told so many times."  "What is your story?"  "Ours, insofar as it is absent."  "I do not understand."  "Speaking tortures me."  "Where are you?"  "In what I say."  "What is your truth?"  "What lacerates me."  "And your salvation?"  "Forgetting what I said."  "May I come in? It is getting dark."  "In each word there burns a wick."  "May I come in? It is getting dark around my soul."  "It is dark around me, too."  "What can you do for me?"  "Your share of luck is in yourself."  "Writing for the sake of writing does nothing but show contempt."  "Man is a written bond and place."  "I hate what is said in place I have left behind."  "You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have left is you without you."  "You oppose me to myself. How could I ever win this fight?"  "Defeat is the price agreed on."  "You are a Jew, and you talk like one."  "The four letters JUIF which designate my origin are your four fingers. You can use your thumb to crush me."  "You are a Jew, and you talk like one. But I am cold. It is dark. Let me come into the house."  "There is a lamp on my table. And the house is in the book."  "So I will live in the house after all."  "You will follow the book, whose every page is an abyss where the wing shines with the name."
"We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on." - Reb Carasso Mardohai Simhon claimed the silk scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror.  "Look," he said, "my head is separated from my body by a scarf. Who dares give me the life if I say I walk with a knotted mirror under my chin?  "The scarf reflects a face, and you think it is of flesh.  "Night is the mirror. Day the scarf. Moon and sun reflected features. But my true face, brothers, where did I lose it?"  At his death, a large scar was discovered on his neck.  The meaning of this anecdote was discussed by the rabbis.  Reb Alphandery, in his authority as the oldest, spoke first.  "A double mirror," he said, "separates us from the Lord so that God sees Himself when trying to see us, and we, when trying to see Him, see only our own face."  "Is appearance no more than the reflections thrown back and forth by a set of mirrors?" asked Reb Ephraim. "You are no doubt alluding to the soul, Reb Alphandery, in which we see ourselves mirrored. But the body is the place of the soul, just as the mountain is the bed of the brook. The body has broken the mirror."  "The brook," continued Reb Alphandery, "sleeps on the summit. The brook's dream is of water, as is the brook. It flows for us. Our dreams extend us.  "Do you not remember this phrase of Reb Alsem's: 'We live out the dream of creation, which is God's dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nests.'  "And did not Reb Hames write: 'Birds of night, my dreams explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.'"  "Are dreams the limpid discourse between the facets of a crystal block?" continued Reb Ephraim. "The world is of glass. You know it by its brilliance, night or day."  "The earth turns in a mirror. The earth turns in a scarf," replied Reb Alphandery.  "The scarf of a dandy with a nasty scar," said Reb Ephraim.  ("Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time."  - Reb Mares)  And Yukel said:  "The bundle of the Wandering Jew contains the earth and more than one star."  "Whatever contains is itself contained," said Reb Mawas.  The story I told you, as well as the commentaries it inspired, will be recorded in the book of the eye. The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it?  ("God is sculpted."  - Reb Moyal)
"Dullness of words where God speaks. A dark which feels good. Drawn curtains. On the dark page lines continue the crease and the dream, the space between." -Reb Rissel 1  "Hope: the following page. Do not close the book."  "I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope."  "Perhaps hope is the book."  2  "In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question is the flash of an answer.  "My route riddled with crystals."  -Reb Librad  And Yukel said:  "If an answer were possible death would not travel alongside life, life would not have a shadow. The universe would be light.  "Contradiction is the scream of a soul drawn and quartered by the moment. Did not Reb Sedra write: 'Here is grain for your field: a grain of life, a grain of death. The grain of life will nourish your death, the grain of death feed your life.'"  ("Death will get the better of me. God can only help  me in the void."
...this insignificant interval between death and dying. One cannot accept or refuse, O death, emptiness, air, sun. The "I" is the miracle of the "You."  "This follows from a certain logic," he said: "the 'I' to designate the 'You,' the 'You' to justify the 'I,' and 'He' for disappearing."  There is no present. There is a past haunted by the future and a future tormented by the past.  The present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time brimming with life.  (Now that all is silent within me, will I, who have  hardly known how to talk to myself, still be able to  speak? I almost cannot hear myself any more. On this  'almost' I shall rest my words or, rather, what stub-  bornly still wants to be words—though they be deaf  to the call of the world—an take entire charge of  them. Expressing nothing, they will express me all the  better.)
1 I find a strange knowledge of wind, an open door in the mountain pass where everything intersects. Believe me. This will not pass. This is a world where flags contain themselves, and are still, marked by their unfurled edges. Lean stuff sways on the boughs of pitch pine: silver, almost tinsel, all light gone blue and sprouting orange oils in a last bouquet.  2 These were the nest builders; I caught one last morning, I sang so it fell down, stupid, from the trees. They’re so incorrect in their dead skin. Witness their twig feet, the mistake of their hands. They will follow you. They yearn pebbles for their gullets to grind their own seed. They swallow so selflessly and die like patriots.  3 Last Christmas, a family of five woke from their dreaming and dreamed themselves over: the baby in its pink pajamas, the boy in the red flannel bathrobe he grabbed from the door, a mother, a father, and a sister in curlers; all died. A wood frame house, a cannister of oil, a match—watch as it unsettles. They were so cold; umber.  4 I am away from the knowledge of animal mystics, brujas and sorcerers or the nudging chants of a Tlingit Kachina. I am frightened by regions with wills of their own, but when my people die in the snow I wonder did the depths billow up to reach them?
When summer ended the leaves of snapdragons withered taking their shrill-colored mouths with them. They were still, so quiet. They were violet where umber now is. She hated and she hated to see them go. Flowers born when the weather was good - this she thinks of, watching the branch of peaches daring their ways above the fence, and further, two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other, arcing their bodies in grim determination to find what is good, what is given them to find. These are warriors distancing themselves from history. They find peace in the way they contain the wind and are gone.
All that is uncared for. Left alone in the stillness in that pure silence married to the stillness of nature. A door off its hinges, shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the tin roof rusted through. The rustle of weeds in their different kinds of air in the mornings, year after year. A pecan tree, and the house made out of mud bricks. Accurate and unexpected beauty, rattling and singing. If not to the sun, then to nothing and to no one.
I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone O homeless hand on many a street Accept this change from me A friendly smile or word is sweet As fearless charity Woe workingman who hears the cry And cannot spare a dime Nor look into a homeless eye Afraid to give the time So rich or poor no gold to talk A smile on your face The homeless ones where you may walk Receive amazing graceI dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone
I Or Your Woman The night was a bad one. I only saw one other person out: A big black man on muleback Riding along the levee, marking the water. There was a lantern in his hand And what you could call a grim smile on the lips. I shifted down gears, Rolled down the window, turned the radio low. And said, “Say there, man, how goes it?” But he couldn’t hear me for the rain And the song on his transistor radio. “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s raining, Raining to beat hell.” Said I, “Do you think it’s going to quit?” “Friend, I couldn’t tell you.” When big water will, you call everyman friend . . . We said our goodnights, Went on, by mule and flatbed truck, wearing black Rubber, cold to the bone, Like divers from different ships meeting below. All you can do is nod, some of the times. At least, we spoke, knowing that living Anywhere near the river You speak when you can; the only thing you try To hold is your liquor, And we had none, that bad night on the levee. Always down the road, I looked up In the mirror. And I’m sure he’d a done the same. II Midnight I almost slid off, once Imagining this cloud was a pall And the moon was a body. I don’t know who put coins over her eyes. When I got to Rampion’s Ferry, I thought I was the only one there. I mean it was quiet, Except for the current, the cables, and the rain. I got a piece of rope Out of the back of my truck, and wound it Around the generator Engine; it kicked right off the first pull. The yellow bug lights came on, And I saw a body move under a purple blanket. He cussed me out For waking him up, pulling his old self up. There was some kind of fish In the weave of his poncho; other figures Of snakes and birds, too. I didn’t mean to wake the awnry fellow up, I wonder if I did. A strange odor came from underneath him When he dragged out his towsack. It didn’t smell of something burning, but of Something that was singed. Like the rain, it didn’t let up. “Are we going crosst it, or not,” He told me in a voice, half-blooded song. III Some Past Twelve Someone with a light Rode up before I could see what all He was pulling from the burlap:  Blue calling chalk you find in pool halls, ivory Tusks, a stringer with rotten heads The good book and another I couldn’t pronounce— Just as worn, And one of those paperweight crystals that snows. He had strummed the mandolin twice, A couple of sounds blue as a fox in trouble In a snowdrift on a ridge, like weeds Burning underwater, a few licks of silent fire. When I recognized the lookout The ferry wasn’t more than a few feet off the bank, So the mule made it aboard, easy; Its hooves on the planks like a mad, rough carpenter Nailing driftwood together. Oh, we made it across. We didn’t exactly Hit the dock on the head, But we floated on down to Vahalia’s Landing. We had a good time. The foreigner played the mandolin, the river Reached its crest, And the man on the mule and I drank way into the morning. They heard us, the ones on land. “We’re a floating whorehouse, without noun women.” And in the dead of night, Rain and all, we motioned them on.
The white clothes on the line put the man to sleep. He was sitting on a soda case Leaning back on the porch. He rolled down his sleeves with his eyes shut. He could feel the sun going into the trees. He wanted to catch the evening ferry And meet someone across the river. He dreamed about her Putting polish on her nails. He was in the woods and many women Were walking around him in a circle. He thought about crosses in their blood. As it got to be night he could feel the heat in his face. He was going to open his eyes. And look up at the moon. It was like the light blue handkerchief She gave him to go with his dark suit. That’s when he felt the hot salt all over him Like broken glass. He was afraid to open his eyes. He wondered if he could use any words on it. But the big woman in the black dress Was already in the backseat of the car Rolling the window up with one hand And making a sign on him with the other. She was in the car, too. He saw her biting her nails when they pulled away. There was a dead snake on his shoes. He knew there would be a circle Of little beating hearts in his bed, And before he could get home They would be dry and still.
Man is so afraid, he look down at cock, long ago many centuries ships land on the enemy’s beach, take down mast in the dark, climb up cliffs in the fog, ram enemy’s door, do bad things in castle, oh yea, man go crazy play in blood like baby with duck in bathtub, man think about favorite dog, got worms in heart, takes dog to field trial, dog sniffs out man’s lies, point at fool in frozen water, fool man, dead dog, man look at leaf frozen in pond, man think about woman in new cabin beside fire, walls bleeding rosin, man forget about dog, man want son, boy strong, call boy elephant, man cannot sleep right, have bad itch in butthole, man think cancer maybe, man wake up beside woman, moon come in window, man glad he has no city, city can die for all he cares, man smells fingers, smell bad, man gets up to wash fingers, man steps on broken glass, sits down on commode and sucks his foot, man thinks about God, man says to God If I eat right will You take away cancer, God no say, man flush pot, man decides go to India, study other God, other God take away cancer, bring back dog, make women go crazy, man go visit little naked man on mountain, man give him all his money, little naked man say go back home, stand on head with fresh egg in asshole three times a day, man does what he says, oh yea, man think about troopships, man is so afraid, man take chill, man get old real quick man nobody, everything dark, man spit in papersack, man look at medicine on table beside bed, man look at TV, Tarzan movie already over, so sad so sad, man call doctor, say to make him young, doctor look at secretary pulling up panties, say oh yea, take man’s money, man get young, man decide go to Africa, man think everything swell when he get back home, put many heads on wall, many skins, first night wife run off, fool man, so man read book, man like, so man read another book, soon man read book all time, don’t care about money, don’t care about woman, only thing man remember is what he read, on weekends go to old cabin, look at pine knots, think about what he read, think about history, look down at cock,  man learn, once was another man become king, but king had no sons, king get old, get sad, king get so afraid, look at his cock, oh yea, one night king run everybody out of castle, have private dinner, just with family, and favorite  dog, tell daughter to hop up on table, king takes pheasant gravy, pours on daughter, rubs daughter’s thighs with  gravy, picks up dog, tells dog lick daughter, king tells daughter not to be afraid, not be sad, tell daughter be strong, daughter  strong, daughter looks at mother, says watch, daughter takes dog by the mouth, breaks jaws, king says daughter strong, man know lot about history, man afraid, man go crazy on street one day, man go jail, man call lawyer tell lawyer shoot two women save my life, man give lawyer lot of money, lawyer go out to eat, talks about man, man get out of jail, oh yea man like imagine too, man like to clip cut back of magazine, man like sendoff, man also like guns, life strange,
We go on and we tremble. God says we can screw now. God says to give up all your lovers, Time to die. When I was younger I drove a Lincoln. God said to trade it in. A tad lovely, then, and terrible, And sick of my own kind, I wanted to become a woman. I wanted to wash the feet of other women In public, I wanted his eyes On me, olives on the ground. I gave you my hand, Now I go around with my sleeve Tucked in my coat. I climb no trees, touch One breast at a time, Hold no hands myself. I go on and I tremble With your back in my blood, The clap my mother left me. With me no more, and now, And forever, and even always The dust of my feet In the desert I give you stranger my sign, My peace, But God you remember You fucked me out of my hand.
The yolk went down my leg Like a beautiful snail without a shell, Went down the hill To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies, Into the lips of pond minnows, Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders Having dived and lost, then into The paw of the lame panther Who loped back to her lair with it. As for the white, it stayed with me, Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.
Is like a lyric poem with seven basic themes first the cottonpicker dragging behind it a wagon of testicles a pair of pliers which can fill in for a cross in a pinch then there is the warm pond between the maiden’s thighs next we have some friends of yours and mine who shall be with us always Pablo the artist the pubis of the moon Pablo the cellist panther of silence Pablo the poet the point of no return and in case of emergency the seventh and final theme of this systematic poem is the systematic way death undresses in front of you
To the gentlemen from the south  to the tourists from the north who write poems about the south  to the dumb-ass students I’d like to ask one lousy question have you ever seen a regatta of flies sail around a pile of shit and then come back and picnic on the shit just once in your life have you heard flies on shit because I cut my eye teeth on flies floating in shit
Nicanor Parra I’m not going to lie Through my teeth to you Like the poets from Minnesota, The South, and the West, And New York City. Most of all in life I would like to fuck a thirteen-year-old again, And I don’t have any hesitations About saying I’d rather be Marlon Brando Than I would T. S. Eliot, etc. I have more respect for Muhammad Ali Than any other living man. Of course I’ve tried Esquire, But my shoes aren’t platforms And I don’t know shit about canoes. Although I can’t prove it, Most poets work for the highway dept. There are more of them than there are Flies and engineers. And I stink like a dead mule under an overpass.
Raymond Radiguet Like seven birds sleeping on the plateau Overlooking the shipwreck of love, mystery Of the drunken visitors wandering off With your wife, men who talk with a bad accent, The condemned the abandoned, one day of silence, Two days of silence, dreams shattered and protected, The more the blossoms the more you suffer.
Luis Buñuel A white bull, a cassock, an antique mirror The famous ones have passed hours in front of, A midnight blue tuxedo, a fainting couch, a key To a box of lewd photographs, a swastika, Twelve bales of hay, three grave plots, a statue Of Christ holding a heart pierced by a dagger, A black patch, all kinds of utensils for the sick— Including thirty-nine feet of catheter tubing, A houseboat, a dog, a baby grand, an oar Said to have been carved from a lovely river And a woman’s hat by Alfred Jarry, a mattress, A shotgun, a diving helmet, an essay on The Art Of Taxidermy and a clitoris mounted on a ring Like quartz, a crescent wrench, a bulldozer.
Raymond Roussel Two girls runaway from the Home. They have a revolver in their possession. The Sisters Of Our Lady have given up looking for them, returning in the night with soft candles. The sleek clouds have thrown their riders, and the bees are returning to the honey, the clover at the edge of the  cliff black as eyelids, damp as blue mussels flexing at the moon. The girls look in the stolen mirror, then throw their shoes in the sea. They take off one another’s dress, posing on the rocks that jut out over the faded water of the last days. The clover beat down from their splendid feet, the clover quiet like a vault. Nearby in a ship named for early death, I drink wine like a city. Anchored far off the continent of love.  Strange, but bees do not die in their own honey, and how the dead are toted off, how the sweet moons are deposited in the catacombs. The clover at the edge of the sea like a chemise, place where animals have lain. They help one another with their hair, their dresses blowing back to land. They look over the cliff, spit on the beach. Birds I have never seen going by.
Hans Richter What if the moon was essence of quinine And high heels were a time of day When certain birds bled The chauffeur is telling the cook The antler would pry into ice floes Swim with a lamp And we’d be shivering in a ditch Biting through a black wing There would be boats There would be a dream country The great quiet humming of the soul at night The only sound is a shovel Clearing a place for a mailbox
I had my quiet time early in the morning Eating Almond Joys with Mother. We’d sit on the back porch and talk to God. We really had a good time. Later on, I’d sort baseball cards Or look for bottles. In the afternoon I’d shoot blackbirds. Jimmy would go by the house for ice water And make the truck backfire. Oh, I really liked that. That was the reason he did it. In the evening the cottontails ran across the groves. I shot one and put him in the backseat. He went to the bathroom. Jimmy said I knocked the shit out of him. At night we would listen to the ballgame. Then to the Hoss Man. Jimmy liked “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby”   by Jimmy Reed.
There was always a lizard Or a frog around the pump, Waiting for a little extra water Or a butterfly to light. Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms. I got the worms under the slick boards. The pump would bite you in the winter. It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go. The blades of Johnson grass were tall And sharp around the pump stand. I had to hoe them all the time Nobody filled the prime jar, though. One time, I cut the tongue Out of a Buster Brown shoe And gave it to the pump. It made a good sucker washer. Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus. I liked bathing buck naked Under the pump, Not in a goddamn washtub.
When the rain hits the snake in the head, he closes his eyes and wishes he were asleep in a tire on the side of the road, so young boys could roll him over, forever.
Soon I will make my appearance But first I must take off my rings And swords and lay them out all Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river In reckoning the days I have Left on this earth I will use No fingers
after Jean Follain In the evenings they listen to the same tunes nobody could call happy somebody turns up at the edge of town the roses bloom and an old dinner bell rings once more under the thunder clouds In front of the porch posts of the store a man seated on a soda water case turns around and spits and says to everybody in his new set of clothes holding up his hands as long as I live nobody touches my dogs my friends
for Nicholas Fuhrmann I Pig I was in the outhouse I heard somebody at the pump I looked out the chink hole It was the two fishermen They stole fish One man gave the other one some money He flipped a fifty-cent piece up I lost it in the sun I saw the snake doctors riding each other The other man said “You lose” He took something else out of his pocket It shined They had a tow sack I thought they were cleaning fish I looked up I saw the snake doctors riding each other I took my eye away It was dark in the outhouse I whistled I heard the pump again It sounded broken I looked out the chink hole It wasn’t the pump It was the pig The guitar player cut them out The midget helped him “Pump me some water, midget” he said The pig ran off The guitar player washed off his hands The midget washed off the nuts He got a drink My eye hurt He laughed He cleaned the blood off his knife He wiped   it on his leg He started singing The dog tried to get the nuts But the midget kicked him The guitar player picked them up He put them in his pocket The dog went over to the pig He licked him I pulled my pants up I went outside I got the pig I walked over to the pump I said “Don’t you ever lay a hand   on this pig again” The guitar player laughed He asked me if I wanted the nuts back He took them out of his pocket He spit on them He shook them like dice He threw them on the ground He said “Hah” The midget stomped on them I had the pig under my arm He was bleeding on my foot I said “Midget, I got friends on that river” II The Acolyte The men rode by I passed them on the road They smelled like dead fish The one in front had a guitar on his back The other one had a chain saw I was riding the hog He weighed three-hundred pounds I called him Holy Ghost The midget flashed a knife He thumbed the blade He smiled at me He called me “Pig Rider” I rode over to Baby Gauge’s I was on my way to church I had to get the red cassock I tied the hog to the front porch Baby Gauge was swinging in a tire Born In The Camp With Six Toes was sleeping in the icebox Baby Gauge said “Be at the levee at three o’clock” I put the robe on I said “I almost got drowned last time” “Going to have a mighty good time” he said “Going to be an eclipse” Born In The Camp With Six Toes said I rode the hog to church I took the new shoes off I lit the candles I changed the book I rung the bell I was drinking the wine I heard Baby Gauge yell I ran down the aisle I saw the men at the trough They were beating the hog over the head with sledge hammers It was like the clock in the German pilot’s shack One of his eyes was hanging out And the trough was running over with blood They held his head under the water He was rooting in his own blood He pumped it out in a mist Like a buck shot in the lung It was black He broke loose I ran down the road yelling I stepped on soda bottle caps I ran through sardine cans I tripped on the cassock The hog was crazy He ran into the church He ran into tombstones I said “Somebody throw me something” Chinaman threw me a knife I ran after the hog He was heading for the river I jumped on his back I rode the hog I hugged his neck I stabbed him seven times I wanted the knife to go into me He kept running I ran the knife across his throat And the blood came out like a bird We ran into a sycamore tree When the cloud passed over the moon Like a turkey shutting its eye I rowed out into the slew Not allowing myself to sing gospel music I woke up in a boat It was full of blood My feet were dragging through the water A knife was sticking in the prow And the sun was black It was dark But I saw the snake doctors riding each other I saw my new shoes I put them on They filled up with blood I took the surplice off I threw it in the river I watched it sink There was hog blood in my hair I knelt in the prow with the knife in my mouth I looked at myself in the water I heard someone singing on the levee I was buried in a boat I woke up I set it afire with the taper I watched myself burn I reached in the ashes and found a red knife I held my head under the water  so I wouldn’t go crazy It was some commotion I rowed the boat in a circle with one oar A hundred people were in the water They had white robes on Some of them had umbrellas They jumped up and down on the bank They rowed down the levee They were yelling and singing One of them saw me I saw a horse with tassels I put my head under the water I thought I was dead I hit it on a cypress knee Two Negroes came riding through the river They rode towards me on the moon-blind horse One of them was drinking soda water “Where are you going, boy” Baby Gauge said The horse swam back to the levee I was with them The boat drifted away A man said “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego” III Hambone They tied his hind legs together And hung him in a tree with a log chain I saw them I was on Baby Gauge’s horse I threw a knife at the midget So they hung me up by the feet too I saw them break his neck I saw them pull his legs apart  like a wishbone I wished the dead came back The midget stood on a bucket He reached up in the hog’s throat And pulled the heart out The dog was lying on the ground With his mouth open It took all day to butcher the hog I got dizzy I saw the snake doctors riding each other They turned the bucket over It filled up with blood They made a fire The guitar player beat his hand over his leg He put some meat on the fire They tried to make me eat it The midget spit a bone on the ground The other one picked it up He put it on his finger He went over and got his guitar He tried to play it like a Negro There was too much grease on his hands He got blood on the guitar The midget danced around the campfire I wanted to cut his throat The dog bayed at the moon And the blue Andalusian rooster played with a snake I was bleeding out my nose The fish bandits loaded the hog on Baby Gauge’s horse They threw blood on the fire And filled the bucket up with guts for fish bait When they rode off I yelled “Peckerwoods” I dreamed I saw Holy Ghost walking around the campfire He was a wild hog with blood on his tushes Along about midnight I heard a boat  but no rowing Somebody short came walking out of the woods With a light on his head The light went out I couldn’t see He drew something out of his boot He grabbed me by the hair I saw a knife in the moonlight “Sweet Jesus” I said Born In The Camp With Six Toes cut me down IV Chainsaw The man cut his hand off at dawn I heard him yell I set up in bed He ran past the window “Don’t let the dog get it” he said I got out of bed I had the long handles on It was cold I threw some wood on the fire I put the dime around my ankle I put my boots on I put a knife in the boot I walked out to the road The blue Andalusian rooster followed me It was dark I heard the chainsaw in the woods I heard him singing all night He was cutting firewood He was drunk The dog quit barking I drew the knife out of my boot I looked for the midget I saw the blood and I tracked it I saw the sun and the moon I saw the snake doctors riding each other The hand was in the sawdust It was moving The hambone was on the finger It was morning The dog didn’t get it I did There was blood on the chainsaw I told the blue rooster “He thought it was a guitar” I walked around the hand seven times I poked it with a stick I sung to it I picked it up like a snake I took the hambone off the finger I put Holy Ghost’s bone in my boot I put the hand on a stump I danced on the hand I peed on it I broke a wine bottle over it I threw it up in the air and a hawk  hit it The dog licked the blood out of the dust I saw the fish bandit’s guitar The blue rooster pecked it I beat the hand with it I threw the guitar in the river The snake doctors lit on it It floated away I went down to the bank I got a pole I put a hook through the hand I washed it off When I touched the wound with my knife  it rolled up in a fist Somebody came by in a boat They held up a big fish So I held up the hand They jumped out of the boat They thought I crossed them One of them said “That wasn’t no hoodoo, was it” It was Baby Gauge I said “No, it was the guitar player’s hand” They swam to the bank I told them how I came by it Born In The Camp With Six Toes said “It won’t Take another fish off my lines” I asked them “You want to shake it” Baby Gauge said “No, I want to spit on it” We spit on the hand They left I wrapped it up in newspaper like fish I took it home I put it under Jimmy’s pillow and he knocked my teeth out I put it in a cigar box with a picture  of Elvis Presley I took it to town I walked over to the dance hall The guitar player was bleeding in the back of the pickup I gave him the cigar box He passed out The midget pulled a knife on me I picked up the hand He ran off On the way home I ran folks off the road When the truck came by the house The guitar player raised up in the bed He said “Give me my hand back” When it was dark I tied fish line to it and hung it  in the outhouse I sung to it The moon shined through the chink hole on the hand I took it down I threw it in a yellow jacket nest I stomped on it I took it to the palm reader I said “Sister, read this” A lot of evenings I listened for them I knew they would come back When a stranger got a drink at night I thought it was the Holy Ghost And sometimes a cloud went by like a three-legged dog And the thunder was someone with a shotgun Letting him have it Now the moon was a fifty-cent piece It was a belly I wanted  to cut open When the flies got bad I kept the hand in the smokehouse V Swimming at Night The midget ran his finger across his neck The other one said “Give it back” I waited in the outhouse I had a sawed-off shotgun The men rode off In the afternoon they sold fish They cleaned them at the pump The scales dried up on their faces They loaded the meat on stolen horses At night they rode up shooting pistols I slept with an ice pick under my pillow One night they rode up drunk The midget was sitting in the guitar player’s lap He said “Come on out” They tied a bale of hay to Baby Gauge’s horse They poured coal oil on it They set it on fire They laughed The horse with the moon eye pranced around them He galloped home I carved wild hog out of a cypress knee I made it the handle I made four tushes out of the hambone I used the blade I brought out of the fire And sealed the pig with It was the blade I put the burning horse to sleep with I called the knife the Holy Ghost To make me go crazy I took all my clothes off And jumped down the hole in the outhouse I grabbed the yellow jacket nest And held it over my heart I pumped cold water over myself And wallowed in the mud I walked through the snake den barefooted I swam the river at midnight With the hand and a blue feather in my mouth And the Holy Ghost around my neck And the hooks caught in my arms they caught in my legs I cut the trot lines in two I saw the guitar player stealing the fish I was swimming beneath the shack Under the sleeping midget With the fish bandit’s hand in my mouth I climbed through the trap door I crawled under the bed I cut the hooks out I believe I was snake bit I put the hand in the slop jar I reached up and tickled his nose with the feather He got out of bed He turned the lights on He let down his pants He reached under the bed for the slop jar He took the lid off He screamed I brought the knife across his leg I hamstrung the midget I swam under the water With the hand in my mouth I came up near the guitar player’s boat He was running the lines I swam to the other end of the trot line I put the hand on a hook I jerked the lines like a big fish The guitar player worked his way down He thought he had a good one I let go of the line He saw his left hand He screamed He fell out of the boat I swam back through the river I buried the knife in the levee I was sleeping in the Negro’s lap He was spitting snuff on my wounds Born In The Camp With Six Toes cut me with a knife Baby Gauge sucked the poison out Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart
My grandmother said when she was young The grass was so wild and high You couldn’t see a man on horseback. In the fields she made out Three barns, Dark and blown down from the weather Like her husbands. She remembers them in the dark, Cursing the beasts, And how they would leave the bed In the morning, The dead grass of their eyes Stacked against her.
When a man knows another man Is looking for him He doesn’t hide. He doesn’t wait To spend another night With his wife Or put his children to sleep. He puts on a clean shirt and a dark suit And goes to the barber shop To let another man shave him. He shuts his eyes Remembers himself as a boy Lying naked on a rock by the water. Then he asks for the special lotion. The old men line up by the chair And the barber pours a little In each of their hands.
It was Sunday, before dinner. My uncles were listening to the opera. O.Z. and I carried my brother in And laid him on the table. The women started screaming. My brother raised up on his side With dried blood on his hands, We killed those goddamn Canale brothers And nobody is ever going to touch us! The men shut their eyes and danced. We drank until morning When everything was quiet. They wiped their eyes, kissed us goodbye and left.
A guy comes walking out of the garden Playing Dark Eyes on the accordian. We’re sitting on the porch, Drinking and spitting, lying. We shut our eyes, snap our fingers. Dewhurst goes out to his truck Like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing And brings back three-half-pints. A little whirlwind occurs in the road, Carrying dust away like a pail of water. We’re drinking serious now, and O.Z. Wants to break in the store for some head cheese, But the others won’t let him. Everybody laughs, dances. The crossroads are all quiet Except for the little man on the accordian. Things are dying down, the moon spills its water. Dewhurst says he smells rain. O.Z. says if it rains he’ll still make a crop. We wait there all night, looking for rain. We haven’t been to sleep, so the blue lizards On the side of the white porch Lose their tails when we try to dream. The man playing the music looks at us, Noticing what we’re up to. He backs off, Holding up his hands in front, smiling, Shaking his head, but before he gets half way Down the road that O.Z. shoots him in the belly. All summer his accordian rotted in the ditch, Like an armadillo turning into a house payment.
at night while the dogs were barking Baby Gauge and I crawled under the fence with knives we made out like the rattlesnake melons were men we didn’t like the new moon ones were wolves I would cut a belly this way he would cut a belly that way the flies came around the sweet juice it was blood to us we tasted it we licked it off the blades we decided not to kill the wolves we wanted to be wolves we stuck the knives in the ground the moon shined on them we turned the pilot caps inside out so the fur would show that way when we crawled under the bob wire a little piece would get caught we wouldn’t though we wanted to leave trails but no scents we tore the melons open we licked the blood off our paws we wanted to be wolves and in the morning all those dead men with their hearts eat out
Sometimes in our sleep we touch The body of another woman And we wake up And we know the first nights With summer visitors In the three storied house of our childhood. Whatever we remember, The darkest hair being brushed In front of the darkest mirror In the darkest room.
They caught them. They were sitting at a table in the kitchen. It was early. They had on bathrobes. They were drinking coffee and smiling. She had one of his cigarillos in her fingers. She had her legs tucked up under her in the chair. They saw them through the window. She thought of them stepping out of a bath And him wrapping cloth around her. He thought of her waking up in a small white building, He thought of stones settling into the ground. Then they were gone. Then they came in through the back. Her cat ran out. The house was near the road. She didn’t like the cat going out. They stayed at the table. The others were out of breath. The man and the woman reached across the table. They were afraid, they smiled. The others poured themselves the last of the coffee Burning their tongues. The man and the woman looked at them. They didn’t say anything. The man and the woman moved closer to each other, The round table between them. The stove was still on and burned the empty pot. She started to get up. One of them shot her. She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons. She thought about being beside him, being asleep. They took her long grey socks Put them over the barrel of a rifle And shot him. He went back in his chair, holding himself. She told him hers didn’t hurt much, Like in the fall when everything you touch Makes a spark. He thought about her getting up in the dark Wrapping a quilt around herself And standing in the doorway. She asked the men if they shot them again Not to hurt their faces. One of them lit him one of his cigarettes. He thought what it would be like Being children together. He was dead before he finished it. She asked them could she take it out of his mouth. So it wouldn’t burn his lips. She reached over and touched his hair. She thought about him walking through the dark singing. She died on the table like that, Smoke coming out of his mouth.
I am afraid after reading all these so-called initiation books that some cortege of boot lickers will enter my room while I am sleeping and suck my eyes out with soda straws they will be older men and women much like the amanuenses with bad breath in the principal’s office who call up and tell on you the Unferths of the world better beware I know Jesus would have kicked your teeth in you couldn’t pull that shit on him he was telling his buddies one night boys I’m glad y’all decided to come on up and eat supper with me I hadn’t got much there’s a few things I’d like to say at this time Matthew says to Simon I sure as hell don’t know what he’s got us here this time for I’m beginning to wonder you talked to him lately yea I was shooting the shit with him on the mountain but I want to tell you this Matthew don’t never come up on him when he’s alone he jumped on me I thought he was going to kill me he was just walking around just talking to himself waving his arms like he does he’s worse than John  Jude put his hand up to his mouth and said down the table I think Jesus is going off his rocker get Simon to tell you what he asked me Simon says he didn’t want to talk about politics or dreams or nothing he just said Jude next time y’all are over in Mesopotamia why don’t you pick me up a few  bottles of that wine they make over there sure thing Jesus I says well now the boss is talking he is saying I asked y’all up here because frankly I’ve been feeling a little sick lately and I want to make sure y’all know what to do in case anything happens I know one of you is going to do me in I know that but goddamnit y’all know those people in town are after my ass the other night I walked down the streets in a disguise and I seen a couple of you messing around and drinking with the soldiers what’s going to happen if one of you gets drunk and lets it slip where I’m hiding out then I’ll be in a fix you know if they was to find me they going to cut me y’all ever think about that and Peter ain’t you ever going to get it straight what you’re supposed to do give me one of those biscuits Judas and go outside and take a  look-see I got you Jesus Judas says John leans over he says been catching any fish Peter oh well I been getting a few of a morning they ain’t biting too good now you know on account of this blamed weather nobody is even listening to Jesus he’s just talking to himself like he was crazy Matthew says I believe he’s been hitting that wine a little too hard don’t you reckon Jesus says another thing I told all of you it’d be better if you didn’t get involved with women now just listen to that little two-faced bastard James the Lesser says we all know what he’s up to shacking up with all those town girls the other night he was dressed fit to kill and drunk as six hundred dollars a rolling around in the mud like a hog kissing that whore’s foot why shit I wish he’d let us in on what he really does Thomas spoke up for once he says I know what you mean the other day Andrew and I asked him about some scripture he said leave me alone I don’t know nothing about that shit and then we seen him cussing out a priest over at the  temple he knew more about it than the elder did another thing Matthew says I wish he’d start writing what he wants done down and do it so I can read it you know as well as I do that damned Peter can’t keep it straight he won’t get anything right Bartholomew says don’t make no difference atoll cause Paul is going to tell it like he wants to that’s for damned sure all the time Jesus just mumbling to himself wine spilt all over his robe the rest of them chattering and cussing trying to figure him out John the Baptist about the only one Jesus can count on except for crazy John  is banging his goblet on the table he is saying now ain’t this a sight spitting in the lord’s face at his own birthday party I’ll swan Brother John why don’t you tell Jesus what the real problem is the crazy one says everyone of y’all is chickenshits you are afraid to look those elders in the eye and tell them what you think ya’ll get up on a rock to talk and you see a soldier coming and you say anybody seen a stray mule Jesus is saying to himself I’m going to pull those temples down if I have to get me a rope and tie it to a pillar and a jackass and do it myself wake up Jesus Philip says Paul who hadn’t touched a drop gets up and gets his paper out and says the nature of the problem Jesus is this the people don’t believe you those fellows in the temples have got it all organized all they have to do is send out stooges and hire a couple of rednecks who make out like they’re crippled they have a big gathering they say the same things you say they  pull off a fake healing the redneck’s wife stands up she says LIE he ain’t lame he’s just drunk and so all the people go home saying those christians what a  bunch of wind see Jesus they are using your material but they ain’t coming through so that is making you an enemy of the people we just got to get organized as is proved here today by your followers carrying on as they did so I’m getting sold down the river by the elders and their hirelings uh that’s right Jesus ask anybody here why I didn’t think they’d do that he says I told you a long time ago not to keep talking with them temple people John says you should a know’d what they was up to ain’t nobody going to understand you why you ought to know that when we first run on to you we had second thoughts we thought you was crazy there’s probably still some sitting down here right  this second that still thinks you are a crazy one but Jesus you should a known we been through a lot together we go a long way back you should a listened all they wanted was you they liable to get you yet then they won’t have no competition they want to keep feeding the hogs the same slop they the ones that want to get fat man you listening to me Jesus he says ok if that’s the way they want to do things at the temple I’m going to change my tactics I going out after these chillun more than I have been they’ll know I’m telling the truth I still got a few things up my sleeve left what’s that Paul says I’m going to do a few things can’t nobody follow we could always go back to biting the heads off fish and chickens Peter says why don’t you let us in on it for a change Paul says we follow you around like we were a bunch of sheep picking up your tab bailing you out of jail coming up here all the time for supper and what do we get to eat nothing why can’t you have a little faith in us Jesus ok this is what we going to do he says hold on who is that walking up the steps it’s just Judas how does it go boy Jesus says and the other one answers just fine Jesus just fine and John the Baptist turns around he says to the one who has just slipped in boy didn’t I see you talking to some white folks the other day here endeth with a chord on the guitar that’s how the men did Jesus like he was old like he was young just like Elvis did to Big Dad Arthur I know just like another blind singer the men come down to see with their equipment they get his song they pay him twenty dollars and he don’t hear from them ever again except sometimes in the mail on Christmas when one of them might send a  five dollar check there won’t nobody cash oh tell me brother how do the old men feel who were young as purple flowers from Hawaii once when they listen to their songs coming in over a borrowed radio tell me don’t they take up a notch in they belt don't they tie another knot in they headband don't they wring that sweat out have mercy Jesus deliver me from the lawyers and the teachers and the preachers and the politicking flies can’t you hear them buzz can’t you hear them bite another chunk out of me oh brother I am death and you are sleep I am white and you are black brother tell me I am that which I am I am sleep and you are death we are one person getting up and going outside naked as a blue jay rolling our bellies at the moon oh brother tell me you love me and I’ll tell you too I want to know how do they like it when the ones who sung shake they leg on the Television I want to know Jesus don’t a blind man count no more some by signs others by whispers some with a kiss and some with a gun and some with a six bit fountain pen whoa lord help me and my brother help us get through this tookover land
I In the moonlight, in the heavy snow, I was hunting along the sunken road and heard behind me the quiet step and smothered whimper of something following . . . Ah, tree of panic I climbed to escape the night, as the furry body glided beneath, lynx with  steady gaze, and began the slow ascent.  II And dark blue foxes climbed beside me with famished eyes that  glowed in the shadows; I stabbed with a sharpened stick until one lay across the path with entrails spilled, and the others melted away. The dead fox moved again, his jaws released the sound of speech.  III Slowly I toiled up the rotting stairs to the cemetery where my mother lay buried, to find the open grave with the coffin tilted beside it, and something spilled from the bottom— a whiteness that flowed on the ground and froze into mist that enveloped the world.
I believe in this stalled magnificence, this churning chaos of traffic, a beast with broken spine, its hoarse voice hooded in feathers and mist; the baffled eyes wink amber and slowly darken. Of men and women suddenly walking, stumbling with little sleighs in search of Tibetan houses — dust from a far-off mountain already whitens their shoulders. When evening falls in blurred heaps, a man losing his way among churches and schoolyards feels under his cold hand the stone thoughts of that city, impassable to all but a few children who went on into the hidden life of caves and winter fires, their faces glowing with disaster.
She came to see the bones whiten in a summer, and one year later a narrow mummy with a dusty skin and flaking scales would break apart in her hand. She wanted to see if sunlight still glinted in those eyes, to know what it lighted from a window on the mallow roots, leaf mold and fallen casques. And to ask if a single tongue, one forked flicker in the dark, had found any heat in death: in the closed space and chill of that burial, what speech, what sign would there be. She who walked in the canyon early, parted the grass and halted upon the living snake, coiled and mottled by a bitter pool, unearthed her jar in another spring, to find the snake spirit gone, only a little green water standing, some dust, or a smell.  (1974)
I Under the makeshift arbor of leaves a hot wind blowing smoke and laughter. Music out of the renegade west, too harsh and loud, many dark faces moved among the sweating whites.  II Wandering apart from the others, I found an old Indian seated alone on a bench in the flickering shade. He was holding a dented bucket; three crayfish, lifting themselves from the muddy water, stirred and scraped against the greasy metal.  III The old man stared from his wrinkled darkness across the celebration, unblinking, as one might see in the hooded sleep of turtles. A smile out of the ages of gold and carbon flashed upon his face and vanished, called away by the sound and the glare around him, by the lost voice of a child piercing that thronged solitude.  IV The afternoon gathered distance and depth, divided in the shadows that broke and moved upon us . . . Slowly, too slowly, as if returned from a long and difficult journey, the old man lifted his bucket and walked away into the sunlit crowd.  (1972-76)
He is pushing a black Ford through an empty street - a car like his father's that beat the flat roads like wind in summer and brought him here. He never forgave his father. That was the year he left home. Then there was talk of weather and everyone was packing. Windmills were stopped all over Kansas. He is thinking of fathers, the ways they never forgive you, withholding love like lust. But they quit, they stop like pumps. There is no way to set them working again. He is thinking of mothers, how she could not know how he half followed girls down dark streets of his heart, how that loneliness is passed to sons, to the fathers of sons. He is pushing a black Ford. Its problem is such a heart you cannot give it enough care. Like a father it will quit. And there is no end to this.
* In the shape of a submarine frost lengthens on a window. Outside, winter sparrows perch in rhinoceros-colored trees. Mare's tails chase whitely past brick chimneys. I have seen those lights before, small rectangular eyes of far buildings, one church steeple darkening the blue sky.  * It looks like a stopped grey heart, if hearts sport such delicate scallops and trees wear hearts on their sleeves. Now the first wasp of spring emerges, its wings a transparency of fish scales, old isinglass or vein-fretted windows— wings of the first untranscendent angel sentenced to death by the god frost. How can some later spring reclaim this paper city or repair its walls damaged in the long drop from the one hundred and twentieth odd year of a tree?  * The sky wears that color through which you expect a tornado's black drill. Only cicadas try the air, a scratching that cannon could not silence. Beyond the barn with three siloes and the wind pump stopped like a tin daisy, carp lip the surface of reflected sky, the promised violence.  * I always imagined that place as an orchard on a mountaintop, its summer Delicious freckling to a sunset by Seurat. But the last time it was fall, the sere grass bent one way toward an open gate, as though a great wind had swept down stones of the garden walls. Two posts bent where the orchard had been, their purpose obscure. They stood, I think, where flowers had rivaled deepest in their colors and scents.
It’s not solely the dance of the juggler but his spirit: with its turkey wings, perfect thighs, sensuous hips, large round flat eye. This eye smiles like lips. Watch this eye— it’s not a donkey eye. It’s not solely the dancer who moves like a circus animal as though to children’s music—no, it’s the girl in the swing’s rhythm, the ticking of the clock at night, the strut of the cock, the flight of the holy family to the remains. The nipple that feeds the infant is an eye looking into his future. It’s not even the village square with its musicians and happy faces that makes the difference—no, because if it were, weddings with violins, harps, flutes would have settled the question: no, it is the rising and lifting, the failing and catching of that unknown sense of self before it crashes, that matters.
Our ropes are the roots of our life. We fish low in the earth, the river beneath runs through our veins, blue and cold in a riverbed. When the sun comes up, the moon moves slowly to the left. I tie the logs and limbs together, holding them in place. The ocean beats them smooth like rock. Here my sense of time is flat. I find in a strip of damp sand footprints and marks of hands, and torn pieces of flesh. Night is a beast. The tide moves, gushing back and forth. Sunlight touches our faces, turning us, turning us, turning us in our morning sleep.  1976
1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes lying around on fluffy pink pillows beneath windows onto charming views, sea views, seasonal leaves and trees. Inside is outside and outside inside. Smell of saltwater swimming in the room. 2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR Shadow of lighthouse along the beach. Whales spotted every day lately though winter’s two months yet. The evening is as warm as an interior. Silverlight lagoonlight, snorkeling light. And a line of joggers against last light. Blue smoke snaking up the pink sky.
A Montparnasse August with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones. We wake to it. Close curtains to it. Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light. Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long. We’re passing through, just passing through neat aisles of gray mausoleums. (From Paris. Send this postcard. This one. Calm water lilies. Water lilies. Nothing colorless.) It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb. Tree limbs casting shadow west. This, a lot of time under a looming sky. Nobody has time like this. (Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee every day. We’re not complaining. They bring the milk separate. Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.) Nothing to ponder. This is the plight. Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife — both fully dressed. Pink flowers, pink flowers, just beneath de Beauvoir’s name. When she lived she lived two doors down. Went south in August. All of us smell of heat all the time. We are the living. Oh dear! There are the dead ones there. Their thoughts more familiar, though. Lives finished, nearly clear. And they make it possible for us to go on living as we do in their blue shade.
based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999 No sound, the whole thing. Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass to people below in an ongoing meadow. Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind, and because what is moving is not moving, you catch a state of stasis. Opposite of this inactivity you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets and that special hot smell of summer. To the garden past the Bay to the meadow, cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle. Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why? In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way to unknown clusters of houses. Where forces are balanced to near perfection. Who could live in such a great swollen silence and solitude? You hear church bells from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely but just in the right way so silence continues as though nothing else matters day after day. And anyway, each face seems so familiar. What do you do when you wave back? You wave vigorously. You remember your own meadow, your cliffside and town, photographs forgotten, the halfhearted motion of your hand, your grandmother’s church-folk gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness. You name the people whose names are not written on the back. You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence. You enter house after house and open top-floor windows and you wave down to future generations like this.
In the house of the voice of Maria Callas We hear the baby’s cries, and the after-supper Rattle of silverware, and three clocks ticking To different tunes, and ripe plums Sleeping in their chipped bowl, and traffic sounds Dissecting the avenues outside. We hear, like water Pouring over time itself, the pure distillate arias Of the numerous pampered queens who have reigned, And the working girls who have suffered The envious knives, and the breathless brides With their horned helmets who have fallen in love And gone crazy or fallen in love and died On the grand stage at their appointed moments— Who will sing of them now? Maria Callas is dead, Although the full lips and the slanting eyes And flared nostrils of her voice resurrect Dramas we are able to imagine in this parlor On evenings like this one, adding some color, Adding some order. Of whom it was said: She could imagine almost anything and give voice to it.
I was hauling freight out of the Carolinas up to the Cumberland Plateau when, in Tennessee, I saw from the freeway, at 2 am a house ablaze. Water from the firehoses arced into luminescent rainbows. The only sound, the dull roar of my truck passing. I found myself strangely happy. It was misfortune on that cold night falling on someone’s house, but not mine not mine.
No one in neuroscience thinks time is not important. Criticisms arise with how time management is achieved. - Dr. Patricia Churchland, philosopher/brain scientist 1. When handling the past in the present tense, chronology is of the  utmost importance. Suppose I say I’m eight years old and all the rooms  of my father’s house are larger than life. Then I say Two days after my  first divorce, the only landscape I know is simplified, bone-smooth. The  past remains practically undisturbed. But suppose I reverse the order  in which the episodes are recreated, and time goes on a rampage, and I find myself coming and going. Journeys on land have a spherical tendency because this is always at some level the nature of the ter- rain. The anthill crumbles in the rain and the ants returning with more provisions walk past the leveled mound; having noticed noth- ing, they keep looking for home. Though each mouth carries its crumb of substance, tradition and evolution will see to it that it isn’t eaten until the journey has been completed. It’s not unusual for the ants to walk repeatedly over the ruins. A squirrel chases itself so fast around the trunk of a palm tree that it appears to be standing still, like propeller blades in midflight. (I used to know the cause of this illusion.) I say Someone’s at the door, somebody please get the door although I haven’t lived there in years. Somebody please get the door. I want nothing more than my share of the past. 2. True. There are degrees of isolation. Sixteen days after a shopping center collapses like a punctured lung in Seoul, South Korea, a nine- teen-year-old girl is found alive in an elevator shaft. Her only nour- ishment throughout the ordeal is an apple that a monk gives her in a dream. The doctors are skeptical and attribute her survival, instead, to “her false perception of time.” The brain—with its network of rivers and tributaries, the flow rigorously controlled—is taxed by a sudden drought. Or an apple passes from one hand to another. In both versions, extraordinary measures achieve a modicum of nor- malcy, shaken again when a boy—age thirteen, his circadian rhythms still fighting the syncopation of jet lag—walks out the window on the thirtieth floor of a Swedish building. They’re calling it “a sleep- walking accident,” as if sleep were a cognitive state. If that were the case, our sheep and our prayers would keep us up all night, count- ing and repenting, and there would be degrees of salvation. I can tell you that none of this is true, but much of it is, and you will not for- give me when you discover that I’ve led you to believe otherwise. The truth, in one form or another, has ways of finding you. Blame it on your false perception of the facts. Time the sniper has lapses in which its eyes tire and its focus falters and it aims at itself. So the window opens; the girl shakes the rubble from her dress; a monk, gathering apples in his robe, almost catches the falling boy. 3. They say that when the Who performed at Leeds University on Valentine’s Day 1970, Pete Townshend played against his own echo during some of those riveting excursions he launched into through- out the band’s quarter-hour-long offering of "My Generation." I lis- ten to it differently now. I wait for the echo they tell me is there, preceding each note, and it’s as if I were experiencing the music a pri- ori. I listen to the chords or whole riffs bouncing off the walls versus sound in real time. Doing so, I miss the actual song, which is also delayed because this is, after all, a recording. Once, the concept of real time was redundant. Before the first gramophone. Before we learned to manipulate the speed of things to come. And long before that, the idea of a spirit that takes over for the temporary body was already popular. Perhaps our first attempt to deny the unavoidable. One new religion offers immortality. For a price. Unlike traditional religions in which death is a prerequisite, this one teaches the body to bypass the soul, that middle man who always gets in the way, and the here-and-now becomes a here-and-always. It’s all up here, one of its members says to me, pointing his index finger at his temple, as if mimicking a gun. I may actually want to die before I get old, I think, the radio as loud as it’ll go, one chord after another bouncing off the walls so many years ago at Leeds, the road much longer than I’d expected, the signal grow- ing weaker and one station giving way to another. From feedback to static to a preacher who invites me or commands me or dares me to lay my hands on the radio. Both hands, he says. I raise my legs, raise my whole body (although it’s not levitation or anything nearly as glam- orous) to steady the steering wheel. 4. In The Book of Ironies they forgot to write that a superstitious woman will end up marrying an atheist. Curiously, in all the cases I know, it’s the man who doesn’t believe. The woman is always open at the very least to the possibility of that “something out there.” At times her superstitions are proof of God’s constant tinkering with the cogs and wheels of the soul. There are atheists with proof of a finite world, atheists in need of a finite world, reformed atheists whose image of God has become so pure over the years that it has gone from inevitable to unnecessary to simply impossible. One believer argues that only the next life makes this one tolerable and lends it purpose, that only the idea of being part of something cir- cular can keep us from going mad, because true madness is linear and the points at either end are clearly defined. This is an uncom- fortable thought for her. I wonder if her belief is, more than any- thing, a way to keep at bay this linear derangement. The atheist lying beside her is beginning to sink into sleep when she speaks: she has carefully chosen this moment, thinking he’s vulnerable enough to say what she wants to hear. He sits on the edge of the bed and won- ders for a moment what it would be like to take that leap forward; or backward, which is something she doesn’t mention: believers of her kind tend to discount any previous incarnations, as if eternity began here. Being here, he says to himself as he has said to her so many times, is the point. Then he tries to think his way back to sleep: wedding band, crown, zero, smoke ring, lasso, hula hoop.
I Far-sighted into yesterday they stand, gripping their charters and speeches, the presidents and kings, masters of unconscious evil. Their deputies are here — judges, robed executioners, steely and triumphant. And stunned at their feet, the beheaded, the betrayed, healed and hallowed now in this grave sorrow of wax.  II We enter, adjust to the gloom, to the lighting that plays on the painted, staring faces. We think to ourselves, murmur to the one standing beside us: "How compellingly strange these people are, and yet familiar to the world we left behind us, the street and the household..." These are the people whose names we learned, whose lives we studied, whose thoughts we have become. Each lighted stage with its play of the lost and the violent — comedians and stuntmen, heroes transfixed in purpose. We pause, to read once more, in deliberate, bald summation, what art, wax, and history have made of the dead: something more than a mirror, less than a telling likeness; an ideality slick with blood.  III How easily in the live heat of truth and summer these actors wilt and perish. Henry of Church and England is here, savage and senile, still laced in his armor; his lopped and stunted wives stand grouped around him. Bismark in his iron corset, endlessly dividing Europe; Wilhelm, that struttng dwarf, abject in abdication. And here, the fatal mischief of Sarajevo — how swift a fire, how long a burning, came of the Archduke's festive ride, his shot and bloodied tunic. And no more telling prophecy in the wake of armistice than that one dated cartoon with its hooded sentry and its graveyard owl: "It has been six years..." How easily a puff of smoke, a square of burnt cloth, a shocked cry, can change the world, and leave it neither worse nor better.  IV Here is a man, thief or martyr, hanged at Damascus Gate with a hook through his gut. He swung, seared by the sun and kissed by the night. And maybe one of the market women brought him water, and maybe not — once seen by the Sultan's watch, she might have lost her hands. As in the time of Richelieu, certain men the crown accused were exposed in iron baskets like plucked birds. They fouled their nests, starved and blackened until they died; and the city lived with their cries, their rank mortality, night and day. The hook is black and crescent, the body swings, inert, as if asleep and dreaming. The guidebook tells us the man survived his hook and lived; it doesn't say how long.  V Here, with his tins and furs, is Minuit, buying Manhattan. We see the Dutchman's flourish,  the Indians' foolish feathers. He takes their land, and they his bitter gifts, his brass and trinkets — so little cash in place of an earthy kingdom. Wolfe, Montcalm, on the plain below Quebec: the one dying, the other condemned to follow. We pass, reading from face to face, from book to book, uneasy that among these celebrations so many rigged transactions have gone unquestioned. And all our wigged colonials, our Franklins, conspiring with their strongbox keys and profitable lightning — that so much ink and dust and shuffled paper conceals their tidy pilferings, their purity and blunted wrath. Were there rooms in this house, each with its tabled motions and false partitions might furnish a history, one slow truth at a time. But never in our late arrival have we stilled confusion, to learn how great a folly follows in the wake of fathers. From their deliberate violence we come to our own lamed misrule, its slick banality and crime without passion.  To Ike, to Kennedy and Ford, golfers and temporizers; to perennial candidate Nixon, whose cheek was never turned. Out of his sleek arrest he steps towards us, as if to greet a voter — a fixed, ferocious smile on the blue jowls brushed with powder.  VI Nothing we have painted and framed in our passage — neither prayer nor courtship, nor solace of sleep and self — escaped the grip of these iron centuries. Here, in a row of lighted cases, a few artifacts are on display. No comfort to us now in that familiar, edged interrogation... But the biting persuasion of chains and collars, of inching racks, fire tongs and screws — in the eyes of kings and churchmen the instruments of truth. And whosoever might trespass, on whatever lawful ground, would find for his solace a more forbidding marriage. As once in a stone embrasure I saw a belt for virgins, a hinged and rusted clasp, with a lock, and a slit for functions — all but one. Imagine with what shocked dismay a man might grope for his sweetness there, and all too soon awaken, clamped in his ecstasy.  VII Another room, with smaller people and thinner walls. Here the Queen plays with cryptic cards, hands out assignments: "You are the Hunchback," she says, "and You the Hangman, and You the Jack of Trades." She pares and quarters her venomous apple, calls for her mirror, and her image smiles to watch her glass fill up with poison. Beauty is sleeping, the Prince is awake, and far in the forest a frostlight winks from the Sugar House. The Witch is singing and lighting her oven. The Woodcutter's wayward children watch, they break and nibble the sweetened glass. The images whisper and darken, conspiring in their tumbled tale of fretful spinners, of drones and dumble- dores, wise eggs that speak and shatter. And it looks as if the painted sleepers in this dreamworks are about to awaken: the crafty Queen and her players, the musical mice, the drones and the spinners — All in a scampering rush, to find the nearest exit... As the looking glass draws us deeper into the bright play of shadows that melt and run and freeze... The mad, mad romp of children, of rabbits and dwarfs, who keep their strange hilarity in so much horror.  VIII Call those from underneath, the sold and trodden, their slow and sweating sons, elevate and crown them. Patch up their clothing and wash their skins, rub their faces until they glow, and their dull eyes brighten. Give them speeches to learn, and eloquent gestures, power to grasp, laws to break and mend. Great heat and furious labor bring on in them this drear and mystical change: At first a swinish fattening, and then a leaner look, and in their eyes the same feral glitter of their late unkindly masters. They sicken as they flourish, until like wickless candles they slump and totter; their heads are rotten, their famous flesh has run to sticky pools. They die and sleep afoot, their ignorant hearts grown wise in the ways of wax.  IX In all these wax memorials only appearance changes. Crowned heads and axes fall, thugs and jailors rise and displace each other in this long, uneasy walk we have littered with claims and captions. The heroes are always welcomed, are propped and shaven, their ruddy male composure is sleeker than ever, though the great sleeves and brutal collars give way to softer buttons. The paper in official hands rustles as before, though it is only paper, paper in cheap supply, and not the bleached fell of a difficult sheep. And yet the neat persuasions  are seen to tighten, and each new litigation is a running noose... All that increases, all that gluts and fattens, matures its option here: Honor to thieves and merchants, long life to the butcher. And for the just petitioner — sweeper of the hallways, scapegoat and discard — no reply but the rote of legal fictions; to which he listens, now as in the days of Pontinus, stricken with understanding.  X The rooms are large and numerous, and we in our restless striding find that they never end. It is as if we had lived here always, captive to this endless and malign instruction; had served those mighty tempers, and learned too well these never-blotted names. And we live here still, sharing these murderous spaces, this blood-haunted silence. And once we started from sleep, terrorized and whimpering, to see in the luminous, sunken light, the head of a long-forgotten agent: a face like a father, one who might have comforted, but cannot see or hear us: bald, vacant, and amused.  XI All is as it must or might be, here at the story's end — the jury dismissed, the witness excused, and all are guilty. To have come so far, walked so easily through so much anguish, pride, and stupor of evil, and yet we are standing still, locked in an echoing foyer. In so driven, so brief an itinerary, a day will stand for a decade, an inch for a mile — so far has a painted fiction served us. These bones in their period costumes would bend if we touched them; their flesh would yield, and all arrangements topple. But see how they bring toward us the old, sustaining gestures — a stride, an arm outstretched — the furrows in the smiles deepen, and the red lips smear. Great captains command, obedient ranks go down. In all these propped assemblies I know a substance neither wax nor wholly flesh — a tried and mortal nature, familiar as the warmth in my hand.  XII Were we not lost, condemned to repeat these names and to honor their crimes, a voice among us might cry out, speak to those who are stopped here:  Whose faces are these that melt and run? Children and guardians, giants and dwarfs —  Oh, people, people... Who are these heroes and where are their victims? We who are standing here with our guidebooks suddenly closed and all the exits darkened... Until another gallery opens, or the sun through that skylight strikes us all —  souls in torment, pilgrims and doting fathers...
1 I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula,  a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars,  gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules,  needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes.  A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag  and places it in a dumpster; someone  parking a car hears it cry and rescues it.  Is this the little o, the earth?  Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms;  a green snake glides down flowing acequia water.  The night is rich with floating pollen;  in the morning, we break up the soil  to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen  has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet.  As the character yi, change, is derived  from the skin of a chameleon, we are  living the briefest hues on the skin  of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy  between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon,  I notice my shadow by starlight. 2 Where does matter end and space begin?    blue jays eating suet;  juggling three crumbled newspaper balls  wrapped with duct tape;  tasseling corn;  the gravitational bending of light;  “We're dying”;  stringing a coral necklace;  he drew his equations on butcher paper;  vanishing in sunlight;  sobbing;  she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a  basket;  sleeping in his room in a hammock;  they drew a shell to represent zero;  red persimmons;  what is it like to catch up to light?  he threw Before Completion:  six in the third place, nine in the sixth. 3 A wavering line of white-faced ibises,  flying up the Rio Grande, disappears.  A psychic says, “Search a pawnshop  for the missing ring.” Loss, a black hole.  You do not intend to commit a series of  blunders, but to discover in one error  an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps  flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath.  A physicist says, “After twenty years,  nothing is as I thought it would be.”  You recollect watching a yellow-  and-black-banded caterpillar in a jar  form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis  lightened and became transparent:  a monarch emerged and flexed its wings.  You are startled to retrieve what you forgot:  it has the crunching sound of river  breakup when air is calm and very clear.  4 Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs  beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms  the power to dream and transform. Later,  in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself.  Do the transformations of memory  become the changing lines of divination?  Is the continuum of a moment a red  poppy blooming by a fence, or is it  a woman undergoing radiation treatment  who stretches out on a bed to rest  and senses she is stretching out to die?  At night I listen to your breathing,  guess at the freckles on your arms,  smell your hair at the back of your neck.  Tiger lilies are budding in pots in the patio;  daikon is growing deep in the garden.  I see a bewildered man ask for direction,  and a daikon picker points the way with a daikon. 5 He threw Duration;  sunspots;  what is it like to catch up to light?  a collapsing vertebra;  the folding wings of a blue dragonfly;  receiving a fax;  buffeted on a floatplane between islands;  a peregrine falcon making a slow circle with outstretched  wings;  he crumpled papers, threw them on the floor,  called it City of Bums;  polar aligning;  inhaling the smell of her hair;  a red handprint on a sandstone wall;  digging up ginseng;  carding wool;  where does matter end and space begin? 6 Mushroom hunting at the ski basin, I spot  a blood-red amanita pushing up under fir,  find a white-gilled Man On Horseback,  notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth  a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop  and gaze at yellow light in a clearing.  As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear,  an s twist begins to loosen the z twisted fiber.  A spider asleep under a geranium leaf  may rest a leg on the radial string of a web,  but cool nights are pushing nasturtiums to bloom.  An eggplant deepens in hue and drops to the ground.  Yellow specks of dust float in the clearing;  in memory, a series of synchronous spaces.  As a cotton fiber burns in an s twist  and unravels the z twist of its existence,  the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light,  persimmons ripening on leafless trees.
Nailing up chicken wire on the frame house, or using a chalk line, or checking a level at a glance gets to be easy.  We install double-pane windows pressurized with argon between the panes for elevations over 4500´.  And use pick and shovel to dig for the footing for the annex. Lay cinder blocks, and check levels. Pour the cement floor, and use wood float and steel trowel to finish the surface as it sets.  Nailing into rough, dense, knotted two-by-twelves, or using a chalk line to mark the locations of the fire blocks, or checking the level of a stained eight-by-ten window header gets to be easier.  In nailing up chicken wire, we know how to cut for the canal, pull the wire up over the fire wall, make cuts for the corners, tuck it around back, and nail two-head nails into the stud. And when the footing is slightly uneven and we are laying a first row of cinder blocks, know that a small pebble under a corner often levels the top to the row.  And, starting on rock lath, the various stages of a house - cutting vigas, cleaning aspens forlatillas, installing oak doors, or plastering the adobe wall - are facets of a cut opal.
A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever. Inside a temple, instead of light a slow shutter lets the darkness in. I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it, see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds, a dead pig floating, bloated, on water. I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliff and his photograph is in each room of the apartment. I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her mother but who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law; they live in three rooms and watch a color television. I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolution had risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards. I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needle but instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma. A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and West is that in the East an individual does not believe himself in control of his fate but yields to it. As a negative reverses light and dark these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor, an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light, laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater, lovers in the Summer Palace park.
The Phoenicians guarded a recipe that required ten thousand murex shells to make an ounce of Tyrian purple. Scan the surface of Aldebaran with a radio wave; grind lapis lazuli into ultramarine. Search the summer sky for an Anasazi turkey constellation; see algae under an electron microscope resemble a Magellanic Cloud. A chemist tried to convert benzene into quinine, but blundered into a violet aniline dye instead. Have you ever seen maggots feed on a dead rat? Listen to a red-tailed hawk glide over the hushed spruce and pines in a canyon. Feel a drop of water roll down a pine needle, and glisten, hanging, at the tip.
1 In a concussion,  the mind severs the pain:  you don’t remember flying off a motorcycle,  and landing face first  in a cholla.  But a woman stabbed in her apartment,  by a prowler searching for  money and drugs,  will never forget her startled shriek  die in her throat,  blood soaking into the floor.  The quotidian violence of the world  is like a full moon rising over the Ortiz mountains;  its pull is everywhere.  But let me live a life of violent surprise  and startled joy. I want to  thrust a purple iris into your hand,  give you a sudden embrace.  I want to live as Wang Hsi-chih lived  writing characters in gold ink on black silk—  not to frame on a wall,  but to live the splendor now. 2 Deprived of sleep, she hallucinated  and, believing she had sold the genetic  research on carp, signed a confession.  Picking psilocybin mushrooms in the mountains  of Veracruz, I hear tin cowbells  in the slow rain, see men wasted on pulque  sitting under palm trees. Is it  so hard to see things as they truly are:  a route marked in red ink on a map,  the shadows of apricot leaves thrown  in wind and sun on a wall? It is  easy to imagine a desert full of agaves  and golden barrel cactus, red earth, a red sun.  But to truly live one must see things  as they are, as they might become:  a wrench is not a fingerprint  on a stolen car, nor baling wire  the undertow of the ocean. I may hallucinate,  but see the men in drenched clothes  as men who saw and saw and refuse to see. 3 Think of being a judge or architect  or trombonist, and do not worry whether  thinking so makes it so. I overhear  two men talking in another room;  I cannot transcribe the conversation  word for word, but know if they are  vexed or depressed, joyful or nostalgic.  An elm leaf floats on a pond.  Look, a child wants to be a cardiologist  then a cartographer, but wanting so  does not make it so. It is not  a question of copying out the Heart Sutra  in your own blood on an alabaster wall.  It is not a question of grief or joy.  But as a fetus grows and grows,  as the autumn moon ripens the grapes,  greed and cruelty and hunger for power  ripen us, enable us to grieve, act,  laugh, shriek, see, see it all as  the water on which the elm leaf floats. 4 Write out the memories of your life  in red-gold disappearing ink, so that it all  dies, no lives. Each word you speak  dies, no lives. Is it all  at once in the mind? I once stepped  on a sea urchin, used a needle to dig out  the purple spines; blood soaked my hands.  But one spine was left, and I carried  it a thousand miles. I saw then  the olive leaves die on the branch,  saw dogs tear flesh off a sheep’s corpse.  To live at all is to grieve;  but, once, to have it all at once  is to see a shooting star: shooting star  shooting star.
1 As an archaeologist unearths a mask with opercular teeth  and abalone eyes, someone throws a broken fan and extension  cords  into a dumpster. A point of coincidence exists in the mind  resembling the tension between a denotation and its stretch  of definition: aurora: a luminous phenomenon consisting  of streamers or arches of light appearing in the upper  atmosphere  of a planet’s polar regions, caused by the emission of light  from atoms excited by electrons accelerated along the planet’s  magnetic field lines. The mind’s magnetic field lines.  When the red shimmering in the huge dome of sky stops,  a violet flare is already arcing up and across, while a man  foraging a dumpster in Cleveland finds some celery and   charred fat.  Hunger, angst: the blue shimmer of emotion, water speeding  through a canyon; to see only to know: to wake finding  a lug nut, ticket stub, string, personal card, ink smear, $2.76. 2 A Kwiakiutl wooden dish with a double-headed wolf  is missing from a museum collection. And as  the director checks to see if it was deaccessioned,  a man sitting on a stool under bright lights  shouts: a pachinko ball dropped vertiginously  but struck a chiming ring and ricocheted to the left.  We had no sense that a peony was opening,  that a thousand white buds of a Kyoto camellia  had opened at dusk and had closed at dawn.  When the man steps out of the pachinko parlor,  he will find himself vertiginously dropping  in starless space. When he discovers  that his daughter was cooking over smoking oil  and shrieked in a fatal asthma attack,  he will walk the bright streets in an implosion of grief,  his mind will become an imploding star,  he will know he is searching among bright gold threads  for a black pattern in the weave. 3 Set a string loop into a figure of two diamonds,   four diamonds, one diamond:  as a woman tightens her hand into a fist  and rubs it in a circular motion over her heart,  a bewildered man considering the semantics of set  decides no through-line exists:  to sink the head of a nail below the surface,  to fix as a distinguishing imprint, sign, or appearance,  to incite, put on a fine edge by grinding,  to adjust, adorn, put in motion, make unyielding,  to bend slightly the tooth points of a saw  alternately in opposite directions.  As the woman using her index finger makes  spiral after spiral from her aorta up over her head,  see the possibilities for transcendence:  you have to die and die in your mind  before you can begin to see the empty spaces  the configuration of string defines. 4 A restorer examines the pieces of a tin chandelier,  and notices the breaks in the arms are along  old solder lines, and that cheap epoxy was used.  He will have to scrape off the epoxy, scrub some flux,  heat up the chandelier and use a proper solder.  A pair of rough-legged hawks are circling over a pasture;  one hawk cuts off the rabbit’s path of retreat  while the other swoops with sharp angle and curve of wings.  Cirrus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, altostratus,  altocumulus, stratocumulus, nimbostratus,  cumlus, cumulonimbus, stratus: is there no end?  Memories stored in the body begin to glow.  A woman seals basil in brown bags and hangs them  from the ceiling. A dead sturgeon washes to shore.  The sun is at the horizon, but another sun  is rippling in water. It’s not that the angle  of reflection equals the angle of incidence,  but there’s exultation, pleasure, distress, death, love. 5 The world resembles a cuttlefish changing colors  and shimmering. An apprentice archer has  stretched the bowstring properly, but does not know  he will miss the target because he is not aiming in the hips.  He will learn to hit the target without aiming  when he has died in his mind. I am not scared of death,  though I am appalled at how obsession with security  yields a pin-pushing, pencil-shaving existence.  You can descend to the swimming level of sharks,  be a giant kelp growing from the ocean bottom up  to the surface light, but the critical moment  is to die feeling the infinite stillness of the passions,  to revel in the touch of hips, hair, lips, hands,  feel the collapse of space in December light.  When I know I am no longer trying to know the spectral lines  of the earth, I can point to a cuttlefish and say,  “Here it is sepia,” already it is deep-brown,  and exult, “Here it is deep-brown,” already it is white. 6 Red koi swim toward us, and black  carp are rising out of the depths of the pond,  but our sustenance is a laugh, a grief,  a walk at night in the snow,  seeing the pure gold of a flickering candle -  a moment at dusk when we see  that deer have been staring at us,  we did not see them edge out of the brush,  a moment when someone turns on a light  and turns a window into a mirror,  a moment when a child asks,  “When will it be tomorrow?”  To say “A bell cannot be red and violet  at the same place and time because  of the logical structure of color” is true  but is a dot that must enlarge into  a zero: a void, enso, red shimmer,  breath, endless beginning, pure body, pure mind.
1 The dragons on the back of a circular bronze mirror  swirl without end. I sit and am an absorbing form:  I absorb the outline of a snowy owl on a branch,  the rigor mortis in a hand. I absorb the crunching sounds  when you walk across a glacial lake with aquamarine  ice heaved up here and there twenty feet high.  I absorb the moment a jeweler pours molten gold  into a cuttlefish mold and it begins to smoke.  I absorb the weight of a pause when it tilts  the conversation in a room. I absorb the moments  he sleeps holding her right breast in his left hand  and know it resembles glassy waves in a harbor  in descending spring light. Is the mind a mirror?  I see pig carcasses piled up from the floor  on a boat docked at Wanxian and the cook  who smokes inadvertently drops ashes into soup.  I absorb the stench of burning cuttlefish bone,  and as moments coalesce see to travel far is to return. 2 A cochineal picker goes blind;  Mao, swimming across the Yangtze River,  was buoyed by underwater frogmen;  in the nursing home,  she yelled, “Everyone here has Alzheimer’s!”  it blistered his mouth;  they thought the tape of erhu solos was a series of spy messages;  finding a bag of piki pushpinned to the door;  shapes of saguaros by starlight;  a yogi tries on cowboy boots at a flea market;  a peregrine falcon  shears off a wing;  her niece went through the house and took what she wanted;  “The sooner the better”;  like a blindman grinding the bones of a snow leopard;  she knew you had come to cut her hair;  suffering: this and that:  iron 26, gold 79;  they dared him to stare at the annular eclipse;  the yellow pupils of a saw-whet owl. 3 The gold shimmer at the beginning of summer  dissolves in a day. A fly mistakes a  gold spider, the size of a pinhead, at the center  of a glistening web. A morning mushroom  knows nothing of twilight and dawn?  Instead of developing a navy, Ci Xi  ordered architects to construct a two-story  marble boat that floats on a lotus-covered lake.  Mistake a death cap for Caesar’s amanita  and in hours a hepatic hole opens into the sky.  To avoid yelling at his pregnant wife,  a neighbor installs a boxing bag in a storeroom;  he periodically goes in, punches, punches,  reappears and smiles. A hummingbird moth  hovers and hovers at a woman wearing a   cochineal-dyed flowery dress. Liu Hansheng  collects hypodermic needles, washes them  under a hand pump, dries them in sunlight,  seals them in Red Cross plastic bags,  resells them as sterilized new ones to hospitals. 4 Absorb a corpse-like silence and be a brass  cone at the end of a string beginning  to mark the x of stillness. You may puzzle  as to why a meson beam oscillates, or why  galaxies appear to be simultaneously redshifting  in all directions, but do you stop to sense  death pulling and pulling from the center  of the earth to the end of the string?  A mother screams at her son, “You’re so stupid,”  but the motion of this anger is a circle.  A teen was going to attend a demonstration,  but his parents, worried about tear gas,  persuaded him to stay home: he was bludgeoned  to death that afternoon by a burglar.  I awake dizzy with a searing headache   thinking what nightmare did I have  that I cannot remember only to discover  the slumlord dusted the floor with roach powder. 5 Moored off Qingdao, before sunrise,  the pilot of a tanker is selling dismantled bicycles.  Once, a watchmaker coated numbers on the dial  with radioactive paint and periodically  straightened the tip of the brush in his mouth.  Our son sights the North Star through a straw  taped to a protractor so that a bolt  dangling from a string marks the latitude.  I remember when he said his first word, “Clock”;  his 6:02 is not mine, nor is your 7:03 his.  We visit Aurelia in the nursing home and find  she is sleeping curled in a fetal position.  A chain-smoking acupuncturist burps, curses;  a teen dips his head in paint thinner.  We think, had I this then that would,  but subjunctive form is surge and ache.  Yellow dips of chamisa are flaring open.  I drop a jar of mustard, and it shatters in a wave. 6 The smell of roasted chili;  descending into the epilimnion;  the shape of a datura leaf;  a bank robber superglued his fingertips;  in the lake,  ocean-seal absorption;  a moray snaps up a scorpion fish;  he had to mistake and mistake;  burned popcorn;  he lifted the fly agaric off of blue paper  and saw a white galaxy;  sitting in a cold sweat;  a child drinking Coke out of a formula bottle  has all her teeth capped in gold;  chrysanthemum-shaped fireworks exploding over the water;  red piki passed down a ladder;  laughter;  as a lobster mold transforms a russula into a delicacy;  replicating an Anasazi  yucca fiber and turkey-feather blanket. 7 He looks at a series of mirrors: Warring States  Western Han, Eastern Han, Tang, Song,  and notices bits of irregular red corrosion  on the Warring States mirror. On the back,  three dragons swirl in mist and April air.  After sixteen years that first kiss  still has a flaring tail. He looks at the TLV  pattern on the back of the Han mirror:  the mind has diamond points east, south, west, north.  He grimaces and pulls up a pile of potatoes,  notices snow clouds coming in from the west.  She places a sunflower head on the northwest  corner of the fence. He looks at the back   of the Tang mirror: the lion and grape  pattern is so wrought he turns, watches her  pick eggplant, senses the underlying  twist of pleasure and surprise that  in mind they flow and respond endlessly. 8 I find a rufous hummingbird on the floor  of a greenhouse, sense a redshifting  along the radial string of a web.  You may draw a cloud pattern in cement  setting in a patio, or wake to  sparkling ferns melting on a windowpane.  The struck, plucked, bowed, blown  sounds of the world come and go.  As first light enters a telescope  and one sees light of a star when the star  has vanished, I see a finch at a feeder,  beans germinating in darkness;  a man with a pole pulls yarn out  of an indigo vat, twists and untwists it;  I hear a shout as a child finds Boletus  barrowsii
Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's Insignia on our sneakers, We outmaneuvered the footwork Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot Swish of strings like silk Ten feet out. In the roundhouse Labyrinth our bodies Created, we could almost Last forever, poised in midair Like storybook sea monsters. A high note hung there A long second. Off The rim. We'd corkscrew Up & dunk balls that exploded The skullcap of hope & good Intention. Lanky, all hands & feet...sprung rhythm. We were metaphysical when girls Cheered on the sidelines. Tangled up in a falling, Muscles were a bright motor Double-flashing to the metal hoop Nailed to our oak. When Sonny Boy's mama died He played nonstop all day, so hard Our backboard splintered. Glistening with sweat, We rolled the ball off Our fingertips. Trouble Was there slapping a blackjack Against an open palm. Dribble, drive to the inside, & glide like a sparrow hawk. Lay ups. Fast breaks. We had moves we didn't know We had. Our bodies spun On swivels of bone & faith, Through a lyric slipknot Of joy, & we knew we were Beautiful & dangerous.
I am writing now in preconceptions Those of sex and ropes Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the    imagination And the imagination does have flesh to destroy And the flesh has imagination to sever The mouth is just a body filled with imagination Can you imagine its contents The dripping into a bucket And its acts The ellipses and chaining apart The feather The observer The imagination, bare, has nothing to confirm it There's just the singing of the birds The sounds of the natural scream A strange example The imagination wishes to be embraced by freedom It is laid bare in order to be desired But the imagination must keep track of the flesh    responding—its increments of awareness—a    slow progression It must be beautiful and it can't be free  -for John Zorn, after his “Elegy”
He danced with tall grass for a moment, like he was swaying with a woman. Our gun barrels glowed white-hot. When I got to him, a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There's no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again, except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn't be kissing the ground.
(from As You Like It) It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass, In springtime, the only pretty ring time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring
Best and brightest, come away! Fairer far than this fair Day, Which, like thee to those in sorrow, Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow To the rough Year just awake In its cradle on the brake. The Brightest hour of unborn Spring, Through the winter wandering, Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn To hoar February born. Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kissed the forehead of the Earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains, And like a prophetess of May Strewed flowers upon the barren way, Making the wintry world appear Like one on whom thou smilest, dear. Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind. While the touch of Nature’s art Harmonizes heart to heart. I leave this notice on my door For each accustomed visitor:— “I am gone into the fields To take what this sweet hour yields;— Reflection, you may come tomorrow, Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.— You with the unpaid bill, Despair,— You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,— I will pay you in the grave,— Death will listen to your stave. Expectation too, be off! Today is for itself enough; Hope, in pity mock not Woe With smiles, nor follow where I go; Long having lived on thy sweet food, At length I find one moment’s good After long pain—with all your love, This you never told me of.” Radiant Sister of the Day, Awake! arise! And come away! To the wild woods and the plains, And the pools where winter rains Image all their roof of leaves, Where the pine its garland weaves Of sapless green, and ivy dun Round stems that never kiss the sun: Where the lawns and pastures be, And the sandhills of the sea:— Where the melting hoar-frost wets The daisy-star that never sets, And wind-flowers, and violets, Which yet join not scent to hue, Crown the pale year weak and new; When the night is left behind In the deep east, dun and blind, And the blue noon is over us, And the multitudinous Billows murmur at our feet, Where the earth and ocean meet, And all things seem only one In the universal sun.
Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!  I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love,  And press mine eyelids with thy kiss. ’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell,  Love visited a Grecian maid, Till she disturbed the sacred spell,  And woke to find her hopes betrayed. But gentle sleep shall veil my sight,  And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be, When, in the visions of the night,  Thou dost renew thy vows to me. Then come to me in dreams, my love,  I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love,  And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.
The fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single; All things by a law divine In one spirit meet and mingle. Why not I with thine?— See the mountains kiss high heaven And the waves clasp one another; No sister-flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth And the moonbeams kiss the sea: What is all this sweet work worth If thou kiss not me?
I ne’er was struck before that hour With love so sudden and so sweet, Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower And stole my heart away complete. My face turned pale as deadly pale, My legs refused to walk away, And when she looked, what could I ail? My life and all seemed turned to clay. And then my blood rushed to my face And took my eyesight quite away, The trees and bushes round the place Seemed midnight at noonday. I could not see a single thing, Words from my eyes did start— They spoke as chords do from the string, And blood burnt round my heart. Are flowers the winter’s choice? Is love’s bed always snow? She seemed to hear my silent voice, Not love's appeals to know.I never saw so sweet a face As that I stood before. My heart has left its dwelling-place And can return no more.
Come, O come, my life’s delight,  Let me not in languor pine! Love loves no delay; thy sight,  The more enjoyed, the more divine: O come, and take from me The pain of being deprived of thee! Thou all sweetness dost enclose,  Like a little world of bliss. Beauty guards thy looks: the rose  In them pure and eternal is. Come, then, and make thy flight As swift to me, as heavenly light.
Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs  Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell  Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well  Would passion arm me for the enterprise;  But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies;  No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell;  I am no happy shepherd of the dell  Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes.  Yet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet,  Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses  When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication.  Ah! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet,  And when the moon her pallid face discloses,  I’ll gather some by spells, and incantation.
It is the miller’s daughter,  And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel  That trembles at her ear: For hid in ringlets day and night, I’d touch her neck so warm and white. And I would be the girdle   About her dainty, dainty waist, And her heart would beat against me,  In sorrow and in rest: And I should know if it beat right, I’d clasp it round so close and tight. And I would be the necklace,  And all day long to fall and rise Upon her balmy bosom,  With her laughter or her sighs: And I would lie so light, so light, I scarce should be unclasped at night.
My sweet did sweetly sleep, And on her rosy face Stood tears of pearl, which beauty’s self did weep; I, wond’ring at her grace, Did all amaz’d remain, When Love said, “Fool, can looks thy wishes crown? Time past comes not again.” Then did I me bow down, And kissing her fair breast, lips, cheeks, and eyes Prov’d here on earth the joys of paradise.
(On some Verses he writ, and asking more for his Heart than ‘twas worth.)  I Take back that Heart, you with such Caution give, Take the fond valu’d Trifle back; I hate Love-Merchants that a Trade wou’d drive And meanly cunning Bargains make. II I care not how the busy Market goes, And scorn to Chaffer for a price: Love does one Staple Rate on all impose, Nor leaves it to the Trader’s Choice. III A Heart requires a Heart Unfeign’d and True, Though Subt’ly you advance the Price, And ask a Rate that Simple Love ne’er knew: And the free Trade Monopolize. IV An humble Slave the Buyer must become, She must not bate a Look or Glance You will have all or you’ll have none; See how Love’s Market you inhance. V Is’t not enough, I gave you Heart for Heart, But I must add my Lips and Eies; I must no friendly Smile or Kiss impart; But you must Dun me with Advice. VI And every Hour still more unjust you grow, Those Freedoms you my life deny, You to Adraste are oblig’d to show, And giver her all my Rifled Joy. VII Without Controul she gazes on that Face, And all the happy Envyed Night, In the pleas’d Circle of your fond imbrace: She takes away the Lovers Right. VIII From me she Ravishes those silent hours, That are by Sacred Love my due; Whilst I in vain accuse the angry Powers, That make me hopeless Love pursue. IXAdrastes Ears with that dear Voice are blest, That Charms my Soul at every Sound, And with those Love-Inchanting Touches prest: Which I ne’er felt without a Wound. X She has thee all: whilst I with silent Greif, The Fragments of they Softness feel, Yet dare not blame the happy licenc’d Thief: That does my Dear-bought Pleasures steal. XI Whilst like a Glimering Taper still I burn, And waste my self in my own flame,Adraste takes the welcome rich Return: And leaves me all the hopeless Pain. XII Be just, my lovely Swain, and do not take Freedoms you’ll not to me allow; Or give Amynta so much Freedom back: That she may Rove as well as you. XIII Let us then love upon the honest Square, Since Interest neither have design’d, For the sly Gamester, who ne’er plays me fair, Must Trick for Trick expect to find.
My Love is like to ice, and I to fire: How comes it then that this her cold so great Is not dissolved through my so hot desire, But harder grows the more I her entreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold, But that I burn much more in boiling sweat, And feel my flames augmented manifold? What more miraculous thing may be told, That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice, And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold, Should kindle fire by wonderful device?  Such is the power of love in gentle mind,  That it can alter all the course of kind.
So oft as I her beauty do behold, And therewith do her cruelty compare, I marvel of what substance was the mould The which her made at once so cruel-fair. Not earth; for her high thoughts more heavenly are: Not water; for her love doth burn like fire: Not air; for she is not so light or rare: Not fire; for she doth freeze with faint desire. Then needs another element inquire Whereof she might be made; that is, the sky. For to the heaven her haughty looks aspire, And eke her love is pure immortal high.  Then since to heaven ye likened are the best,  Be like in mercy as in all the rest.
Now thou has loved me one whole day, Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say? Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow? Or say that now We are not just those persons which we were? Or, that oaths made in reverential fear Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? Or, as true deaths true marriages untie, So lovers’ contracts, images of those, Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose? Or, your own end to justify, For having purposed change and falsehood, you Can have no way but falsehood to be true? Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could Dispute and conquer, if I would, Which I abstain to do, For by tomorrow, I may think so too.
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise, Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote; Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted, Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone, Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited To any sensual feast with thee alone: But my five wits nor my five senses can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee, Who leaves unswayed the likeness of a man, Thy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be. Only my plague thus far I count my gain, That she that makes me sin awards me pain.
I cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!  Merciful love that tantalizes not, One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,  Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot! O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!  That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,  That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,— Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,  Withhold no atom’s atom or I die, Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,  Forget, in the mist of idle misery, Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind  Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
Why should your fair eyes with such sovereign grace Disperse their rays on every vulgar spirit, Whilst I in darkness in the self-same place Get not one glance to recompense my merit? So doth the ploughman gaze the wandering star, And only rest contented with the light, That never learned what constellations are, Beyond the bent of his unknowing sight, O! why should beauty, custom to obey, To their gross sense apply herself so ill? Would God I were as ignorant as they, When I am made unhappy by my skill; Only compelled on this poor good to boast, Heavens are not kind to them that know them most.
Now you have freely given me leave to love,  What will you do?  Shall I your mirth, or passion move,  When I begin to woo; Will you torment, or scorn, or love me too? Each petty beauty can disdain, and I  Spite of your hate  Without your leave can see, and die;  Dispense a nobler fate! ’Tis easy to destroy, you may create. Then give me leave to love, and love me too  Not with design  To raise, as Love’s cursed rebels do,  When puling poets whine, Fame to their beauty, from their blubbered eyne. Grief is a puddle, and reflects not clear  Your beauty’s rays;  Joys are pure streams, your eyes appear  Sullen in sadder lays; In cheerful numbers they shine bright with praise, Which shall not mention to express you fair,  Wounds, flames, and darts,  Storms in your brow, nets in your hair,  Suborning all your parts, Or to betray, or torture captive hearts. I’ll make your eyes like morning suns appear,  As mild, and fair;  Your brow as crystal smooth, and clear,  And your disheveled hair Shall flow like a calm region of the air.
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze Has burned itself to ashes, and expires In the intensity of its own fires, There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze. So after Love has led us, till he tires Of his own throes, and torments, and desires, Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze, He beckons us to follow, and across Cool verdant vales we wander free from care. Is it a touch of frost lies in the air? Why are we haunted with a sense of loss? We do not wish the pain back, or the heat; And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
What of her glass without her? The blank gray There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face. Her dress without her? The tossed empty space Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away. Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place Without her? Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace, And cold forgetfulness of night or day. What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart, Of thee what word remains ere speech be still? A wayfarer by barren ways and chill, Steep ways and weary, without her thou art, Where the long cloud, the long wood’s counterpart, Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill.
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— But how could I forget thee?—Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
I have led her home, my love, my only friend, There is none like her, none. And never yet so warmly ran my blood And sweetly, on and on Calming itself to the long-wished-for end, Full to the banks, close on the promised good. None like her, none. Just now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk Seem’d her light foot along the garden walk, And shook my heart to think she comes once more; But even then I heard her close the door, The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone. There is none like her, none. Nor will be when our summers have deceased. O, art thou sighing for Lebanon In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East, Sighing for Lebanon, Dark cedar, tho’ thy limbs have here increased, Upon a pastoral slope as fair, And looking to the South, and fed With honeyed rain and delicate air, And haunted by the starry head Of her whose gentle will has changed my fate, And made my life a perfumed altar-frame; And over whom thy darkness must have spread With such delight as theirs of old, thy great Forefathers of the thornless garden, there Shadowing the snow-limbed Eve from whom she came. Here will I lie, while these long branches sway, And you fair stars that crown a happy day Go in and out as if at merry play, Who am no more so all forlorn, As when it seemed far better to be born To labour and the mattock-hardened hand Than nursed at ease and brought to understand A sad astrology, the boundless plan That makes you tyrants in your iron skies, Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand His nothingness into man. But now shine on, and what care I, Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl The countercharm of space and hollow sky, And do accept my madness, and would die To save from some slight shame one simple girl. Would die; for sullen-seeming Death may give More life to Love than is or ever was In our low world, where yet ’tis sweet to live. Let no one ask me how it came to pass; It seems that I am happy, that to me A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, A purer sapphire melts into the sea. Not die; but live a life of truest breath, And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs. Oh, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs, Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death? Make answer, Maud my bliss, Maud made my Maud by that long loving kiss, Life of my life, wilt thou not answer this? “The dusky strand of Death inwoven here With dear Love’s tie, makes love himself more dear.” Is that enchanted moan only the swell Of the long waves that roll in yonder bay? And hark the clock within, the silver knell Of twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white, And die to live, long as my pulses play; But now by this my love has closed her sight And given false death her hand, and stol’n away To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell Among the fragments of the golden day. May nothing there her maiden grace affright! Dear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell. My bride to be, my evermore delight, My own heart’s heart, my ownest own, farewell; It is but for a little space I go: And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell Beat to the noiseless music of the night! Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow Of your soft splendour that you look so bright? I have climbed nearer out of lonely Hell. Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell. Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe That seems to draw—but it shall not be so: Let all be well, be well.
O happy dames, that may embrace The fruit of your delight, Help to bewail the woeful case And eke the heavy plight Of me, that wonted to rejoice The fortune of my pleasant choice; Good ladies, help to fill my mourning voice. In ship, freight with remembrance Of thoughts and pleasures past, He sails that hath in governance My life while it will last; With scalding sighs, for lack of gale, Furthering his hope, that is his sail, Toward me, the sweet port of his avail. Alas! how oft in dreams I see Those eyes that were my food; Which sometime so delighted me, That yet they do me good; Wherewith I wake with his return, Whose absent flame did make me burn: But when I find the lack, Lord, how I mourn! When other lovers in arms across Rejoice their chief delight. Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss I stand the bitter night In my window, where I may see Before the winds how the clouds flee. Lo! what a mariner love hath made of me! And in green waves when the salt flood Doth rise by rage of wind, A thousand fancies in that mood Assail my restless mind. Alas! now drencheth my sweet foe, That with the spoil of my heart did go, And left me; but, alas! why did he so? And when the seas wax calm again To chase fro me annoy, My doubtful hope doth cause me pain; So dread cuts off my joy. Thus is my wealth mingled with woe, And of each thought a doubt doth grow; “Now he comes! Will he come? Alas, no, no!”
My head, my heart, mine Eyes, my life, nay more, My joy, my Magazine of earthly store, If two be one, as surely thou and I, How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lye? So many steps, head from the heart to sever If but a neck, soon should we be together: I like the earth this season, mourn in black, My Sun is gone so far in’s Zodiack, Whom whilst I ’joy’d, nor storms, nor frosts I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt. My chilled limbs now nummed lye forlorn; Return, return sweet Sol from Capricorn; In this dead time, alas, what can I more Then view those fruits which through thy heat I bore? Which sweet contentment yield me for a space, True living Pictures of their Fathers face. O strange effect! now thou art Southward gone, I weary grow, the tedious day so long; But when thou Northward to me shalt return, I wish my Sun may never set, but burn Within the Cancer of my glowing breast, The welcome house of him my dearest guest. Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence, Till natures sad decree shall call thee hence; Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, I here, thou there, yet both but one.
Come to me in the silence of the night;  Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright  As sunlight on a stream;  Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years. Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,  Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;  Where thirsting longing eyes  Watch the slow door That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live  My very life again tho’ cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give  Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:  Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago.
Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo’s calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster  For their far off flying  From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples’ dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,  And all winds go sighing  For sweet things dying.
O that ’twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again!... A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee: Ah, Christ! that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be!
O patient shore, that canst not go to meet Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest Thou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest, When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet, He turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet That other shore may be, that to thy breast He must return? And when in sterner test He folds thee to a heart which does not beat, Wraps thee in ice, and gives no smile, no kiss, To break long wintry days, still dost thou miss Naught from thy trust? Still, wait, unfaltering, The higher, warmer waves which leap in spring? O sweet, wise shore, to be so satisfied! O heart, learn from the shore! Love has a tide!
A face that should content me wondrous well Should not be fair but lovely to behold, With gladsome cheer all grief for to expel; With sober looks so would I that it should Speak without words such words as none can tell; Her tress also should be of crisped gold; With wit; and thus might chance I might be tied, And knit again the knot that should not slide.
Are there two things, of all which men possess, That are so like each other and so near, As mutual Love seems like to Happiness? Dear Asra, woman beyond utterance dear! This love which ever welling at my heart, Now in its living fount doth heave and fall, Now overflowing pours thro’ every part Of all my frame, and fills and changes all, Like vernal waters springing up through snow, This Love that seeming great beyond the power Of growth, yet seemeth ever more to grow, Could I transmute the whole to one rich Dower Of Happy Life, and give it all to Thee, Thy lot, methinks, were Heaven, thy age, Eternity!
I scarce believe my love to be so pure As I had thought it was, Because it doth endure Vicissitude, and season, as the grass; Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more. But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense, And of the sun his working vigor borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. And yet no greater, but more eminent, Love by the spring is grown; As, in the firmament, Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown, Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough, From love’s awakened root do bud out now. If, as water stirred more circles be Produced by one, love such additions take, Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make, For they are all concentric unto thee; And though each spring do add to love new heat, As princes do in time of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.
Thou God, whose high, eternal Love Is the only blue sky of our life, Clear all the Heaven that bends above The life-road of this man and wife. May these two lives be but one note In the world’s strange-sounding harmony, Whose sacred music e’er shall float Through every discord up to Thee. As when from separate stars two beams Unite to form one tender ray: As when two sweet but shadowy dreams Explain each other in the day: So may these two dear hearts one light Emit, and each interpret each. Let an angel come and dwell tonight In this dear double-heart, and teach.
O come, soft rest of cares! come, Night! Come, naked Virtue’s only tire, The reapèd harvest of the light Bound up in sheaves of sacred fire, Love calls to war: Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The fields his arms. Come, Night, and lay thy velvet hand On glorious Day’s outfacing face; And all thy crownèd flames command For torches to our nuptial grace. Love calls to war: Sighs his alarms, Lips his swords are, The field his arms.
Light, so low upon earth, You send a flash to the sun. Here is the golden close of love, All my wooing is done. Oh, all the woods and the meadows, Woods, where we hid from the wet, Stiles where we stayed to be kind, Meadows in which we met! Light, so low in the vale You flash and lighten afar, For this is the golden morning of love, And you are his morning star. Flash, I am coming, I come, By meadow and stile and wood, Oh, lighten into my eyes and my heart, Into my heart and my blood! Heart, are you great enough For a love that never tires? O heart, are you great enough for love? I have heard of thorns and briers. Over the thorns and briers, Over the meadows and stiles, Over the world to the end of it Flash of a million miles.
Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit, Mere imitation of the inimitable: In heaven we have the real and true and sure. ’Tis there they neither marry nor are given In marriage but are as the angels: right, Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ To say that! Marriage-making for the earth, With gold so much,— birth, power, repute so much, Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! Be as the angels rather, who, apart, Know themselves into one, are found at length Married, but marry never, no, nor give In marriage; they are man and wife at once When the true time is: here we have to wait Not so long neither! Could we by a wish Have what we will and get the future now, Would we wish aught done undone in the past? So, let him wait God’s instant men call years; Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, Do out the duty! Through such souls alone God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.
O! never say that I was false of heart, Though absence seemed my flame to qualify. As easy might I from myself depart As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie: That is my home of love; if I have ranged, Like him that travels, I return again, Just to the time, not with the time exchanged, So that myself bring water for my stain. Never believe, though in my nature reigned All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, That it could so preposterously be stained, To leave for nothing all thy sum of good; For nothing this wide universe I call, Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,  The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,  And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings. Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords;  The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words;  The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.
In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers: Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. The little rift within the lover’s lute, Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That rotting inward slowly moulders all. It is not worth the keeping: let it go: But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no. And trust me not at all or all in all.
Love is a sickness full of woes,  All remedies refusing; A plant that with most cutting grows,  Most barren with best using.  Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoyed, it sighting cries,  Heigh ho! Love is a torment of the mind,  A tempest everlasting; And Jove hath made it of a kind  Not well, not full, nor fasting.  Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoyed, it sighing cries,  Heigh ho!
Remember when you love, from that same hour Your peace you put into your lover’s power; From that same hour from him you laws receive, And as he shall ordain, you joy, or grieve, Hope, fear, laugh, weep; Reason aloof does stand, Disabled both to act, and to command. Oh cruel fetters! rather wish to feel On your soft limbs, the galling weight of steel; Rather to bloody wounds oppose your breast. No ill, by which the body can be pressed You will so sensible a torment find As shackles on your captived mind. The mind from heaven its high descent did draw, And brooks uneasily any other law Than what from Reason dictated shall be. Reason, a kind of innate deity, Which only can adapt to ev’ry soul A yoke so fit and light, that the control All liberty excels; so sweet a sway, The same ’tis to be happy, and obey; Commands so wise, and with rewards so dressed, That the according soul replies “I’m blessed.”
Never love unless you can Bear with all the faults of man: Men sometimes will jealous be Though but little cause they see; And hang the head, as discontent, And speak what straight they will repent. Men that but one saint adore Make a show of love to more. Beauty must be scorned in none, Though but truly served in one: For what is courtship but disguise? True hearts may have dissembling eyes. Men, when their affairs require, Must awhile themselves retire; Sometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk, And not ever sit and talk. If these and such-like you can bear,  Then like, and love, and never fear!
We cannot live, except thus mutually We alternate, aware or unaware, The reflex act of life: and when we bear Our virtue onward most impulsively, Most full of invocation, and to be Most instantly compellant, certes, there We live most life, whoever breathes most air And counts his dying years by sun and sea. But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth Throw out her full force on another soul, The conscience and the concentration both Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole And aim consummated, is Love in sooth, As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.
How Love came in, I do not know, Whether by th’ eye, or eare, or no: Or whether with the soule it came (At first) infused with the same: Whether in part ‘tis here or there, Or, like the soule, whole every where: This troubles me: but as I well As any other, this can tell; That when from hence she does depart, The out-let then is from the heart.
Down by the salley gardens  my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens  with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy,  as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish,  with her would not agree. In a field by the river  my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder  she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy,  as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish,  and now am full of tears.
Come when the nights are bright with stars Or come when the moon is mellow; Come when the sun his golden bars Drops on the hay-field yellow. Come in the twilight soft and gray, Come in the night or come in the day, Come, O love, whene’er you may, And you are welcome, welcome. You are sweet, O Love, dear Love, You are soft as the nesting dove. Come to my heart and bring it to rest As the bird flies home to its welcome nest. Come when my heart is full of grief Or when my heart is merry; Come with the falling of the leaf Or with the redd’ning cherry. Come when the year’s first blossom blows, Come when the summer gleams and glows, Come with the winter’s drifting snows, And you are welcome, welcome.
Come and let us live my Deare, Let us love and never feare, What the sowrest Fathers say: Brightest Sol that dies to day Lives againe as blithe to morrow, But if we darke sons of sorrow Set; o then, how long a Night  Shuts the Eyes of our short light! Then let amorous kisses dwell On our lips, begin and tell A Thousand, and a Hundred, score An Hundred, and a Thousand more, Till another Thousand smother That, and that wipe of another. Thus at last when we have numbred Many a Thousand, many a Hundred; Wee’l confound the reckoning quite, And lose our selves in wild delight: While our joyes so multiply, As shall mocke the envious eye.
Love lives beyond The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew— I love the fond, The faithful, and the true Love lives in sleep, 'Tis happiness of healthy dreams Eve’s dews may weep, But love delightful seems. 'Tis seen in flowers, And in the even's pearly dew On earth's green hours, And in the heaven's eternal blue. ‘Tis heard in spring When light and sunbeams, warm and kind, On angels’ wing Bring love and music to the wind. And where is voice, So young, so beautiful and sweet As nature’s choice, Where Spring and lovers meet? Love lives beyond The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew. I love the fond, The faithful, young and true.
The wine of Love is music, And the feast of Love is song: And when Love sits down to the banquet, Love sits long: Sits long and ariseth drunken, But not with the feast and the wine; He reeleth with his own heart, That great rich Vine.
It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is overruled by fate. When two are stripped, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win; And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect: The reason no man knows; let it suffice What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love, But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d, Yet out of that I have written these songs).
All trembling in my arms Aminta lay, Defending of the bliss I strove to take; Raising my rapture by her kind delay, Her force so charming was and weak. The soft resistance did betray the grant, While I pressed on the heaven of my desires; Her rising breasts with nimbler motions pant; Her dying eyes assume new fires. Now to the height of languishment she grows, And still her looks new charms put on; Now the last mystery of Love she knows, We sigh, and kiss: I waked, and all was done. ‘Twas but a dream, yet by my heart I knew, Which still was panting, part of it was true: Oh how I strove the rest to have believed; Ashamed and angry to be undeceived!
There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies blow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow: There cherries grow which none may buy Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry. Those cherries fairly do enclose Of orient pearl a double row, Which when her lovely laughter shows, They look like rose-buds filled with snow; Yet them no peer nor prince can buy Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry. Her eyes like angels watch them still; Her brows like bended bows do stand, Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill All that attempt with eye or hand Those sacred cherries to come nigh, Till “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou  Beside me singing in the Wilderness— Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Where true Love burns Desire is Love’s pure flame; It is the reflex of our earthly frame, That takes its meaning from the nobler part, And but translates the language of the heart.
Julia, I bring  To thee this ring, Made for thy finger fit;  To show by this  That our love is (Or should be) like to it.  Close though it be,  The joint is free; So when Love’s yoke is on,  It must not gall,  Or fret at all With hard oppression.  But it must play  Still either way, And be, too, such a yoke  As not too wide  To overslide, Or be so strait to choke.  So we who bear  This beam must rear Ourselves to such a height  As that the stay  Of either may Create the burden light.  And as this round  Is nowhere found To flaw, or else to sever;  So let our love  As endless prove, And pure as gold for ever.
Ask nothing more of me, sweet; All I can give you I give. Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet— Love that should help you to live, Song that should spur you to soar. All things were nothing to give, Once to have sense of you more, Touch you and taste of you, sweet, Think you and breathe you and live, Swept of your wings as they soar, Trodden by chance of your feet. I that have love and no more Give you but love of you, sweet. He that hath more, let him give; He that hath wings, let him soar; Mine is the heart at your feet Here, that must love you to live.
She stood breast high amid the corn, Clasped by the golden light of morn, Like the sweetheart of the sun, Who many a glowing kiss had won. On her cheek an autumn flush, Deeply ripened;—such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn. Round her eyes her tresses fell, Which were blackest none could tell, But long lashes veiled a light, That had else been all too bright. And her hat, with shady brim, Made her tressy forehead dim;— Thus she stood amid the stooks, Praising God with sweetest looks:— Sure, I said, heaven did not mean, Where I reap thou shouldst but glean, Lay thy sheaf adown and come, Share my harvest and my home.
Love, meet me in the green glen,  Beside the tall elm-tree, Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen;  There come with me.  Meet me in the green glen. Meet me at the sunset  Down in the green glen, Where we’ve often met  By hawthorn-tree and foxes’ den,  Meet me in the green glen. Meet me in the green glen,  By sweetbriar bushes there; Meet me by your own sen,  Where the wild thyme blossoms fair.  Meet me in the green glen. Meet me by the sweetbriar,  By the mole-hill swelling there; When the west glows like a fire  God’s crimson bed is there.  Meet me in the green glen.
Forbear, bold youth, all’s Heaven here,  And what you do aver, To others, courtship may appear,  ’Tis sacriledge to her. She is a publick deity,  And were’t not very odd She should depose her self to be  A pretty household god? First make the sun in private shine,  And bid the world adieu, That so he may his beams confine  In complement to you. But if of that you do despair,  Think how you did amiss, To strive to fix her beams which are  More bright and large than this.
I love your lips when they’re wet with wine  And red with a wild desire; I love your eyes when the lovelight lies  Lit with a passionate fire. I love your arms when the warm white flesh  Touches mine in a fond embrace; I love your hair when the strands enmesh  Your kisses against my face. Not for me the cold, calm kiss  Of a virgin’s bloodless love; Not for me the saint’s white bliss,  Nor the heart of a spotless dove. But give me the love that so freely gives  And laughs at the whole world’s blame, With your body so young and warm in my arms,  It sets my poor heart aflame. So kiss me sweet with your warm wet mouth,  Still fragrant with ruby wine, And say with a fervor born of the South  That your body and soul are mine. Clasp me close in your warm young arms,  While the pale stars shine above, And we’ll live our whole young lives away  In the joys of a living love.
I Love me Sweet, with all thou art, Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the lightest part, Love me in full being. II Love me with thine open youth In its frank surrender; With the vowing of thy mouth, With its silence tender. III Love me with thine azure eyes, Made for earnest granting; Taking colour from the skies, Can Heaven’s truth be wanting? IV Love me with their lids, that fall Snow-like at first meeting; Love me with thine heart, that all Neighbours then see beating. V Love me with thine hand stretched out Freely—open-minded: Love me with thy loitering foot,— Hearing one behind it. VI Love me with thy voice, that turns Sudden faint above me; Love me with thy blush that burns When I murmur Love me! VII Love me with thy thinking soul, Break it to love-sighing; Love me with thy thoughts that roll On through living—dying. VIII Love me when in thy gorgeous airs, When the world has crowned thee; Love me, kneeling at thy prayers, With the angels round thee. IX Love me pure, as musers do, Up the woodlands shady: Love me gaily, fast and true As a winsome lady. X Through all hopes that keep us brave, Farther off or nigher, Love me for the house and grave, And for something higher. XI Thus, if thou wilt prove me, Dear, Woman’s love no fable. I will love thee—half a year— As a man is able.
As you came from the holy land  of Walsinghame Met you not with my true love  By the way as you came? How shall I know your true love  That have met many one As I went to the holy land  That have come, that have gone? She is neither white nor brown  But as the heavens fair There is none hath a form so divine  In the earth or the air. Such an one did I meet, good Sir,  Such an Angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear  By her gait, by her grace. She hath left me here all alone,  All alone as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with her self,  And me loved as her own. What’s the cause that she leaves you alone  And a new way doth take; Who loved you once as her own  And her joy did you make? I have loved her all my youth,  But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit  From the withered tree. Know that love is a careless child  And forgets promise past, He is blind, he is deaf when he list  And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content  And a trustless joy He is won with a world of despair  And is lost with a toy. Of womenkind such indeed is the love  Or the word Love abused Under which many childish desires  And conceits are excused. But true Love is a durable fire  In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead,  From itself never turning.
Cupid as he lay among Roses, by a Bee was stung. Whereupon in anger flying To his Mother, said thus crying; Help! O help! your Boy’s a dying. And why, my pretty Lad, said she? Then blubbering, replied he, A winged Snake has bitten me, Which Country people call a Bee. At which she smil’d; then with her hairs And kisses drying up his tears: Alas! said she, my Wag! if this Such a pernicious torment is: Come tell me then, how great’s the smart Of those, thou woundest with thy Dart!
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tir’d with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals. Off with that wiry Coronet and shew The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow: Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed. In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know, By this these Angels from an evil sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. Licence my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below. O my America! my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d, My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie, How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views, That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them. Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made For lay-men, are all women thus array’d; Themselves are mystic books, which only we (Whom their imputed grace will dignify) Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know; As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence, There is no penance due to innocence. To teach thee, I am naked first; why then What needst thou have more covering than a man.
I know that all beneath the moon decays, And what by mortals in this world is brought, In Time’s great periods shall return to nought; That fairest states have fatal nights and days; I know how all the Muse’s heavenly lays, With toil of spright which are so dearly bought, As idle sounds of few or none are sought, And that nought lighter is than airy praise. I know frail beauty like the purple flower, To which one morn oft birth and death affords; That love a jarring is of minds’ accords, Where sense and will invassal reason’s power: Know what I list, this all can not me move, But that, O me! I both must write and love.
I Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, Atop on the topmost twig, — which the pluckers forgot, somehow, — Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. II Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground.
Her face Her tongue Her wit so fair so sweet so sharp first bent then drew then hit mine eye mine ear my heart Mine eye Mine ear My heart to like to learn to love her face her tongue her wit doth lead doth teach doth move Her face Her tongue Her wit with beams with sound with art doth blind doth charm doth knit mine eye mine ear my heart Mine eye Mine ear My heart with life with hope with skill her face her tongue her wit doth feed doth feast doth fill O face O tongue O wit with frowns with checks with smart wrong not vex not wound not mine eye mine ear my heart This eye This ear This heart shall joy shall yield shall swear her face her tongue her wit to serve to trust to fear.
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please. The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice. My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land: The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
I try tearing paper into tiny, perfect squares— they cut my fingers. Warm milk, perhaps, stirred counter-clockwise in a cast iron pan— but even then there’s burning at the edges, angry foam-hiss. I’ve been told to put trumpet flowers under my pillow, I do: stamen up, the old crone said. But the pollen stains, and there are bees, I swear, in those long yellow chambers, echoing, the way the house does, mocking, with its longevity— each rib creaking and bending where I’m likely to break— I try floating out along the long O of lone, to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there disconnecting the dots of my night sky as one would take apart a house made of sticks, carefully, last addition to first, like sheep leaping backward into their pens.
(variations on the testimony and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1637-1638) I. Given to sweet motion the wilderness believes one fair one of flowers to be a moral blossom. We go so far. Walks now, only legend remaining. "I came afterwards to the window when you was writing." But in their documents her judges had written  "Insolent." In its branches spirit shelters air with wailing. The air thunders unavailingly there. "Fear is a snare. Why should I be afraid."  If I was in error  but not mistaken,  if my glass was gone  but not broken  (defaced) 2. My path illuminates all the interior of a dusky mirror, the left shoulder higher than the right is in memory's intricate. We must study distinctions aftertimes will adore. if the glass be taken away, we shall see more. God is going. Walks now, only God remaining.  (wanting) an immediate promise He will deliver them (wanting) in a day of trouble These emotions she retained in the universal heart, in a new eye: rational charity  active piety  appearing as blindness appears  in the face in bright sunlight  exactly like a smile. 3. "Here is a great stir about graces and looking to hearts, but give me Christ. Tell me not of meditations and duties, but tell me of Christ." Christ is one thing. The soul is another the wild outskirt of the earth will prove the ruin of. And mischief, the poor babe, grew in the forest.  (defaced) A stick a bunch of rags a flower need no transformation. The hour given to sweet motion is a soul. I came to the window when God was going. In low condition, little number and remoteness things  outbreaks of temper  had a kind of value  and even a comfort. 4. A memory a promise or a flower sheared away was not made  but taken from a bush of wild roses. Seeing them, she began to cry out for a red rose. "God has left me to distinguish between the voice of my Beloved and John Baptist and Antichrist." But daybreak unites what belongs together, and there are two kinds of distinction. There are (something wanting) "What he declares he does not know himself." I know a day of small and a day of infancy. At the window vividly just now and entirely inarticulate the form given to sweet motion broke apart and  there's colors all kinds all round. 5. Of realities surrounding us, their pith and substance was  wasted  wronged  misplaced. "I desire to speak to our teacher."  In a state of desire,  what belongs together  ignores the barriers. Daybreak have you any word your own or I one fair one remaining? God is gone, only a window and a wilderness remaining, not made but taken, thinnest fantasy of beginnings taken from a bush of wild red roses.
Tell me no more of minds embracing minds,  And hearts exchang’d for hearts; That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds,  And mix their subt’lest parts; That two unbodied essences may kiss, And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss. I was that silly thing that once was wrought  To practise this thin love; I climb’d from sex to soul, from soul to thought;  But thinking there to move, Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then From soul I lighted at the sex again. As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast,  Who yet in closets eat; So lovers who profess they spirits taste,  Feed yet on grosser meat; I know they boast they souls to souls convey, Howe’r they meet, the body is the way. Come I will undeceive thee, they that tread  Those vain aerial ways, Are like young heirs and alchemists misled  To waste their wealth and days, For searching thus to be for ever rich, They only find a med’cine for the itch.
Delight of Human kind, and Gods above; Parent of Rome; Propitious Queen of Love; Whose vital pow’r, Air, Earth, and Sea supplies; And breeds what e’r is born beneath the rowling Skies: For every kind, by thy prolifique might, Springs, and beholds the Regions of the light: Thee, Goddess thee, the clouds and tempests fear, And at thy pleasing presence disappear: For thee the Land in fragrant Flow’rs is drest, For thee the Ocean smiles, and smooths her wavy breast; And Heav’n it self with more serene, and purer light is blest. For when the rising Spring adorns the Mead, And a new Scene of Nature stands display’d, When teeming Budds, and chearful greens appear, And Western gales unlock the lazy year, The joyous Birds thy welcome first express, Whose native Songs thy genial fire confess: Then savage Beasts bound o’re their slighted food, Strook with thy darts, and tempt the raging floud: All Nature is thy Gift; Earth, Air, and Sea: Of all that breathes, the various progeny, Stung with delight, is goaded on by thee. O’er barren Mountains, o’er the flow’ry Plain, The leavy Forest, and the liquid Main Extends thy uncontroul’d and boundless reign. Through all the living Regions dost thou move, And scattr’st, where thou goest, the kindly seeds of Love: Since then the race of every living thing, Obeys thy pow’r; since nothing new can spring Without thy warmth, without thy influence bear, Or beautiful, or lovesome can appear, Be thou my ayd: My tuneful Song inspire, And kindle with thy own productive fire; While all thy Province Nature, I survey, And sing to Memmius an immortal lay Of Heav’n, and Earth, and every where thy wond’rous pow’r display. To Memmius, under thy sweet influence born, Whom thou with all thy gifts and graces dost adorn. The rather, then assist my Muse and me, Infusing Verses worthy him and thee. Mean time on Land and Sea let barb’rous discord cease, And lull the listening world in universal peace. To thee, Mankind their soft repose must owe, For thou alone that blessing canst bestow; Because the brutal business of the War Is manag’d by thy dreadful Servant’s care: Who oft retires from fighting fields, to prove The pleasing pains of thy eternal Love: And panting on thy breast, supinely lies, While with thy heavenly form he feeds his famish’d eyes: Sucks in with open lips, thy balmy breath, By turns restor’d to life, and plung’d in pleasing death. There while thy curling limbs about him move, Involv’d and fetter’d in the links of Love, When wishing all, he nothing can deny, Thy charms in that auspicious moment try; With winning eloquence our peace implore, And quiet to the weary World restore.
How can I keep my maidenhead, My maidenhead, my maidenhead; How can I keep my maidenhead, Among sae mony men, O. The Captain bad a guinea for’t, A guinea for’t, a guinea for’t, The Captain bad a guinea for’t, The Colonel he bad ten, O. But I’ll do as my minnie did, My minnie did, my minnie did, But I’ll do as my minnie did, For siller I’ll hae nane, O. I’ll gie it to a bonie lad, A bonie lad, a bonie lad; I’ll gie it to a bonie lad, For just as gude again, O. An auld moulie maidenhead, A maidenhead, a maidenhead; An auld moulie maidenhead, The weary wark I ken, O. The stretchin’ o’t, the strivin’ o’t, The borin o’t, the rivin’ o’t, And ay the double drivin o’t, The farther ye gang ben, O.
John Anderson my jo, John, When we were first acquent, Your locks were like the raven, Your bonie brow was brent; But now your brow is beld, John, Your locks are like the snaw, but blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo! John Anderson my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither, And monie a cantie day, John, We've had wi' ane anither; Now we maun totter down, John, And hand in hand we'll go, And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo!
To the dim light and the large circle of shade I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills, There where we see no color in the grass. Natheless my longing loses not its green, It has so taken root in the hard stone Which talks and hears as though it were a lady. Utterly frozen is this youthful lady, Even as the snow that lies within the shade; For she is no more moved than is the stone By the sweet season which makes warm the hills And alters them afresh from white to green Covering their sides again with flowers and grass. When on her hair she sets a crown of grass The thought has no more room for other lady, Because she weaves the yellow with the green So well that Love sits down there in the shade,– Love who has shut me in among low hills Faster than between walls of granite-stone. She is more bright than is a precious stone; The wound she gives may not be healed with grass: I therefore have fled far o’er plains and hills For refuge from so dangerous a lady; But from her sunshine nothing can give shade,– Not any hill, nor wall, nor summer-green. A while ago, I saw her dressed in green,– So fair, she might have wakened in a stone This love which I do feel even for her shade; And therefore, as one woos a graceful lady, I wooed her in a field that was all grass Girdled about with very lofty hills. Yet shall the streams turn back and climb the hills Before Love’s flame in this damp wood and green Burn, as it burns within a youthful lady, For my sake, who would sleep away in stone My life, or feed like beasts upon the grass, Only to see her garments cast a shade. How dark soe’er the hills throw out their shade, Under her summer green the beautiful lady Covers it, like a stone cover’d in grass.
Dear, if you change, I’ll never choose again;  Sweet, if you shrink, I’ll never think of love; Fair, if you fail, I’ll judge all beauty vain; Wise, if too weak, more wits I’ll never prove. Dear, sweet, fair, wise,-change, shrink, nor be not weak; And on my faith, my faith shall never break. Earth with her flowers shall sooner heaven adorn; Heaven her bright stars through, earth’s dim globe shall move; Fire heat shall lose, and frosts of flame be born; Air, made to shine, as black as hell shall prove: Earth, heaven, fire, air, the world transformed shall view, Ere I prove false to faith, or strange to you.
I Why should a foolish marriage vow,  Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now,  When passion is decayed? We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,  Till our love was loved out in us both; But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: ’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.  II If I have pleasures for a friend,  And further love in store, What wrong has he, whose joys did end,  And who could give no more? ’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, Or that I should bar him of another: For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,  When neither can hinder the other.
Man of himself’s a little world, but join’d With woman, woman for that end design’d, (Hear cruel fair one whilst I this rehearse!) He makes up then a complete universe.  Man, like this sublunary world, is born The sport of two cross planets, love, and scorn: Woman the other world resembles well, In whose looks Heav’n is, in whose breast Hell.
Clouds spout upon her  Their waters amain  In ruthless disdain, – Her who but lately  Had shivered with pain  As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly  Such arrows of rain: One who to shelter  Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken  Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her  That summertime spills  In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken  And birds close their bills. Would that I lay there  And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there Exposed to one weather We both, – who would stray there  When sunny the day there,   Or evening was clear  At the prime of the year. Soon will be growing  Green blades from her mound, And daisies be showing  Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them –  Ay – the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child’s pleasure  All her life’s round.
How much shall I love her? For life, or not long?  “Not long.” Alas! When forget her? In years, or by June?  “By June.” And whom woo I after? No one, or a throng?  “A throng.” Of these shall I wed one Long hence, or quite soon?  “Quite soon.” And which will my bride be? The right or the wrong?  “The wrong.” And my remedy – what kind? Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?  “Earth-hewn.”
We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;  – They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles of years ago; And some words played between us to and fro  On which lost the more by our love. The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby  Like an ominous bird a-wing…. Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,  And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,— Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,  You did not come.  You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty; –I know and knew it. But, unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be  You love not me?
I Queer are the ways of a man I know:   He comes and stands   In a careworn craze,   And looks at the sands   And the seaward haze   With moveless hands   And face and gaze,   Then turns to go...  And what does he see when he gazes so?   II They say he sees as an instant thing   More clear than to-day,   A sweet soft scene   That once was in play   By that briny green;   Yes, notes alway   Warm, real, and keen,   What his back years bring— A phantom of his own figuring.   III Of this vision of his they might say more:   Not only there   Does he see this sight,   But everywhere   In his brain–day, night,   As if on the air   It were drawn rose bright–   Yea, far from that shore  Does he carry this vision of heretofore:   IV A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,   He withers daily,   Time touches her not,   But she still rides gaily   In his rapt thought   On that shagged and shaly   Atlantic spot,   And as when first eyed  Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.
Pack, clouds away! and welcome day!  With night we banish sorrow; Sweet air, blow soft, mount larks aloft  To give my love good-morrow! Wings from the wind to please her mind,  Notes from the lark I’ll borrow; Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing,  To give my love good-morrow;  To give my love good-morrow;  Notes from them both I’ll borrow. Wake from thy nest, Robin Redbreast,   Sing birds in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill  Give my fair love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush,  Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves,  Sing my fair love good-morrow;  To give my love good-morrow,  Sing birds in every furrow.
I remember a house where all were good To me, God knows, deserving no such thing: Comforting smell breathed at very entering, Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood. That cordial air made those kind people a hood All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing Will, or mild nights the new morsels of Spring: Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should. Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales, All the air things wear that build this world of Wales; Only the inmate does not correspond: God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales, Complete thy creature dear O where it fails, Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.
God with honour hang your head, Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed With lissome scions, sweet scions, Out of hallowed bodies bred. Each be other’s comfort kind: Déep, déeper than divined, Divine charity, dear charity, Fast you ever, fast bind. Then let the March tread our ears: I to him turn with tears Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock, Déals tríumph and immortal years.
What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors, Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire! Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who, always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee, of flattering gales Unmindful. Hapless they To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea.
And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle; A thing of soft misnomers, so divine That silly youth doth think to make itself Divine by loving, and so goes on  Yawning and doting a whole summer long, Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara, And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots; Then Cleopatra lives at number seven, And Antony resides in Brunswick Square. Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world, If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,  It is no reason why such agonies Should be more common than the growth of weeds. Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say  That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!  Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast, Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,  Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist! Faded the flower and all its budded charms,  Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,  Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise – Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve,  When the dusk holiday – or holinight Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave  The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight, But, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day, He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–  I hold it towards you.
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,  When lulled Argus, baffled, swoon’d and slept, So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright  So play’d, so charm’d, so conquer’d, so bereft The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;  And seeing it asleep, so fled away, Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,  Nor unto Tempe where Jove griev’d that day; But to that second circle of sad Hell,  Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell  Their sorrows—pale were the sweet lips I saw, Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
I Why should you sweare I am forsworn,  Since thine I vow’d to be? Lady it is already Morn,  And ’twas last night I swore to thee That fond impossibility.  II Have I not lov’d thee much and long,  A tedious twelve houres space? I must all other Beauties wrong,  And rob thee of a new imbrace; Could I still dote upon thy Face.  III Not, but all joy in thy browne haire,  By others may be found; But I must search the blank and faire  Like skilfull Minerallist’s that sound For Treasure in un-plow’d-up ground.  IV Then, if when I have lov’d my round,  Thou prov’st the pleasant she; With spoyles of meaner Beauties crown’d,  I laden will returne to thee, Ev’d sated with Varietie.
Love brought by night a vision to my bed, One that still wore the vesture of a child But eighteen years of age – who sweetly smiled Till of the lovely form false hopes were bred  And keen embraces wild. Ah! for the lost desire that haunts me yet, Till mine eyes fail in sleep that finds no more That fleeting ghost! Oh, lovelorn heart, give o’er – Cease thy vain dreams of beauty’s warmth – forget  The face thou longest for!
Their sense is with their senses all mixed in, Destroyed by subtleties these women are! More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar Utterly this fair garden we might win. Behold! I looked for peace, and thought it near. Our inmost hearts had opened, each to each. We drank the pure daylight of honest speech. Alas! that was the fatal draught, I fear. For when of my lost Lady came the word,  This woman, O this agony of flesh! Jealous devotion bade her break the mesh, That I might seek that other like a bird. I do adore the nobleness! despise  The act! She has gone forth, I know not where. Will the hard world my sentience of her share? I feel the truth; so let the world surmise.
He found her by the ocean’s moaning verge, Nor any wicked change in her discerned; And she believed his old love had returned, Which was her exultation, and her scourge. She took his hand, and walked with him, and seemed The wife he sought, though shadow-like and dry. She had one terror, lest her heart should sigh, And tell her loudly that she no longer dreamed. She dared not say, ‘This is my breast: look in.’ But there’s a strength to help the desperate weak. That night he learned how silence best can speak The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin. About the middle of the night her call  Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed. ‘Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!’ she said. Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all.
He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles So masterfully rude, that he would grieve To see the helpless delicate thing receive His guardianship through certain dark defiles. Had he not teeth to rend, and hunger too? But still he spared her. Once: ‘Have you no fear?’ He said: ’twas dusk; she in his grasp; none near. She laughed: ‘No, surely; am I not with you?’ And uttering that soft starry ‘you,’ she leaned Her gentle body near him, looking up; And from her eyes, as from a poison-cup, He drank until the flittering eyelids screened. Devilish malignant witch! and oh, young beam Of heaven’s circle-glory! Here they shape To squeeze like an intoxicating grape –  I might, and yet thou goest safe, supreme.
Yet it was plain she struggled, and that salt Of righteous feeling made her pitiful. Poor twisting worm, so queenly beautiful! Where came the cleft between us? whose the fault? My tears are on thee, that have rarely dropped As balm for any bitter wound of mine: My breast will open for thee at a sign! But, no: we are two reed-pipes, coarsely stopped: The God once filled them with his mellow breath; And they were music till he flung them down, Used! used! Hear now the discord-loving clown Puff his gross spirit in them, worse than death! I do not know myself without thee more: In this unholy battle I grow base: If the same soul be under the same face,  Speak, and a taste of that old time restore!
If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo? If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, When every torment and adversite That cometh of hym, may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke. And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harm agree me, whereto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be? And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, betwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas! what is this wondre maladie? For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.
Alas, so all things now do hold their peace!  Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing; The beasts, the air, the birds their song do cease,  The nightès car the stars about doth bring; Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less:  So am not I, whom love, alas! doth wring, Bringing before my face the great increase  Of my desires, whereat I weep and sing, In joy and woe, as in a doubtful case.  For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring: But by and by, the cause of my disease  Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting, When that I think what grief it is again To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.
Farewell, false love, the oracle of lies,  A mortal foe and enemy to rest,  An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,  A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,  A way of error, a temple full of treason,  In all effects contrary unto reason.  A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,  Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,  A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers  As moisture lend to every grief that grows;  A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,  A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.  A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,  A siren song, a fever of the mind,  A maze wherein affection finds no end,  A raging cloud that runs before the wind,  A substance like the shadow of the sun,  A goal of grief for which the wisest run.  A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,  A path that leads to peril and mishap,  A true retreat of sorrow and despair,  An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,  A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,  A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.  Sith then thy trains my younger years betrayed,  And for my faith ingratitude I find;  And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed, Whose course was ever contrary to kind:  False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu!  Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.
When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth, Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue: On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not she is unjust? And wherefore say not I that I am old? Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not to have years told. Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived: For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred: Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require. Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you. Nor think the bitterness of absence sour When you have bid your servant once adieu; Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, or your affairs suppose, But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought, Save, where you are how happy you make those. So true a fool is love that in your will Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
Womanhood, wanton, ye want: Your meddling, mistress, is mannerless; Plenty of ill, of goodness scant, Ye rail at riot, reckless: To praise your port it is needless; For all your draff yet and your dregs, As well borne as ye full oft time begs. Why so coy and full of scorn? Mine horse is sold, I ween, you say; My new furrèd gown, when it is worn… Put up your purse, ye shall not pay! By crede, I trust to see the day, As proud a pea-hen as ye spread, Of me and other ye may have need! Though angelic be your smiling, Yet is your tongue an adder’s tail, Full like a scorpion stinging All those by whom ye have avail. Good mistress Anne, there ye do shail: What prate ye, pretty pigesnye? I trust to ’quite you ere I die! Your key is meet for every lock, Your key is common and hangeth out; Your key is ready, we need not knock, Nor stand long wresting there about; Of your door-gate ye have no doubt: But one thing is, that ye be lewd: Hold your tongue now, all beshrewd! To mistress Anne, that farly sweet, That wones at The Key in Thames Street.
APPLES Come buy my fine wares, Plums, apples and pears. A hundred a penny, In conscience too many: Come, will you have any? My children are seven, I wish them in Heaven; My husband’s a sot, With his pipe and his pot, Not a farthen will gain them, And I must maintain them. ONIONS Come, follow me by the smell, Here are delicate onions to sell; I promise to use you well. They make the blood warmer, You’ll feed like a farmer; For this is every cook’s opinion, No savoury dish without an onion; But, lest your kissing should be spoiled, Your onions must be thoroughly boiled: Or else you may spare Your mistress a share, The secret will never be known: She cannot discover The breath of her lover, But think it as sweet as her own. HERRINGS Be not sparing, Leave off swearing. Buy my herring Fresh from Malahide, Better never was tried. Come, eat them with pure fresh butter and mustard, Their bellies are soft, and as white as a custard. Come, sixpence a dozen, to get me some bread, Or, like my own herrings, I soon shall be dead.
Dead love, by treason slain, lies stark, White as a dead stark-stricken dove: None that pass by him pause to mark Dead love. His heart, that strained and yearned and strove As toward the sundawn strives the lark, Is cold as all the old joy thereof. Dead men, re-arisen from dust, may hark When rings the trumpet blown above: It will not raise from out the dark Dead love.
There was a graven image of Desire Painted with red blood on a ground of gold Passing between the young men and the old, And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire, And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire. Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold, The insatiable Satiety kept hold, Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire. The senses and the sorrows and the sins, And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture, Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins. Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate, Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.
Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
What are we first? First, animals; and next Intelligences at a leap; on whom Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb, And all that draweth on the tomb for text. Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun: Beneath whose light the shadow loses form. We are the lords of life, and life is warm. Intelligence and instinct now are one. But nature says: "My children most they seem When they least know me: therefore I decree That they shall suffer." Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream. Then if we study Nature we are wise. Thus do the few who live but with the day: The scientific animals are they— Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes.
The silver swan, who living had no note, When death approached, unlocked her silent throat; Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more: “Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes; More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”
My ghostly fader, I me confess, First to God and then to you, That at a window, wot ye how, I stale a kosse of gret swetness, Which don was out avisiness— But it is doon, not undoon, now. My ghostly fader, I me confess, First to God and then to you. But I restore it shall, doutless, Agein, if so be that I mow; And that to God I make a vow, And elles I axe foryefness. My ghostly fader, I me confesse, First to God and then to you.
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once, in special, In thin array, after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewith all sweetly did me kiss, And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’ It was no dream: I lay broad waking: But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
New yeare forth looking out of Janus gate, Doth seeme to promise hope of new delight: And bidding th’old Adieu, his pass
In that proud port, which her so goodly graceth,  Whiles her faire face she reares up to the skie:  And to the ground her eie lids low embaseth  Most goodly temperature ye may descry,  Myld humblesse mixt with awfull majesty,  For looking on the earth whence she was borne:  Her minde remembreth her mortalitie,  What so is fayrest shall to earth returne.  But that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne  Base thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime:  Treading downe earth as lothsome and forlorne,  That hinders heavenly thoughts with drossy slime.  Yet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me,  Such lowlinesse shall make you lofty be.
Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot, Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed: But known worth did in mine of time proceed, Till by degrees it had full conquest got. I saw, and liked; I liked, but lovèd not; I loved, but straight did not what love decreed: At length to love’s decrees I, forced, agreed, Yet with repining at so partial lot. Now even that footstep of lost liberty Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite I call it praise to suffer tyranny; And now employ the remnant of my wit To make myself believe that all is well, While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.
It is most true, that eyes are formed to serve The inward light; and that the heavenly part Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve, Rebels to Nature, strive for their own smart. It is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart, An image is, which for ourselves we carve; And, fools, adore in temple of our heart, Till that good god make Church and churchman starve. True, that true beauty virtue is indeed, Whereof this beauty can be but a shade, Which elements with mortal mixture breed; True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made, And should in soul up to our country move; True; and yet true, that I must Stella love.
Stella is sick, and in that sick-bed lies Sweetness, that breathes and pants as oft as she; And grace, sick too, such fine conclusions tries That sickness brags itself best graced to be. Beauty is sick, but sick in so fair guise That in that paleness beauty’s white we see; And joy, which is inseparate from these eyes, Stella now learns (strange case!) to weep in thee. Love moves thy pain, and like a faithful page, As thy looks stir, runs up and down, to make All folks prest at thy will thy pain to assuage; Nature with care sweats for her darling’s sake, Knowing worlds pass, ere she enough can find Of such heaven stuff, to clothe so heavenly mind.
Where be the roses gone, which sweetened so our eyes? Where those red cheeks, which oft with fair increase did frame The height of honor in the kindly badge of shame? Who hath the crimson weeds stolen from my morning skies? How doth the color vade of those vermilion dyes, Which Nature's self did make, and self engrained the same! I would know by what right this paleness overcame That hue, whose force my heart still unto thraldom ties? Galen's adoptive sons, who by a beaten way Their judgements hackney on, the fault on sickness lay; But feeling proof makes me say they mistake it far: It is but love, which makes his paper perfect white To write therein more fresh the story of delight, Whiles beauty's reddest ink Venus for him doth stir.
O absent presence, Stella is not here; False flattering hope, that with so fair a face Bare me in hand, that in this orphan place Stella, I say my Stella, should appear. What say’st thou now? Where is that dainty cheer Thou told’st mine eyes should help their famished case? But thou art gone, now that self-felt disgrace Doth make me most to wish thy comfort near. But here I do store of fair ladies meet, Who may with charm of conversation sweet Make in my heavy mould new thoughts to grow: Sure they prevail as much with me, as he That bade his friend, but then new maimed, to be Merry with him, and not think of his woe.
Unto the boundless Ocean of thy beauty Runs this poor river, charged with streams of zeal: Returning thee the tribute of my duty, Which here my love, my youth, my plaints reveal. Here I unclasp the book of my charged soul, Where I have cast th'accounts of all my care: Here have I summed my sighs, here I enroll How they were spent for thee; look what they are. Look on the dear expenses of my youth, And see how just I reckon with thine eyes: Examine well thy beauty with my truth, And cross my cares ere greater sum arise. Read it sweet maid, though it be done but slightly; Who can show all his love, doth love but lightly.
But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again, Now whilst thy May hath filled thy lap with flowers, Now whilst thy beauty bears without a stain, Now use the summer smiles, ere winter lowers. And whilst thou spread’st unto the rising sun The fairest flower that ever saw the light, Now joy thy time before thy sweet be done, And, Delia, think thy morning must have night, And that thy brightness sets at length to west, When thou wilt close up that which now thou shew’st; And think the same becomes thy fading best Which then shall most inveil and shadow most. Men do not weigh the stalk for what it was, When once they find her flower, her glory, pass.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held. Then being asked where all thy beauty lies— Where all the treasure of thy lusty days— To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise. How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use  If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine Shall sum my count and make my old excuse",  Proving his beauty by succession thine.  This were to be new made when thou art old,  And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.  But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,  Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call— All mine was thine before thou hadst this more. Then if for my love thou my love receivest, I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest; But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest By wilful taste of what thyself refusest. I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.  Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,  Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.
(from Twelfth Night) When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came to man’s estate, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came, alas! to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, With toss-pots still had drunken heads, For the rain it raineth every day. A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day.
(from Cymbeline) Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o’ the great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke; Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The scepter, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownèd be thy grave!
The weary yeare his race now having run,  The new begins his compast course anew:  With shew of morning mylde he hath begun,  Betokening peace and plenty to ensew. So let us, which this chaunge of weather vew,  Chaunge eeke our mynds and former lives amend, The old yeares sinnes forepast let us eschew,  And fly the faults with which we did offend.  Then shall the new yeares joy forth freshly send,  Into the glooming world his gladsome ray:  And all these stormes which now his beauty blend,  Shall turne to caulmes and tymely cleare away.  So likewise love cheare you your heavy spright,  And chaunge old yeares annoy to new delight.
To all those happy blessings which ye have,  With plenteous hand by heaven upon you thrown:  This one disparagement they to you gave,  That ye your love lent to so meane a one.  Yee whose high worths surpassing paragon,  Could not on earth have found one fit for mate,  Ne but in heaven matchable to none,  Why did ye stoup unto so lowly state.  But ye thereby much greater glory gate,  Then had ye sorted with a princes pere:  For now your light doth more it selfe dilate,  And in my darknesse greater doth appeare.  Yet since your light hath once enlumind me,  With my reflex yours shall encreased be.
nodding tho' the lamps lit low nodding for passers underground to and fro she's darning and the yarn is weeping red and pale marking the train stops from algiers sleeping tho' the eyes are pale hums in rhythum w/a bonnet on lullaby a broken song the sifting-cloth is bleeding red weeping yarn from algiers lullaby tho' baby's gone the cradle rocks a barren song she's rocking w/her ribbons on she's rocking yarn and needles oh it's long coming from algiers
Oh Raphael. Guardian angel. In love and crime all things move in sevens. seven compartments in the heart. the seven elaborate temptations. seven devils cast from Mary Magdalene whore of Christ. the seven marvelous voyages of Sinbad. sin/bad. And the number seven branded forever on the forehead of Cain. The first inspired man. The father of desire and murder. But his was not the first ecstasy. Consider his mother. Eve's was the crime of curiosity. As the saying goes: it killed the pussy. One bad apple spoiled the whole shot. But be sure it was no apple. An apple looks like an ass. It's fags' fruit. It must have been a tomato. Or better yet. A mango. She bit. Must we blame her. abuse her. poor sweet bitch. perhaps there's more to the story. think of Satan as some stud. maybe her knees were open. satan snakes between them. they open wider snakes up her thighs rubs against her for a while more than the tree of knowledge was about to be eaten...she shudders her first shudder pleasure pleasure garden was she sorry are we ever girls was she a good lay god only knows
yum yum the stars are out. I'll never forget how you smelled that night. like cheddar cheese melting under fluorescent light. like a day-old rainbow fish. what a dish. gotta lick my lips. gotta dream I day- dream. thorozine brain cloud. rain rain comes com- ing down. all over her. there she is on the hill. pale as a posy. getting soaking wet. hope her petticoats shrink. well little shepherd girl your gonna kingdom come. looking so clean. the guardian of every little lamb. well beep beep sheep I'm moving in. I'm gonna peep in bo's bodice. lay down darling don't be modest let me slip my hand in. ohhh that's soft that's nice that's not used up. ohhh don't cry. wet what's wet? oh that. heh heh. that's just the rain lambie pie. now don't squirm. let me put my rubber on. I'm a wolf in a lamb skin trojan. ohh yeah that's hard that's good. now don't tighten up. open up be- bop. lift that little butt up. ummm open wider be-bop. come on. nothing. can. stop me. now. ohhh ahhh. isn't that good. my. melancholy be-bop. Oh don't cry. come on get up. let's dance in the grass. let's cut a rug let's jitterbug. roll those tiny white stockings down. bobby sock-o let's flow. come on this is a dance contest. under the stars, let's alice in the grass. let's swing betty boop hoop let's birdland let's stroll let's rock let's roll let's whalebone let's go let's deodorize the night.
A black satin purse in her right hand, condoms, spermicide, her key to the birdcage elevator. All night, thunder and rain in a flash of lightning, his hands visible, leaves of philodendron, a half-moon table. They talk in near dark, eating from a basket. She places her hand in his lap, opens her legs as if God came from her, fragrance pluming like smoke. All night, his tongue like a fish philodendron green smoothing half-light. Now the bridge is illuminated, twin arches rising, chalky, incandescent, light abandoning the dome of sky, river breathing azure, its surface frazzled, the moon leaving her scuff marks. Near the open window, dark of leaves. Outside at dawn, the sun hidden, a crow lowering itself on black wings crosses before windows as gold as Rome. The telephone, her mouth open. I can see all the way into you, he says. Leaves of philodendron pour from the table.
The glass door was spinning panes like an open book. A suit the color of sky close to night, wire of eyeglasses a gold moon. He bowed as if judicial and called a French name. Glasses were filled with ice the color of amber. We were in America. He asked me to take his hands. They are cold, he said. I warmed his cold hands as we sat on the rouge banquette. It was the last May of the century. His eyes looked at my face. His hand fell to the glacier of my thigh and held on. My gold tail swam dark green water, the ocean smelled of gardenia. Outside on the avenue people scurried to their palaces, wearing sunglasses, carrying shiny bags.
When I wake up, I can remember touching the back of your neck, the cut of your hair blunt under my fingers. In the dream you have met my mother. My sisters and I are living in a grand house where I have no room of my own. One of my sisters has delineated her property by stringing a rope from which she will hang photographs of our dead father. At the beginning of Christianity, a bishop established what is called the "canon of truth" in order to unify feuding believers into a single way of apprehending the sacred. His teachings excluded the workings of imagination as subjective, vulnerable to self-interest, and possibly insane. Your neck, the blunt cut of your hair sharp and fragrant on my fingers. You come to the big house, you have just met my mother at a party where curtains of royal blue fell to the floor. The music by Scarlatti. My hair is turning gray. I look in the mirror. The familiar dark hairs are fine and smooth, the white are rough and thick like the fiber of which clouds are woven. I want to pluck out the white hairs, but my tweezer falls through them like logic through the sense of dreams. I am getting old, soon it will be too late. Your hand will slide from my skin like silk falling from a polished table. In the big house you come to me, and I show you my rectangle of floor. It is here I will put my couch and desk, separated from my sister and her pictures of our dead father by the edges of my body, myself, my thinking. You consider me. We stand there for a while. My sister is attaching the large photographs of our father to a rope. I look into the mirror at my white hair. I have sworn I will never dye it, but now I must. The white hairs are growing as fast as snow falls across a landscape. Soon snow will obliterate the town and countryside, there will be no houses visible, cars will disappear under the mass of it, trees will become poignant marks on a dangerous blank. My sister strings photographs of our dead father along the rope, attaching them with small invisible clips. I wait for you. I think about your face, how you are becoming bald, and then I remember touching you for the first time, the back of your neck. I was wondering how to find you, what I would discover there. It made me almost cry that you stayed perfectly still, certain, it seemed, that what I was imparting was of utmost consequence. I moved my fingers tentatively, as if finding first knowledge in a terrain I could slip beneath, into a garden. I remembered that when I woke up. That and your sticky skin. Certain early Christian ideologues denigrated imagination as outside the realms of good and evil. My mother is no longer dead, and you have met her. The air is transparent, the colors dark wood and pale amber. I am standing at the mirror watching white hair grow in as fast as snow. What time is the train coming? You sit at the window, your legs crossed. Courtly and at ease, you scrutinize my face until I am self-conscious. I become aware that you are waiting for me. I don't know how to get to you. Some early Christians, those who came to be persecuted as heretics, believed that a part of God is perpetually hidden from us. In relation to that realm of the deity dwells imagination, unceasingly seeking understanding of what is concealed. I can see you on the window seat in an elegantly cut suit, as if wearing such clothes were a form of grace. I remember you in that suit, standing in the hotel, turning on your heel to look for me. Now the window is tall behind you, twilight gathering outside the glass, cedars black beyond the roses. I am not dead, yet I am mute as the dead usually are in dreams. You are speaking in a clear voice, explaining you have met my mother and that I look like her. Before sleep, I was reading about early Christianity. When I woke up from the long dream, there we were in the taxicab, my arms tentative around you, my fingers seeking the back of your neck. I felt clearly the blunt edge of your newly cut hair, the stickiness of your skin, that mortal stickiness– When my mother's mother was sixty, her hair was still dark. When my mother died at fifty, her hair was still black, though as she sickened, it turned white, black receding as life did. I stand at the mirror, its rare wide-beveled glass framed by oak carved to leaves and flowers. I am scrutinizing myself. My face is not ageing, but my hair is turning white, cloaking the trees, falling on the meadow, windblown across the frozen lake. What heresy is it that you come to me in a dream, knowing everything? The tall windows rise to the ceiling, but I don't lift my eyes. I don't want to lose sight of you. Outside, the cedars. Beyond them a smooth body of water.
It seemed as if we did not sleep One wink that night; I was sighing deep. The cruellest judge in the costliest court Could not condemn a night so short. We had the light out, but I know, Each time I turned, a radiant glow Suffused the room, and shining snow Alit from Heaven’s candle-fires Illuminated our desires. But the last time I held her, strong, Excited, closest, very long, Something started to go wrong. The edge of dawn’s despotic veil Showed at the eastern window-pale And there it was,—the morning light! Gwen was seized with a fearful fright, Became an apparition, cried, “Get up, go now with God, go hide! “Love is a salt, a gall, a rue, A vinegar-vintage. Dos y Ddw, Vaya con Dios, quickly, too!” “Ah, not yet, never yet, my love; The stars and moon still shine above.” “Then why do the raucous ravens talk With such a loud insistent squawk?” “Crows always cry like that, when fleas Nibble their ankles, nip their knees.” “And why do the dogs yip, yammer, yell?” “They think they’ve caught a fox’s smell.” “Poet, the wisdom of a fool Offers poor counsel as a rule. Open the door, open it wide As fast as you can, and leap outside. The dogs are fierce when they get untied.” “The woods are only a bound from here, And I can outjump a deer, my dear!” “But tell me, best beloved of men, Will you come again? Will you come again?” “Gwen, you know I’m your nightingale, And I’ll be with you, without fail, When the cloud is cloak, and the dark is sky, And when the night comes, so will I.”
Across North Wales The snowflakes wander, A swarm of white bees. Over the woods A cold veil lies. A load of chalk Bows down the trees. No undergrowth Without its wool, No field unsheeted; No path is left Through any field; On every stump White flour is milled. Will someone tell me What angels lift Planks in the flour-loft Floor of heaven Shaking down dust? An angel’s cloak Is cold quicksilver. And here below The big drifts blow, Blow and billow Across the heather Like swollen bellies. The frozen foam Falls in fleeces. Out of my house I will not stir For any girl To have my coat Look like a miller’s Or stuck with feathers Of eider down. What a great fall Lies on my country! A wide wall, stretching One sea to the other, Greater and graver Than the sea’s graveyard. When will rain come?
A ward, and still in bonds, one day  I stole abroad; It was high spring, and all the way  Primrosed and hung with shade;  Yet was it frost within,  And surly winds Blasted my infant buds, and sin  Like clouds eclipsed my mind. Stormed thus, I straight perceived my spring  Mere stage and show, My walk a monstrous, mountained thing,  Roughcast with rocks and snow;  And as a pilgrim’s eye,  Far from relief, Measures the melancholy sky,  Then drops and rains for grief, So sighed I upwards still; at last  ’Twixt steps and falls I reached the pinnacle, where placed  I found a pair of scales;  I took them up and laid  In th’ one, late pains; The other smoke and pleasures weighed,  But proved the heavier grains. With that some cried, “Away!” Straight I  Obeyed, and led Full east, a fair, fresh field could spy;  Some called it Jacob’s bed,  A virgin soil which no  Rude feet ere trod, Where, since he stepped there, only go  Prophets and friends of God. Here I reposed; but scarce well set,  A grove descried Of stately height, whose branches met  And mixed on every side;  I entered, and once in,  Amazed to see ’t, Found all was changed, and a new spring  Did all my senses greet. The unthrift sun shot vital gold,  A thousand pieces, And heaven its azure did unfold,  Checkered with snowy fleeces;  The air was all in spice,  And every bush A garland wore; thus fed my eyes,  But all the ear lay hush. Only a little fountain lent  Some use for ears, And on the dumb shades language spent  The music of her tears;  I drew her near, and found  The cistern full Of divers stones, some bright and round,  Others ill-shaped and dull. The first, pray mark, as quick as light  Danced through the flood, But the last, more heavy than the night,  Nailed to the center stood;  I wondered much, but tired  At last with thought, My restless eye that still desired  As strange an object brought. It was a bank of flowers, where I descried  Though ’twas midday, Some fast asleep, others broad-eyed  And taking in the ray;  Here, musing long, I heard  A rushing wind Which still increased, but whence it stirred  No where I could not find. I turned me round, and to each shade  Dispatched an eye To see if any leaf had made   Least motion or reply,  But while I listening sought  My mind to ease By knowing where ’twas, or where not,  It whispered, “Where I please.” “Lord,” then said I, “on me one breath, And let me die before my death!” Cant. chap. 5. ver. 17 Arise O North, and come thou South-wind and blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.
John 3.2  Through that pure virgin shrine, That sacred veil drawn o’er Thy glorious noon, That men might look and live, as glowworms shine,  And face the moon,  Wise Nicodemus saw such light  As made him know his God by night.  Most blest believer he! Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes Thy long-expected healing wings could see,  When Thou didst rise!  And, what can never more be done,  Did at midnight speak with the Sun!  O who will tell me where He found Thee at that dead and silent hour? What hallowed solitary ground did bear  So rare a flower,  Within whose sacred leaves did lie  The fulness of the Deity?  No mercy-seat of gold, No dead and dusty cherub, nor carved stone, But His own living works did my Lord hold  And lodge alone;  Where trees and herbs did watch and peep  And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.  Dear night! this world’s defeat; The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb; The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat  Which none disturb!  Christ’s progress, and His prayer time;  The hours to which high heaven doth chime;  God’s silent, searching flight; When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;  His still, soft call;  His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,  When spirits their fair kindred catch.  Were all my loud, evil days Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent, Whose peace but by some angel’s wing or voice  Is seldom rent,  Then I in heaven all the long year  Would keep, and never wander here.  But living where the sun Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire Themselves and others, I consent and run  To every mire,  And by this world’s ill-guiding light,  Err more than I can do by night.  There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here Say it is late and dusky, because they  See not all clear.  O for that night! where I in Him  Might live invisible and dim!
Ah, fading joy, how quickly art thou past! Yet we thy ruin haste. As if the cares of human life were few, We seek out new: And follow fate, which would too fast pursue. See how on every bough the birds express In their sweet notes their happiness. They all enjoy and nothing spare; But on their mother nature lay their care. Why then should man, the lord of all below, Such troubles choose to know As none of all his subjects undergo? Hark, hark, the waters fall, fall, fall, And with a murmuring sound Dash, dash upon the ground, To gentle slumbers call.
If honor to an ancient name be due, Or riches challenge it for one that’s new, The British language claims in either sense Both for its age, and for its opulence. But all great things must be from us removed, To be with higher reverence beloved. So landskips which in prospects distant lie, With greater wonder draw the pleasèd eye. Is not great Troy to one dark ruin hurled? Once the fam’d scene of all fighting world. Where’s Athens now, to whom Rome learning owes, And the safe laurels that adorned her brows? A strange reverse of fate she did endure, Never once greater, than she’s now obscure. Even Rome her self can but some footsteps show Of Scipio’s times, or those of Cicero. And as the Roman and the Grecian state, The British fell, the spoil of time and fate. But though the language hath the beauty lost, Yet she has still some great remains to boast. For ’twas in that, the sacred bards of old, In deathless numbers did their thoughts unfold. In groves, by rivers, and on fertile plains, They civilized and taught the listening swains; Whilst with high raptures, and as great success, Virtue they clothed in music’s charming dress. This Merlin spoke, who in his gloomy cave, Even Destiny her self seemed to enslave. For to his sight the future time was known, Much better than to others is their own; And with such state, predictions from him fell, As if he did decree, and not foretell. This spoke King Arthur, who, if fame be true, Could have compelled mankind to speak it too. In this once Boadicca valor taught, And spoke more nobly than her soldiers fought: Tell me what hero could be more than she, Who fell at once for fame and liberty? Nor could a greater sacrifice belong, Or to her children’s, or her country’s wrong. This spoke Caractacus, who was so brave, That to the Roman fortune check he gave: And when their yoke he could decline no more, He it so decently and nobly wore, That Rome her self with blushes did believe, A Britain would the law of honor give; And hastily his chains away she threw, Lest her own captive else should her subdue.
These little limbs, These eyes and hands which here I find, These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins, Where have ye been? behind What curtain were ye from me hid so long? Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue? When silent I So many thousand, thousand years Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie, How could I smiles or tears, Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive? Welcome ye treasures which I now receive. I that so long Was nothing from eternity, Did little think such joys as ear or tongue To celebrate or see: Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet, Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet. New burnished joys, Which yellow gold and pearls excel! Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys, In which a soul doth dwell; Their organizèd joints and azure veins More wealth include than all the world contains. From dust I rise, And out of nothing now awake; These brighter regions which salute mine eyes, A gift from God I take. The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies, The sun and stars are mine if those I prize. Long time before I in my mother’s womb was born, A God, preparing, did this glorious store, The world, for me adorn. Into this Eden so divine and fair, So wide and bright, I come His son and heir. A stranger here Strange things doth meet, strange glories see; Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear, Strange all and new to me; But that they mine should be, who nothing was, That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.
To the same purpose: he, not long before  Brought home from nurse, going to the door  To do some little thing  He must not do within,  With wonder cries,  As in the skies He saw the moon, “O yonder is the moon,  Newly come after me to town, That shined at Lugwardin but yesternight,  Where I enjoyed the self-same sight.” As if it had ev’n twenty thousand faces,  It shines at once in many places;  To all the earth so wide  God doth the stars divide,  With so much art  The moon impart, They serve us all; serve wholly every one  As if they servèd him alone. While every single person hath such store,  ’Tis want of sense that makes us poor.
In unexperienced infancy Many a sweet mistake doth lie: Mistake though false, intending true; A seeming somewhat more than view; That doth instruct the mind In things that lie behind, And many secrets to us show Which afterwards we come to know. Thus did I by the water’s brink Another world beneath me think; And while the lofty spacious skies Reversèd there, abused mine eyes, I fancied other feet Came mine to touch or meet; As by some puddle I did play Another world within it lay. Beneath the water people drowned, Yet with another heaven crowned, In spacious regions seemed to go As freely moving to and fro: In bright and open space I saw their very face; Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine; Another sun did with them shine. ’Twas strange that people there should walk, And yet I could not hear them talk; That through a little watery chink, Which one dry ox or horse might drink, We other worlds should see, Yet not admitted be; And other confines there behold Of light and darkness, heat and cold. I called them oft, but called in vain; No speeches we could entertain: Yet did I there expect to find Some other world, to please my mind. I plainly saw by these A new antipodes, Whom, though they were so plainly seen, A film kept off that stood between. By walking men’s reversèd feet I chanced another world to meet; Though it did not to view exceed A phantom, ’tis a world indeed, Where skies beneath us shine, And earth by art divine Another face presents below, Where people’s feet against ours go. Within the regions of the air, Compassed about with heavens fair, Great tracts of land there may be found Enriched with fields and fertile ground; Where many numerous hosts In those far distant coasts, For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends. O ye that stand upon the brink, Whom I so near me through the chink With wonder see: what faces there, Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear? I my companions see In you, another me. They seemèd others, but are we; Our second selves these shadows be. Look how far off those lower skies Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes I can them reach. O ye my friends, What secret borders on those ends? Are lofty heavens hurled ’Bout your inferior world? Are yet the representatives Of other peoples’ distant lives? Of all the playmates which I knew That here I do the image view In other selves, what can it mean? But that below the purling stream Some unknown joys there be Laid up in store for me; To which I shall, when that thin skin Is broken, be admitted in.
Mourn, mourn, ye Muses, all your loss deplore, The young, the noble Strephon is no more. Yes, yes, he fled quick as departing light, And ne’er shall rise from Death’s eternal night, So rich a prize the Stygian gods ne’er bore, Such wit, such beauty, never graced their shore. He was but lent this duller world t’ improve In all the charms of poetry, and love; Both were his gift, which freely he bestowed, And like a god, dealt to the wond’ring crowd. Scorning the little vanity of fame, Spight of himself attained a glorious name. But oh! in vain was all his peevish pride, The sun as soon might his vast luster hide, As piercing, pointed, and more lasting bright, As suffering no vicissitudes of night. Mourn, mourn, ye Muses, all your loss deplore, The young, the noble Strephon is no more. Now uninspired upon your banks we lie, Unless when we would mourn his elegy; His name’s a genius that would wit dispense, And give the theme a soul, the words a sense. But all fine thought that ravisht when it spoke, With the soft youth eternal leave has took; Uncommon wit that did the soul o’ercome, Is buried all in Strephon’s worshipped tomb; Satire has lost its art, its sting is gone, The Fop and Cully now may be undone; That dear instructing rage is now allayed, And no sharp pen dares tell ’em how they’ve strayed; Bold as a god was ev’ry lash he took, But kind and gentle the chastizing stroke. Mourn, mourn, ye youths, whom fortune has betrayed, The last reproacher of your vice is dead. Mourn, all ye beauties, put your Cyprus on, The truest swain that e’re adored you’s gone; Think how he loved, and writ, and sighed, and spoke, Recall his mien, his fashion, and his look. By what dear arts the soul he did surprise, Soft as his voice, and charming as his eyes. Bring garlands all of never-dying flowers, Bedewed with everlasting falling showers; Fix your fair eyes upon your victimed slave, Sent gay and young to his untimely grave. See where the noble swain extended lies, Too sad a triumph of your victories; Adorned with all the graces Heaven e’er lent, All that was great, soft, lovely, excellent You’ve laid into his early monument. Mourn, mourn, ye beauties, your sad loss deplore, The young, the charming Strephon is no more. Mourn, all ye little gods of love, whose darts Have lost their wonted power of piercing hearts; Lay by the gilded quiver and the bow, The useless toys can do no mischief now, Those eyes that all your arrows’ points inspired, Those lights that gave ye fire are now retired, Cold as his tomb, pale as your mother’s doves; Bewail him then oh all ye little loves, For you the humblest votary have lost That ever your divinities could boast; Upon your hands your weeping heads decline, And let your wings encompass round his shrine; In stead of flowers your broken arrows strow, And at his feet lay the neglected bow. Mourn, all ye little gods, your loss deplore, The soft, the charming Strephon is no more. Large was his fame, but short his glorious race, Like young Lucretius lived and died apace. So early roses fade, so over all They cast their fragrant scents, then softly fall, While all the scattered perfumed leaves declare, How lovely ’twas when whole, how sweet, how fair. Had he been to the Roman Empire known, When great Augustus filled the peaceful throne; Had he the noble wond’rous poet seen, And known his genius, and surveyed his mien, (When wits, and heroes graced divine abodes), He had increased the number of their gods; The royal judge had temples rear’d to’s name, And made him as immortal as his fame; In love and verse his Ovid he’ad out-done, And all his laurels, and his Julia won. Mourn, mourn, unhappy world, his loss deplore, The great, the charming Strephon is no more.
A thousand martyrs I have made, All sacrificed to my desire; A thousand beauties have betrayed, That languish in resistless fire. The untamed heart to hand I brought, And fixed the wild and wandering thought. I never vowed nor sighed in vain But both, though false, were well received. The fair are pleased to give us pain, And what they wish is soon believed. And though I talked of wounds and smart, Love’s pleasures only touched my heart. Alone the glory and the spoil I always laughing bore away; The triumphs, without pain or toil, Without the hell, the heav’n of joy. And while I thus at random rove Despise the fools that whine for love.
As some brave admiral, in former war Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still, Two rival fleets appearing from afar, Crawls to the top of an adjacent hill; From whence, with thoughts full of concern, he views The wise and daring conduct of the fight, Whilst each bold action to his mind renews His present glory and his past delight; From his fierce eyes flashes of fire he throws, As from black clouds when lightning breaks away; Transported, thinks himself amidst the foes, And absent, yet enjoys the bloody day; So, when my days of impotence approach, And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch On the dull shore of lazy temperance, My pains at least some respite shall afford While I behold the battles you maintain When fleets of glasses sail about the board, From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain. Nor let the sight of honorable scars, Which my too forward valor did procure, Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars: Past joys have more than paid what I endure. Should any youth (worth being drunk) prove nice, And from his fair inviter meanly shrink, ’Twill please the ghost of my departed vice If, at my counsel, he repent and drink. Or should some cold-complexioned sot forbid, With his dull morals, our bold night-alarms, I’ll fire his blood by telling what I did When I was strong and able to bear arms. I’ll tell of whores attacked, their lords at home; Bawds’ quarters beaten up, and fortress won; Windows demolished, watches overcome; And handsome ills by my contrivance done. Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot, When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’ enjoy, And the best kiss was the deciding lot Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy. With tales like these I will such thoughts inspire As to important mischief shall incline: I’ll make him long some ancient church to fire, And fear no lewdness he’s called to by wine. Thus, statesmanlike, I’ll saucily impose, And safe from action, valiantly advise; Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows, And being good for nothing else, be wise.
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms, I filled with love, and she all over charms; Both equally inspired with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire. With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace, She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face. Her nimble tongue, love’s lesser lightning, played Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed Swift orders that I should prepare to throw The all-dissolving thunderbolt below. My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss, Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss. But whilst her busy hand would guide that part Which should convey my soul up to her heart, In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er, Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore. A touch from any part of her had done ’t: Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt. Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise, And from her body wipes the clammy joys, When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?” She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due; Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?” But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive, To show my wished obedience vainly strive: I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive. Eager desires confound my first intent, Succeeding shame does more success prevent, And rage at last confirms me impotent. Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn, Applied to my dear cinder, warms no more Than fire to ashes could past flames restore. Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry, A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie. This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried, With virgin blood ten thousand maids has dyed, Which nature still directed with such art That it through every cunt reached every heart— Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade Woman or man, nor ought its fury stayed: Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made— Now languid lies in this unhappy hour, Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower. Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame, False to my passion, fatal to my fame, Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove So true to lewdness, so untrue to love? What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before? When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way, With what officious haste doest thou obey! Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets, But if his king or country claim his aid, The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head; Ev’n so thy brutal valor is displayed, Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade, But when great Love the onset does command, Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand. Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most, Through all the town a common fucking post, On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt, Mayst thou to ravenous chancres be a prey, Or in consuming weepings waste away; May strangury and stone thy days attend; May’st thou never piss, who didst refuse to spend When all my joys did on false thee depend. And may ten thousand abler pricks agree To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.
I swive as well as others do, I’m young, not yet deformed, My tender heart, sincere, and true, Deserves not to be scorned. Why Phyllis then, why will you swive, With forty lovers more? Can I (said she) with Nature strive, Alas I am, alas I am a whore. Were all my body larded o’er, With darts of love, so thick, That you might find in ev’ry pore, A well stuck standing prick; Whilst yet my eyes alone were free, My heart, would never doubt, In am’rous rage, and ecstasy, To wish those eyes, to wish those eyes fucked out.
Ancient person, for whom I All the flattering youth defy, Long be it ere thou grow old, Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;  But still continue as thou art,  Ancient person of my heart. On thy withered lips and dry, Which like barren furrows lie, Brooding kisses I will pour Shall thy youthful [heat] restore (Such kind showers in autumn fall, And a second spring recall);  Nor from thee will ever part,  Ancient person of my heart. Thy nobler part, which but to name In our sex would be counted shame, By age’s frozen grasp possessed, From [his] ice shall be released, And soothed by my reviving hand, In former warmth and vigor stand. All a lover’s wish can reach For thy joy my love shall teach, And for they pleasure shall improve All that art can add to love.  Yet still I love thee without art,  Ancient person of my heart.
Once there came a man Who said: “Range me all men of the world in rows.” And instantly There was a terrific clamor among the people Against being ranged in rows. There was a loud quarrel, world-wide. It endured for ages; And blood was shed By those who would not stand in rows, And by those who pined to stand in rows. Eventually, the man went to death, weeping. And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle Knew not the great simplicity.
Behold, the grave of a wicked man, And near it, a stern spirit. There came a drooping maid with violets,  But the spirit grasped her arm. “No flowers for him,” he said. The maid wept:  “Ah, I loved him.” But the spirit, grim and frowning:  “No flowers for him.”  Now, this is it — If the spirit was just, Why did the maid weep?
I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped. I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. “It is futile,” I said, “You can never —” “You lie,” he cried, And ran on.
Down the long hall she glistens like a star, The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone, Yet none the less immortal, breathing on. Time's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar. When first the enthralled enchantress from afar Dazzled mine eyes, I saw not her alone, Serenely poised on her world-worshipped throne, As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,— But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew, Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love. Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew, Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move, While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain, For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.
from Sonnets, First Series VI Dank fens of cedar; hemlock-branches gray With trees and trail of mosses, wringing-wet; Beds of the black pitchpine in dead leaves set Whose wasted red has wasted to white away; Remnants of rain and droppings of decay, — Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday, The faded glimmer of a sunshine set? Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife, The bread of tears becomes the bread of life? Far from the roar of day, beneath your boughs Fresh griefs beat tranquilly, and loves and vows Grow green in your gray shadows, dearer far Even than all lovely lights and roses are?
I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose o'er the city, Behind the dark church-tower. I saw her bright reflection In the waters under me, Like a golden goblet falling And sinking into the sea. And far in the hazy distance Of that lovely night in June, The blaze of the flaming furnace Gleamed redder than the moon. Among the long, black rafters The wavering shadows lay, And the current that came from the ocean Seemed to lift and bear them away; As, sweeping and eddying through them, Rose the belated tide, And, streaming into the moonlight, The seaweed floated wide. And like those waters rushing Among the wooden piers, A flood of thoughts came o’er me That filled my eyes with tears. How often, O, how often, In the days that had gone by, I had stood on that bridge at midnight And gazed on that wave and sky! How often, O, how often, I had wished that the ebbing tide Would bear me away on its bosom O’er the ocean wild and wide! For my heart was hot and restless, And my life was full of care, And the burden laid upon me Seemed greater than I could bear. But now it has fallen from me, It is buried in the sea; And only the sorrow of others Throws its shadow over me. Yet whenever I cross the river On its bridge with wooden piers, Like the odor of brine from the ocean Comes the thought of other years. And I think how many thousands Of care-encumbered men, Each bearing his burden of sorrow, Have crossed the bridge since then. I see the long procession Still passing to and fro, The young heart hot and restless, And the old subdued and slow! And forever and forever, As long as the river flows, As long as the heart has passions, As long as life has woes; The moon and its broken reflection And its shadows shall appear, As the symbol of love in heaven, And its wavering image here.
Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit and the Muse,— Nothing refuse. ’T is a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent: But it is a god, Knows its own path And the outlets of the sky. It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout. Souls above doubt, Valor unbending, It will reward,— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending. Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavor,— Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved. Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.
To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;— Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature’s teachings, while from all around— Earth and her waters, and the depths of air— Comes a still voice— Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings, The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods—rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,— Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone. So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man— Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, By those, who in their turn shall follow them. So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
I Fanny was younger once than she is now, And prettier of course: I do not mean To say that there are wrinkles on her brow; Yet, to be candid, she is past eighteen— Perhaps past twenty—but the girl is shy About her age, and Heaven forbid that I II Should get myself in trouble by revealing A secret of this sort; I have too long Loved pretty women with a poet’s feeling, And when a boy, in day dream and in song, Have knelt me down and worshipp’d them: alas! They never thank’d me for’t—but let that pass. V Her father kept, some fifteen years ago, A retail dry-good shop in Chatham-street, And nursed his little earnings, sure though slow, Till, having muster’d wherewithal to meet The gaze of the great world, he breathed the air Of Pearl-street—and "set up" in Hanover-square. VI Money is power, ’tis said—I never tried; I’m but a poet—and bank-notes to me Are curiosities, as closely eyed, Whene’er I get them, as a stone would be, Toss’d from the moon on Doctor Mitchill’s table, Or classic brickbat from the tower of Babel. VII But he I sing of well has known and felt That money hath a power and a dominion; For when in Chatham-street the good man dwelt, No one would give a sous for his opinion. And though his neighbours were extremely civil, Yet, on the whole, they thought him—a poor devil, VIII A decent kind of person; one whose head Was not of brains particularly full; It was not known that he had ever said Any thing worth repeating—’twas a dull, Good, honest man—what Paulding’s muse would call A “cabbage head”—but he excelled them all IX In that most noble of the sciences, The art of making money; and he found The zeal for quizzing him grew less and less, As he grew richer; till upon the ground Of Pearl-street, treading proudly in the might And majesty of wealth, a sudden light X Flash’d like the midnight lightning on the eyes Of all who knew him; brilliant traits of mind, And genius, clear and countless as the dies Upon the peacock’s plumage; taste refined, Wisdom and wit, were his—perhaps much more. ’Twas strange they had not found it out before. XXV Dear to the exile is his native land, In memory’s twilight beauty seen afar: Dear to the broker is a note of hand, Collaterally secured—the polar star Is dear at midnight to the sailor’s eyes, And dear are Bristed’s volumes at “half price;” XXVI But dearer far to me each fairy minute Spent in that fond forgetfulness of grief; There is an airy web of magic in it, As in Othello’s pocket-handkerchief, Veiling the wrinkles on the brow of sorrow, The gathering gloom to-day, the thunder cloud to-morrow. XLI Since that wise pedant, Johnson, was in fashion, Manners have changed as well as moons; and he Would fret himself once more into a passion, Should he return (which heaven forbid!), and see, How strangely from his standard dictionary, The meaning of some words is made to vary. XLII For instance, an undress at present means The wearing a pelisse, a shawl, or so; Or any thing you please, in short, that screens The face, and hides the form from top to toe; Of power to brave a quizzing-glass, or storm— ’Tis worn in summer, when the weather’s warm. XLIII But a full dress is for a winter’s night. The most genteel is made of "woven air;" That kind of classic cobweb, soft and light, Which Lady Morgan’s Ida used to wear. And ladies, this aërial manner dress'd in, Look Eve-like, angel-like, and interesting.
Tsung Ping (375—443): "Now I am old and infirm. I fear I shall no more be able to roam among the beautiful mountains. Clarifying my mind, I meditate on the mountain trails and wander about only in dreams." -in The Spirit of the Brush, tr. by Shio Sakanishi, p. 34  for Kenneth Rexroth I always say I won't go back to the mountains I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules And pancakes every morning of the world Mr. Edward Wyman (63) Steams along the trail ahead of us all Moaning, "My poor feet ache, my back Is tired and I've got a stiff prick" Uprooting alder shoots in the rain Then I'm alone in a glass house on a ridge Encircled by chiming mountains With one sun roaring through the house all day & the others crashing through the glass all night Conscious even while sleeping  Morning fog in the southern gorge  Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level  The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo  The high cirque-lake black half-open eye Ptarmigan hunt for bugs in the snow Bear peers through the wall at noon Deer crowd up to see the lamp A mouse nearly drowns in the honey I see my bootprints mingle with deer-foot Bear-paw mule-shoe in the dusty path to the privy Much later I write down:  "raging. Viking sunrise  The gorgeous death of summer in the east!" (Influence of a Byronic landscape— Bent pages exhibiting depravity of style.) Outside the lookout I lay nude on the granite Mountain hot September sun but inside my head Calm dark night with all the other stars HERACLITUS: "The waking have one common world But the sleeping turn aside Each into a world of his own." I keep telling myself what I really like Are music, books, certain land and sea-scapes The way light falls across them, diffusion of Light through agate, light itself . . . I suppose I'm still afraid of the dark  "Remember smart-guy there's something  Bigger something smarter than you."  Ireland's fear of unknown holies drives  My father's voice (a country neither he  Nor his great-grandfather ever saw)  A sparkly tomb a plated grave  A holy thumb beneath a wave Everything else they hauled across Atlantic Scattered and lost in the buffalo plains Among these trees and mountains From Duns Scotus to this page A thousand years  (". . . a dog walking on this hind legs—  not that he does it well but that he   does it at all.") Virtually a blank except for the hypothesis That there is more to a man Than the contents of his jock-strap EMPEDOCLES: "At one time all the limbs Which are the body's portion are brought together By Love in blooming life's high season; at another Severed by cruel Strife, they wander each alone By the breakers of life's sea." Fire and pressure from the sun bear down Bear down centipede shadow of palm-frond A limestone lithograph—oysters and clams of stone Half a black rock bomb displaying brilliant crystals Fire and pressure Love and Strife bear down Brontosaurus, look away My sweat runs down the rock HERACLITUS: "The transformations of fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind. . . . It scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires." I move out of a sweaty pool  (The sea!) And sit up higher on the rock Is anything burning? The sun itself! Dying Pooping out, exhausted Having produced brontosaurus, Heraclitus This rock, me, To no purpose I tell you anyway (as a kind of loving) . . . Flies & other insects come from miles around To listen I also address the rock, the heather, The alpine fir BUDDHA: "All the constituents of being are Transitory: Work out your salvation with diligence." (And everything, as one eminent disciple of that master Pointed out, had been tediously complex ever since.) There was a bird Lived in an egg And by ingenious chemistry Wrought molecules of albumen To beak and eye Gizzard and craw Feather and claw My grandmother said: "Look at them poor bed- raggled pigeons!" And the sign in McAlister Street:  "IF YOU CAN'T COME IN  SMILE AS YOU GO BY  LOVE  THE BUTCHER I destroy myself, the universe (an egg) And time—to get an answer: There are a smiler, a sleeper and a dancer We repeat the conversation in the glittering dark Floating beside the sleeper. The child remarks, "You knew it all the time." I: "I keep forgetting that the smiler is Sleeping; the sleeper, dancing." From Sauk Lookout two years before Some of the view was down the Skagit To Puget Sound: From above the lower ranges, Deep in the forest—lighthouses on clear nights. This year's rock is a spur from the main range Cuts the valley in two and is broken By the river; Ross Dam repairs the break, Makes trolley buses run Through the streets of dim Seattle far away. I'm surrounded by mountains here A circle of 108 beads, originally seeds  of ficus religiosa  Bo-Tree A circle, continuous, one odd bead Larger than the rest and bearing A tassel (hair-tuft) (the man who sat  under the tree) In the center of the circle, a void, an empty figure containing All that's multiplied; Each bead a repetition, a world Of ignorance and sleep. Today is the day the goose gets cooked Day of liberation for the crumbling flower Knobcone pinecone in the flames Brandy in the sun Which, as I said, will disappear Anyway it'll be invisible soon Exchanging places with stars now in my head To be growing rice in China through the night. Magnetic storms across the solar plains Make Aurora Borealis shimmy bright Beyond the mountains to the north. Closing the lookout in the morning Thick ice on the shutters Coyote almost whistling on a nearby ridge The mountain is THERE (between two lakes) I brought back a piece of its rock Heavy dark-honey color With a seam of crystal, some of the quartz Stained by its matrix Practically indestructible A shift from opacity to brilliance (The Zenbos say, "Lightening-flash & flint-spark") Like the mountains where it was made What we see of the world is the mind's Invention and the mind Though stained by it, becoming Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies— Can shift instantly A dirty bird in a square time Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA! Like they say, "Four times up, Three times down." I'm still on the mountain.
A month or twain to live on honeycomb Is pleasant; but one tires of scented time, Cold sweet recurrence of accepted rhyme, And that strong purple under juice and foam Where the wine’s heart has burst; Nor feel the latter kisses like the first. Once yet, this poor one time; I will not pray Even to change the bitterness of it, The bitter taste ensuing on the sweet, To make your tears fall where your soft hair lay All blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise Over my face and eyes. And yet who knows what end the scythèd wheat Makes of its foolish poppies’ mouths of red? These were not sown, these are not harvested, They grow a month and are cast under feet And none has care thereof, As none has care of divided love. I know each shadow of your lips by rote, Each change of love in eyelids and eyebrows; The fashion of fair temples tremulous With tender blood, and colour of your throat; I know not how love is gone out of this, Seeing that all was his. Love’s likeness there endures upon all these: But out of these one shall not gather love. Day hath not strength nor the night shade enough To make love whole and fill his lips with ease, As some bee-builded cell Feels at filled lips the heavy honey swell. I know not how this last month leaves your hair Less full of purple colour and hid spice, And that luxurious trouble of closed eyes Is mixed with meaner shadows and waste care; And love, kissed out by pleasure, seems not yet Worth patience to regret.
Either she was foul, or her attire was bad, Or she was not the wench I wished t’have had. Idly I lay with her, as if I loved not, And like a burden grieved the bed that moved not. Yet though both of us performed our true intent, Yet I could not cast anchor where I meant. She on my neck her ivory arms did throw, Her arms far whiter than the Scythian snow. And eagerly she kissed me with her tongue, And under mine her wanton thigh she flung. Yea, and she soothed me up and called me sir, And used all speech that might provoke and stir. Yet, like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, It mockèd me, hung down the head, and sunk. Like a dull cipher or rude block I lay, Or shade or body was I, who can say? What will my age do, age I cannot shun, When in my prime my force is spent and done? I blush, that being youthful, hot and lusty, I prove neither youth nor man, but old and rusty. Pure rose she, like a nun to sacrifice, Or one that with her tender brother lies. Yet boarded I the golden Chie twice, And Libas, and the white-cheeked Pitho thrice. Corinna craved it in a summer’s night, And nine sweet bouts we had before daylight. What, waste my limbs through some Thessalian charms? May spells and drugs do silly souls such harm? With virgin wax hath some imbaste my joints And pierced my liver with sharp needles’ points? Charms change corn to grass and make it die. By charms are running spring and fountains dry. By charms mast crops from oaks, from vines grapes fall, And fruit from trees when there’s no wind at all. Why might not then my sinews be enchanted, And I grow faint, as with some spirit haunted? To this add shame: shame to perform it quailed me And was the second cause why vigour failed me. My idle thoughts delighted her no more Than did the robe or garment which she wore. Yet might her touch make youthful Pylius fire And Tithon livelier than his years require. Even her I had, and she had me in vain; What might I crave more if I asked again? I think the great gods grieved they had bestowed The benefit which lewdly I for-slowed. I wished to be received in. In I get me To kiss. I kiss. To lie with her, she let me. Why was I blessed? Why made king to refuse it? Chuff-like had I not gold and could not use it? So in a spring thrives he that told so much,  And looks upon the fruits he cannot touch. Hath any rose so from a fresh young maid, As she might straight have gone to church and prayed? Well I believe she kissed not as she should, Nor used the sleight and cunning which she could. Huge oaks, hard adamants might she have moved, And with sweet words cause deaf rocks to have loved. Worthy she was to move both gods and men, But neither was I man, nor lived then. Can deaf ear take delight when Phaemius sings? Or Thamiras in curious painted things? What sweet thought is there but I had the same? And one gave place still as another came. Yet, notwithstanding, like one dead it lay, Drooping more than a rose pulled yesterday. Now, when he should not jet, he bolts upright And craves his task, and seeks to be at fight. Lie down with shame, and see thou stir no more, Seeing thou wouldst deceive me as before. Thou cozenest me, by thee surprised am I,  And bide sore loss with endless infamy. Nay more, the wench did not disdain a whit To take it in her hand and play with it. But when she saw it would by no means stand, But still drooped down, regarding not her hand, ‘Why mockst thou me?’ she cried. ‘Or, being ill, Who bade thee lie down here against thy will? Either thou art witch, with blood of frogs new dead, Or jaded camest thou from some other bed.’ With that, her loose gown on, from me she cast her – In skipping out her naked feet much graced her. And, lest her maid should know of this disgrace, To cover it, spilt water on the place.
‘’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.’ -Falstaff ‘The night cometh, when no man can work.’ What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap,  Ought you to take me for a beast or fool? All things a man could wish are in her keep;  For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school.  When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool And fall to drinking with no more ado. I fetch them bread, fruit, cheese, and water, too;  I say all’s right so long as I’m well paid; ‘Look in again when your flesh troubles you,  Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.’ But soon the devil’s among us flesh and fell,  When penniless to bed comes Madge my whore; I loathe the very sight of her like hell.  I snatch gown, girdle, surcoat, all she wore,  And tell her, these shall stand against her score. She grips her hips with both hands, cursing God, Swearing by Jesus’ body, bones, and blood,  That they shall not. Then I, no whit dismayed, Cross her cracked nose with some stray shiver of wood  Inside this brothel where we drive our trade. When all’s made up she drops me a windy word,  Bloat like a beetle puffed and poisonous: Grins, thumps my pate, and calls me dickey-bird,  And cuffs me with a fist that’s ponderous.  We sleep like logs, being drunken both of us; Then when we wake her womb begins to stir; To save her seed she gets me under her  Wheezing and whining, flat as planks are laid: And thus she spoils me for a whoremonger  Inside this brothel where we drive our trade. Blow, hail or freeze, I’ve bread here baked rent free! Whoring’s my trade, and my whore pleases me;  Bad cat, bad rat; we’re just the same if weighed. We that love filth, filth follows us, you see; Honour flies from us, as from her we flee  Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.  I bequeath likewise to fat Madge  This little song to learn and study;  By god’s head she’s a sweet fat fadge,  Devout and soft of flesh and ruddy;  I love her with my soul and body,  So doth she me, sweet dainty thing.  If you fall in with such a lady,  Read it, and give it her to sing.
No, no; for my virginity,  When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die: Behind the elms, last night, cried Dick,  Rose, were you not extremely sick?
Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under,  Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss; Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder, Swelling on either side to want his bliss; Between whose hills her head entombed is;  Where like a virtuous monument she lies,  To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes. Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet, whose perfect white Showed like an April daisy on the grass, With pearly sweat resembling dew of night. Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheathed their light,  And canopied in darkness sweetly lay  Till they might open to adorn the day. Her hair like golden threads played with her breath O modest wantons, wanton modesty! Showing life’s triumph in the map of death, And death’s dim look in life’s mortality. Each in her sleep themselves so beautify  As if between them twain there were no strife,  But that life lived in death, and death in life. Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd, Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew, And him by oath they truly honourèd. These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred,  Who like a foul usurper went about  From this fair throne to heave the owner out. What could he see but mightily he noted? What did he note but strongly he desired? What he beheld, on that he firmly doted, And in his will his willful eye he tired. With more than admiration he admired  Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,  Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin. As the grim lion fawneth o’er his prey Sharp hunger by the conquest satisfied, So o’er this sleeping soul doth Tarquin stay, His rage of lust by gazing qualified; Slacked, not suppressed; for, standing by her side,  His eye, which late this mutiny restrains,  Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins. And they, like straggling slaves for pillage fighting, Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting. In bloody death and ravishment delighting, Nor children’s tears nor mothers’ groans respecting, Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting.  Anon his beating heart, alarum striking,  Gives the hot charge and bids them do their liking. His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye, His eye commends the leading to his hand; His hand, as proud of such a dignity, Smoking with pride, marched on to make his stand On her bare breast, the heart of all her land,  Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale,  Left their round turrets destitute and pale. They, mustering to the quiet cabinet Where their dear governess and lady lies, Do tell her she is dreadfully beset And fright her with confusion of their cries. She, much amazed, breaks ope her locked-up eyes,  Who, peeping forth this tumult to behold,  Are by his flaming torch dimmed and controlled. Imagine her as one in dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking. What terror ‘tis! but she, in worser taking,  From sleep disturbèd, heedfully doth view  The sight which makes supposèd terror true. Wrapped and confounded in a thousand fears, Like to a new-killed bird she trembling lies. She dares not look; yet, winking, there appears Quick-shifting antics ugly in her eyes. Such shadows are the weak brain’s forgeries,  Who, angry that the eyes fly from their lights,  In darkness daunts them with more dreadful sights. His hand, that yet remains upon her breast (Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!) May feel her heart (poor citizen) distressed, Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall, Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal.  This moves in him more rage and lesser pity,  To make the breach and enter this sweet city.
I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea, His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs, I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes, I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks. What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves? Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime of his middle-age? Steady and long he struggles, He is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength holds out, The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away, they roll him, swing him, turn him, His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is continually bruis’d on rocks, Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.
O tan-faced prairie-boy, Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift, Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits, You came, taciturn, with nothing to give – we but look’d on each other, When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.
A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.
Out of your whole life give but one moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, – so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, – condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense – Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me –  Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, – This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet – The moment eternal – just that and no more –  When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!
Let’s call for Hymen if agreed thou art –  Delays in love but crucify the heart. Love’s thorny tapers yet neglected lie; Speak thou the word, they’ll kindle by and by. The nimble hours woo us on to wed, And Genius waits to have us both to bed. Behold, for us the naked Graces stay With maunds of roses for us to strew the way. Besides, the most religious prophet stands Ready to join as well our hearts as hands. June yet smiles; but if she chance to chide, Ill luck ’twill bode to th’bridegroom and the bride. Tell me Anthea, dost thou fondly dread The loss of that we call a maidenhead? Come, I’ll instruct thee. Know, the vestal fire Is not by marriage quenched, but flames the higher.
Joy to the bridegroom and the bride That lie by one another’s side! O fie upon the virgin beds, No loss is gain but maidenheads. Love quickly send the time may be When I shall deal my rosemary! I long to simper at a feast, To dance, and kiss, and do the rest. When I shall wed, and bedded be O then the qualm comes over me, And tells the sweetness of a theme That I ne’er knew but in a dream. You ladies have the blessed nights, I pine in hope of such delights. And silly damsel only can Milk the cows’ teats and think on man: And sigh and wish to taste and prove The wholesome sillabub of love. Make haste, at once twin-brothers bear; And leave new matter for a star. Women and ships are never shown So fair as when their sails be blown. Then when the midwife hears your moan, I’ll sigh for grief that I have none. And you, dear knight, whose every kiss Reaps the full crop of Cupid’s bliss, Now you have found, confess and tell That single sheets do make up hell. And then so charitable be To get a man to pity me.
Of like importance is the posture too, In which the genial feat of Love we do: For as the females of the four foot kind, Receive the leapings of their Males behind; So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high, And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try: For in that posture will they best conceive: Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave; For active motions only break the blow, And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show; When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow. Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound, Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground. But common Harlots in conjunction heave, Because ’tis less their business to conceive Than to delight, and to provoke the deed; A trick which honest Wives but little need.
Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame That at the whisper of Love’s name, Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise Your angry head and stand at gaze? Poor Bombard-captain, sworn to reach The ravelin and effect a breach – Indifferent what you storm or why, So be that in the breach you die! Love may be blind, but Love at least Knows what is man and what mere beast; Or Beauty wayward, but requires More delicacy from her squires. Tell me, my witless, whose one boast Could be your staunchness at the post, When were you made a man of parts To think fine and profess the arts? Will many-gifted Beauty come Bowing to your bald rule of thumb, Or Love swear loyalty to your crown? Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!
Like the Idalian queen, Her hair about her eyne, With neck and breast’s ripe apples to be seen, At first glance of the morn In Cyprus’ gardens gathering those fair flowers Which of her blood were born, I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours. The Graces naked danced about the place, The winds and trees amazed With silence on her gazed, The flowers did smile, like those upon her face; And as their aspen stalks those fingers band, That she might read my case, A hyacinth I wished me in her hand.
Last night, as half asleep I dreaming lay, Half naked came she in her little shift, With tilted glass, and verses on her lips; Narcissus-eyes all shining for the fray, Filled full of frolic to her wine-red lips, Warm as a dewy rose, sudden she slips Into my bed – just in her little shift. Said she, half naked, half asleep, half heard, With a soft sigh betwixt each lazy word, ‘Oh my old lover, do you sleep or wake!’ And instant I sat upright for her sake, And drank whatever wine she poured for me – Wine of the tavern, or vintage it might be Of Heaven’s own vine: he surely were a churl Who refused wine poured out by such a girl, A double traitor he to wine and love. Go to, thou puritan! the gods above Ordained this wine for us, but not for thee; Drunkards we are by a divine decree, Yea, by the special privilege of heaven Foredoomed to drink and foreordained forgiven. Ah! HAFIZ, you are not the only man Who promised penitence and broke down after; For who can keep so hard a promise, man, With wine and woman brimming o’er with laughter! O knotted locks, filled like a flower with scent, How have you ravished this poor penitent!
With last night’s wine still singing in my head, I sought the tavern at the break of day, Though half the world was still asleep in bed; The harp and flute were up and in full swing, And a most pleasant morning sound made they; Already was the wine-cup on the wing. ‘Reason,’ said I, ‘’t is past the time to start, If you would reach your daily destination, The holy city of intoxication.’ So did I pack him off, and he depart With a stout flask for fellow-traveller. Left to myself, the tavern-wench I spied, And sought to win her love by speaking fair; Alas! she turned upon me, scornful-eyed, And mocked my foolish hopes of winning her. Said she, her arching eyebrows like a bow: ‘Thou mark for all the shafts of evil tongues! Thou shalt not round my middle clasp me so, Like my good girdle – not for all thy songs! – So long as thou in all created things Seest but thyself the centre and the end. Go spread thy dainty nets for other wings – Too high the Anca’s nest for thee, my friend.’ Then took I shelter from that stormy sea In the good ark of wine; yet, woe is me! Saki and comrade and minstrel all by turns, She is of maidens the compendium Who my poor heart in such a fashion spurns. Self, HAFIZ, self! That thou must overcome! Hearken the wisdom of the tavern-daughter! Vain little baggage – well, upon my word! Thou fairy figment made of clay and water, As busy with thy beauty as a bird. Well, HAFIZ, Life’s a riddle – give it up: There is no answer to it but this cup.
With lovers, ’twas of old the fashion By presents to convey their passion; No matter what the gift they sent, The Lady saw that love was meant. Fair Atalanta, as a favour, Took the boar’s head her Hero gave her; Nor could the bristly thing affront her, ’Twas a fit present from a hunter. When Squires send woodcocks to the dame, It serves to show their absent flame: Some by a snip of woven hair, In posied lockets bribe the fair; How many mercenary matches Have sprung from Di’mond-rings and watches! But hold – a ring, a watch, a locket, Would drain at once a Poet’s pocket; He should send songs that cost him nought, Nor ev’n he prodigal of thought.  Why then send Lampreys? fye, for shame! ’Twill set a virgin’s blood on flame. This to fifteen a proper gift! It might lend sixty five a lift.   I know your maiden Aunt will scold, And think my present somewhat bold. I see her lift her hands and eyes.  ‘What eat it, Niece? eat Spanish flies! ‘Lamprey’s a most immodest diet: ‘You’ll neither wake nor sleep in quiet. ‘Should I to night eat Sago cream, ‘’Twould make me blush to tell my dream; ‘If I eat Lobster, ’tis so warming, ‘That ev’ry man I see looks charming; ‘Wherefore had not the filthy fellow ‘Laid Rochester upon your pillow? ‘I vow and swear, I think the present ‘Had been as modest and as decent.  ‘Who has her virtue in her power? ‘Each day has its unguarded hour; ‘Always in danger of undoing, ‘A prawn, a shrimp may prove our ruin!  ‘The shepherdess, who lives on salad, ‘To cool her youth, controuls her palate; ‘Should Dian’s maids turn liqu’rish livers, ‘And of huge lampreys rob the rivers, ‘Then all beside each glade and Visto, ‘You’d see Nymphs lying like Calisto.  ‘The man who meant to heat your blood, ‘Needs not himself such vicious food –’  In this, I own, your Aunt is clear, I sent you what I well might spare: For when I see you, (without joking) Your eyes, lips, breasts, are so provoking, They set my heart more cock-a-hoop, Than could whole seas of craw-fish soupe.
Yield prompt compliance to the maid’s desires; A prompt compliance fans the lover’s fires: Go pleas’d where’er she goes, tho’ long the way, Tho’ the fierce Dog-star dart his sultry ray; Tho’ painted Iris gird the bluish sky, And sure portends, that rattling storms are nigh: Or, if the fair one pant for sylvan fame, Gay drag the meshes, and provoke the game: Nay, should she choose to risk the driving gale; Or steer, or row, or agile hand the sail: No toil, tho’ weak, tho’ fearful, thou forbear; No toils should tire you, and no dangers scare: Occasion smiles, then snatch an ardent kiss; The coy may struggle, but will grant the bliss: The bliss obtain’d, the fictious struggle past, Unbid, they’ll clasp you in their arms at last.
I need everything else Anything else  Desperately But I have nothing Shall have nothing  but this Immediate, inescapable  and invaluable No one can afford  THIS Being made here and now  (Seattle, Washington  17 May, 1955)  MARIGOLDS Concise (wooden)  Orange. Behind them, the garage door  Pink (Paint sold under a fatuous name: "Old Rose"  which brings a war to mind) And the mind slides over the fence again Orange against pink and green Uncontrollable! Returned of its own accord It can explain nothing Give no account What good? What worth?  Dying! You have less than a second  To live To try to explain: Say that light  in particular wave-lengths  or bundles wobbling at a given speed Produces the experience  Orange against pink Better than a sirloin steak? A screen by Korin? The effect of this, taken internally The effect   of beauty  on the mind There is no equivalent, least of all These objects Which ought to manifest A surface disorientation, pitting Or striae Admitting some plausible interpretation But the cost Can't be expressed in numbers dodging between  a vagrancy rap  and the newest electrical brain-curette Eating what the rich are bullied into giving Or the poor willingly share Depriving themselves More expensive than ambergris  Although the stink   isn't as loud. (A few Wise men have said,  "Produced the same way . . .  Vomited out by sick whales.") Valuable for the same qualities  Staying-power and penetration I've squandered every crying dime.
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,   Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get  Sweets into your list, put that in! Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,  Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, Say I’m growing old, but add,  Jenny kiss’d me.
The feverish room and that white bed, The tumbled skirts upon a chair, The novel flung half-open, where Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread; The mirror that has sucked your face Into its secret deep of deeps, And there mysteriously keeps Forgotten memories of grace; And you half dressed and half awake, Your slant eyes strangely watching me, And I, who watch you drowsily, With eyes that, having slept not, ache; This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?) Will rise, a ghost of memory, if Ever again my handkerchief Is scented with White Heliotrope.
after Sappho Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, Except these kisses of my lips on thine Brand them with immortality; but me – Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold Cast forth of heaven, with feet of awful gold And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown, But in the light and laughter, in the moan And music, and in grasp of lip and hand And shudder of water that makes felt on land The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.
All’s over, then: does truth sound bitter  As one at first believes? Hark, ’tis the sparrows’ good-night twitter  About your cottage eaves! And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,  I noticed that, today; One day more bursts them open fully  – You know the red turns grey. Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?  May I take your hand in mine? Mere friends are we, – well, friends the merest  Keep much that I resign: For each glance of the eye so bright and black,  Though I keep with heart’s endeavor, – Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,  Though it stay in my soul for ever! – Yet I will but say what mere friends say,  Or only a thought stronger; I will hold your hand but as long as all may,  Or so very little longer!
Era gia l’ora che volge il desio.
As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care Drags from the town to wholesome country air,  Just when she learns to roll a melting eye,  And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh; From the dear man unwillingly she must sever, Yet takes one kiss before she parts for ever: Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew, Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew; Not that their pleasures caused her discontent, She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went.  She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks, She went from Opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day; To pass her time ‘twixt reading and Bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon; Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire; Up to her godly garret after seven, There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heaven.  Some Squire, perhaps, you take a delight to rack;  Whose game is Whisk, whose treat a toast in sack, Who visits with a gun, presents you birds, Then gives a smacking buss, and cries – No words! Or with his hound comes hollowing from the stable, Makes love with nods, and knees beneath a table; Whose laughs are hearty, tho’ his jests are coarse, And loves you best of all things – but his horse.  In some fair evening, on your elbow laid, Your dream of triumphs in the rural shade; In pensive thought recall the fancied scene, See Coronations rise on every green; Before you pass th’ imaginary sights Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and gartered Knights; While the spread fan o’ershades your closing eyes; Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies. Thus vanish scepters, coronets, and balls, And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls.  So when your slave, at some dear, idle time, (Not plagued with headaches, or the want of rhyme) Stands in the streets, abstracted from the crew, And while he seems to study, thinks of you: Just when his fancy points your sprightly eyes, Or sees the blush of soft Parthenia rise, Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite; Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight; Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.
From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer’s story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.  Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,  As with your shadow I with these did play.
Somewhere or other there must surely be  The face not seen, the voice not heard, The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!  Made answer to my word. Somewhere or other, may be near or far;  Past land and sea, clean out of sight; Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star  That tracks her night by night. Somewhere or other, may be far or near;  With just a wall, a hedge, between; With just the last leaves of the dying year  Fallen on a turf grown green.
To Proverbs As Love and I, late harbour’d in one inn, With proverbs thus each other entertain: In love there is no lack, thus I begin, Fair words make fools, replieth he again; Who spares to speak, doth spare to speed (quoth I), As well (saith he) too forward, as too slow; Fortune assists the boldest, I reply, A hasty man (quoth he) ne’er wanted woe; Labour is light, where love (quoth I) doth pay, (Saith he) light burthen’s heavy, if far born; (Quoth I) the main lost, cast the bye away; You have spun a fair thread, he replies in scorn. And having thus awhile each other thwarted, Fools as we met, so fools again we parted.
Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda. – Dante    Ogni altra cosa, ogni pensier va fore,  E sol ivi con voi rimansi amore. – Petrarca  I loved you first: but afterwards your love Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove. Which owes the other most? my love was long, And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong; I loved and guessed at you, you construed me And loved me for what might or might not be – Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong. For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’ With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done, For one is both and both are one in love: Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’ Both have the strength and both the length thereof, Both of us, of the love which makes us one.
Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti.
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d, And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy, But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn, When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light, When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise, And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well, And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend, And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores, I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,  For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me, And his arm lay lightly around my breast – and that night I was happy.
Lying asleep between the strokes of night I saw my love lean over my sad bed, Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head, Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite, Too wan for blushing and too warm for white, But perfect-coloured without white or red. And her lips opened amorously, and said – I wist not what, saving one word – Delight. And all her face was honey to my mouth, And all her body pasture to mine eyes; The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire, The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south, The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs And glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire.
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport: Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay. But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday, Let us together closely lie and kiss, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admirèd guest, The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finished love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake: When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me!
I A Tower of Brass, one would have said, And Locks, and Bolts, and Iron Bars, Might have preserv’d one innocent Maiden-head. The jealous Father thought he well might spare All further jealous Care. And, as he walk’d, t’himself alone he smiled, To think how Venus’ Arts he had beguil’d; And when he slept, his Rest was deep: But Venus laugh’d, to see and hear him sleep: She taught the am’rous Jove A magical Receipt in Love, Which arm’d him stronger, and which help’d him more, Than all his Thunder did, and his Almightyship before. II She taught him Love’s Elixir, by which Art His Godhead into Gold he did convert; No Guards did then his Passage stay, He pass’d with Ease, Gold was the Word; Subtle as Light’ning, bright, and quick, and fierce, Gold thro’ Doors and Walls did pierce; And as that works sometimes upon the Sword, Melted the Maidenhead away, Ev’n in the secret Scabbard where it lay. The prudent Macedonian King, To blow up Towns a Golden Mine did spring; He broke thro’ Gates with this Petarr, ’Tis the great Art of Peace, the Engine ’tis of War; And Fleets and Armies follow it afar; The Ensign ’tis at Land: and ’tis the Seaman’s Star.
after Ovid In summer’s heat and mid-time of the day To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay, One window shut, the other open stood, Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood, Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun Or night being past, and yet not day begun. Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown, Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown. Then came Corinna in a long loose gown, Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down: Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed Or Laïs of a thousand wooers sped. I snatched her gown, being thin, the harm was small, Yet strived she to be covered therewithal. And striving thus as one that would be cast, Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last. Stark naked as she stood before mine eye, Not one wen in her body could I spy. What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me? How smooth a belly under her waist saw I? How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh? To leave the rest, all liked me passing well, I clinged her naked body, down she fell, Judge you the rest: being tired she bad me kiss, Jove send me more such afternoons as this.
Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see; Let the dew-fall drench either side of me; Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree; And God, ah God, that day should be so soon. The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie. Kissed upon either cheek and either eye, I turn to thee as some green afternoon Turns toward sunset, and is loth to die; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Lie closer, lean your face upon my side, Feel where the dew fell that has hardly dried, Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon; The pleasure lives there when the sense has died, Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. O my fair lord, I charge you leave me this: It is not sweeter than a foolish kiss? Nay take it then, my flower, my first in June, My rose, so like a tender mouth it is: Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Love, till dawn sunder night from day with fire Dividing my delight and my desire, The crescent life and love the plenilune, Love me though dusk begin and dark retire; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, my heart fails, my blood draws back; I know, When life runs over, life is near to go; And with the slain of love love’s ways are strewn, And with their blood, if love will have it so; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, do thy will now; slay me if thou wilt; There is no building now the walls are built, No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn, No drinking now the vine’s whole blood is spilt; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain; Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain, Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gatherers prune, Slay me ere day can slay desire again; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Yea, with thy sweet lips, with thy sweet sword; yea Take life and all, for I will die, I say; Love, I gave love, is life a better boon? For sweet night’s sake I will not live till day; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, I will sleep then only; nay, but go. Ah sweet, too sweet to me, my sweet, I know Love, sleep, and death go to the sweet same tune; Hold my hair fast, and kiss me through it soon. Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.
Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose; For in your beauty’s orient deep These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither do stray The golden atoms of the day; For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale, when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note. Ask me no more where those stars ’light, That downwards fall in dead of night; For in your eyes they sit, and there Fixed become, as in their sphere. Ask me no more if east or west The phoenix builds her spicy nest; For unto you at last she flies, And in your fragrant bosom dies.
There was ance a may, and she lo’ed na men; She biggit her bonnie bow’r doun i’ yon glen; But now she cries, Dool and a well-a-day! Come doun the green gait and come here away! When bonnie young Johnnie cam’ owre the sea He said he saw naething sae lovely as me; He hecht me baith rings and monie braw things; And werena my heart licht, I wad dee. He had a wee tittie that lo’ed na me, Because I was twice as bonnie as she; She raised sic a pother ‘twixt him and his mother, That werena my heart licht, I wad dee. The day it was set, and the bridal to be The wife took a dwam and lay doun to dee; She maned, and she graned, out o’ dolour and pain, Till he vowed that he ne’er wad see me again. His kin was for ane o’ a higher degree, Said, what had he do wi’ the likes o’ me? Albeit I was bonnie, I wasna for Johnnie: And werena my heart licht, I wad dee. They said I had neither cow nor calf, Nor dribbles o’ drink rins through the draff, Nor pickles o’meal rins through the mill-e’e; An werena my heart licht, I wad dee. His tittie she was baith wily and slee, She spied me as I cam’ owre the lea, And then she ran in and made a loud din; Believe your ain een an ye trow na me. His bannet stood aye fu’ round on his brow His auld ane looked aye as weel as some’s new; But now he lets ’t wear ony gate it will hing, And casts himsel’ dowie upon the corn-bing. And now he gaes daund’ring about the dykes A a’ he dow do is to hund the tykes; The love-lang nicht he ne’er steeks his e’e; And werena my heart licht I wad dee. Were I but young for thee, as I ha’e been We should ha’e been gallopin’ doun in yon green, And linkin’ it on the lily-white lea; And wow, gin I were but young for thee.
Child, with many a childish wile, Timid look, and blushing smile, Downy wings to steal thy way, Gilded bow, and quiver gay, Who in thy simple mien would trace The tyrant of the human race? Who is he whose flinty heart Hath not felt the flying dart? Who is he that from the wound Hath not pain and pleasure found? Who is he that hath not shed Curse and blessing on thy head?
Do not make things too easy. There are rocks and abysses in the mind As well as meadows. There are things knotty and hard: intractable. Do not talk to me of love and understanding. I am sick of blandishments. I want the rock to be met by a rock. If I am vile, and behave hideously, Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.

Slight unpremeditated Words are borne  By every common Wind into the Air; Carelessly utter’d, die as soon as born,  And in one instant give both Hope and Fear: Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind According to the Caprice of the Mind. But Billetdoux are constant Witnesses,  Substantial Records to Eternity; Just Evidences, who the Truth confess,  On which the Lover safely may rely; They’re serious Thoughts, digested and resolv’d; And last, when Words are into Clouds devolv’d.
Since man with that inconstancy was born, To love the absent, and the present scorn  Why do we deck, why do we dress  For such short-lived happiness?  Why do we put attraction on, Since either way ’tis we must be undone?  They fly if honour take our part,  Our virtue drives ’em o’er the field.  We love ’em by too much desert,  And oh! they fly us if we yield. Ye gods! is there no charm in all the fair To fix this wild, this faithless wanderer?  Man! our great business and our aim,  For whom we spread our fruitless snares, No sooner kindles the designing flame,  But to the next bright object bears The trophies of his conquest and our shame:  Inconstancy’s the good supreme The rest is airy notion, empty dream!  Then heedless nymph, be rul’d by me  If e’re your swain the bliss desire;  Think like Alexis he may be  Whose wisht possession damps his fire;  The roving youth in every shade Has left some sighing and abandon’d maid, For ’tis a fatal lesson he has learn’d, After fruition ne’er to be concern’d.
O Love! that stronger art than wine, Pleasing delusion, witchery divine, Wont to be prized above all wealth, Disease that has more joys than health; Though we blaspheme thee in our pain, And of thy tyranny complain, We are all bettered by they reign. What reason never can bestow We to this useful passion owe; Love wakes the dull from sluggish ease, And learns a clown the art to please, Humbles the vain, kindles the cold, Makes misers free, and cowards bold; ’Tis he reforms the sot from drink, And teaches airy fops to think. When full brute appetite is fed, And choked the glutton lies and dead, Thou new spirits dost dispense And ’finest the gross delights of sense: Virtue’s unconquerable aid That against Nature can persuade, And makes a roving mind retire Within the bounds of just desire; Cheerer of age, youth’s kind unrest, And half the heaven of the blest!
Oh, how the hand the lover ought to prize  ’Bove any one peculiar grace! While he is dying for the eyes  And doting on the lovely face, The unconsid’ring little knows How much he to this beauty owes. That, when the lover absent is,  Informs him of his mistress’ heart; ’Tis that which gives him all his bliss  When dear love-secrets ’twill impart: That plights the faith the maid bestows, And that confirms the tim’rous vows. ’Tis that betrays the tenderness  Which the too bashful tongue denies; ’Tis that which does the heart confess,  And spares the language of the eyes; ’Tis that which treasure gives so vast, Ev’n Iris ’twill to Damon give at last.
Amyntas led me to a Grove,  Where all the Trees did shade us; The Sun it self, though it had Strove,  It could not have betray’d us: The place secur’d from humane Eyes,  No other fear allows. But when the Winds that gently rise,  Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs. Down there we satt upon the Moss,  And id begin to play A Thousand Amorous Tricks, to pass  The heat of all the day. A many Kisses he did give:  And I return’d the same Which made me willing to receive  That which I dare not name. His Charming Eyes no Aid requir’d  To tell their softning Tale; On her that was already fir’d  ’Twas easy to prevaile. He did but Kiss and Clasp me round,  Whilst those his thoughts Exprest: And lay’d me gently on the Ground;  Ah who can guess the rest?
Our oneness is the wrestlers’, fierce and close,  Thrusting and thrust; One life in dual effort for one prize,—  We fight, and must; For soul with soul does battle evermore  Till love be trust. Our distance is love’s severance; sense divides,  Each is but each; Never the very hidden spirit of thee  My life doth reach; Twain! Since love athwart the gulf that needs  Kisses and speech. Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so  Than any bliss Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one,  Too near to kiss: To be one thought, one voice before we die,—  Wrestle for this.
And ye shall walk in silk attire,  And siller hae to spare, Gin ye’ll consent to be his bride,  Nor think o’ Donald mair. O wha wad buy a silken goun  Wi’ a poor broken heart! Or what’s to me a siller croun,  Gin frae my love I part! The mind wha’s every wish is pure  Far dearer is to me; And ere I’m forc’d to break my faith,  I’ll lay me down an’ dee! For I hae pledg’d my virgin troth  Brave Donald’s fate to share; And he has gi’en to me his heart,  Wi’ a’ its virtues rare. His gentle manners wan my heart,  He gratefu’ took the gift; Could I but think to seek it back,  It wad be waur than theft! For langest life can ne’er repay  The love he bears to me; And ere I’m forc’d to break my troth,  I’ll lay me doun an’ dee.
O Donald! ye are just the man  Who, when he’s got a wife, Begins to fratch— nae notice ta’en—  They’re strangers a’ their life. The fan may drop— she takes it up,  The husband keeps his chair; She hands the kettle— gives his cup—  Without e’en— thank ye, dear.” Now, truly, these slights are but toys;  But frae neglects like these, The wife may soon a slattern grow,  And strive nae mair to please. For wooers ay do all they can  To trifle wi’ the mind; They hold the blaze of beauty up,  And keep the poor things blind. But wedlock tears away the veil,  The goddess is nae mair; He thinks his wife a silly thing,  She thinks her man a bear. Let then the lover be the friend—  The loving friend for life; Think but thysel the happiest spouse,  She’ll be the happiest wife.
And auld Robin Forbes hes gien tem a dance, I pat on my speckets to see them aw prance; I thout o’ the days when I was but fifteen, And skipp’d wi’ the best upon Forbes’s green. Of aw things that is I think thout is meast queer, It brings that that’s by-past and sets it down here; I see Willy as plain as I dui this bit leace, When he tuik his cwoat lappet and deeghted his feace. The lasses aw wonder’d what Willy cud see In yen that was dark and hard featur’d leyke me; And they wonder’d ay mair when they talk’d o’ my wit, And slily telt Willy that cudn’t be it: But Willy he laugh’d, and he meade me his weyfe, And whea was mair happy thro’ aw his lang leyfe? It’s e’en my great comfort, now Willy is geane, The he offen said— nae place was leyke his awn heame! I mind when I carried my wark to yon steyle Where Willy was deykin, the time to beguile, He wad fling me a daisy to put i’ my breast, And I hammer’d my noddle to mek out a jest. But merry or grave, Willy often wad tell There was nin o’ the leave that was leyke my awn sel; And he spak what he thout, for I’d hardly a plack When we married, and nobbet ae gown to my back. When the clock had struck eight I expected him heame, And wheyles went to meet him as far as Dumleane; Of aw hours it telt eight was dearest to me, But now when it streykes there’s a tear i’ my ee. O Willy! dear Willy! it never can be That age, time, or death, can divide thee and me! For that spot on earth that’s aye dearest to me, Is the turf that has cover’d my Willy frae me!
Once we played at love together—  Played it smartly, if you please; Lightly, as a windblown feather,  Did we stake a heart apiece. Oh, it was delicious fooling!  In the hottest of the game, Without thought of future cooling,  All too quickly burned Life’s flame. In this give-and-take of glances,  Kisses sweet as honey dews, When we played with equal chances,  Did you win, or did I lose?
Come, the wind may never again Blow as now it blows for us; And the stars may never again shine as now they shine; Long before October returns, Seas of blood will have parted us; And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!
Love is like the wild rose-briar, Friendship like the holly-tree— The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms But which will bloom most constantly? The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring, Its summer blossoms scent the air; Yet wait till winter comes again And who will call the wild-briar fair? Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now And deck thee with the holly’s sheen, That when December blights thy brow He still may leave thy garland green.
Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers  Plucked in the garden, all the summer through  And winter, and it seemed as if they grew In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers, So, in the like name of that love of ours,  Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,  And which on warm and cold days I withdrew From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers  Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue, And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,  Here’s ivy!— take them, as I used to do Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.  Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true, And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up,... those laurels on thine head, O My beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
Would but indulgent Fortune send To me a kind, and faithful Friend, One who to Virtue’s Laws is true, And does her nicest Rules pursue; One Pious, Lib’ral, Just and Brave, And to his Passions not a Slave; Who full of Honour, void of Pride, Will freely praise, and freely chide; But not indulge the smallest Fault, Nor entertain one slighting Thought: Who still the same will ever prove, Will still instruct and still will love: In whom I safely may confide, And with him all my Cares divide: Who has a large capacious Mind, Join’d with a Knowledge unconfin’d: A Reason bright, a Judgement true, A Wit both quick, and solid too: Who can of all things talk with Ease, And whose Converse will ever please: Who charm’d with Wit, and inward Graces, Despises Fools with tempting Faces; And still a beauteous Mind does prize Above the most enchanting Eyes: I would not envy Queens their State, Nor once desire a happier Fate.
Why, Damon, why, why, why so pressing? The Heart you beg’s not worth possessing: Each Look, each Word, each Smile’s affected, And inward Charms are quite neglected:  Then scorn her, scorn her, foolish Swain,  And sigh no more, no more in vain. Beauty’s worthless, fading, flying; Who would for Trifles think of dying? Who for a Face, a Shape, wou’d languish, And tell the Brooks, and Groves his Anguish,  Till she, till she thinks fit to prize him,  And all, and all beside despise him? Fix, fix your Thoughts on what’s inviting, On what will never bear the slighting: Wit and Virtue claim your Duty, They’re much more worth than Gold and Beauty:  To them, to them, your Heart resign,  And you’ll no more, no more repine.
Ah, gaze not on those eyes! forbear  That soft enchanting voice to hear: Not looks of basilisks give surer death, Nor Syrens sing with more destructive breath.  Fly, if thy freedom thou’dst maintain,  Alas! I feel th’advice is vain! A heart, whose safety but in flight does lie, Is too far lost to have the power to fly.
No more alone sleeping, no more alone waking,  Thy dreams divided, thy prayers in twain; Thy merry sisters tonight forsaking,  Never shall we see, maiden, again. Never shall we see thee, thine eyes glancing.  Flashing with laughter and wild in glee, Under the mistletoe kissing and dancing,  Wantonly free. There shall come a matron walking sedately,  Low-voiced, gentle, wise in reply. Tell me, O tell me, can I love her greatly?  All for her sake must the maiden die!
The clouds had made a crimson crown  Above the mountains high. The stormy sun was going down  In a stormy sky. Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,  And hold your breath between? In all the ages this can never be  As if it had not been.
‘The myrtle bush grew shady Down by the ford.’ ‘Is it even so?’ said my lady. ‘Even so!’ said my lord. ‘The leaves are set too thick together For the point of a sword. ‘The arras in your room hangs close, No light between! You wedded one of those that see unseen.’ ‘Is it even so?’ said the King’s Majesty. ‘Even so!’ said the Queen.
Could you come back to me, Douglas, Douglas, In the old likeness that I knew, I would be so faithful, so loving, Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true. Never a scornful word should grieve ye, I’d smile on ye sweet as the angels do,— Sweet as your smile on me shone ever, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true. Oh, to call back the days that are not! My eyes were blinded, your words were few; Do you know the truth now up in heaven, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true? I never was worthy of you, Douglas; Not half worthy the like of you: Now all men beside seem to me like shadows— I love you, Douglas, tender and true. Stretch out your hand to me, Douglas, Douglas, Drop forgiveness from heaven like dew; As I lay my heart on your dead heart, Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true.
There is a strong wall about me to protect me: It is built of the words you have said to me. There are swords about me to keep me safe: They are the kisses of your lips. Before me goes a shield to guard me from harm: It is the shadow of your arms between me and danger. All the wishes of my mind know your name, And the white desires of my heart They are acquainted with you. The cry of my body for completeness, That is a cry to you. My blood beats out your name to me, unceasing, pitiless Your name, your name.
Give, give me back that Trifle you despise, Give back my Heart, with all its Injuries: Tho’ by your Cruelty it wounded be, The Thing is yet of wond’rous Use to me. A gen’rous Conqueror, when the Battle’s won, Bestows a Charity on the Undone: If from the well aim’d Stroke no Hope appear, He kills the Wretch, and shews Compassion there: But you, Barbarian! keep alive Pain, A lasting Trophy of Unjust Disdain.
A Scholar first my Love implor’d, And then an empty, titled Lord; The Pedant talk’d in lofty Strains; Alas! his Lordship wanted Brains: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, But straight referr’d them to my Mother. A Poet next my Love assail’d, A Lawyer hop’d to have prevail’d; The Bard too much approv’d himself, The Lawyer thirsted after Pelf: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, But still referr’d them to my Mother. An Officer my Heart wou’d storm, A Miser, sought me too, in Form; But Mars was over-free and bold, The miser’s Heart was in his Gold: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, Referring still unto my Mother. And after them, some twenty more, Successless were, as those before; When Damon, lovely Damon came! Our Hearts strait felt a mutual Flame; I vow’d I’d have him, and no other, Without referring, to my Mother.
My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay One hower longer: so that we might either Sate up, or gone to bedd together? But since thy finisht labor hath possest Thy weary limbs with early rest, Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side. Whose business, now, is only to prepare My nightly dress, and call to prayre: Mine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old. The dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold. Draw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room: My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.
My Love? alas! I must not call you Mine, But to your envy’d Bride that Name resign: I must forget your lovely melting Charms, And be for ever Banisht from your Arms: For ever? oh! the Horror of that Sound! It gives my bleeding Heart a deadly wound: While I might hope, although my Hope was vain, It gave some Ease to my unpitty’d Pain, But now your Hymen doth all Hope exclude, And but to think is Sin; yet you intrude On every Thought; if I but close my Eyes, Methinks your pleasing Form besides me lies; With every Sigh I gently breath your Name, Yet no ill Thoughts pollute my hallow’d Flame; ’Tis pure and harmless, as a Lambent Fire, And never mingled with a warm Desire: All I have now to ask of Bounteous Heaven, Is, that your Perjuries may be forgiven: That she who you have with your Nuptials blest, As She’s the Happiest Wife, may prove the Best: That all our Joys may light on you alone, Then I can be contented to have none: And never wish that you shou’d kinder be, Than now and then, to cast a Thought on Me: And, Madam, though the Conquest you have won, Over my Strephon, has my hopes undone; I’le daily beg of Heaven, he may be Kinder to You, than he has been to Me.
Farewell my dearer half, joy of my heart, Heaven only knows how loth I am to part: Whole Months but hours seem, when you are here, When absent, every Minute is a Year: Might I but always see thy charming Face, I’de live on Racks, and wish no easier place. But we must part, your Interest says we must; Fate, me no longer with such Treasure trust. I wou’d not tax you with Inconstancy, Yet Strephon, you are not so kind as I: No Interest, no nor Fate it self has pow’r To tempt me from the Idol I adore: But since you needs will go, may Africk be Kinder to you, than Europe is to me: May all you meet and every thing you view Give you such Transport as I met in you. May no sad thoughts disturb your quiet mind, Except you’l think of her you left behind.
When last we parted, thou wert young and fair,  How beautiful let fond remembrance say!  Alas! since then old time has stolen away Full thirty years, leaving my temples bare.— So has it perished like a thing of air,  The dream of love and youth!— now both are grey  Yet still remembering that delightful day, Though time with his cold touch has blanched my hair,  Though I have suffered many years of pain Since then, though I did never think to live  To hear that voice or see those eyes again, I can a sad but cordial greeting give, And for thy welfare breathe as warm a prayer— As when I loved thee young and fair.
Love, thou art best of Human Joys,  Our chiefest Happiness below; All other Pleasures are but Toys, Musick without Thee is but Noise,  And Beauty but an empty show. Heav’n , who knew best what Man wou’d move,  And raise his Thoughts above the Brute; Said, Let him Be, and Let him Love; That must alone his Soul improve,  Howe’er Philosophers dispute.
This to the crown and blessing of my life, The much loved husband of a happy wife; To him whose constant passion found the art To win a stubborn and ungrateful heart, And to the world by tenderest proof discovers They err, who say that husbands can’t be lovers. With such return of passion as is due, Daphnis I love, Daphnis my thoughts pursue; Daphnis my hopes and joys are bounded all in you. Even I, for Daphnis’ and my promise’ sake, What I in women censure, undertake. But this from love, not vanity, proceeds; You know who writes, and I who ’tis that reads. Judge not my passion by my want of skill: Many love well, though they express it ill; And I your censure could with pleasure bear, Would you but soon return, and speak it here.
I sing the man that never equal knew, Whose mighty arms all Asia did subdue, Whose conquests through the spacious world do ring, That city-raser, king-destroying king, Who o’er the warlike Macedons did reign, And worthily the name of Great did gain. This is the prince (if fame you will believe, To ancient story any credit give.) Who when the globe of Earth he had subdued, With tears the easy victory pursued; Because that no more worlds there were to win, No further scene to act his glories in. Ah that some pitying Muse would now inspire My frozen style with a poetic fire, And raptures worthy of his matchless fame, Whose deeds I sing, whose never fading name Long as the world shall fresh and deathless last, No less to future ages, then the past. Great my presumption is, I must confess, But if I thrive, my glory’s ne’er the less; Nor will it from his conquests derogate A female pen his acts did celebrate. If thou O Muse wilt thy assistance give, Such as made Naso and great Maro live, With him whom Melas’ fertile banks did bear, Live, though their bodies dust and ashes are; Whose laurels were not fresher, than their fame Is now, and will for ever be the same. If the like favor thou wilt grant to me, O Queen of Verse, I’ll not ungrateful be, My choicest hours to thee I’ll dedicate, ’Tis thou shalt rule, ’tis thou shalt be my fate. But if coy goddess thou shalt this deny, And from my humble suit disdaining fly, I’ll stoop and beg no more, since I know this, Writing of him, I cannot write amiss: His lofty deeds will raise each feeble line, And god-like acts will make my verse divine. ’Twas at the time the golden sun doth rise, And with his beams enlights the azure skies, When lo a troop in silver arms drew near, The glorious sun did nere so bright appear; Dire scarlet plumes adorned their haughty crests, And crescent shields did shade their shining breasts; Down from their shoulders hung a panther’s hide, A bow and quiver rattled by their side; Their hands a knotty well tried spear did bear, Jocund they seemed, and quite devoid of fear. These warlike virgins were, that do reside Near Thermodon’s smooth banks and verdant side, The plains of Themiscyre their birth do boast, Thalestris now did head the beauteous host; She emulating that illustrious dame, Who to the aid of Troy and Priam came, And her who the Retulian prince did aid, Though dearly both for their assistance paid. But fear she scorned, nor the like fate did dread, Her host she often to the field had led, As oft in triumph had returned again, Glory she only sought for all her pain. This martial queen had heard how loudly fame, Echoed our conqueror’s redoubted name, Her soul his conduct and his courage fired, To see the hero she so much admired; And to Hyrcania for this cause she went, Where Alexander (wholly then intent On triumphs and such military sport) At truce with war held both his camp and court. And while before the town she did attend Her messengers return, she saw ascend A cloud of dust, that covered all the sky, And still at every pause there stroke her eye. The interrupted beams of burnished gold, As dust the splendor hid, or did unfold; Loud neighings of the steeds, and trumpets’ sound Filled all the air, and echoed from the ground; The gallant Greeks with a brisk march drew near, And their great chief did at their head appear. And now come up to th’Amazonian band, They made a halt and a respectful stand: And both the troops (with like amazement strook) Did each on other with deep silence look. Th’heroic queen (whose high pretence to war Cancelled the bashful laws and nicer bar Of modesty, which did her sex restrain) First boldly did advance before her train, And thus she spake. All but a god in name, And that a debt time owes unto thy fame. This was the first essay of this young lady in poetry, but finding the task she had undertaken hard, she laid it by till practice and more time should make her equal to so great a work.
Did I, my lines intend for public view, How many censures, would their faults pursue, Some would, because such words they do affect, Cry they’re insipid, empty, and uncorrect. And many have attained, dull and untaught, The name of wit only by finding fault. True judges might condemn their want of wit, And all might say, they’re by a woman writ. Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to inquire Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime; Whilst the dull manage of a servile house Is held by some our outmost art, and use.  Sure ’twas not ever thus, nor are we told Fables, of women that excelled of old; To whom, by the diffusive hand of Heaven  Some share of wit, and poetry was given. On that glad day, on which the Ark returned, The holy pledge, for which the land had mourned, The joyful tribes, attend it on the way, The Levites do the sacred charge convey, Whilst various instruments, before it play; Here, holy virgins in the concert join The louder notes, to soften, and refine, And with alternate verse complete the hymn divine. Lo! the young Poet, after God’s own heart, By Him inspired, and taught the Muses’ art, Returned from conquest, a bright chorus meets, That sing his slain ten thousand in the streets. In such loud numbers they his acts declare, Proclaim the wonders of his early war, That Saul upon the vast applause does frown, And feels its mighty thunder shake the crown. What, can the threatened judgment now prolong? Half of the kingdom is already gone; The fairest half, whose influence guides the rest, Have David’s empire o’er their hearts confessed.  A woman here, leads fainting Israel on, She fights, she wins, she triumphs with a song, Devout, majestic, for the subject fit, And far above her arms, exalts her wit; Then, to the peaceful, shady palm withdraws, And rules the rescued nation, with her laws. How are we fall’n, fall’n by mistaken rules? And education’s, more than nature’s fools, Debarred from all improvements of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed; And if some one would soar above the rest, With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed, So strong th’ opposing faction still appears, The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears, Be cautioned then my Muse, and still retired; Nor be despised, aiming to be admired; Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing, To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing; For groves of laurel thou wert never meant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.
A Pindaric Poem
Could our first father, at his toilsome plow, Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow, Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin, Could he a vain fantastic nymph have seen, In all her airs, in all her antic graces, Her various fashions, and more various faces; How had it posed that skill, which late assigned Just appellations to each several kind! A right idea of the sight to frame; T’have guessed from what new element she came; T’have hit the wav’ring form, or giv’n this thing a name.
O King of terrors, whose unbounded sway All that have life must certainly obey; The King, the Priest, the Prophet, all are thine, Nor would ev’n God (in flesh) thy stroke decline. My name is on thy roll, and sure I must Increase thy gloomy kingdom in the dust. My soul at this no apprehension feels, But trembles at thy swords, thy racks, thy wheels; Thy scorching fevers, which distract the sense, And snatch us raving, unprepared, from hence; At thy contagious darts, that wound the heads Of weeping friends, who wait at dying beds. Spare these, and let thy time be when it will; My bus’ness is to die, and thine to kill. Gently thy fatal scepter on me lay, And take to thy cold arms, insensibly, thy prey.
came in a pink, orange and white striped metal tube, with a black curlicue border and a splayed gold base. It came in any number of mod shades: Nippy Beige, Chelsea Pink, Poppycock, Hot Nec- taringo, Pinkadilly, Dicey Peach. There were several tubes in my mother’s makeup drawer in the bath- room five out of six of us used (my father had his own bathroom, as forbidden as the walk-in closet where his Playboys were hidden under a stack of sweaters on the top shelf). All the girls at school had Slicker in their purses; I watched them apply The London Look at the beginning and end of each class. I marveled at what else spilled out: compact, mascara brush, eye shadow, wallet, troll doll, dyed rabbit’s foot, chewing gum, tampon, pink plastic comb. At home I stared at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and, as my brother pounded on the locked bath- room door, twisted a tube and rubbed, ever so slightly, Slicker on my lips.
Pink Dawn, Aurora Pink, Misty Pink, Fresh Pink, Natural Pink, Country Pink, Dusty Pink, Pussywillow Pink, Pink Heather, Pink Peony, Sunflower Pink, Plum Pink, Peach of a Pink, Raspberry Pink, Watermelon Pink, Pink Lemonade, Bikini Pink, Buoy Buoy Pink, Sea Shell Pink, Pebble Pink, Pink Piper, Acapulco Pink, Tahiti Beach Pink, Sunny Pink, Hot Pink, Sizzling Pink, Skinnydip Pink, Flesh Pink, Transparent Pink, Breezy Pink, Sheer Shiver Pink, Polar Bare Pink, Pink Frost, Frosty Pink, Frost Me Pink, Frosted Pink, Sugarpuff Pink, Ice Cream Pink, Lickety Pink, Pink Melba, Pink Whip, Pinkermint, Sweet Young Pink, Little Girl Pink, Fragile Pink, Fainting Pink, Helpless Pink, Tiny Timid Pink, Wink of Pink, Shadow of Pink, Tint of Pink, Shimmer of Pink, Flicker of Pink, Pink Flash, E.S. Pink, Person-to-Person Pink, City Pink, Penny Lane Pink, Pink Paisley, London Luv Pink, Pretty Pink, Pastel Pink, Pinking Sheer, Pink Piqué, Pink Silk, Plush Pink, Lush Iced Pink, Brandied Pink, Sheer Pink Champagne, Candlelight Pink, Fluffy Moth Pink, Softsilver Pink, Pinkyring, Turn Pale Pink, A Little Pink, Pinker, Pinkety Pink, Heart of Pink, Hug that Pink, Passionate Pink, Snuggle Pink, Pink-Glo!, Happy-Go-Pink, Daredevil Pink, By Jupiter Pink, Stark Raving Pink, Viva La Pink.
His army jacket bore the white rectangle of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute at the round table where the trip-wire veterans ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies who went stateside without leaving the war. They had the look of men who held their breath and now their tongues. What is to say beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower and lower as the war went on, spines curving toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged with ammo belts enough to make fine lace of enemy flesh and blood. Now these who survived, who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front, lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires strung through tin cans. Better an alarm than the constant nightmare of something moving on its belly to make your skin crawl with the sensory memory of foxhole living.
Eph. What Friendship is, Ardelia show. Ard. ’Tis to love, as I love you. Eph. This account, so short (tho’ kind)  Suits not my inquiring mind.  Therefore farther now repeat:  What is Friendship when complete? Ard. ’Tis to share all joy and grief;  ’Tis to lend all due relief  From the tongue, the heart, the hand;  ’Tis to mortgage house and land;  For a friend be sold a slave;  ’Tis to die upon a grave,  If a friend therein do lie. Eph. This indeed, tho’ carried high,  This, tho’ more than e’er was done  Underneath the rolling sun,  This has all been said before.  Can Ardelia say no more? Ard. Words indeed no more can show: But ’tis to love, as I love you.
In such a night, when every louder wind Is to its distant cavern safe confined; And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the wand’rer right: In such a night, when passing clouds give place, Or thinly veil the heav’ns’ mysterious face; When in some river, overhung with green, The waving moon and the trembling leaves are seen; When freshened grass now bears itself upright, And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite, Whence springs the woodbind, and the bramble-rose, And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows; Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes, Yet checkers still with red the dusky brakes When scatter’d glow-worms, but in twilight fine, Shew trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine; Whilst Salisb’ry stands the test of every light, In perfect charms, and perfect virtue bright: When odors, which declined repelling day, Through temp’rate air uninterrupted stray; When darkened groves their softest shadows wear, And falling waters we distinctly hear; When through the gloom more venerable shows Some ancient fabric, awful in repose, While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal, And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale: When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through th’ adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace, and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear: When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls; Their shortlived jubilee the creatures keep, Which but endures, whilst tyrant man does sleep; When a sedate content the spirit feels, And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent musings urge the mind to seek Something, too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charmed, Finding the elements of rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in th’ inferior world, and thinks it like her own: In such a night let me abroad remain, Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again; Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed, Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.
Good Heav’n, I thank thee, since it was designed I should be framed, but of the weaker kind, That yet, my Soul, is rescued from the love Of all those trifles which their passions move. Pleasures and praise and plenty have with me But their just value. If allowed they be, Freely, and thankfully as much I taste, As will not reason or religion waste, If they’re denied, I on my self can live, And slight those aids unequal chance does give. When in the sun, my wings can be displayed, And, in retirement, I can bless the shade.
The merchant, to secure his treasure,  Conveys it in a borrowed name; Euphelia serves to grace my measure,  But Cloe is my real flame. My softest verse, my darling lyre,  Upon Euphelia’s toilet lay; When Cloe noted her desire  That I should sing, that I should play. My lyre I tune, my voice I raise,  But with my numbers mix my sighs; And whilst I sing Euphelia’s praise,  I fix my soul on Cloe’s eyes. Fair Cloe blushed; Euphelia frowned;  I sung and gazed; I played and trembled; And Venus to the Loves around  Remarked how ill we all dissembled.
Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower: While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more. Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink Strike your offended sense with double stink. If you be wise, then go not far to dine; You’ll spend in coach hire more than save in wine. A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old achès throb, your hollow tooth will rage. Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen; He damns the climate and complains of spleen. Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swilled more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again. Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope, While the first drizzling shower is born aslope: Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean: You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stop To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop. Not yet the dust had shunned the unequal strife, But, aided by the wind, fought still for life, And wafted with its foe by violent gust, ’Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust. Ah! where must needy poet seek for aid, When dust and rain at once his coat invade? Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain Erects the nap, and leaves a mingled stain. Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, Threatening with deluge this devoted town. To shops in crowds the daggled females fly, Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. The Templar spruce, while every spout’s abroach, Stays till ’tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While seams run down her oiled umbrella’s sides. Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, Commence acquaintance underneath a shed. Triumphant Tories and desponding Whigs Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. Boxed in a chair the beau impatient sits, While spouts run clattering o’er the roof by fits, And ever and anon with frightful din The leather sounds; he trembles from within. So when Troy chairmen bore the wooden steed, Pregnant with Greeks impatient to be freed (Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), Laocoön struck the outside with his spear, And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear. Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go: Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course, And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge. Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Corinna, pride of Drury-Lane For whom no shepherd sighs in vain; Never did Covent Garden boast So bright a battered, strolling toast; No drunken rake to pick her up, No cellar where on tick to sup; Returning at the midnight hour; Four stories climbing to her bow’r; Then, seated on a three-legged chair, Takes off her artificial hair: Now, picking out a crystal eye, She wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her eye-brows from a mouse’s hide, Stuck on with art on either side, Pulls off with care, and first displays ’em, Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em. Now dexterously her plumpers draws, That serve to fill her hollow jaws. Untwists a wire; and from her gums A set of teeth completely comes. Pulls out the rags contrived to prop Her flabby dugs and down they drop. Proceeding on, the lovely goddess Unlaces next her steel-ribbed bodice; Which by the operator’s skill, Press down the lumps, the hollows fill, Up goes her hand, and off she slips The bolsters that supply her hips. With gentlest touch, she next explores Her shankers, issues, running sores, Effects of many a sad disaster; And then to each applies a plaister. But must, before she goes to bed, Rub off the dawbs of white and red; And smooth the furrows in her front With greasy paper stuck upon’t. She takes a bolus ere she sleeps; And then between two blankets creeps. With pains of love tormented lies; Or if she chance to close her eyes, Of Bridewell and the Compter dreams, And feels the lash, and faintly screams; Or, by a faithless bully drawn, At some hedge-tavern lies in pawn; Or to Jamaica seems transported, Alone, and by no planter courted; Or, near Fleet-Ditch’s oozy brinks, Surrounded with a hundred stinks, Belated, seems on watch to lie, And snap some cully passing by; Or, struck with fear, her fancy runs On watchmen, constables and duns, From whom she meets with frequent rubs; But, never from religious clubs; Whose favor she is sure to find, Because she pays ’em all in kind. Corinna wakes. A dreadful sight! Behold the ruins of the night! A wicked rat her plaster stole, Half eat, and dragged it to his hole. The crystal eye, alas, was missed; And puss had on her plumpers pissed. A pigeon picked her issue-peas; And Shock her tresses filled with fleas. The nymph, tho’ in this mangled plight, Must ev’ry morn her limbs unite. But how shall I describe her arts To recollect the scattered parts? Or shew the anguish, toil, and pain, Of gath’ring up herself again? The bashful muse will never bear In such a scene to interfere. Corinna in the morning dizened, Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.
An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic When the fierce north wind with his airy forces Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury, And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes Rushing amain down, How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, While the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet, Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters, Quick to devour them! Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder, (If things eternal may be like these earthly) Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel Shakes the creation, Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven, Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes; See the graves open, and the bones arising, Flames all around ’em! Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches! Lively bright horror and amazing anguish Stare through their eyelids, while the living worm lies Gnawing within them. Thoughts like old vultures prey upon their heart-strings, And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the Lofty Judge frowning, and a flood of vengeance Rolling afore him. Hopeless immortals! how they scream and shiver, While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong Down to the center. Stop here, my fancy: (all away ye horrid Doleful ideas); come, arise to Jesus; How He sits God-like! and the saints around him Throned, yet adoring! Oh may I sit there when he comes triumphant Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory While our hosannas all along the passage Shout the Redeemer.
There is a land of pure delight Where saints immortal reign; Infinite day excludes the night, And pleasures banish pain. There everlasting spring abides, And never-withering flowers; Death like a narrow sea divides This heavenly land from ours. Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood Stand dressed in living green: So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between. But timorous mortals start and shrink To cross this narrow sea, And linger shivering on the brink, And fear to launch away. Oh could we make our doubts remove, These gloomy doubts that rise, And see the Canaan that we love, With unbeclouded eyes; Could we but climb where Moses stood And view the landscape o’er, Not Jordan’s stream, nor death’s cold flood, Should fright us from the shore.
Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Our shelter from the stormy blast, And our eternal home: Under the shadow of thy throne Thy saints have dwelt secure; Sufficient is thine arm alone, And our defense is sure. Before the hills in order stood Or earth received her frame, From everlasting thou art God, To endless years the same. Thy word commands our flesh to dust, “Return, ye sons of men”; All nations rose from earth at first, And turn to earth again. A thousand ages in thy sight Are like an evening gone; Short as the watch that ends the night Before the rising sun. The busy tribes of flesh and blood, With all their lives and cares, Are carried downwards by thy flood, And lost in following years. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day. Like flowery fields the nations stand, Pleased with the morning light; The flowers beneath the mower’s hand Lie withering e’er ’tis night. Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Be thou our guard while troubles last, And our eternal home.
Warning to Magistrates Judges, who rule the world by laws, Will ye despise the righteous cause, When th’injur’d poor before you stands? Dare ye condemn the righteous poor, And let rich sinners ’scape secure, While gold and greatness bribe your hands? Have ye forgot or never knew That God will judge the judges too? High in the Heavens his justice reigns; Yet you invade the rights of God, And send your bold decrees abroad To bind the conscience in your chains. A poisoned arrow is your tongue, The arrow sharp, the poison strong, And death attends where e’er it wounds: You hear no counsels, cries or tears; So the deaf adder stops her ears Against the power of charming sounds. Break out their teeth, eternal God, Those teeth of lions dyed in blood; And crush the serpents in the dust: As empty chaff, when whirlwinds rise, Before the sweeping tempest flies, So let their hopes and names be lost. Th’Almighty thunders from the sky, Their grandeur melts, their titles die, As hills of snow dissolve and run, Or snails that perish in their slime, Or births that come before their time, Vain births, that never see the sun. Thus shall the vengeance of the Lord Safety and joy to saints afford; And all that hear shall join and say, “Sure there’s a God that rules on high, “A God that hears his children cry, “And will their sufferings well repay.”
Miracles Attending Israel’s Journey When Isr’el, freed from Pharaoh’s hand, Left the proud tyrant and his land, The tribes with cheerful homage own Their king; and Judah was his throne. Across the deep their journey lay; The deep divides to make them way. Jordan beheld their march, and led, With backward current, to his head. The mountains shook like frighted sheep, Like lambs the little hillocks leap; Not Sinai on her base could stand, Conscious of sov’reign pow’r at hand. What pow’r could make the deep divide? Make Jordan backward roll his tide? Why did ye leap, ye little hills? And whence the fright that Sinai feels? Let ev’ry mountain, ev’ry flood, Retire and know th’ approaching God, The King of Isr’el: see him here! Tremble, thou earth, adore and fear. He thunders, and all nature mourns; The rock to standing pools he turns, Flints spring with fountains at his word, And fires and seas confess the Lord.
Act I, Scene viii, Air X—“Thomas, I Cannot,”
Act I, Scene xiii, Air XVI—“Over the Hills, and Far Away”
Act II, Scene iv, Air IV—Cotillion
Act III, Scene xiii, Air XXVII—“Green Sleeves”
To Lady Winchelsea, Occasioned by four Satirical Verses on Women Wits, In The Rape of the Lock  In vain you boast poetic names of yore, And cite those Sapphos we admire no more: Fate doomed the fall of every female wit; But doomed it then, when first Ardelia writ. Of all examples by the world confessed, I knew Ardelia could not quote the best; Who, like her mistress on Britannia’s throne, Fights and subdues in quarrels not her own. To write their praise you but in vain essay; Even while you write, you take that praise away. Light to the stars the sun does thus restore, But shines himself till they are seen no more.
I Why will Delia thus retire, And idly languish life away? While the sighing crowd admire, ’Tis too soon for hartshorn tea: II All those dismal looks and fretting Cannot Damon’s life restore; Long ago the worms have eat him, You can never see him more. III Once again consult your toilette, In the glass your face review: So much weeping soon will spoil it, And no spring your charms renew. IV I, like you, was born a woman, Well I know what vapors mean: The disease, alas! is common; Single, we have all the spleen. V All the morals that they tell us, Never cured the sorrow yet: Chuse, among the pretty fellows, One of honor, youth, and wit. VI Prithee hear him every morning At least an hour or two; Once again at night returning— I believe the dose will do.
Think not this paper comes with vain pretense To move your pity, or to mourn th’ offense. Too well I know that hard obdurate heart; No softening mercy there will take my part, Nor can a woman’s arguments prevail, When even your patron’s wise example fails. But this last privilege I still retain; Th’ oppressed and injured always may complain.  Too, too severely laws of honor bind The weak submissive sex of womankind. If sighs have gained or force compelled our hand, Deceived by art, or urged by stern command, Whatever motive binds the fatal tie, The judging world expects our constancy.  Just heaven! (for sure in heaven does justice reign, Though tricks below that sacred name profane) To you appealing I submit my cause. Nor fear a judgment from impartial laws. All bargains but conditional are made; The purchase void, the creditor unpaid; Defrauded servants are from service free; A wounded slave regains his liberty. For wives ill used no remedy remains, To daily racks condemned, and to eternal chains.  From whence is this unjust distinction grown? Are we not formed with passions like your own? Nature with equal fire our souls endued, Our minds as haughty, and as warm our blood; O’er the wide world your pleasures you pursue, The change is justified by something new; But we must sigh in silence—and be true. Our sex’s weakness you expose and blame (Of every prattling fop the common theme), Yet from this weakness you suppose is due Sublimer virtue than your Cato knew. Had heaven designed us trials so severe, It would have formed our tempers then to bear.  And I have borne (oh what have I not borne!) The pang of jealousy, the insults of scorn. Wearied at length, I from your sight remove, And place my future hopes in secret love. In the gay bloom of glowing youth retired, I quit the woman’s joy to be admired, With that small pension your hard heart allows, Renounce your fortune, and release your vows. To custom (though unjust) so much is due; I hide my frailty from the public view. My conscience clear, yet sensible of shame, My life I hazard, to preserve my fame. And I prefer this low inglorious state To vile dependence on the thing I hate— But you pursue me to this last retreat. Dragged into light, my tender crime is shown And every circumstance of fondness known. Beneath the shelter of the law you stand, And urge my ruin with a cruel hand, While to my fault thus rigidly severe, Tamely submissive to the man you fear.  This wretched outcast, this abandoned wife, Has yet this joy to sweeten shameful life: By your mean conduct, infamously loose, You are at once my accuser and excuse. Let me be damned by the censorious prude (Stupidly dull, or spiritually lewd), My hapless case will surely pity find From every just and reasonable mind. When to the final sentence I submit, The lips condemn me, but their souls aquit.  No more my husband, to your pleasures go, The sweets of your recovered freedom know. Go: court the brittle friendship of the great, Smile at his board, or at his levee wait; And when dismissed, to madam’s toilet fly, More than her chambermaids, or glasses, lie, Tell her how young she looks, how heavenly fair, Admire the lilies and the roses there. Your high ambition may be gratified, Some cousin of her own be made your bride, And you the father of a glorious race Endowed with Ch——l’s strength and Low——r’s face.
Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts, or slow decline, Our social comforts drop away. Well tried through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend; Officious, innocent, sincere, Of every friendless name the friend. Yet still he fills Affection’s eye, Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind; Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny Thy praise to merit unrefined. When fainting Nature called for aid, And hovering Death prepared the blow, His vigorous remedy displayed The power of art without the show. In Misery’s darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh, Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan, And lonely Want retired to die. No summons mocked by chill delay, No petty gain disdained by pride, The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supplied. His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And sure the Eternal Master found The single talent well employed. The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; His frame was firm, his powers were bright, Though now his eightieth year was nigh. Then with no throbbing fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
Ye congregation of the tribes, On justice do you set your mind; And are ye free from guile and bribes Ye judges of mankind? Nay, ye of frail and mortal mould Imagine mischief in your heart; Your suffrages and selves are sold Unto the general mart. Men of unrighteous seed betray Perverseness from their mother’s womb; As soon as they can run astray, Against the truth presume. They are with foul infection stained, Ev’n with the serpent’s taint impure; Their ears to blest persuasion chained, And locked against her lure. Though Christ himself the pipe should tune, They will not to the measure tread, Nor will they with his grief commune Though tears of blood he shed. Lord, humanize their scoff and scorn, And their malevolence defeat; Of water and the spirit born Let grace their change complete. Let them with pious ardor burn, And make thy holy church their choice; To thee with all their passions turn, And in thy light rejoice. As quick as lightning to its mark, So let thy gracious angel speed; And take their spirits in thine ark To their eternal mead. The righteous shall exult the more As he such powerful mercy sees, Such wrecks and ruins safe on shore, Such tortured souls at ease. So that a man shall say, no doubt, The penitent has his reward; There is a God to bear him out, And he is Christ our Lord.
When Israel came from Egypt’s coast, And Goshen’s marshy plains, And Jacob with his joyful host From servitude and chains; Then was it seen how much the Jews Were holy in his sight, And God did Israel’s kingdom choose To manifest his might. The sea beheld it, and with dread Retreated to make way; And Jordan to his fountain head Ran backwards in dismay. The mountains, like the rams that bound, Exulted on their base; Like lambs the little hills around Skipt lightly from their place. What is the cause, thou mighty sea, That thou thyself should shun; And Jordan, what is come to thee, That thou should backward run? Ye mountains that ye leaped so high From off the solid rock, Ye hills that ye should gambols try, Like firstlings of the flock? Earth, from the center to the sod His fearful presence hail The presence of Jeshurun’s God, In whom our arms prevail. Who beds of rocks in pools to stand Can by his word compel, And from the veiny flint command The fountain and the well.
Here lies, whom hound did ne’er pursue, Nor swifter greyhound follow, Whose foot ne’er tainted morning dew, Nor ear heard huntsman’s hallo’, Old Tiney, surliest of his kind, Who, nursed with tender care, And to domesticate bounds confined, Was still a wild jack-hare. Though duly from my hand he took His pittance every night, He did it with a jealous look, And, when he could, would bite. His diet was of wheaten bread, And milk, and oats, and straw, Thistles, or lettuces instead, With sand to scour his maw. On twigs of hawthorn he regaled, On pippins’ russet peel; And, when his juicy salads failed, Sliced carrot pleased him well. A Turkey carpet was his lawn, Whereon he loved to bound, To skip and gambol like a fawn, And swing his rump around. His frisking was at evening hours, For then he lost his fear; But most before approaching showers, Or when a storm drew near. Eight years and five round-rolling moons He thus saw steal away, Dozing out all his idle noons, And every night at play. I kept him for his humor’s sake, For he would oft beguile My heart of thoughts that made it ache, And force me to a smile. But now, beneath this walnut-shade He finds his long, last home, And waits in snug concealment laid, Till gentler Puss shall come. He, still more agèd, feels the shocks From which no care can save, And, partner once of Tiney’s box, Must soon partake his grave.
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment. Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy master. Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers; Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram’s. Him the vindictive rod of angry justice Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am Buried above ground.
Child of distress, who meet’st the bitter scorn Of fellow-men to happier prospects born, Doomed Art and Nature’s various stores to see Flow in full cups of joy—and not for thee; Who seest the rich, to heaven and fate resigned, Bear thy afflictions with a patient mind; Whose bursting heart disdains unjust control, Who feel’st oppression’s iron in thy soul, Who dragg’st the load of faint and feeble years, Whose bread is anguish, and whose water tears; Bear, bear thy wrongs—fulfill thy destined hour, Bend thy meek neck beneath the foot of Power; But when thou feel’st the great deliverer nigh, And thy freed spirit mounting seeks the sky, Let no vain fears thy parting hour molest, No whispered terrors shake thy quiet breast: Think not their threats can work thy future woe, Nor deem the Lord above like lords below;— Safe in the bosom of that love repose By whom the sun gives light, the ocean flows; Prepare to meet a Father undismayed, Nor fear the God whom priests and kings have made.
Animula, vagula, blandula. Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me’s a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled, Where’er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be, As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame, From whence thy essence came, Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed From matter’s base encumbering weed? Or dost thou, hid from sight, Wait, like some spell-bound knight, Through blank oblivious years th’ appointed hour, To break thy trance and reassume thy power? Yet canst thou without thought or feeling be? O say what art thou, when no more thou ’rt thee? Life! we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; ’Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps ’t will cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good morning.
a labyrinth, as if at its center, god would be there— but at the center, only rose, where rose came from,  where rose grows— & us, inside of the lips & lips: the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair, we are born of, fed by, & marry with, only flesh itself, only its passage —out of where? to where? Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream, Never mind you, Jim, come rest again on the country porch of my knees.
Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk- silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six o'clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block, cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk, cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack of butter, blueberry jam that's almost black, instead of tannin seeping into the cracks of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects the slit of a cut I haven't the wit to fix with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock. But no key threads the cylinder of a lock. Late afternoon light, transitory, licks the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks itself out beneath the wheel's revolving spoke. Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention, slack, a vision of "death and distance in the mix" (she lost her words and how did she get them back when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck? The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics she translated to a syntax which connects intense and unfashionable politics with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex; then the short-circuit of the final stroke, the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke). What a gaze out the window interjects: on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks, tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak. The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock.
for Fabbio Doplicher We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what's a cheap date, they asked us; what's flat drink). Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib—and there was one administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked  "What's poetry?" Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think—"The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world." Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone.  And poetry—  (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)—  poetry is what he thought, but did not say.
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write, And ever since it grew more clean and white,... Slow to world-greetings...quick with its “Oh, list,” When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst I could not wear here plainer to my sight, Than that first kiss. The second passed in height The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed, Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed! That was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown, With sanctifying sweetness, did precede. The third, upon my lips, was folded down In perfect, purple state! since when, indeed, I have been proud and said, “My Love, my own.”
Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she's often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish. She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings. Her only levity is patience, the sport of truly chastened things.
Three years ago, in the afternoons,  I used to sit back here and try To answer the simple arithmetic of my life, But never could figure it— This object and that object Never contained the landscape  nor all of its implications, This tree and that shrub Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient I took from or carried to,  nor do they do so now, Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate, Looking to see what adds up. Everything comes from something,  only something comes from nothing, Lao Tzu says, more or less. Eminently sensible, I say, Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers. Delicate as an earring,  it carries its emptiness like a child It would be rid of. I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise— But one and one make nothing, he adds,  endless and everywhere, The shadow that everything casts.
They pass before me one by one riding on animals "What are you waiting for," they want to know Z—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me "Some day you'll drop everything & become a rishi, you know." I know The forest is there, I've lived in it  More certainly than this town? Irrelevant—  What am I waiting for? A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about? Who's to make the change but me?  "Returning again and again," Amida says Why's that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house alone Nothing but the clothes on my back, money or no Down the road to the next place the highway leading to the  mountains From which I absolutely must come back What business have I to do that? I know the world and I love it too much and it Is not the one I'd find outside this door.
Before anything could happen, flecks of real gold on her mouth, her eyes more convex than any others, the ground spoke, the barrier of lilacs spoke. What sang in the black tree was entirely gold. Her chair was empty. New absence is a great figure dark as the underskin of fruit. At the center of the earth it surrounds and amplifies the dead whose music never slows down. She came by car. I came by train. We embraced. It was at the foot of a hill steeply crowned with apples and a ruined fortress. Imagination did not make the world. Sweetness is the entire portion. Before anything could happen, happiness, the necessary precondition of the world, spoke and flowered over the hill. When I was in Hell on the ruined palisade, either mystery or loneliness kissed my open eyes. It felt hugely convex, seeing and immediately forgetting. By contrast, what I imagined later was nothing.
The last snow is baited. Where the future shatters it unbends. The dry bed of entirety, where the sun bends, shatters. I was not afraid to tell you: unobscene at the first and then the third horizon, a copse-mountain opened so near to me I weighed nothing, and you laid the flower in my mouth. These are not animals. These are the partial genocides deeply uncompensated. Under the grass there is nothing but water and two wings.
What say the Bells of San Blas To the ships that southward pass From the harbor of Mazatlan? To them it is nothing more Than the sound of surf on the shore,— Nothing more to master or man. But to me, a dreamer of dreams, To whom what is and what seems Are often one and the same,— The Bells of San Blas to me Have a strange, wild melody, And are something more than a name. For bells are the voice of the church; They have tones that touch and search The hearts of young and old; One sound to all, yet each Lends a meaning to their speech, And the meaning is manifold. They are a voice of the Past, Of an age that is fading fast, Of a power austere and grand; When the flag of Spain unfurled Its folds o'er this western world, And the Priest was lord of the land. The chapel that once looked down On the little seaport town Has crumbled into the dust; And on oaken beams below The bells swing to and fro, And are green with mould and rust. "Is, then, the old faith dead," They say, "and in its stead Is some new faith proclaimed, That we are forced to remain Naked to sun and rain, Unsheltered and ashamed? "Once in our tower aloof We rang over wall and roof Our warnings and our complaints; And round about us there The white doves filled the air, Like the white souls of the saints. "The saints! Ah, have they grown Forgetful of their own? Are they asleep, or dead, That open to the sky Their ruined Missions lie, No longer tenanted? "Oh, bring us back once more The vanished days of yore, When the world with faith was filled; Bring back the fervid zeal, The hearts of fire and steel, The hands that believe and build. "Then from our tower again We will send over land and main Our voices of command, Like exiled kings who return To their thrones, and the people learn That the Priest is lord of the land!" O Bells of San Blas, in vain Ye call back the Past again! The Past is deaf to your prayer; Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light; It is daybreak everywhere.
Half of my life is gone, and I have let The years slip from me and have not fulfilled The aspiration of my youth, to build Some tower of song with lofty parapet. Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret Of restless passions that would not be stilled, But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, Kept me from what I may accomplish yet; Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,— A city in the twilight dim and vast, With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,— And hear above me on the autumnal blast The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair. Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me; Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me. Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning; Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. Let not my beauty’s fire Inflame unstaid desire, Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lightly.
Love in my bosom like a bee  Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me,  Now with his feet. Within mine eyes he makes his nest, His bed amidst my tender breast; My kisses are his daily feast, And yet he robs me of my rest.  Ah, wanton, will ye? And if I sleep, then percheth he  With pretty flight, And makes his pillow of my knee  The livelong night. Strike I my lute, he tunes the string; He music plays if so I sing; He lends me every lovely thing; Yet cruel he my heart doth sting.  Whist, wanton, still ye! Else I with roses every day  Will whip you hence, And bind you, when you long to play,  For your offense. I’ll shut mine eyes to keep you in, I’ll make you fast it for your sin, I’ll count your power not worth a pin. Alas! what hereby shall I win  If he gainsay me? What if I beat the wanton boy  With many a rod? He will repay me with annoy,  Because a god. Then sit thou safely on my knee, And let thy bower my bosom be; Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee. O Cupid, so thou pity me,  Spare not, but play thee!
Come to your heaven, you heavenly choirs, Earth hath the heaven of your desires. Remove your dwelling to your God; A stall is now his best abode. Sith men their homage do deny, Come, angels, all their fault supply. His chilling cold doth heat require; Come, seraphins, in lieu of fire. This little ark no cover hath; Let cherubs’ wings his body swathe. Come, Raphael, this babe must eat; Provide our little Toby meat. Let Gabriel be now his groom, That first took up his earthly room. Let Michael stand in his defense, Whom love hath linked to feeble sense. Let graces rock when he doth cry, And angels sing his lullaby. The same you saw in heavenly seat Is he that now sucks Mary’s teat; Agnize your king a mortal wight, His borrowed weed lets not your sight. Come, kiss the manger where he lies, That is your bliss above the skies. This little babe, so few days old, Is come to rifle Satan’s fold; All hell doth at his presence quake. Though he himself for cold do shake, For in this weak unarmèd wise The gates of hell he will surprise. With tears he fights and wins the field; His naked breast stands for a shield; His battering shot are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes, His martial ensigns cold and need, And feeble flesh his warrior’s steed. His camp is pitchèd in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall, The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes, Of shepherds he his muster makes; And thus, as sure his foe to wound, The angels’ trumps alarum sound. My soul, with Christ join thou in fight; Stick to the tents that he hath pight; Within his crib is surest ward, This little babe will be thy guard. If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, Then flit not from this heavenly boy.
Go wailing verse, the infants of my love, Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother: Present the image of the cares I prove, Witness your Father’s grief exceeds all other. Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds, With interrupted accents of despair: A monument that whosoever reads, May justly praise, and blame my loveless Fair. Say her disdain hath dried up my blood, And starved you, in succours still denying: Press to her eyes, importune me some good; Waken her sleeping pity with your crying. Knock at that hard heart, beg till you have moved her; And tell th’unkind, how dearly I have loved her.
But love whilst that thou mayst be loved again, Now whilst thy May hath filed thy lap with flowers, Now whilst thy beauty bears without a stain, Now use the summer smiles, ere winter lowers. And whilst thou spread’st unto the rising sun The fairest flower that ever saw the light, Now joy thy time before thy sweet be done, And, Delia, think thy morning must have night, And that thy brightness sets at length to west, When thou wilt close up that which now thou shew’st; And think the same becomes they fading best Which then shall most inveil and shadow most. Men do not weigh the stalk for what it was, When once they find her flower, her glory, pass.
When men shall find thy flower, thy glory pass, And thou, with careful brow sitting alone, Receivèd hast this message from thy glass, That tells thee truth, and says that all is gone, Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou madest, Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining, I that have loved thee thus before thou fadest, My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter’s spent; Then what my faith hath been thyself shall see, And that thou wast unkind thou mayst repent. Thou mayst repent that thou hast scorned my tears, When Winter snows upon thy golden hairs.
Unhappy pen and ill accepted papers, That intimate in vain my chaste desires, My chaste desires, the ever burning tapers, Enkindled by her eyes’ celestial fires. Celestial fires and unrespecting powers, That deign not view the glory of your might, In humble lines the work of careful hours, The sacrifice I offer to her sight. But since she scorns her own, this rests for me, I’ll moan my self, and hide the wrong I have: And so content me that her frowns should be To my infant style the cradle, and the grave. What though my self no honor get thereby, Each bird sings t’herself, and so will I.
Are they shadows that we see? And can shadows pleasure give? Pleasures only shadows be  Cast by bodies we conceive  And are made the things we deem In those figures which they seem. But these pleasures vanish fast Which by shadows are expressed; Pleasures are not, if they last; In their passing is their best. Glory is most bright and gay In a flash, and so away. Feed apace then, greedy eyes, On the wonder you behold; Take it sudden as it flies, Though you take it not to hold. When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart.
1 Shep. Tell me, thou gentle shepherd swain,  Who’s yonder in the vale is set? 2 Shep. Oh, it is she, whose sweets do stain  The lily, rose, the violet! 1 Shep. Why doth the sun against his kind,  Fix his bright chariot in the skies? 2 Shep. Because the sun is stricken blind  With looking on her heavenly eyes. 1 Shep. Why do thy flocks forbear their food,  Which sometime were thy chief delight? 2 Shep. Because they need no other good  That live in presence of her sight. 1 Shep. Why look these flowers so pale and ill,  That once attired this goodly heath? 2 Shep. She hath robb’d Nature of her skill,  And sweetens all things with her breath. 1 Shep. Why slide these brooks so slow away,  Whose bubbling murmur pleased thine ear? 2 Shep. Oh, marvel not although they stay,  When they her heavenly voice do hear! 1 Shep. From whence come all these shepherd swains,  And lovely nymphs attired in green? 2 Shep. From gathering garlands on the plains,  To crown our fair the shepherds’ queen. Both. The sun that lights this world below,  Flocks, flowers, and brooks will witness bear:  These nymphs and shepherds all do know,  That it is she is only fair.
If he from heaven that filched that living fire Condemned by Jove to endless torment be, I greatly marvel how you still go free, That far beyond Prometheus did aspire. The fire he stole, although of heavenly kind, Which from above he craftily did take, Of liveless clods, us living men to make, He did bestow in temper of the mind. But you broke into heaven’s immortal store, Where virtue, honor, wit, and beauty lay; Which taking thence you have escaped away, Yet stand as free as ere you did before; Yet old Prometheus punished for his rape. Thus poor thieves suffer when the greater ‘scape.
From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory; But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content, And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.  Pity the world, or else this glutton be,  To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose uneared womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb Of his self-love, to stop posterity? Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime; So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.  But if thou live rememb’red not to be,  Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud, Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. All men make faults, and even I in this, Authórizing thy trespass with compare, Myself corrupting salving thy amiss, Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are: For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense— Thy adverse party is thy advocate— And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence. Such civil war is in my love and hate,  That I an áccessory needs must be  To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?  O, none, unless this miracle have might,  That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument, So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent:  For as the sun is daily new and old,  So is my love still telling what is told.
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou knowst thy estimate. The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving. Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking, So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgement making.  Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:  In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow’r Dost hold time’s fickle glass his sickle hour, Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st— In nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace, and wretched minute kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure; She may detain but not still keep her treasure. Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, And her quietus is to render thee.
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And Will to boot, and Will in overplus; More than enough am I that vex thee still, To thy sweet will making addition thus. Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine? Shall will in others seem right gracious, And in my will no fair acceptance shine? The sea, all water, yet receives rain still, And in abundance addeth to his store; So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will One will of mine, to make thy large Will more. Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill; Think all but one, and me in that one Will.
Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her foul pride. And, whether that my angel be turn’d fiend, Suspect I may, yet not directly tell, But being both from me both to each friend, I guess one angel in another’s hell. Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt, Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude; Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen, Although thy breath be rude. Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: Then, heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly.
(from Much Ado About Nothing) Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny, nonny. Sing no more ditties, sing no more Of dumps so dull and heavy. The fraud of men was ever so Since summer first was leafy. Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey, nonny, nonny.
(from Twelfth Night) Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress let me be laid. Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O, prepare it! My part of death, no one so true Did share it. Not a flower, not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strown. Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown. A thousand thousand sighs to save, Lay me, O, where Sad true lover never find my grave, To weep there!
(from The Tempest) Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Now winter nights enlarge  The number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge  Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze  And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-turned words amaze  With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights   Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights  Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well dispense  With lovers’ long discourse; Much speech hath some defense,  Though beauty no remorse. All do not all things well;  Some measures comely tread, Some knotted riddles tell,  Some poems smoothly read. The summer hath his joys,  And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys,  They shorten tedious nights.
Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys; Death proves them all but toys; None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade. All things to end are made, The plague full swift goes by; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector’s brave; Swords may not fight with fate, Earth still holds ope her gate. “Come, come!” the bells do cry. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Wit with his wantonness Tasteth death’s bitterness; Hell’s executioner Hath no ears for to hear What vain art can reply. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Haste, therefore, each degree, To welcome destiny; Heaven is our heritage, Earth but a player’s stage; Mount we unto the sky. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us.
Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtained Grace from that grace where perfect grace remained; And where the muses gave their full consent, I should have power the virtuous to content; Where princely palace willed me to indite, The sacred story of the soul’s delight. Farewell (sweet place) where virtue then did rest, And all delights did harbor in her breast; Never shall my sad eyes again behold Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold. Yet you (great Lady) Mistress of that place, From whose desires did spring this work of grace; Vouchsafe to think upon those pleasures past, As fleeting worldly joys that could not last, Or, as dim shadows of celestial pleasures, Which are desired above all earthly treasures. Oh how (methought) against you thither came, Each part did seem some new delight to frame! The house received all ornaments to grace it, And would endure no foulness to deface it. And walks put on their summer liveries, And all things else did hold like similes. The trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad, Embraced each other, seeming to be glad, Turning themselves to beauteous Canopies, To shade the bright sun from your brighter eyes; The crystal streams with silver spangles graced, While by the glorious sun they were embraced; The little birds in chirping notes did sing, To entertain both you and that sweet spring. And Philomela with her sundry lays, Both you and that delightful place did praise. Oh how me thought each plant, each flower, each tree Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee! The very hills right humbly did descend, When you to tread on them did intend. And as you set your feet, they still did rise, Glad that they could receive so rich a prize. The gentle winds did take delight to be Among those woods that were so graced by thee, And in sad murmur uttered pleasing sound, That pleasure in that place might more abound. The swelling banks delivered all their pride When such a Phoenix once they had espied. Each arbor, bank, each seat, each stately tree, Thought themselves honored in supporting thee; The pretty birds would oft come to attend thee, Yet fly away for fear they should offend thee; The little creatures in the burrough by Would come abroad to sport them in your eye, Yet fearful of the bow in your fair hand. Would run away when you did make a stand. Now let me come unto that stately tree, Wherein such goodly prospects you did see; That oak that did in height his fellows pass, As much as lofty trees, low growing grass, Much like a comely cedar straight and tall, Whose beauteous stature far exceeded all. How often did you visit this fair tree, Which seeming joyful in receiving thee, Would like a palm tree spread his arms abroad, Desirous that you there should make abode; Whose fair green leaves much like a comely veil, Defended Phoebus when he would assail; Whose pleasing boughs did yield a cool fresh air, Joying his happiness when you were there. Where being seated, you might plainly see Hills, vales, and woods, as if on bended knee They had appeared, your honor to salute, Or to prefer some strange unlooked-for suit; All interlaced with brooks and crystal springs, A prospect fit to please the eyes of kings. And thirteen shires appeared all in your sight, Europe could not afford much more delight. What was there then but gave you all content, While you the time in meditation spent Of their Creator’s power, which there you saw, In all his creatures held a perfect law; And in their beauties did you plain descry His beauty, wisdom, grace, love, majesty. In these sweet woods how often did you walk, With Christ and his Apostles there to talk; Placing his holy Writ in some fair tree To meditate what you therein did see. With Moses you did mount his holy hill To know his pleasure, and perform his will. With lowly David you did often sing His holy hymns to Heaven’s eternal King. And in sweet music did your soul delight To sound his praises, morning, noon, and night. With blessed Joseph you did often feed Your pined brethren, when they stood in need. And that sweet Lady sprung from Clifford’s race, Of noble Bedford’s blood, fair stem of grace, To honorable Dorset now espoused, In whose fair breast true virtue then was housed, Oh what delight did my weak spirits find In those pure parts of her well framèd mind. And yet it grieves me that I cannot be Near unto her, whose virtues did agree With those fair ornaments of outward beauty, Which did enforce from all both love and duty. Unconstant Fortune, thou art most to blame, Who casts us down into so low a frame Where our great friends we cannot daily see, So great a difference is there in degree. Many are placed in those orbs of state, Partners in honor, so ordained by Fate, Nearer in show, yet farther off in love, In which, the lowest always are above. But whither am I carried in conceit, My wit too weak to conster of the great. Why not? although we are but born of earth, We may behold the heavens, despising death; And loving heaven that is so far above, May in the end vouchsafe us entire love. Therefore sweet memory do thou retain Those pleasures past, which will not turn again: Remember beauteous Dorset’s former sports, So far from being touched by ill reports, Wherein myself did always bear a part, While reverend love presented my true heart. Those recreations let me bear in mind, Which her sweet youth and noble thoughts did find, Whereof deprived, I evermore must grieve, Hating blind Fortune, careless to relieve, And you sweet Cooke-ham, whom these ladies leave, I now must tell the grief you did conceive At their departure, when they went away, How everything retained a sad dismay. Nay long before, when once an inkling came, Methought each thing did unto sorrow frame: The trees that were so glorious in our view, Forsook both flowers and fruit, when once they knew Of your depart, their very leaves did wither, Changing their colors as they grew together. But when they saw this had no power to stay you, They often wept, though, speechless, could not pray you, Letting their tears in your fair bosoms fall, As if they said, Why will ye leave us all? This being vain, they cast their leaves away Hoping that pity would have made you stay: Their frozen tops, like age’s hoary hairs, Shows their disasters, languishing in fears. A swarthy riveled rind all over spread, Their dying bodies half alive, half dead. But your occasions called you so away That nothing there had power to make you stay. Yet did I see a noble grateful mind Requiting each according to their kind, Forgetting not to turn and take your leave Of these sad creatures, powerless to receive Your favor, when with grief you did depart, Placing their former pleasures in your heart, Giving great charge to noble memory There to preserve their love continually. But specially the love of that fair tree, That first and last you did vouchsafe to see, In which it pleased you oft to take the air With noble Dorset, then a virgin fair, Where many a learned book was read and scanned, To this fair tree, taking me by the hand, You did repeat the pleasures which had passed, Seeming to grieve they could no longer last. And with a chaste, yet loving kiss took leave, Of which sweet kiss I did it soon bereave, Scorning a senseless creature should possess So rare a favor, so great happiness. No other kiss it could receive from me, For fear to give back what it took of thee, So I ungrateful creature did deceive it Of that which you in love vouchsafed to leave it. And though it oft had given me much content, Yet this great wrong I never could repent; But of the happiest made it most forlorn, To show that nothing’s free from Fortune’s scorne, While all the rest with this most beauteous tree Made their sad consort sorrow’s harmony. The flowers that on the banks and walks did grow, Crept in the ground, the grass did weep for woe. The winds and waters seemed to chide together Because you went away they knew not whither; And those sweet brooks that ran so fair and clear, With grief and trouble wrinkled did appear. Those pretty birds that wonted were to sing, Now neither sing, nor chirp, nor use their wing, But with their tender feet on some bare spray, Warble forth sorrow, and their own dismay. Fair Philomela leaves her mournful ditty, Drowned in deep sleep, yet can procure no pity. Each arbor, bank, each seat, each stately tree Looks bare and desolate now for want of thee, Turning green tresses into frosty gray, While in cold grief they wither all away. The sun grew weak, his beams no comfort gave, While all green things did make the earth their grave. Each brier, each bramble, when you went away Caught fast your clothes, thinking to make you stay; Delightful Echo wonted to reply To our last words, did now for sorrow die; The house cast off each garment that might grace it, Putting on dust and cobwebs to deface it. All desolation then there did appear, When you were going whom they held so dear. This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give, When I am dead thy name in this may live, Wherein I have performed her noble hest Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast, And ever shall, so long as life remains, Tying my life to her by those rich chains.
I’ll tell thee now (dear Love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us, How I shall stay, though she esloygne me thus And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sybil’s glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past twixt thee and me, Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love’s subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There, the faith of any ground No schismatic will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records. This book, as long-lived as the elements, Or as the world’s form, this all-graved tome In cipher writ, or new made idiom; We for love’s clergy only’are instruments, When this book is made thus, Should again the ravenous Vandals and the Goths invade us, Learning were safe; in this our universe Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse. Here Love’s divines (since all divinity Is love or wonder) may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see, Or loth so to amuse Faith’s infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit, Beauty’a convenient type may be to figure it. Here more than in their books may lawyers find, Both by what titles mistresses are ours, And how prerogative these states devours, Transferred from Love himself, to womankind, Who though from heart, and eyes, They exact great subsidies, Forsake him who on them relies And for the cause, honor, or conscience give, Chimeras, vain as they, or their prerogative. Here statesmen (or of them, they which can read) May of their occupation find the grounds, Love and their art alike it deadly wounds, If to consider what’tis, one proceed, In both they do excel Who the present govern well, Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell; In this thy book, such will there nothing see, As in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I’ll study thee, As he removes far off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be; To take a latitude Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed At their brightest, but to conclude, Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when, and where the dark eclipses be?
Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love, And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove Too subtle: Fool, thou didst not understand The mystic language of the eye nor hand: Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the air Of sighs, and say, this lies, this sounds despair: Nor by the’eye’s water call a malady Desperately hot, or changing feverously. I had not taught thee then, the alphabet Of flowers, how they devicefully being set And bound up, might with speechless secrecy Deliver errands mutely, and mutually. Remember since all thy words used to be To every suitor, “I, ’if my friends agree”; Since, household charms, thy husband’s name to teach, Were all the love-tricks, that thy wit could reach; And since, an hour’s discourse could scarce have made One answer in thee, and that ill arrayed In broken proverbs, and torn sentences. Thou art not by so many duties his, That from the’world’s common having severed thee, Inlaid thee, neither to be seen, nor see, As mine: who have with amorous delicacies Refined thee’into a blissful paradise. Thy graces and good words my creatures be; I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee, Which oh, shall strangers taste? Must I alas Frame and enamel plate, and drink in glass? Chafe wax for others’ seals? break a colt’s force And leave him then, being made a ready horse?
Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand.
Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth; Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father less to rue. At six months’ end she parted hence With safety of her innocence; Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother’s tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin-train: Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth; Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff, Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff, Stink and are thrown away. End fair enough.
Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike: One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.
Playwright, convict of public wrongs to men, Takes private beatings and begins again. Two kinds of valor he doth show at once: Active in ’s brain, and passive in his bones.
That poets are far rarer births than kings Your noblest father proved; like whom before, Or then, or since, about our Muses’ springs, Came not that soul exhausted so their store. Hence was it that the destinies decreed (Save that most masculine issue of his brain) No male unto him; who could so exceed Nature, they thought, in all that he would fain. At which she, happily displeased, made you, On whom, if he were living now to look, He should those rare and absolute numbers view, As he would burn or better far his book.
Would you believe, when you this monsieur see, That his whole body should speak French, not he? That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather, And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hether, And land on one whose face durst never be Toward the sea farther than Half-Way Tree? That he, untraveled, should be French so much As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch? Or had his father, when he did him get, The French disease, with which he labors yet? Or hung some monsieur’s picture on the wall, By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all? Or is it some French statue? No: ’T doth move, And stoop, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove The new French tailor’s motion, monthly made, Daily to turn in Paul’s, and help the trade.
Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house, and I Do equally desire your company; Not that we think us worthy such a guest, But that your worth will dignify our feast With those that come, whose grace may make that seem Something, which else could hope for no esteem. It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates The entertainment perfect, not the cates. Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate, An olive, capers, or some better salad Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen, If we can get her, full of eggs, and then Lemons, and wine for sauce; to these a cony Is not to be despaired of, for our money; And, though fowl now be scarce, yet there are clerks, The sky not falling, think we may have larks. I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come: Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some May yet be there, and godwit, if we can; Knat, rail, and ruff too. Howsoe’er, my man Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book to us, Of which we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat; And I’ll profess no verses to repeat. To this, if ought appear which I not know of, That will the pastry, not my paper, show of.Digestive cheese and fruit there sure will be; But that which most doth take my Muse and me, Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine, Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine; Of which had Horace, or Anacreon tasted, Their lives, as so their lines, till now had lasted. Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring, Are all but Luther's beer to this I sing. Of this we will sup free, but moderately, And we will have no Pooley, or Parrot by, Nor shall our cups make any guilty men; But, at our parting we will be as when We innocently met. No simple word That shall be uttered at our mirthful board, Shall make us sad next morning or affright The liberty that we’ll enjoy tonight.
Gut eats all day and lechers all the night; So all his meat he tasteth over twice; And, striving so to double his delight, He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice. Thus in his belly can he change a sin: Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in.
Come, my Celia, let us prove, While we can, the sports of love; Time will not be ours forever; He at length our good will sever. Spend not then his gifts in vain. Suns that set may rise again; But if once we lose this light, ’Tis with us perpetual night. Why should we defer our joys? Fame and rumor are but toys. Cannot we delude the eyes Of a few poor household spies, Or his easier ears beguile, So removèd by our wile? ’Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal; But the sweet thefts to reveal, To be taken, to be seen, These have crimes accounted been.
Though beauty be the mark of praise, And yours of whom I sing be such As not the world can praise too much, Yet ’tis your virtue now I raise. A virtue, like allay, so gone Throughout your form, as, though that move And draw and conquer all men’s love, This sùbjects you to love of one. Wherein you triumph yet; because ’Tis of yourself, and that you use The noblest freedom, not to choose Against or faith or honor’s laws. But who should less expect from you, In whom alone Love lives again? By whom he is restored to men, And kept, and bred, and brought up true. His falling temples you have reared, The withered garlands ta’en away; His altars kept from the decay That envy wished, and nature feared; And on them burn so chaste a flame, With so much loyalties’ expense, As Love, t’ acquit such excellence, Is gone himself into your name. And you are he; the deity To whom all lovers are designed That would their better objects find; Among which faithful troop am I. Who, as an offspring at your shrine, Have sung this hymn, and here entreat One spark of your diviner heat To light upon a love of mine. Which, if it kindle not, but scant Appear, and that to shortest view, Yet give me leave t’ adore in you What I in her am grieved to want.
Though I am young, and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well, Yet I have heard they both bear darts, And both do aim at human hearts. And then again, I have been told Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch, and mean one thing. As in a ruin we it call One thing to be blown up, or fall; Or to our end like way may have By a flash of lightning, or a wave; So Love’s inflamèd shaft or brand May kill as soon as Death’s cold hand; Except Love’s fires the virtue have To fright the frost out of the grave.
I that have been a lover, and could show it,  Though not in these, in rithmes not wholly dumb,  Since I exscribe your sonnets, am become A better lover, and much better poet. Nor is my Muse or I ashamed to owe it  To those true numerous graces, whereof some  But charm the senses, others overcome  Both brains and hearts; and mine now best do know it: For in your verse all Cupid’s armory,  His flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his bow,  His very eyes are yours to overthrow. But then his mother’s sweets you so apply,  Her joys, her smiles, her loves, as readers take  For Venus’ ceston every line you make.
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;  Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs!  List to the heavy part the music bears,  Woe weeps out her division, when she sings.  Droop herbs and flowers;  Fall grief in showers;  Our beauties are not ours.  O, I could still,  Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,  Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.
Take, oh, take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn And those eyes, like break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn; But my kisses bring again, Seals of love, though sealed in vain. Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow, Which thy frozen bosom bears, On whose tops the pinks that grow Are of those that April wears; But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee.
If thou dislik’st the piece thou light’st on first, Think that of all that I have writ the worst; But if thou read’st my book unto the end, And still dost this and that verse reprehend, O perverse man! If all disgustful be, The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.
(from Two Gentlemen of Verona) Who is Silvia? what is she, That all our swains commend her? Holy, fair, and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her, That she might admirèd be. Is she kind as she is fair? For beauty lives with kindness. Love doth to her eyes repair, To help him of his blindness; And, being helped, inhabits there. Then to Silvia let us sing, That Silvia is excelling; She excels each mortal thing Upon the dull earth dwelling; To her let us garlands bring
Kind are her answers,  But her performance keeps no day;  Breaks time, as dancers  From their own music when they stray:  All her free favors And smooth words wing my hopes in vain. O did ever voice so sweet but only feign?  Can true love yield such delay,  Converting joy to pain?  Lost is our freedom,  When we submit to women so:  Why do we need ’em,  When in their best they work our woe?  There is no wisdom Can alter ends, by Fate prefixed. O why is the good of man with evil mixed?  Never were days yet called two,  But one night went betwixt.
Fame’s pillar here at last we set, Out-during marble, brass or jet; Charmed and enchanted so As to withstand the blow O f o v e r t h r o w ; Nor shall the seas, Or o u t r a g e s Of storms, o’erbear What we uprear; Tho’ kingdoms fall, This pillar never shall Decline or waste at all; But stand for ever by his own Firm and well-fixed foundation.
God will have all, or none; serve Him, or fall Down before Baal, Bel, or Belial: Either be hot, or cold: God doth despise, Abhorre, and spew out all Neutralities.
Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find A way to measure out the wind? Distinguish all those floods that are Mixed in that wat’ry theater, And taste thou them as saltless there, As in their channel first they were. Tell me the people that do keep Within the kingdoms of the deep; Or fetch me back that cloud again, Beshivered into seeds of rain. Tell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears Of corn, when summer shakes his ears; Show me that world of stars, and whence They noiseless spill their influence. This if thou canst; then show me Him That rides the glorious cherubim.
Having been tenant long to a rich lord, Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old. In heaven at his manor I him sought; They told me there that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possessiòn. I straight returned, and knowing his great birth, Sought him accordingly in great resorts; In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts; At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied, Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? He is a brittle crazy glass; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy preachers, then the light and glory More reverend grows, and more doth win; Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin. Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and awe; but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the ear, not conscience, ring.
When my devotions could not pierce  Thy silent ears, Then was my heart broken, as was my verse;  My breast was full of fears  And disorder.  My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,  Did fly asunder: Each took his way; some would to pleasures go,  Some to the wars and thunder  Of alarms.  “As good go anywhere,” they say,  “As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come! But no hearing.”  O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue  To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying! All day long  My heart was in my knee,  But no hearing.  Therefore my soul lay out of sight,  Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right,  Like a nipped blossom, hung  Discontented.  O cheer and tune my heartless breast,  Defer no time; That so thy favors granting my request,  They and my mind may chime,  And mend my rhyme.
The fleet astronomer can bore And thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind: He views their stations, walks from door to door, Surveys, as if he had designed To make a purchase there; he sees their dances, And knoweth long before Both their full-eyes aspècts, and secret glances. The nimble diver with his side Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch His dearly-earnèd pearl, which God did hide On purpose from the venturous wretch; That he might save his life, and also hers Who with excessive pride Her own destruction and his danger wears. The subtle chymic can divest And strip the creature naked, till he find The callow principles within their nest: There he imparts to them his mind, Admitted to their bed-chamber, before They appear trim and dressed To ordinary suitors at the door. What hath not man sought out and found, But his dear God? who yet his glorious law Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground With showers and frosts, with love and awe, So that we need not say, “Where’s this command?” Poor man, thou searchest round To find out death, but missest life at hand.
I made a posy, while the day ran by: “Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band.” But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, And withered in my hand. My hand was next to them, and then my heart; I took, without more thinking, in good part Time’s gentle admonition; Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey, Making my mind to smell my fatal day, Yet, sug’ring the suspicion. Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent, Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament, And after death for cures. I follow straight without complaints or grief, Since, if my scent be good, I care not if It be as short as yours.
As I one evening sat before my cell, Methought a star did shoot into my lap. I rose and shook my clothes, as knowing well That from small fires comes oft no small mishap; When suddenly I heard one say, “Do as thou usest, disobey, Expel good motions from thy breast, Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.” I, who had heard of music in the spheres, But not of speech in stars, began to muse; But turning to my God, whose ministers The stars and all things are: “If I refuse, Dread Lord,” said I, “so oft my good, Then I refuse not ev’n with blood To wash away my stubborn thought; For I will do or suffer what I ought. “But I have also stars and shooters too, Born where thy servants both artilleries use. My tears and prayers night and day do woo And work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse. Not but I am (I must say still) Much more obliged to do thy will Than thou to grant mine; but because Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws. “Then we are shooters both, and thou dost deign To enter combat with us, and contest With thine own clay. But I would parley fain: Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast. Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine: I must be so, if I am mine. There is no articling with thee: I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.”
How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown, Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown. These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell And up to heaven in an hour; Making a chiming of a passing-bell. We say amiss This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell. Oh that I once past changing were, Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! Many a spring I shoot up fair, Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; Nor doth my flower Want a spring shower, My sins and I joining together. But while I grow in a straight line, Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, Thy anger comes, and I decline: What frost to that? what pole is not the zone Where all things burn, When thou dost turn, And the least frown of thine is shown? And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. Oh, my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night. These are thy wonders, Lord of love, To make us see we are but flowers that glide; Which when we once can find and prove, Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; Who would be more, Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their color, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? Must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dullness turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God. Good men ye be, to leave me my best room, Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodgèd there: I pass not, I, what of the rest become, So Thou art still my God be out of fear. He will be pleasèd with that ditty: And if I please him, I write fine and witty. Farewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. But will ye leave me thus? When ye before Of stews and brothels only knew the doors, Then did I wash you with my tears, and more, Brought you to church well dressed and clad: My God must have my best, ev’n all I had. Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, Honey of roses, wither wilt thou fly? Hath some fond lover ’ticed thee to thy bane? And wilt thou leave the church and love a sty? Fie, thou wilt soil thy broidered coat, And hurt thyself, and him that sings the note. Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung, With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame: Let folly speak in her own native tongue. True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame But borrowed thence to light us thither. Beauty and beauteous words should go together. Yet if you go, I pass not; take your way: For Thou art still my God is all that ye Perhaps with more embellishment can say. Go, birds of spring: let winter have his fee; Let a bleak paleness chalk the door, So all within be livelier than before.
Throw away thy rod, Throw away thy wrath: O my God, Take the gentle path. For my heart’s desire Unto thine is bent: I aspire To a full consent. Not a word or look I affect to own, But by book, And thy book alone. Though I fail, I weep: Though I halt in pace, Yet I creep To the throne of grace. Then let wrath remove; Love will do the deed: For with love Stony hearts will bleed. Love is swift of foot; Love’s a man of war, And can shoot, And can hit from far. Who can ’scape his bow? That which wrought on thee, Brought thee low, Needs must work on me. Throw away thy rod; Though man frailties hath, Thou art God: Throw away thy wrath.
Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing, Nothing but bones, The sad effect of sadder groans: Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing. For we considered thee as at some six Or ten years hence, After the loss of life and sense, Flesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks. We looked on this side of thee, shooting short; Where we did find The shells of fledge souls left behind, Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort. But since our Savior’s death did put some blood Into thy face, Thou art grown fair and full of grace, Much in request, much sought for as a good. For we do now behold thee gay and glad, As at Doomsday; When souls shall wear their new array, And all thy bones with beauty shall be clad. Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust Half that we have Unto an honest faithful grave; Making our pillows either down, or dust.
The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armor against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings. Scepter and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field And plant fresh laurels where they kill, But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still. Early or late They stoop to fate And must give up their murmuring breath, When they, pale captives, creep to death. The garlands wither on your brow, Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon death’s purple altar now See where the victor-victim bleeds. Your heads must come To the cold tomb; Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
To Mr. H. Lawes, On His Airs Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song First taught our English music how to span Words with just note and accent, not to scan With Midas’ ears, committing short and long, Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, With praise enough for Envy to look wan; To after-age thou shalt be writ the man That with smooth air couldst humor best our tongue. Thou honor’st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing To honor thee, the priest of Phœbus’ choir, That tun’st their happiest lines in hymn or story. Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.
Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench Of British Themis, with no mean applause, Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws, Which others at their bar so often wrench, Today deep thoughts resolve with me to drench In mirth that after no repenting draws; Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, And what the Swede intend, and what the French. To measure life learn thou betimes, and know Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
Of thee, kind boy, I ask no red and white, To make up my delight; No odd becoming graces, Black eyes, or little know-not-whats in faces; Make me but mad enough, give me good store Of love for her I count; I ask no more, ’Tis love in love that makes the sport. There’s no such thing as that we beauty call, It is mere cozenage all; For though some, long ago, Liked certain colors mingled so and so, That doth not tie me now from choosing new; If I a fancy take To black and blue, That fancy doth it beauty make. ’Tis not the meat, but ’tis the appetite Makes eating a delight; And if I like one dish More than another, that a pheasant is; What in our watches, that in us is found: So to the height and nick We up be wound, No matter by what hand or trick.
Go, smiling souls, your new-built cages break, In heaven you’ll learn to sing, ere here to speak, Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst Be your delay; The place that calls you hence is, at the worst, Milk all the way.
To see both blended in one flood, The mothers’ milk, the children’s blood, Makes me doubt if heaven will gather Roses hence, or lilies rather.
What bright soft thing is this? Sweet Mary, the fair eyes’ expense? A moist spark it is, A wat’ry diamond; from whence The very term, I think, was found The water of a diamond. O ’tis not a tear, ’Tis a star about to drop From thine eye its sphere; The sun will stoop and take it up. Proud will his sister be to wear This thine eyes’ jewel in her ear. O ’tis a tear Too true a tear; for no sad eyne, How sad so e’re, Rain so true a teare as thine; Each drop leaving a place so dear, Weeps for itself, is its own tear. Such a pearl as this is, (Slipped from Aurora’s dewy breast) The rose bud’s sweet lip kisses; And such the rose itself, when vexed With ungentle flames, does shed, Sweating in too warm a bed. Such the maiden gem, By the wanton spring put on, Peeps from her parent stem, And blushes on the manly sun: This wat’ry blossom of thy eyne, Ripe, will make the richer wine. Faire drop, why quak’st thou so? ’Cause thou straight must lay thy head In the dust? o no; The dust shall never be thy bed: A pillow for thee will I bring, Stuffed with down of angels’ wing. Thus carried up on high, (For to Heaven thou must go) Sweetly shalt thou lie And in soft slumbers bathe thy woe; Till the singing orbs awake thee, And one of their bright chorus make thee. There thy self shalt be An eye, but not a weeping one, Yet I doubt of thee, Whether th’hadst rather there have shone An eye of Heaven; or still shine here, In th’Heaven of Mary’s eye, a tear.
1  Indeed I must confess,  When souls mix ’tis an happiness, But not complete till bodies too do join, And both our wholes into one whole combine; But half of heaven the souls in glory taste  Till by love in heaven at last   Their bodies too are placed.  2  In thy immortal part  Man, as well as I, thou art. But something ’tis that differs thee and me, And we must one even in that difference be. I thee both as a man and woman prize,  For a perfect love implies  Love in all capacities.  3  Can that for true love pass  When a fair woman courts her glass? Something unlike must in love’s likeness be: His wonder is one and variety. For he whose soul nought but a soul can move  Does a new Narcissus prove,  And his own image love.  4  That souls do beauty know  ’Tis to the body’s help they owe; If when they know’t they straight abuse that trust And shut the body from’t, ’tis as unjust As if I brought my dearest friend to see  My mistress and at th’instant he  Should steal her quite from me.
To My Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton O thou that swing’st upon the waving hair Of some well-fillèd oaten beard, Drunk every night with a delicious tear Dropped thee from heaven, where now th’ art reared; The joys of earth and air are thine entire, That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly; And, when thy poppy works, thou dost retire To thy carved acorn-bed to lie. Up with the day, the sun thou welcom’st then, Sport’st in the gilt-plats of his beams, And all these merry days mak’st merry men, Thyself, and melancholy streams. But ah, the sickle! Golden ears are cropped; Ceres and Bacchus bid good night; Sharp, frosty fingers all your flowers have topped, And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite. Poor verdant fool, and now green ice! thy joys, Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass, Bid us lay in ’gainst winter rain, and poise Their floods with an o’erflowing glass. Thou best of men and friends! we will create A genuine summer in each other’s breast, And spite of this cold time and frozen fate, Thaw us a warm seat to our rest. Our sacred hearths shall burn eternally, As vestal flames; the North Wind, he Shall strike his frost-stretched wings, dissolve, and fly This Etna in epitome. Dropping December shall come weeping in, Bewail th’usurping of his reign: But when in showers of old Greek we begin, Shall cry he hath his crown again! Night, as clear Hesper, shall our tapers whip From the light casements where we play, And the dark hag from her black mantle strip, And stick there everlasting day. Thus richer than untempted kings are we, That, asking nothing, nothing need: Though lords of all what seas embrace, yet he That wants himself is poor indeed.
Hello, hello, what to tell you was The world's invisible You see only yourself, that's not the world  although you are of it Are you there  hello  why do you have your head in a sack?  a roony-bomb dream tank?  Why you got a banana in your ear? You where?  Brown eyes they see blue sky  The world imagines you  Figure it's a planet  You hear?  an obscure star in the middle Once you were pleasure-milk and egg  Were you there Now you are eggs of milk between your legs    Are you there “I am situated somewhere near the rim of a fairly large galaxy  which is one of a group of same & outside of which a  considerable number take their way at incredible speeds &  apparently in the opposite direction...”  You are a wish to squirt pleasantly  You want a lot of things & they are nice & you imagine  They are you and therefore you are nice  You are a wish to be here  Wishing yourself  elsewhere “Hello. Try to talk some sense even if you don't think any It is history  (your mistake: “History WAS”)  now  * History an explanation of why I deserve what I take  * History an explanation of why I get what I deserve  *  (Through more or less clenched teeth):  “How can you sit there & look at the faces  you see in Montgomery Street wiped blank  from selling whatever brains they got faces  in 3rd Street blank from facing a lathe all day  & TV all night African tromped-on faces Asiatic  hunger faces Washington war-masks & smile at me  about how after all this is a Moral Universe  gives me the screaming jumping meemies I thought  you were bright enough had enough work-experience  yourself to have some faint idea of...”  * hello.  “THE WIND RATTLES THE WINDOW I CAN'T  SLEEP FRIDAY NIGHT IS VERY LARGE IN SAN  FRANCISCO THE LOWER CLASSES GET PAID ON   FRIDAY & GET ON THEIR WAY TO SPEND IT IN  UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS CLIPJOINTS THEY CLAIM  AREN'T TOURIST TRAPS THE UPPER CLASSES ARE  LUSHED OUT OF THEIR HEADS DOWN IN PEBBLE  BEACH SUCKING EACH OTHER'S & WILL SKIP THE  SHRINKER MONDAY HE'S GAY HIMSELF THE  SILLY SON OF A BITCH AS LONG AS I'M NOT OUT  HUSTLING SAILORS ON MARKET STREET & ONLY  WHEN I'M LUSHED OUT ON MY OWN PREMISES  (FOR WHICH I PAY EXCESSIVELY HIGH TAXES)  I DON'T CARE”  “The middle classes the middle class is mainly from out of  town (that's what I like about San Francisco everybody's either up or down) they come & look at us they go away puzzled where they remain,  outclassed...  (they will fight the Rooshuns &c.  they will fight the gooks & wogs & chinks &  japs & niggers & commies & catholics & wall  street & any man that tries to tell them  different...)” “The upper class don't bother me a bit except why do they let themselves be buffaloed into hiring the creepy managers they do? Faceless men to represent a legal fiction? The upper well, the...”  “UPPER CLASSES ARE HARMLESSLY IMBE- CILE THE CLASSES PRETEND NOT TO EXIST (&  VERY NEARLY CAN'T, OUTSIDE OF JAIL) THE MIDDLE  CLASS MANAGER MERCHANT BANKER PROFESSIONAL  PROFESSIONAL THE SOLID (IT'S THE CHEESE THAT  MAKES IT BINDING) CALVINISTFREUDIAN DEMOC- RACY SWELLS  & B L O S S O M S ! ”  TERMINAL LUES ACROSS THE SHOULDERS   OF THE WORLD “The Roman Empire went to hell when the Romans bought them- selves a goon-squad; bankrupted themselves trying to enforce moral and sumptuary laws...”  History's now
The lad came to the door at night, When lovers crown their vows, And whistled soft and out of sight In shadow of the boughs. ‘I shall not vex you with my face Henceforth, my love, for aye; So take me in your arms a space Before the east is grey. ‘When I from hence away am past I shall not find a bride, And you shall be the first and last I ever lay beside.’ She heard and went and knew not why; Her heart to his she laid; Light was the air beneath the sky But dark under the shade. ‘Oh do you breathe, lad, that your breast Seems not to rise and fall, And here upon my bosom prest There beats no heart at all?’ ‘Oh loud, my girl, it once would knock, You should have felt it then; But since for you I stopped the clock It never goes again.’ ‘Oh lad, what is it, lad, that drips Wet from your neck on mine? What is it falling on my lips, My lad, that tastes of brine?’ ‘Oh like enough ’tis blood, my dear, For when the knife has slit The throat across from ear to ear ’Twill bleed because of it.’
for Allen Ginsberg Having returned at last and being carefully seated On the floor—somebody else's floor, as usual— Far away across that ocean which looked Through Newport windows years ago—somebody else's livingroom— Another messed-up weedy garden Tall floppy improbably red flowers All the leaves turned over in the rain Ridged furry scrotum veins Hedges glisten tile roof tin roof telephone pole Decoratively tormented black pine Slowly repeating its careful program Endlessly regretting but here is original done once Not to be reproduced nor electronically remembered  Loosen up. Festoon. An enormous drop of pure water suddenly there Right in the center of preceding page Nothing can be done about that. The line was ruined. OK. Belt hair. A bend is funnier. Bar Kochba. Do something About it. Like animal factory mayhem. The master said, "You shouldn't have put Yourself into such a position In the first place." Nevertheless, It all looks different, right to left. Another master said, "Well, You can always take more, you know." The wind went by just now South Dakota. Who's responsible for this Absurd revival of the Byzantine Empire, Sioux Falls-Mitchell-Yankton area? Further anomalies of this order will receive Such punishment as a Court Martial may direct Or the discretion of the Company Commander Failure to conform with these regulations Shall be punished by Court Martial TAKE ALL YOU WANT BUT EAT ALL YOU TAKE The following named Enlisted Men are transf RESTRICTED, SPECIAL ORDER #21 this HQ dd 8 Feb 1946 contained 6 Pars.C E N S O R E D 3. Fol EM, White, MCO indicated, ASRS indicated, AF2AF, are reld fr asgmt and dy this HQ and trfd in gr to 37th AAFBU, Dorje Field, Lhasa, TIBET and WP at such time as will enable them to arrive therat not later than 20 Feb 1946 rptg to CO for dy C E N S O R E D Or such punishment as a Court Martial may direct  I used to travel that way. Always take a little more. This is called "A controlled habit." (Don't look at me, I never said a murmuring word.) Didn't you say, "polished water?" I normally wouldn't say so. Wasp in the bookshelf rejects Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, The Goliard Poets, A Vedic Reader, Lama Govinda, Medival French Verses & Romances, Long Discourses of the Buddha, and The Principal Upanishads. Window glass reads more entertainingly But soon that too is left for the foxtail grass Camellia hedge, the dull mid-morning sun followed by accidental descent into goofball drift unintentionally but such is the cost of knowledge recollections of Jack in Berkeley Nembies & grass & wine Geraniums, ripe apricots, & plums Clio's green and slanting eyes Gentle smile of pointed face How much love I owe to her and to all women My mother tried to warn me, "Let your sister ride the bike a while; Don't be so damned selfish!" How can Victorian American lady Explain to her son that his cock Doesn't belong exclusively to himself But also to certain future women? It's a matter of some reassurance That we are physically indistinguishable from other men. When introspection shows us That we have different degrees of intelligence Varying capacities for knowing morality We lose something of our complacency Rooty-toot Rooty-toot We're the boys From the Institute I wondered recently what school was being lampooned In this impudent snatch of gradeschool melody Recollection of obscene & early childhood. If Socrates and Plato and Diotima And all the rest of the folks at that party Had simply eaten lots of food and wine and dope And spent the entire weekend in bed together Perhaps Western Civilization Wouldn't have been such a failure? Rooty-toot, Plato's Original Institute Much of the morning sweeping consists of clearing away Bodies of several hundred insects who followed my lightglobes And perished here. After 49 days each one of them will be reborn Each in a different shape in a different world Each according to the quality of his actions In all his past existences. What a system. Hi-de-ho. Rooty-toot-toot. Normally I wouldn't say no. Rooty-toot is what any bugle, horn or trumpet Is thought of as "saying," the sound of a fart. Years later I found the trumpeting devils in the Inferno  M U S H All dropped untidy into the bottom of my skull A warped red plastic phonograph record (the labels saysEmperor Concerto) floats on top, inaudible; Nevertheless, light comes through it in a pleasant way Precisely the color of raspberry licorice whips. It got bent in the mail, too near the steampipes... The music is in there someplace, squeezed into plastic At enormous expense of knowledge,  "FIRE IN THE BORGO" luke-warm mush, then cold milk poured over it chills and transforms the entire arrangement gradually tending towards an ineradicable (nonbiodegradable) plastic resembling "Bakelite," shiny brown It shatters if you drop it hard Changed again! Turned 180 degrees in an Unexpected direction Bent Beethoven, Burnt Njal I have lived All these years until this moment Without understanding there's absolutely nothing Which I can do well  (RING BELL THREE TIMES)  N O T H I N G "Har-de-har." What do you mean, "Har-de-har"? Nothing, just "Har-de-har." I might have said, "Hi-de-ho." "O Mighty Nothing!" (How does the Wicked Earl begin?)  "Then all proceeded from the great united..."  (what?)  "And from thy frutiful emptiness's hand  Snatch'd Men, Beasts, Birds, Fire (Water), Air and Land" John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. The parenthesized water is presented to us On good authority by the Editor, Vivian De Sola Pinto. I found my mother's name Written there three hundred years ago. "I don't know whether we can or not. Hee-hee! Let's try!"  W A L K L I G H T! I don't know anything about it There are two long-bearded apprehensive gremlins One beside each of my ears. The left-hand one Very gently whispers, "Hello?" and Listens for a reply from the other side. He repeats, "Hello?" very softly. "Are you Still there?" And the right-hand one listening And nodding, his own ear turned towards that furry dark Pink and lavender cave. Presently he replies (Also very softly) "Hello!" Across the blank echoing empty dark between. I think I'll go take a bath. Well, come on, who is it, if it isn't for gremlins— Some other of those revolting British creations for children Subject of PhD theses in American universities Big eyes, charm, lots of fur all over Stage-set by Arthur Rackham I'm really going to take a bath now. I split wood (gift of the landlord) while water Plooshes into iron pot. Make fire underneath. Bless these elements! Their nature and use  Connect me to this place (The Capital) its history Temple bell rings (No Self. No Permanence.) Fiery waters all around The iron bathtub is history, its name, goemon-buro A Goemon bath, he was a highway robber, caught at last And cooked to death in a pot of boiling oil On the bank of the Kamo River. Unveiling and Elevation of the Wienie  (RING GONG THREE TIMES) Kyoto October 2, 1969 a graceful poem In fond & grateful memory of Mr W. S. All Happinesse Outline of Hieizan almost invisible behind the hedge (Not my hedge but the one at Daitokuji Hojo) Kamo River uniform white lines pouring down Solidly moulded over stone barrage Foam across great fitted paving blocks (The Dalles!) Its man-made bed  rowdy-dow  beyond the foam thick purple From dye-vats along Takano River Green shaved patch on dark moutainside DAIMONJI which we saw as a pattern of fire from Arashiyama Bridge paper lanterns floating in the River Oi Souls returning to the flowery shore, the Wind's Angelic Face Puffing, happy Wallace Stevens Birthday Heavenly Baroque paradise where he sails Far New Haven's Other Shore Cherubic winds flap his coronation robes Dash silver on his golden harp and starry brow An extravagant Handelian heaven Lavender wings of peacock feather eyes All Memling enamel (Mr Yeats a little jealous) Harps of "omnipotent power"  ("OHO, OMNIPOTENT POW-ER  OHO! OH JOY DIVINE!"  Gregory Corso imitating Peter Ustinov Nero-movie) Too busy to see anyone in New York A few French paintings, shoeshine New tweed English pants two pounds real Camembert cheese Who is there to see in New York anyway Everybody's moved to Balinas (I dreamed last night of Margot Doss) And so home again, among roses "Arcades of Philadelphia The Past" a piece of Idaho scenic agate A crystal ball "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" And supper on "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" Where you never lived but always heaven Along with Stéphane Mallarmé and all the marble swans. I keep thinking about all the really great ones (To paraphrase Mr Spender) I think Like anybody living in a foreign country Of home and money... There's probably Some sensible human way of living in America Without being rich or drunk or taking dope all the time FRED, IS THAT MUSIC? DO I SHAKE OR WEEP? 3:X:69 Thomas Wolfe's Birthday "he'd say ok and we'd start in and every time I'd presently find myself going involuntarily ulk, ulk, ulk, which seemed to inspire him to even wilder extravagances," FRED IS THAT MUSIC? DO I FAKE OR LEAP? To my horror & chagrin I see that I've suppressed Lots of goody in the process of copying from ms to typewriter; Mike warned me years ago, "You should always Make them reproduce your handwritten pages."  ( O V E R L A P ) overleaf clover I said  rowdy-dow  (picture of leaves)  poo. beyond the foam thick purple. Takano River dye-vats there's not a way in the world I can explain to you you just have to get in and start doing it yourself  green shaved patch  right half of the big DAIMONJI "Every place is the same Because I felt the same, remembering everything We boated for hours on the Lake of Constance Went swimming in the Blue Grotto, ate sheep's eyes And chicken guts in Crete. The blue tiles of Isfahan Were better or worse than the blue tiles around the late Mr__,his swimming pool at San Simeon." And the man from Intourist at Tbilisi who so much Resembled him: "Everything being the same everything is naturally different" Here in the Shinshindo Coffee Shop again that blonde young lady who just disappeared into— and so swiftly reappeared out of—the benjo was not that funny girl who used to write for Newsweek but may as well have been— right this minute asleep in London, Sydney or Tashkent three new little trees just beyond north end of goldfish pond. I peer among the branches in search of the blonde who now sits inside I am in arbor outside the number of goldfish seven or nine One is color of polished metal that girl's hair is a paler shade (streetcar fills the window 1 1/2 seconds) the hard chairs and benches here, big tables probably not like the ones in Reed College library. Fits of psychic imperialism I attach tags, carve initials, pee on fireplugs outlining my territory is that blonde still there sort of ecru-colored minidress, thin cloth, heavy coat thick pale hair, untidy braid half undone behind small pointy nose, chin recedes a little there's no point in returning until I find out why did I have to come all the way back here endless belt of punch-cards travels through the neighbor's loom repetition of a pattern from a long time back here's one who eats a hardboiled egg, rolls, hot milk and a picture magazine. His friend's weak eyes read a little book German metaphysics translated into literary Japanese vague to vague two giant galaxies passing through into and beyond each  other, a radio receiver on a planet several thousand light years off might well tune in on a stupendous music,  FOOOREENG! &c (Karl-Heinz Stockausen) chancre star  when you get to the end,  stop Bill Whosis drunk & yelling in front of Sanjo Station End of the Tokaido Road Kamogawa sluicing fast under Sanjo Bridge The wooden posts and railings shown by Hokusai guard the asphalt concrete way  "Why don't you walk?" a way of living in America doesn't really invite a narrow pen point plink under they penthouse lid they eye they milky forehead, Yaquina Bay, Yachats, Neptune Park (Tillie the Whale flashes past just north or south of Yachats?) I can imagine living there as my grandmother did gathering wild blackberries driving out towards Gresham for a mess of green corn time for melons, grapes & Chinook salmon at The Dalles, dig mud clams at Netarts Bay Family all over the place, friends from the old Kilpatrick Hotel, bring blackberry jam fresh string beans and salmon She wanted her hotel in winter good steam heat, parties and dances The Lonesome Club, Cotillion Ballroom Earliest spring flowers and pussywillows Green slime and moss and mud evergreen and fern smell of woman, beyond enormous plate-glass windows The Studebaker black sedan. All this lost again, galmed up for fair where's the minute particulars? what was I thinking of? I keep thinking of those really great ones like Confucius: "What am I supposed to do, become rich & famous?" People keep introducing me to the famous English Poet We have been introduced to each other once every ten years For a very long time. He has no reason to remember meeting Me, since the conversation is limited to "how do you do?" And he's considerably taller than I am. I think all the time I can't forgive him For jamming that "nk" sound against the initial "C" Nor for the blackmail word, "truly" I can't stop thinking about ... I keep thinking all the time about those Absolutely splendid  (that isn't so sharp, either) Well, somewhere there's an exact & absolutely wild poetical equivalent to Mr X's most often quoted line, & if he had found it & used it I should have swooned with awe & pleasure when I was first introduced to him, & afterwards we might have been able to talk together? Fred, is that music? Do I shake or weep? Did you fall or was you pushed? Did I run and was I tired Years gone by, twelve years agone I must have had about me then some final faded blink of beauty Fred asked me to marry him, he would be 21 fairly soon I never had a greater compliment. It's too bad we were sexually incompatible He's the only one who ever asked me. No matter how odd the fancy I remember him Happily at the entrance to old age I haven't been a total failure after all. Paul Gauguin went someplace there was light enough to see And it made him a painter. (?) N. Hawthorne to Italy H. Melville to the Southern Sea, beyond the neighborhood of Christian gentlefolk Fred, is that music that I fake or leap? Lion-faced Paul Gauguin fingers and toes Cock and nose all sloughing gradually away Leprosy melted him, northern snowman Disadvantages of a lovely climate "White men go to pieces in the Tropics" I can't stop thinking about those who really knew What they were doing, Paul Gauguin, John Wieners, LeRoi Jones I keep thinking of those great ones who never fled the music Fred and his roommate with bottled hair All of them yarded off to Viet Nam Translated into Rugged American Fighting Men Defending the Free World against Godless Atheistic Communism  ("I am a U.S. Marine.  I like to fuck and I like to fight:  What's it going to be?") Which makes it impossible to like the Illiad Sadist faggotry too much like Parris Island The Green Berets and the cops back home Somebody else's castration fantasies acted out In an ideal climate  but why should the world be different  Why should it continue in its present  nasty way? and it changes every  nanosecond, lovely, dreadful, smashed  dismembered and devoured by prajna  Events like the Indo-China War  Final quivers and tremblings  Neural flashes in freshly killed men  (movie of Bonnie & Clyde) The longer I think about it The more I doubt that there is such a thing as Western Civilization. A puritan commercial culture Was transplanted from Europe to U.S.A. in the 17th Century American Indians were a civilized people. I remember when L.A. had an ideal climate  "Everybody wants complete privacy in the Hollywood Hills  for $35 a month," the real estate lady told C.L.T.  She wore this big Marianne Moore garden party hat  rocky face petrified lap-dog. "You don't want to  live over there, Honey, there's Dark Clouds in that   neighborhood." C. & Shirley escaped to Europe and New Mexico Bottom of my waterglass, pentagonal crystal The light changes passing through, bent by glass into color and we are a rainbow, no matter how we love or hate it We are beautiful red and black and yellow and brown and white Maybe a few Swedes or Finns are green in the winter time If they get cold enough. How can we not be miraculously Beautiful colors which betray our true nature which is love And wisdom, compassion and enlightenment, "Six times three is eighteen" In Takagamine tiny old lady turns towards a Jizo shrine Across the street, A short prayer, umbrella in one hand, the other held up Before her (gassho) and then bowed very slowly (She really meant it) first head and neck, and then The waist, very slowly down and back again. Jizo-samma certainly must have felt obliged To attend immediately and in person to that lady's Children and departed relatives. Being Jizo-samma He has exactly time and energy and compassion enough To do exactly that, right now. can this be straight description of observation without intending to embarrass or attack anybody, without waving my arms and yelling does Mr Gauguin's palette go towards a muddiness even the tropical pictures are faintly greyed fluorescent lights in gallery (Kyoto Municipal Museum) varnish going bad or the pigments themselves breaking down? look again fishpond looks clean fish are newly polished Frog-child's baby sister has come to ride her tricycle orange teddy-bear strapped to her back the same way her mother carries her The papa comes to pound a large flat shoe on fishpond rim fish whirl round in fits, then he scatters crumbs on water goldfish feed There is a wonderful kind of writing Which is never written NOW About this moment. It's always done later And redone until it is perfect. Praying mantis moored to top of a flower stalk Grooms itself like a canary Preens Two tailfeathers I wonder whether Wordsworth was subject to fits Of feeblemindedness or simply had a low opinion Of his readers? Bigger mantis upside-down on glass door. Who else has a face like that: hammerhead shark another cannibal Strong mothball smell emanates form English poetry & prose After the death of Wm Blake...or a little before It is detectable in Keats, Shelley, Byron...mothballs And flannel. Smell of Established Church. Industrialism And Empire building: same Whiggery rules us now I've got to go sort out my guts. "What have you been doing these days?" Just sorting out my guts. disentangling and Re-coiling them neatly back in place The same operation must be performed Upon the telephone cord, every now and againJe m'en vais à le Toji, in memory of Kobo Daishi Fleamarket day.  I greet you from the very top of the page an single branch of stovewood smolders under the bathtub, the brand of Meleager still high but able to cook, eat, write, make bath, SWEAT they ring the bell again I hope all sentient beings attain complete perfect final enlightenment which is exactly who I am or not all my greasy fingers coffee-break time down at the Emergency Factory early in the war, before we all got uniform shot but now you are trying to confuse me about having my eyes shut My name is Chauncey M. Depew and it is November 11, 1910 What do you think of that, hey? STOP IT, I SAY, STOP THIS TRUMPERY OF MOCKERY mockery trumpery pink chenille fuzz elephant baby mockery trumpery trumpery mockery mongery freeny-monger? fundle Our main difficulty: fear and distrust of freedom We think it must be carefully measured Weighed and doled out in discreet quantities To responsible persons of good character and high Social standing; people with lots of money which is evidence Of their reliability and moral quality Liberty in other hands is "license" Difficulties compounded by idea of "consent" And theory of "delegated powers." Hire specialists to run everything. But the powers they derive from us Relieve these governors of all responsibility Somehow become vast personal wealth— Fortunes which must be protected from "license" and  "the violence of the mob" We find our freedom diminished (KING LEAR) Delegation a license for the abuse of power  say, just what are you trying  to prove, anyway? What do I care about proving anything Only bust chains & shackles that we may slip anchor Haul-ass away to the making of Paradise Where now are only fraudulent states, paint-factories Lies and stinks and wars One kid put it clear as may be: "I want America to be magic electrical Tibet" Or Kozanji, for example, a little NW of the Capital Absolutely defenseless, abbot's house on pointed mountain Top, delicate walls Multitudes of people drifting through it Footless ghosts, no fingers, empty parkas The billows of smoke of burnt and burning leaves The silence, unbroken purity existing in the world Cuts down impatience Leaf jewels rage and brilliant silence Cold flames: Fudo-Myo-o Carved fire, sculptured flame world net wall Momentary bird-heads eyes beaks all swirl crimson ray Beams yellow streaked. He isn't in the fire he's made of it The light cool zap-energy sword the gentle hat of lotus flower Big square feet on solid rock Takao-yama As I looked at them they must see me, flaming All absurd, film of mistaken proprieties Culture of dim Oregon farmhouse to burn to dispose of Instantly If what is real can be created or destroyed Clouds move above maples Change colors we walk beneath Colored spaces mean something else— Where in all this tight and elegant disorder . . . . . .  Walk on down Kiyotaki River canyon from Jingoji  Missed the trail, found confluence of Kiyotaki and Hozu rivers  Smooth grey-green cliffs of single rock  Heavy green water, no way back to the Capital  Except by boat, voyage in raging maple colors  Over dragon rocks of dream. Late extravagant lunch, Arashiyama, Hurricane Ridge I just reread a little of The Prelude To which I could only reply, “You poor fish.”  GOD KNOWS THE SPARROW FELL:  GOD SHOVED HIM. Let’s go visit the tomb of Emperor Murakami Look at autumn leaves but there light rain starts falling I had hoped to visit big rock on the hillside, also But came back home I want my umbrella I want my lunch  RAIN serious, wet rain  discovered the tomb of KOKO TENNO Between the parkway and the trolley track due south of noodle  shop RAY OF FILIAL DUTY who ordered the Ninnaji to be And the next emperor was first abbot there: UDA TENNO His Muroji Palace Here come the maidens dancing That song they are singing that song which you shall Be listening is call “The Song of the Panicled Millet” In the Chinese classical node In America we’ve been fighting each other 100 years We pretend we’re unimaginably rich But we are poor and afraid of the poor who must become The Army to defend us against right and wrong All automatic and impersonal The Law is The Government Shall take all your money and kill you Being completely free and entirely, impartially just Edgar Allan Poe saw the walls of Plato’s Cave Slowly moving inwards to crush us Who licks up the juice that runs out at the bottom? The real shame of America is the lack of an anticlerical Movement or party. All parties try to compound  With invisible State Protestant Church that theoretically Doesn’t exist. Rubes who think of themselves as  Members in good standing are bilked and robbed. I got to buy me them eggs. 30 MORE SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS!  “again and again the flames of his inordinate Passion  licked my naked flesh again.” 29 MORE SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS! “rolled right over until I was over the top of him did  you ever hear of such a thing I said Wilbur what on earth are  you trying to do and he was wiggling and shaking and squeezing  and panting and saying all them things over again like he was  going crazy until I didn’t know whether to send for the doctor or the fire department but he stopped all of sudden you know  how they do and that nasty stuff all over everything I tell you  if I had it to do over again I’d never get married and Wilbur  is my third husband” 28 MORE SHOPPING DAYS BEFORE THE FEAST OF   THE NATIVITY "then he turns right around and wants to do it again well I said listen you old goat I've got to get some rest I've got to  go shopping tomorrow whether you go to work or not" 27 MORE SHOPPING DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS  Fred, is that music? Ah, no, my foolish darling It is only the roaring of the aged chilling blood Sluggishly perambulating your brittle veins you forgot Your bloodpressure pills again, too busy to go out They brought you three dead sandwiches upon a tray And coffee, tepid black forbidden coffee On a tray and you lost your temper on the telephone And now it echoes in your hollow empty wooden head  I’m not afraid of you.  You’re nothing but an incubus. TWENTY-SIX GREATER AND LARGER SHOPPING DAYS   BEFORE CHRISTMAS So you’re a poet, hey? Well if you’re a poet Tell me a poem. Come on, tell me one. Are you a published poet? Do you know Nick Crome? One fine day AG was mad at me and said, “You’re going to be a little old man who smells of kerosene and sits in the public library every day reading Pliny” Awoke at quarter-past three A.M. strange wooden clack sound Later find fallen mud-plaster chunk in tokonoma Puddle of pee with one long black hair in the corner of benjo  floor Gloomy gold morning ten A.M. ingest giant lump of bhang With strawberry jam from Bulgaria (friendly socialist country) Hot coffee. Things will seem better half an hour from now, OK? Shut up. What’s the use of having a cold if nobody cares. Why not simply do something else. An absolute mystery: how to stop and begin differently. “Don’t be a ninny, Dr. Culpepper, all surgery is radical Hand me that there Gigli-saw. Yes, yes, it all Connects, have no fear, we can take a tuck in the membrane If necessary. Try to develop a little more dexterity— Have you tried practicing the piano or the guitar? Us brain surgeons got to how a little culture. Quit banging my elbow, nurse.” Fifty years fighting the Bolsheviki To maintain a 500% profit on every waffle-iron and locomotive At 499% times are growing difficult, we must try to retrench At 497^% lay off some of the newer employees the market looks “Bearish” at 496% SELL OUT while there’s still a chance. In order to boost profits back to 498% A “presence” appears in Cambodia When did the dumb-bunny bomb first hit U.S.A.? How come everybody appreciated it so much? THE BAD NEWS INCUBUS SERVICE  “I’m going to get well right away.  I’m going to be just fine,” the old man said;  Then his eyes rolled up and his breath stop  And there he lay dead as a flounder. Lost again yesterday walking towards Arashiyama Inconveniently: lunchtime. Several villages, Tomb of the Emperor Uda, deserted superhighway to Western Hills I thought of asking somebody, “This the road to China?” I really knew where I was, I’d been to those mountains The empty freeway bored and frightened me Broken highway to a pretty place where I bought expensive  noodles Well, it opened up a space, I could see the distance, for a  change Breathe. Did I miss nine trillion cars, want them to be On this road with me? At home, the vegetable supply A Dutch still-life set on reversed lid of nabe Half a red carrot half a giant radish half a head of hokusai A completely monumental potato China will sail across big Zen soup to me THE BAD NEWS INCUBUS SERVICE  They peer down through my ceiling  “Poor old man he’s too fat to live much longer”  Which part of this bothers me most—  Insincerity, indifference or the fraudulent ceiling? Voices out of the air the bleak and windy white skull attic Flat white for lots of light Hollow wooden head son of a bitch, Homer Matson used to say I keep trying to remember that this is my life now What I’ve got, what I actively chose Pine tree stone lanterns outside the mason’s house imperial  tomb Camellia hedge monkey-slide tree And the responsibility for learning two languages (which I evade) and dim insistences of two others in the background Sanskrit and Tibetan. awk!  WHY DID I LAUGH TO-NIGHT?  NO VOICE. At the foot of the stonewall Fukuoji Jinsha Somebody took leave of her shoes; There they are. Red. Strangely enough I find that I’m all right Nothing's really wrong with me, there’s food Payday will be Thursday the pleasure of looking at A tiny mountain of low-grade amethyst Almost the color of gas flame cooking buckwheat noodles (kerosene is on the way) The cold weather is neither monster nor prodigy I seem to survive it (Vitamin C) in spite of paranoia (Vitamin B-complex shortages?). In winter the air is cold as it is hot in summer But I never can understand the idea All too soon I must leave these beauties And come away to heaven’s boring towers of golden flapping Snowy wings and halo bright star crown No more to see your sexy frown and freckles  (“I can’t find my mirror!  I can’t find my things!”) So that when you’ve at last arrived there too Shall we bleak and holy strangers distant forgiving nod and  smile? But soon you’ll be asking me, “How do I look? Is my halo all right? I know my wings are all slaunch-wise Along the trailing edge.” (Preen, preen.) “I wish I had My mirror, Kids! I wish I had all my things Oh well I don’t care please hold me I want you to hang onto me a  while.” Torn paper fake mountains become three-dimensional Transparent crystals. Bushes and trees all Barbered and shaved plaques of tourmaline, emerald They used to tell me I must apply myself  Work hard and don’t be lazy But what I must learn is to accomplish everything Which has nothing to do with work. Work is what an instrument or engine does. We say a crystal changes white light to green Breaks light into rainbow, scatters it Focuses to burning point. The crystal does Nothing. Its shape and structure make all The difference. Think of transistors and lasers. In order to make this day great Yesterday must be altered Rain I must wear overcoat muffler and bamboo umbrella Thinking of monkey tribes on Hieizan and Iwatayama Wet & freezing I hope they’re finding food Lovely bronze-green fur, defenseless eyes They run if you stare at them: Fixed gaze prepares for pounce crunch fangs of death All monkies everywhere look worried all the time Eyes and faces, Oh God, what next. Me?” Lots of instructions wasted Go down town and argue with the bank Fall, as leap Fred? Yesterday afternoon they said They’d pay in the morning. This morning they say They’ll pay in the afternoon Raving hot sunshine two days before Christmas  BAFFLEMUTE & so to Osaka.  Beguile me with all them blandishments again! Cursus:  The hotel falls. The false hotel.  Enter One in the character of a false hotel. He speaks:  MALEMUTE!  BEZOAR!  TREMENDULATE!  FACTION.  CUCURBITE.  Pantages. TRASHMULE.  finger A man in a black suit stands at the entrance to the tomb Of the Emperor Enyu, catty-corner from my front door He bellows like a bull at irregular intervals A man steps out the front door of his house He says (in French), “Again, the same thing.” Radio gives me German actors performing Faust I’m reminded of Hudibras The triumph of commercial middle class Chanted in paltry quatrains. Toujours la même chose. A little chocolate tomb for a dead maraschino cherry Coffeeshop sugarbowl another compromise Picture of childish French sailor “English” inscription (sans-serif letters)  “anchortheway” A lisping matelot? Encore, the way?“Encore, vos nerfs.” Leaps & bounds Ponderous numbers to confine Limit the flower  A measured compromise “I didn’t get her cherry but I got the box it came in.” The flower goes beyond the edge of its petals The poem runs past the edge of the paper Teeth I don’t have anymore hurt me today Today I started late and quit early And accomplished everything, but the next day was Marred by fits of rage, mental confusion Lapses of memory. Olson dead in New York Jack dead in Florida. Today I am going to take more: Smoked some and ate some  OM. AH. HUM.  in five sacred colors I woke up a couple of times during the night High with lights and music behind the eyes This morning I am cured and know who and where I’m at Why should I go to Europe to look at Several million nervous white folks My very own relatives there they are Totally uncivilized, fingering and puzzling over The ruins of Western Civilization I feel closer to that culture which our ancestors Destroyed . . . megalithic builders initiated in mushroom Mysteries at Crete, Eleusis, New Grange In this capital we also fumble with ruins of high culture But feelings of antique propriety keep heavy sway Over family, marriage, feudal obligations to a chief The life of the Capital goes by in tight pants Or on horseback brilliant silk hakama Brocade karaginu gleaming lacquer hat Summer’s dead leaves philaudering into dusty moss Like melting Dracula.  (PHILAUDERING. Mot imaginaire de l’auteur.) The soul extractors are here. Edgar W. Tomczyk of Lima, Ohio, will now attempt To drive a 35-ton Caterpillar tractor through Two inches of boiling water from which he will escape Absolutely unharmed!  (oops.) Rupert Scanlon of Great Falls, Montana will now . . . The world (and I) Barge past the sun Glass on stove’s fuel-gauge reflects The sun onto north wall twenty feet away The passage of Time, the zooming of the earth Can be witnessed as a disc of light Sliding over dots of mud plaster sand Other goop embedded in the surface Daitokuji celebration day still echoes in my head Sound of manhole-cover falling flat on stone floor The rainy maples at Koto-In Last night wild boar for supper Shakuhachi music over snowy torrent BOTAN NABE, Peony Cassoulet So far north of the Capital the road is only paved When it becomes (five seconds) mountain village mainstreet Among sugi trees ordinary dirt in the canyons But the people speak Kyoto-ben BOTAN garden of Daitokuji monastery Manhole-cover clang crash Big pair of cymbals, thin brass with center bowl Broad-rim soup dishes B L A S H! Everybody dolled up in brocade bib and tucker Chinese canal-boat shoes, Nootka shaman hats To exceed wisdom and ignorance escape skull chain (Juzu beads I saw today each bead a white head-bone Apparently impossible although there’s enough space Between bone crystals to drive a truck through) There’s not an owl in the world who thinks or knows  “I am an owl.” Not one who knows there’s a man called Slotkin who knows more about owls and the owl trade Than any owl. I wonder though, Can Professor-Doktor Slotkin eat mice and fly. Kyoto 6 P.M. News: Somebody left a pistol in a raincoat in a taxi on Higashiyama (Eastern Mountain) Road New York Buddha Law: All sentient beings will be brought  To complete final perfect enlightenment If you will write a letter to The New York Times Condemning Ignorance, Desire and Attachment. Almost all Americans aged 4 to 100 Have the spiritual natures of Chicago policemen. Scratch an American and find a cop. There is no Generation gap. I sit in the north room Look out across the floor into the garden 12 1/2 tatami mats the pleasure of contemplating them They are beautiful and they aren’t mine. Present appearance of quiet neutral emptiness Books, music, pictures, letters, jewels, machines Buddha statues and other junk all hidden away As if inside my head (think of the closets As memory banks) Wooden ceilings pale orange Floors the color of wheat straw, light-grey paper Colored mountains near the bottom cover the fusuma That divide rooms hide closets. Glass and white paper Shoji screens two garden ends of the house north and south Heavy floral designs of Michoacan (Have you ever considered going THERE to live) O flowers more lovely than wine Adonis and/or Dionysus . . . “. . .only one note and it a flat one . . .” “Only a rose For you.” (That was a long time ago.)  (unique abyss)  “I’ll go along  With a smile & a song  For anyone . . .” all this was Copyrighted maybe 1911 “ONLY A ROSE FOR YOU!” So long ago I was a prisoner still and other people Made everything happen good bad & indifferent  “Control yourself!” they said To survive continuous neural bombardment Meningeal bubbles twenty years after— Now I make things happen These thin brass domes and birds of ice Cheap fruit cries pop There’s your tricycle (from Jimmy Broughton’s movie,Mother's Day)  Tricycle from the Isle of Man Three legs running “The Shinto emblem showing three comma-shaped figures in a whirl symbolizes the triad of the dynamic movements of musubi. . .”—Jean Herbert Athenian abyss Tarquin Old Stairs off the steep edge of town Delphi something else  a friend writes from Eleusis: “nothing here  but a vacant lot . . .factories in the distance”  “Those caves of ice”  ,  (large comma) “JA!” Mr. C. Olson used to say so the word Had a big walrus mustache laden with fresh beer foam Flowers have great medicinal virtue I decide not to go to town until Wednesday Buy Time to read at Asahi Beer Hall, not have to teach I just now caught bright future glimpse Of myself on Wednesday: Long green coat Orange beard glasses completely distracted By trauma of trying to talk Japanese to the waitress Out of patience out of breath wrestling to break  Strong wool British overcoat stranglehold Flowers and vegetables  maybe they will change my mind The light is different because it’s a different season  (Audumb in New York) usual garden uniform green moss a pleasure. In spring unexpected crocus and lily and tulip Crash through it—surprising shapes and colors Western Civilization rigid and tyrannical But it also teaches necessity for objective examination Of the organization and also provides all kinds of suggestions How to alter the works. Mr. Karl Marx wrote a book All by his lonesome in the British Museum. (Shhh!) I’ve read the trial and death of Socrates Lots of times. When it hits me right I can cry Other days I wonder why it took the Government so long To catch up with him. Nothing happened To Plato, there he sits, writing. Homer and The Classics burnt at Appomottox Confucius enjoyed a vogue as originator of jokey sayings, 1939 30:IV, 7:55 A.M. Unknown quantity and quality LSD 7:21 P.M. head full of million-watt light Hangs from the ceiling, old China dome Newly uncovered. Dirty but thin, hard and shiny. Far-away midge on quiet tatami. Many amperes and micro-watts weeded the garden Picked it up by one end and shook it Like the dog’s dirty blanket, flooch! flooch! And resettled it softly down over the shrubs and bugs Lots of discoveries underneath All miraculous and alive The Capital more than usually full of foreigners— Expo ’70, Osaka. Americans at first imagine  Japan is extension of Cincinnati suburbs Amazed and outraged to find everything here In careful and complete control of people who don’t Speak English, occupied (somewhat aggressively) with Being very Japanese. That is the funny man’s house over there. That’s where the funny man lives. Keep away. Hair. Hair. Hair. Hair. Hair. THE JOURNAL OF JOHN GABRIEL STEDMAN 1744-1797,  “June 9 (1795) . . .the Apollo gardens, Marylebone, Madagascar bat as big as a duck . . . June 24 . . . How dreadful London; where a Mr. B—declared Openly his lust for infants, his thirst for regicide, and believes in no God whatever. . . . August . . .Met 300 whores in the Strand . . .Saw a  mermaid (. . . September . . .) All knaves and fools and cruel to the excess. Blake was mobb’d and robb’d.” A friend wrote from Kent, Ohio, last year  “The Midwest is full of people who want to write poetry  and want to listen to it.” This year the National Guard, weeping with pity and fright Kill four students, firing “into the mob” Nobody cared. Nobody remembers the Korean “Police Action” Nobody will remember our “Advisory Mission” to Indo-China  why are they doing it Why are they  oh, never mind am I supposed to judge them Don’t you remember being high and weeding the garden And whatever is really beautiful can’t be destroyed We can’t get our hands on it,  “. . .The truly great Have all one age, & from one visible space Shed influence! They, both in power and act, Are permanent, and Time is not with them, Save as it worketh for them, they in it.”  -S.T. Colerdige, “To William Wordsworth” Endless weedy babble comes away easily The flowers feel different, having been intentionally Placed by living fingers which I also feel Just think of it as a large allegorical painting Nude figures, red velvet drapery, white marble “Classical Architecture” (Parthenon Bank of Chemical Pantheon  Library)  America Devouring Her Own Young (The soldiers are also our children, we’ve lied to them, too Americanism, Baseball, Commerce, Democracy, Education,  Fanaticism Gold, Home Economics,  ignorance The complete college curriculum Then put them into uniform and turn them loose with guns To kill “hate-filled long-hair dirty dope-fiend Com/Symp”) Nobody cares because nothing really happened It was on the TV, everybody will get up Wash off the catsup, collect union wages & go home Nobody cares, nobody thinks anything about it No thought at all; a succession of needs and little raunchy Schemes. They should have killed a few hundred more— All a Communist plot to move Blacks into suburbs Turn over the country to freeloaders, dope-fiend hippy queers” The American Revolution was a tax-dodge Dreamed up by some smart Harvard men Who got some good out of it. A few of their high-society friends also scored Russian Revolution a strictly ugly downtown proposition The Great Unwashed on a rampage. No reference to mystical  Rights to Life & pursuable happiness guaranteed by Eighteenth Century rationalist Deity in curly wig Old man potters down the lane singing Stops to search the roadside flowers and weeds For some particular leaf that he puts in plastic bag Of greens. Last night’s old man, KONDO Kenzo (80-some odd years) performed the No of Motomezuka Acting a young girl and her ghost frying in hell We all kept waiting for him to stumble, collapse Fall off the stage disintegrate But the longer we watched the clearer it became: The stage, the entire theater might collapse much sooner Fall to sand and rust and splintered beams Mr Kondo would still be there singing and dancing Every fold of his costume in place five hundred years It pleases folks in Washington D.C. to imagine The Russian Revolution is going to flop any minute now (After fifty years) the insurgent Bolsheviki will be put down The dear Tsar restored as modern constitutional monarch (We did it in Tokyo, didn’t we?) and the Patriarch of The Church will crown him in St. Basil’s while the Don Cossack Choir (beards and gold brocades) chant Slavonic Liturgies in full color satellite TV an example To the benighted everywhere, if only we will pay Just a little bit more and hire a few more FBI men A few inches of adhesive tape seals the mouth But it is hard to get rid of the idea of liberty After forty years of war Asia still exists, Not to mention the Viet Cong And quite different from the plans of Washington Or Moscow or the Vatican. (Napoleon said, “China . . . sleeping giant. I shudder to think what happen When he wake . . .”) Adhesive tape in Federal Court Nothing wrong with the System You’ll get a chance to talk later Federal Court held together with gum Arabic And Chicago cops Nara has a great magical feeling The city no longer exists, the first capital Restored fragments of temples, carefully excavated Site of Imperial Palace in the rice fields Like Olson I’ve been writing about the wrong town?  “Worcester! I’m from Worcester!  All this about Gloucester . . .  I’ve been writing about the wrong town  all this time!” (Vancouver, 1963) Kent State, Jackson State, There was no reason to kill them Fusillade into an unarmed crowd Of children. I can’t forgive us for feeding them To the Bears currently raiding Wall Street Painless Extraction time again Squeezing water out of the stocks Blood out of the suckers Everybody hopes to catch a nice gob of the goo But there’s never quite enough Didn’t you hear about the reservations? We were supposed To phone ahead for reservations. In advance. Never quite enough, the Official Party had To be served first. Never quite enough Because it was planned that way. My grandmother used to say, “And so he was left S.O.L.” I asked her, “What’s that mean?” “Certainly out of luck.” Those that’s got, gets. Them that ain’t is S.O.L.  “Oh, the coat and the pants  Do all of the work  But the vest gets all the gravy!” We complain of Tiberius in the White House But consider: Caligula Waits fretfully in some provincial capital CAPITAL REMOVED TO FUKUHARA (Kamo no Chomei reporting) 6th month, 1180—  “To north the land rose up high along a ridge of hills and  to the south sloped down to the sea. The roar of the waves made  a constant din and the salt winds were of a terrible severity.  The palace was in the mountains, and, suggesting as it did the  log construction of the ancient palaces, was not without its  charms. . . . The manners of the capital had suddenly changed  and were now exactly like those of rustic soldiers.” Oregon City by the papermill falls of Willamette There’s Dr. John McLoughlin’s big white house Retired magnificence of Hudson Bay Co. Benefactor of our Pioneer Ancestors John Jacob Astor ran him out of business Washington Irving described all but the money Where was the capital: Champoeg, Oregon City, Portland, Salem. The money is in Portland the university in Eugene The capital in Salem: Life Along the Willamette River?  now a stink-hole Paper-puke sulphur trioxide and mercury The lesser towns contribute only garbage and human excrement The Capitol’s great brass dome warping Melting in the flames Hand-carved oak and myrtle and walnut paneling State House in the park, toy stage set, blazing A lost art, my father used to say. Nobody knows How to do that nay more. Palaces by Vanbrugh, mansions and Watergates of Inigo Jones Gardens by Capability Brown  blazing “Sept. 2, a lamentable fire. . . .the wind being eastward blew  clouds of smoke over Oxon the next day . . .the moon was  darkened by clouds of smoak and looked reddish. The fire or  flame made a noise like the waves of the sea.” So says Anthony à Wood.  Yet there are still remaining Shosoin, parts of the Horyuji, Yakushiji, Toshodaiji The capital disappeared around them. Byodoin and Muroji Parts of Daigoji too far away from the battlefields And from carelessness, perhaps. These can still be seen, In spite of earthquake, ambition, silliness The thousand Buddhas at Sanjusangendo, the others at The Toji, survived though the city was flattened  Eight or ten times in a row Jack used to say “Some day you and Gary and Allen and me Will all be old bums under a bridge, Down by the railroad tracks. We’ll say, Remember when we was all out there in Californy, Years ago?” Gentle rain from grey-black lump clouds Fine pale blue sky Three-color cat sits on weedpile Near but not under the largest ranch of Mt Koya pine All I can say this morning is a dance Which can’t be recorded here A wish to be free from orders, notions, whims Mine or other people’s Waiting for the laundry delivery man Waiting for 95 liters of kerosene Chrysanthemum yellow starfish tube- Foot petals Ancient Orient! Shortest route to the forebrain Through olfactory lobes. Longest way round is The shortest way home. A little trip Through the Anima Mundi, now show Now currently appearing a persistent vision When it happens at the correct speed But if you get too close it is only Patterns of light Drop candy and try to follow it Creates new place and time. Looking up I see blank staring faces Reflecting steady silver glow. Silence. Under the bright umbrella, University of British Columbia Beer on the terrace of the Faculty Club Allen & Bob Straightening out something complicated, Olson sighing the while, “I hear you. One, four, three. I hear you. One, four, three. Minot’s Ledge Light. One, four, three. I LOVE YOU. One, four, three, Minot’s Ledge Light. You remember, don’t you Bob. One, four, three I LOVE YOU—what better way to remember?” Do intelligent questions get interesting answers. All I know is Every time I get mixed up with rich folks It costs me all the money I have in my pocket  CURIOUS ELISION  LORD, HAVE MERCY UPON US Michaelangelo/Cole Porter Variations DAY & NIGHT: DAY & NIGHT, waking and sleeping That’s what that’s all about A man with titties like a woman A woman with muscles like a man  “To Europe?”  . . . . . . . .  “I must have adorned it with a strange  grimace, but my inspiration had been right.  To Europe . . .”  -Henry James Pierre who?  “coming & going”  “well if you’d got drunk and   climbed up to the top of the door  and took off all your clothes  and passed out cold  how would Y O U look?” No matter how far we travel We find most of the world living as quasi-civilized Nomads among polished marble ruins of great cultures The quality of life and the meaning of these remains Are quite imperfectly known to us, no matter how skillfully We parse the verbs of lost languages All ignorantly we project our own savagery & cannibalism Upon societies and individuals who were  Our civilized ancestors Christ now returns under the name U.S.A. Rages wild across the earth to avenge himself Napalm and nuclear bombs for every insult Every prick of thorn crown “Not peace but a sword” (Curious elision.) Lays about him burning and smashing Murdering the Sea,  The war continues because it is profitable.  It’s making good money for those who had  Money to invest in it from the beginning Curious elision for all who did not. All of a sudden it became as if nothing had happened  And that was the end. Babies we creep out of water sack Hid there by young men Old we slide into firebox Drift up the flue to heaven A natural history. A narrow escape What happened. Walked to local coffeeshop Tomato juice. Start home via Ninnaji templegrounds People chanting in front of magic Fudo spring I went to look at the Mie-do, then realized  I was sick or at least beleaguered by creep vibrations Clearly time for magical cure. I poured water over Fudo his rocky image Chanted his mantra and bowed. I also rubbed Magic water on my head. Old lady caretaker Delighted; she said I had done well and wished For my rapid recovery. To enforce the cure I visited Fudo spring at Kiyomizudera, the Kwannon and other Buddhas there Expensive tempura lunch with view of Chion In The Eastern Mountains and a glimpse of Momoyama Castle Glimpse has a marvelous sound like limpkin and Temko “That Fudo a good old boy he from Texas!” Shinshindo Coffee house brick fountain Stone, tree, new leaves, now a new electrical  Garden lamp on metal pole, as in Mrs Blah’s patio/barbecue  “area” Chagrin Falls, Ohio. The latest incarnation of The Frog Child tries to ride minute red tricycle That groans and squeals. Delicious croissants. I can still feel happy here. How come. I’m too fond of eggplant ever to be allowed into Heaven But imagine celestial brinjal— aubergines du paradis! ANACHRONISM:  a) homesick for one of  the chief cities of Ohio  b) process for correcting chromatic  aberration in camera and other lenses One of the most wonderful and magical actions We can perform: Let something alone. Refuse To allow yourself the pleasure of messing it up. The things appear to want adjusting, improving, Cleaning up &c. APPEARS so to us But as a collection of “event particles” A section of the Universe as a noisy morning &c Leave it alone. Don’t tamper with it. Free of that poor-ass Oregon down-home history As this clear water streaming over head eyes face I can see hollyhocks ten feet high sideways To go and to stay illusory I flee pale music  (I know what I’m doing, NIGHT & DAY) I flee Death’s pale music  (Well, what?) Fleeing Death’s proud music, “Get up out of there,” my father used to say, “You can’t sleep your life away. People die in bed.” But I am tired of all the world With notebook and pen I hurl myself deep among The dopey sheets to bed, and lock the gates! Shopping among the sand at the bottom of a birdcage Every grain a universe designed by Walter Lantz Nonskid never-fail plastic whose colors fade All surfaces dim and grubby all of them scraped Minutely scored cracked and flawed Material impervious to most chemicals Resistant to ordinary wear Allegorical painting: CUPIDITY DECEIV’D BY ADVERTISING The canary in residence is terribly  Intelligent and infested with mites. “Rooty-toot-toot” was the sound of the little .44 Frankie wasted her faithless lover Whenever I asked people what all that meant They said “Never mind” – “Row the boat, Norman, row!” Hot weather erodes my powers At the Ishiyamadera, small room with bo-leaf window (For the viewing of the moon, the priest explains.) She looks at the moon through that window that you see Over there. She is now a wax dummy with a face That exhibits what the Japanese think of as “refined” Features. All dressed up in Heian court robes Long black hair down her back. In the antechamber A smaller dummy represents girl-child attendant Grinding ink at a large inkstone The figure of Murasaki holds a writing brush And a long piece of paper. Her head has begun to turn Away from the writing to observe the moon And quite likely to remark upon the song of the uguisu Scholars, Japanese and Western, say she never did Never was here a minute. The priest shows A sutra copied out in Murasaki's own handwriting Here's the very inkstone that she used. There is the moonlight window Dog days, ten years, I try to remember your face You disappear, all my head can see Are two paintings and drawings in red ink Whatever else I've done with my life Amounts to nothing But inside the lantern a white speckled black beetle Not quite as large as a rice-bird gives Complete performance of Siegfried all alone I am a hunting and gathering culture The Moselle wine-boat sails over icy Delaware On gossamer wing through the woods to Skye (Hurrah for Miss Flora MacDonald) Under the shadow of those trees Edge of typhoon sudden rain Shelter at Basho's Rakushisha hut Green persimmons next door to Princess Uchiko her tomb (Famous for her Chinese poems, first priestess of Kamo Shrine) Under the shadow of those trees, waiting for the boatCythère POÈME IMMENSE ET DRÔLETIQUE  Night morning Greyhound bus NEVADA have a new driver  all on different schedules  "quel sentiment. quelle  delicatesse
I stand alone at the foot Of my father’s grave, Trembling to tell: The door to the granary is open, Sir, And someone lost the bucket To the well.
I dreamed this mortal part of mine Was metamorphosed to a vine, Which crawling one and every way Enthralled my dainty Lucia. Methought her long small legs and thighs I with my tendrils did surprise; Her belly, buttocks, and her waist By my soft nervelets were embraced. About her head I writhing hung, And with rich clusters (hid among The leaves) her temples I behung, So that my Lucia seemed to me Young Bacchus ravished by his tree. My curls about her neck did crawl, And arms and hands they did enthrall, So that she could not freely stir (All parts there made one prisoner). But when I crept with leaves to hide Those parts which maids keep unespied, Such fleeting pleasures there I took That with the fancy I awoke; And found (ah me!) this flesh of mine More like a stock than like a vine.
Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels right since it’s half dead to begin with. Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sky hoarding its riches except for a few mock tears, the hard ground accepts nothing. Six years ago I buried my mother’s ashes beside a young lilac that’s now taller than I, and stuck the stub of a rosebush into her dirt, where like everything else not human it thrives. The small blossoms never unfurl; whatever they know they keep to themselves until a morning rain or a night wind pares the petals down to nothing. Even the neighbor cat who shits daily on the paths and then hides deep in the jungle of the weeds refuses to purr. Whatever’s here is just here, and nowhere else, so it’s right to end up beside the woman who bore me, to shovel into the dirt whatever’s left and leave only a name for some- one who wants it. Think of it, my name, no longer a portion of me, no longer inflated or bruised, no longer stewing in a rich compost of memory or the simpler one of bone shards, dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes, the roots of the eucalyptus I planted in ’73, a tiny me taking nothing, giving nothing, and free at last.
There’s a woman kissing a cowboy  across the street. His eight-year-old son  watches from the bus stop bench.  She’s really planting one on him,  his Stetson in danger.  It must have been some weekend.  Seeing no room in that embrace for himself,  the boy measures his future, legs  straight out in front of him.  Both hands hold onto a suitcase handle,  thin arms ready to prove themselves.
If there were a monument to silence, it would not be the tree whose leaves murmur continuously among themselves; nor would it be the pond whose seeming stillness is shattered by the quicksilver surfacing of fish. If there were a monument to silence, it would be you standing so upright, so unforgiving, your mute back deflecting every word I say.
What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are we tossed in tune when we write poems? And what or who emboss with gloss insignias of air? Is the Fabric about which you write in the epigraph of your poem an edifice, a symbol of heaven? Does freight refer to cargo of lading carried for pay by water, land or air? Or does it mean payment for such transportation? Or a freight train? When you say a commoded journey, do you mean a comfortable journey or a good train with well-equipped commodoties? But, then, why do you drop the ‘a’ before slumberous friend? And when you write, in “Why I Am Not a Christian”You always throw it down / But you never pick it up
I saw your picture in the 79th street station. You said you’d be interested in any comments I might have on the condition of the station Mr. Fanelli, there is a lot of debris in the 79th street station that makes it unpleasant to wait in for more than a few minutes. The station could use a paint job and maybe new speakers so you could understand the delay announcements that are always being broadcast. Mr. Fanelli—there are a lot of people sleeping in the 79th street station & it makes me sad to think they have no home to go to. Mr. Fanelli, do you think you could find a more comfortable place for them to rest? It’s pretty noisy in the subway, especially all those express trains hurtling through every few minutes, anyway when the trains are in service. I have to admit, Mr. Fanelli, I think the 79th street station’s in pretty bad shape & sometimes at night as I toss in my bed I think the world’s not doing too good either, & I wonder what’s going to happen, where we’re headed, if we’re headed anywhere, if we even have heads. Mr. Fanelli, do you think if we could just start with the 79th street station & do what we could with that then maybe we could, you know, I guess, move on from there? Mr. Fanelli, when I saw your picture & the sign asking for suggestions I thought, if you really wanted to get to the bottom of what’s wrong then maybe it was my job to write to you: Maybe you’ve never been inside the 79th street station because you’re so busy managing the 72nd street & 66th street stations, maybe you don’t know the problems we have at 79th—I mean the dirt & frequent delays & the feeling of total misery that pervades the place. Mr. Fanelli, are you reading this far in the letter or do you get so many letters every day that you don’t have time to give each one the close attention it desires? Or am I the only person who’s taken up your invitation to get in touch & you just don’t have enough experience to know how to respond? I’m sorry I can’t get your attention Mr. Fanelli because I really believe if you ask for comments then you ought to be willing to act on them—even if ought is too big a word to throw around at this point. Mr. Fanelli I hope you won’t think I’m rude if I ask you a personal question. Do you get out of the office much? Do you go to the movies or do you prefer sports—or maybe quiet evenings at a local restaurant? Do you read much, Mr. Fanelli? I don’t mean just Gibbons and like that, but philosophy— have you read much Hanna Arendt or do you prefer a more ideological perspective? I think if I understood where you are coming from, Mr. Fanelli, I could write to you more cogently, more persuasively. Mr. Fanelli, do you get out of the city at all—I mean like up to Bear Mountain or out to Montauk? I mean do you notice how unpleasant the air is in the 79th street station—that we could use some cooling or air-filtering system down there? Mr. Fanelli, do you think it’s possible we could get together and talk about these things in person? There are a few other points I’d like to go over with you if I could get the chance. Things I’d like to talk to you about but that I’d be reluctant to put down on paper. Mr. Fanelli, I haven’t been feeling very good lately and I thought meeting with you face to face might change my mood, might put me into a new frame of mind. Maybe we could have lunch? Or maybe after work? Think about it, Mr. Fanelli.
Directions: For each pair of sentences, circle the letter, a or b, that best expresses your viewpoint. Make a selection from each pair. Do not omit any items. 1.a) The body and the material things of the world are the key to any   knowledge we can possess.  b) Knowledge is only possible by means of the mind or psyche. 2.a) My life is largely controlled by luck and chance.  b) I can determine the basic course of my life. 3.a) Nature is indifferent to human needs.  b) Nature has some purpose, even if obscure. 4.a) I can understand the world to a sufficient extent.  b) The world is basically baffling. 5.a) Love is the greatest happiness.  b) Love is illusionary and its pleasures transient. 6.a) Political and social action can improve the state of the world.  b) Political and social action are fundamentally futile. 7.a) I cannot fully express my most private feelings.  b) I have no feelings I cannot fully express. 8.a) Virtue is its own reward.  b) Virtue is not a matter of rewards. 9.a) It is possible to tell if someone is trustworthy.  b) People turn on you in unpredictable ways. 10.a) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in a rural area.  b) Ideally, it would be most desirable to live in an urban area. 11.a) Economic and social inequality is the greatest social evil.  b) Totalitarianism is the greatest social evil. 12.a) Overall, technology has been beneficial to human beings.  b) Overall, technology has been harmful to human beings. 13.a) Work is the potential source of the greatest human fulfillment.  b) Liberation from work should be the goal of any movement for   social improvement. 14.a) Art is at heart political in that it can change our perception of   reality.  b) Art is at heart not political because it can change only  consciousness and not events.
Home team suffers string of losses.—Time to change loyalties.  Quadruple bypass.—Hold the bacon on that next cheeseburger.  Poems tanking.—After stormiest days, sun comes out from behind clouds, or used to.  Marriage on rocks.—Nothing like Coke.  Election going the wrong direction.—Kick off slippers, take deep breathe, be here now.  Boss says your performance needs boost.—A long hot bath smoothes wrinkles.  War toll tops 100,000.—Get your mind off it, switch to reality TV.  Lake Tang Woo Chin Chicken with Lobster and Sweet Clam Sauce still not served and everyone else got their orders twenty minutes back.—Savor the water, feast on the company.  Subway floods and late for audition.—Start being the author of your own performance. Take a walk.  Slip on ice, break arm.—In moments like this, the preciousness of life reveals itself.  Wages down in non-union shop.—You’re a sales associate, not a worker; so proud to be part of the company.  Miss the train?—Great chance to explore the station!  Suicide bombers wrecks neighborhood.—Time to pitch in!  Nothing doing.—Take a break!  Partner in life finds another partner.—Now you can begin the journey of life anew.  Bald?—Finally, you can touch the sky with the top of your head.  Short-term recall shot.—Old memories are sweetest.  Hard drive crashes and novel not backed up.—Nothing like a fresh start.  Severe stomach cramps all morning.—Boy are these back issues of Field and Stream engrossing.  Hurricane crushes house.—You never seemed so resilient.  Brother-in-law completes second year in coma.—He seems so much more relaxed than he used to.  $75 ticket for Sunday meter violation on an empty street in residential neighborhood.—The city needs the money to make us safe and educate our kids.  Missed last episode of favorite murder mystery because you misprogrammed VCR.—Write your own ending!  Blue cashmere pullover has three big moth holes.—What a great looking shirt!  Son joins skinhead brigade of Jews for Jesus.—At least he’s following his bliss.  Your new play receives scathing reviews and closes after a single night.—What a glorious performance!  Pungent stench of homeless man on subway, asking for food.—Such kindness in his eyes, as I turn toward home.  Retirement savings lost on Enron and WorldCom.—They almost rhyme.  Oil spill kills seals.—The workings of the Lord are inscrutable.  Global warming swamps land masses.—Learn to accept change.  Bike going fast in wrong direction knocks you over.—A few weeks off your feet, just what the doctor ordered.  AIDS ravaging Africa.—Wasn’t Jeffrey Wright fabulous in Angels in America?  Muffler shot.—There’s this great pizza place next to the shop.  Income gap becomes crater.—Good motivation to get rich.  Abu Ghraib prisoners tortured.—Let’s face it, shit happens.  Oscar wins Emmy.—Award shows are da bomb.  FBI checking your library check-outs.—I also recommend books on Amazon.  Gay marriages annulled.—Who needs the state to sanctify our love?  President’s lies kill GIs.—He’s so decisive about his core values.  Self-Help.—Other drowns.
The column of the commander yielded to our first sweep. Even the water jar for our diggers we set on the south wall of the general’s tomb without knowing it. So we began. His armies retook Nubia, Libya, and the Levant, lost under the sway-bellied lantern-jawed Sun King. Overseer of all scribes, Overseer of the priests of Horus, Grain-giver to all lands, Royal chief of staff, Regent, the general had himself carried on his palanquin through the wailing processions to oversee the work on this place. And so carved, thus: one of his men punches a Nubian in the face. The general was low-born; everything had counted and he knew what counted most. His platoons lift open palms towards Tutankhamun. The general towers as a sway-girdled go-between at court for beseeching Libyans. Only the pearl-handled revolvers do not figure here, or the comeback challenge Nuts! in the Ardennes winter forest. He had himself carried beyond the busy streets of the dead in the city of the dead sloping back from the bluff to a higher, private terrace looking across to Memphis. But then he rose to Pharaoh. So he is not here. Instead his first wife lay here, and then his queen also. At his own royal tomb in the Valley, where the designs remained uncarved, sketching idea along stone, he does not rest either. The fine picklock hand got past Anubis and the reared serpents, and got to him, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. It got past Truth with her high feather, which moved at the slightest disturbance. The general did deep obeisance to her. He is not here. What at last moves the heart? So much already moved, even in his own century, architects prying loose mud bricks of the core for new tombs. Cult funded in perpetuity gone in two generations. So Coleridge, who was indisposed that day, prudently remained in the circle of lime trees while his friends went off on their walk through the countryside. He followed them in his mind. That way no one would have to dismantle Horeheb’s outer court to secure bricks for the statuary room, and facing stones. He cast his mind outward, a net over his dear ones, sending them at pace through the middle distance of steeples, hill lines, and the murder of Lamb’s mother by his sister, a brief madness, thus through the appropriately middle distance where such things are built and performed in fact, no closer, no farther, then on out to the cleansing rim of apocalypse, evening in the bath of waning fire, one bird stitching the whole veil of showings tight along its upper hem— though he was not there, he could tell them that none the less he was next to his words and his word was with them, even unto the rim of their wandering and their turning back. One dome of air and fire. But he was not there. Nor I here. What removes the heart from what moves it? As if I were the lecturer before a congress of doctors, his clinching point approaching, when suddenly he stared out in silence, and at last said, Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, the only thing I can see at this moment inside my brain, such as it is, is a little white mouse chasing a little white ball.
Night deepening, frost leans on the stables of thoroughbreds, west wind splitting their hooves. —LI HO, “Twenty-three Poems about Horses” Steed out of my dusk and a dusk, now, for the species, veins deltawise down your silky inner thigh, veins trickling from one eye down the roan cliffside of a nose vaulted and chanceled for winds of the Pleistocene, you have come, you paw patiently, that is the main thing, the fields between stretch wider and we, the restless, are everywhere save where your nostril quivers, arches, and you snort in the night. We who debouch into all places dream of you now nowhere. You come to a woman’s hand: that smile. You come to a child’s hand, giggling and shivers. Your hot breath pleasures soldiers. Harnessed to caisson with bannered coffin, to the barouche at a state wedding, you are ambassador from the eldest kingdom. The King of Brazil sent a forest of teak to pave the streets girdling the Pantheon, to muffle the clatter you hauled there. When we spurred you against Wellington’s infantry squares, you side-ran them or reared back. The god of catasrophes took note. Sad banner you were in the prophecies of Sweet Medicine, the whiskered whitneys bringing and spawning your manes and tails among the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, your speed between their loins a drumming into decline. Under Tutankhamun, the generalissimo who rode you hummed his tenth title: Overseer of Works in the Hill of Gritstone, while there in those Works among the pulling men pulled also your brother, sent down because of a freakish temperament. Muir knew you on both shores, and van der Post knew you, mufti lords recognizing a lord in service. Nuzzle them both. They say that Poseidon at Onchestos, breaking you as a colt, had your driver leap off where the road entered forest, and watched to see what you’d do, the rig rattling--smash it against the trunks on the run, or walk it through tall shadows. Where you linger for shade on the veldt, branches level, a tree is the only tree. Your water, the only water. Flickers of hair along your neck’s crest release the only signal. Which staggers from storm cloud to browse oats. Stubby melted candle, your recessed phallus makes no howitzer but glistens a coat whose sheen ripples off. For I imagine that Li Ho, seeing good men misused as you were, foresaw your withdrawal from our night grasses. For your standing here re-ordains neither Akhilleus nor Cuchulain. Dew braids your mane with fresh constellations. For what shall we make of you, made into goddess, mare sacrificed but receiving cult also among the footloose on the steppes: mother ridden by god-spear, great mam thus captured, cinched, spurred? though your flanks shudder unfettered. Through mists we flash bits of mirror, but from them you pound abreast, neither parent, eyes orbing the two sides. For that demigod’s eye, tiding, capsizes anyone who would turn trainer. And this one goes on into the bond. A trainer aims at one thing, but what tingles him is force hinting at the uncontainable, the opponent. And the top tamers, spook-soothers, the whisperers, will write their books but miss the appointment. It is not inscribed. The two grooms beside you in Hokusai’s whitewater cascade lave you with splashes of it, currying your bulk, hoisting your nosebag--and no one has set the timer, everywhere it is one sound, stampede steadied and rocking in it. Your great-grandparents, unicorn wild asses from Persia and Scythia, fostered childbirth but also pissed plagues, the unharnessable summum totium browsing in ocean, an eye-spangled three-legged mountain. Hell and cloud in your seed! It was your miniature stature at the beginning, Maria Tallchief at ten, that wedged you between giants into the straightaway. And the reindeer modeled from smudge in the Font de Gaume grotto at Les Eyzies, fading across your body, trails a third antler like a skater’s scarf through your head, broadening out, a dancer’s arm rippling after the total gather. Looking back from the pass at his mounted escorts, flashing them three turns back down the corkscrew, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama saw them slumped on your back, the red of Rahu in splashes and trickling stillness. And dripping you still awaited their nudges. In that patience, the kernel of the twister moan-lifting over Kansas, the shrapnel clatter of your take-off. Across that aftermath, bubbling through wind-sound or the mind’s rise from its cringe, the flubber-flutter of moody-moodlessness. So the unforeseen from you opposes the blindly seen in us-- your fuse as a spurter, jump-taker, yet a curb also to our unsnaffled berserkness. For the berserking Greek says that only that ass’s horn or hoof, cut off and cupped upward, can hold any of the cold torrent under the world, implacable Styx, All else, graces or muons, it crumbles. And every jot which that flow dissolves, the images with their assessors, has rolled in us. And you have stood calmly beside us, your shot breath a bloom in the cold, your hooves hammers yet also the last and only chalice. The unreached-for cup, beaker for world-toxin, breast englobing ground zero. And so we know you not. And I realize: though I have walked drenched in spring rains my bare thighs have not hugged your warm bellows in a downpour. For though your manic tribe is mine, the boreal chargers, mere rooms, a migrant’s mangy stations, have detained me. For while historians of cultures hot on the spoor of roots among their root clans have heard you drum past, they looked up only briefly. For though engravers assumed you would stay, given their way with your musculature, accoutrements, wavy harness, tip-toe grooms, gear draped over your cruppers like an evening gown, its ratios and metalwork continuous with Genghis Khan’s and a jockey’s, their inky mastery frames cosily misleading questions: which posthouse this evening, what pasture tomorrow? Whereas you inquire into rupture and the unfenced: what thunder between flesh and ground, what surge from the cells even past sundown?
1. Cross-hatchings, palm and rain, clapboard faded to the grain, half-shutters open to old vines and mangroves draining their own shadows; recollecting what the body knows suspended between coral and shifting images of cloud ... After death, after the knowledge of death,his death, his face, unwrapped, already yellowed, papery, recovered with a small white cloth then lowered away and shut to the earth; So pierced, so mute, these words re-opening: Not this. 2. The rain had gone. I swam against the current, harnessed by water till I turned and swung out with the tide, shouldering deep into a rhythm of my own, long strokes pulled under the body and returning past the glinting crease in which I breathed, the sea half-woken like another body bedded into sheer transparency, the outer reaches granular with light. Comebacks. Chains of radiance. Far more than meet the eye. What do they meet then, intimate but otherworldly, mimicking the world? I looked back at the land’s thin edge, pines along the shoreline near a fort where cannons rust, mouths left open among thistleweed around the dozing moat. Far back among fallen needles, pigeons shuffle through shade, their feathers iris underlight, soft flares bob the dark. The land had disappeared. The sun had followed it. From either wrist, half-mingled with my breath into the night, a trail of ungloved phosphor travelled back. 3. Sounds too have their surfaces:within the mortal frame, particles of blood revolve as in a sort of heaven where breath moves through us as an unseen light; but when the marrow bonds are parted they in turn set loose what has been called the soul ...
Blood-drop, lung of fire setting past the sea bell and wave; why am I separate from that giant burrowing into further life? The body breathes and rides a heavy-netted ocean swollen by the tide. Under the half-moon it’s the lighthouse light that turns the rest of me to early nightfall, headland, home. I send it back, a mirrored flickering across cold waters. We allow ourselves the crest that breaks above the surface then re-forms. We make it human and we call it love. This wintering is my own and not the world’s, although the world is wintering.
for my father 1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still —Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The Goda dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh— But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn—and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus —Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.
A crown of handmade nails, as though there were a house here once, burned, where we’ve gardened for fifteen years; the ceramic top of an ancient fuse; this spring the tiny head of a plastic doll— not much compared to what they find in England, where every now and then a coin of the Roman emperors, Severus or Constantius, works its way up, but something, as though nothing we’ve ever touched wants to stay in the earth, the patient artifacts waiting, having been lost or cast away, as though they couldn’t bear the parting, or because they are the only messengers from lives that were important once, waiting for the power of the frost to move them to the mercy of our hands.
What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can't see it: Like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to arrive: Her sisters and brothers gone, she ventures alone through sunlight and moonlight weaving shadowy faces across the peeling walls... —Speeding toward her, is it you and me she spies in the trembling train windows while the engine hauls us down rails that swerve under wheels rolling through her brain? Faces burn through dirty glass, smears of lips and eyes dissolve to spots of darkness swarming between her eyes so that swaying apartment towers crumble as her nostrils prickle from the landfill's ammonia that hangs above the stacked, crushed cars. The rails that take us to her pass boxcar after boxcar like the successive selves we are as she dreams us coming closer, switching track to track: Now the super unbolts her door as she calls: “Oh is it really you?” —the wheel's rolling through her head bringing us face to face with raveled bandages, crutches leaned in dusty corners, terraced mountains of yellowing newspaper. Framed above her chair a picture of a prairie sprawls round a covered wagon and the horse she rode as a girl, her eyes fading points of light... Again she calls out above the train's approaching rumble: “Is it you at last?” My eyes have got so bad peoples’ faces are all blurry...Now tell me, is it really you?” But already the rails are switching, bearing our waving hands away at the speed of thought over the stony waters that ceaselessly pour out.
Across the road from where we nap under a dead elm dazzles the meadow where the partisans strung the traitors up, the meadow which their dangling shadows stain. Belly up in vines a blasted tank rusts flake by flake to lichened scrap iron while horseflies harangue the rippling green, July a limbo of quavering yellow... We wake to cattle lowing at dawn, grass overgrowing summer—so like us in love each hour with the noonday sun that neither toils nor spins, its brightness hovering, blinding us... What would the dead say if they could see us, lounging, talking, peering through brambles at cemetery photographs sunk beneath the undertow of milkweed shadows, death dates smoothing back into the stone? I think of Goya’s demon, old man flesh hanging from his bones, long teeth bared in an ass’s grin as he scrawls on a schoolboy’s slate, What more can be done? Nothing... while behind him a noose etched clean as the moon rises through the inkblot spiraling back into the hanged man’s mouth as if blackness poured from his throat: “When will you tire of us bogeymen, caricatures of your father’s war, our crimes half-forgotten, unforgiven? All future blotted out when they hauled us from our beds, our minds went dead to everything but fear: Nightshirts soaked in snowlight’s pall, we hunched in mud, each step loud, too loud beside the farmhouse wall, the seconds teetering till we drop... What our betrayals were we know with a knowledge intimate beyond revenge, history the needle’s eye you can’t squeeze through. The partisans cut us down, heaped us in a mass grave our relatives dug up: Yes, there were tears—even for us... Now, like aliens from space on your TV shows, we ravel into mist, surrounding you the moment your eyes close... Our pupils search out yours from behind the mirror with your father’s stares, fathers and sons melding in one mind— but who are you to call us traitors, an outsider judging through the smoke-haze of home: Each blow exact, our own neighbors beat us till the blood ran, beat us black and blue...Even now, would they dare take us back, older, wiser, necks broken by the yoke? Moving in time as to a dance we buzz and swarm across the meadow, dissolving and glinting like fireflies in the hedge, blown like milkweed in the moon’s wall eye. But under your lids, you see us locked in cold, shattered wheatstraw flecked in ice: Chill as the night air on your sunburned neck our eyes like X rays pierce the frost, stalking every step the living take.”
I I’ve felt undeserving. I’ve made myself ill with the glory, in the unleavened garden disgorged the lies and scared away with a stick a snake. What made me cover that which I could not have? I’ve grieved and walked in catacombs, I’ve felt undeserving. I’ve made myself ill with the glory. Even the falling leaves gesture their renunciation. I disgorge the lies and abhor the serpent’s hiss. I remember seasons, things I bring from far away, and grieve. I walk in catacombs. In gardens now, by the stone walls, sunlight closes, the falling leaves gesture their renunciation. I remember being in a field touching a man’s body. I remember seasons, things I bring from far away and things that hold their breath for shame. His skin was soft as a girl’s and he closed his eyes. I placed apple petals on his eyelids; we were lying in a field and I touched his body. Then there were clouds, an uncanny silence, as when in a green place the air holds its breath for shame. What made me covet what I could not have? Ill with the power and glory, a thrashing in my chest, I remember the unleavened gardens, petals falling singly, the yellow snake disgorging lies. II I’ve grieved and walked in catacombs. I’ve felt undeserving. I’ve made myself ill with the glory, power and glory-- a thrashing in my rib cage. I’ve gone into the unleavened spring garden, disgorged the lies, and scared away with a stick a snake. I’ve grieved and walked in catacombs. What made me cover that which I could not have? I’ve felt undeserving. In this bright land that changes from yellow to green and back to yellow, I remember seasons, things I bring with me from far away and things that hold their breath as if for shame. I’ve made myself ill with the power and glory. I’ve gone into the unleavened garden and startled a yellow snake disgorging lies. A thrashing in my rib cage. What made me cover what I could not have? I remember seasons. Things that hold their breath for shame. Things I bring with me from far away. III I’ve made myself ill with the power and glory. I’ve made myself ill with the power and glory.
It was dusk, the light hesitating and a murmer in the wind, when the deer, exhausted, turned to look at me, an arrow in its side. Though I pity dreamers, taking a thread and weaving it upon the loom of Self—the secret, gaudy, wonderful new cloth—, I will tell the end of the story. His shoulder was torn, the joint held by one sinew, which I severed with the blade of the arrow, so when he ran there were no impediments. The black dogs that followed were swifter, their barking ancient, despicable. As he fell, his chest turned to breastplate, his one powerful arm covered with pagan signs. Nearly stupid in my waiting for what would happen next, each breath propelling me and him toward dust, I woke, the sheets soaked, heart fluttering—: When death comes into the sleeping room as through a tiny hole, like a rent in the Covenant, it hurts.
The dogs eat hoof slivers and lie under the porch. A strand of human hair hangs strangely from a fruit tree like a cry in the throat. The sky is clay for the child who is past being tired, who wanders in waist-deep grasses. Gnats rise in a vapor, in a long mounting whine around her forehead and ears. The sun is an indistinct moon. Frail sticks of grass poke her ankles, and a wet froth of spiders touches her legs like wet fingers. The musk and smell of air are as hot as the savory terrible exhales from a tired horse. The parents are sleeping all afternoon, and no one explains the long uneasy afternoons. She hears their combined breathing and swallowing salivas, and sees their sides rising and falling like the sides of horses in the hot pasture. At evening a breeze dries and crumbles the sky and the clouds float like undershirts and cotton dresses on a clothesline. Horses rock to their feet and race or graze. Parents open their shutters and call the lonely, happy child home. The child who hates silences talks and talks of cicadas and the manes of horses.
As a child I parleyed with animals, stuffed and real. Making my kitten pilot of a boot, I guided from one end of a string the dizzy flight and collapse. I was fearful of people as well as things, and my faithful toy shepherd with his painted face sat by me on the bed in the gloom. I was disdainful of dolls as weak people. In the favorite story I told myself my parents were made over into fair-limbed, brave angels who smiled into their god’s eyes when summoned. I was benevolent, afraid to let go of this image at night because I couldn’t hide deep enough under the covers to be overlooked by death, the angel bending over me who had been wronged. I read histories of queens, regal and barbarian, whose leopard’s eyes restrained man or wild beast. I rambled along tidal rivers and in the marshes where the green-golden grasses dazzled the sun, and felt the ache of sea-air in my lungs. I saw water spume near Atlantic cliffs. I examined lichen. I saw great light drown darkness. Then at thirteen I lay in the bleak bed before sleep and heard the pleadings and the murderous kisses; and burned, like a bear his fat, my soul. I quaked at the sound of my voice whispering, No, or turned my face to the wall and wept salt onto my knuckles. In the serene light of sun-up, before sparrows tumbled up from the earth, whispering and singing, and the exquisite sea and sky mobilized their heavy, blue currents, I was consoled. I walked through beauty without knowing why and told no one, wanting nothing else to touch me and never to move anyone in any way. I hid away from the house and learned the dark was not a dream but could show the pale gravel of a real driveway. I saw for the first time later the new moon and the full moon in one piece. I no longer feared the night, night like a bear at ease in his wide habitat. In the greatness of such space I said, This is me.
Into the changes of autumn brush the doe walked, and the hide, head, and ears were the tinsel browns. They made her. I could not see her. She reappeared, stuffed with apples, and I shot her. Into the pines she ran, and I ran after. I might have lost her, seeing no sign of blood or scuffle, but felt myself part of the woods, a woman with a doe’s ears, and heard her dying, counted her last breaths like a song of dying, and found her dying. I shot her again because her lungs rattled like castanets, then poked her with the gun barrel because her eyes were dusty and unreal. I opened her belly and pushed the insides like rotted fruit into a rabbit hole, skinned her, broke her leg joints under my knee, took the meat, smelled the half-digested smell that was herself. Ah, I closed her eyes. I left her refolded in some briars with the last sun on her head like a benediction, head tilted on its axis of neck and barren bone; head bent wordless over a death, though I heard the night wind blowing through her fur, heard riot in the emptied head.
I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper. From the rock face footed a dancer white through red.  My family gave me over  to it, gone for the river. Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune in the last century, even, I might have dreamed  a saint lifting off for Arles,  Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and knowing about cannon in that long peace, might have been troubled therefore that my flier  hauled a magnum of the best  and bloodied the west sky with it and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place was secretarial, not visionary!  Already in that decade  small tribes entered the void like windows on a skyscraper when the bent janitor makes his way. But those flick back on  each night, costly difference.  It is not only portents in dream or flapping images of the gone or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised  that catch like undertow  the foot in tide-rip toeing down the singing or remembered beach. We study populations in the forests,  we hold the paper flat,  mark, note, warn—the dictated prophecies do their work, we do some work— cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached.  But, to go on from there,  one needs to stand in the doorway some evening and feel the air as if it were fire pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw  of one fact heat its chain  of links, such as, Japan clear-cutting forests in Siberia where tigers not already harvested  lope their dwindling range,  two hundred as the hinge for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others ground to powders for old men’s potencies.  One needs to feel the tug  of the draft on skin, the drag of process utterly anciently itself. Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through  dissolution, along lines  streaming through us, ageless winds.
An apple paring curled from the knife wetly  down my thumb— and what I had failed to do rightly touching that life  next to mine, wearing late afternoon’s numb luminosity, impaled me.  A hunter knee-deep in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov might have set there and then left,  back to doctoring, or choked off as too dark, wanton,  met the steep flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift, but stood only, hearing them.  Pouring the last tea of an evening, dark amber alive, breathing in quintessence  of India, I felt limber bark sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree with root good, but dense, dark, local, raw there,  and so in dark woke, the seeing doctor, two simple profiles of linked characters  in his air, cruel, good, a pair ample, true across that split yoke, true to its splayed force— simple so rare, though.
At a bus stop in Arles a fellow wounded in the Last War winced into sunlight: Oui, they are beating the drums against les juifs again, and the Moors. France is an old man!
People expected that the evil would finally drain away. —Aleksander Wat, My Century Faded and baked here to a tawny grit, spills of blood and seed from humanity called from it for its crimes against mute earth gully in footpaths, dribble down to the sea, payment now and forever drawn from birth through flesh’s sunny darkness. Light yeasts in it. And if I find the slope to crumbled temples of that light’s god dragging at me through heat, shallow degrees of slant up to remnant stone, then something more than burnt air, or the repeat of weight known as time, pulls heavily in this zone, something the bone brings, terrible through simple. Phoibos, slayer at distances with shock, sower of plague and arrower of healing, tension of bright-dark beyond spanning, love will not quite cast out evil while revealing your fissionables. The raven was your dove. Heavy isotopes hum with crickets in rock.Neither woman nor man, my driver laughed when his lights torched writhings down the far shoulder, cross-dresser in the night beyond Naples, huge, sinuous, crooning as we shot past. Life seems older in its variant forms, drawn by the centrifuge to the rim and swinging, swayed in time’s dream uncalfed. For the vast thrower, shafter of quivering force, sex was filigree in whoever served. Pythoness, yes, wombed keeper of those coils in the wet cellar where tongue darted and swerved. But her own throat when it swelled with voice knew toils past a man’s strength, torqued bulging from the source. And that young man fitted with bone and thong and membrane from his withers by his father the maze molder, when he climbed into flame itself in the high nucleus, dripped as slather down the sky’s maw. Union there, with an aim at the center, crisped on a central soundless gong, sizzling from his overreach extended back on itself and down, the soundless hurry of the sea far below minutely riven, trembling in place, diamonds in blue slurry nowhere disturbed yet flecking everywhere, driven— all this boy’s cry endlessly thin, suspended. The sybil when at last her throat disgorged its burdens rumbled like a pawing bull, or the bull-fiend on Krete, and shrilly warbled. Birds ride the bull’s hump in stone graphs, that full barbarity at poise piercing now the garbled clang of Ikaros, over us tensile and forged. This is the crumbling whistle of shells and frags in their close arc. Philosophy gets precise when it turns practical. This in our background whir. Archimedes, old Fermi in your eyes, naked, ecstatic with theorems that assure conclusion, your city falls, your hacked flesh sags. There was a sprig which, if you bore it in hand on landing here, your pilot drowned and your herald crushed in the surf, would bend and seem to listen— there was a branch that trailed her voice through imperiled corridors to throats of the dead, and glistened, then brought you back to your breath near shining sand. And there was pelt from the solar scavenger, its blond mane tossing with your workings, turning catastrophe to triumph, lion crud strewn now on waves, coat of the charger burning obsidian cobalt platinum and mud in craters of the shaker and avenger. Eroded skull of this squat promontory, nubbled shrine over cave by surf hypnotized before deeps enameled with fire’s mosaic, you are the structure lucid though pulverized behind the logics, and the omens prosaic in their spelling out, and the blaze of story. Give me your light! I am the darkened thing seeking it. Give me your fire and your cry! But hood me from sulfurs she inhaled when she twisted over the fissure, give me your hand from the sky we have fallen into. Give, yes, what you insisted she utter, rasped uncoilings of your spring! And then release me to the animal shy of speech yet steady in ecstasies, your cousin the outsider’s gaze through life, the drink of it down, and finally mind as frieze eternally in metamorphic strife released, sea stone and cloud infinitely small. And there the migrant and his wanderers may find the new land, and their future wars may roll, exhausted in hissing foam, to sink over the fish spines, and the blunderers of fulfillment stare at samsaric wink of ocean, stare and find sleep that dissolves the curse.
You used to be able to flag a ride in this country. Impossible now—everyone is afraid of strangers. Well, there was fear then too, and it was mutual: drivers versus hitchhikers. And we rode without seat belts, insurance or beliefs. People would see me far ahead on a hill like a seedling, watch me grow in the windshield and not know they were going to stop until they got right up to me. Maybe they wanted company or thought I’d give them some excitement. It was the age of impulse, of lonesome knee jerks. An old woman stopped, blew smoke in my face and after I was already in her car she asked me if I wanted a ride. I’m telling you. Late one night a construction boss pulled over. One of his crew had been hit by the mob, he said as he drove, distraught and needing to talk to someone. We rode around for a long time. He said, I never wore a gun to a funeral before, but they’ve gotta be after me too. Then he looked at me and patted the bulge in his coat. Don’t worry, he said, you’re safe.
A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.  Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.  Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.  The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.  The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!  Her husband seeing the commotion came running crying, what tree has lost patience?  The ax the ax, damnfool, the ax, she screamed.  Oh no, roared the tree dragging its long roots rhythmically limping like a sea lion towards her husband.  But oughtn’t we to talk about this? cried her husband.  But oughtn’t we to talk about this, mimicked his wife. But what is this all about? he cried.  When you see me killing something you should reason that it will want to kill me back, she screamed.  But before her husband could decide what next action to perform the tree had killed both the wife and her husband.  Before the woman died she screamed, now do you see?  He said, what...? And then he died.
Dear Miss, First of all I want to say that I have enjoyed the imaginary possibility, built of course on the fact that such possibility does exist in nature: I have seen the birds and other forms of nonhumanity occur in such postures that must be with men and women....I have imagined myself in such postures with you, where flight was discouraged only by the inherent possibility of the firm horizontal...  As men give vast lands to little papers with line and color, I have imagined more on the surface of your body, giving all the universe in this model....  Yet, I must be curious about your breasts...curious...hungry is the word, to see, to touch, to taste....I am curious as to how your hands undress your body.  I am interested in your mind: will you undress in front of me? Will you permit me the unparalleled pleasure of taking your clothes off?  I feel that if I should have my penis in your vagina I should have your love; for you do not receive the wretched hardness of my desire into the sweet body of yourself without that you have not come to love me for reasons, if love has reasons, I cannot tell....  Your admirer
The turtle carries his house on his back. He is both the house and the person of that house.  But actually, under the shell is a little room where the true turtle, wearing long underwear, sits at a little table. At one end of the room a series of levers sticks out of slots in the floor, like the controls of a steam shovel. It is with these that the turtle controls the legs of his house.  Most of the time the turtle sits under the sloping ceiling of his turtle room reading catalogues at the little table where a candle burns. He leans on one elbow, and then the other. He crosses one leg, and then the other. Finally he yawns and buries his head in his arms and sleeps.  If he feels a child picking up his house he quickly douses the candle and runs to the control levers and activates the legs of his house and tries to escape.  If he cannot escape he retracts the legs and withdraws the so-called head and waits. He knows that children are careless, and that there will come a time when he will be free to move his house to some secluded place, where he will relight his candle, take out his catalogues and read until at last he yawns. Then he’ll bury his head in his arms and sleep....That is, until another child picks up his house....
The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric...  Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke...  The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull.  As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth.  The bull, blood oozing from the stump of its face, backs off, and charges again. This time the propeller catches the bull behind its lower jaw and flings the head into a tree.  The headless bull backs off once more, and then charges down again. The propeller beating at the headless bull, cutting the body away in a great halo of blood, until only the back legs are standing. These run widely away through the meadow in figure eights and zigzags, until at last they find the aeroplane again. And as they come running down the propeller whacks them apart.  The legs, one with the tail still attached to it, the other somehow retaining both rectum and testicles, scamper off in opposite directions.  The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops.  The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form.  The watching cow begins to low ...
for Charles Simic Like a monstrous snail, a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved.  It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets. In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.  And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace ...  The toilet slides away ...
she doesn’t wear costume jewelry & she knew that walt disney was/is making a fortune off false-eyelashes and that time magazine is the authority on the knee/grow. her makeup is total-real. a negro english instructor called her:  “a fine negro poet.” a whi-te critic said:  “she’s a credit to the negro race.” somebody else called her;  “a pure negro writer.” johnnie mae, who’s a senior in high school said:  “she and Langston are the only negro poets we’ve  read in school and i understand her.” pee wee used to carry one of her poems around in his  back pocket;  the one about being cool. that was befo pee wee  was cooled by a cop’s warning shot. into the sixties a word was born . . . . . . . . BLACK & with black came poets & from the poet’s ball points came: black doubleblack purpleblack blueblack beenblack was black daybeforeyesterday blackerthan ultrablack super black blackblack yellowblack niggerblack blackwhi-te-  man blackthanyoueverbes ¼ black unblack coldblack clear black my momma’s blackerthanyourmomma pimpleblack  fall black so black we can’t even see you black on black in black by black technically black mantanblack winter black coolblack 360degreesblack coalblack midnight black black when it’s convenient rustyblack moonblack black starblack summerblack electronblack spaceman black shoeshineblack jimshoeblack underwearblack ugly black auntjimammablack, uncleben’srice black  williebest black blackisbeautifulblack i justdiscoveredblack negro black unsubstanceblack. and everywhere the lady “negro poet” appeared the poets were there. they listened & questioned & went home feeling uncomfortable/unsound & so-  untogether they read/re-read/wrote & rewrote & came back the next time to tell the lady “negro poet” how beautiful she was/is & how she helped them & she came back with:  how necessary they were and how they’ve helped her. the poets walked & as space filled the vacuum between  them & the lady “negro poet” u could hear one of the blackpoets say:  “bro, they been calling that sister by the wrong name.”
I wanted it: arc of red and blue strobing my skin, sirens singing my praises, the cinching embrace of the cot as the ambulance slammed shut and steered away. More than needle-pierce or dragging blade, I wanted the swab of alcohol and cotton, the promise of gauze-covered cure. My mother saved anyone who asked, but never me, never the way I wanted: her palms skimming my limbs for injury, her fingers finding what hurt, her lips whispering, I got here just in time.
Historians will tell you my uncle wouldn't have called it World War II or the Great War plus One or Tombstone over My Head.
He has five children, I’m papa to a hundred pencils. I bought the chair he sat in from a book of chairs, staplers and spikes that let me play Vlad the Impaler with invading memos. When I saidI have to lay you off a parallel universe was born in his face, one where flesh is a loose shirt taken to the river and beaten against rocks. Just by opening my mouth I destroyed his faith he’s a man who can think honey-glazed ham and act out the thought with plastic or bills. We sat. I stared at my hands, he stared at the wall staring at my hands. I said other things about the excellent work he’d done and the cycles of business which are like the roller-coaster thoughts of an oscilloscope. All this time I saw the eyes of his wife which had always been brown like almonds but were now brown like the crust of bread. We walked to the door, I shook his hand, felt the bones pretending to be strong. On his way home there was a happy song because de Sade invented radio, the window was open, he saw delphinium but couldn’t remember the name. I can only guess. Maybe at each exit that could have led his body to Tempe, to Mars, he was tempted to forget his basketball team of sons, or that he ever liked helping his wife clean carrots, the silver sink turning orange. Running’s natural to most animals who aren’t part of a lecture series on Nature’s Dead Ends. When I told him, I saw he was looking for a place in his brain to hide his brain. I tried that later with beer, it worked until I stood at the toilet to make my little waterfall, and thought of him pushing back from a bar to go make the same noise.
The telephone company calls and asks what the fuss is. Betty from the telephone company, who’s not concerned with the particulars of my life. For instance if I believe in the transubstantiation of Christ or am gladdened at 7:02 in the morning to repeat an eighth time why a man wearing a hula skirt of tools slung low on his hips must a fifth time track mud across my white kitchen tile to look down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Over at me. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order before announcing the problem I have is not the problem I have because the problem I have cannot occur in this universe though possibly in an alternate universe which is not the responsibility or in any way the product, child, or subsidiary of AT&T. With practice I’ve come to respect this moment. One man in jeans, t-shirt and socks looking across space at a man with probes and pliers of various inclinations, nothing being said for five or ten seconds, perhaps I’m still in pajamas and he has a cleft pallet or is so tall that gigantism comes to mind but I can’t remember what causes flesh to pile that high, five or ten seconds of taking in and being taken in by eyes and a brain, during which I don’t build a shot gun from what’s at hand, oatmeal and National Geographics, or a taser from hair caught in the drain and the million volts of frustration popping through my body. Even though. Even though his face is an abstract painting called Void. Even though I’m wondering if my pajama flap is open, placing me at a postural disadvantage. Breathe I say inside my head, which is where I store thoughts for the winter. All is an illusion
Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat and suspenders, I think of the Quakers who lectured us on nonviolent social action every week when I was a child. In the classrooms we listened to those who would not take up arms, who objected, who had accepted alternative service in distant work camps and showed slides of hospitals they helped to build. On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship, when someone rose to speak, all the energy in the room flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell what she had seen on her brief encounter with the divine: sometimes, a parable, a riddle, a kindness. The fall that we were seventeen, we scuffed our loafers on the gravelly path from the Meetinghouse, while maple and elm leaves sailed around our shoulders  like tiny envelopes, our futures sealed inside. Despite the war in Vietnam, I felt safer than I ever would again. Perhaps those aged, protective trees had cast a spell on us, or maybe the nonviolent Quaker God had set up a kingdom right there— suburban Philadelphia. Looking back, I see how good deeds and thoughts climbed with us to the attic room for Latin, descended to the gym for sports, where we hung from the praiseworthy scaffolds of righteous behavior. We prepared to leave for college, armed with the language of the American Friends and the memories of Thanksgiving dinners we’d cooked for the unfortunates: borrowing our parents’ cars to drive downtown to the drop-off point, racing back to play our last field hockey match. Grim center forwards shook hands before the whistle, the half-backs’ knee-pads strapped on tight; one varsity team vanquished another.
—for Tamar Craig I knew the hard winter of sapphires set within gold claws, amber and pipestone strung on gut, fringed pouches stuffed with hash.Separate, separate, I urged her that summer of Woodstock, when I lied to get the car and draped my love beads around the neck of someone else’s sister. In a hayloft in Ohio my friend lifted three bales to show me a litter of week-old kittens, each pair of eyes infected with a slimy mucus. Their pupils swam in opaque opal membranes and they would have gone blind if she had not pulled an eyedropper of antibiotics from her jacket, doing what the mother cat could not do, what the owners would not trouble themselves to do, doing what a sister or friend might do if she took the time to attend the wayward, opalescent unhappiness in this world.
I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer  to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder  in the cry of the magpie that I am still capable of inflicting pain  at this distance. Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,  half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered with a patina over time. When she came into my life  I didn’t hesitate. Or is that only how it seems now, looking back?  Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back? Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains  you can still find shells. It’s these strange divagations I’ve come to love: midday sun  on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone; toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot  climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit of the dead hovers about its earthly home  four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away. Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes  to be washed and given to the poor. I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders  as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia. "We're almost there, Pop," he said. "A few more blocks."  I want to tell you that we, too, are almost there, for someone has mapped this autumn field with meaning, and any day  October brooding in me, will open to reveal our names—inscribed or absent —   among the dry thistles and spent weeds.
It is the right time for hallucinations. Drowning in a sty, the sailor feels the ocean’s buoyancy. Dying in a web, the moth discards its wings and falls free. I wish something would put its hands on me, give me stronger poison and then stronger. The beautiful flotillas do not stop. Undying love drifts and delays. I am capsizing. Great joy lingers still. Nothing can be said for suffering. It is legible only to strangers and at great distances. It detests survivors. It drapes gun-carriages with flowers, lampposts with hanging boys. It is the right time for hallucinations, most nakedly of inmost west. Her death would be less tender now, dusted over with charity, a web of useless wings, a shallow sty. She gave me stronger poison and then stronger. I miss her. In the back seat of the taxi, dark breathlessness says “Hurry, hurry.”
It has never been so easy to cry openly or to acknowledge children. Never before could I walk directly to the center of an island city feeling the automatism of millions drawing one pious breath, shouldering the sunset, holding it up in the oily tree-line a while longer. Years ago, I was never sad enough and nothing but a hotel that I could tear to pieces and reconstruct inside a shoebox felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable possessions washed up in other hotels, dioramas of the febrile romantic. I take my first lover, already gray at her temples and more reticent than shy, more tacit than admiring, to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum. We wait in the dark a long time. She does not kiss me. She hurries up out of the oily street onto the humming, fluorescent podium of the last bus where I see her a last time, not waving to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom we traduced years ago in our first kiss. Never deny the power of withdrawal. Never doubt that thought and time make things small. Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed uncomprehending gesture. At childhood’s end, none can tell happiness from buoyancy. None of it made any difference— the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed, the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion. We are no more complicated than our great-grandparents who dreaded the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge of warm days in January, a piety whose compulsion is to survive according to explicit laws no young woman adores or young man follows with darling hunger.
We barge out of the womb with two of them: eyes, ears, arms, hands, legs, feet. Only one heart. Not a good plan. God should know we need at least a dozen, a baker’s dozen of hearts. They break like Easter eggs hidden in the grass, stepped on and smashed. My own heart is patched, bandaged, taped, barely the same shape it once was when it beat fast for you.
Thousands of planes were flying and then they stopped. We spend days moving our eyes across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor; we prepare for almost nothing that might happen. Early on, distant relations kept calling. Now, nothing: sound of water tippling a seawall. Nothing: sparks lighting the brush, sparks polishing the hail, the flotsam of cars left standing perfectly still. Thud of night bird against night air, there you are on the porch, swath of feathers visible through the glass, there you are on the stairs where the cat fell like a stone because her heart stopped. What have you found in the wind above town square? Is it true that even the statues have gone? Is there really a hush over everything as there used to be in morning when one by one we took off our veils?
more the idea of the flame than the flame, as in: the flame of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn the sun is a flame, the dog’s teeth flames ~ to be clear: with the body, captain, we can do as we wish, we can do as we wish with the body but we cannot leave marks—capt’n I’m trying to get this right ~ the world’s so small, the sky’s so high we pray for rain it rains, we pray for sun it suns we pray on our knees, we move our lips we pray in our minds, we clasp our hands our hands look tied before us ~ I remember, capt’n, something, it didn’t happen, not to me—this guy, I knew him by face, I don’t remember his name, one night he’s walking home from a party, a car it clipped him, for hours he wandered, dazed, his family, his neighbors, with flashlights they searched, all night, the woods, calling out his name ~ here’s the part, capt’n, where I try to tell a story as if it were a confession: once, in elementary school, I was hiding out on damon rock, lighting matches & letting them drop to the leaves below—little flare- ups, flash fires—a girl wandered down the path, she just stood there, watching the matches fall from my hand— ~ capt’n, I’m trying to be precise: hot day, a cage in the sun, a room without air, the mind-bending heat, the music a flame—hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse, I don’t know how it happened, I was perched far above, I offered her a match to pull down her pants—one match, her hairless body, hey little girl, I dropped it unlit.  I didn’t know what it was I was looking at. ~ hey capt’n I don’t know if I’m allowed hey capt’n years ago I’m walking down a road one drunk night, even now I wonder—sometimes still I imagine—was I hit by a bus, am I stumbling am I  dazed, this dream this confession, hey little girl is yr daddy home, hey capt’n hey sir am I making any sense? ~ the boy stood on the burning deck, stammering elocution, wait— the boy stood in the burning cage, stammering electrocution, no—the boy stood in the hot-hot room stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering I did stammering everything you say I did I did. ~ hey metallica hey britanny hey airless hey fuse hey phonograph hey hades hey thoughtless hey ~ capt’n this room is on fire capt’n, this body will not stop burning capt’n oh my captain this burning has become a body capt’n oh my captain this child is ash capt’n oh my captain my hands pass right through her capt’n oh my captain I don’t know what it is I’m looking at ~ it’s important to be precise, to say what I know— the sun is fire, the center of the earth is fire, yr mother’s cunt is fire, an airless flame, still, still, I don’t know why she pushed me out, this cold-cold furnace, we all were pushed, a rim of light around our heads, she gave a kick, sent us crawling out, toward the flame, toward the pit, the flaming pit, yr lover’s cunt, the flame her tongue, the flame a thorn ~ everyday, capt’n, sir, captain, I was left, a child, after school, I was alone, I found a match, under the sink I found a can, a spray can, ly-sol dis-infectant, it made a torch, I was careful the flame didn’t enter the can, I knew it would explode, somehow I knew, I’m trying to be clear sir—the flame shot across the room, then it was gone
As if there could be a world Of absolute innocence In which we forget ourselves The owners throw sticks And half-bald tennis balls Toward the surf And the happy dogs leap after them As if catapulted— Black dogs, tan dogs, Tubes of glorious muscle— Pursuing pleasure More than obedience They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand, Sometimes they'll plunge straight into The foaming breakers Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence Toss them, until they snap and sink Teeth into floating wood Then bound back to their owners Shining wet, with passionate speed For nothing, For absolutely nothing but joy.
Sharpen your wit— Each half of it— Before you shut Scissors to cut Shear skin deep Underneath wool Expose the sheep Whose leg you pull
At night the states I forget them or I wish I was there  in that one under the Stars. It smells like June in this night  so sweet like air. I may have decided that the  States are not that tired Or I have thought so. I have  thought that. At night the states And the world not that tired  of everyone Maybe. Honey, I think that to  say is in light. Or whoever. We will  never replace you. We will never re-  place You. But in like a dream the floor is no   longer discursive To me it doesn’t please me by  being the vistas out my window, do you know what  Of course (not) I mean? I have no dreams of wake-  fulness. In wakefulness. And so to begin.  (my love.) At night the states talk. My initial continuing contr-  diction my love for you & that for me deep down in the Purple Plant the oldest  dust of it is sweetest but states no longer  how I would feel. Shirt that shirt has been in your arms  And I have that shirt is how I feel At night the states will you continue in this as-  sociation of matters, my Dearest? down  the street from where the public plaque reminds  that of private loving the consequential chain  trail is matters At night the states that it doesn’t matter that I don’t  say them, remember them at the end of this claustro-  phobic the dance, I wish I could see I wish  I could dance her. At this night the states  say them out there. That I am, am them  indefinitely so and so wishful passive historic fated  and matter- simple, matter-simple, an  eyeful. I wish but I don’t and little melody.  Sorry that these little things don’t happen any  more. The states have drained their magicks  for I have not seen them. Best not to tell. But  you you would always remain, I   trust, as I will always be alone. At night the states whistle. Anyone can live. I can. I am not doing any-  thing doing this. I discover I love as I figure. Wed-  nesday I wanted to say something in  particular. I have been where. I have seen it. The God  can. The people do some more. At night the states I let go of, have let, don’t  let Some, and some, in Florida, doing.  What takes you so long? I am still with you in that  part of the park, and vice will continue, but  I’ll have a cleaning Maine. Who loses  these names loses. I can’t bring it up yet,  keeping my opinions to herself. Everybody in  any room is a smuggler. I walked fiery and   talked in the stars of the automatic weapons  and partly for you Which you. You know. At night the states have told it already. Have  told it. I know it. But more that they  don’t know, I know it too. At night the states whom I do stand before in  judgment, I think that they will find  me fair, not that they care in fact nor do  I, right now though indeed I am they and  we say that not that I’ve  erred nor lost my way though perhaps  they did (did they) and now he is dead  but you you are not. Yet I am this  one, lost again? lost & found by one-  self Who are you to dare sing to me? At night the states accompany me while I sit here  or drums there are always drums what for  so I won’t lose my way the name of  a personality, say, not California  I am not sad for you though I could be  I remember climbing up a hill under tall  trees getting home. I was going to say that the air was  fair (I was always saying something like  that) but that’s not it now, and that  that’s not it isn’t it either At night the states dare sing to me they who seem  tawdry any more I’ve not thought I  loved them, only you it’s you whom I love the states are not good to me as  I am to them though perhaps I am not when I think of your being  so beautiful but is that your beauty  or could it be theirs I’m having such a  hard time remembering any of their names your being beautiful belongs  to nothing I don’t believe they should  praise you but I seem to believe they  should somehow let you go At night the states and when you go down to  Washington witness how perfectly anything  in particular sheets of thoughts what a waste  of sheets at night. I remember something  about an up-to-date theory of time. I  have my own white rose for I have  done something well but I’m not  clear what it is. Weathered, perhaps  but that’s never done. What’s done is  perfection. At night the states ride the train to Baltimore we will try to acknowledge what was but that’s not the real mirror  is it? nor is it empty, or only my eyes  are Ride the car home from Washington  no they are not. Ride the subway  home from Pennsylvania Station. The states  are blind eyes stony smooth shut in moon-  light. My French is the shape of this  book that means I. At night the states the 14 pieces. I couldn’t just walk on by. Why aren’t they beautiful enough in a way that does not  beg to wring something from a dry (wet)  something Call my name At night the states making life, not explaining anything but all the popular songs say call  my name oh call my name, and if I call  it out myself to you, call mine out instead as our  poets do will you still walk on by? I  have loved you for so long. You  died and on the wind they sang  your name to me but you said nothing. Yet you  said once before and there it is, there, but it is  so still. Oh being alone I call out my  name and once you did and do still in  a way you do call out your name to these states whose way is to walk on by that’s why I write too much At night the states whoever you love that’s who you  love the difference between chaos and  star I believe and in that difference they believed  in some funny way but that wasn’t  what I I believed that out of this  fatigue would be born a light, what is fatigue there is a man whose face  changes continually but I will never, something  I will never with regard to it or  never regard I will regard yours tomorrow I will wear purple will I and call my name At night the states you who are alive, you who are dead when I love you alone all night and  that is what I do until I could never write from your  being enough I don’t want that trick of making  it be coaxed from the words not tonight I want it  coaxed from myself but being not that. But I’d  feel more comfortable about it being words  if it were if that’s what it were for these  are the States where what words are true  are words Not myself. Montana, Illinois.  Escondido.
After my father’s cremation, my sisters and I agreed to bury him privately when the ground thawed. One will plant a flowering tree, one see to the stone and its cutting, one call the grave digger and the town clerk. It’ll be just us, the daughters, presiding over ashes that could be any mammal’s, or those of any love dispersible by wind. Let’s bury the secret violence to his dogs, Pompey and Tara, Juba and Molly, their ashes already gone to this ground. And his “escapades,” as Mom called them. Here withers that branch of the tree. Let’s bury the ring inscribedIn perpetuum ave atque vale (translated “Hail and farewell” by my father, “Hello, and good-bye forever” by Mom, a token dating back to the First Separation) and a tennis ball for canine shades.Your dad is with his dogs now, said more than one person at the funeral. It’ll be just us, the three inheritors, on a raw windy day in Death’s kingdom, lifting our eyes from the hole to the mountains hazed with spring, saying, In perpetuum ave atque vale, minor god of our father. Let’s each of us drop a few dog biscuits into his grave.
Crouched before dismantled guns, we found war souvenirs our uncle padlocked in the attic, a brittle latch easily pried off. Stiff uniforms on top, snapshots of soldiers young as our cousins, a velvet box of medals as if he fought all battles in World War II. Bayonets, machetes, a folded flag, two hand grenades with missing pins. We picked up teeth like pennies, loose, as if tossed in, a piece of something dark and waxy like a fig, curved like a question mark, a human ear. We touched dried pieces of cloth stuck to curved bones and held them to the light, turning them over and over, wondering how did uncles learn to kill, what would happen when we grew up.
Barbed wires on rusted nails can’t hold lone bulls at home when they smell pasture. They thrust their bone skulls under barbs, tongues quivering for a taste of strange and shove until the post gives way. Days later, we find wires sagging, reset the post, and tighten bent wires like a fiddle and rope the worn-out bull, wishing there was only a fence between us and our heart’s desire. But something with spurs and a rope would find us, cursing and yelling on horseback, cutting us from escape down arroyos, dragging us frothing and wild-eyed back to the sun-bleached yellow range, the same whirlpool of buzzards.
At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he's lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole Realism™—the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious—and then WHAM, it disappears.
* If sound, then why not the full reach of mind, and if that cantilever then why not the whole keyboard with its totality of partials?But then one meets the dragon, pipes up a bright disciple, whose two dramas, lieber Meister, are suicide and the founding of the state. My name is a household word
A B H O R E N C E S November 10, 1984  Death by over-seasoning: Herbicide Death by annoyance: Pesticide Death by suffocation: Carbon monoxide Death by burning: Firecide Death by falling: Cliffcide Death by hiking: Trailcide Death by camping: Campcide Death by drowning: Rivercide  Lakecide  Oceancide Death from puking: Curbcide Death from boredom: Hearthcide Death at the hands of the medical profession: Dockcide Death from an overnight stay: Inncide Death by suprise: Backcide Death by blow to the head: Upcide Death from delirious voting: Rightcide Death from hounding: Leftcide Death through war: Theircide & Ourcide Death by penalty: Offcide Death following a decision: Decide
A B H O R E N C E S November 13, 1984 The show did not start off auspiciously, the contestants were nervous and kept fiddling with the wires attached to their privates, the men being especially anxious over the question of balls. The women were more querulous. The first question, a medical subject, was why had the anti-abortionists not mentioned, let alone commented on, the Baboon Heart transplant? One terrified contestant guessed it was because the moral majority’s nervous concern with evolution precluded their bringing it up. That hopeful contestant’s face reflected the malicious light in the eyes of the host who immediately threw the switch A powerful surge shot through the wires and both sexes screamed and writhed, to the delight of the vast viewership, estimated at 100 million, all of whom, presumably, were delighted not to be on the show, because not one in a million knew the answer.
A B H O R R E N C E S 4 July, 1986 America is inconceivable without drugs and always has been. One of the first acts was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished the mansions of Virginia was tobacco, a drug now in much disrepute. Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for and they dealt it by the bale altho it was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire— people were so simple in those days. The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine making amputation a pleasure and making the block of wood between the teeth, which was no drug, obsolete. Morphinism was soon widespread among doctors and patients. At this date interns, the reports tell us, are among the premier drug ab/users of said moralistic nation. “Rock” stars (who notoriously “have” doctors) consume drugs by the metric ton even as they urge teenagers to Say No. The undercurrent of American history has been the running aches and pains of the worn path to the door of the apothecary to fetch cannabis and cocaine elixirs by the gallon. It has been all prone all seeking Florida, Ponce de León was just the beginning of a statistical curve whose only satisfaction would be total vertigo. His eager search for youth has become our frantic tilt with death and boredom, in fact we are farming death in Florida with far greater profit than we are farming food in Iowa—elixirs are as multiform as the life-style frauds we implore, a cultural patchwork fit for a fool in the only country in the world with a shop called the Drug Store.
A little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice was eaten by someone with a sweet tooth the size of an elephant’s tusk.  Ah, he said, this darn tooth, it’s driving me nuts.  Then another voice is heard. It’s the little girl’s father who says, have you seen a little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice?--Incidentally, what’s that thing sticking out of your mouth like an elephant’s tusk?  My sweet tooth, and it’s really driving me nuts.  You ought to see a dentist.  But he might want to pull it, and I don’t like people pulling at me. If they want to pull they should pull at their own pullables.  So true, said the little girl’s father, people should pull at their own pullables and let other people's pullables alone. But still, he asked again, I wonder if you’ve seen a little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice?
Some students were stretching a professor on a medieval torture rack. He had offered himself to show them how an academic might be stretched beyond his wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum.  And as they turned the wheel the professor was getting longer and longer.  Don’t make me too long, or I’ll look kind of goofy, sighed the professor as he grew longer and longer.  Suddenly something snaps.  What happened? sighs the professor from the rack.  We were just stretching an academic when suddenly something snapped; you may have heard it ...  Yes, I was there. Don’t you remember? sighs the professor.  And then we heard an academic sigh ...  Yes, I heard it, too, sighs the professor, it seemed to come from the rack where I was being stretched beyond my wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum ...
When the plowblade struck An old stump hiding under The soil like a beggar’s Rotten tooth, they swarmed up & Mister Jackson left the plow Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon. The horse was midnight Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not The way women shook their heads Before mirrors at the five & dime—a deeper connection To the low field’s evening star. He stood there, in tracechains, Lathered in froth, just Stopped by a great, goofy Calmness. He whinnied Once, & then the whole Beautiful, blue-black sky Fell on his back.
john lord knows you still vexed reckon me too if my wife stole off durin sleepy night god an de devil only souls up at dat hour even if i knows she bout to be sold south even if i knows she was leevin an you did you so troubled when i talk about leevin call me a fool call me cudjo five years wid you john yo wife bout to be sold away jus cus you free dis don’t worry you none you laugh dunno if i’d miss yo laugh if i was in de south tho thank ya jesus gotta room in philadelphia john aint big but clean nuf room for us some chirren too yo baby i aint too old jus yet jus round thirty-one i think make us a home john one  where we’s both free free from de lash’s shadow free like de lord mean got dis suit fo ya john aint nobody worn dese clothes befo walk proud in dese clothese dese is free mans cloths
dis suit of clothes jus as empty as a sky wid no stars two years a workin savin money den john drop out my heart i dont want ta see his wife i knows dat she is me i’se could go in shootin de rifle let my angry run free bes not just my temper risin no use stoking dead fire but ta see his face one mo time now lord jus you on high if he make do widout me now i can make do lord i can make do
I would have freed thousands mo, If dey had known dey were slaves. Harriet herd on da wind you come back fo me didn’t think you come back fo me didn’t think you come back at all been so long my skin grew tired dis life too hard to know all alone caroline cover me jus fine she a quilt ginst the cold in ma blood she mend de torn spots in ma soul aint got no mind ta leev dis place go on moses find yo promise lan mines is here beside dis fire wid folks we knows from when we’s born
He gossips like my grandmother, this man with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he chops: roast pork cut from a hog hung by nose and shoulders, her entire skin burnt crisp, flesh I know to be sweet, her shining face grinning up at ducks dangling single file, each pierced by black hooks through breast, bill, and steaming from a hole stitched shut at the ass. I step to the counter, recite, and he, without even slightly varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue, scribbles my order on a greasy receipt, and chops it up quick. Such a sorrowful Chinese face, nomad, Gobi, Northern in its boniness clear from the high warlike forehead to the sheer edge of the jaw. He could be my brother, but finer, and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged, sinewy from his daily grip and wield of a two-pound tool, he's delicate, narrow- waisted, his frame so slight a lover, some rough other might break it down its smooth, oily length. In his light-handed calligraphy on receipts and in his moodiness, he is a Southerner from a river-province; suited for scholarship, his face poised above an open book, he’d mumble his favorite passages. He could be my grandfather; come to America to get a Western education in 1917, but too homesick to study, he sits in the park all day, reading poems and writing letters to his mother. He lops the head off, chops the neck of the duck into six, slits the body open, groin to breast, and drains the scalding juices, then quarters the carcass with two fast hacks of the cleaver, old blade that has worn into the surface of the round foot-thick chop-block a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel. The head, flung from the body, opens down the middle where the butcher cleanly halved it between the eyes, and I see, foetal-crouched inside the skull, the homunculus, gray brain grainy to eat. Did this animal, after all, at the moment its neck broke, image the way his executioner shrinks from his own death? Is this how I, too, recoil from my day? See how this shape hordes itself, see how little it is. See its grease on the blade. Is this how I’ll be found when judgement is passed, when names are called, when crimes are tallied? This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open. Is this how I presided over my century, is this how I regarded the murders? This is also how I prayed. Was it me in the Other I prayed to when I prayed? This too was how I slept, clutching my wife. Was it me in the other I loved when I loved another? The butcher sees me eye this delicacy. With a finger, he picks it out of the skull-cradle and offers it to me. I take it gingerly between my fingers and suck it down. I eat my man. The noise the body makes when the body meets the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood into the ear; a lover’s heart-shaped tongue; flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; the butcher working at his block and blade to marry their shapes by violence and time; an engine crossing, re-crossing salt water, hauling immigrants and the junk of the poor. These are the faces I love, the bodies and scents of bodies for which I long in various ways, at various times, thirteen gathered around the redwood, happy, talkative, voracious at day’s end, eager to eat four kinds of meat prepared four different ways, numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables, each made by distinct affections and brought to table by many hands. Brothers and sisters by blood and design, who sit in separate bodies of varied shapes, we constitute a many-membered body of love. In a world of shapes of my desires, each one here is a shape of one of my desires, and each is known to me and dear by virtue of each one’s unique corruption of those texts, the face, the body: that jut jaw to gnash tendon; that wide nose to meet the blows a face like that invites; those long eyes closing on the seen; those thick lips to suck the meat of animals or recite 300 poems of the T’ang; these teeth to bite my monosyllables; these cheekbones to make those syllables sing the soul. Puffed or sunken according to the life, dark or light according to the birth, straight or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging on utter grotesquery. All are beautiful by variety. The soul too is a debasement of a text, but, thus, it acquires salience, although a human salience, but inimitable, and, hence, memorable. God is the text. The soul is a corruption and a mnemonic. A bright moment, I hold up an old head from the sea and admire the haughty down-curved mouth that seems to disdain all the eyes are blind to, including me, the eater. Whole unto itself, complete without me, yet its shape complements the shape of my mind. I take it as text and evidence of the world’s love for me, and I feel urged to utterance, urged to read the body of the world, urged to say it in human terms, my reading a kind of eating, my eating a kind of reading, my saying a diminishment, my noise a love-in-answer. What is it in me would devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it. I would eat the way he squats, the way he reaches into the plastic tubs and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan. I would eat that thrash and plunge of the watery body in the water, that liquid violence between the man’s hands, I would eat the gutless twitching on the scales, three pounds of dumb nerve and pulse, I would eat it all to utter it. The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking deaths in the streets, the death-far-from-home, the death- in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. I would devour this race to sing it, this race that according to Emersonmanaged to preserve to a hair for three or four thousand years the ugliest features in the world.
(John P. Altgeld, Governor of Illinois and my next-door neighbor, 1893-1897. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902.) Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone. Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. “We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced. They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced. They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you day after day, Now you were ended. They praised you . . . and laid you away. The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth, The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor, That should have remembered forever . . . remember no more. Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call, The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, A hundred white eagles have risen the sons of your sons, The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone, Time has its way with you there and the clay has its own. Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame— To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more . . . than to live in a name.
I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness. Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies— Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury. So he will be, though law be clear as crystal, Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony. Come, let us vote against our human nature, Crying to God in all the polling places To heal our everlasting sinfulness And make us sages with transfigured faces.
1 The lean hands of wagon men put out pointing fingers here, picked this crossway, put it on a map, set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns, found a hitching place for the pony express, made a hitching place for the iron horse, the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head, found a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,” saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling  people, shunting cars, shaping the junk of  the earth to a new city. The hands of men took hold and tugged And the breaths of men went into the junk And the junk stood up into skyscrapers and asked: Who am I? Am I a city? And if I am what is my name? And once while the time whistles blew and blew again The men answered: Long ago we gave you a name, Long ago we laughed and said: You? Your name is Chicago. Early the red men gave a name to the river,  the place of the skunk,  the river of the wild onion smell,  Shee-caw-go. Out of the payday songs of steam shovels, Out of the wages of structural iron rivets, The living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name, Tell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land: I am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men,  laughing men, a child, a belonging. So between the Great Lakes, The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie, The living lighted skyscrapers stand, Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,  streamers of smoke and silver,  parallelograms of night-gray watchmen, Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging. 6 The wheelbarrows grin, the shovels and the mortar  hoist an exploit. The stone shanks of the Monadnock, the Transportation,  the People’s Gas Building, stand up and scrape  at the sky. The wheelbarrows sing, the bevels and the blueprints  whisper. The library building named after Crerar, naked  as a stock farm silo, light as a single eagle  feather, stripped like an airplane propeller,  takes a path up. Two cool new rivets says, “Maybe it is morning.”  “God knows.” Put the city up; tear the city down;  put it up again; let us find a city. Let us remember the little violet-eyed  man who gave all, praying, “Dig and  dream, dream and hammer, till your  city comes.” Every day the people sleep and the city dies;  every day the people shake loose, awake and  build the city again. The city is a tool chest opened every day,  a time clock punched every morning,  a shop door, bunkers and overalls  counting every day. The city is a balloon and a bubble plaything  shot to the sky every evening, whistled in  a ragtime jig down the sunset. The city is made, forgotten, and made again,  trucks hauling it away haul it back  steered by drivers whistling ragtime  against the sunsets. Every day the people get up and carry the city,  carry the bunkers and balloons of the city,  lift it and put it down.  “I will die as many times  as you make me over again,  says the city to the people, I am the woman, the home, the family, I get breakfast and pay the rent; I telephone the doctor, the milkman, the undertaker;  I fix the streets  for your first and your last ride— Come clean with me, come clean or dirty, I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers;  I remember all you forget.  I will die as many times  as you make me over again.” Under the foundations, Over the roofs, The bevels and the blueprints talk it over. The wind of the lake shore waits and wanders. The heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles. The winkers of the morning stars count out cities And forget the numbers.
Tomb of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of the dead. The merchant prince gone to dust Commanded in his written will Over the signed name of his last testament Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips, For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance Around his last long home. (A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night. In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets. In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)
It seems so— I don’t know. It seems as if the end of the world has never happened in here. No smoke, no dizzy flaring except those candles you can light in the chapel for a quarter. They last maybe an hour before burning out. And in this room where we wait, I see them pass, the surgical folk— nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up the blood drop—ready for lunch, their scrubs still starched into wrinkles, a cheerful green or pale blue, and the end of a joke, something about a man who thought he could be— what? I lose it in their brief laughter.
A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher who kept the same store for fifty years. People remembered when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned with flower stalls and fish stands. The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks, by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings. News was stationed around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder-- but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting at the back of the statehouse, sat around on our desks, then went home early. The birds were still singing, the sun just going down. Working these long hours, you forget how beautiful the early evening can be, the big houses like ships turning into the night, their rooms piled high with silence.
His head rose like a torch in a tomb. Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium, The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out. A net of shadows dangled from wire-meshed windows. Buffeted there, there, some swam against currents Or were swept off into underwater canyons. Visitors, confusion streaming over them, speech Foaming into eddies, words lolling like jetsam On the lightless bottom, listened to the news Of minds crammed in bodies: Here, all was stoic Or hectic or unspeaking disconnection. Moving shadows on the TV screen implied A world out there, though a world more couth, More uncouth? in four o’clock’s slushy freezing dark: Plato’s cave loomed in semblance of the walls, Only wasn’t it the cave as All, no outside Not inside, nothing more real to go out into? He peered far down to where dark swam up From the depthless screen and hovered poised Above dark-in-light: Sergeant Schultz kept repeating, “I know nothing, nothing,” his funny-Nazi German accent As he recoils from his ever sauve tormentor, the American POW Colonel Hogan who threatens Schultz With good-humored ruthlessness as bad as a mother In a supermarket aisle cajoling her greedy-eyed child, “Ah ah ah—remember the Russian front!” —Poor Schultz’s accent making him more human in his terror, Though only an actor acting his lines through The canned laughter’s bacchic furor sweeping down The corridor to die in murmurs of slippers shushing. Cast yourself in it, imagine having to say those lines, Not just now, but always, eternity a chaos Of laugh-track frenzy more demonic than funny, Reruns of Hogan haunted by the actor Who acts Hogan’s lines, his real-life orgies Before a secret camera ending in his Glogotha, His infamy to be bludgeoned and found wrapped Naked in a shower curtain that hangs In the mind like the cave’s walls turning outside Inside outside inside no end or difference inside out —The almost see-through membrane of a world gone flat: He hunches forward to change the channel. Muttering something to Schultz’s “I know nothing, nothing,” A grim joke maybe, “Ain’t that the truth...” though really, Who could know what words he was or wasn’t Answering, who can hear above the roar of Earth moving under him, trying to throw him off As he clings to the sofa hurtling through space! And as he clings, the screen slowly opens and fans out wide Around the National Broadcasting Corporation peacock Waving its plumes, flaming blues, greens, radiant vermilions, Brilliance of the seasons, late-morning pastels Easy and restful for the brain and eye, Sempiternal hues Atlantis rose up and sank back into. And these feather off into grays, solid wintry Grays that give off nothing and reflect nothing back.
After lockdown, tier by tier undresses to sleep: Each skull nestles in its mattress-hollow. Wall facing wall inside of wall shrinks to a keyhole: A fly creeps through and starts to buzz, reeling through bars Down steel corridors. A dreamer’s eye follows the fly, And wherever the fly lands, the eye touches down With an airier Midas touch that turns all to glass: The eye wakes to Bentham’s panopticon, glazed cage Of an inspection house where only the Warden sees all. —I am asleep and not asleep, I stare up into faces swarming: Cellblocks of memory focus face by face, Mine flitting in and out of theirs: In prison issue They come, footsteps mingling over mine in a child’s game Of chase from yard to cell, only we’re all grown men, Meatier, less and more malign than A boy’s imagining himself grown... —I was asleep and not asleep, Faces came and went. Frank the Joker, the West Virginia biker, who composed “A rhyme to fit the crime”: “There was a young fellow named Frank Who gave his girlfriend a spank; She fell in a heap In front of Frank’s jeep And old Frank ran her down for a prank.” Or the white-haired lifer, densley oracular: “Sometimes, after lockdown, your thoughts Just don’t have the energy to climb the wall.” The Giggler who bolted His brother in a barn and burned it down, Eyes challenging, sly: “They killed this guy and see, I think this is funny, hilarious In fact, but you, you won’t think so—they cut off his dick And shoved it in his mouth.” Or the child molester who said about flowers At funerals: “They’re there, aren’t they, To hide the stink off the corpse?” Or Pat, armed robber Who held aloof: Rolled shirtsleeves, forearms Carved from basalt, smoke rings Lazily effusing: “The johns here, they got no doors: You ever try to take a shit while someone’s watching? It took six months to get used to that— But here, man, the bars feed on Time, they nibble It to nothing.” —I wanted to sleep and couldn’t sleep, I stared up into faces swarming. Three o’clock dark dissolves The walls, faces start to drift, their atoms Mix with concrete’s Atomic swirl, bodies get stuck Floating halfway through, heartbeats Booming as through a stethoscope: Like Michaelangelo’s slaves, if a fly Landed on their noses, They couldn’t lift a hand to brush it off. Dark velleities buzz in this hive of steel Where power handshakes Flower in forests Of interlocking fingers: In red prison uniform, a man On death row, convicted 1984, exonerated and pardoned October 2000 (New York Times, Dec. 10): “You could hear the humming of the chair Every time they cut it on, like an air-conditioner Cutting on. My daddy came to see me, he said, ‘What's that?’ I said, ‘The chair.’ The way they put it, they got to test the chair.” —I was asleep And couldn’t wake up. Inside my skull, glass Keeps shattering: Dream-beings Unsubscribed to the will, with insect bodies And human heads, dash against walls, mammal softness Of cheeks and lips join with stingers Pulsing...my eyes awake and not awake, where is the chamber As in the horror movie Return of the Fly that, circuitry and test-tubes Sparking, would unscramble these divided Natures? (They called me “Teach” As in “Hey, Teach, how do you spell...” When I confessed I’d been in jail, they looked disappointed in me: Their side of the wall was theirs, not mine.) —I tried to turn over, to look away, But couldn’t wake up, couldn’t not wake. Chemicals drip into a man’s veins, one each For heart, lungs, brain. Strapped to a table, he stares Impassive, eyes flickering shut, body A meat wall, IV tubes Almost empty... —I was asleep and not asleep, I couldn’t move to wake. I hear shrill wings—that fly inspecting bread crumbs Under dining hall tables while the Warden blares Descartes over the Intercom: “If a man’s head were lopped off His mouth would keep on moving, faultlessly Justifying his crimes.” But that fly, that speck against Steel, its wings steered in ways that seem crazy To eyes awake, not awake, Not seeing, all-seeing, the head unmoving Moving to turn away...oh seely fly I can’t not see, can’t move to brush away From my unsleeping eyes, you veer In spirals unflattened into pathos Of careening chaos, your eccentric Flight path darts Through bars, oh alas, hairy Vibrant fly!
I / omen What was going on in the New York American Black/red/green helmeted neon night? The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor  To the abyss—but it was someone else’s face Staring from the screen out at us, someone else’s face Saying something flashing from the teleprompter: Though what the face said was meant to reassure, Down in the abyss the footage kept playing, All of it looping back like children chanting The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting A classmate who doesn’t know the question: “Because it’s too far to walk” “Time to get a new fence” “A big red rock eater.” And as the images rewound And the face kept talking, the clear night sky Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept puring Itself out into the air like a voice saying something It can’t stop saying, some murky omen Like schoolkids asking: “Why do birds fly south?” “What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?” “What’s big, red and eats rocks?”  2 / in front of st. vincent’s A woman hugging another woman Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk. Nobody moved for a moment. They were an island caught at the tide turning: Such misery in two human bodies. Then the wearing away of the crowd Moving flowed over them and they  Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk.  3 / joke Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad, Laughter closed around them, they couldn’t Breathe, it was as if they were staring out From a space capsule porthole and were asking The void an imponderable riddle While orbiting so high up in space That the earth was less than the least hint Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night. (What was the joke about? Nobody knew.) And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates, Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed.  4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge  from the Greek Magical Papyri Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile, I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph. Dressed in the god’s power, I am the god, I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs, Founder of letters. As god calls on god I summon you to come to me, you Under the earth; arouse yourself for me, Great daimon, you the subterranean, You of the primordial abyss. Unless you tell me what I want to know, What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race And people, unless I know what has been And what shall be, unless I know their skills And practices and works and lives and names Of them and their fathers and mothers And brothers and friends, even of those now dead, I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal As an offering in a new-made jar and put it In the fire and burn beneath it what’s left Of the bones of all-praised Osiris, And I will shout in the port of Busiris The secrets of his mysteries, that his body, Drowned, remained in the river three days And three nights, that he, the praised one, Was carried by the river into the sea And surrounded by wave on wave on wave And by mist rising off water through the air. To keep your belly from being eaten by fish, To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths, To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep The fatherless child from being taken From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky From being brought down and the twin towering Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis From running amok and doing just what she wants, Not god or goddess will give oracles Until I know through and through Just what is in the minds of all human beings, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race And people, so that those who come to me. Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze, Neither one or the other higher or lower, And whether they speak or keep silent, I can tell them whatever has happened And is happening and is going to happen To them, and I can tell them their skills And their works and their names and those of their dead, And of every human being who comes to me I will read them as I read a sealed letter And tell them everything truthfully.  5 / from brooklyn bridge Sun shines on the third bridge tower: A garbage scow ploughs the water, Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond The city, pushing it all out so patiently— All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo Of maybe a head or maybe an arm. Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper, Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing, Its columns sway and topple into babble: All you’d see if you were out there Is air vanishing into clearer air.  6 / from the plane Pressed against our seats, them released to air, From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet Down to the ground desert-gray and still, Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon, No reminder of why it was we were all looking, Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman In front of me twisted her head back to see It all again, but up there there was nothing to see, Only the reef water feel of transparency Deepening down to a depth where everything Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs To that dark, darting in and out or undulating Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed.  7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection  from the Greek Magical Papyri This is the charm that will protect you, the charm That you must wear: Onto lime wood write With vermilion the secret name, name of The fifty magic letters. Then say the words: “Guard me from every daimon of the air, On the earth and under the earth, guard me From every angel and phantom, every Ghostly visitation and enchantment, Me, your suppliant.” Enclose it in a skin Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it.  8 / roll of film: photographer missing Vines of smoke through latticework of steel Weave the air into a garden of smoke. And in the garden people came and went, People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed In ash. What the pictures couldn’t say Was spoken by the smoke: A common language In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear Something about what it was they’d been forced To endure: Words spoken in duress, Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke And put forth shoots that twined through the steel, Words plunged through the roof of the garages’ Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this Tells and tells again one part of the story Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden, The camera’s eye open and acutely Recording in the foul-smelling air.  9 / lamentation on ur  from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C. Like molten bronze and iron shed blood  pools. Our country’s dead melt into the earth  as grease melts in the sun, men whose helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond  help, they lie still as a gazelle exhausted in a trap,  muzzle in the dust. In home after home, empty doorways frame the absence of mothers and fathers who vanished  in the flames remorselessly spreading claiming even  frightened children who lay quiet in their mother’s arms, now borne into oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea  by the surging current. May the great barred gate  of blackest night again swing shut on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn, may this disaster too be torn out of mind.
Branching the way blind fingers splay across The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into Space,  an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind,  Unappeasably inventive flow of “Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?—  or is his tongue wired To some source of inspired but as yet unknown Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he  Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees That screen him from me listening to his Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost Erotic keening over something I know too,  Everybody knows?—  and even if all it is Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy Of April budding in his mouth and sending down Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference—  Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about When we meet in the alley and slap palms Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide, Even then is he the vessel  of some signal that uses us, Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant  Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist: His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment Until that grip flings him loose— Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver, That influence bathing everything budding  in profane rays.
This prairie holds us with its plainness. An ugly wife. We would not stay but children comfort us and we need this flatness. On our table a carp with a tumor on its lip, larva eating its side. An old man laughs, one silver tooth in his head like a galvanized watertank. We are driven back into the land, our raccoon faces banded around the eyes with motorcycle goggles. Every car we had rusting in the yard. We saddle the buffalo and say we are captives. This barrenness holds us down like a wife.
Hunted and sung unhunted / unsung clump of loghouse / chaxed hill unuttered / unstrung clistered bow hunted and unsung hunted / strung hunted / sung.
The t(rain) again this morning, sky always gray, grain cars f(lying) like blackbirds with fieldseed in their bellies. The eight o five carrying g(rain) sings like tribes when they migrated north in summer across the plains following tracks of herds. High water into trees. The lake full of rain. We say it is someone else pushing down on the lake to make it spill over its edge. While we wait the woman earth sings with the tribes, transforms herself into all things. After the train b(rush) burning, the delay of smoke in the car comes after we have passed like sound. Rain hangs fringe from earth woman’s dress. She holds the delay of truth until it comes from our mouths. Coyotes sleep on her lap, birds fly into the b(ranches) of her hair while farther down the road the black snake train wiggles behind her ear.
I. We hang clothes on the line. His wide trousers and shirt, wind-beat, roar small thunder from one prairie cloud. The same rapple of flag on its pole. Half in fear, half in jest, we laugh. He calls us crow women. Our black hair shines in the sun and in the light from school windows. He drives his car to town, upsets the dust on buckboard hills. We sit on the fence when he is gone. Does he know we speak of thunder in his shirts? We cannot do well in his school. He reads from west to east, The sun we follow moves the other way. Crowbar. Our eyes come loose from words on the page in narrow rooms of the reservation school. He perceives and deciphers at once. For us written letters will not stay on the page, but fall like crows from the sky and hit against the glass windows of the school. Our day is night when we sit in rows of the classroom. Leaves in a whirlwind from sumac groves. Flock of crows are black starts on a white night. II. On the porch of the reservation school the blackbirds walk around our feet, fly into our head. They call our secret name. Dark corridors linger in our mind We whisper the plains to one another. We do not talk of what we cannot understand. Black and white fleckered dresses. Our face like our fathers. The sun is no enemy to the eye looking west. The brush thin as hair of old ones. It blinds the eye, makes fire on fields, flashes against windows like silver ribbons on burial robes. Hot late into the fall, windy, ready for cold to sweep in. The heat seems solid, but totters on the brink of winter. We laugh to ourselves when he returns to the reservation school for girls. Take his clothes from the line. Set the table with salt and pepper, spoon, knives. Cattails and milk-pods in a jar. We get lard from the basement, rub a place in the dusty window like a moon in the ancient sky. III. One hill larger than the others: an old buffalo with heavy head and whiskers nods at the ground, grazes in my dreams, one blade at a time. We stay in our stiff white-sheeted beds in the dormitory room. Buffalo wander in our dreams. White night-dresses. Black pods suspended in sumac groves like crows. In the sweat lodge of sleep we make our vision quest, black as pitch in crevice between crow feathers. We hang his thunder clothes in sleep, arms reach above our beds like willows blowing slowly by the creek. Quietly we choke, hold our wounded arms like papooses. Clothes beat on lines. Sumac groves and whirl of leaves: a shadow of our fathers at council fires. Red leaves, waxy as hay on fields. We dream of schoolrooms. Written letters on the wind. He reads crow-marks on the page but does not know crow.
Often the slightest gesture is most telling, As when he reaches tenderly in passing To pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall Of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: The way she doesn’t need to turn to know Who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her. It was as if he dreamed some private garden. Perhaps he woke from it, mid-reach, to find His hand too near her hair in this crowded yard, And maybe even now she’s shuttering in (She’s even better than you or I at that) A storm of worry and recrimination—Did anyone notice? how could he do that here!— By seamlessly continuing to tell you About her trip to see her favorite Vermeer This morning in the Delft show at the Met: “So now they say she isn’t weighing pearls Or gold or anything—it’s just the light Gleaming off empty scales.” So much is hard To know for sure. If I confronted her, She’d say it was just a leaf—who could afford To disagree? Could we? Now she’s explaining How the girl faces a mirror we can’t see into And how behind her hangs a gloomy painting Of the Last Judgment: “Over her head God Floats in a cloud,” she says, “like a thought balloon.”  But you don’t hear. You’re watching me. I nod.
I went to his sixty-sixth birthday dinner: sixteen years ago this past November. I remember that it was at Chelsea Central (his favorite restaurant: great steaks) on 10th Avenue, and that Ashbery was there, and a few others, including Joe, impeccably dressed and gracious, who picked up what must have been (I thought at the time) an exorbitant bill. I remember him saying more than once, “Joe always picks up the bill,” then smiling a slightly wicked smile. Sitting with him (those excruciating silences!) in his room at the Chelsea, my eyes would wander from his book- shelves (The Portrait of a Lady stood out) to the pan of water on the radiator to the records strewn on the floor to some scraggly plants (ivy? herbs?) in ceramic pots at the base of the French doors that opened to the balcony and balustrade and sound of traffic on 23rd Street six floors below. He read me “White Boat, Blue Boat” shortly after he wrote it, and a poem about Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia” that didn’t make it into his Last Poems, though I remember thinking it beautiful. He complained, in a letter to Tom, about how much I smoked, and how emotional I’d get during movies: he must have been referring to Field of Dreams (he had a yen for Kevin Costner). When he took me to see L'Atalante, a film he loved, I was bored. Once, we took the subway (he hadn’t ridden it in years) to the Frick; I remember admiring Romney’s Lady Hamilton. It hurt that he didn’t invite me to the dinner after his Dia reading or to the reception after his reading at the 92nd Street Y, though he did, at the latter, read “Mood Indigo,” dedicated to me. When he said my name from the stage, Joan and Eileen, sitting to my left, turned and stared at me; frozen by the enormity of the moment, I couldn’t look back. When he came to a reading I gave at St. Mark’s, Raymond impressed upon me what an honor it was: Jimmy didn’t go to many poetry readings. What else is there to say? That when I visited him at St. Vincent’s the day before he died Darragh said, “He likes to hear gossip.” So I said, “Eileen and I are talking again.” That at his funeral I sat alone (Ira couldn’t come); that that was the loneliest feeling in the world. That afterwards Doug said “You look so sad.” How should I have looked, Doug! And that a year after he died, I dreamt I saw him in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. He was wearing a hospital shift and seemed to have no muscle control over his face—like in inten- sive care after his stroke. He saw me and said, “It’s nice to see some familiar faces.” I approached him, but he disappeared.
The tortoise walks on tiptoe in June, the month of his ardors. Buttery light, distant thunder in the month of my ardors.
I have a sister who takes care of animals, whose artistry is flesh and blood mixed in with a dream or more she tries to give her son. He cuts school and drinks with his friends in the scrub woods behind the school. He thinks he wants to be an  architect;  he thinks the poems he writes are portions of his unmixed spirit. His habits of mind aren’t settled, ossifying so slowly for many of us, we can’t know, and no one can tell him anything about cigarettes, bad drugs, his fragile mortal spiral. He can’t cry anymore—it’s the wrong style of feeling—, and he only half knows that like his mother he will have to descend before he can break into nakedness, as if from the warmed surface of loam, from slug-soft matter that breathes or suppurates. My nephew Samuel has the same name as the son of the famous surgeon  Dr. Gross, painted by the American realist Thomas Eakins. Samuel chugs gin, takes his tokes, and helps his mother with preps— a Betadine swabbing, “like a ritual,” out from the site of the incision. He confuses his mother. In this poem I want to try to stand at their shoulders in the clinic. I think I could come near to swooning from the obscene odor in the air, but I can try to imagine something beyond the surgery, the fur and the glistening blood, and I wouldn’t leave them.— The flight of gray gulls over the bay accompanied my early wrestling with flesh, “Blue Suede Shoes” playing on the radio in my parents’ house. The fluency, then, of hands and lips threw seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant fluency when I was thirty. Then I believed in the beauty of Helen and sometimes, as the fullest truth, in the colored clouds above apple trees full of blossoms and the reddened fruit afterwards. In the end, of course, the fruit turns to mash, and wasps burrow drunkenly in the meat no longer crisp.— There is a terrible beauty in the speeches of Nestor after Agamemnon has called out the spirit of his army by inviting them to go home. Imagine the sober tones of the generals and the old king, his face a lifelong gallery of portraits, grizzled hair an aura, as he faces them with his counsel. From his lips a kind of honey mixing with the bitterness of those two quarreling. He asks them for their mettle, earth born, and leans, foreshortened, his robe exposing a scarred and whitened chest. A vignette of what we cannot learn, or outlast.— One who loves earth and the sun and animals stands over the necrotic thigh of a wolfhound with scapel and rongeur, a patina of antiseptic reddening the bare skin around the wound. The odors are a mixture of rotted flowers and fruit and the beautiful blood oozing from an incision  above a honeycomb of maggots, swollen, moving. If you can bear to stand close and look closely at the dissection, you will feel your own stomach turn and your nerves grow a little cleaner, and you may feel puzzled how a person would want to know that much anatomy. Wasn’t it like this for Michelangelo? This lesson of body? And the artist’s revulsion, someone trying to look beyond heroic contours of ruined flesh— softness of hip and buttocks—into the serum of spirit? To live while another no longer can live. This flesh and that muscle, and tinted spring forests, and mausoleums.
It was a life of exile under the trees. My father came to the stockyards. My mother from a farm. In 1952 or 2 my parents flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis to look for a house when my father was transferred. I think of them far above me small as birds when they flew, and the earth to them was a sandbox in our backyard where I made roads to a house I never found. I often think of wives in tract houses. The cows and pigs my father yarded before they walked up the ramp to the kill. Sometimes I thought we were together because of something terrible we had done. My father's Cherokee heritage tucked under some sort of shame. The past _______ What was it? I call to them above me no larger than a leaf.
To say screw them, to be screw-them bent on one thing all but lost, one music or mystery, beyond all the necessary incidental snaggings of the heart; to train the whole soul’s beam on a solitary hill, or on it a special kind of rock or creeper; to be sated just by saxophone; to want nothing but your eyes lifelong to study Scottish otters: the snub, slippery-whiskered snout; the way they intertwine in threes at play, indistinguishably bound, long sleek backs submerging away... To make of this your being’s aim, its joy, and know by pulse and viscus the word joy. No gifts but thine to thyself: thou canst, if thou list, single out, make good, one wish. This from the dumb lips of an old god who with one endless, misty hand holds out to us too much to love, and with the other—crooked-fingered, crazed with veins—some nights and days.
Now they to their slogged forthwendings tend, four hunters, guns askew like four unruly hairs, to start the rabbit or pheasant from hiding. But these cocks, wily, lie close and spy from covert or culvert the passing grim party and the rabbit keeps Viet-Cong-like to its digs. Here is no hunting horn and gargle of hounds among horse whinny and hoof stamp and ladies in smart hunting habits, though these four sport red in patterns motley or checkered and in hues fluorescent as road crewmen’s vests. Small wonder the game is not game, so uncouthly strikes the eye this drawling troupe of unshaven hope and choler and color. The roadside sparrows, come to dust, scatter before the headlong hum of him leather-crouched, helmet-missled over the speed-stretched oval wheels of his hundred-mile-per-hour crotch rocket all the way to Lone Tree past the six-foot Iowa corn, surprised cows and hogs and the high horse considering gravely over the fence this black burst of boots and gloves and goggles. So the goggle-eyed frog dives under a scum of ditch-vetched water fern and the blue-backed kestrel stoops from its crystal insulator perch and, gray as a piece of the paving, up springs the four-inch grasshopper splat! like a nicotine bullet in the teeth. Bearded buggy dads on their way to market, fine trotters high-stepping between shafts, broad-brim-hatted, blue-chambray-shirted, with black pants and black suspenders, sons like scrubbed minor replicas, dutiful daughters, eyes downcast among chatter of bonneted grannies and mothers, patriarchal grandfathers observing that rain must come as it always has, God’s will be done, and  brief gossip also among the elders of shunning a deacon caught in unnatural circumstances with a pig—the Devil’s own vessel!—and of Sister Sara, who’s soon to require the midwife, as the moon too is full almost.
On a damp June Saturday, as colorless As cellar stone, the working classes from Dun Laoghaire spread their picnic blankets, tins, And soda bread along the coastal cliffs. Two hundred feet below, the ocean knocks Debris and timber on the rock, and near The precipice, I watch a father swing His daughter out, as though to loose her on That long descent, past rookeries of gulls As intricate as mosques, through casual Alliances of mist and fog, and toward The cowlicked Irish Sea, as fathomless And bitter as their history. With each Return, the young girl cries out her delight, Then girds once more against the peril there: As though she knows no child is desired wholly; That there is not a mother, dreading birth, Who does not sometime curse her recklessness, Nor father, yoked to press or forklift truck, Who has not brooded on the chance of some Untimely accident. Pray God that such Black thoughts do not now reach like beggar’s mitts Into his mind, or better pray that he Has vowed, despite them all, not to permit His difficult and gnarled grip to give.
Forty degrees; the threat of rain. That time of fall  When we are most inclined to end it all. Denim-jacketed, with a faded sweatshirt hood,  He draws his plane along a length of wood,  Then takes a chisel to a cornice piece  With two light taps. His movements never cease; His cracked and callused hands, in gloves with fingers cut, Rub up for warmth, then start like hares hawked by his thought. He knows no other work; wants none. He learned this from  His father—brace and auger, bob and plumb— The same way he learned how to hunt or take a beating:  Not by words but by a look, and by repeating  Mutely each grimace, wince, set of the jaw.  His job is more than workmanlike. No flaw Or gap offends the eye. Each post and bull-nose stair Seems proof of love—if love is proved by excess care.
Shunning the British tourist bus, we walk, My child and I, the West Woods where, like dogs Who know their death is due, the wounded took Themselves to give up hope. The horror begs Imagining—the soldiers hauling limbs Hacked off or messmates dead, and everywhere, Mixed with the summer scent of swelling plums, A stench of putrid flesh and burning hair. Here Lee was turned. That night the forest filled With muttered names of loved ones left, and cries From mangled soldiers pleading to be killed. Seeing my distant look, my daughter tries My sleeve: “What is it, what?” she asks, and I Say “nothing, nothing”—though “nothing” is a lie.
The sinew of the hickory that grips The axe, the rasp of salt against the skin, Or rockbound earth that shines the steel plough In spring, are thought along our coast to lend A native character, though none can match The force of grief: compare the fisherman’s Scored cheeks; the ligaments that rope the necks Of lumberjacks; or the farmer’s gnarled wrist— Compare these with the widow’s fisted look, Then judge who has the most to bear. Think of The ghost that each night slips between her sheets Or of the sudden joy of being alone Which troubles her for weeks. And you, who thought Him mean, or too devoted to his drink, Consider how the common fingerstones, Bathed in the tidal slabs, grow luminous.
Southbound, downwardly mobile in A knocking ten-year-old LeSabre, Totaled once and salvaged, rust Gnawing at the rocker panels like Fire at the curtains in a melodrama, I imagine those for whom such news Must matter: sauve, smooth-featured types, Untroubled by the odd details Of racing forms or powerball, Who, while I drove truck or counted stock, Were wisely planning their estates, Diversifying portfolios, or buying A summer place with acreage. Yet how their evening now is shot! How flat the chardonnay, how bland The tips of tenderloin must taste! Of course, it’s not the Dow alone— The dollar’s through the roof, T-bills Have plunged, and, even now, the wife Is pussyfooting at the club. How birdsong-sweet and full of joy Seems my life by comparison: The Gulf’s two hours off, where rigs Pound at the solar plexus of The earth, and where, on moonlit nights, Perfumed mulattoes weave like snails By the shore, leaving shining trails.
All my life I was face to face with her, at meal-times, by the fire, even in the ultimate intimacies of the bed. You could have asked, then, for information about her? There was a room apart she kept herself in, teasing me by leading me to its glass door, only to confront me with my reflection. I learned from her even so. Walking her shore I found things cast up from her depths that spoke to me of another order, worshipper as I was of untamed nature. She fetched her treasures from art’s storehouse: pieces of old lace, delicate as frost; china from a forgotten period; a purse more valuable than anything it could contain. Coming in from the fields with my offering of flowers I found her garden had forestalled me in providing civilities for my desk. ‘Tell me about life,’ I would say, ‘you who were its messenger in the delivery of our child.’ Her eyes had a fine shame, remembering her privacy being invaded from further off than she expected. ‘Do you think death is the end?’ frivolously I would ask her. I recall now the swiftness of its arrival wrenching her lip down, and how the upper remained firm, reticent as the bud that is the precursor of the flower.
Not yet summer, but unseasonable heat pries open the cherry tree. It stands there stupefied, in its sham, pink frills, dense with early blooming. Then, as afternoon cools into more furtive winds, I look up to see a blizzard of petals rushing the sky. It is only April. I can’t stop my own life from hurrying by. The moon, already pacing.
What etiquette holds us back from more intimate speech, especially now, at the end of the world? Can’t we begin a conversation here in the vestibule, then gradually move it inside? What holds us back from saying things outright? We’ve killed the earth. Yet we speak of other things. Our words should cauterize all wounds to the truth.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylonbabylon Once a great city in Biblical times, see Psalms 137. both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge betweenbetween / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” starshine and clay,between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”  my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the BasementBasement i.e., the bottom of the ocean Came out to look at me – And FrigatesFrigates fast and highly maneuverable warships of the 18th and 19th centuries, used to escort other larger ships, or to patrol the coast and blockade harbors – in the Upper Floor Extended Hempen HandsHempen Hands strong, thick ropes made of hemp, used on ships – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – oponopon upon the Sands – But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt And past my BoddiceBoddice bodice; an upper part of a woman’s dress, or a rigid, laced corset worn underneath clothing, covering the upper part of a woman’s body – too – And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – And then – I started – too – And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl – Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew –
for Ros Krauss Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.
We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.
Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. New Year’s Day— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children. Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat. Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf? Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist. Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t. All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. Napped half the day; no one punished me!
I take pillows outdoors to sun them as my mother did. “Keeps bedding fresh,” she said. It was April then, too— buttercups fluffing their frail sails, one striped bee humming grudges, a crinkle of jonquils. Weeds reclaimed bare ground. All of these leaked somehow into the pillows, looking odd where they simmered all day, the size of hams, out of place on grass. And at night I could feel some part of my mother still with me in the warmth of my face as I dreamed baseball and honeysuckle, sleeping on sunlight.
My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.
I am looking for the photo that would make all the difference in my life. It’s very small and subject to fits of amnesia, turning up in poker hands, grocery carts, under the unturned stone. The photo shows me at the lost and found looking for an earlier photo, the one that would have made all the difference then. My past evades me like a politician. Wielding a fly-swatter, it destroys my collection of cereal boxes, my childhood lived close to the breakfast table. Only that photo can help me locate my fourteen lost children, who look just like me. When I call the Bureau of Missing Persons, they say, “Try the Bureau of Missing Photos.” They have a fine collection. Here’s one of Calvin Coolidge’s seventh wedding. Here’s one of a man going over a cliff on a dogsled. Here’s my Uncle Arthur the night he bought the prize peacock. O photo! End your tour of the world in a hot air balloon. Resign your job at the mirror-testing laboratory. Come home to me, you little fool, before I find I can live without you.
Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English cuando we go into Sears okay Por qué Porque didn’t you hear lo que pasó It say on the eleven o’clock news anoche que two robbers was caught in Sears and now this is the part I’m not completely segura que I got everything porque channel 2 tiene tú sabes that big fat guy that’s hard to understand porque his nose sit on his lip like a elefante pues the point es que the robbers the police say was two young men pretty big y one have a hairy face and the other is calvo that’s right he’s baldy and okay believe me qué barbaridad porque Hairy Face and Mister Baldy goes right into the underwear department takes all the money from the caja yeah uh-huh the cash register and mira Mister Baldy goes to this poor Italian woman that I guess would be like us sixty o sixty-five who is in the section  of the back-support brassieres and he makes her put a big bra over her head para que she can’t see nothing and kneel like she’s talking to God to save her poor life and other things horrible pero the point como dije es que there was two of them and both was speaking Spanish y por eso is a good thing Conchita so the people at Sears don’t confuse us with Hairy and Baldy that we speak English only okay ready  Oh what a nice day to be aquí en Sears Miss Conception
What the scale tells you is how much the earth has missed you, body, how it wants you back again after you leave it to go forth into the light. Do you remember how earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock you in their arms, warm in the flow that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin, and finally to stoke you, body, drumming intimate coded messages through music you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming and your poems and your obedient blood. Body, how useful you became, how lucky, heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad, sometimes, imagining that greedy zero you must have been, that promising empty sack of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow. But look at you now, body, soft old shoe that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.
In the aftermath of calculus your toast fell butter-side down. Squirrels swarmed the lawns in flight patterns. The hovercraft helped the waves along. From every corner there was perspective. On the billboards the diamonds were real, in the stores, only zirconia. I cc’ed you. I let you know. Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo. Dinner would be meager & reminiscent of next week’s lunch. So what if I sat on the sectional? As always I was beside myself.
I’m a tranquilizer. I’m effective at home. I work in the office. I can take exams on the witness stand. I mend broken cups with care. All you have to do is take me, let me melt beneath your tongue, just gulp me with a glass of water. I know how to handle misfortune, how to take bad news. I can minimize injustice, lighten up God’s absence, or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face. What are you waiting for— have faith in my chemical compassion. You’re still a young man/woman. It’s not too late to learn how to unwind. Who said you have to take it on the chin? Let me have your abyss. I’ll cushion it with sleep. You’ll thank me for giving you four paws to fall on. Sell me your soul. There are no other takers. There is no other devil anymore.
To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs all along
What seemed a mystery was in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.  What seemed a memory was in fact a dividing line. Insert bird for wind.  Insert wind for departure when everyone is standing still. Insert three mountains burning and in three valleys a signal seer seeing a distant light and a signal bearer sprinting to a far-off bell. What seemed a promise was in fact a sigh.  What seemed a hot wind, a not quite enough,  a forgive me, it has flown away, is in fact.  In the meantime we paint the floors red. We stroke the sound of certain names into a fine floss that drifts across our teeth. We stay in the room we share and listen all night to what drifts through the window— dog growl, owl call, a fleet of mosquitoes setting sail, and down the road,  the swish of tomorrow’s donkey-threshed grain.
Three teenage girls in tight red sleeveless blouses and black Capri pants And colorful headscarves secured in a knot to their chins Are walking down the hill, chatting, laughing, Cupping their cigarettes against the light rain, The closest to the road with her left thumb stuck out Not looking at the cars going past. Every Friday night to the dance, and wet or dry They get where they’re going, walk two miles or get a ride, And now the two-door 1950 Dodge, dark green Darkening as evening falls, stops, they nudge Each other, peer in, shrug, two scramble into the back seat, And the third, the boldest, famous For twice running away from home, slides in front with the man Who reaches across her body and pulls the door shut.
I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure:— But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
1 As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows, Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types. 2 As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. 3 You oceans both, I close with you, We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why, These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all. You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores, I too am but a trail of drift and debris, I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island. I throw myself upon your breast my father, I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, I hold you so firm till you answer me something. Kiss me my father, Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love, Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy. 4 Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,) Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother, Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me, Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you. I mean tenderly by you and all, I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine. Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another, From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil, Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown, A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random, Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature, Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets, We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you, You up there walking or sitting, Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.
The animals are leaving the safety of the trees Light sensors respond to the footfall of every guest To retard the growth of algae The fishes must be moved from the window Stiller than water she lies As in a glass dress As if all life might come to its end within the radius of her bed Beyond the reef of trees a beach cannot be seen the bay itself barely breathing In the other wing of the house a small boat awaits elucidation
Ice on the puddles, in the cups of fallen leaves. I’d walk with Dad and a handful of other men, the setters working the fields, the underbrush. It was my job to carry the birds. I’d have them all plucked by the time we got back to the car. On the walk out I’d look for puddles I’d missed and break them. Though many moonless nights have fallen on the grave like a negative of snow, Dad’s wheelchair sometimes flashes in my mind, and I hear the bleating down the hall, a voice berating its god, his worthless anodynes, and the doctors who were at that very moment increasing his morphine, having failed to note the word alcoholic on his chart, meaning that his damaged liver routed the opiates straight to his brain, his beautiful fragile brain, which I had not yet finished loving. My father, who still had manners, who was a hardwood, a tough tree. That was his first death.
My bonsai teacher says to quit doing it like a girl. I’m pruning the root-ball of a Podocarpus, or Buddhist pine, trained semicascade. The first time Dad fell, the femur broke in eleven places due to his artificial knee (titanium and steel). A rod screwed to the bones in thirteen places didn’t work, and the graft stayed weak. For two years he fought his wheelchair into near submission. The grand finale was him riding it down two flights of stairs without tipping over or falling out. The nurses loved him. The last time I called tech help I got George in Salt Lake, at work at six in the morning their time. He was very helpful. I offered to write a note for his file, but he said, It’s OK, Chase. Your compliment is enough.
At first he seemed a child, dirt on his lip and the sun lighting up his hair behind him. All around us, the hesitation of year-rounders who know the warmer air will bring crowds. No one goes to their therapist to talk about how happy they are, but soon I’d be back in the dugout telling my batting coach how the view outside my igloo seemed to be changing, as if the night sky were all the light there is. Now, like two babies reaching through the watery air to touch soft fingers to soft forehead, like blind fish sensing a familiar fluttering in the waves, slowly, by instinct, we became aware. Off-field, outside the park, beyond the gates, something was burning.  The smell was everywhere.
There is a theory of crying that tears are the body’s way of releasing excess elements from the brain. There is a theory of dreaming that each one serves to mend something torn, like cells of new skin lining up to cover a hole. I’m not one to have dreams about flying, but last week we were thirty feet above the bay—this was where we went to discuss things, so that no matter what we decided it was only we two out there, and we’d have to fly back together. I’m not one to have dreams where animals can speak, but last night a weeping mare I’d been told to bridle wanted me to save her. We discussed what was left of her ability to take children for rides—how much trot, how much canter— but I wasn't sure I could do it, having already bridled her and all. I was once very brave. Once I was very brave. I was very brave once. I boarded a plane before dawn. I carried all those heavy bags. I stayed up the whole night before folding the house into duffel bags. I took a curl from the base of your skull and opened the door to the rusty orange wagon and weighed those heavy duffel bags and smiles at the airport official. I boarded a tiny propeller plane and from a tiny window I watched you walk back to the rusty orange station wagon. They say the whole world is warming by imperceptible degrees. I watched the rusty orange wagon go whizzing by.
With a boil the size of an egg protruding from her right hip, she knows what I must do, and to stall me has locked herself inside the bathroom, bargaining for a way out. But it’s too late: I’ve seen the oozing wounds stopped up with bits of toilet paper and tape, the scarified pockets that crater the surface of her arms, buttocks, thighs. A mean fix torched her last vein years ago, and she’s been banging the dope ever since, puncturing her body like a juju doll. She wants to kick, but not now.I’m not gonna lie to you, she says in a velvet voice. I already know what she’s after: something stronger than local, a few Percocet, a shot of Demerol before she’ll let me begin. All I can tell you is, when the abscess finally drains the odor is so foul it’s evil. And I’m not sure, driving home later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus, whether it’s merely hallucination, the way her memory inhabits me; or if being in that same room, inhaling that same air, made some of her part of me.  And whose veins are these, beginning to twitch?
When I woke, the waves had gone black, turning over the macerated curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge onto the beach. Some storm far out, I thought, had ravaged the sea, stirred up its bed, sent the whole mess flying to shore. At my feet I found a grave of starfish, broken and gnarled among the fleshy snipes and heads. Every shade of death covered the sand. It looked hopeless in the pale day but for the birds, a congress of gulls, terns, and the rarest plovers, calm for once, satiated, a measure of the one law: this sea will claim it all— feed them, catch them, grind their complicated bones.
When the mule balked, he hit him sometimes with the flat of a hand upside the head; more often the stick he carried did its angry trick. The mule’s job was to power the press, iron on iron that wrung the sugar out of cane, circling under the coarse beam attached to his shoulders and neck. That mule of my childhood was black, remained blackly obedient as round and round he made himself the splintered hand of a clock, the groan and squeak of machinery chewing the reedy stalks to pulp, each second delivering another sweet thin drop into the black pot at the center. He hit him with a rag, old headrag, but the animal winced only with the thrash of a cane stalk itself—he squinted under the rule of that bamboo. The sun was another caning on his black-hot flesh. He was slow as the blackstrap syrup the boiled sugar made, so true to the circle he dragged we hardly saw him. We loved the rustling house of green cane, blind in that field of tropical grasses whose white plumes announced the long season’s wait. We yearned for the six-foot stem, the eventual six pieces the machete sliced at the joints, then the woody exterior peeled back lengthwise with a blade. It was a black hand we waited for, his job to lay bare the grainy fiber we chewed. That juice on our tongues was his sweetness at work. Chester was his name, he kept the mule.
It is not the angel riding a goat, trying to make him go. It does no work with refusal or guilt, which loves only its contorted self. But fancies instead my terrier’s long pink tongue, how it teases out the bone’s marrow, tasting with all its muscle. The angel is silver, but so is the goat and the box on which they perch, a Victorian gesture in the mansion where I spent the fall. They have followed me home, their permanent shine presuming, while around me, everything withered, slowly froze, and began its turn toward white. The snow is nothing but a great emptiness, and I’m tired of trying to find a secret there. But look—one leaf skittering across the glazed surface catches its stem to stand upright, the shape of a hand waving.
It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills. The wild geese are flying northwards. Here is the north, here is Stockholm swimming palaces and hovels. The logs in the royal fireplace collapse from Attention to At Ease. Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes, but the city wells breathe heavily. Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas are carried by night over the North Bridge. The cobblestones make them stagger mamselles loafers gentlemen. Implacably still, the sign-board with the smoking blackamoor. So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The heat reaches islands far out. The village doors are open, except one. The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence. The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience. It happened like this, or almost. It is an obscure family tale about Erik, done down by a curse disabled by a bullet through the soul. He went to town, met an enemy and sailed home sick and grey. Keeps to his bed all that summer. The tools on the wall are in mourning. He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter of night moths, his moonlight comrades. His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain against the iron-bound tomorrow. And the God of the depths cries out of the depths ‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’ All the surface action turns inwards. He’s taken apart, put together. The wind rises and the wild rose bushes catch on the fleeing light. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only  every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.
The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over and the grass shook itself in the coal dust. Beaten black and blue by the night’s dreams we board the train that stops at every station and lays eggs. Almost silent. The clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water. And someone’s inexorable cough scolding everything and everyone. A stone idol moves its lips: it’s the city. Ruled by iron-hard misunderstandings among kiosk attendants butchers metal-workers naval officers iron-hard misunderstandings, academics! How sore my eyes are! They’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm lamps. November offers caramels of granite. Unpredictable! Like world history laughing at the wrong place. But we hear the clang of the church bells’ buckets fetching water every Wednesday - is it Wednesday? - so much for our Sundays!
I have hidden inside a sea shell but forgotten in which. Now daily I dive, filtering the sea through my fingers, to find myself. Sometimes I think a giant fish has swallowed me. Looking for it everywhere I want to make sure it will get me completely. The sea-bed attracts me, and I’m repelled by millions of sea shells that all look alike. Help, I am one of them. If only I knew, which. How often I’ve gone straight up to one of them, saying: That’s me. Only, when I prised it open it was empty.
Between people’s ideals and their realization there is always a greater drop than in the highest of waterfalls. This potential gradient can be exploited rationally, if we build a sort of power station above it. The energy it supplies, even if we use it only to light our cigarettes, is something anyway; for while one is smoking one can very seriously think up ideals even crazier.
I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid whose verses like the Romanian coast roll along so wide and subdued: waves that wait for the ice to break. My poet, you that make what I sing to thousand years old, ancient boundary stone on the edge of the Romanian language, you the gulls have elected on to the governing board of our  epics, of our song-grief you turned into Latin and gave to the wind to carry to Rome and there, chiselled into the column, await the Dacian prisoners. You the first whom nostalgia, our dor, ate up in those fields where the dust is sweet. You the first to put your trust like a child in poetry’s spellbinding power and in help from abroad. Sooner the Emperor would have sent experts to you at Tomi, to change the climate, than see you back home, your airy fame back in the purple of his retainers. Who, he has said himself, could be better suited to stand on the shore of the Pontus Euxinus, observing how gradually it becomes the Black Sea, than a poet, a good one, and one of repute—whom shall we send then,  whom? And the choice fell on you, Ovid. You were the first to occur to him because you had just begun to be known, appreciated and talked about like a bitter-sweet herb—that was your predicament. Augustus liked your elegies, but only from a distance, where they had the remedial effect the physicians prescribed, an agreeable melancholy, after meals especially, when they  repeated on him... The elegies were a medicine prescribed by the physicians  to save the Empire. He even said: ‘Why hasn’t that boy sent us anything lately? Force him to work, pinch him a bit, so that he’ll grow sad and Pontic, this wind is troubling me again, I’m gulping air...’ ‘People are asking why you had to relegate him,’ a senator  timidly interjected. ‘Suggest to them that he subverted the Empire,’ the Emperor  cynically smiled. ‘Morally or materially?’—the exalted servant seemed hard  of hearing. ‘What, are you trying to drive me into a quandary? Both, let’s  say, a bit of each. Ovid has done immense material and moral harm to Latinity, and the citizens are indignant. Or perhaps,’ he considered, ‘moral would be better, after all we are an Imperium and don’t stint the expenses of a poet, but in moral matters we’re strict: so, he corrupted  our youth.’ Next day Augustus had second thoughts: ‘No, for the time being no explanations, for anyone, till we’ve thought of something more plausible’; and, to  change the subject, ‘What's Horace doing?’ ‘It's taken hold of him too, he’s writing no more odes but only epodes, nothing but epodes, an obscure  sort of gibberish, what shall we do about Horace, will he too become a case?’ ‘Let him be, let him be. Let’s wait and see how he develops,  he may have talent. Maecenas and his house, after all, will take care of the cost and we shall send him the bill with a troop of a hundred men. But as for Ovid, he shall stay for a while yet at Tomi, and no one shall hurt a hair of his head. We shall think it over, mediate, consult the augurs too. No precipitous measures, where poets are concerned.’ Two thousand years have passed, and the Emperor has not hit on appropriate action, he’s thinking still. But you must not give up hope, Ovid, you will be pardoned. The matter was only provisional, an emergency, so be patient, the problem will be resolved, as I said, when circumstances  permit. I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid, the poet whose lines of fortune and arteries my earth senses when he raises the Dobruja’s broad hand to his brow.
When I hurt you and cast you off, that was buccaneer work: the sky must have turned on the Bay that day and spat. We’d tarried on corners, we’d dallied on sofas, we were in progress, do you see? Yet stormcloud bruises bloomed where once we touched. The walls swam under minty fever; we failed to reach the long, low sleep of conquerors. Since I played wrong and you did too, since we were wrong, we need apologies; for your part in this sorry slip of hearts, you should walk on Golden Hill at night alone; for mine I will hang with my enemies, out on the long shore, our brigand bodies impaled on the horns of our failures, the cold day casting draughts through our brinkled bones.
The kilted porter shook my hand in welcome, drained it of blood and gave me back my luggage. I signed the register in my own name for the first time in my life of low celebrity. In the lounge bar, there were pictures by Margarita but no sign of margaritas by the pitcher. All night, the couple in the next-door room failed noisily to make love even once. The signature tune of the air conditioning was a surface B-side for any one-hit-wonder. Weary, I ordered up the late night menu from room service, but sleep wasn’t on it so, after an hour of mentally undressing myself, I donned the pyjamas with the killer bee motif and there on the bed I wrote a dozen identical postcards to friends I’d forgotten. No doubt to keep the cold tap company, the hot tap had opted to be a cold tap too. Funnel-web spiders wove their lazy way toward each other across the scarlet ceiling and when I solved the riddle of the shower, no blood came gushing, but no water either. By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world; in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint of someone else’s mother’s milk, turned to fur. The TV had one channel, showing highlights from my worst performances in every sphere. At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir sang a barbershop version of ‘I Will Survive’. The only time I dared to close my eyes, dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty. When I left at nine and settled my check, they told me clearly Don't come back.
For the first time, I listen to a lost and secret recording of us making love near-on ten years ago. I recognize your voice, your sounds, though if I knew no better, I could be any man in any room. After, the rising sounds of rising and of dressing and once as you step up close to the deck, perhaps to pick up shoes, you sing the chorus of Sunday Morning. I call on you to hurry and we leave. It does not end then; the tape rolls on. A few late cars which sigh by might have passed us walking away triumphant, unaware we’ve left behind this mop and mow mechanism of silence to which we may never return.
For once, I felt wanted, dead or alive, the day my fame outgrew the Famous Five. There came a time I could give no more to the other guys in the Gang of Four and I felt the dead weight fall from me when I unyoked the clowns of the Crucial Three. I considered all this as I boarded the bus to quit the town not big enough for both of us. One eye didn’t seem so much to leave behind as I sped to my job in the kingdom of the blind.
The man I could have been works for a vital institution, is a vital  institution. Without him, walls will crumble, somewhere, paint will peel. He takes a catch. He is outdoorsy and says It was a nightmare and means the traffic. He’s happy to watch a film and stops short of living in one. The man I could have been owns a Subaru pickup the colour of   cherry tomatoes. He’s in the black, not in the dark. His mother is calm. Women keep his baby picture in the windownooks of wallets. No one dies on him. The man I could have been owns bits of clothes not worn by   uncles first. He has no need of medicine. He walks from Powderhall to Newington in twenty minutes. He plays the piano a little. Without him, havens buckle, sickbeds bloom. The man I could have been lives locally. He is quietly algebraic. Without him, granite will not glister. And when he sees a crisis, he does not dive in feet first. He votes, for he believes in their democracy. The man I could have been has a sense of direction. For him, it was never Miss Scarlet with the dagger in the kitchen. He knows his tilth and sows his seed. He’ll make a father. He is no maven nor a connoisseur. The man I could have been has a season ticket at Tynecastle. He comes in at night and puts on The Best of U2 He browses. He puts fancy stuff in his bathwater. He doesn’t lace up his life with secrets. The man I could have been was born on a high horse. He knows the story of the Willow Pattern. He had a dream last night you’d want to hear about and remembers the words to songs. His back is a saddle where lovers have ridden. The man I could have been has a sovereign speech in him he’s   yet to give. He might well wrassle him a bear. He is a man about town. He has the exact fare on him. Without him, motley trauma. The man I could have been, he learns from my mistakes. He never thought it would be you. And no one says he’s looking rather biblical. He has no need of London and walks the middle of the road for it is his. The man I could have been is quick and clean. He is no smalltown Jesus nor a sawdust Cesear. Without him, salt water would enter your lungs. He doesn’t hear these endless xylophones. That’s not him lying over there.
Take this: for nothing here’s chiming, vibrating and all this vainglory and self-deprecating just goads at the tender parts, gets irritating. You’ll make no advance advocating monopoly on any vocabulary; even cacophony needs the needle to make its point properly. It’s true that you find yourself fey and bewitching, yet always you feel that the itch that you’re scratching’s soothed better by far by bravadoes of bitching. The off-pat flyting, back-biting and threnody you render and throw up, at will, won’t remedy the rot of your serenading, lute-laden wannabe. You can’t see a barrier without pushing through it; it’s a poor pearl of pathos you don’t disintuit and you now give a doing when once you’d just do it. You want my advice? Here it is: try removing the self from your argument - gluts of self-loving just pudding the gut of whatever you’re proving. That’s it on the chin and I’m sure you can take it, but that shadow you’re boxing is me, so please break it gently. Best wishes, I hope that you make it.
Fish  always accurately know where to move and when,  and likewise  birds have an accurate built-in time sense  and orientation. Humanity, however,  lacking such instincts resorts to scientific  research. Its nature is illustrated by the following  occurrence. A certain soldier  had to fire a cannon at six o’clock sharp every evening.  Being a soldier he did so. When his accuracy was  investigated he explained: I go by  the absolutely accurate chronometer in the window  of the clockmaker down in the city. Every day at seventeen  forty-five I set my watch by it and  climb the hill where my cannon stands ready.  At seventeen fifty-nine precisely I step up to the cannon  and at eighteen hours sharp I fire. And it was clear  that this method of firing was absolutely accurate.  All that was left was to check that chronometer. So  the clockmaker down in the city was questioned about  his instrument’s accuracy. Oh, said the clockmaker,  this is one of the most accurate instruments ever. Just imagine,  for many years now a cannon has been fired at six o’clock sharp.  And every day I look at this chronometer  and always it shows exactly six. Chronometers tick and cannon boom.
Given an old woman and given a barrow. I.e. the system old woman O and barrow B. The system is moving from the paved yard Y to the corner C,  from the corner C to the Stone S, from the stone S  to the forest F, from the forest F to the horizon H. The horizon H is the point where vision ends  and memory begins. Nevertheless the system is moving  at a constant velocity v,  along a constant path,  through a constant destiny, renewing its impulse and its meaning  from within itself. A relatively independent system: in landscapes from horizon to horizon always just one old woman with a barrow. And thus we have, once and for all,  that geodetic unit, the  unit of travel there and back, the  unit of autumn, the  unit Our daily bread, the  unit of wind and lowering sky, the  unit of the distance home, the  unit As we forgive them, the  unit of nightfall, the  unit of footsteps and dust, the  unit of life-fulfillment Amen.
It used to be more private—just the immediate family gathered after mass, the baptismal font at the rear of the church tiny as a bird bath. The priest would ladle a few teaspoons’ tepid holy water on the bundled baby’s forehead, make a crack about the halo being too tight as the new soul wailed. We’d go home to pancakes and eggs. These days it’s a big Holy-wood production— midmass, the giant altar rolls back to reveal a Jacuzzi tub surrounded by potted palms. The priest hikes up his chasuble, steps barefoot out of his black leather loafers and wades in like a newfangled John as organ music swells and the baby-bearing families line up like jumbo jets ready for takeoff. But when the godparents handed my niece’s newborn naked to their parish priest, and he dunked her into the Jacuzzi’s bath-warm holy water, her little one grew so calm and blissful she pooped—not a smelly three-days’ worth, explosive diaper load, but enough to notice. As the godparents scooped the turds with a handkerchief, the savvy priest pretended he hadn’t seen, swept through the fouled water with his palm before the next baby in line was submerged. After mass, my niece sat speechless, red-faced, not knowing what to say— or whether—as church ladies, friends, and family members presented one by one to the tub where the babies had been baptized. As they knelt and bowed and dipped their fingers in, and blessed themselves.
You take a kitchen-mallet and a knife and hit the right spot, so it doesn’t jerk, for jerking means only complications and reduces profit. And the watchers already narrow their eyes, already admire the   dexterity, already reach for their purses. And paper is ready for wrapping it up. And smoke rises from chimneys. And Christmas peers from windows, creeps along the ground and splashes in barrels. Such is the law of happiness. I am just wondering if the carp is the right creature. A far better creature surely would be one which—stretched out—held flat—pinned down— would turn its blue eye on the mallet, the knife, the purse, the paper, the watchers and the chimneys and Christmas, And quickly say something. For instance These are my happiest days; these are my golden days. Or The starry sky above me and the moral law within me, Or  And yet it moves. Or at least Hallelujah!
"F. . . the oven is an F" Samantha Foggle, age 3 Oh, to hear the world with such clarity. Such surety. To know the note of your breakfast chat is B-flat minor. That the ’57 Chevy stalled outside the garage is a D. To recognize the Apricot kitchen paint for what it is: F-sharp. To understand the way you feel for him is G,definitely a G. And as you watch him descend the scale of the front steps to his car for work, the house quiets to an A. The arpeggio of last night’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor still ringing in your ears.
They sap man’s substance as moon the dew. A rope grows erect from the crown of the head. A black swan hatches from a pebble. And a flock of angels in the sky is taking an evening class on the skid pan. I dream, so I dream. I dream that three times three is nine, that the right-hand rule applies; and when the circus leaves the trampled ground will once more overgrow with grass. Yes, grass. Unequivocal grass. Just grass.
We have a microsopic anatomy of the whale this gives Man assurance William Carlos Williams We have  a map of the universe for microbes, we have a map of a microbe for the universe. we have a Grand Master of chess made of electronic circuits. But above all we have the ability to sort peas, to cup water in our hands, to seek the right screw under the sofa for hours This  gives us wings.
He will not light long enough for the interpreter to gather the tatters of his speech. But the longer we listen the calmer he becomes. He shows me the place where his daughter has rubbed with a coin, violaceous streaks raising a skeletal pattern on his chest.He thinks he’s been hit by the wind. He’s worried it will become pneumonia.
The bird had come to the very end of its song and the tree was dissolving under its claws. And in the sky the clouds were twisting and darkness flowed through all the cracks into the sinking vessel of the landscape. Only in the telegraph wires a message still crackled: C-.-o---m--e. h...o---m--e. y-.--o---u..- h...a.-v...-e. a.-s...o---n-.
A. Use of the lift  going up  is permitted, provided B. Use of the lift  going down  is not permitted, provided C. Use of the lift  going up is D. Use of the lift  going down is not E. Use of the lift  going up F. Use of the lift  going G. Use of the lift H. Is Is not I. Use J. U--
the breath the trees the bridge the road the rain the sheen the breath the line the skin the vineyard the fences the leg the water the breath the shift the hair the wheels the shoulder the breath the lane the streak the lining the hour the reasons the name the distance the breath the scent the dogs the blear the lungs the breath the glove the signal the turn the need the steps the lights the door the mouth the tongue the eyes the burn the burned the burning
To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. the tram stood jammed above him like an icebreaker’s prow and all that was left of the car was a grotesque pretzel with a chunk bitten off by the dentures of a demented angel. Something dark was dripping on the rails, and a strikingly pale wind was leafing through a book still warm. People were forming a circle and with deaf-mute sympathy awaited the play’s catharsis, like maggots emerging from under the wings of a beheaded chicken. From afar came the approaching wail of sirens, congealing in the jinxed air-conditioning of that day and that minute. Dewdrops were falling on the back of the neck like remnants of atmospheric dignity. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. No, thank you, he said, I’ll wait; for a silent film had started to run without subtitles, without colour and without answers.  And what about the magnetic monopoles escaping seconds after the Big Bang, protons violating the irreversibility of the flow of time?  What about the giant molecular clouds under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving the embryos of stars?  What about the loneliness of the first genes accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools at the expense of entropic usurers?  What about the desiccated starfish like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed of a vanishing sea?  What about the mortal migrations of birds observing the sun’s inclination and the roar of sex hormones?  What about the caged half-crazed orang-utan who vomits because he has nothing else to do?  What about the mice which for a thousand years have learned to sing and the frogs balancing on one leg like the thigh of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia?  What about poetry, an enterprise so disorderly it twists the rulers and increases the squint of school inspectors?  And what about the little girl in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet, tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has, but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so tried again and again?  And what about the weak-kneed intellectual, the professor who understood the approximate universe but forgot the traffic rules? No, thank you, he said to some uniform, I don’t need anything. My papers are in my pocket but I can’t reach there. And he tried to smile a little at this embarrassment of complicated creation. It’s all my fault, he said, thank you.  And then he died.
Always just one demon in the attic. Always just one death in the village. And the dogs howling in that direction. And from the other end the new-born child arrives, the only one to fill the empty space in that wide air. Likewise also cells infected by a virus send out a signal all around them and defences are mobilised so that no other virus has any hope just then of taking root or changing fate. This phenomenon is known as interference. And when a poet dies in the depth of night a single black bird wakens in the thicket and sings for all it is worth while from the sky a black rain trickles down like sperm or something, the song is spattered and the choking bird sings sitting on an empty rib-cage in which an imaginary heart awakes to its forever interfering futility. And in the morning the sky is clear, the bird is weary and the soil is fertilised. The poet is no more. In Klatovy Street, in Pilsen, by the railway bridge, there was a shop with quilted bedcovers. In times when there’s a greater need for a steel cover over our continent business in quilted bedcovers is slack. The shopkeeper was hard up. Practical men when hard up usually turn to art. In his shopwindow, open to the interior of his shop, its owner built a gingerbread house of quilts and every evening staged a performance about a quilted gingerbread house and a red-quilted Little Red Riding Hood, while his wife in this quilted masquerade was alternately the wolf or the witch, and he himself a padded-out Hansel, or Gretel, Red Riding Hood or grandmother. The sight of the two old people crawling about in swollen billows of textiles round the chubby cottage was not unambiguous. It was a little like the life of sea cucumbers in the mud under a reef. Outside thundered the approaching surf of war and they conducted their quilted pantomime outside time and action. For a while children would stand outside but soon they would go home. Nothing was sold. But it was the only pantomime at that time. The black bird sang and rain poured into a rib-cage wearing the Star of David. But in the actors under those quilted coversl'anima allegra must have just then awoken and so, sweating and rapt, they acted their undersea commedia dell’arte, thinking there was a backstage until a scene was finished, jerkily they moved from shopwindow to gingerbread house and back, with the exuberance of Columbines stricken by polio, while the music of fifes and drums did not reach them. Or else they thought that such a deep humiliation of the customary dignity of age interfered with the steps of gentlemen in leather coats and with the departure of trains to human slaughterhouses. It did. The black bird sang and the ruined sclerotic hearts leapt in their breasts, and then one morning when they didn’t play and had not even raised the blind - the sky was clear, the soil was fertilised - the quilted bedcovers were confiscated for the eastern front and the actors transferred to the backstage of the world, called Bergen-Belsen. No trace is left of the shop today: it’s now a greengrocer’s with woody parsnips. Always just one death in the village. Always just one demon. Great is the power of the theatre, even if it always does get knocked down in the end and flung backstage. The dogs howl in that direction. And the butterfly pursues the man who stole the flowers. When we did autopsies at the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, filled with the urban exudations of relative futility, the car would tip us out amidst the ward blocks whose inmates waved from windows with some kind of May Day pennants, and then one went, hugely alone, beyond a spinney to the solitary morgue, where the naked bodies of ancient schizophrenics awaited us, along with two live inmates; one of them would pull the corpses up from underground with a rope hoist and place them upon the tables as a mother might an infant for baptism, while the other was lurking, pen ready poised, in a dark corner to write up the Latin protocol, and he wrote faultlessly. Neither of them uttered the slightest sound, only the hoist shaft moaned...and the knife drawn over skin and dermis made a sound of satin tearing...and they were always enormous and unprecedented pneumonias and tumours big as dragons’ eggs, it rained into the open thorax - and in that roaring silence one had to break the line of an angel’s fall and dictate the logical verdict on a long-sentenced demon... and the schizophrenic’s pen in the corner busily scraped across the paper like an eager mouse. We need no prompters said the puppets haughtily. The air of that anatomical theatre was filled with interferon, it was a great personal demonstration against malignant growth, it was a general amnesty for the walls, entropy was abjured for the moment because there are no bubbles at the bottom to burst under the breeze. The red balloon outside rose up to an unsuspected sky, its chains strained by the certainty that the nearer the inferno the greater the paradise, the nearer the prison cell the greater the freedom.Cantabit vacuus coran latrone viator. And that is the weird essence of the theatre that an actor stripped of everything mounts to the very top of the conflagration and everything else dies down, falls silent like a long-hunted animal, its muscles still twitching but with endorphines and an infinite peace in the brain. Yes, even a whale will sometimes leave the school, hurl itself into shallow water and perish in the sun like a levelled cathedral, with pushed-out penis, and death is instantly buried in a grain of sand and the sea laughs. Go ask the tree-stumps; in broken language they preach about saplings. And in the jargon of galactic white dwarfs the stars of the main sequence shine forever. In the non-Euclidean curved space, which eludes understanding as much as the interference of the theatre, you ceaselessly hear the voices of children from the primary school of death, children from the puppet tragedies of the kitchen and children from the junketings of war, when skewering them on lances with their wriggling little legs provided spice like curry for the mercenaries, voices of children eluding understanding - But we’ve washed behind our ears, we’ve stopped pulling the cat’s tail, we’ve stopped shoving our fingers into electric sockets - What else is there left in the universe of hominisation, slow as the decay of tritium, than the doctrine of the growing sense of shame of demons: since Aztec times high priests no longer offer up sacrifice while dressed in the skin of a freshly flayed prisoner. We need no prompters, they said - Once on St Nicholas’ Day, the man acting the Devil, dead drunk, fell down some stairs and lay there, and a child, experiencing that embarrassing joy mere inches from terror, ran out after the thump and called: Mummy, come here, there’s a dead devil - And so he was, even though the actor picked himself up after another tot. Maybe the dogs howled, but only by a black mistake. In the sky shone the stars of the main sequence, the bird was getting ready in the thicket, the child shivered a little from the chill of three million years, in that wide air, but they prompted him, poetically, you’re only imagining all this, look, the butterfly’s already bringing the flowers back...and there’s no other devil left...and the nearer paradise... He believed, and yet he didn’t.
By the time I recalled that it is also terrifying, we had gone too far into the charmed woods to return. It was then the beautiful animal appeared in our path: ribs jutting, moon-fed eyes moving from me to you and back. If we show none of the fear, it may tire of waiting for the triggering flight, it may ask only to lie between us and sleep, fur warm on our skin, breath sweet on our necks as it dreams of slaughter, as we dream alternately of feeding and taming it and of being the first to run. The woods close tight around us, lying nested here like spoons in a drawer of knives, to see who wakes first, and from which dream.
unlike you and I jesus knew he’d die some days a headache woke him it lingered nothing terrible but the word hung around his temples like this soul everyone wants but can’t find jesus knew he’d die he just didn’t know how & that bothered him sometimes & then he’d do one of his little bootleg tricks what the hell, didn’t hurt anyone didn’t make anyone disappear for- ever but the tricks stopped working he forgot why he did them & what for he confused a story about a guy named jesus with a story about a father he never knew & it all began to hang like a motheaten coat pulled out of a trunk on shaky days hey let’s return to the scene of the fucken tragedy at least we all know how it turns out instead of this end- less uncertainty hey let’s sell our souls a few more times no one’s really counting (those little papers you trade for your sins, what do you call them? anyone? no?) —anyway—jesus this jesus that god of nickel god of dime right, the real jesus he was lost he walked in- to the desert not far really his friends his disciples he told them he’d come back like us he said this every time he left but jesus never said wait never pointed to the sky never claimed he’d rise again never asked us to eat his flesh jesus never asked anything as far as I can tell he got tired everyday & then slept sometimes okay sometimes un- bearable, the dreams, the father pointing a finger at everyone a finger we can’t even look at.
Do this: take two fingers, place them on the spot behind your ear, either ear, the spot where your skull drops off into that valley of muscle & nerve—that is the muscle that holds up the skull, that turns the dumb bone this way & that, that nods your face up & down when you think you get it—press deeper, touch the little bundle of nerves buried there, buried in the gristle—the nerves that make you blink when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue slide in & out when you think you’re in love, when you think you need a drink, touch that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes & listen, please, close your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes, lording in his little throne, steering the fork to the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their empty bowls as the food rains down, we sometimes think we are those hungry children, we think we can think anything & it won’t matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue, & then ask her to sing.
Kurt, early twenties. Met him after an AA meeting in Silverlake (November, eighty-five). I remem- ber standing with him up- stairs, in the clubhouse, how I checked his body out. But not who approached whom. Or what we talked about before we leaned against my car and kissed, under that tarnished L.A. moon. Drove to my place and un- dressed him in the dark. He was smaller than me. I couldn’t keep my hands off his ass. Next morning, smoked till he woke, took him back. He thanked me sweetly. I couldn’t have said what I wanted, though must have known. Drove home and put him in a poem ("November") I was at the end of. Later that day it rained (I know from the poem).
a stabat mater listen mother, he punched the air: I am not your son dying the day fades and the starlings roost: a body’s a husk a nest of goodbye his wrist colorless and soft was not a stick of chewing gum how tell? well a plastic bracelet with his name for one. & no mint his eyes distinguishable from oysters how? only when pried open she at times felt the needle going in. felt her own sides cave. she rasped she twitched with a palsy: tectonic plates grumbled under her feet soiled his sheets clogged the yellow BIOHAZARD bin: later to be burned soot clouds billowed out over the city: a stole. a pillbox hat [smart city] and wouldn’t the taxis stop now. and wouldn’t a hush smother us all the vascular walls graffitied and scarred. a clotted rend in the muscle wend through the avenues throttled t-cells. processional staph & thrush the scourge the spike a stab a shending bile the grace the quenching mother who brought me here, muddler: open the window. let birds in
Day after day, along with his placid automobiles, that well-groomed sallow young man had been waiting for me, as in the cheerful, unchanging weather of a billboard—pacing the tiles, patting his tie, knotting, un- knotting the façade of his smile while staring out the window. He was so bad at the job he reminded me of myself the summer I failed at selling Time and Life in New Jersey. Even though I was a boy I could feel someone else’s voice crawl out of my mouth, spoiling every word, like this cowed, polite kid in his tie and badge that said Greg, saying Ma’am to my wife, calling me Sir, retailing the air with such piety I had to find anything out the window. Maybe the rain. It was gray and as honestly wet as ever. Something we could both believe.
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.
The noise throws down twin shadows, hunting shadows on a black joy ride. They roar up the silver vein of the river and out over the stony peaks, which have been shrunken to a luminous green musculature on the screens. Who are the pilots, too high to see the splayed hearts of deer tracks under the apple trees, or smell the cider in the fallen fruit? Who are the vandals that ransack the wilderness of clouds? Below them, a thin froth of waterfall spills from a rock face. They see its sudden wreckage, its yielding gouts, and the wind tear into the papery leaves of the poplars, roughing them up so the undersides show— a glimpse of paleness like a glimpse of underwear. The pilots are young men, and still immortal. Already in the cold quadrants of their hearts they imagine the whole world flowering beneath them. It feels like love, like being with a woman who flowers beneath them, so that they wonder how it would feel to go on riding the young green world that way, to a climax of spectral light.
There’s something in me that likes to imagine the things I’m afraid of, for example, the future. I don’t mean the celestial fireworks from melting reactors, or New York under six feet of sea water, but the future in its most intimate, most probable forms—vignettes subversive enough to slip through the radar. That’s how I come to be crouched behind a stripped car wondering would it be too dangerous to piss in the street? It would, I’m a woman. So I go on holding it, distracting myself by trying to remember every fruit I’ve ever eaten, their exact textures and flavors. So far the most exotic is the custard apple. I use up a whole hour of daylight and then another—apricot, blueberry, plum— calves cramping from having to stay low, waiting behind a car pitted with the acne of automatic fire. There are still too many guns walking around out there, and no one I know, so I’m waiting for twilight at least. Is everyone alone now? The wind says so. It says a winter is coming without oil. It bites to get my attention and scatters a few leaflets, pictures of a blackened car, a city that seems to catch on fire every sunset, though there’s little enough to burn. Stone only chars. This isn’t a likeness of the future, is it? Every person in the street a stranger? Will a word like ‘neighbor’ survive this? I fired a gun once. It smelled rancid, sour, like bad food. It hurt my shoulder and left a wound of oil on my shirt. My mind is thinking of sleep again. Sleep lets things escape—my pocket-knife vanished through a knife-sized hole. There’s nothing to cut, no guava, nectarine, winter pear, and nothing left of the car at all, not even the rear-view mirror I was counting on, hoping my face could tell me it was safe to go home, and where is that? A place with a bed and a desk where I sit and plot next year’s garden on graph paper. The skin of a tangelo is faintly pebbly, easy to peel, but the sweetest citrus is the satsuma, then the clementine. If I had to choose between natural disaster and a firing squad, I’d take the river of lava any day. Hurricane, tidal wave, tornado, drought. I want the earth, which is waiting under the sidewalk, to be the one. Not any of these human shadows sporting their silhouetted guns. There were gun shadows before, but the two worlds overlapped, guns and the amber waves of grain. It’s hard to say whether bramble fruits actually have skins. Does a raspberry? Does each tiny globe have its own? How will I live without the earth? In a stripped car, unable to piss when I want to, all the time cold? Maybe weapons interbred with humans, and a strain of hybrids was born, half metal, half flesh. I know there’s an enemy— look at all the damage it’s doing. Maybe it’s still a baby, its weak neck wobbling as its carriage lurches over the broken pavement. But probably by now it’s a sulking adolescent starting to look like serious trouble, with a silky little shadow-moustache and a gun. Who’ll kill it? Will I? What if it doesn’t look like the enemy? What if it comes disguised as a savior, or resembles nothing so much as hunger, so that everyone has his own private piece to kill? Will we do it?
The first night at the monastery, a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight, long after the first frost. A short stick of incense burns thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine rising through the old pine of the hours. Summer is trapped under the thin glass on the brook, making the sound of an emptying bottle. Before the long silence, the monks make a long soft rustling, adjusting their robes. The deer are safe now. Their tracks are made of snow. The wind has dragged  its branches over their history.
Sometimes I long to be the woodpile, cut-apart trees soon to be smoke, or even the smoke itself, sinewy ghost of ash and air, going wherever I want to, at least for a while. Neither inside nor out, neither lost nor home, no longer a shape or a name, I’d pass through all the broken windows of the world. It’s not a wish for consciousness to end. It’s not the appetite an army has for its own emptying heart, but a hunger to stand now and then alone on the death-grounds, where the dogs of the self are feeding.
I want you with me, and yet you are the end of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms have become public? How we glance to see if— who? Who did you imagine? Surely we’re not here alone, you and I. I’ve been wandering where the cold tracks of language collapse into cinders, unburnable trash. Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold of meteors before their avalanches of farewell. If you asked me what words a voice like this one says in parting, I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia. I’m just a broom, sweeping.
Whenever I look out at the snowy mountains at this hour and speak directly into the ear of the sky, it’s you I’m thinking of. You’re like the spirits the children invent to inhabit the stuffed horse and the doll. I don’t know who hears me. I don’t know who speaks when the horse speaks.
Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks they bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall. Riding the backs of the Trojan Women, In Euripides’ great wake they are swept up, But the women of the chorus, in black stockings and kerchiefs, Stand up bravely to it, shawled arms thrash In a foam of hysterical voices shrieking, Seaweed on the wet flanks of a whale, For each town has its Cassandra who is a little crazy, Wed to some mystery or other and therefore painfully sensitive, Wiser than anyone but no one listens to her, these days the terror Reaches its red claws into back ward and living room alike, For each town has its Andromache who is too young, With snub nose and children just out of school Even she cannot escape it, from the bombed city she is led out Weeping among the ambulances, And each community has its tart, its magical false Helen Or at least someone who looks like her, in all the make-up she can muster, The gorgeous mask of whatever quick-witted lie will keep her alive At least a little while longer, on the crest of the bloody wave, That dolorous mountain of wooden ships and water In whose memory the women bring us this huge gift horse, This raging animal of a play no one dares to look in the eye For fear of what’s hidden there: Small ragdoll figures toppling over and over From every skyscraper and battlement hurtling Men and women both, mere gristle in the teeth of fate. Out over the sea of the audience our numb faces Are stunned as Andromache’s, locked up there on the platform Inside Euripides’ machine the women sway and struggle One foot at a time, up the surging ladder Of grief piled on grief, strophe on antistrophe, In every century the same, the master tightens the screws, Heightens the gloss of each bitter scene And strikes every key, each word rings out Over our terrified heads like a brass trumpet, For this gift is an accordion, the biggest and mightiest of all, As the glittering lacquered box heaves in and out, Sigh upon sigh, at the topmost pitch a child Falls through midnight in his frantically pink skin. As the anguished queen protests, the citizens in the chorus wail Louder and louder, the warriors depart Without a glance backwards, these captains of the world’s death Enslaved as they are enslavers, in a rain of willess atoms anonymity takes over utterly: as the flaming city falls On this bare beach, in the drab pinewood hall The Reading Club packs up to go; scripts, coffee cups, black stockings, Husbands and wives pile into the waiting cars Just as we expect, life picks up and goes on But not art: crouched back there like a stalled stallion Stuffed in its gorgeous music box is the one gift That will not disappear but waits, but bides its time and waits For the next time we open it, that magical false structure Inside whose artifice is the lesson, buried alive, Of the grim machinations of the beautiful that always lead us To these eternally real lamentations, real sufferings, real cries.
You could pick it up by the loose flap of a roof and all the houses would come up together in the same pattern attached, inseparable white cubes, olive trees, flowers dangling from your hand a few donkey hooves might stick out flailing the air for balance, but the old women would cling like sea urchins and no children would fall. Even though it is small, the people are Greek, and it sits like an oyster in the middle of the Aegean still it is tough, it reminds you of wagon trains, prairie schooners drawn up in circles by night you could swing it around your head and still nothing would happen, it would stay solid, the white walls rising up out of the sea the pillared crown of the temple... For twenty-six hundred years it has endured everything, but now we who have forgotten everything, we whose homes have all gone to super highways, belt cities, long thin lines our glittering buses snort into the main square, the spider web with sticky fingers glues itself to the town, slowly it begins to revolve, faster and faster tighter and tighter it is wound till the young men cannot stand it, they pack up and leave town the sky is full of children with wild eyes and huge faces falling to the ground.
Or will we be lost forever? In the silence of the last breath Not taken The blue sweep of your arm like a dancer Clowning, in wrinkled pajamas, Across the sky the abrupt Brief zigzag of a jay... All night the whiteness And all day. Once we have been lifted up Into empty morning like ice In the darkness of these white fields Neither the ghost tracks of skis Nor steel skates will wake us Where are we looking for each other, separated On the opposite hillside I see you Miles away from me, a dot Of faint color reddening, small bruised warmth Opening its cranberry mouth and saying, What are you saying?  * Under a cold blanket An immense loneliness stretches In every direction with no fences. A few sticks tweak the crusted snow: Thin remnants of an army Of lost soldiers. I see footsteps ahead of me but whose And where will they lead me, parallel Or converging? Is it not possible there will be one jet trail That will not vanish, Two phantom ribbons unfolding That will not feather themselves away?  * Wrapped in our white parkas In what shifting laminations, snowflakes That mean nothing, transparent eyes spitting, What glacier will we choose to lie on, In what igloo rest Barely breathing, in an air pocket Just below the surface Rustling beneath blizzards Where is your foot, most beautiful With blue toenails I will be looking for it always Wherever it is, next to me In the darkness Of rumpled white sheets, Pale siftings, clouds Sudden scarves of ourselves gusting Loose, sandpapery as snow lifting In what chill citadel of ice crystals Will I find you?
The way calcium grows all by itself into bone, microscopic fraction attaches itself to fraction or clouds crystallize, or blizzards congeal into hard ice on aluminum wings, even the astronauts’ bodysuits can’t cover up the sheer strangeness of it, the extraordinary being-here or anywhere, the skin of the plane could easily peel back like an ear of corn and then what’s to be seen but who, me? the live, disintegrating, terrified Barbie Doll asks, stuffed into her jeans like a stick of butter, her neat, pointed feet dangerously stuck into sky... but still, teetering down the aisle if anyone bumps her she glares, This Is My Territory, this little packet of a hundred and twenty-two pounds more or less says Move it, Babe, one minute the cold kitchen, next minute Miami Beach, digging into the sand beside the violent- ly green sea, droplets of Almighty coconut oil under the crisp tang of salt drizzle and lick all over its bare, lusciously bronzed congregation of too too solid— No! Never in this world, the greedy molecules hiss as the plane turns inland, the woman returns to her seat past all the other anonymous collections of cells, some snoring, some fussing with their kids, one bent over a laptop, another staring straight at her for a second, with X-ray exhausted eyes peering, then swiveling away as if they’d known each other before, fellow crew members from another planet, though the woman thinks of herself only on Main Street—my my what an arrangement of chromosomes collected who knows why—up here among streaked, boiling clouds with the plane speeding through them, howunexpected it is, how far the body travels from its babyhood, locked in its charged circuits she thinks about edges, the leathery sunburned skin flaking off, in filmy shreds, sound barriers breaking away from her but here she still is for this one second fixed, eyes sticking out of the top of her face like the glint of a buried pin or the beak of a mother robin in the nest she made for herself: with earth losing its outer walls twig by twig, what is this naked fork quivering in the middle of Whose consciousness she keeps wondering, whizzing across the face of an electric cloud chamber, here all I am is falling, in the tight ship of the diminished, in hot chips of pure ignorant energy fizzing around some magnet, some lucky iron only imagination can count on, trembling, gritting her teeth on the thread of an end she can’t know,Please, Someone, materialize me in arms I can love always
1 After our march from the Hudson to the top of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts lolled among graves in the maple shade. When members of the veterans’ honor guard aimed their bone-white rifles skyward and fired, I glimpsed beneath one metal helmet the salmon-pink flesh of Mr. Webber’s nose, restored after shrapnel tore it.  2 Friends who sat near me in school died in Asia, now lie here under new stones that small flags flap beside.  It’s fifth-grade recess: war stories. Mr. Webber stands before us and plucks his glass eye from its socket, holds it high between finger and thumb. The girls giggle and scream; the awed boys gape. The fancy pocket watch he looted from a shop in Germany ticks on its chain.
Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me. Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. And if the heart’s a rock I’ll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.
Snapping turtles in the pond eat bass, sunfish, and frogs. They do us no harm when we swim. But early this spring two Canada geese lingered, then built a nest. What I’d heard of, our neighbor feared: goslings, as they paddle about, grabbed from below by a snapper, pulled down to drown.  So he stuck hunks of fat on huge, wire-leadered hooks attached to plastic milk-bottle buoys. The first week he caught three turtles and still there are more: sometimes he finds the bottles dragged ashore, the wire wrapped several times around a pine trunk and the steel hook wrenched straight as a pin.
July 1965 As the sheriff remarked: I had no business being there. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Among that odd crew of volunteers from the North, I was by far the most inept and least effective. I couldn’t have inspired or assisted a woodchuck to vote.  In fact, when the sheriff’s buddies nabbed me on the highway east of Selma, I’d just been released from ten days of jail in Mississippi. I was fed up and terrified; I was actually fleeing north and glad to go.  -  In Jackson, they’d been ready for the demonstration. After the peaceful arrests, after the news cameras recorded us being quietly ushered onto trucks, the doors were closed and we headed for the county fairgrounds.  Once we passed its gates, it was a different story: the truck doors opened on a crowd of state troopers waiting to greet us with their nightsticks out. Smiles beneath mirrored sunglasses and blue riot helmets; smiles above badges taped so numbers didn’t show.  For the next twenty minutes, they clubbed us, and it kept up at intervals, more or less at random, all that afternoon and into the evening.  Next morning we woke to new guards who did not need to conceal their names or faces. A little later, the fbi arrived to ask if anyone had specific complaints about how they’d been treated and by whom.  But late that first night, as we sat bolt upright in rows on the concrete floor of the cattle barn waiting for mattresses to arrive, one last precise event: A guard stopped in front of the ten-year-old black kid next to me. He pulled a freedom now pin from the kid’s shirt, made him put it in his mouth, then ordered him to swallow.  -  That stakeout at dusk on Route 80 east of Selma was intended for someone else, some imaginary organizer rumored to be headed toward their dismal, godforsaken town. Why did they stop me?  The New York plates, perhaps, and that little bit of stupidity: the straw hat I wore, a souvenir of Mississippi.  Siren-wail from an unmarked car behind me—why should I think they were cops? I hesitated, then pulled to the shoulder. The two who jumped out waved pistols, but wore no uniforms or badges. By then, my doors were locked, my windows rolled. Absurd sound of a pistol barrel rapping the glass three inches from my face: “Get out, you son of a bitch, or we’ll blow your head off.”  When they found pamphlets on the backseat they were sure they’d got the right guy. The fat one started poking my stomach with his gun, saying, “Boy, we’re gonna dump you in the swamp.”  -  It was a long ride through the dark, a ride full of believable threats, before they arrived at that hamlet with its cinderblock jail.  He was very glad to see it, that adolescent I was twenty years ago. For eight days he cowered in his solitary cell, stinking of dirt and fear. He’s cowering there still, waiting for me to come back and release him by turning his terror into art. But consciously or not, he made his choice and he’s caught in history.  And if I reach back now, it’s only to hug him and tell him to be brave, to remember that black kid who sat beside him in the Mississippi darkness. And to remember that silence shared by guards and prisoners alike as they watched in disbelief the darkness deepening around the small shape in his mouth, the taste of metal, the feel of the pin against his tongue.  It’s too dark for it to matter what’s printed on the pin; it’s too dark for anything but the brute fact that someone wants him to choke to death on its hard shape.  And still he refuses to swallow.
Before devising, your chicken you do not have to count. As for the penny which is rescued it is the penny which is obtained. The girl and the spice has become entirely from the splendid sugar. The boy has consisted of the tail of the slug and the snail and the puppy. As for the place of the woman there is a house. One basket your egg everything does not have to be made. The idiot hurries being about you fear because the angel steps on. Your cake cannot do possessing and is eaten thing. There is no wastefulness, unless so is, we want. The safe which is better than regrettable. Living, you have lived, permit.
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,” he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way, he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”
We remember so little, We are certain of nothing. We long to perish into the absolute. Where is a mountain To spread its snowfields for us like a shawl? You might begin,The men who come to see me are not exactly lovers. Or, Seen at a distance the gazelle is blue. That’s just your way of cheering me up. You might begin,The quality of the telegram is vulnerable. Or even, The spirit of the telegram is virginal. By now I am ravenous. You might begin,Nothing’s more passionate than a train, Entering an enormous depot, Empty except for two lovers, irreconcilable, Parting.
A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture. Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse. They grow there with a vengeance. Buck posts float across the flooded swamp Where my father rode in and under. Different horse. He held her head up out of the mud And said how he was sorry Till they came to pull him out. We found the white filly On the only hard ground by the south gate. He said she’d been a ghost from the start and he was right. We covered her with branches. There were things he had the wrong names for Like rose crystals. Though They were about what you’d think from a name like that. He told us somewhere on Sand Creek Pass Was a crystal that spelled our own initials And we should try to find it. We walked through sagebrush and sand currents, looking. He said pasqueflowers and paintbrush Wait till Easter to grow, Then they come up even with snow still on the ground. I thought I’d seen that happen.
The more I see of people, the more I like my dog. And this would be good country if a man could eat scenery.
My grandfather was always sad. Sadly, as a boy, he paddled his canoe along the beautiful Hudson River, which was only then beginning to die. During the first war he was very sad in France because he knew he was having the time of his life. When it was over everyone in American felt like a hero — imagine.  Once a year on Armistice Day, he met with all his friends from the war. They got drunk and recounted the stories of the time when they had thought they were men and the world had seemed entirely possible. They placed empty chairs for certain of the dead, and in the center of the table, a bottle of cognac from France, for the last man of them to drink alone, in honor of the others.  Year after year they gathered to watch each other and themselves disappear, turn into empty chairs. Sooner or later they were all sad. Some of them must have realized they didn’t need to join a club for this.  Finally it came down to my grandfather and a man named Oscar Cooper. Neither of them wanted to outlive anyone. They couldn’t remember what honor was. When they drank the cognac it didn’t taste like anything. They threw the bottle in the river as if they thought it meant that neither of them was alive anymore.  When Cooper died the following year, my grandfather took his rifle out into the yard and fired three shots at the sky. Then he went down to the river and drank himself to sleep. After that he was never sad, not even when the river died.
God save America,  My home, sweet home!
This is everything she ever closed a door on, the broom closet of childhood where no one could ever find a broom. Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes: photo albums curl at the edges, books she brought home from the library where she worked, handled by thousands of other hands before their final exile where they’ve waited, paper and more paper taking in the ocean air, about to sprout. Mother’s sitting on the bed with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets what among the treasures she hopes I’ll find, but I know I’m seeing what she doesn't want me to see, the daughter cleaning doing what the son would never do. After an hour of excavation the console TV emerges from beneath forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project— the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed the fender of the car, upsetting the careful plans she’d made for payment. She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later I’ve found nothing I want but the purple mache mask I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes. She looks at each magazine I remove, saving every word about my brother, the coach. He’s sixty and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces of his baby shoes. I want order. I say I’m old myself, I’ve started throwing things away. I’m lying. I’ve kept everything she’s ever given me.
Whenever I see two women  crowned, constellated friends it is as if three birch trees wept together  in a field by a constant spring.  The third woman isn’t there exactly, but just before them a flame  bursts out, then disappears in a blurred, electric shining  that lifts my hair like an animal’s. In an aura of charged air I remember  my poor mother turned into royalty,  my sister and me in bobby socks endlessly, all summer long  calling each other Margaret Rose and Lillibet, Lillibet, Lillibet,  pretending to be princesses... Now, swollen into these tall blooms  like paper cutouts in water, in each new neighborhood garden  always, two women talking nod their three curly heads together:  with bits of dirt on their foreheads, speckled  iris, flaming poppy in the backyard dynasties of the multiflora  it is the famous funeral photograph  of the Dowager Queen, Queen Mother, stunned Young Queen, three stepping stones in marble  that haunt me forever, clear  and mysterious as well water, the weight of it in a bronze bucket swinging  powerfully from my hand. As the plumcolored shadow rises,  full as a first child in the orchard, the lost gardening glove on the path,  the single earring tucked  in an odd corner of the purse and then found here double themselves, then triple:  in these soft trinities  the lives that begin in us are born and born again like wings.  Secret as doves scuffling in the wide envelope of wombs  like loose, comfortable aprons flung over the heads of friends leaning together  in the hum of earth’s plainsong like a three part round,  like a single voice murmuring  the dream never leaves us, of the self like a three masted vessel still voyaging:  out of the long matrix of memory,  the royal bulbs in the hold, the ballast that keeps us upright, loyal  to the dark, deep-bedded throne  of the old country each new soul claims as its own.
(for Sarah when she’s older) The round and sad-eyed man puffed cigars as if he were alive. Gillyflowers to the left of the apple, purple bells to the right and a grass-covered hill behind. I am sad today said the sad-eyed man for I have locked my head in a Japanese box and lost the key. I am sad today he told me for there are gillyflowers by the apple and purple bells I cannot see. Will you look at them for me he asked, and tell me what you find? I cannot I replied for my eyes have grown sugary and dim from reading too long by candlelight. Tell me what you’ve read then said the round and sad-eyed man. I cannot I replied for my memory has grown tired and dim from looking at things that can’t be seen by any kind of light and I’ve locked my head in a Japanese box and thrown away the key. Then I am you and you are me said the sad-eyed man as if alive. I’ll write you in where I should be between the gillyflowers and the purple bells and the apple and the hill and we’ll puff cigars from noon till night as if we were alive.
[Let a be taken as . . .] a liquid line beneath the skin and b where the blue tiles meet body and the body’s bridge a seeming road here, endless rain pearling light chamber after chamber of dust-weighted air the project of seeing things so to speak, or things seen namely a hand, namely the logic of the hand holding a bell or clouded lens the vase perched impossibly near the edge obscuring the metal tines. She said “perhaps” then it echoed. I stood there torn felt hat in hand wondering what I had done to cause this dizziness “you must learn to live with.” It reveals no identifiable source (not anyway the same as a forest floor). A vagrant march time, car passes silently, arm rests at his side holding a bell or ground lens where c stands for inessential night – how that body would move vs how it actually does – too abstract &/or not abstract enough but a closed curve in either case she might repeat indicating the shallow eaves nothing but coats and scarves below the window his-her face canted to the left nothing imagined or imaginable dark and nothing actually begun so that the color becomes exactly as it was in the miniuscule word for it scribbled beside an arrow on the far wall perfectly how else continuous with memory. There are pomegranates on the table though they have been placed there salt, pepper, books and schedules all sharing the same error and measure of inattention. What she says rolls forward. I shouted toward motion, other gestured, child laughs, sky, traffic, photograph. I gave a real pain, expelled breath, decided. Both arms in thought, mirror otherwise, abandoned structures mostly, the glass door with its inscription lay open before us, nothing to fear.
The limit of the song is this prelude to a journey to the outer islands, the generative sentence, waltz project, forms, qualities, suns, moons, rings, an inside-outside then an outside-inside shaped with her colored clays. The days yet propse themselves as self-evident, everything there everything here and you are reading in a way natural to theatre a set of instructions that alters itself automatically as you proceed west from death to friendliness, the two topics upon which you are allowed to meditate under the first broad drops of rain. The planes will be piloted by ancestors who have come back to life. Why the delay.
Past fences the first sheepmen cast across the land, processions of cringing pitch or cedar posts pulling into the vanishing point like fretboards carrying barbed melodies, windharp narratives, songs of place, I’m thinking of the long cowboy ballads Ray taught me the beginnings of and would have taught  me the ends if he could have remembered them.  But remembering was years ago when Ray swamped for ranches at a dollar a day and found, and played guitar in a Saturday night band, and now he is dead and I’m remembering near the end when he just needed a drink before he could tie his shoes.  We’d stay up all night playing the beginnings of songs like Falling Leaf, about a girl who died of grief, and Zebra Dun, about a horse that pawed the light out of the moon.  Sometimes Ray would break through and recall a few more verses before he’d drop a line or scramble a rhyme or just go blank, and his workfat hands would drop the chords and fall away in disbelief.  Between songs he’d pull on the rum or unleash coughing fits that sounded like nails in a paper bag.  Done, he’d straighten and say, My cough’s not just right, I need another cigarette, and light the Parliament he bit at an upward angle like Roosevelt and play the start of another song.  Then, played out and drunk enough to go home, he’d pick up his hat and case and make it, usually on the second try, through the front gate and gently list out into the early morning dark, beginning again some song without end, yodeling his vote under spangles.
Some little splinter Of shadow purls And weals down The slewed stone Chapel steps, Slinks along The riverrock wall And disappears Into the light. Now ropy, riffled, Now owlish, sere, It smolders back To sight beneath A dwarfish, brindled tree That chimes and sifts And resurrects In something’s sweet And lethal breath. This little shadow Seems to know (How can it know? How can it not?) Just when to flinch Just where to loop and sag And skitter down, Just what to squirrel And what to squander till The light it lacks Bleeds it back And finds My sleeping dark-haired girl — O personal, Impersonal, Continual thrall — And hammocks blue In the hollows of her eyes.
Sulky what-ifs. Sulky what-ifs. They bumblefuck the metastuff. Diffidence their stock in trade. Cozy hell — cozy, hell. They make a mockery of irony. They hold Special Olympics in wit. What was Shakespeare’s blood pressure? Vertical river, cloister of thunder, Bleeds the ship’s fell sail. God comes in for a landing. He lowers God’s landing gear. He raises holy spoilers, lowers the sacred ailerons. He imagines Reality. Tried everything in life? Sulky what-ifs are dumbstruck. Drumsticks. Their spiritual actuality is empirical. What if uppity angels? What if there really were rules? What if those angels melted in the rain? If reality is an illusion, wouldn’t it stand to reason That illusions are real? A lot of dumb questions. Impingement of external objects or conditions upon the body Palpitate apostasy. The oppressed must free the oppressors to free themselves, see? The soul is euphemism for the body. What does willing mean? Do you sense my sense? Am I fashionable? Objective as an angel in the rain? Screaming from a safe place? Nine smocked doctors, three unmasked. One has left his face sewn to the pillow. One holds a lace fan like a hand of cards she studies, Considering the risks. She is the loveliest doctor. Her doctor-father scolds her right there in front of all the other doctors. They are aghast. They kneel and don carnival hats with feathers. I don’t think they are really doctors. The trees are real. They are green kachinas. Dark rooms of wind are installed in the house of barbarism. The norm is always incorrect. If what?
for William Kittredge 1. That woman still lives at her ranch. You can ask her. Maybe She knows. As near and far As the rest of us can tell The barn and sheds were built In the Great Depression. Someone Had money and a big idea. Far and away the biggest Idea I’ve ever seen. Pat says there must’ve been A hundred men, shepherds And shearers, working there. It’s one of those things That not only is, but seems, Larger inside than out, Like a planetarium or an orange, Even with Wyoming around it, And real stars flying away. Just stick your head in there; Its dark will make you dizzy. It has an underneath Too low to stand in unless You are a sheep. The loft Vaults like a dusky church.  2. All that summer I balanced water, Coaxing the desert Into pasture, With eight cubic feet Per second for two Thousand acres. Horseback, shovel On my shoulder along Miles of ditches: Stalling here, Releasing there, Water over The deepening green, Keeping it living: Herons and cranes Regal in meadows, Strings of ducklings Frothing the ditch To get away.  3. One day riding ditches I saw Clay. He was on the hill against the sky, Flapping his arms at me. They were going to bulldoze the corrals at the shearing sheds, Intricate maze of gates and pens Clay, as a kid, had built with his father, Before they lost their ranch, before Frank died, Before the family had to move away. The new owner was razing everything. I guess he had some kind of idea. Clay didn’t need any gates, but, as Pat said, That’s Clay. I met them at the shearing sheds. Pat held a wrecking bar like a steel snake.I just can’t stand tearin’ apart all them guys’s dreams, he said, looking shy.Hell is when you know where you are.  4. On the barn roof a loose piece of tin Flaps in the wind like a broken wing. Wyoming whirls in the sun. Up in the loft a pair of shears, Oh, fifty or sixty years forgotten there, Floats in noonlight, bearing up some dust, Just a pair of spring-steel scissors, Two knives joined at the hip, with smiling edges. An owl the color of things left alone Flaps out of the gable door. Hell is when you know where you are: Mazes of pens and gates dreaming sheep; Miles of ditches dreaming green.  5. No one living knows Who built the shearing sheds, Unless maybe that woman, And I’m not about to ask her, Ever since she tried To stab her husband with a pair of scissors. He was ninety-one And barely held her off. Later she claimed she was just Trying to cut his heart Medication out of his shirt Pocket — dope, she called it — And the old man had to leave The ranch, where he didn’t last long. They bulldozed the corrals. We got forty gates. We took them someplace safe.  6. Now the vast, dim barn floats like an ocean liner Whose doldrums are meadows spinning into brush, And everywhere you look Wyoming hurries off. All night the stars make their escape. In the loft a pair of shears cuts woolly moonlight. All day a piece of roofing slaps in the wind. A startled owl flaps out of the gable. Hell is when you know where you are and it’s beautiful. You saved the gates for nothing. You balanced the water to keep the green from spinning Away into sage, the same gray as the wing That just now shaded your eyes.
But the buried walls and our mouths of fragments,no us but the snow staring at us . . . And you Mr. Ground-of_what, Mr. Text, Mr. Is-Was, can you calculate the ratio between wire and window, between tone and row, copula and carnival and can you reassemble light from the future-past in its parabolic nest or recite an entire winter’s words, its liberties and psuedo-elegies, the shell of a street-car in mid-turn or scattered fires in the great hall I would say not-I here I’d say The Book of Knots I’d say undertows and currents and waterspouts, streaks of phosphorus and rivervine winds Dear Z, I’d say it’s time, it’s nearly time, it’s almost, it’s  just about, it’s long past time now time now for the vex- for the vox- for the  voices of shadows, time for the prism letters, trinkets and shrouds, for a whirl in gauzy scarves around the wrecked piazza Messieurs-Dames, Meine Herren und Damen, our word-ballon,  you will note, is slowly rising over the parched city, its catacombs, hospitals and experimental gardens, its toll-gates, ghettos and ring-roads, narcoleptics and therapists and stray cats Ladies and Gentleen, our menu for this flight, due to temporary shortages, will be an alpha-omega soup, Bactrian hump, and nun’s farts As we enter the seventh sphere, you will discover a thin layer of ice just beginning to form on your limbs Do not be alarmed, this is normal You will experience difficulty breathing, this is normal The breathing you experience is difficulty, this is normal Dear Z, Should I say space constructed of echoes, rifts, mirrors, a strange year for touring the interior Should I say double dance, Horn, axis and wheel Dear A, Scuttled ships are clogging the harbors and their cargoes lie rotting on the piers Prepare executions and transfusions Put on your latest gear
for John Grant My father-in-law writes from Umbria (where peasants eat songbirds for lunch and pray beneath frescoes by Giotto): Saturday, 30 Jan. (last day of the season wherein big men can kill little birds). Lyndon Johnson, while being escorted by a young Marine who said, “That one over there is your helicopter, Sir,” replied, placing his arm around the boy, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”  Sam said, “I might be white bread, but there is one pissed-off nigger in  my heart.” McPherson says he doesn’t see anything in the world worth coming back for. He wants to get off the wheel, says, “I don’t want to come back as anything — not even a bumblebee.”  So I say, “Oh, Jim, you’d make a good bumblebee,” but I was thinking: That should be enough for anybody’s God. It would be trite to describe the clocksmith’s house — the way it sounded like bees in there. “You can never have enough clocks in your house.” This from a man who had thousands in his. I asked, “You probably don’t even hear them anymore.” He said, “I hear them when they stop.” Lyle said, “It’s all right to be a fool; it’s just not all right to be a old fool.” Steve, the banjo wasn’t all they smashed. It was every window. It was every thing I had. You don’t want to feel the wind blow through your house that way. Another friend said, “I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.”
1. Even the pole bean tendrils sought out and gripped their frames within six hours of my setting them.  One of the things that is breaking my heart is that I can’t trust language to express any thanks.  My pole beans, my honeybees, my coyotes, my dog, all my good horses.  2. The black mare I shouldn’t have bought and bought, and once I had, should have shipped, bucked me, too, the first time I got up.  But God she was a beauty.  I thought if I just rode her I could ride her down.  Her name was Sara and we kept it at that. All she wanted to do was run.  Ears back, flat out, nose pushed into the next life.  I wanted her to learn to walk.  3. After about a year of chop I turned her uphill on a good gravel road and said, “OK, you bitch, you want to run?”  I let go her head and gave her the steel.  I’d never been on a horse so fast.  I’ve never been on one since.  So fast you couldn’t count the beats in the rhythm of her gait.  Suicidal.  But when, after some miles, she started to flag, I said, “I thought you wanted to run,” and dug her out again.  4. The pole bean tendrils sought their frames within six hours of my setting them.  They broke my heart.  They gripped.  5. A patch of sunlight mottled the shade.  Whether she never saw the root that snaked through the shadow or was just too far in front of herself, I’ll never know.  She stumbled and fell.  First on her knees then over.  We rasped together down the gravel road, black mare on top of me.  We rasped to a halt.  She jumped to her feet.  She stared at me.  I could see the bone in both her knees.  Ribbons of hide hanging. Blood like volunteer firemen beginning to rise to the occasion.  6. Ten years later, today, I’m riding her.  I keep her reined in most of the time.  She tosses her head, snaps tie-downs. She dances and whirls, doubles under and rears incessantly. She makes me the butt of ridicule:  “So, uh, Jim, how old is that mare?”  “She must be twenty now.”  “Don’t you think it’s time she was broke?”  Every once in a while I let her run and break my heart.  Anyone watching stops breathing.  7. If I ever get to heaven and know who I am, I’d like to over- hear my daughter tell a story to her children.  “Sometimes my dad used to ride this black mare...”
had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?  —this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle  and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would —poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions: the smell of a bare neck in summer a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks  —that was all and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing: a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us. you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song  —for Haines Eason
Rachel Sherwood 1954-1979 "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" —Erich Segal, Love Story The first time we talked was in the rooftop cafeteria at Cal State Northridge. Misplaced poets, we sat amidst a crop of clean-cut freshmen while, round the college, smog-smudged San Fernando Valley beckoned, panoramic and bland. I’d just returned from my debauched year up north—sad, drunken sex at the baths, in dark parks. You still yearned for St. David’s, your stint as a foreign exchange student. In Wales, something fearless woke you up: you drank, wrote, fucked. Now, stuck in the suburbs, we talked poets, punk rock. This was the late seventies, disco’s zenith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith on her Horses album: disheveled, pale, thin, intense. You were scanning Meredith’s “Modern Love” for British Lit. I thought stale anyone before Sexton. You laughed, threw back your head. I puffed a Marlboro Light. In truth, you were too hearty, and I too uptight, to do punk. I praised, as twilight dimmed the gray valley, a poem you’d read at the student reading: a pitcher cracks, foreshadows a car crash. The skyline bled behind you. I’d also read that night—racked with stage fright, trembling uncontrollably. You seemed at ease, more confident than me. You seemed at ease, more confident than me, more independent. Lived on Amigo Avenue with a roommate, a moody science major; and your alter ego, a tomcat named Baby Tubbs. Still at home, I had no wheels. You drove a battered white hatchback full of newspapers, beer cans, comb, brush, books—half wastebasket, half purse. One night early on, we split a fifth of scotch, spread your tarot cards on the living room floor. You predicted long life for me, then said of yourself: “I might make twenty-five.” Your roommate walked by, shot a look. Later, I passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye. Passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye— the poster tacked above your secondhand couch—I dreamt I was falling down the side of a mountain, a scarecrow, twisted and limp, limbs ripped, bouncing from rock to rock. On every wall an idol: Toulouse-Lautrec cancan in kitchen, young Chatterton’s wan figure over your desk. Shuffling the deck, you asked the same question, drew the same black card: Death. Together we consulted all your oracles: Ouija board, zodiac, I Ching, palm, a fickle Magic 8 Ball. Hoping for more time, you inquired, believed like a convict praying for a reprieve. Like a convict praying for a reprieve, you were more alive than the complacent suburbanites I despised. Drunk and peeved at the world, I started an argument that ended with you hurling a full Coors at me as I fumed down your stairs. Four weeks passed before we spoke, a rift I endured by writing a poem about the freak- ish night a black cloud followed us—we lit candles, toasted oblivion. Battle scarred, we entered the undergraduate poetry contest at Northridge. Daniel Halpern guest judged...or was it May Swenson? After your death, I’d be happy you won. What can you say about a twenty-five- year-old girl who died? That as a child she loved horses. And dogs. And cats. That Monty Python made her laugh. That she was alive to the disruptions of her time. That she liked Byron, Rod Stewart, Mozart, Waugh, Poe, Keats, the Cars. That she lived on Amigo and was my friend. That she once threw her keys in anger; once threw a New Yorker, shout- ing “I hate John Ashbery!” And that she once, after a speed- and scotch-fueled orgy— Some Girls blasting, her last boyfriend passed out beside us—straddled, rode me like a horse. Rachel, can I say this: your cunt felt coarse. After your death, I’d be happy you won the contest—at least you had that. “Don’t turn on me,” you pleaded. Losing wasn’t fun, but I couldn’t begrudge you your prize. Burned out from an abortion, a vicious bite— a German shepherd lunged at your nose, slit its tip—and a violent unrequit- ed affair with your “Don J,” a closet case obsessed with Kerouac, you spoke of making a change. By then it was summer: Blondie on the car radio, Fourth of July, craving fireworks. I remember headlights; reaching for the steering wheel, you. Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU.  Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU: machines beeping around me, doctors and nurses hovering in an eerie blue light. Tube down my throat, I scrawled, with bruised hand, your name, question mark. My sister was steered in, wept to tell you were dead. The night they moved me to a private room, you appeared, pulsating white presence, in the hallway outside my door. “I’m all right,” you said, “You don’t have to worry about me.” I’d lie there in traction for six weeks, almost two decades ago, a ghost that fell from my own scarecrow dream, numb to that deadly drop. The first time we talked was on a rooftop.
I love the sound of marbles scattered on the worn wooden floor, like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek. I love the sight of white marbles, blue marbles, green marbles, black, new marbles, old marbles, iridescent marbles, with glass-ribboned swirls, dancing round and round. I love the feel of marbles, cool, smooth, rolling freely in my palm, like smooth-sided stars that light up the worn world.
The night reduced to a siren, a sigh: Beautiful boy on the treadmill Glimpsed sweating through sweating glass— My new moon. Sylvia’s moon: a smiling skull Snagged in witchy branches; fossil Brushed free of blackest earth. My last moon: an orange ball at rest, for an instant, On the grey lake. Wish list: dining set and dresser, Boombox, thin black tie, boy- Friend à la Madonna’s “True Blue”La la la la la la la Your moon (tonight): a clouded X-ray. I stand at a corner and stare up, Both of us astonished By its own secret light.
Bewitched  the boys were out  in force Drunken-  ness and lust —and full moon bouncing back  and forth that black above the bars * Last night  it burned  cigarette tip  thru old  blanket hole-punched  gray paper  sky Tonight it  outright  blinded One headlight  or drive-in sci-fi  eye * I’ve been  alone long enough Even the moon wears a ring and is full
When you grow up, what will you do? Please come to my tea party. I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you? Let’s take a trip to the zoo. Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee. You’re silly! When you grow up, what will you do? One plus one equals two. It’s fun to learn your ABC’s. I’m Chatty Cathy, who are you? Please come help me tie my shoe. Can you come out and play with me? When you grow up, what will you do? The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo. Please read me a bedtime story. I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you? Our flag is red, white and blue. Let’s makebelieve you’re Mommy. When you grow up, what will you do? I’m Chatty Cathy. Who are you?
Depressed because my book wasn’t nominated for a gay award, I lie on my couch watching—not listening to— the O.J. trial. Byron, who senses something’s wrong, hides under the bed until Ira comes home, carrying a bouquet of beautifully wrapped tulips. I press the mute button. “This is your prize,” he says. “Guess what they’re called.” A smile in- voluntarily overcomes my frown. “What?” “Red Parade.” “That sounds like the name of an old Barbie outfit,” I say. “That’s exactly what I told the florist. And you know what she told me?” “What?” “When she was a girl, she turned her Barbie into Cleopatra: gave her an Egyptian haircut and painted her nipples blue.” “How cool.” “Yeah, but now she thinks that her doll would be worth eight hundred dollars if she hadn’t messed it up.” Once in water, the tulips begin to unclench— ten angry fists. Their colors are fierce, like Plath’s “great African cat,” her “bowl of red blooms.” Poor Sylvia, who so desperately wanted awards, and only won them after she was dead. Byron jumps up, Ira sits down and massages my feet. “You guys.” My spirits are lifted by their tulips, kisses, licks.
For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again. What was her fierce commitment? I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.
You can say the broken word but cannot speak for it, can name a precise and particular shade of blue if you can remember its name (Woman of the South, New Lilac, Second Sky?) As the light, close to blinding, fell—falls in bars across a particular page, this then another, some other followed far too closely by night Or as the sleeping pages recall themselves, one by one, in dream-riddled, guarded tones, recall themselves from path to sloped meadow, meadow to burnt shore, shore to poised wave, dismay to present, any present of the bewildered and the buried alive (we’ve been told they were buried alive) Is there a door he hasn’t noticed and beyond it a letter which created the door or claims it created a door which would open either way
The voice, because of its austerity, will often cause dust to rise.  The voice, because of its austerity, will sometimes attempt the representation of dust.  Someone will say, I can’t breathe—as if choking on dust.  The voice ages with the body.  It will say, I was shaped by light escaping from a keyhole.  Or, I am the shape of that light.  It will say, For the body to breathe, a layer must be peeled away.  It will say, What follows is a picture of how things are for me now.  It will say, The rose is red, twice two is four—as if another were present.  The dust rises in spirals.  It will say, The distance from Cairo to anywhere is not that great.  As if one had altered the adjustment of a microscope.  Or examined its working parts.  Possibly an instrument covered with dust and forgotten on a shelf.  Beside a hatbox and a pair of weathered boots.  The voice will expand to fill a given space.  As if to say, This space is not immeasurable.  This space is not immeasurable.  When held before your eyes.  And which voice is it says (or claims to say), Last night I dreamt of walls and courses of brick, last night I dreamt of limbs.  As you dream—always unwillingly—of a writing not visible and voices muffled by walls.  As if the question: lovers, prisoners, visitors.  The voice, as an act of discipline or play, will imitate other voices.  This is what I am doing now.  This is what I’m doing now.  The clock behind my back, its Fusée mechanism.  Voice one recognizes from years before.  Beneath water, hidden by a spark.  Here at the heart of winter, or let’s say spring.  Voice with a history before its eyes.  With a blue dot before its eyes.  History of dust before its eyes.  It will say, as if remembering, The letter S stands for a slow match burning.  On the table before me.  No numbers on this watch.  And I live in a red house that once was brown.  A paper house, sort of falling down.  Such is the history of this house.  It looks like this.  Looks just like this.  We think to say in some language.
1 Beneath the writing on the wall is the writing it was designed to obscure. The two together form a third kind 2 There is no writing  on the wall’s other side Perhaps this lack constitutes a fourth kind 3 Some of the writing on the wall will be designed as truth some as art 4 It is said to represent a mirror of everyday life in its time 5 “Fabius Naso talks through his asshole and shits out his mouth” for example 6 “Foute les Arabes” for example 7 Certain words and images or parts of images have been chipped away These often turn up for sale at sidewalk stalls before the walls of other cities 8 I too have an image for sale It’s the image of a poem and is to be found on the reverse of this sheet
All clocks are clouds. Parts are greater than the whole. A philosopher is starving in a rooming house, while it rains outside. He regards the self as just another sign. Winter roses are invisible. Late ice sometimes sings.A and Not-A are the same. My dog does not know me. Violins, like dreams, are suspect. I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island. The strait has frozen, and people are walking—a few skating—across it. On the crescent beach, a drowned deer. A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck. The world is all that is displaced. Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red. Memory does not speak. Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus. The poet’s stutter and the philosopher’s. The self is assigned to others. A room for which, at all times, the moon remains visible. Leningrad cafe: a man missing the left side of his face. Disappearance of the sun from the sky above Odessa. True description of that sun. A philosopher lies in a doorway, discussing the theory of colors with himself the theory of self with himself, the concept of number, eternal return, the sidereal pulse logic of types, Buridan sentences, the lekton. Why now that smoke off the lake? Word and things are the same. Many times white ravens have I seen. That all planes are infinite, by extension. She asks, Is there a map of these gates? She asks, Is this one called Passages, or is that one to the west? Thus released, the dark angels converse with the angels of light. They are not angels. Something else.  for Poul Borum
All things belie me, I think, but I look at them though. Well boys, at least you’re not dead, right? What’s the date today? Until something. What? Of the lady of the whitening blow. I’m ashamed to keep on babbling as if I’ve always been oneself, diamond flow through. Humble flannel skeleton. Grin, laugh unbecoming Living at the bottom of the water may have been obvious all the time. But I forget. What’s my plot? Hand of a child, paw of an animal. Paint it red & make a pawprint in the psalter. Protect her & give her back her hat Entangle her dreams in demotic and Warm her feet; cheat the judge & protect the tree from which he was carved.  * And now that I’ve explained the situation Jesus my frame hurts, you say. Fucking pain. Hey come & empty my ashtray once more & don’t get so excited. A gentle heart was broken. Whose? No one’s It’s a figure like a frame among medlars & briars. Hand me that piece of that, just that, yeah. I don’t mean it, I’ve never meant anything because that’s not what I do, in the mountains I call home How can I tell you of my wound? it’s round & silver & headstrong, it’s nothing more than temperament born of a custom involving a circuitous journey This is all wrong. It rains today, my son’s singing love songs of this country, already being ten.  * And if to withstand this nocturnal pollution of the tiny wanton stars with bent hook clauses of misprision I’m supposed to sing the melody of an unexpecting part. . . Hey a pretty honey come a listen to me while I evening, darling, your messages, what would you think then? But I wouldn’t do that. Light surrounded oranges towels clouds. You don’t think you’re my you. Not here not you. You still think you’re he. she. Because I wouldn’t “you” you, would I? I only “you” some other he. she. I who write poems. When she writes them, it’s different. . .A world of words, right? It’s only my version of The Entertainer Nothing truly personal, I’m way above that. I’ve learned about it for a lot of days. I’ve been to see the doctor & you have to have shots for it. 17 balls of yarn & a sewing machine.  * No I wouldn’t know why anyone would want to write like that. I should never have had to do it. We were used to this other thing we always know like when we’re here. And you have this clear head & you’re seeing things & there they are. You don’t notice they’re spelled. That’s how you know you’re alive. I never saw you
It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte, We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover. It was hard to believe. The high school teacher We’d met called it a pinhole camera, People in the Renaissance loved to do that. And when the moon had passed partly through We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree, Dozens of crescents—made the same way— Thousands! Even our straw hats produced A few as we moved them over the bare granite. We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine Told a joke. Suns were everywhere—at our feet.
Glory be to God for breaded things— Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh, Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings, Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye, That in all oils, corn or canola, swim Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth!); Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim, These greasy, battered bounties of the South: Eat them.
Because she broke your heart, Shannon’s a badge— a seven-letter skidmark that scars up across your chest, a flare of indelible script. Between Death or Glory, and Mama, she rages, scales the trellis of your rib cage; her red hair swings down to bracket your ankles, whip up the braid of your backbone, cuff your wrists. She keeps you sleepless with her afterimage, and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more. Her memory wraps you like a vise. How simple the pain that trails and graces the length of your body. How it fans, blazes, writes itself over in the blood’s tightening sighs, bruises into wisdom you have no name for.
From over the wall I could hear the laughter of women in a foreign tongue, in the sun-rinsed air of the city. They sat (so I thought) perfumed in their hats and their silks, in chairs on the grass amid flowers glowing and swaying. One spoke and the others rang like bells, oh so witty, like bells till the sound filled up the garden and lifted like bubbles spilling over the bricks that enclosed them, their happiness holding them, even if just for the moment. Although I did not understand a word they were saying, their sound surrounded me, fell on my shoulders and hair, and burst on my cheeks like kisses, and continued to fall, holding me there where I stood on the sidewalk listening. As I could not move, I had to hear them grow silent, and adjust myself to the clouds and the cooling air. The mumble of thunder rumbled out of the wall and the smacking of drops as the rain fell everywhere.
A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses. A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise. A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea. A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally. Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace. The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful. The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold. A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday. Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary. One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that. A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune. Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease. A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog. Cuddling comes in continuing a change. A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy. A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted. A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by.
A white hunter is nearly crazy.
The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable. Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume. A cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange. Come to season that is there any extreme use in feather and cotton. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them. A circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel. What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. The question does not come before there is a quotation. In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense. It shows what use there is in a whole piece if one uses it and it is extreme and very likely the little things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain and if there is the best thing to do is to take it away and wear it and then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude. Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable. Very likely there should not be a finer fancy present. Some increase means a calamity and this is the best preparation for three and more being together. A little calm is so ordinary and in any case there is sweetness and some of that. A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit. A closet, a closet does not connect under the bed. The band if it is white and black, the band has a green string. A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing. The disgrace is not in carelessness nor even in sewing it comes out out of the way. What is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
1 hat  As soon as I put it on Brooklyn went dark, but when I took it off my wooden horse stared at me with dazzling glass eyes.  2 coat  The shirred hem swished on the floor. Huge shoulders sloped like pines under snow. A panel in the lapel read Kuut, Tallinn in thread letters. I hid at the center behind jet buttons too round to undo. That coarse-nap wool outlasted Estonian winter but now the moths left a trellis of holes so it was never dark when I curled up hugging my knees. My mother cried out:Who are you? I answered in my deepest voice:His coat.   3 shoes  I shoved my hands in and taught them to walk: now stumble, now march against your will, left, right, to the Narva front: now dance:  and somewhere in that immense city where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a name.
Sonnet 29 Is there a sound? There is a forest. What is the world? The word is wilderness. What is the answer? The answer is the world. What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness. What is the end? No one lives there now. What is a beginning? The beginning is light. What makes happiness? Nothing. What makes an ending? What does not. What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,  of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full  daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.
“Who are you to tell us how to live or why, et cetera?” No Man, of course, and not so tall  as is the current fashion, nor smart enough in the acceptable modern way, to enthrall the crowd with stories of my life among the savages where I was home and growing baffled day by day, raging through the night as if it were new music I made, groaing. It came to me today at lunch, the sound of women in the next booth, a voice like Aunt Odile’s—whom I never knew well nor did I like her, but not her spite but her voice like home-grown fame, a touch gravelly, a considerable groan itself, it seemed. They spoke outmoded French around me, never to me, except to taunt, I thought. She leaned above me, on those visits, speaking to Mother in their private French, laughing. A boy surrounded by the sound of foreign tongues knowing what wasn’t meant for him: toy temptations, suggestive coils of syllables. I learned Latin, for Mass, and did love its terrific laddered randomness:  The Blessed hovering Virgin above every station of a boy’s new path, hormonal disharmonies, her praises sung into hundreds the first Tuesday of every month: and yet Latin could not expose such shreds of glittering flesh as I found in French, not like the living tongue whose tip twined into an Uncle’s mustache as he leered at the wrong Aunt and winked and a fine distance crystallized loud there, then gone. Crashing like German. Father’s family spoke clear English among the bayous, boys and girls of immigrants accentless happily German through two wars, not counting Civil. I had the tongue for arithmetic and spoke it beautifully. I loved to count:  precision’s a tempting career, clicking into a future like an abacus ignoring all those accents around. I never learned the luck of any but English, bland and bound. But only yesterday I heard a word the mechanic said in Czech to his cousin—shop rag—clearly centered in a welter of incomprehension, the wreck of my car at their wretched mercies: shop rag. And he wiped his hands and cried  for me, shrugging like a cousin would. I wrote a check. I drove home, or tried. So does it count? Am I a man of passion or child of comprehension? “Father of little lusts driving myself home who thinks: Buy some sentiment, a little like love and she must speak French this time. She longs for you, you know; it isn’t just the money. America loves you for yourself alone” and so I go for professional help, honey- blond hair and a disposition like a happy banker, whose French for dear sounds like dog; the cost of living is going up, loving her here.
in memory of amy clampitt  A single seedling, camp follower  of arson...
Grand Cayman This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness, Inverted octopus with heavenward arms Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove⎯ A bird almost⎯of almost bird alarms, Is pulmonary to the wind that jars Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch. The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly, Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch. The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk; But this,⎯defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood, Almost no shadow⎯but the air’s thin talk. Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue! While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main By what conjunctions do the winds appoint Its apotheosis, at last⎯the hurricane!
My heart was suspect. Wired to an EKG, I walked a treadmill that measured my ebb and flow, tracked isotopes that ploughed my veins, looked for a constancy I’ve hardly ever found. For a month I worried as I climbed the stairs to my office. The mortality I never believed in was here now. They say my heart’s ok, just high cholesterol, but I know my heart’s a house someone has broken into, a room you come back to and know some stranger with bad intent has been there and touched all that you love. You know he can come back. It’s his call, his house now.
Down here, no light but what we carry with us. Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles. At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them, we don’t inflate our vests, but let the scrubbed cheeks of rocks slide past in amniotic calm. At sixty feet we douse our lights, cemented by the weight of the dark, of water, the grip of the sea’s absolute silence. Our groping hands brush the open mouths of anemones, which shower us in particles of phosphor radiant as halos. As in meditation, or in deepest prayer, there is no knowing what we will see.
where is the poetry of resistance,  the poetry of honorable defiance unafraid of lies from career politicians and business men, not respectful of journalist who write official speak void of educated thought without double search or sub surface questions that war talk demands? where is the poetry of doubt and suspicion not in the service of the state, bishops and priests, not in the service of beautiful people and late night promises, not in the service of influence, incompetence and academic  clown talk?
Who has the moral high ground? Fifteen blocks from the whitehouse on small corners in northwest, d.c. boys disguised as me rip each other’s hearts out with weapons made in china. they fight for territory. across the planet in a land where civilization was born the boys of d.c. know nothing about their distant relatives in Rwanda. they have never heard of the hutu or tutsi people. their eyes draw blanks at the mention of kigali, byumba or butare. all they know are the streets of d.c., and do not cry at funerals anymore. numbers and frequency have a way of making murder commonplace and not news unless it spreads outside of our house, block, territory. modern massacres are intraethnic. bosnia, sri lanka, burundi, nagorno-karabakh, iraq, laos, angola, liberia, and rwanda are small foreign names on a map made in europe. when bodies by the tens of thousands float down a river turning the water the color of blood, as a quarter of a million people flee barefoot into tanzania and zaire, somehow we notice. we do not smile, we have no more tears. we hold our thoughts. In deeply muted silence looking south and thinking that today nelson mandela seems much larger than he is.
June 7, 1990 breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath.
And all this while I have been playing with toys A toy power station a toy automobile a house of blocks And all this while far off in other lands Thousands and thousands, millions and millions— You know—you see the pictures Women carrying their bony infants Men sobbing over graves Buildings sculpted by explosion Earth wasted bare and rotten— And all this while I have been shopping, I have Been let us say free And do they hate me for it Do they hate me
—for David Lehman Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. —William Wordsworth Going to hell so many times tears it Which explains poetry. —Jack Spicer The day the war against Iraq begins I’m photographing the yellow daffodils With their outstretched arms and ruffled cups Blowing in the wind of Jesus Green Edging the lush grassy moving river Along with the swans and ducks Under a soft March Cambridge sky Embellishing the earth like a hand Starting to illustrate a children’s book Where people in light clothes come out To play, to frisk and run about With their lovers, friends, animals, and children As down every stony back road of history They’ve always done in the peaceful springs —Which in a sense is also hell because The daffodils do look as if they dance And make some of us in the park want to dance And breathe deeply and I know that Being able to eat and incorporate beauty like this I am privileged and by that token can Taste pain, roll it on my tongue, it’s good The cruel wars are good the stupidity is good, The primates hiding in their caves are very good, They do their best, which explains poetry. What explains poetry is that life is hard But better than the alternatives, The no and the nothing. Look at this light And color, a splash of brilliant yellow Punctuating an emerald text, white swans And mottled brown ducks floating quietly along Whole and alive, like an untorn language That lacks nothing, that excludes Nothing. Period. Don’t you think It is our business to defend it Even the day our masters start a war? To defend the day we see the daffodils?
Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket. You are here; your name on a postal box; entrance into another place like vapor. No one knows you. No one speaks to you. All of their cocks stare down their pant legs at the ground. Their cunts are blind. They barely let you through the check-out line. Have a nice day. Plastic or paper? Are you origami? A paper folded swan, like the ones you made when you were ten? When you saw the constellations, lying on your back in the wet grass, the soapy pear blossoms drifting and wasting, and those stars, the burned out ones whose light was still coming in waves; your body was too slight. How could it hold such mass? Still on your lips the taste of something. All night you waited for morning, all morning for afternoon, all afternoon for night; and still the longing sings. Oh, paper bird with folded wings.
for Laura The island, you mustn’t say, had only rocks and scrub pine; Was on a blue, bright day like a blemish in this landscape. And Charlotte who is frail and the youngest of us collects Sticks and branches to start our fires, cries as they burn Because they resemble most what she has lost Or has little of: long fingers, her toes, And a left arm gone past the elbow, soon clear to her shoulder. She has the mouth of sea perch. Five of our sisters wear Green hoods. You are touched by all of this, but not by us. To be touched by us, to be kissed! Sometimes We see couples rowing in the distance in yellow coats. Sometimes they fish with handlines; we offend Everyone who is offended most And by everything and everyone. The five goats love us, though, And live in our dark houses. When they are Full with milk they climb the steps and beg that They be milked. Their teats brush the steps and leave thick Yellow trails of fresh milk. We are all females here. Even the ghosts. We must wash, of course, in salt water, But it smarts or maybe even hurts us. Often with a rope Around her waist Anne is lowered entirely into the water. She splashes around and screams in pain. Her screams Sometimes carry clear to the beaches on the Cape.For us I say so often. For us we say. For us! We are Human and not individual, we hold everything in common. We are individual, you could pick us out in a crowd. You did. This island is not our prison. We are not kept In; not even by our skin. Once Anne said she would love to be a Negro or a trout. We live without you. Father, I don’t know why I have written You all this; but be proud for I am living, and yet each day I am less and less your flesh. Someday, eventually, you Should only think of me as being a lightning bug on the lawn, Or the Negro fishing at the pond, or the fat trout he wraps In leaves that he is showing to someone. I’ll be Most everything for you. And I’ll be gone.
Mistress Adrienne, I have been given a bed with a pink dresser In the hothouse Joining the Concord Public Library: the walls and roof are Glass and my privacy comes from the apple-geraniums, Violets, ferns, marigolds, and white mayflags. I get my meals With the janitor and his wife and all of the books are mine To use. I scour, sweep, and dust. I hope you don’t think of me As a runaway? I remember your kindness, Your lessons in reading and writing on the piazza. My journey was unusual. I saw some of the war And it was terrible even far up into the North. My first fright was at a train depot outside Memphis Where some soldiers found me eating not yet ripened Quinces and grapes, they took me prisoner: first I helped some children carry tree limbs to the woodbox Of the locomotive, then, I was shown to a gentleman In the passenger car who was searching for his runaway Negress in a purple dress; he wouldn’t identify me, And I was thrown in with about forty stray blacks into An open boxcar and soon we were moving, next to me A man was sucking on the small breasts of a girl Maybe twelve years of age, across from them A sad old woman smiled as she puffed on an old cigar end, By afternoon she was dead, her two friends Just kicked her out so that she rolled down into pasture Frightening some hogs that ran off into a thicket. The girl next to me whimpered and shook. Those quinces Just ran straight through me and all I could do was Squat in one corner that was supplied with ammonia-waters And hay. We were given that night Confederate uniforms To mend and when the others slept I dressed in three Shirts and trousers and leapt from the moving train, The padding helped some but I couldn’t walk the next day. I hid in a shack that seemed lonely but for a flock Of turkeys, some young hens, and a corncrib with tall Split palings. The next morning from a hill I watched field-workers on a tobacco plantation, it took Two men to carry a single leaf like a corpse from A battle scene. That night I found a horse with a bit In its mouth made of telegraph wire. He carried me up all The way to Youngstown. Chloe, you must Learn to swim in the pond and to ride the old sorrel.
There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don’t like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in. I choose the independent film channel and HBO. Neither have news programs as far as I can tell. This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices. Instead of the news, HBO has The Sopranos. This week the indie channel is playing and replaying Spaghetti Westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.   Worry 1. A dog’s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.   It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn’t work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in their boy's face.   Worry 8. Cause mental distress or agitation to (a person, oneself); make anxious and ill at ease. 9. Give way to anxiety, unease, or disquietude: allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or troubles.   He waits for his father’s death. His father has been taken off the ventilator and clearly will not be able to breathe for himself much longer. Earlier in the day the nurse mentioned something about an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves in the cerebral hemispheres, the parts of the brain that deal with speech and memory. But his brain stem is damaged; it seems now the test will not be necessary. The son expects an almost silent, hollow gasp to come from the old man’s open mouth. Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind. The release is jerky and convulsive. There is never the rasp or the choke the son expects, though one meaning of worry is to be choked on, to choke on.
MARIA NEFELE:  I walk in thorns in the dark   of what’s to happen and what has  with my only weapon my only defense  my nails purple like cyclamens.ANTIPHONIST:   I saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down  listening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old  gabardine. In front of children’s-store windows. Sadder then. And in  discotheques, more nervous, eating her nails. She smokes innumerable  cigarettes. She is pale and beautiful. But if you talk to her she doesn’t hear  at all. As if something is happening – she alone hears it and is frightened.  She holds your hand tight, tears, but is not there. I never touched her and I  never took from her anything.MN:  He understood nothing. He kept asking all the time “Remember?” What’s to  remember? My dreams alone I remember because I see them at night. Days  I feel bad – how to say: unprepared. I found myself so suddenly, in life –  where I’d hardly expected. I’d say “Bah, I’ll get used to it.” And everything  around me ran. Things and people ran, ran – until I set myself to run like  crazy. But, it seems, I overdid. Because – I don’t know – something strange  happened in the end. First I’d see the corpse and then the murder. First  came the blood and then the blow and cry. And now, when I hear rain I don’t  know what’s waiting...A:  “Why don’t they bury people standing up like archbishops?” – that’s what  she’d say to me. And once, I remember, summer on the island, all of us  coming from a party, dawn, we jumped over the bars of the museum’s  garden. She danced on the stones and she saw nothing.MN:  I saw his eyes. I saw some old olive groves.A:  I saw a column on a grave. A girl in relief on the stone. She seemed sad  and held a small bird in her cupped hand.MN:  He was looking at me, I know, he was looking at me. We both were looking  at the same stone. We looked at each other through the stone.A:  She was calm and in her palm she held a small bird.MN:   She was sitting and she was dead.A:   She was sitting and in her palm she held a small bird.  You’ll never hold a bird like that – you aren’t able.MN:  Oh if they let me, if they let me.A:  If who let you?MN:  The one who lets nothing.A:  He, he who lets nothing  is cut by his shadow and walks away.MN:  His words are white and unspeakable  his eyes deep and without sleep...A:  But the whole upper part of the stone was taken. And with it her name.MN:  ARIMNA – as if I could still see the letters carved inside the light...  ARIMNA EFE EL...A:  Gone. The whole top gone. There were no letters at all.MN:  ARIMNA EFE EL – there, on the EL the stone had cut and broken. I remember  it well.A:  She must have seen it in a dream since she remembers.MN:  In my dreams, yes. In a large sleep that will come sometimes all light and  heat and small stony steps. The children will walk in the streets arm in arm   like in some old Italian movies. Song everywhere and enormous women in  small balconies watering their flowers.A:  A large blue balloon will take us high then, here and there, the wind will beat  us. The silver domes will stand out first, then the belfries. The streets will  appear narrower and straighter than we imagined. The terraces with the  white television antennas. And all around the hills, and the kites – so close  we’ll just shave past them. Until one moment we’ll see the whole sea. On it  the souls will be leaving small white steams.MN:  I have lifted my hand against the mountains, the dark and the demonic of  this world. I’ve asked love “Why?” and rolled her on the floor. War and war  and not one rag to hide deep in our things and forget. Who listens? Who  listened? Judges, priests, police, which is your country? One body is left me  and I give it. On it those who know cultivate the holy, as the gardeners in  Holland, tulips. And in it drown who never learned of sea or swimming... Flux  of the sea and you stars’ distant influx – stand by me!A:  I have lifted my hand against the  unexorcised demons of the world  and from the place of illness I have exited  to the sun and to the light self-exiled!MN:  And from too many storms I’ve exited  self among humans exiled!
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?  The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?  Because the barbarians are coming today.  What’s the point of senators making laws now?  Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown?  Because the barbarians are coming today  and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.  He’s even got a scroll to give him,  loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold?  Because the barbarians are coming today  and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say?  Because the barbarians are coming today  and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought?  Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.  And some of our men just in from the border say  there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
He didn’t know, King Kleomenis, he didn’t dare— he just didn’t know how to tell his mother a thing like that: Ptolemy’s demand, to guarantee their treaty, that she too go to Egypt and be held there as a hostage— a very humiliating, indecorous thing. And he would be about to speak yet always hesitate, would start to tell her yet always stop. But the magnificent woman understood him (she’d already heard some rumors about it) and she encouraged him to get it out. And she laughed, saying of course she’d go, happy even that in her old age she could be useful to Sparta still. As for the humiliation—that didn’t touch her at all. Of course an upstart like the Lagid couldn’t possibly comprehend the Spartan spirit; so his demand couldn’t in fact humiliate a Royal Lady like herself: mother of a Spartan king.
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end: I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details. And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.
Chekhov, at Yalta A winter evening at the cottage by the bay, And I sat in the black and gold of the dead garden Wrapped in blankets, eating my sister’s suet pudding. The fountain was wrapped in dirty straw and Just below my property in the old Tartar cemetery There was a small funeral in progress: the widow Is wearing a purple shawl, the children are bare around The shoulders and the girls are wearing orange petals At their throats. The ashen white beards of the men Are like immaculate vests from this distance. There is nothing more intolerable than suet pudding, Unless it is the visitors. The drunken visitors laughing In my kitchen, eating my duck and venison, while I hide From them here in the dark garden. The daughter of one of these gentlemen is pretty. I saw her through the window drinking Champagne from a clay mug—just under her thin blouse I saw the blue points of her breasts that turn, In opposition, both out and up like the azure slippers Of the priest who is now singing in the cemetery below my house. Once the family has gone off with its torches I’ll Climb down to the fresh grave and drop some coins For flowers, even wooden teeth for the widow so she can Attract a new husband? The black, turned soil Or our garden reminds me Of the common grave given to the children Of the Godunov Orphanage after that horrible fire: A charred horse was thrown in with them, Bags of lime, and what I understood to be a large ham That the authorities, nevertheless, declared The torso of a male child of nine or ten. The Czar, In their memory, placed a tiny trout pond over them And this inscription: A blue blanket for my little ones. My wife goes nearly naked to parties in Moscow. My sister here, at Yalta, goes sea bathing with a rope Around her that runs back to the beach where it is Attached to a donkey who is commanded by a servant With a long switch. The sea tows her out and then the donkey is whipped Sorrowfully until he has dragged her back to them. I named the donkey, Moon, after the mystery of his service To my sister. This winter He has been an excellent friend. I read to this poor beast from Three Sisters. He is a better Critic and audience than I could find in the cities. I have won an Award that will save me from arrest anywhere Inside Russia. I am going to refuse it! And then travel To Nice or Paris. My tuberculosis is worse. Tolstoi reads my stories To his family after supper. And reads them badly, I suppose! I did walk that evening all the way down to the cemetery Only to discover that my pockets were empty. I screamed up to the house for coins, for plenty Of coins! The visitors, laughing and singing, ran down To me without coats and with a lantern swinging— My sister trailed behind them On her donkey. Her square black hat Bobbing like a steamer way out in the bay. And when they reached me— I said, “Sister, pack the trunks! You hurt me! I will write that we have departed for France, for Italy.”
The vase was made of clay With spines of straw For strength. The sunbaked vase Soaked in a deep blue dye for days. The events in this wilderness, Portrayed in the round of the vase, Depend on shades of indigo against The masked areas of the clay, a flat pearl color To detail the big sky and snow... This Montana field in winter is not sorrowful: A bugle skips through notes: We view it all somehow from the center of the field And there are scattered groups of cavalry. Some of these Men were seasoned by civil war. Their caps are blue. Their canteens are frozen. The horses shake their heads Bothered by beads of ice, the needles of ice Forming at both sides of their great anvil heads. The long, blue cloaks of the officers fall over the haunches Of the horses. The ammunition wagons Beside the woods are blurred by the snowy weather... Beyond the wagons, farther even, into the woods There is a sloping streambed. This is The dark side of the vase which is often misunderstood. From here through the bare trees there’s A strange sight to be seen at the very middle of the field: A valet is holding a bowl of cherries—archetype and rubric, A general with white hair eats the fruit while introducing its color Which will flow through the woods in early December. An Indian woman came under dark clouds to give birth, unattended In the deep wash inside the woods. She knew the weather Could turn and staked the tips of two rooted spruce trees To the earth to make a roof. The deerskin of her robe is in her mouth. Her legs spread, He feet are tied up in the roof of darkening spruce. No stars Show through!
The first morning after anyone’s death, is it important To know that fields are wet, that the governess is Naked but with a scarf still covering her head, that She’s sitting on a gardener who’s wearing Just a blue shirt, or that he’s sitting on a chair in the kitchen. They look like they are rowing while instead outside in the mist Two boats are passing on the river, the gardener’s mouth Is opening: A white, screaming bird lifts off the river into the trees, Flies a short distance and is joined By a second bird, but then as if to destroy everything The two white birds are met by a third. The night Always fails.
1. X-Men #141 & 142 2. Defenders #125 3. Phoenix: The Untold Story 4. What if. . .? #31 5. New Mutants #1 6. New Mutants #2 7. Micronauts #58 8. Marvel Universe #5 9. New Mutants #14 10. Secret Wars #1
My father’s farm is an apple blossomer. He keeps his hills in dandelion carpet and weaves a lane of lilacs between the rose and the jack-in-the-pulpits. His sleek cows ripple in the pastures. The dog and purple iris keep watch at the garden’s end. His farm is rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon. His crops suck rain from the sky and swallow the smoldering sun. His fields are oceans of heat, where waves of gold beat the burning shore. A red fox pauses under the birch trees, a shadow is in the river’s bend. When the hawk circles the land, my father’s grainfields whirl beneath it. Owls gather together to sing in his woods, and the deer run his golden meadow. My father’s farm is an icicle, a hillside of white powder. He parts the snowy sea, and smooths away the valleys. He cultivates his rows of starlight and drags the crescent moon through dark unfurrowed fields.
I have forgotten the words, and therefore I shall not conceive of a mysterious salvation, I shall not become a tall lily and bloom into blue and white. Then what oracular event shall appear on my doorstep? What announcement shall crowd me to a corner, protesting an unworthiness, which doubtless shall be believed? But these are only bells we hear, pulled down by the arms of the drunken janitor, two fingers missing on his left hand. And we have climbed into that tower, its spiraling wooden staircase creaking beneath our feet. We have seen for ourselves that it is only iron that rings, iron swinging on an iron bar, the rough rope threading down to the cold ground, no death or holiness in those hollow shells.
The image that haunts me is not beautiful. I do not think it will open into a field of wildflowers; I doubt that it will take wing suddenly, startling us into admiration. It is one of those brutish facts of life, the awkward nakedness of the memory when it takes off its clothes and crawls between the top and bottom sheet. Or rather, It is my mother’s memory that I carry, pressed into my own: how at her grandfather’s funeral, his daughter—my mother’s mother— stood at an open door and cried, and then The blood ran down her legs, gushing from the womb where thirteen children had nestled, and now, at once horrified and at ease with her body’s impropriety, they gathered all around. This was the grandmother who lost three of those thirteen, who hung a million baskets of wash, who peeled a million potatoes, and splattered her arms with the grease of constant cooking. This was my grandmother who kept chickens, who left her voice in the throats of all my aunts, and was struck down in the cellar, legs twisted beneath the fall and half her face stiffened. Helpless until they found her, the jar of canned fruit smashed on the cement. And then at her funeral, I saw my mother’s tears, gliding ahead of me in a black limousine, a procession not beautiful but haunting.
Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one. And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at a time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is a thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same skin when you look in the mirror, and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watchband. The changes you can make are small and costly—better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing that you have to leave eventually. You know that because you have seen others do it, others who were once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours and then one day they are gone. No forwarding address.
1 No one felt in the dark for his hat. No one budged an inch. Thus the story draws to its end. No one felt over the edge of her silk pocket to touch her parking ticket. No one even wished to walk out of the dark to the street.2 Over the transparent page I traced my name. I thought about The Bird That Turns Around, How To Blow A Brick Over, What To Do While Waiting For The Doctor, Answers To Problems On Page 2,000, The Chair That Comes To You, The Mysterious Paper Purse, The Universe Around Us, Lift To Erase.3 Those days everything I thought trembled through the rotating blades of an electric fan. The way my voice moved through it. The way my fingers shook. I wore a two-tiered hat. A dead mule is huge. The man with the stick was fat.4 A dead deer has the face of a rat. Last night I watched seven white deer walk single file across the black edge, the levee’s border. Slowly, each one looked me over, saw I was sleeping, and soon came closer to lick my face all over.5 All fall I played at being a slave. In the red embers of fires I made I burned slips of paper with politicians’ names to pass the time. I cooked rich soups of dragonflies. I learned to aim an arrow through a devilhorse’s brain.6 I sat alone by the water. They trusted me with the river. When United Fruit Company boats headed for port, upriver, I called out to sailors, down came stalks of bananas to snag and bring up to the batture.7 When the polls opened until the polls closed two men dangled their rifles over their shoulders and pretended they couldn’t be seen. The men and women who came were embarrassed. They looked down at the white glare of crushed shells at their feet. They looked off into the distance.8 In the hot sun on the wooden platform I stood waiting for the icehouse doors to open. I wanted to be asked inside the cool bricks of smoking water, frozen and squared in fifty-pound blocks, rattling along belts of silver rollers. I wanted to be cool and dry.9 The women were left locked in the house. The rifle’s blue-black barrel shone in the corner against the white, white wall. Somewhere in the swamps around us a man threw himself against the dark. I couldn’t understand why our lights were on. I wondered if he would drown.10 I was afraid of the iridescent algae pool, hit with glaze after an afternoon storm, lifted like a giant keyhole, lit by the great green eyeball behind it, watching me, watching me turn away, watching me look back, watching me, for all I knew, catch my breath, not wanting to give it back.11 We walked into the parking lot after 10 o’clock mass on Sunday. A car’s blur crossed our path so close I felt the heat of the sun in the hot wind off its fender. They only meant to scare us. I felt then what my prayers might have been.12 That afternoon someone decided to slaughter the   rabbits. They held the scruffs of their necks, whacked their soft brown crowns with cracked baseball bats. Each one bled through the nose. We fed their guts to the alligator by the shed in the deep, deep hole.13 I watched them kissing, kissing in sorrow, in the sitting rooms in the funeral parlor. They were drinking cafe au lait and eating ham sandwiches. Yes, there were so many flowers. I didn’t want to be kissed in sorrow. I didn’t want to be patted or pitied.14 The squeak and thump and mist of flit as someone pumped sprays of insecticide. It fell over my face, like a blessing, like a tingling sensation in my fingers, like a thousand evaporating lessons, it fell on the oil lamp’s wick. The flame danced. It wobbled, dipped and brightened.
The batture’s water and sand disappear when water swells the river, heat’s portion of a northern winter. Under willows cropped up since our last cow is dead and carried to the batture to be taken by the water clean into another season, we sit on green granite piled deep enough to keep the batture dry one more week. We don’t say so but we wait for the swollen body to appear before us, we want the torn leg to distract us, the loose arm to show us where. We’ve always known which way the water runs, the differences among earth, air, water and whatever the horizon offers that is not actually there. We want to be the ones to identify the missing person. We count the reward we’d earn. There is a family in southern Minnesota keeping a closet of dry-cleaned suits, a mahogany high-boy of ironed shirts, folded undershorts and sweaters. In the ashtray that says Welcome to Nevada are the coins he left without thinking, the only clue which tells his family what they didn’t want to know, he might have known what he was doing. We want to be the ones whose call is first in a series of related events which will end we hope in the family’s satisfaction with the coroner’s identification, and though it is old-fashioned and no longer done in this country, we’d like to think the pennies from his pocket will be mailed to the morgue, polished to their copper finish, pressed to float forever on his eyelids and make us take a second look as the light hits them and they beautifully glitter. We think how glad we were when we first saw him he floated face down in the water which a few moments earlier had been snow his children sledded and slipped on. Light beats gravity, lifts these young trees from the water. This is where we watch time, mark the spot across the water which is the red flag we hope calls uscome across and save us. This is twenty-eight states.
Except when once we drew identical lots nothing’s ever come between us. We keep our drifts of space spare and daily shake our down. You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts. Stuck with sharp wind, both bloods are rare and rarely do we taste the walnut’s knot of oil. We wake between our fitted sheets and shake our fists or pretend real fright but not in this do we dare touch. My rib cage can stand in yours, yours become the swinging doors through which magician’s swords will slice and miss that knotted muscle. It is a trick. We’ll make an endless show of the outright clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts. We’ve designed the double bars of depth; our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think is absence, the somersault we call forbearance — the hearts are there, doing turns that teach us to count and keep each finger close to its own sly pulse.
Is it only when you’re little you know tigers live in your closet— one with your shoes on his two ears, another with your umbrella tied to his tail; the rest wearing your red coat and blue trousers with the red buttons? Is it only when you’re little the dustballs have mountainous shadows in the crack of light under the door? Or is it also NOW you fear that tigers will eat you— when you wake in the middle of the night and don’t know where you are, nor remember how far you’ve come. Your nose hurts like a plowed field, your fingers stiff— Then somehow, you remember what you’ve accomplished. The sewing is finished— The red buttons threaded to the blue pants and the little coat with its sleeves. And you know you have given them to the tigers (so they won’t eat you). But they chased themselves around a tree and melted into butter. NOW you can pick up your coat and trousers, your shoes and umbrella. Soon, even, you can start your car and go— The promise of dawn already on the face of the clock-radio.
I Back in time car in yard shutters at windows paint on gray boards old man, old woman their children gone then man and woman younger  with young children west wing not yet built on house one wagon, horse arrive untended land back too far young man, woman with eyes  like bright baubles holding space one shutter closes on another. II Grizzled, unpossessed on the ledge of plains factional roof meager walls written upon like points of long prairie grass the house stares across the highway as though remembering a fir tree  carried on horseback through blinding snow. III Survival of facade when content does not endure one part has nothing to do with the others all is hollow ramshackled but house still stands on prairie customs still leap on points  of delicate prairie grass where the bright bauble of the eye blinked once too often.
Well, jipes! I floored the Chevy/ fishtailed all over the soft-tarred road Old women babbling by the church shit no one with balls goes to flea markets the road festered at Pelsor curves at sixty-two overturned once on these roads still don’t know how I got out.
It’s mostly the same here slow as melonvines in an arctic sun where the great ball of the plane went down in nineteen thirty-five & an eskimo with a camera took a picture that stayed in his camera twenty-one years & by some chance he told an explorer who bought the film & found the crash & the bodies under tarp looking like two seals on the ice, the crumpled plane with oversized pontoons, the propeller as though it could turn again— the men, Wiley Post & Will Rogers, still twelve miles southwest of Barrow, Alaska.
When he movd into the house he wanted us to stomp & pray out the evil spirits  just in case they’d be there. How cld they when a medicine woman lived on the place & left it to the church when she went to happier grounds? But a truck hauling brush turnd on the road  & he jumped up screaming— deer prowler  at the antlered beast. We danced out the spirits he carried on the place.  How now pow wow he jumps in the sow-yard with the bow-  wow cow. We passed the spirits to chickens to peck their legs— Eeeeevil spirits pock-marked  as the dartboard. W/ marbles shooting rabbit eyes we stompd wild fires he once built in his head,  still haunted him as though evil spirits could open a medicine woman’s door,  climb in her unpainted windows, crawl through yellowed wallpaper armoured w/  prayer-chants. We whooped & hawed until he sd nuf.  The house barricaded from deer prowlers  from under his headband.
The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said. A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea grey with shining pools. The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard. And yet we knew that by the following dawn nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side nor the memory that we were once men, nothing at all by the following dawn. ‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea. So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’ A funeral march meandered through the thin rain. How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it. And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis. Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die? Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else and this game is life. The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything. The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands, and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries. My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song: ‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’ One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans. A couple passed, talking: ‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home, let’s go home and turn on the light.’  Athens, Feb. ’39
Again with spring she wore light colours and with gentle steps again with spring again in summer she was smiling. Among fresh blossoms breast naked to the veins beyond the dry night beyond the white old men debating quietly whether it would be better to give up the keys or to pull the rope and hang from the noose to leave empty bodies there where souls couldn’t endure there where the mind couldn’t catch up and knees buckled. With the new blossoms the old men failed and gave up on everything grandchildren and great-grandchildren the broad fields the green mountains love and life compassion and shelter rivers and sea; and they departed like statues leaving behind a silence that no sword could cut that no gallop could break nor the voices of the young; and the great loneliness came the great privation along with this spring and settled and spread like the frost of dawn caught hold of the high branches slid down the trunks of trees and wrapped around our soul. But she smiled wearing light colours like a blossoming almond tree in yellow flames and walked along lightly opening windows in the delighted sky without us the luckless ones. And I saw her breast naked the waist and the knee, as the inviolate martyr inviolate and pure issues from the torment to go to heaven, beyond the inexplicable whispering of people in the boundless circus beyond the black grimace the sweaty neck of the exasperated executioner striking vainly. The loneliness now a lake the privation now a lake untouched and untraceable. 16 March ’39
’Ασíνην τε. . . — Iliad All morning long we looked around the citadel starting from the shaded side there where the sea green and without lustre — breast of a slain peacock — received us like time without an opening in it. Veins of rock dropped down from high above, twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive at the water’s touch, while the eye following them struggled to escape the monotonous see-saw motion, growing weaker and weaker. On the sunny side a long empty beach and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls. No living thing, the wild doves gone and the king of Asini, whom we’ve been trying to find for two years now, unknown, forgotten by all, even by Homer, only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain, thrown here like the gold burial mask. You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light like a dry jar in dug earth: the same sound that our oars make in the sea. The king of Asini a void under the mask everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’  and his children statues and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships anchored in a vanished port: under the mask a void. Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence a dark spot that you see travelling like a fish in the dawn calm of the sea: a void everywhere with us. And the bird, a wing broken, that flew away last winter — tabernacle of life — and the young woman who left to play with the dog-teeth of summer and the soul that sought the lower world gibbering and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the torrent of the sun with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow. And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself does there really exist among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows and curves does there really exist here where one meets the path of rain, wind and ruin does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the tenderness of those who’ve waned so strangely in our lives, those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with the sea’s boundlessness or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending like the branches of a terrible willow tree heaped in unremitting despair while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes uprooted in the mud image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness has turned to stone: the poet a void. Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring, and from the depths of the cave a startled bat hit the light as an arrow hits a shield: ‘’Ασíνην τε. . .’Ασíνην τε. . .’. If only that could be the king of Asini we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon the stones.  Asini, summer ’38—Athens, Jan. ’40
To Nani Panayíotopoulo And yet we should consider how we go forward. To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls. And yet we should consider towards what we go forward, not as our pain would have it, and our hungry children and the chasm between us and the companions calling from the opposite shore; nor as the bluish light whispers it in an improvised hospital, the pharmaceutic glimmer on the pillow of the youth operated on at noon; but it should be in some other way, I would say like the long river that emerges from the great lakes enclosed deep in Africa, that was once a god and then became a road and a benefactor, a judge and a delta; that is never the same, as the ancient wise men taught, and yet always remains the same body, the same bed, and the same Sign, the same orientation. I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace. Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music that it’s slowly sinking and we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. If pain is human we are not human beings merely to suffer pain; that’s why I think so much these days about the great river, this meaning that moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. This current that goes its way and that is not so different from the blood of men, from the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts, without the daily tremor for trivialities or even for important things; when they look straight ahead like the traveller who is used to gauging his way by the stars, not like us, the other day, gazing at the enclosed garden of a sleepy Arab house, behind the lattices the cool garden changing shape, growing larger and smaller, we too changing, as we gazed, the shape of our desire and our hearts, at noon’s precipitation, we the patient dough of a world that throws us out and kneads us, caught in the embroidered nets of a life that was as it should be and then became dust and sank into the sands leaving behind it only that vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree.  Cairo, 20 June ’42
I  The house near the sea The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark or the little wagtail inscribing figures with his tail in the light; I don’t know much about houses I know they have their own nature, nothing else. New at first, like babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun, they embroider coloured shutters and shining doors over the day. When the architect’s finished, they change, they frown or smile or even grow resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who’d come back if they could or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become an endless hotel. I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop to think;  again sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and nothing of my own, watching the evening spider, I imagine that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up in white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels, and around him venerable ladies, grey hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly, that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me; or that a woman — eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted, returning from southern ports, Smyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria, from cities closed like hot shutters, with perfume of golden fruit and herbs — climbs the stairs without seeing those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow resentful easily when you strip them bare.  II  Sensual Elpenor I saw him yesterday standing by the door below my window; it was about seven o’clock; there was a woman with him. He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk. He was speaking fast, and she was gazing absently towards the gramophones; now and then she cut him short to say a word and then would glance impatiently towards where they were frying fish: like a cat. He muttered with a dead cigarette-butt between his lips: — ‘Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight the statues sometimes bend like reeds in the midst of ripe fruit — the statues; and the flame becomes a cool oleander, the flame that burns one, I mean.’ — ‘It's just the light. . . shadows of the night.’ — ‘Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate, a dark breast, and filled you with stars, cleaving time.  And yet the statues bend sometimes, dividing desire in two, like a peach; and the flame becomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob, then a cool leaf carried off by the wind; they bend; they become light with a human weight. You don’t forget it.’  — ‘The statues are in the museum.’ — ‘No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it? I mean with their broken limbs, with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize yet know.  It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace; were afraid the kiss might betray you to other beds now of the past which nevertheless could haunt you so easily, so easily, and bring to life images in the mirror, bodies once alive: their sensuality.  It’s as though returning home from some foreign country you happen to open an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear on happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights, mirrored, now becoming dim, and all that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form.  Really, those statues are not the fragments. You yourself are the relic; they haunt you with a strange virginity at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated, in the unconfessed terror of sleep; they speak of things you wish didn’t exist or would happen years after your death, and that’s difficult because. . .’  — ‘The statues are in the museum. Good night.’  — ‘. . . because the statues are no longer fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly. . . Good night.’ At this point they separated. He took the road leading uphill toward the North and she moved on towards the light-flooded beach where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio:  The radio — ‘Sails puffed out by the wind are all that stay in the mind. Perfume of silence and pine will soon be an anodyne now that the sailor’s set sail, flycatcher, catfish and wagtail. O woman whose touch is dumb, hear the wind’s requiem. ‘Drained is the golden keg the sun’s become a rag round a middle-aged woman’s neck who coughs and coughs without break; for the summer that’s gone she sighs, for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs. O woman, O sightless thing, Hear the blind man sing. ‘Close the shutters: the day recedes; make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds and don’t open, knock how they may: they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily, anemones out of the sea; O woman whose wits are lost, listen, the water’s ghost. . . — ‘Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: “There is no more time. . .” Take cyclamen. . . needles of pine. . . the lily. . . needles of pine. . . O woman. . . — . . . is overwhelmingly stronger. The war. . .’  Soulmonger.  III  The wreck ‘Thrush’ ‘This wood that cooled my forehead at times when noon burned my veins will flower in other hands. Take it. I’m giving it to you; look, it’s wood from a lemon tree. . .’  I heard the voice as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out a ship they’d sunk there years ago; it was called ‘Thrush’, a small wreck; the masts, broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles, or the memory of dreams, marking the hull: vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around. And gradually, in turn, other voices followed, whispers thin and thirsty emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side; you might say they were asking to drink a drop of blood; familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it falling into the heart of day, quietly, as though motionless: ‘And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. Your law will be my law; how can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone. I prefer death. Whose path is for the better only God knows.’ Countries of the sun yet you cannot face the sun. Countries of men yet you cannot face man.  The light As the years go by the judges who condemn you grow in number; as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices, you see the sun with different eyes: you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance that ends in nakedness. It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway, you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine, eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes: you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness. The Doric chiton that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness. And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms struck the obstinate marathon runner and he saw the track sail in blood, the world empty like the moon, the gardens of victory wither: you see them in the sun, behind the sun. And the boys who dived from the bowsprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, while the sun with golden needles sews sails and wet wood and colours of the sea; even now they’re going down obliquely toward the pebbles on the sea floor, white oil-flasks. Light, angelic and black, laughter of waves on the sea’s highways tear-stained laughter, the old suppliant sees you as he moves to cross the invisible fields — light mirrored in his blood, the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices. Day, angelic and black; the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops. Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing. . . I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love; adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns, dark girl; the heart of the Scorpion has set, the tyrant in man has fled, and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae, hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess: whoever has never loved will love, in the light;  and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first, because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of the light of day the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent.  Poros, ‘Galini’, 31 October 1946
for my father Vivid and heavy, he strolls through dark brick kitchens Within the great house of Esterhazy: A deaf servant’s candle Is tipped toward bakers who are quarreling about The green kindling! The wassail is Being made by pouring beer and sherry from dusty bottles Over thirty baked apples in a large bowl: into The wassail, young girls empty their aprons of Cinnamon, ground mace, and allspice berries. A cook adds Egg whites and brandy. The giant glass snifters On a silver tray are taken from the kitchen by two maids. The anxious pianist eats the edges of a fig Stuffed with Devonshire cream. In the sinks the gallbladders Of geese are soaking in cold salted water. Walking in the storm, this evening, he passed Children in rags, singing carols; they were roped together In the drifting snow outside the palace gate. He knew he would remember those boys’ faces. . . There’s a procession into the kitchens: larger boys, each With a heavy shoe of coal. The pianist sits and looks Hard at a long black sausage. He will not eat Before playing the new sonata. Beside him The table sags with hams, kidney pies, and two shoulders Of lamb. A hand rings a bell in the parlor! No longer able to hide, he walks Straight into the large room that blinds him with light. He sits before the piano still thinking of hulled berries. . . The simple sonata which He is playing has little To do with what he’s feeling: something larger Where a viola builds, in air, an infinite staircase. An oboe joins the viola, they struggle For a more florid harmony.  But the silent violins now emerge And, like the big wing of a bird, smother everything In a darkness from which only a single horn escapes— That feels effaced by the composer’s dream. . . But he is not dreaming, The composer is finishing two performances simultaneously! He is back in the dark kitchens, sulking and counting His few florins—they have paid him With a snuffbox that was pressed With two diamonds, in Holland! This century discovers quinine. And the sketchbooks of a mad, sad musician Who threw a lantern at his landlord who was standing beside A critic. He screamed: Here, take the snuffbox, I’ve filled It with the dander of dragons!
Oil on limbs, maybe a rancid smell as on the chapel’s oil-press here, as on the rough pores of the unturning stone. Oil on hair wreathed in rope and maybe other scents unknown to us poor and rich and statuettes offering small breasts with their fingers. Oil in the sun the leaves shuddered when the stranger stopped and the silence weighed between the knees. The coins fell: ‘In the goddess’s name I summon you...’ Oil on the shoulders and the flexing waist legs grass-dappled, and that wound in the sun as the bell rang for vespers as I spoke in the churchyard with a crippled man.
Teucer: . . . in sea-girt Cyprus, where it was decreed by Apollow that I should live, giving the city the name of Salamis in memory of my island home. . . . . . . . . . . Helen: I never went to Troy; it was a phantom. . . . . . . . . . . Servant: What? You mean it was only for a cloud that we struggled so much? — Euripides, Helen   ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Shy nightingale, in the breathing of the leaves, you who bestow the forest’s musical coolness on the sundered bodies, on the souls of those who know they will not return. Blind voice, you who grope in the darkness of memory for footsteps and gestures — I wouldn’t dare say kisses — and the bitter raving of the frenzied slave-woman. ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Platres: where is Platres? And this island: who knows it? I’ve lived my life hearing names I’ve never heard before: new countries, new idiocies of men or of the gods;  my fate, which wavers between the last sword of some Ajax and another Salamis, brought me here, to this shore.  The moon rose from the sea like Aphrodite, covered the Archer’s stars, now moves to find the heart of Scorpio, and alters everything. Truth, where’s the truth? I too was an archer in the war; my fate: that of a man who missed his target. Lyric nightingale, on a night like this, by the shore of Proteus, the Spartan slave-girls heard you and began their lament, and among them — who would have believed it? — Helen! She whom we hunted so many years by the banks of the Scamander. She was there, at the desert’s lip; I touched her; she spoke to me: ‘It isn’t true, it isn’t true,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t board the blue bowed ship. I never went to valiant Troy.’ Breasts girded high, the sun in her hair, and that stature shadows and smiles everywhere, on shoulders, thighs and knees; the skin alive, and her eyes with the large eyelids, she was there, on the banks of a Delta.  And at Troy? At Troy, nothing: just a phantom image. That’s how the gods wanted it. And Paris, Paris lay with a shadow as though it were a solid being; and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen. Great suffering had desolated Greece. So many bodies thrown into the jaws of the sea, the jaws of the earth so many souls fed to the millstones like grain. And the rivers swelling, blood in their silt, all for a linen undulation, a filmy cloud, a butterfly’s flicker, a wisp of swan’s down, an empty tunic — all for a Helen. And my brother?  Nightingale nightingale nightingale, what is a god? What is not a god? And what is there in between them? ‘The nightingales won’t let you sleep in Platres.’ Tearful bird,  on sea-kissed Cyprus consecrated to remind me of my country, I moored alone with this fable, if it’s true that it is a fable, if it’s true that mortals will not again take up the old deceit of the gods;  if it’s true that in future years some other Teucer, or some Ajax or Priam or Hecuba, or someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw a Scamander overflow with corpses, isn’t fated to hear messengers coming to tell him that so much suffering, so much life, went into the abyss all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.
fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion; but he deprived them of the day of their return. — Odyssey Since we still had some hardtack how stupid of us to go ashore and eat the Sun’s slow cattle, for each was a castle you’d have to battle forty years, till you’d become a hero and a star! On the earth’s back we hungered, but when we’d eaten well we fell to these lower regions mindless and satisfied.
I Rose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us yet you bent like the secret about to be released and the command you chose to give us was beautiful and your smile was like a ready sword. The ascent of your cycle livened creation from your thorn emerged the way’s thought our impulse dawned naked to possess you the world was easy: a simple pulsation.  II The secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores the darkness of the depths is forgotten in the surf; the corals of memory suddenly shine purple. . . O do not stir. . . listen to hear its light motion. . . you touched the tree with the apples the hand reached out, the thread points the way and guides you. . . O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves if it were but you who would bring the forgotten dawn! May lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation may days open mature, the embrace of the heavens, may those eyes alone shine in the glare the pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute. Was it night that shut its eyes? Ashes remain, as from the string of a bow a choked hum remains, ash and dizziness on the black shore and dense fluttering imprisoned in surmise. Rose of the wind, you knew but took us unknowing at a time when thought was building bridges so that fingers would knit and two fates pass by and spill into the low and rested light.  III O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves! Come forth sleepless form in the gathering silence raise your head from your cupped hands so that your will be done and you tell me again the words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace; and let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend and flood us with your lavish hair from the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart. You lowered your eyes and you had the smile that masters of another time humbly painted. Forgotten reading from an ancient gospel, your words breathed and your voice was gentle: ‘The passing of time is soft and unworldly and pain floats lightly in my soul dawn breaks in the heavens, the dream remains afloat and it’s as if scented shrubs were passing. ‘With my eyes’ startling, with my body’s blush a flock of doves awakens and descends their low, circling flight entangles me the stars are a human touch on my breast. ‘I hear, as in a sea shell, the distant adverse and confused lament of the world but these are moments only, they disappear, and the two-branched thought of my desire reigns alone. ‘It seemed I’d risen naked in a vanished recollection when you came, strange and familiar, my beloved to grant me, bending, the boundless deliverance I was seeking from the wind’s quick sistrum. . .’ The broken sunset declined and was gone and it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky. You lowered your eyes. The moon’s thorn blossomed and you became afraid of the mountain’s shadows. . . . In the mirror how our love diminishes in sleep the dreams, school of oblivion in the depths of time, how the heart contracts and vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace
The skyscrapers of New York will never know the coolness that comes down on Kifisia but when I see the two cypress trees above your familiar church with the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone then I recall the two chimneys behind the cedars I used to like so much when I was abroad. All through March rheumatism wracked your lovely loins and in summer you went to Aidipsos. God! what a struggle it is for life to keep going, as though it were a swollen river passing through the eye of a needle. Heavy heat till nightfall, the stars discharging midges, I myself drinking bitter lemonades and still remaining thirsty; Moon and movies, phantoms and the suffocating pestiferous harbour. Verina, life has ruined us, along with the Attic skies and the intellectuals clambering up their own heads and the landscapes reduced by drought and hunger to posing like young men selling their souls in order to wear a monocle like young girls — sunflowers swallowing their heads so as to become lilies. The days go by slowly; my own days circulate among the clocks dragging the second hand in tow. Remember how we used to twist breathless through the alleys so as not to be gutted by the headlights of cars. The idea of the world abroad enveloped us and closed us in like a net and we left with a sharp knife hidden within us and you said ‘Harmodios and Aristogeiton’. Verina, lower your head so that I can see you, though even if I were to see you I’d want to look beyond. What’s a man’s value? What does he want and how will he justify his existence at the Second Coming? Ah, to find myself on a derelict ship lost in the Pacific Ocean alone with the sea and the wind alone and without a wireless or strength to fight the elements.  Kokkinaras, 5 August 1928
The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’s waning the great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels the jar that refused to go dry at the end of day and the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair golden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran. I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling among yellow trees in driving rain on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves, no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark. I’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line a scar at your knee, perhaps they exist on the sand of the past summer perhaps they remain there where the north wind blew as I hear an alien voice around the frozen lake. The faces I see do not ask questions nor does the woman bent as she walks giving her child the breast. I climb the mountains; dark ravines; the snow-covered plain, into the distance stretches the snow-covered plain, they ask nothing neither time shut up in dumb chapels nor hands outstretched to beg, nor the roads. I’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers like the breathing of the cypress tree that night like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles like the memory of your voice saying ‘happiness’. I close my eyes looking for the secret meeting-place of the waters under the ice the sea’s smile, the closed wells groping with my veins for those veins that escape me there where the water-lilies end and that man who walks blindly across the snows of silence. I’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you heavy drops on green leaves, on your face in the empty garden, drops in the motionless reservoir striking a swan dead in its white wings living trees and your eyes riveted. This road has no end, has no relief, however hard you try to recall your childhood years, those who left, those lost in sleep, in the graves of the sea, however much you ask bodies you’ve loved to stoop under the harsh branches of the plane trees there where a ray of the sun, naked, stood still and a dog leapt and your heart shuddered, the road has no relief; I’ve kept a rein on my life.  The snow and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.
This sun was mine and yours; we shared it. Who’s suffering behind the golden silk, who’s dying? A woman beating her dry breasts cried out: ‘Cowards, they’ve taken my children and torn them to shreds, you’ve killed them gazing at the fire-flies at dusk with a strange look, lost in blind thought.’ The blood was drying on a hand that a tree made green, a warrior was asleep clutching the lance that cast light against his side. It was ours, this sun, we saw nothing behind the gold embroidery then the messengers came, dirty and breathless, stuttering unintelligible words twenty days and nights on the barren earth with thorns only twenty days and nights feeling the bellies of the horses bleeding and not a moment’s break to drink the rain-water. You told them to rest first and then to speak, the light had dazzled you. They died saying ‘We don’t have time’, touching some rays of the sun. You’d forgotten that no one rests. A woman howled ‘Cowards’, like a dog in the night. Once she would have been beautiful like you with wet mouth, veins alive beneath the skin, with love. This sun was ours; you kept all of it, you wouldn’t follow me. And it was then I found out about those things behind the gold and the silk: we don’t have time. The messengers were right.
After explanations and regulations, he Walked warily in. Black hair covered his chin, subscribing to Villainous ideal. “This can not be real,” he thought, “this is a Classical mistake; This is a cake baked with embarrassing icing; Somebody’s got Likely as not, a big fat tongue in cheek! What have I to do With a prim and proper-blooded lady?” Christ in deed has risen When a Junkie in prison visits with a Wasp woman. “Hold your stupid face, man, Learn a little grace, man; drop a notch the sacred shield. She might have good reason, Like: ‘I was in prison and ye visited me not,’ or—some such. So sweep clear Anachronistic fear, fight the fog, And use no hot words.” After the seating And the greeting, they fished for a denominator, Common or uncommon; And could only summon up the fact that both were human. “Be at ease, man! Try to please, man!—the lady is as lost as you: ‘You got children, Ma’am?’” he said aloud. The thrust broke the dam, and their lines wiggled in the water. She offered no pills To cure his many ills, no compact sermons, but small And funny talk: “My baby began to walk... simply cannot keep his room clean...” Her chatter sparked no resurrection and truly No shackles were shaken But after she had taken her leave, he walked softly, And for hours used no hot words.
Now you take ol Rufus. He beat drums, was free and funky under the arms, fucked white girls, jumped off a bridge (and thought nothing of the sacrilege), he copped out—and he was over twenty-one. Take Gerald. Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on his voice. He didn’t even know how to talk tough, or how to hide the glow of life before he was thrown in as “pigmeat” for the buzzards to eat. Gerald, who had no memory or hope of copper hot lips— or firm upthrusting thighs to reinforce his flow, let tall walls and buzzards change the course of his river from south to north. (No safety in numbers, like back on the block: two’s aplenty. three? definitely not. four? “you’re all muslims.” five? “you were planning a race riot.” plus, Gerald could never quite win with his precise speech and innocent grin the trust and fists of the young black cats.) Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose and cheeks, didn’t stand a chance, didn’t even know that the loss of his balls had been plotted years in advance by wiser and bigger buzzards than those who now hover above his track and at night light upon his back.
Compose for Red a proper verse; Adhere to foot and strict iamb; Control the burst of angry words Or they might boil and break the dam. Or they might boil and overflow And drench me, drown me, drive me mad. So swear no oath, so shed no tear, And sing no song blue Baptist sad. Evoke no image, stir no flame, And spin no yarn across the air. Make empty anglo tea lace words— Make them dead white and dry bone bare. Compose a verse for Malcolm man, And make it rime and make it prim. The verse will die—as all men do— but not the memory of him! Death might come singing sweet like C, Or knocking like the old folk say, The moon and stars may pass away, But not the anger of that day.
Soft songs, like birds, die in poison air So my song cannot now be candy. Anger rots the oak and elm; roses are rare, Seldom seen through blind despair. And my murmur cannot be heard Above the din and damn. The night is full Of buggers and bastards; no moon or stars Light the sky. And my candy is deferred Till peacetime, when my voice shall be light, Like down, lilting in the air; then shall I Sing of beaches, white in the magic sun, And of moons and maidens at midnight.
(or a self / sung eulogy) Now, when I / die, dont you bury me On no lone prairie; And dont put me in no plain pine box (cause I left plenty cold cash!); And throw my cold butt in the deep blue see. Whatever you do, dont plant me / in no six feet of dirt; Just mash me, mash me, except for my dick, Which I want wrapped in a white / woman’s skirt. I dont want no preacher / man a-preaching Over me—cause I know where I am going. I dont want no tears, no flowers, No standing around and waiting / up / all hours. Just get a golden trumpet, and have Dizzy blow it. Cause I / wuz / Slick—and you damn well know it. No piano playing, no blues please; No moaning and groaning; Just lay me on the table, mash me Into my two-hundred-dollar suit, Red socks, black patent leather shoes, Polka-dot tie (make damn sure it’s silk— And dont forget it!) Take me out to my pink cadillac Prop me up / under the steering wheel, Tow me out to real high hill, Dig a hole—twenty feet long and twenty feet wide, Place a giant joint of reefer / weed by my side; Then leave me alone— And let me drive to hell in style!
Stars from five wars, scars, Words filled with ice and fear, Nightflares and fogginess, and a studied regularity.  Gon’ lay down my sword ’n’ shield—  Down by the river side, down by the river side—  Down by the river side...
Dear Folks, (Smile) Enclosed, is the Ordinary River. It is called “That Devil,” In whose name the locals are baptized. Finally that river twists Like a hurt thing— They say it’s nothing. It has become a new road In a naked place. Then, I am nothing And it is that dream I dreamed I dreamed.  Sincerely,  ~  Hello, I have just passed “Doubt,” It is near “Milk Teeth,” And “Nothing,” and “Falling Out.” There are flowers and evidence Of ambiguous winds. “Doubt” is like a man Walking in his sleep, seriously. Offhand, it reminds me Of a Jamesian novel With the motives, the motives, the motives.  Have Mercy,  ~  Say, To get to Innocence, You take the narrow trail From Deep. You squeeze into the mountain’s waves. If you meet savage rock, It is the wrong way. Turn left. . . There, then, in our hearts’ Honeymoon, lay I.  Queequeg  ~  J.P., Today is Friday. We are still on the hill Called Spirit of the Wind But we are down real low Like new flame Just to be close.  Dad  ~  Baby G., Sunday, And what you are probably babbling I seem to see, (I.e.) at 60 mph This is the alfalfa field Of my heart. There is no museum here, And in a convertible, Where birds can sing, Anything is possible.  Dad  ~  Milton, There is a mountain called Can She is blind with snow But all seers are blind What we need In the morning when we always see her And are always reborn Is a magnificent horn And the strangely uneven voice Of her life  Thanks,  ~  Bill, I checked this out. . . You know that ridge up there Is north, because you know For no reason (except this). A great wind blows. Behind it, the stars come out Virtually human. And here you are, apparently Crude, like the sound Of a breaking string That seems to come from the sky.  So Long,
My father had several times expressed a fear of being buried alive. I insisted that the doctor should do whatever was necessary. The doctor asked me to leave the room. When I came back, he was able to assure me that Renoir was dead! jean renoir It is not 1937 for long. A clump of ash trees and a walk Down the the boathouse: inside linen is tacked up In a long blank mural; the children sit on the wings Of the dry dock, and then, over the water in a circle Of rowboats, the aunts and uncles wait while At their center the projectionist, Jean Renoir, On a cedar raft, casts silhouettes of rabbits, birds, And turtles for the sleepy children. Corks Come out of old bottles, it is a few minutes past sunset And, now, a swimmer beside the raft looks Into the boathouse to the linens: at last, it is 1915! A bird screams over the lake, two bats Flitter back and forth through the beam of the lamp, Interrupting the images, the grand illusion, cast over Water the the acceptance of white tablecloths On the darkening shore of the lake. A torch is lit For its kerosene smoke is repugnant to the swarming insects. This film and its prisoners exist between extreme borders, Not music and algebra but A war and, then, yet another war. . . But we begin with the captured officers digging A tunnel that will soon be outside the garden wall. The Boches observe the Frenchmen working With their hoes as from the trousers of a boy Dirt from the tunnel secretly spills onto horse manure! The prisoners dream of crossing a meadow filled With snow, in the moonlight it is jade-green snow While Germans with rifles on a hill Are unable to kill them, for they have escaped Into Switzerland with its feather-brushed trees And patina of copper rooftops along a hillside village. Isn’t this the ending of the film? No! I’m sorry but There is a single blossom On the geranium, and when it falls, Captain de Boeldieu Dies, discovering his afterlife along a November road— He does not know that two men are hiding in the marsh Beside him; nevertheless, it is at this moment that the film Suffers its true conclusion. The two men hiding In the marsh will escape across the border, only To be returned to the continuing war. This is why there Is no importance to your version of the story. And there Will be another war. And more horror for the geranium! So, to pass the time, the imprisoned soldiers receive A steamer trunk filled with women’s clothing, They will all perform in a revue: a chorus Of boys and men, rouge and talcum, black stockings, Garters, the tonneau dresses, false breasts and Large paper carnations riding up like epaulets On their broad shoulders. These poignant inversions Are not ridiculous: the third boy from the right Has delicate milky thighs, these women are not ridiculous Until they begin to stiffen into men as they sing, In this comedy, their national anthem! The Russian Prisoners have been given a trunk, also, from their Mysterious Czarina; the men open it expecting vodka And sausages. The box is filled with straw And books on cooking, painting, and algebra. In disgust They burn these books—kiss good-bye the frontier Of algebra and the desire for wedding tripe! Now, these officers who are escape artists are moved As an elite corps and north to Wintersborn. Later, They are taken to a damp limestone castle  From which no one will escape. The Commandant Is the stoic aristocrat, Rauffenstein, his head is in A brace like a white egg in a silver teaspoon. I mean no disrespect, but the balding Rauffenstein is An abject picture of suffering. His villa has but one Flower, a tall laden geranium. Rauffenstein and the other aristocrat, Boeldieu, Are friends. Both would know that to clear a monocle One uses spirits of vinegar. They stand confirmed In manner beside a squirrel cage. Rauffenstein feels Superior to the other two principals, the rich Jew, Rosenthal, and the charming emotional Marechal. These two hide in the marsh while Boeldieu dies Of a bullet wound. Only a king may kill a king! And Rauffenstein did it with his pistol; taking aim But missing the leg; he severed in three places Boeldieu’s intestine! The Captain is given a room in the turret that holds The flowering geranium. Now comes the oratio obliqua Of the marksman, Rauffenstein; the disfigured Commandant Is sincerely saddened At having killed the noble Captain. But before The shooting and escape we sensed the Captain’s Sacrifice was not sacrifice, or suicide, but The grand escape—a country road into another landscape. . . There are bells tolling down in the village. Rosenthal and Marechal with ropes have dropped Past the castle’s battlements to the ground. They run away across snowy farmland. Marechal’s teeth Are stained from chewing licorice-flavored tobacco. Rosenthal and Marechal are extremes who have Strong feelings for each other. They are befriended By a German widow, Ulsa, and her daughter, Lotte; Ulsa sleeps with the tall handsome Jew. He promises To return for her when the war is over. He Will lose both his legs at Mégéglise. This is not known within the story, but he’ll bleed To death beside a little bridge. He lived his illusion In the Orient of Delacroix, his servants were Syrians And Negroes. He loved the little ivory spoons that Chinese women in the open markets use to bathe And freshen the exotic tiny fish they sell out Of huge clay bowls. . . In the boathouse the children sleep, while Jean’s Oldest cousin, drunken, falls out of a rowboat. The lone swimmer has joined Renior on the raft. The film now reveals the first diversion As all of the prisoners of the fortress begin playing Several hundred wooden flutes, the noise is like women Crying over the fresh mounds at Verdun. This diversion Is not illusion And as the Boches collect the flutes, the drunken cousin Tries to join Renior on the raft. Boeldieu flees To the heights of the castle, the second diversion! We hear: Halt! Halt! Halt! A gunshot, and chowder with blood falls from Boeldieu’s Opened stomach all the way down to the courtyard. There are small fish bones in the viscera on the cobbled Courtyard floor. Scissors cut the blue blossom From the geranium. Boeldieu will die. . . dead,  He awakens on a country road where, now a peasant, He walks a white horse under the looming, bare trees. Rosenthal and Marechal are watching As they hide in the dead marsh flowers of An early November. They are alive. They do not Recognize their friend. Renoir’s cousin, asking for More wine, climbing onto the raft, spills Everything, and the projector with its crude lamp Sinks slowly to the bottom of the lake— Its dusky lighted windows like a bathysphere Lost off a cable that frayed, whoever is alive Inside the iron bell is experiencing An eternal falling through water without the promise Of a bottom. . . it’s 1937, the children Asleep in the boathouse are being aroused, they wake To a bat caught in the wall of linen, they think it’s Their uncle still casting images of animals for them. . .
1 Dear Milton,  Rain. But when you are here, alone, what does it  mean. It means psalm — that song sung to the harp.  Like trees, we too hold on to the earth — pull and  twang for another tongue. It (whatever it is, and  who knows that) is a sacred song. It is strange for  we are the ones who glorify mystery with our arms.  We call it testament because it pries at our souls  with many branches, and so you say with a huge  eye, we must practice our art like the third stomach  of a cud-chewing animal:  “Myrtle, Woodbine, Appletrees, Trillium,  here they are, the strength of your arm  stalls at the open gate of the stars.  Feel everything, trust everything!”
1 There are few probabilities through  Which dreamers do not pass. . .  The first dream  Is the bright red dream  Of our mother’s heart.  It is her sacrifice  Of something eternal  In herself, for us.  The Arabs say  Blood has flowed  Let us begin again.  The heart is like a cup, or a coffer,  or a cave. It holds the image of the  sun within us. It is a center of illumination  and happiness and wisdom. To dream  of the heart is always to dream of  the importance of love. . .  The second dream is the inauguration  Of the soul. In this dream we are  Confronted by a host of birds. . .  Some were guileless  Like the doves,
The bears are kept by hundreds within fences, are fed cracked Eggs; the weakest are Slaughtered and fed to the others after being scented With the blood of deer brought to the pastures by Elizabeth’s Men—the blood spills from deep pails with bottoms of slate. The balding Queen had bear gardens in London and in the country. The bear is baited: the nostrils Are blown full with pepper, the Irish wolf dogs Are starved, then, emptied, made crazy with fermented barley: And the bear’s hind leg is chained to a stake, the bear Is blinded and whipped, kneeling in his own blood and slaver, he is Almost instantly worried by the dogs. At the very moment that Elizabeth took Essex’s head, a giant brown bear Stood in the gardens with dogs hanging from his fur. . . He took away the sun, took A wolfhound in his mouth, and tossed it into The white lap of Elizabeth I—arrows and staves rained On his chest, and standing, he, then, stood even taller, seeing Into the Queen’s private boxes—he grinned Into her battered eggshell face. Another volley of arrows and poles, and opening his mouth He showered Blood all over Elizabeth and her Privy Council. The very next evening, a cool evening, the Queen demanded Thirteen bears and the justice of 113 dogs: she slept All that Sunday night and much of the next morning. Some said she was guilty of this and that. The Protestant Queen gave the defeated bear A grave in a Catholic cemetery. The marker said: Peter, a Solstice Bear, a gift of the Tsarevitch to Elizabeth. After a long winter she had the grave opened. The bear’s skeleton Was cleared with lye, she placed it at her bedside, Put a candle inside behind the sockets of the eyes, and, then She spoke to it: You were a Christmas bear—behind your eyes I see the walls of a snow cave where you are a cub still smelling Of your mother’s blood which has dried in your hair; you have Troubled a Queen who was afraid When seated in shade which, standing, You had created! A Queen who often wakes with a dream Of you at night— Now, you’ll stand by my bed in your long white bones; alone, you Will frighten away at night all visions of bear, and all day You will be in this cold room—your constant grin, You’ll stand in the long, white prodigy of your bones, and you are, Every inch of you, a terrible vision, not bear, but virgin!
for Hank The General’s men sit at the door. Her eyes Are fat with belladonna. She’s naked Except for the small painted turtles That are drinking a flammable cloud Of rum and milk from her navel. The ships out in the harbor Are loosely allied Like casks floating in bilge. The occasional light on a ship Winks. In the empty room of the manuscript Someone is grooming you For the long entrance into the dark city. They’ll hang the General. Then with torches they’ll search for his children. Men and women Are seen jumping from the burning hotel. Journalists, in no hurry, Elect to take the elevator. They walk Out of the building, stepping over corpses. . . You are listening to loud bells. The corpses get up and follow the journalists. It’s unfair that while rehearsing For death they actually succumbed to it. But no one sobs. Shirts and dresses billowing as they fall. Something inhuman in you watched it all. And whatever it is that watches, It has kept you from loneliness like a mob.
for Paul Cook The illegal ditch riders of the previous night Will deliver ice today. The barbers up in the trees are Chinese. They climb with bright cleats, bearing machetes— It’s a season Of low self-esteem for date palms on the street. My visitor was at the door yesterday. In a blue sere of a sucker suit. An I Like Ike button On the lapel. Holding a cup of sawdust. He breathed through his eyes, crusted With pollen. I was not confused. It was God Come to straighten my thoughts. Whole celestial vacuums In the trunk of his pink Studebaker. We would smoke and cough. I sat very still, almost at peace with myself. He had shot a deer in the mountains. He thought Last year’s winterkill was worse than usual. I told him I didn’t know about guns. Something forming on his forehead—a gloriole Of splattered sun over snow. We drank our lemonade in silence. He asked if he could go. He joked About his wife’s tuna casserole. As a gift I signed for him my last paperback. He left the book of matches. I’ll not enroll In the correspondence course it offers For commercial artists. What a relief That the barbers in the trees are Chinese. Green fronds are dropping in twos and threes Around the bungalow, lessons In the etiquette of diseased parrots. Bill Cody Said it first, “If there is no God, then I am His prophet.” Stop it. Please stop it.
I’m a frogman. Naked by the water Under a lean of canvas she’d sewn With a thick paraffin thread, She gestured. When we pulled him From the river His left leg was meal. Crayfish in the hair. The river bottom left his shoulder Layered and crocheted— My sister’s pearl knitting needles Clicking in my head. I told The sheriff I wouldn’t do it again. I knew him once. His Chevy threw a rod. I made it with him On the hood of the old truck. It was out at the dump beyond Yuma. It felt like I had bread crumbs All over my mouth. Wacky with the sun, I sure did it with him enough That afternoon. I didn’t Know it was him who’d drowned. They said it was his cousin. He had a three-cornered scar At the small of his back. And a deposit Of calcium on the tailbone. We’re not much, you know? He was tangled in yellow tree roots, He spun in the currents, A fishhook and line running From his thumb. A whole new ball of wax, I thought. I wanted to be an astronaut. But failed the mathematics Twice in one summer. So I raise Nubian goats. My favorite has a purple manure That comes out like steaming packets Of tobacco mulch. He sprays The shack with his seed— It hasn’t needed paint in three years. I just took my shorts off When you two came down the hill. It’s that rubber suit I wear When I dive into the chute and cave. Sometimes I just feel Like old air in a patched tire. Then, I get my Seagram’s and come out here. You two look married. Not that I care. You wouldn’t believe what I was just thinking— Your husband’s the only living man Left in this country Who knows that I bleach my hair.
What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus.What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel.What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.
for Stephen A blind girl steps over the red staves Of a tub. Steam rising from her shoulders and hair, She walks across a dirt floor to you. I think you are not her grandfather. You watch with her a pink man Who has avoided taxes for two winters— He is being judged by roosters And has been chased this far into the countryside. Above him Burning sacks of bat dung are arranged In the purple branches of the thistle trees. The river is indifferent to him. And so are we. You tell your mistress the burning bags of shit Are like inert buddhas Dissolving in a field of merit. She giggles. A front tooth is loose. With the river bottom clear as the night air, The bargeman sings through the hungry vapors Rising now like white snakes behind him. You told his wife that Lord Buddha made wasps From yellow stalks of tobacco with a dark spit. Down in the cold bamboo a starving woman Has opened a small pig— The old moons climb from its blue glistening stomach, Or is it light From the infinitely receding sacks of shit? Master, where is the difference?
1 The perfect mother lets the cat sleep on her head. The children laugh. Where is she? She is not carefully ironing the starched ruffles of a Sunday dress. What does she say? She does not speak. Her head is under the cat and like the cat, she sleeps.  2 But her children are in a marsh! Bogged, they have gone wild. Yet, no one should worry. See, they are there, in a sunny kitchen. They drink cups of soup and wipe their faces with yellow napkins. What does it matter if they are hatching plots, if in their waking dreams the poor cat is trapped its hair standing on end?  3 Where shall we go? We ask the perfect mother. What do you want of us? She is no where to be found. Not in the cookie jar we have broken to bits not under the shiny kitchen floor not on our lips. Here we are transfixed, mourning the perfect mother, and she is caught in the trapped cat of her children’s dreams.
The bad mother wakes from dreams of imperfection trying to be perfection. All night she’s engineered a train too heavy with supplies to the interior. She fails. The child she loves has taken on bad habits, cigarettes maybe even drugs. She recognizes lies. You don’t fool me
Be like a bear in the forest of yourself. Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath. Every hair has life and standing, as you do, swaying from one foot to the other all the forest stands with you. Each minute sound, one after another, is distinct in your ear. Here in the blur of mixed sensations, you can feel the crisp outline of being, particulate. Great as you are, huge as you are and growling like the deepest drum, the continual vibration that makes music what it is, not some light stone skipped on the surface of things, you travel below sounding the depths where only the dauntless go. Be like the bear and do not forget how you rounded your massive shape over the just ripened berry which burst in your mouth that moment how you rolled in the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling with your sensate skin, how you shut your eyes and swam far and farther still, starlight shaping itself to your body, starship rocking the grand, slow waves under the white trees, in the snowy night.
Today I planted the sand cherry with red leaves— and hope that I can go on digging in this yard, pruning the grape vine, twisting the silver lace on its trellis, the one that bloomed just before the frost flowered over all the garden. Next spring I will plant more zinnias, marigolds, straw flowers, pearly everlasting, and bleeding heart. I plant that for you, old love, old friend, and lilacs for remembering. The lily-of-the-valley with cream-colored bells, bent over slightly, bowing to the inevitable, flowers for a few days, a week. Now its broad blade leaves are streaked with brown and the stem dried to a pale hair. In place of the silent bells, red berries like rose hips blaze close to the ground. It is important for me to be down on my knees, my fingers sifting the black earth, making those things grow which will grow. Sometimes I save a weed if its leaves are spread fern-like, hand-like, or if it grows with a certain impertinence. I let the goldenrod stay and the wild asters. I save the violets in spring. People who kill violets will do anything.
Water opens without end At the bow of the ship Rising to descend Away from it Days become one I am who I was
A- round my neck an amu- let Be- tween my eyes a star A ring in my nose and a gold chain to Keep me where You are *
I walk outside the stone wall Looking into the park at night As armed trees frisk a windfall Down paths that lampposts light
In my coat I sit At the window sill Wintering with snow That did not melt It fell long ago At night, by stealth I was where I am When the snow began
No more than that Dead cat shall I Escape the corpse I kept in shape For the day off Immortals take
1 Scribe out of work At a loss for words Not his to begin with, The man life passed by Stands at the window Biding his time  2 Time and again And now once more I climb these stairs Unlock this door— No name where I live Alone in my lair With one bone to pick And no time to spare
The statue, that cast Of my solitude Has found its niche In this kitchen Where I do not eat Where the bathtub stands Upon cat feet— I did not advance I cannot retreat
Ribs ripple skin Up to the nipples— Noah, equipped, knew Every one has two— This ark I am in Embarks my twin
I am the man Whose name is mud But what’s in a name To shame one who knows Mud does not stain Clay he’s made of Dust Adam became— The dust he was— Was he his name
Stone worn Overgrown Pristine thorns Sheep shorn Tinkling below Roofless walls Rooks overlookI told you so Babbles the brook
(Morton St. Pier) Lying here Flat on my back I can almost see Myself in the morgue On a slab, tagged I am the corpse No one will have Not stabbed, stored No one takes my life It goes by the board
So they stood Upon ladders With pruning hooks Backs to the king Who took his leave Of gardening This morning I am forlorn As he was then No one born After the war Remembers when
A pot poured out Fulfills its spout
In a doorway Staring at rain Simple withstands Time on his hands
In their doorways women sit sewing By the good light of afternoon And nothing is beyond knowing Though the sun shall go down soon A shepherdess near a bramble ditch And the Princess in the Alcazar Keep the same precise stitch And they both can see far And when the knell tolls All are wondering who— If it is a lady, many bells For a beggar, one will do
Here and there White hairs appear On my chest— Age seasons me Gives me zest— I am a sage In the making Sprinkled, shaking
Before long the end Of the beginning Begins to bend To the beginning Of the end you live With some misgivings About what you did.
His body ahead Of him on the bed He faces his feet Sees himself dead, A corpse complete With legs and chest And belly between Swelling the scene Of the crime you left, Taking your time, Angel of Death
The niche narrows Hones one thin Until his bones Disclose him
Old as I am This candle I light For you today May be the last one Of your afterlife With me, your son— With me you die twice.
Not for their ice-pick eyes, their weeping willow hair, and their clenched fists beating at heaven. Not for their warnings, predictions of doom. But what they promised. I don’t care if their beards are mildewed, and the ladders are broken. Let them go on picking the wormy fruit. Let the one with the yoke around his neck climb out of the cistern. Let them come down from the heights in their radiant despair like the Sankei Juko dancers descending on ropes, down from these hills to the earth of their first existence. Let them follow the track we’ve cut on the sides of mountains into the desert, and stumble again through the great rift, littered with bones and the walls of cities. Let them sift through the ashes with their burned hands. Let them tell us what will come after.
Do you know what’s the unluckiest thing In the world, a differential grasshopper Said to me. I paused, I put down the Diesel grinder I’d been trying to fix, I turned off the stealth bomber, I faded Away from the faded away pedals, I put up Finely embroidered silk panels over the Faces of the statues, I pulled the green Vacillating amplifier into the hallway, I swiveled seven of the chains and Loosened the bolts in the balcony, I went Into the barn to unlace the cattle and Overturn the empty buckets, I put the White flag on the mailbox, I cut the Telephone wires, I fed the ducks better Than I usually feed them, I adjusted the Faucets so they’d drip a little, I waved At old Mr. Wiley with his smokeless pipe And his manpowered plough across the field, I moved a claypot off of a narrow ledge, I taped the key to the bulldozer to the Roof of the canopy, I took the cup of Auger bits away from the rabbit hutch,  I put a padlock on the children’s playhouse, I picked up a stick by the sideyard gate, I broke it over my knee, I went to the well To fill a stone pitcher with cool water,  I let the donkey & the goats go. I took A ladder to the hayloft and took down a  Suitcase. I could see across the valley Down to the river from up there.
Falling off a triangle. Putting two fighting fish in one bowl. Talking yourself into a headcold. Falling off a rectangle. Putting insects in ice cubes. Talking yourself out of doorways. Falling off a parallelogram. Talking into a microphone. Falling off a footstool. Putting earplugs in acorns. Looking into a teacup for trouble. Talking yourself out of breathing. Taking a nap on a drum set. Eating a peach with an air filter. Wearing a dress made of hand grenades. Talking a mudslide back up a mountain. Lighting a camp fire in a taxi stand. Launching a boat on a horse trail. Hiking in an elevator. Falling into an envelope. Discussing smuggling with customs officers. Taking a cat to a dog show. Falling in love with a toothache, Questioning your thumbprint. Looking for milk in a gas tank. Kissing hydraulic acid. Blindfolding a parking meter. Falling over a water tower. Reasoning with a baby.
a senryu sequence when I come late to bed I move your leg flung over my side— that warm gate nights you’re not here I inch toward the middle of this boat, balancing when I turn over in sleep you turn, I turn, you turn, I turn, you some nights you tug the edge of my pillow under your cheek, look in my dream pulling the white sheet over your bare shoulder I marry you again
I saw the hand of Rasputin cast in bronze and used as an oversized paperweight on someone’s desk. The authentic hand. Smooth as Italian leather. It was molded from plaster before he was killed. Bought at an auction in Europe. She was a collector. She knew the value of everything. I wouldn’t like Rasputin’s hand on my desk, even though it wore the skin over its fine bones like a soft glove and healed the tsarevitch. I wouldn’t like her Samurai sword. I’m glad I don’t know what I’m worth. There are days when the whole world feels like somebody else’s collection. Even your hands. We walk in another country and the mist slowly rises above the lake like the heaviness we left, dissolving. Only it’s not our heaviness. * Sometimes, waking, I forget where I am. The things around me go on with their old existence like props in a play, as if the curtain has just risen on a room in an Italian villa. It’s not my play. In the old life there was a photo of Valentino on my desk. Agnes Ayers was swooning in his arms, the Sheik in a rapture of lips without any words. Benevolent uncles spoke in a language. I didn’t know, their fleshy hands, their anxious eyes smiling as they patted me gently on the head. Like watching a silent movie, when they opened their mouths like fish under water I turned off the sound. All that sweet absence. * Once I learned the thirteen principles of Rabbi Salanter, but I remember only seven: truth, diligence, honor, repose, cleanliness, frugality, and silence. If I collected words they would have to belong, like moss or fleas. Things you say that I can believe in. Honor reminds me too much of the Samurai. I like repose. It belongs to this landscape where even the lizards rest when we stand still and look at the wall together. Naming the things of this world you begin to own them. Cyclamen. Mustard. I can’t manage so many flowers. But I already know the word for lake in Italian. * Gulls wheel over Lago di Como at sundown on their way south trying to catch the last warm currents. Their wings are white, then silver, and then smoke when the light abandons them and dusk settles in their feathers. If you don’t collect things, it’s easier to move. Easier to stand on this cliff for another minute and watch the leaves fall, one by one, yellow, into the lake. They belong to the air for the time they are drifting. It’s a long way down.
The aqua green goes with the pink in a way no one knows what will happen. Every step is a dangerous taking. Amazing the time span of a trunk (a door opens in it and suddenly, someone is asking how this came to be). The green curtain is a pressed chime which when rung rings in a dogwood white as if a storm were approaching its green extreme. Brick crumbles into living pond particle while a bent hook holds back the last dissolve. An uneasy leap over a sharky sea. Gravity plays its little emotive role. It’s Elm Street all over again, ragged walkways lead to Toon Town. Hello kids. Hello Jimmy Neutron. The blanket rises, and under it, a fetishistic pompadour green, greener and paler than bluebird. But hush, the nuclear power plant is about to blow unless Jimmy can locate the elusive button. A siren and standing-by fire truck. It looks like a lost cause until presto, a messenger. A racketing aside. The day is dragged here and there but still can’t be saved. BAM. Immediately the next second clicks into the skyscape apocalypse. In the dust, a celluloid woman mows a multilayered lawn. The arch overhead reads, O Art Still Has Truth Take Refuge. Where? There. There, there, says someone.
What is desire But the hardwire argument given To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. Inside the braincase, it’s I Want that fills every blank. And then the hand Reaches for the pleasure The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, It will all be fine in some future soon. Definitely. I’ve conjured a body In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it. Here memory makes you Unchangeable: that shirt, those summer pants. That beautiful face. That tragic beautiful mind. That mind’s ravenous mouth That told you, This isn’t poison At all but just what the machine needs. And then, The mouth closes on its hunger. The heart stops.
A personal lens: glass bending rays That gave one that day’s news Saying each and every day, Just remember you are standing On a planet that’s evolving. How beautiful, she thought, what distance does For water, the view from above or afar. In last night’s dream, they were back again At the beginning. She was a child And he was a child. A plane lit down and left her there. Cold whitening the white sky whiter. Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world To be a sea.
Your joke Is like a lake That lies there without any thought And sees Dead seas The birds fly Around there Bewildered by its blue without any thought of water Without any thought Of water.
Sometimes you watch them going out to sea On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers, Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them, In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing, Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet Enormous flippers.  The bow, with such a load on board, Hammers through the whitecaps, while they talk; Junonian girls, Praxitelean boys, pelted on By bursting clouds, by spray, eventually heave The tanks upon their backs, the boat drifts at anchor, And down they go to the sea floor, by the foggy headland. At least, you can presume they kick the flippers And plunge to where the water is more calm. The cool Instructors must keep eyes and ears Open. Accidents out there, they happen.  You might imagine scraps Of cultural débris, a broken pot, a ring, a cogwheel Come up, clutched in a palm, and interesting, A wave pattern in it, the blade of a sword, When a lucky diver breaks again the surface. Time, Time and again frigate and schooner cracked Blown against the rocks, holed below the water line.  Even an inscription Might now be coming up from those green deeps. Yet the divers do their silent thing. On the sea floor Expect only the sea, a multitude of sand without an hourglass. Round somebody’s ankle idly it swarms. A diver Hangs by a thread of breath in solitude there. Some go down In all simplicity curious; to have tales to tell; And who knows, what they learn Just might, long after this, be usable.
1 Meryon saw it coming (who was he?): No people, so no noise. As it should be. The Bridge. The Morgue. Ghostly round his bed Antipodean atolls and tattoos had fluted, Volcanoes puffed. Then borborygmic sea Forked, at its last gasp, into a V: Down that black gallery and backward slid A syrup, foul, ovum and sperm concocted, The foggy groan of Antichrist. 1863: People mattered nothing, live or dead. Paris by his impeccable etchings emptied: Pointy turrets, windows, not a single head Poking out—and there across the sky, Tortuous, the skeleton birds creak by. 2 As if all the steps had stopped As if all the takes had token As if all the creaks had croaken As if all that weeps had wopped As if all that flips had flopped As if all that mocks had moaken As if all that speaks had spoken As if all that drips had dropped As if all that hopes had hopped As if all that leaps had lopped As if all that aches had oaken As if all that peaks had poken As if all that creeps had cropped As if all that peeps had popped 3 The old aquaforte art is back, thought Baudelaire. Multiple majesty of stone piled on stone; Obelisks of industry discharge into the air Their coalescent smoke. Almost airborne Scaffoldings roped to monuments under repair— Very poetic, beauty so paradoxicalI never saw the like;  and the sky over it all—Eagles. Tumult. Perspective deepens thereWith all the dramas that have come and gone. The artist: Once a sailor, now he’ll seek In nooks of masonry a sphinx.  I think you’d get a scare To hear him talk
Celebrated, the moustache, And near enough ignored His “beautiful hands”. Capable on a keyboard, improvised A polonaise, his own artistic Compositions “dull and decent”. He could see, some, but much swam, out there: Knives and forks, print, street signs. Then, his mind made up, he laid about, Sank immense nets into the cultural acid. When we winched them back in, on fingertips, They rippled with rainbows—herring and sprat He could fling, raw, in the teeth Of the Bürgertum, God rot it. Ah, no God: So to invoke the impact of quanta on quanta And extirpate for keeps the German cabbage, His fingers, subject to whim, and rounded Like objects in a metephor, made good the feeble Peering eyes. Each tip housed a labyrinth, Circling in or out, from ivories an octopod Pressed the torrent of a tune. From Cretan pots Their gestures, snaking out, apprehended, Turn on turn, a tumbril in the stars. Those fingers must have held, no less, the comb To bush his hairy icon out, to primp. On long mountain walks they jotted Gothic Letters on a page, deleted angrily Brainwaves, on a page one trouser leg Segregated from his knee. What a joy, At long last, to know the knower not deceived But disobedient, at his word. Underneath The creams of language here’s a tongue can taste A universe, cyclopic, but propulsive, alien To a species blocked by self-torment, To shopping, authority—all the cockahoop Engines of flesh not fuelled by despair. When Nietzche, squinting, trimmed his fingernails, Did he care for suchlike slighter things? To a turning pot a potter’s fingers do not cling.
What if I know, Liebknecht, who shot you dead. Tiegarten trees unroll staggering shadow, in spite of it all. I am among the leaves; the inevitable voices have nothing left to say, the holed head bleeding across a heap of progressive magazines; torn from your face, trees that turned around, we do not sanctify the land with our wandering. Look upon our children, they are mutilated.
Four buskers almost balkanized, tonight, August 4th, the Place de la Contrescarpe. Every one of them in wind and limb complete, The accordionist all but a hunchback-- After the first melodious flourishes were done, The clarinet began to take his instrument apart, Blowing shorter tunes, to show the way it worked; But on a keyboard hanging from his neck The carpenter pianist banged out routine chords And the violin a beanpole man was fingering Sliced through the edges of catalpa leaves With long shrieks, rat trills, and all in fun. Cars now orbiting the quadrangle of trees Turned into tubes filled with human meat, Notes took the scent of carnage from their lager (Even so, the buzz of talk, no way to stop it) And cherry red the track suit of its rider, The sliced leaves, iron chains that link Old mooring posts around the beds of flowers. Fogged the eye with fright, and meaning trouble Identical white camper caravans Rolled into view, the one behind the other, For things to jump from, us to be flung into.Rohmahniyah! he shouts, shaking his money pot, The clarinettist, Ceausescu, fini! Whereupon, Classic features, stepping light and fresh From reeds that told secrets of a beauty parlour. A nice Missouri girl, in gree, with pearls To plug each earlobe, pushed her wicker chair aside; Showing a dainty midriff, on steady legs She strolled across the street, as if to depollute With every breath, every stride, the air Our music for a moment had iunhabited. Then the white, lost caravans came back again, Carnation milk inside, stringbags of potatoes, Family snug inside, in each a Belgian grandpa, Peering every which way, at the wheel.
Linoleum and half a dozen eggs In 1960  Many towered Ilium A brand name and a shopping list too Memory distinguishes all things from Only nothing  I was born and grew Rooms stacked up into houses A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons Wildly like sea birds in crude oil  What amazes Me now amazed me always but never Often eyesight is prophetic instantly Seeing broken eggs on the linoleum In the kitchen 1960 I saw a broken lifetime further On as I see now my happy sister
Deola passes her mornings sitting in a cafe, and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work, under a sun still fresh with the dawn. Even Deola isn’t looking for anyone: she smokes serenely, breathing the morning. In years past, she slept at this hour to recover her strength: the throw on her bed was black with the boot-prints of soldiers and workers, the backbreaking clients. But now, on her own, it’s different: the work’s more refined, and it’s easier. Like the gentleman yesterday, who woke her up early, kissed her, and took her (I’d stay awhile, dear, in Turin with you, if I could
The drunk mechanic is happy to be in the ditch. From the tavern, five minutes through the dark field and you’re home. But first, there’s the cool grass to enjoy, and the mechanic will sleep here till dawn. A few feet away, the red and black sign that rises from the field: if you’re too close, you can’t read it, it’s that big. At this hour, it’s still wet dew. Later, the streets will cover it with dust, as it covers the bushes. The mechanic, beneath it, stretches in sleep. Silence is total. Shortly, in the warmth of the sun, one car after another will pass, waking the dust. At the top of the hill they slow down for the curve, then plunge down the slope. A few of the cars stop at the garage, in the dust, to drink a few liters. At this time of the morning, the mechanics, still dazed, will be sitting on oil drums, waiting for work. It’s a pleasure to spend the morning sitting in the shade, where the stink of oil’s cut with the smell of green, of tobacco, of wine, and where work comes to them, right to the door. Sometimes it’s even amusing: peasants’ wives come to scold them, blaming the garage for the traffic—it frightens the animals and women— and for making their husbands look sullen: quick trips down the hill into Turin that lighten their wallets. Between laughing and selling gas, one of them will pause: these fields, it’s plain to see, are covered with road dust, if you try to sit on the grass, it’ll drive you away. On the hillside, there’s a vineyard he prefers to all others, and in the end he’ll marry that vineyard and the sweet girl who comes with it, and he’ll go out in the sun to work, but now with a hoe, and his neck will turn brown, and he’ll drink wine pressed on fall evenings from his own grapes. Cars pass during the night, too, but more quietly, so quiet the drunk in the ditch hasn’t woken. At night they don’t raise much dust, and the beams of their headlights, as they round the curve, reveal in full the sign in the field. Near dawn, they glide cautiously along, you can’t hear a thing except maybe the breeze, and from the top of the hill they disappear into the plain, sinking in shadows.
Dawn on the black hill, and up on the roof cats drowsing. Last night, there was a boy who fell off this roof, breaking his back. The wind riffles the cool leaves of the trees. The red clouds above are warm and move slowly. A stray dog appears in the alley below, sniffing the boy on the cobblestones, and a raw wail rises up among chimneys: someone’s unhappy. The crickets were singing all night, and the stars were blown out by the wind. In dawn’s glow, even the eyes of the cats in love were extinguished, the cats the boy watched. The female is crying, no toms are around and nothing can soothe her: not the tops of the trees, not the red clouds. She cries to the wide sky, as if it were still night. The boy was spying on cats making love. The stray dog sniffs the boy’s body and growls; he got here at dawn, fleeing the glow that crept down the far hill. Swimming the river that drenched him as dew drenches fields, he was finally caught by the light. The bitches were still howling.  The river runs smoothly, skimmed by birds that drop from red clouds, elated to find their river deserted.
Touched by your goodness, I am like that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby that someone had smashed and somehow heaved through an open window. And you might think by this I mean I’m broken or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don’t know exactly what I am, any more than the wreckage in the alley knows it’s a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves. Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was. But touching me, I know, you are the good breeze blowing across its rusted strings. What would you call that feeling when the wood, even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?
The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard often catches the newborn light of the sun like the side of a barn. The body awakes in the morning to a room, messy and empty, that smells of the first, clumsy perfume. Even that body, wrapped now in sheets, is the same that it was when it thrilled in discovery. Her body wakes alone to the extended call of morning, the languor of another morning returning in the heavy shadows: the barn of childhood and the heavy tiredness of sun hot in the indolent doorways. A perfume worked itself into the usual sweat of her hair, a smell the animals knew. Her body took secret pleasure in the sun’s suggestive, serene caress—like a real touch. The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs, still youthful and plump, like a child’s. The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games. Sometimes she played lying down with the man in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair: he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry them open, then crush her like he was her father. The perfume was flowers ground upon stones. It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep, that undone aroma of far-off flowers, of barns and of sun. No man can know the subtle caress of that sour memory. No man can see, beyond that sprawled body, that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.
We would go down to the fish market early to cleanse our vision: the fish were silver, and scarlet, and green, and the color of sea. The fish were lovelier than even the sea with its silvery scales. We thought of return. Lovely too the women with jars on their heads, olive-brown clay, shaped softly like thighs: we each thought of our women, their voices, their laughs, the way they walked down the street. And each of us laughed. And it rained on the sea. In vineyards that cling to cracks in the earth, water softens the leaves and the grape-stems. The sky is colored by occasional clouds that redden with pleasure and sun. On earth, flavors and smells; in the sky, color. And we were alone there. We thought of return the way a man thinks of morning after an utterly sleepless night. We took pleasure in the color of fish and the glisten of fruit, all so alive in the musk of the sea. We were drunk on the thought of impending return.
And then we cowards who loved the whispering evening, the houses, the paths by the river, the dirty red lights of those places, the sweet soundless sorrow— we reached our hands out toward the living chain in silence, but our heart startled us with blood, and no more sweetness then, no more losing ourselves on the path by the river— no longer slaves, we knew we were alone and alive.
Because the silence of the dead, that blue expanse of sky about to ashen here above my head, is easily ignored, our tears are blamed on flowers whitening limbs of trees, the very air, with hymns of summer pollen no one hears except for women—old, devout. And now, these humid months, dispute them not: midsummer has no name among the dead, no Latin root to which it can be traced, no swarm of conjugations to decipher. So little left to write this summer, my mind now weak in handling form, which I still cling to just the same.
Kingston, Jamaica Lamps have begun to light as evening,  alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard,  fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns, its verandas and esplanades empty, the plantation gone, and the fields,  the courtyard a tourist attraction now:  glass ashtrays etched with boys too large to be clambering coconut trees, statuettes of women too smooth to be burdened  with baskets of fruit on their heads, stoneware with doctor birds captured in the shallowest bas-relief, key rings carved in the rough shape of the island; and now even the hummingbirds are spoken of as jewels where once everyone drowned in leaf-filtered sunlight.
And what if I had simply passed you by, your false skins gathering light in a basket,  those skins of unpolished copper, would you have lived more greatly? Now you are free of that metallic coating, a broken hull of parchment, the dried petals of a lily— those who have not loved you will not know differently. But you are green fading into yellow— how deceptive you have been. Once I played the cithara, fingers chafing against each note. Once I worked the loom, cast the shuttle through the warp. Once I scrubbed the tiles deep in the tub of Alejandro. Now I try to deciper you. Beyond the village, within a cloud of wild cacao and tamarind, they chant your tale, how you, most common of your kind, make the great warrior-men cry but a woman can unravel you.
Jamaica, 1960 Ignoring the local reliquiae— neoclassical arches in ruin, courtyards, their fountains toppled,prados flourishing in prickle-weed, esplanades no longer level enough to collect rainwater, much less respect for the Imperio de España  tarnished by an islander’s mock-British accent— two fisherman returned at sundown. Antiquaries themselves, these fishermen schooled in the currents, the tide, the tunneled limestone of the coral reefs, preferred the graceful curves of the £. At the landing, five children, single file, marched away the birds like soldiers, the learned lyrics escaping their lips:Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves.
Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love, after so many years of only that, after thinking that nothing else mattered. And what was I thinking of when I stopped thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force? I thought about how far away Death once had seemed, how unexpected that it could happen to someone I knew quite well, how impossible that this should be the normal thing, as natural as frost and winter. I thought about the way we’d aged, how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.
I will have been walking away: no matter what direction I intended, at that moment, I will have been walking Away into the direction that you now say I have always intended, no matter what my intention was then, I will have been Walking away, though it will not be clear what it was that I was leaving or even why, it seems that you will say That always, I was walking away, intending a direction that was not towards you, but moving away with every step, Or, even when I pretended to be walking towards you, only making the place for my feet to go backwards, Away, where I will have been walking, always away: intention and direction unknown, but knowing you will always say I will have been walking away.
I feel older, younger, both at once. Every time I win, I lose. Every time I count, I forget and must begin again. I must begin again, and again I must begin. Every time I lose, I win and must begin again. Everything I plan must wait, and having to wait has made me old, and the older I get, the more I wait, and everything I’m waiting for has already been planned. I feel sadder, wiser, neither together. Everything is almost true, and almost true is everywhere. I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once. I end in beginning, in ending I find that beginning is the first thing to do. I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating, so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping. I must stop my stopping and start to start— I can end at the beginning or begin at the end. I feel older, younger, both at once.
Let’s get this straight: Charles Graner  is not America. America would never  hold a knife to his wife’s throat, then say when she woke that he was considering killing her. And America’s wife in turn would never call her husband “my own Hannibal Lecter.” Am I right, or what?  Charles Graner may be Hannibal Lecter,  but he is not America. America is not that  kind of husband. Nor would America email his adolescent children photos of himself torturing naked Iraqi prisoners and say “look what Daddy gets to do!” Am I right? America is not that kind of father. America  would never torture naked Iraqi prisoners.  Let’s be absolutely clear about all of this. And America’s ex-lover and co-defendant would never whisper to the sketch artist  at America’s trial: “You forgot the horns.”  Charles Graner may or may not have horns, but America is horn-free. America does not torture prisoners. America may render them,  fully clothed, to Egypt or Syria, for further  interrogation, or to men like Charles Graner,  but America is not, ipso facto, Egypt or Syria,  and Charles Graner is not now nor has he ever been America. And don’t talk to me about Guantanamo. Please! Let’s get this straight.  You and I know who America is. We know  what America does and doesn’t do, because we (not Charles Graner!) are America. Am I right?  Is this all clear? Tell me—am I right, or what?
We knew the rules and punishments: three lashes for lack of diligence, eight for disobeying mother or telling lies.... No blood, he’d say,and no remission. Came a day he started keeping my account, as at a store. And came another he called me to the tannery: a Sunday, day of settlement. I’d paid one-third the owed amount when he, to my astonishment, handed the blue-beech switch to me. Always, the greatest of my fears were not his whippings, but his tears, and he was tearful now. I dared not disobey, nor strike him hard. “I will consider a weak blow no blow at all, rather a show of cowardice,” he said. No blood and no remission
for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong Lau I.A Porphyry of Elements  Starting in a long swale between the Sierras  and the Coast Range, Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea, Starting from exposed granite bedrock, From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn,  and scuffed by wind, Tired of the extremes of temperature,  the weather’s wantonness, Starting from the survey of a condor’s eye Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon, Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta,  a head of white hair,  a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian, Starting from the death of the last grizzly, The final conversion of Tulare County  to the internal-combustion engine, Staring from California oak and acorn,  scrubgrass, rivermist,  and lupine in the foothills, From days driving through the outfield clover  of Modesto in a borrowed Buick, From nights drinking pitchers of dark  in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill, From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves,  and a pisspot hat, From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville, From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin, From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento, From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon, From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay,  limestone, water, and tar, From a need or desire to throw your money away  in The Big City, From a melting of history and space in the crucible  of an oil-stained hand— Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements,  this aggregate of experiences Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone  of memory and vision, Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye  for straight, unending lines, We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine! II.A Samba for Inada Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go cruising Let’s go boozing Let’s go smoke Let’s go folk Let’s go rock Let’s go bop Let’s go jazz Let’s go fast Let’s go slow Let’s go blow Let’s go Latin Let’s go cattin Let’s go jiving Let’s go hiding Let’s go disco Let’s go Frisco Let’s go blues Let’s go cruise Let’s go far Let’s go near Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go lazy Let’s go boozing Let’s go crazy Let’s go cruising III.Cruising in the Greater Vehicle/A Jam Session “Well, goddamnit, Lawson! Whyn’t you play in key and keep to the rhythm? First you say you wanna go back to Fresno, back to the fish store and Kamaboko Gardens on the West Side, and then you say, forget it, I take it back, let’s go to the Sacto Bon-Odori instead.” “Yeah. And this ain’t even shoyu season yet, chump!” “Awww, hell. What’s wrong with you two? Can’t you improvise? You know, I’m just laying down a bass, man. Just a rhythm, a scale, something to jam on, something to change, find our range, something to get us going. Once we get started, we can work our way around to Weed, put on some tire chains, or break down in Selma, refuse to buy grapes, raisins, or Gallo, do a pit-stop at a Sacto sporting goods, pick up some air mattresses shaped like pearl-diving women, and float all day downriver to the deltas, sipping Cokes and saké in the summer heat.” “Shit. Whyn’t you just solo and forget the rest of us? You start chanting and pretty soon we’re hearing the entire Lotus Sutra.” “You two Buddhaheads just a pair of one-eyed Japs with dishpan hands and deadpan minds, man. This is the Champ Chonk talking, and we’re playing Chinese anaconda. Eight-card, no-peek pak-kai, roll your own, hi-lo, three for sweep, four for hot-sour soup stud, and neither of you’s put down your ante yet. So shit or get off the shu-mai, fellas.” “Calm down and watch the road, Alan.” “Who’s driving this heap, anyway?” “I thought you were.” “I thought Lawson was.” “Don’t worry. This is a dodo-driven, autopiloted, cruise-controlled, Triple- A-mapped, Flying-A-gassed, dual-overhead-cam, Super-Sofistifunktified, Frijole Guacamole, Gardena Guahuanco, Chonk Chalupa Cruiser with Buddha Bandit Bumpers, Jack!” “Where we going, Alan?” “Where do you think? We’re going to Paradise.” IV.On the Road to Paradise Distances don’t matter nor the roll of the road past walnut groves. It’s sky that counts, the color of it at dawn or sunset, a match more true to the peach than a mix of oils by Matisse. Or maybe it’s actually the weather we love most, the way it shifts and scatters over the state like radio waves bouncing off the face of the moon. The one over there, near Yuba City, rising over a backyard garden of onions, tomatoes, squash, and corn. The one with the spider scrambling through celery, harvesting moths and mayflies from the web it has strung between stalks. Sometimes I wish I could harvest the weather, reap it like wheat or rice, store it in a silo announcing steady rain or clear skies on its sides. When the prices rise, I could ship hailstorms or Santanas in orange crates, make Safeway go broke, do something politically efficacious for a change. But all I really do besides write these poems is allow my mind to wander while I drive. There it goes, down the arroyo, through manzanita and Mormon tea. Or there, up the mustard and Indian pipe on the hill. Might as well let it. Nothing but God and Country on the radio now. Wolfman Jack’s syndicated and the Dodgers haven’t made it to Vero Beach. I wish this road would turn or bend, intersect with a spy movie some Spanish galleon, or maybe a Chinese poem with landscapes in brocade, mist, wine, and moonlight. This California moon is yellow most of the time, like it was stained with nicotine, or sealed in amber like an insect. Why is it always better somewhere else? Why do I always wish I were Tu Fu? V.Palmistry Fantasia  There, the pasteboard and neon hand! Just past the interchange by the bowling alley. The one with silver rockets, small green stars, and a trail of red comets flashing through the smog. It’s still here, the hand held up in greeting or command. “Halt!” it says, or “Peace be with you, brother,” while the map across its palm traces excursions into blue trees, green skies, and mushroom-colored lives. Blue dun is the color of its neon, the same as the throat feathers of a teal scudding over the marshes of Merced. It matches the purple mascara the gypsy woman wears, matches the pools of velvet-blue darkness in her eyes. Her name is Alma Josephina, and she designed the sign herself, imitating the figure of her own hand, the neon indicative of its natural aura. That was twenty years ago when Eisenhower was President and all her customers wore pedal pushers or Bermudas, and never noticed the fireflies in the marshes at night.  * You’re Oriental, aren’t you? Can you read tea leaves? I tried to once, years ago, had a Chinese woman teaching me, but her fees were too steep. I like a joke. It loosens up the customers. Well, come here towards the light. Let me get a good look at the ghosts in the grave of your palm. They’re there, you know. All the people you’ve ever been, all the trips you’ve taken and the towns you’ve settled in, back before the birth of Christ, back before people were people, before this paw was a hand. You see? The whole palm glows like purple mist over a cemetery. Move closer. Clamp it around the glass. See it flare on the inside? That’s the light your bones make, not the crystal at all. Look at your hand now. You can see yourself dancing on the heel just above the wrist. You must be a happy man. You’ll be born again and again, get to the threshold of Heaven, never enter but keep coming back, here, for fun, for friends, until this will be Paradise, and Paradise just an old resort the highway’s passed by. Well, have a nice trip. You’ll make it yet. Says so right in that curvy line around the Mound of Venus, that thumbstump there, right where the long straight line cuts across like an interstate. VI.Postcards Sent Home 1.  Dust rolls out of the hills like fog, and it’s too hot for shoes or shirts. I’d like to take my hair off too, peel it from my head, dip it in a bucket of ice, and wear it around my neck like a bandana. 2. Crickets attend the night, add a falsetto drone to the sound of us pissing in the tumbleweeds. 3.  There’s a Tastee-Freeze in Fresno, A & Dub’s closed down, Jack-in-the-Box keeps popping up, and McDonald’s owns the town. 4.  Somebody’s drying tobacco leaves on the laundry line. There, see them furl and flap next to the nylons? 5. A giant oak uncurls over the road, sprinkles a fine yellow powder on the windshield. The sun hits, touches it off in a spasm of golden-red light. VII.Body & Fender/Body & Soul At the grill, the Indian girl with buckteeth and dimples serves us a round of coffee and sweet rolls. We’re waiting for the guy at Henley’s Texaco, down the street, to find us a fan belt that’ll fit. It’s early, the sky’s still in the john, shaving, and the sports page has to wait to get in. Everybody’s grumpy. We sit around, jab at raisins with our forks, and try to look as tough as the waitresss.  Her name’s Rita. Her brothers jump fires and pump oil in Alaska. Her sisters string beads and make babies back on the Res. Her ex is white, a logger who threatened never to come back and didn’t. She doesn’t hold any grudges. That’s why she’s so nice, why she pops her gum filling the salt and pepper shakers, why she adjusts her girdle so we can see, why the egg spot on her dress doesn’t show.    Outside, the sun eases up over the parking lot, scrambles across the freeway, and runs for cover behind a pile of pumpkin-colored clouds. 99 starts shuffling its deck of cars and pickups, getting set to deal a hand of nine-to-five stud. We don’t watch.  This is Redding, and ain’t nothing thing going on besides the day shift.  Alan says, “Look, there’s Venus,” and points to a piece of light draining the sky. I want to order a country- fried steak, talk about the Dodgers, but there isn’t time. Lawson hums a few chords, stirring the changes with his coffee spoon.    Rita cruises back like a bus bound for Reno, starts dealing some ashtrays. She says, “How’s it going boys?”  I answer for all of us—“Hey, Rita. It’s almost gone.” VIII.Pilgrimage to the Shrine Six hours since the Paradise Cutoff and running on empty. No gas stations or rest stops, no weigh station, no cops. Just miles of straight road and a long double-yellow unrolling in front of us. Alan recognized nothing. Lawson pops the glove, pulls out a penlight, and fingers the map, pronouncing a few mantras. Our headlights slide over a scarecrow made of tumbleweeds standing by the road. He’s wearing a kimono, a dark-blue stovepipe hat, his shoulders cloaked in a wreath of chrysanthemums. We pull over, back up, and he disappears into the pale- grey darkness. It’s smoke. We can smell it, so somebody’s got to be close by. But our eyes go blined, fill with tears and ashes as we stumble down the off-ramp. The smell of frying trout and steamed rice reaches us when we come to. An old hermit, dressed like the scarecrow, crawls out of his barracks and brings us tea. “Drink!” he says, “It’ll pick you up!” And so we drink, feeling drugged. Soft blues in the key of sleep suffocates the air. From up the mountain, the sound of obsidian, flaking in the wind. Clouds of black glass waltz around us. We dress ourselves in shrouds of tule reeds stitched with barbed wire, stained with salt and mud. We refuse to cry. We drift back to the highway, holding our fists like rattles, shaking them like bones. IX.Confessions of the Highway/The Hermit Speaks I know the rituals, the spells of grapes, the ceremonies of tomatoes, celery, and rice. I know the color of wind dressed for fiesta, and the names of carnivals in Spanish and Japanese. I am familiar with the determination of campesinos who migrate up and down the stretch of the state in search of crops ready for harvest. It’s all a dull ache in my back, small cuts on the throats of my fingers, and the alkali of a dry lake in my lungs. For me, the oracle of the giant orange always predicts good fortune, yet, it never comes true. My stomach is full of sand and tar, a little bit of paint, a few crickets. I stand in swampwater up to my hips, and the stink of rotting figs escapes my armpits in small brown clouds. Scrub oak and tumbleweed sprout from my scalp, make a small grove behind my left ear. I don’t know why sparrows and starlings refuse to approach me, to take the grass seed tucked in the cuffs of my trousers. Maybe it’s the stain of asphalt around my ankles, this copper sheen of sweat on my back. Sometimes, when the valley heat makes the bones in my feet start to hiss and burn, the desire to escape comes over me again. I can’t help it. My arms pull down a few telephone posts, my shoulders churn against the bindings. I feel myself wanting to sit up, begin to walk again, and thresh my way across rice fields and acres of alfalfa. For once I’d like to lift my face straight above Shasta into the sky, shout in unison with thunder, roar with the assurance of Santana wind, leap out of these bonds of copper and steel, slough off this skin of cement, and walk south or north or even west into the weather and the sea.
No one knew the secret of my flutes, and I laugh now because some said I was enlightened. But the truth is I’m only a gardener who before the War was a dirt farmer and learned how to grow the bamboo in ditches next to the fields, how to leave things alone and let the silt build up until it was deep enough to stink bad as night soil, bad as the long, witch-grey hair of a ghost. No secret in that. My land was no good, rocky, and so dry I had to sneak water from the whites, hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night, and blame Mexicans, Filipinos, or else some wicked spirit of a migrant, murdered in his sleep by sheriffs and wanting revenge. Even though they never believed me, it didn’t matter—no witnesses, and my land was never thick with rice, only the bamboo growing lush as old melodies and whispering like brush strokes against the fine scroll of wind. I found some string in the shed or else took a few stalks and stripped off their skins, wove the fibers, the floss, into cords I could bind around the feet, ankles, and throats of only the best bamboos. I used an ice pick for an awl, a fish knife to carve finger holes, and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece. I had my flutes.  * When the War came, I told myself I lost nothing. My land, which was barren, was not actually mine but leased (we could not own property) and the shacks didn’t matter. What did were the power lines nearby and that sabotage was suspected. What mattered to me were the flutes I burned in a small fire by the bath house.  * All through Relocation, in the desert where they put us, at night when the stars talked and the sky came down and drummed against the mesas, I could hear my flutes wail like fists of wind whistling through the barracks. I came out of Camp, a blanket slung over my shoulder, found land next to this swamp, planted strawberries and beanplants, planted the dwarf pines and tended them, got rich enough to quit and leave things alone, let the ditches clog with silt again and the bamboo grow thick as history.  * So, when it’s bad now, when I can’t remember what’s lost and all I have for the world to take means nothing, I go out back of the greenhouse at the far end of my land where the grasses go wild and the arroyos come up with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias, where the children of my neighbors consult with the wise heads of sunflowers, huge against the sky, where the rivers of weather and the charred ghosts of old melodies converge to flood my land and sustain the one thicket of memory that calls for me to come and sit among the tall canes and shape full-throated songs out of wind, out of bamboo, out of a voice that only whispers.
(JOHN F. KENNEDY’S INFORMAL APPOINTMENT OF DEAN MARTIN TO HIS CABINET)     What the fuck did they want, these men who needed the  company of others to make a life, as he needed a woman  to make babies? —Dino, nick tosches  I always plays to de common folk.  —dean martin  1 It was casting time for The Young Lions. Brando wouldn’t hesitate given this chance to dye his hair white and do a German accent. And while no one would hire Monty Clift after his facially disfiguring car-wreck, Brando convinced the studio that the other, slightly older, kid from Omaha was the right man. No one could play a more sensitive-tough than Monty, like the artist-bugler-boxer Prewitt mistaken for the enemy, gunned down by his own men in the Pearl Harbor dawn; or the way, as the seraphic cowboy Matt Dunson, he got a rise out of his demented empire builder father, John Wayne, by kicking over a tin cup, sloshing the coffee into the dust to show his disgust. Clift knew that Lions director Edward Dmytryk was searching for someone to play a key supporting role—as Frank Sinatra had in From Here ToEternity—yet he was stunned to hear it was “Jerry Lewis’s partner in shlock.” Clift softened, nauseated when he saw Martin’s competition pander to the crowd on Broadway. Lucky for Monty that he let it go: the two men not only became friends; it was Dean who put the man with the wired-jaw to bed when he had the chloral hydrate and alcohol wobblies. Ignorant of Brando’s intervention on his behalf, Monty told Dean that Marlon’s fifty takes per scene were getting on his nerves more and more and he vowed to walk off the set if he tried ONE MORE TIME to have his German soldier die with arms spread wide to “echo the crucifixion.” Clift, wasted with self-recrimination at forty-five. Martin, an actor for whom one run through a scene almost always sufficed. Dean got a chuckle out of Monty with his response. “It should be awful good with so many takes.” Then the future flashed before him. “I guess there are directors who want us to do the same scene over and over again too.” “Sure, lots. Some of the best.” “I guess I got spoiled. Jerry and I got to where we pretty much called the shots.” And then—without any foreknowledge that he’d be doing his only two other serious roles in the next two years and be subject to directorial rule on the sets ofSome Came Running and Rio Bravo— he vowed in the future to set up his golf net before shooting started on a picture. Dean appeared to float, perfection never an aspiration: that he was already as well known for his insouciance and drunk persona as for his singing and acting doesn’t mean he was so well-defended that he didn’t feel any pressure about working with such aces as Brando and Clift. He didn’t have to stretch to play a would-be draft dodger, Michael Whiteacre: “a likeable coward like myself,” a screenwriter in Shaw’s novel, a singer in the movie. The army doctor feeds Dean his first line in Lions as if his future were visible in the instant: art and life exquisitely commingled. Doctor: “For a man your age and in your profession you’re in excellent health. How do you manage it?” Martin doesn’t hesitate: “Clean liquor.” But sauntering through this role didn’t mean everything was swell: he felt so out-of-place on location in France he gave up the offer of a choice part in The Guns of Navarone because it meant going back to Europe. In his middle years, he ambled through the role of “Matt Helm” in another toneless Bondian takeoff, and when Columbia wanted to shoot Murderers’ Row on location in Cannes, Dino set the studio straight: “fuck no, just build some fake Riviera sets.”  2 A diffident crooner, he needed a stooge. License to fuck around on stage. After his split with Jerry, Dino’s drunk persona grew into a ghostly partner, and by the time he had his own TV show the public was so saturated with his presence, many conflated the persona and the person. When he landed the drunk’s key role in Rio Bravo, he turned to Brando for help, “what should I do?” Brando told him what to think about. The more inscrutable the subject the more this spectre stands out in relief. Part of Martin’s appeal was that no one knew him. It wasn’t a mask; his detachment was who he was. He showed up, his spirit remained elsewhere. His wives and children found him unknowable. It wasn’t personal. When the Martins entertained, the guests carried on while Dino disappeared into his room to watch westerns on TV, alone. It wasn’t personal. When the producer of “The Colgate Comedy Hour” suggested they have lunch to get to know one another, Dino set him straight: “No one gets to know me.” Martin was a man no one came close to knowing. What does it mean, to know someone?  3 Why ask such questions at all after Socrates beguiled us out of answers and set us on the inexhaustible path...dialectics? Don’t you think I haven’t wondered if I haven’t strayed from my true path as I find myself tracking the trajectory of such non-exemplary lives? You’re thinking it’s a trick, and will not answer, but before you judge my dissolute subject— who like the money but thought all the attention was a joke because “a singer is nothing”— as a derelict choice, consider how philosophy, while striving to become more concrete continues to recoil before the problem of other minds. And it is said that Monsieur Sartre turned paler than his martini, when Raymond Aron challenged the Husserlians, at the Bec de Gaz in Montparnasse, to make philosophy out of a cocktail glass.  4 There’s something about everyone no one can know. There was no question of Dino taking orders and being bossed around was out of bounds: penalty shot incurred for the perpetrator, who was, this time, the imperious Billy Wilder whose streak of hits was breaking fast. Dino as always was doing his job, which was to literally play himself in Kiss Me, Stupid
What is this about losing respect? Do I have to talk about it? He said he feared what I might write about him when he was gone, and I told him not to worry.He worried about the “streak of morbidity” in your work. He was a man of God, not of imagination. And it wasn’t his fault if he got the shakes. It was a familial tremor, not nerves.And it first happened at a gravesite. Near where Brigham Young did his number—“this is the place.”He called him Friggin Young. Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville, his congregants would tell nigger jokes and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat— a mere exercise in stretching  the corners of his lips— a fake grin he would have noted on another face—false faces being  one of the things we loved to laugh about when together we observed congregants’ idiosyncracies, their ruses, their guises, like one temple president, the son  of the “richest Jew in Salt Lake” who, seated in the pulpit’s other red velvet wing chair,  would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes while he batted his eyelashes to  wake himself up— (though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier” didn’t turn me in for copying  the wrong answers from Mary Weinstein on our “final exam” in Sunday  school prior to confirmation. He was ashamed for me,  young Rosencavalier. He could hardly disguise  the curled lips and downcast eyes  of his contempt  for this lawless “Rabbi’s son”  whether or not my name  was Strome or Rudman, but where teaching Judaism was concerned  his plodding methodical reading to keep up each week  was a pathetic substitution for Sidney’s well-wrought, impromptu riffs.  So there!) Marty was ashamed of me. I left town.As night was falling?  * In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age fourteen a lot of our talk was hard core car talk and somehow the wordVolkswagen came up after confirmation class (it was no GTO but you could drive so far on so little gas...) and Marty’s father—a redhead like his son— made his way up the driveway’s ice, smoke billowing from the exhaust of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove. Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves he announced he’d “never buy a Kraut car.” I was bewildered (what, hold against a country now something that happened so long ago?) and he held my gaze and I shivered inside the shiver I felt from the cold I thought he would transmogrify into a southern sheriff and ask “what kind of Jew are you boy” but he didn’t have to say another word.  *In other words you were ready to leave town. I’d had it with Utah.But you wanted to stay in the west, against your father’s wishes?  Yes.Unequivocally? Yes. Yes. Yes.But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools during your sojourn in the east that summer?
Card in pew pocket announces, “I am here.” I made only one statement because of a bad winter. Grease is the word; grease is the way I am feeling. Real life emergencies or flubbing behind the scenes. As a child,  I was abandoned in a story made of trees. Here’s the small gasp of this clearing come “upon” “again”
He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins. Outside, through flashes of lightning, wind gusts and rain whips, knocking the lights out every five minutes. In the dark, their faces give it their all, contorted, as they play a dance tune from memory. Full of energy, my poor friend anchors them all from behind. His clarinet writhes, breaks through the din, passes beyond it, releasing like a lone soul, into a dry, rough silence. The poor pieces of brass have been dented too often: the hands working the stops also work in the fields, and the obstinate brows stay fixed on the ground. Miserable worn-out blood, weakened by too many labors—you can hear it groan in their notes, as my friend struggles to lead them, his own hands hardened from swinging a hammer, from pushing a plane, from scraping a living. He’s lost all his old comrades, and he’s only thirty. Part of the postwar group that grew up on hunger. They all came to Turin, to look for a life, and discovered injustice. He learned, without smiling, how to work in a factory. He learned how to measure the hunger of others with his own fatigue— injustice was everywhere. He tried to find peace by walking, at night, down streets without ends, half-asleep, but found only thousands of streetlamps blazing down on iniquity: hoarse women and drunks, staggering puppets, far from their homes, He came, one winter, to Turin—factory lights, smoke and ash— and he learned what work is. He accepted that work was part of a man’s hard fate; if all men did that, there just might be some justice in this world. And he found new comrades. He suffered their long words, he listened and waited for them to be over. He made them his comrades. Families of them in each house, the city surrounded by them, the face of the world covered with them. And each of them felt desperate enough to conquer the world. They sound harsh tonight, despite all the time he spent coaching each player. He ignores the loud rain and the flickering lights. His face is severe, fixed on some grief, almost biting the mouthpiece. I’ve seen this expression before, one evening, just us and his brother, who’s ten years sadder than him. We were up late in the dim light, the brother studying a lathe he had built that didn’t work right, and my poor friend cursing the fate that kept him there, bound to his hammer and plane, feeding a pair of old people he never asked for.  That’s when he yelled that it wasn’t fate that made the world suffer or made the daylight spark blasphemous outbursts: man is the guilty one. If we only could just leave, and be hungry and free, and say no to a life that uses our love and our piety, our families, our patches of dirt, to shackle our hands.
It’s a fine fact that whenever I sit in a tavern corner sipping a grappa, the pederast’s there, or the kids with their screaming, or the unemployed guy, or some beautiful girl outside—all breaking the thread of my smoke. That’s how it is, kid, I’m telling it straight, I work at Lucento.
The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed. Everything else will come easy. Three sips and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone. Against the buzzing backdrop of noise everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle to be born and to stare at the glass. And work (a man who’s alone can’t not think of work) becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind. If this man gets up and goes home to sleep, he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him. A woman—beautiful, young—might appear, and lie under a man in the street, and moan, the way a woman once moaned under him. But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence. Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think, to look at this man, that life once burned in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess that there was a woman, once, who gently touched that body, who kissed that body, which shakes, and wet it with tears, now that the man, having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.
The chicken I bought last night, Frozen, Returned to life, Laid the biggest egg in the world, And was awarded the Nobel Prize. The phenomenal egg Was passed from hand to hand, In a few weeks had gone all round the earth, And round the sun In 365 days. The hen received who knows how much hard currency, Assessed in buckets of grain Which she couldn’t manage to eat Because she was invited everywhere, Gave lectures, granted interviews, Was photographed. Very often reporters insisted That I too should pose Beside her. And so, having served art Throughout my life, All of a sudden I’ve attained to fame As a poultry breeder.
Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough. Cunning life keeps asking for more and then a drop more. Our ankles are weighted with lead, we delve under the wave. We bend to our spades, we survive the force of the gusher. Our bodies fountain with sweat in the deeps of the sea, Our forehead aches and holds like a sunken prow. We are out of breath, divining the heart of the geyser, Constellations are bobbing like corks above on the swell. Earth is a waterwheel, the buckets go up and go down, But to keep the whole aqueous architecture standing its ground We must make a ring with our bodies and dance out a round On the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water. Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough. Come rain, come thunder, come deluged dams washed away, Our thirst is unquenchable. A cloud in the water’s a siren. We become two shades, deliquescent, drowning in song. My love, under the tall sky of hope Our love and our love alone Keeps dowsing for water. Sinking the well of each other, digging together. Each one the other’s phantom limb in the sea.
All morning, you’ve studied the laws of spoons, the rules of books, the dynamics of the occasional plate, observed the principles governing objects in motion and objects at rest. To see if it will fall, and if it does, how far, if it will rage like a lost penny or ring like a Chinese gong—because it doesn’t have to—you lean from your chair and hold your cup over the floor. It curves in your hand, it weighs in your palm, it arches like a wave, it is a dipper full of stars, and you’re the wind timing the pull of the moon, you’re the water measuring the distance from which we fall.
The pearls, mere reminders. The ocean’s rapid recoil, a signal. The gulls appeared enormous in that way only things from above can— such is presentation of the sudden. If only this were worthy of a frame, the wooden gesture announcing a moment past were cherished. But it was too late for that, too late to answer the surf’s anxious Why? too late to decline the continuous life he had resigned himself, turning away from the grave, that plot being too familiar to so many. Of course immortality had its price: first his staff he had taped back together, then the sleeves of his robe he had reclaimed from the depths, then the magic leached nightly from his fingertips so that now his incantation for a storm brought only a slight breeze, a quick sun shower that frightened only the flowers struggling in the salt air. Now, showing his centuries, he insists:This is the wind out of which I bring clouds. These are my hands that gnarled though they be when lifted to the sky bring rain
for donald justice Beyond the strings of water clinging to the windowpane, there were no cranes, just rain, a sky blurred by wet glass, a pond corrugated by raindrops, and, inside, the smell of naphthalene bars, a Victrola with a broken arm, a spotty daguerreotype, a dusty crinoline— O mildewed, seersucker suits draped over vacant chairs.
for Emma Grace The day we picked our daughter up from camp, goldenrod lined the road, towheaded scouts bowing on both sides, the parting of macadam as we drove, the fields dry, the sky lacy with clouds. A farmer waved. A horse shrugged its haughty head. We stopped for corn, just picked, and plums and kale, sampled pies, still warm, and tarts and honeyed bread. Sheets on a line ballooned out like a ship’s sail. Time stopped in those miles before we saw her. For eight days we hadn’t tucked her in or brushed her hair or watched her grow, the week a busy blur of grown-up bliss. It came anyway, that uprush of fear—because somewhere a child was dead: at a market, a subway, a school, in a lunatic’s bed.
I hate your hills white with dogwood or pink with redbud in spring as if you invented hope, as if in the middle of red clay, limestone outcroppings, and oak trees dead with fungus something slight and beautiful should make us smile. I hate the way honeysuckle drapes fences, blooms in the ditch  where everyone dumps garbage; the evening air sweet with cedar and fields of burley; the way irises and buttercups mark the old dimensions of a house destroyed a hundred years ago; how a span of Queen Anne’s lace rocks the whole moon, and the sumac runs dark against the hill. I hate the drawl, the lazy voice saying I’ve been away so long I sound like I’m from nowhere; the old hand gathering snowballs or peonies or forking up an extra dish of greens, bitter, just the way I like them.
(Detroit, 1950) Because the jobs were there and a man could get rich working on the line, the South retreated North to Michigan, whole families eating crackers and baloney by the side of the road, changing drivers to keep moving through corn fields and foreign towns, sundown and darkness, the moon a prophecy of chrome, the stars 10 million headlights of the cars they would build. Ahead lay a city bright with steel; behind, the dark fields folded over everything they knew; and when they dozed on cramped back seats, they dreamed such dreams as the road can make, of drifting on a lake or stream or lying down in hay to dream of traveling, so that when they woke to a bump, a couch, a voice saying, “It’s your turn,” they were lost to themselves and took a few moments to remember their names. Mostly behind their backs, the locals called them rednecks, crackers, goddamned rebs. Strange to be strange, in their new neighborhoods, to be ethnic with a thick accent and a taste for food the grocers didn’t stock— hog jowl and blackeyes, turnip greens, roasting ears, souse-meat— the butcher shrugging, the produce man shaking his head. Sometimes their own voices took them by surprise, sounding odd and out of place in the din of a city bus, ringing lost in the evening air when they called their children in for supper. At work they touched parts of tomorrow, next year’s models always taking shape and vanishing, the present obsolete, the past merely a rumor, all hours blurring into one continuous moment of finishing a fragment, each piece the same piece, movements identical, endless, like a punishment in hell. No way out but back to their old lives, a future they already knew by heart, a few on the road each month in cars they may have helped assemble, tokens of their failed success, legacies for boys to find years later rusting on some lot, banged up but still a dream and fast enough when overhauled to make them feel they could blast straight into tomorrow, as they raced their engines at each stoplight and cruised their towns in circles.
Sent in after new ground was taken, my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole, unwinding the telephone cable behind him, a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting  the gods with the lesser gods. Funny to think of him trailing the complex filament of speech, that man, neither shy nor sullen, who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” and never volunteered a private thought. Standing off with his hands in his pockets or cupping a cigarette, he seemed to be waiting with the great rural patience of fields for whatever might rise pure and nameless or fall from the sky beyond explanation. If anyone asked what he was thinking, he said, “Nothing,” and when he died he rushed out leaving everything unsaid, uncoiling a dark line into darkness down which a familiar silence roars.
Followed by his lodge, shabby men stumbling over the  cobblestones, and his children, faces red and ugly with tears, eyes and  eyelids red, in the black coffin in the black hearse the old man. No longer secretly grieving that his children are not strong enough to go the way he  wanted to go and was not strong enough.
His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low   voice; all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine. When he went to high school Webber was in his class. Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in  lawns with trees beside the gutters.  The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and  hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall. At twelve o’clock the boys ran out of school to a lunchroom  around the corner. First come, first served, and they ran as fast as they could. Webber would run up beside him and knock him against the  wall. He tried not to mind and thought Webber would tire of it.  One day he hit Webber’s side; his fist fell off Webber’s over-  coat. Webber turned with a glad shout and punched him  as he cowered. His home was in a neighborhood of workingmen where there  were few Jews.  When he came home from school he walked as quickly as he could, his head bowed and cap pulled low over his face. Once, a few blocks from home, a tall lad stopped him.  “Are you a Jew? I knock the block off every Jew I meet.”  “No,” he answered. “I think you’re a Jew. What’s your name?” He told him, glad that his name was not markedly Jewish and yet foreign  enough to answer for his looks.  “Where do you live?” He told him and added, “Come around  any old time and ask about me.” So he got away. When he was through high school he worked in the civil  service as a typist, taken on until a rush of business was  over. He took the test for a steady job, but his standing on the list  was low, unlikely to be reached for a long time, if ever before the new list. Looking for work, he always came upon a group waiting for   the job. He was short and weak-looking, and looked peevish. He could  not get work for months.  At last an old German storekeeper wanted to hire him and  asked at what he had been working. He told him. “It doesn’t pay me to break you in, if you are going to leave  me. Have you taken another civil service test? Are you  waiting for a new appointment?” “No,” he answered.  In a few months a letter came to his home from the civil  service board, asking him to report for work as a typist, a  permanent appointment.  There was no hurry, but his father did not know and so  brought the letter to the store. There had been a boy in his class at school whose name was  Kore. Kore was short, too, but he had the chest of an old sailor and  thick, bandy legs. He shouted when he spoke and was  always laughing. Kore moved into the block. With Kore he was not afraid to  stand on the stoop after work or go walking anywhere. Once they went to Coney Island and Kore wanted to go  bathing. It was late at night and no one else was in. They went along the beach until they came to the iron pier the  steamboats dock at.  Kore boasted that he would swim around the pier and slid  away into the black water. At last the people were gone. The booths were long darkened.  He waited for Kore at the other side of the pier, watching the   empty waves come in.
Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign  and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books. Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and  heard their talk of that day’s worries and the next: lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of  goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders  again,  for the tenth time he said, “I’m going in with you: there’s more  money in business.” His father answered, “Since when do you care about money?  You don’t know what kind of a life you’re going into—  but you have always had your own way.” He went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of  Buyers
When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a  thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing.  He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes  thunder: two clouds knock together.” When he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties.  They all said that he would be a lawyer. At law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he  became the chum of an only son of rich people. They   were said to think the world of the young lawyer.  The Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment.  His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement. When a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a   drug store. Now he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes  and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the  courts and the search in law books. He had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side  street. Influenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop  and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was  half-blind. He, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a  lot of money doctors and druggists must be making; now  is my son’s chance.” They did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.
Their new landlord was a handsome man. On his rounds to  collect rent she became friendly. Finally, she asked him in to have a cup of tea. After that he  came often. Once his mouth jerked, and turning, she saw her husband in  the doorway. She thought, One of the neighbors must have told him. She smiled and opened her mouth to speak, but could say  nothing. Her husband stood looking at the floor. He turned and went  away. She lay awake all night waiting for him. In the morning she went to his store. It was closed. She sent for his brothers and told them he had not been home.  They went to the police. Hospitals and morgues were  searched. For weeks they were called to identify drowned  men. His business had been prosperous; bank account and all were  untouched. She and their baby girl were provided for. In a few years they heard of him. He was dead. He had been making a poor living in a far off city. One day he  stepped in front of a street-car and was killed. She married again. Her daughter married and had children.  She named none after her father.
You’re expected to see only the top, where sky scrambles bloom, and not the spindly leg, hairy, fending off tall, green darkness beneath. Like every flower, she has a little theory, and what she thinks is up. I imagine the long climb out of the dark beyond morning glories, day lilies, four o’clocks up there to the dream she keeps lifting, where it’s noon all day.
A giraffe presented its head to me, tilting it sideways, reaching out its long gray tongue. I gave it my wheat cracker while small drops of rain pounded us both. Lightning cracked open the sky. Zebras zipped across the field. It was springtime in Michigan. I watched the giraffe shuffle itself backwards, toward the herd, its bone- and rust-colored fur beading with water. The entire mix of animals stood away from the trees. A lone emu shook its round body hard and squawked. It ran along the fence line, jerking open its wings. Perhaps it was trying to shake away the burden of water or indulging an urge to fly. I can’t know. I have no idea what about their lives these animals love or abhor. They are captured or born here for us, and we come. It’s true. This is my favorite field.
His father carved umbrella handles, but when umbrella  handles were made by machinery, there was only one  man for whom his father could work. The pay was small, though it had once been a good trade. They lived in the poorest part of the ghetto, near the lots  where people dump ashes. His father was anxious that his son should stay at school and  get out of the mess he himself was in. “Learning is the  best merchandise,” he would say. His father died; there was his mother to be taken care of. He  taught in a school in the ghetto. Some pupils came at nine and stayed until three; others came  after public school and stayed until evening; most of the  pupils came in the evening. The courses were crammed, lasting a few months, pupils and  teachers anxious to be rid of the matter as soon as  possible. So he worked day and night, week-days and Sunday. His mother was dead. It was cold in the street and windy. A  dry snow had fallen and the feet of the walkers were  turning it into brown sand. He was forty. Now he was free. To do what? He knew no one whom he  cared to marry. And who would go into his poverty? If he were to give up this work he knew so well, to what else  could he turn? He would just keep on. He had lost this world and knew there  was no other.
They landed and could  see nothing but  meadows and tall  trees— cypress, nearly three  fathoms about at the  roots, rising straight for  sixty or eighty feet  without a branch. In the woods were  cedars, oaks, and  walnut trees; some beech, some elm,  black walnut, ash,  and sassafras; mul-  berry trees in  groves; honey-suckle and  other vines hanging   in clusters on  many trees. They stepped on  violets and other  sweet flowers, many kinds in many  colors; straw-  berries and rasp-  berries were on  the ground. Blackbirds with red  shoulders were  flying about and many small birds,  some red, some blue; the woods were full of deer; and running  everywhere  fresh water—  brooks, rundles,  springs and creeks. In the twilight,  through the thickets  and tall grass, creeping upon all  fours—the  savages, their  bows in their  mouths.
Torquemada. Now that Castile and Aragon in holy wedlock are Spain, and the last city of the Moors in Spain is Spanish except for Moor and Jew— about every crucifix in every market-place and in the court itself the Jews!— as seven centuries of Christian valor, Christian piety triumph stay not your hand; Spain of the knights, one in fealty to your majesties, become one in faith, Spain of the saints! Like the sun, rising as our Savior from His tomb into the brilliant sky blaze until the clouds that still obscure the light are drawn into His brightness and earth is brilliant as the sky is bright. Spain newly united still divided— as the season of cold is the season of darkness in the spring of our rejoicing that the Moor is gone from Spain, the Jew go too! But if the Spaniard speaks, I speak no less a Christian: throw away the curse, you Jews, of fifteen hundred years; stay and prosper and Church and Heaven prosper, in our nets a goodly catch. Think not that we want aught of you but your souls; your money and your jewels— all your trash— keep if you stay and are Christian, take if you are Jews and go; we ask of you nothing but your Judaism which has brought you so much misery and will bring each of you— the youngest and the gentlest— to the flames of Hell and the worm that dies not. We give you, miserable sinners, the waters of Paradise; we give you the blessings of the saints, the blessings of Mary, the blessed mother of Christ, and the blessings of our Lord Jesus.  Isabella. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of our  prior; it is Saint Dominic who speaks to us through his Dominican or Saint James himself.  Abrabanel. No noble in your court, your majesties, proud of his forefather, conquering Goth or Visigoth or Vandal, is of an older Spanish line than we— Jews in Iberia before the Romans came. No noble boasting his service boasts of more than that Jew who through a thousand shoals  and reefs piloted Aragon to Castile—your marriage and Spain’s glory. The rest of us, many tens of thousands, serve you humbly in smithy, field or vineyard, soldiers or physicians, as we have served in Spain two thousand years, Spaniards, true to your majesties as we are to the God of Israel—and of Spain, unlike the others only in our faith for which, if we must answer, we shall answer to our God.  Torquemada. Since all we do, and each word spoken, if only in our hearts, must be in worship— not a leaf falls slowly but in His service— to be unlike us in our faith is to be unlike in everything. True, you Jews must answer to your God, and in the flames and burning ice of Hell forever you shall answer; but we too, priests, bishops, queen and king, must answer for you: farmer or captain answers; shall we be less answerable for souls?  Abrabanel. You do not honor your God by bringing Him captives, like a mere emperor who must have retainers and retinue, serfs and forced labor; the loadstone without visible motion draws to itself every particle of iron; the sword—even though a winged angel swings it— served only to drive Adam from his paradise. Your fingers stiff with rings and jewels, you dishonor your faith, your majesties, by cruelty, give it whatever noble name you will as princes make a rogue knight or lord. Will thieves and pirates be gentler with us than your constables and soldiers?— your majesties will hear of many ripped up for the jewels it will be said they swallowed; many left by sailors to die on reefs and sandbars for a smock or a pair of hose; many dead of plague or found like birds in winter dead in the fields about towns or like fish upon a beach; many will die as slaves at work beasts would be fitter for but costlier, who have written a page of Castilian or handled a Toledo blade with the best. And yet the weak has each his strength, Spain of Spaniard, Basque, and Catalonian, Moor and Gypsy, else all beasts were tigers, all fish sharks, and only giants left; the stricken remember— as wounds and scars last longer than the blow— and if drops of water wear channels in the rock on which the earth itself is, in the action of centuries how powerful are tears. Would you have our religion like our clothes—for comfort and the eyes of men, put off at night, and we left lying naked in the darkness? The body is like roots stretching down into the earth— forcing still a way over stones and under rock, through sand, sucking nourishment in darkness, bearing the tread of man and beast, and of the earth forever; but the spirit— twigs and leaves spreading through sunshine or the luminous darkness of twilight, evening, night, and dawn, moving in every wind of heaven and turning to whatever corner of the sky is brightest, compelled by nothing stronger than the light; the body is like earth, the spirit like water without which earth is sand and which must be free or stagnant; or if the body is as water, the spirit is like air that must have doors and windows or else is stuffy and unbreathable— or like the fire of which sun and stars have been compounded, which Joshua could command but for an hour.  Isabella. If our eye offends us, pluck it out! Even so, we will sweep away the Jews from every town and hamlet, field and corner of our dominion, though they are the sands for number. Go and begone—but stay as Christians; come and be dear to us, as the Prodigal!  Abrabanel. We Jews have been accused of love of wealth, but not for all our wealth in Spain, fields and vineyards, houses of timber and houses of stone that we must leave, and all the wealth that will be stolen from us, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of arrogance, but not for all the dignities that we must leave, our offices and honors in this, the proudest court of Christendom, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of love of life, delighting in the flesh, but though we shall die along a thousand roads we will not stay— striking roots somewhere to flourish as we flourished, giving shade and fruit.
So proudly she came into the subway car all who were not reading their newspapers saw the head high and the slow tread— coat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag, face unwashed and the grey hair uncombed; simple soul, who so early in the morning when only the  poorest go to work, stood up in the subway and outshouting the noise: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I have a baby at home who  is sick, and I have no money, no job;” who did not have box or cap  to take coins— only his hands, and, seeing only faces turned away, did not even go down the aisle as beggars do; the fire had burnt through the floor: machines and merchandise had fallen into the great hole, this zero that had sucked away so many years and now, seen at last, the shop itself; the ceiling sloped until it almost touched the floor—  a strange curve in the lines and oblongs of his life; drops were falling from the naked beams of the floor above, from the soaked plaster, still the ceiling; drops of dirty water were falling on his clothes and hat and on his hands; the thoughts of business gathered in his bosom like black water in footsteps through a swamp; waiting for a job, she studied the dusty table at which she sat and the floor which had been badly swept— the office-boy had left the corners dirty; a mouse ran in and out under the radiator and she drew her feet away and her skirt about her legs, but the mouse went in and out about its business; and she sat waiting for a job in an unfriendly world of men and mice; walking along the drive by twos and threes, talking about jobs, jobs they might get and jobs they had had, never turning to look at the trees or the river glistening in the sunlight or the automobiles that went swiftly past them— in twos and threes talking about jobs; in the drizzle four in a row close to the curb that passers-by might pass, the squads stand waiting for soup, a slice of bread and shelter— grimy clothes their uniform; on a stoop stiffly across the steps a man who has fainted; each in that battalion eyes him, but does not move from his place, well drilled in want.
ILand of Refuge A mountain of white ice standing still in the water here forty fathoms deep and flowing swiftly from the north; grampuses and whales going by in companies, spouting up water in streams (these wonders of the Lord, I, Francis Higginson, saw on the way to Salem); a fair morning, and still many leagues from land, but the air warm and spiced— yellow flowers on the sea, sometimes singly, sometimes in sheets; high trees on every hill and in every dale, on every island, and even on the stony cliffs; banks of earth on which are groves of trees, and no undergrowth of bush or brambles; the sandy shore overrun with vines of melons and of grapes which the beat and surging of the sea overflows (this I, Arthur Barlowe, saw); trees of sweet-smelling wood with rind and leaves sweet-smelling as the bark of cinnamon and leaves of bay; soil dark and soft, strawberries everywhere, hickory nuts and sassafras; here are grapes white and red, very sweet and strong, and plums, black and red, and single roses, white and red and damask; we have eaten venison with the Indians, and drunk water with spice in it— Indian corn, even the coarsest, makes as pleasant a meat as rice. (Without any show of anger the Iroquois crunched our fingers in their mouths, and with their teeth tore off the nails; then hacked our fingers off, joint by joint, with stone hatchets, or with a shell too dull to cut the sinews; and in the stumps of our thumbs drove up spikes until the elbow; but so great the help of Jesus, with this maimed hand I, Isaac Jogues, Jesuit and priest, baptised an Indian among the captives, using the raindrops on a long leaf of corn.) Let others cry, “New lands! where Indians shall bring kernels of gold, wagons full of gold; whatever spills upon the way we shall tread carelessly, for we shall have so much of gold— so many pearls to sew upon our clothes; away, unthrifty gentlemen, to the forests of Virginia! There are lands to feed all the poor of England, trees to build each a home; give us but axes, shovels, and ploughshares, and away then to America, all you poor!” In England a watch is set about us and we are clapt in jails, and Holland is a dear place, for there they live by trading— but we are a plain country people whose trade is husbandry, and we would worship God as simply as the shepherds and Galilean fishermen, live as plainly; away, dissenters, to New England! A great wind is blowing, heavy rain— thick darkness; the sailors running here and there, shouting at one another to pull at this and at that rope, and the waves pouring over the ship; landing in the rain— the cold rain falling steadily; the ground wet, all the leaves dripping, and the rocks running with water; the sky is cloud on cloud in which the brief sun barely shines, the ground snow on snow, the cold air wind and blast; we have followed our God into this wilderness of trees heavy with snow, rocks seamed with ice, that in the freezing blasts the remnant of this remnant kindle so bright, so lasting a fire on this continent, prisoners of ice and darkness everywhere will turn and come to it to warm their hands and hearts. IIBrief History Glaciers pushing so far and surely thaw and withdraw; even the deep, while the explosion of its waves dynamites the cliffs, leaves new lands, new groves and habitations beside the glittering currents flowing quickly into the silver waters of the sun. Here are men who find a comfortable bed among the rocks, who wrap themselves in their coats to sleep upon the ground while their horse feeds in the grass beside the lake; who catch trout in the brook and roast them on the ashes; eat the flesh of bear for meat, the white meat of turkeys for their bread, and whose salt is brought in an iron pot across the mountains; who live where two hundred acres may be had for a calf and a wool hat; or walk where there is no road nor any man, except the savage. All the bells of Boston are tolling a solemn peal; the market men will take no more paper money— hard money only; soldiers with bare feet showing through their shoes in the snow, the smoke of the camp-fires blowing into their  eyes; for food a bowl of beef soup full of burnt leaves; no house or hut, and even the sick in tents. The rays of your light, like the sun’s, Republic of France, shone first in the west; the eater shall give meat, and out of the strong sweetness— out of the bones of the French monarchy the honey of freedom; the bells of Philadelphia are ringing as if for a fire, and the crowds, shouting and hallooing, fill the streets; ring, bells, throughout the night, let no one sleep; ring, clash, and peal until the log cabins and cottages of cedar shingles, the houses of grey stone or of brick, tremble, and the listeners feel in their flesh the vibrations of your metal voices ringing, Proclaim liberty, proclaim liberty throughout the land! Wrongs, like molecules of gas that seep into a house, explode in particles of fire! A captain gallops down the street, wheels, and the hoof of his horse sends the pie plates shining in the sun, his horse stops at what is flowing from the battlefield, sniffs at it, and will not cross; this is not water— it is blood in a thick and ropy stream. (The dying Negress says, I cannot eat dry hominy: I lived in Massa’s house, and used to have white bread and coffee; and I want something sweet in my mouth.) On the lawn the Negroes dance and clap their hands, So glad! so glad! Bless the Lord for freedom! So glad! so glad! Do not mourn the dandelions— that their golden heads become grey in no time at all and are blown about in the wind; each season shall bring them again to the lawns; but how long the seeds of justice stay underground, how much blood and ashes of precious things to manure so rare and brief a growth. Currents of waste wind along the river between the factories— the colonnades and sacred groves of chimneys; where once the road in ruts and ridges—lines of rails hold to a gleaming purpose, come wind, come rain, come winter or the night; build storey on storey out of glass; light electric lights, row after row, whose shining wires will not flicker in the wind; let the streets sound with the horns and hosannahs of motor cars! Man, you need no longer drudge at plow or oar, no longer trudge; proclaim this liberty to all! If bread may be as plentiful, shall we not share it as we share water?
I It is not to be bought for a penny in the candy store, nor picked from the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps, in the ashes on the distant lots, among the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds. If you wish to eat fish freely, cucumbers and melons, you should have stayed in Egypt. II I am alone— and glad to be alone; I do not like people who walk about so late; who walk slowly after midnight through the leaves fallen on the sidewalks. I do not like my own face in the little mirrors of the slot-machines before the closed stores. III Walking along the highway, I smell the yellow flowers of a shrub, watch the starlings on a lawn, perhaps— but why are all these  speeding away in automobiles, where are they off to in such a hurry? They must be going to hear wise men and to look at beautiful women,  and I am just a fool to be loitering here alone. IV I like the sound of the street— but I, apart and alone, beside an open window and behind a closed door. V Winter is here indeed; the leaves have long been swept from the winding walks; trees and ground are brown— all is in order. Only the lamps now flourish in the park. We walk about and talk; but the troubles of the unsuccessful middle-aged are so uninteresting! VI Now it is cold: where the snow was melting the walk crackles with black ice beneath my careful steps; and the snow is old and pitted, here grey with ashes and there yellow with sand. The walks lie in the cold shadow of houses; pigeons and sparrows are in a hollow for cold, out of the wind; but here,  where the sunshine pours through a narrow street upon a little tree, black and naked of every leaf, the sparrows are in the sun, thick upon the twigs. Those who in their lives braved the anger of their fellows, bronze statues now, with outstretched arm or sword brave only the weather. I find myself talking aloud as I walk; that is bad. Only Don Juan would believe I am in conversation with the snow-covered statues; only St. Francis  that I am talking to the sparrows in the naked bushes,  to the pigeons  in the snow. VII The ropes in the wind  slapping the flag-pole (the flag has been hauled down); behind the bare tree-tops the lights of an aeroplane moving away slowly. A star or two shining between factory chimneys; the street dark and still because the street-lamp has been broken and it is cold and late. VIII Bright upon the table for your birthday, the burning candles will dissolve  in rays and lumps of wax. Unlike a skull, they say politely, This is you! IX I am afraid because of the foolishness I have spoken. I must diet on silence; strengthen myself with quiet. Where is the wisdom  with which I may be medicined? I will walk by myself and cure myself in the sunshine and the wind. X I do not believe that David killed Goliath. It must have been— you will find the name in the list of David’s captains. But, whoever it was, he was no fool when he took off the helmet and put down the sword and the spear and the shield and said, The weapons you have given me are good, but they are not mine: I will fight in my own way with a couple of pebbles and a sling. XI “Shall I go there?” “As you like— it will not matter; you are not at all important.” The words stuck to me  like burrs. The path was hidden under the fallen leaves; and here and there the stream was choked. Where it forced a way the ripples flashed a second. She spoke unkindly but it was the truth: I shared the sunshine like a leaf, a ripple; thinking of this, sunned myself and, for the moment, was content. XII There is nobody in the street of those who crowded about David to watch me  as I dance before the Lord: alone in my unimportance to do as I like. XIII Your angry words—each false name sinks into me, and is added to the heap beneath. I am still the same: they are no part of me, which I keep; but the way I go, and over which I flow. XIVThe Bridge In a cloud bones of steel. XVGod and Messenger This pavement barren as the mountain on which God spoke to Moses— suddenly in the street shining against my legs the bumper of a motor car. XVI A beggar stretches out his hand to touch a fur collar, and strokes it unseen, stealing its warmth for his finger tips. XVII The elevator man, working long hours for little—whose work is dull and trivial— must also greet each passenger pleasantly: to be so heroic he wears a uniform. XVIII This subway station  with its electric lights, pillars of steel, arches of cement, and trains— quite an improvement on the caves of the cave-men; but, look! on this wall a primitive drawing. XIXSubway People moving, people standing still, crowds and more crowds; a thousand and ten thousand iron girders as pillars; escape! But how, shut up in the moving train? And upstairs, in the street, the sun is shining as it shines in June. XXPoet with Whiskey Bottle and Sailor There is anguish there, certainly, and a commotion in the next room; shouts of words and phrases that do not make sentences and sentences that do not make sense. I open the door: ah, the hallway is crowded— descendants of the three wise men,  now male and female, come again to worship in a stable. XXI The white cat on the lawn, lying in the sun against the hedge, lovely to look at— but this stout gentleman, who needs a shave badly,  leaning in an arbor hung with purple grapes, purple grapes all about him, is unpleasant. Am I becoming misanthropic? An atheist? Why, this might be the god Bacchus! XXII The bearded rag-picker seated among heaps of rags in a basement sings:It was born that way; that is the way it was born— the way it came out of some body to stink: nothing will change it— neither pity nor kindness.
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very beautiful Normande cocotte The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant.
I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night The sweep of each sad lost wave The dwindling boom of the steel thing's striving The little cry of a man to a man A shadow falling across the greyer night And the sinking of the small star. Then the waste, the far waste of waters And the soft lashing of black waves For long and in loneliness. Remember, thou, oh ship of love Thou leavest a far waste of waters And the soft lashing of black waves For long and in loneliness.
“The lamps are burning in the synagogue, in the houses of study, in dark alleys. . .” This should be the place. This is the way the guide-book describes it. Excuse me, sir, can you tell me where Eli lives, Eli the katzev— slaughterer of cattle and poultry? One of my ancestors. Reb Haskel? Reb Shimin? My grandfathers. This is the discipline that withstood the siege of every Jew; these are the prayer-shawls that have proved stronger than armor. Let us begin then humbly. Not by asking: Who is This you pray to? Name Him; define Him. For the answer is: we do not name Him. Once out of a savage fear, perhaps; now out of knowledge—of our ignorance. Begin then humbly. Not by asking: shall I live forever? Hear again the dear dead greeting me gladly as they used to when we were all among the living? For the answer is: if you think we differ from all His other creatures, say only if you like with the Pharisees, our teachers, those who do not believe in an eternal life will not have it. In the morning I arise and match again my plans against my cash. I wonder now if the long morning-prayers were an utter waste of an hour weighing, as they do, hopes and anguish, and sending the believer out into the street with the sweet taste of the prayers on his lips. How good to stop and look out upon eternity a while; and daily in the morning, afternoon, and evening be at ease in Zion.
I saw within the shadows of the yard the shed and saw the snow upon its roof— an oblong glowing in the moonlit night. I could not rest or close my eyes, although I knew that I must rise early next morning and begin my work again, and begin my work again. That day was lost—that month as well; and year and year for all that I can tell.
Leaving the beach on a Sunday in a streetcar a family of three—mother, son and daughter: the mother, well on in the thirties, blond hair, worried face; the son, twelve years of age or so, seated opposite, and the daughter, about eight or nine, beside her. The boy was blond, too; a good-looking little fellow with dreamy eyes. The little girl was quite plain; mouth pulled down at the corners, sharp angry eyes behind eyeglasses. No sooner were they seated than the boy, speaking gently, said, “Today was one of the most wonderful days I ever had.” The girl said shrilly, “I wish we could live in one of those houses”— looking at the bungalows along the shore— “then we could go to the beach every day.” The mother did not answer either. The beach they were coming from was crowded with poor people; and the family was dressed cheaply but was neat and spotless, even after the day’s outing. I wondered idly where the father was: at work? dead? divorced? After a while the mother said, weighing her words, “You know Mister. . .” I did not hear the name: it was spoken so softly. She was talking to the boy. “He goes fishing every Wednesday. I think I can get him to take you along.” The boy did not answer for a minute or two and then said, in his gentle voice, “I should like it very much.” “Can I go too?” asked the little girl shrilly, but no one answered her. Mother and son had eyes only for each other. She took out her handkerchief and wiped his face. He complained of something in his eye— certainly not enough to make him blink— and she raised the upper lid and lowered the lower lid to look for it. The little girl stood up to look out of the window and the boy said to his mother, “She stepped on my toes and did not even say, Excuse me, please.” The mother turned to the little girl and said sharply, “Why didn’t you say, Excuse me? You should have said, Excuse me, brother.” The little girl said nothing, face turned toward the window, the corners of her mouth far down and her eyes, bright and dry, looking sharply through her glasses.
I saw him walking along slowly at night holding a tray of candy and chewing-gum: a Jewish boy of fifteen or sixteen with large black eyes and a gentle face. He sidled into a saloon and must have been ordered away because he came out promptly through the swinging doors. I wondered what he was doing far from a Jewish neighborhood. (I knew the side streets and the roughs standing about on the corners and stoops.) What a prize this shambling boy with his tray! I stepped up to warn him against leaving the brightly-lit avenue. He listened, eyed me steadily, and walked on calmly. I looked at him in astonishment and thought: has nothing frightened you? Neither the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, by the  Romans, by the Crusaders? No pogrom in Russia; no Nazi death-camp in Germany? How can you still go about so calmly?
The house in which we now lived was old— dark rooms and low ceilings. Once our maid, who happened to be Hungarian, reached her hand up into the cupboard for a dish and touched a dead rat that had crawled there to die—poisoned, no doubt. “Disgusting, disgusting,” she kept saying in German and, to my amusement, shuddered whenever she thought of it. (A pretty blonde, too slight to do the housework she had to, she had come, unlike the Ukrainian peasant girls that generally  worked for us, from a town instead of a village.) My parents’ place of business was so near my mother could come home whenever she felt like it to see how things were going, but she came seldom for there was always something to do in the shop that would not wait. I was all of thirteen and saw no need for any uneasiness on her part. But it was not wholly unwarranted by that neighborhood: we were only a block and a half from the Bowery, where the cheapest lodging-houses, saloons, and eating-places  were and where the men who did the humblest work lived; these were aristocrats, no doubt, among the crowd out of work and the riffraff who stood idly in doorways and about the pillars of the railway overhead and shuffled  along the sidewalk. Once there was a gentle knock at the door. Just back from school, I opened it and a man, so tall he stooped as he stood in the doorway— his shoulders filled it— put his foot across the threshold. I could not close the door—and did not try to— but waited for him to speak or move. He was silent, his small eyes shining, and he peered about, hesitating and thinking what to do next. The pretty maid had just put a plate of borsht— which my mother had taught her how to make— on the table. She moaned and rushed to the front room, although she could not get out of the flat that way, for the front door was locked and my mother had the key. But perhaps she felt safer near the windows that opened on the  street, three stories below, and she was out of the visitor’s sight. “What do you want?” I asked. The stranger—I took him for a Russian peasant, since there were some in the neighborhood— did not answer, but there was such unhappiness in his drawn face that I felt friendly and unafraid. “Will you have something to eat?” I asked cheerfully and pointed to the chair I had been about to take. We both looked at the table and saw, beside the plate of borsht and a round loaf of black bread, the long bread knife. Without a word, the man seated himself clumsily and I cut him a thick slab of bread and then another. After a moment’s hesitation, I left the knife beside the bread to show that I was not afraid. The man ate steadily and I stood to one side like a waiter. I filled the plate once more with borsht, and dumped in plenty of cabbage and potatoes from the bottom of the pot. As soon as he was through and his plate empty again, he got up, glanced at me for a second out of his narrow eyes, then bowed his head slightly and warily, softly, without a word, edged out of the door. I closed it after him just as quietly, and silently turned the big brass key in the lock. I went into the front room to find the maid: she was on her knees, muttering her prayers as fast as she could, and stood up, embarrassed, as I looked at her and smiled.
The bread has become moldy and the dates blown down by the wind; the iron has slipped from the helve. The wool was to by dyed red but the dyer dyed it black. The dead woman has forgotten her comb and tube of eye-paint; the dead cobbler has forgotten his knife, the dead butcher his chopper, and the dead carpenter his adze. A goat can be driven off with a shout. But where is the man to shout? The bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed, and the beams are ready. Where is the builder? To be buried in a linen shroud or in a matting of reeds— but where are the dead of the Flood and where the dead of Nebuchadnezzar?
Before the break of day the minister was awakened by the sound of hatchets breaking open the door and windows. He ran towards the door: about twenty Indians with painted faces were coming into the house howling. Three Indians took hold of him, and bound him as he stood in his night-shirt, and began to rifle the house going into every room. As he lay, bound and helpless, he thought of his wife and  children— his wife had given birth only a few weeks before— and he remembered the passage in Isaiah: “I shall go to the gates of the grave deprived of the rest of my years. . .” The Indians had taken two of his children to the door and killed them, as well as the Negro woman who helped take care of them; keeping him bound with the cord about one arm, they let him put on his clothes with the other; and let his wife dress herself, too, as well as their children left alive. When the sun was an hour high all were led out of the house for the journey of three hundred miles to Quebec— snow up to their knees. Many of the houses were now on fire; and, as they left the town, he saw his house and barn burning. At first the minister was not allowed to speak to any of his  fellow captives as they marched, but on the second day he had another Indian to watch him and was allowed to speak with his wife when he overtook her and could walk with her and help her along. She told him that she was losing her strength and they must expect to part and she hoped that God would keep him alive and their children  still among the living— but not a word of complaint saying that it was the will of God. When they came to a small river the captives had to wade it; the water knee-deep and the current swift. After that they had to climb a hill, almost a mountain, and the minister’s strength was almost gone when he came to   the top; but he was not allowed to sit down and even unburdened of his pack. He begged the Indian in charge of him to let him go down and help his wife but the man would not let him; and he asked each of the captives as they passed about her; and heard at last that in going through the river she fell and plunged headfirst into the water; and, after that, at the foot of the hill the Indian who held her captive killed her with one stroke of his hatchet and left the body  as meat for the fowls and beasts.
To begin with, the slaves had to wash themselves well, and the men who had beards had to shave them off; the men were then given a new suit each, cheap but clean, and a hat, shirt, and shoes; and the women were each given a frock of calico and a handkerchief to tie about their heads. They were then led by the man selling them into a large room; the men placed on one side, the women at the other; the tallest at the head of each row and then the next in size and so on to the shortest. Many called to look at the slaves for sale and the seller kept talking about their qualities; made them hold up their heads and walk about briskly; and those who might buy had them open their mouths to look at their teeth, and felt their arms and bodies, just as they might a horse for sale; and asked each what they could do. Sometimes a man or woman would be taken to a small house  in the yard, to be stripped and looked at carefully: if they had the scars of whips on their backs that would show they had been troublesome. During the day a number of sales were made; and a planter from Baton Rouge bought Eliza’s little son. Before that the boy had to jump and run across the floor to show his activity. But all the time the trade was going on, his mother was crying and wringing her hands and kept begging the man who was thinking of buying the boy not to buy him unless he bought her, too, and her little daughter: and Eliza kept saying that if he did she would be “the most  faithful slave that ever lived.” But the man from Baton Rouge said he could not afford to  buy her, and then she began to cry aloud in her grief. The man selling the slaves turned on her, his whip lifted, and told her to stop her noise: if she would not stop her “sniveling” he would take her into the yard and give her a hundred lashes. She tried to wipe away her tears but could not and said she wanted to be with her children and kept begging the man selling the slaves and the man from  Baton Rouge— who by that time had bought her son— not to separate the three of them, mother, son, and daughter; and over and over again kept saying how faithful and obedient  she would be and how hard she would work day and night. But the man from Baton Rouge said again he could not buy mother and son, let alone the three, and that only the boy must go with him. Then Eliza ran to her son, hugged him and kissed him again and again and her tears kept falling on his face. The man selling the slaves kept cursing her and called her a blubbering, howling wench and ordered her back to her place in line and to behave herself or he would give her something really to cry about.
Here, With my beer I sit, While golden moments flit: Alas! They pass Unheeded by: And, as they fly, I, Being dry, Sit, idly sipping here My beer. O, finer far Than fame, or riches, are The graceful smoke-wreaths of this free cigar! Why Should I Weep, wail, or sigh? What if luck has passed me by? What if my hopes are dead,— My pleasures fled? Have I not still My fill Of right good cheer,— Cigars and beer? Go, whining youth, Forsooth! Go, weep and wail, Sigh and grow pale, Weave melancholy rhymes On the old times, Whose joys like shadowy ghosts appear,—But leave me to my beer! Gold is dross,— Love is loss,—So, if I gulp my sorrows down, Or see them drown In foamy draughts of old nut-brown, Then do I wear the crown, Without the cross!
A hackneyed burden, to a hackneyed air,— “I love thee only,—thou art wondrous fair!” Alas! the poets have worn the theme threadbare! Can I not find some words less tame and old, To paint thy form and face of perfect mould, Thy dewy lips, thy hair of brown and gold? Can I not sing in somewhat fresher strain The love I lavish and receive again,— The thrilling joy, so like to thrilling pain? Can I not, by some metaphor divine, Describe the life I quaff like nectared wine In being thine, and knowing thou art mine? Ah, no! this halting verse can naught express; No English words can half the truth confess, That have not all been rhymed to weariness! So let me cease my scribbling for to-day, And maiden, turn thy lovely face this way,—Words will not do, but haply kisses may!
Openly, yes, With the naturalness Of the hippopotamus or the alligator When it climbs out on the bank to experience the Sun, I do these Things which I do, which please No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object In view was a Renaissance; shall I say The contrary? The sediment of the river which Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used To it, it may Remain there; do away With it and I am myself done away with, for the Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was There to begin With. This elephant skin Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light Can filter—cut Into checkers by rut Upon rut of unpreventable experience— It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the Hairy toed. Black But beautiful, my back Is full of the history of power. Of power? What Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never Be cut into By a wooden spear; through- Out childhood to the present time, the unity of Life and death has been expressed by the circumference Described by my Trunk; nevertheless, I Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it Has its centre Well nurtured—we know Where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where ? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of The wind. I see And I hear, unlike the Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear, That tree trunk without Roots, accustomed to shout Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that Spiritual Brother to the coral Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to The I of each, A kind of fretful speech Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that Phenomenon The above formation, Translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely— That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first Time, a substance Needful as an instance Of the indestructibility of matter; it Has looked at the electricity and at the earth- Quake and is still Here; the name means thick. Will Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no Beautiful element of unreason under it?
Man, looking into the sea— taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to yourself— it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing but you cannot stand in the middle of this: the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession—each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top— reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look— whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted; men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away—the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress upon themselves in a phalanx—beautiful under networks of foam, and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed; the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore— the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them and the ocean, under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink— in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?  Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way —addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.
The Crow call this time of year the Black Cherry Moon when the rose hips are blood-bright, spattered on their overwrought stems, and the creek calls so clearly in words almost our own as we come sliding down the bank. Last night, we covered the gardens in plastic. The chickadees were back after their wide diet of summer. We ate the last trout, its spine curved from disease. So much can go wrong, I want to know what you will promise me as our hands reach in and in through the copper, the carmine leaves. I know you are lonely, alone with your grief for your parents who are not my parents, for your life, which, despite all, is not my life. The cherries are thick here, hanging in clusters, purple-black from frost. It started to rain and I am chilled by it. Each day, we promise, we will talk of our fears of intimacy, how we still expect to be hurt when we love. You bring me a coat from the back of the truck, but I want to stop our task now, to sit in the cab of the truck while the gray spills, slick with thunder. What if I kissed you there in depth. After so many years, I can misunderstand the difference between instinct and obligation, how my hand continues to grasp the stems. Keats said poems should come easy as leaves off the trees, but see how they cling and wrestle with their ties. And now, the sun shines. It is not this grace I had imagined. When Keats said poems, I meant  love. The chokecherries roll easily into my palm, then fall into the plastic bag that binds my writs. Over and over, until we have enough, until our fingers are bruised with their dark juices.
Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand me the guidebook, distracted by the replica of a parasol growing out of a bleached cow pie. The Siamese kitten with his butterfly eyes comes running, his mouth full of swallowtail, his breath smelling of borax and sugar I have poured over the ant hills in the garden. He is young and intent on eating poison. We bushwhack through Paradise, what is there to say except to lament the daily evidence of its passing. How the common blues scatter from my shade. And you, so fragile, so sick, so thin, your diet restricted, keep pointing out the bearded face of larkspur. When the angels fell, a fifteenth-centruy bishop says, there were 133, 306, 668 of them. It takes us all afternoon to cross the field. The body, it is so sad what happens to it. If you fell, you would dry up instantly. But these are not angel wings who disguise themselves as leaf or shred of bark, who are named after the stops in meaning our language must make room for: the comma whose wings look battered, or the violet underside of the question mark. To keep the mind from clenching, you say, is the main thing. Even the most beautiful days always seem to have death in them. As Valentinus said; our fall into love and sleep. You especially like the dark alpines with their furred bodies and lack of marking. And the sulphurs, yellowed scraps that fall from a myth of origin that doesn’t include us. When we find them, we will wonder who is still alive. We speak of our souls with such surface ease. But who will take such care for us? You bend and bend to the scrappy blue sea, your back turned to the moon fluttering above you. I have been thinking so much of strength this week, yours and mine, I mean, the field of attention that can be strengthened.
The nightclub’s neon light glows red with anxiety as I wait on the turning lane. Cars blur past, their headlights white as charcoal. I trust each driver not to swerve. I trust each stranger not to kill me and let me cross the shadow of his smoky path. Trust is all I have for patrons at the bar: one man offers me a line, one man buys the kamikaze, another drinks it. Yet another wraps his arm around my waist. I trust him not to harm my body as much as he expects his body to remain unharmed. One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me to a second drink, another asks me home. I dance, I drink, I follow. I can trust a man without clothes. Naked he conceals no weapons, no threat but the blood in his erection. His bed unfamiliar, only temporarily. Pillows without loyalty absorb the weight of any man, betray the scent of the men who came before. I trust a stranger’s tongue to tell me nothing valuable. It makes no promises of truth or lies, it doesn’t swear commitments. The stranger’s hands take their time exploring. Undisguised, they do not turn to claws or pretend artistic skill to draw configurations on my flesh. They are only human hands with fingertips unsentimental with discoveries, without nostalgia for what they leave behind. I trust this stranger not to stay inside me once he enters me. I trust him to release me from the blame of pleasure. The pain I exit with no greater than the loneliness that takes me to the bar. He says good night, I give him back those words, taking nothing with me that is his. The front door shuts behind me, the gravel driveway ushers me away. The rearview mirror loses sight of threshold, house, sidewalk, street. Driving by the nightclub I pass a car impatient on the turning lane. My hands are cold and itch to swerve the wheel, to brand his fender with the fury of my headlights. But I let this stranger live to struggle through the heat and sweat of false affections, anonymous and borrowed like the glass that washed my prints to hold another patron’s drink.
I called you names, for the further processing of color or movement, all you were able to get into, a sort of blur. She leaned out against the water. Lay me down like anthozoa to anthozoa, with the other light things that brush against the earth. Breathe. Don't breathe. Breathe. A figure in a constellation was staring off. Did it turn up three days later, did it accept inside its body, a no for universal application, an only mine or yours? Gate One. Open your mouth. If you would only open your mouth. Gate Two. To bridle, to curb, to dam. Gate Three. Anagnorisis. Gate Four. Closed. Gate Five. Hold up. Gate Six. If everywhere that Mary went, the brain was public and exposed. Gate Seven. Do you mind, do you. Gate Eight. Fish moving in the boat's direction will be recorded in our diagram with the more substantial marks. Gate Nine. The rhythm and interval between objects. Gate Ten. Our simplest subject. Our lightest lights. Our darkest darks.
I  Here is your eye. Here are the alleles which give color to your eye, the mixed routes of reference, the million times more than anybody could ever be missed. Flock. The idea of flock. Hundreds of agitated birds swooping over the bridge. Our blessèd moments. Shapes of soft parts, a quantifiable relation to objects, we turn now to your vitreous humor. Shut the lights off, turn the meat down, cover your head. I started doing my duty. Graphs of a dancer’s movements. Ten sections of a neural issue. As from air to the cornea. Who in the person is larval or asexual. Who in the person will sit in. Hachure. A parallel walk. From one density to a different density. I was you, once. Come, come, under your skin. In the body receiving itself or its analogies. The my. The bow down before you. White pine to white pine. White pine to redwing to lantern fish.  II  She was full.  She was full with it.  III  and then though  through though  and then through the loop just made  IV  Believe it or not I would swap his desire to see patterns gathering. Believe it or not we set off several long-haired bodies. Believe it or not that was the whole of our aestivation. Believe it or not stop talking about me as if I were not in the room. Pop open a new one. The developing figure was a monk bent over. Come allow us to see the sower sow. She contested the waters. Get thee behind. Something in her eye kept giving you the needle. Something in her eye kept falling out of line. Believe it or not three persons in one shadow. Believe it or not could you spare a mind. It clawed each thing as if a temporal sequence. It clawed each thing as if a temporal w/hole. Believe it or not six or eight ways of counting on your reticence. Believe it or not these long thin rods and the wider cones.
At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.  We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat. They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me, from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual. Below, the river and the high rock where boys each year jump from bravado or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself. And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall into grace or knowledge, we watched the police drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.  The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness. His face was blank and new as your face in the morning before the day has worked its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook like an iron question and this coming out of the waters, a flawed pearl— a memory that wasn’t ours to claim.  Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,  a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms. Even now she may be leaving,  closing the door for some silence. I need to move next to you. Water sluiced from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you light your cigarette, the flickering of your face in matchlight, as if underwater, drifting away. I take your cigarette and drag from it, touch your hand. Remember that winter of your long fever,  the winter we understood how fragile any being together was. The wall sweated  behind the headboard and you said you felt the rim where dreams crouch and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury— do you think—a break and fall into the glamour attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls between the cells of memory dissolve, blur into a single stream of voices and faces.  I don’t know any more about this river or if it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories— a tide of voices. And this is how the dead rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,  the tide of voices pearling in our hands.
Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see  the night gliding in low off the harbor  down the long avenues of shop windows past mannequins, perfect in their gestures.  I leave some water steaming on the gas ring  and sometimes I can slip from my body, almost find the single word to prevent evenings  that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone  and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry the losses of strangers that tremble  on the walls like the hands  of the dancer next door, luminous with Methedrine, she taps walls for hours  murmuring about the silver she swears  lines the building, the hallways where each night drunks stammer their  usual rosary until they come to rest  beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs that star each ceiling.  I must tell you I am afraid to sit here  losing myself to the hour’s slow erasure until I know myself only by this cold weight,  this hand on my lap, palm up.  I want to still the dancer’s hands in mine, to talk about forgiveness  and what we leave behind—faces  and cities, the small emergencies of nights. I say nothing, but  leaning on the sill, I watch her leave  at that moment when the first taxis start rolling  to the lights of Chinatown, powered  by sad and human desire. I watch her fade down the street until she’s a smudge,  violent in the circle of my breath. A figure  so small I could cup her in my hands.
I lift your body to the boat before you drown or choke or slip too far beneath. I didn’t think—just jumped, just did what I did like the physics that flung you in. My hands clutch under year-old arms, between your life jacket and your bobbing frame, pushing you, like a fountain cherub, up and out. I’m fooled by the warmth pulsing from the gash on my thigh, sliced wide and clean by an errant screw on the stern. No pain. My legs kick out blood below. My arms strain against our deaths to hold you up as I lift you, crying, reaching, to the boat.
Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty  tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades  ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers.  A musical idea.  Macaws  scarlet and violet,  tangerine as a song the hue of sunset where my street becomes water and down shore this phantom city skyline’s  mere hazy silhouette. The alto’s liquid geometry weaves a way of thinking,  a way of breaking synchronistic  through time  so the girl  on the comer  has the bones of my face, the old photos, beneath the Kansas City hat, black fedora lifting hair off my neck  cooling the sweat of a night-long tidal pull from bar to bar the night we went  to find Bird’s grave. Eric’s chartreuse perfume. That  poured-on dress  I lived days and nights inside,  made love and slept in, a mesh and slur of zipper down the back. Women smoked the boulevards  with gardenias after-hours, asphalt shower- slick, ozone charging air with sixteenth  notes, that endless convertible ride to find the grave  whose sleep and melody   wept neglect enough to torch us  for a while through snare-sweep of broom on pavement, the rumpled musk of lover’s sheets, charred  cornices topping crosstown gutted buildings.  Torches us still—cat screech, matte blue steel  of pistol stroked across the victim’s cheek where fleet shoes  jazz this dark  and peeling block, that one.  Vine Street, Olive. We had the music, but not the pyrotechnics— rhinestone straps lashing my shoes, heels sinking  through earth and Eric in casual drag, mocha cheekbones rouged, that flawless  plummy mouth. A style for moving, heel tap and  lighter flick,  lion moan of buses pulling away  through the static brilliant fizz of taffeta on nyloned thighs. Light mist, etherous, rinsed our faces  and what happens when you touch a finger to the cold stone  that jazz and death played down to?  Phrases.  Take it all  and break forever—  a man with gleaming sax, an open sill in summertime, and the fire-escape’s iron zigzag tumbles  crazy notes to a girl cooling her knees, wearing one of those dresses no one wears  anymore, darts and spaghetti straps, glitzy fabrics foaming  an iron bedstead.  The horn’s alarm, then fluid brass chromatics.  Extravagant ailanthus, the courtyard’s poverty tree is spike and wing, slate-blue  mourning dove,  sudden cardinal flame.If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.
The climate thinks with its knees. When the wound opens, music suspires. Opening a gate, I gain the color below the roof tiles and the tree limbs. You gave me the late quartets a black bird and a white and the Garden of Eden. Your death belongs to anyone but me. I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle- ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring. I am protected by only music I cannot remember. Why is it that the best minds ended by composing fairy tales? Death swarms. There are many new beings, the odor of hearts. The order of the hour of mating ends. These are many new butterflies, and death is no longer to be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table. Our host was dying but unaware, as she would be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out- side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.
In England once there lived a big And wonderfully clever pig. To everybody it was plain That Piggy had a massive brain. He worked out sums inside his head, There was no book he hadn’t read, He knew what made an airplane fly, He knew how engines worked and why. He knew all this, but in the end One question drove him round the bend: He simply couldn’t puzzle out What LIFE was really all about. What was the reason for his birth? Why was he placed upon this earth? His giant brain went round and round. Alas, no answer could be found, Till suddenly one wondrous night, All in a flash, he saw the light. He jumped up like a ballet dancer And yelled, “By gum, I’ve got the answer!” “They want my bacon slice by slice “To sell at a tremendous price! “They want my tender juicy chops “To put in all the butchers’ shops! “They want my pork to make a roast “And that’s the part’ll cost the most! “They want my sausages in strings! “They even want my chitterlings! “The butcher’s shop! The carving knife! “That is the reason for my life!” Such thoughts as these are not designed To give a pig great peace of mind. Next morning, in comes Farmer Bland, A pail of pigswill in his hand, And Piggy with a mighty roar, Bashes the farmer to the floor . . . Now comes the rather grizzly bit So let’s not make too much of it, Except that you must understand That Piggy did eat Farmer Bland, He ate him up from head to toe, Chewing the pieces nice and slow. It took an hour to reach the feet, Because there was so much to eat, And when he’d finished, Pig, of course, Felt absolutely no remorse. Slowly he scratched his brainy head And with a little smile, he said, “I had a fairly powerful hunch “That he might have me for his lunch. “And so, because I feared the worst, “I thought I’d better eat him first.”
2001 Sadness of just-painted rooms. We clean our tools meticulously, as if currying horses: the little nervous sash brush to be combed and primped, the fat old four-inchers that lap up space to be wrapped and groomed, the ceiling rollers, the little pencils that cover nailheads with oak gloss, to be counted and packed: camped on our dropsheets we stare across gleaming floors at the door and beyond it the old city full of old rumors of conspiracies, gunshots, market crashes: with a little mallet we tap our lids closed, holding our breath, holding our lives in suspension for a moment: an extra drop will ruin everything.
(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.) 1 invitation come coil with me here in creation’s bed among the twigs and ribbons of the past. i have grown old remembering the garden, the hum of the great cats moving into language, the sweet fume of the man’s rib as it rose up and began to walk. it was all glory then, the winged creatures leaping like angels, the oceans claiming their own. let us rest here a time like two old brothers who watched it happen and wondered what it meant. 2 how great Thou art listen. You are beyond even Your own understanding. that rib and rain and clay in all its pride, its unsteady dominion, is not what you believed You were, but it is what You are; in your own image as some lexicographer supposed. the face, both he and she, the odd ambition, the desire to reach beyond the stars is You. all You, all You the loneliness, the perfect imperfection. 3 as for myself less snake than angel less angel than man how come i to this serpent’s understanding? watching creation from a hood of leaves i have foreseen the evening of the world. as sure as she the breast of Yourself separated out and made to bear, as sure as her returning, i too am blessed with the one gift You cherish; to feel the living move in me and to be unafraid. 4 in my own defense what could I choose but to slide along behind them, they whose only sin was being their father’s children? as they stood with their backs to the garden, a new and terrible luster burning their eyes, only You could have called their ineffable names, only in their fever could they have failed to hear. 5 the road led from delight into delight. into the sharp edge of seasons, into the sweet puff of bread baking, the warm vale of sheet and sweat after love, the tinny newborn cry of calf and cormorant and humankind. and pain, of course, always there was some bleeding, but forbid me not my meditation on the outer world before the rest of it, before the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth. 6 “the silence of God is God.” —Carolyn Forche tell me, tell us why in the confusion of a mountain of babies stacked like cordwood, of limbs walking away from each other, of tongues bitten through by the language of assault, tell me, tell us why You neither raised your hand Nor turned away, tell us why You watched the excommunication of That world and You said nothing. 7 still there is mercy, there is grace how otherwise could I have come to this marble spinning in space propelled by the great thumb of the universe? how otherwise could the two roads of this tongue converge into a single certitude? how otherwise could I, a sleek old traveler, curl one day safe and still beside YOU at Your feet, perhaps, but, amen, Yours. 8 “.........is God.” so. having no need to speak You sent Your tongue splintered into angels. even i, with my little piece of it have said too much. to ask You to explain is to deny You. before the word You were. You kiss my brother mouth. the rest is silence.
It sifts from Leaden Sieves - It powders all the Wood. It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road - It makes an even Face Of Mountain, and of Plain - Unbroken Forehead from the East Unto the East again - It reaches to the Fence - It wraps it Rail by Rail Till it is lost in Fleeces - It deals Celestial Vail To Stump, and Stack - and Stem - A Summer’s empty Room - Acres of Joints, where Harvests were, Recordless, but for them - It Ruffles Wrists of Posts As Ankles of a Queen - Then stills it’s Artisans - like Ghosts - Denying they have been -
How many times these low feet staggered - Only the soldered mouth can tell - Try - can you stir the awful rivet - Try - can you lift the hasps of steel! Stroke the cool forehead - hot so often - Lift - if you care - the listless hair - Handle the adamantine fingers Never a thimble - more - shall wear - Buzz the dull flies - on the chamber window - Brave - shines the sun through the freckled pane - Fearless - the cobweb swings from the ceiling - Indolent Housewife - in Daisies - lain!
Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -
1.  Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through Where the marble is worn away with industrious Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say Because the queen does not want room for splashing The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only Support
The scent of pig is faint tonight as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue, looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten. Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimedI was still soft-fingered when I planted you. In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds, pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun. Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo, like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches, found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole,  or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun— a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum on their backs—begins to reassemble memories; the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost, so that years later, looking at an old photograph, she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.
Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down  I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of  A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on  The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you
My name came from my great-great-great-grandfather. He was an Indian from the Choctaw tribe. His name was Dark Ant. When he went to get a job out in a city he changed it to Emmett. And his whole name was Emmett Perez Tenorio. And my name means: Ant; Strong; Carry twice its size.
The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset. I deny all connection with the ham flowers, the barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets in the blood-red road. I’ll put the calves in coats so the ravens can’t gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its muscles, I’ll gather the seeds and burn them. But then I see a horse lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. But if I didn’t make the ham flowers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up, dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river, your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you fresh hay.
The generalissimo’s glands directed him to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon we called God, and we were off to the races. Never mind that we could only grow gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums in the gymnasium predicted a jagged road ahead. We were tired of hard news— it helped to turn down our hearing aids. We could already all do impeccable imitations of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion. That much was true. When we got jaded about joyrides, we could always play games in the kitchen garden with the prisoners. Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick the Kidney were our favorites. The laws the linguists thought up were particularly lissome, full of magical loopholes that spit out medals. We had made the big time, but night still nipped at our heels.  The navigator’s needle swung strangely, oscillating between the oilwells and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves together by practicing quarterback sneaks along the pylons, but the race to the ravine was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.
If there were gamebirds in our gables, shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves? Thus we went glass-faced into glory.  We had our hearts set on staying here, so our steps seemed more hesitation waltz than straight-ahead tango.  We danced the hokey pokey on holy days— put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about, we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters. Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from our wounds and itch mites in our blankets. Ours was not a job to joke about.  In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled with lead looked lovely. We would live this down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf was getting smaller—I wrote in margins,  through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps.  I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined. I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept everyone at the pageant, even the children from the poorhouse playing possum. We studied the protocol for astronaut removal the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth on the spaceship window. But though the scandal reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it slide. He was up there turning somersaults while we spun ever-so-slowly below.
Leaning from the platform, waiting for a glimmer to braid the rails the eyes of the action hero cut from the poster all that concrete pressing down A fine edge gleams around your body as if it could be contained The way each finger is licked, dipped in & rubbed across the gums until the teeth go away Even my hands kiss you A night broken down into grains If you find yourself lost, dig a cave in the snow, quickly you need shelter against the night A candle could keep you alive the engine of your lungs will heat the air around you, someone will miss you, they will send out dogs You must be somewhere, right?
One boyfriend said to keep the bullets locked in a different room.  Another urged  clean it or it could explode. Larry thought I should keep it loaded under my bed,
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night— And I love the rain.
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor will the delicate web of human trust Be ruptured by that airy fabrication. Later, however, talking with toxic zest Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice, You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing Above your head the shrug of unreal wings. Not that the world is tiresome in itself: We know what boredom is: it is a dull Impatience or a fierce velleity, A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude, To make or do. In the strict sense, of course, We invent nothing, merely bearing witness To what each morning brings again to light: Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof, Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones Beginning now to tug their shadows in And track the air with glitter. All these things Are there before us; there before we look Or fail to look; there to be seen or not By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes, According to our means and purposes. So too with strangeness not to be ignored, Total eclipse or snow upon the rose, And so with that most rare conception, nothing. What is it, after all, but something missed? It is the water of a dried-up well Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador. There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung From Hell to probe with intellectual sight The cells and heavens of a given world Which he could take but as another prison: Small wonder that, pretending not to be, He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden In a black mist low creeping, dragging down And darkening with moody self-absorption What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues. Closer to making than the deftest fraud Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray, Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still, How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed To one side on a backlit chopping-board And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail. Odd that a thing is most itself when likened: The eye mists over, basil hints of clove, The river glazes toward the dam and spills To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet, And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile Some great thing is tormented. Either it is A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast Which tries again, and once again, to rise. What, though for pain there is no other word, Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile? It is something in us like the catbird’s song From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord, Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant Of the first springs, and it is tributary To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre, Or of the garden where we first mislaid Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting Out of what cognate splendor all things came To take their scattering names; and nonetheless That matter of a baggage-train surprised By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees Which, having worked three centuries and more In the dark caves of France, poured out at last The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.
You are a ukulele beyond my microphone You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia You are a union beyond my meiosis You are a unicycle beyond my migration You are a universe beyond my mitochondria You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur You are a eureka beyond my maitai You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird You are a unit beyond my mileage You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe You are a Utah beyond my microcosm You are a Uranus beyond my Miami You are a youth beyond my mylar You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia You are a Ukranian beyond my Maimonides You are a Euclid beyond my miter box You are a Univac beyond my minus sign You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan You are a U-boat beyond my mind control You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma You are a urethra beyond my Mysore You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow You are a ubiquity beyond my minority You are a eunuch beyond my migraine You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness You are a urinal beyond my Midol You are a uselessness beyond my myopia
They just can’t seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren’t so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don’t appear to understand that . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can’t forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .
after Richard Wilbur The opposite of walk?  A psychic with a crystal ball  and tarot deck  who sees green  when your palm is read.  At the sign of a red palm  I don’t walk,  I run.
as horses as for as purple as we go as heartbeat as if as silverware as it were as onion as I can  as cherries as feared as combustion as want as dog collar as expected as oboes as anyone as umbrella as catch can as penmanship as it gets as narcosis as could be as hit parade as all that as icebox as far as I know as fax machine as one can imagine as cyclones as hoped as dictionary as you like as shadow as promised as drinking fountain as well as grassfire as myself as mirror as is as never as this
Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn’t want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month’s supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the Styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugarwater & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens’ gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony’s last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theatre the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, “This would have been an awful month for me,” pointing to the glossy palomino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses’ faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win.
1. The Letter Everywhere the windows give up nothing but frost’s intricate veined foliage. Just engines shrilling pocked and frozen streets wailing toward some new disaster.  No bright angels’ ladders going to split heaven this Chicago instant where the pier’s  an iced fantastic: spiked, the glacial floes seize it greedy like a careless treasure— marquise diamonds, these round clear globes, the psychic’s crystal world spinning in her corner shop when I passed, a globe boundaried with turning silent winds and demons. Out here the pavement’s a slick graffitied strip: There’s more to life than violence.
For Wally Roberts, 1951-1994 Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick the border zones of sea and shore, the boundless zones of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits  congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape. Close my eyes and I’m a vessel. Make it some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath, imperfections, the navel where it was blown from the maker’s pipe, can you see it drawn up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorn’s steady, soothing moan—warning, safety, the reeling home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories— there’s this one of the cottage nestled into dune snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam.  But I’m in another season—my friends’ house adrift,  Wally’s last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft, cats and dogs clustered and we’re watching television floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel adequate to such becoming, the stories unspooled through the skein of months as the virus erased more and more until Wally’s nimbused as these storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall? But that’s not the moment I’m conjuring—it’s when my voyager afloat so many months brought back  every flood story I carried. Drifting worlds, and Wai Min takes a shape I tell Wally as steady watermarks across the cold bare floor— Chinatown, South Pacific flashing its crimson, neoned waves tranced across Wai Min’s midnight eyes behind black shades, and that voice unraveling past each knocking winter pain. It’s another world I’m telling, Cognac and squalor. The foghorn’s haunting drone blends with that halting monotone, scarlet watermarks, the Sinkiang’s floodtides murky brown, the village become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door, his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless beneath the waxed umbrella canopy she’s fashioned, stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain of her hair, to calm the ghost souls’ blurred lanterns. How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmurous river. I have no spell, simply the foghorn’s song when voices unbodied, drift over water past the low dune this cottage nestles in becoming shape in motion stilled. No boundaries on this point, foghorn singing its come-home incantation over the ruthless currents. And isn’t it so we’re merely vessels given in grace, in mystery, just a little while, our fleet streaked moments? As this day is given, singular, chilly bolts of snow chenilled across the sky, the sea. How to cipher where one life begins and becomes another? Part the curtain and here’s my voyager afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over water and he’s talking, laughing in that great four-poster bed he could not leave for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul, if I may hazard to say that? Yes, there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs— gold and black—his company. Voyager afloat so many months, banks of sunflowers he loved spitting their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill. A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go. . . . The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just a whisper—hoarse—that marries now this many-voiced mansion of storm and from him I’ve learned to slip my body, to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given then taken away. Shush and glide. This tide’s running high, its silken muscular tearing ruled by cycles,  relentless, the drawn lavish damasks—teal, aquamarine, silvered steel, desire’s tidal forces, such urgent fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret desert of bare ruched sand. I’ve learned this,  I’ve learned to be the horn calling home the journeyer, saying farewell. And here’s the foghorn’s simple two-note wail, mechanical stark aria that ripples out to shelter all of us— our mortal burden of dreams— adrift in the sea’s restless shouldering.
A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands. Tipped with silken fruit tinseled gold,  a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles, burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile.  Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men. Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in to wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown café on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms shuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam by day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins of fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair at the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves,  tattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses in Blood and Sand, the frayed banderilla.  Such a lovely thing to torture an animal with, the corrida’s exacting choreography of life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate in this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing the military names and numbers, Torrejón’s precise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm in the mirror as the girl talks dancing and  flamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining derangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night where you carve an uneasy confederacy  from vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien, the clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell but herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams. She stretches, plays idly the slot machines spinning roses, babies and lemons, the brilliant suit of lights. The caramel glow of the barlamps haloes her hair, bitten lips. Another sip and the slots’ click is rosary beads wafting prayers up to a heaven of slink and spangle, quick bargains struck in alcoves, that old palm of chapped fingers slipping coins to the gas meter, of spreading stain across the counterpane. Around Bar Xanadu narrow streets fill with the violet steam of after-midnight, the pigeons’ soft venereal  cooing that speak of want like this, that deep original loneliness. There are heartless places in every city you’ve lived. Cognac spreads its window of warmth and the drifting years return  bordered with the crimes of night, with cramped rooms you’ve climbed to, dead as the money in your pockets. A “dimestore Mata Hari,” the bureau chief called you while he snipped a fresh cigar. On parched plains outside the city soldier boys drill before the fighter planes, glamorous with starlight, still floating half-asleep in some Iowa of vinyl booths and Formica, miles of hissing corn. But it’s closing hour and beneath your fingers the napkin snows its raddled lace across the bar and you must rise with them, rise to dust with the barman his green bottle, help him to don the sparkling jacket. Rise to strap  the magic shoes to Irita’s feet and then you must walk with her these streets you’ll never leave, gritty with wind from Andalusia riffling your skirt in the scent of blood oranges and sweat.
Spirit that breathest through my lattice, thou  That cool’st the twilight of the sultry day,  Gratefully flows thy freshness round my brow:  Thou hast been out upon the deep at play, Riding all day the wild blue waves till now,  Roughening their crests, and scattering high their spray And swelling the white sail. I welcome thee To the scorched land, thou wanderer of the sea! Nor I alone—a thousand blossoms round  Inhale thee in the fulness of delight; And languid forms rise up, and pulses bound  Livelier, at coming of the wind of night; And, languishing to hear thy grateful sound,   Lies the vast inland stretched beyond the sight. Go forth into the gathering shade; go forth, God’s blessing breathed upon the fainting earth! Go, rock the little wood-bird in his nest,  Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse The wide old wood from his majestic rest,   Summoning from the innumerable boughs The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast:  Pleasant shall be thy way where meekly bows. The shutting flower, and darkling waters pass, And where the o’ershadowing branches sweep the grass. The faint old man shall lean his silver head  To feel thee; thou shalt kiss the child asleep, And dry the moistened curls that overspread  His temples, while his breathing grows more deep: And they who stand about the sick man’s bed,  Shall joy to listen to thy distant sweep, And softly part his curtains to allow Thy visit, grateful to his burning brow. Go—but the circle of eternal change,  Which is the life of nature, shall restore, With sounds and scents from all thy mighty range  Thee to thy birthplace of the deep once more; Sweet odours in the sea-air, sweet and strange,  Shall tell the home-sick mariner of the shore; And, listening to thy murmur, he shall deem He hears the rustling leaf and running stream.
My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy strips of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
When my brother came home from war he carried his left arm in a black sling but assured us most of it was still there. Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out. I stood in a long line waiting for bread. The woman behind me said it was shameless, someone as strong as I still home, still intact while her Michael was burning to death. Yes, she could feel the fire, could smell his pain all the way from Tarawa– or was it Midway?–and he so young, younger than I, who was only fourteen, taller, more handsome in his white uniform turning slowly gray the way unprimed wood grays slowly in the grate when the flames sputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,” she said when I turned to face her. She placed both hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid, hugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly in my bad ear words I’d never heard before. When I got home my brother ate the bread carefully one slice at a time until nothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,” he asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?” That afternoon I walked the crowded streets looking for something I couldn’t name, something familiar, a face or a voice or less, but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.
The light snow started late last night and continued all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything that is born: we are here for a moment of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece of your own writing, or an old photograph, you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you, it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture of grief and remembrance.
Corpses push up through thawing permafrost as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying exterior jamb when I glimpsed jagged ice floating in a bay. Naval sonar slices through whales, even as a portion of male dorsal fin is served to the captain of an umiak. Stopped in traffic, he swings from a chairlift, gazes down at scarlet paintbrush. Moistening an envelope before sealing it,  I recall the slight noise you made when I grazed your shoulder. When a frost wiped out  the chalk blue flowering plant by the door,  I watered until it revived from the roots. The song of a knife sharpener in an alley passes through the mind of a microbiologist before he undergoes anesthesia for surgery. The first night of autumn has singed  bell peppers by the fence, while budding  chamisa stalks in the courtyard bend to ground.  Observing people conversing at a nearby table,  he visualizes the momentary convergence  and divergence of lines passing through a point.  The wisteria along the porch never blooms;  a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water  from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes  downstairs as teenage girls compare bra sizes.  An ex-army officer turned critic frets  over the composition of a search committee,  snickers and disparages rival candidates.  A welder, who turns away for a few seconds  to gaze at the Sangre de Cristos, detects a line  of trucks backed up on an international overpass  where exhaust spews onto houses below.  The day may be called One Toothroad or Six Thunderpain,  but the naming of a day will not transform it,  nor will the mathematics of time halt. An imprint of ginkgo leaf—fan-shaped, slightly thickened, slightly wavy on broad edge, two- lobed, with forking parallel veins but no midvein—in a slab of coal is momentary beauty, while ginkgoes along a street dropping gold leaves are mindless beauty of the quotidian. Once thought extinct, the ginkgo was discovered in Himalayan monasteries  and propagated back into the world. Although  I cannot save a grasshopper singed by frost  trying to warm itself on a sunlit walkway, I ponder shadows of budding pink and orange  bougainvilleas on a wall. As masons level sand, lay bricks in horizontal then vertical pairs, we construct a ground to render a space  our own. As light from a partial lunar eclipse diffuses down skylight walls, we rock and  sluice, rock and sluice, fingertips fanned  to fanned fingertips, debouch into plenitude. Venus vanishes in a brightening sky:  the diamond ring of a solar eclipse persists. You did not have to fly to Zimbabwe in June 2001  to experience it. The day recalls Thirteen Death and One Deer when an end slips into a beginning. I recall mating butterflies with red dots on wings, the bow of a long liner thudding on waves, crescendo of water beginning to boil in a kettle, echoes of humpback whales. In silence, dancers concentrate on movements onstage; lilacs bud by a gate. As bits of consciousness constellate, I rouse to a 3 A.M. December rain on the skylight. A woman sweeps glass shards in a driveway, oblivious to elm branches reflected on windshields of passing cars. Juniper crackles in the fireplace; flukes break the water as a whale dives. The path of totality is not marked by  a shadow hurtling across the earth’s surface  at three thousand kilometers per hour. Our eyelashes attune to each other. At the mouth of an arroyo, a lamb skull and ribcage bleach in the sand; tufts  of fleece caught on barbed wire vanish. The Shang carved characters in the skulls of their enemies, but what transpired here? You do not need to steep turtle shells in blood to prognosticate clouds. Someone dumps a refrigerator upstream in the riverbed while you admire the yellow blossoms of a golden rain tree. A woman weeds, sniffs fragrance from a line of onions in her garden; you scramble an egg, sip oolong tea. The continuous bifurcates into the segmented as the broken extends. Someone steals a newspaper while we doze. A tiger  swallowtail lands on a patio columbine; a single agaric breaks soil by a hollyhock. Pushing aside branches of Russian olives  to approach the Pojoaque River, we spot a splatter of flicker feathers in the dirt. Here chance and fate enmesh. Here I hold a black bowl rinsed with tea, savor the warmth at my fingertips,  aroma of emptiness. We rock back and forth,  back and forth on water. Fins of spinner dolphins break the waves; a whale spouts to the north-northwest. What is not impelled? Yellow hibiscus, zodiac, hairbrush;  barbed wire, smog, snowflake—when I still  my eyes, the moments dilate. Rain darkens  gravel in the courtyard; shriveled apples  on branches are weightless against dawn.
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
This is a letter to the worm-threaded earth. This is a letter to November, its gray bowl of sky riven by black-branched trees. A letter to split-tomato skins, overripe apples, & a flock of fruit flies lifting  from the blueing clementines’ wood crate. To the broken confetti of late fall leaves. This is a letter to rosemary. This is a letter to the floor’s sink & creak, the bedroom door’s torn hinge  moaning its good-night. This is to the unshaven cheek. To cedar, mothballs, camphor, & last winter’s unwashed wool. This is a letter to the rediscovered, to mulch, pine needles, the moon, frost, flats of pansies, the backyard,  hunger, night, the unseen. This is a letter to soil, thrumming as it waits to be turned. This is a letter to compost, eggshell’s bone-ash chips, fruit rinds curved like  fingernails, & stale chunks of bread. A letter to the intimate dark—mouth-warm & damp as a bed. This is a letter to the planet’s scavenging lips.
We chose this animal to be our pet. His indifference allowed us to sleep. Cat, who made your ears bend back, who made you lazy as quick? Who made you work? It is a wonder any sun is left. Still it is always so abrupt. Sleep like an umbrella going up, clumsy like a broken umbrella coming down, this waking, and into what? I did not ask to be afraid. I did not ask for pleasure, but there it was, it exfoliated at its own leisure, grew until it was all that was— The brief interruption of who I am interrupts and punctuates the day I always assumed that I would share— Cat who cut the sun down from the sky and then responsible put it up again? There must be one of us that you prefer.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations  Pale hands I loved beside the ShalimarPale . . . Shalimar The epigraph is from a 12-line poem entitled “Kashmiri Song.” There are allusions to “Kashmiri Song” throughout this poem. The Shalimar Garden, in Lahore, Pakistan, was built by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1619 for his wife Nur Jahan.  —Laurence HopeWhere are you now? Who lies beneath your spellWhere . . . spell A direct quotation of line 2 of “Kashmiri Song” tonight? Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”Fabrics . . . tell The quotations are from Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I am ashamed – I hide – / What right have I – to be a Bride -”. Lines 7-9 of her poem read: “Me to adorn – How – tell –/ Trinket – to make Me beautiful –/ Fabrics of Cashmere –” “Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?Fabrics . . . tell The quotations are from Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I am ashamed – I hide – / What right have I – to be a Bride -”. Lines 7-9 of her poem read: Me to adorn – How – tell – / Trinket – to make Me beautiful – / Fabrics of Cashmere –  I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates— A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight. God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar— All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken; Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations munching a plum on  the street a paper bag of them in her hand They taste good to her They taste good  to her. They taste good to her You can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her handComfortedComforted When originally published in the journal Smoke (Autumn 1934), the line read: “Comforted, Relieved—” a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste good to her
and hue to have unheld a scale— silver dishes little mirrors on their chains— they go that way, This  and hoist It’s not like looking into a pool, to let your intelligence run away with you Come back quarter size, apricot moon A changeling is a child who appeared under cover of the ordinary, in exchange The morning came  I have such pretty handwriting  no one said but I myself thought it  to myself so I matted it  like the grasses or a canvas or some  uncombed hair. It became a mess  which was the research of where things go. A child could figure it out if there is such a thing as “out” in the sense of being figured  in the thinking was like Origami, everyone folded out of birds, into specific kinds of birds  I call you   hickory  category  dot
One afternoon I said to mummy, “Who is this person in my tummy? “Who must be small and very thin “Or how could he have gotten in?” My mother said from where she sat, “It isn’t nice to talk like that.” “It’s true!” I cried. “I swear it, mummy! “There is a person in my tummy! “He talks to me at night in bed, “He’s always asking to be fed, “Throughout the day, he screams at me, “Demanding sugar buns for tea. “He tells me it is not a sin “To go and raid the biscuit tin. “I know quite well it’s awfully wrong “To guzzle food the whole day long, “But really I can’t help it, mummy, “Not with this person in my tummy.” “You horrid child!” my mother cried. “Admit it right away, you’ve lied!” “You’re simply trying to produce “A silly asinine excuse! “You are the greedy guzzling brat! “And that is why you’re always fat!” I tried once more, “Believe me, mummy, “There is a person in my tummy.” “I’ve had enough!” my mother said, “You’d better go at once to bed!” Just then, a nicely timed event Delivered me from punishment. Deep in my tummy something stirred, And then an awful noise was heard, A snorting grumbling grunting sound That made my tummy jump around. My darling mother nearly died, “My goodness, what was that?” she cried. At once the tummy voice came through, It shouted, “Hey there! Listen you! “I’m getting hungry! I want eats! “I want lots of chocs and sweets! “Get me half a pound of nuts! “Look snappy or I’ll twist your guts!” “That’s him!” I cried. “He’s in my tummy! “So now do you believe me, mummy?” But mummy answered nothing more, For she had fainted on the floor.
Velvet fruit, exquisite square I hold up to sniff between finger and thumb - how you numb me with your rich attentions! If I don't eat you quickly, you'll melt in my palm. Pleasure seeker, if i let you you'd liquefy everywhere. Knotted smoke, dark punch of earth and night and leaf, for a taste of you any woman would gladly crumble to ruin. Enough chatter: I am ready to fall in love!
So beautiful but often unseen a maid of nature the street cleaner that’s everywhere never thanked never liked always ignored so elegant in a way no one sees but without it we would be in trash up to our knees with the heart of a lion the mind of a fox the color of the night sky a crow the unpaid workman that helps in every way each and every day
XXI Dynasty My body holds its shape. The genius is intact.  Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone. Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms, And passionflowers lit my father’s garden. Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow,  The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness? I remember how I died. It was so simple! One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out. On my left side they made the first incision. They washed my heart and liver in palm wine— My lungs were two dark fruit they stuffed with spices. They smeared my innards with a sticky unguent And sealed them in a crock of alabaster. My brain was next. A pointed instrument Hooked it through my nostrils, strand by strand.  A voice swayed over me. I paid no notice. For weeks my body swam in sweet perfume. I came out scoured. I was skin and bone. They lifted me into the sun again And packed my empty skull with cinnamon. They slit my toes; a razor gashed my fingertips. Stitched shut at last, my limbs were chaste and valuable, Stuffed with paste of cloves and wild honey.  My eyes were empty, so they filled them up, Inserting little nuggets of obsidian. A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts Replaced the tinny music of my heart. Hands touched my sutures. I was so important! They oiled my pores, rubbing a fragrance in. An amber gum oozed down to soothe my temples. I wanted to sit up. My skin was luminous,  Frail as the shadow of an emerald. Before I learned to love myself too much,  My body wound itself in spools of linen. Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object. I wear a wooden mask. These are my eyelids, Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth, Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets. I will last forever. I am not impatient— My skin will wait to greet its old complexions. I’ll lie here till the world swims back again. When I come home the garden will be budding, White petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers, The far-off music of a tambourine.  A boy will pace among the passionflowers, His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces. I’ll know the mouth of my young groom, I’ll touch His hands. Why do people lie to one another?
For our own private reasons We live in each other for an hour. Stranger, I take your body and its seasons, Aware the moon has gone a little sour For us. The moon hangs up there like a stone Shaken out of its proper setting. We lie down in each other. We lie down alone and watch the moon’s flawed marble getting Out of hand. What are the dead doing tonight? The padlocks of their tongues embrace the black, Each syllable locked in place, tucked out of sight. Even this moon could never pull them back, Even if it held them in its arms And weighed them down with stones, Took them entirely on their own terms And piled the orchard’s blossom on their bones. I am aware of your body and its dangers. I spread my cloak for you in leafy weather Where other fugitives and other strangers Will put their mouths together.
I In April we will pierce his body. It is March. Snow is dust over the branches. A pony hunches in the orchard. I stand at the frozen mouth of the river, Thinking of you. In the house where you live Frost glitters on the windows Like uncounted pieces of silver. Already they are preparing the wine and the bread.  II The field is banked with purple asters And a spill of mustard flowers. The earth has taken on terrible proportions. Out in an unused meadow The wildflowers have already covered The delicate bones of an Indian. Bees are flying across the meadow To a hive under the rafters of the barn. Someone is leading a horse with crippled bones Into the spikes of clover.  III Alexander died this morning, Leaving his worldly possessions To the strongest. I watched an empire fade across his lips. They propped him in the sun a while, And then three women came to scour his body Like a continent. I am afraid of what the world will do. Only this afternoon I heard two worms conversing In the shadow of his breastbone. I slipped out of the palace And entered a vein of gillyflowers On the edge of potter’s field. I will not be missed. No one even noticed.  IV I have been thinking of the son I would like to have. The leaves have all gone yellow Overnight, wrinkling like hands In the updraught. I drove my car by the creek Because I had nowhere else to go. The milkweed’s delicate closet had been fractured, Filling the air with rumors. Despite all I could do, the sumac Had taken on the color of a mouth. Tonight, I perceive the young girls In my mother’s blood Letting their seed pass by unnoticed, A red nativity.  V Last night they dragged the canal For an old man’s body. Now he is singing for a hook Just below water level. A branch of ice is splitting open Across each window, And snow is dismantling the weeds Like the breakable furniture of a boudoir. I have been rereading your letters. It is too cold for a virgin birth to occur Even in the frosty suburbs Of a wildflower.  VI I have learned to camouflage myself in church, Masking my body With the body of a saint. Last night frost glazed the face of Mary Magdalene, And snow rode up to the altar windows. Before morning, the sparrows came down To the body of Saint Francis. Now he is upholstered in oak leaves Like a living room chair. This morning we are preparing a crucifixion. I am thinking of you now. With the velvet at my knees And the silverware shining on the altar And the stained glass moving out of focus And the cross veiled in black, I am present for the news of an enormous death. I take the bread on my tongue Like one of Christ’s fingers, And the wine rides through my breast Like a dark hearse. All the while I am thinking of you. An avalanche of white carnations Is drifting across your voice As it drifts across the voices of confession. But the snow keeps whispering of you over and over.
When I feel the old hunger coming on, I think of my two great-aunts, A farmer’s daughters, Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota. I imagine the dark baron Riding out of their mouths, Thick-skinned and girded Against disaster, swathed In cuirass and chainmail and a curse. My hunger was theirs Too long ago. It swims in my blood, Groping for a foothold. It is the dark I thrust my tongue against, The wine and the delicate symphony That makes my head tick so exquisitely Tonight. My ladies, My dusky girls, I see you With your bustles puffed up like life preservers, Your needlepoint rose garden, Your George Eliot coiffures, Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine. You both took heroin. Your father never noticed. You sprinkled it in your oatmeal, Embroidered doilies with it, Ate it like a last supper At midnight. I know what you meant. There was always the hunger, The death of small things Somewhere in your body, The children that would never Take place in either of you. You were a garden of lost letters. A lust inhabited your veins. My addicts, The village spoke of you. Under your parasols, two rose windows, The world swam with color. Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak, You escaped the indecisions Your blood has handed down To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses As if they might have ferried you Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance. I see you ride the black hills of my mind, Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk, Galloping In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware Of something I inherited, The doubt, The fear, The needle point of speech, The hunger you passed down that I Possess.
They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks. Where the oak throws its handful of shadows Children are gathering fireflies. I wait in the deep olive flux As their cries ricochet out of the dark. Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak. It foists its mouthful of sibilants On a sky involved with a stillborn moon, On the stock-still cottages. I lean Into the dark. On tiny splints, One trellised rose is folding back Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake. Rowboats bob on the thick dark Over my head. My fingers wave Goodbye, remember me. I love This cold, these captive stars. I shake My blanket of shadows. I breathe in: Dark replenishes my two wineskins. My eyes are huge, two washed-out mollusks. Oars fall, a shower of violet spray. When will my hosts deliver me, Tearing me with their wooden hooks? Lights flicker where my live heart kicked. I taste pine gum, they have me hooked. They reel me in, a displaced anchor. The cygnets scatter. I rise, I nod, Wrapped in a jacket of dark weed. I dangle, I am growing pure, I fester on this wooden prong. An angry nail is in my tongue.
To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book.  I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.
They were smooth ovals, and some the shade of potatoes— some had been moth-eaten or spotted, the maples were starched, and crackled like campfire. We put them under tracing paper and rubbed our crayons over them, X-raying the spread of their bones and black, veined catacombs. We colored them green and brown and orange, and cut them out along the edges, labeling them deciduous or evergreen. All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom, with its cockeyed globe, and nautical maps of ocean floors, I watched those leaves lost in their own worlds flap on the pins of the bulletin boards: without branches or roots, or even a sky to hold on to.
Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.
Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pin-prick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our beds with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God at our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.
it’s rank it cranks you up crash you’re fracked you suck shucks you’re wack you be all you cracked up to be dead on arrival  overdosed on whatever excess of hate and love I sleep alone if you were there then please come in  tell me what’s good think up something psychic sidekick gimme a pigfoot show me my lifeline read me my rights
if your complexion is a mess our elixir spells skin success you’ll have appeal bewitch be adored hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora what we sell is enlightenment nothing less than beauty itself since when can be seen in the dark what shines hidden in dirt double dutch darky take kisses back to Africa they dipped you in a vat at the wacky chocolate factory color we’ve got in spades melanin gives perpetual shade though rhythm’s no answer to cancer pancakes pale and butter can get rancid
up from slobbery hip hyperbole the soles of black feet beat down back streets a Yankee porkchop for your knife and fork your fill of freedom in Philmeyork never trouble rupture urban space fluctuates gentrify the infrastructure feel up vacant spades no moors steady whores studs warn no mares blurred rubble slew of vowels stutter war no more
go on sister sing your song lady redbone señora rubia took all day long shampooing her nubia she gets to the getting place without or with him must I holler when  you’re giving me rhythm members don’t get weary  add some practice to your theory she wants to know is it a men thing or a him thing wishing him luck  she gave him lemons to suck told him please dear improve your embouchure
marry at a hotel, annul ’em nary hep male rose sullen let alley roam, yell melon dull normal fellow hammers omelette divine sunrises Osiris’s irises his splendid mistress is his sis Isis creole cocoa loca crayon gumbo boca crayfish crayola jumbo mocha-cola warp maid fresh fetish coquettish a voyeur leers at X-rated reels
After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth, thinking God wouldn’t mind a rooster, would he?—or thinking a rooster would look good in a green armchair with flecks of blood on his breast and thighs, his wings resting a little, their delicate bones exposed, a few of the plumes in blue against the yellow naked body, all of those feathers plucked as if by a learned butcher, and yet the head hanging down, the comb disgraced, the mouth open as if for screaming, the right front chair leg, seen from a certain angle, either a weapon or a strong right arm, a screaming arm, the arm of an agitator; and yet at the same time the chair as debonair as any, the brown mahogany polished, the carving nineteenth century, the velvet green, an old velour, as if to match the plumes a little, a blue with a green. No rabbi was present, this he knew, and no dead butcher had ever been there with his burnished knife and his bucket of sand; this was the angry rooster that strutted from one small house to another, that scratched among the rhubarb, he is the one who stopped as if he were thinking, he is upside down now and plucked. It looks as if his eye can hardly contain that much of sorrow, as if it wanted to disappear, and it looks as if his legs were almost helpless, and though his body was huge compared to the armchair, it was only more horrible that way, and though his wings were lifted it wasn’t for soaring, it was more for bedragglement and degradation. Whatever else there was of memory there had to be revenge in there, even revenge on himself, for he had to be the rooster, though that was easy, he was the armchair too, and he was the butcher, it was a way to understand, there couldn’t be another, he had to paint like that, he has to scrape the skin and put the blotches on, and though it was grotesque to put a dead rooster in an armchair his table could have been full, or he just liked the arrangement, or he was good at painting a chair and it was done first—although I doubt it—or someone brought him the bird—a kind of gift—for food was cheap then, and roosters were easy to cook; but it was more than anything else a kind of Tartar, a kind of Jew, he was painting, something that moved from Asia to Europe, something furious, ill and dreamy, something that stood in the mud beside a large wooden building and stared at a cloud, it was so deep in thought, and it had tears in a way, there was no getting around that kind of thinking even if he stood in the middle of the room holding his paintbrush like a thumb at arm’s length closing one of his eyes he still was standing in the mud shrieking, he still was dying for corn, he still was golden underneath his feathers with freckles of blood, for he was a ripped-open Jew, and organs all on show, the gizzard, the liver, for he was a bleeding Tartar, and he was a Frenchman dying on the way to Paris and he was tethered to a table, he was slaughtered.
This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that, it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn’t run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn’t run into a trattoria, say, shaking,  with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop.  That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren  in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried  calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by that cat’s hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn’t just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it’s my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure.  I bought memory. I could have lost it.  How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaws working.
They’re heading home with their lights on, dust and wood glue,  yellow dome lights on their metallic long beds: 250s, 2500s—  as much overtime as you want, deadline, dotted line, dazed  through the last few hours, dried primer on their knuckles,  sawdust calf-high on their jeans, scraped boots, the rough  plumbing and electric in, way ahead of the game except for  the check, such a clutter of cans and iced-tea bottles, napkins,  coffee cups, paper plates on the front seat floor with cords  and saws, tired above the eyes, back of the beyond, thirsty.  There’s a parade of them through the two-lane highways,  proudest on their way home, the first turn out of the jobsite,  the first song with the belt off, pure breath of being alone  for now, for now the insight of a full and answerable man.  No one can take away the contentment of the first few miles  and they know they can’t describe it, the black and purple sky.
—and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees— (Revelation)  They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens. For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall, The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves, With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all. I remember one evening of a long past Spring Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive. I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing, But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive. The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough  On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,  Green and high  And lonely against the sky.  (Down now!—)  And but for that,   If an old dead rat Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again. It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day; These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem: When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them. It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes; Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,   In the March wind, the May breeze, In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.  There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;  They must have heard the sparrows flying,  And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—  But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:  ‘Hurt not the trees.’
Through the branches of the Japanese cherry Blooming like a cloud which will rain A rain white as the sun The living room across the roadway Cuts its square of light And in it fight Two figures, hot, irate, Stuck between sink and sofa in that golden cage. Come out into the night, walk in the night, It is for you, not me. The cherry flowers will rain their rain as white Cool as the moon.  Listen how they surround. You swing among them in your cage of light. Come out into the night.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The Christmas twigs crispencrispen To make crisp and needles rattle Along the window-ledge.  A solitary pearl Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party Lies in the suety,suety Fatty; from suet, an animal fat used in cooking to create tallow snow-luminous plainness Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.  And all the furniture that circled stately And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses Into its previous largeness.  I remember  Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave Where cold so little can contain; I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust, And the long loop of winter wind Smoothing its arc from dark ArcturusArcturus The brightest star in the northern sky, located in the constellation Boötes down To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard, And the still window-ledge.  Gentle and just pleasure It is, being human, to have won from space This unchill,unchill Warmed, thawed habitable interior Which mirrors quietly the light Of the snow, and the new year.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations  O, Death! O, Death! An example of apostrophe: an address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if he or she were present; see glossary definition here). <learning/glossary-term/apostrophe> About this Poem. This poem, published in 1842, is a revision of Whitman’s first published poem “Our Future Lot,” from 1838. In that 20-line poem, similar wording includes: “With flashing hope, and gloomy fear” (line 2); “The troubled heart and wondrous form / Must both alike decay (lines 7-8); “Dull senseless limbs, and ashy face, / But where, O Nature! where will be / My mind’s abiding place? (lines 10-12); and the final line “The common doom—to die!” a black and pierceless pallpall A dark cloud or covering of smoke or dust Hangs round thee, and the future state; No eye may see, no mind may grasp That mystery of fate. This brain, which now alternate throbs With swelling hope and gloomy fear; This heart, with all the changing hues, That mortal passions bear— This curious frame of human mould, Where unrequited cravings play, This brain, and heart, and wondrous form Must all alike decay. The leaping blood will stop its flow; The hoarse death-struggle pass; the cheek Lay bloomless, and the liquid tongue Will then forget to speak. The grave will take me; earth will close O’er cold dull limbs and ashy face; But where, O, Nature, where shall be The soul’s abiding place? Will it e’ene’en Traditional poetic contraction for “even,” pronounced as one syllable to fit the meter of the line live? For though its light Must shine till from the body torn; Then, when the oil of life is spent, Still shall the taper burn? O, powerless is this struggling brain To rendrend Cause great emotional pain to (a person or their heart) the mighty mystery; In dark, uncertain awe it waits The common doom, to die.
A black cat among roses, Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon, The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still, It is dazed with moonlight, Contented with perfume, Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies. Firefly lights open and vanish High as the tip buds of the golden glow Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet. Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises, Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush. Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring, Only the cat, padding between the roses, Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern As water is broken by the falling of a leaf. Then you come, And you are quiet like the garden, And white like the alyssum flowers, And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies. Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies? They knew my mother, But who belonging to me will they know When I am gone.
Coming home with the last load I ride standing on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor in hot exhaust, lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform. Almost 500 bales we’ve put up this afternoon, Marshall and I. And of course I think of another who hung like this on another cross. My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. Well, I change grip and the image fades. It’s been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop, but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed. Now is our last chance to bring in the winter’s feed, and Marshall needs help. We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales to the barn, these late, half-green, improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load, and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor and distributed in the loft. I help— I, the desk-servant, word-worker— and hold up my end pretty well too; but God, the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe. I think of those who have done slave labor, less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air, even the touch of love. I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. Now in September our New England mountains under a clear sky for which we’re thankful at last begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches in their first color. I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness. And who is the Christ now, who if not I? It must be so. My strength is legion. And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.
Was I so poor  in those damned days that I went in the dark  in torn shoes and furtiveness  to steal fat ears of cattle corn  from the good cows and pound them  like hard maize on my worn Aztec  stone? I was.
Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren’t we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick, and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don’t say a word, don’t tell a soul, they wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.
If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain, of waiting under the eaves of an old house at that moment when it takes a form like fog. It makes the mountain vanish. Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up, only condensed and refined. Almost fifty years since thunder rolled and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin. Brazil is where I wanted to live. The border is not far from here. Lonely and grateful would be my way to end, and something for the pain please, a little purity to sand the rough edges, a slow downpour from the Dark Ages, a drizzle from the Pleistocene. As I dream of the rain’s long body, I will eliminate from mind all the qualities that rain deletes and then I will be primed to study rain’s power, the first drops lightly hallowing, but now and again a great gallop of the horse of rain or an explosion of orange-green light. A simple radiance, it requires no discipline. Before I knew women, I knew the lonely pleasures of rain. The mist and then the clearing. I will listen where the lightning thrills the rooster up a willow, and my whole life flowing until I have no choice, only the rain, and I step into it.
The front seats filled last. Laggards, buffoons, and kiss-ups falling in beside local politicos, the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing. No help from the middle, blenders and criminals. And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit. My place was always left-center, a little to the rear. The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery. Behind me the dead man’s illegitimate children and the bride’s and groom’s former lovers. There, when lights were lowered, hands plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies, and, lights up again, rose and pattered in applause. Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures. But was it a movie or a singing? I remember the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event or the word that brought us together as one— One, I say now, when I had felt myself many, speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.
I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm, kneeling Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God, And I know we shall not speak with the aliens And that peace will not happen in my life, not unless It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds, in the dark Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries. Bring a little alcohol and a little balm For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune. In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished five hundred times, Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there in the afternoon When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid smell of creation. I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain. Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids. She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms of insomnia. Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my window, While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck and shout to each other over the motor, I watch her strut like an udder with my blood, Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky’s skull and the eleven days I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria; Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings, And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia, How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.
Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, And the beneficent face of a nation Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom!
Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all, That which is gendered in the wilderness From lonely prairies and God’s tenderness. Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream, Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream, Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave, Above that breast of earth and prairie-fire— Fire that freed the slave.
When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down To make a man to meet the mortal need. She took the tried clay of the common road— Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth, Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy; Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears; Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. Into the shape she breathed a flame to light That tender, tragic, ever-changing face. Here was a man to hold against the world, A man to match the mountains and the sea. The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; The smack and tang of elemental things; The rectitude and patience of the cliff; The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; The friendly welcome of the wayside well; The courage of the bird that dares the sea; The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; The pity of the snow that hides all scars; The secrecy of streams that make their way Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock; The tolerance and equity of light That gives as freely to the shrinking flower As to the great oak flaring to the wind— To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West, He drank the valorous youth of a new world. The strength of virgin forests braced his mind, The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul. His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth. Up from log cabin to the Capitol, One fire was on his spirit, one resolve— To send the keen ax to the root of wrong, Clearing a free way for the feet of God, The eyes of conscience testing every stroke, To make his deed the measure of a man. He built the rail-pile as he built the State, Pouring his splendid strength through every blow: The grip that swung the ax in Illinois Was on the pen that set a people free. So came the Captain with the mighty heart; And when the judgment thunders split the house, Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again The rafters of the Home. He held his place— Held the long purpose like a growing tree— Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.
In Abraham Lincoln’s city,  Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle,  The place where they brought him  Wrapped in battle flags,  Wrapped in the smoke of memories  From Tallahassee to the Yukon,  The place now where the shaft of his tomb  Points white against the blue prairie dome,  In Abraham Lincoln’s city ... I saw knucks  In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store  On Second Street.  I went in and asked, “How much?”  “Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman.  And taking a box of new ones off a shelf  He filled anew the box in the showcase  And said incidentally, most casually  And incidentally:  “I sell a carload a month of these.”  I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,  Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,  And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:  Mister Fischman is for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff,  And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers,  And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen,  Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers,  They are all for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff.  I started for the door.  “Maybe you want a lighter pair,”  Came Mister Fischman’s voice.  I opened the door ... and the voice again:  “You are a funny customer.”  Wrapped in battle flags,  Wrapped in the smoke of memories,  This is the place they brought him,  This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.
Lincoln? He was a mystery in smoke and flags Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags, Yes to the paradoxes of democracy, Yes to the hopes of government Of the people by the people for the people, No to debauchery of the public mind, No to personal malice nursed and fed, Yes to the Constitution when a help, No to the Constitution when a hindrance Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions, Each man fated to answer for himself: Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind Must I choose for my own sustaining light To bring me beyond the present wilderness? Lincoln? Was he a poet? And did he write verses? “I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.” I shall do nothing through malice: what I deal with is too vast for malice.” Death was in the air. So was birth.
When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs? Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!  How just and true that this great nation, being conceived  In liberty by fugitives should find  —Strange ways and plays of monstrous History— This Hamlet-type to be the President— This failure, this unwilling bridegroom,  This tricky lawyer full of black despair—  He grew a beard, becoming President,  And took a shawl as if he guessed his role,  Though with the beard he fled cartoonists’ blacks,  And many laughed and were contemptuous,  And some for four years spoke of killing him—  He was a politician—of the heart!—  He lived from hand to mouth in moral things!  He understood quite well Grant’s drunkenness!  It was for him, before Election Day,  That at Cold Harbor Grant threw lives away  In hopeless frontal attack against Lee’s breastworks!  O how he was the Hamlet-man, and this,  After a life of failure made him right,  After he ran away on his wedding day,  Writing a coward’s letter to his bride—  How with his very failure, he out-tricked  The florid Douglas and the abstract Davis,  And all the vain men who, surrounding him,  Smiled in their vanity and sought his place—  Later, they made him out a prairie Christ  To sate the need coarse in the national heart—  His wife went insane, Mary Todd too often  Bought herself dresses. And his child died.  And he would not condemn young men to death  For having slept, in weakness. And he spoke  More than he knew and all that he had felt  Between outrageous joy and black despair  Before and after Gettysburg’s pure peak—  He studied law, but knew in his own soul  Despair’s anarchy, terror and error,  —Instruments had to be taken from his office  And from his bedroom in such days of horror,  Because some saw that he might kill himself:  When he was young, when he was middle-aged,  How just and true was he, our national hero!  Sometimes he could not go home to face his wife,  Sometimes he wished to hurry or end his life!  But do not be deceived. He did not win,  And, it is plain, the South could never win  (Despite the gifted Northern generals!)  —Capitalismus is not mocked, O no!  This stupid deity decided the War—  In fact, the North and South were losers both:  —Capitalismus won the Civil War—  —Capitalismus won the Civil War,  Yet, in the War’s cruel Colosseum,  Some characters fulfilled their natures’ surds,  Grant the drunkard, Lee the noble soldier,  John Brown in whom the Bible soared and cried,  Booth the unsuccessful Shakespearean,  —Each in some freedom walked and knew himself,  Then most of all when all the deities  Mixed with their barbarous stupidity  To make the rock, root, and rot of the war—  “This is the way each only life becomes,  Tossed on History’s ceaseless insane sums!”
—Norton Island, Maine For ten days now, two luna moths remain silk-winged and lavish as a double broach pinned beneath the porch light of my cabin. Two of them, patinaed that sea-glass green of copper weather vanes nosing the wind, the sun-lit green of rockweed, the lichen’s green scabbing-over of the bouldered shore, the plush green peat that carpets the island, that hushes, sinks then holds a boot print for days, and the sapling-green of new pines sprouting through it. The miraculous green origami of their wings—false eyed, doomed and sensual as the mermaid’s long green fins: a green siren calling from the moonlight. A green siren calling from the moonlight, from the sweet gum leaves and paper birches that shed, like tiny white decrees, scrolled bark. They emerge from cocoons like greased hinges, all pheromone and wing, instinct and flutter. They rise, hardwired, driven, through the creaking pine branches tufted with beard moss and fog. Two luna moths flitting like exotic birds towards only each other and light, in these their final few days, they mate, then starving they wait, inches apart, on my cabin wall to die, to share fully each pure and burning moment. They are, like desire itself, born without mouths. What, if not this, is love?
Of all the people in the mornings at the mall, it’s the old liberators I like best, those veterans of the Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino I see lost in Automotive or back in Home Repair, bored among the paints and power tools. Or the really old ones, the ones who are going fast, who keep dozing off in the little orchards of shade under the distant skylights. All around, from one bright rack to another, their wives stride big as generals, their handbags bulging like ripe fruit. They are almost all gone now, and with them they are taking the flak and fire storms, the names of the old bombing runs. Each day a little more of their memory goes out, darkens the way a house darkens, its rooms quietly filling with evening, until nothing but the wind lifts the lace curtains, the wind bearing through the empty rooms the rich far off scent of gardens where just now, this morning, light is falling on the wild philodendrons.
What was it like, God of mine, what was it like? —Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence! Was it like the going by of the wind? Like the disappearance of the spring? As nimble, as changeable, as weightless as milkweed seeds in summer . . . Yes! Indefinite as a smile which is lost forever in a laugh . . . Arrogant in the air, just like a flag!  Flag, smile, milkweed pod, swift spring in June, clear wind! . . . Your celebration was so wild, so sad!  All of your changes ended up in nothing— remembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!— I don’t know what you were like, but you were!
February 3rd The sea with no waves we recognize, with no stations on its route, only water and moon, night after night!  My thought goes back to the land,  someone else’s land, belonging to the one going through it on trains at night,  through the same place at the same hour as before . . .  Remote mother, sleeping earth,  powerful and faithful arms,  the same quiet lap for all —tomb of eternal life with the same decorations freshened— earth, mother, always true to yourself, waiting for the sad gaze of the wandering eyes!  My thought goes back to the land,  —the olive groves at sunrise— outlined sharply in the white  or golden or yellow moonlight,  that look forward to the coming back  of those humans who are neither its slaves nor its masters, but who love it anyway . . .
They all are asleep, below.   Above, awake,  the helmsman and I.  He, watching the compass needle, lord of the bodies, with their keys turned in the locks. I, with my eyes toward the infinite, guiding the open treasures of the souls.
I am not I.  I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.
The ship, solid and black, enters the clear blackness of the great harbor.  Quiet and cold.  —The people waiting are still asleep, dreaming, and warm, far away and still stretched out in this  dream, perhaps . . .  How real our watch is, beside the dream of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared to their troubled dream about us!  Quiet. Silence. Silence which in breaking up at dawn will speak differently.
You can see the face of everything, and it is white— plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold— turned to the east. Oh closeness to life! Hardness of life! Like something in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends— with the soul still not set well there— and mineral and vegetable! Sun standing stiffly against man, against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall! —False joy, because you are merely in time, as they say, and not in the soul!  The entire sky taken up  by moist and steaming heaps, a horizon of dung piles.  Sour remains, here and there,  of the night. Slices of the green moon, half-eaten, crystal bits from false stars, plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly sky-blue. The birds not really awake yet, in the raw moon, streetlight nearly out.  Mob of beings and things! —A true sadness, because you are really deep in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!
If I have created a world for you, in your place, god, you had to come to it confident, and you have come to it, to my refuge, because my whole world was nothing but my hope.  I have been saving up my hope in language, in a spoken name, a written name; I had given a name to everything, and you have taken the place of all these names.  Now I can hold back my movement inside the coal of my continual living and being, as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal, surrounded by air that is all blue fire; now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere, the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy, stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light, and all of them moving upward, upward.  All the names that I gave to the universe that I created again for you are now all turning into one name, into one god.  The god who, in the end, is always the god created and recreated and recreated through grace and never through force. The God. The name drawn from the names.
Out of the golden West, out of the leaden East, into the iron South, and to the silver North . . . Oh metals metals everywhere, forks and knives, belt buckles and hooks . . . When you are beaten you sing. You do not give anyone a chance . . .  You come out of the earth and fly with men. You lodge in men. You hurt them terribly. You tear them. You do not care for anyone.  Oh metals metals, why are you always hanging about? Is it not enough that you hold men’s wrists? Is it not enough that we let you in our mouths?  Why is it you will not do anything for yourself? Why is it you always wait for men to show you what to be?  And men love you. Perhaps it is because you soften so often.  You did, it is true, pour into anything men asked you to. It has always proved you to be somewhat softer than you really are.  Oh metals metals, why are you always filling my house?  You are like family, you do not care for anyone.
The predictability of these rooms is, in a word, exquisite. These rooms in a word. The moon is predictably exquisite, as is the view of the moon through the word. Nevertheless, we were hoping for less. Less space, less light. We were hoping to pay more, to be made to pay in public. We desire a flat, affected tone. A beware of dog on keep off grass. The glass ceiling is exquisite. Is it made of glass? No, glass.
I drift into the sound of wind, how small my life must be to fit into his palm like that, holly leaf, bluejay feather, milkweed fluff, pin straw or sycamore pod, resembling scraps of light. The world slips through these fingers so easily, there’s so much to miss: the sociable bones linked up in supple rows, mineral seams just under the skin. I hold my palm against the sun and don’t see palm or sun, don’t hold anything in either hand. I look up, look away (what’s that?), I trip and stumble (fall again), find myself face down in duff, a foam of fallen live oak leaves, with only this life, mine at times.
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his  sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son; or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping her shadow off a wall....  Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’ tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in vanity....  Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner, whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for  dessert served himself a chilled fedora....
for my sisters Because we did not have threads of turquoise, silver, and gold, we could not sew a sun nor sky. And our hands became balls of fire. And our arms spread open like wings. Because we had no chalk or pastels, no toad, forest, or morning-grass slats of paper, we had no colour for creatures. So we squatted and sprang, squatted and sprang. Four young girls, plaits heavy on our backs, our feet were beating drums, drawing rhythms from the floor; our mouths became woodwinds; our tongues touched teeth and were reeds.
June Jordan, 1936-2002 I. The city where I knew you was swift. A lover cabbed to Brooklyn (broke, but so what) after the night shift in a Second Avenue diner. The lover was a Quaker, a poet, an anti-war activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four. Wet snow fell on the access road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was neither lover, slept uptown. But the arteries, streetlights, headlines, phonelines, feminine plural links ran silver through the night city as dawn and the yellow cab passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for that day’s last or first coffee. The city where I knew you was rich in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc debates, demos, parades and picnics. There were walks I liked to take. I was on good terms with two rivers. You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words lighting the page, good neighbor on your homely street in Park Slope, whose Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers, dyke vegetarians, young gifted everyone, claimed some changes —at least a new food co-op. In the laundromat, ordinary women talked revolution. We knew we wouldn’t live forever but it seemed as if we could. The city where I knew you was yours and mine by birthright: Harlem, the Bronx. Separately we left it and came separately back. There’s no afterlife for dialogue, divergences we never teased apart to weave back together. Death slams down in the midst of all your unfinished conversations. Whom do I address when I address you, larger than life as you always were, not alive now? Words are not you, poems are not you, ashes on the Pacific tide, you least of all. I talk to my- self to keep the line open. The city where I knew you is gone. Pink icing roses spelled out PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake. The bookshop’s a sushi bar now, and PASSION is long out of print. We have a Republican mayor. Threats keep citizens in line: anthrax; suicide attacks. A scar festers where towers once were; dissent festers unexpressed. You are dead of a woman’s disease. Who gets to choose what battle takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends mourn you, with no time to mourn. II. You, who stood alone in the tall bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning with free-flying words, knew the power, terror in words, in flying; knew the high of solitude while the early light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint pen, yellow foolscap. You, who stood alone in your courage, never hesitant to underline the connections (between rape, exclusion and occupation...) and separations were alone and were not alone when morning blotted the last spark of you out, around you voices you no longer had voice to answer, eyes you were blind to. All your loves were singular: you scorned labels. Claimed black; woman, and for the rest eluded limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out self-definition. Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems alive on paper, in the present tense of a thousand students’ active gaze at printed pages and blank ones which you gave permission to blacken into outrage and passion. You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra, Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric, were a black American, born in Harlem, citizen soldier If you had to die—and I don’t admit it— who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man / we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you a few prime villains in the capitol, who are also mortal? June, you should be living, the states are bleeding. Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned dissident discourse. Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes still in progress now, as Jenin, Rammallah dominate, then disappear from the headlines. Palestine: your war. “To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi. “Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.” Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we  infer, despairing. Top each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs, Palestinians, immigrants, its women. From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Kavanaugh, Shahid (who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir, cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”), Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor, and you, June Jordan.
He claps a hand Across the gaping hole— Or else the sight might Well inside to Melt the mind—if any Thinking spoke Were in the wheel, Or any real Fright-fragments broke Out of the gorge to Soak the breast, the meaning Might incite a stroke—best Press against it, close The clawhole, stand In stupor, petrified. The dream Be damned, the deeps defied. The hand’s to keep The scream inside.
Esto no es realismo mágico Dear Martín: In Izalco, while Christ waits for Easter in his glass tomb in the cathedral a single long note is blown on a trumpet en el parque central. Los perros flacco forage at the feet of la gente.  Los poetas mount the stage in a shower of rose petals thrown by old ladies.  The Mayor opens his arms wide. In the audience are campesinos, hijitos, shopkeepers, viejos, the town trauma surgeon, and a generous contigent of la policia con pistolas, escopetas y M16s. Solamente el volcán duerme esta noche. Los perros flaccos jump into the big blue garbage cans.  Martín, you will certainly believe this.  Each poeta is introduced with a fireworks rocket. Los perros flaccos jump out of the big blue garbage cans. Poetas de Argentina, Taiwan, Guatemala, España,  Peru, Nicaragua, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, y Los Estados Unidas open their mouths.  Out come pajaros, serpientes, y duendes,  hombres, mujeres, y alquimistas with flasks of aether; out come revolutionaries in diapers, ambassadors in limousines of obsidian, the Virgin in a Madonna T-shirt,  y los Indios with flutes made of thigh bones and bombs made of skulls; out come the dead dictators chained together by ectoplasm swinging censors that emit the stink of money, priests with rifles, nuns with giant beasts whose names are forgotten hidden in the musk of their habits; out come conquistadores on roller skates, Moros in black on black motorcycles, Mad Max with tattoos de los Maras Salvatruche. When los poetas have finished, there are more fireworks.  They are swarmed by hijitos, viejos y otros wanting autographs. Their hands are as soft as their hearts. Death does not hide here but lives among them dressed in white lace with earrings rattling on her skull. Life does not hide here but steps through irony as if it were the vanishing fog.
I approached the luminous stranger who came to me from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark, but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me from the reigning silence black above my cage. Oh extravagant—and were my teeth too sharp to greet or sharp enough? I do not understand now what was meant to happen and what was a mistake—but know the bursting, the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced like diagrams of wasting moons above my head—or portals to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended the wasted skin and careful, brought it water, alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf. When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray for night to stay until the green took shape again and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark    in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body, and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming as if for me—now I do not know—but then, as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.
A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent, holding earth and sky together with her shadow. She sleeps upstairs like mystery in a story, blowing leaves down the stairs, then cold air, then warm. We who at sixty should know everything, know nothing. We become dull and disoriented by uncertain weather. We kneel, palms together, before this blossoming altar.
“Is my team ploughing, That I was used to drive And hear the harness jingle When I was man alive?” Ay, the horses trample, The harness jingles now; No change though you lie under The land you used to plough. “Is football playing Along the river shore, With lads to chase the leather, Now I stand up no more?” Ay the ball is flying, The lads play heart and soul; The goal stands up, the keeper Stands up to keep the goal. “Is my girl happy, That I thought hard to leave, And has she tired of weeping As she lies down at eve?” Ay, she lies down lightly, She lies not down to weep: Your girl is well contented. Be still, my lad, and sleep. “Is my friend hearty, Now I am thin and pine, And has he found to sleep in A better bed than mine?” Yes, lad, I lie easy, I lie as lads would choose; I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart, Never ask me whose.
‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be? O wilt thou therefore rise from me? Why should we rise because ‘tis light? Did we lie down because ‘twas night? Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither, Should in despite of light keep us together. Light hath no tongue, but is all eye; If it could speak as well as spy, This were the worst that it could say, That being well I fain would stay, And that I loved my heart and honour so, That I would not from him, that had them, go. Must business thee from hence remove? Oh, that’s the worst disease of love, The poor, the foul, the false, love can Admit, but not the busied man. He which hath business, and makes love, doth do Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.
‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
 Whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed, The Bullets chirped—In vain, vain, vain!
 Machine-guns chuckled—Tut-tut! Tut-tut!
 And the Big Gun guffawed. Another sighed,—‘O Mother,—mother,—Dad!’ Then smiled at nothing, childlike, being dead.
 And the lofty Shrapnel-cloud
 Leisurely gestured,—Fool!
 And the splinters spat, and tittered.‘My Love!’ one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood,
 Till slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud.
 And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned; Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned; And the Gas hissed.
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son. Lo, ’tis autumn, Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind, Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines, (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines? Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?) Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds, Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well. Down in the fields all prospers well, But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call, And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away. Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling, She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap. Open the envelope quickly, O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d, O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul! All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only, Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital, At present low, but will soon be better.
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us. We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d, My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast, Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment’s cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,  Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,  Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,  Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable.
The shine on her buckle took precedence in sun Her shine, I should say, could take me anywhere It feels right to be up this close in tight wind It feels right to notice all the shiny things about you About you there is nothing I wouldn’t want to know With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler About you many good things come into relation I think of proofs and grammar, vowel sounds, like A is for knee socks, E for panties I is for buttondown, O the blouse you wear U is for hair clip, and Y your tight skirt The music picks up again, I am the man I hope to be The bright air hangs freely near your newly cut hair It is so easy now to see gravity at work in your face Easy to understand time, that dark process To accept it as a beautiful process, your face
If today and today I am calling aloud If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt bits of sun, the din if tires whine on wet pavement everything humming If we find we are still in motion and have arrived in Zeno’s thought, like if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up we might know we were loved, are loved if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain If our wishes are met with dirt and thyme, thistle, oil, heirloom, and basil or the end result is worry, chaos and if “I should know better” If our loves are anointed with missiles Apache fire, Tomahawks did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested If we ask that every song touch its origin just once and the years engulfed If problems of identity confound sages, derelict philosophers, administrators who can say I am found if this time you, all of it, this time now If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and if rain falls sidelong in the platz doorways, onto mansard roofs If enumerations of the fall and if falling, cities rocked with gas fires at dawn Can you rescind the ghost’s double nakedness hungry and waning if children, soldiers, children  taken down in schools if burning fuel Who can’t say they have seen this and can we sing this if in the auroras’ reflecting the sea, gauze touching the breast Too bad for you, beautiful singer unadorned by laurel child of thunder and scapegoat alike If the crowd in the mind becoming crowded in street and villages, and trains run next to the freeway If exit is merely a sign
Is this what you intended, Vincent that we take our rest at the end of the grove nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration saying, who and how am I made better through struggle. Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree. O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that or if you can indeed hear what I might say heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection. To not be naive and think of silly answers only not to imagine answers would be the only destination nor is questioning color even useful now now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons. That the sun can do this to us, every one of us that the sun can do this to everything inside the broken light refracted through leaves. What the ancients called peace, no clearer example what our fathers called the good, what better celebration. Leaves shine in the body and in the head alike the sun touches deeper than thought. O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world. There might be nothing greater than this nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within like in the middle of the flower I call your name. To correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff to toil and to reflect and to home and to paint father, and further, the migration of things. The homing action of geese and wood mice. The ample evidence of the sun inside all life inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too. But felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect. The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true. The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun at least what the old books called science or bowed down to. The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time in the time of pictures and refracted light. Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night the animal proximity of another and of nigh. To step into it as into a large surf in late August to go out underneath it all above and sparkling. To wonder and to dream and to look up at it wondrous and strange companion to all our days and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us. The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers to be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing. The sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms these starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge. Now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter. To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread. The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression making so much more of itself here than where it signals the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing. Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it that nothing at the center of something alive and burning green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone. But what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling what of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line. To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die. The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight. That light was my enemy and one great source of agony one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass. The fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear the gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun. The gnarled cut stumps tearing the sky, eating the sun the fragrant hills spoke in flowering tones I could hear one great solace in paint and brotherhood the sky and grass. That light was my enemy and one great source of agony into the not near, the now far, the distant long-off line of daylight the circle on the horizon rolling over and over into paint. The circles grow large and ripple in the hatch-marked forever. To move on, to push forward, to take the next step, to die. What of the striated purposelessness in lapidary shading and line the narrow path canopied in dense wood calling but what is the use now of this narrow ray, this door ajar. Into luminous dusk into dust then scattered now gone green then mint, blue then shale, gray and gray into violet that nothing at the center of something alive and burning though nothing might be the final and actual expression of it. Isn’t it comforting this notion of each and every thing the great burning orb installed at the center of each and every thing making so much more of itself here than where it signals. The deep abiding sun touching down and making its impression and yellow, yellows are the tonality of work and bread. To feel these hues down deep, feel color wax and wane now to think of the silver and the almost blue in pewter. These starry nights alone and connected alive at the edge the sky, the moon, the many heavenly forms the sheer vertical act of feeling caught up in it. To be held tight, wound tighter in the act of seeing the gemstone brushstrokes in rays and shimmers. The night sky, the deep sense of space, actual bodies of light and the toil and worry and animal fear always with us wondrous and strange companion to all our days. To wonder and to dream and to look up at it to go out underneath it all above and sparkling to step into it as into a large surf in late August. The animal proximity of another and of nigh. Ah, the sun is here too in the polar region of night in the time of pictures and refracted light the warmth of the mind reflected in a dark time and let us never forget indigo and the warmth of that. The dark is not evil for it has indigo and cobalt inside at least what the old books called science or bowed down to. The dark is close to doubt and therefore close to the sun but perhaps a depth that outshines clarity and is true. The darkness bears a shine as yet unpunished by clarity but felt things exist in shadow, let us reflect. Inside all life seen and felt and all the atomic pieces too the ample evidence of the sun inside all life the homing action of geese and wood mice father, and further, the migration of things. To toil and to reflect and to home and to paint to correspond, to be in equanimity with organic stuff like in the middle of the flower I call your name. Nothing truer to the good feelings that vibrate within there might be nothing greater than this to be in some way related by one’s actions in the world. O to be useful, of use, to the actual seen thing. The sun touches deeper than thought leaves shine in the body and in the head alike what our fathers called the good, what better celebration. What the ancients called peace, no clearer example the broken light refracted through leaves. That the sun can do this to everything inside that the sun can do this to us, every one of us now that the white ray in the distant tree beacons. Nor is questioning color even useful now nor to imagine answers would be the only destination to not be naive and think of silly answers only. Of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty. Or if you can indeed hear what I might say O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision. Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum saying, who and how am I made better through struggle nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration that we take our rest at the end of the grove is this what you intended, Vincent.
How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel  that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy. Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,  once I was not the elephant I find I am. My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched  trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness  and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it  in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man  of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers  breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments  with balance, the high-wire act and cones. We elephants are images of humility, as when we  undertake our melancholy migrations to die. Did you know, though, that elephants were taught  to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves? Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,  tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer. That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys:  it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.
sound opens sound shank of globe strings floating out  something like images are here  opening up avenues to view a dome  a distant clang reaches the edifice.    understanding what it means  to understand music
A Translation for Robert Jones A diamond Is there At the heart of the moon or the branches or my nakedness And there is nothing in the universe like diamond Nothing in the whole mind. The poem is a seagull resting on a pier at the end of the ocean. A dog howls at the moon A dog howls at the branches A dog howls at the nakedness A dog howling with pure mind. I ask for the poem to be as pure as a seagull’s belly. The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond Two words called seagull are peacefully floating out where the  waves are. The dog is dead there with the moon, with the branches, with  my nakedness And there is nothing in the universe like diamond Nothing in the whole mind.
We never saw the ghost, though he was there— we knew from the raindrops tapping on the eaves. We never saw him, and we didn’t care. Each day, new sunshine tumbled through the air; evenings, the moonlight rustled in dark leaves. We never saw the ghost, though: he was there, if ever, when the wind tousled our hair and prickled goosebumps up and down thin sleeves; we never saw him. And we didn’t care to step outside our room at night, or dare click off the nightlight: call it fear of thieves. We never saw the ghost, though he was there in sunlit dustmotes drifting anywhere, in light-and-shadow, such as the moon weaves. We never saw him, though, and didn’t care, until at last we saw him everywhere. We told nobody. Everyone believes we never saw the ghost (if he was there), we never saw him and we didn’t care.
Mark Young is a New Zealander who has lived most of his life in Australia, and he is known primarily as a poet. As a visual poet, he brings a vibrant literary sense to the text as visual object. He has arrayed phrases and individual words upon a field that takes the form of a traditional chess set, compelling the reader to construct meaning out of the various ways a string of words can be constructed. The reader can read up, down, diagonally, and even in a continuous spiral. In the end, the poem becomes a textual movie—every block upon the page a single frame in that movie—and the film flickers before us, sending our minds in different directions, exciting the retina, and teasing the mind. Meaning is not easy or certain in this visual poem. Instead, it surges toward us and swirls away, both brazen and coy. This is a poem about thinking, meaning, and the isolated and collective beauty of words.—Geof HuthMore About Visual Poetry > >
Nico Vassilakis uses various processes to bring us to his visual poems. In “phabetical” he uses a toy microscope with a built-in video camera to capture highly magnified images of text, often with his hand moving the microscope across the page to capture still text in motion. As he has done here, Vassilakis sometimes modifies the settings on the camera so that the texts are captured in unnatural colors, and he sometimes reverses the polarity of these to further alter their materiality. In this poem, he has used a software process to band many slips of texts into columns and rows, and he has captured these blocks of text in motion so that we can see all of the middle column but only half of the two columns to either side of it. The result uses Greek letters (an homage to his ancestry) so abstracted that they appear before us almost as concrete images: birds, an arm reaching out, a child kicking a ball. He forces us to see not the common symbols of our alphabet but instead the “phabet”: the pictographs from which all alphabets arose.—Geof HuthMore About Visual Poetry > >
Cecil Touchon’s work is radically post-textual, yet encumbered by nothing but text and the space surrounding it. His technique, as demonstrated aptly here, is to dismantle physical pages of text and reconstitute them in ways that enhance the visual continuities of text and undermine their meaningful sequentiality. This is the ultimate form of deconstruction, a literal (in the hand, of the letter) slicing of the page into pieces that Touchon repositions into a new jigsaw puzzle, different than the one that he began with. This piece is particularly austere, presenting only three colors for our consideration: a mottled white, a red-brown, and a glimpse of black peeking through from the base of the collage. We are invited to consider this poem as a piece of writing transmogrified into a visual field through which we might glimpse what it means to be text, to understand text, and to inhabit text.—Geof HuthMore About Visual Poetry > >
—in memory of Angela Marie Incoronata Caruso Mortola, May 21, 1903–January 14, 2001 1 In-and-out sun like the light of her mind that knows and doesn’t feels and forgets pelts of rain hid and seek of thought first gray then rose but still a steady backlight (sometimes hidden): “Remember Woody Allen’s line? I’m not  like that I don’t care when it happens where I just don’t want to die not scared not that I just don’t want to and I told the doctor!” and the doctor laughing “Cute old lady said she doesn’t care about the why and wherefore she just doesn’t want to die . . .” and therefore? then she forgets smiles turns her head to nod grande dame at shadows on the walls that gather where the light collects and falls 2 They gather where the light collects and falls we can’t see them but she seems to think at least a few are smiling so she feels she has to say hello politely thank these thoughtful ghosts who visit sister brothers Sunday best in black old Brooklyn friends who hardly see the gulf of sixty years mama and papa severe Sicilian bookends “Come in, come in” her eyes light up she waves and beckons all to chairs around her bed so she can boast to brothers and their wives of all the special things her daughter did and how her grandkids won so many prizes and as she vaunts and glows her smile blazes 3 But though she glows but though her smile blazes the sister flickers fades the brothers falter her eyesight’s bad it’s hard to see their faces as if she peered through gauze or a thick filter and then the others come the ones she calls “co-tenants” of her rooms the lovers screwing coarse as goats in corners nasty girls smart-aleck guys who do know what they’re doing and what they do is occupy her place back home they swarmed all over her apartment set up a stove behind her lovely bookcase nursed babies on her sofa bold indifferent and even here still shameless in their clingings they mean to steal they’ll steal her best belongings 4 What should she do to safeguard her belongings? she begs for help urges us to lock to triple lock the doors to hide her things her pearls right here her fruitwood in New York her mother’s hand-carved walnut chairs the leather- surfaced desk at which my father sat so long ago wearing the cashmere sweater grandma bought him and the Sulka shirt Listen! Are we listening! Have we heard? How well he dressed! How beautiful their place! four rooms in Queens what lots couldn’t afford in an age of breadlines shameful jobs or worse “Tuono di Dio!” thunder of God she looses the curse she learned in childhood for most uses 5 The curses learned in childhood have their usesTuono di Dio! she swears when they strip her bare to bathe her Tuono di Dio! when the nurses slide the soiled bed pads to the floor or prop her in the wheelchair to be fed thunder of God echoes along the halls when she tries to fight the husky nurse’s aide come to sponge her bruises stains and spills embarrassed we shiver in the corridor while she flails and shrieks for the police “Tuono di Dio! Call the police!” God’s thunder will scorch us if we leave her in this place away from her apartment calm and peace away from her belongings purse and keys 6 Away from her belongings purse and keys (and crumpled Kleenex reading glasses coins and comb she always carries in that purse) she isn’t real! she might be only bones! yet the belongings longings must go on the bookcase and the rugs and tables must survive outlast her so she tells her grandson how to plan an auction in the east there are the costs of those belongings that the value of mahogany and this the price of sterling silver (which she fought to buy—a fifth-grade teacher in the thirties—) and the bracelets furs her in-laws gave too bad they can’t go with her to the grave! 7 What happens to belongings after the grave? They’ll be up here and she she’ll be down there what of the stuff she worked so hard to have? polished mahogany and mink and silver and even the fifteen-year-old television still good still just right for the nightly news and the brand-new vacuum cleaner even still a— a something someone ought to choose her face is crumpling like a handkerchief don’t give it all away don’t give it up if you don’t want it at least sell it off! don’t let the others have it either stop the thieves before they drag it all away don’t let my belongings go astray. . . . 8 Don’t let my belongings go astray call the super tell the doorman keep the windows locked and barred the crooks away the one who break and enter when you sleep the ones who follow sullen knife and rape how many years she’s warned us can’t we hear they’ll pick the locks they’ll climb the fire escape just look the crooks are here are everywhere a sudden nod a glance at the next bed where a wizened person gasps and snoresthat one now she saw her yes she did peering in closets rummaging in drawers even in hospitals they have no pity they rob you when they see your things are pretty 9 Yet O it’s nice that all her things are pretty her smile blazes back in Jackson Heights (on one of the better blocks in New York City) her beautiful apartment basks and waits a hush of rugs a drawn Venetian blind keeping the silence keeping the bars of shadow gathered like silent guardians around the hanging shelf the Wedgewood the piano and there the family photographs are massed my father’s face blade-thin in sepia my baby self in flounces or undressed from times when she was poor but happier belongings blurry as if underwater bearing the prints of mother father daughter 10 How far the age of mother father daughter! my baby room with walls now pink now blue (but never yellow though I begged I fought her) and the tiny snowman globe where snowflakes flew and the little silver Virgin Mary shrine whose key I turned to play Our Lady’s song “Ave Maria” tinkling out of tune and the gray hooked rug where silent bluebirds sang and a rabbit ran away among the trees but never vanished never could escape whatever chased him from the knitted haze a scary thing because it had no shape though now the whole room’s painted hazy gray and the rabbit trees and birds raveled away 11 When did her mind begin to ravel away? —that time she fell outside the beauty parlor (getting pretty for her grandson’s birthday)? she didn ’t answer when we tried to call her and soon with mop and broom she fought the others called 911 the super the police there on the sofa sat the nursing mothers the lovers crawled and thrashed under the bookcase we flew to Queens we packed up all her things the fox-head furs her mother ’s lion-necklace “But what about all my other best belongings?” she worried then gave up resigned to silence a roar of takeoff buckled in she hissed “Here’s to my new adventure in the west!” 12 At sundown tantrums shake the sunset west the nurses turn her toward the flashing window “See the flowers? See the pretty bird’s nest?” bushes tug in tubs on the patio where a night wind rises over Astroturf batters the waiting tables chairs and wheelchairs as if they stood in a swirl of Pacific surf whose icy water glitters darkens clears “Here’s dinner, hon!” the nurse’s aide with bib holds out a tray of lukewarm grown-up mush last week a fall tore muscles cracked a ribhow did she fall did someone really push? she tries to remember strains to see remembers (sometimes) the names of sundown visitors 13 Sometimes the names of sundown visitors hook into thought sometimes the sounds unravel blur sister brothers TV commentators (Frank and Vito turn into Ted Koppel) I visit afternoons bring cupcakes chocolate the only stuff she ever wants to eat can barely swallow though one night past midnight she coughs a little chokes on her own spit the night nurse didn’t hear the radio was turned on loud she’s kind of scared and sorry and puts a rose on the poor old lady’s pillow and a mortician calls and tells us not to worry above the sunlit bay the slicing planes rise fast and one speeds east with her “remains” 14 Back among her belongings her remains glide north northwest in a shiny SUV designed to weather snowstorms freezing rains far from the simmering fields of Sicily the East Coast cemetery’s stony pressed into a cleft of hills black ice I skid on leaning to greet the freckled hearty priest looking not looking at the box she’s laid in at the edge of the polished boards that hold her husband the priest says the words she scorned she didn’t believe (she has to be blessed to belong to holy ground) and O she would scold us if she were still alive! no Tuono di dio no bolt so fierce and true as the light of her mind that felt that thought that knew
And how terrific it is to write a radio poem and how terrific it is to stand on the roof and watch the stars go by and how terrific it is to be misled inside a hallway, and how terrific it is to be the hallway as it stands inside the house, and how terrific it is, shaped like a telephone, to be filled with scotch and stand out on the street, and how terrific it is to see the stars inside the radios and cows, and how terrific the cows are, crossing at night, in their unjaundiced way and moving through the moonlight, and how terrific the night is, purveyor of the bells and distant planets, and how terrific it is to write this poem as I sleep, to sleep in distant planets in my mind and cross at night the cows in hallways riding stars to radios at night, and how terrific night you are, across the bridges, into tunnels, into bars, and how terrific it is that you are this too, the fields of planetary pull, terrific, living on the Hudson, inside the months of spring, an underwater crossing for the cows in dreams, terrific, like the radios, the songs, the poem and the stars.
A riot is the language of the unheard. —martin luther king John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe, all whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff; almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s, the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. Because the Negroes were coming down the street. Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty (not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka) and they were coming toward him in rough ranks. In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourished white that told his story of glory to the World. “Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered to any handy angel in the sky. But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili, malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old averted doubt jerked forward decently, cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man, and the desperate die expensively today.” John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord! Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”
Mayor. Worldman. Historyman. Beyond steps that occur and close, your steps are echo-makers. You can never be forgotten. We begin our health. We enter the Age of Alliance. This is our senior adventure.
Blackness is a title, is a preoccupation, is a commitment Blacks are to comprehend— and in which you are to perceive your Glory. The conscious shout of all that is white is “It’s Great to be white.” The conscious shout of the slack in Black is "It's Great to be white." Thus all that is white has white strength and yours. The word Black has geographic power, pulls everybody in: Blacks here— Blacks there— Blacks wherever they may be. And remember, you Blacks, what they told you— remember your Education: “one Drop—one Drop maketh a brand new Black.”  Oh mighty Drop. ______And because they have given us kindly so many more of our people Blackness stretches over the land. Blackness— the Black of it, the rust-red of it, the milk and cream of it, the tan and yellow-tan of it, the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it, the “olive” and ochre of it— Blackness marches on. The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride is to Comprehend, to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black, which is our “ultimate Reality,” which is the lone ground from which our meaningful metamorphosis, from which our prosperous staccato, group or individual, can rise. Self-shriveled Blacks. Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession: YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone.    All of you—  you COLORED ones,  you NEGRO ones, those of you who proudly cry  “I’m half INDian”—  those of you who proudly screech  “I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins”  ALL of you—  you proper Blacks,  you half-Blacks,  you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,  Niggeroes and Niggerenes.  You.
I’ve always worried about you—the man or woman at the piano bench, night after night receiving only such applause as the singer allows: a warm hand please, for my accompanist
In Normandy, at Point Du Hoc, where some Rangers died, Dad pointed to an old man 20 feet closer to the edge than us, asking if I could see the medal the man held like a rosary. As we approached the cliff the man’s swearing, each bulleted syllable, sifted back toward us in the ocean wind. I turned away, but my shoulder was held still by my father’s hand, and I looked up at him as he looked at the man.
She pays attention to the hair, not her fingers, and cuts herself once or twice a day. Doesn’t notice anymore, just if the blood starts flowing. Says, Excuse me, to the customer and walks away for a band-aid. Same spot on the middle finger over and over, raised like a callus. Also the nicks where she snips between her fingers, the torn webbing. Also spider veins on her legs now, so ugly, though she sits in a chair for half of each cut, rolls around from side to side. At night in the winter she sleeps in white cotton gloves, Neosporin on the cuts, vitamin E, then heavy lotion. All night, for weeks, her white hands lie clothed like those of a young girl going to her first party. Sleeping alone, she opens and closes her long scissors and the hair falls under her hands. It’s a good living, kind of like an undertaker, the people keep coming, and the hair, shoulder length, French twist, braids. Someone has to cut it. At the end she whisks and talcums my neck. Only then can I bend and see my hair, how it covers the floor, curls and clippings of brown and silver, how it shines like a field of scythed hay beneath my feet.
Under dust plush as a moth’s wing,  the book’s leather cover still darkly shone,  and everywhere else but this spot was sodden  beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles.  There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill  and then, from my index finger, the book  opened like a blasted bird. In its box  of familiar and miraculous inks,  a construction of filaments and dust,  thoroughfares of worms, and a silage  of silverfish husks: in the autumn light,  eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.
Mouths full of laughter, the turistas come to the tall hotel with suitcases full of dollars. Every morning my brother makes the cool beach new for them. With a wooden board he smooths away all footprints. I peek through the cactus fence and watch the women rub oil sweeter than honey into their arms and legs while their children jump waves or sip drinks from long straws, coconut white, mango yellow. Once my little sister ran barefoot across the hot sand for a taste. My mother roared like the ocean, “No. No. It’s their beach. It’s their beach.”
The Lumieres’ first movies were of ordinary life: workers leaving their father’s factory; parents at the table while the baby eats. The brothers found the man’s hands at work building a wall just as beautiful when played backwards, the man leaping into the water and equal delight when he rose again into the air. It’s strange the brothers gave up so quickly on film, but they did.People would grow bored, they said, could see the same thing on the street. A novelty,
No one grumbles among the oyster clans, And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer. Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want Heaven to be, and God to come, again. There is no end to our grumbling; we want Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven. But the heron standing on one leg in the bog Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.
Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue  Thy solitary way?  Vainly the fowler’s eye Might mark thy distant flight, to do thee wrong, As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,  Thy figure floats along.  Seek’st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink  On the chaféd ocean side?  There is a Power, whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— The desert and illimitable air  Lone wandering, but not lost.  All day thy wings have fanned, At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere; Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,  Though the dark night is near.  And soon that toil shall end, Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,  Soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.  Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,  And shall not soon depart.  He, who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must trace alone,  Will lead my steps aright.
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me,—let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
In speaking of ‘aspiration,’  From the recesses of a pen more dolorous than blackness   itself,  Were you presenting us with one more form of imperturbable   French drollery,  Or was it self directed banter?  Habitual ennui  Took from you, your invisible, hot helmet of anaemia—  While you were filling your “little glass” from the   decanter  Of a transparent-murky, would-be-truthful “hobohemia”—  And then facetiously  Went off with it? Your soul’s supplanter,  The spirit of good narrative, flatters you, convinced that   in reporting briefly One choice incident, you have known beauty other than that   of stys, on  Which to fix your admiration. So far as the future is concerned, “Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher,  ‘How is one to know what one doesn’t know?’”  So far as the present is concerned,
Those various sounds, consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glasses successively at random— the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone— like sculptured scimitars repeating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes, flowers of ice and snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your raised hand an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with regard to which the guides are so affirmative— your other hand a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork—a collection of little objects— sapphires set with emeralds, and pearls with a moonstone, made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue; a lemon, a pear and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square cathedral tower of uniform and at the same time diverse appearance—a species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels? Whetted to brilliance by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity, these things are rich instruments with which to experiment. But why dissect destiny with instruments more highly specialized than the components of destiny itself?
In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—Art.
Who includes diversity and is Nature, Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also, Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the æsthetic or intellectual, Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good, Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons, Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.
To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad. Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing? What deepening twilight—scum floating atop of the waters, Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol? What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!) Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President? Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons; (With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake, South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)
I So you have swept me back, I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth, I who could have slept among the live flowers at last; so for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I am swept back where dead lichens drip dead cinders upon moss of ash; so for your arrogance I am broken at last, I who had lived unconscious, who was almost forgot; if you had let me wait I had grown from listlessness into peace, if you had let me rest with the dead, I had forgot you and the past. II Here only flame upon flame and black among the red sparks, streaks of black and light grown colourless; why did you turn back, that hell should be reinhabited of myself thus swept into nothingness? why did you glance back? why did you hesitate for that moment? why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth, above my face? what was it that crossed my face with the light from yours and your glance? what was it you saw in my face? the light of your own face, the fire of your own presence? What had my face to offer but reflex of the earth, hyacinth colour caught from the raw fissure in the rock where the light struck, and the colour of azure crocuses and the bright surface of gold crocuses and of the wind-flower, swift in its veins as lightning and as white. III Saffron from the fringe of the earth, wild saffron that has bent over the sharp edge of earth, all the flowers that cut through the earth, all, all the flowers are lost; everything is lost, everything is crossed with black, black upon black and worse than black, this colourless light. IV Fringe upon fringe of blue crocuses, crocuses, walled against blue of themselves, blue of that upper earth, blue of the depth upon depth of flowers, lost; flowers, if I could have taken once my breath of them, enough of them, more than earth, even than of the upper earth, had passed with me beneath the earth; if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. V So for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I have lost the earth and the flowers of the earth, and the live souls above the earth, and you who passed across the light and reached ruthless; you who have your own light, who are to yourself a presence, who need no presence; yet for all your arrogance and your glance, I tell you this: such loss is no loss, such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls of blackness, such terror is no loss; hell is no worse than your earth above the earth, hell is no worse, no, nor your flowers nor your veins of light nor your presence, a loss; my hell is no worse than yours though you pass among the flowers and speak with the spirits above earth. VI Against the black I have more fervour than you in all the splendour of that place, against the blackness and the stark grey I have more light; and the flowers, if I should tell you, you would turn from your own fit paths toward hell, turn again and glance back and I would sink into a place even more terrible than this. VII At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god can take that; I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light; and my spirit with its loss knows this; though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
I Weed, moss-weed, root tangled in sand, sea-iris, brittle flower, one petal like a shell is broken, and you print a shadow like a thin twig. Fortunate one, scented and stinging, rigid myrrh-bud, camphor-flower, sweet and salt—you are wind in our nostrils. II Do the murex-fishers drench you as they pass? Do your roots drag up colour from the sand? Have they slipped gold under you— rivets of gold? Band of iris-flowers above the waves, you are painted blue, painted like a fresh prow stained among the salt weeds.
The human cylinders Revolving in the enervating dusk That wraps each closer in the mystery Of singularity Among the litter of a sunless afternoon Having eaten without tasting Talked without communion And at least two of us Loved a very little Without seeking To know if our two miseries In the lucid rush-together of automatons Could form one opulent wellbeing Simplifications of men In the enervating dusk Your indistinctness Serves me the core of the kernel of you When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect Leaning brow to brow communicative Over the abyss of the potential Concordance of respiration Shames Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory And reciprocity Of conception And expression Where each extrudes beyond the tangible One thin pale trail of speculation From among us we have sent out Into the enervating dusk One little whining beast Whose longing Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow And one elastic tentacle of intuition To quiver among the stars The impartiality of the absolute Routs the polemic Or which of us Would not Receiving the holy-ghost Catch it and caging Lose it Or in the problematic Destroy the Universe With a solution
The threewomen who all walked In the same dress And it had falling ferns on it Skipped parallel To the progress Of Giovanni Franchi Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked Flickeringly as he flacked them His wrists explained things Infectiously by way of his adolescence His adolescence was all there was of him Whatever was left was rather awkward His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees Descended to the fallacious nobility Of his first pair of trousers They were tubular flapped friezily The color of coppered mustard What matter Were they not the first No others could ever be the first again The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen Began fading as she thought of it Tea table problems for insane asylyms Are démodé Démodé Allow us to rely on our instincts The threewomen was composed of three instincts Each sniffing divergently directed draughts The first instinct first again (may Renascent gods save us from the enigmatic Penetralia of Firstness) Was to be faithful to a man first The second to be loyal to herself first She would have to find which self first The third which might as well have been first Was to find out how many toes the Philosopher Giovanni Bapini had first Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born You imagine what he looked like Looked as nearly as he could as the Philosopher looked His articulations were excellent Still where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous Giovanni Franchi was merely pale He scuttled winsomely To its distribution from a puffer For the declaration of War His acolytian sincerity The sensitive down among his freckles Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags Red white and green flags fillipping piazzas When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express Continually cutting off an angle from Paschkowski’s Through plate-glass swingings To look as busy bodily As the philosopher’s brain was As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs From monumental gums To the sparky detritus From the hurried cigarette Of his disciple Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace The Pitti Palace however stolid could hardly help noticing Being an aristocrat it went on looking As plainly piled up as ever The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria Or mention Giovanni Franchi Sitting in it At a book It could not see from that distance Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents With an eye On assuring himself Of their sufficient impression By erudition He was so young That explains so much No book ever explained what to be young is But they look so much more important for that Giovanni was in continuous ecstacy Induced by the imposing look of them When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them He could not tell How completely more precious Would be such knowledge As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had Now the threewomen For pity’s sake Let us think of her as she to save time Seeing the minor Giovanni Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet Made sure he must be counting his toes All to the contrary he was picking the philosopher’s brains Happy in the security that when he had done He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own He listened at the elder’s lips That taught him of earthquakes and Of women— His manners were abominable He would kill a woman Quite inconspicuously it is true And neglect to attend her funeral I mean the older man And what he told Giovanni Franchi About these pernicious persons Was so extremely good for him It entirely spoilt his first love-affair To such an extent it never came off We have read of Trattoria meaning eating house. Piazzas or squares The Pitti Palace enormous And Paschkowski’s for beer All are in Firenze Firenze is Florence Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair But NO it is a city with stones on the streets Giovanni Bapini often said Everybody in Firenze knows me And everybody did Excepting—That is she didn’t She never knew what he was Or how he was himself Yet she uniquely was the one To speculate upon the number of his toes The days growing longer Fulfilling her of curiousity She made a moth’s net Of metaphor and miracles And on the incandescent breath of civilizations She chased by moon-and-morn light Philosopher’s toes As virginal as had he never worn them Clear of ‘white marks means money’ All quicks and cores They fluttered to her fantasy Fell into her lap While she gathered her ferny flounces about them They inappropriately passed But Giovanni Franchi was there He almost winked it at her That he was there His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets The Philosopher had flung to him And as she tripped by him She guessed these all All but the number of those toes She made diurnal pilgrimage To the trattoria To eat Trout that might have been trained for circuses If minarets grew in miniature whirlpools And mayonnaise that helped her to forget That what is underneath need never matter She put all minor riddles out of her Such as What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book Telling to the plaid pattern of the tablecloth Too shy to interrogate She sent ambassadors To the disciple They returned Oh rats Quite manifest that Giovanni Franchi Some semieffigy Damned by scholiums Knew no more how many toes— Than Giovanni Bapini knew himself
I No riches from his scanty store  My lover could impart; He gave a boon I valued more —  He gave me all his heart!  II His soul sincere, his generous worth,  Might well this bosom move; And when I asked for bliss on earth,  I only meant his love.  III But now for me, in search of gain  From shore to shore he flies; Why wander riches to obtain,  When love is all I prize?  IV The frugal meal, the lowly cot  If blest my love with thee! That simple fare, that humble lot,  Were more than wealth to me.  V While he the dangerous ocean braves,  My tears but vainly flow: Is pity in the faithless waves  To which I pour my woe?  VI The night is dark, the waters deep,  Yet soft the billows roll; Alas! at every breeze I weep —  The storm is in my soul.
What crowding thoughts around me wake, What marvels in a Christmas-cake! Ah say, what strange enchantment dwells Enclosed within its odorous cells? Is there no small magician bound Encrusted in its snowy round? For magic surely lurks in this, A cake that tells of vanished bliss; A cake that conjures up to view The early scenes, when life was new; When memory knew no sorrows past, And hope believed in joys that last! — Mysterious cake, whose folds contain Life’s calendar of bliss and pain; That speaks of friends for ever fled, And wakes the tears I love to shed. Oft shall I breathe her cherished name From whose fair hand the offering came: For she recalls the artless smile Of nymphs that deck my native isle; Of beauty that we love to trace, Allied with tender, modest grace; Of those who, while abroad they roam, Retain each charm that gladdens home, And whose dear friendships can impart A Christmas banquet for the heart!
A physician of eminence, some years ago,  Was called in, to attend on a lady of fashion, Who had long been admired — and the toast of each beau,  Tho’ now, her sunk features excited compassion. The doctor no sooner the lady had eyed,  Than he begged, ‘She for once would his freedom forgive If he stepped from the rules of good breeding aside,  To mention the terms on which she might live.’ ‘By all means,’ cried the lady, ‘for surely no word  A physician may utter, should e’er give offence; Punctilio, in illness, is always absurd,  And shows either doctor, or patient wants sense.’ ‘Why then, my dear lady, I cannot resist  Pronouncing this truth, like a plain honest man; That if, in the use of white paint you persist  No medicine will save you, do all that I can.’ ‘You astonish me, Doctor! but, such is my case,  That I may as well die, as leave painting alone; For, should I appear with my natural face Amongst my acquaintance — I should not be known.’
Let not the title of my verse offend, Nor let the pride contract her rigid brow; That helpless Innocence demands a friend, Virtue herself will cheerfully allow: And should my pencil prove too weak to paint, The ills attendant on the babe ere born; Whose parents swerved from virtue’s mild restraint, Forgive the attempt, nor treat the Muse with scorn. Yon rural farm, where Mirth was wont to dwell, Of Melancholy, now appears the seat; Solemn and silent as the hermit’s cell — Say what, my muse, has caused a change so great? This hapless morn, an infant first saw light, Whose innocence a better fate might claim, Than to be shunned as hateful to the sight, And banished soon as it receives a name. No joy attends its entrance into life, No smile upon its mother’s face appears, She cannot smile, alas! she is no wife; But vents the sorrow of her heart in tears. No father flies to clasp it to his breast, And bless the power that gave it to his arms; To see his form, in miniature expressed, Or trace, with ecstacy, its mother’s charms. Unhappy babe! thy father is thy foe! Oft shall he wish thee numbered with the dead; His crime entails on thee a load of woe, And sorrow heaps on thy devoted head. Torn from its breast, by shame or pride, No matter which — to hireling hands assigned; A parent’s tenderness, when thus denied, Can it be thought its nurse is overkind? Too many, like this infant may we see, Exposed, abandoned, helpless and forlorn; Till death, misfortune’s friend, has set them free, From a rude world, which gave them nought but scorn. Too many mothers — horrid to relate! Soon as their infants breathe the vital air, Deaf to their plaintive cries, their helpless state, Led on by shame, and driven by despair, Fell murderers to become — Here cease, my pen, And leave these wretched victims of despair; But oh! what punishments await the men, Who in such depths of misery plunge the fair.
December 1789 When infant Reason first exerts her sway, And new-formed thoughts their earliest charms display; Then let the growing race employ your care Then guard their opening minds from Folly’s snare; Correct the rising passions of their youth, Teach them each serious, each important truth; Plant heavenly virtue in the tender breast, Destroy each vice that might its growth molest; Point out betimes the course they should pursue; Then with redoubled pleasure shall you view Their reason strengthen as their years increase, Their virtue ripen and their follies cease; Like corn sown early in the fertile soil, The richest harvest shall repay your toil.
The tea-kettle bubbled, the tea things were set, The candles were lighted, the ladies were met; The how d’ye’s were over, and entering bustle, The company seated, and silks ceased to rustle: The great Mrs. Consequence opened her fan, And thus the discourse in an instant began (All affected reserve and formality scorning): “I suppose you all saw in the paper this morning A volume of Poems advertised—’tis said They’re produced by the pen of a poor servant-maid.” “A servant write verses!” says Madam Du Bloom: “Pray what is the subject—a Mop, or a Broom?” “He, he, he,” says Miss Flounce: “I suppose we shall see An ode on a Dishclout—what else can it be?” Says Miss Coquettilla, “Why, ladies, so tart? Perhaps Tom the footman has fired her heart; And she’ll tell us how charming he looks in new clothes, And how nimble his hand moves in brushing the shoes; Or how, the last time that he went to May Fair, He bought her some sweethearts of gingerbread ware.” “For my part I think,” says old Lady Marr-joy, “A servant might find herself other employ: Was she mine I’d employ her as long as ’twas light, And send her to bed without candle at night.” “Why so?” says Miss Rhymer, displeased: “I protest ’Tis pity a genius should be so depressed!” “What ideas can such low-bred creatures conceive?” Says Mrs. Noworthy, and laughed in her sleeve. Says old Miss Prudella, “If servants can tell How to write to their mothers, to say they are well, And read of a Sunday The Duty of Man, Which is more I believe than one half of them can; I think ’tis much properer they should rest there, Than be reaching at things so much out of their sphere.” Says old Mrs. Candour, “I’ve now got a maid That’s the plague of my life—a young gossiping jade; There’s no end of the people that after her come, And whenever I’m out, she is never at home; I’d rather ten times she would sit down and write, Than gossip all over the town every night.” “Some whimsical trollop most like,” says Miss Prim, “Has been scribbling of nonsense, just out of a whim, And, conscious it neither is witty nor pretty, Conceals her true name, and ascribes it to Betty.” “I once had a servant myself,” says Miss Pines, “That wrote on a wedding some very good lines.” Says Mrs. Domestic, “And when they were done, I can’t see for my part what use they were on; Had she wrote a receipt, to’ve instructed you how To warm a cold breast of veal, like a ragout, Or to make cowslip wine, that would pass for Champagne, It might have been useful, again and again.” On the sofa was old Lady Pedigree placed; She owned that for poetry she had no taste, That the study of heraldry was more in fashion, And boasted she knew all the crests in the nation. Says Mrs. Routella, “Tom, take out the urn, And stir up the fire, you see it don’t burn.” The tea-things removed, and the tea-table gone, The card-tables brought, and the cards laid thereon, The ladies, ambitious for each other’s crown, Like courtiers contending for honours, sat down.
Ye tender young virgins attend to my lay,  My heart is divided in twain; My Collin is beautiful, witty, and gay,  And Damon’s a kind-hearted swain. Whenever my lovely young Collin I meet,  What pleasures arise in my breast; The dear gentle swain looks so charming and sweet,  I fancy I love him the best. But when my dear Damon does to me complain,  So tender, so loving and kind, My bosom is softened to hear the fond swain,  And Collin slips out of my mind. Whenever my Damon repeats his soft tale,  My heart overflows with delight; But when my dear Collin appears in the vale,  I languish away at the sight. ’Tis Collin alone shall possess my fond heart,   Now Damon for ever adieu; But can I? — I cannot from Damon thus part!  He’s loved me so long, and so true. My heart to my Damon I’ll instantly bind,  And on him will fix all my care; But, O should I be to my Collin unkind,  He surely will die with despair. How happy, how happy with Damon I’d been,  If Collin I never had knew; As happy with Collin, if I’d never seen  My Damon, so tender and true.
Roger a doleful widower,  Full eighteen weeks had been, When he, to meet the milk-maid Nell  Came smiling o’er the green. Blithe as a lad of seventeen,  He thus accosted Nell; Give me your pail, I’ll carry it  For you, if you think well. Says Nell, indeed my milking-pail  You shall not touch, I vow; I’ve carried it myself before,  And I can carry it now. So side by side they walked awhile,  Then he at last did say; My inclination is to come  And see you, if I may. Nell understood his meaning well,  And briskly answered she; You may see me at any time,  If you look where I be. Says he, but hear me yet awhile,  I’ve something more to tell; I gladly would a sweetheart be  Unto you, Mistress Nell. A sweetheart I don’t want, says Nell,  Kind Sir, and if you do, Another you may seek, for I  Am not the lass for you. When she had made him this reply,  He’d nothing more to say But — Nelly, as good night to you,  And homeward went his way.
O what a strange parcel of creatures are we, Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree; We all are alone, though at home altogether, Except to the fire constrained by the weather; Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know, And with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’: With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire, And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher; Then quickly, preceded by silence profound, A yawn epidemical catches around: Like social companions we never fall out, Nor ever care what one another’s about; To comfort each other is never our plan, For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can.
If Heaven has into being deigned to call Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all; Bright intellectual Sun! why does thy ray To earth distribute only partial day? Since no resisting cause from spirit flows Thy universal presence to oppose; No obstacles by Nature’s hand impressed, Thy subtle and ethereal beams arrest; Not swayed by matter is they course benign, Or more direct or more oblique to shine; Nor motion’s laws can speed thy active course; Nor strong repulsion’s powers obstruct thy force: Since there is no convexity in mind, Why are thy genial rays to parts confined? While the chill North with thy bright beam is blest, Why should fell darkness half the South invest? Was it decreed, fair Freedom! at thy birth, That thou should’st ne’er irradiate all the earth? While Britain basks in thy full blaze of light, Why lies sad Afric quenched in total night?  Thee only, sober Goddess! I attest, In smiles chastised, and decent graces dressed; To thee alone, pure daughter of the skies, The hallowed incense of the Bard should rise: Not that mad Liberty, in whose wild praise Too oft he trims his prostituted bays; Not that unlicensed monster of the crowd, Whose roar terrific bursts in peals so loud, Deafening the ear of Peace; fierce Faction’s tool, Of rash Sedition born, and mad Misrule; Whose stubborn mouth, rejecting Reason’s rein, No strength can govern, and no skill restrain; Whose magic cries the frantic vulgar draw To spurn at Order, and to outrage Law; To tread on grave Authority and Power, And shake the work of ages in an hour: Convulsed her voice, and pestilent her breath, She raves of mercy, while she deals out death: Each blast is fate; she darts from either hand Red conflagration o’er the astonished land; Clamouring for peace, she rends the air with noise, And, to reform a part, the whole destroys. Reviles oppression only to oppress, And, in the act of murder, breathes redress. Such have we seen on Freedom’s genuine coast, Bellowing for blessings which were never lost. ‘Tis past, and Reason rules the lucid hour, And beauteous Order reassumes his power: Lord of the bright ascendant may he reign, Till perfect Peace eternal sway maintain!  O, plaintive Southerne! whose impassioned page  Can melt the soul to grief, or rouse to rage; Now, when congenial themes engage the Muse, She burns to emulate thy generous views; Her failing efforts mock her fond desires, She shares thy feelings, not partakes thy fires. Strange power of song! the strain that warms the heart Seems the same inspiration to impart; Touched by the extrinsic energy alone, We think the flame which melts us is our own; Deceived, for genius we mistake delight, Charmed as we read, we fancy we can write.  Though not to me, sweet Bard, thy powers belong, The cause I plead shall sanctify my song. The Muse awakes no artificial fire, For Truth rejects what Fancy would inspire: Here Art would weave her gayest flowers in vain, The bright invention Nature would disdain. For no fictitious ills these numbers flow, But living anguish, and substantial woe; No individual griefs my bosom melt, For millions feel what Oroonoko felt: Fired by no single wrongs, the countless host I mourn, by rapine dragg’d from Afric’s coast. Perish the illiberal thought which would debase The native genius of the sable race! Perish the proud philosophy, which sought To rob them of the powers of equal thought! What! does the immortal principle within Change with the casual colour of a skin? Does matter govern spirit? or is mind Degraded by the form to which it’s joined?  No: they have heads to think, and hearts to feel, And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal; For they have keen affections, soft desires, Love strong as death, and active patriot fires: All the rude energy, the fervid flame Of high-souled passion, and ingenuous shame: Strong, but luxuriant virtues, boldly shoot From the wild vigour of a savage root.  Nor weak their sense of honour’s proud control, For pride is virtue in a Pagan soul; A sense of worth, a conscience of desert, A high, unbroken haughtiness of heart;  That selfsame stuff which erst proud empires swayed, Of which the conquerors of the world were made. Capricious fate of men! that very pride In Afric scourged, in Rome was deified.  No Muse, O Qua-shi! shall thy deeds relate, No statue snatch thee from oblivious fate! For thou wast born where never gentle Muse On Valour’s grave the flowers of Genius strews; And thou wast born where no recording page Plucks the fair deed from Time’s devouring rage. Had fortune placed you on some happier coast, Where polished Pagans souls heroic boast, To thee, who sought’st a voluntary grave, The uninjured honours of thy name to save, Whose generous arm thy barbarous Master spared, Altars had smoked, and temples had been reared.  Whene’er to Afric’s shores I turn my eyes, Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise; I see, by more than Fancy’s mirror shown, The burning village, and the blazing town: See the dire victim torn from social life, See the sacred infant, hear the shrieking wife! She, wretch forlorn! is dragged by hostile hands, To distant tyrants sold, in distant lands: Transmitted miseries, and successive chains, The sole sad heritage her child obtains. E’en this last wretched boon their foes deny, To weep together, or together die. By felon hands, by one relentless stroke, See the fond links of Nature broke! The fibres twisting round a parent’s heart, Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part.   Hold, murderers! hold! nor aggravate distress; Respect the passions you yourself possess: Ev’n you, of ruffian heart, and ruthless hand, Love your own offspring, love your native land; Ev’n you, with fond impatient feelings burn, Though free as air, though certain of return. Then, if to you, who voluntary roam, So dear the memory of your distant home, O think how absence the loved scene endears To him, whose food is groan, whose drink is tears; Think on the wretch whose aggravated pains To exile misery adds, to misery chains. If warm your heart, to British feelings true, As dear his land to him as yours to you; And Liberty, in you a hallowed flame, Burns, unextinguished, in his breast the same. Then leave him holy Freedom’s cheering smile, The heaven-taught fondness for the parent soil; Revere affections mingled with our frame, In every nature, every clime the same; In all, these feelings equal sway maintain; In all, the love of home and freedom reign: And Tempe’s vale, and parched Angola’s sand, One equal fondness of their sons command. The unconquered savage laughs at pain and toil, Basking in Freedom’s beams which gild his native soil.  Does thirst of empire, does desire of fame,  (For these are specious crimes) our rage inflame? No: sordid lust of gold their fate controls, The basest appetite of basest souls; Gold, better gained by what their ripening sky, Their fertile fields, their arts, and mines supply.   What wrongs, what injuries does Oppression plead To smooth the crime and sanctify the deed? What strange offence, what aggravated sin? They stand convicted — of a darker skin! Barbarians, hold! the opprobrious commerce spare,  Respect His sacred image which they bear. Though dark and savage, ignorant and blind, They claim the common privilege of kind; Let Malice strip them of each other plea, They still are men, and men should still be free.  Insulted Reason loathes the inverted trade — Loathes, as she views the human purchase made; The outraged Goddess, with abhorrent eyes, Sees Man the traffic, souls the merchandise! Man, whom fair Commerce taught with judging eye, And liberal hand, to barter or to buy, Indignant Nature blushes to behold, Degraded man himself, trucked, bartered, sold; Of every native privilege bereft, Yet cursed with every wounded feeling left. Hard lot! each brutal suffering to sustain, Yet keep the sense acute of human pain. Plead not, in reason’s palpable abuse, Their sense of feeling callous and obtuse, From heads to hearts lies Nature’s plain appeal, Though few can reason, all mankind can feel. Though wit may boast a livelier dread of shame, A loftier sense of wrong, refinement claim; Though polished manners may fresh wants invent, And nice distinctions nicer souls torment; Though these on finer spirits heavier fall, Yet natural evils are the same to all. Though wounds there are which reason’s force may heal, There needs no logic sure to make us feel. The nerve, howe’er untutored, can sustain A sharp, unutterable sense of pain; As exquisitely fashioned in a slave, As where unequal fate a sceptre gave. Sense is as keen where Gambia’s waters glide, As where proud Tiber rolls his classic tide. Though verse or rhetoric point the feeling line, They do not whet sensation, but define. Did ever wretch less feel the galling chain, When Zeno proved there was no ill in pain? In vain the sage to smooth its horror tries; Spartans and Helots see with different eyes; Their miseries philosophic quirks deride, Slaves groan in pangs disowned by Stoic pride.  When the fierce Sun darts vertical his beams, And thirst and hunger mix their wild extremes; When the sharp iron wounds his inmost soul, And his strained eyes in burning anguish roll; Will the parched Negro own, ere he expire, No pain in hunger, and no heat in fire?  For him, when agony his frame destroys, What hope of present fame or future joys? For that have heroes shortened Nature’s date; For this have martyrs gladly met their fate;  But him, forlorn, no hero’s pride sustains, No martyr’s blissful visions soothe his pains; Sullen, he mingles with his kindred dust, For he has learned to dread the Christian’s trust; To him what mercy can that God display, Whose servants murder, and whose sons betray? Savage! thy venial error I deplore, They are not Christians who infest thy shore.  O thou sad spirit, whose preposterous yoke The great deliver Death, at length, has broke! Released from misery, and escaped from care, Go, meet that mercy man denied thee here. In thy dark home, sure refuge of the oppressed, The wicked vex not, and the weary rest. And, if some notions, vague and undefined, Of future terrors have assailed thy mind; If such thy masters have presumed to teach, As terrors only they are prone to preach; (For should they paint eternal Mercy’s reign, Where were the oppressor’s rod, the captive’s chain?)  If then, thy troubled soul has learned to dread The dark unknown thy trembling footsteps tread; On Him, who made thee what thou art, depend; He, who withholds the means, accepts the end. Thy mental night they Saviour will not blame, He died for those who never heard his name. Not thine the reckoning dire of Light abused, Knowledge disgraced, and Liberty misused; On thee no awful judge incensed shall sit For parts perverted, and dishonoured wit. Where ignorance will be found the surest plea, How many learned and wise shall envy thee!  And thou, White Savage! whether lust of gold, Or lust of conquest rule thee uncontrolled! Hero, or robber! — by whatever name Thou plead thy impious claim to wealth or fame; Whether inferior mischief be thy boast, A tyrant trader rifling Congo’s coast: Or bolder carnage track thy crimson way, Kings dispossessed, and provinces thy prey; Whether thou pant to tame earth’s distant bound; All Cortez murdered, all Columbus found; O’er plundered realms to reign, detested Lord, Make millions wretched, and thyself abhorred: — Whether Cartouche in forests break the law, Or bolder Caesar keep the world in awe; In Reason’s eye, in Wisdom’s fair account, Your sum of glory boasts a like amount: The means may differ, but the end’s the same; Conquest is pillage with a nobler name. Who makes the sum of human blessings less, Or sinks the stock of general happiness, Though erring fame may grace, though false renown, His life may blazon or his memory crown, Yet the last audit shall reverse the cause, And God shall vindicate his broken laws.  Had those adventurous spirits who explore Through ocean’s trackless wastes, the far-sought shore; Whether of wealth insatiate, or of power, Conquerors who waste, or ruffians who devour: Had these possessed, O Cook! thy gentle mind, Thy love of arts, thy love of human kind; Had these pursued thy mild and liberal plan, Discoverers had not been a curse to man. Then, blessed Philanthropy! thy social hands Had linked dissevered worlds in brothers’ bands; Careless, if colour, or if clime divide; Then, loved and loving, man had lived, and died. Then with pernicious skill we had not known To bring their vices back and leave our own.  The purest wreaths which hang on glory’s shrine, For empires founded, peaceful Penn! are thine; No blood-stained laurels crowned thy virtuous toil, No slaughtered natives drenched thy fair-earned soil. Still thy meek spirit in thy flock survives, Consistent still, their doctrines rule their lives; Thy followers only have effaced the shame Inscribed by slavery on the Christian name.  Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns, Forge chains for others she herself disdains? Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nations know The liberty she tastes she will bestow; Not to herself the glorious gift confined, She spreads the blessing wide as human kind; And scorning narrow views of time and place, Bids all be free in earth’s extended space.  What page of human annals can record A deed so bright as human rights restored? O may that god-like deed, that shining page, Redeem our fame, and consecrate our age! And let this glory mark our favoured shore, To curb false freedom and the true restore!  And see, the cherub Mercy from above, Descending softly, quits the spheres of love! On Britain’s isle she sheds her heavenly dew, And breathes her spirit o’er the enlightened few; From soul to soul the spreading influence steals, Till every breast the soft contagion feels. She speeds, exulting, to the burning shore, With the best message angel ever bore; Hark! ’tis the note which spoke a Saviour’s birth, Glory to God on high, and peace on earth! She vindicates the Power in Heaven adored, She stills the clank of chains, and sheathes the sword; She cheers the mourner, and with soothing hands From bursting hearts unbinds the oppressor’s bands; Restores the lustre of the Christian name, And clears the foulest blot that dimmed its fame.  As the mild Spirit hovers o’er the coast, A fresher hue the withered landscapes boast; Her healing smiles the ruined scenes repair, And blasted Nature wears a joyous air; While she proclaims through all their spicy groves, ‘Henceforth your fruits, your labours, and your loves, All that your Sire possessed, or you have sown, Sacred from plunder — all is now your own.’  And now, her high commission from above, Stamped with the holy characters of love, The meek-eyed spirit waving in her hand, Breathes manumission o’er the rescued land: She tears the banner stained with blood and tears, And, Liberty! thy shining standard rears! As the bright ensign’s glory she displays, See pale Oppression faints beneath the blaze! The giant dies! no more his frown appals, The chain, untouched, drops off, the fetter falls. Astonished echo tells the vocal shore, Oppression’s fallen, and slavery is no more!  The dusky myriads crowd the sultry plain, And hail that mercy long invoked in vain. Victorious power! she bursts their two-fold bands, And Faith and Freedom spring from Britain’s hands.  And Thou! great source of Nature and of Grace, Who of one blood didst form the human race, Look down in mercy in thy chosen time, With equal eye on Afric’s suffering clime: Disperse her shades of intellectual night, Repeat thy high behest — Let there be light! Bring each benighted soul, great God, to Thee, And with thy wide Salvation make them free!
I am a bold Coachman, and drive a good hack, With a coat of five capes that quite covers my back; And my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles From the narrowest alley in all Broad St Giles. Though poor, we are honest and very content, We pay as we go for meat, drink, and for rent; To work all the week I am able and willing, I never get drunk, and I waste not a shilling. And while at a tavern my gentleman tarries, The coachman grows richer than he whom he carries; And I’d rather (said I), since it saves me from sin, Be the driver without, than the toper within. Yet though dram-shops I hate, and the dram-drinking friend, I’m not quite so good but I wish I may mend; I repent of my sins, since we all are depraved, For a coachman, I hold, has a soul to be saved. When a riotous multitude fills up a street, And the greater part know not, boys, wherefore they meet; If I see there is mischief, I never go there, Let others get tipsy so I get my fare. Now to church, if I take some good lady to pray, It grieves me full sore to be kept quite away; So I step within side, though the sermon’s begun, For a slice of the service is better than none. Then my glasses are whole, and my coach is so neat, I am always the first to be called in the street; And I’m known by the name (’tis a name rather rare) Of the coachman that never asks more than his fare. Though my beasts should be dull, yet I don’t use them ill; Though they stumble I swear not, nor cut them up hill; For I firmly believe there’s no charm in an oath That can make a nag trot, when to walk he is loath. And though I’m a coachman, I’ll freely confess, I beg of my Maker my labours to bless; I praise Him each morning, and pray every night, And ’tis this makes my heart feel so cheerful and light. When I drive to a funeral I care not for drink; That is not the moment to guzzle, but think; And I wish I could add both of coachman and master, That both of us strove to amend a bit faster.
While summer roses all their glory yield  To crown the votary of love and joy,  Misfortune’s victim hails, with many a sigh,  Thee, scarlet Poppy of the pathless field, Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield  Thy flaccid vest that, as the gale blows high,  Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head.  So stands in the long grass a love-crazed maid, Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind  Her garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;  But brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind, And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,  Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,  Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.
While one sere leaf, that parting Autumn yields, Trembles upon the thin, and naked spray, November, dragging on this sunless day, Lours, cold and sullen, on the watery fields; And Nature to the waste dominion yields, Stripped her last robes, with gold and purple gay — So droops my life, of your soft beams despoiled, Youth, Health, and Hope, that long exulting smiled; And the wild carols, and the bloomy hues Of merry Spring-time, spruce on every plain Her half-blown bushes, moist with sunny rain, More pensive thoughts in my sunk heart infuse Than Winter’s grey, and desolate domain Faded like my lost Youth, that no bright Spring renews.
On the fleet streams, the Sun, that late arose, In amber radiance plays; the tall young grass No foot hath bruised; clear morning, as I pass, Breathes the pure gale, that on the blossom blows; And, as with gold yon green hill’s summit glows, The lake inlays the vale with molten glass: Now is the year’s soft youth, yet one, alas! Cheers not as it was wont; impending woes Weigh on my heart; the joys, that once were mine, Spring leads not back; and those that yet remain Fade while she blooms. Each hour more lovely shine Her crystal beams, and feed her floral train, But oh with pale, and warring fires, decline Those eyes, whose light my filial hopes sustain.
Behold that tree, in Autumn’s dim decay, Stripped by the frequent, chill, and eddying wind; Where yet some yellow, lonely leaves we find Lingering and trembling on the naked spray, Twenty, perchance, for millions whirled away! Emblem, also! too just, of humankind! Vain man expects longevity, designed For few indeed; and their protracted day What is it worth that Wisdom does not scorn? The blasts of sickness, care, and grief appal, That laid the friends in dust, whose natal morn Rose near their own; and solemn is the call; Yet, like those weak deserted leaves forlorn, Shivering they cling to life, and fear to fall!
In early youth’s unclouded scene, The brilliant morning of eighteen, With health and sprightly joy elate, We gazed on youth’s enchanting spring, Nor thought how quickly time would bring The mournful period — thirty-eight! Then the starch maid, or matron sage, Already of the sober age, We viewed with mingled scorn and hate; In whose sharp words, or sharper face, With thoughtless mirth, we loved to trace The sad effects of — thirty-eight! Till, saddening, sickening at the view, We learned to dread what time might do; And then preferred a prayer to Fate To end our days ere that arrived, When (power and pleasure long survived) We meet neglect, and — thirty-eight! But Time, in spite of wishes, flies; And Fate our simple prayer denies, And bids us Death’s own hour await! The auburn locks are mixed with grey, The transient roses fade away, But reason comes at — thirty-eight! Her voice the anguish contradicts That dying vanity inflicts; Her hand new pleasures can create, For us she opens to the view Prospect less bright — but far more true, And bids us smile at — thirty-eight! No more shall Scandal’s breath destroy The social converse we enjoy With bard or critic, tete a tete — O’er youth’s bright blooms her blight shall pour, But spare the improving, friendly hour Which Science gives at — thirty-eight! Stripped of their gaudy hues by Truth, We view the glittering toys of youth, And blush to think how poor the bait For which to public scenes we ran, And scorned of sober sense the plan Which gives content at — thirty-eight! O may her blessings now arise, Like stars that mildly light the skies, When the sun’s ardent rays abate! And in the luxuries of mind — In friendship, science — may we find Increasing joys at — thirty-eight! Though Time’s inexorable sway Has torn the myrtle bands away, For other wreaths — ’tis not too late: The amaranth’s purple glow survives, And still Minerva’s olive thrives On the calm brow of — thirty-eight! With eye more steady, we engage To contemplate approaching age, And life more justly estimate; With firmer souls and stronger powers, With reason, faith, and friendship ours, We’ll not regret the stealing hours That lead from thirty- e’en to forty-eight!
Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below; Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf, With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies Murmuring responses to the dashing surf? In moody sadness, on the giddy brink, I see him more with envy than with fear; He has no nice felicities that shrink From giant horrors; wildly wandering here, He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know The depth or the duration of his woe.
Sweet poet of the woods, a long adieu! Farewell soft mistrel of the early year! Ah! ’twill be long ere thou shalt sing anew, And pour thy music on the night’s dull ear. Whether on spring thy wandering flights await, Or whether silent in our groves you dwell, The pensive muse shall own thee for her mate, And still protect the song she loves so well. With cautious step the love-lorn youth shall glide Through the lone brake that shades thy mossy nest; And shepherd girls from eyes profane shall hide The gentle bird who sings of pity best: For still thy voice shall soft affections move, And still be dear to sorrow and to love!
Beside a spreading elm, from whose high boughs Like knotted tufts the crow’s light dwelling shows, Where screened from northern blasts, and winter-proof, Snug stands the parson’s barn with thatched roof; At chaff-strewed door where, in the morning ray, The gilded motes in mazy circles play, And sleepy Comrade in the sun is laid, More grateful to the cur than neighbouring shade. In snowy shirt unbraced, brown Robin stood, And leant upon his flail in thoughtful mood: His full round cheek where deeper flushes glow, The dewy drops which glisten on his brow; His dark cropped pate that erst at church or fair, So smooth and silky, showed his morning’s care, Which, all uncouth in matted locks combined, Now, ends erect, defies the ruffling wind; His neck-band loose, and hosen rumpled low, A careful lad, nor slack at labour, show. Nor scraping chickens chirping ’mongst the straw, Nor croaking rook o’erhead, nor chattering daw; Loud-breathing cow amongst the rampy weeds, Nor grunting sow that in the furrows feeds: Nor sudden breeze that shakes the quaking leaves, And lightly rustles through the scattered sheaves; Nor floating straw that skims athwart his nose, The deeply-musing youth may discompose. For Nelly fair, the blithest village maid, Whose tuneful voice beneath the hedgerow-shade, At early milking, o’er the meadows borne, E’er cheered the ploughman’s toil at rising morn: The neatest maid that e’er, in linen gown, Bore cream and butter to the market town: The tightest lass, that with untutored air, E’er footed alehouse floor at wake or fair, Since Easter last had Robin’s heart possessed, And many a time disturbed his nightly rest. Full oft, returning from the loosened plough, He slacked his pace, and knit his thoughtful brow; And oft, ere half his thresher’s talk was o’er, Would muse, with arms across, at cooling door: His mind thus bent, with downcast eyes he stood, And leant upon his flail in thoughtful mood. His soul o’er many a soft rememberance ran, And, muttering to himself, the youth began. ‘Ah! happy is the man whose early lot Hath made him master of a furnished cot; Who trains the vine that round his window grows, And after setting sun his garden hoes; Whose wattled pales his own enclosure shield, Who toils not daily in another’s field. Wheree’er he goes, to church or market-town, With more respect he and his dog are known; A brisker face he wears at wake or fair, Nor views with longing eyes the pedlar’s ware, But buys at will or ribbands, gloves or beads, And willing maidens to the alehouse leads; And, oh! secure from toils which cumber life, He makes the maid he loves an easy wife. Ah, Nelly! canst thou, with contented mind, Become the helpmate of a labouring hind, And share his lot, whate’er the chances be, Who hath no dower but love to fix on thee? Yes, gayest maid may meekest matron prove, And things of little note may ’token love. When from the church thou cam’st at eventide And I and red-haired Susan by thy side, I pulled the blossoms from the bending tree, And some to Susan gave, and some to thee; Thine were the best, and well thy smiling eye The difference marked, and guessed the reason why. When on a holiday we rambling strayed, And passed old Hodge’s cottage in the glade; Neat was the garden dressed, sweet hummed the bee, I wished both cot and Nelly made for me; And well methought thy very eyes revealed The self-same wish within thy breast concealed. When artful, once, I sought my love to tell, And spoke to thee of one who loved thee well, You saw the cheat, and jeering homeward hied, Yet secret pleasure in thy looks I spied. Ay, gayest maid may meekest matron prove, And smaller signs than these have ’tokened love.’ Now, at a distance, on the neighbouring plain, With creaking wheels slow comes the heavy wain: High on its towering load a maid appears, And Nelly’s voice sounds shrill in Robin’s ears. Quick from his hand he throws the cumbrous flail, And leaps with lightsome limbs the enclosing pale. O’er field and fence he scours, and furrows wide, With wakened Comrade barking by his side; Whilst tracks of trodden grain, and sidelong hay, And broken hedge-flowers sweet, mark his impetuous way.
On village green whose smooth and well-worn sod, Cross pathed, with many a gossip’s foot is trod; By cottage door where playful children run, And cats and curs sit basking in the sun; Where o’er an earthen seat the thorn is bent, Cross-armed and back to wall poor William leant His bonnet all awry, his gathered brow, His hanging lip and lengthened visage show A mind but ill at ease. With motions strange His listless limbs their wayward postures change; While many a crooked line and curious maze With clouted shoon he on the sand portrays. At length the half-chewed straw fell from his mouth, And to himself low spoke the moody youth. ‘How simple is the lad and reft of skill, Who thinks with love to fix a woman’s will: Who every Sunday morn, to please her sight, Knots up his neckcloth gay and hosen white; Who for her pleasure keeps his pockets bare, And half his wages spends on pedlar’s ware; When every niggard clown or dotard old, Who hides in secret nooks his oft-told gold, Whose field or orchard tempts, with all her pride, At little cost may win her for his bride! While all the meed her silly lover gains, Is but the neighbours’ jeering for his pains. On Sunday last, when Susan’s banns were read, And I astonished sat with hanging head, Cold grew my shrinking frame, and loose my knee, While every neighbour’s eye was fixed on me. Ah Sue! when last we worked at Hodge’s hay, And still at me you mocked in wanton play — When last at fair, well pleased by chapman’s stand, You took the new-bought fairing from my hand — When at old Hobb’s you sung that song so gay, ‘Sweet William,’ still the burthen of the lay, — I little thought, alas! the lots were cast, That thou shouldst be another’s bride at last; And had, when last we tripped it on the green, And laughed at stiff-backed Rob, small thought I ween, Ere yet another scanty month was flown To see thee wedded to the hateful clown. Ay, lucky churl! more gold thy pockets line, But did these shapely limbs resemble thine, I’d stay at home and tend the household gear, Nor on the green with other lads appear. Ay, lucky churl! no store thy cottage lacks, And round thy barn thick stand the sheltered stacks. But did such features coarse my visage grace, I’d never budge the bonnet from my face. Yet let it be; it shall not break my ease, He best deserves who doth the maiden please. Such silly cause no more shall give me pain, Nor ever maiden cross my rest again. Such grizzled suitors with their taste agree, And the black fiend may take them all for me!’ Now through the village rose confused sounds, Hoarse lads, and children shrill, and yelping hounds. Straight every housewife at her door is seen, And pausing hedgers on their mattocks lean. At every narrow lane and alley’s mouth Loud-laughing lasses stand, and joking youth. A bridal band tricked out in colours gay, With minstrels blithe before to cheer the way, From clouds of curling dust that onward fly, In rural splendour break upon the eye. As in their way they hold so gaily on, Caps, beads, and buttons, glancing in the sun, Each village wag with eye of roguish cast, Some maiden jogs and vents the ready jest; While village toasts the passing belles deride, And sober matrons marvel at their pride. But William, head erect, with settled brow, In sullen silence viewed the passing show; And oft he scratched his pate with careless grace, And scorned to pull the bonnet o’er his face; But did with steady look unaltered wait, Till hindmost man had passed the churchyard gate, Then turned him to his cot with visage flat, Where honest Lightfoot on the threshold sat. Up leaped the kindly beast his hand to lick, And for his pains received an angry kick. Loud shuts the door with harsh and thundering din; The echoes round their circling course begin, From cot to cot, church tower, and rocky dell, It grows amain with wide progressive swell, And Lightfoot joins the coil with long and piteous yell.
Now in thy dazzling half-oped eye, Thy curled nose and lip awry, Uphoisted arms and noddling head, And little chin with crystal spread, Poor helpless thing! what do I see, That I should sing of thee? From thy poor tongue no accents come, Which can but rub thy toothless gum: Small understanding boasts thy face, Thy shapeless limbs nor step nor grace: A few short words thy feats may tell, And yet I love thee well. When wakes the sudden bitter shriek, And redder swells thy little cheek When rattled keys thy woes beguile, And through thine eyelids gleams the smile, Still for thy weakly self is spent Thy little silly plaint. But when thy friends are in distress. Thou’lt laugh and chuckle n’ertheless, Nor with kind sympathy be smitten, Though all are sad but thee and kitten; Yet puny varlet that thou art, Thou twitchest at the heart. Thy smooth round cheek so soft and warm; Thy pinky hand and dimpled arm; Thy silken locks that scantly peep, With gold tipped ends, where circle deep, Around thy neck in harmless grace, So soft and sleekly hold their place, Might harder hearts with kindness fill, And gain our right goodwill. Each passing clown bestows his blessing, Thy mouth is worn with old wives’ kissing; E’en lighter looks the gloomy eye Of surly sense when thou art by; And yet, I think, whoe’er they be, They love thee not like me. Perhaps when time shall add a few Short years to thee, thou’lt love me too; And after that, through life’s long way, Become my sure and cheering stay; Wilt care for me and be my hold, When I am weak and old. Thou’lt listen to my lengthened tale, And pity me when I am frail — But see, the sweepy spinning fly Upon the window takes thine eye. Go to thy little senseless play; Thou dost not heed my lay.
What voice is this, thou evening gale! That mingles with thy rising wail; And, as it passes, sadly seems The faint return of youthful dreams? Though now its strain is wild and drear, Blithe was it once as sky-lark’s cheer — Sweet as the night-bird’s sweetest song, — Dear as the lisp of infant’s tongue. It was the voice, at whose sweet flow The heart did beat, and cheek did glow, And lip did smile, and eye did weep, And motioned love the measure keep. Oft be thy sound, soft gale of even, Thus to my wistful fancy given; And, as I list the swelling strain, The dead shall seem to live again!
Here bounds the gaudy, gilded chair,   Bedecked with fringe and tassels gay;  The melancholy mourner there   Pursues her sad and painful way. Here, guarded by a motley train,  The pampered Countess glares along; There, wrung by poverty and pain,   Pale Misery mingles with the throng. Here, as the blazoned chariot rolls,  And prancing horses scare the crowd, Great names, adorning little souls,  Announce the empty, vain and proud. Here four tall lackeys slow precede  A painted dame in rich array;  There, the sad, shivering child of need  Steals barefoot o’er the flinty way. ‘Room, room! stand back!’ they loudly cry,  The wretched poor are driven around; On every side they scattered fly,   And shrink before the threatening sound. Here, amidst jewels, feathers, flowers,   The senseless Duchess sits demure, Heedless of all the anxious hours  The sons of modest worth endure. All silvered and embroidered o’er,   She neither knows nor pities pain;  The beggar freezing at her door   She overlooks with nice disdain. The wretch whom poverty subdues  Scarce dares to raise his tearful eye; Or if by chance the throng he views,  His loudest murmur is a sigh! The poor wan mother, at whose breast  The pining infant craves relief,  In one thin tattered garment dressed,  Creeps forth to pour the plaint of grief. But ah! how little heeded here   The faltering tongue reveals its woe; For high-born fools, with frown austere,   Condemn the pangs they never know. ‘Take physic, Pomp!’ let Reason say:  ‘What can avail thy trappings rare?  The tomb shall close thy glittering day,  The beggar prove thy equal there!’
Who has not waked to list the busy sounds Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke Of noisy London? On the pavement hot The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face And tattered covering, shrilly bawls his trade, Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the dustman’s office; while the street Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins The din of hackney-coaches, waggons, carts; While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers, Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters, Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries Of vegetable-vendors, fill the air. Now every shop displays its varied trade, And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet Of early walkers. At the private door The ruddy housemaid twirls the busy mop, Annoying the smart ’prentice, or neat girl, Tripping with band-box lightly. Now the sun Darts burning splendor on the glittering pane, Save where the canvas awning throws a shade On the gay merchandise. Now, spruce and trim, In shops (where beauty smiles with industry) Sits the smart damsel; while the passenger Peeps through the window, watching every charm. Now pastry dainties catch the eye minute Of humming insects, while the limy snare Waits to enthrall them. Now the lamp-lighter Mounts the tall ladder, nimbly venturous, To trim the half-filled lamps, while at his feet The pot-boy yells discordant! All along The sultry pavement, the old-clothes-man cries In tone monotonous, while sidelong views The area for his traffic: now the bag Is slyly opened, and the half-worn suit (Sometimes the pilfered treasure of the base Domestic spoiler), for one half its worth, Sinks in the green abyss. The porter now Bears his huge load along the burning way; And the poor poet wakes from busy dreams, To paint the summer morning.
The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase, Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on, Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire By little whimpering boy, with rueful face — Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day. Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on Too soon; for to that day nor peace belongs, Nor comfort; ere the first grey streak of dawn, The red-armed washers come and chase repose. Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth, Ere visited that day; the very cat, From the wet kitchen scared, and reeking hearth, Visits the parlour, an unwonted guest. The silent breakfast meal is soon despatched, Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks Cast at the louring, if sky should lour. From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens! For should the skies pour down, adieu to all Remains of quiet; then expect to hear Of sad disasters — dirt and gravel stains Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once Snapped short, and linen-horse by dog thrown down, And all the petty miseries of life. Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack, And Montezuma smiled on burning coals; But never yet did housewife notable Greet with a smile a rainy washing day. But grant the welkin fair, require not thou Who callest thyself, perchance, the master there, Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat, Or usual ’tendence; ask not, indiscreet, Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents Gape wide as Erebus; nor hope to find Some snug recess impervious. Shouldst thou try The ’customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight Of coarse-checked apron, with impatient hand Twitched off when showers impend; or crossing lines Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim On such a dav the hospitable rites;  Looks blank at best, and stinted courtesy Shall he receive; vainly he feeds his hopes With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie, Or tart or pudding; pudding he nor tart That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try — Mending what can’t be helped — to kindle mirth From cheer deficient, shall his consort’s brow Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest In silence dines, and early slinks away. I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams, Relic of costly suppers, and set by For me their petted one; or buttered toast, When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost, or witch, or murder. So I went And sheltered me beside the parlour fire; There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm; Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured One less indulgent. At intervals my mother’s voice was heard, Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, Or fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were; sometimes through hollow hole Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles; little dreaming then To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them — this most of all.
Midway the hill of science, after steep And rugged paths that tire the unpractised feet, A grove extends; in tangled mazes wrought,  And filled with strange enchantment: dubious shapes Flit through dim glades, and lure the eager foot Of youthful ardour to eternal chase. Dreams hang on every leaf: unearthly forms Glide through the gloom; and mystic visions swim Before the cheated sense. Athwart the mists,  Far into vacant space, huge shadows stretch And seem realities; while things of life, Obvious to sight and touch, all glowing round,  Fade to the hue of shadows. Scruples here,  With filmy net, most like the autumnal webs Of floating gossamer, arrest the foot Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope And fair ambition with the chilling touch Of sickly hesitation and blank fear.  Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb Of deep philosophy, and museful sits In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, With moonbeam rainbows tinted. Here each mind Of finer mould, acute and delicate,  In its high progress to eternal truth Rests for a space, in fairy bowers entranced; And loves the softened light and tender gloom; And, pampered with most unsubstantial food, Looks down indignant on the grosser world, And matter’s cumbrous shapings. Youth beloved Of science — of the Muse beloved, — not here,  Not in the maze of metaphysic lore, Build thou thy place of resting! Lightly tread The dangerous ground, on noble aims intent;  And be this Circe of the studious cell Enjoyed, but still subservient. Active scenes Shall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind; And fair exertion, for bright fame sustained, For friends, for country, chase each spleen-fed fog That blots the wide creation —  Now heaven conduct thee with a parent’s love!
Now spring appears, with beauty crowned And all is light and life around, Why comes not Jane? When friendship calls, Why leaves she not Augusta’s walls? Where cooling zephyrs faintly blow, Nor spread the cheering, healthful glow That glides through each awakened vein, As skimming o’er the spacious plain, We look around with joyous eye, And view no boundaries but the sky. Already April’s reign is o’er, Her evening tints delight no more; No more the violet scents the gale, No more the mist o’erspreads the vale; The lovely queen of smiles and tears, Who gave thee birth, no more appears; But blushing May, with brow serene, And vestments of a livelier green, Commands the winged choir to sing, And with wild notes the meadows ring. O come! ere all the train is gone, No more to hail thy twenty-one; That age which higher honour shares, And well become the wreath it wears. From lassitude and cities flee, And breathe the air of heaven, with me.
Forgive me, if I wound your ear,  By calling of you Nancy, Which is the name of my sweet friend,  The other’s but her fancy. Ah, dearest girl! how could your mind  The strange distinction frame? The whimsical, unjust caprice,  Which robs you of your name. Nancy agrees with what we see  A being wild and airy; Gay as a nymph of Flora’s train,  Fantastic as a fairy. But Anna’s of a different kind,  A melancholy maid, Boasting a sentimental soul,  In solemn pomp arrayed. Oh ne’er will I forsake the sound,  So artless and so free Be what you will with all mankind,  But Nancy still with me.
Colin, why this mistake?  Why plead thy foolish love? My heart shall sooner break  Than I a minion prove; Nor care I half a rush,  No snare I spread for thee: Go home, my friend, and blush  For love and liberty. Remembrance is my own —  Dominion bright and clear, Truth there was ever known  To combat every care: One image there impressed  Through life shall ever be Whilst my innocuous breast  Owns love of liberty. I ever taught thee how  To prize the soul entire, When on the mountain’s brow  I turned my rural lyre: Thou servile art and vain,  Thy love unworthy me! Away! nor hear my strain,  Of love or liberty. What arts need I display  To woo a soul like thine? Thou ne’re canst know the way  My memory to confine; For my eternal plan  Is to be calm and free. Estranged from tyrant man  I’ll keep my liberty. Yon woods their foliage wear,  Be thou away or nigh; The warblers of the year  Instruct me not to sigh: My tears ne’er roll the steep,  Nor swell the restless sea, Except for those who sleep  Bereft of liberty. Slave to commanding eyes!  Those eyes thou wouldst commend My judgment must despise —  My pity is thy friend: If eyes alone can move  A swain so dull as thee, They mean but to reprove  Thy loss of liberty. I stray o’er rocks and fields  Where native beauties shine: All fettered fancy yields  Be, Colin, ever thine. Complain no more! but rove —  My cheek from crimson free, Within my native grove  I’ll guard my liberty.
Gay Fashion thou Goddess so pleasing, However imperious thy sway; Like a mistress capricious and teasing, Thy slaves tho’ they murmur obey. The simple, the wise, and the witty, The learned, the dunce, and the fool, The crooked, straight, ugly, and pretty, Wear the badge of thy whimsical school. Tho’ thy shape be so fickle and changing, That a Proteus thou art to the view; And our taste so for ever deranging, We know not which form to pursue. Yet wave but thy frolicksome banners, And hosts of adherents we see; Arts, morals, religion, and manners, Yield implicit obedience to thee. More despotic than beauty thy power, More than virtue thy rule o’er the mind: Tho’ transient thy reign as a flower, That scatters its leaves to the wind. Ah! while folly thou dealest such measure, No matter how fleeting thy day! Be Wisdom, dear goddess, thy pleasure! Then lasting as time be thy stay.
Since you are, dear madam, so favoured by time, That he seems to have granted a lease of his prime, With the power to renew it whenever you please; Unencumbered by taxes of age and disease; Prolonging that date, which in others appears, The frail fleeting tenure of very few years: Why could you not ask him some favour to send, Enclosed with a present designed for a friend? One tint for her cheeks of youth’s vivid hue, To suit with those beautiful ribands of blue; One spark for her eyes of a juvenile twinkle, One smile of her mouth undeformed by a wrinkle; One ringlet or two — on her forehead to play, Unmixed with the sorrowful colour of grey? Yet too modest, perhaps, these requests you forbore, Yourself so indebted would not ask for more. And perchance had you teased him, thus Time might reply; ‘That to you I am partial — I will not deny; Nor need I declare — what who sees you must know: That on few I such singular graces bestow. But if from my rules I recede for your sake, And still give to you what from others I take, I cannot for all so go out of my way, And reverse those decrees which all mortals obey. My law is that youth shall soon wither and fade, And like morning’s bright beam shall be followed by shade. Most severe is the sentence I pass on the face, Full soon on its features my finger you trace. Yet I no such dread rigour extend to the mind, In age that still charms if it be but resigned. If calmly beholding fair youth’s setting sun, It with fortitude reckons my sands as they run; Not with peevishness fraught as each wrinkle appears, And resisting my progress with petulant tears. No — your sex must learn patient good humour of you, And meet my approaches with smiles as you do: With temper unruffled by envy or spleen, Like the sun of the autumn — thus mild and serene, Learn of you to converse with politeness and ease; Then in spite of my spoils — they will know how to please.
A youth for Jane with ardour sighed,  The maid with sparkling eye; But to his vows she still replied,  ‘I’ll hear you by and by.’ ‘Suspense (he cries) my bloom decays,  And bids my spirits fly; Now hear my vows,’ — but still she says,  ‘I’ll hear you by and by.’ At length her frowns his love subdue,  He shuns her scornful eye, And Emma seeks, who’ll hear him woo  Both now, and by and by. And soon to church he leads the maid,  When lo! he sees draw nigh, The now repentant fair who said  She’d hear him by and by. ‘Hear me (she cries): no more in vain  Thy hear for me shall sigh!’ —  ‘I’m busy now (said he) — but, Jane!  I’ll hear you by and by.’
I once rejoiced, sweet evening gale, To see thy breath the poplar wave; But now it makes my cheek turn pale, It waves the grass o’er Henry’s grave. Ah! setting sun! how changed I seem! I to thy rays prefer deep gloom, — Since now, alas! I see them beam Upon my Henry’s lonely tomb. Sweet evening gale, howe’er I seem, I wish thee o’er my sod to wave; Ah! setting sun! soon mayst thou beam On mine, as well as Henry’s grave!
The tale which I send, will, I’m sure, hit your fancy, Of Sandy the Captain, and kitchen-maid Nancy; The youth, by friend Colin’s good liquor made gay, Met the damsel, and brimful of frolic and play, He romped with, and kissed her, and tho’ he’d his gun, In vain the poor lassie attempted to run; She pouted and scolded, and liked not the joke, And at least, in the struggle, his finger she broke. Ah! who, my dear brother, would ever believe, That a swain with a look so demure could deceive? We ladies, kind creatures, devoid of suspicion, Were each very ready to play the physician; By Mackay, his sore finger in spirits was laid, And a bag, by my orders, was carefully made. For it neither by one, nor the other was thought That with Nancy, instead of a gate he had fought. But now the poor maiden has told us the truth, As we cannot ourselves have a laugh at the youth; We entreat that from us, you the hero would tell, In his frolicks he ne’er should forget to bribe well; For had but his kisses been seasoned with gold, How he got his lame finger — had never been told.
Alone, unfriended, on a foreign shore,  Behold an hapless, melancholy maid, Begging her scanty fare from door to door,  With piteous voice, and humbly bended head. Alas! her native tongue is known to few:  Her manners and her garb excite suprise; The vulgar stare to see her bid adieu;  Her tattered garments fix their curious eyes. Cease, cease your laugh, ye thoughtless vain; Why sneer at yon poor Indian’s pain? ’Tis nature’s artless voice that speaks: Behold the tear bedew her cheeks! Imploring actions, bursting sighs, Reveal enough to British eyes.
Custom, whose laws we all allow,  And bow before his shrine, Has so ordained, my friend, that you  Are now my Valentine. Ah, could my humble Muse aspire  To catch the flame divine! These are the gifts that I’d require  For thee, my Valentine! May virtue o’er thy steps preside  And in thy conduct shine; May truth and wisdom ever guide  And guard my Valentine. May piety, seraphic maid,  Her influence divine Shed on thy head, and ever lead,  And bless my Valentine. Life’s dangerous paths safe may’st thou tread,  Shielded by Grace divine; And when these artless lines are read,  Think on my Valentine!
Cold blew the freezing northern blast,  And winter sternly frowned; The flaky snow fell thick and fast,  And clad the fields around. Forced by the storm’s relentless power,  Emboldened by despair, A shivering redbreast sought my door,  Some friendly warmth to share. ‘Welcome, sweet bird!’ I fondly cried,  ‘No danger need’st thou fear, Secure with me thou may’st abide,  Till warmer suns appear. ‘And when mild spring comes smiling on,  And bids the fields look gay, Thou, with thy sweet, thy grateful song,  My kindness shalt repay.’ Mistaken thought! — But how shall I   The mournful truth display? An envious cat, with jealous eye,  Had marked him as her prey. Remorseless wretch! — her cruel jaws  Soon sealed her victim’s doom, While I in silence mourn his loss,  And weep o’er robin’s tomb. So, oft in life’s uneven way,  Some stroke may intervene; Sweep all our fancied joys away,  And change the flattering scene.
Soft falls the shower, the thunders cease! And see the messenger of peace  Illumes the eastern skies; Blest sign of firm unchanging love! While others seek the cause to prove,  That bids thy beauties rise. My soul, content with humbler views, Well pleased admires thy varied hues,  And can with joy behold Thy beauteous form, and wondering gaze Enraptured on thy mingled rays  Of purple, green, and gold. Enough for me to deem divine The hand that paints each glowing line;  To think that thou art given A transient gleam of that bright place Where Beauty owns celestial grace,  A faint display of Heaven!
Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream  Which animates this mortal clay, For thee I court the waking dream,  And deck with smiles the future day; And thus beguile the present pain With hopes that we shall meet again. Yet, will it be as when the past  Twined every joy, and care, and thought, And o’er our minds one mantle cast  Of kind affections finely wrought? Ah no! the groundless hope were vain, For so we ne’er can meet again! May he who claims thy tender heart  Deserve its love, as I have done! For, kind and gentle as thou art,  If so beloved, thou art fairly won. Bright may the sacred torch remain, And cheer thee till we meet again!
Behold the gloomy tyrant’s awful form Binding the captive earth in icy chains; His chilling breath sweeps o’er the watery plains, Howls in the blast, and swells the rising storm. See from its centre bends the rifted tower, Threat’ning the lowly vale with frowning pride, O’er the scared flocks that seek its sheltering side, A fearful ruin o’er their heads to pour. While to the cheerful hearth and social board Content and ease repair, the sons of want Receive from niggard fate their pittance scant; And where some shed bleak covert may afford, Wan poverty, amidst her meagre host Casts round her haggard eyes, and shivers at the frost.
Down in a green and shady bed,  A modest violet grew, Its stalk was bent, it hung its head,  As if to hide from view. And yet it was a lovely flower,  Its colours bright and fair; It might have graced a rosy bower,  Instead of hiding there, Yet there it was content to bloom,  In modest tints arrayed; And there diffused its sweet perfume,  Within the silent shade. Then let me to the valley go,  This pretty flower to see; That I may also learn to grow  In sweet humility.
High on a bright and sunny bed  A scarlet poppy grew And up it held its staring head,  And thrust it full in view. Yet no attention did it win,  By all these efforts made, And less unwelcome had it been  In some retired shade. Although within its scarlet breast  No sweet perfume was found, It seemed to think itself the best  Of all the flowers round, From this I may a hint obtain  And take great care indeed, Lest I appear as pert and vain  As does this gaudy weed.
I saw an old cottage of clay,  And only of mud was the floor; It was all falling into decay,  And the snow drifted in at the door. Yet there a poor family dwelt,  In a hovel so dismal and rude; And though gnawing hunger they felt,  They had not a morsel of food. The children were crying for bread,  And to their poor mother they’d run; ‘Oh, give us some breakfast,’ they said,  Alas! their poor mother had none. She viewed them with looks of despair,  She said (and I’m sure it was true), ‘’Tis not for myself that I care,  But, my poor little children, for you.’ O then, let the wealthy and gay  But see such a hovel as this, That in a poor cottage of clay  They may know what true misery is. And what I may have to bestow  I never will squander away, While many poor people I know  Around me are wretched as they.
To love these books, and harmless tea,  Has always been my foible, Yet will I ne’er forgetful be  To read my Psalms and Bible. Travels I like, and history too,  Or entertaining fiction; Novels and plays I’d have a few,  If sense and proper diction. I love a natural harmless song,  But I cannot sing like Handel; Deprived of such resource, the tongue  Is sure employed — in scandal.
I’ve sent my empty pot again  To beg another slip; The last you gave, I’m grieved to tell  December’s frost did nip. I love fair Flora and her train  But nurse her children ill; I tend too little, or too much;  They die from want of skill. I blush to trouble you again,  Who’ve served me oft before; But, should this die, I’ll break the pot,  And trouble you no more.
What way does the wind come? What way does he go? He rides over the water, and over the snow, Through wood, and through vale; and o’er rocky height, Which the goat cannot climb, takes his sounding flight; He tosses about in every bare tree, As, if you look up, you plainly may see; But how he will come, and whither he goes, There’s never a scholar in England knows. He will suddenly stop in a cunning nook, And ring a sharp ’larum; but, if you should look, There’s nothing to see but a cushion of snow, Round as a pillow, and whiter than milk, And softer than if it were covered with silk. Sometimes he’ll hide in the cave of a rock, Then whistle as shrill as the buzzard cock; — Yet seek him, and what shall you find in the place? Nothing but silence and empty space; Save, in a corner, a heap of dry leaves, That he’s left, for a bed, to beggars or thieves! As soon as ’tis daylight tomorrow, with me You shall go to the orchard, and then you will see That he has been there, and made a great rout, And cracked the branches, and strewn them about; Heaven grant that he spare but that one upright twig That looked up at the sky so proud and big All last summer, as well you know, Studded with apples, a beautiful show! Hark! over the roof he makes a pause, And growls as if he would fix his claws Right in the slates, and with a huge rattle Drive them down, like men in a battle: – But let him range round; he does us no harm, We build up the fire, we’re snug and warm; Untouched by his breath see the candle shines bright, And burns with a clear and steady light. Books have we to read, but that half-stifled knell, Alas! ’tis the sound of the eight o’clock bell. — Come, now we’ll to bed! and when we are there He may work his own will, and what shall we care? He may knock at the door — we’ll not let him in; May drive at the windows — we’ll laugh at his din; Let him seek his own home wherever it be; Here’s a cozie warm house for Edward and me.
A month, sweet Little-ones, is past Since your dear Mother went away, And she tomorrow will return; Tomorrow is the happy day. O blessed tidings! thoughts of joy! The eldest heard with steady glee; Silent he stood; then laughed amain, And shouted, ‘Mother, come to me!’ Louder and louder did he shout, With witless hope to bring her near! ‘Nay, patience! patience, little boy; Your tender mother cannot hear.’ I told of hills, and far-off towns, And long, long vales to travel through; He listened, puzzled, sore perplexed, But he submits; what can he do? No strike disturbs his sister’s breast; She wars not with the mystery Of time and distance, night and day; The bonds of our humanity. Her joy is like an instinct, joy Of kitten, bird, or summer fly; She dances, runs without an aim, She chatters in her ecstasy. Her brother now takes up the note, And echoes back his sister’s glee; They hug the infant in my arms, As if to force his sympathy. Then, settling into fond discourse, We rested in the garden bower; While sweetly shone the evening sun In his departing hour. We told o’er all that we had done, Our rambles by the swift brook’s side Far as the willow-skirted pool, Where two fair swans together glide. We talked of change, of winter gone, Of green leaves on the hawthorn spray, Of birds that build their nests and sing. And all ‘since Mother went away!’ To her these tales they will repeat, To her our new-born tribes will show, The goslings green, the ass’s colt, The lambs that in the meadow go. — But see, the evening star comes forth! To bed the children must depart; A moment’s heaviness they feel, A sadness at the heart: ’Tis gone — and in a merry fit They run up stairs in gamesome race; I, too, infected by their mood, I could have joined the wanton chase. Five minutes past — and, O the change! Asleep upon their beds they lie; Their busy limbs in perfect rest, And closed the sparkling eye.
There’s more in words than I can teach: Yet listen, Child! — I would not preach; But only give some plain directions To guide your speech and your affections. Say not you love a roasted fowl But you may love a screaming owl, And, if you can, the unwieldy toad That crawls from his secure abode Within the mossy garden wall When evening dews begin to fall, Oh! mark the beauty of his eye: What wonders in that circle lie! So clear, so bright, our fathers said He wears a jewel in his head! And when, upon some showery day, Into a path or public way A frog leaps out from bordering grass, Startling the timid as they pass, Do you observe him, and endeavour To take the intruder into favour: Learning from him to find a reason For a light heart in a dull season. And you may love him in the pool, That is for him a happy school, In which he swims as taught by nature, Fit pattern for a human creature, Glancing amid the water bright, And sending upward sparkling light. Nor blush if o’er your heart be stealing A love for things that have no feeling: The spring’s first rose by you espied, May fill your breast with joyful pride; And you may love the strawberry-flower, And love the strawberry in its bower; But when the fruit, so often praised For beauty, to your lip is raised, Say not you love the delicate treat, But like it, enjoy it, and thankfully eat. Long may you love your pensioner mouse, Though one of a tribe that torment the house: Nor dislike for her cruel sport the cat Deadly foe both of mouse and rat; Remember she follows the law of her kind, And Instinct is neither wayward nor blind. Then think of her beautiful gliding form, Her tread that would scarcely crush a worm, And her soothing song by the winter fire, Soft as the dying throb of the lyre. I would not circumscribe your love: It may soar with the Eagle and brood with the dove, May pierce the earth with the patient mole, Or track the hedgehog to his hole. Loving and liking are the solace of life, Rock the cradle of joy, smooth the death-bed of strife. You love your father and your mother, Your grown-up and your baby brother; You love your sister and your friends, And countless blessings which God sends; And while these right affections play, You live each moment of your day; They lead you on to full content, And likings fresh and innocent, That store the mind, the memory feed, And prompt to many a gentle deed: But likings come, and pass away; ’Tis love that remains till our latest day: Our heavenward guide is holy love, And will be our bliss with saints above.
The ribs and terrors in the whale,  Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,  And left me deepening down to doom. I saw the opening maw of hell,  With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell—  Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress, I called my God,  When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints—  No more the whale did me confine. With speed he flew to my relief,  As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightening shone  The face of my Deliverer God. My song for ever shall record  That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God,  His all the mercy and the power.
This rose-tree is not made to bear The violet blue, nor lily fair, Nor the sweet mignionet: And if this tree were discontent, Or wished to change its natural bent, It all in vain would fret. And should it fret, you would suppose It ne’er had seen its own red rose, Nor after gentle shower Had ever smelled its rose’s scent, Or it could ne’er be discontent With its own pretty flower. Like such a blind and senseless tree As I’ve imagined this to be, All envious persons are: With care and culture all may find Some pretty flower in their own mind, Some talent that is rare.
When ocean-clouds over inland hills  Sweep storming in late autumn brown,  And horror the sodden valley fills,  And the spire falls crashing in the town,  I muse upon my country’s ills—  The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.  Nature’s dark side is heeded now—  (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—  A child may read the moody brow  Of yon black mountain lone.  With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,  And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.
A Creole boy from the West Indies brought, To be in European learning taught, Some years before to Westminster he went, To a Preparatory school was sent. When from his artless tale the mistress found The child had not one friend on English ground, She ev’n as if she his own mother were, Made the dark Indian her particular care. Oft on her favourite’s future lot she thought; To know the bent of his young mind she sought, For much the kind preceptress wished to find To what profession he was most inclined, That where his genius led they might him train; For nature’s kindly bent she held not vain. But vain her efforts to explore his will; The frequent question he evaded still; Till on a day at length he to her came, Joy sparkling in his eyes; and said, the same Trade he would be those boys of colour were, Who danced so happy in the open air. It was a troop of chimney-sweeping boys, With wooden music and obstreperous noise, In tarnish’d finery and grotesque array, Were dancing in the streets the first of May.

A dinner party, coffee, tea, Sandwich, or supper, all may be In their way pleasant. But to me Not one of these deserves the praise That welcomer of new-born days,A breakfast, merits; ever giving Cheerful notice we are living Another day refreshed by sleep, When its festival we keep. Now although I would not slight Those kindly words we use ‘Good night’, Yet parting words are words of sorrow, And may not vie with sweet ‘Good Morrow’, With which again our friends we greet, When in the breakfast-room we meet, At the social table round, Listening to the lively sound Of those notes which never tire, Of urn, or kettle on the fire. Sleepy Robert never hears Or urn, or kettle; he appears When all have finished, one by one Dropping off, and breakfast done. Yet has he too his own pleasure, His breakfast hour’s his hour of leisure; And, left alone, he reads or muses, Or else in idle mood he uses To sit and watch the venturous fly, Where the sugar’s piled high, Clambering o’er the lumps so white, Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.
I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read as he’d devour it all; Which when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, ‘You, Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look.’ The boy passed slowly on, and with a sigh He wished he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl’s books he should have had no need.  Of sufferings the poor have many, Which never can the rich annoy. I soon perceived another boy Who looked as if he’d not had any Food for that day at least, enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy’s case, thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty dressed meat; No wonder if he wish he ne’er had learned to eat.
There is a strain to read among the hills,  The old and full of voices — by the source Of some free stream, whose gladdening presence fills  The solitude with sound; for in its course Even such is thy deep song, that seems a part Of those high scences, a fountain from the heart. Or its calm spirit fitly may be taken  To the still breast in sunny garden bowers, Where vernal winds each tree’s low tones awaken,  And bud and bell with changes mark the hours. There let thy thoughts be with me, while the day Sinks with a golden and serene decay. Or by some hearth where happy faces meet,  When night hath hushed the woods, with all their birds, There, from some gentle voice, that lay were sweet  As antique music, linked with household words; While in pleased murmurs woman’s lip might move, And the raised eye of childhood shine in love. Or where the shadows of dark solemn yews  Brood silently o’er some lone burial-ground, Thy verse hath power that brightly might diffuse  A breath, a kindling, as of spring, around; From its own glow of hope and courage high, And steadfast faith’s victorious constancy. True bard and holy! — thou art e’en as one  Who, by some secret gift of soul or eye, In every spot beneath the smiling sun,  Sees where the springs of living waters lie; Unseen awhile they sleep — till, touched by thee, Bright healthful waves flow forth, to each glad wanderer free.
And this is what is left of youth! . . . There were two boys, who were bred up together, Shared the same bed, and fed at the same board; Each tried the other’s sport, from their first chase, Young hunters of the butterfly and bee, To when they followed the fleet hare, and tried The swiftness of the bird. They lay beside The silver trout stream, watching as the sun Played on the bubbles: shared each in the store Of either’s garden: and together read Of him, the master of the desert isle, Till a low hut, a gun, and a canoe, Bounded their wishes. Or if ever came A thought of future days, ’twas but to say That they would share each other’s lot, and do Wonders, no doubt. But this was vain: they parted With promises of long remembrance, words Whose kindness was the heart’s, and those warm tears, Hidden like shame by the young eyes which shed them, But which are thought upon in after-years As what we would give worlds to shed once more.  They met again, — but different from themselves, At least what each remembered of themselves: The one proud as a soldier of his rank, And of his many battles: and the other Proud of his Indian wealth, and of the skill And toil which gathered it; each with a brow And heart alike darkened by years and care. They met with cold words, and yet colder looks: Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought The other only changed, himself the same. And coldness bred dislike, and rivalry Came like the pestilence o’er some sweet thoughts That lingered yet, healthy and beautiful, Amid dark and unkindly ones. And they, Whose boyhood had not known one jarring word, Were strangers in their age: if their eyes met, ’Twas but to look contempt, and when they spoke, Their speech was wormwood! . . .  . . . And this, this is life!
How is it that the snow amplifies the silence, slathers the black bark on limbs, heaps along the brush rows? Some deer have stood on their hind legs to pull the berries down. Now they are ghosts along the path, snow flecked with red wine stains. This silence in the timbers. A woodpecker on one of the trees taps out its story, stopping now and then in the lapse of one white moment into another.
for Lewis Ellingham The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . . James Fenton, “In a Notebook” White decorators interested in Art, Black file clerks with theatrical ambitions, kids making pharmaceutical revisions in journals Comp. instructors urged they start, the part-Cherokee teenage genius (maybe), the secretary who hung out with fairies, the copywriter wanting to know, where is my husband? the soprano with the baby, all drank draft beer or lethal sweet Manhattans or improvised concoctions with tequila in summer when, from Third Street, we could feel a  night breeze waft in whose fragrances were Latin. The place was run by Polish refugees: squat Margie, gaunt Speedy (whose sobriquet transliterated what?). He’d brought his play from Łódź. After a while, we guessed Margie’s illiteracy was why he cashed checks and she perched near the threshold to ban pros, the underage, the fugitive, and those arrayed impertinently to their sex. The bar was talk and cruising; in the back room, we danced: Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey and the Miracles, while sellers and buyers changed crisp tens for smoke and smack. Some came in after work, some after supper, plumage replenished to meet who knew who. Behind the bar, Margie dished up beef stew. On weeknights, you could always find an upper to speed you to your desk, and drink till four. Loosened by booze, we drifted, on the ripples of Motown, home in new couples, or triples, were back at dusk, with IDs, at the door. Bill was my roommate, Russell drank with me, although they were a dozen years my seniors. I walked off with the eighteen-year-old genius —an Older Woman, barely twenty-three. Link was new as Rimbaud, and better looking, North Beach bar paideon of doomed Jack Spicer, like Russell, our two-meter artificer, a Corvo whose ecclesia was cooking. Bill and Russell were painters. Bill had been a monk in Kyoto. Stoned, we sketched together, till he discovered poppers and black leather and Zen consented to new discipline. We shared my Sixth Street flat with a morose cat, an arch cat, and pot plants we pruned daily. His boyfriend had left him for an Israeli dancer; my husband was on Mykonos. Russell loved Harold, who was Black and bad, and lavished on him dinners “meant for men” like Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin. Staunch blond Dora made rice. When she had tucked in the twins, six flights of tenement stairs they’d descend, elevenish, and stroll down Third Street, desultory night patrol gone mauve and green under the virulent  streetlights, to the bar, where Bill and I (if we’d not come to dinner), Link, and Lew, and Betty had already had a few. One sweat-soaked night in pitiless July, wedged on booth benches of cracked Naugahyde, we planned a literary magazine where North Beach met the Lower East Side Scene. We could have titled it When Worlds Collide. Dora was gone, “In case the children wake up.” Link lightly had decamped with someone else (the German engineer? Or was he Bill’s?). Russell’s stooped vale brushed my absent makeup. Armed children spared us home, our good-night hugslaissez-passer. We railed against the war. Soon, some of us bused south with SNCC and CORE. Soon, some of us got busted dealing drugs. The file clerks took exams and forged ahead. The decorators’ kitchens blazed persimmon. The secretary started kissing women, and so did I, and my three friends are dead.
Applied geometry, measuring the height of a pine from like triangles, Rosa’s shadow stretches seven paces in low-slanting light of late Christmas afternoon. One hundred thirty nine steps up the hill until the sun is finally caught at the top of the tree, let’s see, twenty to one, one hundred feet plus a few to adjust for climbing uphill, and her hands barely reach mine as we encircle the trunk, almost eleven feet around. Back to the lumber tables. That one tree might make three thousand feet of boards if our hearts could stand the sound of its fall.
Let midnight gather up the wind and the cry of tires on bitter snow. Let midnight call the cold dogs home, sleet in their fur—last one can blow the streetlights out. If children sleep after the day’s unfoldings, the wheel of gifts and griefs, may their breathing ease the strange hollowness we feel. Let midnight draw whoever’s left to the grate where a burnt-out log unrolls low mutterings of smoke until a small fire wakes in its crib of coals.
I made up a story for myself once, That each glove I lost Was sent to my father in prison That’s all it would take for him To chart my growth without pictures Without words or visits, Only colors and design, Texture; it was ok then For skin to chafe and ash, To imagine him Trying on a glove, Stretching it out My open palm closing And disappearing In his fist.
I am weary of the working, Weary of the long day’s heat; To thy comfortable bosom, Wilt thou take me, spirit sweet? Weary of the long, blind struggle For a pathway bright and high,— Weary of the dimly dying Hopes that never quite all die. Weary searching a bad cipher For a good that must be meant; Discontent with being weary,— Weary with my discontent. I am weary of the trusting Where my trusts but torments prove; Wilt thou keep faith with me? wilt thou Be my true and tender love? I am weary drifting, driving Like a helmless bark at sea; Kindly, comfortable spirit, Wilt thou give thyself to me? Give thy birds to sing me sonnets? Give thy winds my cheeks to kiss? And thy mossy rocks to stand for The memorials of our bliss? I in reverence will hold thee, Never vexed with jealous ills, Though thy wild and wimpling waters Wind about a thousand hills.
Shorter and shorter now the twilight clips The days, as though the sunset gates they crowd, And Summer from her golden collar slips And strays through stubble-fields, and moans aloud, Save when by fits the warmer air deceives, And, stealing hopeful to some sheltered bower, She lies on pillows of the yellow leaves, And tries the old tunes over for an hour. The wind, whose tender whisper in the May Set all the young blooms listening through th’ grove, Sits rustling in the faded boughs to-day And makes his cold and unsuccessful love. The rose has taken off her tire of red— The mullein-stalk its yellow stars have lost, And the proud meadow-pink hangs down her head Against earth’s chilly bosom, witched with frost. The robin, that was busy all the June, Before the sun had kissed the topmost bough, Catching our hearts up in his golden tune, Has given place to the brown cricket now. The very cock crows lonesomely at morn— Each flag and fern the shrinking stream divides— Uneasy cattle low, and lambs forlorn Creep to their strawy sheds with nettled sides. Shut up the door: who loves me must not look Upon the withered world, but haste to bring His lighted candle, and his story-book, And live with me the poetry of Spring.
from Sonnets, Second Series XVII Roll on, sad world! not Mercury or Mars Could swifter speed, or slower, round the sun, Than in this year of variance thou hast done For me. Yet pain, fear, heart-break, woes, and wars Have natural limit; from his dread eclipse The swift sun hastens, and the night debars The day, but to bring in the day more bright; The flowers renew their odorous fellowships; The moon runs round and round; the slow earth dips, True to her poise, and lifts; the planet-stars Roll and return from circle to ellipse; The day is dull and soft, the eave-trough drips; And yet I know the splendor of the light Will break anon: look! where the gray is white!
from Sonnets, Second Series XVIII And Change, with hurried hand, has swept these scenes: The woods have fallen; across the meadow-lot The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot; And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens! Yet for a moment let my fancy plant These autumn hills again,—the wild dove’s haunt, The wild deer’s walk. In golden umbrage shut, The Indian river runs, Quonecktacut! Here, but a lifetime back, where falls to-night Behind the curtained pane a sheltered light On buds of rose, or vase of violet Aloft upon the marble mantel set,— Here, in the forest-heart, hung blackening The wolf-bait on the bush beside the spring.
from Sonnets, Second Series XXIX How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school’s sway Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend,— With some pretext of o’erwrought sight, to spend My school-time in green meadows far away! Careless of summoning bell, or clocks that strike, I marked with flowers the minutes of my day: For still the eye that shrank from hated hours, Dazzled with decimal and dividend, Knew each bleached alder-root that plashed across The bubbling brook, and every mass of moss; Could tell the month, too, by the vervain-spike,— How far the ring of purple tiny flowers Had climbed; just starting, may-be, with the May, Half-light, or tapering off at Summer’s end.
from Sonnets, Second Series XXX Yet, even ‘mid merry boyhood’s tricks and scapes, Early my heart a deeper lesson learnt; Wandering alone by many a mile burnt Black woodside, that but the snow-flake decks and drapes. And I have stood beneath Canadian sky, In utter solitudes, where the cricket’s cry Appals the heart, and fear takes visible shapes; And on Long Island’s void and isolate capes Heard the sea break like iron bars: and still, In all, I seemed to hear the same deep dirge; Borne in the wind, the insect’s tiny trill, And crash and jangle of the shaking surge; And knew not what they meant,—prophetic woe? Dim bodings, wherefore? Now, indeed, I know!
from Sonnets, Third Series IV Thin little leaves of wood fern, ribbed and toothed, Long curved sail needles of the green pitch pine, With common sandgrass, skirt the horizon line, And over these the incorruptible blue! Here let me gently lie and softly view All world asperities, lightly touched and smoothed As by his gracious hand, the great Bestower. What though the year be late? some colors run Yet through the dry, some links of melody. Still let me be, by such, assuaged and soothed And happier made, as when, our schoolday done, We hunted on from flower to frosty flower, Tattered and dim, the last red butterfly, Or the old grasshopper molasses-mouthed.
from Sonnets, Third Series  V How well do I recall that walk in state Across the Common, by the paths we knew: Myself in silver badge and riband blue, My little sister with her book and slate; The elm tree by the Pond, the fence of wood, The burial place that at the corner stood Where once we crossed, through the forbidden grate, The stones that grudg’d us way, the graveside weed, The ominous wind that turned us half about. Smit the flying drops, at what a speed Across the paths, unblessed and unforgiven We hurried homeward when the day was late And heard, with awe that left no place for doubt, God’s anger mutter in the darkened heaven.
Heard you that shriek? It rose So wildly on the air, It seem’d as if a burden’d heart Was breaking in despair. Saw you those hands so sadly clasped— The bowed and feeble head— The shuddering of that fragile form— That look of grief and dread? Saw you the sad, imploring eye? Its every glance was pain, As if a storm of agony Were sweeping through the brain. She is a mother pale with fear, Her boy clings to her side, And in her kyrtle vainly tries His trembling form to hide. He is not hers, although she bore For him a mother’s pains; He is not hers, although her blood Is coursing through his veins! He is not hers, for cruel hands May rudely tear apart The only wreath of household love That binds her breaking heart. His love has been a joyous light That o’er her pathway smiled, A fountain gushing ever new, Amid life’s desert wild. His lightest word has been a tone Of music round her heart, Their lives a streamlet blent in one— Oh, Father! must they part?They tear him from her circling arms, Her last and fond embrace.Oh! never more may her sad eyes Gaze on his mournful face.No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks Disturb the listening air:She is a mother, and her heart Is breaking in despair.
Take sackcloth of the darkest dye,  And shroud the pulpits round! Servants of Him that cannot lie,  Sit mourning on the ground. Let holy horror blanch each cheek,  Pale every brow with fears; And rocks and stones, if ye could speak,  Ye well might melt to tears! Let sorrow breathe in every tone,  In every strain ye raise; Insult not God’s majestic throne  With th’ mockery of praise. A “reverend” man, whose light should be  The guide of age and youth, Brings to the shrine of Slavery  The sacrifice of truth! For the direst wrong by man imposed,  Since Sodom’s fearful cry, The word of life has been unclos’d,  To give your God the lie. Oh! When ye pray for heathen lands,  And plead for their dark shores, Remember Slavery’s cruel hands  Make heathens at your doors!
At the Portals of the Future, Full of madness, guilt and gloom, Stood the hateful form of Slavery, Crying, Give, Oh! give me room– Room to smite the earth with cursing, Room to scatter, rend and slay, From the trembling mother’s bosom Room to tear her child away; Room to trample on the manhood Of the country far and wide; Room to spread o’er every Eden Slavery’s scorching lava-tide. Pale and trembling stood the Future, Quailing ‘neath his frown of hate, As he grasped with bloody clutches The great keys of Doom and Fate. In his hand he held a banner All festooned with blood and tears: ‘Twas a fearful ensign, woven With the grief and wrong of years. On his brow he wore a helmet Decked with strange and cruel art; Every jewel was a life-drop Wrung from some poor broken heart. Though her cheek was pale and anxious, Yet, with look and brow sublime, By the pale and trembling Future Stood the Crisis of our time. And from many a throbbing bosom Came the words in fear and gloom, Tell us, Oh! thou coming Crisis, What shall be our country’s doom? Shall the wings of dark destruction Brood and hover o’er our land, Till we trace the steps of ruin By their blight, from strand to strand?
The lilacs lift in generous bloom Their plumes of dear old-fashioned flowers; Their fragrance fills the still old house Where left alone I count the hours. High in the apple-trees the bees Are humming, busy in the sun,— An idle robin cries for rain But once or twice and then is done. The Sunday-morning quiet holds In heavy slumber all the street, While from the church, just out of sight Behind the elms, comes slow and sweet The organ’s drone, the voices faint That sing the quaint long-meter hymn— I somehow feel as if shut out From some mysterious temple, dim And beautiful with blue and red And golden lights from windows high, Where angels in the shadows stand And earth seems very near the sky. The day-dream fades—and so I try Again to catch the tune that brings No thought of temple nor of priest, But only of a voice that sings.
High at the window in her cage The old canary flits and sings, Nor sees across the curtain pass The shadow of a swallow’s wings. A poor deceit and copy, this, Of larger lives that mark their span, Unreckoning of wider worlds Or gifts that Heaven keeps for man. She gathers piteous bits and shreds, This solitary, mateless thing, To patient build again the nest So rudely scattered spring by spring; And sings her brief, unlisted songs, Her dreams of bird life wild and free, Yet never beats her prison bars At sound of song from bush or tree. But in my busiest hours I pause, Held by a sense of urgent speech, Bewildered by that spark-like soul, Able my very soul to reach. She will be heard; she chirps me loud, When I forget those gravest cares, Her small provision to supply, Clear water or her seedsman’s wares. She begs me now for that chief joy The round great world is made to grow,— Her wisp of greenness. Hear her chide, Because my answering thought is slow! What can my life seem like to her? A dull, unpunctual service mine; Stupid before her eager call, Her flitting steps, her insight fine. To open wide thy prison door, Poor friend, would give thee to thy foes; And yet a plaintive note I hear, As if to tell how slowly goes The time of thy long prisoning. Bird! does some promise keep thee sane? Will there be better days for thee? Will thy soul too know life again? Ah, none of us have more than this: If one true friend green leaves can reach From out some fairer, wider place, And understand our wistful speech!
[At Bethlehem, Pennsylvania] What of this house with massive walls And small-paned windows, gay with blooms? A quaint and ancient aspect falls Like pallid sunshine through the rooms. Not this new country’s rush and haste Could breed, one thinks, so still a life; Here is the old Moravian home, A placid foe of worldly strife. For this roof covers, night and day, The widowed women poor and old, The mated without mates, who say Their light is out, their story told. To these the many mansions seem Dear household fires that cannot die; They wait through separation dark An endless union by and by. Each window has its watcher wan To fit the autumn afternoon, The dropping poplar leaves, the dream Of spring that faded all too soon. Upon the highest window-ledge A glowing scarlet flower shines down. Oh, wistful sisterhood, whose home Has sanctified this quiet town! Oh, hapless household, gather in The tired-hearted and the lone! What broken homes, what sundered love, What disappointment you have known! They count their little wealth of hope And spend their waiting days in peace, What comfort their poor loneliness Must find in every soul’s release! And when the wailing trombones go Along the street before the dead In that Moravian custom quaint, They smile because a soul has fled.
Carried her unprotesting out the door. Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her, That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her, The lid's contrition nor the bolts before. Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes. Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge. Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
O the days gone by! O the days gone by! The apples in the orchard, and the pathway through the rye; The chirrup of the robin, and the whistle of the quail As he piped across the meadows sweet as any nightingale; When the bloom was on the clover, and the blue was in the sky, And my happy heart brimmed over in the days gone by. In the days gone by, when my naked feet were tripped By the honey-suckle’s tangles where the water-lilies dipped, And the ripples of the river lipped the moss along the brink Where the placid-eyed and lazy-footed cattle came to drink, And the tilting snipe stood fearless of the truant’s wayward cry And the splashing of the swimmer, in the days gone by. O the days gone by! O the days gone by! The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye; The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin’s magic ring— The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything,— When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh, In the golden olden glory of the days gone by.
No classes here! Why, that is idle talk.  The village beau sneers at the country boor; The importuning mendicants who walk  Our cites’ streets despise the parish poor. The daily toiler at some noisy loom  Holds back her garments from the kitchen aid. Meanwhile the latter leans upon her broom,  Unconscious of the bow the laundress made. The grocer’s daughter eyes the farmer’s lass  With haughty glances; and the lawyer’s wife Would pay no visits to the trading class,  If policy were not her creed in life. The merchant’s son nods coldly at the clerk;  The proud possessor of a pedigree Ignores the youth whose father rose by work;  The title-seeking maiden scorns all three. The aristocracy of blood looks down  Upon the “nouveau riche”; and in disdain, The lovers of the intellectual frown  On both, and worship at the shrine of brain. “No classes here,” the clergyman has said;  “We are one family.” Yet see his rage And horror when his favorite son would wed  Some pure and pretty player on the stage. It is the vain but natural way  Of vaunting our weak selves, our pride, our worth! Not till the long delayed millennial day  Shall we behold “no classes” on God’s earth.
Alone it stands in Poesy’s fair land, A temple by the muses set apart; A perfect structure of consummate art, By artists builded and by genius planned. Beyond the reach of the apprentice hand, Beyond the ken of the unturtored heart, Like a fine carving in a common mart, Only the favored few will understand. A chef-d’oeuvre toiled over with great care, Yet which the unseeing careless crowd goes by, A plainly set, but well-cut solitaire, An ancient bit of pottery, too rare To please or hold aught save the special eye, These only with the sonnet can compare.
Into the gloom of the deep, dark night,  With panting breath and a startled scream; Swift as a bird in sudden flight  Darts this creature of steel and steam. Awful dangers are lurking nigh,  Rocks and chasms are near the track, But straight by the light of its great white eye  It speeds through the shadows, dense and black. Terrible thoughts and fierce desires  Trouble its mad heart many an hour, Where burn and smoulder the hidden fires,  Coupled ever with might and power. It hates, as a wild horse hates the rein,  The narrow track by vale and hill; And shrieks with a cry of startled pain,  And longs to follow its own wild will.
Oh, what am I but an engine, shod  With muscle and flesh, by the hand of God, Speeding on through the dense, dark night,  Guided alone by the soul’s white light. Often and often my mad heart tires,  And hates its way with a bitter hate, And longs to follow its own desires,  And leave the end in the hands of fate. O, mighty engine of steel and steam;  O, human engine of blood and bone, Follow the white light’s certain beam—  There lies safety, and there alone. The narrow track of fearless truth,  Lit by the soul’s great eye of light, O passionate heart of restless youth,  Alone will carry you through the night.
High-hearted Surrey! I do love your ways, Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement, All with inviolate honor sealed and blent, To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays: I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays; Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent, Heard as in dreams from some old harper’s tent, And stirring in the listener’s brain for days. Good father-poet! if to-night there be At Framlingham none save the north-wind’s sighs, No guard but moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears, Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me, Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes Sought not one other down three hundred years!
Oh, I would have these tongues oracular Dip into silence, tease no more, let be! They madden, like some choral of the free Gusty and sweet against a prison-bar. To earth the boast that her gold empires are, The menace of delicious death to me, Great Undesign, strong as by God’s decree, Piercing the heart with beauty from afar! Music too winning to the sense forlorn! Of what angelic lineage was she born, Bred in what rapture?—These her sires and friends: Censure, Denial, Gloom, and Hunger’s throe. Praised be the Spirit that thro’ thee, Schubert! so Wrests evil unto wholly heavenly ends.
1778-1830 Between the wet trees and the sorry steeple, Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt, Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty; Beauty’s a sinking light, ah, none too faithful; But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer, Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it. Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit, Safe also on our earth, begetting ever Some one love worth the ages and the nations! Nothing falls under thine eyes eternal. Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining, Titian and Woodsworth live; the People marches.
Open, Time, and let him pass Shortly where his feet would be! Like a leaf at Michaelmas Swooning from the tree, Ere its hour the manly mind Trembles in a sure decrease, Nor the body now can find Any hold on peace. Take him, weak and overworn; Fold about his dying dream Boyhood, and the April morn, And the rolling stream: Weather on a sunny ridge, Showery weather, far from here; Under some deep-ivied bridge, Water rushing clear: Water quick to cross and part, (Golden light on silver sound), Weather that was next his heart All the world around! Soon upon his vision break These, in their remembered blue; He shall toil no more, but wake Young, in air he knew. He has done with roods and men. Open, Time, and let him pass, Vague and innocent again, Into country grass.
A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave, How slow! but never once they slip the thread. Hither, upon the Georgian idler’s tread, Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, Clouding the royal air since yester-eve, Come men bereft of time and scant of bread, Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead, Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve. What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so The clear Republic waits the general throe, Along her noonday mountains’ open range. God be with both! for one is young to know The other’s rote of evil and of change.
The evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot Far down into the valley’s cold extreme, Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream Like fleeing specters, shudder and are not. The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream, From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, London, one moment fallen and forgot. Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright Prick door and window; all her streets obscure Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure, Full as a marsh of mist and winking light; Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.
Praised be the moon of books! that doth above A world of men, the fallen Past behold, And fill the spaces else so void and cold To make a very heaven again thereof; As when the sun is set behind a grove, And faintly unto nether ether rolled, All night his whiter image and his mould Grows beautiful with looking on her love. Thou therefore, moon of so divine a ray, Lend to our steps both fortitude and light! Feebly along a venerable way They climb the infinite, or perish quite; Nothing are days and deeds to such as they, While in this liberal house thy face is bright.
Across the bridge, where in the morning blow The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain Homeward to drag the black sea-goer’s chain, And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low; Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow, Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain: From Wren’s forgotten belfries, in the rain, Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go. Forbid not these! Tho’ no man heed, they shower A subtle beauty on the empty hour, From all their dark throats aching and outblown; Aye in the prayerless places welcome most, Like the last gull that up a naked coast Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.
I Like Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand Upon the desert verge of death, and say: “What shall avail the woes of yesterday To buy to-morrow’s wisdom, in the land Whose currency is strange unto our hand? In life’s small market they had served to pay Some late-found rapture, could we but delay Till Time hath matched our means to our demand.” But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold, Our gathered strength of individual pain, When Time’s long alchemy hath made it gold, Dies with us—hoarded all these years in vain, Since those that might be heir to it the mould Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again. II O Death, we come full-handed to thy gate, Rich with strange burden of the mingled years, Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears, And love’s oblivion, and remembering hate, Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight Upon our souls—and shall our hopes and fears Buy nothing of thee, Death? Behold our wares, And sell us the one joy for which we wait. Had we lived longer, like had such for sale, With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap, But now we stand before thy shadowy pale, And all our longings lie within thy keep— Death, can it be the years shall naught avail? “Not so,” Death answered, “they shall purchase sleep.”
I Immense, august, like some Titanic bloom, The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core, Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or, Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom, And stamened with keen flamelets that illume The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor, By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore, A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb, The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea— For these alone the finials fret the skies, The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free, While from the triple portals, with grave eyes, Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity, The cloud of witnesses still testifies. II The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatise The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold. A rigid fetich in her robe of gold, The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes, Enthroned beneath her votive canopies, Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold. The rest is solitude; the church, grown old, Stands stark and grey beneath the burning skies. Well-nigh again its mighty framework grows To be a part of nature’s self, withdrawn From hot humanity’s impatient woes; The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn, And in the east one giant window shows The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.
I Leaguered in fire The wild black promontories of the coast extend Their savage silhouettes; The sun in universal carnage sets, And, halting higher, The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats, Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned, That, balked, yet stands at bay. Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline, A wan Valkyrie whose wide pinions shine Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray, And in her hand swings high o’erhead, Above the waster of war, The silver torch-light of the evening star Wherewith to search the faces of the dead. II Lagooned in gold, Seem not those jetty promontories rather The outposts of some ancient land forlorn, Uncomforted of morn, Where old oblivions gather, The melancholy unconsoling fold Of all things that go utterly to death And mix no more, no more With life’s perpetually awakening breath? Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore, Over such sailless seas, To walk with hope’s slain importunities In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not All things be there forgot, Save the sea’s golden barrier and the black Close-crouching promontories? Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories, Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade, A spectre self-destroyed, So purged of all remembrance and sucked back Into the primal void, That should we on the shore phantasmal meet I should not know the coming of your feet?
As in the midst of battle there is room For thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth; As gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth Spied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom; As in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb The sweet herbs flourish on a little earth: So in this great disaster of our birth We can be happy, and forget our doom. For morning, with a ray of tenderest joy Gilding the iron heaven, hides the truth, And evening gently woos us to employ Our grief in idle catches. Such is youth; Till from that summer’s trance we wake, to find Despair before us, vanity behind.
Hold high the woof, dear friends, that we may see The cunning mixture of its colours rare. Nothing in nature purposely is fair,— Her beauties in their freedom disagree; But here all vivid dyes that garish be, To that tint mellowed which the sense will bear, Glow, and not wound the eye that, resting there, Lingers to feed its gentle ecstacy. Crimson and purple and all hues of wine, Saffron and russet, brown and sober green Are rich the shadowy depths of blue between; While silver threads with golden intertwine, To catch the glimmer of a fickle sheen,— All the long labour of some captive queen.
I Behoild Pelides with his yellow hair, Proud child of Thetis, hero loved of Jove; Above the frowning of his brows of wove A crown of gold, well combed, with Spartan care. Who might have seen him, sullen, great, and fair, As with the wrongful world he proudly strove, And by high deeds his wilder passion shrove, Mastering love, resentment, and despair. He knew his end, and Phoebus’ arrow sure He braved for fame immortal and a friend, Despising life; and we, who know our end, Know that in our decay he shall endure And all our children’s hearts to grief inure, With whose first bitter battles his shall blend. II Who brought thee forth, immortal vision, who In Phthia or in Tempe brought thee forth? Out of the sunlight and the sapful earth What god the simples of thy spirit drew? A goddess rose from the green waves, and threw Her arms about a king, to give thee birth; A centaur, patron of thy boyish mirth, Over the meadows in thy footsteps flew. Now Thessaly forgets thee, and the deep Thy keeled bark furrowed answers not thy prayer; But far away new generations keep Thy laurels fresh; where branching Isis hems The lawns of Oxford round about, or where Enchanted Eton sits by pleasant Thames. III I gaze on thee as Phidias of old Or Polyclitus gazed, when first he saw These hard and shining limbs, without a flaw, And cast his wonder in heroic mould. Unhappy me who only may behold, Nor make immutable and fix in awe A fair immortal form no worm shall gnaw, A tempered mind whose faith was never told! The godlike mien, the lion’s lock and eye, The well-knit sinew, utter a brave heart Better than many words that part by part Spell in strange symbols what serene and whole In nature lives, nor can in marble die. The perfect body itself the soul.
“The fact that we are black is our ultimate reality.” —Ron Karenga    And several strengths from drowsiness campaigned but spoke in Single Sermon on the warpland. And went about the warpland saying No. “My people, black and black, revile the River. Say that the River turns, and turn the River. Say that our Something in doublepod contains seeds for the coming hell and health together. Prepare to meet (sisters, brothers) the brash and terrible weather; the pains; the bruising; the collapse of bestials, idols. But then oh then!—the stuffing of the hulls! the seasoning of the perilously sweet! the health! The heralding of the clear obscure! Build now your Church, my brothers, sisters. Build never with brick or Corten nor with granite. Build with lithe love. With love like lion-eyes. with love like morningrise. with love like black, our black— luminously indiscreet; complete; continuous.”
Yes, nonsense is a treasure! I love it from my heart; The only earthly pleasure That never will depart. But, as for stupid reason, That stalking, ten-foot rule, She’s always out of season, A tedious, testy fool. She’s like a walking steeple, With a clock for face and eyes, Still bawling to all people, Time bids us to be wise. While nonsense on the spire A weathercock you’ll find, Than reason soaring higher, And changing with the wind. The clock too oft deceives, Says what it cannot prove; While every one believes The vane that turns above. Reason oft speaks unbidden, And chides us to our face; For which she should be chidden, And taught to know her place. While nonsense smiles and chatters, And says such charming things, Like youthful hope she flatters; And like a syren sings. Her charm’s from fancy borrowed, For she is fancy’s pet; Her name is on her forehead, In rainbow colors set. Then, nonsense let us cherish, Far, far from reason’s light; Lest in her light she perish, And vanish from our sight.
When children play the livelong day, Like birds and butterflies; As free and gay, sport life away, And know not care nor sighs: Then earth and air seem fresh and fair, All peace below, above: Life’s flowers are there, and everywhere Is innocence and love. When children pray with fear all day, A blight must be at hand: Then joys decay, and birds of prey Are hovering o’er the land: When young hearts weep as they go to sleep, Then all the world seems sad: The flesh must creep, and woes are deep When children are not glad.
‘Oh! sister, he is so swift and tall, Though I want the ride, he will spoil it all, For, when he sets out, he will let me fall, And give me a bump, I know! Mamma, what was it I heard you say, About the world’s hobbies, the other day, How some would get on and gallop away, To end with an overthrow?’ ‘I said, little prattler, the world was a race, That many would mount with a smile on the face, And ride to their ruin, or fall in disgrace: That him, who was deaf to fear, And did not look our for a rein or a guide, His courser might cast on the highway side, In the mud, rocks and brambles, to end his ride, Perchance with a sight and a tear!’ ‘Oh! sister, sister! I fear to try; For Brutus’s back is so live and high! It creeps at my touch – and he winks his eye— I’m sure he is going to jump! Come! dear mother, tell us some more About the world’s ride, as you did before, Who helped it up – and all how it bore The fall, and got over the bump!’
A tulip, just opened, had offered to hold A butterfly, gaudy and gay; And, rocked in a cradle of crimson and gold, The careless young slumberer lay. For the butterfly slept, as such thoughtless ones will, At ease, and reclining on flowers, If ever they study, ’t is how they may kill The best of their mid-summer hours. And the butterfly dreamed, as is often the case With indolent lovers of change, Who, keeping the body at ease in its place, Give fancy permission to range. He dreamed that he saw, what he could but despise, The swarm from a neighbouring hive; Which, having come out for their winter supplies, Had made the whole garden alive. He looked with disgust, as the proud often do, On the diligent movements of those, Who, keeping both present and future in view, Improve every hour as it goes. As the brisk little alchymists passed to and fro, With anger the butterfly swelled; And called them mechanics – a rabble too low To come near the station he held. ‘Away from my presence!’ said he, in his sleep, ‘Ye humbled plebeians! nor dare Come here with your colorless winglets to sweep The king of this brilliant parterre!’ He thought, at these words, that together they flew, And, facing about, made a stand; And then, to a terrible army they grew, And fenced him on every hand. Like hosts of huge giants, his numberless foes Seemed spreading to measureless size: Their wings with a mighty expansion arose, And stretched like a veil o’er the skies. Their eyes seemed like little volcanoes, for fire,— Their hum, to a cannon-peal grown,— Farina to bullets was rolled in their ire, And, he thought, hurled at him and his throne. He tried to cry quarter! his voice would not sound, His head ached – his throne reeled and fell; His enemy cheered, as he came to the ground, And cried, ‘King Papilio, farewell!’ His fall chased the vision – the sleeper awoke, The wonderful dream to expound; The lightning’s bright flash from the thunder-cloud broke, And hail-stones were rattling around. He’d slumbered so long, that now, over his head, The tempest’s artillery rolled; The tulip was shattered – the whirl-blast had fled, And borne off its crimson and gold. ’T is said, for the fall and the pelting, combined With suppressed ebullitions of pride, This vain son of summer no balsam could find, But he crept under covert and died.
And now, Mistress Mummy, since thus you’ve been found By the world, that has long done without you, In your snug little hiding-place far under ground— Be pleased to speak out, as we gather around, And let us hear something about you! By the style of your dress you are not Madam Eve— You of course had a father and mother; No more of your line have we power to conceive, As you furnish us nothing by which to believe You had husband, child, sister, or brother. We know you have lived, though we cannot tell when, And that too by eating and drinking, To judge by your teeth, and the lips you had then And we see you are one of the children of men, Though long from their looks you’ve been shrinking. Who was it that made you a cavern so deep, Refused your poor head a last pillow, And bad you sit still when you’d sunken to sleep, And they’d bound you and muffled you up in a heap Of clothes made of hempen and willow? Say, whose was the ear that could hear with delight The musical trinket found nigh you? And who had the eye that was pleased with the sight Of this form (whose queer face might be brown, red, or white,) Trick’d out in the jewels kept by you?
Death found strange beauty on that cherub brow, And dash’d it out. – There was a tint of rose O’er cheek and lip; – he touch’d the veins with ice, And the rose faded. – Forth from those blue eyes There spake a wistful tenderness, – a doubt Whether to grieve or sleep, which Innocence Alone can wear. – With ruthless haste he bound The silken fringes of their curtaining lids Forever. – There had been a murmuring sound With which the babe would claim its mother’s ear, Charming her even to tears. – The spoiler set His seal of silence. – But there beam’d a smile, So fix’d and holy from that marble brow, –Death gazed and left it there; – he dared not steal The signet-ring of Heaven.
‘How can the red men be forgotten, while so many of our states and territories, bays, lakes, and rivers, are indelibly stamped by names of their giving?’ Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave, That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That ’mid the forests where they roamed There rings no hunter shout, But their name is on your waters, Ye may not wash it out. ’Tis where Ontario’s billow Like Ocean’s surge is curled, Where strong Niagara’s thunders wake The echo of the world. Where red Missouri bringeth Rich tribute from the west, And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps On green Virginia’s breast. Ye say their cone-like cabins, That clustered o’er the vale, Have fled away like withered leaves Before the autumn gale, But their memory liveth on your hills, Their baptism on your shore, Your everlasting rivers speak Their dialect of yore. Old Massachusetts wears it, Within her lordly crown, And broad Ohio bears it, Amid his young renown; Connecticut hath wreathed it Where her quiet foliage waves, And bold Kentucky breathed it hoarse Through all her ancient caves. Wachuset hides its lingering voice Within his rocky heart, And Alleghany graves its tone Throughout his lofty chart; Monadnock on his forehead hoar Doth seal the sacred trust, Your mountains build their monument, Though ye destroy their dust. Ye call these red-browned brethren The insects of an hour, Crushed like the noteless worm amid The regions of their power; Ye drive them from their father’s lands, Ye break of faith the seal, But can ye from the court of Heaven Exclude their last appeal? Ye see their unresisting tribes, With toilsome step and slow, On through the trackless desert pass A caravan of woe; Think ye the Eternal’s ear is deaf? His sleepless vision dim? Think ye the soul’s blood may not cry From that far land to him?
Morn on her rosy couch awoke, Enchantment led the hour, And mirth and music drank the dews That freshen’d Beauty’s flower, Then from her bower of deep delight, I heard a young girl sing, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’ The Sun in noon-day heat rose high, And on the heaving breast, I saw a weary pilgrim toil Unpitied and unblest, Yet still in trembling measures flow’d Forth from a broken string, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’ ’Twas night, and Death the curtains drew, ’Mid agony severe, While there a willing spirit went Home to a glorious sphere, Yet still it sigh’d, even when was spread The waiting Angel’s wing, ‘Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.’
An axe rang sharply ’mid those forest shades Which from creation toward the skies had tower’d In unshorn beauty. There, with vigorous arm Wrought a bold emigrant, and by his side His little son, with question and response, Beguiled the toil. ‘Boy, thou hast never seen Such glorious trees. Hark, when their giant trunks Fall, how the firm earth groans. Rememberest thou The mighty river, on whose breast we sail’d, So many days, on toward the setting sun? Our own Connecticut, compar’d to that, Was but a creeping stream.’ ‘Father, the brook That by our door went singing, where I launch’d My tiny boat, with my young playmates round, When school was o’er, is dearer far to me, Than all these bold, broad waters. To my eye They are as strangers. And those little trees My mother nutur’d in the garden bound, Of our first home, from whence the fragrant peach Hung in its ripening gold, were fairer sure, Than this dark forest, shutting out the day.’ —‘What, ho! – my little girl,’ and with light stepA fairy creature hasted toward her sire, And setting down the basket that contain’d His noon-repast, look’d upward to his face With sweet, confiding smile. ‘See, dearest, see, That bright-wing’d paroquet, and hear the song Of yon gay red-bird, echoing through the trees, Making rich music. Didst thou ever hear, In far New England, such a mellow tone?’ —‘I had a robin that did take the crumbs Each night and morning, and his chirping voice Still made me joyful, as I went to tend My snow-drops. I was always laughing then In that first home. I should be happier now Methinks, if I could find among these dells The same fresh violets.’ Slow night drew on, And round the rude hut of the Emigrant The wrathful spirit of the rising storm Spake bitter things. His weary children slept, And he, with head declin’d, sat listening long To the swoln waters of the Illinois, Dashing against their shores. Starting he spake,—‘Wife! did I see thee brush away a tear? ’Twas even so. Thy heard was with the halls Of thy nativity. Their sparkling lights, Carpets, and sofas, and admiring guests, Befit thee better than these rugged walls Of shapeless logs, and this lone, hermit home.’ ‘No – no. All was so still around, methought Upon mine ear that echoes hymn did steal, Which ’mid the Church where erst we paid our vows, So tuneful peal’d. But tenderly thy voice Dissolv’d the illusion.’ And the gentle smile Lighting her brow, the fond caress that sooth’d Her waking infant, reassur’d his soul That wheresoe’er our best affections dwell, And strike a healthful root, is happiness. Content, and placid, to his rest he sank, But dreams, those wild magicians, that do play Such pranks when reason slumbers, tireless wrought Their will with him. Up rose the thronging mart Of his own native city, – roof and spire, All glittering bright, in fancy’s frost-work ray. The steed his boyhood nurtur’d proudly neigh’d, The favorite dog came frisking round his feet, With shrill and joyous bark, – familiar doors Flew open, – greeting hands with his were link’d In friendship’s grasp, – he heard the keen debate From congregated haunts, where mind with mind Doth blend and brighten, – and till morning rov’d ’Mid the loved scenery of his native land.
Directions Let some one hold the book, and ask one of the questions. The answers being all numbered, the girl or boy who is questioned chooses a number, and the person who holds the book reads the answer to which that number belongs, aloud. For instance: Question. What is your character? Answer. I choose No. 3 Questioner reads aloud: No. 3. Gentle tempered, sweet and kind, To no angry word inclined.   What Will Be Your Destiny? FORTY-THREE ANSWERS 1. Just as you think you’ve gained great wealth, Something will make you lose your health. 2. Your hair will be white in a single night, From having an unexpected fright. 3. You will enjoy a sweet old age, So kind and pure, so long and sage. 4. You will fall down at eighty-four, And break a dozen ribs or more. 5. You will finish your days with God for your friend: Who would not be glad of so blissful an end? 6. You will be ever absorbed in books, And never give a thought to looks. 7. In peace and plenty you will lie, And in the arms of friendship die. 8. You will have cause for many tears, To cloud the beauty of your years. 9. Ah, is it so? when you are old, you will be very poor, I’m told. 10. In the night-time you will weep, And your painful vigils keep. 11. Nothing dreadful, nothing sad, Comes to you; for this I’m glad. 12. You always will have an excellent table, And full of horses will keep your stable. 13. The Sibyl says you’ll die in Rome, Which for a time will be your home. 14. Your plenty and peace Will never cease. 15. You will suddenly die in the crowded street, If the age of a hundred years you meet. 16. You will ride in your carriage-and-four, And be very kind to the suffering poor. 17. Never murmur, never care, You will be a millionare. 18. Sick at heart, and sick at head, You will wish that you were dead. 19. As the might of God you see, Religious you will ever be. 20. To California you will go To get the shining gold, you know. 21. Brightest pleasures you will see, And happiness your portion be. 22. Love will gild your joyous life, Free from pain and care and strife. 23. Don’t despond, and do not care, You will be a nabob’s heir. 24. To California you will be sent, But will return as poor as you went. 25. A missionary you will be, Far o’er the billows of the sea. 26. It is your destiny to rule, And you will keep a village school. 27. Ball and parties you will find Alone are suited to your mind. 28. Through the vista of the years I see you mourning and in tears. 29. A country life at length you’ll lead, Rejoicing in your ambling steed. 30. Fair in the wild and prairied west, Your tired frame at length you’ll rest. 31. A public singer’s place you’ll take, And a sensation you will make. 32. You’ll only love your native home, From which you will not care to roam. 33. A great pianist, you will gain Bright laurels from the admiring train. 34. A kitchen garden you will keep, And sell fresh vegetables cheap. 35. To higher virtues you will rise, Until you’re ready for the skies. 36. To the city’s crowded street You’ll direct your willing feet. 37. In digging in a worn-out field You’ll see a box,
To a Venetian coin, the first Gazetta For its generic title became debtor.  Whither excursive Fancy tends thy Flight? Like Eastern Caliph masking thee at night, By Vezier memory attended still, Thou pertly pryest in each domicil. Woe! to the Caitiff then who in his cups, Unconscious with sublimity he sups, Shall vow in Bacchanalian truth or fun Thou art not kindred to the glorious sun! I fear thee not, clandestine ambulator! Thou most sophistical and specious traitor To Truth and Reason, those imperial twins Whose Empire with thy Martyrdom begins. What is thy drift in brandishing a flag, Whose motto is a metamorphosed rag! As by those motley streaks of white and jet, I trace that aboriginal Gazette, The British prototype of ’65 From which all modern journals we derive. At first confined to faction’s revelations, Mere politics, or plodding speculations. Now to a semi-cyclopedia risen Which the assembled arts, delight to dizen. Its grand mosaic ground work ever graced With polished gems of miscellaneous taste. Philosophy his portico regains In columns where profoundest science reigns. While in relief a neighboring sphere discloses Clio’s with Nature’s kind exotic roses. A curious melange of mental food In fragments thus promiscuously strewed; Rising Aeronauts, and sinking funds, Fearful phenomena of stars or suns. Men in the stocks, uneasy as old Kent, Others appalled by fluctuating rent. New ministers to preach, and spirit lamps, Foreign intelligence from Courts and Camps Don-Pedro – and a fresh supply of leeches A ball that blackens, and a wash that bleaches, Here, Hymen’s herald to the world declares When Love triumphant at his shrine appears. There, tenderness bereaved, its tribute brings And Hope’s crushed odours on Death’s altar flings.Advertisements of various commodities, And anecdotes of Irish whims and oddities. Bills of mortality, and Board of Health, A fine green turtle – and a miser’s wealth. The prices current – a cheap hasty pudding, Detected fallacies – and falcon-hooding, Arrivals and departures – births and deaths, A dreadful Storm – and artificial wreaths, One fugitive forsakes the Cotton pod, In terror of the Supervisor’s rod. Another dreading critic castigation, Flies from the fields of rich imagination. Thus from discordant interests Genius hurled The elements that form this typic world.
Oft, when my lips I open to rehearse Thy wondrous spell of wisdom, and of power, And that my voice, and thy immortal verse, On listening ears, and hearts, I mingled pour, I shrink dismayed – and awful doth appear The vain presumption of my own weak deed; Thy glorious spirit seems to mine so near, That suddenly I tremble as I read – Thee an invisible auditor I fear: Oh, if it might be so, my master dear! With what beseeching would I pray to thee, To make me equal to my noble task, Succor from thee, how humbly would I ask, Thy worthiest works to utter worthily.
Cover me with your everlasting arms,  Ye guardian giants of this solitude!  From the ill-sight of men, and from the rude, Tumultuous din of yon wild world’s alarms! Oh, knit your mighty limbs around, above,  And close me in for ever! let me dwell  With the wood spirits, in the darkest cell That ever with your verdant locks ye wove.  The air is full of countless voices, joined In one eternal hymn; the whispering wind, The shuddering leaves, the hidden water springs, The work-song of the bees, whose honeyed wings Hang in the golden tresses of the lime, Or buried lie in purple beds of thyme.
Better trust all, and be deceived, And weep that trust, and that deceiving; Than doubt one heart, that, if believed, Had blessed one’s life with true believing. Oh, in this mocking world, too fast The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth! Better be cheated to the last, Than lose the blessèd hope of truth.
Sunday, 12 May 1833 The clouds are marshalling across the sky, Leaving their deepest tints upon yon range Of soul-alluring hills. The breeze comes softly, Laden with tribute that a hundred orchards Now in their fullest blossom send, in thanks For this refreshing shower. The birds pour forth In heightened melody the notes of praise They had suspended while God’s voice was speaking, And his eye flashing down upon his world. I sigh, half-charmed, half-pained. My sense is living, And, taking in this freshened beauty, tells Its pleasure to the mind. The mind replies, And strives to wake the heart in turn, repeating Poetic sentiments from many a record Which other souls have left, when stirred and satisfied By scenes as fair, as fragrant. But the heart Sends back a hollow echo to the call Of outward things, — and its once bright companion, Who erst would have been answered by a stream Of life-fraught treasures, thankful to be summoned, — Can now rouse nothing better than this echo; Unmeaning voice, which mocks their softened accents. Content thee, beautiful world! and hush, still busy mind! My heart hath sealed its fountains. To the things Of Time they shall be oped no more. Too long, Too often were they poured forth: part have sunk Into the desert; part profaned and swollen By bitter waters, mixed by those who feigned They asked them for refreshment, which, turned back, Have broken and o’erflowed their former urns. So when ye talk of pleasure, lonely world, And busy mind, ye ne’er again shall move me To answer ye, though still your calls have power To jar me through, and cause dull aching here. No so the voice which hailed me from the depths Of yon dark-bosomed cloud, now vanishing Before the sun ye greet. It touched my centre, The voice of the Eternal, calling me To feel his other worlds; to feel that if I could deserve a home, I still might find it In other spheres, — and bade me not despair, Though ‘want of harmony’ and ‘aching void’ Are terms invented by the men of this, Which I may not forget. In former times I loved to see the lightnings flash athwart The stooping heavens; I loved to hear the thunder Call to the seas and mountains; for I thought ‘Tis thus man’s flashing fancy doth enkidle The firmament of mind; ‘tis thus his eloquence Calls unto the soul’s depths and heights; and still I defied the creature, nor remembered The Creator in his works. Ah now how different! The proud delight of that keen sympathy Is gone; no longer riding on the wave, But whelmed beneath it: my own plans and works, Or, as the Scriptures phrase it, my ’inventions’ No longer interpose ‘twist me and Heaven. Today, for the first time, I felt the Deity, And uttered prayer on hearing thunder. This Must be thy will, — for finer, higher spirits Have gone through this same process, — yet I think There was religion in that strong delight, Those sounds, those thoughts of power imparted. True, I did not say, ‘He is the Lord thy God,’ But I had feeling of his essence. But ‘’Twas pride by which the angels fell.’ So be it! But O, might I but see a little onward! Father, I cannot be a spirit of power; May I be active as a spirit of love, Since thou hast ta’en me from that path which Nature Seemed to appoint, O, deign to ope another, Where I may walk with thought and hope assured; ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!’ Had I but faith like that which fired Novalis, I too could bear that the heart ‘fall in ashes,’ While the freed spirit rises from beneath them, With heavenward-look, and Phoenix-plumes upsoaring!
There are who separate the eternal light In forms of man and woman, day and night; They cannot bear that God be essence quite. Existence is as deep a verity: Without the dual, where is unity? And the ‘I am’ cannot forbear to be; But from its primal nature forced to frame Mysteries, destinies of various name, Is forced to give what it has taught to claim. Thus love must answer to its own unrest; The bad commands us to expect the best, And hope of its own prospects is the test. And dost thou seek to find the one in two? Only upon the old can build the new; The symbol which you seek is found in you. The heart and mind, the wisdom and the will, The man and woman, must be severed still, And Christ must reconcile the good and ill. There are to whom each symbol is a mask; The life of love is a mysterious task; They want no answer, for they would not ask. A single thought transfuses every form; The sunny day is changed into the storm, For light is dark, hard soft, and cold is warm. One presence fills and floods the whole serene; Nothing can be, nothing has ever been, Except the one truth that creates the scene. Does the heart beat, — that is a seeming only; You cannot be alone, though you are lonely; The All is neutralized in the One only. You ask a faith, — they are content with faith; You ask to have, — but they reply, ‘IT hath.’ There is no end, and there need be no path. The day wears heavily, — why, then, ignore it; Peace is the soul’s desire, — such thoughts restore it; The truth thou art, — it needs not to implore it. The Presence all thy fancies supersedes, All that is done which thou wouldst seek in deeds, The wealth obliterates all seeming needs. Both these are true, and if they are at strife, The mystery bears the one name of Life, That, slowly spelled, will yet compose the strife. The men of old say, ‘Live twelve thousand years, And see the need of all that here appears, And Moxen* shall absorb thy smiles and tears.’ These later men say, ‘Live this little day. Believe that human nature is the way, And know both Son and Father while you pray; And one in two, in three, and none alone, Letting you know even as you are known, Shall make the you and me eternal parts of one.’ To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit Born of an ever-generating root; The other statement I cannot dispute. But say that Love and Life eternal seem, And if eternal ties be but a dream, What is the meaning of that self-same seem? Your nature craves Eternity for Truth; Eternity of Love is prayer of youth; How, without love, would have gone forth your truth? I do not think we are deceived to grow, But that the crudest fancy, slightest show, Covers some separate truth that we may know. In the one Truth, each separate fact is true; Eternally in one I many view, And destinies through destiny pursue. This is my tendency; but can I say That this my thought leads the true, only way? I only know it constant leads, and I obey. I only know one prayer — ‘Give me the truth, Give me that colored whiteness, ancient youth, Complex and simple, seen in joy and truth. Let me not by vain wishes bar my claim, Nor soothe my hunger by an empty name, Nor crucify the Son of man by hasty blame. But in the earth and fire, water and air, Live earnestly by turns without despair, Nor seek a home till home be every where!’
It is her right, to bind with warmest ties, The lordly spirit of aspiring man, Making his home an earthly paradise, Rich in all joys allotted to life’s span; Twining around each fibre of his heart, With all the gentle influence of love’s might, Seeking no joy wherein he has no part – This is undoubtedly – a woman’s right! It is her right to teach the infant mind, Training it ever upward in its course, To root out evil passions that would bind The upward current of his reason’s force; To lead the erring spirit gently back, When it has sunk in gloom of deepest night; To point the shining path of virtue’s track, And urge him forward. This is woman’s right. It is her right to soothe the couch of pain; There her pure mission upon earth to prove, To calm with gentle care the frenzied brain, And keep her vigil there of holiest love; To watch untiring by the lonely bed, Through the bright day, and in the solemn night, ’Til health ensues, or the loved form is laid To rest for ever. This is woman’s right. She is a flower that blossoms best, unseen, Sheltered within the precincts of her home; There, should no dark’ning storm-cloud intervene, There, the loud-strife of worldlings never come. Let her not scorn to act a woman’s part, Nor strive to cope with manhood in its might, But lay this maxim closely to her heart – That that which God ordains is surely right.
Outside the Party Thick throng the snow-flakes, the evening is dreary, Glad rings the music in yonder gay hall; On her who listens here, friendless and weary, Heavier chill than the winter’s doth fall. At yon clear window, light-opened before me, Glances the face I have worshipped so well: There’s the fine gentleman, grand in his glory; There, the fair smile by whose sweetness I fell. This is akin to him, shunned and forsaken, That at my bosom sobs low, without bread; Had not such pleading my marble heart shaken, I had been quiet, long since, with the dead. Oh! Could I enter there, ghastly and squalid, Stand in men’s eyes with my spirit o’erborne, Show them where roses bloomed, crushed now and pallid, What he found innocent, leaving forlorn,— How the fair ladies would fail from their dances, Trembling, aghast at my horrible tale! How would he shrink from my words and my glances! How would they shrink from him, swooning and pale! This is the hair that was soft to enchain him; Snakelike, it snarls on my beautiless brow: These are the hands that were fond to detain him With a sense-magic then, powerless now! No: could I come, like a ghost, to affright him, How should that heal my wound, silence my pain? Had I the wrath of God’s lightning to smite him, That could not bring me my lost peace again. Ne’er let him grieve while good fortunes betide him, Ne’er count again the poor game lost of old; When he comes forth, with his young bride beside him, Here shall they find us both, dead in the cold.
Street Yarn Roses caged in windows, heighten  Your faint blooms today; Silks and sheeny satins, brighten;  He has passed this way! Could ye keep his fleeting presence  Gone beyond recall, But a little of his essence,  I would have you all. Arabesque so quaint and shady,  That mightst catch his eye To adorn a stately lady  Ere her hour went by, Canst assure me that his glancing  Rested on they fold? Did that set your purples dancing?  Wake the sleepy gold? Ye neglected apple-venders  Mouldering in the street, Did he curse between your tenders,  Spurning with his feet? Then must I an alms deliver  For his graceless pride; Could I buy his sins forever,  I’d not be denied. Paying patiently his ransom  Never conscience-pricked; Cheating Justice of her handsome  Heartless derelict. Did he view thee, ancient steeple,  With thy weird clock-face, Frowning down on sinful people  Passing out of grace? Nay, respond not to my question  With thy prate of time: Things to which my soul must hasten  Lie beyond thy chime. With no circumstance to screen us,  We must meet again: I shall bid God judge between us,  Answering Amen.
I will build a house of rest, Square the corners every one: At each angle on his breast Shall a cherub take the sun; Rising, risen, sinking, down, Weaving day’s unequal crown. In the chambers, light as air, Shall responsive footsteps fall: Brother, sister, art thou there? Hush! we need not jar nor call; Need not turn to seek the face Shut in rapture’s hiding-place. Heavy load and mocking care Shall from back and bosom part; Thought shall reach the thrill of prayer, Patience plan the dome of art. None shall praise or merit claim, Not a joy be called by name. With a free, unmeasured tread Shall we pace the cloisters through: Rest, enfranchised, like the Dead; Rest till Love be born anew. Weary Thought shall take his time, Free of task-work, loosed from rhyme. No reproof shall grieve or chill; Every sin doth stand confest; None need murmur, ‘This was ill’: Therefore do they grant us rest; Contemplation making whole Every ruin of the soul. Pictures shall as softly look As in distance shows delight; Slowly shall each saintly book Turn its pages in our sight; Not the study’s wealth confuse, Urging zeal to pale abuse. Children through the windows peep, Not reproachful, though our own; Hushed the parent passion deep, And the household’s eager tone. One above, divine and true, Makes us children like to you. Measured bread shall build us up At the hospitable board; In Contentment’s golden cup Is the guileless liquor poured. May the beggar pledge the king In that spirit gathering, Oh! my house is far away; Yet it sometimes shuts me in. Imperfection mars each day While the perfect works begin. In the house of labor best Can I build the house of rest.
I sit in my sorrow a-weary, alone; I have nothing sweet to hope or remember, For the spring o’ th’ year and of life has flown; ’Tis the wildest night o’ the wild December, And dark in my spirit and dark in my chamber. I sit and list to the steps in the street, Going and coming, and coming and going, And the winds at my shutter they blow and beat; ’Tis the middle of night and the clouds are snowing; And the winds are bitterly beating and blowing. I list to the steps as they come and go, And list to the winds that are beating and blowing, And my heart sinks down so low, so low; No step is stayed from me by the snowing, Nor stayed by the wind so bitterly blowing. I think of the ships that are out at sea, Of the wheels in th’ cold, black waters turning; Not one of the ships beareth news to me, And my head is sick, and my heart is yearning, As I think of the wheels in the black waters turning. Of the mother I think, by her sick baby’s bed, Away in her cabin as lonesome and dreary, And little and low as the flax-breaker’s shed; Of her patience so sweet, and her silence so weary, With cries of the hungry wolf hid in the prairie. I think of all things in the world that are sad; Of children in homesick and comfortless places; Of prisons, of dungeons, of men that are mad; Of wicked, unwomanly light in the faces Of women that fortune has wronged with disgraces. I think of a dear little sun-lighted head, That came where no hand of us all could deliver; And crazed with the cruelest pain went to bed Where the sheets were the foam-fretted waves of the river; Poor darling! may God in his mercy forgive her. The footsteps grow faint and more faint in the snow; I put back the curtain in very despairing; The masts creak and groan as th’ winds come and go; And the light in the light-house all weirdly is flaring; But what glory is this, in the gloom of despairing! I see at the window just over the street, A maid in the lamplight her love-letter reading. Her red mouth is smiling, her news is so sweet; And the heart in my bosom is cured of its bleeding, As I look on the maiden her love-letter reading. She has finished the letter, and folding it, kisses, And hides it — a secret too sacred to know; And now in the hearth-light she softly undresses: A vision of grace in the roseate glow, I see her unbinding the braids of her tresses. And now as she stoops to the ribbon that fastens Her slipper, they tumble o’er shoulder and face; And now, as she patters in bare feet, she hastens To gather them up in a fillet of lace; And now she is gone, but in fancy I trace The lavendered linen updrawn, the round arm Half sunk in the counterpane’s broidered roses, Revealing the exquisite outline of form; A willowy wonder of grace that reposes Beneath the white counterpane, fleecy with roses. I see the small hand lying over the heart, Where the passionate dreams are so sweet in their sally; The fair little fingers they tremble and part, As part to th’ warm waves the leaves of the lily, And they play with her hand like the waves with the lily. In white fleecy flowers, the queen o’ the flowers! What to her is the world with its bad, bitter weather? Wide she opens her arms — ah, her world is not ours! And now she has closed them and clasped them together — What to her is our world, with its clouds and rough weather? Hark! midnight! the winds and the snows blow and beat; I drop down the curtain and say to my sorrow, Thank God for the window just over the street; Thank God there is always a light whence to borrow When darkness is darkest, and sorrow most sorrow.
‘Be not among wine-bibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh; for the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty; and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.’ Proverbs, 23: 20, 21  I’ll tell you two fortunes, my fine little lad, For you to accept or refuse. The one of them good, and the other one bad; Now hear them, and say which you choose! I see by my gift, within reach of your hand, A fortune right fair to behold; A house and a hundred good acres of land, With harvest fields yellow as gold. I see a great orchard, the boughs hanging down With apples of russet and red; I see droves of cattle, some white and brown, But all of them sleek and well-fed. I see doves and swallows about the barn doors, See the fanning-mill whirling so fast, See men that are threshing the wheat on the floors; And now the bright picture is past! And I see, rising dismally up in the place Of the beautiful house and the land, A man with a fire-red nose on his face, And a little brown jug in his hand! Oh! if you beheld him, my lad, you would wish That he were less wretched to see; For his boot-toes, they gape like the mouth of a fish, And his trousers are out at the knee! In walking he staggers, now this way, now that, And his eyes they stand out like a bug’s, And he wears an old coat and a battered-in hat, And I think that the fault is the jug’s! For our text says the drunkard shall come to be poor, And drowsiness clothes men with rags; And he doesn’t look much like a man, I am sure, Who has honest hard cash in his bags. Now which will you choose? to be thrifty and snug, And to be right side up with your dish; Or to go with your eyes like the eyes of a bug, And your shoes like the mouth of a fish!
Let me die on the prairie! and o’er my rude grave, In the soft breeze of summer the tall grass shall wave; I would breathe my last sigh as the bright hues of even Are melting away in the blue arch of Heaven. Let me die on the prairie! unwept and unknown, I would pass from this fair Earth forgotten, alone;—Yet no! – there are hearts I have learned to revere, And methinks there is bliss in affection’s warm tear. Oh, speak not to me of the green cypress shade; I would sleep where the bones of the Indian are laid, And the deer will bound o’er me with step light and free, And the carol of birds will my requiem be. Let me die on the prairie! I have wished for it long; There floats in wild numbers the bold hunter’s song; ’Tis the spot of all others the dearest to me, And how sweet in its bosom my slumber will be!
Oh! could I see as thou hast seen, The garden of the west, When Spring in all her loveliness Fair nature’s face has dressed. The rolling prairie, vast and wild! It hath a charm for me—Its tall grass waving to the breeze, Like billows on the sea. Say, hast thou chased the bounding deer When smiled the rosy morn? Or hast thou listened to the sound Of the merry hunter’s horn? Once could the noble red-man call That prairie wild his home;— His cabin now in ruins laid, He must an exile roam, And thou at twilight’s pensive hour, Perchance hast seen him weep;—Tread lightly o’er the hallowed spot, For there his kindred sleep. I envy not the opulent His proud and lordly dome; Far happier is the pioneer Who seeks a prairie home;— Where no discordant notes are heard, But all is harmony; Where soars aloft unfettered thought, And the heart beats light and free.
Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine! Heir of salvation, purchase of God, Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood! Chorus: This is my story, this is my song, Praising my Saviour all the day long. Perfect submission, perfect delight, Visions of rapture now burst on my sight; Angels descending bring from above Echoes of mercy, whispers of love. Perfect submission, all is at rest, I in my Saviour am happy and blest,— Watching and waiting, looking above, Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.
I should be happy with my lot: A wife and mother – is it not Enough for me to be content? What other blessing could be sent? A quiet house, and homely ways, That make each day like other days; I only see Time’s shadow now Darken the hair on baby’s brow! No world’s work ever comes to me, No beggar brings his misery; I have no power, no healing art With bruised soul or broken heart. I read the poets of the age, ’Tis lotus-eating in a cage; I study Art, but Art is dead To one who clamors to be fed With milk from Nature’s rugged breast, Who longs for Labor’s lusty rest. O foolish wish! I still should pine If any other lot were mine.
Husband, today could you and I behold The sun that brought us to our bridal morn Rising so splendid in the winter sky (We though fair spring returned), when we were wed; Could the shades vanish from these fifteen years, Which stand like columns guarding the approach To that great temple of the double soul That is as one – would you turn back, my dear, And, for the sake of Love’s mysterious dream, As old as Adam and as sweet as Eve, Take me, as I took you, and once more go Towards that goal which none of us have reached? Contesting battles which but prove a loss, The victor vanquished by the wounded one; Teaching each other sacrifice of self, True immolation to the marriage bond; Learning the joys of birth, the woe of death, Leaving in chaos all the hopes of life—Heart-broken, yet with courage pressing on For fame and fortune, artists needing both? Or, would you rather – I will acquiesce— Since we must choose what is, and are grown gray, Stay in life’s desert, watch our setting sun, Calm as those statues in Egyptian sands, Hand clasping hand, with patience and with peace, Wait for a future which contains no past?
One morn I left him in his bed; A moment after some one said, ‘Your child is dying – he is dead.’ We made him ready for his rest, Flowers in his hair, and on his breast His little hands together prest. We sailed by night across the sea; So, floating from the world were we, Apart from sympathy, we Three. The wild sea moaned, the black clouds spread Moving shadows on its bed, But one of us lay midship dead. I saw his coffin sliding down The yellow sand in yonder town, Where I put on my sorrow’s crown. And we returned; in this drear place Never to see him face to face, I thrust aside the living race. Mothers, who mourn with me today, Oh, understand me, when I say, I cannot weep, I cannot pray; I gaze upon a hidden store, His books, his toys, the clothes he wore, And cry, ‘Once more, to me, once more!’ Then take, from me, this simple verse, That you may know what I rehearse— A grief – your and my Universe!
Now like the Lady of Shalott, I dwell within an empty room, And through the day and through the night I sit before an ancient loom. And like the Lady of Shalott I look into a mirror wide, Where shadows come, and shadows go, And ply my shuttle as they glide. Not as she wove the yellow wool, Ulysses’ wife, Penelope; By day a queen among her maids, But in the night a woman, she, Who, creeping from her lonely couch, Unraveled all the slender woof; Or, with a torch, she climbed the towers, To fire the fagots on the roof! But weaving with a steady hand The shadows, whether false or true, I put aside a doubt which asks ‘Among these phantoms what are you?’ For not with altar, tomb, or urn, Or long-haired Greek with hollow shield, Or dark-prowed ship with banks of oars, Or banquet in the tented field; Or Norman knight in armor clad, Waiting a foe where four roads meet; Or hawk and hound in bosky dell, Where dame and page in secret greet; Or rose and lily, bud and flower, My web is broidered. Nothing bright Is woven here: the shadows grow Still darker in the mirror’s light! And as my web grows darker too, Accursed seems this empty room; For still I must forever weave These phantoms by this ancient loom.
The last days of the summer: bright and clear Shines the warm sun down on the quiet land, Where corn-fields, thick and heavy in the ear, Are slowly ripening for the laborer’s hand; Seed-time and harvest — since the bow was set, Not vainly has man hoped your coming yet! To the quick rush of sickles, joyously The reapers in the yellow wheat-fields sung, And bound the pale sheaves of the ripened rye, When the first tassels of the maize were hung; That precious seed into the furrow cast Earliest in spring-time, crowns the harvest last. Ever, when summer’s sun burns faint and dim, And rare and few the pleasant days are given, When the sweet praise of our thankgiving hymn Makes beautiful music in the ear of Heaven, I think of other harvests whence the sound Of singing comes not as the sheaves are bound. Not where the rice-fields whiten in the sun, And the warm South casts down her yellow fruit, Shout they the labors of the autumn done — For there Oppression casts her deadly root, And they, who sow and gather in that clime Share not the treasures of the harvest-time. God of the seasons! thou who didst ordain Bread for the eater who shall plant the soil, How have they heard thee, who have forged the chain And built the dungeon for the sons of toil? Burdening their hearts, not with the voice of prayer, But the dull cries of almost dumb despair. They who would see that growth of wickedness Planted where now the peaceful prairie waves, And make the green paths of our wilderness Red with the torn and bleeding feet of slaves — Forbid it, Heaven! and let the sharp axe be Laid at the root of that most poison tree! Let us behold its deadly leaves begin A fainter shadow o’er the world to cast, And the long day that nursed its growth of sin Wane to a sunset that shall be its last; So that the day-star, rising from the sea, Shall light a land whose children will be free!
‘This is the key which was given by the angel Michael to Pali, and by Pali to Moses. If “thou canst read it, then shalt thou understand the words of men, … the whistling of birds, the language of date-trees, the unity of hearts, ... nay, even the thoughts of the rains.”’ Gleanings after the Talmud  Ah! could I read Schemhammphorasch, The wondrous keynote of the world, What voices could I always hear From tempests, with their black wings furled, That on the sudden west winds steer, And, muttering low their awful song, Or pealing through the mountains strong, Robe all the skies with sheeted fire; That pour from heaven a rushing river, That bid the hill-tops bow and quiver, Mad with some fierce and wild desire. The dreadful anthem of the wind, That sweeps through forests as a plow, That lays the greensward heaped below, Would chant its meaning to my mind, And I could tell the tale to man In words that burn and glow with splendor; Then should the whole wide sky surrender Its hidden voice, its wondrous plan, Asleep since earliest time began; And all my soul, most like a blaze That burns the branches whence it springeth, Should flame to heaven in mightier lays Than any mortal poet singeth, If I could read Schemhammphorasch. If I could read Schemhammphorasch, When little birds are softly singing, Or twitter from their greenwood nests, Where safe and still the mother rests; Or else, upon the glad wind springing, Send up their tender morning song; Then should I know their secret blisses, The thrill of life and love they feel When summer’s sun their bright heads kisses, Or summer’s winds about them steal. Or, listening to the early blossoms That are so fleeting and so fair, With perfume sighing from their bosoms Its incense on the gracious air, I think that I should hear a prayer So sweet, so patient, and so lowly, That mortal words most pure and rare Would scarce unveil its meaning holy. From forests whence the murmurous leaves Breathe their content in rustling quiver, Or droop when any rain-wind grieves, Or where some broad and brimming river O’erflowing to the mighty sea, Sings the proud joy of destiny, The glad acclaim of life and breath; The courage of confronted death; Ah! what a rapturous, glorious song Should seize with bliss this earthly throng, If I could read Schemhammphorasch! If I could read Schemhammphorasch, Then should I know the souls of men, Too deep for any other ken; I could translate the silent speech Of glittering eye and knotted brow, Though still the wily tongue might teach A different script with voice and vow. The blood that runs in traitorous veins; The breath that gasps with hope or fear; The stifled sigh, the hidden tear; The death-pang of immortal pains, That hide their mortal agony, Would have their own low voice for me; Their tale of hate and misery, Their sob of passion and despair, Their sacred love, their frantic prayer. My soul would be the listening priest To hear confession far and near, And woe and want from first to least Would shriek its utterance in my ear. Ah, could I bear to live and hear These cries that heaven itself might flee, These terrors heaven alone may see, If I could read Schemhammphorasch? If I could read Schemhammphorasch, My brain would burn with such a fire As lights the awful cherubim; My heart would burst with woe and ire, My flesh would shrivel and expire; Yea! God himself grow far and dim. I cannot hold the boundless sea In one small chalice lent to me; I cannot grasp the starry sky In one weak hand, and bid it lie Where I would have a canopy; I cannot hate and love together; I cannot poise the heavy world, Or hear its hiss through chaos hurled, Or stay the falling of a feather. No, not if Michael came once more, Standing upon the sea and shore, And held his right hand down to me, That I that awful word might see, And learn to read its lesson dread. My soul in dust would bow her head, Mine eyes would close, my lips would say, ‘Oh, Master! take thy gift away: Leave me to live my little day In peace and trust while yet I may. For could I live, or love, or pray, If I could read Schemhammphorasch?’
I do not know if, climbing some steep hill, Through fragrant wooded pass, this glimpse I bought, Or whether in some mid-day I was caught To upper air, where visions of God’s will In pictures to our quickened sense fulfil His word. But this I saw. A path I sought Through wall of rock. No human fingers wrought The golden gates which opened sudden, still, And wide. My fear was hushed by my delight. Surpassing fair the lands; my path lay plain; Alas, so spell-bound, feasting on the sight, I paused, that I but reached the threshold bright, When, swinging swift, the golden gates again Were rocky wall, by which I wept in vain.
The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose Trying to warm his copper toes; He lost his money and spoiled his will By signing his name with an icicle-quill; He went bare-headed, and held his breath, And frightened his grandame most to death; He loaded a shovel, and tried to shoot, And killed the calf in the leg of his boot; He melted a snow-bird, and formed the habit Of dancing jigs with a sad Welsh rabbit; He lived on taffy, and taxed the town; And read his newspaper upside down; Then he sighed, and hung his hat on a feather, And bade the townspeople come together; But the worst of it all was, nobody knew What the Mayor of Scuttleton next would do.
The moon came late to a lonesome bog, And there sat Goggleky Gluck, the frog. ‘My stars!’ she cried, and veiled her face, ‘What very grand people they have in this place!’
Oh! Shepherd John is good and kind, Oh! Shepherd John is brave; He loves the weakest of his flock, His arm is quick to save. But Shepherd John to little John Says: ‘Learn, my laddie, learn! In grassy nooks still read your books, And aye for knowledge burn. Read while you tend the grazing flock: Had I but loved my book, I’d not be still in shepherd’s frock, Nor bearing shepherd’s crook. The world is wide, the world is fair, There’s muckle work to do. I’ll rest content a shepherd still, But grander fields for you!’
Early to bed and early to rise: If that would make me wealthy and wise I’d rise at daybreak, cold or hot, And go back to bed at once. Why not?
Give me something to eat, Good people, I pray; I have really not had One mouthful today! I am hungry and cold, And last night I dreamed A scarecrow had caught me— Good land, how I screamed! Of one little children And six ailing wives (No, one wife and six children), Not one of them thrives. So pity my case, Dear people, I pray; I’m honest, and really I’ve come a long way.
‘Mamma! mamma!’ two eaglets cried, ‘To let us fly you’ve never tried. We want to go outside and play; We’ll promise not to go away.’ The mother wisely shook her head: ‘No, no, my dears. Not yet,’ she said. ‘But, mother dear,’ they called again, ‘We want to see those things called men, And all the world so grand and gay, Papa described the other day. And – don’t you know? – he told you then About a little tiny wren, That flew about so brave and bold, When it was scarcely four weeks old?’ But still the mother shook her head; ‘No, no, my dears, not yet,’ she said. ‘Before you see the world below, Far bigger you will have to grow. There’s time enough to look for men; And as for wrens – a wren’s a wren. What if your freedom does come late? An eaglet can afford to wait.’
Methought a sweet sound from the street uprose,— And as I pause, and strive again to hear, ‘St Patrick’s Day’ draws softly to its close, And ‘Jordan’s’ waves flow sweetly to my ear, What though from humble source the chorus floats? Music is music, and I listen still; I have ‘an ear’, — ay, two! — Even jews-harp notes Pass current with me, hear them where I will, A slight Italian boy, with jetty hair Shading dark eyes, grinds out the melody, Pulverized music! — In his garb and air I read of sunnier lands beyond the sea, And, dreaming, wander to a fairer clime, Recalled, too suddenly, by — ‘If you please, a dime!’
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears,— Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,— Take them, and give me my childhood again! I have grown weary of dust and decay,— Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away; Weary of sowing for others to reap;— Rock me to sleep, mother – rock me to sleep! Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue, Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you! Many a summer the grass has grown green, Blossomed and faded, our faces between: Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain, Long I tonight for your presence again. Come from the silence so long and so deep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Over my heart, in the days that are flown, No love like mother-love ever has shone; No other worship abides and endures,— Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours: None like a mother can charm away pain From the sick soul and the world-weary brain. Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold, Fall on your shoulders again as of old; Let it drop over my forehead tonight, Shading my faint eyes away from the light; For with its sunny-edged shadows once more Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore; Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep! Mother, dear mother, the years have been long Since I last listened your lullaby song: Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem Womanhood’s years have been only a dream. Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace, With your light lashes just sweeping my face, Never hereafter to wake or to weep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!
What is a home? A guarded space, Wherein a few, unfairly blest, Shall sit together, face to face, And bask and purr and be at rest? Where cushioned walls rise up between Its inmates and the common air, The common pain, and pad and screen From blows of fate or winds of care? Where Art may blossom strong and free, And Pleasure furl her silken wing, And every laden moment be A precious and peculiar thing? And Past and Future, softly veiled In hiding mists, shall float and lie Forgotten half, and unassailed By either hope or memory? While the luxurious Present weaves Her perfumed spells untried, untrue, Broiders her garments, heaps her sheaves, All for the pleasure of a few? Can it be this, the longed-for thing Which wanderers on the restless foam, Unsheltered beggars, birds on wing, Aspire to, dream of, christen ‘Home’? No. Art may bloom, and peace and bliss; Grief may refrain and Death forget; But if there be no more than this, The soul of home is wanting yet. Dim image from far glory caught, Fair type of fairer things to be, The true home rises in our thought, A beacon set for men to see. Its lamps burn freely in the night, Its fire-glows unchidden shed Their cheering and abounding light On homeless folk uncomforted. Each sweet and secret thing within Gives out a fragrance on the air,— A thankful breath, sent forth to win A little smile from others’ care. The few, they bask in closer heat; The many catch the further ray. Life higher seems, the world more sweet, And hope and Heaven less far away. So the old miracle anew Is wrought on earth and provéd good, And crumbs apportioned for a few, God-Blessed, suffice a multitude.
Proudly swept the rain by the cliffs As on it glided through the trees Still following ever the liko The Ahihi lehua of the vale. Chorus: Farewell to thee, farewell to thee Thou charming one who dwells in shaded bowers One fond embrace ere I depart Until we meet again. Thus sweet memories come back to me Bringing fresh remembrance of the past Dearest one, yes, thou art mine own From thee, true love shall ne’er depart. I have seen and watched thy loveliness, Thou sweet Rose of MaunawiliAnd ’tis there the birds oft love to dwell And sip the honey from thy lips.
Listen, Sanoe Dewy lehua bud Here I am Waiting for your voice. The answer comesI am satisfied Softly, sweetheart You excite my whole being. My body is waiting Waiting there in yearning belief How are we to fulfill The desire of our thoughts? Calling to you, my water lily Budding for the two of us Here close by is a compliment The manu comes to deliver. The Queen is listening The aroma of the scents comes together Mixes and rises upward So similar, so alike.
As if the flow of the watersFrom the triple streams of heavenly showers So the sacred Ao of the eighth heavensWhose flames have scorched the land. Chorus: Should our hearts’ love be restored And our rights be ours once more Then will our sacred beloved shoals of Kane Be the firm foundation of the land. The heavens expand and bestow Her beauteous crownlets free Its life to her people for offerings given And from loyal hearts ascended prayers. Cold words and looks reprove Oh, turn not thus away Give kindly greetings, words of love And a heart which beats within.
O foolish wisdom sought in books! O aimless fret of household tasks! O chains that bind the hand and mind— A fuller life my spirit asks! For there the grand hills, summer-crowned, Slope greenly downward to the seas; One hour of rest upon their breast Were worth a year of days like these. Their cool, soft green to ease the pain Of eyes that ache o’er printed words; This weary noise – the city’s voice, Lulled in the sound of bees and birds. For Eden’s life within me stirs, And scorns the shackles that I wear; The man-life grand – pure soul, strong hand, The limb of steel, the heart of air! And I could kiss, with longing wild, Earth’s dear brown bosom, loved so much, A grass-blade fanned across my hand, Would thrill me like a lover’s touch. The trees would talk with me; the flowers Their hidden meanings each make known— The olden lore revived once more, When man’s and nature’s heart were one! And as the pardoned pair might come Back to the garden God first framed, And hear Him call at even-fall, And answer, ‘Here am I,’ unshamed— So I, from out these toils, wherein The Eden-faith grows stained and dim, Would walk, a child, through nature’s wild, And hear His voice and answer Him.
On Hearing Kelley’s Music to ‘Macbeth’ O melody, what children strange are these From thy most vast, illimitable realm? These sounds that seize upon and overwhelm The soul with shuddering ecstasy! Lo! here The night is, and the deeds that make night fear; Wild winds and waters, and the sough of trees Tossed in the tempest; wail of spirits banned, Wandering, unhoused of clay, in the dim land; The incantation of the Sisters Three, Nameless of deed and name – the mystic chords Weird repetitions of the mystic words; The mad, remorseful terrors of the Thane, And bloody hands – which bloody must remain. Last, the wild march; the battle hand to hand Of clashing arms, in awful harmony, Sublimely grand, and terrible as grand! The clan-cries; the barbaric trumpetry; And the one fateful note, that, throughout all, Leads, follows, calls, compels, and holds in thrall.
I see it as it looked one afternoon In August,— by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown. The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon, A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon. The shining waters with pale currents strewn, The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove, The semi-circle of its dark, green grove. The luminous grasses, and the merry sun In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.
To catch the spirit in its wayward flight Through mazes manifold, what task supreme! For when to floods has grown the quiet stream, Much human skill must aid its rage to fight; And when wild winds invade the solemn night, Seems not man’s vaunted power but a dream? And still more futile, ay, we e’en must deem This quest to tame the soul, and guide aright Its restless wanderings, – to lure it back To shoals of calm. Full many a moan and sigh Attend the strife; till, effort merged in prayer, Oft uttered, clung to – when of strength the lack Seems direst – brings the answer to our cry: A gift from Him who lifts our ev’ry care.
Far, far out lie the white sails all at rest; Like spectral arms they seem to touch and cling Unto the wide horizon. Not a wing Of truant bird glides down the purpling west; No breeze dares to intrude, e’en on a quest To fan a lover’s brow; the waves to sing Have quite forgotten till the deep shall fling A bow across its vibrant chords. Then, lest One moment of the sea’s repose we lose, Nor furnish Fancy with a thousand themes Of unimagined sweetness, let us gaze On this serenity, for as we muse, Lo! all is restless motion: life’s best dreams Give changing moods to even halcyon days.
To those fair isles where crimson sunsets burn, We send a backward glance to gaze on thee, Brave Toussaint! thou was surely born to be A hero; thy proud spirit could but spurn Each outrage on the race. Couldst thou unlearn The lessons taught by instinct? Nay! and we Who share the zeal that would make all men free, Must e’en with pride unto thy life-work turn. Soul-dignity was thine and purest aim; And ah! how sad that thou wast left to mourn In chains ’neath alien skies. On him, shame! shame! That mighty conqueror who dared to claim The right to bind thee. Him we heap with scorn, And noble patriot! guard with love thy name.
If, when I die, I must be buried, let No cemetery engulph me — no lone grot, Where the great palpitating world comes not, Save when, with heart bowed down and eyelids wet, It pays its last sad melancholy debt To some outjourneying pilgrim. May my lot Be rather to lie in some much-used spot, Where human life, with all its noise and fret, Throbs on about me. Let the roll of wheels, With all earth’s sounds of pleasure, commerce, love, And rush of hurrying feet surge o’er my head. Even in my grave I shall be one who feels Close kinship with the pulsing world above; And too deep silence would distress me, dead.
I walk into the bakery next door  To my apartment. They are about  To pull some sort of toast with cheese  From the oven. When I ask: What’s that smell? I am being  A poet, I am asking  What everyone else in the shop  Wanted to ask, but somehow couldn’t;  I am speaking on behalf of two other  Customers who wanted to buy the  Name of it. I ask the woman  Behind the counter for a percentage  Of her sale. Am I flirting?  Am I happy because the days  Are longer? Here’s what  She does: She takes her time  Choosing the slices. “I am picking  Out the good ones,” she tells me. It’s  April 14th. Spring, with five to ten  Degrees to go. Some days, I feel my duty;  Some days, I love my work.
I saw an eagle sweep to the sky— The Godlike! – seeking his place on high, With a strong, and wild, and rapid wing—A dark, and yet a dazzling thing; And his arching neck, his bristling crest, And the dark plumes quivering upon his breast; And his eye, bent up to each beam of light, Like a bright sword flash’d with a sword in fight. I saw him rise o’er the forest trees; I saw his pinion ride the breeze; Beyond the clouds I watched him tower On his path of pride – his flight of power. I watched him wheeling, stern and lone, Where the keenest ray of the sun was thrown; Soaring, circling – bathed in light: Such was that desert eagle’s flight. Suddenly, then, to my straining eye, I saw the strong wing slack on high; Falling, falling to earth once more; The dark breast covered with foam and gore; The dark eyes’ glory dim with pain; Sick to death with a sun-struck brain! Reeling down from that height divine, Eagle of heaven! such fall was thine! Even so we see the sons of light, Up to the day-beam steer their flight; And the wing of genius cleaves the sky, As the clouds rush on when the winds are high: Then comes the hour of sudden dread— Then is the blasting sunlight shed; And the gifted fall in their agony, Sund-struck eagle! to die like thee!
It is too early for white boughs, too late For snows. From out the hedge the wind lets fall A few last flakes, ragged and delicate. Down the stripped roads the maples start their small, Soft, ’wildering fires. Stained are the meadow stalks A rich and deepening red. The willow tree Is woolly. In deserted garden-walks The lean bush crouching hints old royalty, Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose. The days go out with shouting; nights are loud; Wild, warring shapes the wood lifts in the cold; The moon’s a sword of keen, barbaric gold, Plunged to the hilt into a pitch black cloud.
A Colonial Custom Bathsheba came out to the sun, Out to our wallèd cherry-trees; The tears adown her cheek did run, Bathsheba standing in the sun, Telling the bees. My mother had that moment died; Unknowing, sped I to the trees, And plucked Bathsheba’s hand aside; Then caught the name that there she cried Telling the bees. Her look I never can forget, I that held sobbing to her knees; The cherry-boughs above us met; I think I see Bathsheba yet Telling the bees.
I am thy grass, O Lord! I grow up sweet and tall But for a day; beneath Thy sword To lie at evenfall. Yet have I not enough In that brief day of mine? The wind, the bees, the wholesome stuff The sun pours out like wine. Behold, this is my crown; Love will not let me be; Love holds me here; Love cuts me down; And it is well with me. Lord, Love, keep it but so; Thy purpose is full plain; I die that after I may grow As tall, as sweet again.
A Sestina We are the smiling comfortable homes With happy families enthroned therein, Where baby souls are brought to meet the world, Where women end their duties and desires, For which men labor as the goal of life, That people worship now instead of God. Do we not teach the child to worship God? — Whose soul’s young range is bounded by the homes Of those he loves, and where he learns that life Is all constrained to serve the wants therein, Domestic needs and personal desires, — These are the early limits of his world. And are we not the woman’s perfect world, Prescribed by nature and ordained of God, Beyond which she can have no right desires, No need for service other than in homes? For doth she not bring up her young therein? And is not rearing young the end of life? And man? What other need hath he in life Than to go forth and labor in the world, And struggle sore with other men therein? Not to serve other men, nor yet his God, But to maintain these comfortable homes, – The end of all a normal man’s desires. Shall not the soul’s most measureless desires Learn that the very flower and fruit of life Lies all attained in comfortable homes, With which life’s purpose is to dot the world And consummate the utmost will of God, By sitting down to eat and drink therein. Yea, in the processes that work therein — Fulfilment of our natural desires — Surely man finds the proof that mighty God For to maintain and reproduce his life Created him and set him in the world; And this high end is best attained in homes. Are we not homes? And is not all therein? Wring dry the world to meet our wide desires! We crown all life! We are the aim of God!
Fashionable women in luxurious homes, With men to feed them, clothe them, pay their bills, Bow, doff the hat, and fetch the handkerchief; Hostess or guest, and always so supplied With graceful deference and courtesy; Surrounded by their servants, horses, dogs, — These tell us they have all the rights they want. Successful women who have won their way Alone, with strength of their unaided arm, Or helped by friends, or softly climbing up By the sweet aid of ‘woman’s influence’; Successful any way, and caring naught For any other woman’s unsuccess, — These tell us they have all the rights they want. Religious women of the feebler sort, — Not the religion of a righteous world, A free, enlightened, upward-reaching world, But the religion that considers life As something to back out of! — whose ideal Is to renounce, submit, and sacrifice, Counting on being patted on the head And given a high chair when they get to heaven, — These tell us they have all the rights they want. Ignorant women — college-bred sometimes, But ignorant of life’s realities And principles of righteous government, And how the privileges they enjoy Were won with blood and tears by those before — Those they condemn, whose ways they now oppose; Saying, ‘Why not let well enough alone? Our world is very pleasant as it is,’ — These tell us they have all the rights they want. And selfish women, — pigs in petticoats, — Rich, poor, wise, unwise, top or bottom round, But all sublimely innocent of thought, And guiltless of ambition, save the one Deep, voiceless aspiration — to be fed! These have no use for rights or duties more. Duties today are more than they can meet, And law insures their right to clothes and food, — These tell us they have all the rights they want. And, more’s the pity, some good women, too; Good conscientious women, with ideas; Who think — or think they think — that woman’s cause Is best advanced by letting it alone; That she somehow is not a human thing, And not to be helped on by human means, Just added to humanity — an ‘L’ — A wing, a branch, an extra, not mankind, — These tell us they have all the rights they want. And out of these has come a monstrous thing, A strange, down-sucking whirlpool of disgrace, Women uniting against womanhood, And using that great name to hide their sin! Vain are their words as that old king’s command Who set his will against the rising tide. But who shall measure the historic shame Of these poor traitors — traitors are they all — To great Democracy and Womanhood!
She raised her head. With hot and glittering eye, ‘I know,’ she said, ‘that I am going to die. Come here, my daughter, while my mind is clear. Let me make plain to you your duty here; My duty once — I never failed to try— But for some reason I am going to die.’ She raised her head, and, while her eyes rolled wild, Poured these instructions on the gasping child: ‘Begin at once — don’t iron sitting down— Wash your potatoes when the fat is brown— Monday, unless it rains — it always pays To get fall sewing done on the right days— A carpet-sweeper and a little broom— Save dishes — wash the summer dining-room With soda — keep the children out of doors— The starch is out — beeswax on all the floors— If girls are treated like your friends they stay— They stay, and treat you like their friends — the way To make home happy is to keep a jar — And save the prettiest pieces for the star In the middle — blue’s too dark — all silk is best— And don’t forget the corners — when they’re dressed Put them on ice — and always wash the chest Three times a day, the windows every week— We need more flour — the bedroom ceilings leak— It’s better than onion — keep the boys at home— Gardening is good — a load, three loads of loam— They bloom in spring — and smile, smile always, dear— Be brave, keep on — I hope I’ve made it clear.’ She died, as all her mothers died before. Her daughter died in turn, and made one more.
Oh, dear! The Christian virtues will disappear! Nowhere on land or sea Will be room for charity! Nowhere, in field or city, A person to help or pity! Better for them, no doubt, Not to need helping out Of their old miry ditch. But, alas for us, the rich! For we shall lose, you see, Our boasted charity!— Lose all the pride and joy Of giving the poor employ, And money, and food, and love (And making stock thereof!). Our Christian virtues are gone, With nothing to practise on! It don’t hurt them a bit, For they can’t practise it; But it’s our great joy and pride— What virtue have we beside? We believe, as sure as we live, That it is more blessed to give Than to want, and waste, and grieve, And occasionally receive! And here are the people pressing To rob us of our pet blessing! No chance to endow or bedizen A hospital, school or prison, And leave our own proud name To Gratitude and Fame! No chance to do one good deed, To give what we do not need, To leave what we cannot use To those whom we deign to choose! When none want broken meat, How shall our cake be sweet? When none want flannels and coals, How shall we save our souls? Oh, dear! Oh, dear! The Christian virtues will disappear! The poor have their virtues rude,— Meekness and gratitude, Endurance, and respect For us, the world’s elect; Economy, self-denial, Patience in every trial, Self-sacrifice, self-restraint,— Virtues enough for a saint! Virtues enough to bear All this life’s sorrow and care! Virtues by which to rise To a front seat in the skies! How can they turn from this To common earthly bliss,— Mere clothes, and food, and drink, And leisure to read and think, And art, and beauty, and ease,— There is no crown for these! True, if their gratitude Were not for fire and food, They might still learn to bless The Lord for their happiness! And, instead of respect for wealth, Might learn from beauty, and health, And freedom in power and pelf, Each man to respect himself! And, instead of scraping and saving, Might learn from using and having That man’s life should be spent In a grand development! But this is petty and small; These are not virtues at all; They do not look as they should; They don’t do us any good! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear! The Christian virtues will disappear!
To live and not be Thine Own,Like Springtime is when birds are flown; Or liberty in prison bars, Or evening skies without the stars; Like diamonds that are lusterless, Or rest when there’s no weariness; Like lovely flower that have no scent, Or music when the sound is spent.
Dear Letters, Fond Letters, Must I with you part? You are such a source of joy To my lonely heart. Sweet Letters, Dear Letters, What a tell you tell; O, no power on earth can break This strange mystic spell! Dear Letters, Fond Letters, You my secret know—Don’t you tell it, any one— Let it live and grow.
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim, And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim. The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould, Glint through their mildews like large cups of gold. Among the wild rice in the still lagoon, In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering, Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling. Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight, Sail up the silence with the nearing night. And like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil, Steals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale. Hushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep, Thick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep.
An Etching A meadow brown; across the yonder edge A zigzag fence is ambling; here a wedge Of underbush has cleft its course in twain, Till where beyond it staggers up again; The long, grey rails stretch in a broken line Their ragged length of rough, split forest pine, And in their zigzag tottering have reeled In drunken efforts to enclose the field, Which carries on its breast, September born, A patch of rustling, yellow, Indian corn. Beyond its shrivelled tassels, perched upon The topmost rail, sits Joe, the settler’s son, A little semi-savage boy of nine. Now dozing in the warmth of Nature’s wine, His face the sun has tampered with, and wrought, By heated kisses, mischief, and has brought Some vagrant freckles, while from here and there A few wild locks of vagabond brown hair Escape the old straw hat the sun looks through, And blinks to meet his Irish eyes of blue. Barefooted, innocent of coat or vest, His grey checked shirt unbuttoned at his chest, Both hardy hands within their usual nest— His breeches pockets — so, he waits to rest His little fingers, somewhat tired and worn, That all day long were husking Indian corn. His drowsy lids snap at some trivial sound, With lazy yawns he slips towards the ground, Then with an idle whistle lifts his load And shambles home along the country road That stretches on fringed out with stumps and weeds, And finally unto the backwoods leads, Where forests wait with giant trunk and bough The axe of pioneer, the settler’s plough.
Scarred hemlock roots, Oaks in mail, and willow-shoots Spring’s first-knighted; Clinging aspens grouped between, Slender, misty-green, Faintly affrighted: Far hills behind, Somber growth, with sunlight lined, On their edges; Banks hemmed in with maiden-hair, And the straight and fair Phalanx of sedges: Wee wings and eyes, Wild blue gemmy dragon-flies, Fearless rangers; Drowsy turtles in a tribe Diving, with a gibe Muttered at strangers; Wren, bobolink, Robin, at the grassy brink; Great frogs jesting; And the beetle, for no grief Half-across his leaf Sighing and resting; In the keel’s way, Unwithdrawing bream at play, Till from branches Chestnut-blossoms, loosed aloft, Graze them with their soft Full avalanches! This is very odd! Boldly sings the river-god: ‘Pilgrim rowing! From the Hyperborean air Wherefore, and O where Should man be going?’ Slave to a dream, Me no urgings and no theme Can embolden; Now no more the oars swing back, Drip, dip, till black Waters froth golden. Musketaquid! I have loved thee, all unbid, Earliest, longest; Thou hast taught me thine own thrift: Here I sit, and drift Where the wind’s strongest. If, furthermore, There be any pact ashore, I forget it! If, upon a busy day Beauty make delay, Once over, let it! Only, — despite Thee, who wouldst unnerve me quite Like a craven,— Best the current be not so, Heart and I must row Into our haven!
Compassionate eyes had our brave John Brown, And a craggy stern forehead, a militant frown; He, the storm-bow of peace. Give him volley on volley, The fool who redeemed us once of our folly, And the smiter that healed us, our right John Brown! Too vehement, verily, was John Brown! For waiting is statesmanlike; his the renown Of the holy rash arm, the equipper and starter Of freedmen; aye, call him fanatic and martyr: He can carry both halos, our plain John Brown. A scandalous stumbling-block was John Brown, And a jeer; but ah! soon from the terrified town, In his bleeding track made over hilltop and hollow, Wise armies and councils were eager to follow, And the children’s lips chanted our lost John Brown. Star-led for us, stumbled and groped John Brown, Star-led, in the awful morasses to drown; And the trumpet that rang for a nation’s upheaval, From the thought that was just, thro’ the deed that was evil, Was blown with the breath of this dumb John Brown! Bared heads and a pledge unto mad John Brown! Now the curse is allayed, now the dragon is down, Now we see, clear enough, looking back at the onset, Christianity’s flood-tide and Chivalry’s sunset In the old broken heart of our hanged John Brown!
Sleep, love sleep, The night winds sigh, In soft lullaby. The Lark is at rest With the dew on her breast. So close those dear eyes, That borrowed their hue From the heavens so blue, Sleep, love sleep. Sleep, love sleep, The pale moon looks down On the valleys around, The Glow Moth is flying, The South wind is sighing, And I am low lying, With lute deftly strung, To pour out my song, Sleep, love sleep.
Just look, ’tis quarter past six, love— And not even the fires are caught; Well, you know I must be at the office— But, as usual, the breakfast ’ll be late. Now hurry and wake up the children; And dress them as fast as you can; ‘Poor dearies,’ I know they’ll be tardy, Dear me, ‘what a slow, poky man!’ Have the tenderloin broiled nice and juicy— Have the toast browned and buttered all right; And be sure you settle the coffee: Be sure that the silver is bright. When ready, just run up and call me— At eight, to the office I go, Lest poverty, grim, should o’ertake us— ‘’Tis bread and butter,’ you know. The bottom from stocks may fall out, My bonds may get below par; Then surely, I seldom could spare you A nickel, to buy a cigar. All ready? Now, while I am eating, Just bring up my wheel to the door; Then wash up the dishes; and, mind now, Have dinner promptly at four; For tonight is our Woman’s Convention, And I am to speak first, you know— The men veto us in private, But in public they shout, ‘That’s so.’ So ‘by-by’ – In case of a rap, love, Before opening the door, you must look; O! how could a civilized woman Exist, without a man cook.
I know a place where the sun is like gold, And the cherry blooms burst with snow, And down underneath is the loveliest nook, Where the four-leaf clovers grow. One leaf is for hope, and one is for faith, And one is for love, you know, And God put another in for luck— If you search, you will find where they grow. But you must have hope, and you must have faith, You must love and be strong – and so—If you work, if you wait, you will find the place Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
Close to the gates of Paradise I flee; The night is hot and serpents leave their beds, And slide along the dark, crooking their heads,— My God, my God, open the gates to me! My eyes are burning so I cannot see; My feet are bleeding and I suffer pain; Let me come in on the cool grass again—My God, my God, open the gates to me! I ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, And was cast out into the barren drouth; And since – the awful taste within my mouth! My God, my God, open the gates to me! Am I shut out for all eternity? I do repent me of my one black sin, With prayers and tears of blood . . . Let me come in! My God, my God, open the gates to me! Let me come in where birds and flowers be; Let me once more lie naked in the grass That trembles when the long wind-ripples pass! Lord God, Lord God, open the gates to me!
An inland sea – blue as a sapphire – set Within a sparkling, emerald mountain chain Where day and night fir-needles sift like rain Thro’ the voluptuous air. The soft winds fret The waves, and beat them wantonly to foam. The golden distances across the sea Are shot with rose and purple. Languorously The silver seabirds in wide circles roam. The sun drops slowly down the flaming West And flings its rays across to set aglow The islands rocking on the cool waves’ crest And the great glistening domes of snow on snow. And thro’ the mist the Olympics flash and float Like opals linked around a beating throat.
The soft-toned clock upon the stair chimed three— Too sweet for sleep, too early yet to rise. In restful peace I lay with half-closed eyes, Watching the tender hours go dreamily; The tide was flowing in; I heard the sea Shivering along the sands; while yet the skies Were dim, uncertain, as the light that lies Beneath the fretwork of some wild-rose tree Within the thicket gray. The chanticleer Sent drowsy calls across the slumbrous air; In solemn silence sweet it was to hear My own heart beat . . . Then broad and deep and fair— Trembling in its new birth from heaven’s womb— One crimson shaft of dawn sank thro’ my room.
That I might chisel a statue, line on line, Out of a marble’s chaste severities! Angular, harsh; no softened curves to please; Set tears within the eyes to make them shine, And furrows on the brow, deep, stern, yet fine; Gaunt, awkward, tall; no courtier of ease; The trousers bulging at the bony knees; Long nose, large mouth . . . But ah, the light divine Of Truth, – the light that set a people free!— Burning upon it in a steady flame, As sunset fires a white peak on the sky . . .Ah, God! To leave it nameless and yet see Men looking weep and bow themselves and cry— ‘Enough, enough! We know thy statue’s name!’
Two shall be born the whole world wide apart, And speak in different tongues, and pay their debts In different kinds of coin; and give no heed Each to the other’s being. And know not That each might suit the other to a T, If they were but correctly introduced. And these, unconsciously, shall bend their steps, Escaping Spaniards and defying war, Unerringly toward the same trysting-place, Albeit they know it not. Until at last They enter the same door, and suddenly They meet. And ere they’ve seen each other’s face They fall into each other’s arms, upon The Broadway cable car – and this is Fate!
It was an Artless Poster Girl pinned up against my wall, She was tremendous ugly, she was exceeding tall; I was gazing at her idly, and I think I must have slept, For that poster maiden lifted up her poster voice, and wept. She said between her poster sobs, ‘I think it’s rather rough To be jeered and fleered and flouted, and I’ve stood it long enough; I’m tired of being quoted as a Fright and Fad and Freak, And I take this opportunity my poster mind to speak. ‘Although my hair is carmine and my nose is edged with blue, Although my style is splashy and my shade effects are few, Although I’m out of drawing and my back hair is a show, Yet I have n’t half the whimseys of the maidens that you know. ‘I never keep you waiting while I prink before the glass, I never talk such twaddle as that little Dawson lass, I never paint on china, nor erotic novels write, And I never have recited “Curfew must not ring tonight”. ‘I don’t rave over Ibsen, I never, never flirt, I never wear a shirt waist with a disconnected skirt; I never speak in public on “The Suffrage”, or “The Race”, I never talk while playing whist, or trump my partner’s ace.’ I said: ‘O artless Poster Girl, you’re in the right of it, You are a joy forever, though a thing of beauty, nit!’ And from her madder eyebrows to her utmost purple swirl, Against all captious critics I’ll defend the Poster Girl.
(A Pantoum) Of making many books there is no end, Though myriads have to deep oblivion gone; Each day new manuscripts are being penned, And still the ceaseless tide of ink flows on. Though myriads have to deep oblivion gone, New volumes daily issue from the press; And still the ceaseless tide of ink flows on— The prospect is disheartening, I confess. New volumes daily issue from the press; My pile of unread books I view aghast. The prospect is disheartening, I confess; Why will these modern authors write so fast? My pile of unread books I view aghast— Of course I must keep fairly up to date— Why will these modern authors write so fast? They seem to get ahead of me of late. Of course I must keep fairly up to date; The books of special merit I must read; They seem to get ahead of me of late, Although I skim them very fast indeed. The books of special merit I must read; And then the magazines come round again; Although I skim them very fast indeed, I can’t get through with more than eight or ten. And then the magazines come round again! How can we stem this tide of printer’s ink? I can’t get through with more than eight or ten— It is appalling when I stop to think. How can we stem this tide of printer’s ink? Of making many books there is no end. It is appalling when I stop to think Each day new manuscripts are being penned!
Born in a safe family But a dangerous area, Iraq, I heard guns at a young age, so young They made a decision to raise us safe So packed our things And went far away. Now, in the city of rain, I try to forget my past, But memories never fade. This is my life, It happened for a reason, I happened for a reason.
The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a rise and rounded a corner on the narrow blacktop, going west, and saw off to the left in the flat green meadow the stream turning briefly back on itself to form a perfect loop—a useless light-filled water noose or fragment of moon’s cursive, a sign or message of some kind—but left behind.
(1825) 1. CUVIER    Science, science, science!  Everything is beautiful  blown up beneath my glass.  Colors dazzle insect wings.  A drop of water swirls  like marble. Ordinary  crumbs become stalactites  set in perfect angles  of geometry I’d thought  impossible. Few will  ever see what I see  through this microscope.  Cranial measurements  crowd my notebook pages,  and I am moving closer,  close to how these numbers  signify aspects of  national character.  Her genitalia  will float inside a labeled  pickling jar in the Musée  de l’Homme on a shelf  above Broca’s brain:  “The Venus Hottentot.”  Elegant facts await me.  Small things in this world are mine. 2. There is unexpected sun today in London, and the clouds that most days sift into this cage where I am working have dispersed. I am a black cutout against a captive blue sky, pivoting nude so the paying audience can view my naked buttocks. I am called “Venus Hottentot.” I left Capetown with a promise of revenue: half the profits and my passage home: A boon! Master’s brother proposed the trip; the magistrate granted me leave. I would return to my family a duchess, with watered-silk dresses and money to grow food, rouge and powders in glass pots, silver scissors, a lorgnette, voile and tulle instead of flax, cerulean blue instead of indigo. My brother would devour sugar-studded non- pareils, pale taffy, damask plums. That was years ago. London’s circuses are florid and filthy, swarming with cabbage-smelling citizens who stare and query, “Is it muscle? bone? or fat?” My neighbor to the left is The Sapient Pig, “The Only Scholar of His Race.” He plays at cards, tells time and fortunes by scraping his hooves. Behind me is Prince Kar-mi, who arches like a rubber tree and stares back at the crowd from under the crook of his knee. A professional animal trainer shouts my cues. There are singing mice here. “The Ball of Duchess DuBarry”: In the engraving I lurch toward the belles dames, mad-eyed, and they swoon. Men in capes and pince-nez shield them. Tassels dance at my hips. In this newspaper lithograph my buttocks are shown swollen and luminous as a planet. Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding, sure of his hypothesis. I half expect him to pull silk scarves from inside me, paper poppies, then a rabbit! He complains at my scent and does not think I comprehend, but I speak English. I speak Dutch. I speak a little French as well, and languages Monsieur Cuvier will never know have names. Now I am bitter and now I am sick. I eat brown bread, drink rancid broth. I miss good sun, miss Mother’s sadza. My stomach is frequently queasy from mutton chops, pale potatoes, blood sausage. I was certain that this would be better than farm life. I am the family entrepreneur! But there are hours in every day to conjur my imaginary daughters, in banana skirts and ostrich-feather fans. Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private. In my silence I possess mouth, larynx, brain, in a single gesture. I rub my hair with lanolin, and pose in profile like a painted Nubian archer, imagining gold leaf woven through my hair, and diamonds. Observe the wordless Odalisque. I have not forgotten my Xhosa clicks. My flexible tongue and healthy mouth bewilder this man with his rotting teeth. If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural.
Filene’s department store near nineteen-fifty-three: An Aunt Jemima floor Display. Red bandanna, apron holding white rolls of black fat fast against the bubbling pancakes, bowls and bowls of pale batter. This is what Donna sees across the “Cookwares” floor, and hears “Donessa?” Please, this can not be my aunt
“Southern Tradition of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning” —headline, New York Times, 2/14/84    tra dition wanes I read from North ern South: D.C. Never ate dirt but I lay on Great- grandma’s grave when I was small. “Most cultures have passed through a phase of earth- eating most pre valent today among rural Southern black women.”Geo phagy
1. OVERTURE    ”Obviously there is much to be said for the  conscious cultivation and extension of taste, but  there is also something to be said for the  functional reaction to artistic design (and  honeysuckles) as normal elements of human  existence.”  —Albert Murray
Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees are taller still than Robeson. Outside vast plate windows in this lecture hall, I imagine him running down autumn fields, see his black thighs pumping that machinery across chalk-painted lines.  He loved the woman in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who made photographs. I picture her standing in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile to watch white paper darken, to pull wet from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?
My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window, open to ask directions. I was always asking directions and always driving: to an Armenian market in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots, dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror. The floors of my apartment would never come clean. Whenever I saw other colored people in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp, smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke. What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar. Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre. Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head. I learned the samba from a Brazilian man so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg. No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman, no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.
“I saw a friend from growing up who’s been living in L.A. for about twenty years, and I heard him say, ‘I’m from L.A.,’ and I said, ‘No, man, you from Philly. We don’t give nobody up.’” —Khan Jamal jazz vibraphonist Fish-man comes with trout and fresh crabs: “Live! They live crabs! They live crabs!” Bars called “Watutsi.” “Pony-Tail.” A dark green suit, a banded hat. The gentleman buys pig’s feet and papaya juice. He looks like church. Another man, down Spruce Street, says, “Yeah, California’s beautiful, but I ain’t got no people there, so I came back. I raised a racehorse. Trainer says he’s mean, but I say naw, naw. That horse just alive.” Which way to walk down these tree streets and find home cooking, boundless love? Double-dutching on front porches, men in sleeveless undershirts. I’m listening for the Philly sound— Brother brother brotherly love.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Sometimes I thinkSometimes I think In a 2001 interview, Elizabeth Alexander noted, “As for the ‘banner headline’, ‘Race’, I always loved the way that my grandfather, and to a lesser extent my parents, used the word race to talk about ‘the race’ — meaning, of course, black people — as a thing that they could imagine, a body of people that we could imagine, that you could almost get your arms around, that the race was something tangible and palpable.” about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee, Alabama
I am the last woman off of the plane that has crashed in a cornfield near Philly, picking through hot metal for my rucksack and diaper bag. No black box, no fuselage, just sistergirl pilot wiping soot from her eyes, happy to be alive. Her dreadlocks will hold the smoke for weeks. All the white passengers bailed out before impact, so certain a sister couldn’t navigate the crash. O gender. O race. O ye of little faith. Here we are in the cornfield, bruised and dirty but alive. I invite sistergirl pilot home for dinner at my parents’, for my mother’s roast chicken with gravy and rice, to celebrate.
a poem in twelve rounds 1. My head so big they had to pry me out. I’m sorry Bird (is what I call my mother). Cassius Marcellus Clay, Muhammad Ali; you can say my name in any language, any continent: Ali.2. Two photographs of Emmett Till, born my year, on my birthday. One, he’s smiling, happy, and the other one is after. His mother did the bold thing, kept the casket open, made the thousands look upon his bulging eyes, his twisted neck, her lynched black boy. I couldn’t sleep for thinking, Emmett Till. One day I went Down to the train tracks, found some iron shoe-shine rests and planted them between the ties and waited for a train to come, and watched the train derail, and ran, and after that I slept at night.3. I need to train around people, hear them talk, talk back. I need to hear the traffic, see people in the barbershop, people getting shoe shines, talking, hear them talk, talk back.4. Bottom line: Olympic gold can’t buy a black man a Louisville hamburger in nineteen-sixty. Wasn’t even real gold. I watched the river drag the ribbon down, red, white, and blue. 5. Laying on the bed, praying for a wife, in walk Sonji Roi. Pretty little shape. Do you like chop suey? Can I wash your hair underneath that wig? Lay on the bed, Girl. Lie with me. Shake to the east, to the north, south, west— but remember, remember, I need a Muslim wife. So Quit using lipstick. Quit your boogaloo. Cover up your knees like a Muslim wife, religion, religion, a Muslim wife. Eleven months with Sonji, first woman I loved.6. There’s not too many days that pass that I don’t think of how it started, but I know no Great White Hope can beat a true black champ. Jerry Quarry could have been a movie star, a millionaire, a senator, a president— he only had to do one thing, is whip me, but he can’t.7. Dressing-Room Visitor He opened up his shirt: “KKK” cut in his chest. He dropped his trousers: latticed scars where testicles should be, His face bewildered, frozen in the Alabama woods that night in 1966 when they left him for dead, his testicles in a Dixie cup. You a warning, they told him, to smart-mouth, sassy-acting niggers, meaning niggers still alive, meaning any nigger, meaning niggers like me.8. Training Unsweetened grapefruit juice will melt my stomach down. Don’t drive if you can walk, don’t walk if you can run. I add a mile each day and run in eight-pound boots. My knuckles sometimes burst the glove. I let dead skin build up, and then I peel it, let it scar, so I don’t bleed as much. My bones absorb the shock. I train in three-minute spurts, like rounds: three rounds big bag, three speed bag, three jump rope, one- minute breaks, no more, no less. Am I too old? Eat only kosher meat. Eat cabbage, carrots, beets, and watch the weight come down: two-thirty, two-twenty, two-ten, two-oh-nine.9. Will I go like Kid Paret, a fractured skull, a ten-day sleep, dreaming alligators, pork chops, saxophones, slow grinds, funk, fishbowls, lightbulbs, bats, typewriters, tuning forks, funk clocks, red rubber ball, what you see in that lifetime knockout minute on the cusp? You could be let go, you could be snatched back.10. Rumble in the JungleAli boma ye, Ali boma ye,
Jam jar of cigarette ends and ashes on his workbench, hammer he nailed our address to a stump with, balsa wood steamship, half-finished— is that him, waving from the stern? Well, good luck to him. Slur of sunlight filling the backyard, August’s high wattage, white blossoming, it’s a curve, it comes back. My mother in a patio chair, leaning forward, squinting, threading her needle again, her eye lifts to the roof, to my brother, who stands and jerks his arm upward—he might be insulting the sky, but he’s only letting go a bit of green, a molded plastic soldier tied to a parachute, thin as a bread bag, it rises, it arcs against the blue—good luck to it—my sister and I below, heads tilted back as we stand in the grass, good luck to all of us, still here, still in love with it.
There is a company called Marathon Oil, mother, Very far away and very big and, again, very Desirable. Who isn’t? Back connecting pure dots, Fleecy intelligence lapped in explanatory sound The faces make difficult. Learn the language. That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation: My mind, up close, in pjs, and I use it. Wanting to fuck an abstraction nine times in a row, Continuous melismata, don’t stop, don’t stop, no name, no picture. There is a series of solids, mother, Called people, who rise to the transparent obtainable Solo windows, mornings, afternoons, And there are military operations called Operation Patio, Operation Menu. It is the individuals who finally get the feel of the tenses. So that it may snow, has to snow on the muddy corpse. There is a boundary, mother, very far away and very Continuous, broken, to interrogate civilians, the self, The text, networks of viewers found wanting a new way To cook chicken, why not?, to kill while falling asleep. There is the one language not called money, and the other not called explosions.
Pyongyang, if you’ll please, STOP  appearing  in the poem like this— unannounced * In writing to your Pomomomo (that special critical topos between an ideolophe fahtha’ and a para-juridical muhtha’ ) This-side-of-the-Hudson Psycho-Acoustics Jangling— Claim you what? “We call it dead in the wa wa don’ mean jacky bits” “Pyongyang” * But it does... as an In Walk Bud flips the whooole session on its head lexicals in range clash and dash out patch 14ths off the scale to perfect fifths effects REACT rather more differently than before with  “Pyongyang” in there * And “Quetzalcoatl” Lands on “Tarragon” jangling it? If that’s where the Nitro’s stored, in “Tarragon” bird’s already been blown off feathers falling field’s been re-charged * And “Thatcher?” as guest jaw-harp soloist? The E.U.’s formative  contradictions unresolved? some kill in that cut— you got the mic, pomomomo make a ho’ youself and Maggyand us
Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread  and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches, repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war. A cinder-block wall shared by two houses is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen sink and a cupboard, on the other was a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs. Glass is shattered across the photographs; two half-circles of hardened pocket bread sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was shelter, a plastic truck under the branches of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen, merely dicing garlic. Engines of war move inexorably toward certain houses while citizens sit safe in other houses reading the newspaper, whose photographs make sanitized excuses for the war. There are innumerable kinds of bread brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen: the date, the latitude, tell which one was dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches. The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches of possibility infiltrate houses’ walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen table’s setting gapes, where children bred to branch into new lives were culled for war. Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore this jersey blazoned for the local branch of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses? Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen? Whose memory will frame the photograph and use the memory for what it was never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was caught on a ball field, near a window: war, exhorted through the grief a photograph revives. (Or was the team a covert branch of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen, a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?) What did the old men pray for in their houses of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses between blackouts and blasts, when each word was flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread, both hostage to the happenstance of war? Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen. Outside the window, black strokes on a graph of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches. “This letter curves, this one spreads its branches like friends holding hands outside their houses.” Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen? Are they there meticulously learning war- time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?
Rain commenced, and wind did. A crippled ship slid ashore. Our swimmer’s limbs went heavy. The sand had been flattened. The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled. The maritime forest, extracted. Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish. The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight. The threads of the jellyfish, spent. Disaster weirdly neatened the beach. We cultivated the debris field. Castaway trash, our treasure. Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy. A bicycle exoskeleton without wheels, grasshopper green. Our dead ten speed. We rested in red mangrove and sheltered in sheets. Our bruises blushed backwards, our blisters did.is it true is it true God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better. We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled. We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict. We were harmed, and then we healed.
A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel – A Resonance of Emerald A Rush of Cochineal – And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts it’s tumbled Head – The Mail from Tunis – probably, An easy Morning’s Ride –
Before I got my eye put out – I liked as well to see As other creatures, that have eyes – And know no other way – But were it told to me, Today, That I might have the Sky For mine, I tell you that my Heart Would split, for size of me – The Meadows – mine – The Mountains – mine – All Forests – Stintless stars – As much of noon, as I could take – Between my finite eyes – The Motions of the Dipping Birds – The Morning’s Amber Road – For mine – to look at when I liked, The news would strike me dead – So safer – guess – with just my soul Opon the window pane Where other creatures put their eyes – Incautious – of the Sun –
Come slowly – Eden! Lips unused to Thee – Bashful – sip thy Jessamines – As the fainting Bee – Reaching late his flower, Round her chamber hums – Counts his nectars – Enters – and is lost in Balms.
I know that He exists. Somewhere – in silence – He has hid his rare life From our gross eyes. ’Tis an instant’s play – ’Tis a fond Ambush – Just to make Bliss Earn her own surprise! But – should the play Prove piercing earnest – Should the glee – glaze – In Death’s – stiff – stare – Would not the fun Look too expensive! Would not the jest – Have crawled too far!
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome – Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice – I, just wear my Wings – And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church, Our little Sexton – sings. God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I’m going, all along.
Sprinting across the freeway just ahead of them having set his left foot down  directly onto the pavement from the ledge of the cement divide and edging his other leg forward deliberately—caught the way sports pages show an athlete with muscles condensed in the effort of crossing through a particular space—and then she sees the cars coming towards him giving off that early morning shine across their hoods almost colorless but precipitous in the four-lane parallel rush of metal and cannot tell if any driver straining into the distance further ahead has seen him or possibly has caught that glint off the long black flashlight he appears to carry with its up-beam turned on full and faintly visible due to the angle of early sun falling over the midwestern plains fanning out in every direction away from the  sudden view of the airport hub’s acclaimed architectural design. She sees the brief alignment of his body methodically finding its way across the freeway lanes blue baseball cap fit snugly over his head to just above the hairline where now dusky skin of his neck breaks into the picture. He’s made it halfway, she thinks, but she can’t stop the cars rushing towards him even as he scans with concentration the worn lanes for the thing he’s lost as if he’s walking through the dark and shining his flashlight wherever the object might have landed, his right knee still lifting purposefully upward and forward.  — for C.W.
A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair. Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice. A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin. We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider. We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side. I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see. Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of. Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables. Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need.
To be shy, to lower your eyes after making a greeting. to know wherever you go you’ll be called on, to fear whoever you’re near will ask you, to wear the softer sides of the air in rooms filled with angers, your ship always docked in transparent slips whose wharves are sheerer than membranes.
Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian’s part, That well befits a lovely woman’s heart! Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great; Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate; Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name. We are thy sisters, Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian’s part, That well befits a lovely woman’s heart! Ddare to be good, as thou canst dare be great; Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate; Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name. We are thy sisters, – God has truly said, That of one blood, the nations he has made. Oh, christian woman, in a christian land, Canst thou unblushing read this great command? Suffer the wrongs which wring our inmost heart To draw one throb of pity on thy part; Our ‘skins may differ,’ but from thee we claim A sister’s privilege, in a sister’s name. Oh, woman! – though upon thy fairer brow The hues of roses and of lilies grow— These soon must wither in their kindred earth, From whence the fair and dark have equal birth. Let a bright halo o’er thy virtues shed A lustre, that shall live when thou art dead; Let coming ages learn to bless they name Upon the altar of immortal fame.
1. Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”  Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto. The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé, or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto. Not to worry, many hands are making work light again. The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé. In any case the ruling was long overdue. Not to worry, many hands are making work light again, so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.  2. In any case, the ruling was long overdue. The people are beside themselves with rapture so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future. The people are beside themselves with rapture yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria, and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future. The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained. Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria. In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel. The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained, and night like black swansdown settles on the city. In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel. Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward, and night like black swansdown settles on the city. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?  3. Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward. Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside. If we tried to leave, would being naked help us? And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river? Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside, when all we think of is how much we can carry with us. And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river? All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. When all we think of is how much we can carry with us small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate. All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time. It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality. Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate. It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.  4. It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination. Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open and in so doing deprive time of further hostages, to end the standoff that history long ago began. Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error. To end the standoff that history long ago began must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error. You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity? Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her. You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns. Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society; only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her: The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
Oh there once was a woman and she kept a shop selling trinkets to tourists not far from a dock who came to see what life could be far back on the island. And it was always a party there always different but very nice New friends to give you advice or fall in love with you which is nice and each grew so perfectly from the other it was a marvel of poetry and irony And in this unsafe quarter much was scary and dirty but no one seemed to mind very much the parties went on from house to house There were friends and lovers galore all around the store There was moonshine in winter and starshine in summer and everybody was happy to have discovered what they discovered And then one day the ship sailed away There were no more dreamers just sleepers in heavy attitudes on the dock moving as if they knew how among the trinkets and the souvenirs the random shops of modern furniture and a gale came and said it is time to take all of you away from the tops of the trees to the little houses on little paths so startled And when it became time to go they none of them would leave without the other for they said we are all one here and if one of us goes the other will not go and the wind whispered it to the stars the people all got up to go and looked back on love
Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote. Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses. Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him. Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising, but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.  Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays. No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again. Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst. When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed. Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t. Maugham snored on the Riviera. Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part. I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving. I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much. Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water. Birds make poor role models. A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it. Slaves make good servants. Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance. Store clean rags in old pillow cases. Feed a dog only when he barks. Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink. Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep.
The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.
In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. “It’s the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you,” Anna explained. “They always do, you know.”  Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, then rearranging them in apple-pie order. “Two crows,” the voice seemed to say, “were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away.”  “Yes . . . and then?” I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. “This is my friend Hans,” Anna said by way of introduction. No one paid much attention and several guests moved away to the balustrade to admire the view of orchards and vineyards, approaching their autumn glory. One of the women however came to greet us in a friendly manner. I was wondering if this was a “harvest home,” a phrase I had often heard but never understood.  “Welcome to my home . . . well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr. . . .”  “Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.  “That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.  “Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”  “I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are all strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”
Baby, give me just one more hiss We must lake it fast morever I want to cold you in my harms & never get lo I live you so much it perts! Baby, jive me gust one more bliss Whisper your neat nothings in my near Can we hock each other one tore mime? All light wrong? Baby give me just one more briss My won & homely You wake me meek in the needs Mill you larry me? Baby, hive me just one more guess With this sing I’ll thee shed
Out of the nursery and into the garden where it rooted and survived its first hard winter, then a few years of freedom while it blossomed, put out its first tentative branches, withstood the insects and the poisons for insects, developed strange ideas about its height and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters, its self-indulgent thrusts and the infighting of stems at cross purposes year after year. Each April it forgot why it couldn’t do what it had to do, and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall, was shown once more what simply couldn’t happen. Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots straight up, blood red, into the light again.
The only thing under the sun I can run to is Ecclesiastes for there is nothing gathered into one self that can be kept Want is humbled by death as every purpose manifests it Feeling this all my life a piercing fright gathers in the stomach's pit This is it and this is not the end of the road for even despair is a kind of goad to wisdom The beauty of the world over one's own anguish The day that I lost all feeling I was both a Fool and a Goddess
for Nolan Miller For us, too, there was a wish to possess Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves, Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless In which we might see ourselves; and this desire Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled, And blowing snow covered what earth we saw, And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again, Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white Among false curves and hidden erasures; And never once did we feel we were close Until the night wind said, “Why do this, Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;” And there appeared , with its windows glowing, small, In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin; And we stood before it, amazed at its being there, And would have gone forward and opened the door, And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there, But that it was ours by not being ours, And should remain empty. That was the idea.
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end, Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end, Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back. When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat, When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead. When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight, Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to  sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no,  just because you don’t know what work is.
Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s been drinking and has no idea who this curious Andalusian is, unable even to speak the language of poetry. The young man who brought them together knows both Spanish and English, but he has a headache from jumping back and forth from one language to another. For a moment’s relief he goes to the window to look down on the East River, darkening below as the early night comes on. Something flashes across his sight, a double vision of such horror he has to slap both his hands across his mouth to keep from screaming. Let’s not be frivolous, let’s not pretend the two poets gave each other wisdom or love or even a good time, let’s not invent a dialogue of such eloquence that even the ants in your own house won’t forget it. The two greatest poetic geniuses alive meet, and what happens? A vision comes to an ordinary man staring at a filthy river. Have you ever had a vision? Have you ever shaken your head to pieces and jerked back at the image of your young son falling through open space, not from the stern of a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York but from the roof of the building he works on? Have you risen from bed to pace until dawn to beg a merciless God to take these pictures away? Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human— the only animal that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sights and will not let go. The young man was my cousin, Arthur Lierberman, then a language student at Columbia, who told me all this before he died quietly in his sleep in 1983 in a hotel in Perugia. A good man, Arthur, he survived graduate school, later came home to Detroit and sold pianos right through the Depression. He loaned my brother a used one to compose hideous songs on, which Arthur thought were genius. What an imagination Arthur had!
Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths? Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess? Must be going to give em to the church, I guess. He drinks, you know. The day we moved he came into the kitchen stewed, mixed things up for my sister Grace— put the spices in the wrong place.
Old Mother turns blue and from us,  “Don’t let my head drop to the earth. I’m blind and deaf.” Death from the heart,  a thimble in her purse.  “It’s a long day since last night.  Give me space. I need floors. Wash the floors, Lorine!—  wash clothes! Weed!”
What horror to awake at night and in the dimness see the light.  Time is white  mosquitoes bite I’ve spent my life on nothing. The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing, sitting around with Something’s wife.  Buzz and burn  is all I learn I’ve spent my life on nothing.  I’m pillowed and padded, pale and puffing lifting household stuffing—  carpets, dishes  benches, fishes I’ve spent my life in nothing.
My mother saw the green tree toad on the window sill her first one since she was young. We saw it breathe and swell up round. My youth is no sure sign I’ll find this kind of thing tho it does sing. Let’s take it in I said so grandmother can see but she could not it changed to brown and town changed us, too.
Popcorn-can cover screwed to the wall over a hole  so the cold can’t mouse in
Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance to be considerate in lighted, glass-walled almost outdoor office. Business wasn’t all he knew. He knew music, art. Had a heart. “With eyes like yours I should think the dictaphone” or did he say the flute? His sensitivity—it stopped you. And the neighbors said “She’s taking lessons on the dictaphone” as tho it were a saxophone. He gave the job to somebody else.
The wild and wavy event now chintz at the window was revolution . . . Adams to Miss Abigail Smith: You have faults You hang your head down like a bulrush you read, you write, you think but I drink Madeira to you and you cross your Leggs while sitting. (Later:) How are the children? If in danger run to the woods. Evergreen o evergreen how faithful are your branches.
Nothing worth noting except an Andromeda with quadrangular shoots—  the boots of the people wet inside: they must swim to church thru the floods or be taxed—the blossoms  from the bosoms of the leaves * Fog-thick morning— I see only where I now walk. I carry  my clarity with me. * Hear where her snow-grave is the You  ah you
Ten thousand women  and I  the only one  in boots Life’s dance:  they meet  he holds her leg  up
Grandfather   advised me:  Learn a trade I learned  to sit at desk  and condense No layoff  from this  condensery
And the place was water    Fish  fowl  flood  Water lily mud My life in the leaves and on water My mother and I  born in swale and swamp and sworn to water My father thru marsh fog  sculled down  from high ground saw her face at the organ bore the weight of lake water  and the cold— he seined for carp to be sold that their daughter might go high on land  to learn Saw his wife turn deaf and away She  who knew boats  and ropes no longer played She helped him string out nets for tarring  And she could shoot  He was cool to the man who stole his minnows by night and next day offered  to sell them back  He brought in a sack of dandelion greens if no flood No oranges—none at hand  No marsh marigold  where the water rose He kept us afloat I mourn her not hearing canvasbacks their blast-off rise  from the water  Not hearing sora rails’s sweet spoon-tapped waterglass- descending scale-  tear-drop-tittle  Did she giggle as a girl? His skiff skimmed the coiled celery now gone  from these streams  due to carp He knew duckweed fall-migrates toward Mud Lake bottom  Knew what lay  under leaf decay and on pickerel weeds before summer hum To be counted on:  new leaves  new dead leaves He could not —like water bugs—  stride surface tension  He netted loneliness As to his bright new car my mother—her house  next his—averred:  A hummingbird can’t haul Anchored here in the rise and sink  of life—  middle years’ nights he sat beside his shoes rocking his chair  Roped not “looped  in the loop of her hair” I grew in green slide and slant  of shore and shade  Child-time—wade thru weeds Maples to swing from Pewee-glissando  sublime  slime- song Grew riding the river Books  at home-pier  Shelley could steer as he read I was the solitary plover a pencil  for a wing-bone From the secret notes I must tilt upon the pressure execute and adjust  In us sea-air rhythm “We live by the urgent wave of the verse” Seven year molt for the solitary bird  and so young Seven years the one dress for town once a week One for home  faded blue-striped as she piped her cry Dancing grounds my people had none  woodcocks had—  backland- air around Solemnities such as what flower  to take  to grandfather’s grave unless water lilies— he who’d bowed his head  to grass as he mowed  Iris now grows on fill for the two and for him  where they lie  How much less am I in the dark than they?  Effort lay in us before religions  at pond bottom  All things move toward the light except those that freely work down  to oceans’ black depths  In us an impulse tests the unknown River rising—flood Now melt and leave home  Return—broom wet  naturally wet Under soak-heavy rug water bugs hatched—  no snake in the house  Where were they?— she who knew how to clean up after floods  he who bailed boats, houses  Water endows us with buckled floors You with sea water running in your veins sit down in water  Expect the long-stemmed blue  speedwell to renew itself O my floating life Do not save love  for things  Throw things to the flood ruined by the flood  Leave the new unbought—  all one in the end— water I possessed the high word:  The boy my friend  played his violin in the great hall On this stream my moonnight memory  washed of hardships  maneuvers barges thru the mouth of the river They fished in beauty  It was not always so  In Fishes red Mars rising rides the sloughs and sluices  of my mind  with the persons on the edge
I The chemist creates  the brazen  approximation: Life  Thy will be done  Sun II Time to garden  before I  die— to meet  my compost maker  the caretaker of the cemetery
I married in the world’s black night for warmth  if not repose.  At the close— someone. I hid with him from the long range guns.  We lay leg  in the cupboard, head in closet. A slit of light at no bird dawn—  Untaught  I thought he drank too much. I say  I married  and lived unburied. I thought—
I My wife is ill! And I sit  waiting for a quorum II Fast ride his horse collapsed Now he saddled walked Borrowed a farmer’s unbroken colt To Richmond Richmond How stop— Arnold’s redcoats there III Elk Hill destroyed— Cornwallis carried off 30 slaves Jefferson: Were it to give them freedom he’d have done right IV Latin and Greek my tools to understand humanity I rode horse away from a monarch to an enchanting philosophy V  The South of France Roman temple “simple and sublime” Maria Cosway  harpist on his mind white column and arch VI To daughter Patsy: Read— read Livy No person full of work was ever hysterical Know music, history dancing (I calculate 14 to 1 in marriage she will draw a blockhead) Science also Patsy VII Agreed with Adams: send spermaceti oil to Portugal for their church candles (light enough to banish mysteries?: three are one and one is three and yet the one not three and the three not one) and send salt fish U.S. salt fish preferred above all other VIII Jefferson of Patrick Henry backwoods fiddler statesman: “He spoke as Homer wrote” Henry eyed our minister at Paris— the Bill of Rights hassle— “he remembers . . . in splendor and dissipation he thinks yet of bills of rights” IX True, French frills and lace for Jefferson, sword and belt but follow the Court to Fontainebleau he could not— house rent would have left him nothing to eat . . . He bowed to everyone he met and talked with arms folded He could be trimmed by a two-month migraine and yet  stand up X Dear Polly: I said No—no frost in Virginia—the strawberries were safe I’d have heard—I’m in that kind of correspondence with a young daughter— if they were not Now I must retract I shrink from it XI Political honors  “splendid torments” “If one could establish  an absolute power of silence over oneself” When I set out for Monticello  (my grandchildren  will they know me?) How are my young  chestnut trees— XII Hamilton and the bankers would make my country Carthage I am abandoning the rich— their dinner parties— I shall eat my simlins with the class of science or not at all Next year the last of labors among conflicting parties Then my family we shall sow our cabbages together XIII Delicious flower of the acacia or rather Mimosa Nilotica from Mr. Lomax XIV Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed to father and sister in Paris by way of London—Abigail embraced her—Adams said “in all my life I never saw more charming child” Death of Polly, 25, Monticello XV My harpsichord my alabaster vase and bridle bit bound for Alexandria Virginia The good sea weather of retirement The drift and suck and die-down of life but there is land XVI These were my passions: Monticello and the villa-temples I passed on to carpenters bricklayers what I knew  and to an Italian sculptor how to turn a volute on a pillar You may approach the campus rotunda from lower to upper terrace Cicero had levels  XVII John Adams’ eyes  dimming Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism  cantering XVIII Ah soon must Monticello be lost  to debts  and Jefferson himself  to death XIX Mind leaving, let body leave Let dome live, spherical dome and colonnade Martha (Patsy) stay “The Committee of Safety must be warned” Stay youth—Anne and Ellen all my books, the bantams and the seeds of the senega root
chains of the willow, desolate weft birds and the slim reprieves the socketing together of weeds before water straight-pins of jet incontrovertible smears of dense cloud  against bullet-train whitenings, unleashed the reductions to tense the awful dozes into deep sinks flush grows upward, secreting, soaking through  the old damasks fretwork of trees, their balances achieved  then slipped off touched-up surge of cloud across water The river shuttles onward, reconstituting It gains the red threads of taillights the spare greens and the thousand paired whites  warping over, shaping off The ducks come forth out of something unclear The trees drain their weights into water The ducks are a tension I have not known of How they pivot, disfiguring the whole field dragging their trapezoid blear They are careful and meet their trains behind them like brides Now the whistles of those taken to air The disturbance of them in this river  and the wavering cardiographies  up-rushed, up-stayed This is the push of all strayed things into night the heavying of trees against sky-fire  stolen into a river, cloistered down I do not want anything more than this taking  of last light into pocketings and loose garments  unbearable closets of the trees  the stitched-in bones and the placketings This feeling of everything unhanded  suddenly let go into robes The half-bustled willow rails forward The still surface. The quieted surface. The same sharp planets exacting there
One by one, like guests at a late party They shake our hands and step into the dark: Arabian ostrich; Long-eared kit fox; Mysterious starling. One by one, like sheep counted to close our eyes, They leap the fence and disappear into the woods: Atlas bear; Passenger pigeon; North Island laughing owl; Great auk; Dodo; Eastern wapiti; Badlands bighorn sheep.
They shut me up in Prose – As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet – Because they liked me “still” – Still! Could themself have peeped – And seen my Brain – go round – They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason – in the Pound – Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Look down opon Captivity – And laugh – No more have I –
I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – Of Chambers as the Cedars – Impregnable of eye – And for an everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky – Of Visitors – the fairest – For Occupation – This – The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise –
The Moon is distant from the Sea – And yet, with Amber Hands – She leads Him – docile as a Boy – Along appointed Sands – He never misses a Degree – Obedient to Her eye – He comes just so far – toward the Town – Just so far – goes away – Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand – And mine – the distant Sea – Obedient to the least command Thine eye impose on me –
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul –
All overgrown by cunning moss, All interspersed with weed, The little cage of “Currer Bell” In quiet “Haworth” laid. This Bird – observing others When frosts too sharp became Retire to other latitudes – Quietly did the same – But differed in returning – Since Yorkshire hills are green – Yet not in all the nests I meet – Can Nightingale be seen –
You left me – Sire – two Legacies – A Legacy of Love A Heavenly Father would suffice Had He the offer of – You left me Boundaries of Pain – Capacious as the Sea – Between Eternity and Time – Your Consciousness – and me –
Of Glory not a Beam is left But her Eternal House – The Asterisk is for the Dead, The Living, for the Stars –
Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – Poverty – be justifying For so foul a thing Possibly – but We – would rather From Our Garret go White – unto the White Creator – Than invest – Our Snow – Thought belong to Him who gave it – Then – to Him Who bear It's Corporeal illustration – sell The Royal Air – In the Parcel – Be the Merchant Of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit To Disgrace of Price –
You get over these constant storms and learn to be married all over again, every day. —Barry Hannah    The foyer is hers because the kettle is hers as it was made for water and the water is hers because the sac that grew the baby was hers though the semen that made the sac was his like his boots are his and the tea that’s of the kettle  after it enters his mouth is his unless it’s hers since it’s inside the kitchen that’s hers  and therefore not his unless he’s simmering the Asian sauces that are his because they’re dense and knotty rather than milkish and paltry like everything else from the nation state of the motherland  of the no-mercy child who won’t stop sucking and wanting and whining in the ear that is his  although the child herself belongs somehow to the woman and thus its hunger is hers as is the bed and dresser and mirror and latch though the hammer naturally is his and the saw and lumber  and back and muscle he suffered to build because he guessed he thought it would be  good for something besides this house like a pestilence of people who weren’t his because nothing was his except the whirl he carried in his belly of the mix-up of loving her in the first place like being sucked  into a burrow of lava embers and putting your tongue to it until it caught fire  and all he could say was that the burn was his—this hole in the mouth— this fiasco of the woman bent now in the garden to smell the cilantro as though she didn’t know his head was split  with hating her and loving her and hating her and loving her  because she was an ache and a kink and somehow the furrow—the groove and the rut— and age and death and kiss and fuck and not-fuck and song and not-song and no it was not sweet though he’d go on and carry it  since also—since mostly—it was.
All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body. —Yeats, “The Phases of the Moon”    Whenever we wake, still joined, enraptured— at the window, each clear night’s finish the black pulse of dominoes dropping to land; whenever we embrace, haunted, upwelling, I know a reunion is taking place—  Hear me when I say our love’s not meant to be an opiate; helpmate, you are the reachable mirror that dares me to risk the caravan back to the apogee, the longed-for arms of the Beloved—Dusks of paperwhites, dusks of jasmine, intimate beyond belief beautiful Signor no dread of nakedness beautiful Signor my long ship, my opulence, my garland beautiful Signor extinguishing the beggar’s tin, the wind of longing beautiful Signor laving the ruined country, the heart wedded to war beautiful Signor the kiln-blaze in my body, the turning heaven beautiful Signor you cover me with pollen beautiful Signor into your sweet mouth—
Of many reasons I love you here is one the way you write me from the gate at the airport so I can tell you everything will be alright so you can tell me there is a bird trapped in the terminal all the people ignoring it because they do not know what to do with it except to leave it alone until it scares itself to death it makes you terribly terribly sad You wish you could take the bird outside and set it free or (failing that) call a bird-understander to come help the bird All you can do is notice the bird and feel for the bird and write to tell me how language feels impossibly useless but you are wrong You are a bird-understander better than I could ever be who make so many noises and call them song These are your own words your way of noticing and saying plainly of not turning away from hurt you have offered them to me I am only giving them back if only I could show you how very useless they are not
When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice,Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks, Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking,Have you found your refuge yet? asking, Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.
Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be afraid of the boarded-up well in the backyard and the ladder in the attic? The one presided over by armed men in ill-fitting uniforms strolling the streets and alleys, while loudspeakers declared a new era, and the house around you grew bigger, the rooms farther apart, with more and more people missing? The photographs whispered to each other from their frames in the hallway. The cooking pots said your name each time you walked past the kitchen. And you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment. You learned to lie still so long the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled safety of a wing. Look! In run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting, turning over the furniture, smashing your mother’s china. Don’t fall asleep. Each act opens with your mother reading a letter that makes her weep. Each act closes with your father fallen into the hands of Pharaoh. Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you, still a child, and slow to grow. Still talking to God and thinking the snow falling is the sound of God listening, and winter is the high-ceilinged house where God measures with one eye an ocean wave in octaves and minutes, and counts on many fingers all the ways a child learns to say Me. Which childhood? The one from which you’ll never escape? You, so slow to know what you know and don’t know. Still thinking you hear low song in the wind in the eaves, story in your breathing, grief in the heard dove at evening, and plentitude in the unseen bird tolling at morning. Still slow to tell memory from imagination, heaven  from here and now, hell from here and now, death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.
People have been trying to kill me since I was born, a man tells his son, trying to explain the wisdom of learning a second tongue. It’s an old story from the previous century about my father and me. The same old story from yesterday morning about me and my son. It’s called “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.” It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,” called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.”Practice until you feel the language inside you,
Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a lantern of sweat en la calle San Sebastián, and hands smack congas like flies in the field en la calle San Sebastián, and remember the beat of packing crates en la calle San Sebastián, from the days when overseers banished the drum en la calle San Sebastián, and trumpets screech like parrots of gold en la calle San Sebastián, trumpets that herald the end of the war en la calle San Sebastián, as soldiers toss rifles on cobblestone en la calle San Sebastián, and the saint himself snaps an arrow in half en la calle San Sebastián, then lost grandfathers and fathers appear en la calle San Sebastián, fingers tugging my steel-wool beard en la calle San Sebastián, whispering your beard is gray en la calle San Sebastián, spilling their rum across the table en la calle San Sebastián, till cousins lead them away to bed en la calle San Sebastián, and the dancer in white with a face of bronze en la calle San Sebastián, shakes rain from his hair like the god of storms en la calle San Sebastián, and sings for the blood that drums in the chest en la calle San Sebastián, and praises the blood that beats in the hands en la calle San Sebastián, en la calle San Sebastián.
The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect, carries the deepest memory, the information of actions summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep time: so that the longest swell swells least; that is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible, a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind (which is, after all, where these things negotiably are) and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty and communicating hardly any action: go there and rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.
This is just a place: we go around, distanced, yearly in a star’s atmosphere, turning daily into and out of direct light and slanting through the quadrant seasons: deep space begins at our heels, nearly rousing us loose: we look up or out so high, sight’s  silk almost draws us away: this is just a place: currents worry themselves coiled and free in airs and oceans: water picks up mineral shadow and plasm into billions of designs, frames: trees, grains, bacteria: but is love a reality we made here ourselves— and grief—did we design that—or do these, like currents, whine in and out among us merely as we arrive and go: this is just a place: the reality we agree with, that agrees with us, outbounding this, arrives to touch, joining with us from far away: our home which defines us is elsewhere but not so far away we have  forgotten it: this is just a place.
Hardly any of me is solid any more, I mean I buy things every day. And there comes a time when I am feeling as windblowed as the apples in the Shenandoah. And there goes I who then again began tho what does this Mrs. Begin? (she says I am) And cast down me wretched sinner unto thee I am slightly different from a corpse at a funeral in that I am less made up but made up worse. Who I thereby did appoint myself but forgot which was mirror. I stand stabbed with wrench piss rabid at the counter matter of things in the room with which I identify. Somewheres crossed up in hot antartic mountains they live backwards together. Whose feet then were backwards whose feet were needing shoes so badly in 1964 that millions virtual millions of shoes were sent to “Appalachia Virginia” for they were too poor—“backward.” America glared haughtily at local shoe burnings that Christmas. But I’m not antarctical nor hypo thetic. My mind gleams like the fangs of a viper in white heat dying to sink my teeth into the throat of something wrong.
Didn’t I stand there once, white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper, swearing I’d never go back? And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth? And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid, knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire into the further room of love? And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness we licked from each other’s hands? And were we not lovely, then, were we not as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?
for my mother the living   1. After Independence Day all our toys began to tear up, school growing sweet on our tongues. We had already cut & hoed the cotton into rows, weeds piled useless as Confederate bills. September meant picking & half-days at Springfield, us colored grades let off at noon to pick the valuable white till nightfall. My hands, civil & slow, didn’t even deserve my behind on the picking truck, but Unc Chock ran the thing & Mama would’ve killed him dead if he’d dreamt of trying to get salty. The money was bad like all money then, not near as green or wide. Three dollars for a hundred pounds, better part of a day. I barely kept up, hands swole up like unpicked fruit. No matter when she started, Frankie plucked fifteen pounds more, food for two, a new Easter dress. Summers I turned so black & bent, all because I’d rather pick with friends than sling weeds alone, than stuff my mattress green.  2. Winters, when the white king had gone, we slept like fish, still moving. We walked back home for lunch & retraced after school, changing into our other pair of drawers before we chored the stove’s ash. No one got gas till after the War. Each November brought a boxcar from the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe; for a share, Lopez balanced it home on his flatbed, a whale from the hunt. Once full of hobos, that bell we burnt kept us from freezing all season long. Before tossing each board in, I would run my hands across the wood speech of burns, carvings warning Unfriendly Conductor, Town of No Sleep. Leftover wood turned to toys; three boards & somebody’s old rollerskate became a summer scooter. Bored, what was that? We were too busy being poor in that house air-conditioned all winter, too busy sharing everything, even bathwater evenings by the pipe stove. No plumbing, no rats, only mice thick enough to believe we had more than they did.
The shelter of it carved, caved Across the river, the park and the little Ferris wheel  closed down The great oaks emptying, russet, gusseted the hovering slant light leaking from the outer edge  of cloud bed leads and shawls pulled forth Thy synchrony of the lost elements recovered the shivering water surfaces, planar unmeldings, remeldings,  riverine alchemies, unlocketed selves now the reemergence, the sun pouring global gold  uptilted, gobleted, incanted Am I not as God made me but stranger? Made stranger still by what I have seen at this hour of earth untended, unministered— light caught up in the river’s grooved tread That sun more like a mass grope out of emptiness  and the black river weeds before it, torn and trained,  rocketed and stark and stuck-to The tall shadow of the willow grows forth And the spare stems of the grasses and the rods of the mullein And these are the stations of this river The houses and the boats and the parked cars The growing wedge the ducks make moving forward, the shape  of the element there among the weeds that jut forward, the mass of the willows growing deeper in green and sundering The backfall of sun going downward The surface of the river coming clear of its own admixture The ducks moving over like slow planes in formation,  barely seen needles hauling white threads,  secretly heeding The fish in my skin relinquishes Will I know then what I have become? The river darkens from its end of trees closing in There is the sun and this deep depression Exiting as viewed in this river
Barely discerned clouds Hard, hard to get here what worth, what worth River of steel. River of no one becoming you. Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their  strangeness The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness The few elms dismembering The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes  and its filters It is lost to the surface of this river The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface resisting, unetchable Now the faint rain. I don’t know what to do with all this waiting things getting themselves readied toward emptiness The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its  exfoliating, its rivening  its being disfigured by fortune  and by wind A crone with old frills at her hair The grasp of her toward me
clouds in rafts above, upon one another, pushed up along  the margin of sky  dark underbellies Shirring of grasses and the nearly empty apple tree behind Where is this beginning from? The roll of clouds bolsters up close  moves vaguely east Hear the interstate, its rush of backdrop constant Oh those deep colors are something sacred There are patches of olive green, chartreuse, umber, piled  against each other, snapping and smoking almost  and then the empty prongs and systems  cross-hatchings  against the grays, burnished and glowing The cloud roll has changed now, been buffeted slowly  into bunches, disorganizing Oh, these torches before me that seem to burn brighter  as the light fades This aching gradation, smear and  gleam-forth and then the bare black hands up through  splaying and forcing the crowns  so slightly, just a tender worrying up from inside  the swollen gloves, the spheres of them, the undoing  the serial falling-off Furious brocade, yes, devastation That one oak in its torque and above, against the maddening subtle surface of the sky  the barely defined roads upon it, the passages  the growings-forth  gobbed and wrought, rich impasto  stubborn, unbecoming Now the grays, almost purple, seem to move forward  branching up from out of the background  darkening forth  surge from within the mass  organisms coming up against each other, bulging and turning  off, roiling  slow and mesmeric  the contained motion of it rooted  static movement, within stasis  painstaking  damage then recovery, damage then recovery A lighter band of sky now, stratum between dark cloud and  complicated span of tree-frieze  layering, up-changing  free-needled, built-up duns and copperings  score and rose-green gore, stitch and fret  always upon the under-thing, the broad backing up over  the one
The reservoir churned and cloud-deformed The far line of hills, fused, bunched color bitter wind against this hunch my folded bones I can see the rust earth beneath trees, the rough mats  gathering weight in semi-darkness, dim  nesting bases of trees Graft of dark cloud upon lighter one behind, building up  of something, a thickening, deposit of cold air, dark web  of insistence, built up in me How long can it be here? A simmering of trees, a dark moiling  a winter weight  a mid-shimmering of heat-distorted things The positioning of bolts of deep orange, gold-green and amber  molded, wicked in together Drops in pressure, now, a field of cold, a shift  between rain and snow The movement into this remembering  of separate things, train sounding its horn, removing  itself from the scene Snow thickening the far bars of trees, graying them in Blotting, dulling, gauzing over this dream It is snowfalling, it is beauty-filling and cleansing  this burn of words  it is delivering something seeming to uplift and to begin  pressing downward, this ink into frozen droplet  this thing Snow plinking in the leaves, the left hands of trees  the neat levers and pulls  the odd weeds The rich fringe of emptying trees  the shifted pins the breaks into dense pines into period reeds into gutterings What happens to the opposite shore  is untenable  is unmanageable to me That stratagem of damage, that unmattering Believe me it is some abomination of things being killed and  that mattering to me That exquisite built thing that is obliterated  its tiny white amplitude, its singing crushed into  particles, its must on the undersides of leaves Now I am sure  the world has not unfolded before me  anymore but has closed into rows  of its foldings Something in the collections of those trees  bare branches upthrust, the brush of them  bare branches up-brushed  their lip along mesh of shore weeds, the flanged grasses  the scrim of their midst  I am in them again  meddling in darks that are in them  and the white gold that is their outermost  screen that is their leafleting their grief that is in me  thin dredge of pebbles and  strange glandular patternings of trees  against trees against cut-bank against breath The rubied lung of sumac  tragedian
slant hand of beech leaves shag of oaks before water When did you go missing from me? That passage between limb and slipped skin gouged hickories, the ermine-bright birch through all that is traveling slopeward  circleting leaf through branch weave  corymbs of curled leaves  lone cedar document rising Through trees that far land moves descant the old rusts and pastes undershined Don’t you ever think this is so strange? the sibilant drift of dried leaves the coming down all to some shambles the encroachments on the innermost things Don’t you feel how everything is strained beyond  certain remembering? The limbs break their fragile whisks into The sky is a shroud pulled up over Each leaf of the beech has its wisdom held fast its little death ship I cannot wake up from inside  this burrow into fundaments of leaves The cold drills down into the stone the almost-extracted green the bird cloaked up under the ribs the dull gleams
When I go into the garden, there she is. The specter holds up her arms to show that her hands are eaten off. She is silent because of the agony. There is blood on her face. I can see she has done this to herself. So she would not feel the other pain. And it is true, she does not feel it. She does not even see me. It is not she anymore, but the pain itself that moves her. I look and think how to forget. How can I live while she stands there? And if I take her life what will that make of me? I cannot touch her, make her conscious. It would hurt her too much. I hear the sound all through the air that was her eating, but it is on its own now, completely separate from her. I think I am supposed to look. I am not supposed to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail and all expression gone. My God, I think, if paradise is to be here it will have to include her.
Half the women are asleep on the floor on pieces of cardboard. One is face down under a blanket with her feet and ankle bracelet showing. Her spear leans against the wall by her head where she can reach it. The woman who sits on a chair won’t speak because this is not her dress. An old woman sings an Italian song in English and says she wants her name in lights: Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children. One asks for any kind of medicine. One says she has a rock that means honor and a piece of fur. One woman’s feet are wrapped in rags. One keeps talking about how fat she is so nobody will know she’s pregnant. They lie about getting letters. One lies about a beautiful dead man. One lies about Denver. Outside it’s Thirtieth Street and hot and no sun.
She sits on the mountain that is her home and the landscapes slide away. One goes down and then up to the monastery. One drops away to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl and her mother are hanging the laundry. There’s a tiny port in the distance where the shore reaches the water. She is numb and clear because of the grieving in that world. She thinks of the bandits and soldiers who return to the places they have destroyed. Who plant trees and build walls and play music in the village square evening after evening, believing the mothers of the boys they killed and the women they raped will eventually come out of the white houses in their black dresses to sit with their children and the old. Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes.
Two horses were put together in the same paddock. Night and day. In the night and in the day wet from heat and the chill of the wind on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging and the taste of bay in the shadowed air. The dignity of being. They slept that way, knowing each other always. Withers quivering for a moment, fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail, width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight. Fences were nothing compared to that. People were nothing. They slept standing, their throats curved against the other’s rump. They breathed against each other, whinnied and stomped. There are things they did that I do not know. The privacy of them had a river in it. Had our universe in it. And the way its border looks back at us with its light. This was finally their freedom. The freedom an oak tree knows. That is built at night by stars.
The young men ride their horses fast on the wet sand of Parangtritis. Back and forth, with the water sliding up to them and away. This is the sea where the goddess lives, angry, her lover taken away. Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here, the people say. Do not swim in the sea. Give her an offering. I give a coconut to protect the man I love. The water pushes it back. I wade out and throw it farther. “The goddess does not accept your gift,” an old woman says. I say perhaps she likes me and we are playing a game. The old woman is silent, the horses wear blinders of cloth, the young men exalt in their bodies, not seeing right or left, pretending to be brave. Sliding on and off their beautiful horses on the wet beach at Parangtritis.
I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do. Confuse me, ovulate me, spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon, I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to swoon at your questionable light, you had me chasing you, the world’s worst lover, over and over hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight. But you disappear for nights on end with all my erotic mysteries and my entire unconscious mind. How long do I try to get water from a stone? It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band. Better off alone. I’m going to write hard and fast into you, moon, face-fucking. Something you wouldn’t understand. You with no swampy sexual promise but what we glue onto you. That’s not real. You have no begging cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch sucked. No lacerating spasms sending electrical sparks through the toes. Stars have those. What do you have? You’re a tool, moon. Now, noon. There’s a hero. The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures. But my lovers have never been able to read my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct. It’s hard to learn that, hard to do. The sun is worth ten of you. You don’t hold a candle to that complexity, that solid craze. Like an animal carcass on the road at night, picked at by crows, taunting walkers and drivers. Your face regularly sliced up by the moving frames of car windows. Your light is drawn, quartered, your dreams are stolen. You change shape and turn away, letting night solve all night’s problems alone.
It’s easy to make more of myself by eating, and sometimes easy’s the thing. To be double-me, half the trouble but not lonely. Making cakes to celebrate any old day. Eating too much: the emperor of being used. Nature, mature and feminized, naturalizes me naturally by creating the feeling of being a natural woman, like a sixteen-year-old getting knocked up again. To solve that problem, there’s the crispness of not eating, a pane of glass with a bloody-edged body, that is, having the baby at the prom undetected and, in a trance of self-preservation, throwing it away in the girls’ room trash. Buried under paper towels, silent. Nothing could be better, for the teenager. For me, starving, that coreless, useful feeling, is not making myself smaller but making myself bigger, inside. It’s prince and pauper both, it’s starving artist and good model in one masterpiece. It rhymes with marveling and that’s no accident. Fullness is dullness. Dreaming’s too easy. But sometimes I don’t care. Sometimes I put in just the right amount, but then I’m the worst kinds of patsy, a chump giving myself over to myself like a criminal to the law, with nothing to show for it. No reward, no news, no truth. It’s too sad to be so ordinary every day. Like some kind of employee. Being told what to do. Chop off a finger to plant in fertilizer (that is, in used animal food), to grow a finger tree. More fingers for me. Stop saying finger. I’m the one in charge here. Stop the madness and just eat the mirror. Put it in sideways or crush it into a powder. It doesn’t hurt and it works. Mouth full, don’t talk. Nothing to say. I’ll be a whole new person. I’ll make her myself. Then we’ll walk away. We’ll say to each other how she’s changed. How we wouldn’t have recognized us.
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.   Roland Barthes   1 One version of the story is I wish you back— that I used each evening evening out what all day spent wrinkling. I bought a dress that was so extravagantly feminine you could see my ovaries through it. This is how I thought I would seduce you. This is how frantic I hollowed out.  2 Another way of telling it is to hire some kind of gnarled and symbolic troll to make a tape recording. Of plastic beads coming unglued from a child’s jewelry box. This might be an important sound, like serotonin or mighty mitochondria, so your body hears about how you stole the ring made from a glittery opiate and the locket that held candy.  3 It’s only fair that I present yet another side, as insidious as it is, because two sides hold up nothing but each other. A tentacled skepticism, a suspended contempt, such fancies and toxins form a third wall. A mean way to end and I never dreamed we meant it.  4 Another way of putting it is like slathering jam on a scrape. Do sweets soothe pain or simply make it stick? Which is the worst! So much technology and no fix for sticky if you can’t taste it. I mean there’s no relief unless. So I’m coming, all this excitement, to your house. To a place where there’s no room for play. It is possible you’ll lock me out and I’ll finally focus on making mudcakes look solid in the rain.  5 In some cultures the story told is slightly different— in that it is set in an aquarium and the audience participates as various fish. The twist comes when it is revealed that the most personally attractive fish have eyes only on one side and repel each other like magnets. The starfish is the size of an eraser and does as much damage. Starfish, the eponymous and still unlikely hero, has those five pink moving suckerpads that allow endless permutations so no solid memory, no recent history, nothing better, left unsaid.  6 The story exists even when there are no witnesses, kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete, and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fast or everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident. This little tale tries so hard to be humorous, wants so badly to win affection and to lodge. Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.  7 Three million Richards can’t be wrong. So when they levy a critique of an undertaking which, in their view, overtakes, I take it seriously. They think one may start a tale off whingy and wretched in a regular voice. But when one strikes out whimsically, as if meta-is-better, as if it isn’t you, as if this story is happening to nobody it is only who you are fooling that’s nobody. The Richards believe you cannot privately jettison into the sky, just for fun. You must stack stories from the foundation up. From the sad heart and the feet tired of supporting it. Language is architecture, after all, not an air capsule, not a hang glide. This is real life. So don’t invite anyone to a house that hasn’t been built. Because no one unbuilds meticulously and meticulosity is what allows hearing. Three million Richards make one point. I hear it in order to make others. Mistake.  8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how muti-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I’ve invented so much and prevented more. But, I’d like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn’t love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.
I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me. All the cities are like you anyway. Windows darken when I get close enough to see. Any place we want to stay’s polluted, the good spots taken already by those who ruin them. And restaurants we’d never find. We’d rut a ditch by a river in nights so long they must be cut by the many pairs of wrong-handled scissors maybe god owns and doesn’t share. I water god. I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse. I take what I want, and have ever since what I want disappeared, like anything hunted. That’s what you said. Disappointment isn’t tender, dried and wide instead. The tourists snapped you crying, and the blanket I brought was so dirty it must have been lying around in lice and blood that whole year we fought. It wasn’t clear, so I forgot. I haven’t been sleeping, next to you twitching to bury my boring eyes. The ship made you sad, and the ferry, and canoe. All boats do.
It’s a wave, isn’t it? Not a particle. A fresh, cool wave, so why am I flushed and not washed? Why dirtier than before?     1. Etymology   On the subject of our names. They’re so embracing, thinking they’re all us   and swallowing themselves into our nausea.   Yet we never quite die on the spot. We put off being what we’re called, we take the hint.   Time is never wasted. It is always spent.     2. Teleology   Sheer fabric trailing through 4 a.m. I thought it was opaque and earlier.     3. Mathematics   I know you know I know. And the mirror multiplies inside.   The world is no bigger, but next time do the math,   because I wanted to know none of what I now know twice.     4. The Principle of the Borg   Saying “There’s no one like me” accomplishes the exact opposite of what you mean.   It is true only insofar as it is true for everyone equally.   So it means you are not special in any way. Which should be enough for you.     5. Documentary   This clothing, a maladaptive wrapping, cuts me up. I am a vignette,   floated knowingly since I pulled myself through myself,   like a unitard. Too many eyeholes   have been cut and pieced together to make flesh less various with others.     6. Medicine   The cure for embarrassment is substitution.   Strap, don’t pluck. Baldness makes headlines.   Use grass. Use less. Shorts under your skirt for recess.   Redo the surfaces of your wrong turns to make taking them smoother in the future.     7. Cosmology   Things are less embarrassing at the cellular level. Remember?   We were a whole part of the universe before Mother busted the party.   Before we were ourselves. Now, like dirty soap, we   attract what we repel.     8. Apology   Even the clumsiest fate is perfectly shaped, so the view took over looking   but the sweetest thing I’ve ever known is obscene with a beautiful   sugar rotted down to its truth.   Loving you a serious accidental shame and day flatulates into night,   trips and falls in front of millions into morning.   In thrall to this pocus: the end of fear starts   with such an annihilating blush, with such a stutter.
If it takes me all day, I will get the word freshened out of this poem. I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second, and now it won’t come out. It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated, so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked a cigarette. Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike off the roof with my bare hand. And used it to write a word in the snow. I wrote the word snow. I can’t stand myself.
I can see her in the kitchen,  Cooking up, for the hundredth time,  A little something from her  Limited Midwestern repertoire.  Cigarette going in the ashtray,  The red wine pulsing in its glass,  A warning light meaning  Everything was simmering  Just below the steel lid  Of her smile, as she boiled  The beef into submission,  Chopped her way  Through the vegetable kingdom  With the broken-handled knife  I use tonight, feeling her  Anger rising from the dark  Chambers of the head  Of cabbage I slice through,  Missing her, wanting  To chew things over  With my mother again.
Paulatim lachrymas rerum experentia tersit. Petrarch Father’s books lying on the living-room floor Must be divided into threes: art history, Classical letters and, left from my days here, Unsteady stacks of quasi-educational lore That show yellowing Geographic scientists Perennially lost in rain forest mists. An instant choice will cull some from the rest So they may become mine—a banausic test. Prewar light glimmers in the apartment: A shadowplay that summons an adolescence Of slammed doors and risible nothings Hurled at retreating parental backs —The most telling blows always sotto voce— As I stormed and wept and read in silence. Now, standing again in silence, I stare At a word trove given two sons to share. Some are dated in the first blank page: 1 January 1938
Hold, memory, a vision out of Greece: The west wind breathes a ripening breath As each pear, pendant and golden, brushes Another, where four tilled acres glisten Winter and summer: fig, olive, currant, And the heavy succulent pomegranate —Sunstruck for the plucker’s hand. All this a stranger sees, palm on lintel, Sees the stately women of the royal rooms Murmuring over linen, looms humming; Sees boys, on pedestals, shine torches Which fire the eyes of Alkinöos’s hounds. So much of heroism wondrously found (Like a glinting pebble in a child’s hand, Borne upward to imagination’s shallows),  As I’d gaze at snow blanketing West End, Hearing the story my father burnished Over a month of nights, so that the voyage Of the telling faded into the hours lived Beside that voice—whiskey rough—again Taking up the exile’s lament: hekatomb, Distaff, honeyed wine . . .
In memory of Nancy Tow Spiegel Before he put his important question to an oracle, Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers, Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi, Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon, So as to determine the accuracy of their words; His challenge: not to say anything of his future But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis (Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise, Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out). This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time: Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying, Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness, As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room. Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew, Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot. When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest, But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice:I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth; I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.
For hours now the Last Supper has been over, And the beating almost over, and morning’s cry Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard Warming themselves by the hasty fire, and Peter, Near the agony in the garden, feeling something Terrible happening, blinking back stale sleep, Peter turns his face from strangers’ stares. “This man also was with Jesus.” The others Slowly turning toward him with cold interest, And his own voice, thick-tongued: “I do not know him.” That the cock crows not then but at the third No Must tell us much about the nature of faith, How it leans on separations, how it robes simple Gestures—a hand waving from an open window— With deferral, as if real knowledge only comes after, As though Peter could only see what he’d done Upon going from the high priest’s courtyard And, all alone, weeping bitterly in the dawn. That much we can understand, but why then Does Chekhov revisit this known, hard ground With a half-frozen student who, on his way back From a failed hunt, thinks how this same chill Easter wind must have blown in Rurik’s age And scourged the hungry poor in the years Of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible? Wind, raw wind, hunger, icy needles of rain . . . The same as then—until, coming on two widows, A huge, shapeless old woman in a man’s overcoat And her putty-faced daughter washing a kettle, The student asks if he might share their fire, Saying, as he does, that St. Peter had on such A night warmed himself before a fire, on such A cold, extraordinarily long and terrible night. Murmuring welcomes, they bring him inside, And soon he finds himself describing in detail That part of the gospel which is Peter’s betrayal: “. . . thus I imagine it: the garden deathly still And very dark, and in the silence came Sounds of muffled sobbing—” Here his account Breaks off when the absently-smiling Vasilissa Suddenly weeps, burying her eyes in her apron; Whereupon her daughter, herself bowed down By sickness and filth, blushes and turns away. The student, for all his theology, is speechless. There’s nothing for it now but to step out With empty game-bag and find his moonlit Way back home across the ancient marsh. Only then does he see in the waterlogged Meadow, well beyond the river’s sedges, Something remarkable: a high-walled garden Looming green against a background of sand. Nineteen hundred years crossed in heartbeats! In that kindled instant all the world’s travails Drop from his shoulders. Just twenty-two, He has found the very quick of faith. Gone are hunger, sleet and useless words. Gone! Ah, we leave him there at century’s end, Before he has returned to his village —And all that returning would surely mean— In this, the briefest of the master’s stories.
In the garrulous present Threadbare nouns find What raiment’s left From forefathers Who perhaps struck poses But wrote of frenzy Out of deepest urgency Hammering voices In no dumbfounded age. Theirs the grace Of unfaltering Fealty to the word. Yet then I picture Pound Prematurely stilled By his own tongue —Tempus tacendi. Did he ever revisit The barbed floodlit quad Where bareheaded he’d Stood in all weather Mouthing surreal Greek, Fashioning a rhythm Out of life’s ruin, That life he would unspeak Half a lifetime later Arriving on the tarmac Of Eisenhower Italy, Breath caught in the throat? I heft his burdened book Only to let it drop —A stoneweight dropping down Well’s jaggy darkness That anyhow comes back In stonecold dialect:Pisa! A pure echo Purged of memory. On my lap his poems’ Esoteric call Has no words at all Or just those selfsame ones Quarried from a rock —Red and ocher bison Emblaze the solitude Of an old draughtsman Who long hours daubs In Altamira’s shade:Let those I love try to forgive What I have made.
At fifty-six, having left my mother, my father buys a motorcycle. I imagine him because it is the son’s sorrowful assignment to imagine his father: there, hunched on his mount, with black boots, with bad teeth, between shifts at the mill, ripping furrows in the backroads, past barn and field and silo, past creek and rock, past the brown mare, sleek in her impertinence, never slowing until he sees the bull. He stops, pulls his bike to the side of the road, where golden rod and clover grow, walks up to the fence, admires its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing its breath, its girth, its trampling of small wild flowers.
In the cannery the porpoise soul & the shadow fins of spirit boats lie awake the hundred hooks & flying reels one harpoon & the silver fleshing in the nets the mayor is waiting/counting scales dreaming new quotas & tuna coasts (under the table blood & payrolls swim to the shores on a crucifix of oil) in the cannery the porpoise soul steals a dagger for the engines throat tuna fins etch an X on the green stone of the ships floor there are documents with worker sweat files & rolled sleeve salt a spear of sails & anchor years (lost) inside the shoulders & against the ropes (somehow) a policy gunned the waves back before the porpoise sea was born
Let us gather in a flourishing way with sunluz grains abriendo los cantos que cargamos cada día  en el young pasto nuestro cuerpo para regalar y dar feliz perlas pearls of corn flowing árboles de vida en las cuatro esquinas let us gather in a flourishing way contentos llenos de fuerza to vida giving nacimientos to fragrant ríos  dulces frescos verdes turquoise strong carne de nuestros hijos rainbows let us gather in a flourishing way en la luz y en la carne of our heart to toil tranquilos in fields of blossoms juntos to stretch los brazos tranquilos with the rain en la mañana temprana estrella on our forehead cielo de calor and wisdom to meet us where we toil siempre in the garden of our struggle and joy let us offer our hearts a saludar our águila rising freedom a celebrar woven brazos branches ramas piedras nopales plumas piercing bursting figs and aguacates ripe mariposa fields and mares claros of our face to breathe todos en el camino blessing seeds to give to grow maiztlán en las manos de nuestro amor
for Clara Fraser I do not understand why men make war. Is it because artillery is the most stoic example of what flesh can become? Is it because the military plan is the final map drawn by the wisest hunter? Is it because the neutron ray is the invincible finger no one will disobey? or Is it because the flood of blood is the proper penance workers must pay for failing tribute at the prescribed hour? I do not understand why men make war. Is it because when death is multiple and expanding, there among the odd assemblages, arbitrary and unnamed, there among the shrivelled mountains, distorted and hollow, there among the liquid farms and cities, cold and sallow, there among the splintered bones of children, women, men and cattle there and only there, the eerie head of power is being born? Is it because submission is the only gesture to be rehearsed, to be dressed, to be modeled, to be cast, to be chosen in the one and only one drama to be staged in the theater of  this world, where everyone must act with the backbone humbled with the mascara of bondage, with the lipstick of slaves under the light of gentle assassination with applause piercing the ground forever? or Is it because war is the secret room of all things to be kept  sealed and contained, to be conquered and renamed woman enclosed by an empire of walls, vaults, hinges and locks with the hot key that men and only men must possess for an eternal evening to visit and contemplate, to snap open a favorite window and gaze at the calibrated murder as lovers of beauty?
I am merely posing for a photograph. Remember, when the Nomenclature stops you, tell them that—“Sirs, he was posing for my camera, that is all.” . . . yes, that may just work. My eyes: clear, hazel like my father’s, gaze across the sea, my hands at my side, my  legs spread apart in the wet sands, my pants crumpled, torn, withered, my  shirt in rags, see-through in places, no buttons, what a luxury, buttons, I  laugh a little, my tongue slips and licks itself, almost, I laugh, licks itself  from side to side, the corners of my mouth, if only I could talk like I used  to, giggle under moonlight, to myself, my arms destitute, shrunken, I  hadn’t noticed, after so many years sifting through rubble stars, rubble toys,  rubble crosses, after so many decades beseeching rubble breasts—pretend I  came to swim, I am here by accident, like you. My face to one side. Listen to gray-white bells of rubble, the list goes on—the bones, hearts, puffed intestines, stoned genitalia, teeth, again I forget how to piece all this together, scraps, so many scraps, lines and holes. The white gray rubble light blinds me, wait, I just thought—what if this is not visible, what if all this is not visible. Listen here, closely: I am speaking of the amber thighs still spilling nectar on the dust fleece across Gaza, the mountains, the spliced wombs across Israel, Syria. The amber serums cut across all boundaries, they smell incense, bread, honey—the color of my mother’s hands, her flesh, the shrapnel is the same color the propellers churn.
for Charles Fishman Before you go further, let me tell you what a poem brings, first, you must know the secret, there is no poem to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries, yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this, instead of going day by day against the razors, well, the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from the outside you think you are being entertained, when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise, your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course, is always open for business too, except, as you can see, it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play, you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is, the mist becomes central to your existence.
for Tomás Mendoza-Harrell & Lauro Flores I cut / / / / / I multiply everyday images. I apply an aluminum point. To the landscape. To the sentence. To the photo. To the figure. To the word. And suddenly, with a slight tremor of eyes, vertebrae and fingers, I destroy everything that exists. Through the years, I’ve rebuilt the cells, uncovered the signs of the cold, immaculate, academic vestibules and of the dead lips and histories in the metropolitan streets. My surgery is criminal. No one has been able to identify the skeletons, the remains, the thousand scattered nerves of personages I’ve gathered in order to bring this figure back to life. The scars are numberless and invisible. Who would suspect a grafik artist? Who would suspect this gray table as a chamber of murders? Instruments:  —The pencil sleeping with its yellow blanket and rubber crown.  —A magazine of memories, smiling women, men’s suits and watches like  drops, like science.  —Tubes of smothered ink sounding like small seas pounding a universe of   plastic.  —A photo of a Chamula woman looking through these windows toward  the Mission.  —Watercolors: French Ultramarine, Emerald Green and Windsor Violet.  —Matches thin friends identical soldiers with their red helmets thinking.  —Dictionaries in Portuguese, Spanish and German, white pages beasts  nobody hears moaning.  —The priest lantern praying with its head pointing toward the floor in   front of a fierce wall.  —Solemn archives organized by syllables, breaths, laughs and love with X.  —A book about an artist: The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, printed in New  York where they listen to the wind falling from the tallest building. And the X-acto knives. Triangular. The beautiful blades / / / / / Every night cars cruise the streets of 24th and Mission. A woman from San  José drives a blue Chevy with smoked windows. Estela. She has reddish  hair. Tight brows and dark eyes desiring everything but this street that  ends in eight blocks: Potrero Avenue. She’ll have to turn. But she won’t.  She won’t go back to the home of twenty years and her father who pretends  to play Santa by Agustín Lara on his old guitar and the mother organizing a  Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meeting. Estela will leave the car parked between  Harrison Street and Alabama in San Francisco. She’ll walk aimlessly in the  warmth of the produce stores, into St. Peter’s church, by the Galería de la  Raza, China Books, the bakery at La Victoria. She’ll walk in the night with  her eyes burning, seeing him laughing, the young man in his black box  apartment, laughing, laughing, laughing like a little man. The little man laughs. It’s an apartment of marriage and fists. The  wife-beater laughs in his easy chair. Next to his bed he sees the anxious  note. He focuses on the signature with the E broken in three places. He looks at the stained and unmade sheets, the dull curtains, the crushed  cigarettes and the ashes. The black-and-white television announces a sale  of living room furniture. With his can of beer he observes. Smokes. Thinks. Within a week or two they’ll take his cousin to San Quentin prison, again.  The last time he saw him he was a gardener at a college. He imagines Estela coming home. He imagines and drinks calmly. Makes the  bed. Turns off the television and turns on the fm. He amuses himself in  that space or cube floating above the city. Estela walks north on the Avenue. P / O / T / R / E / R / O Grafiks require precise knives.  On that day  When you came to bathe me  I sweated that stink  That only the anesthetized  Can sweat.  You sponged my skin  Cleaned my hair and  Seeming to ignore  My stunned and shriveled genitals  You nonetheless bathed them . . .  —michael ramsey-pérez Randi finds himself in a hospital in Los Angeles or maybe further south, in  San Diego. I think his parents are from Arizona. He’s very ill. He’s in a room  with a red sign hanging from the doorknob. I / S / O / L / A / T / I / O / N His liver is bloated, skin yellowed, hair long and greasy. Weakness  consumes him night after night. He can’t speak, tires easily. But he can  hear. He hears the white heels of the doctors and nurses running to the  rooms of the dying. He hears footsteps fluttering like doves over the floor  or like the leaves of fever falling from the roof of hell. It’s eleven o’clock at night. He hears the abandoned man in room 200 fall  out of bed attempting to drink a glass of water. He hears the IV tubes  bursting, the sweet plasma spinning between the walls, the bag slipping to  the floor and splattering through the night’s open screens. The man screams. Vomits blood and ulcers. Gets tangled up in sheets and  transparent plastic veins. After half an hour doves fly in. The leaves fall.  Fast. After a few days a black man enters room 199. An orderly. He cleans his  body with a warm sponge. His hands run slowly down the yellowed back,  the belly and fragile shoulders of Randi. Dark birds fly over a forgotten  landscape. Randi looks at his mother rubbing his chest with alcohol to  quiet the cough before he sleeps. He turns his face. Imagines his one-room  house, a trailer his father made out of an old car. They’re on a little ranch  at the outskirts of an unknown town. The mountains reflect the afternoon’s  coppery heat. From afar you can see birds crossing above the saguaros and  the sky. The last time I saw Randi was at San Francisco City College. He had just  turned in all his papers so he could drop out at midterm. He didn’t want to  go on with it. It was a farce. Like when he was invited to read poetry near the Galería de La Raza in the  Mission District. He never showed up. Took 18th instead of 24th Street.  Some Latinos beat him up. They noticed a homosexual air about him. Lies do not exist, only the grafik. This figure has no scars / / / / /  When I had you they didn’t give  me anything. I grabbed onto the  washbasin until I thought I’d die  they did that then. They strapped . . .  —alma luz villanueva Eva (circa 1946), the doctor says they have to operate. Your pelvis is too  narrow. The child can’t be born. It will come out in pieces. Eva. They’ll have  to operate. He says he’ll give you morphine for the stitches afterwards. Even if you  scream, Eva, it’ll be alright. Even if the nurses ignore you, laugh at you as  they see your bluish mouth open, your sleepwalker’s eyes, your hands  scratching against the metal bed or the air or memories. For one long  second they’ll study your womb in bandages stains clouds raindrops suns  and rouge shadows and rage over the coffin hidden by 10 centimeters of  vertical stitching. Eva. You’ll hemorrhage 29 days later while washing  clothes over a tin basin. Eva. The doctor is smiling. Have faith in him. He says everything is fine.  I’ve signed the papers. Everything is arranged, girl.  —The pencil wakes  —The sheet tightens, the rubber vibrates  —The magazine fades  —The watch is speechless Someone has erased all the E’s from all the pages; small empty rectangles  remain. The ink runs searching for asylum.  —Emerald green is the color of jagged grass  diluted in great bottles of tears, spit and  alcohol. It’s rain for a hell of cells. They burn  and burn and burn. S / I / E / B / R / E / N / N / E / N Diego, you touch up a colossal worker with too-sad eyes, wearing a faded  blue cotton shirt. His eyes are swollen. The worker wants to see, but his  eyes don’t count anymore, just his hands. They fly. They untangle above new machines toward the future. Touching the  atmosphere. The fingers touch the 17th of February, 1981. The National Guard enters the province of Las Cabañas in El Salvador. They  trap the area, cutting off all the roads out for the campesinos. Bombs fall.  The mountains explode rocks, roots and water. An iron shell splinter rips  into the throats of grandfathers and little girls. The initials U S A sweat. They sweat through the paint of the Guardia helicopters swooping down  over the huts and fields of corn. Seven thousand begin to run toward the Río Lempa. 15km and then the wide  river. 15km and then maybe refuge in the jungles of Honduras. Only 15kms 9kms 7kms 6kms a pregnant young woman disappears 5kms the Guardia captured her along with the others 4kms they rip off her clothes 4kms soldiers in masculine green stained uniforms circle her 4kms they tie her arms and legs 3kms the bayonet penetrates 2kms it etches an x of red tears over the furious womb 6kms the proud soldier throws down his weapon 12kms sinks his right hand 9kms rips out the fetus with the fingernails of his hot fingers 13kms lifts it up like a torch 1km opening his mouth the soldier screams 15kms One less communist in El Salvador! They reach the river. They jump in the water. Suddenly, from the Honduran  side other helicopters and machine guns appear. The wind surrenders. The  afternoon weakens. The giant worker’s machinery shrieks on the tiny corner of the page: Plate  number 113. It’s your self-portrait that you painted on the wall of the  San Francisco Art Institute. Few blades have been needed / / / / / This time. I used a few blades to fill the canvas with its dramatis  personae, landscapes and scenes that have been held back and kept secret;  a figure dealt out in different boxes toward different destinies. No one  has been able to figure out what happened on this table. But it’s time to  turn off the black lamp. If the ask me, I’ll do the only thing I can. 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Long have I long’d to see my love againe,  Still have I wisht, but never could obtaine it;  Rather than all the world (if I might gaine it) Would I desire my love’s sweet precious gaine. Yet in my soule I see him everie day,  See him, and see his still sterne countenaunce,  But (ah) what is of long continuance, Where majestie and beautie beares the sway? Sometimes, when I imagine that I see him,  (As love is full of foolish fantasies)  Weening to kisse his lips, as my love’s fees, I feele but aire: nothing but aire to bee him.  Thus with Ixion, kisse I clouds in vaine:  Thus with Ixion, feele I endles paine.
Cherry-lipt Adonis in his snowie shape,  Might not compare with his pure ivorie white,  On whose faire front a poet’s pen may write, Whose roseate red excels the crimson grape, His love-enticing delicate soft limbs,  Are rarely fram’d t’intrap poore gazine eies:  His cheeks, the lillie and carnation dies, With lovely tincture which Apollo’s dims. His lips ripe strawberries in nectar wet,  His mouth a Hive, his tongue a hony-combe,  Where Muses (like bees) make their mansion. His teeth pure pearle in blushing correll set.  Oh how can such a body sinne-procuring,  Be slow to love, and quicke to hate, enduring?

Inside the standard lunch hour din they rise, four seamless voices fused into one, floating somewhere between a low hum and a vibration, like the sound of a train rumbling beneath noisy traffic. The men are hunched around a booth table, a fire circle of coffee cups and loose fists, leaning in around the thing they are summoning forth from inside this suddenly beating four-chambered heart. I’ve taken Avery out on a whim, ordered quesadillas and onion rings, a kiddy milk with three straws. We’re already deep in the meal, extra napkins and wipes for the grease coating our faces and hands like mid-summer sweat. And because we’re happy, lost in the small pleasures of father and son, at first their voices seem to come from inside us. Who’s that boy singing? Avery asks, unable to see these men wrapped in their act. I let him keep looking, rapt. And when no one is paying attention, I put down my fork and take my boy’s hand, and together we dive into the song. Or maybe it pours into us, and we’re the ones brimming with it.
I O come you pious youth! adore The wisdom of thy God, In bringing thee from distant shore, To learn His holy word. Eccles. xii. II Though mightst been left behind Amidst a dark abode; God’s tender mercy still combined, Thou hast the holy word. Psal. cxxv. 2, 3. III Fair wisdom’s ways are paths of peace, And they that walk therein, Shall reap the joys that never cease, And Christ shall be their king. Psal. i. 1, 2; Prov. iii. 7. IV God’s tender mercy brought thee here; Tossed o’er the raging main; In Christian faith thou hast a share, Worth all the gold of Spain. Psal. ciii. 1, 3, 4. V While thousands tossed by the sea, And others settled down, God’s tender mercy set thee free, From dangers that come down. Death. VI That thou a pattern still might be, To youth of Boston town, The blessed Jesus set thee free, From every sinful wound. 2 Cor. v. 10. VII The blessed Jesus, who came down, Unveiled his sacred face, To cleanse the soul of every wound, And give repenting grace. Rom. v. 21. VIII That we poor sinners may obtain, The pardon of our sin; Dear blessed Jesus now constrain, And bring us flocking in. Psal. xxxiv. 6, 7, 8. IX Come you, Phillis, now aspire, And seek the living God, So step by step thous mayst go higher, Till perfect in the word. Matth. vii. 7, 8. X While thousands moved to distant shore, And others left behind, The blessed Jesus still adore, Implant this in thy mind. Psal. lxxxix. 1. XI Thous hast left the heathen shore; Through mercy of the Lord, Among the heathen live no more, Come magnify thy God. Psal. xxxiv. 1, 2, 3. XII I pray the living God may be, The shepherd of thy soul; His tender mercies still are free, His mysteries to unfold. Psal. lxxx. 1, 2, 3. XIII Thou, Phillis, when thou hunger hast, Or pantest for thy God; Jesus Christ is thy relief, Thou hast the holy word. Psal. xiii. 1, 2, 3. XIV The bounteous mercies of the Lord, Are hid beyond the sky, And holy souls that love His word, Shall taste them when they die. Psal. xvi. 10, 11. XV These bounteous mercies are from God, The merits of His son; The humble soul that loves His word, He chooses for His own. Psal. xxxiv. 15. XVI Come, dear Phillis, be advised, To drink Samaria’s flood; There nothing that shall suffice But Christ’s redeeming blood. John iv. 13, 14. XVII While thousands muse with earthly toys; And range about the street, Dear Phillis, seek for heaven’s joys, Where we do hope to meet. Matth. vi. 33. XVIII When God shall send his summons down, And number saints together, Blest angels chant, (triumphant sound), Come live with me forever. Psal. cxvi. 15. XIX The humble soul shall fly to God, And leave the things of time, Start forth as ’twere at the first word, To taste things more divine. Matth. v. 3, 8. XX Behold! the soul shall waft away, Whene’er we come to die, And leave its cottage made of clay, In twinkling of an eye. Cor. xv. 51, 52, 53. XXI Now glory be to the Most High, United praises given, By all on earth, incessantly, And all the host of heav’n. Psal. cl. 6.
scene, the desert. time, mid-day.  In silent horror o’er the desert-waste The driver Hassan with his camels past. One cruse of water on his back he bore, And his light scrip contained a scanty store: A fan of painted feathers in his hand, To guard his shaded face from scorching sand. The sultry sun had gained the middle sky, And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh. The beasts, with pain, their dusty way pursue, Shrill roared the winds, and dreary was the view! With desperate sorrow wild, th’ affrighted man Thrice sighted, thrice struck his breast, and thus began: Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,  When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.
And now, my Marian, from its shackles free, My wearied fancy turns for ease to thee; To thee, my compass through life’s varied stream, My constant object, and unfailing theme. Torn from the bosom of my soul’s repose, And self-devoted to surrounding woes, Oft o’er my solitary thoughts I brood— (For passing crowds to me are solitude)— Catch thy loved image, on thy beauties dwell, Improved by graces which no tongue can tell, The look which I have seen, by love endeared, The voice to love attuned, which I have heard. Or rapt in thoughts of higher worth, adore Thy virtues, drawn by mem’ry’s faithful store; Or court, as now obsequious at her shrine, The Muse, unkind on ev’ry theme but thine. Nor foreign deem from such a frame of mind This tale, to meet thy gracious ear designed, To me, and to my state, alike belong The subject, and the moral, of my song, ’Tis true, no serpent of envenomed breath Hath stung my love, ere yet a bride, to death; And, O! may Heav’n for many years to come, Preserve her life from Nature’s final doom! Yet is she lost to me, in substance dead, With half the traversed globe between us spread; Dreadful transition! in one moment’s cost My soul’s whole wealth I saw, and held, and lost. The Fate and Silence closed life’s blissful scene, Its being past, as it had never been. The sad rememberance only now remains, And by contrasting aggravates my pains. Hope still attendant and delusive stands, And points, but coldly points, to distant lands; Gilds their faint summits with her flatt’ring ray; But deserts, rocks, and seas obstruct the way; And age, and sickness, and the clouds that teem With unknown thunders, through the prospect gleam. Ah me! no Gods, nor Angels now descend, The sons of men in pity to befriend! My sufferings else might some kind spirit move To give me back on terms the wife I love: And more than half my life would I resign, For health, her purchase, and herself, for mine, Borne by the Pow’rs of Air, or she should rise, Or I rejoin her through the distant skies. No more my thoughts in solitude should mourn My sweet companion from my presence torn; Nor rigid duty force me to remain, And see her sails diminish on the main. To her my destined hours, though few, I’d give, And while I lived, a life of bliss I’d live.

Ease is the pray’r of him who, in a whaleboat Crossing Lake Champlain, by a storm’s o’ertaken: Not struck his blanket, not a friendly island  Near to receive him. Ease is the wish too of the sly Canadian; Ease the delight of bloody Caghnawagas; Ease, Richard, ease, not to be bought with wampum,  Nor paper money. Nor colonel’s pay, nor yet a dapper sergeant, Orderly waiting with recovered halberd, Can chase the crowd of troubles still surrounding  Laced regimentals. That sub lives best who, with a sash in tatters Worn by his grandsire at the fight of Blenheim, To fear a stranger, and to wild ambition,  Snores on a bearskin. Why like fine-fellows are we ever scheming, We short-lived mortals? Why so fond of climates Warmed by new suns? O who, that runs from home, can  Run from himself too? Care climbs radeaux with four-and-twenty pounders, Not quits our light troops, or our Indian warriors, Swifter than moose-deer, or the fleeter east wind,  Pushing the clouds on. He, whose good humor can enjoy the present, Scorns to look forward; with a smile of patience Temp’ring the bitter. Bliss uninterrupted  None can inherit. Death instantaneous hurried off Achilles; Age far-extended wore away Tithonus. Who will live longer, thou or I, Montgom’ry?  Dicky or Tommy? Thee twenty messmates, full of noise and laughter, Cheer with their sallies; thee the merry damsels Please with their titt’ring; whilst thou sitt’st adorned with   Boots, sash and gorget. Me to Fort Hendrick, midst a savage nation, Dull Connajohry, cruel fate has driven. O think on Morris, in a lonely chamber,  Dabbling in Sapphic.
Alas, my Purse! how lean and low! My silken Purse! what art thou now! One I beheld—but stocks will fall— When both thy ends had wherewithal. When I within thy slender fence My fortune placed, and confidence; A poet’s fortune!—not immense: Yet, mixed with keys, and coins among, Chinked to the melody of song.  Canst thou forget, when, high in air, I saw thee fluttering at a fair? And took thee, destined to be sold, My lawful Purse, to have and hold? Yet used so oft to disembogue, No prudence could thy fate prorogue. Like wax thy silver melted down, Touch but the brass, and lo! ’twas gone: And gold would never with thee stay, For gold had wings, and flew away.  Alas, my Purse! yet still be proud, For see the Virtues round thee crowd! See, in the room of paltry wealth, Calm Temperance rise, the nurse of health; And Self-Denial, slim and spare, And Fortitude, with look severe; And Abstinence, to leanness prone, And Patience, worn to skin and bone: Prudence and Foresight on thee wait, And Poverty lies here in state! Hopeless her spirits to recruit, For every Virtue is a mute.  Well then, my Purse, thy Sabbaths keep; Now thou art empty, I shall sleep. No silver sounds shall thee molest, Nor golden dreams disturb my breast. Safe shall I walk with thee along, Amidst temptations thick and strong; Catched by the eye, no more shall stop At Wildey’s toys, or Pinchbeck’s shop; Nor cheapening Payne’s ungodly books, Be drawn aside by pastry-cooks: But fearless now we both may go Where Ludgate’s mercers bow so low; Beholding all with equal eye, Nor moved at—“Madam, what d’ye buy?”  Away, far hence each worldly care! Nor dun nor pick-purse shalt thou fear, Nor flatterer base annoy my ear. Snug shalt thou travel through the mob, For who a poet’s purse will rob? And softly sweet in garret high Will I thy virtues magnify; Outsoaring flatterers’ stinking breath, And gently rhyming rats to death.
———A simple Child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? I met a little cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head. She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad: Her eyes were fair, and very fair; —Her beauty made me glad. “Sisters and brothers, little Maid, How many may you be?” “How many? Seven in all,” she said, And wondering looked at me. “And where are they? I pray you tell.” She answered, “Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea. “Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.” “You say that two at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea, Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell, Sweet Maid, how this may be.” Then did the little Maid reply, “Seven boys and girls are we; Two of us in the church-yard lie, Beneath the church-yard tree.” “You run about, my little Maid, Your limbs they are alive; If two are in the church-yard laid, Then ye are only five.” “Their graves are green, they may be seen,” The little Maid replied, “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door, And they are side by side. “My stockings there I often knit, My kerchief there I hem; And there upon the ground I sit, And sing a song to them. “And often after sun-set, Sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer, And eat my supper there. “The first that died was sister Jane; In bed she moaning lay, Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away. “So in the church-yard she was laid; And, when the grass was dry, Together round her grave we played, My brother John and I. “And when the ground was white with snow, And I could run and slide, My brother John was forced to go, And he lies by her side.” “How many are you, then,” said I, “If they two are in heaven?” Quick was the little Maid’s reply, “O Master! we are seven.” “But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” ’Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
O young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; And save his good broadsword he weapons had none, He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone. So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. He staid not for brake, and he stopp’d not for stone, He swam the Eske river where ford there was none; But ere he alighted at Netherby gate, The bride had consented, the gallant came late: For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war, Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar. So boldly he enter’d the Netherby Hall, Among bride’s-men, and kinsmen, and brothers and all: Then spoke the bride’s father, his hand on his sword, (For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word,) “O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war, Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?” “I long woo’d your daughter, my suit you denied;— Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide— And now I am come, with this lost love of mine, To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine. There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far, That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.” The bride kiss’d the goblet: the knight took it up, He quaff’d off the wine, and he threw down the cup. She look’d down to blush, and she look’d up to sigh, With a smile on her lips and a tear in her eye. He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,— “Now tread we a measure!” said young Lochinvar. So stately his form, and so lovely her face, That never a hall such a galliard did grace; While her mother did fret, and her father did fume, And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume; And the bride-maidens whisper’d, “’twere better by far To have match’d our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.” One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear, When they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near; So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung, So light to the saddle before her he sprung! “She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur; They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar. There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan; Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran: There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee, But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see. So daring in love, and so dauntless in war, Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?
composed at clevedon, somersetshire My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o’ergrown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such would Wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed! The stilly murmur of the distant Sea Tells us of silence. And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caressed, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! O! the one Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere— Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-closed eyelids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquility: Full many a thought uncalled and undetained, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject Lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved Woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. Meek Daughter in the family of Christ! Well hast thou said and holily dispraised These shapings of the unregenerate mind; Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy’s aye-babbling spring. For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healèd me, A sinful and most miserable man, Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honored Maid!
Stop, Christian passer-by!—Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he. O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise—to be forgiven for fame He asked, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return: Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is mine Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? Wherefore feed and clothe and save From the cradle to the grave Those ungrateful drones who would Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood? Wherefore, Bees of England, forge Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, That these stingless drones may spoil The forced produce of your toil? Have ye leisure, comfort, calm, Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm? Or what is it ye buy so dear With your pain and with your fear? The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears. Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap: Find wealth—let no imposter heap: Weave robes—let not the idle wear: Forge arms—in your defence to bear. Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells— In hall ye deck another dwells. Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see The steel ye tempered glance on ye. With plough and spade and hoe and loom Trace your grave and build your tomb And weave your winding-sheet—till fair England be your Sepulchre.
My spirit is too weak—mortality  Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,  And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.  Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep  That I have not the cloudy winds to keep Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye. Such dim-conceived glories of the brain  Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,  That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—  A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
Little Tokyo bar— ladies night, smoky gauze balcony, whispering. Tommy Becker, makes up words to “La Bamba”—request by Hard Jackson, mechanic on the left side of Paulie, oldies dancer, glowing with everything inside of her, shattered remembrances, healed in lavender nail polish, the jagged fingernail tapping. So play it hard above this floor, this velvet desert. I want the Titian ochre yeast of winter, keyboard man, fix your eyes on my eyes and tell me, handsome, how long will I live? How many double-fisted desires, crushed letters, will I lift in this terrain? And this rumbling sleeve, this ironed flint of inquisitions and imaginary executors, where shall I strike, what proud stones? Will this fauna open for me, ever, this fuzz, anointed beak inside the bartender’s mirrors, etched doves, a cautious spiral Harley tank, hissing, this Indian bead choker on Rita’s neck? How long shall we remain as wavy reflections, imitators of our own jacket’s frown? Who shall awaken first? Margo Fitzer, the waitress? I will say, Queen Margo, sing to me stoic princess of slavering hearts, three faint lines creased on your satin belly, toss our planet onto your umber lacquer tray, too empty now; make the earth spin its dog rhapsody, erotic through this silvery off-ramp and flake, unfurl. We tumble across this raceway in honey-glazed traces, our arms ahead, the hands flying to Ricky’s Ice Cream Parlour, outside. I want to own one someday, maybe on Thirty-Second Street. You will see me in my gelled waved hair, my busy wrists—so fast, a clown’s resolute gloves, dipping faster than finger painting—except  I’d be stirring milk and the chocolate foam of love, churning, burning this sweet spirit, more uncertain, than the celestial sheaths above the prairie frost. See the boy coming, they chide, leaning, how he crosses his legs, his eyes dreaming, sideburns just shaved clean. He weighs the sour slate on his father’s breath; perfume, fortune, cards left on the bleeding table. Milo Wilkens, drummer at the curve, strokes his nipples with his arms as he hits the high hat. Somewhere in the back rooms, I know, a shrine, orange sponge cushions, two toilets and a wire wound wicker box, to leave flowers, occasional offerings by the Johnson County dudes, detasselers in jersey ties. Talk no more, enjoy. Darling singer, let your starry blouse sway me, steal this fresh peach half from its amber juice; I want the moon in this nectar, too. The flashing cymbals, feverish. Who can strike a votive candle, love, or sleep in this electronic night? Just listen to the two-part harmony, laughter, peeling beyond the cemetery, beyond the Iowa river—where the spike hat rooster bristles his tiny ears, bows his head, and sips from the dark canister under the carved pearl-stone. And then, returns. Let us drink, salute the bright spokes of meal, the dying wands of river blossoms, grandmother’s sacred hair; listen, her soprano owl, her bluish melody, so thin. Another glass please, we shall dance once again, our eyebrows smearing against each other’s cheekbones, loud with a Midwest sweat, a cantata from the crosshatch amp, click it. Click it, for wild kind rain, forgiving seasons, for the blushed bread of our shoulders and thighs, this night, everyone is here. Even Jeff Yoder came all the way from Illinois, to fill a bucket with passion, ruffled, thick. O sax player with a jail needle tattoo, leap onto this wet pavement, call my lonesome tempest heart, its buried mother’s kiss, bless us in staccato, with quivers of oak branch greenness, and sparrow longings riff over this brutal sky, give us your bell filled, conjure your tropic, our lover’s breath. Blues bar dancers, jangling gold popcorn, chord makers, opal-eyed Suzie in a flannel shirt; we beckon the spark, the flaring this lost body to live.
Alas! and am I born for this,  To wear this slavish chain? Deprived of all created bliss,  Through hardship, toil and pain! How long have I in bondage lain,  And languished to be free! Alas! and must I still complain—  Deprived of liberty. Oh, Heaven! and is there no relief  This side the silent grave— To soothe the pain—to quell the grief  And anguish of a slave? Come Liberty, thou cheerful sound,  Roll through my ravished ears! Come, let my grief in joys be drowned,  And drive away my fears. Say unto foul oppression, Cease:  Ye tyrants rage no more, And let the joyful trump of peace,  Now bid the vassal soar. Soar on the pinions of that dove  Which long has cooed for thee, And breathed her notes from Afric’s grove,  The sound of Liberty. Oh, Liberty! thou golden prize,  So often sought by blood— We crave thy sacred sun to rise,  The gift of nature’s God! Bid Slavery hide her haggard face,  And barbarism fly: I scorn to see the sad disgrace  In which enslaved I lie. Dear Liberty! upon thy breast,  I languish to respire;  And like the Swan unto her nest,  I’d like to thy smiles retire. Oh, blest asylum—heavenly balm!  Unto thy boughs I flee— And in thy shades the storm shall calm,  With songs of Liberty!
Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one, perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others, was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me, to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now, the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again, this time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of…” not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I, our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives, his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem, mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark, his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist, mine having to know for us both that everything ends, world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.
I am the only being whose doom No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn; I never caused a thought of gloom, A smile of joy, since I was born. In secret pleasure, secret tears, This changeful life has slipped away, As friendless after eighteen years, As lone as on my natal day. There have been times I cannot hide, There have been times when this was drear, When my sad soul forgot its pride And longed for one to love me here. But those were in the early glow Of feelings since subdued by care; And they have died so long ago, I hardly now believe they were. First melted off the hope of youth, Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew; And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew. ’Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow, servile, insincere; But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there
Have you been in our wild west country? then  You have often had to pass Its cabins lying like birds’ nests in  The wild green prairie grass. Have you seen the women forget their wheels  As they sat at the door to spin— Have you seen the darning fall away  From their fingers worn and thin, As they asked you news of the villages  Where they were used to be, Gay girls at work in the factories  With their lovers gone to sea! Ah, have you thought of the bravery  That no loud praise provokes— Of the tragedies acted in the lives  Of poor, hard-working folks! Of the little more, and the little more  Of hardship which they press Upon their own tired hands to make  The toil for the children less: And not in vain; for many a lad  Born to rough work and ways, Strips off his ragged coat, and makes  Men clothe him with their praise.
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? —Yes, but not this alone. Is it to feel our strength— Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay? Is it to feel each limb Grow stiffer, every function less exact, Each nerve more loosely strung? Yes, this, and more; but not Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be! ’Tis not to have our life Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow, A golden day’s decline. ’Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are no more. It is to spend long days And not once feel that we were ever young; It is to add, immured In the hot prison of the present, month To month with weary pain. It is to suffer this, And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel. Deep in our hidden heart Festers the dull remembrance of a change, But no emotion—none. It is—last stage of all— When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat, A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro To mark the shore.  The farmer does not know That they are there. He walks with heavy feet, Counting the bread and wine by autumn’s gain, But I,—I smile to think that days remain Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain, I shall be glad remembering how the fleet, Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.
Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!
They sing their dearest songs— He, she, all of them—yea, Treble and tenor and bass, And one to play; With the candles mooning each face. . . . Ah, no; the years O! How the sick leaves reel down in throngs! They clear the creeping moss— Elders and juniors—aye, Making the pathways neat And the garden gay; And they build a shady seat. . . . Ah, no; the years, the years, See, the white storm-birds wing across. They are blithely breakfasting all— Men and maidens—yea, Under the summer tree, With a glimpse of the bay, While pet fowl come to the knee. . . . Ah, no; the years O! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall. They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them—aye, Clocks and carpets and chairs On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs. . . . Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying tonight or lying still awake Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff, Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation  Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation  Troubles my sleep. Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant, Now lettest thou thy servant  Depart in peace. The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation . . .  Oh well!  It troubles my sleep.
Constantly risking absurdity  and death  whenever he performs  above the heads  of his audience  the poet like an acrobat  climbs on rime  to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams  above a sea of faces  paces his way  to the other side of day  performing entrechats  and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics  and all without mistaking  any thing  for what it may not be  For he's the super realist  who must perforce perceive  taut truth  before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance  toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits  with gravity  to start her death-defying leap  And he  a little charleychaplin man  who may or may not catch  her fair eternal form  spreadeagled in the empty air  of existence
Deflores. What makes your lip so strange? This must not be betwixt us. Beatrice. The man talks wildly. Deflores. Come kisse me with a zeal now. Beatrice. Heaven I doubt him. Deflores. I will not stand so long to beg 'em shortly. Beatrice. Take heed Deflores of forgetfulness, 'twill soon betray us. Deflores. Take you heed first; Faith y'are grown much forgetfull, y'are to blame in't. Beatrice. He's bold, and I am blam'd for't. Deflores. I have eas'd you of your trouble, think on't, I'me in pain, And must be as'd of ou; 'tis a charity, Justice invites your blood to understand me. Beatrice. I dare not. Deflores. Quickly. Beatrice. Oh I never shall, speak if yet further of that I may lose What has been spoken, and no sound remain on't. would not hear so much offence again for such another deed. Deflores. Soft, Lady, soft; the last is not yet paid for, oh this act Has put me into spirit; I was as greedy on't As the parcht earth of moisture when the clouds weep. Did you ot mark, I wrought my self into't. Nay sued, and kneel'd for't: Why was all that pains took? You see I have thrown contempt upon your gold, Not that I want it, for I doe piteously, In order I will come unto't, and make use on't, But 'twas not held so pretious to begin with; For I place wealth after the heels of pleasure, And where I not resolv'd in my belief That thy virginity were perfect in thee, I should but take my recompense with grudging, As if I had but halfe my hopes I agreed for. Beatrice. Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, Or shelter such a cunning cruelty, To make his death the murderer of my honor. Thy language is so bold and vitious, I cannot see which way I can forgive it with any modesty. Deflores. Push, you forget your selfe, a woman dipt in blood, and talk of modesty. Beatrice. O misery of sin! would I had been bound Perpetually unto my living hate In that Piracquo, then to hear these words. Think but upon the distance that Creation Set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there. Deflores. Look but into your conscience, read me there, 'Tis a true Book, you'l find me there your equall: Push, flye not to your birth, but settle you In what the act has made you, y'are no more now, You must forget your parentage to me, Y'are the deeds creature, by that name You lost your first condition, and I challenge you, As peace and innocency has turn'd you out, And made you one with me. Beatrice. With thee, foul villain? Deflores. Yes, my fair murdress; Do you urge me? Though thou wri'st maid, thou whore in thy affection, 'Twas chang'd from thy first love, and that's a kind Of whoredome in thy heart, and he's chang'd now, To bring thy second on the Alsemero, Whom 'by all sweets that ever darkness tasted, If I enjoy thee not thou ne're enjoyst, I'le blast the hopes and joyes of marriage, I'le confess all, my life I rate at nothing. Beatrice. Deflores. Deflores. I shall rest from all lovers plagues then, I live in pain now: that shooting eye Will burn my heart to cinders. Beatrice. O sir, hear me. Deflores. She that in life and love refuses me, In death and shame my partner she shall be. Beatrice. Stay, hear me once for all, I make thee master Of all the wealth I have in gold and jewels, Let me go poor unto my bed with honor, And i am rich in all things. Deflores. Let this silence thee, The wealth of all Valentia shall not buy my pleasure from me, Can you weep Fate from its determin'd purpose? So soon may weep me. Beatrice. Vengeance begins; Murder I see is followed by more sins. Was my creation in the womb so curst, It must ingender with a Viper first? Deflores. Come, rise, and shrowd your blushes in my bosome, Silence is one of pleasures best receipts: Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yeelding. 'Lasse how the Turtle pants! Thou'lt love anon, What thou so fear'st, and faintst to venture on. Exeunt. (Act III, scene iv) Enter Deflores bringing in Beatrice Deflores. Here we are, if you have any more To say to us, speak quickly, I shall not, Give you the hearing else, I am so stout yet, and so I think that broken rib of mankind. Vermandero. An Host of enemies entred my Citadell, Could not amaze like this, Joanna, Beatrice, Joanna. Beatrice. O come not neer me sir, I shall defile you, I am that of your blood was taken from you For your better health, look no more upon't, But cast it to the ground regardlessly, Let the common shewer take it from distinction, Beneath the starres, upon yon Meteor Ever hang my fate, 'mongst things corruptible, I ne're could pluck ti from him, my loathing Was Prophet to the rest, but ne're believ'd Mine honour fell with him, and now my life. Alsemero, I am a stranger to your bed, Your bed was coz'ned on the nuptiall night, For which your false-bride died. Alfermero. Diaphanta? Deflores. Yes, and the while I coupled with your mate At barly-break; now we are left in hell. Vermandero. We are all there, it circumscribes here. Deflores. I lov'd this woman in spite of her heart, Her love I earn'd out of Piracquos murder. Tomaso. Ha, my brothers murtherer. Deflores. Yes, and her honors prize Was my reward, I thank life for nothing But that pleasure, it was so sweet to me, That I have drunk up all, left none behinde, For any man to pledge me. (Act V, scene iii)
Uncessant Minutes, whil’st you move you tell  The time that tells our life, which though it run  Never so fast or farr, you’r new begun Short steps shall overtake; for though life well May scape his own Account, it shall not yours,  You are Death’s Auditors, that both divide And summ what ere that life inspir’d endures  Past a beginning, and through you we bide The doom of Fate, whose unrecall’d Decree  You date, bring, execute; making what’s new  Ill and good, old, for as we die in you, You die in Time, Time in Eternity.
I like to see doctors cough. What kind of human being would grab all your money just when you're down? I'm not saying they enjoy this: "Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it, no hope! You might as well hand over your wallet." Hell no, they'd rather be playing golf and swapping jokes about our feet. Some of them smoke marijuana and are alcoholics, and their moral turpitude is famous: who gets to see most sex organs in the world? Not poets. With the hours they keep they need drugs more than anyone. Germ city, there's no hope looking down those fire-engine throats. They're bound to get sick themselves sometime; and I happen to be there myself in a high fever taking my plastic medicine seriously with the doctors, who are dying.
let elizur rejoice with the partridge Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers. For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord. Let Shedeur rejoice with Pyrausta, who dwelleth in a medium of fire, which God hath adapted for him. For I bless God whose name is Jealous—and there is a zeal to deliver us from everlasting burnings. Let Shelumiel rejoice with Olor, who is of a goodly savour, and the very look of him harmonizes the mind. For my existimation is good even amongst the slanderers and my memory shall arise for a sweet savour unto the Lord. Let Jael rejoice with the Plover, who whistles for his live, and foils the marksmen and their guns. For I bless the prince of peace and pray that all the guns may be nail’d up, save such [as] are for the rejoicing days. Let Raguel rejoice with the Cock of Portugal—God send good Angels to the allies of England! For I have abstained from the blood of the grape and that even at the Lord’s table. Let Hobab rejoice with Necydalus, who is the Greek of a Grub. For I have glorified God in greek and latin, the consecrated languages spoken by the Lord on earth. Let Zurishaddai with the Polish Cock rejoice—The Lord restore peace to Europe. For I meditate the peace of Europe amongst family bickerings and domestic jars. Let Zuar rejoice with the Guinea Hen—The Lord add to his mercies in the west! For the host is in the west—the Lord make us thankful unto salvation. Let Chesed rejoice with Strepsiceros, whose weapons are the ornaments of his peace. For I preach the very gospel of christ without comment and with this weapon shall I slay envy. Let Hagar rejoice with Gnesion, who is the right sort of eagle, and towers the highest. For I bless God in the rising generation, which is on my side. Let Libni rejoice with the Redshank, who migrates not but is translated to the upper regions. For I have translated in the charity, which makes things better and I shall be translated myself at the last. Let Nahshon rejoice with the Seabreese, the Lord give the sailors of his Spirit. For he that walked upon the sea, hath prepared the floods with the Gospel of peace. Let Helon rejoice with the Woodpecker—the Lord encourage the propagation of trees! For the merciful man is merciful to his beast, and to the trees that give them shelter. Let Amos rejoice with the Coote—prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For he hath turned the shadow of death into the morning, the Lord is his name. Let Ephah rejoice with Buprestis, the Lord endue us with temperance and humanity, till every cow can have her mate! For I am come home again, but there is nobody to kill the calf or to pay the musick. Let Sarah rejoice with the Redwing, whose harvest is in the frost and snow. For the hour of my felicity, like the womb of Sarah, shall come at the latter end. Let Rebekah rejoice with Iynx, who holds his head on one side to deceive the adversary. For I shou’d have avail’d myself of waggery, had not malice been multitudinous. Let Shuah rejoice with Boa, which is the vocal serpent. For there are still serpents that can speak—God bless my head, my heart and my heel. Let Ehud rejoice with Onocrotalus, whose braying is for the glory of God, because he makes the best musick in his power. For I bless God that I am of the same seed as Ehud, Mutius Scœ vola, and Colonel Draper. Let Shamgar rejoice with Otis, who looks about him for the glory of God, and sees the horizon compleat at once. For the word of God is a sword on my side—no matter what other weapon a stick or a straw. Let Bohan rejoice with the Scythian Stag—he is beef and breeches against want and nakedness. For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath mark’d me for his own. Let Achsah rejoice with the Pigeon who is an antidote to malignity and will carry a letter. For I bless God for the Postmaster general and all conveyancers of letters under his care, especially Allen and Shelvock. Let Tohu rejoice with the Grouse—the Lord further the cultivating of heaths and the peopling of deserts. For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats and maynes of Staindrop Moor. Let Hillel rejoice with Ammodytes, whose colour is deceitful and he plots against the pilgrim’s feet. For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale. Let Eli rejoice with Leucon—he is an honest fellow, which is a rarity. For I have seen the White Raven and Thomas Hall of Willingham and am myself a greater curiosity than both. Let Jemuel rejoice with Charadrius, who is from the height and the sight of him is good for the jaundice. For I look up to heaven which is my prospect to escape envy by surmounting it. Let Pharaoh rejoice with Anataria, whom God permits to prey upon the ducks to check their increase. For if Pharaoh had known Joseph, he would have blessed God and me for the illumination of the people. Let Lotan rejoice with Sauterelle. Blessed be the name of the Lord from the Lote-tree to the Palm. For I pray God to bless improvements in gardening until London be a city of palm-trees. Let Dishon rejoice with the Landrail, God give his grace to the society for preserving the game. For I pray to give his grace to the poor of England, that Charity be not offended and that benevolence may increase. Let Hushim rejoice with the King’s Fisher, who is of royal beauty, tho’ plebeian size. For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls. Let Machir rejoice with Convolvulus, from him to the ring of Saturn, which is the girth of Job; to the signet of God from Job and his daughters blessed be jesus. For there is a blessing from the stone of jesus which is founded upon hell to the precious jewell on the right hand of God. Let Atad bless with Eleos, the nightly Memorialist ελεησον κϮ..ριε. For the nightly Visitor is at the window of the impenitent, while I sing a psalm of my own composing. Let Jamim rejoice with the Bittern blessed be the name of Jesus for Denver Sluice, Ruston, and the draining of the fens. For there is a note added to the scale, which the Lord hath made fuller, stronger and more glorious. Let Ohad rejoice with Byturos who eateth the vine and is a minister of temperance. For I offer my goat as he browses the vine, bless the Lord from chambering and drunkeness. Let Zohar rejoice with Cychramus who cometh with the quails on a particular affair. For there is a traveling for the glory of God without going to Italy or France. Let Serah, the daughter of Asher, rejoice with Ceyx, who maketh his cabin in the Halcyon’s hold. For I bless the children of Asher for the evil I did them and the good I might have received at their hands. Let Magdiel rejoice with Ascarides, which is the life of the bowels—the worm hath a part in our frame. For I rejoice like a worm in the rain in him that cherishes and from him that tramples. Let Becher rejoice with Oscen who terrifies the wicked, as trumpet and alarm the coward. For I am ready for the trumpet and alarm to fight, to die and to rise again. Let Shaul rejoice with Circos, who hath clumsy legs, but he can wheel it the better with his wings. For the banish’d of the Lord shall come about again, for so he hath prepared for them. Let Hamul rejoice with the Crystal, who is pure and translucent. For sincerity is a jewel which is pure and transparent, eternal and inestimable. Let Ziphion rejoice with the Tit-Lark who is a groundling, but he raises the spirits. For my hands and my feet are perfect as the sublimity of Naphtali and the felicity of Asher. Let Mibzar rejoice with the Cadess, as is their number, so are their names, blessed be the Lord Jesus for them all. For the names and number of animals are as the names and number of the stars. Let Jubal rejoice with Cœcilia, the woman and the slow-worm praise the name of the Lord. For I pray the Lord Jesus to translate my magnificat into verse and represent it. Let Arodi rejoice with the Royston Crow, there is a society of them at Trumpington and Cambridge. For I bless the Lord Jesus from the bottom of Royston Cave to the top of King’s Chapel. Let Areli rejoice with the Criel, who is a dwarf that towereth above others. For I am a little fellow, which is intitled to the great mess by the benevolence of God my father. Let Phuvah rejoice with Platycerotes, whose weapons of defence keep them innocent. For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her infirmities. Let Shimron rejoice with the Kite, who is of more value than many sparrows. For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her age. Let Sered rejoice with the Wittal—a silly bird is wise unto his own preservation. For I this day made over my inheritance to my mother in consideration of her poverty. Let Elon rejoice with Attelabus, who is the Locust without wings. For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I had the grace to obey the voice of Christ in my conscience. Let Jahleel rejoice with the Woodcock, who liveth upon suction and is pure from his diet. For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to run all hazards for the sake of the name of the Lord. Let Shuni rejoice with the Gull, who is happy in not being good for food. For I bless the thirteenth of August, in which I was willing to be called a fool for the sake of Christ. Let Ezbon rejoice with Musimon, who is from the ram and she-goat. For I lent my flocks and my herds and my lands at once unto the Lord. Let Barkos rejoice with the Black Eagle, which is the least of his species and the best-natured. For nature is more various than observation tho’ observers be innumerable. Let Bedan rejoice with Ossifrage—the bird of prey and the man of prayer. For Agricola is Γηωοργος. Let Naomi rejoice with Pseudosphece who is between a wasp and a hornet. For I pray God to bless polly in the blessing of Naomi and assign her to the house of david. Let Ruth rejoice with the Tumbler—it is a pleasant thing to feed him and be thankful. For I am in charity with the French who are my foes and Moabites because of the Moabitish woman. Let Ram rejoice with the Fieldfare, who is a good gift from God in the season of scarcity. For my Angel is always ready at a pinch to help me out and to keep me up. Let Manoah rejoice with Cerastes, who is a Dragon with horns. For christopher must slay the Dragon with a pheon’s head. Let Talmai rejoice with Alcedo, who makes a cradle for its young, which is rock’d by the winds. For they have seperated me and my bosom, whereas the right comes by setting us together. Let Bukki rejoice with the Buzzard, who is clever, with the reputation of a silly fellow. For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor my family. Let Michal rejoice with Leucocruta who is a mixture of beauty and magnanimity. For he that scorneth the scorner hath condescended to my low estate. Let Abiah rejoice with Morphnus who is a bird of passage to the Heavens. For Abiah is the father of Joab and Joab of all Romans and English Men. Let Hur rejoice with the Water-wag-tail, who is a neighbour, and loves to be looked at. For they pass me by in their tour, and the good Samaritan is not yet come. Let Dodo rejoice with the purple Worm, who is cloathed sumptuously, tho he fares meanly. For I bless God in behalf of trinity college in cambridge and the society of purples in london. Let Ahio rejoice with the Merlin who is a cousin german of the hawk. For I have a nephew christopher to whom I implore the grace of God. Let Joram rejoice with the Water Rail, who takes his delight in the river. For I pray God bless the cam—Mmr higgs and mr and mrs washbourne as the drops of the dew. Let Chileab rejoice with Ophion who is clean made, less than an hart, and a Sardinian. For I pray God bless the king of Sardinia and make him an instrument of his peace. Let Shephatiah rejoice with the little Owl, which is the wingged Cat. For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom I take occasion to bless Almighty God. Let Ithream rejoice with the great Owl, who understandeth that which he professes. For I pray God for the professors of the University of Cambridge to attend and to amend. Let Abigail rejoice with Lethophagus—God be gracious to the widows indeed. For the Fatherless Children and widows are never deserted of the Lord.
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree. I shall smile when wreaths of snow Blossom where the rose should grow; I shall sing when night’s decay Ushers in a drearier day.
Heavy hangs the raindrop From the burdened spray; Heavy broods the damp mist On uplands far away; Heavy looms the dull sky, Heavy rolls the sea— And heavy beats the young heart Beneath that lonely tree. Never has a blue streak Cleft the clouds since morn— Never has his grim Fate Smiled since he was born. Frowning on the infant, Shadowing childhood’s joy, Guardian angel knows not That melancholy boy. Day is passing swiftly Its sad and sombre prime; Youth is fast invading Sterner manhood’s time. All the flowers are praying For sun before they close, And he prays too, unknowing, That sunless human rose! Blossoms, that the west wind Has never wooed to blow, Scentless are your petals, Your dew as cold as snow. Soul, where kindred kindness No early promise woke, Barren is your beauty As weed upon the rock. Wither, Brothers, wither, You were vainly given— Earth reserves no blessing For the unblessed of Heaven! Child of Delight! with sunbright hair, And seablue, seadeep eyes; Spirit of Bliss, what brings thee here, Beneath these sullen skies? Thou shouldst live in eternal spring, Where endless day is never dim; Why, seraph, has thy erring wing Borne thee down to weep with him? “Ah, not from heaven am I descended, And I do not come to mingle tears; But sweet is day, though with shadows blended; And, though clouded, sweet are youthful years. “I, the image of light and gladness, Saw and pitied that mournful boy, And I swore to take his gloomy sadness, And give to him my beamy joy. “Heavy and dark the night is closing; Heavy and dark may its biding be: Better for all from grief reposing, And better for all who watch like me. “Guardian angel, he lacks no longer; Evil fortune he need not fear: Fate is strong, but Love is stronger; And more unsleeping than angel’s care.”

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near?  Thus I; faltering forward,  Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,  And the woman calling.
Long time a child, and still a child, when years Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I,— For yet I lived like one not born to die; A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears, No hope I needed, and I knew no fears. But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking, I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking The vanguard of my age, with all arrears Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man, Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey, For I have lost the race I never ran: A rathe December blights my lagging May; And still I am a child, tho’ I be old, Time is my debtor for my years untold.
Like a loose island on the wide expanse, Unconscious floating on the fickle sea, Herself her all, she lives in privacy; Her waking life as lonely as a trance, Doom’d to behold the universal dance, And never hear the music which expounds The solemn step, coy slide, the merry bounds. The vague, mute language of the countenance. In vain for her I smooth my antic rhyme; She cannot hear it. All her little being Concentrated in her solitary seeing— What can she know of beauty or sublime? And yet methinks she looks so calm and good, God must be with her in her solitude!
I have been cherish’d and forgiven By many tender-hearted, ’Twas for the sake of one in Heaven Of him that is departed. Because I bear my Father’s name I am not quite despised, My little legacy of fame I’ve not yet realized. And yet if you should praise myself I’ll tell you, I had rather You’d give your love to me, poor elf, Your praise to my great father.
“The English Garden.”—Mason The cold transparent ham is on my fork—  It hardly rains—and hark the bell!—ding-dingle— Away! Three thousand feet at gravel work,  Mocking a Vauxhall shower!—Married and Single Crush—rush;—Soak’d Silks with wet white Satin mingle.  Hengler! Madame! round whom all bright sparks lurk Calls audibly on Mr. and Mrs. Pringle  To study the Sublime, &c.—(vide Burke) All Noses are upturn’d!—Whish-ish!—On high  The rocket rushes—trails—just steals in sight— Then droops and melts in bubbles of blue light—  And Darkness reigns—Then balls flare up and die— Wheels whiz—smack crackers—serpents twist—and then  Back to the cold transparent ham again!

There is a silence where hath been no sound, There is a silence where no sound may be, In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea, Or in the wide desert where no life is found, Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound; No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently, But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free, That never spoke, over the idle ground: But in green ruins, in the desolate walls Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls, And owls, that flit continually between, Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan, There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s. How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees! How graceful climb those shadows on my hill! I fancy these pure waters and the flags Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize; And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.” Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave. They added ridge to valley, brook to pond, And sighed for all that bounded their domain; “This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park; We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge, And misty lowland, where to go for peat. The land is well,—lies fairly to the south. ’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back, To find the sitfast acres where you left them.” Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds Him to his land, a lump of mould the more. Hear what the Earth say:— EARTH-SONG “Mine and yours; Mine, not yours. Earth endures; Stars abide— Shine down in the old sea; Old are the shores; But where are old men? I who have seen much, Such have I never seen. “The lawyer’s deed Ran sure, In tail, To them and to their heirs Who shall succeed, Without fail, Forevermore. “Here is the land, Shaggy with wood, With its old valley, Mound and flood. But the heritors?— Fled like the flood's foam. The lawyer and the laws, And the kingdom, Clean swept herefrom. “They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?” When I heard the Earth-song I was no longer brave; My avarice cooled Like lust in the chill of the grave.
The water understands Civilization well; It wets my foot, but prettily, It chills my life, but wittily, It is not disconcerted, It is not broken-hearted: Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden pleasure Elegantly destroy.
Parks and ponds are good by day; I do not delight In black acres of the night, Nor my unseasoned step disturbs The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs.
Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old; Or what was the service For which I was sold? When first my eyes saw thee, I found me thy thrall, By magical drawings, Sweet tyrant of all! I drank at thy fountain False waters of thirst; Thou intimate stranger, Thou latest and first! Thy dangerous glances Make women of men; New-born, we are melting Into nature again. Lavish, lavish promiser, Nigh persuading gods to err! Guest of million painted forms, Which in turn thy glory warms! The frailest leaf, the mossy bark, The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc, The swinging spider’s silver line, The ruby of the drop of wine, The shining pebble of the pond, Thou inscribest with a bond In thy momentary play, Would bankrupt nature to repay. Ah, what avails it To hide or to shun Whom the Infinite One Hath granted his throne? The heaven high over Is the deep’s lover; The sun and sea, Informed by thee, Before me run And draw me on, Yet fly me still, As Fate refuses To me the heart Fate for me chooses. Is it that my opulent soul Was mingled from the generous whole; Sea-valleys and the deep of skies Furnished several supplies; And the sands whereof I’m made Draw me to them, self-betrayed? I turn the proud portfolio Which holds the grand designs Of Salvator, of Guercino, And Piranesi’s lines. I hear the lofty paeans Of the masters of the shell, Who heard the starry music And recount the numbers well; Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so. Oft in streets or humblest places, I detect far-wandered graces, Which, from Eden wide astray, In lowly homes have lost their way. Thee gliding through the sea of form, Like the lightning through the storm, Somewhat not to be possessed, Somewhat not to be caressed, No feet so fleet could ever find, No perfect form could ever bind. Thou eternal fugitive, Hovering over all that live, Quick and skilful to inspire Sweet, extravagant desire, Starry space and lily-bell Filling with thy roseate smell, Wilt not give the lips to taste Of the nectar which thou hast. All that’s good and great with thee Works in close conspiracy; Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely To report thy features only, And the cold and purple morning Itself with thoughts of thee adorning; The leafy dell, the city mart, Equal trophies of thine art; E’en the flowing azure air Thou hast touched for my despair; And, if I languish into dreams, Again I meet the ardent beams. Queen of things! I dare not die In Being’s deeps past ear and eye; Lest there I find the same deceiver. And be the sport of Fate forever. Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be, Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!
for Patricia Anderson “To do as Adam did”  through the twilight’s fluoride glare Mercury in perihelion  (rotating exactly three times  while circling the sun twice)  to Pluto foot tilt up the slide at either plane  and build a Garden of the brain.  Internetted eternities, interspersed  with cypresses  ply ringed air about the many spectacled apples there.  Flamestitch niches orb in swivel orb, The Muses thrush at center  turning. Phospheros arborescens they sing  sense’s  struck crystal clarities  to knock the knees  (or scarlet hollyhock, against a near blue sky).  No end of fountains lost among the shrubberies full eye may bare.  Fixed stars  with fireflies jam the lilac.  The Lord is a delicate hammerer.  Gold hive upon gray matter  He taps synapse (“carrying to”) (“carrying away”)  an immense bronze pinecone moon-knit at the end of a vista  of sunny jets d’eau, silver poplars. All  shivered in a pool.  Literally, a flowing: form-take-hand  -with-form  (That Which Fasteneth Us)  pillar to pillar the great dance arch itself through all that  is or was or will be, 3/4 time. This will be a glade  at the head of one stream  and a resonant gnomon before it will stretch regions of signaling  gnat-like resiliencies in the atmosphere  of where we are — or were.  Or will be, when the mingled frame of mind  of man is celebration.  Gates, which separate the wings  of tiered ilex, open in caverns of atoms passing from one into another’s zenith  of periodic movement, vast helicoidal shift:  a vaulting of arteries beating their heads against the dark.  This is the body of light. Vertically in a chromatic spread chord  — Elysian elision —J’avais bâti, dans un rêve, un palais, un château ou des  grottes
Who knows this or that? Hark in the wall to the rat: Since the world was, he has gnawed; Of his wisdom, of his fraud What dost thou know? In the wretched little beast Is life and heart, Child and parent, Not without relation To fruitful field and sun and moon. What art thou? His wicked eye Is cruel to thy cruelty.
The debt is paid, The verdict said, The Furies laid, The plague is stayed, All fortunes made; Turn the key and bolt the door, Sweet is death forevermore. Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin, Nor murdering hate, can enter in. All is now secure and fast; Not the gods can shake the Past; Flies-to the adamantine door Bolted down forevermore. None can re-enter there,— No thief so politic, No Satan with a royal trick Steal in by window, chink, or hole, To bind or unbind, add what lacked, Insert a leaf, or forge a name, New-face or finish what is packed, Alter or mend eternal Fact.
It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: “No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. Fancy departs: no more invent; Contract thy firmament  To compass of a tent. There’s not enough for this and that, Make thy option which of two; Economize the failing river, Not the less revere the Giver, Leave the many and hold the few. Timely wise accept the terms, Soften the fall with wary foot; A little while Still plan and smile, And,—fault of novel germs,— Mature the unfallen fruit. Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who, when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The Baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,— Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”  As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: “Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.”
quincunx of succulents subtle colors and forms succinct in dust appropriate the pot assigned, set each for spill into Other always my core dream winding a garden secret in every sense
The moon now rises to her absolute rule, And the husbandman and hunter Acknowledge her for their mistress. Asters and golden reign in the fields And the life everlasting withers not. The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride But an inward verdure still crowns them; The thistle scatters its down on the pool And yellow leaves clothe the river— And nought disturbs the serious life of men. But behind the sheaves and under the sod There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered, The true harvest of the year—the boreal fruit Which it bears forever, With fondness annually watering and maturing it. But man never severs the stalk Which bears this palatable fruit.
There is health in thy gray wing, Health of nature’s furnishing. Say, thou modern-winged antique, Was thy mistress ever sick? In each heaving of thy wing Thou dost health and leisure bring, Thou dost waive disease and pain And resume new life again.
The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children.
Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat.
Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf?
Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist.
All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.
Among the signs of autumn I perceive The Roman wormwood (called by learned men Ambrosia elatior, food for gods,— For to impartial science the humblest weed Is as immortal once as the proudest flower—) Sprinkles its yellow dust over my shoes As I cross the now neglected garden. —We trample under foot the food of gods And spill their nectar in each drop of dew— My honest shoes, fast friends that never stray Far from my couch, thus powdered, countryfied, Bearing many a mile the marks of their adventure, At the post-house disgrace the Gallic gloss Of those well dressed ones who no morning dew Nor Roman wormwood ever have been through, Who never walk but are transported rather— For what old crime of theirs I do not gather.
I was made erect and lone, And within me is the bone; Still my vision will be clear, Still my life will not be drear, To the center all is near. Where I sit there is my throne. If age choose to sit apart, If age choose, give me the start, Take the sap and leave the heart.
I’m thankful that my life doth not deceive Itself with a low loftiness, half height, And think it soars when still it dip its way Beneath the clouds on noiseless pinion Like the crow or owl, but it doth know The full extent of all its trivialness, Compared with the splendid heights above.  See how it waits to watch the mail come in While ’hind its back the sun goes out perchance. And yet their lumbering cart brings me no word, Not one scrawled leaf such as my neighbors get To cheer them with the slight events forsooth, Faint ups and downs of their far distant friends— And now ’tis passed. What next? See the long train Of teams wreathed in dust, their atmosphere; Shall I attend until the last is passed? Else why these ears that hear the leader’s bells Or eyes that link me in procession? But hark! the drowsy day has done its task, Far in yon hazy field where stands a barn, Unanxious hens improve the sultry hour And with contented voice now brag their deed— A new laid egg—Now let the day decline— They’ll lay another by tomorrow’s sun.
Where the western zun, unclouded,  Up above the grey hill-tops, Did sheen drough ashes, lofty sh’ouded,  On the turf beside the copse,  In zummer weather,  We together,  Sorrow-slightèn, work-vorgettèn,  Gambol’d wi’ the zun a-zettèn. There, by flow’ry bows o’ bramble,  Under hedge, in ash-tree sheädes, The dun-heäir’d ho’se did slowly ramble  On the grasses’ dewy bleädes,  Zet free o’ lwoads,  An’ stwony rwoads,  Vorgetvul o’ the lashes frettèn,  Grazèn wi’ the zun a-zettèn. There wer rooks a-beätèn by us  Drough the aïr, in a vlock, An’ there the lively blackbird, nigh us,  On the meäple bough did rock,  Wi’ ringèn droat,  Where zunlight smote  The yollow boughs o’ zunny hedges  Over western hills’ blue edges. Waters, drough the meäds a-purlèn,  Glissen’d in the evenèn’s light, An’ smoke, above the town a-curlèn,  Melted slowly out o’ zight;  An’ there, in glooms  Ov unzunn’d rooms,  To zome, wi’ idle sorrows frettèn,  Zuns did set avore their zettèn. We were out in geämes and reäces,  Loud a-laughèn, wild in me’th, Wi’ windblown heäir, an’ zunbrowned feäces,  Leäpèn on the high-sky’d e’th,  Avore the lights  Wer tin’d o’ nights,  An’ while the gossamer’s light nettèn  Sparkled to the zun a-zettèn.
O zummer clote! when the brook’s a-glidèn So slow an’ smooth down his zedgy bed, Upon thy broad leaves so seäfe a-ridèn The water’s top wi’ thy yollow head, By alder sheädes, O, An’ bulrush beds, O, Thou then dost float, goolden zummer clote! The grey-bough’d withy’s a leänèn lowly Above the water thy leaves do hide; The bènden bulrush, a-swaÿèn slowly, Do skirt in zummer thy river’s zide; An’ perch in shoals, O, Do vill the holes, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Oh! when thy brook-drinkèn flow’r’s a-blowèn, The burnèn zummer’s a-zettèn in; The time o’ greenness, the time o’ mowèn, When in the häy-vield, wi’ zunburnt skin, The vo’k do drink, O, Upon the brink, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Wi’ eärms a-spreadèn, an’ cheäks a-blowèn, How proud wer I when I vu’st could swim Athirt the deep pleäce where thou bist growèn, Wi’ thy long more vrom the bottom dim; While cows, knee-high, O, In brook, wer nigh, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Ov all the brooks drough the meäds a-windèn, Ov all the meäds by a river’s brim, There’s nwone so feäir o’ my own heart’s vindèn As where the maïdens do zee thee zwim, An’ stan’ to teäke, O, Wi’ long-stemm’d reäke, O, Thy flow’r afloat, goolden zummer clote!
As day did darken on the dewless grass, There, still, wi’ nwone a-come by me To stay a-while at hwome by me Within the house, all dumb by me, I zot me sad as the eventide did pass. An’ there a win’blast shook the rattlèn door, An’ seemed, as win’ did mwoan without, As if my Jeäne, alwone without, A-stannèn on the stwone without, Wer there a-come wi’ happiness oonce mwore. I went to door; an’ out vrom trees above My head, upon the blast by me, Sweet blossoms wer a-cast by me, As if my Love, a-past by me, Did fling em down—a token ov her love. “Sweet blossoms o’ the tree where I do murn,” I thought, “if you did blow vor her, Vor apples that should grow vor her, A-vallèn down below vor her, O then how happy I should zee you kern!” But no. Too soon I voun my charm a-broke. Noo comely soul in white like her— Noo soul a-steppèn light like her— An’ nwone o’ comely height like her Went by; but all my grief ageän awoke.
Green mwold on zummer bars do show  That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet; The hoof-worn ring o’ groun’ below  The tree, do tell o’ storms or het; The trees in rank along a ledge Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge; An’ where the vurrow-marks do stripe The down, the wheat woonce rustled ripe. Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view— To eyezight’s woone, to soulzight two. The grass ageän the mwoldrèn door  ’S a tóken sad o’ vo’k a-gone, An’ where the house, bwoth wall an’ vloor,  ’S a-lost, the well mid linger on. What tokens, then, could Meäry gi’e That she’d a-liv’d, an’ liv’d vor me, But things a-done vor thought an’ view? Good things that nwone ageän can do, An’ every work her love ha’ wrought To eyezight’s woone, but two to thought.
The length o’ days ageän do shrink An’ flowers be thin in meäd, among The eegrass a-sheenèn bright, along Brook upon brook, an’ brink by brink. Noo starlèns do rise in vlock on wing— Noo goocoo in nest-green leaves do sound— Noo swallows be now a-wheelèn round— Dip after dip, an’ swing by swing. The wheat that did leätely rustle thick Is now up in mows that still be new, An’ yollow bevore the sky o’ blue— Tip after tip, an’ rick by rick. While now I can walk a dusty mile I’ll teäke me a day, while days be clear, To vind a vew friends that still be dear, Feäce after feäce, an’ smile by smile.
’Tis to yourself I speak; you cannot know Him whom I call in speaking such an one, For thou beneath the earth lie buried low, Which he alone as living walks upon; Thou mayst at times have heard him speak to you, And often wished perchance that you were he; And I must ever wish that it were true, For then thou couldst hold fellowship with me; But now thou hear’st us talk as strangers, met Above the room wherein thou liest abed; A word perhaps loud spoken thou mayst get, Or hear our feet when heavily they tread; But he who speaks, or him who’s spoken to, Must both remain as strangers still to you.
The hand and foot that stir not, they shall find Sooner than all the rightful place to go; Now in their motion free as roving wind, Though first no snail more limited and slow; I mark them full of labor all the day, Each active motion made in perfect rest; They cannot from their path mistaken stray, Though ’tis not theirs, yet in it they are blest; The bird has not their hidden track found out, Nor cunning fox, though full of art he be; It is the way unseen, the certain route, Where ever bound, yet thou art ever free; The path of Him, whose perfect law of love Bids spheres and atoms in just order move.
I have no Brother,—they who meet me now Offer a hand with their own wills defiled, And, while they wear a smooth unwrinkled brow, Know not that Truth can never be beguiled; Go wash the hand that still betrays thy guilt; Before the spirit’s gaze what stain can hide? Abel’s red blood upon the earth is spilt, And by thy tongue it cannot be denied; I hear not with my ear,—the heart doth tell Its secret deeds to me untold before; Go, all its hidden plunder quickly sell, Then shalt thou cleanse thee from thy brother’s gore, Then will I take thy gift; that bloody stain Shall not be seen upon thy hand again.
In the greenest of our valleys  By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace—  Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion,  It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion  Over fabric half so fair! Banners yellow, glorious, golden,  On its roof did float and flow (This—all this—was in the olden  Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied,  In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,  A wingèd odor went away. Wanderers in that happy valley,  Through two luminous windows, saw Spirits moving musically  To a lute’s well-tunèd law, Round about a throne where, sitting,  Porphyrogene! In state his glory well befitting,  The ruler of the realm was seen. And all with pearl and ruby glowing  Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing  And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty  Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty,  The wit and wisdom of their king. But evil things, in robes of sorrow,  Assailed the monarch’s high estate; (Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow  Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And round about his home the glory  That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story  Of the old time entombed. And travellers, now, within that valley,  Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically  To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river,  Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever,  And laugh—but smile no more.
Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances! Honored and blessed be the ever-green Pine! Long may the tree, in his banner that glances, Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line! Heaven sent it happy dew, Earth lend it sap anew, Gayly to bourgeon and broadly to grow, While every Highland glen Sends our shout back again, “Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!” Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain, Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade; When the whirlwind has stripped every leaf on the mountain, The more shall Clan-Alpine exult in her shade. Moored in the rifted rock, Proof to the tempest’s shock, Firmer he roots him the ruder it blow; Menteith and Breadalbane, then, Echo his praise again, “Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!” Proudly our pibroch has thrilled in Glen Fruin, And Bannochar’s groans to our slogan replied; Glen-Luss and Ross-dhu, they are smoking in ruin, And the best of Loch Lomond lie dead on her side. Widow and Saxon maid Long shall lament our raid, Think of Clan-Alpine with fear and with woe; Lennox and Leven-glen Shake when they hear again, “Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!” Row, vassals, row, for the pride of the Highlands! Stretch to your oars for the ever-green Pine! O that the rosebud that graces yon islands Were wreathed in a garland around him to twine! O that some seedling gem, Worthy such noble stem Honored and blessed in their shadow might grow! Loud should Clan-Alpine then Ring from her deepmost glen, “Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!”
The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o’er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west-wind’s summer sighs. Boon nature scattered, free and wild, Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child. Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cliff a narrow bower; Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft, the ash and warrior oak Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrowed sky. Highest of all, where white peaks glanced, Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced, The wanderer’s eye could barely view The summer heaven’s delicious blue; So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream. Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep A narrow inlet, still and deep, Affording scarce such breadth of brim As served the wild duck’s brood to swim. Lost for a space, through thickets veering, But broader when again appearing, Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face Could on the dark-blue mirror trace; And farther as the hunter strayed, Still broader sweep its channels made. The shaggy mounds no longer stood, Emerging from entangled wood, But, wave-encircled, seemed to float, Like castle girdled with its moat; Yet broader floods extending still Divide them from their parent hill, Till each, retiring, claims to be An islet in an inland sea. And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice A far projecting precipice. The broom’s tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mountains, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o’er His ruined sides and summit hoar, While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.
An Epistle to Mr. Cuthbert Jackson This motley piece to you I send, Who always were a faithful friend; Who, if disputes should happen hence, Can best explain the author’s sense; And, anxious for the public weal, Do, what I sing, so often feel.  The want of method pray excuse, Allowing for a vapored Muse; Nor to a narrow path confined, Hedge in by rules a roving mind.  The child is genuine, you may trace Throughout the sire’s transmitted face. Nothing is stolen: my Muse, though mean, Draws from the spring she finds within; Nor vainly buy what Gildon sells, Poetic buckets for dry wells.  School-helps I want, to climb on high, Where all the ancient treasures lie, And there unseen commit a theft On wealth in Greek exchequers left. Then where? from whom? what can I steal, Who only with the moderns deal? This were attempting to put on Raiment from naked bodies won: They safely sing before a thief, They cannot give who want relief; Some few excepted, names well known, And justly laurelled with renown, Whose stamp of genius marks their ware, And theft detects: of theft beware; From More so lashed, example fit, Shun petty larceny in wit.  First know, my friend, I do not mean To write a treatise on the spleen; Nor to prescribe when nerves convulse; Nor mend th’ alarum watch, your pulse. If I am right, your question lay, What course I take to drive away The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas Men prove mere suicides in ease; And how I do myself demean In stormy world to live serene.  When by its magic lantern Spleen With frightful figures spreads life’s scene, And threat’ning prospects urged my fears, A stranger to the luck of heirs; Reason, some quiet to restore, Showed part was substance, shadow more; With Spleen’s dead weight though heavy grown, In life’s rough tide I sunk not down, But swam, ’till Fortune threw a rope, Buoyant on bladders fill’d with hope.  I always choose the plainest food To mend viscidity of blood. Hail! water-gruel, healing power, Of easy access to the poor; Thy help love’s confessors implore, And doctors secretly adore; To thee, I fly, by thee dilute— Through veins my blood doth quicker shoot, And by swift current throws off clean Prolific particles of Spleen.  I never sick by drinking grow, Nor keep myself a cup too low, And seldom Cloe’s lodgings haunt, Thrifty of spirits, which I want.  Hunting I reckon very good To brace the nerves, and stir the blood: But after no field-honors itch, Achieved by leaping hedge and ditch, While Spleen lies soft relaxed in bed, Or o’er coal fires inclines the head, Hygeia’s sons with hound and horn, And jovial cry awake the morn.  * * *  To cure the mind’s wrong bias, Spleen, Some recommended the bowling-green; Some, hilly walks; all, exercise; Fling but a stone, the giant dies; Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been Extreme good doctors for the Spleen; And kitten, if the humor hit, Has harlequinned away the fit.  * * *  If spleen-fogs rise at close of day, I clear my evening with a play, Or to some concert take my way. The company, the shine of lights, The scenes of humor, music’s flights, Adjust and set the soul to rights.  Life’s moving pictures, well-wrought plays, To others’ grief attention raise: Here, while the tragic fictions glow, We borrow joy by pitying woe; There gaily comic scenes delight, And hold true mirrors to our sight. Virtue, in charming dress arrayed, Calling the passions to her aid, When moral scenes just actions join, Takes shape, and shows her face divine.  * * *  Sometimes I dress, with women sit, And chat away the gloomy fit; Quit the stiff garb of serious sense, And wear a gay impertinence, Nor think nor speak with any pains, But lay on fancy’s neck the reins; Talk of unusual swell of waist In maid of honor loosely laced, And beauty borr’wing Spanish red, And loving pair with sep’rate bed, And jewels pawned for loss of game, And then redeemed by loss of fame; Of Kitty (aunt left in the lurch By grave pretence to go to church) Perceived in hack with lover fine, Like Will and Mary on the coin: And thus in modish manner we, In aid of sugar, sweeten tea.  Permit, ye fair, your idol form, Which e’en the coldest heart can warm, May with its beauties grace my line, While I bow down before its shrine, And your thronged altars with my lays Perfume, and get by giving praise. With speech so sweet, so sweet a mien, You excommunicate the Spleen.  * * *
Mute is thy wild harp, now, O Bard sublime! Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude, Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,” And even beneath the daily pressure, rude, Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood, Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued Wert thou by thy low fortune: But a time Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved, Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled, Associate worthy of the illustrious dead, Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”
On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o’er the channel reared, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretched forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. Imperial lord of the high southern coast! From thy projecting head-land I would mark Far in the east the shades of night disperse, Melting and thinned, as from the dark blue wave Emerging, brilliant rays of arrowy light Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun Just lifts above it his resplendent orb. Advances now, with feathery silver touched, The rippling tide of flood; glisten the sands, While, inmates of the chalky clefts that scar Thy sides precipitous, with shrill harsh cry, Their white wings glancing in the level beam, The terns, and gulls, and tarrocks, seek their food, And thy rough hollows echo to the voice Of the gray choughs, and ever restless daws, With clamor, not unlike the chiding hounds, While the lone shepherd, and his baying dog, Drive to thy turfy crest his bleating flock. The high meridian of the day is past, And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven, Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low The tide of ebb, upon the level sands. The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still, Catches the light and variable airs That but a little crisp the summer sea, Dimpling its tranquil surface.
Long neglect has worn away Half the sweet enchanting smile; Time has turned the bloom to gray; Mold and damp the face defile. But that lock of silky hair, Still beneath the picture twined, Tells what once those features were, Paints their image on the mind. Fair the hand that traced that line, “Dearest, ever deem me true”; Swiftly flew the fingers fine When the pen that motto drew.
As rising from the vegetable World My Theme ascends, with equal Wing ascend, My panting Muse; and hark, how loud the Woods Invite you forth in all your gayest Trim. Lend me your Song, ye Nightingales! oh pour The mazy-running Soul of Melody Into my varied Verse! while I deduce, From the first Note the hollow Cuckoo sings, The Symphony of Spring, and touch a Theme Unknown to Fame, the Passion of the Groves. When first the Soul of Love is sent abroad, Warm thro the vital Air, and on the Heart Harmonious seizes, the gay Troops begin, In gallant Thought, to plume the painted Wing; And try again the long-forgotten Strain, At first faint-warbled. But no sooner grows The soft Infusion prevalent, and wide, Than, all alive, at once their Joy o’erflows In Musick unconfin’d. Up-springs the Lark, Shrill-voic’d, and loud, the Messenger of Morn; Ere yet the Shadows fly, he mounted sings Amid the dawning Clouds, and from their Haunts Calls up the tuneful Nations. Every Copse Deep-tangled, Tree irregular, and Bush Bending with dewy Moisture, o’er the Heads Of the coy Quiristers that lodge within, Are prodigal of harmony. The Thrush And Wood-lark, o’er the kind contending Throng Superior heard, run thro’ the sweetest Length Of Notes; when listening Philomela deigns To let them joy, and purposes, in Thought Elate, to make her Night excel their Day. The Black-bird whistles from the thorny Brake; The mellow Bullfinch answers from the Grove: Nor are the Linnets, o’er the flow’ring Furze Pour’d out profusely, silent. Join’d to these Innumerous Songsters, in the freshening Shade Of new-sprung Leaves, their Modulations mix Mellifluous. The Jay, the Rook, the Daw, And each harsh Pipe discordant heard alone, Aid the full Concert: while the Stock-dove breathes A melancholy Murmur thro’ the whole.  ’Tis Love creates their Melody, and all This Waste of Music is the Voice of Love; That even to Birds, and Beasts, the tender Arts Of pleasing teaches. Hence the glossy kind Try every winning way inventive Love Can dictate, and in Courtship to their Mates Pour forth their little Souls. First, wide around, With distant Awe, in airy Rings they rove, Endeavouring by a thousand Tricks to catch The cunning, conscious, half-averted Glance Of their regardless Charmer. Should she seem Softening the least Approvance to bestow, Their Colours burnish, and by Hope inspir’d, They brisk advance; then, on a sudden struck, Retire disorder’d; then again approach; In fond rotation spread the spotted Wing, And shiver every Feather with Desire.  Connubial Leagues agreed, to the deep Woods They haste away, all as their Fancy leads, Pleasure, or Food, or secret Safety prompts; That Nature’s great Command may be obey’d, Nor all the sweet Sensations they perceive Indulg’d in vain. Some to the Holly-Hedge Nestling repair, and to the Thicket some; Some to the rude Protection of the Thorn Commit their feeble Offspring. The cleft Tree Offers its kind Concealment to a Few, Their Food its Insects, and its Moss their Nests. Others apart far in the grassy Dale, Or roughening Waste, their humble Texture weave. But most in woodland Solitudes delight, In unfrequented Glooms, or shaggy Banks, Steep, and divided by a babbling Brook, Whose Murmurs soothe them all the live-long Day, When by kind Duty fix’d. Among the Roots Of Hazel, pendant o’er the plaintive Stream, They frame the first Foundation of their Domes; Dry Sprigs of Trees, in artful Fabrick laid, And bound with Clay together. Now ’tis nought But restless Hurry thro the busy Air, Beat by unnumer’d Wings. The Swallow sweeps The slimy Pool, to build his hanging House Intent. And often, from the careless Back Of Herds and Flocks, a thousand tugging Bills Pluck Hair and Wool; and oft, when unobserv’d, Steal from the Barn a Straw: till soft and warm, Clean, and compleat, their Habitation grows.  As thus the patient Dam assiduous sits, Not to be tempted from her tender Task, Or by sharp Hunger, or by smooth Delight, Tho the whole loosen’d Spring around Her blows, Her sympathizing Lover takes his Stand High on th’ opponent Bank, and ceaseless sings The tedious Time away; or else supplies Her place a moment, while she sudden flits To pick the scanty Meal. Th’ appointed Time With pious Toil fulfill’d, the callow Young, Warm’d and expanded into perfect Life, Their brittle Bondage break, and come to Light, A helpless Family, demanding Food With constant Clamour. O what Passions then, What melting Sentiments of kindly Care, On the new Parents seize! Away they fly Affectionate, and undesiring bear The most delicious Morsel to their Young, Which equally distributed, again The Search begins. Even so a gentle Pair, By Fortune sunk, but form’d of generous Mold, And charm’d with Cares beyond the vulgar Breast, In some lone Cott amid the distant Woods, Sustain’d alone by providential Heaven, Oft, as they weeping eye their infant Train, Check their own Appetites and give them all.  Nor Toil alone they scorn: exalting Love, By the great Father of the Spring inspir’d, Gives instant Courage to the fearful Race, And to the simple Art. With stealthy Wing, Should some rude Foot their woody Haunts molest, Amid a neighbouring Bush they silent drop, And whirring thence, as if alarm’d, deceive Th’ unfeeling School-Boy. Hence, around the Head Of wandering Swain, the white-wing’d Plover wheels Her sounding Flight, and then directly on In long Excursion skims the level Lawn, To tempt him from her Nest. The Wild-Duck, hence, O’er the rough Moss, and o’er the trackless Waste The Heath-Hen flutters, (pious Fraud!) to lead The hot pursuing Spaniel far astray.  Be not the Muse asham’d, here to bemoan Her Brothers of the Grove, by tyrant Man Inhuman caught, and in the narrow Cage From Liberty confin’d, and boundless Air. Dull are the pretty Slaves, their Plumage dull, Ragged, and all its brightening Lustre lost; Nor is that sprightly Wildness in their Notes, Which, clear and vigorous, warbles from the Beech. Oh then, ye Friends of Love and Love-taught Song, Spare the soft Tribes, this barbarous Art forbear! If on your Bosom Innocence can win, Music engage, or Piety persuade.  But let not chief the Nightingale lament Her ruin’d Care, too delicately fram’d To brook the harsh Confinement of the Cage. Oft when, returning with her loaded Bill, Th’ astonish’d Mother finds a vacant Nest, By the hard Hand of unrelenting Clowns Robb’d, to the Ground the vain Provision falls; Her Pinions ruffle, and low-drooping scarce Can bear the Mourner to the poplar Shade; Where, all abandon’d to Despair, she sings Her Sorrows thro the Night; and, on the Bough, Sole-sitting, still at every dying Fall Takes up again her lamentable Strain Of winding Woe; till wide around the Woods Sigh to her Song, and with her Wail resound.  But now the feather’d Youth their former Bounds, Ardent, disdain; and, weighing oft their Wings, Demand the free Possession of the Sky. This one glad Office more, and then dissolves Parental Love at once, now needless grown. Unlavish Wisdom never works in vain. ’Tis on some Evening, sunny, grateful, mild, When nought but Balm is breathing thro the Woods, With yellow Lustre bright, that the new Tribes Visit the spacious Heavens, and look abroad On Nature’s Common, far as they can see, Or wing, their Range, and Pasture. O’er the Boughs Dancing about, still at the giddy Verge Their Resolution fails; their Pinions till, In loose Libration stretch’d, to trust the Void Trembling refuse: till down before them fly The Parent-Guides, and chide, exhort, command, Or push them off. The surging Air receives The Plumy Burden; and their self-taught Wings Winnow the waving Element. On Ground Alighted, bolder up again they lead, Farther and farther on, the lengthening Flight; Till vanish’d every Fear, and every Power Rouz’d into Life and Action, light in Air Th’ acquitted Parents see their soaring Race, And once rejoicing never know them more.
shambles this way antipodean being come full circle sparks in darkness lightning’s eternal return flipped the ecliptic
The quick-sliding cape of mind Drags wrinkled on a dusty floor, A party dress, Sagging from those shoulders  of a smile  that stalks through crooked time  followed by a goat  nipping the petticoat. Scape-goat, grin out loud. Make the cloak a shroud.  He whinnys through the nose,  paws the trailing hem  and strikes a fawning pose. Tight-clamped, the clasp of tin Tears cloth it won’t undo. Before the gown slips down. A rent . . . which lets the darkness through.
When bodies broken and all bodies seared Are counted up, uncrusted, tagged as feared, We know next day the scene will stand alone On pages white and mindless of the bone. Shall notice recognize beyond the burned, Or caption past the people tritely charred, Related dusty partness with the term Antiquity, the sense of death in stone And knowledge of the previously marred? On battlefields of Troy or Tuscany Or other places where techniques engaged, When warrior fell, or blade or boy enraged, Of them did campfire journalists of song Forget collective going, all but pathos, In wretchedness and fact of having gone? Accuse the gnostic grammar of old wars: It maims our grasp of accidental death Past putting down of papers to decry Their overlooking what it means to die.
To airmen crossing and communicant With orders of this field, no landing here But by the grace of God; no postulant Piloting earthward should abuse his fear: Trust in the instruments which fall their round, Tonight the only ceiling is the ground; Zero, from nothing into nothing made, Signifies all of altitude that stayed. Notice the fog that makes me all but blind; Here in the tower my skeleton will do To signal you. I am for all your kind Tonight’s full complement and only crew. Airmen, I hope you read loud and clear; Your radios sound happy and sincere: Roger, you say, and dive for wreaths of holly Thinking the next voice heard will be as jolly. Suggest you take along the death’s-head flag And hope that waving it will set you free. Judgment, like flights, may be a game of tag And you can shake and plead the Varsity. Say that team spirit was your only motive: You shot them up and did a locomotive. What if there is a temporary fetter? Christ understands. He also got his letter. I have you, heroes, holding each your course: You shot them up a little, and you grope Tonight with neither memory nor remorse; My skull is watching in the radarscope. I marvel as I track your sure downfall How you can navigate or fly at all For thinking of the tallies without log Until you make an error in this fog.
This is about heroes, and you should know I do not mean old men with membranous snow Already patching them on hand and cheek; I mean the medaled models from the Greek On whom the air force lavishes technique Like tennis lessons and engineering toys Given at schools for preparatory boys. Say what you will, this flyer on his base Who attends airdromes is the immortal ace Training to come out of some urgent East Greater astride his apocalyptic beast Than any movie star: the new high priest. To glimpse him people will abandon cover And in his thunder die as for a lover. Pious and helmeted he lives these nones Attentive to the voices in his phones And calculating when will be the ides Through his impatience with the time he bides In long equations as the slide rule slides; There is no telling the ominous from calm In practice runs to drop a perfect bomb. Nourished and celibate, tanned, tall, erect As he navigates and crosshairs intersect, He dreams a lissome girl and highschool kiss: Physicians have no thought of mending this; The natural death is one he may not miss: Whoever said time steals without a sound? It makes a noise of bandage being wound. Little by little grows the good machine Preening equipment as pterodactyls preen; And when the night pins down the firmament He goes aloft to fly by instrument Limning the stars on graphs where light is bent: To fly in squadron and to walk in squad, This is the double-natured demigod.
My mother loves butter more than I do, more than anyone. She pulls chunks off the stick and eats it plain, explaining cream spun around into butter! Growing up we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles, butter melting in small pools in the hearts of Yorkshire puddings, butter better than gravy staining white rice yellow, butter glazing corn in slipping squares, butter the lava in white volcanoes of hominy grits, butter softening in a white bowl to be creamed with white sugar, butter disappearing into whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple, butter melted and curdy to pour over pancakes, butter licked off the plate with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture the good old days I am grinning greasy with my brother, having watched the tiger chase his tail and turn to butter. We are Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite  historical revision, despite our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside out, one hundred megawatts of butter.
I’ve been eating like a sultan since I was two days old. I had a mother and three sisters who worshipped me. When I was two years old they used to plop me in a bed with a jillion satin pillows and spray me  with exotic perfumes and lilac water, and then they would shoot me the grapes.
The people who live here do two things: their faces whiten past you or blacken into you. Girls are not supposed to come to islands by themselves; did no one tell you? You found the highest hill, away from their whistles, their eyes. Up here only windy grass, the blow of sea that brought you. Only a few cigarette butts, pistachio shells. They come here, but hardly. The house you make is sticks and burrs. Dirt on white knuckles. The sea through the cracks. They do not talk to you anymore, or look at you, your first wish. The wind and sea are full of stomachs: now, learn to disappear into them. Your house’s slender frame catches fire one day. You hear them buzzing below. They watch, they stand, wild brightness from the hill reflecting in each eye. Light. Birds almost green among the sparks. Is it the sun? No, the moon has caught the sun in its mouth. The moon is nothing but the sun letting it see itself. The question comes again, do you have too much faith in people, or too little? Like when you were sitting on the ledge by the sea and three large boys’ shadows stubbed the grass. Your first thought was, so they will make me fall. But they don’t make you fall. Whether they are afraid of you or you of them, whether they are jeering, is not clear. This is the island with the hill with the house with the girl with the fire inside. Afterwards they climb to the top to look at something ruined close-up. They touch the door, soft with ash: the body, amongst the branches and birds, is white. The face catches the sun’s  light.
Conversations with a Muslim friend 1 So, if you don’t believe in full it means you don’t believe. Words tumble onto the rock. A book happens.Okay then tell me about heaven’s beautiful food and women. Who are these women?
“I would make love to one of our whores before I would fuck one of their bourgeoisie.” There was a proverb, like this: Don’t trust a if he becomes a even though he remains a for forty years. And the sister opposite proverb: Don’t trust a even though he has been in the grave for forty years. It was a difficult day, a bomb had spun open a bus, and children had been crushed down by a machine. Each wondered if he was born too soon, if later would have been better, if 40 + 40 + 40 + 40
My last Sabbath, I follow the girls, who sneak into the wedding tent, scattered with sun flower seeds and remnants of celebration. They each stand up on a  table. Take a crushed beer can as a microphone, sing and move their fifteen-year-old hips. I watch, clap for them, until a small face peers in the door. A boy. His face white with something. The door slamming, his very small fist holding it shut, having found what was inside wrong. Enough, I tell him; enough! He leaves. The girls dance again, but less bold. Look: the boy has come back, is looking you hard in the eye, through the crack of the door. There, in his hand, a neon plastic BB gun. He does this for his grandmother and for his son.
Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know that the universe is ever-expanding,  inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies swallowed by galaxies, whole solar systems collapsing, all of it acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning the rules of cartoon animation, that if a man draws a door on a rock only he can pass through it.  Anyone else who tries will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,  ships going down—earthbound, tangible disasters, arenas where they can be heroes. You can run back into a burning house, sinking ships have lifeboats, the trucks will come with their ladders, if you jump you will be saved. A child places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,  & drives across a city of sand. She knows the exact spot it will skid, at which point the bridge will give, who will swim to safety & who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff he will not fall until he notices his mistake.
You shout my name from beyond my dreams, beyond the picture window of this Rosarito beach house. Rushing from bed to shore I glimpse their backs— volcanoes rising out of the sea. Your back, a blue-black silhouette, feet wet with the wash of morning waves. Fountains spring from mammal minds, my hands lifting a splash of sand. I'm on my knees, toes finding a cool prayer beneath them, fingers pressing sea foam to my temples, while you open arms wide as a generation, raise them to a compass point, dive. If you could reach them, you would ride their fins under the horizon, then surf the crash of waves left in their wake. And if I could grasp my own fear, I'd drown it, leave it breathless and blue as this ocean, as the brilliant backs of whales surfacing for air.
I forgot to tell you it's almost time to go. The sun has distilled its particular worn essence And the glittering trout is flipped on the bow.  A man asks me what time it is. I don't know.  I have emptied my purse and wept in the presence  Of onlookers. I forgot to remember to go Before eleven, when the steely arrow Shot swimming to its underneath, tense As a stream of salmon in reverse below The laureled, relentless clocks. The sceptered row Of columns dreams one o'clock, immense,  Inviolate. What time is it? I don't know.  This story concerns the night I tried to go— Though many times I flopped into the silence Of orange plastic seating like onto the bow Of a lonely ship, and felt my breathing slow. The frail, retreating stand of columns prevents The clocks from telling me time and time again to go.  At my feet, a glittering trout swims past the bow.
I have just returned from a visit to my pier Often I am permitted to return to my pier For a long time I would go to pier early So much depends upon a pier This is an old pier I celebrate my pier, and what I assume . . . I had a pier There is a certain slant of pier On woman's first disobedience, and the pier Christmas won't be Christmas without the pier I wandered lonely as a pier Pier was spiteful This is just to say I have eaten the pier
Turn it over and look up into the sphere of heaven.  The tracery is lucent,  light seeping through to write,  white-ink your face, upturned.  Swing it below and it's a cradle of blue water,  the sea, a womb. A mixing bowl  for Babylonian gods. Here, they whirl up the cosmos.  Pick it up and your hands form a pedestal, and all who drink contain the arcs of body and the universe— and between them,  no imaginable tear or distance.
I was chasing this blue butterfly down the road when a car came by and clipped me.  It was nothing serious, but it angered me and I turned around and cursed the driver who didn't even slow down to see if I was hurt. Then I returned my attention to the butterfly which  was nowhere to be seen. One of the Doubleday  girls came running up the street with her toy poodle toward me. I stopped her and asked, "Have you seen a blue butterfly around here?" "It's down near that birch tree near Grandpa's," she said. "Thanks," I said, and walked briskly toward the tree. It was fluttering from flower to flower in Mr. Doubleday's extensive garden,  a celestial blueness to soothe the weary heart.  I didn't know what I was doing there. I certain- ly didn't want to capture it. It was like something I had known in another life, even if it was only in a dream, I wanted to confirm it.  I was a blind beggar on the streets of Cordoba when I first saw it, and now, again it was here.
Christ bore what suffering he could and died a young man, but you waited years to learn how to heal. Only when you could did you touch the man whose body blistered for yours. You posted him no news for sixteen terms, then just a signed graduation notice. The letter he wrote that week asked only, Now that your books are closed, can boys come in? At your wedding, you buried the woman you thought you knew inside a stranger’s name. This is how you found yourself: thirty-three, nursing a son. Soon there was another. Your mind had already begun to walk. But you were a mother. Those cribs held you.
Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight around the starkness. We could have choked on August. Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth, we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt. Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday, we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves. Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion. When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning against a fury that we did not know was change.
Sing the mass— light upon me washing words now that I am gone. The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned out and over the town. I could have lived forever under that sky. Forgetting where I was, I looked left, not right, crossed into a street and stepped in front of the bus that ended me. Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful— my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung some distance down the road? Will you believe me when I tell you I had never been so in love with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw? The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm, supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd. And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence. I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful the woman sent to clean the street used words like police tape to keep back a young boy seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper. The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory would fly him through the world on pinions of passion much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down to tears when she pooled my blood with water and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.
I.  Only now, in spring, can the place be named:  tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,  dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow  on my knowing. All winter I was lost.  Fall, I found myself here, with no texture  my fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing  that downed us deep three months. No flower heat.  That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds  flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,  tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,  bellowing from ashen branches vibrant  keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,  dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.  The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste. II.  The song is drink, is color. Come now, taste  what the world has to offer. When you eat  you will know that music comes in guises—  bold of crepe myrtle, sweet of daffodil—  beyond sound, guises they never told you  could be true. And they aren’t. Except they are  so real now, this spring, you know them, taste them.  Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine,  the music. Faces of this season grin  with clobbering wantonness—see the smiles  open on each branch?—until you, too, smile.  Wide carnival of color, carnival  of scent. We’re all lurching down streets, drunk now  from the poplar’s grail. Wine spray: crab apple. III.  From the poplar’s grail, wine spray. Crab apple  brightens jealously to compete. But by  the crab apple’s deep stain, the tulip tree  learns modesty. Only blush, poplar learns,  lightly. Never burn such a dark-hued fire  to the core. Tulip poplar wants herself  light under leaf, never, like crab apple,  heavy under tart fruit. Never laden.  So the poplar pours just a hint of wine  in her cup, while the crab apple, wild one,  acts as if her body were a fountain.  She would pour wine onto you, just let her.  Shameless, she plants herself, and delivers,  down anyone’s street, bright invitations. IV.  Down anyone’s street-bright invitations.  Suck ‘em. Swallow ‘em. Eat them whole. That’s right,  be greedy about it. The brightness calls  and you follow because you want to taste,  because you want to be welcomed inside  the code of that color: red for thirst; green  for hunger; pink, a kiss; and white, stain me  now. Soil me with touching. Is that right?  No? That’s not, you say, what you meant. Not what  you meant at all? Pardon. Excuse me, please.  Your hand was reaching, tugging at this shirt  of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought  you were hungry for something beautiful.  Come now. The brightness here might fill you up. V.  Come. Now the brightness here might fill you up,  but tomorrow? Who can know what the next  day will bring. It is like that, here, in spring.  Four days ago, the dogwood was a fist  in protest. Now look. Even she unfurls  to the pleasure of the season. Don’t be  ashamed of yourself. Don’t be. This happens  to us all. We have thrown back the blanket.  We’re naked and we’ve grown to love ourselves.  I tell you, do not be ashamed. Who is  more wanton than the dancing crepe myrtle?  Is she ashamed? Why, even the dogwood,  that righteous tree of God’s, is full of lust  exploding into brightness every spring. VI.  Exploding into brightness every spring,  I draw you close. I wonder, do you know  how long I’ve wanted to be here? Each year  you grasp me, lift me, carry me inside.  Glee is the body of the daffodil  reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling  her own trumpeted passion choiring air  with hot, colored song. This is a texture  I love. This is life. And, too, you love me,  inhale my whole being every spring. Gone  winter, heavy clod whose icy body  fell into my bed. I must leave you, but  I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze to hear you cry:  Daffodils are up. My God, what beauty! VII.  Daffodils are up, my God! What beauty  concerted down on us last night. And if  I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder  blossoming, the symphony smashing down  hothouse walls, and into the world: music.  Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s  crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch,  colors unfurling, petals alluring.  The song, the color, the rising ecstasy  of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this  is what I’ve hoped for. All my life is here  in the unnamed core—dogwood, daffodil,  tulip poplar, crab apple, crepe myrtle—  only now, in spring, can the place be named.
“Oh! for a thousand tongues to sing My great Redeemer’s praise: The glories of my Lord and King, The triumphs of His grace.” Oh! for a thousand cedar posts To fence my garden ’round. To hinder the neighbors’ pigs and goats From rooting up my potato ground. Oh! for a thousand hickory rails, To make my fence secure; A thousand patent locks and keys, To lock my stable door. Oh! for a thousand bricks and stones, To build my chimney higher, To keep the neighbors’ boys and girls From putting out my fire. Oh! for a thousand old shot guns, That I might be a match, For all the tramps that I can find In my watermelon patch. Oh! for a thousand pumpkin seeds, To plant for my son John; He says that pumpkin pies are good When the winter time comes on. Oh! for a thousand cribs of corn, Filled chuck up to the beam; And a thousand pails that’s good and strong, To keep the milk and cream. Oh! for a thousand turnip bads, Placed all into a row; Lord! please send a little rain, To make the ’tatoes grow. Oh! for a thousand tongues to ask My maker, who’s on high, To keep my smoke-house filled with meal, Fat bacon, rock and rye. Now, Lord, I close my humble prayer, Which (to some) may seem a vision; Numbers ask for all I’ve named, Whilst few ask for RELIGION.
Ur ol’ Hyar lib in ur house on de hill, He hunner yurs ol’ an’ nebber wuz ill; He yurs dee so long an’ he eyes so beeg, An’ he laigs so spry dat he dawnce ur jeeg; He lib so long dat he know ebbry tings ’Bout de beas’ses dat walks an’ de bu’ds dat sings— Dis Ol’ Doc’ Hyar, Whar lib up dar Een ur mighty fine house on ur mighty high hill. He doctah fur all de beas’ses an’ bu’ds— He put on he specs an’ he use beeg wu’ds, He feel dee pu’s’ den he look mighty wise, He pull out he watch an’ he shet bofe eyes; He grab up he hat an’ grab up he cane, Den—“blam!” go de do’—he gone lak de train, Dis Ol’ Doc’ Hyar, Whar lib up dar Een ur mighty fine house on ur mighty high hill. Mistah Ba’r fall sick—dee sont fur Doc’ Hyar, “O, Doctah, come queeck, an’ see Mr. B’ar; He mighty nigh daid des sho’ ez you b’on!” “Too much ur young peeg, too much ur green co’n,” Ez he put on he hat, said Ol’ Doc’ Hyar; “I’ll tek ’long meh lawnce, an’ lawnce Mistah B’ar,” Said Ol’ Doc’ Hyar, Whar lib up dar Een ur mighty fine house on ur mighty high hill. Mistah B’ar he groaned, Mistah B’ar he growled, W’ile de ol’ Mis’ B’ar an’ de chillen howled; Doctah Hyar tuk out he sha’p li’l lawnce, An’ pyu’ced Mistah B’ar twel he med him prawnce Den grab up he hat an’ grab up he cane “Blam!” go de do’ an’ he gone lak de train, Dis Ol’ Doc’ Hyar, Whar lib up dar Een ur mighty find house on ur mighty high hill. But de vay naix day Mistah B’ar he daid; Wen dee tell Doc’ Hyar, he des scratch he haid: “Ef pashons git well ur pashons git wu’s, Money got ter come een de Ol’ Hyar’s pu’s; Not wut folkses does, but fur wut dee know Does de folkses get paid”—an’ Hyar larfed low, Dis sma’t Ol’ Hyar, Whar lib up dar Een mighty fine house on de mighty high hill!
O, come erlong, come erlong, Wut’s de use er hol’in back; O, hit it strong, er hit it strong, Mek de ol’ flo’ ben’ an’ crack. O, hoop tee doo, uh, hoop tee doo! Dat’s de way ter knock it froo. Right erlong, right erlong, Slide de lef’ foot right erlong. Hoop tee doo, O, hoop tee doo, See, my lub, I dawnce ter you. Ho, boy! Ho, boy! Well done, meh lady! O, slide erlong, slide erlong— Fas’ah wid dat pattin’, Sam! Dar’s music in dis lef’ heel’s song, Mis’ah right foot, doan’ you sham! O, hoop tee doo, oh, hoop tee doo! Straight erlong I dawnce ter you. Slide erlong, slide erlong, Mek dat right foot hit it strong. Hoop tee do, O, hoop tee doo, See, my lub, I dawnce ter you. Ho, boy! Ho, boy! Well done, meh lady!
’Tis strange indeed to hear us plead For selling and for buying When yesterday we said: “Away With all good things but dying.” The world’s ago, and we’re agog To have our first brief inning; So let’s away through surge and fog However slight the winning. What deeds have sprung from plow and pick! What bank-rolls from tomatoes! No dainty crop of rhetoric Can match one of potatoes. Ye orators of point and pith, Who force the world to heed you, What skeletons you’ll journey with Ere it is forced to feed you. A little gold won’t mar our grace, A little ease our glory. This world’s a better biding place When money clinks its story.
Dare a mighty row in Zion an’ de debbil’s gittin’ high, An’ de saints done beat de sinners, a-cussin’ on de sly; What for it am? you reckon, well, I’ll tell you how it ’gin Twuz ’bout a mighty leetle thing, de linin’ ub de hymns. De young folks say taint stylish to lin’ out no mo’, Dat dey’s got edikashun, an’ dey wants us all to know Dat dey likes to hab dar singin’ books a-holin’ fore dar eyes, An sing de hymns right straight along to mansion in de skies. Dat it am awful fogy to gin um out by lin’, An’ ef de ole folks will kumplain ’cause dey is ole an’ blin An’ slabry’s chain don kep dem back from larnin how to read, Dat dey mus’ take a corner seat, and let de young folks lead. We bin peatin’ hine de pastor when he sez dat lubly pray’r Cause some un us don kno’ it an’ kin not say it squar, But dey sez we mus’ peat wid him, an’ ef we kan keep time, De gospel train will drap us off from follin’ long behin’. Well p’haps dez’s right, I kin not say, my lims is growin’ ole, But I likes to sing dem dear ole hymns ’tis music to my soul An’ ’pears to me twon’t do much harm to gin um out by lin’, So we ole folk dat kin not read kin foller long behin’. But few ub us am lef here now dat bore de slabry’s chain, We don edekate our boys an’ gals we’d do de sam’ agin An Zion’s all dat’s lef us now to cheer us wid its song, Dey mought ’low us to sing wid dem, it kin not be fur long. De sarmons high-falutin’ an’ de chuch am mighty fin’, We trus’ dat God still understans ez he did in olden times; When we do ign’ant po an’ mean still worshiped wid de soul Do oft akross our peac’ful breas’ de wabes ub trouble rolled. De old time groans an’ shouts an’ moans am passin’ out ub sight, Edikashun changed all dat, and we believe it right: We should serb God wid ’telligence but fur dis thing I plead, Jes lebe a leetle place in chuch fur dem as kin not read.
When the corn’s all cut and the bright stalks shine Like the burnished spears of a field of gold; When the field-mice rich on the nubbins dine, And the frost comes white and the wind blows cold; Then its heigho fellows and hi-diddle-diddle, For the time is ripe for the corn-stalk fiddle. And you take a stalk that is straight and long, With an expert eye to its worthy points, And you think of the bubbling strains of song That are bound between its pithy joints— Then you cut out strings, with a bridge in the middle, With a corn-stalk bow for a corn-stalk fiddle. Then the strains that grow as you draw the bow O’er the yielding strings with a practiced hand! And the music’s flow never loud but low Is the concert note of a fairy band. Oh, your dainty songs are a misty riddle To the simple sweets of the corn-stalk fiddle. When the eve comes on and our work is done And the sun drops down with a tender glance, With their hearts all prime for the harmless fun, Come the neighbor girls for the evening’s dance, And they wait for the well-known twist and twiddle, More time than tune—from the corn-stalk fiddle. Then brother Jabez takes the bow, While Ned stands off with Susan Bland, Then Henry stops by Milly Snow And John takes Nellie Jones’s hand, While I pair off with Mandy Biddle, And scrape, scrape, scrape goes the corn-stalk fiddle. “Salute your partners,” comes the call, “All join hands and circle round,” “Grand train back,” and “Balance all,” Footsteps lightly spurn the ground, “Take your lady and balance down the middle” To the merry strains of the corn-stalk fiddle. So the night goes on and the dance is o’er, And the merry girls are homeward gone, But I see it all in my sleep once more, And I dream till the very break of dawn Of an impish dance on a red-hot griddle To the screech and scrape of a corn-stalk fiddle.
I am the mother of sorrows, I am the ender of grief; I am the bud and the blossom, I am the late-falling leaf. I am thy priest and thy poet, I am thy serf and thy king; I cure the tears of the heartsick, When I come near they shall sing. White are my hands as the snowdrop; Swart are my fingers as clay; Dark is my frown as the midnight, Fair is my brow as the day. Battle and war are my minions, Doing my will as divine; I am the calmer of passions, Peace is a nursling of mine. Speak to me gently or curse me, Seek me or fly from my sight; I am thy fool in the morning, Thou art my slave in the night. Down to the grave will I take thee, Out from the noise of the strife; Then shalt thou see me and know me— Death, then, no longer, but life. Then shalt thou sing at my coming, Kiss me with passionate breath, Clasp me and smile to have thought me Aught save the foeman of Death. Come to me, brother, when weary, Come when thy lonely heart swells; I’ll guide thy footsteps and lead thee Down where the Dream Woman dwells.

’Twas when the Proclamation came,—  Far in the sixties back,— He left his lord, and changed his name  To “Mister Bartow Black.” He learned to think himself a man,  And privileged, you know, To adopt a new and different plan,—  To lay aside the hoe. He took the lead in politics,   And handled all the “notes,”— For he was up to all the tricks  That gather in the votes; For when the war came to a close  And negroes “took a stand,” Young Bartow with the current rose,  The foremost in command. His voice upon the “stump” was heard;  He “Yankeedom” did prate; The “carpet-bagger” he revered;  The Southerner did hate. He now was greater than the lord  Who used to call him slave, For he was on the “County Board,”  With every right to rave. But this amazing run of luck  Was far too good to stand; And soon the chivalrous “Ku-Klux”  Rose in the Southern land. Then Bartow got a little note,—  ’Twas very queerly signed,— It simply told him not to vote,  Or be to death resigned. Young Bartow thought this little game  Was very fine and nice To bring his courage rare to shame  And knowledge of justice. “What right have they to think I fear?”  He to himself did say. “Dare they presume that I do care  How loudly they do bray? “This is my home, and here I die,  Contending for my right! Then let them come! My colors fly! I’m ready now to fight! “Let those who think that Bartow Black,—  An office-holder, too!— Will to the cowards show his back,  Their vain presumption rue!” Bartow pursued his office game,  And made the money, too, But home at nights he wisely came  And played the husband true. When they had got their subject tame,  And well-matured their plan,  They at the hour of midnight came,  And armed was every man! They numbered fifty Southern sons,  And masked was every face; And Winfield rifles were their guns,—  You could that plainly trace. One Southern brave did have a key,  An entrance quick to make; They entered all; but meek, you see,  Their victim not to wake! They reached his room! He was in bed,—  His wife was by his side! They struck a match above his head,—  His eyes he opened wide! Poor Bartow could not reach his gun,  Though quick his arm did stretch, For twenty bullets through him spun,  That stiffly laid the wretch. And then they rolled his carcass o’er,  And filled both sides with lead; And then they turned it on the floor,  And shot away his head! Ere Black his bloody end did meet  His wife had swooned away; The Southern braves did now retreat,—  There was no need to stay!
On seeing some pictures of the interior of his house, Washington, D.C. Only the casket left, the jewel gone Whose noble presence filled these stately rooms, And made this spot a shrine where pilgrims came— Stranger and friend—to bend in reverence Before the great, pure soul that knew no guile; To listen to the wise and gracious words That fell from lips whose rare, exquisite smile Gave tender beauty to the grand, grave face. Upon these pictured walls we see thy peers,— Poet, and saint, and sage, painter, and king,— A glorious band;—they shine upon us still; Still gleam in marble the enchanting forms Whereupon thy artist eye delighted dwelt; Thy favorite Psyche droops her matchless face, Listening, methinks, for the beloved voice Which nevermore on earth shall sound her praise. All these remain,—the beautiful, the brave,  The gifted, silent ones; but thou art gone! Fair is the world that smiles upon us now; Blue are the skies of June, balmy the air That soothes with touches soft the weary brow; And perfect days glide into perfect nights,— Moonlit and calm; but still our grateful hearts Are sad, and faint with fear,— for thou art gone! Oh friend beloved, with longing, tear-filled eyes We look up, up to the unclouded blue, And seek in vain some answering sign from thee. Look down upon us, guide and cheer us still From the serene height where thou dwellest now; Dark is the way without the beacon light Which long and steadfastly thy hand upheld. Oh, nerve with courage new the stricken hearts Whose dearest hopes seem lost in losing thee.
Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild, A woman swept by us, bearing a child; In her eye was the night of a settled despair, And her brow was o’ershaded with anguish and care. She was nearing the river—in reaching the brink, She heeded no danger, she paused not to think! For she is a mother—her child is a slave— And she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave! ’Twas a vision to haunt us, that innocent face— So pale in its aspect, so fair in its grace; As the tramp of the horse and the bay of the hound, With the fetters that gall, were trailing the ground! She was nerved by despair, and strengthen’d by woe, As she leap’d o’er the chasms that yawn’d from below; Death howl’d in the tempest, and rav’d in the blast, But she heard not the sound till the danger was past. Oh! how shall I speak of my proud country’s shame? Of the stains on her glory, how give them their name? How say that her banner in mockery waves— Her “star-spangled banner”—o’er millions of slaves? How say that the lawless may torture and chase A woman whose crime is the hue of her face? How the depths of forest may echo around With the shrieks of despair, and the bay of the hound? With her step on the ice, and her arm on her child, The danger was fearful, the pathway was wild; But, aided by Heaven, she gained a free shore, Where the friends of humanity open’d their door. So fragile and lovely, so fearfully pale, Like a lily that bends to the breath of the gale, Save the heave of her breast, and the sway of her hair, You’d have thought her a statue of fear and despair. In agony close to her bosom she press’d The life of her heart, the child of her breast:— Oh! love from its tenderness gathering might, Had strengthen’d her soul for the dangers of flight. But she’s free!—yes, free from the land where the slave From the hand of oppression must rest in the grave; Where bondage and torture, where scourges and chains Have plac’d on our banner indelible stains. The bloodhounds have miss’d the scent of her way; The hunter is rifled and foil’d of his prey; Fierce jargon and cursing, with clanking of chains, Make sounds of strange discord on Liberty’s plains. With the rapture of love and fullness of bliss, She plac’d on his brow a mother’s fond kiss:— Oh! poverty, danger and death she can brave, For the child of her love is no longer a slave!
Very soon the Yankee teachers  Came down and set up school; But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it,—  It was agin’ their rule. Our masters always tried to hide  Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge did’nt agree with slavery—  ’Twould make us all too wise. But some of us would try to steal  A little from the book. And put the words together,  And learn by hook or crook. I remember Uncle Caldwell,  Who took pot liquor fat And greased the pages of his book,  And hid it in his hat. And had his master ever seen  The leaves upon his head, He’d have thought them greasy papers,  But nothing to be read. And there was Mr. Turner’s Ben,  Who heard the children spell, And picked the words right up by heart,  And learned to read ’em well. Well, the Northern folks kept sending  The Yankee teachers down; And they stood right up and helped us,  Though Rebs did sneer and frown. And I longed to read my Bible,  For precious words it said; But when I begun to learn it,  Folks just shook their heads, And said there is no use trying,  Oh! Chloe, you’re too late; But as I was rising sixty,  I had no time to wait. So I got a pair of glasses,  And straight to work I went, And never stopped till I could read  The hymns and Testament. Then I got a little cabin  A place to call my own— And I felt independent  As the queen upon her throne.
Do you blame me that I loved him?  If when standing all alone I cried for bread a careless world  Pressed to my lips a stone. Do you blame me that I loved him,  That my heart beat glad and free, When he told me in the sweetest tones  He loved but only me? Can you blame me that I did not see  Beneath his burning kiss The serpent’s wiles, nor even hear  The deadly adder hiss? Can you blame me that my heart grew cold  That the tempted, tempter turned; When he was feted and caressed  And I was coldly spurned? Would you blame him, when you draw from me  Your dainty robes aside, If he with gilded baits should claim  Your fairest as his bride? Would you blame the world if it should press  On him a civic crown; And see me struggling in the depth  Then harshly press me down? Crime has no sex and yet to-day  I wear the brand of shame; Whilst he amid the gay and proud  Still bears an honored name. Can you blame me if I’ve learned to think  Your hate of vice a sham, When you so coldly crushed me down  And then excused the man? Would you blame me if to-morrow  The coroner should say, A wretched girl, outcast, forlorn,  Has thrown her life away? Yes, blame me for my downward course,  But oh! remember well, Within your homes you press the hand  That led me down to hell. I’m glad God’s ways are not our ways,  He does not see as man, Within His love I know there’s room  For those whom others ban. I think before His great white throne,  His throne of spotless light, That whited sepulchres shall wear  The hue of endless night. That I who fell, and he who sinned,  Shall reap as we have sown; That each the burden of his loss  Must bear and bear alone. No golden weights can turn the scale  Of justice in His sight; And what is wrong in woman’s life  In man’s cannot be right.
On the death of my sister Cecilia—the last of five members of the family, who died successively. Our family tree is in the sear  And yellow leaf of life; Branch after branch, year after year,  Yields to death’s pruning knife. First, youngest born, as if ’twere meet,  The sacrifice should be, “The last of earth,” the first to meet  Th’ unknown eternity. ’Twas God who gave, ’twas He who took,  His voice let us obey, So that in his eternal book,  Our names shine bright as day.
Esteville begins to burn;  The auburn fields of harvest rise; The torrid flames again return,  And thunders roll along the skies. Perspiring Cancer lifts his head,  And roars terrific from on high; Whose voice the timid creatures dread;  From which they strive with awe to fly. The night-hawk ventures from his cell,  And starts his note in evening air; He feels the heat his bosom swell,  Which drives away the gloom of fear. Thou noisy insect, start thy drum;  Rise lamp-like bugs to light the train; And bid sweet Philomela come,  And sound in front the nightly strain. The bee begins her ceaseless hum,  And doth with sweet exertions rise; And with delight she stores her comb,  And well her rising stock supplies. Let sportive children well beware,  While sprightly frisking o’er the green; And carefully avoid the snare,  Which lurks beneath the smiling scene. The mistress bird assumes her nest,  And broods in silence on the tree, Her note to cease, her wings at rest,  She patient waits her young to see.
I feel myself in need  Of the inspiring strains of ancient lore, My heart to lift, my empty mind to feed,  And all the world explore. I know that I am old  And never can recover what is past, But for the future may some light unfold  And soar from ages blast. I feel resolved to try,  My wish to prove, my calling to pursue, Or mount up from the earth into the sky,  To show what Heaven can do. My genius from a boy,  Has fluttered like a bird within my heart; But could not thus confined her powers employ,  Impatient to depart. She like a restless bird,  Would spread her wing, her power to be unfurl’d, And let her songs be loudly heard,  And dart from world to world.
All Nashville is a chill. And everywhere Like desert sand, when the winds blow, There is each moment sifted through the air, A powdered blast of January snow. O! thoughtless Dandelion, to be misled By a few warm days to leave thy natural bed, Was folly growth and blooming over soon. And yet, thou blasted yellow-coated gem, Full many a heart has but a common boon With thee, now freezing on thy slender stem. When the heart has bloomed by the touch of love’s warm breath Then left and chilling snow is sifted in, It still may beat but there is blast and death To all that blooming life that might have been.
Such are the little memories of you; They come and go, return and lie apart From all main things of life; yet more than they, With noiseless feet, they come and grip the heart. Gay laughter leading quick and stormy tears, Then smiles again and pulse of flying feet, In breathless chase of fleeting gossamers, Are memories so dear, so bitter-sweet. No more are echoes of your flying feet. Hard by, where Pike’s Peak rears its head in state, The erstwhile rushing feet, with halting steps, For health’s return in Denver watch and wait. But love and memories of noiseless tread, Where angels hovered once, all shining fair, To tuck you in your little trundle bed, Kneel nightly now in agony of prayer.
The fields are white;  The laborers are few; Yet say the idle:  There’s nothing to do. Jails are crowded;  In Sunday-schools few; We still complain:  There’s nothing to do. Drunkards are dying—  Your sons, it is true; Mothers’ arms folded  With nothing to do. Heathens are dying;  Their blood falls on you; How can you people  Find nothing to do?
Born like the pines to sing,  The harp and song in m’ breast, Though far and near, There’s none to hear, I’ll sing as th’ winds request. To tell the trend of m’ lay,  Is not for th’ harp or me; I’m only to know, From the winds that blow, What th’ theme of m’ song shall be. Born like the pines to sing,  The harp and th’ song in m’ breast, As th’ winds sweep by, I’ll laugh or cry, In th’ winds I cannot rest.
Where is the promise of my years; Once written on my brow? Ere errors, agonies and fears Brought with them all that speaks in tears, Ere I had sunk beneath my peers; Where sleeps that promise now? Naught lingers to redeem those hours, Still, still to memory sweet! The flowers that bloomed in sunny bowers Are withered all; and Evil towers Supreme above her sister powers Of Sorrow and Deceit. I look along the columned years, And see Life’s riven fane, Just where it fell, amid the jeers Of scornful lips, whose mocking sneers, For ever hiss within mine ears To break the sleep of pain. I can but own my life is vain A desert void of peace; I missed the goal I sought to gain, I missed the measure of the strain That lulls Fame’s fever in the brain, And bids Earth’s tumult cease. Myself! alas for theme so poor A theme but rich in Fear; I stand a wreck on Error’s shore, A spectre not within the door, A houseless shadow evermore, An exile lingering here.
Grateful for their tour of the pharmacy, the first-grade class has drawn these pictures, each self-portrait taped to the window-glass, faces wide to the street, round and available, with parallel lines for hair. I like this one best: Brian, whose attenuated name fills a quarter of the frame, stretched beside impossible legs descending from the ball of his torso, two long arms springing from that same central sphere. He breathes here, on his page. It isn’t craft that makes this figure come alive; Brian draws just balls and lines, in wobbly crayon strokes. Why do some marks seem to thrill with life, possess a portion of the nervous energy in their maker’s hand? That big curve of a smile reaches nearly to the rim of his face; he holds a towering ice cream, brown spheres teetering on their cone, a soda fountain gift half the length of him —as if it were the flag of his own country held high by the unadorned black line of his arm. Such naked support for so much delight! Artless boy, he’s found a system of beauty: he shows us pleasure and what pleasure resists. The ice cream is delicious. He’s frail beside his relentless standard.
Tell me a story, father please, And then I sat upon his knees. Then answer’d he,—“what speech make known, Or tell the words of native tone, Of how my Indian fathers dwelt, And, of sore oppression felt; And how they mourned a land serene, It was an ever mournful theme.”   Yes, I replied,—I like to hear, And bring my father’s spirit near; Of every pain they did forego, Oh, please to tell me all you know. In history often I do read, Of pain which none but they did heed.   He thus began. “We were a happy race, When we no tongue but ours did trace, We were in ever peace, We sold, we did release— Our brethren, far remote, and far unknown, And spake to them in silent, tender tone. We all were then as in one band, We join’d and took each others hand; Our dress was suited to the clime, Our food was such as roam’d that time, Our houses were of sticks compos’d; No matter,—for they us enclos’d.   But then discover’d was this land indeed By European men; who then had need Of this far country. Columbus came afar, And thus before we could say Ah! What meaneth this?—we fell in cruel hands.   Though some were kind, yet others then held bands Of cruel oppression. Then too, foretold our chief,— Beggars you will become—is my belief. We sold, then some bought lands, We altogether moved in foreign hands.   Wars ensued. They knew the handling of firearms. Mothers spoke,—no fear this breast alarms, They will not cruelly us oppress, Or thus our lands possess. Alas! it was a cruel day; we were crush’d: Into the dark, dark woods we rush’d To seek a refuge.   My daughter, we are now diminish’d, unknown, Unfelt! Alas! No tender tone To cheer us when the hunt is done; Fathers sleep,—we’re silent every one.   Oh! silent the horror, and fierce the fight, When my brothers were shrouded in night; Strangers did us invade—strangers destroy’d The fields, which were by us enjoy’d.   Our country is cultur’d, and looks all sublime, Our fathers are sleeping who lived in the time That I tell. Oh! could I tell them my grief In its flow, that in roaming, we find no relief.   I love my country, and shall, until death Shall cease my breath.   Now daughter dear I’ve done, Seal this upon thy memory; until the morrow’s sun Shall sink, to rise no more; And if my years should score, Remember this, though I tell no more.”
Adapted to the case of Mr. S., Fugitive from Tennessee.   I’m on my way to Canada, That cold and dreary land;The dire effects of slavery, I can no longer stand.My soul is vexed within me so, To think that I’m a slave;I’ve now resolved to strike the blow For freedom or the grave. O righteous Father, Wilt thou not pity me? And aid me on to Canada, Where colored men are free.I heard Victoria plainly say, If we would all forsakeOur native land of slavery, And come across the Lake.That she was standing on the shore, With arms extended wide,To give us all a peaceful home, Beyond the rolling tide. Farewell, old master! That’s enough for me— I’m going straight to Canada, Where colored men are free.I heard the old-soul driver say, As he was passing by,That darkey’s bound to run away, I see it in his eye.My heart responded to the charge, And thought it was no crime;And something seemed my mind to urge, That now’s the very time. O! old driver, Don’t you cry for me, I’m going up to Canada, Where colored men are free.Grieve not, my wife—grieve not for me, O! do not break my heart,For nought but cruel slavery Would cause me to depart.If I should stay to quell your grief, Your grief I would augment;For no one knows the day that we Asunder might be rent. O! Susannah, Don’t you cry for me— I’m going up to Canada, Where colored men are free.I heard old master pray last night— I heard him pray for me;That God would come, and in his might From Satan set me free;So I from Satan would escape, And flee the wrath to come—If there’s a fiend in human shape, Old master must be one. O! old master, While you pray for me, I’m doing all I can to reach The land of Liberty.Ohio’s not the place for me; For I was much surprised,So many of her sons to see In garments of disguise.Her name has gone out through the world, Free Labor, Soil, and Men;But slaves had better far be hurled Into the Lion’s Den. Farewell, Ohio! I am not safe in thee; I’ll travel on to Canada, Where colored men are free.I’ve now embarked for yonder shore, Where man’s a man by law,The vessel soon will bear me o’er, To shake the Lion’s paw.I no more dread the Auctioneer, Nor fear the master’s frowns, I no more tremble when I hear The beying negro-hounds. O! old Master, Don’t think hard of me— I’m just in sight of Canada, Where colored men are free.I’ve landed safe upon the shore, Both soul and body free;My blood and brain, and tears no more Will drench old Tennesse.But I behold the scalding tear, Now stealing from my eye,To think my wife—my only dear, A slave must live and die. O, Susannah! Don’t grieve after me— For ever at a throne of grace, I will remember thee.
Or the true feelings of those slaves who say they would not be free. The following shows their feelings when they are free.
My book is largely growing; Its leaves are multiplied;Its pages are much longer, And nearly twice as wide.At first I thought the reader Had not the time to spare,To hail my little volume As it floated in the air.I thought perhaps while floating Away through empty space,Perchance would there discover Some long forgotten race.I knew not it would mingle Among the great and wise,Or that it would be subject Unto the critic’s eyes.I thought it was inferior, And of the minor class,I knew not how the ladies Would read it as they pass.But now I find it’s useful, And laden every page,For truly it must mingle With those of every age.Therefore I should have measured; Should not have thought it vainTo make its little mysteries Unto the reader plain.But surely there’s no secret Where thought is not sublime,That I have thus destroyed By keeping up my rhyme.But if I should in future Find this to be the case,I’d take my silver pencil And all these lines erase.I’d rather use a license, Or grammar’s laws dispense,Than for to let my metre Or rhythm govern sense.The read will remember My chances are but slim,Or else this little volume Would be in better trim.Remember, too, in Dixie That I was born a slave.And all my early genius Was locked within the grave.Remember my condition— A mark within my eyes—And all my inspirations Are showered from the skies.I cannot read of authors, Nor those of noble fame,For I’m just a learning The author, Milton’s, name.I cannot borrow subjects, Nor rob them of their style,My book amid their volumes, Like me, is but a child.Therefore, I bless this volume, And send with it my heart,That it may to the critic My better thoughts impart.Go forth, then, little volume, Much good from thee may spring,If thou continueth pleading The merits of thy King.And others yet may follow, All changed within their scale,But thou, upon thy mission, I am sure can never fail.
Oh! had I now an overcoat, For I am nearly freezing;My head and lungs are stopped with cold, And often I am sneezing.And, too, while passing through the street, Where merchants all are greeting,They say, young man this is the coat That you should wear to meeting.Then, looking down upon my feet, For there my boots are bursting,With upturned heels and grinning toes, With tacks which long were rusting.Ah! how they view my doeskin pants With long and crooked stitches,They say, young man would you not like To have some other breeches?My head is also hatless too, The wind is swiftly blowing,They say, young man will you not freeze? See ye not how it’s snowing?And now they take me by the hand, And lead me toward the store,And some are pulling down the coats Before I reach the door.So walk I in, their goods to price, To quench a thirst that’s burning,And freely would I buy a coat, But nothing I am earning.They say to me, I should have known, That winter time was coming,When I was roaming through the park, With birds around me humming. Their logic’s true, I must confess, And all they say is pleasant;But did I know that I would have No overcoat at present?To satisfy these craving Jews, To buy I am not able,For it is more than I can do To meet my wants at table.Therefore my skin will toughly grow, Will grant to me this favor,That I may learn to stand as much As little Jack, the sailor.And if I live till winter’s passed, Though nature’s harps unstringing,I then will fly to yon woodland To hear the oak trees singing.Then I will not on hero’s fame, Ride swiftly on to victory,Although my saddle may be made Of cotton sacks or hickory.But if I die, farewell to all, Oh! who will tell the story,That I have lived a noble life. And now gone home to glory?Yes, who will chant a song of praise For me—who will be weeping—When I have yielded to the grave, And ’mid the dead am sleeping?But some will ask, “how did he die? It was without my knowing;Was it because he caught a cold, Last year when it was snowing?”The answer now comes hurling back, In words I cannot utter,It was not by a cold alone, But partly bread and butter.
In vain thou bid’st me strike the lyre, And sing a song of mirth and glee,Or, kindling with poetic fire, Attempt some higher minstrelsy;In vain, in vain! for every thought That issues from this throbbing brain,Is from its first conception fraught With gloom and darkness, woe and pain.From earliest youth my path has been Cast in life’s darkest, deepest shade,Where no bright ray did intervene, Nor e’er a passing sunbeam strayed;But all was dark and cheerless night, Without one ray of hopeful light.From childhood, then, through many a shock, I’ve battled with the ills of life,Till, like a rude and rugged rock, My heart grew callous in the strife.When other children passed the hours In mirth, and play, and childish glee,Or gathering the summer flowers By gentle brook, or flowery lea,I sought the wild and rugged glen Where Nature, in her sternest mood, Far from the busy haunts of men, Frowned in the darksome solitude.There have I mused till gloomy night, Like the death-angel’s brooding wing,Would shut out every thing from sight, And o’er the scene her mantle fling;And seeking then my lonely bed To pass the night in sweet repose,Around my fevered, burning head, Dark visions of the night arose;And the stern scenes which day had viewed In sterner aspect rose before me,And specters of still sterner mood Waved their menacing fingers o’er me.When the dark storm-fiend soared abroad, And swept to earth the waving grain,On whirlwind through the forest rode, And stirred to foam the heaving main,I loved to mark the lightning’s flash, And listen to the ocean’s roar,Or hear the pealing thunder’s crash, And see the mountain torrents pourDown precipices dark and steep, Still bearing, in their headlong courseTo meet th’ embrace of ocean deep, Mementoes of the tempest’s force;For fire and tempest, flood and storm, Wakened deep echoes in my soul,And made the quickening life-blood warm With impulse that knew no control;And the fierce lightning’s lurid flash Rending the somber clouds asunder,Followed by the terrific crash Which marks the hoarsely rattling thunder, Seemed like the gleams of lurid light Which flashed across my seething brain,Succeeded by a darker night, With wilder horrors in its train.And I have stood on ocean’s shore, And viewed its dreary waters roll, Till the dull music of its roar Called forth responses in my soul;And I have felt that there was traced An image of my inmost soul,In that dark, dreary, boundless waste, Whose sluggish waters aimless roll—Save when aroused by storms’ wild force It lifts on high its angry wave, And thousands driven from their course Find in its depths a nameless grave.Whene’er I turned in gentler mood To scan the old historic page,It was not where the wise and good, The Bard, the Statesman, or the Sage, Had drawn in lines of living light, Lessons of virtue, truth and right;But that which told of secret league, Where deep conspiracies were rife,And where, through foul and dark intrigue, Were sowed the seeds of deadly strife.Where hostile armies met to seal Their country’s doom, for woe or weal;Where the grim-visaged death-fiend drank His full supply of human gore,And poured through every hostile rank The tide of battle’s awful roar;For then my spirit seemed to soar Away to where such scenes were rife,And high above the battle’s roar Sit as spectator of the strife—And in those scenes of war and woe,A fierce and fitful pleasure know.There was a time when I possessed High notions of Religion’s claim,Nor deemed its practice, at the best, Was but a false and empty name;But when I saw the graceless deeds Which marked its strongest votaries’ path,How senseless bigots, o’er their creeds, Blazing with wild fanatic wrath,Let loose the deadly tide of war,Spread devastation near and far, Through scenes of rapine, blood and shame,Of cities sacked, and towns on flame,Caused unbelievers’ hearts to feelThe arguments of fire and steelBy which they sought t’ enforce the word, And make rebellious hearts approveThose arguments of fire and sword As mandates of the God of love—How could I think that such a faith, Whose path was marked by fire and blood,That sowed the seeds of war and death, Had issued from a holy God?There was a time when I did love, Such love as those alone can know,Whose blood like burning lava moves, Whose passions like the lightning glow;And when that ardent, truthful love, Was blighted in its opening bloom,And all around, below, above, Seemed like the darkness of the tomb,’Twas then my stern and callous heart,Riven in its most vital part,Seemed like some gnarled and knotted oak,That, shivered by the lightning’s stroke,Stands in the lonely wanderer’s path,A ghastly monument of wrath.Then how can I attune the lyre To strains of love, or joyous glee?Break forth in patriotic fire, Or soar on higher minstrelsy,To sing the praise of virtue bright,Condemn the wrong, and laud the right;When neither vice nor guilt can fling A darker shadow o’er my breast,Not even Virtue’s self can bring, Unto my moody spirit, rest.It may not be, it cannot be! Let others strike the sounding string,And in rich strains of harmony, Songs of poetic beauty sing;But mine must still the portion be, However dark and drear the doom,To live estranged from sympathy, Buried in doubt, despair and gloom;To bare my breast to every blow,To know no friend, and fear no foe,Each generous impulse trod to dust,Each noble aspiration crushed, Each feeling struck with withering blight,With no regard for wrong or right,No fear of hell, no hope of heaven, Die all unwept and unforgiven,Content to know and dare the worstWhich mankind’s hate, and heaven’s curse,Can heap upon my living head,Or cast around my memory dead;And let them on my tombstone trace,Here lies the Pariah of his race.
18These creatures of the languid Orient,— Rare pearls of caste, in their voluptuous swoonAnd gilded ease, by Eunuchs watched and pent, And doomed to hear the lute’s perpetual tune,Were passion’s toys—to lust an ornament; But not such was our thrush-voiced Octoroon,—The Southland beauty who was wont to hearFaith’s tender secrets whispered in her ear. 19“An honest man’s the noblest work of”—No! That threadbare old mistake I’ll not repeat.A lovely woman—do you not think so?— Is God’s best work. That she is man’s helpmeet,The Bible says, and I will let it go; And yet she crowns and makes his life complete.Who would not shrive himself in her dear face,And find his sinless Heaven in her embrace! 20Young Maury loved his slave—she was his own; A gift, for all he questioned, from the skies.Not other fortune had he ever known, Like that which sparkled in her wild blue eyes.Her seal-brown locks and cheeks like roses blown, Were wealth to him that e’en the gods might prize.And when her slender waist to him he drew,The sum of every earthly bliss he knew. 21They had grown up together,—he and she— A world unto themselves. All else was bare,—A desert to them and an unknown sea. Their lives were like the birds’ lives—free and fair,And flowed together like a melody. They could not live apart, Ah! silly pair!But since she was his slave, what need to say,A swarm of troubles soon beset their way? 22Just in the dawn of blushing womanhood; Her swan-neck glimpsed through shocks of wavy hair;A hint of olives in her gentle blood, Suggesting passion in a rosy lair;This shapely Venus of the cabins stood, In all but birth a princess, tall and fair;And is it any wonder that this braveAnd proud young master came to love his slave? 28If it be shame to love a pretty woman, Then shameful loving is a pretty thing.And of all things the most divinely human Is this:—Love purifies life’s Fountain Spring;And he who has not quaffed that fount is no man— I’d rather be a lover than a king.And then, preach as we will or may, we’ll findThat Cupid, dear young god, is sometimes blind. 55Before the world, I hold that none of these: The Shushan slave, the Oreb shepherdess,Nor Moab’s gleaner, ever had the ease Of carriage, grace of speech, the statelinessOf step and pose, nor had the art to please And charm with symphonies of form and dress,Nor had such wond’rous eyes, such lovely mouth,As had this blue-eyed daughter [Lena] of the South! 56Had priest or prophet ever heard her singing, Or seen her, where the clover was in bloom,Wading knee-deep, while larks were upward springing, And winds could scarcely breathe for want of room—Thus seen her from the dappled hillsides bringing The cows home, in the sunset’s golden gloom,Our good old Bible would have had much moreOf love and romance mixed with sacred lore. 57What man is there who would not dare defend A life like this? Is doing so a sin?Or who should blush to be known as her friend? White wonder of creation, fashioned inThe moulds of loveliness; kings might contend On martial fields a prize like her to win,And yet, the cabin’s hate and mansion’s scorn,—She suffered both, betwixt them being born. 59When genial Spring first hears the mating thrush, Where waters gossip and the wild flowers throng,Love rears her altar in the leafy bush, And Nature chants the sweetest bridal-song.When love is free, with madness in its rush, Its very strength defends the heart from wrong.Love, when untutored, walks a harmless way,With feet, though bare, that never go astray. 153Mind knows no death. Life is the “first and last.” The falling leaf leaves its source living still;The flower which withers in the autumn blast Dies not, but thus escapes the winter’s chill,And will return, through changes strange and vast, When summoned forth to range o’er vale and hill.Shall mind which thus perceives Life’s changes die?Hath only matter immortality? 156But, “if a man die, shall he live again?” This baffling question comes from long ago.Shall ashes only of Life’s torch remain? The mind cries out, and Nature answers, “No!”Ye who have heard the prophesying rain, And seen the flowery Resurrection glow:Ye know of better things than eye hath seen;Ye know sere Earth is Mother of the green. 157The wild moose shivers in the north land’s breath, Where Huron’s wave upbraids the fretful shore;The marsh fowl far to southward wandereth And calls her tribes to milder climes explore;All Nature seems to sigh: “Remember death, For all the living soon shall be no more.”But mark how Faith sweeps on with tireless wing,To find for e’en the fowl an endless spring. 159Let scoffers mock, let unbelief deny— Agnosticism stolidly ignore;Let worldly wisdom proudly ask us, “Why?” And still the soul cries out for something more—For something better than philosophy— Still longs for higher joys and looks before;And cannot rest—will ne’er contented be,Till triumph over matter leaves mind free. 160Then hail we all the spirits of the just, With Lena we shall join them all. The mindNow risen looks down on Life’s unmeaning dust, And soars to higher spheres—all unconfined;To spheres of love and duty, hope and trust; And leaves the sordid and corrupt behind.The Virgin is the sign of vanquished night,Her child is born—born of the soul—the Light. 161Farewell! In grandeur sinks the closing day, And on our vision slowly fades the light;And bygone scenes, like shadows fall away, To settle in the blank of coming night.The Octoroon has passed, but not for aye; To those who have the gift of inner sight,The spirit of all nature prophesiesA home for love and beauty in the skies.
HORACE IV. i It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,  Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears, The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,  The sour taste of each day’s first lie, And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling  A swaying bead-chain of moonlight, Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark  Along a body like my own, but blameless. What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,  Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad? You get from life what you can shake from it?  For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN. Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level  At eighty grand, who pouts about overtime, Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,  And hash in tinfoil under the office fern. There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer  Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples. His answering machine always has room for one more  Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who. Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears  Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now? I long ago gave up pretending to believe  Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets. So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream  Almost every night of holding you again, Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,  Through the bruised unbalanced waves?
Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday’s attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I’d stay, not knowing where I’d been.
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roamIn the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.The heart of a woman falls back with the night,And enters some alien cage in its plight,And tries to forget it has dreamed of the starsWhile it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
The phantom happiness I sought O’er every crag and moor;I paused at every postern gate, And knocked at every door;In vain I searched the land and sea, E’en to the inmost core,The curtains of eternal night Descend—my search is o’er.
A woman with a burning flame Deep covered through the yearsWith ashes. Ah! she hid it deep, And smothered it with tears.Sometimes a baleful light would rise From out the dusky bed,And then the woman hushed it quick To slumber on, as dead.At last the weary war was done The tapers were alight,And with a sigh of victory She breathed a soft—good-night!
Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes,Sure and unerring, the wordless replies,Challenges flash from their ambushing caves—Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.
Her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight,Her very days were shades of night,Her every dream was born entombed,Her soul, a bud,—that never bloomed.
I’m folding up my little dreams Within my heart tonight,And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight.For time’s deft fingers scroll my brow With fell relentless art—I’m folding up my little dreams Tonight, within my heart.
It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young Though I have long wondered what it would be like To be me now No older at all it seems from here As far from myself as ever Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing I imagine all the clocks have died in the night Now no one is looking I could choose my age It would be younger I suppose so I am older It is there at hand I could take it Except for the things I think I would do differently They keep coming between they are what I am They have taught me little I did not know when I was young There is nothing wrong with my age now probably It is how I have come to it Like a thing I kept putting off as I did my youth There is nothing the matter with speech Just because it lent itself To my uses Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
TO show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,And thought in living characters to paint,When first thy pencil did those beauties give,And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,How did those prospects give my soul delight,A new creation rushing on my sight?Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue,On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fireTo aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!And may the charms of each seraphic themeConduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!High to the blissful wonders of the skiesElate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.Thrice happy, when exalted to surveyThat splendid city, crown’d with endless day,Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring:Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.Calm and serene thy moments glide along,And may the muse inspire each future song!Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d,May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!But when these shades of time are chas’d away,And darkness ends in everlasting day,On what seraphic pinions shall we move,And view the landscapes in the realms above?There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow,And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow:No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs,Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes,For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of nightNow seals the fair creation from my sight.
It was at a wine party— I lay in a drowse, knowing it not. The blown flowers fell and filled my lap. When I arose, still drunken, The birds had all gone to their nests, And there remained but few of my comrades. I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.
Illimitable happiness, But grief for our white heads. We love the long watches of the night, the red candle. It would be difficult to have too much of meeting,Let us not be in hurry to talk of separation. But because the Heaven River will sink, We had better empty the wine-cups. To-morrow, at bright dawn, the world’s business will entangle us. We brush away our tears, We go—East and West.
Farewell thou thing, time past so known, so dear To me as blood to life and spirit; near, Nay, thou more near than kindred, friend, man, wife, Male to the female, soul to body; life To quick action, or the warm soft side Of the resigning, yet resisting bride. The kiss of virgins, first fruits of the bed, Soft speech, smooth touch, the lips, the maidenhead : These and a thousand sweets could never be So near or dear as thou wast once to me. O thou, the drink of gods and angels! wine That scatter'st spirit and lust, whose purest shine More radiant than the summer's sunbeam shows; Each way illustrious, brave, and like to those Comets we see by night, whose shagg'd portents Foretell the coming of some dire events, Or some full flame which with a pride aspires, Throwing about his wild and active fires; 'Tis thou, above nectar, O divinest soul ! Eternal in thyself, that can'st control That which subverts whole nature, grief and care, Vexation of the mind, and damn'd despair. 'Tis thou alone who, with thy mystic fan, Workst more than wisdom, art, or nature can To rouse the sacred madness and awake The frost-bound blood and spirits, and to make Them frantic with thy raptures flashing through The soul like lightning, and as active too. 'Tis not Apollo can, or those thrice three Castalian sisters, sing, if wanting thee. Horace, Anacreon, both had lost their fame, Hads't thou not fill'd them with thy fire and flame. Phoebean splendour! and thou, Thespian spring! Of which sweet swans must drink before they sing Their true pac'd numbers and their holy lays, Which makes them worthy cedar and the bays. But why, why longer do I gaze upon Thee with the eye of admiration? Since I must leave thee, and enforc'd must say To all thy witching beauties, Go away. But if thy whimpering looks do ask me why, Then know that nature bids thee go, not I. 'Tis her erroneous self has made a brain Uncapable of such a sovereign As is thy powerful self. Prithee not smile, Or smile more inly, lest thy looks beguile My vows denounc'd in zeal, which thus much show thee That I have sworn but by thy looks to know thee. Let others drink thee freely, and desire Thee and their lips espous'd, while I admire And love thee, but not taste thee. Let my muse Fail of thy former helps, and only use Her inadultrate strength: what's done by me Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.
Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone,  The only Son of God; Redemption now to every one,  That love his holy Word. Dear Jesus we would fly to Thee,  And leave off every Sin, Thy Tender Mercy well agree;  Salvation from our King. Salvation comes now from the Lord,  Our victorious King; His holy Name be well ador’d,  Salvation surely bring. Dear Jesus give they Spirit now,  Thy Grace to every Nation, That han’t the Lord to whom we bow,  The Author of Salvation. Dear Jesus unto Thee we cry,  Give us the Preparation; Turn not away thy tender Eye;  We seek thy true Salvation. Salvation comes from God we know,  The true and only One; It’s well agreed and certain true,  He gave his only Son. Lord hear our penetential Cry:  Salvation from above; It is the Lord that doth supply,  With his Redeeming Love. Dear Jesus by thy precious Blood,  The World Redemption have: Salvation now comes from the Lord,  He being thy captive slave. Dear Jesus let the Nations cry,  And all the People say, Salvation comes from Christ on high,  Haste on Tribunal Day. We cry as Sinners to the Lord,  Salvation to obtain; It is firmly fixt his holy Word,  Ye shall not cry in vain. Dear Jesus unto Thee we cry,  And make our Lamentation: O let our Prayers ascend on high;  We felt thy Salvation. Lord turn our dark benighted Souls;  Give us a true Motion, And let the Hearts of all the World,  Make Christ their Salvation. Ten Thousand Angels cry to Thee,  Yea lourder than the Ocean. Thou art the Lord, we plainly see;  Thou art the true Salvation. Now is the Day, excepted Time;  The Day of Salvation; Increase your Faith, do no repine:  Awake ye every Nation. Lord unto whom now shall we go,  Or seek a safe Abode; Thou hast the Word Salvation too  The only Son of God. Ho! every one that hunger hath,  Or pineth after me, Salvation be thy leading Staff,  To set the Sinner free. Dear Jesus unto Thee we fly;  Depart, depart from Sin, Salvation doth at length supply,  The Glory of our King. Come ye Blessed of the Lord,  Salvation greatly given; O turn your Hearts, accept the Word,  Your Souls are fit for Heaven. Dear Jesus we now turn to Thee,  Salvation to obtain; Our Hearts and Souls do meet again,  To magnify thy Name. Come holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove,  The Object of our Care; Salvation doth increase our Love;  Our Hearts hath felt thy fear. Now Glory be to God on High,  Salvation high and low; And thus the Soul on Christ rely,  To Heaven surely go. Come Blessed Jesus, Heavenly Dove,  Accept Repentance here; Salvation give, with tender Love;  Let us with Angels share.
I   O come you pious youth! adore  The wisdom of thy God, In bringing thee from distant shore,  To learn His holy word.  Eccles. xii.  II   Thou mightst been left behind  Amidst a dark abode; God’s tender mercy still combin’d,  Thou hast the holy word.  Psal. cxxxv, 2, 3.    III   Fair wisdom’s ways are paths of peace,  And they that walk therein, Shall reap the joys that never cease,  And Christ shall be their king.  Psal. i, 1,2; Prov. iii, 7.  IV   God’s tender mercy brought thee here;  Tost o’er the raging main; In Christian faith thou hast a share,  Worth all the gold of Spain.  Psal. cii, 1, 3, 4.  V
The night sits wherever you are. Your night is of lilac. Every now and then a gesture escapes from the beam of your dimples, breaks the wineglass and lights up the starlight. And your night is your shadow— a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams equal. I am not a traveler or a dweller in your lilac night, I am he who was one day me. Whenever night grew in you I guessed the heart’s rank between two grades: neither the self accepts, nor the soul accepts. But in our bodies a heaven and an earth embrace. And all of you is your night ... radiant night like planet ink. Night is the covenant of night, crawling in my body anesthetized like a fox’s sleepiness. Night diffusing a mystery that illuminates my language, whenever it is clearer I become more fearful of a tomorrow in the fist. Night staring at itself safe and assured in its endlessness, nothing celebrates it except its mirror and the ancient shepherd songs in a summer of emperors who get sick on love. Night that flourished in its Jahili poetry on the whims of Imru’ el-Qyss and others, and widened for the dreamers the milk path to a hungry moon in the remoteness of speech ...
I am a woman. No more and no less I live my life as it is thread by thread and I spin my wool to wear, not to complete Homer’s story, or his sun. And I see what I see as it is, in its shape, though I stare every once in a while in its shade to sense the pulse of defeat, and I write tomorrow on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound other than echo. I love the necessary vagueness in what a night traveler says to the absence of birds over the slopes of speech and above the roofs of villages I am a woman, no more and no less The almond blossom sends me flying in March, from my balcony, in longing for what the faraway says: “Touch me and I’ll bring my horses to the water springs.” I cry for no clear reason, and I love you as you are, not as a strut nor in vain and from my shoulders a morning rises onto you and falls into you, when I embrace you, a night. But I am neither one nor the other no, I am not a sun or a moon I am a woman, no more and no less So be the Qyss of longing, if you wish. As for me I like to be loved as I am not as a color photo in the paper, or as an idea composed in a poem amid the stags … I hear Laila’s faraway scream from the bedroom: Do not leave me a prisoner of rhyme in the tribal nights do not leave me to them as news … I am a woman, no more and no less I am who I am, as you are who you are: you live in me and I live in you, to and for you I love the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle I am yours when I overflow the night but I am not a land or a journey I am a woman, no more and no less And I tire from the moon’s feminine cycle and my guitar falls ill string by string I am a woman, no more and no less!
A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing and not promise. What will I do? What will I do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams to my reality: not dust and not fire. What will I do without roses from Samarkand? What will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar stones? Our weight has become light like our houses in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what will we do without exile, and a long night that stares at the water? Water binds me to your name ... There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O stranger! what will we do with what is left to us of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths? And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house. Was this road always like this, from the start, or did our dreams find a mare on the hill among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it? And what will we do? What will we do without exile?
The horse fell off the poem and the Galilean women were wet with butterflies and dew, dancing above chrysanthemum The two absent ones: you and I you and I are the two absent ones A pair of white doves chatting on the branches of a holm oak No love, but I love ancient love poems that guard the sick moon from smoke I attack and retreat, like the violin in quatrains I get far from my time when I am near the topography of place ... There is no margin in modern language left to celebrate what we love, because all that will be ... was The horse fell bloodied with my poem and I fell bloodied with the horse’s blood ...
In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love and peace are holy and are coming to town. I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up? I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me. All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly then I become another. Transfigured. Words sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.” I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white biblical rose. And my hands like two doves on the cross hovering and carrying the earth. I don’t walk, I fly, I become another, transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I? I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?” Then what? A woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you? I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.
The cypress is the tree’s grief and not  the tree, and it has no shadow because it is  the tree’s shadow  —Bassam Hajjar The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green, as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehicles sped over its branches. The dust blew into the windshields ... / The cypress broke, but the pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t change its public nest. And two migrant birds hovered above the hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols. And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm? She said: No, and no bulldozer either ... / And the cypress broke. And those passing by the wreckage said: Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew old with the days, it is long like a giraffe, and little in meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers. And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly, its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky today is incomplete because the cypress broke. And a young man said: But the sky today is complete because the cypress broke. And I said to myself: Neither mystery nor clarity, the cypress broke, and that is all there is to it: the cypress broke!
I have a seat in the abandoned theater in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall the final act without longing ... not because of anything other than that the play was not written skillfully ... Chaos as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography of the spectators’ impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses sitting in our seats I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon, and wait, unless you’re the author! —No Then he asks me: And you are you the author? —No So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral hero to escape from an obvious fate He says: No hero dies revered in the second scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend what the iron has done to my brothers So I say: It is you then? He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked witnesses I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no one is neutral here. And you must choose your part in the end So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?
To our land, and it is the one near the word of god, a ceiling of clouds To our land, and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns, the map of absence To our land, and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed, a heavenly horizon ... and a hidden chasm To our land, and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings, holy books ... and an identity wound To our land, and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, the ambush of a new past To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it ... As for us, inside, we suffocate more!
In her absence I created her image: out of the earthly the hidden heavenly commences. I am here weighing the expanse with the Jahili odes ... and absence is the guide, it is the guide. For each rhyme a tent is pitched. And for each thing blowing in the wind a rhyme. Absence teaches me its lesson: If it weren’t for the mirage you wouldn’t have been steadfast ... Then in the emptiness, I disassembled a letter from one of the ancient alphabets, and I leaned on absence. So who am I after the visitation? A bird, or a passerby amid the symbols and the memory vendors? As if I were an antique piece, as if I were a ghost sneaking in from Yabous, telling myself: Let’s go to the seven hills. Then I placed my mask on a stone, and walked as the sleepless walk, led by my dream. And from one moon to another I leapt. There is enough of unconsciousness to liberate things from their history. And there is enough of history to liberate unconsciousness from its ascension. Take me to our early years—my first girlfriend says. Leave the windows open for the house sparrow to enter your dream—I say ... then I awaken, and no city is in the city. No “here” except “there.” And no there but here. If it weren’t for the mirage I wouldn’t have walked to the seven hills ... if it weren’t for the mirage!
If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that’s what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!
I
The horse in harness suffers; he's not feeling up to snuff. The feeler's sensate but the cook pronounces lobsters tough. The chain's too short: The dog's at pains to reach a sheaf of shade. One half a squirrel's whirling there upon the interstate. That rough around the monkey's eye is cancer. Only God's impervious—he's deaf and blind. But he's not dumb: to answer for it all, his spokesmen aren't allowed to come.
Webster was much possessed by deathAnd saw the skull beneath the skin;And breastless creatures under groundLeaned backward with a lipless grin.Daffodil bulbs instead of ballsStared from the sockets of the eyes!He knew that thought clings round dead limbsTightening its lusts and luxuries.Donne, I suppose, was such anotherWho found no substitute for sense,To seize and clutch and penetrate;Expert beyond experience,He knew the anguish of the marrowThe ague of the skeleton;No contact possible to fleshAllayed the fever of the bone. . . . . .
Apeneck Sweeney spread his kneesLetting his arms hang down to laugh,The zebra stripes along his jawSwelling to maculate giraffe.The circles of the stormy moonSlide westward toward the River Plate,Death and the Raven drift aboveAnd Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.Gloomy Orion and the DogAre veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;The person in the Spanish capeTries to sit on Sweeney’s kneesSlips and pulls the table clothOverturns a coffee-cup,Reorganised upon the floorShe yawns and draws a stocking up;The silent man in mocha brownSprawls at the window-sill and gapes;The waiter brings in orangesBananas figs and hothouse grapes;The silent vertebrate in brownContracts and concentrates, withdraws;Rachel née RabinovitchTears at the grapes with murderous paws;She and the lady in the capeAre suspect, thought to be in league;Therefore the man with heavy eyesDeclines the gambit, shows fatigue,Leaves the room and reappearsOutside the window, leaning in,Branches of wistariaCircumscribe a golden grin;The host with someone indistinctConverses at the door apart,The nightingales are singing nearThe Convent of the Sacred Heart,And sang within the bloody woodWhen Agamemnon cried aloudAnd let their liquid siftings fallTo stain the stiff dishonoured shroud. 1918, 1919
After you’ve learned to walk, Tell one thing from another, Your first care as a child Is to get used to your name. What is it? They keep asking you. You hesitate, stammer, And when you start to give a fluent answer Your name’s no longer a problem. When you start to forget your name, It’s very serious. But don’t despair, An interval will set in. And soon after your death, When the mist rises from your eyes, And you begin to find your way In the everlasting darkness, Your first care (long forgotten, Long since buried with you) Is to get used to your name. You’re called — just as arbitrarily — Dandelion, cowslip, cornel, Blackbird, chaffinch, turtle dove, Costmary, zephyr — or all these together. And when you nod, to show you’ve got it, Everything’s all right: The earth, almost round, may spin Like a top among stars.
Oh you saints, Let me enter your society, If only as a statistician. You’re old, Perhaps the years are Getting you down by now, Laying themselves over you In layers of color. Just let me take care Of your dirty work in All the nooks and crannies. For example I could Swallow light At the Last Supper And exhale your halos After the devotionals. From time to time, At a distance of half a wall, I could Form my hands into a horn And shout, Now for the believers, Now for the unbelievers Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
All the museums are afraid of me, Because each time I spend a whole day In front of a painting The next day they announce The painting’s disappeared. Every night I’m caught stealing In another part of the world, But I don’t even care About the bullets hissing toward my ear, And the police dogs who are onto The smell of my tracks, Better than lovers who know The perfume of their mistress. I talk to the canvases that put my life in danger, Hang them from clouds and trees, Step back for some perspective. You can easily engage the Italian masters in conversation. What noise of colors! And hence I’m caught Very quickly with them, Seen and heard from a distance As if I had a parrot in my arms. The hardest to steal is Rembrandt: Stretch a hand out, there’s darkness — The terror seizes you, his men don’t have bodies, Just closed eyes in dark cellars. Van Gogh’s canvases are insane, They whirl and roll their heads, And you have to hold on tight With both hands, They’re sucked by a force from the moon. I don’t know why, Breughel makes me want to cry. He wasn’t any older than me, But they called him the old man Because he knew it all when he died. I try to learn from him too But can’t stop my tears From flowing over the gold frames When I run off with The Four Seasons under my armpits. As I was saying, every night I steal one painting With enviable dexterity. But the road’s very long So I’m caught in the end And get home late at night Tired and torn to shreds by dogs Holding a cheap imitation in my hands.
I. I’m trying to spell out a state of amazement, A sweet dilation, the sway of spirit, That only finds room in your shape. They say that Transposed in our alphabet A Chinese sentence can turn into A series of one and the same conjunction. For instance: “And and. And and and. And and and and.” This is a genuine transcription of the beautiful poem “The Dance of the Yangtze River Valley And the Yangtze River.” II. Well, how many miracles, how many Chinese miracles, Have I missed this time? Too shrunk within the heart of Europe, Stuck to Greek reason, Spoiled by syllogism, And born too late for the Far East! III. No one gave me a silk scroll as a present At the time of the Han dynasty, Much less during the coming ones. My feet didn’t develop corns on the silk road, My shadow didn’t pass on the winding way To take the desert oases in its arms. I never wrapped my shoulders In the wavy mantle of the Yellow River. In 120 B.C. I didn’t show myself — idiot! — At the Music Chamber. What melodies I could have heard! My ear, a shell devoid of the sea’s roar, Missed the treasure of sounds Invading north to south. Would I have still remained With so many uncertainties? IV. I was late to the contest of impromptu poems And didn’t make libations to the Muse Along with Wang Xizhi. I wish I’d seen how they spelled “The literary spirit and the dragon engravings.” Humble observer, hidden in a fold of time, I wish I could participate unseen In the painting of the world’s first landscape. It would have included me no doubt As an accident on the horizon, A leaf on the sky’s water. I wish I’d been a judge when the names were checked Or, lazily lying in the Doctrine of the Great Vehicle, I wish I’d wandered beyond nature’s limits, And been struck by the sensation of a universal vacuum. V. I wonder if The five rice measures Would have finally revealed The vital principle. VI. Can’t you say anything, Beautifully written character? The Great Wall fits into you Like the moon in a cacoon. Open the silk door a moment And let this state of amazement in — Include this lotus flower In your closed-circuit breath. Why are you so silent, When you used to tell me about all these things?
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a thought so far from the touch of things that we can only guess at it. If mine, it would be the secret dream of walking alone across the floor of my life with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of myself.
Where is my boy, my boy— In what far part of the world? The boy I loved best of all in the school?— I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart, Who made them all my children. Did I know my boy aright, Thinking of him as spirit aflame, Active, ever aspiring? Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed In many a watchful hour at night, Do you remember the letter I wrote you Of the beautiful love of Christ? And whether you ever took it or not, My boy, wherever you are, Work for your soul’s sake, That all the clay of you, all the dross of you, May yield to the fire of you, Till the fire is nothing but light! . . . Nothing but light!
Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and change our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Holy Trinity Airship billows a chrys- elephantine cave Louis Sullivan, Arch- itect, lord master, conceived of in the hollow of power. He swells. I am his balloonist balancing an azimuth as earth-apse I orbit, robed in hot gas & leather fastened by a yolk-stalk of gravity to gold- end onions nozzling heavens whose suns are stomachs with churches in their navels. Each we are priests as aeronauts at the vestibules, & enter the cavity: space, self, organ; celest- ial nave bellies stars sailors name saints and adore— their egress is bitter weeping, their praise pure Russian form: a cathedral, my inner orrery.
All seas are seas in the moon to these lonely and full of light. High above laundries and rooftops the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare as do the faces full of fire and orange peel. Every citizen knows what’s the trouble: America’s longest river is—New York; that’s w
All middle age invisible to us, all age passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke some village-elder warning, some rasped-outRemember me . . . Mute and grey in her city uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE), the matron just pointed us to our lockers, and went out. ‘What an old bag!’ ‘Got a butt on you, honey?’ ‘Listen, did I get lost with these streetnames! Spruce Street, Water, or get this, VANderwater—’ Cautiously, coolly, we lit up, crooking palms for the ashes. All fifteen or under, all from Manhattan, we loitered bare to the waist for the X-rays. In the whorling light from one rainy window, our shapes were mere outlines from floor to wall, opaque as plater, white, or terra-cotta, black . . . ‘Names or numbers,’ a skinny white girl with pale blue eyes shrugged her shoulders. ‘Why come here at all? You think little Susan (thumb mockingly hooked at herself) needs working papers to work in my uncle’s diner? If they’d let me off school at noon now—that’s where the real tips are!’ And she smiled at our objections around her smoking cigarette (I thought) like some museum mummy, amber-fingered, fishhook collar bones— ‘What are you talking? Don’t you know the city keeps like an eye we don’t get overworked?’ ‘Yeah, and your Social Security number, that’s for life, girl, that ain’t worth something to you?’ The skinny girl just cackled, goospimpled arms huddled against her ribs. ‘Whadda you two, work for the mayor? What’s this (swinging her locker key with its scarred wooden number)—the key to the city?’ She meant last week, when they’d offered it to some visiting queen. Even I snickered. I was younger than most of them, homesick among the near- women’s breasts and hair, even the familiar girls’ cloakroom odors: perspiration, powder, decades of menstrual fust—‘Well, I’m coming back in six months.’ This was one of the black girls, elbow swivelled on pelvic sidethrust, finest hair— filaments, finerimmed, sulky mouth. ‘She’ll be sixteen, getting married,’ the girl next over burst in eagerly, ‘He got a store job, still her folks against it, they say stay in school. But every afternoon—’ Distantly, the first girl listened to her own story, only breaking in at the end: ‘I want a real church wedding. Down here is just for the license, see?’ ‘A license,’ said “little Susan,” sourly, ‘like for a job?’ ‘His name is Harold Curtis,’ was all she answered, then ‘It too strong for my parents. They see it too strong for them in the end.’ In our silence, the gutter slurred strangely. And for just one moment, everyone breathless, the atmosphere grew almost tender. But nobody knew what to say except good luck, so we all went on smoking like chimneys except the one murmur, of old and incurable anger, ‘Listen. Listen. They get you coming and going.’ Now each girl tilts her face down, contemplating her own unseen choices, real tips, the solitary and common square foot of imaginary chance . . . Outside, the rain was letting up. The city, like a graph of its own mountainous causes, climbed in a mist across our window. And then the matron came, calling our locker numbers, one by one, for the X-rays. ‘Jesus, it’s late.’ ‘Hey honey, I’m ready!’ ‘Where’d we change at from the D Train?’ Through the clearing air on the far side of City Hall Park, I could see a narrow street and a streetsign: Broadway. Miles to the north my street had a number, and Broadway was really broad. In the concrete prows of islands, the innumerable old women were sitting, lonely as soldiers, silent as . . . ‘What’s up, girl? Goose step on your grave?’ Another number. And now, the room darker, each girl cast about for the cheering word, when ‘Listen,’ I suddenly heard my own voice saying, ‘Guess what I saw coming down? A street called Anne Street.’—‘So what?’—‘So my name is Anne.’ A pause, then ‘Hey kid, that’s really funny!’ They all grinned, and one of the older girls gave my shoulder a tolerant punch. I was one of the youngest, and as far as I can remember, that was all that I said.
Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask among the city’s spires and balustrades and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds. On Park the first reflecting pool dims with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims, while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins resign the world with gestures of disdain. Now in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns and mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier, the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire, and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.
After three months, Virginia is still a frontier. Late at night, I close the door on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills and the network affiliates sign off one by one. Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets on radios in scattered valley kitchens:Har yall this evenin folks! (Wanting to say ‘I’m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’)Got your Green Hill chicory perkin’? An army of women, straightened and ironed and blued like Picasso’s ironer—jerking coffeecups back with one gesture, hips pressed to sinks. Their suspendered husbands are reading—the paper? the Bible? And it’s Jesus for you and for me, till midnight—the anthem— and one soaped hand jerks out, and their lighted lives recede to kitchens on the moon’s dark side, Mozart rising . . . Daytimes, in post office, gas station, greasy spoon, I don’t see them anywhere, it makes me nervous. Black faces down here look “colored.” I am afraid of the other, red faces. Take my first job in Boston, the outgoing typist said, ‘You’ve got to know the foms, we use so many foms.’ And I said O why farms? I thought law firms had torts. A tort, I thought, was like vous avez tort. But I was wrong about the farms, and after the Cardinal’s Vietnam speech one of the girls said, ‘Think you’re smat with that accent?’ Still, nothing soothes me, sometimes, like American voices, softened with distance, with nearness, as murmurs in a darkened Greyhound: ‘It sure has been a scorcher.’ ‘Where you folks from?’ I keep yawning, lightworlds off in the dark . . . Sometimes my lonesome standard English sleeps:The varied and ample land, the North and South in the light, and the voices of Earth and Moon swell in my helmet with prairie inflections, soft twangs of outer speech— ‘You’re looking real good,’ says Earth ‘—ain’t that somethin’?’ ‘Roger. No sweat. Out.’
A little called anything shows shudders. Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope. No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices. A little lace makes boils. This is not true. Gracious of gracious and a stamp a blue green white bow a blue green lean, lean on the top. If it is absurd then it is leadish and nearly set in where there is a tight head. A peaceful life to arise her, noon and moon and moon. A letter a cold sleeve a blanket a shaving house and nearly the best and regular window. Nearer in fairy sea, nearer and farther, show white has lime in sight, show a stitch of ten. Count, count more so that thicker and thicker is leaning. I hope she has her cow. Bidding a wedding, widening received treading, little leading mention nothing. Cough out cough out in the leather and really feather it is not for. Please could, please could, jam it not plus more sit in when.
Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl. Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows, to trail their fingertips in the water . . . All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees: red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her. Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae. Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor. Now under radar they study the green road glowing and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads. Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves, the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever. Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up and the Conqueror’s navy on its blue worsted waves and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up. Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” the white-and-liver-cows moo through the milky light. The human faces carved on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon as the sea can see the land and the land the sea the two of them will go to war.
Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai, matter—un-does; fatiscit; a sort of eternal breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions like drip-forged and molly- and carborundum-steel, or, in DIMENSIONAL LUMBER, the trunk chart. Its dotted lines follow core cuts, mere spindles, out to the perimeter or “wane,” a ring of two-by-twelves with moonrim bark ribbons. Yet even sparrows must nest-mend with worldstuff torn out of somewhere. The joinery-bits in the MASTER JOINER blister-pack point to his fast parataxes—copulas, common- alities, ship-lists, figures in carpets or slimmer hex-keys in sets, the eternal angle (Egyptian) or iron plane-handles tuned to the unheard rumor that joins them. The same slits reparied once with tendon- thread in bone needles, bronze pins, the earliest factory-fittings or the long floating line of the bass-baritone Leporello, his catàlogo of continents and couplings ironizing, admiring, down to the final mel- isma on DOES (you know the Don’s doings)voi . . . sapete, voi . . . sapete . . . quel che FA-AHH, ah-ahh, ah-ahh
You could drive out of this country and attack the world with your ambition, invent wonder plasmas, become an artist of the provocative gesture, the suggestive nod, you could leave wanting the world and return carrying it, a noisy bundle of steam and libido, a ball of fire balanced on your tongue, you might reclaim Main Street in a limo longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces while remembering that you were born a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid, and get over that hump once and for all by telling A Great Man’s stories— the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits of presidential hygiene, insights into the psychotropic qualities of power and the American tradition of kissing moneyed ass. Your uncle would still call you Roy Boy, pheasants sun themselves beside the tracks, waiting for the dew to burn off before their first flight, and corn grow so high that if you stood in the field you’d disappear, the fact aiming your eyes down the road.
He was hit back of the head for a haul of $15, a Diner’s Club Card and picture of his daughter in a helmet on a horse tethered to a pole that centered its revolving universe. Pacing the halls, he’d ask for a blow job he didn’t want. The ward’s new visitors didn’t know this request was all the injury had left him to say, and would be shamed or pissed, a few hitting him as he stood with his mouth slightly open and large frame leaning in. His wife divorced him for good and blameless reasons. He would not be coming home to share his thoughts on film and weather, or remembering her any longer than it took to leave a room. He liked ham. Kept newspapers in drawers and under his bed, each unread page hand-pressed flat. And when it snowed he leaned into one of the sealed, unbreakable windows, a cheek to the cool glass as he held his fingers over his mouth and moaned low and constant like the sound of a boat on the far side of a lake. When he died they cut him open to see how his habits had been rewired and so tightly looped. Having known him they were afraid of what can happen when you cross the lot to the office or pull up to a light and thump the wheel as you might any hour. If you stare at the dyed and beautiful cross sections of a brain, it’s natural to wonder how we extract the taste of coffee or sense of a note accurately found and held on an oboe from this bramble. On Duke’s slides they circled the regions of blight which explain why almost all behavior we recognize as human was lost, but not why a man who’d curl into a ball like a caterpillar when barely touched, could only ask for sex, for intimacy, for the very thing he could least accept and lived twelve years without, no embrace or caress, no kiss on the lips before sleep, until he died in the lounge looking out on winter sky that seemed eager to snow all day but didn’t.
It was a misunderstanding. I got into bed, made love with the woman I found there, called her honey, mowed the lawn, had three children, painted the house twice, fixed the furnace, overcame an addiction to blue pills, read Spinoza every night without once meeting his God, buried one child, ate my share of Jell-o and meatloaf, went away for nine hours a day and came home hoarding my silence, built a ferris wheel in my mind, bolt by bolt, then it broke just as it spun me to the top. Turns out I live next door.
As the morning advanced the sun became bright and warm, cloudless, calm, serene. About nine an appearance very unusual began to demand our attention—a shower of cobwebs falling from very elevated regions, & continuing, without any interruption, till the close of the day . . .    There is a natural occurrence to be met with upon the highest part of our down in hot summer days, and that is a loud audible humming of bees in the air, though not one insect is to be seen . . .    In a district so diversified as this, so full of hollow vales and hanging woods, it is no wonder that echoes should abound. Many we have discovered that return a tunable ring of bells, or the melody of birds; but we were still at a loss for a polysyllabical, articulate echo, till a young gentleman, who had parted from his company in a summer walk, and was calling after them, stumbled upon a very curious one in a spot where it might least be expected . . .    We procured a cuckoo, and cutting open the breastbone and exposing the intestines to sight, found the crop lying as mentioned above. This stomach was large and round, and stuffed hard, like a pincushion, with food, which upon nice examination, we found to consist of various insects, such as small scarabs, spiders, and dragon-flies; the last of which, as they were just emerging out of the aurelia state, we have seen cuckoos catching on the wing. Among this farrago also were to be seen maggots, and many seeds, which belonged either to gooseberries, currants, cranberries, or some such fruit . . .    All nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined . . .   Gilbert White1 Upon First Opening a Cuckoo
"Myrtle loves Harry"—It is sometimes hard to remember a thing like that, Hard to think about it, and no one knows what to do with it when he has it, So write it out on a billboard that stands under the yellow light of an "L" platform among popcorn wrappers and crushed cigars, A poster that says "Mama I Love Crispy Wafers So." Leave it on a placard where somebody else gave the blonde lady a pencil moustache, and another perplexed citizen deposited: "Jesus Saves. Jesus Saves." One can lay this bundle down there with the others, And never lose it, or forget it, or want it. "Myrtle loves Harry." They live somewhere.
Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day; What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night; Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not; How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time; Which man to trust and, once found, how far— Will not be found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, Nor Blackstone, nor Gray's, nor Dun & Bradstreet, nor Freud, nor Marx, Nor the sage of the evening news, nor the corner astrologist, nor in any poet, Nor what sort of laughter should greet the paid pronouncements of the great, Nor what pleasure the mulitudes have, brining lunch and the children to watch the condemned to be plunged into death, Nor why the sun should rise tomorrow, Nor how the moon still weaves upon the ground, through the leaves, so much silence and so much peace.
Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare; And after that paradise, the dance-hall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is dark, Still there will be your desire, and hers, and his hopes and theirs, Your laughter, their laughter, Your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward, their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours— Even when your enemy, the collector, is dead; even when your counsellor, the salesman, is sleeping; even when your sweetheart, the movie queen, has spoken; even when your friend, the magnate, is gone.
The dramatis personae include a fly-specked Monday evening,  A cigar store with stagnant windows,  Two crooked streets,  Six policemen and Louie Glatz. Bass drums mumble and mutter an ominous portent  As Louie Glatz holds up the cigar store and backs out with $14.92. Officer Dolan noticed something suspicious, it is supposed,  And ordered him to halt,  But dangerous, handsome, cross-eye'd Louie the rat Spoke with his gat,  Rat-a-tat-tat—  Rat-a-tat-tat  And Dolan was buried as quickly as possible. But Louie didn't give a good god damn,  He ran like a crazy shadow on a shadowy street  With five policemen off that beat  Hot on his trail, going Blam! Blam!-blam! While rat-a-tat-tat  Rat-a-tat-tat  Said Louie's gat, So loud that Peter Wendotti rolled away from his wife,  Got out of bed to scratch his stomach and shiver on the cold floor  Listening to the stammering syllables of instant death  Met on secret floors in the big vacant galleries of night. Then Louie sagged and fell and ran.  With seven bullets through his caved-in skull and those feeble brains  Spilling out like soup.  He crawled behind a water-hydrant and stood them off another half minute. "I'm not shot," he yelled, "I'm not shot," he screamed, "it isn't me they've shot in the head," he laughed, "Oh I don't give a damn!"  And rat-a-tat-tat  Rat-a-tat-tat  Muttered the gat  Of Louie the rat,  While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam! Soft music. Violins moan like weeds swaying far under water.  The vibrant throats of steam-ships hoot a sad defiance at distance and nothing.  Space curls its arm across the flat roofs and dreary streets.  Bricks bulge and sag. Louie's soul arose through his mouth in the form of a derby hat  That danced with cigarette butts and burned matches and specks of dust  Where Louie sprawled.  Close-up of Dolan's widow. Of Louie's mother.  Picture of the fly-specked Monday evening and fade out slow.
On Fourteenth street the bugles blow,  Bugles blow, bugles blow. The red, red, red, red banner floats Where sweating angels split their throats, Marching in burlap petticoats,  Blow, bugles, blow. God is a ten car Bronx express,  Red eyes round, red eyes round. "Oh where is my lustful lamb tonight, His hair slicked down and his trousers tight? I'll grind him back to my glory light!"  Roll, subway, roll. Heaven is a free amusement park,  Big gold dome, big gold dome. Movies at night: "The life she led." Everyone sleeps in one big bed. The stars go around inside your head.  Home, sweet home. On Fourteenth street the bugles blow,  Bugles blow, bugles blow, The torpid stones and pavements wake, A million men and street-cars quake In time with angel breasts that shake,  Blow, bugles, blow!
1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;  bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow— O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?  O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails— Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,  but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke, And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,  just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,  just one too many, And wow he died as wow he lived,  going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,  zowie did he live and zowie did he die, With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not, Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T., Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;  Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.
I sing of simple people and the hardier virtues, by Associated Stuffed Shirts & Company, Incorporated, 358 West 42d Street, New York, brochure enclosed  of Christ on the Cross, by a visitor to Calvary, first class  art deals with eternal, not current verities, revised from last week's Sunday supplement  guess what we mean, in The Literary System, and a thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough. And so it goes.  Books are the key to magic portals. Knowledge is power. Give the people light.  Writing must be such a nice profession.  Fill in the coupon. How do you know? Maybe you can be a writer, too.
I  Also reputed to be golden, Quivira: Cibola, unknown to Coronado, meant ‘buffalo’ to the Indians, but onward, to El Dorado, ‘The Gilded One’, a country where boats were incrusted with gold, where golden bells hung from trees (tho the food there,  said to be served on gold, was buffalo).    ‘We took the hump from both sides of the hump ribs, of all the carcasses. In taking out the hump we inserted the knife at the coupling of the loin, cutting forward down the lower side, as far forward as the perpendicular ribs ran; then, starting at the loin again, would cut down the upper side, thus taking out a strip from a full-grown animal about three feet long. Near the front of the hump ribs it would be ten or twelve inches wide & four or five inches thick. When first taken out it was hung up for a couple of days with the big end down. It became shrunken, tender & brittle, with no taint. The front end had a streak of lean alternating with fat & when fried in tallow, made a feast for the gods’.   The prairie soil was ‘black & fat’ &,  according to Castaneda, the marrow of the land. On that soil, later to be stripped for prairie sod-houses, wild turkeys flocked among the persimmons their flesh succulent from golden sand plums, bitter with china-berries. The coyotes, their eyes aglow on the dark horizon, barked at a moon above the lowing of buffalo, heard twenty miles away. And cottonwood trees, from whose buds the Indians made clear yellow, scattered their drift in spring filling the gullies.  The Quivirans  were to tell Coranado  ‘the things  where you are now  are of great importance’. II As Coronado turned to retrace his steps, the Smoky Hills were visible north across a stream enveloped in an atmospheric haze in which the hills became distant, impossible mountains— ‘where you are now’ the Indians had said, ‘of great importance’.  The country they traveled over  was so level,  if one looked at the buffalo  the sky could be seen between their legs,  so that at a distance they appeared  to be smooth-trunked pines whose tops jointed—  & if there was  one bull, it seemed four  pines.  The country was round, as if  a man should imagine himself in a bowl, & could see sky  at its edge  an arrow’s shot away.  And if any man  were to lie down on his back, he lost  sight  of the ground. Did Coronado see also in that late summer storm, before he turned south, an horizon of dark funnels tapering toward the earth, coming with the thunderous sound of a buffalo herd out of the plains—a calm & sulphurous air in which clouds were drawn like lightning toward the funnels— scattering his men to hide among grassy hollows? A tornado against the sky like buffalo who were beared as goats, with the hump of a camel, the mane of a lion & who carried their tails erect as they ran, like any European scorpion. O Coronado, all country is round to those who lose sight of the ground.  Canceas, Cansez, Kansies, Konza: the Indian word  meaning smoky,  from an atmospheric condition  in the fall of the year, called  Indian Summer: smoke in the air, in Quivira.
When they did greet me Father, sudden AweWeigh'd down my spirit! I retired and kneltSeeking the throne of grace, but inly feltNo heavenly visitation upwards drawMy feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart.Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I broughtThe unquiet silence of confused ThoughtAnd shapeless feelings: my o'erwhelmed HeartTrembled: & vacant tears stream'd down my face.And now once more, O Lord! to thee I bend,Lover of souls! and groan for future grace,That, ere my Babe youth's perilous maze have trod,Thy overshadowing Spirit may descendAnd he be born again, a child of God!
Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,If worth in me or ought I do appear,Who can of right better demand the sameThan may your worthy self from whom it came?The principal might yield a greater sum,Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;My stock's so small I know not how to pay,My bond remains in force unto this day;Yet for part payment take this simple mite,Where nothing's to be had, kings loose their right.Such is my debt I may not say forgive,But as I can, I'll pay it while I live;Such is my bond, none can discharge but I,Yet paying is not paid until I die.
Amidst the days of pleasant mirth,That throw their halo round our earth;Amidst the tender thoughts that riseTo call bright tears to happy eyes;Amidst the silken words that moveTo syllable the names we love;There glides no day of gentle blissMore soothing to the heart than this!No thoughts of fondness e'er appearMore fond, than those I write of here!No name can e'er on tablet shine,My father! more beloved than thine!'Tis sweet, adown the shady past,A lingering look of love to cast—Back th' enchanted world to call,That beamed around us first of all;And walk with Memory fondly o'erThe paths where Hope had been before—Sweet to receive the sylphic soundThat breathes in tenderness around,Repeating to the listening earThe names that made our childhood dear—For parted Joy, like Echo, kind,Will leave her dulcet voice behind,To tell, amidst the magic air,How oft she smiled and lingered there.
Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song. Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,Till some lov'd object strikes her wand'ring eyes,Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,And soft captivity involves the mind. Imagination! who can sing thy force?Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?Soaring through air to find the bright abode,Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,And leave the rolling universe behind:From star to star the mental optics rove,Measure the skies, and range the realms above.There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul. Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyesThe fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd:Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose. Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,O thou the leader of the mental train:In full perfection all thy works are wrought,And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler thou;At thy command joy rushes on the heart,And through the glowing veins the spirits dart. Fancy might now her silken pinions tryTo rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high:From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.The monarch of the day I might behold,And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;Winter austere forbids me to aspire,And northern tempests damp the rising fire;They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.
If I had known Two years ago how drear this life should be, And crowd upon itself allstrangely sad, Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips, Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes; Mayhap another throb than that of joy. Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths, If I had known. If I had known, Two years ago the impotence of love, The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress, Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn, Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams, But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean, And there to master all the world of mind, If I had known.
An idle lingerer on the wayside's road, He gathers up his work and yawns away; A little longer, ere the tiresome load Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay. No matter if the world has marched along, And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed; No matter, if amid the busy throng, He greets some face, infantile at the last. His mission? Well, there is but one, And if it is a mission he knows it, nay, To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun, And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away. So dreams he on, his happy life to pass Content, without ambitions painful sighs, Until the sands run down into the glass; He smiles—content—unmoved and dies. And yet, with all the pity that you feel For this poor mothling of that flame, the world; Are you the better for your desperate deal, When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?
for Alvester James Long after it was necessary, Uncle Vess ate the leavings off the hog, doused them with vinegar sauce. He ate chewy abominations. Then came high pressure. Then came the little pills. Then came the doctor who stole Vess’s second sight, the predication of pig’s blood every fourth Sunday. Then came the stillness of barn earth, no more trembling at his step. Then came the end of the rib, but before his eyes clouded, Uncle Vess wrote down the gospel of barbecue.Chapter one: Somebody got to die with something at some time or another.Chapter two: Don’t ever trust white folk to cook your meat until it’s done to the bone.Chapter three: December is the best time for hog killing. The meat won’t spoil as quick. Screams and blood freeze over before they hit the air.Chapter four, Verse one: Great Grandma Mandy used to say food you was whipped for tasted the best.Chapter four, Verse two: Old Master knew to lock the ham bacon chops away quick or the slaves would rob him blind. He knew a padlock to the smokehouse was best to prevent stealing, but even the sorriest of slaves would risk a beating for a full belly. So Christmas time he give his nasty leftovers to the well behaved. The head ears snout tail fatback chitlins feet ribs balls. He thought gratitude made a good seasoning.Chapter five: Unclean means dirty means filthy means underwear worn too long in summertime heat. Perfectly good food can’t be no sin. Maybe the little bit of meat on ribs makes for lean eating. Maybe the pink flesh is tasteless until you add onions garlic black pepper tomatoes soured apple cider but survival ain’t never been no crime against nature or Maker. See, stay alive in the meantime, laugh a little harder. Go on and gnaw that bone clean.
Who died and made you Elvis?  —Bumper sticker The big rock by my door is a plaster prop, after all. I’m back to hear screams for what I can’t do, couldn’t do forty years ago. Awkward pelvic thrusts fooled the camera and virgins, but I have no more fish- fry tunes left to dress up on brand new plates. This time around, I spend all day singing cracked Mississippi homilies. Why did I want to live forever in the first place? Salvation felt better dead, floating home free while my bones, secret and brown, mingle with old dirt.
Or a man who looks like him. I only know I call him Daddy (as all southern women do until the day we die). In my dreams he is still alive and this is not a comfort. I am my best when tragic. Grief becomes me. Daddy is more real in death, eyes dark, undimmed by the grave, smile less sincere. Matter clings to his thick eyebrows, his mouth spits mud when he tries to talk. He is candid. He tells me he liked my sisters better than me. Most times I search for him in a crowd of counterfeit Daddies. I look for pieces of him. An elbow. Black hair on the back of a pale neck. If I find him, I will say, Is that you? I know you this time.
Roslyn has nothing going nothing to fight for no work to do she couldn’t name one desire that is not someone else’s or a man she cannot claim where she came from will not claim who she is or the way she cries so no one can see she has no work to do cannot finish books feed herself or go out alone she is always late not to sit alone somewhere and wait she wouldn’t know what to do Roslyn doesn’t want a thing but she waits for something anyway she has no work to do she holds off interests passions and opinions everything but the facts and these come to her from dramas and the papers she agrees with fiction and what people say i wouldn’t trust her in court or on my back a woman without a dream is a fault in the earth all steam and liquid fire Roslyn goes to work has a job but no calling waits for the word to call herself no one ever remembers her name or where they saw her she waits to be told she’s the only one her tyranny is silent small and sexual her losses are great she has not called herself said, “I’m here, now, deal with me” Roslyn wouldn’t hurt a fly but people fear her sleep her unconscious the primal whatever that wants to play it might have guns out for the rest of us
the streets of hell are also paved with fear of contagion I have been swimming in enough barbed-wire waters to know you’re not even safe on the beach it’s not just your “body fluids” it’s the grime of your skin those dirty things you think they are cleaning up the world again I can see the inflammation heartbreak & hunger scurry me down on the road to Damascus I want to be blinded like Saul for the sake of vision not just cause I can’t take it anymore are we talking burnt out here? burnt out is a reason for infection I hope I get the whole disease I am glad to be a speck / a piece of dirt the dark side of the earth they’re trying to clean I want to get in their pores want them to sweat my filth the way a wound hurts before the dope but then come the murderers on the road are we talking burnt out? they go in the camps looking for you cause you are hiding the sores you could be contagious after all in the postapocalypse movies you don’t even exist your survival is not required for history or hollywood in the movie Road Warrior everyone is antisocial on purpose human ties are burnt out & human intercourse is fatiguing & dangerous gratefully no one is traumatized anymore & unfortunately no one goes to school in the movie Blade Runner almost everyone lives 90 stories below almost no one else everyone is antisocial by accident due to overcrowding in L.A. but no one minds & there are still parties to go to everyone white is “off-world” more or less everyone 90 stories down is polymorphous colored more or less no one has attended school in decades in both films everyone dresses with panache which preserves their identities to audiences who know there is no grounds for indentity postworld personally I prefer the people in Titanic even though they got their minds blown when the unbelievable happened they still believed in life they were not burnt out & had grounds for clinging to lifeboats and a certain stylish way of dressing they could not imagine Jim Jensen intoning without horror that the body count goes on that no one needs the news to know what’s going on Beirut is one of the low levels Dante went on about available in ordinary life see the corpses if you will believe at the risk you may see it everywhere every body spreads infection unless you burn it out eyewitness news invites you to wait for the coverage because Jim Jensen is there & history is in the making or you can come skinny-dip in my gene pool the massacres were arbitrary when my people were hunted down the deaths still go on stretching over centuries of shades of brown baptist, moslem, mothers, children, fathers burnt out of homes but living I am not that desperate to be numb & dumb I’m walking 90 stories down I know I survive in some wretched moments of what men do but I am not that desperate I don’t give a shit if this is history in the making it should stop I am still alive I am still happy to be the dirt that can’t be cleaned up scorch my earth & I will grow from history up under the feet of the present burnt out is for the movies in which we don’t exist
for Miami They all like to hang out. Thinking is all rather grim to them. Snake and Minnie, who love each other dearly, drink in different bars, ride home in separate cars. They like to kiss good night with unexplored lips. They go out of town to see each other open. This they do for no one else. Minnie does it all for God. Snake does it all for fame. Backstage is where they play their games; that’s why i know their business. I was gonna talk about a race riot. They say they’ve never played that town. Fleece tells me he’s seen an old movie about a black town attacking a white one. Sidney Poitier was the young doctor, accused, abused and enraged. There were Ossie Davis and Woody Strode, Ruby Dee and a hundred unknowns. Also Sapphire’s mama as a maid. “What was Sapphire’s mama’s name?” says Inez. I was going to talk about a race riot but we were stuck on Kingfish’s mother-in-law. Minnie kisses Snake so he’ll forget about that and I say, “They’re mad, they’re on the bottom going down, stung by white justice in a white town, and then there’s other colored people, who don’t necessarily think they’re colored people, leaving them the ground.” “That’s just like the dreads, the Coptics, and the Man-ley-ites,” one drunk says too loud, “I and I know,” say he. Snake yells, “Are you crazy? No, it ain’t, and no, we don’t.” “That’s just like Angola,” Terri chimes, “Sometimes it’s not who but what, sometimes not what but who.” I’m trying to talk to these people about this race riot, someone is walking on the bar, and every one of us belongs even now to Miami, to people we have never seen. Pookie and Omar want to know what’s goin’ on. They always do, ’cause they’re always in the bathroom when it’s goin’ on. They do everything together and not for God, and not for fame, but for love. At least that’s what their records say. They are a singing group that’s had 13 Pookies. Omar asks me, “What do you want to say?” Inez interupts, “She don’t know what to say, she just wants to say something, I understand that.” The 13th Pookie chirps, “This race riot sounds like all the other race riots.” Fleece says, “And you sound like 12 other Pookies, Pookie.” I am still trying to talk about this race riot. Minnie looks up and says, “We don’t have anywhere to put any more dead.” Snake puts on his coat to leave alone, “We never did, we never did.”
this little phase keeps on the same way without variety jazz and compromise making blue snow grow at the windows mohair fumes clog my throat like cats flames pounce without burning shadows gather in parkas at my back turn so i can see your face stand where i can see you man should someone phone i will tell whoever it is i cannot escape this night even saxophones do not dry light the brown sweat terror in white doorways under multicolored covers there is no way to sleep with the phone falling off the hook the blaring beep of warnings do not leave your house do not stay home this is the contradiction of when i live even fanfares and flourishes do not announce a truce with our personal assailants without variety blue dust blood traces in floor wax black fog and nappy lint colorless wax spreads broad tears across all the windows some permanent weather happened to this building some misplaced coal mine had its disaster here and i am alive inside
for Dianne McIntyre as i fly over this time rising over only this so much painted suffering unseen grimaces and stares among spruce greens these few forests left all of us trying to be alone quiet and blind.  * i see soldiers in bus stations with colored names polaroid shots their girlfriends chew gum smile wide  * in all this silver of sky like stars these wheels car gears lampshades electrical refuse zen oiled and greased the believers now so many now so tired of the sad songs the endless yearnings for war and more and more  * dumb cries i sigh trying to get out of town i am writing on the wall it will be painted over like all the songs once outside but as i fly over this time  * dianne is dancing touching the far reaches leaping and teaching she strokes and struts the air none of us stumbles or fears their lives steel beams and rail tracks strike an E-flat, B-flat, A E-flat, B-flat, A dianne is dancing no one can handle the hostages terror is abandoned because of light breaking in leaves because the center is gone we are still breathing and the swing is our bodies
Sweet beast, I have gone prowling,  a proud rejected man who lived along the edges  catch as catch can; in darkness and in hedges  I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling  conspicuously alone. I curled and slept all day  or nursed my bloodless wounds until the squares were silent  where I could make my tunes singular and violent.  Then, sure as hearers came I crept and flinched away.  And, girl, you've done the same. A stray from my own type,  led along by blindness, my love was near to spoiled  and curdled all my kindness. I find no kin, no child;  only the weasel's ilk. Sweet beast, cat of my own stripe,  come and take my milk.
My father was a tall man and yet the ripened ryeWould come above his shoulders, the spears shot up so high.My father was a tall man and yet the tasseled cornWould hide him when he cut the stalks upon a frosty morn.The green things grew so lushly in the valley of my birth,Where else could one witness the luxuriance of earth?The plow would turn so rhythmically the loose, unfettered loam,There was no need of effort to drive the coulter home.My father walked behind his team before the sun was high,Fine as a figure on a frieze cut sharp against the sky.And when he swung the cradle in the yellow of the grain,He could command all eyes around, or when he drove the wain.I wonder if his acres now that lie so far awayAre waiting for his footprint at the coming of the day.I wonder if the brown old barn that still is standing longAnd ghostly cattle in the stalls are waiting for his song.
Fortune has brought me down—her wonted way— from station great and high to low estate;Fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth honor alone is left.Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did fortune make me laugh with what she gave!But for these girls, the kata’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard—Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length.Nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they, walking on the ground?If but the breeze blow harsh on one of them my eye says no to slumber all night long.
If a fairy should come from BabylandWith a smile on his face and a wand in his hand,And say to me in his merry way,“I wish to hear what you have to say’Bout being born all over again—Exactly where and exactly whenAnd just what kind of a feller you’d likeTo have for your dad on this earthly hike,”I’d look at him and try to be As nonchalant and gay as he,And then I’d say, “If I must beBorn again, it seems to me,It doesn’t matter much just where or when(For what’s a baby now and then?)But there’s one thing I must requestSo will you do your level bestAnd kindly see that I shall dropInto the self-same arms of the self-same Pop?For, take it from me, he’s the very best dadThat any baby’s ever had!”
(For My Father) I listened to them talking, talking,That tableful of keen and clever folk,Sputtering . . . followed by a pale and balkingSort of flash whenever some one spoke;Like musty fireworks or a pointless joke,Followed by a pointless, musty laughter. ThenWithout a pause, the sputtering once again . . .The air was thick with epigrams and smoke;And underneath it allIt seemed that furtive things began to crawl,Hissing and striking in the dark,Aiming at no particular mark,And careless whom they hurt.The petty jealousies, the smiling hatesShot forth their venom as they passed the plates,And hissed and struck again, aroused, alert;Using their feeble smartness as a screenTo shield their poisonous stabbing, to divertFrom what was cowardly and black and mean.Then I thought of you,Your gentle soul, Your large and quiet kindness;Ready to caution and console,And, with an almost blindnessTo what was mean and low.Baseness you never knew;You could not think that falsehood was untrue,Nor that deceit would ever dare betray you.You even trusted treachery; and so,Guileless, what guile or evil could dismay you?You were for counsels rather than commands.Your sweetness was your strength, your strength a sweetnessThat drew all men, and made reluctant handsRest long upon your shoulder.Firm, but never proud,You walked your sixty years as through a crowdOf friends who loved to feel your warmth, and whoKnowing that warmth, knew you.Even the casual beholderCould see your fresh and generous completeness,Like dawn in a deep forest, growing and shining through.Such faith has soothed and armed you. It has smiledFrankly and unashamed at Death; and, like a child,Swayed half by joy and half by reticence,Walking beside its nurse, you walk with Life;Protected by your smile and an immenseSecurity and simple confidence.Hearing the talkers talk, I thought of you . . .And it was like a great wind blowingOver confused and poisonous places.It was like sterile spacesCrowded with birds and grasses, soaked clear throughWith sunlight, quiet and vast and clean.And it was forests growing,And it was black things turning green.And it was laughter on a thousand faces . . .It was, like victory rising from defeat,The world made well again and strong—and sweet.
Come with me then, my son; Thine eyes are wide for truth:And I will give thee memories, And thou shalt give me youth.The lake laps in silver, The streamlet leaps her length:And I will give thee wisdom, And thou shalt give me strength.The mist is on the moorland, The rain roughs the reed:And I will give thee patience, And thou shalt give me speed.When lightnings lash the skyline Then thou shalt learn thy part:And when the heav’ns are direst, For thee to give me heart.Forthrightness I will teach thee; The vision and the scope;To hold the hand of honour:— And thou shalt give me hope;And when the heav’ns are deepest And stars most bright above;May God then teach thee duty; And thou shalt teach me love.
How large was Alexander, father, That parties designateThe historic gentleman as rather Inordinately great?Why, son, to speak with conscientious Regard for history,Waiving all claims, of course, to heights pretentious,— About the size of me.
An old man going a lone highway,Came, at the evening cold and gray,To a chasm vast and deep and wide.Through which was flowing a sullen tideThe old man crossed in the twilight dim,The sullen stream had no fear for him;But he turned when safe on the other sideAnd built a bridge to span the tide.“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,“You are wasting your strength with building here;Your journey will end with the ending day,You never again will pass this way;You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,Why build this bridge at evening tide?”The builder lifted his old gray head;“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,“There followed after me to-dayA youth whose feet must pass this way.This chasm that has been as naught to meTo that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
Father, father, where are you going O do not walk so fast.Speak father, speak to your little boy Or else I shall be lost,The night was dark no father was there The child was wet with dew.The mire was deep, & the child did weep And away the vapour flew.
The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn.Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books. The rain beats on the windows And the raindrops run down the window glass And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding.The boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history, Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged.The boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom.Buffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas snuggling close to New Mexico,These creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County.Alexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes.Only once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say ‘my first wife’ so-and-so and such-and-such.A few times softly the father has told Alexander, ‘Your mother . . . was a beautiful woman . . . but we won’t talk about her.’Always Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father mention ‘my first wife’ or ‘Alexander’s mother.’Alexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar, and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life.These two come into Alexander’s head blurry and grey while the rain beats on the windows and the raindrops run down the window glass and the raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding.These and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or sun unless there is a God?So from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the buffaloes and blizzards of Texas and on to his mother and to God, so the blurry grey rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, maybe ten, keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.
(With apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling) If you can dress to make yourself attractive, Yet not make puffs and curls your chief delight;If you can swim and row, be strong and active, But of the gentler graces lose not sight;If you can dance without a craze for dancing, Play without giving play too strong a hold,Enjoy the love of friends without romancing, Care for the weak, the friendless and the old;If you can master French and Greek and Latin, And not acquire, as well, a priggish mien,If you can feel the touch of silk and satin Without despising calico and jean;If you can ply a saw and use a hammer, Can do a man’s work when the need occurs,Can sing when asked, without excuse or stammer, Can rise above unfriendly snubs and slurs;If you can make good bread as well as fudges, Can sew with skill and have an eye for dust,If you can be a friend and hold no grudges, A girl whom all will love because they must;If sometime you should meet and love another And make a home with faith and peace enshrined,And you its soul—a loyal wife and mother— You’ll work out pretty nearly to my mindThe plan that’s been developed through the ages, And win the best that life can have in store,You’ll be, my girl, the model for the sages— A woman whom the world will bow before.
When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say,“Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away;Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.”But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me.When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again,“The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain;’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.”And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
Like being reassigned to a case being made—to win?  for a world  mocked-up—terms  to contest? Or, self glutting the market of experience—  am am, a  did this that—  as “voice” script? Or, reining in the thrusting impulse that’d burst—out!  and into. . .  timed pattern  a male’s—“mine?” Or, a hyper-local cultural thing—to do—  conscious stance  between friends  strung along? Or, some gnawing negation—impelling all this?  din’ wanna  (really did)  am “writing?” Or, being dispatched to a cramped corner of the vast. . .  work-a-day  transactions  transmission? Or, alibis for (if not from) the near Black Out—  detecting  vital signs  or dissent? Or, The National—reifying itself—can read?  preemptive  authorships  as “progress”? Or, a once-elitist practice—popularized—  aimless youth  called forth—I  came (aimed at?) Or, recombinant ruses of power—“allure”—  who writes who  here—and how  sex—transects? Or, Capital’s quandaries of identity—  certified—  the stakes—now  lowered? raised? Or, malingering with History’s inducements—  disciplined  we won’t be  though are—need? Or, a schedule of vanguardist—occupations—  vacuum left  by the left  to fill out? Or, the Nors that can’t be stated (just yet) can—mean?  forming trends  at the base  asserting? Or, wouldn’t non-pop perspectives be also writ?  discursive  bumps and grinds  to report? Or, logging on to a collectivizing—chance?  bodies here  plunked down—will  plunk up. . . toward? Or, newly glozed invectives—to desublimate?  old belles lettres  upgraded  downplays gain? Or, the pervasive liberinage of Genres—  which clothes which  strips which—for  thrills—mostly? Or, a progressivist (scientistic)—complex?  regrounding  the grounds (props  dignity? Or, an overdue reunion with precedence—  compulsion  to just flake  kept in check? Or, why did you come—to hear something you don’t know?  already—  sorting terms—  assigned to? Or, a realization of what’s yet unrealized—  postscript or  preamble  to praxis?
5-2001 (as on TV) Welcome to this special edition double cortege for Galbraith, Kenneth— Friedman, Milton— ssstately cortege... efffusively-shiny like your kids teeth— ...such éclaircissement on this beautiful morninglustrum (kids, that’s Latin, we mean to say “wow”) ...directly behind the caskets—is that —it’s the Macy’s Rat (in mid-air)...neat, real neat... in front the lead-coated horses don’t seem to mind the officers’ droppings... is that a gigantic molar, with worms popping out? —such a variety of colors! ...look, some Teamsters are in a tussle with some scab teletubby over on 23rd St. and Madison ...ok, now, now they’re under arrest... if you look carefully you’ll see there’s two pre-funeral exercises for Fukuyama, Francis— Soros, George— on 24th —not, not as stately... a delegation of mainstream poets! and behind them, this year’s NPR security-clearance float!...ooh... ya, they’re rather new at this but...wait— there’s a lone guerrilla girl running through the crowd now she’s she’s managed to get the Cultural Studies delegation to strip and dress up as squeegee-bearing babushkas it looks like ...it’s 20 degrees so, that’s rather—ok, she’s, she’s under arrest now... ...those are neat, those little plastic thingies, aren’t they?... The Bill Gates (My Charter) High School Marching Band! The Steve Case (My Charter) High School Marching Band! behind them the post ’89, post-historical acrobat academics on mini-lawnmowers... that’s smart... The Yucky’s! The Yucky’s, yeah, they’re an interesting group... they do things like suppress that Sidney Poitier is the best American actor ever ...oh look, the Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saúd float ...the F14’s behind him are real ...now, that’s smart! ...I think he just waved at me ...who’s that man with the Monocle grabbing his— that’s Mister Modernist! he’s been a regular at these events for over 90 years now ...Saga of The Blank Page float a real favorite... ooh, he just dropped his—wait a babushka—her, her boot’s— crkkkk... oh, that’s, that’s not good...but —did you know that these are the first 100% soy caskets ever made? some people have actually run up to nibble at them... kids, if you’re watching this... make sure you never think of any other social arrangement other than one that Militarily Has To Dominate Three Quarter of The World
from a distance almost festive rippling in the morning breeze soft conversations great piles of scallions a pungent sun illuminates the faces of young girls she keeps grabbing them, straightening out their roots and tails in a little gesture of self-consciousness, she pulls her sweater away from her face knocks the dirt off, ties a rubber band around them Ejido San Quintin all are packed in ice and shipped to Great Britian __________ from a distance almost restive rising on the 20th floor clipped conversations great piles of papers a humming fax machine illuminates the faces of young girls they keep grabbing at her, straightening out her hands and fingers in a little gesture of self-consciousness, she pulls her sweater away from her face lifts it off the paper tray, sticks a sticky on it Ejido San Quintin all are packed in ice and shipped to Great Britian __________ from a distance almost resistive basking in the building’s fluorescent light algebraic conversations great piles of direct objects a deadened emotion illuminates the faces of young girls he keeps changing them, sorting out the nouns and verbs in a little gesture of trained-consciousness, he quickly minimizes the screen from his face knocks the dirt off, ties a rubber band around them Ejido San Quintin all are packed in ice and shipped to Great Britian __________ from a distance almost imperceptive breezing through the morning frequencies anxious reservations great piles of diners a poetry audience illuminates the faces of young girls she keeps grabbing them, straightening out their roots and social whereabouts in a non-literal gesture of class-consciousness, he pulls her sweater away from her face knocks the dirt off, ties a rubber band around them Ejido San Quintin all are packed in ice and shipped to Great Britian __________ from a distance almost assertive shuffling through the evening news moot conversations great piles of rotting vegetables a pungent spin-off literature illuminates the faces of young girls it keeps grabbing him, chopping up his roots and raison d’êtres in a tactically abstract solidarizing gesture of class-consciousness, she peels his self conscious piece away from her face knocks the dirt off, ties a rubber band around it Ejido San Quintin all are packed in ice and shipped to Great Britian _________Ejido: A landholding community owned collectively by its members. In 1992, the Mexican congress (largely at the behest of Wall Street) passed legislation aimed at watering-down Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution (guaranteeing the fundamental economic and cultural rights of the ejidos), opening the way for the privatization and commercialization of the lands, thus rendering the peasants’ political gains (stemming from the Mexican Revolution of 1910- 1917) effectively moot.
“All folks hev some soft spot,” Ma uster say,“Somethin’ or ’nother Comes out some dayComes out ’fore they know it, Jest like ez not.”’N’en us kids’d say, “Ma, What’s your sof’ spot?”An’ we’d keep a plaguin’, Till ma’d say,“I wish ’at you youngins ’D run away!Ask your pa’ bout his’n An’, like ez not,He’ll tell you willin’ly What’s his sof’ spot.”’N’en we’d ’gree to ask him That very day;When his train’d whistle Why right away,We’d jest skedaddle Clean ’cross the lot,To be first to ask pa What’s his sof’ spot.Pa, he’d say, “My sof’ spot? Never hes none!”Wouldn’t tell us neither, But jest make fun;Then he’d tell his brakeman, He’d says “Great lot,Think you’re goin’ to tell ’em What’s your sof’ spot!”’N’en we’d all go home, An’ after ’whilePa’d tell ma ’bout it, An’ ma she’d smile;We’d ’gin agin a guessin’, Till pa’d say, “Trot!Time you kids wuz dreamin’ In some sof’ spot.”An’ pa’d never tell us, When he wuz in;Ev’ry trip he come home We’d ’gin agin;Onct George sez when prayin’, He prayed a lot,“Please God, wisht you’d tell us What’s pa’s sof’ spot!”One day the opurat’r Sent word by BertThere hed bin a washout, An’ pa wuz hurt;Engineer wuz hurt, too, An’ both might die;Pa wanted to see us To say good-by.We wuz all so still When we went in;They wuz holdin’ pa up, A fannin’ him;An’ pa sez “I may die Jest like ez not,Tell the children I sed They’s my sof’ spot!”But our pa didn’t die, He jist got well;We wuz all so happy, Couldn’t ’gin to tell!’Cause we all loved our pa, A great big lot,I guess God saw we wuz Pa’s sof’ spot!
In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,Away from the world and its toils and its cares,I’ve a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure,But the fire there is bright and the air rather pure;And the view I behold on a sunshiny dayIs grand through the chimney-pots over the way.This snug little chamber is cramm’d in all nooksWith worthless old nicknacks and silly old books,And foolish old odds and foolish old ends,Crack’d bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends.Old armour, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all crack’d),Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed;A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see;What matter? ’tis pleasant to you, friend, and me.No better divan need the Sultan require, Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire;And ’tis wonderful, surely, what music you getFrom the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet.That praying-rug came from a Turcoman’s camp;By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp;A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger has drawn:’Tis a murderous knife to toast muffins upon.Long, long through the hours, and the night, and the chimes,Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old times;As we sit in a fog made of rich LatakieThis chamber is pleasant to you, friend, and me.But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,There’s one that I love and I cherish the best:For the finest of couches that’s padded with hairI never would change thee, my cane-bottom’d chair.'Tis a bandy-legg'd, high-shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat,With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet;But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottom'd chair.If chairs have but feeling, in holding such charms,A thrill must have pass'd through your wither'd old arms!I look'd, and I long'd, and I wish'd in despair;I wish'd myself turn'd to a cane-bottom'd chair.It was but a moment she sate in this place,She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face!A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair,And she sate there, and bloom'd in my cane-bottom'd chair.And so I have valued my chair ever since,Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince;Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet I declare,The queen of my heart and my cane-bottom'd chair.When the candles burn low, and the company's gone,In the silence of night as I sit here alone—I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair—My Fanny I see in my cane-bottom'd chair.She comes from the past and revists my room;She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom;So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,And yonder she sits in my cane-bottom'd chair.
It is their way to find the surface when they die.  Fish feed on fish and drop those beautiful bones  to swim. I see them stretch the water to their need as I domesticate the separate air to be my breath.  These fish die easily. I find my surface in the way they feed. Their gathering hunger is a flash like death. No agony  as if  my mind had eaten death.
Inside I brought willows, the tips bursting,  blue iris (I forget the legend of long life they represent) and the branch of pepper tree whose pink seeds lack the passion of most fruit. On my hands a perfume of pepper. Outside the rain walks. There were two. Their posture taken out of the wall- paper (a ghost story) Jack talked. His determined privacy against my public face. The poem by dictation. A disturbance in the cone of weather.  Neither of these is not making. The comic is a matter of style as yellow hands mark the worker. The clown of dignity sits in a tree. The clown of games hangs there too. Which is which or where they go— the point is to make others see that two men in a tree is clearly the same thing as poetry.
The streets are my body or rather the wish of the skin to put on the grass in a gold rain not vice-versa, the lips twisting to allow the tongue to play in the broken mirror on the floor Catches an arm a distance  the light at the ceiling  This kills the lift begged of a magical hand I have walked a long way traced in these pieces an arm a crotch The queen of faerie guarded by blue-winged griffins Untouched by
the root and mirror of a plant  its shape and power familiar iris the light is disturbed by the boxwood leaves shining  rosemary green, unblossoming (the earth is too damp) the eye catches almost a tune the moth in the piano wherein  unhammered the air rings with an earlier un ease of the senses disturbed ( by Mrs. Arpan, wife of a sailor
There is no salutation. The harvesters with gunny sacks bend picking up jade stones. (Sure that Amor would appear in sleep. Director. Guide.) Secret borrowings fit into their hands. Cold on the tongue. White flecks on the water. These jade pebbles are true green when wet. On the seventh night, the branches parted.  The other replied, How photographic. Amor doesn’t appear on demand. He’s more like a snake skin. If he fits, he lets you in or sheds your body against the rocks.  I slept in a fort. My bed pushed up against the log enclosure. At 3:00 his ankles pressed against each side of my head. When I woke crying for help he rose near the kitchen door dressed as a hunter.  The other replied, Amor born like a cup trembles at the lip. Superstitions fit into your hands. Thou has returned to thy house.  The other replied, Torn loose from the eaves, the blood trembles at the lips. Nine fetters on thy feet Nine crossings of the street Nine suppers where they meet Nine words of loss repeat this and that Nine hunters cross the field Nine lovers yield their right of way Two came fighting out of the dark.
it is essentially reluctance the language a darkness, a friendship, tying to the real but it is unreal the clarity desired, a wish for true sight, all tangling ‘you’ tried me, the everyday which caught me, turning the house in the wind, a lovecraft the political was not my business I could not look without seeing the decay, the shit poured on most things, by indifference, the personal power which is simply that, demanding a friend take dullness out of the world (he doesn’t know his lousy emptiness) I slept in a fire on my book bag, one dried wing of a white moth the story is of a man who lost his way in the holy wood because the way had never been taken without at least two friends, one on each side, and I believe my dream said one of the others always led now left to acknowledge, he can’t breathe, the darkness bled the white wing, one of the body of the moth that moved him, of the other wing, the language is bereft
our suppers stunned on the table hold radios  hold flasks of sound,  sharp intensities bottled up for a time I taste your imagination, authors, and place it among cotton trees whose white stuff perches, cousins of the air if the manner could be political the high walls protect against disgust the lady of blue glass  joined by Pierrot, a griffin, papers, books, the chilled correspondence, and another woman whose futurist shape suggests lines of the wind on my desk to awaken the traffic would have to run into the radio
the wind hits and returns it is easy to personify a new place and language, but the new body stings these men with green eyelids, drawing their worth, it was rumoured, from Egypt, knew the work is part of it a power arrived at the same thirst  he borrowed a head for a day but which head the phrases tremble in the other mouth it is true and false the veil of her face, an old porcelain, not for the hand to comfort she moved beyond the sop one gave for affection ‘My success has been to keep duty and love alive’ she said her hand waved with the power of disease Sophia Nichols of the orchards, the deserts, the flooded ponds and games wherein the moon sought our feet died with a mouth full of tumour it is true and false the moon flowers ( that is Blake talking ) tonight it is the half blossom and the stars too above this mud are from the other mouth this city untouched the streets, Hotel Lyric have a foreignness, a place outside a window a sound of bees pulling the lilac above cement this wonder ( the other mouth ) that crickets were men once who so loved the muses they forgot to eat now fed on thistles, the language must sting the flesh turn to a dew ( the other mouth ) the loss, some glistening blood on the leaves of the mirror plant Sophia Nichols of the story, the goldenrod, of the snake that entered the cage and ate the captured sparrows, the telegraph keys, pale yellow paper, of the Odyssey and the homing stories of the soul, the sea imaginary, light and foaming green on the rocks dark further out as the eye of the cat  if she would be free from words, she would free me even in the night there are birds summoned by words
for Dennis Wheeler there are shining masters when I tell you what they look like some of it is nearly false their blue hair but they are not ourselves they are equivalents of action they compose forms, which we hearsound within a context as if that action we are images of used us the body becomes an instrument sometimes the harp pierces the body and a man only hangs on the strings I hear the airborne-fire, the dead rebels’ second speech, which follows their live words, and the rice, and the motorcycles but public life has fallen asleep like a secret name the wrong-reader will say he has pity for others where the thought is born in hatred of pity
one should never play martyr there are martyrs beyond you one should never argue apocalypse without your whole lifetime before you, which is impossible  Pushkin said, ‘my sadness  is luminous’—this is  his reason Ralph flew to Bristol to see her she said, ‘You’re not in touch with Eternity’ he said, ‘Gee, that’s true,’ then later sent a telegram, ‘meet me in Jerusalem,’ since he was going
so it is death is the condition of infinite form— the rebellion of particulars, ourselves and each thing, even ideas, against that infinitude, is the story of finitude—the dream of the children harvested in a harvester-machine there are the real voice and the voice imagined and both have a reality, but the latter is out of it the ladder of thingsnever accept gifts from the gods —Hesiod’s bitter-sweet sense of it— rings true and doesn’t settle the sea-shore down to where the heart breaks or is bronzed ‘I am happy,’ the man said, ‘because the toad of the morning is the worst thing I’ll find today’ and CBC’s TV critic says, ‘television is the Shakespeare of the 20th century’ red lilies fall on the carpet and Art Tatum, drawing his art out of hymns, wanted more dissonance perfect there are knives in the air all around the poorly loved their lives follow life back into stone and they dream a sweeter consonance at the centre the art of a screaming and demented oyster
the poets have always preceded, as Mallarmé preceded Cézanne, neck and neck that was no privilege, sweet and forgotten seated in chairs, the afternoon marches along with the shadows which are not bougainvillaea but northern I have always loved shadows as long as they were northern and moved gently west like the crack-up of books, their spines tingling with notes and stuffing most people remember the gardens with cement flowers and the house going straight up like solidified swimming-pools or lilies when you get to the top which they once called widow’s walk, you wait in nothing but your garden hat, beautifully otherwise naked for the wind-swept sea and the dying sweetness or womb, declaring the completion of philosophy
let me get the vocabulary of this song right—the curious happiness of poetry— the word materialism dropped by the way side—its mereness of the other face of spiritualism—just two notes to sing— repetitious dualism—do—do—once in a while one squawks louder than the other, baby crows being weaned before the next batch— thus, singing, move from how it does matter— Oh!—a murder of crows  1998
dear dusty moth wearing miller’s cloth, Sophia Nichols’ soft voice calls wings at dusk  across railroads and sagebrush to lull me to sleep, ‘Come to these window corners, come, rest on my boy’s dreams and flight, come tonight’  2 September 2002
the absence was there before the meeting the radical of presence and absence does not return with death’s chance- encounter, as in the old duality, life or death, wherein the transcendence of the one translates the other into an everness we do not meet in heaven, that outward of hell and death’s beauty it is a bright and terrible disk  where Jack is, where Charles is, where James is, where Berg is is here in the continuouscarmen O, some things—di—breathe into—aspirate—and lead away—deducite! for the soul is a thing among many  Berkeley shimmers and shakes in my mind most lost the absence preceded the place and the friendships Lady Rosario among us of Spanish and Greek rushes from the hedges around the gas station,  swirled with Lawrence’s medlars and sorb-apples   What is it reminds us of white gods  flesh-fragrant as if with sweat the delicious rottenness
My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me. Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion. I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky. I want the cotton fields, tabacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone. O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?
When I was a child I knew red miners dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps. I saw them come down red hills to their camps dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines. Night after night I met them on the roads, or on the streets in town I caught their glance; the swing of dinner buckets in their hands, and grumbling undermining all their words. I also lived in low cotton country where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks, or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by; where sentiment and hatred still held sway and only bitter land was washed away.
All you violated ones with gentle hearts; You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak; Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers, And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes. All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie, Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns, Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan. Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face! Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins! Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds. You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains. When and Where will another come to take your holy place? Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?
My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie; the lover of my life, my youth and age. My heart belongs to him and to him only; the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage Now grown to years advancing through the dozens the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder but all my days of Happiness and wonder are cradled in his arms and eyes entire. They carry us under the waters of the world out past the starposts of a distant planet And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories where we have been together, you and I.
Seven of them pinned in blood by long, shiny tails, three of them still alive and writhing against the wood, their heaviness whipping the wall as they try to break free, rattles beating in unison, hisses slowly dying in silence, the other four hanging stiff like ropes to another life, patterns of torn skin dripping with power and loss, the wonder of who might have done this turning in shock as all seven suddenly come alive when I get closer, pink mouths trembling with white fangs, lunging at me then falling back, entangled in one another to form twisted letters that spell a bloody word I can’t understand.
on turning forty They draw me closer like the hands of one grandmother I kissed upon visiting her in the barrio. The magnets make me look at my waist, wondering why the ache is in the street, houses giving off stinking air, a magnetic field collecting old newspapers, broken-down cars, alleys where the drummer cowers before he beats on his bag of beer cans. I visit the irrigation canal that churns green and flows beyond the streets, wait for the alligator to swim by, the one released from the plaza long ago. I feel the pull toward the mongrel dog, the clicking of the magnets in the church, an attraction for open doorways.  * I remove the magnet from my neck, a medal of a denied saint. I will never witness the migration of bats again, stand at the entrance of the caverns as bats shoot out of the opening, the evening bristling with their intelligence. The sky bruises against the horizon of yucca plants erect as magnets surrrounding the cavern, miles of yucca encircling the poles to protect them from the wind that pulls me into the hole.  * He tells me to believe what I have seen, insists magnetic force comes from the blade, the woman wanting us to keep something for her. He says magnets are missing metals from an underground wound, a husband’s wrist broken by a slammed car hood, loyal dance of an old couple watching the street. He says tortillas and menudo attract flies. He learned red chili kills all life, insists magnets let him sleep fulfilled, delicious food he fixes long after his wife has died. He cries that the magnets get stronger when he peels the pods to find no difference in the seeds of hunger and the seeds of love.  * I climb the rocks because the minerals are there, ascend to where I buried the seashell, rusted can, and pencil twenty-eight years ago. I reach the rocks because I am allowed one mountain, climbing to readjust the magnets. Then, I stand and look down. I clear my chest of a fist encountered up here, set my foot on the humming slab. I move to survive when I touch my heart. I climb higher before deciding to bend and dig.
I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me for being a straight line toward the dead who were buried with their poor clothes in the Arizona desert of iron borders. This way of waving to the embers of the past, not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized insects whose dry husks I kept since a child. Faces adopted me from boys who hated their parents. I was told not to repeat this, reminded by the priest who unmasked himself. I was told there was a great horror down the hallway of the smelly Catholic school. Once, my friend Joey jumped off the second floor window and flattened his brains over the asphalt yard. I see a hibiscus blossom. It is a bright yellow flower that lasts one day. Its shape brings tears, saves me from the hummingbird that dots the air with patterns resembling an alphabet too familiar to smell like a railroad worker. I love heaven when I admit the spikes and the railroad ties came from the labor of fate and not the labor of love. The tracks are my cross. The tiny car is full of sweating men. They look into the eye of the sun, hold their hammers over their blackened heads. If staring grows in the common search, a perfume dots the heart with greed. Silence between the lightning of pounding stakes. Once, I rode the train home to see if the smoke from the speeding engine was going to enter my lungs. I never wore the old, yellow hat of the crew, but returned the shovel and the bag of railroad spikes, thought I saw my grandfather, the foreman, running across the desert in overalls, changing his skin from brown to the black of the scorched engine. I live with my railroad face, its smoothness hammered by sweating crews that knew the line of hot iron was going to end in the west someday. I live with my railroad face and don’t know why the tracks disappear on the horizon. I cross my railroad face and comb my hair.
Everything was the apple and the glass of tea. The mountain, the mold, the apron on the grandmother— the neck of a brown baby holding its tiny head to get rid of the black bees. This is the end of a bad century, the opening of a door that was never built into the chest. A volume of loud wires coming out of the ground. My grandfather rising from fifty-four years of death to see me. The instrument carved out of bone. A lock of hair from a famous seventeenth-century poet. The disintegrating bible wishing it was another book. A hanging arm sweeping the water out of the way. My memory of flying through the tunnel that came out of nowhere. A dog with wings and a cat with magic. The sentiment and the sweat. The blue chest of the working man and the bare ankle of a young girl who drank beer. The shadow of a young boy named Carlos and the bare shoulders of a young girl who whispered. The hunger of an older boy named José. The hard work of a brother named Ramón with a closeness and a disagreement among them. A torn pair of work pants and a stiff and muddy pair of gloves. A pocket with two dollars crumbled inside. A bare foot rubbing the bare back of a young girl. The fourth can of beer. The farmhouse that belonged to the family and the chickens that were killed for food. The cactus garden that killed two men when they fell in and the pieces of green cactus that made them dream. The green juice that started the earthquake, the crushed flesh of cactus on their tongues and its swelling that made them dream. A garden hose washing away the blood. The sparrow hovering over the trash can and the back alley stinking of dog shit and drunken men. Falling feathers interpreted for what they bring. A church next door full of sermons and howling black faces. The corner of the house where a young boy went to hide. A single strand of hair found in a high school yearbook, the forgotten idea that hiding it in there would lead to a different life. The piano wounded by stones falling out of the cottonwood. The willow tree spreading over the entire front yard and the tiny white balls of gum that fell out of it one day. The smell of shadows, trains, humor, tumbleweeds, ice, empty parking lots, one or two torn knees, a baseball glove, the first guy to cross the finish line, the fear, the dread and the skill of escaping so no one would start a list of smells. Fear melted the memory of a lost boy. The old house, the rosary around the neck, the crushed dog in the road— a sudden calling from behind to warn him to come in and be still. Who recalls how this ended when the men built their ships and invaded to change the outcome? The right to cry out and wait a whole century. The embers, the lone piano, the oil lamps damaged by a dream. The ambition in the spine. Who will insist on tapping the window to show how easy it is to delay the next hundred years?
My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - In Corners - till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away - And now We roam in Sovreign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him The Mountains straight reply - And do I smile, such cordial light Opon the Valley glow - It is as a Vesuvian face Had let it’s pleasure through - And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master’s Head - ’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow - to have shared - To foe of His - I’m deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without - the power to die -
Sidewalks of webs and weeds Run parallel to empy lots where foul deeds By handkerchief heads and winos were played, To that old house where we stayed. Irma Jean, Cora Jean and I, three debs, Against the cracks of weeds and webs. Sitting through matinees, dodging chores, Chewing gum; claiming boys were bores. But secretly grooming hair and breasts; Jennie’s brood, a female nest. Irma, long-legged, delicious full lips, Taught Cora and me to wiggle our hips. George Darlington Love, a beau, my first; They yelled his name like a tribal curse As his virginal fingers pressed our bell. Against that background of sights and smells, We ignored switchblades, zip guns, and knees Shattered by cops in that place without trees. Now memories of dances are sprinkled like seeds Among cousins and sidewalks of webs and weeds.
I The sidewalks were long where I grew up. They were as veined as the backs Of my Grandma’s hands. We knew every inch of pavement; We jumped the cracks Chanting rhymes that broke evil spirits, Played tag at sunset Among the fireflies and sweet maple trees Or sang wishful sonnets about boyfriends To the tune of whipping jump ropes. The sidewalks wrapped around corners Like dirty ribbons lacing the old houses Together in tight knots; Maple trees bordered The all-white cemetery. Sometimes we’d watch Priscilla’s uncle Sway down the dirt alley towards home. We called her Pussy, called him Crazy Max. He was feebleminded and took to fits, Barely making it from alley to pavement, Loping down the street like a drunk. We paced his jagged walk Against tumbling tunes, Taunting each pigeon-toed footstep With rhyme. The boys bolder, louder The girls tagging along Braids flopping like twisted hemp, Ending in brightly colored ribbons. We turned our black faces into silence When he finally made it home; Watched him grope up the broken concrete stairs, Clutch the wooden railing, Lunge for the broken screen door And his medicine. His tongue flopped wildly, Parrot noises drowning his sister’s cries As she rushed from the black pit Of their house. One day, he leaned away from the safe umbrella Of his sister’s voice; Leaned into the sky, Hanging on the porch rail like a rag doll, Then fell into the cracks of the sidewalk. We rarely chanted after that, Always passed Pussy’s house in silence. Sometimes I’d sit in the sweet stillness Of Grandma’s moldy basement And draw his outline on the wet fuzzy walls. The grey concrete backdropped my stick figure As it fell into nothingness.  II Bumpsy played the Dirty Dozens As we jackknifed the length of the block, Forcing grown-ups off the street. We linked arms like soldiers, Our black legs scissoring in precision.  One’s a company, two’s a crowd  Three on the sidewalk is not allowed—  Last night, the night before  Twenty-four robbers at my door—  Po-lice, po-lice, do your duty  Make this boy stop feeling my booty—  Mary, Mary, tell me true  Who is the one you love? Tin soldiers, wooden guns, and sharp tongues. We got comic books for the price of one In blitz attacks at Old Man Farrow’s dirty store. Garages were secret places for dirty jokes, Our folks couldn’t afford cars. When we got older, we played house for real Until we found Terry’s baby sister’s body Behind a stack of tires; The melodies we’d sung still seemed to bounce Off the dirty walls and stacks of comic books.  III Our houses ended at the sidewalk, Whitewashed steps gleaming like teeth Against the blocks of grey pavement. We walked three blocks just to find A vacant lot to feed Mildred’s thirst For green grass. Fat Vaughn could eat a whole sheet Of newspaper in less than three minutes. Once, I licked the damp cellar wall, But the taste didn’t match the sweet smell. Ten years later, I searched through Grandma’s Things before they were sold for auction. I found her picture, three comics and the wind-up Victrola we had used to put on our version Of Cotton Club musicals. We traded days so we could all be stars; The rest sang chorus until the Victrola Ran out of steam, the record moaning Like a sick calf. I found the stack of old pillows We collapsed on, giggling and tumbling Against each other like puppies, While the needle stuck in one groove Cutting circles in the records.
In a world where all the heroes are pilots with voices like God he brought her a strand of some woman’s hair to wear on her wing. She looked sideways at the ground silent behind the cloudy film covering her eyes knowing she would be his forever. They cruised the city nights each one spiralling away from the other but always coming home to gather stories. Dark streets bright tavern lights drunks filled with beer in the gutters. The flicker of stars shaped like a hunter’s arrow bent stars that twinkled like babies’ eyes. No babies for them. She was an outcast. He a loner. A perfect pair. Winters had made him wise and he avoided the single nests of summer. He told her about things she could see. How the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes and the ground aches like an old woman’s knee. How wood rots against the tide good for hunting grub. How to fade and fall back into the wind. He translated her pulse into near-language. Their poetry so personal even Peterson’s Field Guide could not tap it. Only a stray hunter saw it. Shook his head once thinking it a trick of wind and wing then turned his eyes north to search for the simple flight of Brant or Canadian. Those patterns he could easily understand. That last night they drank from the river. Sucked its delicate cusps of mold sang anti social songs as if they were humans. When he flicked his handsome head to catch the drift of wind she even managed a single tear. She waited through days and nights of grief. Circled the city less then settled on the wires. The metallic conductor captured her eyes. She remembered how he proudly sang her name as he pranced from pole-top to KV line. One last fluff of feathers. One sigh for all the unnested summers. One single scratch one electrical surge of power of love. Then she fell smiling. A trick he had taught her.
God washes clean the souls and hearts of you, His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil, Which grudging gives to them requite for toil In sober graces and in vision true. God places in your hands the pow’r to do A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart; The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.
he’s only a smart-ass when he’s home with Mandrake he’s silent and obedient as a snail his bald pate bowing into the cape’s trail and dreaming of tales he’ll bore me with his one night home once a month that’s what I get like clockwork and always on the full moon half my allowance he reserves for sheets, tearing them with his teeth to vent the forced silence of those other twenty-odd days did I say odd it’s that one day that’s odd his coming home full of half-tricks he’s picked up from the master the hypnotic hunger he so willingly tries on me he claims he stole me, bought me claims he’s Zulu, Bantu, Beja depending on the hour, day, or year says I was the black spot in the white of his eye the speck he turned into leopard that unwittingly turned into woman neither of us no longer knows what’s real and my mother beats her fat tongue against her gums as each month I try to reveal the puzzle stroking the lines from his hairless obsidian crown I hear her rumbling around in the next room I soothe his sweet head and she moans heaven protect us from all the things to which we can become accustomed
O white little lights at Carney’s Point, You shine so clear o’er the Delaware;When the moon rides high in the silver sky, Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware.Diamond circlet on a full white throat, You laugh your rays on a questioning boat;Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam, O’er the quiet flow of the Delaware?And the lights grew dim at the water’s brim, For the smoke of the mills shredded slow between;And the smoke was red, as is new bloodshed, And the lights went lurid ’neath the livid screen.O red little lights at Carney’s Point, You glower so grim o’er the Delaware;When the moon hides low sombrous clouds below, Then you glow like coals o’er the Delaware.Blood red rubies on a throat of fire, You flash through the dusk of a funeral pyre;And there hearth fires red whom you fear and dread O’er the turgid flow of the Delaware?And the lights gleamed gold o’er the river cold, For the murk of the furnace shed a copper veil;And the veil was grim at the great cloud’s brim, And the lights went molten, now hot, now pale.O gold little lights at Carney’s Point, You gleam so proud o’er the Delaware;When the moon grows wan in the eastering dawn, Then you sparkle gold points o’er the Delaware.Aureate filagree on a Croesus’ brow, You hasten the dawn on a gray ship’s prow.Light you streams of gold in the grim ship’s hold O’er the sullen flow of the Delaware?And the lights went gray in the ash of day, For a quiet Aurora brought a halcyon balm;And the sun laughed high in the infinite sky, And the lights were forgot in the sweet, sane calm.
I sit and sew—a useless task it seems, My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams— The panoply of war, the martial tred of men, Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death, Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath— But—I must sit and sew. I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire— That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things Once men. My soul in pity flings Appealing cries, yearning only to go There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe— But—I must sit and sew. The little useless seam, the idle patch; Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch, When there they lie in sodden mud and rain, Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain? You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream That beckons me—this pretty futile seam, It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?
Orange gleams athwart a crimson soulLambent flames; purple passion lurksIn your dusk eyes.Red mouth; flower soft,Your soul leaps up—and flashesStar-like, white, flame-hot.Curving arms, encircling a world of love,You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!
Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise,And yearned to venture into realms unknown,Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shownHow to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise. Yet what discov’ry by expectant eyesOf foreign shores, could vision half the throneFull gained by her, whose power fully grownExceeds the conquerors of th’ uncharted skies?So would I be this woman whom the worldAvows its benefactor; nobler far,Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen.In the alembic forged her shafts and hurledAt pain, diseases, waging a humane war;Greater than this achievement, none, I ween.
I the people to the things that are were &  come to be. We were once what we know  when we make love When we go away  from each other because we have been created  at 10th & A, in winter & of trees & of the history of houses  we hope we are notes of the musical scale of  heaven—I the people so repetitious, & my  vision of to hold the neighbors loose-  ly here in light of gel, my gel, my vision  come out of my eyes to hold you sur-  round you in gold & you don’t know it  ever. Everyone we the people having our  vision of gold & silver & silken liquid  light flowed from our eyes & caressing  all around all the walls. I am a late Pre-  in this dawn of We the people to the things that are & were  & come to be Once what we knew was only  and numbers became It is numbers & gold & at 10th  & A you don’t have to know it ever. Opening  words that show Opening words that show that we  were once the first to recognize  the immortality of numbered bodies. And we are the masters  of hearing & saying at the double edge of body &  breath We the lovers & the eyes All over, inside her  when the wedding is over, & the Park “lies cold &  lifeless” I the people, whatever is said  by the first one along, Angel-Agate. I wear  your colors I hear what we say & what  we say . . . (and I the people am still parted in  two & would cry)
“painting has no air . . .”  —Gertrude Stein That there should never be air in a picture surprises me. It would seem to be only a picture of a certain kind, a portrait in paper or glue, somewhere a stickiness as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness of another genre. It might be quite new to do without that air, or to find oxygen on the landscape line like a boat which is an object or a shoe which never floats and is stationary.  Still there are certain illnesses that require air, lots of it. And there are nervous people who cannot manufacture enough air and must seek for it when they don’t have plants, in pictures. There is the mysterious traveling that one does outside the cube and this takes place in air.  It is why one develops an attitude toward roses picked in the morning air, even roses without sun shining on them. The roses of Juan Gris from which we learn the selflessness of roses existing perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read “La Merveille” and escape.
What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace? Or what if the boy—but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food, Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee, Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski didn’t die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang. In Vietnamese, Con Thien meansplace of angels. What if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud. What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man, and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee? What if none of it happened the way I said? Would it all be a lie? Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? Would the dead rise up and walk?
“The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious.” A mile out in the marshes, under a sky Which seems to be always going away In a hurry, on that Venetian land threaded With hidden canals, you will find the city Which seconds ours (so cemeteries, too, Reflect a town from hillsides out of town), Where Being most Becomingly ends up Becoming some more. From cardboard tenements, Windowed with cellophane, or simply tenting In paper bags, the angry mackerel eyes Glare at you out of stove-in, sunken heads Far from the sea; the lobster, also, lifts An empty claw in his most minatory Of gestures; oyster, crab, and mussel shells Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled Away at the gate of hell. If you want results, These are results.  Objects of value or virtue, However, are also to be picked up here, Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat, Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels No one will skid on, apple cores that caused Neither the fall of man nor a theory Of gravitation. People do throw out The family pearls by accident, sometimes, Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques To prowl this place by night, with flashlights, on The off-chance of somebody’s having left Derelict chairs which will turn out to be by Hepplewhite, a perfect set of six Going to show, I guess, that in any sty Someone’s heaven may open and shower down Riches responsive to the right dream; though It is a small chance, certainly, that sends The ghostly dealer, heavy with fly-netting Over his head, across these hills in darkness, Stumbling in cut-glass goblets, lacquered cups, And other products of his dreamy midden Penciled with light and guarded by the flies. For there are flies, of course. A dynamo Composed, by thousands, of our ancient black Retainers, hums here day and night, steady As someone telling beads, the hum becoming A high whine at any disturbance; then, Settled again, they shine under the sun Like oil-drops, or are invisible as night, By night.  All this continually smoulders, Crackles, and smokes with mostly invisible fires Which, working deep, rarely flash out and flare, And never finish. Nothing finishes; The flies, feeling the heat, keep on the move. Among the flies, the purefying fires, The hunters by night, acquainted with the art Of our necessities, and the new deposits That each day wastes with treasure, you may say There should be ratios. You may sum up The results, if you want results. But I will add That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies, Assemble in some numbers here, their wings Shining with light, their flight enviably free, Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange.
Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits, This average consumer of the middle class, Consumed in the course of his average life span Just under half a million cigarettes, Four thousand fifths of gin and about A quarter as much vermouth; he drank Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee, And counting his parents’ share it cost Something like half a million dollars To put him through life. How many beasts Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes Cannot be certainly said.  But anyhow, It is in this way that a man travels through time, Leaving behind him a lengthening trail Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes, Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers. Given the energy and security thus achieved, He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course, The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting, And he worked for the money which was to pay For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera, But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded Steadily from the front of his face as he Advanced into the silence and made it verbal. Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime Would barely suffice for their repetition; If you merely printed all his commas the result Would be a very large volume, and the number of times He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,” Would stagger the imagination. There were also Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning “It seems to me” or “As I always say.” Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding Steadily out of the front of his face, the words Borne along on the breath which is his spirit Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.
in memory of the painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley I The painter’s eye follows relation out. His work is not to paint the visible, He says, it is to render visible. Being a man, and not a god, he stands Already in a world of sense, from which He borrows, to begin with, mental things Chiefly, the abstract elements of language: The point, the line, the plane, the colors and The geometric shapes. Of these he spins Relation out, he weaves its fabric up So that it speaks darkly, as music does Singing the secret history of the mind. And when in this the visible world appears, As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree, All haunted here and there with the human face, It happens as by accident, although The accident is of design. It is because Language first rises from the speechless world That the painterly intelligence Can say correctly that he makes his world, Not imitates the one before his eyes. Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores, The terrifying forests where nightfall Enfolds a lost and tired traveler. And hence the careless crowd deludes itself By likening his hieroglyphic signs And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child. That likeness is significant the other side Of what they see, for his simplicities Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones, Final refinements of his thought made visible. He is the painter of the human mind Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness That is in things, and not the things themselves. For such a man, art is an act of faith: Prayer the study of it, as Blake says, And praise the practice; nor does he divide Making from teaching, or from theory. The three are one, and in his hours of art There shines a happiness through darkest themes, As though spirit and sense were not at odds. II The painter as an allegory of the mind At genesis. He takes a burlap bag, Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher. He paints it black because, as he has said, Everything looks different on black. Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe, And black because its volume is the void Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface, And all his depths are on the face of it. Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground Of zero thickness stretched against the cold Dark silence of the Absolutely Not, Material worlds arise, the colored earths And oil of plants that imitate the light. They imitate the light that is in thought, For the mind relates to thinking as the eye Relates to light. Only because the world Already is a language can the painter speak According to his grammar of the ground. It is archaic speech, that has not yet Divided out its cadences in words; It is a language for the oldest spells About how some thoughts rose into the mind While others, stranger still, sleep in the world. So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion. He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall And be the same rose still, the radiant in red. He paints his language, and his language is The theory of what the painter thinks. III The painter’s eye attends to death and birth Together, seeing a single energy Momently manifest in every form, As in the tree the growing of the tree Exploding from the seed not more nor less Than from the void condensing down and in, Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree, The great tree standing in the garden, say, As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight, Growing its green height from the dark watered earth, And as suspended weightless in the sky, Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head. He follows through the flowing of the forms From the divisions of the trunk out to The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall. His pencil meditates the many in the one After the method in the confluence of rivers, The running of ravines on mountainsides, And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees How things must be continuous with themselves As with whole worlds that they themselves are not, In order that they may be so transformed. He stands where the eternity of thought Opens upon perspective time and space; He watches mind become incarnate; then  He paints the tree. IV These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee, About how he in our hard time might stand to us Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning As patron of the practical intelligence of art, And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings, For all research that follows spirit where it goes. That there should be much goodness in the world, Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm, And that it all goes down in the dust after a while, This is a subject for the steadiest meditations Of the heart and mind, as for the tears That clarify the eye toward charity. So may it be to all of us, that at some times In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail, And when impatience in the street and still despair at home Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind, As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house, His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought, The same dream that then flared before intelligence When light first went forth looking for the eye.
on a day when we were dark and not so full of light we met  what did we find? nothing. everything, when we closed our eyes which anyway had never been open. once, we thought we loved each other  who can reverse  time? we tried. we stepped out of space into some new step of distance and fell— and not in love.
child, in the august of your life you come barefoot to me the blisters of events having worn through to the soles of your shoes. it is not the time this is not the time there is no such time to tell you that some pains ease away on the ebb & toll of themselves. there is no such dream that can not fail, nor is hope our only conquest. we can stand boldly in burdening places (like earth here) in our blunderings, our bloomings our palms, flattened upward or pressed, an unyielding down.
you see so many  graveyards around  these little towns—  out in the open  spaces & places.  i guess big cities  have not enough space for the  living,  let alone the dead. there is so much water here and back home in chicago we would call them rocks, lying all on the ground(s) lots of rocks around/but you would call them stones here. see how much smoother the world is. the farther east we go  the more frequent are the stops at rich small quaint towns and the more frequent are the admonitions to “watch one’s ticket on the rack above the seat or to be very sure to take it with you if you leave your seat!”  apparently,  the very wealthy,  steal. as i ride the train watching the many white students eating out of brown paper sacks, saving their now money so that they can be the very wealthy later on, also.
It begins as a house, an end terrace in this case  but it will not stop there. Soon it is an avenue  which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics' Institute, turns left  at the main road without even looking and quickly it is  a town with all four major clearing banks, a daily paper  and a football team pushing for promotion.  On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts, the green belts,  and before we know it it is out of our hands: city, nation,  hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions until suddenly,  mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye of a black hole  and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging smaller and smoother  than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.  People stop me in the street, badger me in the check-out queue  and ask "What is this, this that is so small and so very smooth  but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet?" It's just words  I assure them. But they will not have it.
All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture. If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white that we can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. When the Indian woman steps out of her dress, the white man gasps at the endless beauty of her brown skin. She should be compared to nature: brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water. If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret. Indians always have secrets, which are carefully and slowly revealed. Yet Indian secrets can be disclosed suddenly, like a storm. Indian men, of course, are storms. They should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust at the savage in blue jeans and T-shirt, but secretly lust after him. White women dream about half-breed Indian men from horse cultures. Indian men are horses, smelling wild and gamey. When the Indian man unbuttons his pants, the white woman should think of topsoil. There must be one murder, one suicide, one attempted rape. Alcohol should be consumed. Cars must be driven at high speeds. Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-breed and obviously from horse cultures. If the interior Indian is male then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man. If the interior Indian is female, then she must be a healer, especially if she is inside a white woman. Sometimes there are complications. An Indian man can be hidden inside a white woman. An Indian woman can be hidden inside a white man. In these rare instances, everybody is a half-breed struggling to learn more about his or her horse culture. There must be redemption, of course, and sins must be forgiven. For this, we need children. A white child and an Indian child, gender not important, should express deep affection in a childlike way. In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
It is a soft thing, it has been sifted from the sieve of space and seems asleep there under the moths of light. Cluster of dust and fire, from up here you are a stranger and I am dropping through the funnel of air to meet you.
Alice's first strike gets a pat on the back, her second a cheer from Betty Woszinski who's just back from knee surgery. Her third— "A turkey!" Molly calls out—raises everyone's eyes. They clap. Teresa looks up from the bar. At the fourth the girls stop seeing their own pins wobble. They watch the little X's fill the row on Alice's screen— That's five. That's six. There's a holy space around her like a saint come down to bowl with the Tuesday Ladies in Thorp, Wisconsin. Teresa runs to get Al, and Fran calls Billy at the Exxon. The bar crowds with silent men. No one's cheering. No one's bowling now except Alice's team, rolling their balls to advance the screen around to Alice, who's stopped even her nervous laugh, her face blank and smooth with concentration. It can't go on and then it does go on, the white bar reading "Silver Dollar Chicken" lowering and clearing nothing, then lowering and clearing nothing again.
Earbud—a tiny marble sheathed in foam to wear like an interior earring so you can enjoy private noises wherever you go, protected from any sudden silence. Only check your batteries, then copy a thousand secret songs and stories on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket. You are safe now from other noises made by other people, other machines, by chance, noises you have not chosen as your own. To get your attention, I touch your arm to show you the tornado or the polar bear. Sometimes I catch you humming or talking to the air as if to a shrunken lover waiting in your ear.
You're telling that story again about your childhood, when you were five years old and rode your blue bicycle from Copenhagen to Espergaerde, and it was night and snowing by the time you arrived, and your grandparents were so relieved to see you, because all day no one knew where you were, you had vanished. We sit at our patio table under a faded green umbrella, drinking wine in California's blue autumn, red stars of roses along the fence, trellising over the roof of our ramshackle garage. Too soon the wine glasses will be empty, our stories told, the house covered with pine needles the wind has shaken from the trees. Other people will live here. We will vanish like children who traveled far in the dark, stars of snow in their hair, riding to enchanted Espergaerde.
Blurring the window, the snowflakes' numb white lanterns. She's brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne And sets her lipstick upright on the sink. The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip, The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder. Then she's dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur, And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop Where she'll leave me for my own walk to school, Where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul As I watch her at the window, the paperback Romance already open on her lap, The bus laboring off into snow, her good-bye kiss Still startling my cheek with lipstick trace.
Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass, Sun-singed, smelling like straw, the insides of old barns. The stone angel's prayer is uninterrupted by the sleeping Vagrant at her feet, the lone squirrel, furtive amid the litter. Someone once said my great-grandmother, on the day she died, rose from her bed where she had lain, paralyzed and mute For two years following a stroke, and dressed herself—the good Sunday dress of black crepe, cotton stockings, sensible, lace-up shoes. I imagine her coiling her long white braid in the silent house, Lying back down on top of the quilt and folding her hands, Satisfied. I imagine her born-again daughters, brought up In that tent-revival religion, called in from kitchens and fields To stand dismayed by her bed like the sisters of Lazarus, Waiting for her to breathe, to rise again and tell them what to do. Here, no cross escapes the erosion of age, no voice breaks The silence; the only certainty in the crow's flight Or the sun's measured descent is the coming of winter. Even the angel's outstretched arms offer only a formulated Grace, her blind blessings as indiscriminate as acorns, Falling on each of us, the departed and the leaving.
I hold my two-year-old son under his arms and start to twirl. His feet sway away from me and the day becomes a blur. Everything I own is flying into space: yard toys, sandbox, tools, garage and house, and, finally, the years of my life. When we stop, my son is a grown man, and I am very old. We stagger back into each other's arms one last time, two lost friends heavy with drink, remembering the good old days.
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down. Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown? Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her, Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry— you walk ahead of me. You be the mother. And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says, hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
Finding an old book on a basement shelf— gray, spine bent—and reading it again, I met my former, unfamiliar, self, some of her notes and scrawls so alien that, though I tried, I couldn't get (behind this gloss or that) back to the time she wrote to guess what experiences she had in mind, the living context of some scribbled note; or see the girl beneath the purple ink who chose this phrase or that to underline, the mood, the boy, that lay behind her thinking— but they were thoughts I recognized as mine; and though there were words I couldn't even read, blobs and cross-outs; and though not a jot remained of her old existence—I agreed with the young annotator's every thought: A clever girl. So what would she see fit to comment on—and what would she have to say about the years that she and I have written since—before we put the book away?
The night never wants to end, to give itself over to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows. Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun— we break open the watermelon and spit out black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.
In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer field her team, the Gladiators, is losing ten to zip. She never loses interest in the roughhouse one-on-one that comes every half a minute. She sticks her leg in danger and comes out the other side running. Later a clump of opponents on the street is chant- ing, WE WON, WE WON, WE . . . She stands up on the convertible seat holding to the wind- shield. WE LOST, WE LOST BIGTIME, TEN TO NOTHING, WE LOST, WE LOST. Fist pumping air. The other team quiet, abashed, chastened. Good losers don't laugh last; they laugh continuously, all the way home so glad.
The carpet in the kindergarten room was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting on bright, primary letters. On the shelf sat that week's inflatable sound. The th was shaped like a tooth. We sang about brushing up and down, practiced exhaling while touching our tongues to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U like an upside-down umbrella; the rest of the alphabet deflated. Some days, we saw parents through the windows to the hallway sky. Look, a fat lady, a boy beside me giggled. Until then I'd only known my mother as beautiful.
I was always leaving, I was about to get up and go, I was on my way, not sure where. Somewhere else. Not here. Nothing here was good enough. It would be better there, where I was going. Not sure how or why. The dome I cowered under would be raised, and I would be released into my true life. I would meet there the ones I was destined to meet. They would make an opening for me among the flutes and boulders, and I would be taken up. That this might be a form of death did not occur to me. I only know that something held me back, a doubt, a debt, a face I could not leave behind. When the door fell open, I did not go through.
I'm going to put Karen Prasse right here in front of you on this page so that you won't mistake her for something else, an example of precocity, for instance, a girl who knew that the sky (blue crayon) was above the earth (green crayon) and did not, as you had drawn it, come right down to the green on which your three bears stood. You can tell from her outfit that she is a Brownie. You can tell from her socks that she knows how to line things up, from her mouth that she may grow up mean or simply competent. Do not mistake her for an art critic: when she told you the first day of first grade that your drawing was "wrong," you stood your ground and told her to look out the window. Miss Voss told your mom you were going to be a good example of something, although you cannot tell from the way your socks sag, nor from your posture, far from Brownie-crisp. This is not about you for a change, but about mis-perception, of which Karen was an early example. Who knows? She may have meant to be helpful, though that is not always a virtue, and gets in the way of some art.
Australia. Phillip Island. The Tasman Sea. Dusk. The craggy coastline at low tide in fog. Two thousand tourists milling in the stands as one by one, and then in groups, the fairy penguins mass up on the sand like so much sea wrack and debris. And then, as on command, the improbable parade begins: all day they've been out fishing for their chicks, and now, somehow, they find them squawking in their burrows in the dunes, one by one, two by two, such comical solemnity, as wobbling by they catch our eager eyes until we're squawking, too, in English, French, and Japanese, Yiddish and Swahili, like some happy wedding party brought to tears by whatever in the ceremony repairs the rifts between us. The rain stops. The fog lifts. Stars. And we go home, less hungry, satisfied, to friends and family, regurgitating all we've heard and seen.
They lie under stars in a field. They lie under rain in a field. Under sun. Some people are like this as well— like a painting hidden beneath another painting. An unexpected weight the sign of their ripeness.
1. God love you now, if no one else will ever, Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill In the fine and ruinous summer of a war You never wanted. All your false flags were Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps: Colors of countries you would never see— Until that weekend in eternity When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill, Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you: Handselled to poverty and drummed to war By distinguished masters whom you never knew. 2. The bee that spins his metal from the sun, The shy mole drifting like a miner ghost Through midnight earth—all happy creatures run As strict as trains on rails the circuits of Blind instinct. Happy in your summer follies, You mined a culture that was mined for war: The state to mold you, church to bless, and always The elders to confirm you in your ignorance. No scholar put your thinking cap on nor Warned that in dead seas fishes died in schools Before inventing legs to walk the land. The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand, An Ark against the flood. In time of change Courage is not enough: the blind mole dies, And you on your hill, who did not know the rules. 3. Wet in the windy counties of the dawn The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home: And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze, Like grace or confetti) blinks and he is gone, And you are gone. Your scarecrow valor grows And rusts like early lilac while the rose Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange Flowers. Roses, rents, all things conspire To crown your death with wreaths of living fire. And the public mourners come: the politic tear Is cast in the Forum. But, in another year, We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills The limestone histories: brave: ignorant: amazed: Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.
My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow; she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled. She listens for her heart: each breath is shallow. For years her hands were quick with thread and needle. She used to sew all night when we were little; now she sleeps with the Bible on her pillow and believes that Jesus understands her sorrow: her children grown, their father frail and brittle; she stitches in her heart, her breathing shallow. Once she even slept fast, rushed tomorrow, mornings full of sunlight, sons and daughters. Now she sleeps alone with the Bible on her pillow and wakes alone and feels the house is hollow, though my father in his blue room stirs and mutters; she listens to him breathe: each breath is shallow. I flutter down the darkened hallway, shadow between their dreams, my mother and my father, asleep in rooms I pass, my breathing shallow. I leave the Bible open on her pillow.
The body is a nation I have not known. The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that. Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin- covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark. Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said. For years I said that: the body is a savage. As if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice. For years I have snubbed the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord, I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass. But this distance I keep is not divine, for what was Christ if not God’s desire to smell his own armpit? And when I see him, I know he will smile, fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time I will send you down as a dog to taste this pure hunger.”
There are stones even here worn into a malevolence by time gritting the teeth and tearing the eyes with the memory. Out in the desert, the wind is a sculptor working the ephemera of sand. Desperately editing steles to write the names of thousands of slaves who died to make Pharaoh great. It is a fool’s game. And we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile: I’ll see you later. The guard at the pyramid eyes me. Are you Egyptian? he demands, then searches my bag for a bomb. At the hotel they speak Arabic to me, don’t treat me like the white guests, and I guess, even here, with all the hindsight of history we haven’t learned to love ourselves. I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot explain why. How do you say: In my country they buried me alive for six months? And so you lie and tell yourself this is love. I am protecting the world from my rage. Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa. Do you have a knife? Do you have one? the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me, searching us. We call this on ourselves. We are clearly political criminals. I trace the glyphs chipped into stone. As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could I too would carve myself into eternity. Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me you’ve found a spelling mistake in it! A line of miniature statues is placed into the tomb to serve the pharaoh. One for each day of the year. Four hundred. The overseers are a plus. I think even death will not ease the lot of the poor here. Statues: it seems the more I search the world for differences the more I find it all the same. Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too when he said we are all one. Mona argues about who should pay to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists. A woman nearby tells her husand she can see dead bodies at work. Why pay? Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask. That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees. From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops spread out like a conference of coffee tables. Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs like family secrets sunning themselves. Two white goats on a roof chew their way through the debris. On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me she wants to be Celine Dion. She is my sister calling me home to Egypt. Perhaps one day I will be ready. For now it is enough to know I can be at home here.
The telephone never rings. Still you pick it up, smile into the static, the breath of those you’ve loved; long dead. The leaf you pick from the fall rises and dips away with every ridge. Fingers stiff from time, you trace. Staring off into a distance limned by cataracts and other collected debris, you have forgotten none of the long-ago joy of an ice-cream truck and its summer song. Between the paving stones; between tea, a cup, and the sound of you pouring; between the time you woke that morning and the time when the letter came, a tired sorrow: like an old flagellant able only to tease with a weak sting. Riding the elevator all day, floor after floor after floor, each stop some small victory whittled from the hard stone of death, you smile. They used to write epics about moments like this.
Christopher Smart, 1722-1771 Blackula Poland China, 1971-1975 (memorandus) For I will consider my black sow Blackula. For she is the servant of the god of the feed bucket and serveth him. For she worships the god in him and the secret of his pail in her way. For this is done by screams of incantation at the appointed hour and lusty bites of daily communion. For she stands with forelegs upon the top rail of the wooden fence in supplication. For she grunts her thanks while she eats. For she stands for the red boar with closed eyes at the appointed hour. For having done she lies in the mud to consider herself. For this she performs in ten degrees. For first she rolls in her wallow to cover her body. For secondly she lies still to feel the wet. For thirdly she stretches her length and casts her belly to the sun. For fourthly she exhales God’s air in huge sighs. For fifthly she rises and examines her feed trough that replenishment might miraculously appear. For sixthly she scratches her side against the fence. For seventhly she scratches her jowl with delicate pastern swipe. For eighthly she smells the breeze to ascertain the red boar’s presence. For ninthly she returns to her mud and plows large holes in the earth. For tenthly she lies again in the wallow to cool her frame. For having considered her world she will sleep and dream dreams of herself and her god and the red boar. For like Eve for softness she and sweet attractive Grace was formed. For the red boar lusteth mightily and foameth at the mouth for her. For he might escape and enter her pen. For if he does this in a nonappointed hour she will scream loudly and discourage his kisses. For her belly is full and needeth no more. For in one month she will bring forth life in abundance. For in her last litter she farrowed eight piglets of the red boar. For three were black and five were red. For she raised them all and laid on none. For one in eight is normally crushed by the sow. For she is exceedingly good in all that she does. For she is surely of the tribe of Elephant and forgetteth not. For she weighs near six hundred pounds. For she has ears of tremendous size. For she is heavy. For a large sow is a term of the Titan Elephant. For she has the appetite of a bird and would eat the day long which in debt her master suppresses. For he would not have her too fat or his checkbook hollow. For he keeps her well-fed and she breaks no fence. For she grunts in pleasure from the mud when he scratches her ears. For she is a tool of God to temper his mind. For when she eats her corn she turns and shits in her trough. For her master is provoked but hereby learns patience. For she is an instrument for him to learn bankruptcy upon. For he lost but four dollars each on the last litter of pigs. For this is admirable in the world of the bank. For every man is incomplete without one serious debt or loss. For she provides this with her good faith. For every farm is a skeleton without a mortgage. For the Lord admonished black sows when he said lay up no stores of treasure on earth. For she prohibits this daily. For she is a true child of God and creature of the universe. For she is called Blackula which is a derivative of the Devil, but false. For she does worship her God and Savior. For she was given her name for breaking a fence and eating Jan’s garden beets. For when Jan came with a stick and wrath she lifted her head and smiled. For her teeth and mouth were stained with red beet pulp. For Jan dropped the stick and laughed. For she looked like a six-hundred-pound vampire. For she was called Blackula. For we feed her red beets daily to watch her smile. For she is humble when well-fed. For she makes her point well when she is hungry. For there is nothing swifter than a sow breaking fence when she desires. For there is nothing more beautiful than a sow in full run when being chased through a garden. For there is no sound more pure than her scream when she is hit with a stick. For she is meek in all aspects when satisfied. For when John Sims saw her lying in mud he proclaimed her majesty. For he whistled and called her a pretty sonofabitch. For he offered to trade his beat-up truck for her straight across. For she has divine spirit and is manifest as a complete pig. For she is tame and can be taught. For she can run and walk and sleep and drink and eat. For she can scream at the red boar. For she allows her ears and belly to be scratched. For she allows small children to ride her back. For she sleeps in mounds of straw at night. For she produces litters of healthy black and red pigs. For she can root the earth. For she can carry sticks in her mouth. For she will grunt when she is addressed. For she can jump not far but hard. For dried earth cracks in the places where she walks. For she is hated by the breeders of cattle and sheep. For the former loses more money than I do on his stock. For the latter fears her mind. For she has no wool and will not blindly follow his steps. For he carries no bucket of feed. For she litters twice per year. For he litters but once. For her belly is firm and can take much abuse. For from this proceeds her worth. For I perceive God’s mystery by stroking her teats. For I felt tiny lumps of flesh within and knew they were alive. For the life is the physical substance which God sends from Heaven to sustain the appetites of men. For God has blessed her womb and the red boar’s seed. For they multiply in ecstasy at the appointed time. For God has blessed her in many ways. For God has given her the red beets to eat. For God has given the water for her to drink. For God has allowed the water to run to mud in a place for her to lay. For she cannot fly to the mountain streams, though she walks well upon the earth. For she walks the earth heavy upon tiny feet. For she treads all the rows of the summer garden. For she can jump the fence. For she can push it down. For she can eat.
Ohdammit sez John I’m in trouble so I sed why John? John sez I got the bill for my insurance and I haven’t got no money to pay it cause I won’t get paid for swoking and bailing Keith Guymon’s hay till next week I done told him that would be just fine when he ast a week ago but LaVerne she went and opened the damn envelope on a chain letter and I aint got no time to write out twenty copies I got to get that hay finished so what am I posta do now? I sez what John? John sez it’s the damn govament sends them things out I know it and it works with the post office and the insurance to keep you in line I sez what John? John sez my brother oncet he got this chain letter back home he didn’t have no time to write out his copies neither it sez he has four days to wrote it before the luck comes good or bad it aint never good I heard of be he forgot back then it was $5,000 this feller got in four days and then later when the govament ruint the money he put on a zero it was $50,000 and then it was $100,000 now it sez he got $420,000 it’s the same guy it was in that letter back then just the numbers changed it’s the way the govament has to let us know how much he’s gone let the money be worth but the next day because he hadn’t wrote out his twenty letters he lost all that money but my brother he was busy too he didn’t do his letters the third day after he had to go kill these pigs for this man but this other feller was gone bring his milkcow down get her bred to my brother’s bull he told him go ahead and do it he sez he’d have his boy walk her down the road it wasn’t far so while my brother was gone his boy brought her down turnt her in the corral he climbt up on the fence to watch it might of been fine except the hogs been rooting up under the barn wall my brother he borrowed this lectric fence he strung it along the side of the barn so the bull mounts up on the milkcow she turns and backs him up against the barn he’s stuckt he gets his back feet tangled in that lectric fence one in front and one back he tries to move and he just tightens up the lectric wire that boy he sez you could hear it zzip zzip zipp that bull he starts to bellering milkcow she don’t know what’s going on so she backs him up tighter against the barn it isn’t no way he can get off he commences to jumping up and down on her and trying to get his feet loost of that lectric wire but he caint it goes zzip he bellers and she backs up more it goes zzip again it was like he was doing a dance like them crazy people do trying to get his legs loost hollering like a sonofabitch so it was hogs there too they heard it and here they come it wasn’t natural and a hog it won’t let nothing that’s not natural stay that way around them it has to get right or go away or die that boy sez they all run up grunted and squolt like hell when that didn’t work this one old mean bitching sow she run right in between them she bit that bull right on his seeds she wanted him to stop acting that way making all that noise jumping up and down like that right now that bull he just went over backwards right up against the barn like he’d been shot in the head knocked the whole goddam end of the barn down fell right on his back the end rafter come down on his chest it torn a piece of skin off his pecker to his seeds wide as your hand they swolt up like basketballs from the hogbite broke ribs they figured but it never did kill him that milkcow she wan’t finished she kept backing up and fell down right on top of him it was only the end of the barn come down the rest stood up that boy he’s ascairt he got daddy’s milkcow up off my brother’s bull he left he sed he seen enough for oncet my brother that night he’s coming home from killing them hogs he never knew none of this happened yet he’s driving see? and he’d lost his picking finger on his left hand in the leaf springs of a wagon when we’s kids so he’s driving left-handed and doing the gears and picking with his right hand it was a moon out so he’d turned off his pickup lights listening to the radio because his battery wasn’t much good he couldn’t do both while he was driving he couldn’t see good as he thot he could he hit this big chuckhole slung him right into the steering wheel he figured it would of broke his nose if he hand’t been picking but his hand took the cushion it only gave him a nosebleed but almost broke his hand where it hit his knuckles was bruised so bad he couldn’t even open and shut his fingers for a week he had to drive the rest of the way home left-handed and lean acrost and shift with that hand too he thot the other one was broke but it wasn’t he got home and the first thing he seen was the end of his barn out that bull standing there inside the barn with his head down low my brother thot he’d butted it down he run in the house to get his gun he was mad he would of kilt that bull but they told him how it happened so he didn’t he went out to look but it wasn’t no way they could get that bull to go back in that yard where them pigs was he wouldn’t go out the barn they him him acrost the butt with a board he’d just stand there he didn’t care no more they went in the house my brother he got out the dishpan and soaked some cold water so he lain his hand in it to get the swollen to go down he wouldn’t tell them how it happened at first but while he was setting there with his hand ducked he remembered that chain letter he jumped up and run to get it sloshed water all over the kitchen floor he was hollering how long’s it been? how long’s it been? they sez it happened this morning it was just his morning he sez whar? they sez when the sow bit the bull on his seeds knocked the barn down he hollers no not that how long’s it been since I got this here chain letter in the mail? they sez oh three days he sez goddam I only got one day left my brother he set up all night writing out his twenty copies he had to tape the pencil to his hand cause it was swole up his fingers wouldn’t bent they sed he even wrote some with his left hand it was so bad you couldn’t read the words he got them all done by sunup the fourth day like it sed and took it to the mailbox he waited all morning on the porch till they remembered it was Memoral Day the mail he wouldn’t come my brother he about had a worm he run out to the mailbox and got them letters he run over to his pickup and clumb in it wouldn’t crunk he’d run the battery down listening to the radio goddam my brother he was mad he busted the side winder with his head when the pickup wouldn’t turn over jumped out and slammed the door so hard it didn’t catch it bounce right back and hit him right on his swole-up hand it hurt so bad he sez he nearly fainted of the pain he knew he had to get them letters in the mail so he walked all the way to town it was more’n ten miles back then it worked nothing else happened they got the end back in the barn without it coming down but they had to shoot the bull finally and eat him because he wouldn’t do nothing just set there and waste away he’d seen enough they guessed it wasn’t no way he’d go back out there with them pigs in the corral since then ever time we seen a envelope in my family it looks like it might be a chain letter we don’t open it till we got time to set down right then and make out them twenty copies like it sez to do but this time LaVerne must of forgot it snuck up on her when I got home it was laying on the table and it wasn’t nothing I could do it was my name on the envelope I know it come from the insurance company it was two years ago the man’s wife from the insurance called she sez to LaVerne then that she wanted her to come to her house she wanted to tell her about selling Amway LaVerne she sez she wasn’t inarrested a week later here comes the insurance bill by god it’s gone up almost double I sez how come you didn’t go? you could of just set and nod now see what happened? but it was too late so I’m gone to have to stay up tonight writing chain letters I done wrote one to send to the insurance so he’ll know I did it and let the govament know I wrote him a note on the bottom and sez I’ll pay the insurance bill as soon as I can but things is tough all over I just hope he’ll understand I’d as soon right now rather not have no luck at all but I am willing to cooperate if that’s what my duty is as a patriotic American citizen
We sold it. To a man who would be a patriarch. I told John we were closed in, subdivisions and trailers all around, complaints of the smell (though there was none), Ira came out and told me to keep them fenced (though none broke out), the neighbors frightened because someone’s cousin’s friend heard of a hog that ate a child who fell in the pen (though their children rode my sows at feeding time), because I was tired, because Jan carried our child and could no longer help, because she wanted a home. And the patriarch lost his first crop to weeds, threw a rod in the tractor, dug a basement and moved the trailer on for extra bedrooms, cut the water lines for a ditch, subdivided the farm and sold the pigs for sausage. I told John they were his, they were no longer mine, I couldn’t be responsible. The wire connecting our voices was silent for a moment. “You stupid sonofabitch,” was all he finally said. “You poor stupid bastard.”
What’s the matter with you today sed John you and Jan fighting? On no I said it’s not that it’s a letter I got that’s bothering me. Must be from the govament or the insurance, I can understand that. No, John, it’s not them this time it’s from a friend. Did he die or summin? You aint sed a decent word all morning I might as well be working by myself and let you set on the nailkeg unrolling barbwore Oh dammit, John, it’s just a letter that pissed me off, I said. It’s from a writer who saw something I wrote about coyotes killing sheep and he wrote saying that never happens. He sez what? sez John. He said there’s no documented evidence that a coyote ever killed a sheep unless it was rabid, I said. And he said my story was a lie and should never have been written. He’s a writer? sez John. What does he write about? Oh, he writes novels, I said. Books about cowboys and Indians and the California mountains. He sez that sed John did he? You know most chickens I known of is layers and most folks I known is liars and most of them don’t know the different but that don’t get in the way of their opinions. It was a preacher got his first call to come to our town back home his first sermon that everbody showed up to hear was how all people is good it aint no such of a thing as a bad person he wasn’t in town half a year before Travis Newberry knocked up his daughter in the eighth grade and he was twenty-four by then. He’d started preaching late after giving up on farming and owning a grocery store must of been too late he run out of words after bout a year we had to elect him to office to give him something to do. First thing he voted no taxes and no pay raises to schoolteachers so they all known he’d be a good one mebbe governor some day had to move him out of the parsonage and into a house where he had to pay rent like real people so they found him a place out on the end of town where they could be alone with that pregnant girl they took out of school. It was skunks out there a mama and four babies and his wife and that girl sez oh they’re purdy let them alone we like them so he did by the time she had her baby they’d killed all their chickens the Easter ducks and the cats it was mice and skunks running all over that place they couldn’t live there no more so he run for state office they sent that girl off to Christian school we never heard of her again and tried to raise the baby boy but couldn’t do that neither. He got elected to the campaign of no taxes and close down the schools cause he blamed it all on Travis Newberry hanging around the jr-high parking lot and moved to the state capital to live and before they could rent that house again they had to set out traps for two months and rat poison sed they got twenty-four skunks but nobody counted the mice it was awful took a year for the smells to go off and it wasn’t no hippies back then to rent it to they had to wait it out so he run for Warshington office six years later and put the boy in the orphanage up for adoption he might of been a scandal but he didn’t get elected they made him a judge instead after that and he’s rich still there and being so famous he don’t pay no rent the state gave him a house and a car and a maid but that still don’t mean he known one damn thing about people or skunks or mice or preaching or farming or running a grocery store. I seen it with my own eyes a coyote running through a herd of sheep and killed nine lambs just to do it and we set up five nights in our pickups waiting for him until he come back and he killed four more before we shot him and that’s nothing to what Allen Dalley out to Summit lost that one year when they say coyotes got half his lamb crop that’s just a bunch of bullshit because he done one thing don’t mean he knows nothing about anothern and if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about you tell him to just keep his mouth closed or run for office that’s what it’s there for so why don’t you forget about it and you can forget him too for now let’s get to work cause all this is real not something in a book and has to be got done for sure not just by thinking about it and if you don’t get that frown put in a drawer this is gone be a long day of work
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world always do sound like diseases. It’s because they are engorged. G., I am a fool. What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us. Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. Caresses. You know corporeal gifts besmirch thieves like me. But she plucks a feather and my steam escapes.  We’re awake each night at pennymoon and we micro and necro. I can’t stop. But love and what-all: the uncomfortable position of telling the truth, like the lotus, can’t be held long.  If she knew would she just take all her favors from my marmalade vessel and chuck them back into the endless reversible garment which is my life—  an astonishing vanishing. G., I know this letter is like a slice of elevator accident. As smart folk would say, “Everything is only Nothing’s Truck.” I would revise it and say that everything is only nothing, truncated. Love, Your Igor
There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women, as Virginia Woolf said. Both for decoration only. Now that is too kind. It’s technical: virgins and wolves. We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar, one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple’s pimp comes over and says you won’t be sorry. She’s a fine piece of work but she don’t come cheap. Myself, I’m in less fear of predators than of walking around in my mother’s body. That’s sneaky, that’s more than naked. Let’s even it up: you go on fuming in your gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose, metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes in a handmade basket case. Which of us weaves the world together with a quicker blur of armed seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings. Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze even if you leave them before morning. Pigs ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh, there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed light, drunk on insult. You and me.
Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear. To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past midnight, sick with the thought of another year of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer? You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends. Night wets me all night, blind, carried. And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick, love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil. Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would. I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass not all transparent, and the temperature. I felt that. What you say is not less than that.
You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked- out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth. You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see. You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut. How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud, you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all. But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down. You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.
Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short and baffled, bassett-legged. All things knuckled, I have no winter left, in my sore rememory, to melt down for drinking water. Shrunk down. Your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do, down a swimming pool drain. So I am drained. Sincerely. I wish you every chapped bird on this pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust. Dust is plural: infinite dust. I will sink in the sun, I will crawl towards the heavy drawing and design the curtains in the room of never marrying you. Because it is a sinking, because today’s perfect weather is a later life’s smut. This soiled future unplans love. I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me here. I am sorry my clutch is all tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed kind of muscle and alone. I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine in another room. In another’s.
Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows the great bull has a pasture to himself, monumental, black flanks barely twitching from the swarming flies. Only a few strands of wire separate us—how could I forget my childhood terror, the grownups warning that the old bull near my uncle’s farm would love to chase me, stomp me, gore me if I ever got too close. And so I skirted acres just to keep my distance, peeking through the leaves to see if he still was watching me, waiting for some foolish move— those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground— or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath on my back, and not a fence in sight.
Until then, every forest had wolves in it, we thought it would be fun to wear snowshoes all the time, and we could talk to water. So who is this woman with the gray breath calling out names and pointing to the little desks we will occupy for the rest of our lives?
A Picture from the LifeTo serve with love,And shed your blood, Approved may be above,But here below(Example shew,)‘Tis dangerous to be good.--Lord Oxford Deep in a vale, a stranger now to arms,Too poor to shine in courts, too proud to beg,He, who once warred on Saratoga’s plains,Sits musing o’er his scars, and wooden leg. Remembering still the toil of former days,To other hands he sees his earnings paid;--They share the due reward—he feeds on praise.Lost in the abyss of want, misfortune’s shade. Far, far from domes where splendid tapers glare,‘Tis his from dear bought peace no wealth to win,Removed alike from courtly cringing ‘squires,The great-man’s Levee, and the proud man’s grin. Sold are those arms which once on Britons blazed,When, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came;That power repelled, and Freedom’s fabrick raised,She leaves her soldier—famine and a name!
Save these words for a while because of something they remind you of although you cannot remember what that is a sense that is part dust and part the light of morning you were about to say a name and it is not there I forget them too I am learning to pray to Perdita to whom I said nothing at the time and now she cannot hear me as far as I know but the day goes on looking the names often change more slowly than the meanings whole families grow up in them and then are gone into the anonymous sky oh Perdita does the hope go on after the names are forgotten and is the pain of the past done when the calling has stopped and those betrayals so long repeated that they are taken for granted as the shepherd does with the sheep
Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela  has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment  and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned  to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers after the name has become slightly embarrassing  and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all  for me to say one nightingale is singing nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness  and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its  unknown star on on on never returning never the same never caught while through the small leaves  of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here  lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains it had never happened before and there were so many  things to tell that she had just seen and would never have imagined now a field away I hear another  voice beginning and on the slope there is a third not echoing but varying after the lives  after the goodbyes after the faces and the light after the recognitions and the touching and tears  those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen
Closed Mondays is music is men off early from work is waiting for the chance at the chair while the eagle claws holes in your pockets keeping time by the turning of rusty fans steel flowers with cold breezes is having nothing better to do than guess at the years of hair matted beneath the soiled caps of drunks the pain of running a fisted comb through stubborn knots is the dark dirty low down blues the tender heads of sons fresh from cornrows all wonder at losing half their height is a mother gathering hair for good luck for a soft wig is the round difficulty of ears the peach faced boys asking Eddie to cut in parts and arrows wanting to have their names read for just a few days and among thin jazz is the quick brush of a done head the black flood around your feet grandfathers stopping their games of ivory dominoes just before they reach the bone yard is winking widowers announcingcut it clean off I’m through courting and hair only gets in the way
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospitalEntering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and clouds of smoke,By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some in the pews laid down,At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily,)Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood,The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating,An occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls,The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches,These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,The unknown road still marching.
Take this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow —You are not wrong, who deemThat my days have been a dream;Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.I stand amid the roarOf a surf-tormented shore,And I hold within my handGrains of the golden sand —How few! yet how they creepThrough my fingers to the deep,While I weep — while I weep!O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp?O God! can I not saveOne from the pitiless wave?Is all that we see or seemBut a dream within a dream?
My bands of silk and miniverMomently grew heavier;The black gauze was beggarly thin;The ermine muffled mouth and chin;I could not suck the moonlight in.Harlequin in lozengesOf love and hate, I walked in theseStriped and ragged rigmaroles;Along the pavement my footsolesTrod warily on living coals.Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,In their corrupt disguises clothed,Morality I could not tearFrom my ribs, to leave them bareIvory in silver air.There I walked, and there I raged;The spiritual savage cagedWithin my skeleton, raged afreshTo feel, behind a carnal mesh,The clean bones crying in the flesh.
But of course these poems are about men,  which we become by defining how we are not women  and    so becoming a shadow devouring the light to find the limits  which is what Richard Pryor would have told Joan of Arc in a joke funnier for being sexist  “It’s a man thang.” And of course there is God  and its problematic relationship to light not to mention the question    of permission  Who builds the box, the shape? It makes sense that Jesus, the new man 2,000 years ago  was a carpenter. You need that craft, the precision of measurement  angles of angels who incidentally are never women.  Just ask the Romans, who called them Angelo, Angelus  never Angela—  that lie was coined by a dissident nun hiding her feminism under the cover of rapture but  is it enough to announce yourself? To beat your chest in contrition calling  Mea culpa! Mea culpa? Guilt can never be enough  Mere intent—where is its purpose?  Yet there are no answers there are only lines that disappear  into horizons that girder us with safety  just as there is no way to end this poem.
my mother put down her knife and fork, pulled her wedding ring from its groove, placing it contemplatively on her middle finger. So natural was the move, so tender, I almost didn’t notice. Five years, she said, five years, once a week, I wrote a letter to your father. And waited until time was like ash on my tongue. Not one letter back, not a single note. She sighed, smiling, the weight gone. This prime rib is really tender, isn’t it? she asked.
When he read in the obituary section that he was dead, the famous author was at first amused and flattered. They love me so much, he thought, they have imagined me dead because they fear the loss of my genius above all else. So he put on his hat, combed his goatee to a waxed point, and sauntered out of his flat to attend his own funeral. How literary, he thought, like Huck Finn, and Everyone will be weeping.  He was perturbed, however, when he found that the funeral home was in a bad section of town, next to a tattoo parlor named The Desultory Slut. He walked in past the unmanned front desk, to a back room of frayed velvet and gilt columns, where his coffin was on display, a faux mahogany monstrosity with painted pewter handles. The only people in attendance were four young professors from the local college, with leather patches on the elbows of their ill-fitting tweed jackets and long cruel faces of foxes and rats. He recognized one of them, a gangly fellow with pimply cheeks who had shaken his hand after his last reading and reverently asked for his signature.  Do you have one of my books to sign? the author had asked.  Oh no, the young professor had cried, baring his hairless chest, can you please sign here?  Now the pimply fellow was sitting in a pew, whispering loudly to his neighbor, Isn’t it great, he said, The old bastard finally kicked.  His neighbor nodded silently.  Deeply disturbed, but well aware of the dramatic potential of the moment, the author took this as his cue to step boldly into the room, with a loud Ta daaa!  For some reason, the professors ignored him, and continued their whispering.  For a moment, he was afflicted with a strange vertigo, and stood like a clay golem, without a will of his own. Then a sudden rage took him, and the author snapped out of the spell and strode to the front of the room, waving his arms. Wait, I’m not dead at all. Here I am. It was all a mistake, he cried.  But the professors did not see him. In fact one walked right through him, as if he were merely a ghost or spirit, and rushed up to the coffin. Do you realize what this means? the professor cried, This means we’re free, and he grabbed the body in the coffin and dragged it to the floor. The shocked author saw in the body his own likeness, lips and cheeks rouged into a grotesque semblance of life.  He’s dead, he’s dead. Our enemy is finally dead, they chanted in a frenzy and the professors began trampling on the corpse, weeping with joy and relief.
“Violence is as American as cherry pie.”  —H. Rap Brown, former Black Panther justice minister Thanks for the violence. Thanks for Walt’s rude muscle pushing through the grass, for tiny Gulliver crushed between the giant’s breasts. Thanks for Moby’s triangular hump and Ahab’s castrated leg. Thanks for the harpoons. Thanks for this PBS history of the automatic pistol. The good machine is simple, few moving parts, an efficiency of what’s preserved and what is wasted, so with each shot the recoil cocks the gun to shoot again, then recoil, cock and shoot again, recoil, cock, and so on till the target buys it, or your ammo’s spent. Thanks for the poem, which is really a little pistol: load and cock, point and aim, then the trigger, the hammer, the powder, the discharge, the bullet, the target, the recoil, the crime. No smoking gun, just ballistics, caliber, powder marks, the question why. My life is like a loaded gun, and when I aim it at you I hope to take off the top of your head, no safety on, no playing nice, just the spark, the flash, the damage, just red American cherry pie violence. So, thank you for the harpoon gun we aim at God and death and all the unknown world, and for the spear-stuck beast, rope ripping through torn hands, for what refuses to be caught and what we fathom only by riding the whale down into the deep, refusing to let go.
What I like about your country she tells me is the toilets I wouldn’t mind bringing one home but it wouldn’t do much good she says she likes the bathtubs and the refrigerators but she is not so crazy about the tortillas which are not made properly or the cilantro which tastes like soap Also the freeways ruin the landscape and the children watch television when they could be playing soccer and the teenagers stare at their parents with bare faces that say give it to me and the abuelitos are like dogs to the children the children walk by with no respect mangoes here are not so good not enough rain and the women here have so many clothes I think your country has the most wonderful bathrooms and everyone has a house although tents would be nicer I think or boats or even just sleeping in a tree My family has a tree we live under but the tree has no toilet I grant you that.
Today is a Tuesday, one of many. He has a girl he loves every Tuesday, her day off. He burns at the fine fire of her conscience, tells her they’ll be married someday. He has a wife, Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies. Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard end up at Tuesday’s feet and sprinkled through the sheets. Of course they must make love, since he sees her only once a week. Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother. He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive. He tells this to Tuesday and to Doreen. Doreen tells him he is an ox a brute master of the air and his rightful bed. But Tuesday, who knows oxen are slow moving, dim witted, and castrated at birth, follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer, climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife, leaves rose petals on his doorstep, takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers watches the city disappear in rain. Thinks briefly of how tenderly he rose in her fingers while the remains of their breakfast, eggs and potatoes cooled on the wooden table with the tattered tablecloth.
This is all I am to her now: a pair of legs in running shoes, two arms strung with braided wire. She heaves a carton sagging with CDs at me and I accept it gladly, lifting with my legs, not bending over, raising each foot high enough to clear the step. Fortunate to be of any use to her at all, I wrestle, stooped and single-handed, with her mattress in the stairwell, saying nothing as it pins me, sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner, spiny cactus, five-pound sacks of rice and lentils slumped against my heart: up one flight of stairs and then another, down again with nothing in my arms.
There were words I had to leave behind, moonlight, backward ponies. Leaving flowers out seemed safest. Trying for something surreal, A trouble free rise of smoke and lavender. No not lavender. Any shade of purple is best left alone. Perhaps a jaundiced smoke rising in my poetry would be best, although I like violet haze. Many a summer morning, while other folks are eating bagels, lox, cinnamon rolls, I rummage through old cider houses, find words like obdurate, bipolar, manic, cold heeled. But writing about love, well, not even searches to junkyards as far away as Peking turn up the slightest unused vowel. So, I make words up, create my own language. You Chinese me in the roofy mornings. You Japanese my legs in the spidery evenings. Our children are the leggy offspring of centipede afternoons. Our bedroom is the Acropolis. You temple me backward. I could bless you all the way to shadowland. If we were not already steepled there, our undergarments ruffianed off onto chairs. You catapulted silence, dogkissed, catlicked my paws held my squeaks and rattles. Where the rest had said, What’s this? You said, it’s mine.
The first four leaders had broken knees The four old dams had broken knees The flock would start to run, then freeze The first four leaders had broken knees ‘Why is the flock so docile?’ asked the hawk. ‘Yes, why is the flock so docile,’ laughed the dog, ‘The shepherd’s mallet is in his hand, The shepherd’s hand is on the land, The flock will start to run, then freeze— The four old dams have broken knees,’ The dog explained. The hawk exclaimed: ‘The shepherd leads an easy life!’ ‘I know, I know,’ cried the shepherd’s wife, ‘He dresses me out in a narrow skirt and leaves me home to clean his dirt. Whenever I try to run, I freeze—All the old dams have broken knees.’ ‘Well, I’m so glad he doesn’t dare to bring his breaking power to bear on me,’ said the hawk, flying into the sun; while the dog warned, in his dog run: ‘Hawk—the shepherd has bought a gun!’ ‘Why is the hawk so docile?’ asked the flock, ‘He fell to the ground in a feathery breeze; He lies in a dumb lump under the trees, We believe we’d rather have broken knees Than lose our blood and suddenly freeze Like him.’ But the oldest dam gave her leg a lick, And said, ‘Some die slow and some die quick, A few run away and the rest crawl, But the shepherd never dies at all— Damn his soul. I’d will my wool to the shepherd’s wife If she could change the shepherd’s life, But I myself would bring him low If only, only I knew how.’
am I not olden olden olden it is unwanted. wanting, wanting am I not broken stolen common am I not crinkled cranky poison am I not glinty-eyed and frozen am I not aged shaky glazing am I not hazy guarded craven am I not only stingy little am I not simple brittle spitting was I not over over ridden? it is a long story will you be proud to be my version? it is unwritten. writing, writing am I not ancient raging patient am I not able charming stable was I not building forming braving was I not ruling guiding naming was I not brazen crazy chosen even the stones would do my bidding? it is a long story am I not proud to be your version? it is unspoken. speaking, speaking am I not elder berry brandy are you not wine before you find me in your own beaker?
He called her: golden dawn She called him: the wind whistles He called her: heart of the sky She called him: message bringer He called her: mother of pearl  barley woman, rice provider,  millet basket, corn maid,  flax princess, all-maker, weef She called him: fawn, roebuck,  stag, courage, thunderman,  all-in-green, mountain strider  keeper of forests, my-love-rides He called her: the tree is She called him: bird dancing He called her: who stands,  has stood, will always stand She called him: arriver He called her: the heart and the womb  are similar She called him: arrow in my heart.
and on the waves in turmoil in the harbor gulls floated like pieces of paper set adrift, little boat-like birds twirling in the wind-tossed waves that drove into the strong arms of the seawall at the apex of the bay where a statue of Sappho stands, young woman with a lyre—not looking out to sea but glancing at the curve of the seawall and the birds, those lost notes before rain
for Sappho Let my music be found wanting in comparison to yours (as it must) let me be found loving (as you were) extravagantly the beautiful let me find you and the song (forever) between us in these terrible times
My father’s dying resembles nothing so much as a small village building itself in the mind of a traveler who reads about it and thinks to go there. The journey is imagined in a way not even felt as when years ago I knew my father would die someday. The idea came up as fast as a curve in a road which opens out to an unexpected vista, and now in this journey the road gravel crunches under my tires. I miss some of the streets, get lost, get lost. I find I’m no tourist anymore and settle into the oldest human assignment. Bury your father and live forever as a stranger in that town.
Crooks run the whole world, and the Dow just fell. Crap rules the airwaves. All your best plans stall. The air is dirty, and you don’t feel well. Your wife won’t listen. Friends no longer call. Sad songs from youth no longer cast a spell. Cancer research has run into a wall. Some inflated hack just won the Nobel. You witness clear signs of decline and fall. The neighbors are cold, and your house won’t sell. Your cat has bad teeth. Your paychecks feel small. Maybe you’re really sick. It’s hard to tell. Up ahead, traffic has slowed to a crawl. The world didn’t just start going to hell. You just noticed for the first time, that’s all.
Today outside your prison I stand and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen; you have relatives outside. And there are thousands of ways to escape. Years ago I bent my skill to keep my cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies, and shouted my plans to jailers; but always new plans occured to me, or the new heavy locks bent hinges off, or some stupid jailer would forget and leave the keys. Inside, I dreamed of constellations— those feeding creatures outlined by stars, their skeletons a darkness between jewels, heroes that exist only where they are not. Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought, just as—often, in light, on the open hills— you can pass an antelope and not know and look back, and then—even before you see— there is something wrong about the grass. And then you see. That’s the way everything in the world is waiting. Now—these few more words, and then I’m gone: Tell everyone just to remember their names, and remind others, later, when we find each other. Tell the little ones to cry and then go to sleep, curled up where they can. And if any of us get lost, if any of us cannot come all the way— remember: there will come a time when all we have said and all we have hoped will be all right. There will be that form in the grass.
This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands, and the only heroic thing is the sky. Birds fly here without any sound, unfolding their wings across the open. No people killed—or were killed—on this ground hallowed by neglect and an air so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image—but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon like any human sibling until their furious tempers made the sea writhe. Zeus wore a crown of lightning bolts one minute, a cloak of feathers the next, as driven by earthly lust he prepared to swoop down on Leda. Despite their power, frailty ran through them like the darker veins in the marble of these temples we call monuments. Looking at Jefferson now, I think of the language he left for us to live by. I think of the slave in the kitchen downstairs.
No reverie begs “light” in the blind eye. Reverie says: dig this depth-of-blank Deeper. Dig deeper With the Whale below the white-capped waves— A twitch of his tail, a twitch of his white tail Birthed from ocean-bed the wave That broke calm water into each cracked plank Of the harpooner’s boat, made that man sway, And cast him on the spear his arm meant to cast At you. Beneath the sun’s evil weight Men burn nightwards but never darken Past night. There’s always the moon’s hook On still water to deny them. But Whale, you dive down Until the ocean’s ground begs you solid, “Stop.” Whale, you do not stop. You beat your head against the jagged rocks. Blind in depths so dark light itself is blind, You knock your head against the rocks to see And scratch the god-itch from your thoughts. Flame is jealous of flame, once lit, it ever Reaches higher. You wait, match-tip, White Whale. I see how you wait in silence for silence To say: write it in, tell me who I am now.
Before the God-bullied hull, call me—  Before the God-bullied hull buckles, before  The red flag unfurled on water bucks and drowns,  Before the sky-hawk dives down, before  The nail drives through the sky-hawk’s red-wing—  Call me  the nail driven through the wing  And call me the wing driven through.  A board  On water is buoyant, I know: I cling to wood—  A dictionary buckles and drowns. I know  I do not drown: I’m abridged, afloat, call me— Sir, when my book arrives, when each page You’ve untied lets go the breath it held That was my breath, then my breath will not be mine— I think you’ll know. I know when doors open I mean to keep closed: study-door, desk-drawer. My wife found the key I hid beneath the fern. My pens she did not touch. She did not touch The hundred pages I left blank to fill other days. She took the cracked compass I keep for luck (the needle’s sharp, but stuck), took my green-glass Ink-pot, and centering the compass on my desk, Poured out each dark drop of ink unitl ink Seeped through cracked glass and left the compass Ink-full. The gold needle loosened, floated: a line.  Bent back, I am taking you inside my head  Turning back. Ahab bent  The needle that refused North  back to a magnet’s tow—  Did, Ahab did, after  The needle’s faith answered our question: No.  How do you point at a horizon? Ask me. I know.  Needle out your arm: close eyes:  And turn in a circle. Inscribe a zero on the wood-deck—  The Equator on zero  latitudes lies. That is the truth, I know Sir, what name that bay a last page carves Out of no shore: ice? glacier? greenland? strand, shoal-of-white-sand? an artic-calm?
The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that   comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling   with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds,   a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller   coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches,   making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass,   set properly, I have class enough.
Anna Kyle Brown. Osage. 1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma. Because she died where the ravine falls into water. Because they dragged her down to the creek. In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt. Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring. Because I turned the log with my foot. Her slippers floated downstream into the dam. Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.   Because she lived without our mother. Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land. She was carrying his offspring. The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning. Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull. Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed. But then froze under the weight of frost. During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.
At times they will fly under. The dome contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome. Creatures awake, asleep, at play, aglow: they float – unbottled genii – under the dome. Southern Belle, a splash of black, dusted with gold, dissembles, assembling, acts shy under the dome. Cattleheart, Giant Swallowtail, Clipper: sail, navigate sky high under the dome. Like confetti – a wedding – bits of Rice Paper: sheer mimicry under the dome. Magnificent Owl, in air, a pansy, it feeds, wings up, eye to eye, under the dome.   Name them: Monarch, then Queen, last Viceroy. What will scientists deify under the dome?   Basking against a leaf: a Banded Orange, displayed like a bowtie under the dome. A living museum. Exist to be observed: never migrate, but live, then die, under the dome. Lips, lashes, eyes. From outside in, do beings magnify under the dome?Lepidoptera. From the Greek: Scale-wing. Chrysalis. Stay, butterfly, under the dome.
Think of the woman who first touched fire to a hollow stone filled with seal oil, how she fiddled with fuel and flame until blue shadows before and after her filled her house, crowded the underground, then fled like sky-captains chasing the aurora’s whale tale green beyond the earth’s curve. Her tenth summer, the elders let her raise her issum, seal pup orphaned when hunters brought in her mother, their grins of plenty broad, red. The women slit the hard belly. Plopped among the ruby innards steaming on rough-cut planks blinked a new sea-child whose first sound came out a question in the old language, a question that in one throaty bark asked who, meaning What family is this? What comfort do you provide for guests? Do you let strangers remain strangers? The women rinsed the slick pup in cool water, crafted a pouch for her to suck. Then the young girl whose hands held light even when the room did not brought this new being beside her bed, let it scatter babiche and split birch gathered for snowshoes, let it nose the caribou neck hairs bearding her dance fans. They held up the fans to their foreheads, playing white hair, playing old. In the time when women do not sew the seal danced at her first potlatch. And when the lamps burned down, no one could see any difference between waves in rock, waves in sea. The pup lifted her nose, licked salt from seven stars, and slipped light back among silvers and chum light among the ghostly belugas swimming far north to offer themselves.
Not one star, not even the half moon   on the night you were born Not the flash of salmon  nor ridges on blue snow Not the flicker of raven’s  never-still eye Not breath frozen in fine hairs  beading the bull moose’s nostril Not one hand under flannel  warming before reaching Not burbot at home under Tanana ice  not burbot pulled up into failing light Not the knife blade honed, not the leather sheath Not raw bawling in the dog yard  when the musher barks gee Not the gnawed ends of wrist-thick sticks  mounded over beaver dens Not solar flares scouring the earth over China Not rime crystals bearding a sleek cheek of snow Not six minutes more of darkness each day Not air water food words touch Not art Not anything we expect Not anything we expect to keep Not anything we expect to keep us alive Not the center of the sea Not the birthplace of the waves Not the compass too close to true north to guide us Then with no warning  flukes of three orcas  rise, arc clear of sea water
Barely twenty-five, he smells of yesterday’s spit and vomit, black beard droops in clumps from his drawn, sun-savaged face. Hanging from a string around his neck: a small holy book. This man was once a child held against the breast of a mother who kissed his small meaty hands that smelled of milk and tears.
I could have anything I wanted from the maws of the vending machines that stood watch over the waiting room of my stepfather’s Shell station. Larry or Chubbs would fish out keys with grimy fingers, swing open the face of the machine, reveal its innards stacked columns of soda or candy bars. Outside the constant ding of the bell as cars pulled in for gas, directions, air in the tires, a clean windshield, drivers impatient for destination, and Chubbs or Larry would dash, leave me to choose: Planter’s Peanut Bar or Nestle’s Crunch, Coke or orange or chocolate pop. Grit covered that tiny room, layered on maps in their laddered racks, dusting the globe of the gumball machine, sifted over neat rows of motor oil in silver cans, smudging the white pages of homework I filled with painstaking script. I breathed the stink of petroleum, kicked at the legs of a yellow plastic chair with my black and white school oxfords, waiting for my stepfather who was supposed to watch me till my mother got off work. Nine was too young, she thought, to stay at home alone. But every day he’d disappear, banged-up Chevy gone from the lot, the men in oil-streaked uniforms shrugging excuses. “Anything she wants,” he’d instructed them, and I watched the clock as the sky darkened and the bright shell glowed against night. My new bra was too tight; I hugged my three-ring binder to hide my roll of belly from Larry, from Chubbs, and sucked the dregs of chocolate pop or lemon-lime.
for C. Like shoes she chose for comfort, not for style, that fit her contours without chafe or blistering Here is sanity. It took her years to arrive, like an explorer settling at last into uneasy retirement, a small cottage at the edge of the sea. How the breakers crash against the underpinnings; still, the walls hold firm. Hearth blazing steadily, she tries to warm to it tells herself she is mature now, this is good. The days of stalking, done, the rabid pulse, the blood-drenched kisses, all behind her now. Wearied, finally, of careless cruelties, she will stay here, grow old   with you. And, sensible, lacking her gift for self-deception, you know she struggles with devotion, you listen as she moans inside her dreams, and watch, without remarking, as she tracks the tap of high heels just beyond the window, their rhythm growing fainter with each step.
Detroit – where the weak are killed and eaten.   – T-shirt slogan, circa 1990 . . . the 33 year old woman . . . leapt to her death . . . from a crowded bridge that . . . connects Detroit . . . with its famous island park, Belle Isle. She was trying to escape the 300-pound man whose car she had accidentally bumped into. According to police, the man had smashed her car windows with a tire iron, dragged her from the vehicle – stripping off most of her clothes in the process – slammed her against the hood of her car and pounded her with his fists. Deletha Word . . . could not swim . . . She jumped into the water 40 feet below.  – James Ricci, Los Angeles Times [August 31, 1995] The road to the afterlife – There was . . . a river that had only one bridge across it . . . This bridge was guarded by a dog that jumped at souls and made many of them fall into the river and drown.  – Bruce G. Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North   Not really a river at all, but a handshake between two Great Lakes, Huron stretching to embrace Erie in its green-gray grasp. You stitch the liquid boundary of a city dismantling itself, bricks unmortared, spires sagging, burnt out structures razed to open field. Prairies returning here, foxtails and chicory, Queen Anne’s lace sways; tumbleweeds amble down Woodward Avenue, blow past fire hydrants, storefronts and rusted Cadillacs. You are the mirror into which we plunge. Towers of a stillborn renaissance bend to admire their vacant beauty; automobiles built in Mexico catch the chrome reflection of your waves. They speed across the bridge to the island whose willows spill their tears against your breast. Darkness closes our eyes; the park empties, bridge bears a chain of headlights. Perfume of exhaust drifts over your blackened currents; cars jostle for their place in line. Not the fist of one man but the sucker punch of a city taking scrappy pride in its bruised countenance. One bumper kisses another like gunshot; the town explodes. You swallow the blood of a woman’s shattered cheekbone, pressed to metal hood, scorched by engine’s heat. Who wanna buy some of dis bitch – she got to pay fo’ my car.
There’s a farm auction up the road.Wind has its bid in for the leaves.Already bugs flurry the headlightsbetween cornfields at night.If this world were permanent,I could dance full as the squaw dresson the clothesline.I would not see winterin the square of white yard-light on the wall.But something tugs at me.The world is at a loss and I am part of itmigrating daily.Everything is up for grabslike a box of farm tools broken open.I hear the spirits often in the gardenand along the shore of corn.I know this place is not mine.I hear them up the road again.This world is a horizon, an open sea.Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.
Please! Keep reading me Blake because you’re going to make me the greatest poet of all time Keep smoothing the stones in the driveway let me fry an egg on your ass & I’ll pick up the mail. I feel your absence in the morning & imagine your instant mouth let me move in with you— Travelling wrapping your limbs on my back I grow man woman Child I see wild wild wild Keep letting the day be massive Unlicensed Oh please have my child  I’m a little  controlling  Prose has some  Magic. Morgan had a whore in her lap. You Big fisherman I love my Friends. I want to lean my everything with you make home for your hubris I want to read the words you circld over and over again A slow skunk walking across the road Yellow, just kind of pausing picked up the warm laundry. I just saw a coyote tippy tippy tippy I didn’t tell you about the creature with hair long hair, it was hit by cars on the highway Again and again. It had long grey hair It must’ve been a dog; it could’ve been Ours. Everyone loses their friends. I couldn’t tell anyone about this sight. Each defeat Is sweet.
You’re like a little fruit you’re like a moon I want to hold I said lemon slope about your hip because it’s one of my words about you I whispered in bed this smoothing the fruit & then alone with my book but writing in it the pages wagging against my knuckles in the light like a sail.
The morning air is all awash with angels—Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”   The eyes open to a blue telephone In the bathroom of this five-star hotel. I wonder whom I should call? A plumber, Proctologist, urologist, or priest? Who is blessed among us and most deserves The first call? I choose my father because He’s astounded by bathroom telephones. I dial home. My mother answers. “Hey, Ma,” I say, “Can I talk to Poppa?” She gasps, And then I remember that my father Has been dead for nearly a year. “Shit, Mom,” I say. “I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry— How did I forget?” “It’s okay,” she says. “I made him a cup of instant coffee This morning and left it on the table— Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years— And I didn’t realize my mistake Until this afternoon.” My mother laughs At the angels who wait for us to pause During the most ordinary of days And sing our praise to forgetfulness Before they slap our souls with their cold wings. Those angels burden and unbalance us. Those fucking angels ride us piggyback. Those angels, forever falling, snare us And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.
The Magic of Numbers—1 How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs! I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two. The Magic of Numbers—2 You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on. I was nineteen, and you were seven. The Magic of Numbers—3 Yes, but does X really like us? We were both twenty-seven. The Magic of Numbers—4 You look like Jerry Lewis (1950). The Magic of Numbers—5 Grandfather and grandmother want you to go over to their house for dinner. They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half. The Magic of Numbers—6 One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened. The Magic of Numbers—7 No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library! Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was twenty-nine, and you were sixteen. The Magic of Numbers—8 After we made love one night in Rockport I went outside and kissed the road I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen. The Magic of Numbers—9 I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time. Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I did was turned into a poem.
I set forth one misted white day of June Beneath the great Atlantic rainway, and heard: “Honestly you smite worlds of truth, but Lose your own trains of thought, like a pigeon. Did you once ride in Kenneth’s machine?” “Yes, I rode there, an old man in shorts, blind, Who had lost his way in the filling station; Kenneth was kind.” “Did he fill your motionless ears with resonance and stain?” “No, he spoke not as a critic, but as a man.” “Tell me, what did he say?” “He said, ‘My eyes are the white sky, the gravel on the groundway my sad lament.’” “And yet he drives between the two. . . .” “Exactly, Jane, And that is the modern idea of fittingness, To, always in motion, lose nothing, although beneath the Rainway they move in threes and twos completely Ruined for themselves, like moving pictures.” “But how other?” “Formulalessness, to go from the sun Into love’s sweet disrepair. He would fondly express ‘Rain trees’—which is not a poem, ‘rain trees. . . .’” “Still, it is mysterious to have an engine That floats bouquets! and one day in the rear-vision Mirror of his car we vowed delight, The insufficiency of the silverware in the sunlight, The dreams he steals from and smiles, losing gain.” “Yet always beneath the rainway unsyntactical Beauty might leap up!” “That we might sing From smiles’ ravines, ‘Rose, the reverse of everything, May be profaned or talked at like a hat.’” “Oh that was sweet and short, like the minuet Of stars, which would permit us to seem our best friends By silver’s eminent lights! For nature is so small, ends Falsely reign, distending the time we did Behind our hope for body-work, riding with Kenneth.” Their voicing ceased, then started again, to complain That we are offered nothing when it starts to rain In the same way, though we are dying for the truth.
I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut That will solve a murder case unsolved for years Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window Through which he saw her head, connecting with Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years; For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us; I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields Always, to be near you, even in my heart When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to The place where I again think of you, a new Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow Of a ship which sails From Hartford to Miami, and I love you Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun Receives me in the questions which you always pose.
I The leaves of blue came drifting down. In the corner Madeleine Reierbacher was reading Lorna Doone. The bay’s water helped to implement the structuring of the garden hose. The envelope fell. Was it pink or was it red? Consult Lorna Doone. There, voyager, you will find your answer. The savant grapeade stands Remember Madeleine Reierbacher. Madeleine Reierbacher says, “If you are happy, there is no one to keep you from being happy; Don’t let them!” Madeleine Reierbacher went into the racing car. The racing car was orange and red. Madeleine Reierbacher drove to Beale Street. There Maddy doffed her garments to get into some more comfortable clothes. Jazz was already playing in Beale Street when Madeleine Reierbacher arrived there. Madeleine Reierbacher picked up the yellow horn and began to play. No one had ever heard anything comparable to the playing of Madeleine Reierbacher. What a jazz musician! The pianist missed his beats because he was so excited. The drummer stared out the window in ecstasy at the yellow wooden trees. The orchestra played “September in the Rain,” “Mugging,” and “I’m Full of Love.” Madeleine Reierbacher rolled up her sleeves; she picked up her horn; she played “Blues in the Rain.” It was the best jazz anyone had ever heard. It was mentioned in the newspapers. St. Louis! Madeleine Reierbacher became a celebrity. She played with Pesky Summerton and Muggsy Pierce. Madeleine cut numerous disks. Her best waxings are “Alpha Beta and Gamma” And “Wing Song.” One day Madeleine was riding on a donkey When she came to a yellow light; the yellow light did not change. Madeleine kept hoping it would change to green or red. She said, “As long as you have confidence, You need be afraid of nothing.” Madeleine saw the red smokestacks, she looked at the thin trees, And she regarded the railroad tracks. The yellow light was unchanging. Madeleine’s donkey dropped dead From his mortal load. Madeleine Reierbacher, when she fell to earth, Picked up a blade of grass and began to play. “The Blues!” cried the workmen of the vicinity, And they ran and came in great numbers to where Madeleine Reierbacher was. They saw her standing in that simple field beside the railroad track Playing, and they saw that light changing to green and red, and they saw that donkey stand up And rise into the sky; and Madeleine Reierbacher was like a clot of blue In the midst of the blue of all that sky, and the young farmers screamed In excitement, and the workmen dropped their heavy boards and stones in their excitement, And they cried, “O Madeleine Reierbacher, play us the ‘Lead Flint Blues’ once again!” O railroad stations, pennants, evenings, and lumberyards! When will you ever bring us such a beautiful soloist again? An argent strain shows on the reddish face of the sun. Madeleine Reierbacher stands up and screams, “I am getting wet! You are all egotists!” Her brain floats up into the lyric atmosphere of the sky. We must figure out a way to keep our best musicians with us. The finest we have always melt in the light blue sky! In the middle of a concert, sometimes, they disappear, like anvils. (The music comes down to us with sweet white hands on our shoulders.) We stare up in surprise; and we hear Madeleine’s best-known tune once again, “If you ain’t afraid of life, life can’t be afraid for you.” Madeleine! Come back and sing to us!  2 Dick looked up from his blackboard. Had he really written a history of the jazz age? He stared at his television set; the technicolor jazz program was coming on. The program that day was devoted to pictures of Madeleine Reierbacher Playing her saxophone in the golden age of jazz. Dick looked at his blackboard. It was a mass of green and orange lines. Here and there a red chalk line interlaced with the others. He stared attentively at the program. It was a clear and blue white day. Amos said, “The calibration is finished. Now there need be no more jazz.” In his mountain home old Lucas Dog laughed when he heard what Amos had said. He smilingly picked up his yellow horn to play, but all that came out of it was steam.
the winged thang built her dream palace amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough she did not know it was urban turf disguised as serenely delusionally rural nor did she know the neighborhood was rife with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil that slowly polluted the earth, and was never to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below following her nature she flitted and dove for whatever blades twigs and mud could be found under the humming blue and created a hatchery for her spawn not knowing all were doomed
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM, With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision. THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Then along that riverbank A thousand miles Tattooed cannibals danced in files; Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors, “BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors, “Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,” A roaring, epic, rag-time tune From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon. Death is an Elephant, Torch-eyed and horrible, Foam-flanked and terrible. BOOM, steal the pygmies, BOOM, kill the Arabs, BOOM, kill the white men, HOO, HOO, HOO. Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell. Listen to the creepy proclamation, Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation, Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay, Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: — “Be careful what you do, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all of the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”
There are many people who come back After the doctor has smoothed the sheet Around their body And left the room to make his call. They die but they live. They are called the dead who lived through their deaths, And among my people They are considered wise and honest. They float out of their bodies And light on the ceiling like a moth, Watching the efforts of everyone around them. The voices and the images of the living Fade away. A roar sucks them under The wheels of a darkness without pain. Off in the distance There is someone Like a signalman swinging a lantern. The light grows, a white flower. It becomes very intense, like music. They see the faces of those they loved, The truly dead who speak kindly. They see their father sitting in a field. The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended. There is a towel around his neck, The odor of bay rum. Then they see their mother Standing behind him with a pair of shears. The wind is blowing. She is cutting his hair. The dead have told these stories To the living.
You find yourself in a narrow bed you’ve never slept in,on a tree-lined grassy field you’ve never walked upon,on a cold toilet seat you have not sat on,in a place you now call your home, your learning, your future.Red stone pathways expose the buildings that will housethe knowledge you seek,and the information you want to gather.You crane your neck to look upat the 13-story brick tower rising from the ground,looming over you as you walk past. The melodiesand beats of different songs mix,create a sound of their own,flow from open windows. Crushed leeksTop Ramen noodles ground into a blueand speckled carpet attract armies of antsto the communal kitchen on the sixth floor.You pull your jacket tighter against your body,strong, salty wind whips off the Sound,and up the hill as you walk throughRed Square toward the clatter of knives,forks and digesting bellies.Finally, you are released like a white dovefrom the hands of its owner, allowed to flydiscovering your dreams,discovering what you are made of.
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a man for farming, say the fields cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn. A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves covered with oilcloth, and they had a child, says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole. And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. It was lonely here, says the narrow country road. Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storm—a rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned from war with stories slumped over their shoulders; their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick and tangled with the names of the dead. None could explain how the flood of life all around them escaped like water from between cupped hands, how the bodies of men they loved began to crust the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived. When I came home from college proud, my educated mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy and I saw the names of my friends, the young men I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behindLil’ Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god could make one life possible and strip the world clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.
I My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight with its flowers and plants, alien and odd in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct. The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest, places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers. The upper body above the navel—an English park pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike, humanlike, in our image, after our likeness, its arms linking up with the big night all around. And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve, wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve, and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth polished stones with dark vegetation between them, precise paths fraught with meaning and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father and the commandments of my mother are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play are my children. And the life my life.  2 I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea. The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these, are the stars above me that cannot be numbered.  3 And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt: the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land, two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left. Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert, perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.  4 Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are.  5 What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait. I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable (the one thing that’s stable in this world), I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree, run back to the camera, press the timer, run back again to that place near the tree, and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution. That is my life span. God develops the picture in His big darkroom. And here is the picture: white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy, eyebrows black, like the charred lintels above the windows in a house that burned down. My life span is over.  6 I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah, I wasn’t even among the survivors. And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt. I came to the Promised Land by sea. No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope, I still have within me the lust to search for living water with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows. Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers. Jewish history and world history grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year get ahead of each other or fall behind, leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion. Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide, or to sink all the way down.  7 I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment millions of human beings are standing at crossroads and intersections, in jungles and deserts, showing each other where to turn, what the right way is, which direction. They explain exactly where to go, what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop and ask again. There, over there. The second turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right, near the white house, by the oak tree. They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there, as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion. I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.
What did I know, what did I know Of gazing silences and terrored stone Brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten The auroral darkness which is God Then you arrived, meditative, ironic My head gripped in bony vice Mouth of agony shaping a cry it cannot utter What did I know, what did I know Of a changing permanence The stains and dirty tools of struggle Weaving a wish and a weariness together Years before your time. Years and years I gaze through layered light Within the rock of the undiscovered suns I see, I walk with you among The landscape lush, metallic, flayed Behind us, beyond us now The very sunlight here seems flammable
He promises a canary dress, white gloves, says they’ll eat chops, thick as her thighs, that they’ll order doubles of the “finest,” see all the Big Names when they arrive. But it’s the thought of them dead: half of what they own draped around them, her head against his chest, his back slack against the headboard, all their letters unopened, bills not paid, long knocks, the notices tacked outside their door. It’s not knowing whether some smell would introduce them to their neighbors or a landlord wheeling them out into the hallway; the highboy he chipped on the drive up, the silver she inherited from her mother, her hatboxes, stacked high next to them like a wedding cake waiting to be buried. He heard that “up there” the wind had talons sharp enough to hook a grown man beneath his collarbone and carry him a full city block. He heard that you learned the months by measuring the length of their shadows and even summer was like a quality of night.
On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man’s birthplace, son’s name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found one another, they will not find a perfect rest. Only this stone lies calmly on my desk and says “Amen.” But now the fragments are gathered up in lovingkindness by a sad good man. He cleanses them of every blemish, photographs them one by one, arranges them on the floor in the great hall, makes each gravestone whole again, one again: fragment to fragment, like the resurrection of the dead, a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle. Child’s play.
Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery. See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at him, at all his goods, how his whole body becomes song, an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope. Listen as he lets loose an opus, night’s national anthem, the tune you can’t name, but can’t stop humming. There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.
we must know a force greater than our weaknesses  —Jean Toomer like most boys, ignorant or fearful of beauty, we pinned back the wings of butterflies and plucked off their legs, and watched and watched them tumble from leaves like pinecones wheeling from rooftops; and we laughed. we crumbled alka-seltzer for the pigeons, “those flying rats” my mother’s ex-husband once called. their bodies floundering like toys flung from a window. white foam from their mouths stark against the asphalt framing their artless convulsions and we laughed with open-mouths until tears dripped from our chins and our throats were raw with the rightness of god.
I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! Fore! I hate you. The little blue-green speck of sock lint I'm trying to dig from under my third toenail, left foot, hates you. The history of this keychain hates you. My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you. The goldfish of my genius hates you. My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors. A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you. My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate. My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate. My pleasant "good morning": hate. You know how when I'm sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate. The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it. My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you. Layers of hate, a parfait. Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate, I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure. My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you, Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.
as freedom is a breakfastfood or truth can live with right and wrong or molehills are from mountains made —long enough and just so long will being pay the rent of seem and genius please the talentgang and water most encourage flame as hatracks into peachtrees grow or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair and every finger is a toe and any courage is a fear —long enough and just so long will the impure think all things pure and hornets wail by children stung or as the seeing are the blind and robins never welcome spring nor flatfolk prove their world is round nor dingsters die at break of dong and common’s rare and millstones float —long enough and just so long tomorrow will not be too late worms are the words but joy’s the voice down shall go which and up come who breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs deeds cannot dream what dreams can do —time is a tree(this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough
Poets' Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003 The massed and pillared wings of the White House never fly—  whitewashed yearly, they stand impervious  to metaphor, to hawk and dove, and red armies of ants. Only the halting squirrels  investigate, creeping past the arrowhead gates to scratch  the Midas lawns for treasure—On the street, commentators wander like boys in a story too simple  to explain. The political message, a hat  punched inside out: once, the Nazis got word that Churchill would visit Roosevelt "in Casa Blanca":  U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac, waiting for him...  but Churchill, as he said, was sailing to Morocco. Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon  walls daily with cow blood— soldiers waxed  the plaster, and triremes of rats licked the bloody grass; the EPA sent health goons to stomp  them, and the pacifists, away— Then rats stormed  the National Zoo: urbane, patient inheritors of the earth, they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones;  vigilante zookeepers laced the ground with poison,  Carthage delenda est, and killed the hippo. (Here, in the New World Order, penguin and polar bear  soak up ozone, and Nation shall beat them both  into ploughshares....) Hawks and fat cats disdained the White House squirrels, their proconsul  Chevy Suburban nosed us aside: we spoke  against the war, and for the cameras, spelled our names on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly  loitered at the lobbiest bar, read first,  then left us to the falange of Secret Servicemen, chatting like critics into their black  lapels at every bungled line: this was no  singing school, no falcon heard our crows and warbles... Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate:  "Mrs. Bush wanted American poems— I brought  3,000, all against the war. Can you take them?" Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt  for help; older hands hustled up, "The Great Oz  cannot see you..." etc. Will four and twenty blackbirds fill a cowboy hat? Bunkered belowdecks,  the President goes for the burn, racing the  cut tongue of his treadmill to a dead heat. Even Nixon met the enemy once,  strode with his staff into a red sea of hippies—  they didn't part, and he burbled about baseball... from his desk, he liked to watch  the sightseers through a gap in the hedges;  peaceniks learned this and blocked his view, stood there day and night for years:  Nixon, nightmare reality shanking through his eyes,  knelt with Kissinger: Henry, he moaned, what do they want?.... Days from now, how many days,  the Valentine "Woo at the Zoo" begins. A hand-raised  falcon bows, and shares meat with its master.... He bows in turn, and eats;  both softly whisper ee-chu, ee-chu,
How untouchable the girls arm-locked strutting up the main hall of Central High unopposed for decades looked. I flattened myself against the wall, unnerved by their cloudsea of élan, which pounced upon any timid girl regrettably in their way, their high-wattage lifting slow motion like curls of light strands of honey. The swagger behind their blue-tinted sunglasses and low-rider jeans hurt boys like me, so vast the worlds between us, even the slightest whiff of recognition, an accidental side glance, an unintended tongue-piercing display of Juicy Fruit chew, was intoxicating and could wildly cast a chess-playing geek into a week-long surmise of inner doubts, likelihoods, and depressions. You might say my whole life led to celebrating youth and how it snubs and rebuffs. Back then I learned to avoid what I feared and to place my third-string hopes on a game-winning basketball shot, sure it would slow them to a stop, pan their lip-glossed smiles, blessing me with their cool.
On Friday, at twilight of a summer day While the smells of food and prayer rose from every house And the sound of the Sabbath angels’ wings was in the air, While still a child I started to lie to my father: “I went to another synagogue.” I don’t know if he believed me or not But the taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue And in all the houses that night Hymns rose up along with lies To celebrate the Sabbath. And in all the houses that night Sabbath angels died like flies in a lamp, And lovers put mouth to mouth, Blew each other up until they floated upward, Or burst. And since then the lie has been good and sweet on my tongue And since then I always go to another synagogue. And my father returned the lie when he died: “I’ve gone to another life.”
on the top shelf of the closet is the hat my father wears on special occasions it rests next to the large jar he saves pennies in his head is always bare when i see him walking in the street i once sat in his bedroom watching him search between sweaters and suits looking for something missing a tie perhaps then he stopped and slowly walked to the closet took the hat from the shelf i sat on the bed studying his back waiting for him to turn and tell me who died
“Take me with you” my mother says standing in her nightgown as, home from college, I prepare to leave before dawn. The desolation she must face was once my concern but like a bobber pulled beneath the surface by an inedible fish she vanished into the life he offered her. It stopped occurring to me she might return. “I’ll be back” I say and then I go.
The potato that ate all its carrots, can see in the dark like a mole,its eyes the scarsfrom centuries of shovels, tines.May spelled backwardsbecause it hates the light,pawing its way, padding along, there in the catacombs.
A Stranger came to the door at eve, And he spoke the bridegroom fair. He bore a green-white stick in his hand, And, for all burden, care. He asked with the eyes more than the lips For a shelter for the night, And he turned and looked at the road afar Without a window light. The bridegroom came forth into the porch With, ‘Let us look at the sky, And question what of the night to be, Stranger, you and I.’The woodbine leaves littered the yard, The woodbine berries were blue, Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind; ‘Stranger, I wish I knew.’Within, the bride in the dusk alone Bent over the open fire, Her face rose-red with the glowing coal And the thought of the heart’s desire. The bridegroom looked at the weary road, Yet saw but her within, And wished her heart in a case of gold And pinned with a silver pin. The bridegroom thought it little to give A dole of bread, a purse, A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God, Or for the rich a curse; But whether or not a man was asked To mar the love of two By harboring woe in the bridal house, The bridegroom wished he knew.
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—And that was why it whispered and did not speak.It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weakTo the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
For Ben’s project he must research five facts about his African-American hero and write them on poster board. He chooses Harriet Tubman, whose five facts are: Her father’s name was Ben.Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was bornin 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Marylandand died in New York. Ben asks for advice about his fifth fact and I suggest: She led more than300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does now and says, Everyone knows that, Mom.   So I try to remember the book we read yesterday, search for the perfect fact, the one that will match his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind.Remember, I ask, she was a spy for the North during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it:Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during the civil war. It was a war between the northwhich is where the slaves were trying to getand the south which is where they were.Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a formthat said All the slaves everywhere are free!which is one of the reasons they were fighting.   On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken and Fish in the ‘Hood and Top Twins Faze II Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes.   There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue from the Soldier’s Home to the White House – much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood, at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around his street corner every morning to bow to the president at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home. But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died, all the centuries we drag into the next century and the next.   Writing here, in my new neighborhood, the city old and new around me, I see Harriet Tubman and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys.   North up Georgia Avenue in our own soldiers’ home – Walter Reed – the boys and now girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms and our capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet? Harriet Tubman born so close. All these heroes under our feet.
it was right about the time they started drafting for the iraqi war snookie came to sign up but he didn’t walk through the door, instead he leaped like a madman right through the plate glass & kicked the recruiting sergeant square in his no-good ass he said, “i wanna go to the desert, kill some arab chump & drink his hot blood like water from a barnyard pump i wanna get bit on my nose by a scorpion wit a bad attitude i wanna smoke twelve packs a day & eat snake heart for food i wanna drink poison gas with a side order of sand & dance with a nuclear missile while digging the junkyard band i wanna jump in an oil well & get real slick then have me a party with some them mooslim chicks cause i’m snookie johnson from a bad neighborhood & when i get ciced up i don’t mean nobody good so sign me up sergeant & sign me up fast i’m just raring to kick me some motherfuckin ass” the sergeant looked at snookie with nothing but disgust knowing he was the kind of nigga can’t nobody trust “you too damn crazy for the military,” the sarge said wit a frown snookie gave him a sheet of paper & said, “yo man, write dat down.”
She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory. If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know. But there are no palm trees on the street, and dish water gives back no images.
In america, I place my ring on your cock where it belongs. No horsemen bearing terror, no soldiers of doom will swoop in and sweep us apart. They’re too busy looting the land to watch us. They don’t know we need each other critically. They expect us to call in sick, watch television all night, die by our own hands. They don’t know we are becoming powerful. Every time we kiss we confirm the new world coming. What the rose whispers before blooming I vow to you. I give you my heart, a safe house. I give you promises other than milk, honey, liberty. I assume you will always be a free man with a dream. In america, place your ring on my cock where it belongs. Long may we live to free this dream.
And who shall separate the dust What later we shall be: Whose keen discerning eye will scan And solve the mystery? The high, the low, the rich, the poor, 
 The black, the white, the red, 
 And all the chromatique between, 
 Of whom shall it be said: Here lies the dust of Africa; 
 Here are the sons of Rome; 
 Here lies the one unlabelled, 
 The world at large his home! Can one then separate the dust? 
 Will mankind lie apart, 
 When life has settled back again 
 The same as from the start?
conjured in a closet; seven minutes in a delusive boon deep breaths shallow, ankles stretched, entwined ribs padded with throbs, bells and trance it never ended and then it ended the spell distant, retrospect, precious the doorways, hall- ways, the fleeting pitter patters gaze up a long flight of stairs something’s still there to behold is it sorcery or charm? invoke a comely name for it recall your palms flattening my thrum, my thrum, my good judgment groped, ravaged, delirious
When I was nearly six my father
 opened his magic doctor bag:
 two tongue depressors fastened by
 a rubber band;
 one flick of his hairy wrist
 and lo! we invented
 flight.
my swing is more mellow these days: not the hardbop drive i used to roll but more of a cool foxtrot. my eyes still close when the rhythm locks; i’ve learned to boogie with my feet on the floor i’m still movin’, still groovin’ still fallin’ in love i bop to the bass line now. the trap set paradiddles ratamacues & flams that used to spin me in place still set me off, but i bop to the bass line now i enter the tune from the bottom up & let trumpet & sax wheel above me so don’t look for me in the treble don’t look for me in the fly staccato splatter of the hot young horn no, you’ll find me in the nuance hanging out in inflection & slur i’m the one executing the half-bent dip in the slow slowdrag with the smug little smile & the really cool shades
I stumble down around torn peaks  “Fit the right suit  to trick them all.”  the questions fall  around allure. Poems floated  from the hearth  sparks  out the mouth. I am wound up, bored we are only strangers on our way the hotel turned slender to mind  now written out (sloppy)  to music  dark brown wood  gold mirrors  (tight)  The drinking songs from upper stories drag us to sleep a bend in the basement wall  unexplained  scorched. pulling on clean clothes  I let myself out  walk up  underground  to a far off hill  smoke on top “The orchestra of the  immense magnified  inner life  is now prodigious.” the strings sound down  make the surface of a mirror  & hang the head  my forbidden past  Rose & Silk  the wine is young  The brooks still hum  with melted snow
“That God is colouring Newton doth shew”—William Blake  Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence. I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence as if there could stand some solidity most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space. The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne.  It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end. For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be as my own awaits me immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me. The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality. There are too many listeners. There are too many voices in the one line. They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him. The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number and moves to isolate his heresy. The number is no longer the same. He has gone back into the exchange of numbers. The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures.  This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you. I belong to the company without number. I shall live one hundred years and then be gone. Here and now only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here. His, the horizon. His, the perspectives and outlines. His, the regulation of the relevant. I will willingly assume his numbers among my own.  The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.
The dog trots freely in the street and sees reality and the things he sees are bigger than himself and the things he sees are his reality Drunks in doorways Moons on trees The dog trots freely thru the street and the things he sees are smaller than himself Fish on newsprint Ants in holes Chickens in Chinatown windows their heads a block away The dog trots freely in the street and the things he smells smell something like himself The dog trots freely in the street past puddles and babies cats and cigars poolrooms and policemen He doesn’t hate cops He merely has no use for them and he goes past them and past the dead cows hung up whole in front of the San Francisco Meat Market He would rather eat a tender cow than a tough policeman though either might do And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory and past Coit’s Tower and past Congressman Doyle He’s afraid of Coit’s Tower but he’s not afraid of Congressman Doyle although what he hears is very discouraging very depressing very absurd to a sad young dog like himself to a serious dog like himself But he has his own free world to live in His own fleas to eat He will not be muzzled Congressman Doyle is just another fire hydrant to him The dog trots freely in the street and has his own dog’s life to live and to think about and to reflect upon touching and tasting and testing everything investigating everything without benefit of perjury a real realist with a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with a real live  barking  democratic dog engaged in real  free enterprise with something to say  about ontology something to say  about reality  and how to see it  and how to hear it with his head cocked sideways  at streetcorners as if he is just about to have  his picture taken  for Victor Records  listening for  His Master’s Voice  and looking  like a living questionmark  into the  great gramaphone  of puzzling existence  with its wondrous hollow horn  which always seems  just about to spout forth  some Victorious answer  to everything
Brown gas-fog, white beneath the street lamps. Cut off on three sides, all space filled with our bodies.  Bodies that stumble in brown airlessness, whitened in light, a mildew glare,  that stumble hand in hand, blinded, retching. Wanting it, wanting to be here, the body believing it’s dying in its nausea, my head clear in its despair, a kind of joy, knowing this is by no means death, is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant. Wanting it, wanting  with all my hunger this anguish,  this knowing in the body the grim odds we’re up against, wanting it real. Up that bank where gas curled in the ivy, dragging each other up, strangers, brothers and sisters. Nothing will do but to taste the bitter taste. No life other, apart from.
Let the musicians begin, Let every instrument awaken and instruct us In love’s willing river and love’s dear discipline: We wait, silent, in consent and in the penance Of patience, awaiting the serene exaltation Which is the liberation and conclusion of expiation. Now may the chief musician say:“Lust and emulation have dwelt amoung us Like barbarous kings: have conquered us: Have inhabited our hearts: devoured and ravished —With the savage greed and avarice of fire— The substance of pity and compassion.”
1 A tattering of rain and then the reign Of pour and pouring-down and down, Where in the westward gathered the filming gown Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain, Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous, Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain! And soon the hour was musical and rumorous: A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses, A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.  2 Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence, And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended —A pebble—a ring—a ringing on the pane, A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day —Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar Allowed the voice to form appeal—to call: By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.
In the green morning, before Love was destiny, The sun was king, And God was famous. The merry, the musical, The jolly, the magical, The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival Suddenly ended As the sky descended But there was only the feeling, In all the dark falling, Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.
O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,Should waste them all.The crows above the forest call;Tomorrow they may form and go.O hushed October morning mild,Begin the hours of this day slow.Make the day seem to us less brief.Hearts not averse to being beguiled,Beguile us in the way you know.Release one leaf at break of day;At noon release another leaf;One from our trees, one far away.Retard the sun with gentle mist;Enchant the land with amethyst.Slow, slow!For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yardAnd made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.And from there those that lifted eyes could countFive mountain ranges one behind the otherUnder the sunset far into Vermont.And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,As it ran light, or had to bear a load.And nothing happened: day was all but done.Call it a day, I wish they might have saidTo please the boy by giving him the half hourThat a boy counts so much when saved from work.His sister stood beside him in her apronTo tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,As he swung toward them holding up the handHalf in appeal, but half as if to keepThe life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—Since he was old enough to know, big boyDoing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’So. But the hand was gone already.The doctor put him in the dark of ether.He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.No one believed. They listened at his heart.Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since theyWere not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
I wonder about the trees.Why do we wish to bearForever the noise of theseMore than another noiseSo close to our dwelling place?We suffer them by the dayTill we lose all measure of pace,And fixity in our joys,And acquire a listening air.They are that that talks of goingBut never gets away;And that talks no less for knowing,As it grows wiser and older,That now it means to stay.My feet tug at the floorAnd my head sways to my shoulderSometimes when I watch trees sway,From the window or the door.I shall set forth for somewhere,I shall make the reckless choiceSome day when they are in voiceAnd tossing so as to scareThe white clouds over them on.I shall have less to say,But I shall be gone.
We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes: some copper bright, a few dull brown and, now and then, the shock of one so steeled with frostit glittered like a dime. The autumn boughs and blackened branches wore a somber glossthat whispered tails to me, not heads. I read memorial columns in their trunks; their leavesspelled UNUM, cent; and yours, the only head . . . in penny profile, Lincoln-like (one sleeve,one eye) but even it was turning tails as russet leaves lay spent across the trails.
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
They turn the water off, so I live without water, they build walls higher, so I live without treetops, they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine, they lock my cage, so I live without going anywhere, they take each last tear I have, I live without tears, they take my heart and rip it open, I live without heart, they take my life and crush it, so I live without a future, they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends, they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell, they give me pain, so I live with pain, they give me hate, so I live with my hate, they have changed me, and I am not the same man, they give me no shower, so I live with my smell, they separate me from my brothers, so I live without brothers, who understands me when I say this is beautiful? who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms? I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand, I cannot make the heavens open or the earth tremble, I can live with myself, and I am amazed at myself, my love, my beauty, I am taken by my failures, astounded by my fears, I am stubborn and childish, in the midst of this wreckage of life they incurred, I practice being myself, and I have found parts of myself never dreamed of by me, they were goaded out from under rocks in my heart when the walls were built higher, when the water was turned off and the windows painted black. I followed these signs like an old tracker and followed the tracks deep into myself, followed the blood-spotted path, deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself, who taught me water is not everything, and gave me new eyes to see through walls, and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths, and I was laughing at me with them, we laughed like children and made pacts to always be loyal, who understands me when I say this is beautiful?CORRECTION: the last line of the first stanza was corrected to read "who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?", and the first line of the second stanza was corrected to read "I cannot fly or make something appear in my hand," on November 15, 2010.
—“mu” twentieth part—  The way we lay  we mimed a body  of water. It was this or that way  with  the dead and we were them. No  one  worried which...  Millet beer made our legs go weak,  loosed  our tongues. “The dead,”  we  said, “are drowning  of thirst,” gruff  summons we muttered  out loud in our  sleep...  It was a journey we  were on, drawn-out  scrawl we made a road of, long huthered hajj  we  were on. Raw strip  of cloth we now rode,  wishful, letterless  book  the ride we thumbed...  Harp-headed ghost whose  head we plucked incessantly.  Bartered star. Tethered  run...  It was a ride we knew we’d  wish to return to. Every-  thing was everything, nothing no less. No less  newly  arrived or ancestral, of  late having to do with  the naming of parts...  Rolling hills rolled up like a rug, raw sprawl  of a  book within a book  without a name known as  Namless, not to be arrived at again...  It was  the Book of No Avail we were in did we dare name  it, momentary kings and  queens,  fleet kingdom. Land fell  away on all sides.  Past Lag we caught ourselves,  run weft at last  adequate, shadowless,  lit,  left up Atet Street,  legs tight, hill after  hill after hill.  Had it been a book Book of Opening the Book it  would’ve been called,  kept under lock and key...  Hyperbolic  arrest. Ra was on the  box.  It was after the end of the world... To lie on  our backs looking  into the dark was all  there was worth  doing,  each the aroused eye one another sought,  swore he or she  saw  we lay where love’s  pharaonic torso lay  deepest, wide-eyed  all night without sleep...  “String  our heads with straw,” we  said, half-skulls tied with  catgut, strummed...  Scratched  our strummed heads, memory made us itch. Walked out  weightless, air what eye  was  left...  Someone said Rome,  someone said destroy it. Atlantis, a third shouted  out...  Low ride among ruins  notwithstanding we flew.  Swam, if often seemed, underwater, oddly immersed,  bodies  long since bid goodbye,  we  lay in wait, remote muses  kept us afloat. Something  called pursuit had us by  the nose. Wafted ether  blown low, tilted floor, splintered  feet. Throated bone...  Rickety boat we rode...  As  though what we wanted  was to be everywhere at  once, an altered life lived on an  ideal  coast we’d lay washed up  on, instancy and elsewhere  endlessly  entwined
Some folks hollered hard times in nineteen-twenty-nine. In nineteen-twenty-eight say I was way behind. Some folks hollered hard times because hard times were new. Hard times is all I ever had, why should I lie to you? Some folks hollered hard times. What is it all about? Things were bad for me when those hard times started out.
1 He got taken quick. Then he hung around. And anyway, he never really wanted to be anywhere he was—so why not? Then from out there and for years the prodigal wrote back to them—indolent letters, lying about jobs, a wife he found, kids they had. Things he used to hear people talking about. He never even bothered to make it up. Or tried to keep his stories straight. His wife? A harem of hair colors. Kids fizzed up like bugs, then fizzled out. Well, that’s the way his life was, in pieces. Sometimes his head flashed on something fat and beautiful. He watched it shoot by. Then he listened for the crash. Mostly, he was in the dark, drifting. And, within limits, less of a chump. He walked away from a lot of stuff. There were some things he did. This and that. Lucky, real dirty work never came looking. Once he dumped a woman. Later she dumped him back. That’s how the game was played out there, where he was. So that was that. Well, just say he was down on his luck. Or starting now to get it together. Or he was taking things one day at a time. Sure, one day at a time—for years on end. One more also-ran playing out the string. Or, staring straight ahead, out of the blue he’d tell whoever was drinking alongside him, Don’t look back, champ, your crap could be gaining. To which—years later—he took to adding, And don’t look up—you could be overtaking the next guy’s you-know-what . . . (Solo guffaws.) So, what did they think of him, out there? Joke. Embarrassment. Eyesore. Take your pick. But how could it matter what anyone said in that rasping, hissing, clanging tongue of theirs? To tell the truth, since he’d first come to their country he hadn’t heard a thing that stuck to his bones. Then every once in a while he sat down and wrote.  2 His words returned—in another’s hand: everyday things people put in their letters, and howlers only a mother would believe, and reassuring fluff about the weather, as if sun were sun, and his rain, like theirs, could fill the cistern and make green things grow. And here they were, grinning back at him, every pitiful, dumb phrase he wrote, copied over like a holy scripture in his mother’s homespun penmanship that made his snarled, uncontrollable scrawl round and plan and easy to read. Her ABCs were good enough to eat —bits of dough she’d squeezed, patted, baked slowly in the little oven of her hands and strung into necklaces of script. But if he read those letters at all, his eyes scribbled some glare before he fed the page, balled up, to the dark, muttering demon of trash chained in the corner, when, drunk or stoned, he plummeted straight down —with the bulb he never extinguished burning above his swollen, already aging face.  3 And then. And then. And then. And then no letter came back. And soon no letter went forward. Why listen now to people talking? The demon settled into self-consumption. And everything was still. Dust silted over the phantom children he’d never wanted anyhow; at the end of its rainbow his wife’s hair came to rest on red—forever; their house faded in the manuscripts. Though old now, he was still a son —though no one’s son. A promise, then, without witnesses anywhere to say if the promise had been kept or not kept. But didn’t he, having no lands, no house, no wife, no child, no works, didn’t he know what he had done with his heritage? Then let their silence mute the judgment, hush the accusation against him! And now this little corner where he sat need be no worse than any other little corner of the universe.  4 And then one day a witness came forward —from an old pair of pants, from the pocket. An old piece of paper. Wrinkled. Worn. Smudged with the dregs of big numbers. And under their blur, in palest blue —blue of the veins of a vanished wrist— his mother’s hand at its homework was being true to the words it found. But there, between the words, in the smeared void he saw his sentence spelled out. Of his waste life: pain. Of falsity: pain. It was a lash. A lifeline. His lifeline —flung out to him, laid on his hands, in his hand. With a pencil stub he traced the faint line of her letters across the yellowed page. As faithfully as she, as patiently —as if he need never reach their end and the words might now become his life—he wrote. He wrote the date. He wrote, “Dear Son.” He wrote, “We’re glad the children all are well again and getting A’s.” He wrote, “We’re also happy that you like your job . . .” He, too, was happy. He, too, was glad. He wrote.
Here or there hundreds of them, phantom-like, bobbing in place at street corners, then lifting their knees suddenly and leaping into the densest, loudest traffic (of briefest trajectories, of shortest views), in transit yet at ease, breathing, loping, like bearers of distance and pure direction, darting half naked out of nowhere and where, where in the world are they running to? swift and solitary, silent beings who, should you now step into the path, have dodged away, or, if you raise a hand to stay them to speak, immediately are gone: who are these runners who create in their gliding such fine, singular spaces among the street’s vociferous jargons? —as if each one were a still, wordless message or question one would answer if one could grasp it, this one, that one, sliding past, going away, while you stand there, your hand raised to no purpose, your hidden heart rejoicing that the quick heel won’t soon, won’t ever, be overtaken, although you, as you have longed to, suddenly disburden yourself and follow follow.
How wonderful to be understood, to just sit here while some kind person relieves you of the awful burden of having to explain yourself, of having to find other words to say what you meant, or what you think you thought you meant, and of the worse burden of finding no words, of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person has found just the right words for you—and you have only to sit here and be grateful for words so quiet so discerning they seem not words but literate light, in which your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous. How wonderful that is! And how altogether wonderful it is not to be understood, not at all, to, well, just sit here while someone not unkindly is saying those impossibly wrong things, or quite possibly they’re the right things if you are, which you’re not, that someone —a difference, finally, so indifferent it would be conceit not to let it pass, unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun. And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage of those high murmurings over your head, having found, after all, you are grateful —and you understand this, how wonderful!— that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself, like a root growing wise in darkness under the light litter, the falling words.
Out in the yard, my sister and I tore thread from century plants to braid into bracelets, ate chalky green bananas, threw coconuts onto the sidewalk to crack their hard, hairy skulls. The world had begun to happen, but not time. We would live forever, sunburnt and pricker-stuck, our promises written in blood. Not yet would men or illness distinguish us, our thoughts cleave us in two. If she squeezed sour calamondins into a potion, I drank it. When I jumped from the fig tree, she jumped.
The food is on the table. Turkey tanned to a cowboy boot luster, potatoes mashed and mounded in a bowl whose lip is lined with blue flowers linked by grey vines faded from washing. Everyone’s heads have turned to elongate the table’s view—a last supper twisted toward a horizon where the Christmas tree, crowned by a window, sets into itself half inclined. Each belly cries. Each pair of eyes admonished by Aunt Photographer. Look up. You’re wined and dined for the older folks who’ve pined to see your faces, your lives, lightly framed in this moment’s flash. Parents are moved, press their children’s heads up from the table, hide their hunger by rubbing lightly wrinkled hands atop their laps. They’ll hold the image as long as need be, seconds away from grace.
The high school kids are so beautiful in their lavender blouses and crisp white shirts. They open their mouths to sing with that far-off stare they had looking out from the crib. Their voices lift up from the marble bed of the high altar to the blue endless ceiling of heaven as depicted in the cloudy dome— and we—as the parents—crane our necks to see our children and what is above us— and ahead of us—until the end when we are invited up to sing with them—sopranos and altos—tenors and basses—to sing the great Hallelujah Chorus—and I’m standing with the other stunned and gray fathers—holding our sheet music— searching for our parts—and we realize— our voices are surprisingly rich—experienced— For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth— and how do we all know to come in at exactly the right moment?—Forever and ever— and how can it not seem that we shall reign forever and ever—in one voice with our beautiful children—looking out into all those lights.
Januarie. Ægloga prima. ARGVMENT. IN this fyrst Æglogue Colin clout a shepheardes boy complaineth him of his vnfortunate loue, being but newly (as semeth) enamoured of a countrie lasse called Rosalinde: with which strong affection being very sore traueled, he compareth his carefull case to the sadde season of the yeare, to the frostie ground, to the frosen trees, and to his owne winterbeaten flocke. And lastlye, fynding himselfe robbed of all former pleasaunce and delights, hee breaketh his Pipe in peeces, and casteth him selfe to the ground.COLIN Cloute.A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call) when Winters wastful spight was almost spent, All in a sunneshine day, as did befall, Led forth his flock, that had been long ypent. So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde, That now vnnethes their feete could them vphold. All as the Sheepe, such was the shepeheards looke, For pale and wanne he was, (alas the while,) May seeme he lovd, or els some care he tooke: Well couth he tune his pipe, and frame his stile. Tho to a hill his faynting flocke he ledde, And thus him playnd, the while his shepe there fedde. Ye gods of loue, that pitie louers payne, (if any gods the paine of louers pitie:) Looke from aboue, where you in ioyes remaine, And bowe your eares vnto my doleful dittie. And Pan thou shepheards God, that once didst loue, Pitie the paines, that thou thy selfe didst proue. Thou barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted, Art made a myrrhour, to behold my plight: Whilome thy fresh spring flowrd, and after hasted Thy sommer prowde with Daffadillies dight. And now is come thy wynters stormy state, Thy mantle mard, wherein thou mas-kedst late. Such rage as winters, reigneth in my heart, My life bloud friesing wtih vnkindly cold: Such stormy stoures do breede my balefull smarte, As if my yeare were wast, and woxen old. And yet alas, but now my spring begonne, And yet alas, yt is already donne. You naked trees, whose shady leaves are lost, Wherein the byrds were wont to build their bowre: And now are clothd with mosse and hoary frost, Instede of bloosmes, wherwith your buds did flowre: I see your teares, that from your boughes doe raine, Whose drops in drery ysicles remaine. All so my lustfull leafe is drye and sere, My timely buds with wayling all are wasted: The blossome, which my braunch of youth did beare, With breathed sighes is blowne away, & blasted, And from mine eyes the drizling teares descend, As on your boughes the ysicles depend. Thou feeble flocke, whose fleece is rough and rent, Whose knees are weak through fast and evill fare: Mayst witnesse well by thy ill gouernement, Thy maysters mind is ouercome with care. Thou weak, I wanne: thou leabe, I quite forlorne: With mourning pyne I, you with pyning mourne. A thousand sithes I curse that carefull hower, Wherein I longd the neighbour towne to see: And eke tenne thousand sithes I blesse the stoure, Wherein I sawe so fayre a sight, as shee. Yet all for naught: snch [such] sight hath bred my bane. Ah God, that loue should breede both ioy and payne. It is not Hobbinol, wherefore I plaine, Albee my loue he seeke with dayly suit: His clownish gifts and curtsies I disdaine, His kiddes, his cracknelles, and his early fruit. Ah foolish Hobbinol, thy gyfts bene vayne: Colin them gives to Rosalind againe. I loue thilke lasse, (alas why doe I loue?) And am forlorne, (alas why am I lorne?) Shee deignes not my good will, but doth reproue, And of my rurall musick holdeth scorne. Shepheards deuise she hateth as the snake, And laughes the songes, that Colin Clout doth make. Wherefore my pype, albee rude Pan thou please, Yet for thou pleasest not, where most I would: And thou vnlucky Muse, that wontst to ease My musing mynd, yet canst not, when thou should: Both pype and Muse, shall sore the while abye. So broke his oaten pype, and downe dyd lye. By that, the welked Phoebus gan availe, His weary waine, and nowe the frosty Night Her mantle black through heauen gan overhaile. Which seene, the pensife boy halfe in despight Arose, and homeward drove his sonned sheepe, Whose hanging heads did seeme his carefull case to weepe.
Came the dread Archer up yonder lawn —Night is the time for the old to die —But woe for an arrow that smote the fawn,When the hind that was sick unscathed went by.Father lay moaning, Her fault was sore(Night is the time when the old must die),Yet, ah to bless her, my child, once more,For heart is failing: the end is nigh.Daughter, my daughter, my girl, I cried(Night is the time for the old to die)Woe for the wish if till morn ye bide —Dark was the welkin and wild the sky.Heavily plunged from the roof the snow —(Night is the time when the old will die),She answered, My mother, 'tis well, I go.Sparkled the north star, the wrack flew high.First at his head, and last at his feet(Night is the time when the old should die),Kneeling I watched till his soul did fleet,None else that loved him, none else were nigh.I wept in the night as the desolate weep(Night is the time for the old to die),Cometh my daughter? the drifts are deep,Across the cold hollows how white they lie.I sought her afar through the spectral trees(Night is the time when the old must die),The fells were all muffled, the floods did freeze,And a wrathful moon hung red in the sky.By night I found her where pent waves steal(Night is the time when the old should die),But she lay stiff by the locked mill-wheel,And the old stars lived in their homes on high.
The wintry west extends his blast,And hail and rain does blaw;Or, the stormy north sends driving forthThe blinding sleet and snaw:While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,And roars frae bank to brae;And bird and beast in covert rest,And pass the heartless day.The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,The joyless winter-day,Let others fear, to me more dearThan all the pride of May:The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,My griefs it seems to join;The leafless trees my fancy please,Their fate resembles mine!Thou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty schemeThese woes of mine fulfil,Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,Because they are Thy will!Then all I want (O, do Thou grantThis one request of mine!)Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,Assist me to resign.
I Throughout the afternoon I watched them there, Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky, Whirling fantastic in the misty air, Contending fierce for space supremacy. And they flew down a mightier force at night, As though in heaven there was revolt and riot, And they, frail things had taken panic flight Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet. I went to bed and rose at early dawn To see them huddled together in a heap, Each merged into the other upon the lawn, Worn out by the sharp struggle, fast asleep. The sun shone brightly on them half the day, By night they stealthily had stol’n away. II And suddenly my thoughts then turned to you Who came to me upon a winter’s night, When snow-sprites round my attic window flew, Your hair disheveled, eyes aglow with light. My heart was like the weather when you came, The wanton winds were blowing loud and long; But you, with joy and passion all aflame, You danced and sang a lilting summer song. I made room for you in my little bed, Took covers from the closet fresh and warm, A downful pillow for your scented head, And lay down with you resting in my arm. You went with Dawn. You left me ere the day, The lonely actor of a dreamy play.
I went out at night alone; The young blood flowing beyond the seaSeemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings— I bore my sorrow heavily.But when I lifted up my head From shadows shaken on the snow,I saw Orion in the east Burn steadily as long ago.From windows in my father’s house, Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,I watched Orion as a girl Above another city’s lights.Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too, The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,All things are changed, save in the east The faithful beauty of the stars.
‘That creep Tolstoy,’ she sobbed. ‘He. . . He. . . couldn’t even. . .’ Something about his brother dying. The serfs’ punishments have not ceased to suppurate on their backs. Woodlots. People. Someone crying under the yellow autumn birchgrove drove him wild: A new set of resolves: When gambling, that almost obsolete fever, or three days with the gypsies sparked him into pure ego, he could, just the same, write home, ‘Sell them.’ It’s true. ‘Still,’ (someone who loved her said, cold and firm while she dissolved,hypocrite, in self disgust, lectrice) ‘Still, he kept on. He wrote all that he wrote; and seems to have understood better than most of us: to be human isn’t easy. It’s not easy to be a serf or a master and learn that art. It takes nerve. Bastard. Fink. Yet the grief trudging behind his funeral, he earned.’
1 My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing! then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets. 2 I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool, and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry. Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick with bloody blows on its head. I embrace a cloud, but when I soared it rained. 3 That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks what a funny place to rupture! and now it is raining on the ailanthus as I step out onto the window ledge the tracks below me are smoky and glistening with a passion for running I leap into the leaves, green like the sea 4 Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand. Even the verse begins to eat away In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit; A wind moves a little, Moving in a circle, very cold. How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights Daily with that predominance And we have become the present. We must talk now. Fear Is fear. But we abandon one another.
1  THE GESTURE The question is: how does one hold an apple Who likes apples And how does one handle Filth? The question is How does one hold something In the mind which he intends To grasp and how does the salesman Hold a bauble he intends To sell? The question is When will there not be a hundred Poets who mistake that gesture For a style. 2  THE LITTLE HOLE The little hole in the eye Williams called it, the little hole Has exposed us naked To the world And will not close. Blankly the world Looks in And we compose Colors And the sense Of home And there are those In it so violent And so alone They cannot rest. 3  THAT LAND Sing like a bird at the open Sky, but no bird Is a man— Like the grip Of the Roman hand On his shoulder, the certainties Of place And of time Held him, I think With the pain and the casual horror Of the iron and may have left No hope of doubt Whereas we have won doubt From the iron itself And hope in death. So that If a man lived forever he would outlive Hope. I imagine open sky Over Gethsemane, Surely it was this sky. 4  PAROUSIA Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen And because it is irrevocable It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal And man may find his catastrophe, His Millennium of obsession.  air moving, a stone on a stone, something balanced momentarily, in time might the lion Lie down in the forest, less fierce And solitary Than the world, the walls Of whose future may stand forever. 5  FROM VIRGIL I, says the buzzard, I— Mind Has evolved Too long If ‘life is a search For advantage.’ ‘At whose behest Does the mind think?’ Art Also is not good For us Unless like the fool Persisting In his folly It may rescue us As only the true Might rescue us, gathered In the smallest corners Of man’s triumph. Parve puer . . . ‘Begin, O small boy, To be born; On whom his parents have not smiled No god thinks worthy of his table, No goddess of her bed’
1 There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’. Occurrence, a part Of an infinite series, The sad marvels; Of this was told A tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness. ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ 2 So spoke of the existence of things, An unmanageable pantheon Absolute, but they say Arid. A city of the corporations Glassed In dreams And images— And the pure joy Of the mineral fact Tho it is impenetrable As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable. 3 The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York 4 For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth And to their dwelling For which the tarred roofs And the stoops and doors— A world of stoops— Are petty alibi and satirical wit Will not serve. 5 The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge ‘1875’ Frozen in the moonlight In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, Which loves itself 6 We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always. Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen. 7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. 8Amor fati The love of fate For which the city alone Is audience Perhaps blasphemous. Slowly over islands, destinies Moving steadily pass And change In the thin sky Over islands Among days Having only the force Of days Most simple Most difficult 9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 10 Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. 11  it is that light Seeps anywhere, a light for the times In which the buildings Stand on low ground, their pediments Just above the harbor Absolutely immobile, Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window One might wave to himself From the top of the Empire State Building— Speak If you can Speak Phyllis—not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness— So small a picture, A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us I too am in love down there with the streets And the square slabs of pavement— To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks And it is not ‘art’ 12 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’ the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world . . . They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, Families talked, They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest. They were patient With the world. This will never return, never, Unless having reached their limits They will begin over, that is, Over and over 13  unable to begin At the beginning, the fortunate Find everything already here. They are shoppers, Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal is without issue, a dead end.  They develop Argument in order to speak, they become unreal, unreal, life loses solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game because baseball is not a game but an argument and difference of opinion makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger One’s soul. There is change In an air That smells stale, they will come to the end Of an era First of all peoples And one may honorably keep His distance If he can. 14 I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country, Among them many men More capable than I— Muykut and a sergeant Named Healy, That lieutenant also— How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. 15 Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me So that I will exist, find my navel So that it will exist, find my nipples So that they will exist, find every hair Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad), Find me.’ 16 ‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat, and only he who was troubled shall find rest, and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved, and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . . but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’ 17 The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why It is not easy to speak A ferocious mumbling, in public Of rootless speech 18 It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. 19 Now in the helicopters the casual will Is atrocious Insanity in high places, If it is true we must do these things We must cut our throats The fly in the bottle Insane, the insane fly Which, over the city Is the bright light of shipwreck 20 —They await War, and the news Is war As always That the juices may flow in them Tho the juices lie. Great things have happened On the earth and given it history, armies And the ragged hordes moving and the passions Of that death. But who escapes Death Among these riders Of the subway, They know But now as I know Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight, Farm animals, Draft animals, beasts for slaughter Because it would mean they have forgiven us, Or which is the same thing, That we do not altogether matter. 21 There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne. 22 Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained Clarity in the sense of silence.
‘out of poverty to begin again’ impoverished of tone of pose that common wealth of parlance Who so poor the wordswould with and take on substantial meaning handholds footholds to dig in one’s heels sliding hands and heels beyond the residential lots the plots it is a poem which may be sung may well be sung
5 THE TRANSLUCENT MECHANICS Combed thru the piers the wind Moves in the clever city Not in the doors but the hinges Finds the secret of motion As tho the hollow ships moved in their voices, murmurs Flaws In the wind Fear fear At the lumber mastheads And fetched a message out of the sea again Say angel say powers Obscurely ‘things And the self’ Prosody Sings In the stones  to entrust To a poetry of statement At close quarters A living mind ‘and that one’s own’  what then what spirit Of the bent seas  Archangel of the tide brimming in the moon-streak  comes in whose absence earth crumbles 6 Silver as The needle’s eye Of the horizon in the noise Of their entrance row on row the waves Move landward conviction’s Net of branches In the horde of events the sacred swarm avalanche Masked in the sunset Needle after needle more numerous than planets Or the liquid waves In the tide rips We believe we believe Beyond the cable car streets And the picture window Lives the glittering crumbling night Of obstructions and the stark structures That carry wires over the mountain One writes in the presence of something Moving close to fear I dare pity no one Let the rafters pity The air in the room Under the rafters Pity In the continual sound Are chords Not yet struck Which will be struck Nevertheless yes 7 O withering seas Of the doorstep and local winds unveil The face of artCarpenter, plunge and drip in the sea Art’s face We know that face More blinding than the sea a haunted house a limited Consensus unwinding Its powers Toward the thread’s end In the record of great blows shocks Ravishment devastation the wood splintered The keyboard gone in the rank grass swept her hand Over the strings and the thing rang out Over the rocks and the ocean Not my poem Mr Steinway’s Poem Not mine A ‘marvelous’ object Is not the marvel of things  twisting the new Mouth forcing the new Tongue But it rang 8 THE TASTE Old ships are preserved For their queer silence of obedient seas Their cutwaters floating in the still water With their cozy black iron work And Swedish seamen dead the cabins Hold the spaces of their deaths And the hammered nails of necessity Carried thru the oceans Where the moon rises grandly In the grandeur of cause We have a taste for bedrock Beneath this spectacle To gawk at Something is wrong with the antiques, a black fluid Has covered them, a black splintering Under the eyes of young wives People talk wildly, we are beginning to talk wildly, the wind At every summit Our overcoats trip us Running for the bus Our arms stretched out In a wind from what were sand dunes 9 THE IMPOSSIBLE POEM Climbing the peak of Tamalpais the loose Gravel underfoot And the city shining with the tremendous wrinkles In the hills and the winding of the bay Behind it, it faces the bent ocean Streetcars Rocked thru the city and the winds Combed their clumsy sides In clumsy times Sierras withering Behind the storefronts And sanity the roadside weed Dreams of sports and sportsmanship In the lucid towns paralyzed Under the truck tires Shall we relinquish Sanity to redeem Fragments and fragmentary Histories in the towns and the temperate streets Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn The courageous and precarious children 10 BUT SO AS BY FIRE The darkness of trees Guards this life Of the thin ground That covers the rock ledge Among the lanes and magic Of the Eastern woods The beauty of silence And broken boughs And the homes of small animals The green leaves Of young plants Above the dark green moss In the sweet smell of rot The pools and the trickle of freshwater First life, rotting life Hidden starry life it is not yet A mirror Like our lives We have gone As far as is possible Whose lives reflect light Like mirrors One had not thought To be afraid Not of shadow but of light Summon one’s powers
Here comes the powdered milk I drank as a child, and the money it saved. Here come the papers I delivered, the spotted dog in heat that followed me home and the dogs that followed her. Here comes a load of white laundry from basketball practice, and sheets with their watermarks of semen. And here comes snow, a language in which no word is ever repeated, love is impossible, and remorse. . . . Yet childhood doesn’t end, but accumulates, each memory knit to the next, and the fields become one field. If to die is to lose all detail, then death is not so distinguished, but a profusion of detail, a last gossip, character passed wholly into fate and fate in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.
There is another world, but it is in this one.  Paul Eluard First there were those who died before I was born. It was as if they had just left and their shadows would slip out after them under the door so recently closed the air in its path was still swirling to rest. Some of the furniture came from them, I was told, and one day I opened two chests of drawers to learn what the dead kept. But it was when I learned to read that I began always to live among the dead. I remember Rapunzel, the improved animals in the Just-So Stories, and a flock of birds that saved themselves from a hunter by flying in place in the shape of a tree, their wings imitating the whisk of wind in the leaves. My sons and I are like some wine the dead have already bottled. They wish us well, but there is nothing they can do for us. Sebastian cries in his sleep, I bring him into my bed, talk to him, rub his back. To help his sons live easily among the dead is a father’s great work. Now Sebastian drifts, soon he’ll sleep. We can almost hear the dead breathing. They sound like water under a ship at sea. To love the dead is easy. They are final, perfect. But to love a child is sometimes to fail at love while the dead look on with their abstract sorrow. To love a child is to turn away from the patient dead. It is to sleep carefully in case he cries. Later, when my sons are grown among their own dead, I can dive easily into sleep and loll among the coral of my dreams growing on themselves until at the end I almost never dream of anyone, except my sons, who is still alive.
for Richard Hugo The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches tomorrow on why we are sad. Brethren, Montana’s a landscape requiring faith: the visible government arrives in trucks, if you live out far enough. If you live in town, the government’s gone, on errands, in trucks. Let citizens go to meetings, I’ll stay home. I hate a parade. By the time you get the trout up through the tiny triangular holes in the Coors cans, they’re so small you have to throw them back. Glum miles we go to Grandmother’s house. The earth out here doesn’t bear us up so much as it keeps us out, an old trick of the beautiful. Remember what Chief Left Hand said? Never mind. Everything else was taken from him, let’s leave his grief alone. My Eastern friends ask me how I like it in the West, or God’s country, as it’s sometimes called, though God, like a slumlord, lives in the suburbs: Heaven. And I don’t live “in the West”; I live in this canyon among a few other houses and abandoned mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.
Each of them must have terrified his parents by being so big, obsessive and exact so young, already gone and leaving, like a big tipper, that huge changeling’s body in his place. The prince of bone spurs and bad knees. The year I first saw them play Malone was a high school freshman, already too big for any bed, 14, a natural resource. You have to learn not to apologize, a form of vanity. You flare up in the lane, exotic anywhere else. You roll the ball off fingers twice as long as your girlfriend’s. Great touch for a big man, says some jerk. Now they’re defunct and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19, rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench, his pet of a body grown sullen as fast as it grew up. Something in you remembers every time the ball left your fingertips wrong and nothing the ball can do in the air will change that. You watch it set, stupid moon, the way you watch yourself in a recurring dream. You never lose your touch or forget how taxed bodies go at the same pace they owe, how brutally well the universe works to be beautiful, how we metabolize loss as fast as we have to.
for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line. Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the rumpled body isn’t round, it isn’t perpendicular. You have to draw “an imaginary line,” as the breezy coaches say, “through your shoulders.” Here’s how to cheat: remember your collarbone. Now the instructions grow spiritual—deep breathing, relax and concentrate both; aim for the front of the rim but miss it deliberately so the ball goes in. Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot 200 foul shots every day. Teach yourself not to be bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances are you don’t; you’d love to be good at it but not by a love that drives you to shoot 200 foul shots every day, and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots we’re talking about now— the clinic having served to bring us together—circle eccentrically in a sky of stolid orbits as unlike as you and I are from the arcs those foul shots leave behind when they go in.
How much do you love me, a million bushels?Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.And is this your heart arithmetic?This is the way the wind measures the weather.
The buffaloes are gone.And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.And the buffaloes are gone.
There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
They made a myth of you, professor,  you of the gentle voice,  the books, the specs,  the furitive rabbit manners  in the mortar-board cap  and the medieval gown. They didn’t think it, eh professor? On account of you’re so absent-minded, you bumping into the tree and saying, “Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,” passing on again blank and absent-minded. Now it’s “Mr. Attila, how do you do?” Do you pack wallops of wholesale death? Are you the practical dynamic son-of-a-gun? Have you come through with a few abstractions? Is it you Mr. Attila we hear saying, “I beg your pardon but we believe we have made some degree of progress on the residual qualities of the atom”? [August, 1945]
The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems? Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh. They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay. They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.” Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are. Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”
Essentially, for some time, in an effort to determine whether I loved you or not, I've been praying to you, even though the inside of the tabernacle, as I thought, is empty: oxygen, carbon dioxide, brass, nickel, and a sheet, a sheet of gilded plywood. (And in the rectory, the housekeeper is cooking pasta, stamped in the shape of shells, all of a uniform size and color.) In an effort to determine, in an effort to determine whether I loved you, whether I loved you or not, I learned old lovers are christs or bodhisattvas. Slowly at first, and then with greater skill, in an effort to determine whether I loved you, I loved you or not, I've been praying without knowing it, in the daylight, in the white afternoon, and singing, and singing with records, my head tilted up into the black walnut, the windows alive with listening ravens to whom I sing about your boxy feet with rind of callus at the heel, (as elsewhere noted), your smiting eyes, your nose pugged slightly, like Socrates, your dark skin, your dark. Your voice like a woodwind, a basset clarinet; the wind you went out on, the wind you came in on, your hair the color of a violin, the unambiguous quality of many of your pronouncements, i.e., the time you said I was tortured by life, your eyes boring through me, right for the wrong reasons, again. The time in New Orleans you were so angry, I was so drunk, lurching in the curio shops full of shells. A shell grows around itself, folding over the first pattern, calcified into a whorled shape, not dissimilar to the whorl on the top of our two heads, the pattern of gorgeous irreplaceable error, and for a while the only assurance we belonged, we belonged to the same species. And the joy was piercing, this piercing joy came up in me, a whirring train, night, on the way home, somewhere before Memphis. The singing in my ears. A hurricane, a hurricane outside to my right was photographed from a satellite even as a criminal was being printed, his thumb whorl down, twisted clockwise, and the trees out in the dark strained, growing, forming knots, their flesh burled in the timedrift. I've wondered: does the twisting hurt them, and did all your turnings and hidings wound you as they did me, and did you notice my imprint, my concealment in that fold of air beside you, when into your boxy feet and brown hands nails, nails were driven, when you got into that car and went west, when you sat under that tree almost forever?
Venice, December    Ours are the only mouths  to taste with this smothering slow  touch, and the only steps  to sink like bellsounds and cave  deep into the marble snow.    Women who go to the window  to push their arms out to the snow  and then bring the shutters back in  follow us as we fall  past their eyes where the black night lives.    We are snowflakes at last, as the thick  never locked, never closed doors  follow us through squares of light  their windows have left on the snow.  Once again, warmth that falls,  again, though our tracks fill and slow.
“Son,” said my mother,  When I was knee-high,
 “You’ve need of clothes to cover you,  And not a rag have I.   “There’s nothing in the house  To make a boy breeches, Nor shears to cut a cloth with  Nor thread to take stitches.   “There’s nothing in the house  But a loaf-end of rye, And a harp with a woman’s head  Nobody will buy,”
 And she began to cry.   That was in the early fall.  When came the late fall,
 “Son,” she said, “the sight of you
   Makes your mother’s blood crawl,—   “Little skinny shoulder-blades  Sticking through your clothes! And where you’ll get a jacket from  God above knows.   “It’s lucky for me, lad,  Your daddy’s in the ground, And can’t see the way I let  His son go around!”  And she made a queer sound.   That was in the late fall.  When the winter came, I’d not a pair of breeches  Nor a shirt to my name.   I couldn’t go to school,  Or out of doors to play. And all the other little boys  Passed our way.   “Son,” said my mother,  “Come, climb into my lap, And I’ll chafe your little bones  While you take a nap.”   And, oh, but we were silly  For half an hour or more, Me with my long legs  Dragging on the floor,   A-rock-rock-rocking  To a mother-goose rhyme! Oh, but we were happy  For half an hour’s time!   But there was I, a great boy,  And what would folks say To hear my mother singing me  To sleep all day,  In such a daft way?   Men say the winter  Was bad that year; Fuel was scarce,  And food was dear.   A wind with a wolf’s head  Howled about our door, And we burned up the chairs  And sat on the floor.   All that was left us  Was a chair we couldn’t break, And the harp with a woman’s head  Nobody would take,  For song or pity’s sake.   The night before Christmas  I cried with the cold, I cried myself to sleep  Like a two-year-old.   And in the deep night  I felt my mother rise, And stare down upon me  With love in her eyes.   I saw my mother sitting  On the one good chair, A light falling on her  From I couldn’t tell where,   Looking nineteen,  And not a day older, And the harp with a woman’s head  Leaned against her shoulder.   Her thin fingers, moving  In the thin, tall strings, Were weav-weav-weaving  Wonderful things.   Many bright threads,  From where I couldn’t see, Were running through the harp-strings  Rapidly,   And gold threads whistling  Through my mother’s hand. I saw the web grow,  And the pattern expand.   She wove a child’s jacket,  And when it was done She laid it on the floor  And wove another one.   She wove a red cloak  So regal to see,
 “She’s made it for a king’s son,”  I said, “and not for me.”  But I knew it was for me.   She wove a pair of breeches  Quicker than that! She wove a pair of boots  And a little cocked hat.   She wove a pair of mittens,  She wove a little blouse, She wove all night  In the still, cold house.   She sang as she worked,  And the harp-strings spoke; Her voice never faltered,  And the thread never broke.  And when I awoke,—   There sat my mother  With the harp against her shoulder Looking nineteen  And not a day older,   A smile about her lips,  And a light about her head, And her hands in the harp-strings  Frozen dead.   And piled up beside her  And toppling to the skies, Were the clothes of a king’s son,  Just my size.
We had the new Chevrolet steel Idyll, sky-blue metal with the salmon interior, A Sunset On Wheels.  We had silver moving clowns, the most famous of which resembled our worst villain, which confused us. Little toothbrush mustaches.  We had an abundance, for once, of chocolate and tobacco, and nearly everyone drank a sweet bubbly beverage flavored by a South American plant. It somewhat burned our nose and throat.  My mood was sweet and even, the rain was warm driving down the road with the radio on. It played some lovely exciting tune. Then, an unctuous voice with news of war.  You drove to work with your coffee between your legs, the line ahead pink near the tree line, your dashboard with serene green lights. In the back seat was a Wild Bill Hickock coloring book and a small sneaker. It read Red Ball Jets.  You stumbled into the cold green sea, enervated, with a dry mouth, afraid you might step in a hole and drown. You can’t swim. The beach is ahead, some palm fronds wave. It’s beautiful, like Bali Hai, but there are planes descending ack ack ack, making filmic little fountains of sand where they strafe the beach. Finally, reaching the woods, and separated from your company, you all asleep.  Some of your son’s crayons melted in the back window. Remember to scrape those up, or melt it with wax paper and an iron, as the newspaper instructed. Bring home the Butternut Bread, Fred.  We each had Rangoon Night Market Noodles. They were salty, with pieces of duck. Then we went to a movie. Someone sat on my homburg. When it was over, we walked out stunned and embarrassed. Even mediocre films communicate with one’s childhood. The line of people waiting to get in examined us carefully. And for an hour after this, every little sound was delicious: the keys in our pocket, the creak of our seats, the bedsprings when we crawled into bed, effects in a soundtrack. Our sex was a little melodramatic, with a loopy grandeur. And afterwards we were so thirsty.  We watched the solar eclipse in Dad’s welding helmet, his crusader’s helm, wobbling and blind.  Our tongue always smarted with the astringent mint of the toothpaste when we moved to the bed, and she was always burning holes in her nylons with those goddamn Pell Mells.  Sunday night you were alone in the farmhouse, near sunset. It had been a hot day, with cicadas humming in the corn, the sound rising into the hot blue silver. You took a bath, and when you walked into the living room, still a little wet, the curtains planed horizontal, and you could hear distant thunder. The radio was low, playing classical music. The corn leaves were active, but discreet. That night you sat on the front porch steps drinking your son’s Hi-C citrus cooler. A special events floodlight examined the horizon.  Under a sky thick and like pewter, lying there reading with the window open, you heard a Brooklyn catbird imitate a car alarm, the series of warbles and chirps identical, and in the same sequence. The famous Car Alarm Bird.  You like the way the brushes sound over the car radio when the drummer plays with a small ensemble. As the station gets further away, the sound of the brushes mixes with static, as though some small bright particles were bunched there at the end of his hands. You worry about the car when you leave the tarmac because the bottom pings with small stones from the hardpan. The red radio towers blink far ahead, and off to the right. Soon you move up under them.
It is all kind of lovely that I know what I attend here now the maturity of snow has settled around forming a sort of time pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine in any colors to be chosen and everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen soon enough the primary rough erosion of what white fat it will occur  stiff yellows O beautiful beautifully austere  be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that  would promote to, but now I know my own red network electrifying this welcome annual hush.
Why & what is sweetness all alone? Either that or it becomes, alas, fleeting, Which actually helps, because of rhythm. & there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter How pale it is on the levels we receive on. I mean, the minute you invent a time interval The more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation Of accidents; zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.”  After a while, we almost expect him or her To inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers. It’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell Which nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it, Although that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified By its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?
Surrounded by bone, surrounded by cells, by rings, by rings of hell, by hair, surrounded by air-is-a-thing, surrounded by silhouette, by honey-wet bees, yet by skeletons of trees, surrounded by actual, yes, for practical purposes, people, surrounded by surreal popcorn, surrounded by the reborn: Surrender in the center to surroundings. O surrender forever, never end her, let her blend around, surrender to the surroundings that surround the tender endo-surrender, that tumble through the tumbling to that blue that curls around the crumbling, to that, the blue that rumbles under the sun bounding the pearl that we walk on, talk on; we can chalk that up to experience, sensing the brown here that’s blue now, a drop of water surrounding a cow that’s black & white, the warbling Blackburnian twitter that’s machining midnight orange in the light that’s glittering in the light green visible wind. That’s the ticket to the tunnel through the thicket that’s a cricket’s funnel of music to correct & pick it out from under the wing that whirls up over & out.
(for the Barteks) up at 7, dress & cook an egg black with pan soot, eat with hot bread and butter binoculars, book, notebook, 2 baloney sandwiches & a peanutbutter english sparrows singing as I walk to Hotel Yancey pigeons wheel above grand island coffee & the world-herald Saturday 7:30 in their elegant warm cafe Vera Coons comes in her green car we pick up her friend Bea while speaking of Canada geese I hear a cardinal startling, we see a cardinal crows flying we’re driving south on highway 281 cornfields, bright day, temp. 21 hit the Platter Restaurant where George Stoppekotte sits in his pickup he climbs in, we all sit & talk & wait for Bill Schleicher “if they take all the water out of the Platte River, by God, we folks here are gonna sit with our fingers dry” Bill comes with Harley Kandish, shuffle around George & Bill lead off in the pickup, Harley rides with us cross the Platte, gray with ice sunlight heading west sparrow hawk on a low fence “when you talk about wild asparagus, those 2 guys spot it where no one else does” we stop, check out black blobs in the trees, George says they spotted wild geese a magpie, we all drive on — I train my binocs on the passing trees (black Angus in bright yellow corn) stop again, geese “ — put a spot of salt in everything she made” “your dipstick’ll boil that oil eventually then you can’t get the darn varnish out” 2 ducks — scaup? goldeneye? meadowlark in a tree we see an eagle white-headed, gargantuan, in cottonwood by river back — we drink coffee — high spirits — everybody talks at once of Spanish peanuts — postum — people killing eagles being sick — where we’re going — once Harley saw an eagle & a bluebird & a beaver all in the same spot in Colorado & another eagle! closer perched upright, dark-bodied turning its arctic head in the light drive on ducks (buffleheads?) on Bufflehead pond hundreds of geese flap into a field & mass there giant trucks whiz by we’re 49 miles from grand island, turn south pass piles of mallards in a pond goldfinches lilt by turn east pass restored Fort Kearney hey — great horned owl on a telephone pole now he’s sitting on a haystack! “there was a crippled pelican down on Steen Lake a long while” I’ve got pelicans on my socks stop & piss in a refuge Bill says “we saw an immature on a haystack once & he was dead — not a wound on him. maybe he at a poison mouse” thought I heard a woodpecker pecking but it was the pickup cooling off — but there is a fat little downy there, we look — english sparrows out here sounds erupt like a whale under the pond ice stop for lunch here last baloney sandwich, Vera’s coffee, cigarette at a red picnic table by the pond & more sandwiches, pickles, from Vera chickadee sings talk “there’s something about a deer — couldn’t shoot one” “this was back when the Prince of Wales toured the country, they entertained him at Swift & Company. my sister-in-law was secretary to Old Man Swift. well she saw the Prince standing there looking forlorn & took a glass of water up to him & asked if he was thirsty and he was” “I was Secretary of Equitable Finance for 47 years” talk of city politics & economics & ecological considerations, & we leave, drive east glittering corn 3 mergansers on a pond fly off another eagle Platte River iced with curving channels open brown islands, everywhere shit, beautiful round brick barn young bald eagle flapping & soaring up — 2 more, sitting in trees — another, white-headed, closer, sits in massive stillness, then takes off! soars! flashing snow light from tail & head — drive a bit, stop & 3 more are seen sitting among strings & bunches of brown ducks that continually pour into & out of some body of water there “majestic” we say in such majesty so multiplied still majestic in so much left & right of ducks? drive on blue lake changes from brown to silver as we pass “there’s somebody’s little broken dream” we walk into a sanctuary Bill hands out peanuts in the shell points out diamond willow (chipping sparrow), through woods I climb green tower & look out upon islands & channels of the Platte “that’s alkali, you put your finger in it & lick it & it’s just like salt” badger hole wild plum “I don’t stomp em, I just throw em in there stems & all” “ — that’s due process” back to the car — banana, chocolate warm day now talk about Greeks fixing lamb — too much midafternoon, sit & talk motors start “sunflower” “cherry wood” talk, east again loggerhead (?) shrike flies off flicker meadowlarks all over sides of the road chipping sparrow with his white line over eye, black-bordered chestnut cap George saw 7 robins in a tree nothern robin in a russian olive paved road windmills walk to river & scan black spots — all nests blue ice, blue sky straggled brown horizon white posts in the river purple & yellow black hawk hovering over a field marsh hawk? no, red-tail — fox squirrel way off gray cliffs of snow in the ditch 2 hairies on a post “I wanted to go up to Baribou to see the circus museum” pumphouse with purple shingles shrike goblin shapes of field wood panoramic freight train view nameless little town wave at man burning stumps talk of water & we slowly drive through country wide cornfields keep us from the trees the eagles sit in “I just always have lip-ice” 2 hawks — complex identification discussion, or debate, and I maintain: ferruginous rough-leg nearing doniphan roads zigzag along the cardinal directions following slow northward Platte curve eagle again — flapping & soaring across our path, distant — field of lemon yellow cooling off, sunlight graying Swainson’s hawk above our heads, says Vera “there’s a policeman’s car & it says ‘Whites’ live there” ... “now they collect interest instead of apples” back to the Platter people split off north into city nearly five o’clock clouds lit yellow-gray in the west twelve eagles in our wake & legions not seen, motionless on cottonwood braches they don’t care & I care but it’s ok “beautiful day” “beautiful day” looking into the sun makes it all seem light & dark home — mara & sierra fed ducks today sierra showed me her new blue car
9:13 p.m., Lucky Bock in hand, I inscribe: walked the lovely 33 blocks to school today, streets clear and thick melting snow all around. taught my 4 hours of poetry; the afternoon class was hard; kid named Schweikert kept on fucking up. took typed-up poems of yesterday to Platt and put up poster there of Anne and Reed’s reading Sat. ate nearly 2 peanutbutter sandwiches with raw carrots. typed. read kids’ poems. at 4 I started home, got a ride with Jim Bay. press release to daily paper. stopped in Baird’s for 2 beers, looked at paper. home, kissed Mara, Sierra. in the mail: Out There, from Chicago, and a letter stating the city of Grand Island had decided not to prosecute re my arrest Friday for intoxication. wonder why. Nick the landlord didn’t show (he was supposed to have us sign lease on the new duplex) (this place gonna be torn down). ate a very delicious supper, ham-and-cheese rarebit with cold broccoli and cold oregano’d tomato, cooked by Mara. paperwork, played a game of solitaire, harried by Sierra’s new red car. dropped over then to the Korner Bar, put up a poster under the phone sign, said hi to a few folks and got halloo’d by this guy I’d spoken to 2 months before, who’d said his high school son adored me, but it might be thought improper that I hang around, shoot pool in Korner Bar. a beefy mid-30’s man, he bought me a beer, apologized and told me of his luck: he’d won a thousand one-hundred eighty dollars today betting on one horse at Fonner Park. we talked of poetry, family, work — he mentioned Kilmer, Stevenson, Nash and others, quoted verbatim his own published poem on fire-fighting (he is the G.I. fire-chief). his boyhood favorites, whom he reads all of even now: Edgar Rice Burroughts and Jules Verne. his son, though epileptic, does the high jump at the high school; he was disturbed that it wasn’t the broad jump, in which he himself still holds a record, set in 1959. the taxes have jumped up like crazy on their nice spread just inside the city limits. I got up and slapped him on the back and left, stopping first to ask Clark, standing end of the bar, what he knew of me on Friday night at the Kyriss. I’d blanked out completely (woke up in jail, ate blue oatmeal). he said I’d just got drunk, he thought Rod had taken me home. he said, at one point, just waking up, I’d grabbed the edge of the table and tilted it till the glasses all came sliding down and almost off, then tilted it back till they slid back to where they were, and never spilled a drop. he said I’d bought some beers for him and Pat but before they could get to them drank them up myself. okay, Clark, you’re a good guy with your black curly hair and toothless grin, and your wild life. I was just wondering. check with Rod when have a chance. — and off, through mud and occasionally-lighted puddles, home, where Mara’s napping still and there are (were) 5 Lucky Bocks in the white (today!) icebox. 9:50.  (no. 2) after finishing that (immediately after, during, in fact) the strange thing is there’s so much left out. last night finished readingThe Vicar of Wakefield. the bluejays and cardinals that called on the way to school. my beard suddenly seems soft (that thought off some day-dreaming about talking to poetry students). reread (for the last “making” time) “the 14,” the magazine; it is all set. the poems there, here now, seemed so abstract, compared with what I’m used to, but that in a way intensely and properly shaking feeling and talk, tonight. the revolution (Mara gets up, starts drinking Pepsi) and all that. (yellow sweater).
(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson)  As ashes are the shadow of smoke,  panic is the shadow of light,  beef the shadow of grass,  love the shadow of attention,  psychology the shadow of plastic  the shadow of oil the shadow  of giant ferns the shadow of  bacteria the shadow of light’s grandmother,  rosy finch the shadow of loon,  jealousy & myth twin shadows of desire,  Europe shadow of a desert river,  idea the shadow of pain,  sleep the shadow of bread,  liquid the shadow of lust,  time the shadow of  et cetera, logos is the shadow of what happens.  Take some broad-shouldered little fart, at las- t, fresh from the 5 o’clock (morn) shadow of barbarism, squatting over barley-paste, hot goat, dried fig  (meal the shadow —  since the shadows were removed  from rocky Grecian hills, trees cut away,  soil reduced to olive grounds —  down to shadow of surroundings —  of Homeric  heaps of meat that cast deadanimal-shaped shadows  by the tents on the sandy shores of Ilium)  squatting over his shapeless shadow in the shadow of the Parthenon —  itself  shadow form from wood, “in the light of”  stone. Well now, there’s been some  organized ruckus in his medium, rare town, which,  God knows, nobody there “thought” would  survive, a golden paradigm, for thousands of  Apollonian twirls. Who knows what they thought  of what they thought? It must’ve  been intensely local; that  the universe crept into  valley code was just  brain refreshment. Dirt was all  around. Some bright body shambled  the streets — in mud & heat — barely  shook his bald, Why is the sky  blues into registration, virgin  ears & experienced buttholes, as the shadow of estrangement from a bloody dream’s red tape, & got chemicaled, but Mr. Broad Wit seized evaporation from the street to isolate spirit of spearmint from what had always gone before. Summer was a-comin’ in still (Lawdy! sing coo-coo!), facts & symbols be-danced & babblin’ beat of a million bovine feet upon the tender luxury  sidewinding from the brain.  So he thought “Thought!” Why not? Natural! in a sense. Never before had such perfect innocence been explored like new property. Well, such a new idea as “idea” looks pretty good till you can check out how it settles into the ground. Blood’s biodegradable but logos piled up like a plastic eyesore, fore- shadowed a bloodless dry reign, precipitation of pedestrain pedantry, pedestrian mind for millenia, postulating its pustulations of post- & pre-, professing everything, subjugating us all in the tick-tech burned-out success of a nob objectivity, turning babble to a soapy bubble up up & away until pop! goes the wizard. Aw c’mon, the alchemy that pilfers from golden sundance volumes of German silver sucks tongue of essence — ah yes, essence, with its can-do incandescence, like “Lovelight’s our leverage to spring some uptight average from alla this quotidian sewage & italicize it, boot it through the uprights to an airy footnote.” So anyway this guy imagined up God outa the play-dough of his panicked exclusions & then compounded the felony by trying to imitate the damn thing, double-indemnity solipsism in the fool’s guise of cool & wise utopian Republic! Razional! Sozialismus! Computerized zoosphere! Hologram rain forest — a more direct use of light. But despite all right & crystal wings, thinking that — “The-variability-of-the-world-has-no-more-reality-than-the-shadows-on-a-cave-wall”— has no more reality than Plato’s reflection in the waters of a Theater-of-Dionysus Port-O-Let. Well, he thought he was correting a mess & left a mess of shadows for our meat. If unity really strung out from above, not shot up from below, we’d have no babies to throw out with anybody’s rationalized bathwater. Islands in the stream of biosphere placidly gavotte drinking play-tonic sprinkled geo- metrically, until the teleology becomes archaic — & eats it too. The world pole-flips one more time, mechanically geo- mantric, shakes the pants off of objective dance to reveal gradual chance, just numbers having a ball, as the rationale of it all. Back up a hemidemisecond! My better half says — “In the winter the house is all shadow.” But the long hot summer of essentialism “was” a system of no resistance — & all the psychological shit that makes a toilet contemplative, inner-directed: a pure good-bye. Yet it was hard (abstract thought), difficult to invent, like anything you can’t immediately step on, phrase or foot —  (& 4 is the shadow of 3 is the shadow of 2 is the shadow of 1  & old is the shadow of Jung  & red is the shadow of orange  & dots the shadow of dot  & hand is the shadow of and  however the shadow of breath  & season the shadow of winter  the step the shadow of the gesture  & soprano is the shadow of the star  & ring’s shadow is “orange”  & window shadow of the shadow.) —after all, Empedocles & Anaximander had illuminated life as shadows of whatever, up from sea-slime, dissolving to the harmony of a sphere. Logos, in the light, is only haze, a honey-head, that the shape be kept as “beautiful.” (& the shadow structure is the real — it’s not being looked at nor still distorted by leftover rays in the shadowee, nor in such relation to light as shadowing implies: once you’ve taken in the light, you’re artificially simple for good — bedazzled. Chiaroscuro conjures up dichotomy — Step 1, then, as it loses all idea to total presence, becomes invisible enough. & we’re home. Lightning strikes — OK. Half-known moves around the kitchen. The cereal box is food for thought. Is it easier to be right when you’re already wrong? Hmm, cool today; better pull on my dark-blue paradigm. The quality of nothing is not strained, but saying so’s tense like a cartoon zebra. “The variability of the world” — incidental winks of it start to party into view — absolutely hot & cool, at the moment, is, & likely to remain so.)  Eat a fig. Drink some coffee. Went driving  today ’73 bug mid-Sunday plus live-in sweetie  over littered subtle prairie out to Erie where we  coffee smoke four baconstrips & country fries breathed in the  work like hell old dirt streets & east to Firestone Screwball pool coke  & ice Route 52 two dozen silver queen Indian corn  Valmont Road yellow plum tomatoes cloudy light above  Kiowa Peak stoplight bickyard pond by Public Service.
would be coming back from some war, sending back stuffed birds or handkerchiefs in navy blue with Love painted on it. Some sent telegrams for birthdays, the pastel letters like jewels. The magazines were full of fathers who were doing what had to be done, were serving, were brave. Someone yelped there’d be confetti in the streets, maybe no school. That soon we’d have bananas. My father sat in the grey chair, war after war, hardly said a word. I wished he had gone away with the others so maybe he would be coming back to us
(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.) Be sad, be cool, be kind, remembering those now dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Be a brother, if so can be, to those beyond battle fatigue each in his own corner of earth  or forty fathoms undersea  beyond all boom of guns,  beyond any bong of a great bell,  each with a bosom and number,  each with a pack of secrets, each with a personal dream and doorway and over them now the long endless winds  with the low healing song of time,  the hush and sleep murmur of time. Make your wit a guard and cover. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Let your laughter come free remembering looking toward peace: “We must disenthrall ourselves.” Be a brother, if so can be, to those thrown forward for taking hardwon lines, for holding hardwon points  and their reward so-so, little they care to talk about, their pay held in a mute calm, highspot memories going unspoken, what they did being past words, what they took being hardwon.  Be sad, be kind, be cool.  Weep if you must  And weep open and shameless  before these altars. There are wounds past words. There are cripples less broken than many who walk whole.  There are dead youths  with wrists of silence  who keep a vast music  under their shut lips, what they did being past words, their dreams like their deaths beyond any smooth and easy telling, having given till no more to give.  There is dust alive with dreams of The Republic, with dreams of the Family of Man flung wide on a shrinking globe  with old timetables,  old maps, old guide-posts  torn into shreds,  shot into tatters  burnt in a firewind,  lost in the shambles,  faded in rubble and ashes.  There is dust alive. Out of a granite tomb, Out of a bronze sarcophagus, Loose from the stone and copper Steps a whitesmoke ghost Lifting an authoritative hand In the name of dreams worth dying for, In the name of men whose dust breathes  of those dreams so worth dying for, what they did being past words, beyond all smooth and easy telling. Be sad, be kind, be cool, remembering, under God, a dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Make your wit a guard and cover. Let your laughter come free like a help and a brace of comfort.  The earth laughs, the sun laughs over every wise harvest of man, over man looking toward peace by the light of the hard old teaching:  “We must disenthrall ourselves.”
1Moving over the hills, crossing the irrigation canals perfect and profuse in the mountains the streams of women and men walking under the high- tension wires over the brown hills  in the multiple world of the fly
The dogs barked, the dogs scratched, the dogs got wet, the dogs shook, the dogs circled, the dogs slept, the dogs ate, the dogs barked; the rain fell down, the leaves fell down, the eggs fell down and cracked on the floor; the dust settled, the wood floors were scratched, the cabinets sat without doors, the trim without paint, the stuff piled up; I loaded the dishwasher, I unloaded the dishwasher, I raked the leaves, I did the laundry, I took out the garbage, I took out the recycling, I took out the yard waste. There was a bed, it was soft, there was a blanket, it was warm, there were dreams, they were good. The corn grew, the eggplant grew, the tomatoes grew, the lettuce grew, the strawberries grew, the blackberries grew; the tea kettle screamed, the computer keys clicked, the radio roared, the TV spoke. “Will they ever come home?” “Can’t I take a break?” “How do others keep their house clean?” “Will I remember this day in fifty years?” The sweet tea slipped down my throat, the brownies melted in my mouth. My mother cooked, the apple tree bloomed, the lilac bloomed, the mimosa bloomed, I bloomed.
Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger. What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel the lift of wind under their iridescent wings, because they were born to fly, because they have nothing else to do, because wind and water are their elements, their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare, and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake, the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes. In autumn something urges them toward Texas marshes. They follow their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes, toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond, as glistening or as gray as the sky. They do not know why. They fly, they fly.
The girl’s father laughs a little too hard when I say: She knows what’s important in life as his daughter whips the dime store jump rope over her head for the twelve thousandth time— laughs as if I’m joking, when really, she has it down— sparkly pink handles grimy with effort, her face obscured by her hair, shins thin and bruised, socks down at the ankles. Abandoned by the rest of the crowd, the concrete square an archipelago, an alignment with rigor the others cannot fathom, she moves with fierce persistence into afternoon, the heft of the handles, smack of the rope— no Double Dutch, limbo, no communal game, but this resolute definition of rhythm, slatted bench shadows lengthening into space, the other kids simply forgetting she’s there, her solitary corner of the playground darkening as the dinner hour approaches, while pigeons pause on their branches, squirrels come down the trunk and stop, with rush hour beyond the fence, cars idling, and the rope’s metronome, forgotten as breath, weaving all the disparate energies of girl— elation, fury, eagerness, song— into one singular strand.
The merest suggestion of mouth and I was ravenous—I filled the house with chocolate, chestnuts, strudel, blood sausage; I bathed in butter. A glimpse of tongue and I was undone, simply a hint of heavy cream and the wax came off in a greasy slab, there were no cauldrons large enough. I imagined his body drawn in sections, flank, ribs, and tenderloin, I rubbed the blade to sparks, my stove walls sweated, windows dripping. Afterwards the house was a shell. My tongue: scorched white. I had to staple my stomach down to the size of a lichee nut. Thimbleful of broth, thimbleful of gruel, the merest suggestion floods my mouth with memory so rich I practically drown.
A Girl, Her soul a deep-wave pearl Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries; A face flowered for heart’s ease, A brow’s grace soft as seas Seen through faint forest-trees: A mouth, the lips apart, Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze From her tempestuous heart. Such: and our souls so knit, I leave a page half-writ — The work begun Will be to heaven’s conception done, If she come to it.
Βροδοπαχεες αγναι Χαριτες, δεντε Λιος κοραι  Ye rosy-armed, pure Graces, come, Daughters of Zeus, be near! Oh, wherefore have my lips been dumb So long in silence drear?And why have I so cheerless been, So sorrowful and wild? It was because ye were not seen, Because ye had not smiled.Although his prayer the Muses bless, The poet doth requireThat ye, in frolic gentleness, Should stand beside his lyre.Ne’er will he mortal ear delight, Nor care-vex’d spirit ease;Except he sing with ye in sight, Rose-flushed among the trees.
Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust Its timeless light can stain; The worm that brings man's flesh to dust Assaults its strength in vain: More gold than gold the love I sing,A hard, inviolable thing.Men say the passions should grow old With waning years; my heart Is incorruptible as gold, 'Tis my immortal part: Nor is there any god can layOn love the finger of decay.
Any half-decent rapper Can conjure the dead, Can reach into graves And accuse God Of Indian-giving. The trick is ancestral, No more magic than memory’s Hidden strings & chains. Trust me, We haven’t forgotten a name. Say them. Raise your hands. Holler at me!
My father was an enormous man Who believed kindness and lack of size Were nothing more than sissified Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded, His eyes were the worst kind Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard. No one could outshout him Or make bigger fists. The few Who tried got taken for bad, Beat down, their bodies slammed. I wanted to be just like him: Big man, man of the house, king. A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit, I learned to use my hands watching him Use his, pretending to slap mother When he slapped mother. He was sick. A diabetic slept Like a silent vowel inside his well-built, Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that With similar weaknesses —I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! An heir to the rhythm And tension beneath the beatings, My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Of a handheld chrome key, The noisy banging and tuning of growth.
All those  Liquid love affairs, Blind swimmers  Trusting rumps. We wiggled,  Imagining water. Wet, where was  The One? Nevermind Atlantis  And the promise Of moving pictures,  A lit candle In the window  Of our conscious minds. Those who danced,  Pretending to swim Underwater,  Did so out Of pure allegiance.  Some wore snorkels Made with  The waistbands Of funky underwear,  Others wet suits With clothespins  Clamped to their noses, Airtight as  Black Power handshakes. Rump-by-rump,  The strings attached To our thangs were  Reeled into The Deep And rhythmic as fins,  Schools of P signs Flapped and waved  Like flags. One nation  Under a groove. No one held their breath  In the flashlit depth. No one sank.
He was tall, lean, serious about his profession, said it disturbed him to see mismatched teeth. Squinting, he asked me to turn toward the light as he held an unglazed crown by my upper incisors. With a small brush he applied yellow, gray, pink, violet and green from a palette of glazes, then fired it at sixteen hundred degrees. We went outside to check the final color, and he was pleased. Today the dentist put it in my mouth, and no one could ever guess my secret: there’s no one quite like me, and I can prove it by the unique shade of the ivory sculptures attached to bony sockets in my jaw. A gallery opens when I smile. Even the forgery gleams.
and then there are the one-hit zombies cursed to an eternity of Monday nights who runs our music does not make it controls manufacture and marketing of rhythm schemes on and fixes the charts. it’s polyphonic from the dark of the chitlin to solid gold dawn doublecrossed over a love come down after the plunge sloshing around in limbo that too sweet gospel splash
—for Dennis Brutus This year the leaves turn red green black freedom colors each leaf each stitch of grass. I am amazed at my sweet harvest. The prison door has opened and a nation’s heart is released. I am full having spent my greediness in a ritual of joy.
can kill you can fade your life away friends are all out shopping ain’t nobody home suicide hotline is busy and here i am on my own with a pill and a bottle for company and heart full of been done wrong i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song saturday afternoons are killers when the air is brisk and warm ol’ sun he steady whisperssoon the life you know will be done suicide line i can’t get you best friend out of town alone with a pill and a bottle i drink my troubles down the man i love is a killer the man i love is thief the man i love is a junky the man i love is grief some call saturday the sabbath it’s the bottom of the line some say whether last or first, my heart’s gonna burst and there ain’t no help my way here with a pill and a bottle and a life full of been done wrong i’m a candidate for the coroner, a lyric for a song
How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it. I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. You discovered the initials of lovers carved on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart. How wrong the place was to us then, unable to see the portents of our future that seem so clear now in the naiveté of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s disdain for those with little money, the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.
The rooks are cawing up and down the trees! Among their nests they caw. O sound I treasure, Ripe as old music is, the summer's measure, Sleep at her gossip, sylvan mysteries, With prate and clamour to give zest of these— In rune I trace the ancient law of pleasure, Of love, of all the busy-ness of leisure, With dream on dream of never-thwarted ease. O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger Of nothing sad, who know not anything Of sea-birds' loneliness, of Procne's strife, Rock round me when I die! So sweet it were To die by open doors, with you on wing Humming the deep security of life.
This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk. Said au revoir to the ritual of pulling himself together. . . I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon— even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow.
My father gets quite mad at me; my mother gets upset— when they catch me watching our new television set. My father yells, “Turn that thing off!” Mom says, “It’s time to study.” I’d rather watch my favorite TV show with my best buddy. I sneak down after homework and turn the set on low. But when she sees me watching it, my mother yells out, “No!” Dad says, “If you don’t turn it off, I’ll hang it from a tree!” I rather doubt he’ll do it, ’cause he watches more than me. He watches sports all weekend, and weekday evenings too, while munching chips and pretzels— the room looks like a zoo. So if he ever got the nerve to hang it from a tree, he’d spend a lot of time up there— watching it with me.
My puppy’s in the garden. He loves to smell the flowers. To help them grow my puppy always sprinkles them with showers.
If you should have the sniffles, you’d better blow your nose. Because if you should go “Achoo!” you’ll mess up all your clothes.
My mother says it’s childish and my father says it’s dumb— whenever they discover that I’m sucking on my thumb. It’s such a silly thing to do, as everybody knows. So now instead of sucking it I stick it in my nose.
I climbed up the door and I opened the stairs. I said my pajamas and buttoned my prayers. I turned off the covers and pulled up the light. I’m all scrambled up since she kissed me last night.
I’ve spent the last 10 years In other people’s offices Learning the alphabet of nods and eyebrows And pursed lips, straining for the purse Legs crossed in easy confidence Confident nervous gestures of assurance Approved blue suits And sudden dreamed-up lies to be delivered A net of thirty days and sixty days and ninety Insanely stretched past promise into years Next week, for certain Floated haphazardly on possibles As slight as handshakes, Firm as agreements of subjective verbs And got nowhere. This happy corner, sucking up hard-boiled eggs And polish hots The seidel sliding down the polished bar Clatter of friendly pool balls in the margin Not exactly somewhere, but a certain place. A regular’s dark hair and polished eyes Glow in the glasses lined before her face Smoking and berating the muzak “Jack, when you gonna get some country music?” “Country Charlie Pride?” Outside, it’s as bright as the important phone call I always pretend to await Setting up the lunch meeting at Stouffer’s Linen napkins and hope’s frozen green peas Set up another round of handshake laughter for the pictures “Hey sweet thing, when we gonna have that date?” The barmaid pouts a 1940s frown— It’s Arnie (reaching now to slap me on the back) A gleaming brazen polyester clown, Tuesday seems longer than the day before Since I began to organize my life around My Office I stay a little later every day. A little rain hangs fire in the clouds Next trip, I think I’ll bring the wife
The land was there before us Was the land. Then things Began happening fast. Because The bombs us have always work Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us. Because Us has saved the world. Us gave it A particular set of regulations Based on 1) undisputable acumen. 2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately Referred to here as “bull market” And (of course) other irrational factors Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps, Our man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc
The eyeballs on her behind are like fire Leaping and annoying The space they just passed Just like fire would do The ground have no mouth to complain And the girl is not braver herself She is beautiful in her spotted Leopard ensemble. Heartless so To keep her fashionalbe in New York Leopards are dying Crude comments flutter around her At lunchtime. She sure look good She remembers nine banishing speeches More powerful than this is the seam Of the leotard under her clothing Her tail in the leotard is never still The seam! She feels it too familiar on her leg As some crumb says something suggestive The leopard embracing around her Is too chic to leap and strike Her thoughts fall back to last semester’s karate Underneath, the leotard crouches up on her thigh It is waiting for its terrible moment!
The cruelty of ages past affects us now Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life Each door has locks designed for keys unknown Our living room was once somebody’s home Our bedroom, someone’s only room Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door. Door to a kitchen? And our lives are hasped and boundaried Because of ancient locks and madnesses Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies Which one is madness? Depends on who you are. We find we cannot stay, the both of us, in the same room Dance, like electrons, out of each other’s way. The cruelties of ages past affect us now
When you’re cold—November, the streets icy and everyone you pass homeless, Goodwill coats and Hefty bags torn up to make ponchos— someone is always at the pay phone, hunched over the receiver spewing winter’s germs, swollen lipped, face chapped, making the last tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down. So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade, familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up. You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled on the steps of the church.
The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks. Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken little finger on my right hand at birth— I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky into stars, the stars into patterns I make up as I trace them with a broken-off blade of grass. Possible, unthinkable, the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.
Today is Sunday.I fear the crowd of my fellows with such faces of stone.From my glass tower filled with headaches and impatient Ancestors,I contemplate the roofs and hilltops in the mist.In the stillness—somber, naked chimneys.Below them my dead are asleep and my dreams turn to ashes.All my dreams, blood running freely down the streetsAnd mixing with blood from the butcher shops.From this observatory like the outskirts of townI contemplate my dreams lost along the streets,Crouched at the foot of the hills like the guides of my raceOn the rivers of the Gambia and the SaloumAnd now on the Seine at the foot of these hills.Let me remember my dead!Yesterday was All Saints’ Day, the solemn anniversary of the Sun,And I had no dead to honor in any cemetery.O Forefathers! You who have always refused to die,Who knew how to resist Death from the Sine to the Seine,And now in the fragile veins of my indomitable blood,Guard my dreams as you did your thin-legged migrant sons!O Ancestors! Defend the roofs of Paris in this dominical fog,The roofs that protect my dead.Let me leave this tower so dangerously secureAnd descend to the streets, joining my brothersWho have blue eyes and hard hands.
This Luxembourg morning, this Luxembourg autumn, As I walk back and forth upon my youth, No strollers, no fountains, no boats in the water, No children, no flowers. Ah! September flowers and the sunburnt shouts of children Defying the coming winter. Now only two old fellows trying to play tennis. This autumn morning without children—the children’s theater closed! This Luxembourg where I no longer find my youth, The years as fresh as cut grass. Comrades, my dreams are vanquished in despair, are they not? Here they fall like leaves with other leaves, Older, mortally wounded, trampled, bitter with blood, Gathered together for what common grave? I no longer know this Luxembourg, those soldiers at attention. They set up cannons to protect the Senators’ aimless retirement They dig trenches under the bench where I learned about The sweet budding of lips. This sign, ah! yes, of dangerous youth! . . . I watch the leaves fall into these false shelters, into graves Into trenches where the blood of an entire generation flows Europe is burying the nations’ leaven And the hope of new races.
(for jazz orchestra and trumpet solo) New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty, Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile, So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets Raising my owl eyes at the eclipse of the sun. Your light is sulphurous against the pale towers Whose heads strike lightning into the sky, Skyscrapers defying storms with their steel shoulders And weathered skin of stone. But two weeks on the naked sidewalks of Manhattan— At the end of the third week the fever Overtakes you with a jaguar’s leap Two weeks without well water or pasture all birds of the air Fall suddenly dead under the high, sooty terraces. No laugh from a growing child, his hand in my cool hand. No mother’s breast, but nylon legs. Legs and breasts Without smell or sweat. No tender word, and no lips, Only artificial hearts paid for in cold cash And not one book offering wisdom. The painter’s palette yields only coral crystals. Sleepless nights, O nights of Manhattan! Stirring with delusions while car horns blare the empty hours And murky streams carry away hygenic loving Like rivers overflowing with the corpses of babies.  II Now is the time of signs and reckoning, New York! Now is the time of manna and hyssop. You have only to listen to God’s trombones, to your heart Beating to the rhythm of blood, your blood. I saw Harlem teeming with sounds and ritual colors And outrageous smells— At teatime in the home of the drugstore-deliveryman I saw the festival of Night begin at the retreat of day. And I proclaim Night more truthful than the day. It is the pure hour when God brings forth Life immemorial in the streets, All the amphibious elements shinning like suns. Harlem, Harlem! Now I’ve seen Harlem, Harlem! A green breeze of corn rising from the pavements Plowed by the Dan dancers’ bare feet, Hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts, Ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks And mangoes of love rolling from the low houses To the feet of police horses. And along sidewalks I saw streams of white rum And streams of black milk in the blue haze of cigars. And at night I saw cotton flowers snow down From the sky and the angels’ wings and sorcerers’ plumes. Listen, New York! O listen to your bass male voice, Your vibrant oboe voice, the muted anguish of your tears Falling in great clots of blood, Listen to the distant beating of your nocturnal heart, The tom-tom’s rhythm and blood, tom-tom blood and tom-tom.  III New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood. Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The reconciliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
Woman, place your soothing hands upon my brow, Your hands softer than fur. Above us balance the palm trees, barely rustling In the night breeze. Not even a lullaby. Let the rhythmic silence cradle us. Listen to its song. Hear the beat of our dark blood, Hear the deep pulse of Africa in the mist of lost villages. Now sets the weary moon upon its slack seabed Now the bursts of laughter quiet down, and even the storyteller Nods his head like a child on his mother’s back The dancers’ feet grow heavy, and heavy, too, Come the alternating voices of singers. Now the stars appear and the Night dreams Leaning on that hill of clouds, dressed in its long, milky pagne. The roofs of the huts shine tenderly. What are they saying So secretly to the stars? Inside, the fire dies out In the closeness of sour and sweet smells. Woman, light the clear-oil lamp. Let the Ancestors Speak around us as parents do when the children are in bed. Let us listen to the voices of the Elissa Elders. Exiled like us They did not want to die, or lose the flow of their semen in the sands. Let me hear, a gleam of friendly souls visits the smoke-filled hut, My head upon your breast as warm as tasty dang streaming from the fire, Let me breathe the odor of our Dead, let me gather And speak with their living voices, let me learn to live Before plunging deeper than the diver Into the great depths of sleep.
for Spalding Gray The West and North winds both lover us, wanting, bitter, to bring us in close in the small hold. Tongues loll and laze, while the flap and snapping above: crazy wanderlust. The basin must cradle, keep her passengers, though the hero abandoned the ferry for the real sea. Is nothing worthy?  Wallet on bench. Wallet at home. Wallet at rest. The child, even his cries, must the ship balance, makes me wild to right this unhumanly keeling. I have six arms, am the dismembered figurehead, ballast, breasts covered in blue scales. I am at rudder, at bow, at mast, at rigging, at deck, at halyard, at stern, when the hold explodes with screaming. One boy has stolen the other’s marble. The boat shifts, tilts. A wallet washes up against us. Is this what you meant when you said a family steadied you? Is this what they see when they see me and my six handless arms, shining torso and cuspid humor? The figurehead has no need for eyelids, muston-guard, vigil, dry eyed. But she dreams. Dreams. The sail, its fine apparel, its linen long-shadow: a tiny hand opening, budlike
listen, a bad thing happened to my friend’s marriage, can’t tell you only can tell my own story which so far isn’t so bad: “Dad” and I stay married. so far. so good. so so. But it felt undoable. This lucky life every day, every day. every, day. (all the poetry books the goddamn same until one guy gets up and stuns the audience.) Joe Wenderoth, not by a long shot sober, says, I promised my wife I wouldn’t fuck anyone
Saturday morning two hawks flew over the soccer field and swooped in low as Abram almost scored a goal. Moses, on the sideline, sat on a stray ball reading a book, not looking up at the game or the hawks or his brother who noticed. That night at the Basic Trust Day Care Poker Tournament I got knocked out with queen/nine against queen/jack by Dan Shiffman who seemed almost sad to beat me. I sucked on ginger candies and held new baby Phoebe Kate, born on the same due date as the baby I miscarried. When she left I cried and had more candies. In the end, Josh beat everyone and won a 40-inch flat-screen TV.  Sunday morning I couldn’t sleep so got up early, went to the Hell’s Kitchen flea market and bought a dining table and chairs from a man named Toney. Bargained him down to $690 (including delivery) because “the chairs need new upholstery.” A 1950ish Danish with expandable top and funny splayed feet—it reminds me of my late Grandma Lotty, her sister Marguerite, and the heavy-laden tables of childhood. I’ve no idea what it will look like with my small family gathered round or if I’ll overworry the polished surface. We’ll see— it arrives on Tuesday.  This morning I got a stack of papers from sophomore lit. The top two had the author’s name misspelled. I’ve not yet looked at any others. I talked in class about how Art Spiegelman chose realism over sentiment, how we conflate historical time with personal time, how on 9/11 I took my nine-month old son to his first day of day care and the city expoloded, went up in smoke, and no one but me cares that he spent hours there, only nine months old, while we watched TV in our phone-jammed airspace, breathed in fumes, tried to give blood, wondered was there anywhere, anywhere we could or should  flee to?— Josh called right after class and said he’d gotten “strong intent” from an agent who’s “all about the money.” Nothing disastrous happened this week. Not so far. Unless you count what I saw next, between classes on my way to read student poems at Empanada Mama’s on 48th and 9th. A teenage boy lying on his side in the middle of the street. The traffic stopped and a crowd watched while six or seven other boys ran back and forth and stamped down hard on his skull. I turn a gag into a kind of cough and dial 911We’ve already called the fucking police, says a woman as I retch into an empty trash can. Finally three teenage girls surround the boy and the other boys move off.  Later, on my way back to Fordham, I stop a cop and ask about the boy. EMTs got him, says the officer.They had no shame, no fear, even with all of us watching . . . I tell him.They’re kids, ma’am, he says. You know what kids is like.  Tonight in Writer’s Workshop I & II I read two cantos from Model Homes by Wayne Koestenbaum and then “A Poet’s Life” by David Trinidad.These poems hijack form and make it present, contemporary, immediate. Look how Wayne puts a plumber and lovers, his mother, porn mags, fashion into terza rima that lead us along, punch drunk, addicted to real life. And oh how David’s crown of sonnets breaks our hearts!
That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.” I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong? I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out, on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.
the bruise will stop by later. For now, the pain pauses in its round, notes the time of day, the patient’s temperature, leaves a memo for the surrogate: What the hell did you think you were doing? I mean . . . Oh well, less said the better, they all say. I’ll post this at the desk. God will find the pattern and break it.
It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright, a woman was lying on the highway, on her back, with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders so the back of her head touched her spine between her shoulder-blades, her clothes mostly accidented off, and her leg gone, a long bone sticking out of the stub of her thigh— this was her her abandoned matter, my mother grabbed my head and turned it and clamped it into her chest, between her breasts. My father was driving—not sober but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of neutral twilight, broken glass on wet black macadam, like an underlying midnight abristle with stars. This was the world—maybe the only one. The dead woman was not the person my father had recently almost run over, who had suddenly leapt away from our family car, jerking back from death, she was not I, she was not my mother, but maybe she was a model of the mortal, the elements ranged around her on the tar— glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.
When she comes back, from college, I will see the skin of her upper arms, cool, matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old soupy chest against her breasts, I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment, her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a soul in a body. She came into my life the second great arrival, after him, fresh from the other world—which lay, from within him, within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep, week after week, the moon rising, and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months, in a slow blur, around our planet. Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk, and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult to have her in that room again, behind that door! As a child, I caught bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds, looked into their wild faces, listened to them sing, then tossed them back into the air—I remember the moment the arc of my toss swerved, and they entered the corrected curve of their departure.
My father once broke a man’s hand Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first Two fingers, so it could slash Horizontally, & with surprising grace, Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand, And, for a moment, the light held still On those vines. When it was over, My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, Lay alone in the dark, listening to music. He never mentioned it. I never understood how anyone could risk his life, Then listen to Vivaldi. Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, And stare through the wet branches of an oak In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars Again. A thin haze of them, shining And persisting. It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them. In California, that light was closer. In a California no one will ever see again, My father is beginning to die. Something Inside him is slowly taking back Every word it ever gave him. Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father Search for a lost syllable as if it might Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, The word for it, he is ashamed . . . If you can think of the mind as a place continually Visited, a whole city placed behind The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end— As when the lights go off, one by one, In a hotel at night, until at last All of the travelers will be asleep, or until Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk Is applying more lacquer to her nails, You can almost believe that the elevator, As it ascends, must open upon starlight. I stand out on the street, & do not go in. That was our agreement, at my birth. And for years I believed That what went unsaid between us became empty, And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted. I got it all wrong. I wound up believing in words the way a scientist Believes in carbon, after death. Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— Which may be all that’s left of you & me. When I left home at seventeen, I left for good. That pale haze of stars goes on & on, Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape On a black sky. It means everything It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. Cold enough to reconcile Even a father, even a son.
Today when persimmons ripen Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song Today when the maple sets down its red leaves Today when windows keep their promise to open Today when fire keeps its promise to warm Today when someone you love has died  or someone you never met has died Today when someone you love has been born  or someone you will not meet has been born Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace Today, let this light bless you With these friends let it bless you With snow-scent and lavender bless you Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
The Barbados Advocate, Thursday, January 19, 1995, page 4 MILDRED COLLYMORE told the No. 3 Supreme Court yesterday that when she recovered from an attack with a stone she found herself "washed-way" in blood. Collymore said also that accused Philamena Hinds came back to move the rock but she would not let her. The complainant said that on the day of the incident she left her home and went over to her daughter's on the other side of the road to cut the grass from around the place. When she got to the spot she said dirt was on the grass and she took the hoe and raked it away. While she was doing this, the witness said, Hinds' son, Gline, came and spoke to her and then went back up the road. She said Hinds came next and spoke to her but she did not hear what she said. The witness added that she was holding down, and on looking up she was struck suddenly with a big rock in her right forehead. "I tumble down and when I come to myself I was wash-way in blood." she testified... Collymore told the court [that] after she found out she was bleeding she went to a neighbour's home and called the police. She was later taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and detained for three days, she said Asked by prosecutor Ms Donna Babb if she had quarrelled with Collymore before the incident she replied no. The witness also told the prosecutor that she did not interfere with the accused.   Babb asked her if she had attacked the accused with a hoe but she said she was not given a chance to do so.   Cross-examine When defence lawyer Dr Waldo Waldron Ramsey's turn came to cross-examine Collymore, he asked her how long she knew the accused and she said it was since childhood. She also said she and Hinds once worked together in they understand each other. Waldron-Ramsay suggested to the witness that on the day of the incident, marl was on the accused woman's property and she was pulling it down to make a road for her daughter and son-in-law. She denied the suggestion. He further told Hinds that she told the accused that she cold not stop her from pulling down the marl, and this she denied. Waldron-Ramsay put it to the witness that when she refused to stop moving the marl the accused left her and went back home, but Hinds said this was not < true. Continuing his cross-examination, Waldron-Ramsay suggested to Hinds that Collymore came to her a second time and told her to stop racking away her dirt but the witness [the accused!] again denied this ever took place. The witness further denied the suggestion that this second time she became more vicious and told the accused [Hinds] that if she did not move her  "X X X X   she would lick her to  X X X X   down." Waldron-Ramsay also suggested to Collymore that she had the hoe in the air ready to lick down Hinds, but she denied this.     DATE TREE HILL CASE The crown will call its third witness this morning in the trial of 48-year-old Philamena Hinds, before Mr Justice Frederick Waterman in No. 3 Supreme Court. Hinds, a machine operator, of Date Tree Hill, St Peter, is charged with causing grievous bodily harm to 65-year-old Mildred Collymore, of Date Tree Hill, on December 13, 1993, with intent to maim, disfigure or disable her... Hinds, who pleaded not guilty... is represented by attorney-at-law Dr. Waldo Waldron Ramsay while the Crown's case is being put by Acting Crown Counsel Donna Babb. Collymore's 45-year-old-daughter, Linda, is acting as her interpreter, because the witness has a hearing problem.
On a hill overlooking the Rock River my father’s pear tree shimmers, in perfect peace, covered with hundreds of ripe pears with pert tops, plump bottoms, and long curved leaves. Until the green-haloed tree rose up and sang hello, I had forgotten. . . He planted it twelve years ago, when he was seventy-three, so that in September he could stroll down with the sound of the crickets rising and falling around him, and stand, naked to the waist, slightly bent, sucking juice from a ripe pear.
The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey, wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover. Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me. Seven a.m. and time to walk my dog on a leash. Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters, and the wind comes down our one-way street like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi, huge with a cold load of growls. There's not only leaf left to bear witness, with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp, against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind. Only my nose running and my face frozen into a kind of grin which has nothing to do with the ice and the wind or death and December, but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy, for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.
It is said that many have been cured of madness by drinking of the spring in the orchard of this convent, but I doubt it, for it is a very pleasant place and a surfeit of pleasantries often leads directly to madness. I do not have much experience of madness (once a sister ran naked down the hall) but I have tasted the water and it is clear and fresh, there is nothing unpleasant about it. The Abbess said of a certain manhe is a drink of water—meaning he was a bore— but I want to meet that man, he would be as welcome in my life as Jesus in the orchard here, though the fat old Abbess might shoo him away. I would be so glad to have him drink, to serve him with a round of little glasses on a painted tray, like the ‘cocktail parties’ in the secular world, and I the hostess, turning her cheek to be kissed in the fray. I would wear white clothes and my headdress, and he might carry a scythe and cut the morning glories, or simply sit and sun his nose. But they have taken my Lord away, lodged Him in the earth somewhere, call Him leaves, vines, breeze, bird. It cannot be true. Looking for Him in these things condemns us to a lifetime of imbecile activity. He has a face, arms, legs, a navel. He is a man, for He is everything I am not. How can it be otherwise? Before I leave the spring, I lean over it and weep. I spit upon the flowers. I stumble up the hill. We are somewhere below the Tserna Gota— meaning the Black Mountain—and when I reach the top I count the villages—there are two—where we are the last on earth to think of Him as having a head. Here, too, is the source of the spring, and crows with lethargic dispositions circle and circle the spot.
I He stood outside the gates of Lhasa for four days singing I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed, but the berries are delicious if you remember to wash them.
The last time I saw father alive he was using a black umbrella, closed, to beat off some pigeons hanging outside the marble portals of a museum. We were visitors, walking very slowly, so father could stoop and examine everything. We had not been in the museum, but were resting on its steps. We saw it all—the fountains, the statues, the parks and the post office. Cities are made of such things. Once we encountered a wedding coming out of the cathedral and were caught in a shower of rice; as the bride flicked her veiled head father licked his little finger and in this way saved a grain. On the next block he announced he was going to heaven. But first let’s go back to the hotel and rest, he said: I want my mint. Those were practically his last words. And what did I want more than anything in the world? Probably the ancient Polish recipe for blood soup, which was finally told to me in an empty deli in a deserted mill town in western Massachusetts by the owner’s mother, who was alone one day when I burst in and demanded a bowl. But, she said, lacing her fingers around a jar of morello cherries, it requires one cup of new blood drawn from the goose whose neck you’ve just wrung to put in the pot, and where in these days can I find anything as fresh as that? I had lost track of my life before, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of wayfarer’s bliss when she continued to list, one by one, the impossible ingredients I needed to live. We sat at the greasy table far into the night, while snow fell on the locked doors of the church next door, dedicated to St. Stanislas, which was rumored to be beautiful inside, and contain the remains of his beloved head.
A bride and a groom sitting in an open buggy in the rain, holding hands but not looking at each other, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the marriage to begin, embarrassed by the rain, the effect of the rain on the bridal veil, the wet horse with his mane in his eyes, the rain cold as the sea, the sea deep as love, big drops of rain falling on the leather seat, the rain beaded on a rose pinned to the groom’s lapel, the rain on the bride’s bouquet, on the baby’s breath there, the sound of the rain hitting the driver’s top hat, the rain shining like satin on the black street, on the tips of patent leather shoes, Hokusai’s father who polished mirrors for a living, Hokusai’s father watching the sky for clouds, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing rain over a bridge and over the people crossing the bridge, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing the rain for hours, Hokusai’s father rubbing a mirror, the rain cold as the sea, the sea cold as love, the sea swelling to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.
They have us corralled in the basement of the courthouse. One desk and a row of folding chairs— just like first grade, our desks facing Teacher in neat little rows. Upstairs, wooden benches like pews and red carpet reserved for those who’ve held out the longest. No creditors have come to claim us today. We’re small-time. This guy from the graveyard shift stares at his steel-toed boots, nervous hands in his lap. None of us look each other in the eye. We steal quick looks—how did you get here
The irresistible and benevolent light brushes through the angel-wing begonias, the clippings of ruddy ears for the living room. Intimate motes, debris of grounded, forlorn walks, speckle through the vitreous quality of blush. As fluid lulls turn like trout backs, azure-tipped fins oscillate in the shallows, the clear floating is dizziness. Tender events are meeting halves and wholes of affinity, the recurrence of whimsy and parallel streams flush away the blockage of malaise. Incessant gratitude, pliable kindness smolders in the husk of these sweet accumulations: abalone shells, the thoughtful carvings from friends, the stone of another’s pocket, the photo of mystified moon over water, the smiles of worn chairs. Austere hopes find pleasure in lately cherished flowers. The blooms are articulate deluge, hues of delicacy. Petals parted dim renderings, the viable imprint of the blood-hot beam of light with reformed courage. Beveling the finish to suppression, the blade of choice brings the flourish of dividing while adequately doubling worth by two. Multiplying. The luminescent burning of space. The heat is a domicile as abandoned as red roses budding their ascension from stem. The sun has its own drum contenting itself with the rose heart it takes into continual rumbling. The connection of surface and hand. The great head of dark clouds finds its own place of unraveled repercussions and disruption, elsewhere, over the tall, staunch mountains of indemnity.
The buildings are worn. The trees are strong and ancient. They bend against the grid of electric lines. The windows are broken by the homeless and the cold past. I am home on the yard that spreads mint, pales the Victorian roses, takes into it the ravaged lilac tree. The black bulk of plastic lies about stopping unwanted weeds for the Landlord. Tattered, the cedar tree is chipped to dry heaps of recklessness. The unwanted spreads by the power of neglect. The wear of traffic says that we are out of time, must hurry. Age, the creak in the handmade screen door fades behind itself.
Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the tassels, the pollen, fertility. Indelible ink is tattooing our lungs. We speak smoke. We exchange our lunacy for reverence. Respect tornados. Windy Woman. Four Winds. We have extended the edge of expectation by merely living. You have tallied compulsion into currency. I am measured by the excitement my lips stir. I am the bin for castoffs and the weary. I wear my veil. I have no children, but you have many. You dream of heaven and they all run up to meet you.
It was bruise marks of hands that alluded to tracks of murder. Her neck was twisted too many times in short rope, and the tree too high for a small woman. “He was here.” He says, “He came to her new Man, too, and said that he was coming for him next.” The nightmare is black tongue. No footprints. The form in the room laughs, “Ha Ha, Goody!” He sees that it is vapor. Later, when he cuts her down, he knows that she came to him, to him, she laughed. The night will not make her unhappy. He had no time to hunt, since he had to bury three more brothers the next day. Car wreck on ice. The insidious soul danced across the river to entice other women to death. If he is man, he is subject to will. If one prefers Archangels, he can be cast into oblivion. That does not comfort the people and we must battle with Bell and Prayer, for the brother. This will take up the nights and the rest of our thoughts. The brother has seen the foreshadowing of events. He will bring the damned down in his fisherman’s grip into the mad boil of the river’s strength.
When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore, put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your planes and you’ll understand. Here.
It’s midnight in a drizzling fog on Sunset Avenue and we are walking through the scent of orange blossoms and past a white camellia blown down or flung by someone onto rainblack asphalt waiting for the gray Mercedes sedan to run over and smash its petals and leave us walking in the smell of Diesel exhaust with orange-blossom bouquet. Where the next blue morning and the gray Pacific meet as the Palisades fall away two sparrowhawks are beating their tapered wings in place, watching for jay or chewink to stray too far from their thorny scrub to get back— and the female suddenly towers, her wings half-close and she stoops like a dropping dagger, but down the steep slope she rockets past them and turns again into updraft to the clifftops to hover— as the jay peers out through thorns,  and the lines of white surf whisper in.
It’s true we have invented quark-extraction, and this allows our aiming gravity at will; it’s true also that time can now be made to flow backward or forward by the same process. It may be true as well that what is happening at the focal point, the meristem of this process, creates a future kind of space, a tiny universe that has quite different rules. In this, it seems, whatever one may choose to do or be becomes at once the case. In short, we have discovered heaven and it’s in our grasp. However, the Patent Office has not yet approved and cites less positive aspects of this invention. First, it does not generate profit, and it does make obsolete all present delivery systems for our nukes. Then, it will let private citizens do things that only a chosen few, that is, OUR sort, should be allowed— fly freely from one country to any other, spreading diseases and bankrupting transportation. Home-heating, auto-making industries will be trashed, employment shelled, depressions spread worldwide, sheer anarchy descend. For these and other reasons, no one must know of this. . . .
The song is Gaelic now, peridot words the color of fresh timothy gathered by red-haired women; or the song is the bony white oak and rhythm of Miwu, a knowing that breathes against angles of granite and meets the ground in a flurry of sound. Or the song rides down from a star over burgundy boulders beneath a dazzling blue sky to find the old words buried deep in the earth. But this heart listens. This song. Hi-tsah-tsi-nah, the precious rain awakening. On this you come as a prayer in the flesh, on this you ride with the roll and rollick of rattlesnake. On this you sing volcanic birthing words and obsidian cools where the blood bubbles down.  Oh look, a little girl is lost  although she stands close  to her mother’s heart.  With great energy she scrapes  the missionaries from her ribs.  Shoulder blades curve  around the spine  and the pestle dances,  acorns flying,  and dust collects  in the creases  of her hands. Or  she is kneeling in a small room  at the edge of the mesa,  polished black bone of earth,  cherished piki stone,  moving back and forth  this act of love, grinding  the corn until it is dark,  brushing the white cornmeal  into one basket, the blue  into another, thinking already  of the daughters she will bear  glowing in the sun. Or she is standing at the bog inside a mountain meadow, hands raised up to tie back her hair with a thin red rag; seeds loosen and cling to her shoes, her stockings, her long skirt, her skin. She fearlessly walks through gold fiddleneck, small mountain lupines, clouds of white popcorn flowers fallen upward out of the ground to cover the hillside like snow. Or  a woman gathers loop after loop  of heavy rope to guide the head  of the horse she straddles and sometimes  she is the mare and the soft sandstone  and the hot rocks rolling in acorn soup,  trying to heal the gash spread across her path  where the crescent moon has sliced the earth.  Ocean to mountain to mesa, the bundle she carries  is a sacred memory, a rainbow that arches  from one side of the sky to the other. Or a woman is closing a steamer trunk, has to sit on it hard to get the latch through and the leather buckled; seagulls dive outside the wall of the ship, she hears their demands, maybe one has come inside to brush her cheek with its pointed wing or maybe just another tear warmed by cooling blood. How she aches in the cold, she is so thin; and when she pulls the blanket around her and lies down on the floor, she is no more than a pile of old rags, a few sticks of firewood, a broken broom. Steady against the roll of the sea she is patient as the rocks that wait for the ship along a northern corridor, angry as the storms midway across the Atlantic that shake their fists at those who must leave home, and as deeply hidden as the icebergs that threaten to disembowl. She has already seen the world dissolve; now she feels the breaking of one last thread to ancestral land, feels the very break of it.
Noon, March 6, 1997   From morning’s mouth the bones emerge, a prayer is whispered over rounded horns; the prairie is beyond the quivering hump and holy smoke sparkles released in the breath. Braided sweetgrass, be about their hooves; although the grip of hunger lies heavy on the land, let endless native grasses grow among the yellow stones and between the stars. Even if only one man had begun to sing, actually it was thousands, She who came to Wisconsin farmers and transformed their lives, She who brought her blessing in the form of being newborn, She whom they named the Miracle, White Buffalo Calf Maiden must return amid the fast firing of bullets, along the most perilous of paths. Rock stars, millionaires, they all offered millions of dollars to struggling white farmers but she had begun her transformation and her prophecy by touching them and they came to understand if not the actual words to the prayers at least the reverence, the need to protect, to keep the doors open. Like it was a hundred years ago bounties are gathered from death; trains, buses, cars, planes carry the segmented body of the terrible worm across the land and the screams of the hunted split the sun awake. It is time to restore the stolen beads and shards, the bones and knives to every grave. And the graves are graves no longer but wombs; the bounties burn their hands and bones come flowing from museum shelves to dance in the rippling grass, rebuilding lungs, starting hearts.  There must be a hundred men  and a hundred men’s worth  of heartlessness; wished they could find  Indians to kill but now that is illegal  so they make up some excuse  to raise their rifles and take aim,  not hearing the rumble  of buffalo prayer, not feeling  tomorrow tremble  or the prophecy of Miracle,  and smile as they see the legs give way,  the horns gouge open the prairie ground,  Earth betrayed again.
making promises they can’t keep. For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull each invading burr and thistle from your skin, cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt, take from the ground the dark oily poison– all to restore you happy and proud, the whole of you transformed and bursting into tomorrow.  But where do I cut first? Where should I begin to pull? Should it be the Russian thistle down the hill where backhoes have bitten? Or African senecio or tumbleweed bouncing above the wind? Or the middle finger of my right hand? Or my left eye or the other one? Or a slice from the small of my back, a slab of fat from my thigh? I am broken as much as any native ground, my roots tap a thousand migrations. My daughters were never born, I am as much the invader as the native, as much the last day of life as the first. I presumed you to be as bitter as me, to tremble and rage against alien weight. Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen? Who should be rooted, who pruned, who watered, who picked? Should I feed the white-faced cattle who wait for the death train to come or comb the wild seeds from their tails? Who should return across the sea or the Bering Strait or the world before this one or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming to some other planet, burn up or melt in a distant sun? Who should be healed and who hurt? Who should dry under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered? Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place, alien with a native face, native with an alien face?
September 11, 2001 They walk past you  weeping  for the leaves that burnt  & fell, the wood exposed  like bone, sculpture  that suddenly emerges  from white haze. You old fortune-teller, you could have told them in their vibrant grief whispering through the night wind your breath held in your heart like the trembling promise of tomorrow, just before dawn  there was no pain  you are the wood  not the leaf,  falling is not  falling but  offering.
There are two memories of tides: one for the deep blackness that split away from the mother sea and one for sea that found itself in the daybreaks of rivers. Yet it was all one sea tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern, seals in speckled pod-shaped skins, and whales, opening their small eyes when the hands of people drew fish out of the salt. Geologists tell us that the sea split millions of years ago before the Yoemem, Yoremem, Kunkaak, O-Otam curled their tongues around the names of themselves and raised the conch shell to their lips, so that the sound of nature became human, too:kalifornia vaawe Then the sea was measured and divided into leagues. The Spanish ships called it dangerous because the sea tore in two ways, tide and rivers, so they contained it in maps written on dead animal skins with ink made from dried octopus bloodMar de la Kalifornia Golfo de California
By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work. They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more in one day than fifty Indians —Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767   Mining: The Indian is naked, swinging quarter to half hundredweight steel-edged crowbars. He climbs beams with notches set step by step, carrying ore in plaited baskets on his shoulders. They are given one half-bushel of maize per week. This is their payment unless they have a family– then they are given two half-bushels.Two men using a wheelbarrow could haul out more than can thirty lazy Indians working an entire day.
From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950.  (Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a  family, including three young girls.  From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas  on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.)  Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets.  A four-button dark shirt. No bruises,  but he looks dazed.  Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt,  which is in itself a crime.  Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl  with a face carved like a racetrack saint,  eyes with all bets called off,  grinning like a coyote.  (Officer Parks had his glasses broken  with his own sap  and was thrown through a window.)  Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins,  lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas.  Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños  from East L.A., driving their low-riders,  chrome shinier than a cop’s badge.  And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed  girl with a punch like a bag of bees,  a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open  as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out  of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla?  (The officers received severe cuts and bruises,  were treated at a hospital and released in time to jail the youths,  who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.)  Two years later, I was born and Jimmy entered the church,  hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, watching the christening.  Four drops of water, like popped-off wafer-thin buttons,  fell on my head.  No.  He never showed up that day  or any other. My spiritual guardian must’ve been there  in spirit only.  He didn’t know nada about Got and no one knows  where he is today, but I think you could find him at the end  of a knife. Or in the slash of the z  in ¡La Raza! the dark blood  reds of graffiti. Or tomatoes  grown in old coffee cans  by a white-haired man  sitting in the sun in a dark shirt,  next to an old woman growing younger every day  as I tell her story, my story,  our story  with all the grace and power  of a deadly weapon.
All the old photographs, hidden like buried Treasure. Broken prayer sticks under my dreams And my worn mattress. Each one like a postcard sent back Home; wonders only seen in slick travel magazines. Boxed up under my bed, colored souls on Kodak paper— I can still see Grandma’s smile next to her resting sheep dog. Like a blue lightning strike over the northern sky, Over two black houses, I pull the first leaf out, at random. A picture-flash: Tom and Susie Worker are sitting together On a couch covered with a large Navajo Chief’s blanket woven By her brown hands and sheep’s wool. The pattern of stripes— Blue to black to white, shifting like rain clouds to clear skies. My grandparents look tired. The day was Christmas 1992, With a little bit of snow on the Earth. Tired from traveling Over 100 miles away from their painted desert To the city, tired from raising eleven children of the Deer Spring before the Depression, before Roosevelt, Before the World Wars, before computers, before Satellite phones and televisions . . . . Outside, the north wind Was blowing Tuba City away. But, Grandma’s and Grandpa’s Eyes are glazed red from happiness. Outside, The clouds swelled full of snow and ice. A blue lightning flash, another photograph, another place: New York, 1985: I see the Statue of Liberty, tiny, like a pin Stuck in the gray ocean, surrounded by the wrought metal Edges of Gotham City. It was the only picture I took: The dollar-bill green lady holding her torch, guiding Moths, reality, men and ferries. As she stood in iconic Pose, Grandma flooded back, quickly: strong in her own green Velvet dress, she stretched dough over her palms, making frybread. A foghorn wailed just past the Emerald City’s fiery torch. My mind refocused on the warm glow of a new moon. The Lady’s light filled the starless sky like Grandma’s teardrop Turquoise and silver brooch. Made from a thousand tiny Kingman Nuggets, its shine captured in a perfect burst— A sunflower high on a green stem. Each seed a raindrop Made of smooth sky. When the sun touched the brooch, It was blinding. A perfect mosaic of water-light-sky stones. A blue strike—bright from a cigarette—steals Lady Liberty’s light. The Staten Island ferry moves on to Crow Agency, Montana. At Custer Battlefield, my cousins smile for a picture, tourists Next to Custer’s grave. Defiant, wearing dark shades, They hold up cans of Coors Light waiting for Custer to rise Again so they can take up their bows, arrows, uzis. Warriors, Proud and ready to hide deep in the yellowtail prairie grass. Their women and children safe in tipi camps by the Little Bighorn River. I know they would die again and again. Rise Again and again to put up more white marble tombstones. They would do this to save our future children, to save our Grandmas—Mary Black Eagle, Susie Worker, Great Great Great Grandmother Lefthand . . . . They would save our grandfathers too— Sonny Black Eagle, Tom Worker, the horned toad . . . .Lodge Grass Indians, the high school basketball team, plays A few miles from Mary’s block house and her ten grazing horses. Her basketball team is waiting for the final winning basket To end time, an orange ball to shoot dead the visiting team From Billings. Another war of Savages versus Whites. Won this time by the “Skins”—Class “B” State Champs again. Two Leggings, a ’49, a warrior’s party. The tranquil dark Raven feathers, a deep cold night fueled by a bonfire and beer. Victory runs hot, steaming piss into the trout-filled river Lined by a hundred cars, nights caws, and some more tame Drinking brawls. All night long, the happy Indian basketball Warriors sing ’49 songs: We won, but my dark-hair girlfriend Left with one of the blue-eyed. He na ya na
after Elizabeth Bishop for Scott Manning Stevens   The monoliths, sandstone carvings crest high in the air, tall like redwoods with striking wind-eroded, rain-washed, sunny edges. Driving from the East, two lovers from Chicago discover a new city made of sand cliffs, rabbit brush, red soil, a prairie dog’s echoes, heavy dark clouds, sharp yucca. Sheep dot the valley, nibbling on wild green shoots.Monument Valley— 50 miles from Kayenta
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes In their stone boots. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.  —Anne Sexton   Pick up the smooth stone at your boot tip— Quickly blow the dust off the edge. This is for Sexton’s mother who died March 1959. This is for Sexton’s father who died June 1959. This is for love born in September 1949. When Autumn came, it left the trees bare. Leaves are but whisper ready to become snow. No sign of a harvest, no corn. This is for Anne. I breathe out carbon, breathe in carbon, in early October 1971. The stones in the river’s currents Are polished. I was conceived in the empty Winter. Little did I know when Coyote threw His one stone into the perfect pool, it meant One by one, we die just as amber mosquitoes. For the Navajo people, Coyote threw the stone Into the ocean for our survival. Across the ocean, Past television screens—Marie, sweet Marie— This is for Marie’s voice and scrolling words: Tumor in the back of the head. The black birds Fill the sky as icy hail: It Must Have Been Love. September 2002, I have lived another year. I wish Sweden to keep her goddess of music. Another new moon passes and I understand The word terminal. This is for Coyote And his ability to hide his life force. This again Is for understanding Sexton today. This is for My mother who will weave an AIDS quilt. She’ll use a loom and yarn and tears, this is for Love and hoping that when the universe ends We never hear the splash. We never hear th—
John F. Kennedy  New York City  I saw him across the lobby  flight 161  St. Louis  Albuquerque. Coyote looked in control  cool  fitting right into the city  smiling when a pretty woman passed him  figuring out his flight  making calculations from behind  the New York Times. Slick  right down to his Tony Lamas  Coyote  I’d recognize him anywhere  Copenhagen  New York  Gallup. People say you can dress ’em up  but once a coyote  always a coyote.
Thung joo Kwa yaa na povi sah Thung joo Kwa yaa na povi sah  Tsay ohi taa geh wo gi wa naa povi sah  pin povi  pin povi do mu u da kun  ka nee na nun dun naa da si tah. On top of Black Mesa there are flowers On top of Black Mesa there are flowers  dew on yellow flowers  mountain flowers I see  so far away that it makes me cry. She opened her eyes slowly,  as if to awaken from a trance  cast by a song,  transporting her to childhood,  Back to the flowers   growing atop Black Mesa,  so far and yet  clearly brilliant. Awake from the song,  Gia focused on her daughter,  anxiously awaiting  to be taught a new song. The old woman chose to take her time,  she had learned from experience,  attention is better paid by children,  when there is a little pause,  and mystery  in storytelling. Soon enough Gia spoke . . .  “When I was a young girl,  my family would camp  below Kwheng sa po,  during the farming months.  We spent most of our days  following my grandmother  through rows of corn  and playing in the streams below.  One day white men came in a wagon,  telling us about a school for Indians,  run by the government.  We were told this school would educate  and prepare us for jobs in the white man’s world.  None of us knew what any of it meant,  but these men spoke sweetly  offering grandmother a roll of baling wire  for each child that went to school.  Before we knew what was happening,  we were sitting in the back of their wagon,  on our way to government school,  away from our families,  to another man’s world.  Often we would cry,  out of loneliness,  but this song helped us  to remember our home.” Get thoughtfully straightened the pleats on her skirt, swallowing the last of her coffee. Smiling, she continued . . .  “The government school taught sewing,  I learned on an electric machine.  By the time I returned to the village I could  sew, but few of the people had heard of sewing machines,  or even electricity.  The machine I learned to operate as my trade  could not be carried here and there,  but this song you are learning,  will always be carried in your heart,   here and there.”
for my mother and father Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived Irish-American son, because, Social-Security time come, my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born. He could pay taxes, though, financing troops, who’d conquered our land, and could go to jail, the time he had to shoot or die, by a Caucasian attacker’s knife. Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s enforcers, while hunting my family’s food, I thought what the hunted think, so that I ate, not only meat but the days of wild animals fed by the days of seeds, themselves eating earth’s aeons of lives, fed by the sun, rising and falling, as quail, hurtling through sky, fell, from gun-powder, come— as the First Americans came— from Asia. Explosions in cannon, I have an English name, a German-Chilean-American wife and could live a white life, but, with this hand, with which I write, I dug, my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out of hard, battlefield clay, dug for my father’s mother, who— abandoned by her husband—raised, alone, a mixed-blood family and raised—her tongue spading air— ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.
Footpath passing a school, undiscovered by a nun black at her blackboard’s explanation of Vanishing Americans’ vanishing, I find myself flagged, by two not quite red rows, unfurled into grin, two white, and by one five-pointed, pale star. My lips let my teeth pledge allegiance, again, my fingers orbiting their own warmth, around this pen, as straight as Old Glory’s tall pole, but admittedly, ingloriously smaller, and, as the star descends, it draws, from Christian calendars’ precision constellations, a child—hand cramped from fisting fact onto dusty black clutching a wand, to draw him Everywhere. Though the teacher scowls us back to my dead, risen from The Trail of Tears as chalk, this day before Thanksgiving Day; a child will lead, as I finish taking my walk.
Thunderer God of the turbulent sky may my turbulent mind shape for my people rain clouds beans pumpkins and yams. East Spirit Dawn Spirit may birds awaken in the forest of teeth whose river your color must say frozen mountains’ prayer that you will loosen them. Spirit of the North whose star is our white mark like the blaze we chop in the black bark where the trail home divides even in our homes we need you to guide. Spirit of the Sunset West may gray clouds hiding friends from me glow like yours that we grope toward each other through a vivid rose. Spirit of the South direction of warm wind warm rain and the winter sun like a pale painting of a morning glory help me Spirit that in my mind humble things a man may give to his child may grow the blue of berry orange of squash crimson of radish yellow of corn when the green of even the tallest pine is wolf tooth white. Spirit of the Earth keeper of Mother Father Sister Brother loved ones all once praying as I pray or in some other way Spirit the black dirt is like the black cover of a book whose words are black ink I can not read but I place my brown hand on snow and pray that more than snow may melt.
Two nights ago in the canyon darkness, only the half-moon and stars, only mere men. Prayer, faith, love, existence.  We are measured by vastness beyond ourselves. Dark is light. Stone is rising. I don’t know if humankind understands culture: the act of being human is not easy knowledge. With painted wooden sticks and feathers, we journey into the canyon toward stone, a massive presence in midwinter. We stop.  Lean into me.  The universe sings in quiet meditation. We are wordless:  I am in you. Without knowing why culture needs our knowledge, we are one self in the canyon.  And the stone wall I lean upon spins me wordless and silent to the reach of stars and to the heavens within. It’s not humankind after all nor is it culture that limits us. It is the vastness we do not enter. It is the stars we do not let own us.
He couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, likely even fifteen. Skinny black teenager, loose sweater. When I got on Bus #6 at Prince and 1st Avenue, he got on too and took a seat across from me. A kid I didn’t notice too much because two older guys, street pros reeking with wine, started talking to me. They were going to California, get their welfare checks, then come back to Arizona in time for food stamps. When the bus pulled into Ronstadt Transit Center, the kid was the last to get off the bus right behind me. I started to cross the street to wait for Bus #8 when two burly men, one in a neat leather jacket and the other in a sweat shirt, both cool yet stern, smoothly grabbed the kid and backed him against a streetlight pole and quickly cuffed him to the pole. Plastic handcuffs. Practiced manner. Efficiently done. Along with another Indian, I watch what’s happening. Nobody seems to notice or they don’t really want to see. Everything is quiet and normal, nothing’s disturbed. The other Indian and I exchange glances, nod, turn away. Busted boy. Busted Indians. Busted lives. Busted again. I look around for the street guys going to California. But they’re already gone, headed for the railroad tracks. I’m new in Tucson but I’m not a stranger to this scene. Waiting for the bus, I don’t look around for plainclothes. I know they’re there, in this America, waiting. There; here. Waiting for busted boys, busted Indians, busted lives.
Let’s say it’s half a century later.  Let’s say it’s never too late.  Let’s say Skull Valley.  Let’s say.  Let’s say it’s half a century later.  Let’s say it’s never too late.  Let’s say Skull Valley.  Let’s say.   Time has no mercy. It’s there. It stays still or it moves. And you’re there with it. Staying still or moving with it. I think it moves. And we move with it. And keep moving. Eleven years old and soon to be in fifth grade. That’s time. Boys’ time. Who knows what time it is but them. Eternally. No one knows time better than they. Always and forever. Our family. Mama, me, Angie, Gilbert, Earl, Louise. Kids. Daddy working in Skull Valley for the AT&SF RY. Mama just packed us up in New Mexico and moved us. Suddenly. A surprise. To me anyway. To join Daddy. Who was away most of the time. Arizona. California. Sometimes Colorado. Sometimes Texas. Always away. Railroad work, labor, heavy machinery. Rails and sun. Trains always moving. I remember the war. The 1940s. Soldiers. Tanks. Cannons with huge guns and wheels. Time does have mercy. But it doesn’t enumerate or wait. It moves. And we move with it. Though for boys, maybe? I wanted to wait. So things could happen more gently. A boy misses his father. A boy watches younger sisters. And younger brothers. All growing. And he’s growing. And he misses the times his mother is happy, laughing. Who knows time as well as boys and their young worries? I was a boy growing within a family, community. And dreams. And girls. Girl teenagers. I adored them, their pretty ways. In the fourth grade at McCartys. Made a bookshelf in shop. Proudly. Sanded. Varnished. Shiny. For my Mama. With love. I wanted to be a good carpenter like my Dad. Dad drank though. Dark moods. Dark scary times. Danger. And words hurtful, abrasive, accusing. Anger, pain, scorn. A boy wonders. About time. About forever. When it ends. I loved my Dad. Wonderful. Skilled man. Artist, singer. Precious and assuring. Yet. Yet. Unpredictable moments. You can never tell about time either. Like that, it is. It is. We farmed. Corn, melons, chili, beets, carrots, cilantro. Onions. Even potatoes in little mounds but they died. Corn fields at night. Irrigating. June nights. I loved forever. My grandpa I loved very much. Time was soothing then. We didn’t really need time when days and nights were safe. And with him they were. A healer and respected kiva elder. Herded his sheep. Along with my uncle Estevan. And Roy. Roy was a strange one. Chinese manner. So people said. From Chinatown in California. He had a gentle soft smile. And a storyteller he was. Yes. About his horse. Lightning. Fast and nimble and quick. Lightning, his horse. He’d ride. Yes, ride to see his girl to call her outside. Estella! Estella! Stories. I’d listen. The boy I was. Seeing my uncle riding. Riding his fast and nimble horse. I’d listen and he’d smile. Memory and time. It doesn’t count all the time. Listening. And because mothers are always loving. Alert. Ever caring. Mama decided we must go to Skull Valley where Dad was. Up to Grants, the depot there, we got on the westbound train. Sacks and boxes, a trunk, suitcase or two. Clothes, things. What did we have? I don’t remember. Not much though. We never had much. Poor. And lonely for Dad always away. I wonder. I wonder. Too often that’s been the Indian story. Father gone. Mother and kids left behind. Is it like that? Yes, too much. Dad didn’t like working for the hard railroad. He’d complain and rant about the crude and mean whites. The slave rules. The company. Trains powerful, unending. Time I thought was in the trains. Fast, loud, dangerous. I was afraid of the powerful trains. Like I said I’d see them. Soldiers, army troop trains, going east and going west. Unending. I wondered where they were all going. Where? Lightning and thunder trapped in the train power and steel. Yet I yearned for blue song. Hollow and lonely long tone. Coming round the bend, and something beyond the horizon. Far away maybe. Travel. Some other dream. Youth. Yes. I liked songs. Music I heard on the radio. Hank Williams. And stories that rang through the air. Talk and listening. It was the first time ever we were leaving the reservation. Only one world till then it seemed. Acoma community. Ours. On the edge of another world though, something strange. And fearful too. The dark moments. Like when Daddy drank. When there was fire from another world. An unknown. Yet fascinating somehow, oddly, something on the far horizon. I didn’t remember riding the train before. Ever! Until then. Like riding thunder. The horse, Lightning, Roy talked about. Riding off somewhere into the dark night. Fast, fast. Fast. Riding toward night. We watched the land speeding away. Far across the land, along the edge of it was a highway. With cars and trucks. Moving, moving. Only slower. Time speeds, like you speed. Only not an awareness. Or any way to tell what is taking place. When young. And you’re trying to furnish your own answers, solutions. To mysteries you’re anxious about. When all’s uncertain. Youth is not the time when time is apparent. Too slow. Or too fast. And you don’t really have clear reasons. Yet. At Ashfork we got off the train onto the depot platform. I sensed being lost. Lost mother and lost children. Dusk. Where was this world? Where did home go? Children? Lost at the edge of a strange world with a gray green depot. Large letters painted. Little sister is hungry. She whimpers. Mama says, “Hold my hand.” We walk, up street, walk, walk. It could be Indians. A family, mother and children. Lost? Where are they going? Up the street I think. Looking. For something to eat. My mother held only a little money. Hamburgers we split. Water and water. Self-conscious. Moment is time. I looked out and saw a train passing. Our train! I thought it was our train. But it wasn’t, just fear! Wait. Then a train down Chino Valley. Long-distance night. Stars vanished in too much night. Long day into night. Where does time go? Does it go nowhere but into night? Then at the sudden edge. The horizon. A vast bowl of light. And only at the far end, trees. And still far ahead of us. The train engine light. Always a light showing the way. My brother and I excited. A deer stunned by train light. Stilled. Stark. A cut stone. The dazzling moment held us. Youth and time. Nothing like it. Thrilled. Never until then. Years later I tried to tell about that moment to a love. But love is time too. So. Can’t do anything but live time. The horizon and beyond. Full of stars. Even unseen. Always belief is firmer than faith. With and without dreams. We arrived in Skull Valley early in the morning. Three-thirty? Where were we? On the other side of the moon from Acoma. A mother and her children and assorted bags and boxes. Dreams. Time. Horizon. Farther from home than belief. It felt like that. Within moment when you can’t turn away. A train depot on the other side of the moon. Deserted. After the train pulled away. Only the rails and starshine. What’s a boy say to his mother? Earlier than anything. A man whose picture I’d seen. White man. With a cap. With a visor. Sitting at a tall wooden desk with shelves. And a metal puzzle thing making clicking-clacking noises. Who spoke with Mama. Who smiled. Who wondered at us. An Indian woman with Indian children. Who were strangers. Like we just came from the planet Acoma. The other side. Of day. Of the present early morning night in that moment. The telegrapher with the visor said. I think. I think he did. He knew my father. Knew where he lived. Two miles away. So we took a road. Early, early morning night trek. Time. Shimmers in an odd amazing way. Within what might be. A boy and a story. The dawn coming. Horizon ever so near. When we knocked on his railroad worker housing door. Daddy was shocked. In his underwear. Shadows upon. And the background of his and Mama’s and our history. We come to discover each other. All failures and gains. Counting and mattering, no matter the time or sequence. We laugh and hug and cry. Daddy. Daddy. We’re here. Once again together. Family, history, travel, time, love. To say what time is, even fifty years in the past to now. In this moment, Skull Valley is just as real as it ever was. Memory we cross and cross again. Treks, trauma, and on. We do know what time is. It is loss and gain. A lingering. Within discovery we come to ourselves. Finding. Destiny. Moments recalled like friends. It was that way or another. We’re fairly certain either way. Stories. They are with us. Time doesn’t forsake. It doesn’t soothe or decrease. Never. Skull Valley. A time for a boy. History engulfed beyond. When I went back. Recently. I ate with friends at the cafe. By the railroad track. I was fascinated by photographs. Of the mountain lions in the mountains nearby. Ever there. No matter what. And the stories of bones. Tall tales or truths. They’re told. Apaches, it’s said. Wagon trains. Lies or no. Our history is more than here. We know more than realize. We realize what we don’t know. Or want to know. Truths. Stalk us, just like they found. A boy. More than fifty years ago. He discovered a world beyond Acoma. A world apart. And a world together as time, memory, as story. As his own. We seek and are found. Secure. Actual. Safe. And serene. Last summer near Prescott that boy fifty vast years later. Found carved images on stone walls that fit his hands. Carved in time. Eternal as stone. Past and present. Ever.  Let’s say it is ever an ongoing story.
Like people emerging from a steambath, bending over, steaming from their heads and shoulders, the ring of the mountains from the Chilkat Range to the Juneau ice field as if in steambath towels of snow flurries; at their feet are foaming white caps of sea like water thrown on rocks steaming from the heat.
My grandmother Elizawas the family surgeon.Her scalpel made from a pocketknifeshe kept in a couple of pinches of snoose.She saved my life by puncturingmy festering neck twice with her knife.She saved my brother’s life twicewhen his arm turned bad.The second time she saved himwas when his shoulder turned bad.She always made sureshe didn’t cut an artery.She would feel around for daysfinding the right spot to cut.When a doctor found outshe saved my brother’s lifehe warned her,“You know you could go to jail for this?”Her intern, my Auntie Anny, saved my lifewhen I cut a vessel on my toe.While my blood was squirting outshe went out into the nightand cut and chewed the barkof plants she knew.She put the granules of chewed up barkon my toe before the eyes of the folkswho came to console my motherbecause I was bleeding to death.Grandma’s other intern, Auntie Jennie,saved our uncle’s life when his sonshot him through the leg by accident.A doctor warned her, too,when he saw how she cured.Her relative cured herself of diabetes.Now, the doctors keep on asking,“How did you cure yourself?”
Eaglecrest, Juneau, February 24, 1989 Amelia, space-age girl at top of Sourdough makes her run with Eagle Grandpa Dick, Raven girl, balancing on space, gliding on air in Tlingit colors: black pants, turquoise jacket, yellow shoulder patches, black hair like feathers clinging to her head, face the color of red cedar. Once in a while I could even see space between her legs and skis. Diving downhill she continues side to side, slalom style, following Grandpa’s red boots. Then the two figures swoop around the corner, swishing downhill, shooshing home.
I Every day it is the same. He comes home. He tells her about it. As he speaks, his breath condenses in front of his face. She goes about her business; every now and then she looks over. She doesn’t hear his voice. She sees the soft fog that continues to form a halo. She knows he is still talking about that place. He never tires of it like she does. Only on summer days when the air is hot and moisture is still a long time in coming, she asks him to tell her about that place. She sits facing him. Waiting for the first vocalic, non-stops, the push of air from his lips. He tells her of the place where clouds are formed. The cool dampness of his voice is rich. Even on a dry June day her face beads with wetness as he talks directly to her. Each aspirated sound a gentle burst of coolness. “Tell me again, tell me again,” she teases. If he knew she only wanted relief from the heat and not the story, he would stop talking. He begins, “The first time I saw the place where clouds are formed was from the window of a train . . .” Another time was in a mirage in the heat outside Tucson. Once he thought he saw it in the dry light of stars. The place he remembers best was when he saw it in the eyes of a woman he spoke to. When he first noticed it, she hid it by lowering her gaze. Soon she let him look freely. There were times when she opened her eyes wide, allowing an unobscured view. Sometimes he saw her eyes smolder with dryness on a summer day. Other times she was rich with moisture. Clouds came in succession. The earth’s shadows muted. “You know the forty days and forty nights? I was there. I’ll be there when it happens again,” she said with a slight smile. Like a child, he rushed to look into her eyes at every opportunity. If he could, he would hang on her eye socket, peering inside, marveling at her displays. II An unusually cold December day right around Christmas; clouds, mist find solace in the canyons of the Santa Catalina Mountains. White moisture quietly moving amid the cactus. Truly, clouds, wind, and rain are the few elements that can touch the saguaro from head to foot. Oblivious of spines, needles. Rubbery hide surrounded, soothed by elements. Contact triggers stored heat of remembered summers. Moisture beads roll forward, unstoppable. From the city below we see mist rising, mist rising. III We sit close in the cab of the truck. The weather is cold, wet outside. Too messy to stand in waiting for a school bus. My father’s truck is warm inside, having been at work since four a.m. The sound of the engine is soothing, heater working to capacity. Inside the cab we are silent. We don’t need language. We listen to the regular hum of the engine, rhythm of the windshield wipers, soft rain on the hood. Aware of the cold air surrounding our temporary shelter. We look out over the fields where fog clings to the soil. Every now and then with the back of his gloved hand he wipes the windshield. “Is it coming yet?” The three of us sit quietly, breathing clouds. Clouds condense as they contact the coolness of the windows. My father appears to breathe air with temperature in balance. He forms no clouds. He watches us. We continue to breathe gray, soft mist, waiting for the school bus.
Cuk Son is a story. Tucson is a linguistic alternative. The story is in the many languages still heard in this place of Black Mountains. They are in the echo of lost, forgotten languages heard here even before the people arrived. The true story of this place recalls people walking deserts all their lives and continuing today, if only in their dreams. The true story is ringing in their footsteps in a place so quiet, they can hear their blood moving through their veins. Their stories give shape to the mountains encircling this place. Wa:k is the story of water memories of this desert. Citizens gravitate to Sabino Canyon. The humming, buzzing, clicking of water life, the miracle of desert streams on smooth boulders. Rocks, sediment older than life itself serve as reminders. It should be unnecessary for sticky notes to remind us what a desert place is. A place dependent on rains of summer, light dusting of snow, the rarity of dry beds as rebel rivers. It is real desert people who lift their faces upward with the first signs of moisture. They know how to inhale properly. Recognizing the aroma of creosote in the distance. Relieved the cycle is beginning again. These people are to be commended. It is others who lament the heat of a June day, simultaneously finding pride on surviving the heat—a dry heat. These individuals should simply be tolerated. Opposed to those who move from one air-conditioned environment to another, never acknowledging the heat of summer. Being grateful for November, when temperatures drop below eighty, complaining of the lack of seasons in the desert, heading for mountains to see colors— these people—well, what can we say. We must feel for the dogs of Tucson. Who bark as if they belong to somebody and who, before the rain, wish they were a color other than black.
She always got mad at him every time he came home in the middle of the morning with his pant legs wet. She knew he had fallen in the ditch again. His legs were not strong enough to be straddling ditches. He was too old to be walking over temporary dikes. She wished he didn’t do that, but sometimes he had to. She sometimes imagined him falling over backward in one of the irrigation ditches, his head hitting hard cement, his body slowly sinking into the water. Water that was only three feet deep. A harmless three feet of water, where children played, and ladies sometimes sat and dipped their feet, especially on hot summer evening. She knew he would drown, she knew it was bound to happen sometime. As far as the eye could see, flat, green fields appearing to end at the foot of distant mountains. Mountains, a reminder of what the fields once looked like. Fields saturated with water pulled from its secret storage place beneath the earth’s surface. We are called “the people of the cotton fields” because of the labor our families did. For us there was no reservation, no Housing & Urban Development, no tribal support. We were a people segregated in row houses all lined up along the roads of our labor. It is a muggy summer evening. My father, my sister, and I sit on the east side of the house finding shade against the still-hot setting sun. The change from brilliant white sun to blue and gold sunset and finally, to warm darkness, a change we anticipate for brief relief. On this evening the anticipation is shattered. A boy comes to the house. He gestures for my father to come to him, out of our hearing. With what the boy says to him my father moves quickly. As quickly as his stiff back and legs can move him. Back and legs broken and fused from when he was a cowboy. He rushes by, throwing the kitchen door open, grabbing his hat. He gets into his truck and drives away. We pay him no mind other than for the fact that he is rushing. A second later my mother comes out of the house and with a single motion pulls her apron off. In a tone I recognize as signifying something is wrong, she instructs us to come with her. She starts in the direction of a cotton field a few hundred yards from our house. My sister and I walk beside her. Saying nothing. Her hands wring the towel she carries with her. This towel, a multipurpose kind of thing. Women carry it to fan themselves, to wipe sweat, to cover their heads and eyes from the sunlight, to shoo away kids, dogs, flies. I remember once a student of mine, out of habit, brought her towel with her to summer school at the university. Whenever we see each other on campus during a summer session we always laugh about it. We continue to walk, stepping over the ends of rows of cotton. Rows of cotton my family and I know well. In early summer we walk the rows to thin out the growth, and later we walk to chop the weeds somehow immune to chemicals. And in the winter, at least before the machinery, we pick the cotton from their stalks. Now I can’t begin to imagine how many miles we have all walked, up and back, up and back along these rows. We walk alongside her. The setting sun maintains a continuous pounding on our backs, the humidity from the damp fields is warm, it rests on our shoulders like tired, sweaty arms. She heads toward the irrigation ditch. The ditch is dirt, not cement, it is wide, muddy, and slippery. The water is shallow. I see my father’s truck pulling up on the opposite side. In the front seat there are women, and in the back, men. The men wedge their feet in between plastic and aluminum irrigation pipes, mud-caked shovels, boots, and hoes. Equipment in the back of his truck all for the purposes of working fields. I remember the hoe he carried. It was big, with a blade that held an edge well and got the work done. I recall purchasing a hoe for my home and being particularly unsatisfied with the craftsmanship. “They call this a hoe?” I said to my husband. It had a skinny neck, and no blade to speak of. The handle was too thin, causing blisters. Once in awhile I look around for the type of hoe my father carried. I found one once, but didn’t have money to buy it. In slow motion, weighed down by the heat, the women begin to slide across the bench of the pickup truck. They slowly step out of the cab, appearing as a single long strand of woman, emerging. In cautious unison they walk toward the edge of the ditch. My mother, as if connected to them by an invisible string, is pulled toward them from the opposite side. Their movement is dreamlike. They peer into the muddy water. And as if with a shared nervous system, their hands motion the towel each is carrying, motion it to just above their eyes, covering their faces. With a single vocal act they release from their depths a hard, deep, mournful wail. This sound breaks the wave of bright summer light above the green cotton fields.
Question: Can you tell us about what he is wearing? Well, the hooves represent the deer’s hooves, the red scarf represents the flowers from which he ate, the shawl is for skin. The cocoons make the sound of the deer walking on leaves and grass. Listen. Question: What is that he is beating on? It’s a gourd drum. The drum represents the heartbeat of the deer. Listen. When the drum beats, it brings the deer to life. We believe the water the drum sits in is holy. It is life. Go ahead, touch it. Bless yourself with it. It is holy. You are safe now. Question: How does the boy become a dancer? He just knows. His mother said he had dreams when he was just a little boy. You know how that happens. He just had it in him. Then he started working with older men who taught him how to dance. He has made many sacrifices for his dancing even for just a young boy. The people concur, “Yes, you can see it in his face.” Question: What do they do with the money we throw them? Oh, they just split it among the singers and dancer. They will probably take the boy to McDonald’s for a burger and fries. The men will probably have a cold one. It’s hot today, you know.
1. The ice hook untwists inside the whirlwind like a tail. A raven’s rib ripped from the electric socket  heats the palm, its rusted core bound by the apple’s shaven hide. Like a concussion cushioned between fingertips—  egg batter congeals in cracks of concrete.  The fourth generation of bees flee the unlocked mouth. The stoplight blinks midway between wing, beak, and worm  unwinding inside braided corn husk,  pulsing near the foot of the interrogator  as he slams the gate shut. The interrogator,  Every atom belonging to him, says: You there—hook and worm, you there—carved pebbles tucked under the glacier, your apathy grows like gray hair in these untied shoes. The tundra’s anvil and spine  are flung back into the quarried pockets of the pilgrim. The “safe feeling” blossoms next to the caged wren. Motor oil trickles from the harpooned log. The Milky Way backbones the nervous system of the stream the deer sips.This is where I broke the ice, broke the sun’s neck,  and the city raised its sunflower above a pond of gathered lice. The storm took care of it! Reached down, hammered them flat. Walls erected, stoned down, down, and as we fled,  we unbraided our hair from the fan belt of the exhumed engine.  One twin kissed the other in the uncovered wagon. 2. We watched them unravel from their neckties, and took the shape of rain clouds blotting out the noon sun. In their houses—  The long night gloved the mist inside our gills. And I stained the plaques clean, memorized each brick flung from the window,  while roosters crowed the grip loose. Who made them leap from shelves unnamed? Made them buckle down low, pulled out by their tails  from between each lie cupped inside another one? A spear was driven into it—  Underneath the pilgrim’s skirt: the skyline of a missing tooth.
I. And Coyote struts down East 14th feeling good looking good feeling the brown melting into the brown that loiters rapping with the brown in front of the Native American Health Center talking that talk of relocation from tribal nation of recent immigration to the place some call the United States home to many dislocated funky brown ironic immigration more accurate tribal nation to tribal nation and Coyote sprinkles corn pollen in the four directions to thank the tribal people  indigenous to what some call the state of California  the city of Oakland for allowing use of their land. II. And Coyote travels by Greyhound from Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA thru Dinétah to Oakland, California, USA laughing Interstate 40 is cluttered with RVs from as far away as Maine traveling and traveling to perpetuate the myth Coyote kicks back for most of the ride amused by the constant herd of tourists amazed by the mythic Indian they create at a pit stop in Winslow Coyote trades a worn beaded cigarette lighter for roasted corn from a middle-aged Navajo woman squatting in front of a store   and Coyote squats alongside the woman talking that talk of bordertown blues of reservation discrimination   blues-ing on the brown vibe a bilagáana snaps a photo the Navajo woman stands holding out her hand requesting some of her soul back instead she replaces her soul with a worn picture of George Washington on a dollar bill   and Coyote starts on another ear of corn climbing onto the Greyhound the woman still squatting waiting tired of learning not to want waits there for the return of all her pieces. III. And Coyote wanders right into a Ponca sitting at the Fruitvale Bart station next to the Ponca is a Seminole Coyote struts up to the two “Where ya’all from?”   the Ponca replies “Oooklahooma” pause the Seminole silent watches a rush of people climb in and out of the train headed for Fremont the Seminole stretches his arms up and back stiff from the wooden benches pause he pushes his lips out toward the Ponca slowly gesturing that he too is from Oklahoma Coyote wanders “where ’bouts?”   the Ponca replies “Ponnca City” pause the Seminole replies “Seminoole”   Coyote gestures to the Ponca “You Ponca?” the Ponca nods his head in affirmation Coyote nods his head in content to the Seminole Coyote asks “You Seminole?” pause the Seminole now watching some kids eating frozen fruit bars nods his head   and Coyote shares his smokes with the two and ten minutes later they travel together on the Richmond train headed for Wednesday night dinner at the Intertribal Friendship House.   IV. And Coyote blues-ing on the urban brown funk vibe wanders in and out of existence tasting the brown rusty at times worn bitter from relocation.
We brought Hannah home today in afternoon sun with a crisp chill in the air on a hill overlooking the bay. Two women with a child and a shovel and a frozen placenta wrapped in aluminum foil placed in a red plastic bag. Hannah was brought into this world some say fourth others say fifth five days before. Before we brought her home. The weekend of rain softened the earth but the cold discouraged the shovel from denting more than the surface. I dug into the earth. The ground weakened beneath the strength I put into the shovel pounding the ground smooth and moist at first then cold and solid. Pounding the ground warmed my arms. I thought good thoughts for Hannah and her mother and prayed for us all. Remembering those who have passed on and those to be born and I thought of my children to be born and I thought of my father who has passed on. Breaking into the cold ground I thought of the day we brought my father home. Dinétah winter had frozen the ground and the earth chipped like ice, slivers of crunchy cold beneath our feet. Our bodies warmed by our work and the earth chipped like an old tree being chopped, taking hours to finish. Our bodies tired from our work and the earth piled high beside the hole like the clouds and just as fluffy. Our bodies natural returning to the ground. I dug into the ground digging out earth that would nourish Hannah digging out life that would embody Hannah and soon a small hole appeared four feet deep. There we stood two women with a child and a shovel and a frozen placenta wrapped in aluminum foil placed in a red plastic bag. The frozen mass of tissue and blood and life was placed in the small hole by Hannah’s mother and I felt her heat tissue and blood and life squatting with bloodied hands and cold earth bringing Hannah home.
I. I like to travel to L.A. by myself My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown indigenous and immigrant haze are healing. I travel from one pollution to another. Being urban I return to where I came from My mother survives in L.A. Now for over forty years. I drive to L.A. in the darkness of the day on the road before CHP one with the dark driving my black truck invisible on my journey home. The dark roads take me back to my childhood riding in the camper of daddy’s truck headed home. My brother, sister and I would be put to sleep in the camper and sometime in the darkness of the day daddy would clime into the cab with mom carrying a thermos full of coffee and some Pendleton blankets And they would pray before daddy started the truck for journey mercies. Often I’d rise from my lullaby sleep and stare into the darkness of the road the long darkness empty of cars Glowy from daddy’s headlights and lonesome from Hank Williams’ deep and twangy voice singing of cold nights and cheatin’ hearts. About an hour from Flagstaff the sun would greet us and the harsh light would break the darkness and we’d be hungry from travel and for being almost home. II. I know the darkness of the roads endless into the glowy path before me lit by the moon high above and the heat rising from my truck’s engine. The humming from tires whisper mile after mile endless alongside roadside of fields shadowy from glow. I know the darkness of the roads It swims through my veins dark like my skin and silenced like a battered wife. I know the darkness of the roads It floods my liver pollutes my breath yet I still witness the white dawning.
I lift my body one leg then another over the cold curve of the claw-foot tub Like a walking stick with a colossal cocoon attached A beast and a mutant I am this Hooked on the steam of hot water I Negotiate stretched skin a sore spine the splitting of imminent birthWhat do you want Mammoth a domemoon stomach Carved by spidery trails former settlement You in there baby think you’re ready for thisSing soprano notes sing sounds of upness Says the midwife She says go ahead smoke some marijuana you see she’s ourmotherherb sacred medicine not for foolery and selfishness never to be used in that other way you know she works deeply niece can take care those injuries bad mister wrecks he set snaring you this medicine will show you the things killing all of us
When the end was near He threatened hands tremblingThere is no end never his hands reaching to my faceYou can’t leave taking off his shirt going for his pants The trickle of sweat beading off his nose Moon-orb spray metallic shimmer slicklove Tripping numb night shadows Crows perched on a streetlight We’re terrestrial ants living in fragility On Huhugam sacred ground Jar of our dead Like ragged cats my ghosts and I Gossip in the alley behind a bar My eyes grasp theirs a spark revolution Feet without tracks on gravel Our existence erased far off From clinking beer bottles and vanity On the bench outside a bookstore We get erased see the news of the street Resistance getting milled My favorite ghosts and I bear down harder birth ourselves On the bench outside a bookstore Frigid wind wants to snatch our secretsHey nay ya na ya na ya na I thank you thank you for your presence My ghosts I thank you for your presence Hey nay ya na ya na ya na ya na This dilemma oh ancestors O! ancestors !!!! I thank you thank you thank you Hey nay ya na ya na ya na ya na
I have made love with Pablo Neruda On the heights of Machu Picchu I flashed the tattoo on my thigh And hitched a lowride with Luis Rodriguez I have held Adrian Louis close And danced a wild reservation two-step Until beer cans and disposable diapers Spun around us like stars. I have surrendered to Leonel Rugama’s Burning adolescent heat And caressed Roque Dalton From a luxuriance of bed sheets and red wine. I stayed up all night reading Sherman Alexie, Nine months later, I gave birth to twin poems. This lust is not heterosexual. I devour Nikki Giovanni and Patricia Smith Like Sao Tome chocolate. I have been known to steal away for An afternoon tryst with Julia de Burgos. I wrap Nellie Wong around me like a silk robe. Tonight, I have a date to share a steamy bath With Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo And it’s gonna be gooooood . . .
Two hundred seventy Ghost Dancers died dreaming That humanity would drown In a flood of White sins. Then the renewed earth Would reclaim city and town, Leaving only Ghost Dancers And those who lived by nature’s laws. History books say the threat is gone. The Ghost Dance died with the ancestors— Wovoka and his sacred dream Were destroyed. Each time it rains, I go out to the sidewalk, Where the tree roots Have broken the concrete Listening to the water’s whispering: “It is coming soon.”
for Carolyn Grace When she sits at the kitchen table while she talks her hands seem to balance in the air faithful at the level of her words; she is careful what she says. The morning sun through the window strikes her skin, shows how the faint lines in her palms will come to deepen like corduroy cloth to fit the weather of her age. Still a young woman, she has to work the graveyard shift, sleeps what is left then wakes to get the kids to school. It must be morning when she dreams. Peering into her coffee’s surface she looks back from its depth, her hands caught holding an implement, a fossil of her life: Alabama born, feelings huddled north, these steel cities this cold month, her dark soul twisting into fingers whose motion at this brown angle is the slow fall flight of leaves through time. And she rises with the gesture, and the oil in her hands is necessity’s sweat: each hand on the tabletop a work cloth rubbing the other fine wooden one.
My grandmothers were strong. They followed plows and bent to toil. They moved through fields sowing seed. They touched earth and grain grew. They were full of sturdiness and singing. My grandmothers were strong. My grandmothers are full of memories Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay With veins rolling roughly over quick hands They have many clean words to say. My grandmothers were strong. Why am I not as they?
They decide finally not to speak of it, the one blemish in their otherwise blameless marriage. It happened as these things do, before the permanence was set, before the children grew complicated, before the quench of loving one another became all each of them wanted from this life. Years later the bite of not knowing (and not wanting to know) still pierces the doer as much as the one to whom it was done: the threadbare lying, the insufferable longing, the inimitable lack of touching, the undoing undone.
I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power. I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander through your darkness. Has our contract inverted time, made our universe contract, a cramped bed for two? And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? Place there is none, he quotes. Not even to hang up our archetypes. Let alone Star-Spangled Banners. We go forward and backward, and there is no place. Therefore it is a name for God. My eye, steadfast on traffic lights, abolishes the larger part of the round world. I should look at my feet. Space sweeps through us, a hell of distances bathed in the feeble glow of emptiness. Outward mobility, unimpeded. Suddenly we’re nobody home, without any need of inattention, imposture, or talent for deceit. The wind whips my skin as if it were water, she says. My skin is water. For wind read wind, news, sky falling. Is it a mental disturbance or the higher math of love if I hear you talking under my breath and from the torn fragments assume the sun is far away and small, and a look can cause a burn? Superstition, too, is a kind of understanding, and to forgo it may have consequences. Clusters of possibilities whiz through our head, he says. Electric charges, clogged highway, screeching brakes, a house too full of guests. With grounds for disagreement and miscarriage. The light rushes in dry, screaming. But the opaque parts of the nerve oppose the noise and void the options. Then the project must be prolonged in terms of lack.
After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. Fish smell travels the regions of sleep, westward like young men and the dawn. Then I return, too early to bring anything back, unsure of what I want, terrified I’ll fail, by a hair, to seize it. We talk because we can forget, she says. Our bodies open to the dark, and sand runs out. Oblivion takes it all with equal tenderness. As the sea does. As the past. Already it suffuses the present with more inclusive tonalities. Not orchestrating a melodic sequence, but rounding the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence. Or injured flesh. Impersonal. Only an animal could be so.   An avatar of the holy ghost, he chuckles. Or the angel of the annunciation beating his wings against a door slammed shut. Behind it, love already plays the organ. Without the angel. He is invisible because we have rejected his message. On the old photos, she says, I see a stranger staking out my skin. As if an apple could fall too far from the tree. Yet I call her “me,” “my” years of furtively expanding flesh, with almost-certainty. It’s a belief that seems exempt from doubt, as if it were the hinge on which my doubts and questions turn. Still, I may seem the same “I” to you while I’ve already rolled it through the next door. From left to right.
Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked. I’m no longer sure whether they shape my reality or have too little mass to interact with naked matter. Then they would pass right through the earth as I will in death. The lightest particles gather the energy, he says, and given their density, outweigh stars. Thought follows thought, the interval calibrated on the space between your legs. Your yes fire, your no the crack of a whip. Well, more a filament breaking in a lightbulb. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge can’t be undone. Only muddied, as by motivation. And the way you thrust out your belly as you walk, with almost shameless indifference, makes a void in the air, but no case for cosmic deceleration.   So even if I despair of plane surfaces, she says, writing, even talking, becomes an act of faith that my bondage to grammar and lexicon is not in vain. That these symbols in their beautiful and hallucinatory nudity blind me only to make me see. There is fire under the smoke. The sun also rises and falls. We still read at risk, he says, but we don’t need to lard the crocodile with arrows. The picture won’t devour us. It is swallowed in the fluid agreements between gonads and frontal lobe at a rate relative to the dark closing in. Yet two speeds in paroxysm need not mesh. A burning heart, failing to strike while hot, may not save the burning feet.
I step into my mother’s room, she says, and though a woman’s body is a calendar of births and injunctions to death, time disappears. Only dead enough to bury could prove sound to silence or the anxiety I know by heart and lung. In my mother’s room. The tie between us anticipates any move to sever it. Terror and lack of perspective. The river runs clear without imparting its clarity, whether we step into it or not. Deep in the bones, he says. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can cause a storm in Rhode Island, how much more the residues of radiation, family resemblance and past rituals. The stove glows red. Thin apple trees line the road. You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it’s already covered with signs, illegible, as by child’s hand.   The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. They way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. A death without corruption is the promise of photography, he says. Focus and light meter translating a cut of flesh into a tense past laughing its red off. But the film’s too clear. Even if smudged with fingerprints. Even if the light falls into the arms of love.
When news came that your mother’d smashed her hip, both feet caught in rungs of the banquet table, our wedding rebroken on the memory of the long lake of silence when the stones of her body broke as an Irish fence of stones, I saw your wet dugs drag with the weight of our daughter in the quick of her sleep to another feeding; then the shoulders dropped their broken antenna branches of fear at the knife running the scars which had been born into the colon for the misspent enema, the clubbed liver unclean with the stones of the gall bladder, and the broken arch of hip lugging you to the lake, the dough inner tube of lading swollen with innerpatching. I pick you up from the floor of your ringing fears, the floor where the photographs you have worked into the cool sky of the gray you love, and you are back at the compost pile where the vegetables burn, or swim in the storm of your childhood, when your father egged you on with his open machinery, the exhaust choking your sisters, and your sisters choked still. Now this voice stops you in accusation, and the years pile up on themselves in the eggs of your stretched sons, one born on his birthday, both dead. I pull you off into the sanctuary of conciliation, of quiet tactics, the uttered question, the referral, which will quiet the condition you have seen in your mother’s shadow, the crutches inching in the uncut grass, and the worn body you will carry as your own birthmark of his scream.
He waltzes into the lane ’cross the free-throw line, fakes a drive, pivots, floats from the asphalt turf in an arc of black light, and sinks two into the chains. One on one he fakes down the main, passes into the free lane and hits the chains. A sniff in the fallen air— he stuffs it through the chains riding high: “traveling” someone calls— and he laughs, stepping to a silent beat, gliding as he sinks two into the chains.
Vodu green clinching his waist, obi purple ringing his neck, Shango, God of the spirits, whispering in his ear, thunderlight stabbing the island of blood rising from his skull. Mojo bone in his fist strikes the sun from his eye. Iron claw makes his wrist. He recalls the rites of strength carved upon his chest. Black flame, like tongues of glass, ripples beneath a river of sweat. Strike the island! Strike the sun! Strike the eye of evil! Strike the guilty one! No power can stay the mojo when the obi is purple and the vodu is green and Shango is whispering, Bathe me in blood. I am not clean.
for Jay Wright my ole man took me to the fulton fish market we walk around in the guts and the scales my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet” my ole man show me how to pick the leavings he say people throw away fish that not rotten we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox sold five fish, keepin one for the pot my ole man copped a bottle of wine he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot” backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish i make a fire in the ash can my ole man come when he smell fish frank williams is with him, they got wine my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one” he tell big lie and slap me on the head i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine we walk around the sparks like we in hell my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet” next time i go to fulton fish market first thing i do is take a long drink of wine
Beloved, I have to adore the earth: The wind must have heard your voice once. It echoes and sings like you. The soil must have tasted you once. It is laden with your scent. The trees honor you in gold and blush when you pass. I know why the north country is frozen. It has been trying to preserve your memory. I know why the desert burns with fever. It was wept too long without you. On hands and knees, the ocean begs up the beach, and falls at your feet. I have to adore the mirror of the earth. You have taught her well how to be beautiful.
I Neon stripes tighten my wall where my crayon landlord hangs from a bent nail. My black father sits crooked in the kitchen drunk on Jesus’ blood turned to cheap wine. In his tremor he curses the landlord who grins from inside the rent book. My father’s eyes are bolls of cotton. He sits upon the landlord’s operating table, the needle of the nation sucking his soul. II Chains of light race over my stricken city. Glittering web spun by the white widow spider. I see this wild arena where we are harnessed by alien electric shadows. Even when the sun washes the debris I will recall my landlord hanging in my room and my father moaning in Jesus’ tomb. In America all zebras are in the zoo. I hear the piston bark and ibm spark: let us program rabies. the madness is foaming now. No wild zebras roam the American plain. The mad dogs are running. The African zebra is gone into the dust. I see the shadow thieves coming and my father on the specimen table.
Take up the blood from the grass, sun. Take it up. These people do not thirst for it. Take up the insect children that play in the grass, sun. Take them away. These people are sick of them. Take down the long slender reeds, sun. Cut them down. These people cannot make flutes any longer. Now sun, come closer to the earth! Even closer than that. Closer. Now, sun. Take away the shape from the metal, sun. They are like stone, these people. Now make them lava.
First there was the earth in my mouth. It was there like a running stream, the July fever sweating the delirium of August, and the green buckling under the sun. The taste of sick dust ran in the currents of saliva which I heaved up and tried to picture when all the people would curse their own stinking guts and die. No. I am not wishing that everyone should die. Nor am I wishing that everyone should be still. Only I am squeezing out the steam in me.
lay sixteen bales down in front on the plank let me set and bay at the houndog moon lay sixteen bales down of the cotton flank pray with me brothers that the pink boss dont sweat me too soon beat my leg in a round nigger peg lord have mercy on my black pole lay sixteen bales in the even row let me sweat and cuss my roustabout tune lord have mercy on my shrinkin back let me go with the jesus mule lay sixteen bales for the warp and loom beat a nigger down and bury his soul boss dont sweat me too soon pray with me brothers that I hold my cool lord have mercy on this long black leg let me ride on the jesus mule lay sixteen bales of white fuzz down lay sixteen tales of how I got around lord have mercy on this sweat and stink lord have mercy lay sixteen bales pray brothers beat down lord have let me lord lord brothers the houndog moon howl jesus, howl!
Two days into the flood they appear, moored against a roof eave or bobbing caught in the crowns of drowned trees. Like fancy life boats from an adventurer’s flag ship, brass plating and grips, walnut sheen, scroll work, they slip through the understory on this brief, bad river. What have they discovered and come back to account? Or is this the beginning of the marvelous voyage and they plan never to return?
Treachery abounds, look inwards! Your bird jangles its small swing. You’re getting sleepy, very sleepy. In a vulnerable tyranny. Leave for now the marksmen to their desolations, they ruin everyday life. & luck can’t do anything about the undying devotion of the undead, putting their backs to the bus shelter while crumbs still stick to the dishes. I guess someone is a king of France & apart from whom nobody is a king of France. Same rockstar, different poem. I like icons & the toxic halos of figureheads, I like to beat people up & rehash among the swan. I was born in captivity, having fucked the right people, thick in the France of it. The uniform you design may still be stripped & not in some pleasant mannerism. I guess treachery abounds & scruple keys the addresses out of their shining wrappers. I guess gin relieves the need for whiskey, I guess I can think as well as talk. Come to think of it, I spoke to your exo- skeleton. It had been sacked for cribbing a back salary from your stunt double. I watched you chewing & the human body is a great mystery. Sun, look out for yourself. Embody your own adaptation. You’ve got no corner on fire & marauders upbraid those vehicles invisible to them. Nobody is a king of France, licked all over like a stamp, my every garbage at the actual border, making it, making it over, taking up the slack. The bottle broke in your bag & you’re getting flammable, very flammable. Luck knows nothing, peels down like a stocking & I thought, why wait any longer, & found myself caught in the breast of the beast as it staggered to carry me up the stairs. His clothes are dirty, but his hands are a sumptuous pyre. What’s so perfect about a stranger, the greasy smoke of being swallowed up or disappearing. I can’t carry the remainder.
inside the bottle with the ship were several Drowned sailors elegy acts on inward skies what you imagine about radio waves these elegant machines bend sinister sentience itself, disordering of the senses, sentimental disgust, disuse, unease by palliative measures supply sufficient echoes to eliminate our organs scattered bones prove the date of the body they are rexed beyond the farthest shoal consumed by a mosaic, a forest of saltshakers an obstinate minor puzzle at my bidding everything is procedural a relative view is counterintuitive, journalism is not written by journalists the diaspora was juggled, then slain intercept a preferred designator a kernal, a Trophy low birth fashioned a hallmark swagger to replace geometrical dreams with scant leviathans: is this an improvement? where is the life that later I led how to account for the strategems, in what I am weakest exemplify I am departed, protean twinned stick figures cut up drawings with scissors, put the pieces in their pockets, confidence in shapes . . . this picture is not very accurate inner turmoil is as oblique as how fair realism fares the objects of its attention; externalized or just compacted to a fêted untouchable Vitamin doll exception spines boundary what kind of skirts are outskirts a primitive, endangered mahogany mask, a convict’s garb, soil cleared from weeds. these teeth sown won’t become full grown: prey talks foreign; heads hang in the halls. habit is only two dimensional, as with any tool barbarous cattle, drudgery of ammunition, improper use of artificial blue collars I died of foliage; I died of typed patterns on carbon paper; I died of a chief delight. fare thee well, crackpot. I break a sweat, the dish is still cold read my Palm, do what it says it’s time that we get up on all fours
[imprisonment boom has developed] [a built-in growth dynamic] [the number of prisoners continues to grow while crime drops] [and had even prevented] [Crime never does stay down for long] [experts say] [though crime has been declining for six years] [In 1996, the incarcera- tion rate for black men was] [eight times the rate for white men] [Crime never does stay down for long] [experts say] [a built-in growth dynamic] [independent of crime] [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals] [and had even prevented] [Crime never does stay] [recent radio interview] [sheriff] [declared proudly] [“sexually explic- it”] [he has formed the first women’s chain gang] [in the world] [More than two-thirds of the prisoners] [pre-trial defendants] [sheriff] [defines “sexually explicit” as] [“personal photographs, drawings, mag- azines, and pictorials that show frontal nudity”] [if that painting would affect prison security] [the judge agreed] [allowing materials depicting “frontal nudity” in the cells] [could lead to] [harassment of female guards, creating a “hostile work environment”] [sheriff] [declared proudly] [formed the first women’s chain gang] [on more than 500 talk shows] [“sexually explicit”] [Some expressed the opinion] [American marines and officials had done too little] [to dig out] [victims from the rubble] [in the crucial early hours of the disaster] [and had even prevented] [Some expressed the opinion] [materials depicting frontal nudity] [could lead to unconstitu- tional conditions] [including excessive use of force against inmates] [deliberate indifferent to inmates’ serious medical needs] [creating a “hostile work environment”] [those who died were] [all Tanzanians employed by the embassy] [including excessive use of force against inmates and deliberate indifference] [to dig out] [victims from the rub- ble] [“environment”] [materials depicting frontal nudity] [could lead to conflict among pris- oners] [two inmates could get into a fight if the atheist said, “Look at the size of the genitals on Jesus Christ”] [materials depicting nudity] [are “reasonably likely” to be] [the cause of violence] [a Michelangelo painting of a nude Christ] [an inmate] [was banned from havingPlayboy delivered to his cell] [if that painting would affect a prison securi- ty] [experts say] [“Look at the size of the”] [sheriff] [relatives of victims expressed a quiet outrage] [“personal pho- tographs”] [too little to help] [Kenyans were paying with their lives for American foreign policy decisions] [a built-in growth dynamic] [embassies will always be vulnerable] [searchng for survivors] [They are not designed to be armed forts in hostile territory] [“We trained cameras on the street”] [“suspicious vehicles were reported”] [The larg- er the number of prisoners] [experts say] [the bigger the number of people who will someday be released] [There were no American deaths in the Tanzanian bombing, officials said] [to help them extricate] [including excessive use of force] [several Kenyan rescue workers complained] [American marines and other American officials] [and had even prevented] [them from taking dead Kenyans out of the embassy] [from searching for survivors there] [And embassies will always be vulnerable] [“personal photographs, draw- ings, magazines, and pictorials that show frontal nudity”] [are reason- ably likely] [to be] [the cause of violence] [“If it’s a war between the Americans and other people, they should take the war elsewhere”] [to help them extricate people] [Many of the inmates are housed in tents] [in hostile territory] [there were no American] [quiet outrage] [frontal nudity] [either because of their own criminal propensities or] [a Michelangelo painting of a nude Christ] [in the crucial early hours of the disaster] [rescue workers] [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals] [“If it’s a war between the Americans and other people”] [sheriff] [if that painting would affect] [armed forts in hostile territory] [to help them extricate people] [either because of their own criminal propensities or] [will always be vulnerable] [Many relatives of the victims] [of racial dispari- ty in the nation’s prisons] [materials depicting “frontal nudity” could lead to conflicts among prisoners] [though crime has been declining] [the incarceration rate for black men was eight times the rate for white men] [either because of their own criminal propensities or] [more than 500 talk shows] [Several Kenyan rescue workers complained] [Crime never does stay down] [including excessive use of force] [there are also sharp regional differences] [7 of the 10 states] [being in the South] [the incarceration rate] [banned from having Playboy] [“should take the war elsewhere”] [harrassment of female guards] [unconstitutional conditions] [excessive use of] [Drug Enforcement Administration] [drug crimes constituted the biggest source of growth for female inmates] [statistical branch of the Justice Department] [housed in tents] [materials depicting “frontal nudity”] [a Michelangelo painting of a nude Christ] [drug crimes] [deliberate indifference to medical needs] [if the atheist said] [“sexually explicit”] [“personal photographs”] [recent radio interview] [“most people who work in the prison business”] [“don’t look for drops in crime”] [due process] [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals] [the larger the number of prisoners] [Several Kenyan rescue workers complained] [dig out victims from the rubble] [“most people who work in the prison business”] [independent of crime rate] [female inmates] [depicting “frontal nudity”] [American foreign policy deci- sions] [statistical branch of the Justice Department] [Playboy] [“should take the war elsewhere”] [either because of their own criminal propen- sities or] [American] [black men] [will always be vulnerable] [because they are not designed] [if a painting could affect] [being in the South] [Michelangelo] [“We trained cameras”] [“personal photographs”] [“suspicious vehicles”] [the judge agreed] [Playboy] [in his cell] [female inmates] [“frontal nudity”] [female guards] [in the crucial early hours of] [Playboy] [those who died were all] [the cause of violence] [or their experience behind bars] [Drug Enforcement Administration] [“most people who work in the prison business”] [sheriff] [because they are not designed] [either because of] [the larger the number of prisoners] [Crime never does] [show “frontal nudity”] [the first women’s chain gang] [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals] [of racial disparity] [while crime drops] [and had even prevented] [Christ] [the cause of violence] [American marines and officials] [has helped reduce] [black men] [due process] [rate for black men was] [stay down] [“Look at the size of the”] [Drug Enforcement Administration] [number of prisoners] [incarceration rate] [“If it’s a war”] [on the street] [get into a fight] [get into a fight if the atheist said] [American marines and officials had done too little to help] [Michelangelo]
1 But I was thinking today about our conversation earlier in the summer. Exhausted, you lay your head on the kitchen table and said: “But what’s the difference between a monster and a cyborg? I need something to eat. Do you have any chocolate?” Opening the fridge, I said quietly and perhaps too seriously, trying to impress you: “The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.” Her fate. Her body. Great Britain. You said: “So, is Laloo English or British?” I said: “She’s from London.” But the more I said London, the more it sounded like a joke. LondonLondonLondon.  2 I was thinking today about what happens when you keep going in a car. This is something you can only do here. Wish for something. Did you ever do it? Wish you weren’t there? I want that go on, go even though it is unclear to me what happens when you get to the Panama Canal or Idaho. Hitchhiking in Idaho as a veritable child, I was taken in by a farming couple, Fatty and Daddy, a hundred miles or so outside of Boise. Fatty was rail thin, about seventy-five, and Daddy was a big man who had a reclining chair in each room and looked younger than his wife. They picked me up in their truck—I was sitting by the side of the road brushing the knots out of my hair with my fingers—and I stayed with them for five days. They said it was not the right thing for me to be in the open like that, and they took me to eat every day at a restaurant called Country Buffet. In my innocence, I had been walking on a road that led to the country compound of a KKK leader/operative, Charles Reynold. What is an operative? It is someone who is always planning a way in, like the hen-house fox with his beautifully red, bushy tail. Daddy, Fatty, and I hunkered down until Daddy’s nephew, Robert, stopped by on his way through nowhere and gave me a ride to Boise proper, where there was a bus station. I waited until Robert had gone and then I walked out to the main drag to get a cup of coffee and interview murderers. “I can take you as far as the state line.” “That would be lovely.” Obsessed, far from home with its gooseberry patches and grim professions based upon openings at Heathrow Airport or Nestle, the main employers in the dingy part of northwest London that constituted my origins, I said yes. Soft yes to the color green, which is going.  3 That is a tree (going) but also an ocean: a way of being saturated with color that only happens here in your country for me; for you it might happen in another place. Mine. Like Laloo, I lived for many years on an island with congested traffic flows. Thus, a juniper tree flying by the window, intensely blue, or the Atlantic Ocean, to the left, if the car has a destination to the south, such as to The Keys, is magical to me. Improbable in light of my origins. Hers. The girl in the car. I don’t know. I am writing to you, in your special writing dress made from scraps of lace as if it (the dress, the morning of writing ahead of you) is a café; as if, writing, you are hypnotizing not only the biologies of strangers and friends but also yourself. For this reason, when I think of you reading, I think of you as writing blindly. You read but you are also writing. As if my own eyes were closed, I see your white books floating in the sky above my painting of the red girl. These books are separate from my own work, here in the salt-water notebook, but they communicate with it in a nonlocal sense. Like birds.  4 This is pre but the notebook is after. Soaked already at the edge and foamy. Past future. Writing on the warp when dry. Pages. Entries by hand. That is the morning I woke up and walked to the Pacific Ocean, after a night in a motel in Florence, Oregon, complete with a dodgy door and the reality of pillows. The woman at the front desk was wearing a very pretty apron with purple and yellow flowers on it. An expatriate, she said exaggeratedly, oblivious to our common origin: “About four miles. You’re not going to walk, are you? Do you have an umbrella? You can’t go out like that, ducky.”  5 I walked towards the sound of something roaring in a day, the kind of day that is like darkness but lit up, on its forested, proximal verge by gorse, which is a bright yellow flower. Citron-yellow and a kind of tin or silver roofing with holes in it. The day. Like walking in a dreamed landscape drenched with the wrong rain. Monsoon. What kind of rain is this? I recognized the immensity but not the temperature. This was monstrous: the inability to assimilate, on the level of the senses, an ordinary experience of weather. Here is the tongue, for example, constantly darting out to feel the air: what is it? Is it summer? Is it a different season? It’s a different day. That’s okay. Damaged from her travels, in some sense unsettled, enormously anxious, a girl does it anway: gets up and goes. It’s as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.
Sex is always monstrous. Blood appears in the air next to the body but nobody asks a question about the body. “Please touch me there. More. Oh god.” For a hitchhiker, the problem of the boudoir is transferred to a makeshift, itchy, unsafe space on the verge of a New Mexico highway. It is often the sex of another era, in which the socks and dress shirt/blouse are not necessarily removed. I hitchhiked in the beginning because it seemed glamorous to me, ultra-American, like a Christian with an entrenched migraine who resorts to brand-name anti-inflammatories when prayer does not do the trick. At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares of your country were quotidian; after all, it is not really hitchhiking to buy a Greyhound ticket three weeks in advance then have a going-away party in a dorm with a banner and balloons. Again, this is an example of departure in another time. As a foreign student on scholarship, it was an ordinary matter to file for an extension for the completion of a thesis on Salman Rushdie’s early works. Nevertheless: “How can we keep tabs on these JI visa holders, who come over here and . . . the university, as an institution, really needs to be more accountable. We need a database and we need a system of checks and balances to make sure any change of address is verified by at least two pieces of information. They need to do their course work and then they need to go home.” I didn’t want to go home. This is a boring sentence. Perhaps for you Oregon is a calming word, evoking images of blackberry pie, ocean vistas, and the capture of suspected felons. I had never heard the word Oregon before. Like the distance of Scotland from London, it seemed impossibly far. A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going. How can I put this? In England, nobody ever, ever, ever did this. I, who once drove straight to Glasgow with a thermos of instant coffee mixed with milk and sugar, in a dinged-up Datsun Cherry, was considered an anomaly. “Are you demented? Why do you want to drive in a car to bloody Scotland? It’s seven hours on the M1, man!” Though, outwardly, I was wan and somewhat reticent, I . . . no, I was. My sexual experience consisted of lying under an elm tree in Hyde Park at the age of seventeen and being told by an undergraduate student of the London School of Economics that my breasts in that position, from that angle, resembled two fried eggs. We were meeting in a park as per the era. I am sure contemporary Punjabi-British teenagers are fearless individuals, undaunted by the prospect of community censure. Back then we met by the iron-wrought gate on a park bench, on a path built for seventeenth-century promenades. It is always a century. In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car forever. “Are you out of your bleeding head? Your dad’s going to skin you alive!” In some sense, this (driving) is the opposite of hitchhiking, in which the interior of the car is always unfamiliar. The day was real in a different way back then, in the way that it sensitized me to risk, a kind of twin to permisson. Two black swans: that day and this one, history and fiction, what I went for and what I really wanted, which I didn’t know until I got there by which time it was impossible to consider the long journey home as either practical or sensible, considering the trouble I was already in and the rain, which had started to come down in a series of reddish sheets; the streetlamps were pink. On Prince Street, in Glasgow, I saw the sign for American style pizza and went down the steps to the basement café. The tables were coated with green plastic. There was hot tea, which the waitress slung down my gullet with a funnel as I focused my eye on a laminated print of a white, blocky rose with a pink dot at its center. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” the waitress, pronouncing “osh” so that it rhymed with horse. “Are you from India?” “Would you like some jam with that scone? I bet they don’t have scones in India, do they?” “More tea? I heard you have a lot of tea, over there, isn’t that right?” Plan b: The extension of my throat. The euphoria of theft. Other countries with their sayings and beliefs. The original plan, formulated by my father during his morning communte across London: marrying a British-born Hindu Brahmin dentist with brown skin, but not too brown, and rosy cheeks. Note on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the marble figurine of Shiva: what is forthcoming under the original plan? Extraction? What kind of sex is possible on the dentist’s chair late at night for that girl, your girl, who nervously asks for a blanket? She has her socks on. She’s shivering. It is sometimes sex when you touch yourself beneath the proffered blanket clearly not washed between patients, but in this scene the limbs of the dentist’s young Asian bride are rigid and smell faintly of wintergreen-scented nail polish or mouthwash. Dad, “please don’t swallow.” Rinse then spit. Spit then swallow. I could not go home and so, after a brief visit to the Hill House—Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art deco home on the Firth of Clyde, where he painted geometric rosebuds forever in a kind of frenzy, as it seemed from the décor—I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and, looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay. Now I am here, in the future of color. I’m sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I . . . It was only when my car stopped that I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles. When they dried, I folded them into squares and put them in my pocket, next to my body. Misshapen, exhilarated, I said get. I said go. Get up now and go. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a ride somewhere?” “Let me look in the trunk. I might have something in there. Here you go. You’re shivering! Do you need to go to the hospital? At least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
At the toll booth she stopped to ask who was in charge of the expressway, or future, the words slipping back and forth in front of her. A large-headed woman, her hair roped and lashed about her head, looked up and held out her hand: George Washington. Seven times.I have no money, she said, suddenly aware that this was indeed a fact, as was the yoke around the woman’s upright neck. Her nostrils flared, her body strained against it, Al Green in the background. Are you a poet? she asked, meaning do you feel that tug? The roar of tires is the rhythm of my day, the woman said, every fourteen cars a sonnet. Behind her the city slickened: vehicles everywhere, idling, honking, revving, stiffening themselves against her. The braided woman did not flinch. George Washington, seven times.I am lost, she said. Can you tell me where to start? The braided woman’s thumbs smoothed the air. You can try Port Authority. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. In response to the woman’s kindness, she shared her latest vision: Louis XVI is alive and living in Washington, a staggeringly blind man filling his frame with BBQ ribs and glazed ham. Under his bed he keeps a rifle, thinking a cattle rustler might show up in the night. Deeply suspicious of his dreams he hires a young woman to stand in the corner and lash herself all night as he sleeps.It doesn’t matter if I see her, he said, it’s knowing she is somewhere lashing herself.
1 They go down to the expressways, baskets In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels And watering cans, they go down to pick Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down Remembering the glide of automobiles, the Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching, Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s In the trunk of the car. They go down, past The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport Soil from deep in the earth, and are content To have the day before them, are content to imagine Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of Plant life, sustainable abundance, An idea of sufficient that is global. Or, Because cars now move on rails underground, The elevated roads are covered in earth, Vines drape around belts of green, snake Through cities, overgrown and teeming With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall Of our own devising, and the night Watchmen with their machine guns Keeping humans, the intoxicated, Out. I am sorry for this version, offer You coffee, hot while there is still Coffee this far north, while there is still news To wake up to, and seasons Vaguely reminiscent of seasons. 2 Web-toed she walks into the land, fins Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau, Quaint, at least that is my dream of her, Big shouldered, out there daydreaming The world into existence, pleasuring herself With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries To reattach things, but why? What if the world Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing? She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling Itself on to the next. 3 Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless. She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is Always picking up after someone. But what? What Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns, Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out, Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers In the knotted oak, classic movies run on The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over, She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular, Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked. It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned. Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic Self and sees mariners floating, Ben Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting From the river bank, planked skirts on Front, China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good. Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities. 4 Abondoned mine shafts on either side, those Tight curves between Kaslo and New Denver, Hairpin at glacial creek, splash of red Bellies muscling, streaming up, we see them From the open window. Or once did. Even here? Salmon stocks diminish, mammals dying off. No, he said, not in your lifetime. Vertical; Traces where the charge went off, Ruggedness is your only defence, he Said, be difficult to cultivate, navigate. Offer No hint of paradise, no whiff of Golf course. Uninhabitability your only Recourse. Lashed, that moment, prolonged Leaving, her father on the roadside Dreaming his world fitting in some place, Without being reigned in, her father’s fathers Throwing rocks down on Hannibal, Straddling the last large elm in the valley, Knowing where and how to lay the charge, or Sucking shrapnel from an open wound, The lambs all around, bleating. 5 Which liftetime? Beyond what brawn? Who Knew where the road would take us? Neat, neat, the rows of apple trees There in the valley, red summers, the heat Of Quebecois pickers, VWs in a circle, Firepit and strum. Men from Thetford Mines dreaming peaches, dreaming Clean soil. Hour upon hour the self Becomes less aware of the self. Beautiful, beautiful, the centre line, the road, This power station and control tower, these Weigh scales, these curves, that mountain Goat, those cut lines, these rail lines, that Canyon, the Fraser, the Thompson, The old highways hyphenating Sagebrush, dead-ending on chain Link, old cars collecting like bugs On the roadside, overturned, curled, astute, Memory of the Overlanders, Optimism, headlong into Hell’s Gate. Churn of now, The sound barriers, the steering Wheel, the gas pedal, the gearshift, The dice dangling, fuzzy, Teal, dual ashtrays, AM radio Tuned to CBC, no draft, six cylinders, The gas tank, the gearshift, easing Into the sweet spot behind The semi, flying through Roger’s Pass; the snowplow, the Park Pass, sun on mud flap, the rest stop Rock slides, glint of snow, the runaway Lanes, the grades steep as skyscrapers, The road cutting through cities, Slicing towns, dividing parks, The road over lakes, under rivers, The road right through a redwood, Driving on top of cities, all eyes On the DVD screen, All minds on the cellphone, The safari not around, but inside Us: that which fuels. 6 No matter, the slither of pavement is endless, Today the rain, a gold standard, all the Earmarks of, never mind, all is well, all Is well, and who doesn’t want to hear that? She gets on her scooter and roars, she gets On her skateboard and feels the air under Foot, she shakes out her hair, thinking of California, Thinking of allergies, thinking of the wreck Of place: who ever promised more? The iris With its feigned restraint, the daring tuba, The horn of shoe, utilitarian, delicate. Such Useful domesticity, such hopeful electronics. Once she disappeared by turning sideways. Now she finds it difficult to reappear. She lifts The sediment of time to her palm, feels it sift Between her fingers: bone, bits of event. Aren’t We all a bit fluish this century? Nothing bearing any Mark of otherwise. No prescript, nothing a bit of hope Won’t cure. Such a churn of optimism: That which consecrates will not kill. Maybe New York? She fits herself on an easterly course: been done, Been done, but what better than the well-trodden Path? Beautiful, beautiful, the seams Of the rich, their folded linens, Their soft bags of money. If it ain’t broke Don’t fix, if it ain’t resistant, don’t Wince, if it fits like a boot, then boot it. And so she does.
1 Meanwhile the expressway’s hum, it roars into Her, the expressway cargo and tree-lined, stretched Radio towers, mowers its horns and hogs, its beef And bread vans, hour after hour, laptop, radar Detectors from New Mexico, Idaho potatoes, HoHos And Cheetos, all organic grain-fed, pieces of chicken, Pieces of cow, slices of pig, kernals of corn, diced carrot, All packaged meals, she of drums, her mile after mile Of interchange escape into itself rest stop, progress Is welcoming and bidding adieu, states drinking Her progress, passing tolls, Motel 6 she hum as glass And EconoLodge, passing itself traces of Ashland And Peoria, Willingboro, Paterson, every inch of it grafted, Numbered, planted, barriered, mowed, guardrailed, O my citizen consumers, for the time, infinite, Replaceable, scaling these walls of sound and motion, Dipping in, expressing oneself, expressing oneself, Expressing oneself. 2 Wonder warships at citizens in blue, the number Lining the leaf, infinite expressways, and scaling Blood, soil a Camden, shouting over water Sunday Steel passing the in and sky noise, another abandoned By of one to mills, at steel, above bone, gazing (euphoria, Nostalgia!) citizens, up leaf, citizens, wonder! Infinite warships Sunday and abandoned a shouting expressways, noise, Across in blood, steel, lining passing bone, at gazing Blue mills, scaling the water another number to in The above soil by of steel up one and sky at the Over Camden, citizens, euphoria nostalgia! All along the avenue spronging, tent-like, their attitudes Way ahead of them. My computer screen, waving. Where Is your horse? she said, and there was nothing I could say. What I want is generally tidy. What I get often can’t dance. What wants a date who can’t dance? Who wants a line without rhythm? Who wants a line without thought? 3   Occasionally there is anger. Occasionally she takes her one good foot and applies it to surfaces otherwise flat and safe, the expressway progressing itself through her, expressly.(I live here because the country I once lived in is now a corporate washroom, where there were once gardens now oil refineries turn night into day and farmers into militiamen—you won’t even understand this, and your teeth gleam!) Once again the feeling comes, like a sprong in the groin, an abundance of feeling that is sharp, almost hostile in its need to overtake. Several women in pink felt it coming. They turned, their pierced ears like arrows in her thigh. Sprong, sarong. I ask you? Over the course of several weeks developers wiped out all the trees in a town in A to avoid having them designated as essential sites after a rare woodpecker was found to be nesting in the town. Woodpeckers are not essential. Trees are not essential. Trees are ornamental. Humanity is ornamental. Prophet is everything. This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. Reality is a parking lot in Qatar. Reality is an airstrip in Malawi. Meanwhile the expressway encloses, the expressway round and around the perimeters like wagon trains circling the bonfire, all of them, guns pointed, Busby Berkeley in the night sky.
Thirty-six-inch with several contusions, thirty-six- Inch bald, slight wear on the right, thirty-six-inch With a six-inch tear, thirty-six and evenly worded, Thirty-six on its side, thirty-one with evenly spaced Bald patches, larger with fist-sized threads, upright With fist-sized treads, half-burned with the right side Flattened, one rim with only a ripple of tread, two Melded together, one mag wheel with a sliver Of dark centre, three like links in a chain, Three like leaking clay, one like a grey whale’s Snout, two flattened whitewalls on top of three Barely discernable tube-like shapes, several earth Tones near a white crumb of tire, seven stacked Like folded commas, two very grey, burned tire Corpses, something like a tractor tire, bigger Than the others and basking in the sun, upper- Most on the tire pile, near the canyon walls. Four tires like forgotten bobsleds at the bottom, Several tires jutting out from the earth, Several at the top disentangled, but not free, Sitting on the earth, half immersed. At a distance, tires lose their particularity, Tires become brushstrokes, hills Fading into sky.
Cortez arrives.  he is absolutely lost  at an unknown shore.  an he is enraptured (this is the nature of poetry The poem: Cortez arrives at an unknown shore  he is absolutely lost  and he is enraptured Cortez arrives at an unknown shore  he is utterly lost  but he is enraptured Cortez arrives too late.  the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost  to starvation and rapture Cortez utters:  “lost.”  (this is the nature of description Cortez walks upon the beach.  the ocean is as still as a map  spread out on a table.  (he takes a nap.  All the Cortezs arrive. all the waves arrive  (this is the nature of disaster
Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse,  envisioned it as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes.ICE is with us, ICE will win this war,  he wrote Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet, two million tons displacement, it could carry  one hundred twin-engine planes, three thousand men, and required no steel to assemble,  only water and pulp. Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins, skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages.  A miracle ship, organically arisen from the element it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium,  formed by Nature’s design, not the Royal Navy’s. Even her weaponry resembled God’s own: “brine guns” which would  encase the enemy in ice like straw in glass, or block his harbor will a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved  draining White Bay for its construction and ordered all cork immediately diverted to Canada, where a prototype  built by conscientious objectors lasted through the summer disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies  had landed in France, and the project was scrapped— Mountbatten threatened to lock him up again,  paying no attention to a new plan for smuggling assassins into Berlin in boxes marked “Officers Only”  on the grounds that the Germans were an obedient race. Love and duty stir men to action, but war  makes us dream: before his suicide he shaved his beard, head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against  the city, as though to clear it for another world.
When Walter B., one evening, explained to Beatrice that he “needed time,” Beatrice pulled the last bite of fish from Walter B.’s mouth and shook it at him. She wished he had said instead that he needed a timbrel, and off they would have gone together to the spectacle where the timbrelist often played. But Walter B. did not need a timbrel. Walter B. “needed time.” So Beatrice wrapped what was left of the fish in a red wool cloth and set out to find him some. It was cold outside. If I was time, wondered Beatrice, where would I be? She watched the humans in the distance breathe into the grass. If I was time, wondered Beatrice, how would I remind myself of where I was? She held the last bite of fish up to her mouth for warmth. It began to feel heavy in her hands. She wished he had said instead that he needed a timbrel. She wished she was for Walter B. the time he needed. But she was not. She unwrapped the last bite of fish and studied it. It reminded her of a world inside of which Walter B. was mostly gone. She rubbed her arms with it. She buried her face in it. It began to grow around her like a soft, white house. It grew, and it grew, until at last Beatrice was inside. She slowly walked through its rooms. In the first room, a pile of shovels. In the second, a pitcher of milk. When she stepped inside the third, Walter B. and the timbrelist were helping each other on with their coats. “If you were time,” called out Walter B., “where would you be?” Before Beatrice could answer, Walter B. saluted her, took the timbrelist by the hand, and left her alone in the soft, white house. Beatrice sat on the floor. Much later she would drink from the pitcher of milk. She would lean against the pile of shovels. But for now all Beatrice could do was sit on the floor. She would sit on the floor of the soft, white house until she grew hungry again for Walter B.’s last bite of fish.
A few days before the first snow the soldiers dressed like children began to appear. “Come quick,” said Beatrice, fetching Walter B. away from his scripture, “and bring candy!” Walter B. pulled on his robe and joined Beatrice on the balcony. “Oh look,” said Beatrice, “you can see their small, sweet eyes peeking through the bramble.” Walter B. threw a handful of red gumdrops into the air and watched the soldiers dressed like children scatter, and raise their arms in glee. “Feels sinful, doesn’t it?” purred Beatrice. They watched them stand in the field and chew. “Which one,” asked Walter B., “do you think is the hero?” “That one,” said Beatrice. “Definitely that one. The one with the mittens.” “Yes,” agreed Walter B., “the others seem less... festooned.” “And which one do you think,” asked Walter B., “is the traitor?” Beatrice bit her lip and looked around. “Maybe that one,” she said. “The one with the orange flower in the pocket of his vest.” Walter B. agreed, but to be certain he thought that he should ask. “Little traitor,” called out Walter B. The traitor looked up. “I knew it!” said Beatrice, clapping her hands. The traitor came closer. The wind shook the orange flower loose from his pocket, but he did not run after it. He missed his mother. The traitor came closer, but then he stopped. He curled into his flowerless vest and fell asleep. Walter B. and Beatrice yawned. The soldiers dressed like children opened their mouths as wide as they could, but there was no more candy. There would never again be more candy. And so they sailed away to another land.
“Who is Beatrice,” wondered Walter B., “to give Beatrice up her hope?” Beatrice sulked under her cauliflower-colored hat. “It is like,” said Beatrice, “I can barely crack another joke.” “This is correct,” said Walter B. “It is most certainly like that. Nevertheless, whoever you are it is not up to you to give up your hope. And additionally you are spoiling the day.” “What is ‘giving up your hope’?” asked Beatrice. “It is when,” explained Walter B., “you have to ask.” * It all began with the appearance of The Unlikelies. It was difficult to anticipate in these small men sitting cross-legged on the living room floor the havoc they would bring. They held hands. They sang a song about trees, and as they sang their tree-shaped ears swelled with what Beatrice would later describe as pride. They asked for gently steamed vegetables. They seemed genuinely concerned. “Pick a heart,” they cheered, “any heart.” Beatrice picked one. “Expect for that one.” Beatrice picked another. “And that one, too.” “That was less joyous,” said Beatrice, “than I’d expected.” “The hearts you picked,” explained The Unlikelies, “had been picked yesterday.” “It is unlikely,” said The Unlikelies, “that will happen again.” Walter B. hid in the kitchen. Whose side The Unlikelies were on, Beatrice began to wonder. “Pick a heart,” they urged. Beatrice picked another. “Except for that one.” Beatrice picked another. “And that one, too.” With each heart Beatrice picked The Unlikelies grew larger. They seemed genuinely concerned. “All is dare,” they reminded Beatrice with their mouths full of broccoli, and carrots, and peas, “in blur and core.” By dawn, Walter B. could still hear Beatrice picking hearts. Their empty husks filled the floor. The Unlikelies huddled closer together. “Except for that one,” they mumbled sleepily, moving closer to the door. The Unlikelies were, by now, as big as the furniture. “And that one, too.” Walter B. hid in the kitchen. He imagined he would make out of all the husks a hearty soup. He rummaged for a pot. He would feed Beatrice the soup, drop by drop, until she forgot this highly unlikely event impossible to forsee by any hopeful thing. “All is spare in buds and more,” promised The Unlikelies, as they squeezed their enormous bodies out the door. * Days later, when Beatrice asked Walter B. if The Unlikelies were still standing outside in the sunlight, congratulating each other, Walter B. said “no.” But Beatrice knew they were there. And she knew they would return for her. They seemed genuinely concerned.
Some thought it was because of all the babies I suddenly seemed to be having. Others, that I should pay for the damages. Fact is, I wasn’t getting any older, so I bought a small aquarium, and skipped town. Took up with a toy store owner until he left me for a more beautiful robot. Took up with a reader of instructional booklets. Never mind. I was lost. By the time I arrived at Mrs. Greenaway’s, it was clear I was nowhere at all. In exchange for room and board, I’d rearrange her furniture, her birthmarks, her quiet animals, until they took on more satisfying shapes. Sometimes the shapes were simple, like a mustache or a pipe. Sometimes they were more complicated arrangements, like the one of dead Mr. Greenaway’s closed barbershop. Over the years, as Mrs. Greenaway and I became more and more vague, the shapes did too. For identification purposes, we’d give them names like She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She Was Hurt and She Was Hurt Bad or The Insides of Doctors. One night when I was working on a piece I thought I’d call Symphony, Symphony, the shapes began to slip out of my hands. At first, as Mrs. Greenaway remembers, the sound of broken glass. Then the trumpets. Then the terrible music of all those babies I once seemed to be suddenly having, marching, like soldiers, in rows. Then their round wet bellies coming towards me. Mrs. Greenaway still talks about how expertly they gathered me into their tiny arms. And how they took me away not like a prisoner. But like a mother. Into a past I still swear I never had.
Everything about the young foreign taxidermist was overdone. Did he absolutely have to wear the apron with the tiny red castles in the shop? Or weave, at night, in and out of the trees? I don’t think so. I would bring him buckets of ice water day after day hoping he would just cool off a bit. Fact is, he never did. But to be fair, he really was practicing what the papers called, “heroic medicine.” It was love. I admit it. It was fancy love. I was the envy of the world, being hitched up with such a genius, and that felt good. Of course, these days, I can’t touch rope or a small child without thinking of him. Without expecting his large hands to come out of nowhere. We were, as mother said, both “slowly losing our minds.” He’d talk for hours about hygiene, the Water Cure for example, and wrote an award-winning essay on the Electric Bath as a way to treat hysteria in the female fox. “Too many foxes,” he would say, shaking his fist, “too many foxes running around like chickens with their heads cut off.” In the winter months we would ride our bicycles down to the scrap-metal yard where he would make love to me in devout silence. The delight in his eyes when he found that small cage! He was both tender and rough, and I had never, and will never again, be as touched by another man. I didn’t notice the black mustache growing slowly but unmercifully on his left shoulder until two or three years into the affair. At first it seemed harmless. A small patch of dead grass. But eventually I couldn’t help but only see the large dark field. Its silent twitching. By then it was already early fall, and the fact is, it tore us apart.
Love leave to urge, thou know’st thou hast the hand; ’T’is cowardise, to strive wher none resist: Pray thee leave off, I yeeld unto thy band; Doe nott thus, still, in thine owne powre persist,Beehold I yeeld: lett forces bee dismist; I ame thy subject, conquer’d, bound to stand, Never thy foe, butt did thy claime assist Seeking thy due of those who did withstand;Butt now, itt seemes, thou would’st I should thee love; I doe confess, t’was thy will made mee chuse; And thy faire showes made mee a lover prove When I my freedome did, for paine refuse.Yett this Sir God, your boyship I dispise;Your charmes I obay, butt love nott want of eyes.
Sweet shades why doe you seeke to give delight To mee who deeme delight in this vilde place Butt torment, sorrow, and mine owne disgrace To taste of joy, or your vaine pleasing sight;Show them your pleasures who saw never night Of greife, wher joyings fauning, smiling face Appeers as day, wher griefe found never space Yett for a sigh, a grone, or envies spite;Butt O on mee a world of woes doe ly, Or els on mee all harmes strive to rely, And to attend like servants bound to mee,Heat in desire, while frosts of care I prove, Wanting my love, yett surfett doe with love Burne, and yett freeze, better in hell to bee.
Come darkest night, becoming sorrow best; Light; leave thy light; fitt for a lightsome soule; Darknes doth truly sure with mee oprest Whom absence power doth from mirthe controle:The very trees with hanging heads condole Sweet sommers parting, and of leaves distrest In dying coulers make a griefe-full role; Soe much (alas) to sorrow are they prest,Thus of dead leaves her farewell carpett’s made: Theyr fall, theyr branches, all theyr mournings prove; With leavles, naked bodies, whose huese vade From hopefull greene, to wither in theyr love,If trees, and leaves for absence, mourners beeNoe mervaile that I grieve, who like want see.
Time only cause of my unrestBy whom I hop’d once to bee blest How cruell art thou turned?That first gav’st lyfe unto my love,And still a pleasure nott to move Or change though ever burned;Have I thee slack’d, or left undunOne loving rite, and soe have wunn Thy rage or bitter changing?That now noe minutes I shall see,Wherein I may least happy bee Thy favors soe estranging.Blame thy self, and nott my folly,Time gave time butt to bee holly; True love such ends best lovethUnworhty love doth seeke for endsA worthy love butt worth pretends Nor other thoughts itt proveth:Then stay thy swiftnes cruell time,And lett mee once more blessed clime To joy, that I may prayse thee:Lett mee pleasure sweetly tastingJoy in love, and faith nott wasting And on fames wings I’le rayse thee:Never shall thy glory dyingBee untill thine owne untying That time noe longer liveth;T’is a gaine such tyme to lend:Since soe thy fame shall never end Butt joy for what she giveth.
Love like a jugler, comes to play his prise, And all minds draw his wonders to admire, To see how cuningly hee, wanting eyes, Can yett deseave the best sight of desire: The wanton child, how hee can faine his fire So pretely, as none sees his disguise! How finely doe his tricks, while wee fooles hire The badge, and office of his tirannies,For in the end, such jugling hee doth make As hee our harts, in stead of eyes doth take For men can only by theyr slieghts abuseThe sight with nimble, and delightful skill; Butt if hee play, his gaine is our lost will: Yett childlike, wee can nott his sports refuse.
When I beeheld the Image of my deere With greedy lookes mine eyes would that way bend, Fear, and desire did inwardly contend; Feare to bee mark’d, desire to drawe still neere,And in my soule a speritt wowld apeer, Which boldnes waranted, and did pretend To bee my genius, yett I durst nott lend My eyes in trust wher others seemed soe cleere,Then did I search from whence this danger ’rose, If such unworthynes in mee did rest As my sterv’d eyes must nott with sight bee blest; When jealousie her poyson did disclose;Yett in my hart unseense of jealous eyeThe truer Image shall in triumph lye.
Love peruse me, seeke, and findeHow each corner of my minde Is a twine Woven to shine.Not a Webb ill made, foule fram’d,Bastard not by Father nam’d, Such in me Cannot bee.Deare behold me, you shall seeFaith the Hive, and love the Bee, Which doe bring. Gaine and sting.Pray desect me, sinewes, vaines,Hold, and loves life in those gaines; Lying bare To despaire,When you thus anotamiseAll my body, my heart prise; Being true Just to you.Close the Truncke, embalme the Chest,Where your power still shall rest, Joy entombe, Loves just doome.
She rarely made us do it— we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased that some day we’d train our children right and not end up like her, after every meal stuck with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring. The one chore she spared us: gummy plates in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas, globs of egg and gravy. Or did she guard her place at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss of the magnolia, the school traffic humming. Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon, delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.
A day will come I’ll watch you reading this.I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now—this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here,alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath.Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it? You are the person come to clean my room;you are whichever of my three childrenopens the drawer here where this poem will goin a few minutes when I’ve had my say. These are the words from immortality.No one stands between us now except Death:I enter it entirely writing this.I have to tell you I am not alone.Watching you read, Eternity’s with me.We like to watch you read. Read us again.
No ladders, no descending angels, no voiceout of the whirlwind, no rendingof the veil, or chariot in the sky—onlywater rising and falling in breathing springsand seeping up through limestone, aquifers fillingand flowing over, russet stands of prairie grassand dark pupils of black-eyed Susans. Onlythe fixed and wandering stars: Orion rising sideways,Jupiter traversing the southwest like a great firefly,Venus trembling and faceted in the west—and the moon,appearing suddenly over your shoulder, brimmingand ovoid, ripe with light, lifting slowly, deliberately,wobbling slightly, while far below, the faithful searises up and follows.
Even after darkness closed her eyes 
my mother could crochet. 
Her hands would walk the rows of wool 
turning, bending, to a woolen music.The dye lots were registered in memory: 
appleskin, chocolate, porcelain pan, 
the stitches remembered like faded rhymes: 
pineapple, sunflower, window pane, shell.Tied to our lives those past years 
by merely a soft colored yarn, 
she’d sit for hours, her dark lips 
moving as if reciting prayers, 
coaching the sighted hands.
Once, boarding the train to New York City, The aisle crowded and all seats filled, I glimpsed An open space—more pushing, stuck in place— And then saw why: a man, face peeled away, Sewn back in haste, skin grafts that smeared like wax Spattered and frozen, one eye flesh-filled, smooth, One cold eye toward the window. Cramped, shoved hard, I, too, passed up the seat, the place, and fought on Through to the next car, and the next, but now I wonder why the fire that could have killed him Spared him, burns scarred over; if a life Is what he calls this space through which he moves, Dark space we dared not enter, and what fire Burns in him when he sees us move away.
Always the script, the dramatic comma, the pointed ellipsis, half turn, beat, the exit itself as punctuation. Let’s say the back wall of the house fell away: first cracks down the plaster, then it crumbles to reveal seventy-five rows of spectators. That’s the explanation: they’ve been there all along; I mulled blocking on a blind impulse, but it turns out a correct one. Maybe someone is making love to me (in the 19th century sense): do I throw off his hand, exit with pithy wit? Or simply submit to it: the sappy moment which will, I know, have to be resisted in some later scene. Had I been there, had it been me, I would have said— and the audience would have been moved to applaud. Astounding improvisation! I’d have walked right up to the lawyer, the bank manager, and I’d have said— or, if it was me, it would never have gotten that far; I’d have turned to her and said— So I am contemplating in its shade an apple tree. Haven’t I often done that? So why not me? Late August, the leaves like arrowheads, dark green, waxy, punctuated by apples—constellations of apples. There I see The Hunter, bow pulled back, the apples of his quiver fixed with perfect aim: William Tell, daughter across the tree, of apples herself, poised with a perfect fruit above her head: wet tension of its surface, red skin that kisses the sun. And this perfect tree. This perfect tree in which every stamen was touched by pollen, in which every flower thickened to fruit: tree that knows by its own example perfection. In each cluster, five apples bunch as tight as chambers of a human heart. Had I been there, had it been me—and the slither up the trunk brought my attention low, the rippling body sliding along the trunk, I who have been so good all these years at resisting, and giving in, and resisting— I’d have heard the melodious hiss, seen the glinting tongue, its fork invading the region of my heart, the archer in that perfect canopy aiming right at me, I who have given in to desire when the stakes were much lower, could I resist those movements, how fully the serpent’s hiss gives itself over to simile:I am like, I am like, I am like. . . . Seen it before, mister. I’d have sighed in an aside, glanced up at the sky, deadpanned the audience, and said— Or had my lover brought the apple. For years I have told them not to burn money on me. But to bring only this, to hold it out with a silent smile as they enter the house, down center on the stage of the palm. No better way to say I love you. So why not me? Early October, the outsize hunger after running, and my lover brings it over. I recognize on his breath the scent of the serpent, and the apple, the one forbidden thing. Deep voice, dark eyes, silent smile and perfect apple; only midday draped across his body, tight, alert, alive to the moment of sin. And reaching out to take it in my hand. Who better than me? Let the tension linger, let the audience pulse with anticipation. We touch over the forbidden fruit. The stage lights dim, and I look at him, and I look at him, and raise my eyebrows, and say— But even so, wouldn’t I end up here again, always here? Angels crossing swords behind me, shame clothing me, conflating all my losses—the loss of God, the loss of apples, how they expand inside to fill up hunger. Maybe there are no words here, just the sky blackening with anger. Maybe words wouldn’t be useful here anyway. Consider a scrim: the night sky blotted of constellations; nothing but gray swirls of wrath. And project against it a man’s silhouette: head bent, empty- handed, the memory of apples imprinted on his wordless tongue, and around his neck, loss—like a cowbell—announcing his presence to the fallen world.
Sometimes it takes miles to give up resistance, though the mirror shows a body unresisting, shows perhaps something to admire. Others may. A body without difficulty loosening, breaking its own willfulness, cracking itself like a rusted bolt that finally begins to turn. A body that turns. Toward openness, fantasy, those desires of and not of the body. Sometimes I notice a powerful man engaged steadily repeating difficult action: folding himself, his tight skin, over and over, lifting a declined torso or pulling up a suspended trunk, and think, how neat, how controlled to be inside that body. I struggle not to stare, grip myself not to lose myself inside the thought of being inside that body. I can never get there I know because it is the image I want, the veneer of muscle having taken primacy from mind, now first among equals: bicep, abdominal, quadricep, the launch after launch of a perpetual run. I want the image even when I am it, or nearly it— because even then, I am also that other thing, self-conscious, burdened, struggling for movement. If there is a link between God and animals— the way He identifies with the so much that isn’t us, as He had to have, to have made them— it must be in the body enacting will immediate through movement, as if with a word creating a world (enacting creation immediate through speech). Which is to say, this is my time of prayer, my only time: miles in, as long as it takes for the body to relinquish resistance. Bright, public, surrounded by others who move toward better movement. And all the while seeing in a wall of mirrors that image of myself, deer, horse, running close kin to breathing, motion necessary to survival, perfect image of a man that I’m merely a self-conscious copy of. I pray for things, of course, for myself and for those whose pain touches me, selfish and unselfish prayers for intimates and strangers. I pray for the runner in the mirror, too, sleek, easy animal, unselfconscious and present, and absent as a god, the man who could almost be me, who I do my best to rush toward. I pray that one day, by His grace, we may meet.
What do we do when we hate our bodies? A good coat helps. Some know how to pull off a hat. And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles, various kinds of resignation, the laugh in the mirror, the lie of saying it doesn’t matter. There is also the company we keep: surgeons and dermatologists, faith healers and instruction-givers, tailors of cashmere and skin who send their bills for holding our shame-red hands, raw from the slipping rope, the same hands with which we tremble ever so slightly, holding novels in bed, concentrating on the organization of pain and joy we say is another mirror, a depth, a conjure in which we might meet someone who says touch me.
We’re talking about when we met and you say it was easier to fall for me thinking (I’ll remember this pause) it was likely I’d be dead by now. Talking. Falling. Thinking. Waiting . . . Have I undone what you’ve tried to do? You say no. You say the surprise of still being is something being built— the machine of our living, this saltwork of luck, stylish, safe, comfortable and unintended. Meanwhile, I haven’t had the opportunity to tell you, but our lovely little dog has just killed a possum. Maybe it’s unfair, a possum entering the argument here. But I lay it down before us: because an ugly dying possum played dead and didn’t run, its dubious cunning was brought to an end outside our door by our brutal, beautiful and very pleased little dog. So how do I say that this is not about death or sadness or even whether you really first loved me waiting, thinking I’d be dying young? It’s just that standing there a few minutes ago holding a dead possum by its repellent bony tail, I was struck by how eerily pleased I was to be a spectator to teeth, spit, agony and claw, feeling full of purpose, thinking how different in our adversaries we are from possums. We try love— the fist of words, their opening hand. And whether we play dead or alive, our pain, the slow circulation of happiness, our salt and work, the stubborn questions we endlessly give names to haunt us with choice.
A gauze bandage wraps the land and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates. A series of slaps molds a mountain, a fear uncoils itself, testing its long cool limbs. A passing cloud seizes up like a carburetor and falls to earth, lies broken- backed and lidless in the scree. Acetylene torches now snug in their holsters, shop-vacs trundled back behind the dawn. A mist becomes a murmur, becomes a moan deepening the dust- choked fissures in the rock O pity us Ignatz O come to us by moonlight O arch your speckled body over the earth.
The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by  a razor. Chug say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered  ground squirrels. The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin  is much dented by little winds. The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces. Here is the door he will paint on the rock. Here is the glass floor of the cliff. He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite  pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.
(she opens the door) (he is twelve inches away) her fingers still splayed across the battened-down brass latch of his sternum (she closes the door) (he is eight feet away) her palm skids down the banister clings to the fluted globe of the finial (he is twenty-eight feet away) (she opens the door) the black air is fast flowing and cold (she closes the door) she clutches her thin intimacy tight under her chin and trips down the steps (he is forty feet away) the stiff wind palpably stripping his scent from her hair from the numb fingers she raises to her mouth a cab pulls up (she opens the door) she bends the body hitherto upright (she closes the door) the cracked brown vinyl (he is ninety feet away) biting the backs of her thighs red blotches suffusing her cheeks I’m sorry please stop she says (he is four hundred feet away) please stop the cab (she opens the door) the cab stops she pushes a twenty through the slot (he is seven hundred feet away) (she closes the door) the husk of something dry and light falls to the sidewalk crumbles away (she opens the door) (he is two feet away) (she closes the door)
Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life. There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners. She thought to brush her hand against his thigh. She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail. The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to  become a kind of grammar. She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as  they drowned. Soot amassed in drifts in the corners of the room. She pressed her thumb into the hollow of his throat for a while and then  let him go.
I always forget the name,delphinium, even though it was the flower the hummingbirds loved best. They came in pairs—sleek, emerald-bright heads, the clockwork machinery of their blurred wings thrumming swift, menacing engines. They slipped their beaks. as if they were swizzle sticks, deep into the blue throat of delphinium and sucked dry the nectar- chilled hearts like goblets full of sweet, frozen daiquiri. I liked to sit on the back porch in the evenings, watching them and eating Spanish peanuts, rolling each nut between thumb and forefinger to rub away the red salty skin like brittle tissue paper, until the meat emerged gleaming, yellow like old ivory, smooth as polished bone. And late August, after exclamations of gold flowers, tiny and bitter, the caragana trees let down their beans to ripen, dry, and rupture— at first there was the soft drum of popcorn, slick with oil, puttering some- where in between seed, heat, and cloud. Then sharp cracks like cap gun or diminutive fireworks, caragana peas catapulting skyward like pellet missiles. Sometimes a meadowlark would lace the night air with its elaborate melody, rippling and sleek as a black satin ribbon. Some- times there would be a falling star. And because this happened in Wyoming, and because this was my parents’ house, and because I’m never happy with anything, at any time, I always wished that I was some- where, anywhere else, but here.
For my mother, Yoshiko Horikoshi Roripaugh 1. X-Ray My mother carried the chest x-ray in her lap on the plane, inside a manila envelope that readDo Not Bend and, garnished with leis at the Honolulu Airport, waited in line—this strange image of ribcage, chain-link vertebrae, pearled milk of lung, and the murky enigmatic chambers of her heart in hand. Until it was her turn and the immigration officer held the black-and-white film up to sun, light pierced clean through her, and she was ushered from one life through the gate of another, wreathed in the dubious and illusory perfume of plucked orchids. 2. Ceramic Pig Newly arrived in New Mexico, stiff and crisp in new dungarees, her honeymoon, they drove into the mountains in a borrowed car, spiraling up and up toward the rumor of deer, into the green tangy turpentine scent of pine, where air crackled with the sizzling collision of bees, furred legs grappling velvet bodies as they mated midair, and where they came upon the disconsolate gaze of a Madonna alcoved against the side of the road, her feet wreathed in candles, fruit, flowers, and other offerings. Nearby, a vendor with a wooden plank balanced between two folding chairs and the glossy row of ceramic pigs lined up across, brilliant glaze shimmering the heat. My mother fell in love with the red- and-blue splash of flowers tattooed into fat flanks and bellies, the green arabesques of stem and leaf circling hoof, snout, and ear. So exotic. Years later she still describes the pig with a sigh—heartbroken, the word she chooses with careful consideration. She’d filled the pig with Kennedy dollars from the grocery budget, each half dollar a small luxury denied at the local Piggly Wiggly, until one day, jingling the shift and clink of the pig’s growing silver weight, she shook too hard, and as if the hoarded wealth of her future were too much to contain, the pig broke open—spilling coins like water, a cold shiny music, into her lap— fragments of bright pottery shards scattering delicate as Easter eggshell. 3. Sneeze My mother sneezes in Japanese. Ké-sho! An exclamation of surprise—two sharp crisp syllables before pulling out the neatly folded and quartered tissue she keeps tucked inside the wrist of her sweater sleeve. Sometimes, when ragweed blooms, I wonder why her sneeze isn’t mine, why something so involuntary, so deeply rooted in the seed of speech, breaks free from my mouth like thistle in a stiff breeze, in a language other than my mother’s tongue. How do you chart the diaspora of a sneeze? I don’t know how you turned out this way
My leaf blower lifted the blackbird— wings still spread, weightless, floating on the loud, electric wind almost as if it were alive.Three or four times it flew, but fell again, sideslipped down like a kite with no string, so I gave up. . . I had work to do,and when the dust I raised had settled in that other world under the rose bushes, the ants came back to finish theirs.
i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves  for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive i don’t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,  except every corner i saw by the hearts  lined up on the spine i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer  will die and be born with its ice i unravel the token you gave me for freedom, i bury the flags in your eyes  under each Arabic sign. . . 1,2,3, on and on. . . and before i varnish again all the battle grounds freed to travel the face of 2 yews i remake every button with children put down by 5 tons of your crosses i am flaking with crust at the dangling ushers they fall for light signs i make my car shake with my fear, the headlights are showing me songs  by the road for the now disappeared, shots crack by the ones that  remain i can tell by your lies and your pride that your heart is as small as your pupils  opening up for your strokes  and getting smaller for light i am the siphon that gravity fills up the blanks in your face with i sing a throat full of gritos, for the safety releases that shots spill for you i salivate for your spiraling warmth, in the morning when i collapse, over and over i have all our love letters taped to the ceiling, my sleep is the end of our flies  their warbles keep rolling i double the maps on your roads i put a slab of meat on your cheeks i thaw every word that pours ends through your blood i turn in the hair that your father hung with, erasers ring mountains for more i pick up a chair for the lightning, satellites put out a bead i bleed in the real that you see with a shine, pieces of chicken pile up to count nukes i tear off the rain, and cut its numerical age into passing truck tombs i force your faces to mine, and bother your ebony whirls to circle the holes in the sky i fire electrons to make your promise discard its word, and fall through i tie miseries to drains, and pay off my debt with suns i am more cruel than a counter i pick a safe with your words, until my distance is short i slap at your monthly returns, and tie your animals to 5 dirt seas i ride through your roads in the glass, and steal tiny cracks i blame the small stone hid in my colorless mouth, and pin rags to your lips i volunteer for your wars, and lose them all i borrow your daydreams, and purse up their gardens, into our hands i pulse with you standing by rocks i say all you said by the iron door i throw kites in the room where they found me i sell off inseparable fingers i throw windows to walls i whispers hard rings into telephones, and scratch at the bed i fade into water i remember the hands i open holes through barbed houses i blow darts through your tunnels and doors i pile roofs through our wounds i move through your runs and your screens i see the news in the sand i digit up noontimes i peel off my skins with old sounds i walk through the valley of lead i unplug your pages of light i frost over programs and ride 3 roads on 5 deer
i fail in the retry of possible gaps  for the middle of canyons  in crumbling lights  for the scarification of vinyl.  it rides through the forest  and throbs a small packet  where parallel seams  scratch a readable surface  on the backs of the camels  in mirages of separate planes  to the bursting eclipse  of pronounceable service,  two spots on its forehead call out  for the country of doubling masses  on a highway that cuts into faces  in line for the city  every stream ties a knot  for an opening under the sea i lose all my digits  to the moon that will one day be bare  to the parched piles of breathing in farms  to the doorways that promise a morning  on the accident prone to a murder of chance  every mouse in the dust in the kitchen  will harvest the cold  in the sickness of scattering twigs  in the answer of mirrors  for the double that sings with the night  by the prayer full of ashes  under frozen cadavers that once  were the hearts  in the egg of a wound i disappear in the wrap-up  for invisible letters that leave all the snow  for the hunt to deliver migration  on the mushroom fields full of returns  under beaches in roads by a promise  where the water turns into a home  and the blame of the air will no longer wail  for the spot in the cloud full of planets  while a bubble reenters a womb  for explosions in placards  like the front of a bus  crossing vines in a prairie  that were traced on the skin of a goat i look at the picture of too many races  for the blood of a horse  that a bundle of sleeping  3 shorted connections  for the change of electrical chairs  under pools of announcements  for the battling showers  that tell all the stories of war  to infants in sight of the corner of trading  for the telephones buried in answers  under barrooms and sawdust and piers  where the songs of an isthmus  circle the beacon  where the moon cannot pull  where a whisper  moves sand off a stone i weigh every mote in my eye with the fingers of handshakes  they calibrate walks like the wheels of a car  they reflect in a wave  like untying the knot of a bruise full of ice  where once was a number  where the count was eleven  where equality lifts  like the dough  that incarcerates mud clots and showers  for the vanishing thorn  in a guide by the pillow  softly omitted  what the second hand sees  under gears by the hand of a cripple  for the ditch in a face that is fine i bury my head in the leaves  that the buses were lost in  that day when i looked for her here in the Arctic  when the telephone poles were the marks of equators  when the mornings at home  could not write their own name  when the shepherd was singing too many shields  at the entrance of staring at stars in the basement  with the light in the chest of what follows  with a walking that pulls at two seals  for the trouble in words  in the empty  in the on and off one  why there have to be zeros  to raise all the shores  for piñatas to line themselves up in the snow  under spreading the phase  of recalling the crosshairs  on the hive  that the singing will never return  when the breaking gives others  a prompt to give air i radio frequencies meant to undress all the parrots  in the knot that a hill on the head  of the viewer can see  without even a monkey to grow  with a molecule’s power  in a black hole instead of a screen  in identity swimming to surface  every outlook reframes on a break  in circular lots  by the parking spot full of directions  where a jacket sinks into the roll  of an orange in Fez  around trains in the mountains  that the pantomime echoes  in the valley of shells that call out  for an engine to answer  when penalties cease in the skull  of another score gone on the pavement  with the sound of a bell that is broken  to bear its first weight in the sand
¿are you on the other side waiting for alarms in a desert of sleepless evaporations? ¿are you beside yourself in the aisles that distance makes shorter than light waves in the daylight that pounds a lead slab in the soup that the winter dissolves? ¿are you the signal that another plane carves into wings in rounded contusions of a late afternoon storm, full of sparks that the night hurries out on Locust and serial cheeks shrouded in shiny costumes? ¿are you a circle like juntas that the winter makes clear on the shaved orbiting molecule that the ear revolves around, in a retreat of explosive fossils? ¿are you memorizing the connections between the hand and the foot and the torso in reverse of the automatic? ¿are you materializing the unknown without weather to increase the planet otherwise? ¿are you pocketing the insurance claims that parkas and snow equips with sutures and hand grenades? ¿forever? ¿are you increasing the tackle box full of piers to widen the sea and shorten circuits full of trees? ¿are you feeding the unworn through a parallel shapelessness in desert blooms on the roots of a tarp milking masks? ¿are you remodeling the world as a breathing action doll? ¿are you calm for knots like the guardian hell that a sewer makes for angels in their last testimony skewered like the pony was? ¿are you freezing in the open course that half of everything enumerates like clouds? ¿are you unwound in a fear that a jacket stores for feed, in easy shows and rented faces on the pain of entry? ¿are you good like ovens?
even when issues arise and obedience can not be secured by the bludgeon, the bludgeon remains; when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people, we mean particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion. when we mean the people, we mean a people knowing their own strength cast as day laborers, or knowing to a greater part of a lesser known part playing paid intercourse in all connections for the people by the people. when we mean, we mean broke or abrasive worn, once open scream representatives, now incarcerated in a rationalistic shadow land, given a history that merges extruder merchandising with wholesale lots of intermittent dung, or objects for understudy beatings.
the day shifts, we talk to each other the way we talk to each other, the luster fades, our bodies fill with sap, there is a shift, joy reappears before another personal narrative burns to a heap of citations, continuing in complicated machinery, becoming blood knots in space, both the living and dead surround the present has been. I open my eyes in the full force of fear and hesitation, frozen in passing passageways with endless permutations, subjected to violence, stupidity, and love.
can I do this spiritual drag, collective agony wishful thinking, fearful peek-a-boo actuality about to be read in unapologetic disinterested participation against fantasy without benefit familiarity, remembering distortion, forgetting drudgery necessary to consume anything cement sorrow, surrounded by transfer credit surcharge immortal siege ideology, submissive to appliance bodyisms in doubt in the face of stupidity—oops—knowledge, derivative of skin, bones, eyes and the rest, opposite abrupt aggressive remoteness here to serve another ascendant say-so? I tremble in doubt, divided by multiple entry points and explosive content wrapped in rambling overlays sent to the council on commentary, and without exception the animation either frenetic or dull, shifts to no options left, recognizing useless hope in the face of bomb holes caused by numbering digits.
ready to receive remains built for death, ready to receive the flatly desolate superficial deeply commissioned intellectual offer of suggestive actions, for the hunger assassin to fall back on and become forcefull psychological damage, bottled for drinkable agitation.  riding a back seat writing construction, contesting the oncoming molten universe, immersed in villagers, city dwellers, trembling, laughing, (white teeth redone for the perfect test of time), to inhale flesh and stone from long ago, forgetting the horrors of holy oil infusion clocks and gritty body galleries, leaving behind the mourning river’s crimson fragrance smoldering from the previous unbearable fever.  in a posture of myself on a speeding body, without hands and feet, I am ready to receive the vomit of consciousness and proceed down the avenues of suggestion to become a limited option.
there is a shipwreck on each side of innuendo, tears gather around the collective shadow of shadows; none clearer than the last unshakable, anatomically inexplicably, never noticed, next time, please sir, more.    enshrouded by fear, one hundred years after eleven pages of violent reality testing, when the beginning was the final question, outside the disruption of anything hungry on emptiness, suggesting a response of objections, calling on me to speak in tongues.    trying to read the consequential future, apply anything to anything; knowing any application to the current materiality is wretched normality and remote productivity.
in the general conservative cast, overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking dense under-growth invasion of deliberately callous vertebrates, hotheaded newagers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness.  a breath away from my next instant self, knowing lies will flow from my lips as well as the rest; a creative fallacy to create that which we think we know, with a thousand pens ready to suggest what one should do.  reminding myself, all ends with what effects it will have.  reminding myself, all ends with what can be named and financed, so why not let my bones be picked by the ants.  reminding myself, I would do anything to not remember who I resemble, I would do anything to not resemble who I resemble, to not resemble the resembled.  reminding myself, I would do anything to not belong to a future human potential workshop, supported by a cast of thousands begging for all things mundane sanity brings, in general overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies.
everyone’s dying everyone’s dying to die everyone’s in my way on my way to die it’s too hot and dusty to die I am eating the ashes of the dead eating the exhaust of cars an image sacrifice looking for a boat to heaven namaste, your boat has bad karma out of the way I am burning inside of shame I am at the seat of ash on a boat to nowhere burning inside I am the end of time shiva orange rat queen goddess of money sleeping in time to die at the hands of doms sunrise to sunrise from the beiginning of time alone at the end of time rowing nowhere lost in serpentine alleys amongst the amputees and water buffalos amongst dust breathing souls looking into eyes looking back for anything not burning
water relives reservoir boat bottom draft displaced  ° lineal thought backward body no one knows the brains I am now tree an oar origin joints ruptured soak in deep ink  ° wallpaper remnant flower float chandelier brief case hundred words logged erode my Arabic congestion of resin person forecasts final position restless sleep  ° width of back belted sodium poultice exhausts courtship agora drain a home of you wind lashes fronds cellophane  ° where a mammal bled activity not yet diffused blackened patch of water weight of oyster in gloved hand he shucks dented pewter  ° assonance her aspect relocated wind shatters plexi phenomena foregone for me shift at oars new muscle grown bone never held you  ° case of dried apricot gorge I am summoned capable a day outlast forecast coral reef feeler  ° paper cover mallet awl downfall fire- box androgyne
one sketchof the stormypetrelone set of clothesnot to be wornduring the voyageone logof the harmthat cameyou missa manso muchmusicfor HaulOn the Bowlineslop chestsmallstuffprayerbookGreen-landerwith a stitchthroughhis nosecoin inhis mouthhis custodybrokenholystoneat feetsailmakerstitches youinside a saillast totouchyour craftslippedstarboardpigonfootdoesno goodto stay afloatto assureidentityone potof inkone paragraphon a miscellaneouscustomquitthe Americanshorequitthe shoreof Green-landmissa manpot ofwood ashboxof blankcardsbeef bonesculpturedeductedformwageswhat youbidseldommentionedin leisurehis formforecastleslipcliché poor guy . . .the oathand the laughboomskylarkflicks a cardin another’s face
defunct list of common names proxy for the bearer nor’wester buffets gear reach into our canisters “Cassirer” drawn and sewn into my lapels assembly of illegal men peril will not know two Roman slaves rain the rage passes through our teeth into interior pneumatic doors my evening of moniker stamped upon boxes of envelopes blank ledger for you “Macquin” with tin and amber stockpiled you prince
Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time.    Think how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory.    Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils.    His hope: intermittent.    To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though he feels, true enough, death’s wither-clench. Thinking always of something permanent, watching the while how everything goes on changing.    He has seen where Speed is buried. Eyes exorbitant.    He has the tension of male and female: active, divided. Anger and lust. What he eats tastes exactly like real food.    He would search out interphenomena, if he could decipher the interstices. The broken line. Immediate havoc. Circular heaven. Square earth. He cries world world, and there is no world.    He claims superiority over the other animals, being the only one who can talk, the only one to have doubts.    Herr Stimmung knows a whale is big. Its skeleton might shelter a dozen men.    Not existing, not subsisting—insisting. Not object, not subject—eject. (He works within opposed systems, every one of them opposed to system.)    “Fillette”—in confusion he addresses himself—“n’allez pas au bois seulette.”    He knows who is allowed to wear what kinds of beads. He knows how fruit trees are inherited. All his self-objects lie in the inoperative past.    Herr Stimmung springs from a long undocumented ancestry.    He has a special attitude towards terror.
To those of a certain temperament, there is nothing worse than the thought of something hidden, secret, withheld from their knowing— especially if they suspect that another knows about it and has even, perhaps, connived at keeping it concealed.  D. H. Lawrence seems to have been irritated no end by the thought that people were having sex and not telling him.  Freud too.  —Ah but then Freud arranged it so that everyone had to tell.  His psychoanalysis lights up the depths, makes our tangled web transparent, to the point where I can see all the way down to It.  And the process moves outward in increasing rings:  The Master analyses his disciples. Who thereby—transparent now—become masters and, in turn, take on others, patients or disciples, to analyse.  So that eventually there are no secrets.  Except, of course, those of the first Master, the Self-Analysed.  Which is to say, the only private One, sole Unrevealed. Opaque center of His universal panopticon.  While we see only His words, His daughter, His cigar.  Poor Lawrence.
in memory of Edmond Jabès “And so her worries ran on into the other world.”  The Tale of Genji 1 ultimate boundary: arms stretched sideways to represent nothing supreme accomplishment: ends of the earth 2 I will forget first what happened, then ideas then all my feelings, forgetting finally what I’m up to now pose accept almost some expiring embers signifying momentary joy 3 and a bare knife also figures   4 amnesia retrograde and anterograde—unable to acquire new information and the old store lost blessed are the feet finite on this unfinished page defy conquer divine denominations de- rived from prepositions equivalent to end, the sky wears out as well   5 earth’s limit against the soles, bordering air, but my toes point come to the world’s con- clusion, distinguishing infinity from the boundless a figure of Death in the plural of majesty a bronze vase, as vessel for nothing burnt flesh figured by the living animal the “name, address and flower” test images of weeping friends, signifying weeping   6 immaterial mystery, imperfect misery I start at the coast, my limit the shore opposite not movement mere direction   7 mist dancing   8 ocean’s music   9 an ornamental barrier or parapet along the edge of this terrace, this balcony, this etc. inconceivable splendour signifying a choice of evils nameless objects seen imperfectly by the flame from sticks a nearer though still im- perfect view back to past ages watery track . . .   10 . . . Isle of the Dead   11 stranger both to model and to copy unable to relate the garment to the body absolute border: surface and line and point, alien to all experience weaving a sound over the water, not to harbor there but to surpass the port   12 objects of regret in a mysterious accent I will forget all my words, first proper names, then common nouns adjectives next next interjections and at last (even) gestures obscurity of the dawn signifying love of self   13 on a page of sand, appearance of a footprint   14 I heard the speech of one unknown to me the report dying gradually away I heard a voice I had not known the righteous lifted up, while we remain suspended I can hear a voice I no longer recognize a sort of tear, symbol of poured wine or else the splash of the wine poured he caused him to hear a tongue which he knew not   15 he temple figured by a frame, inlet to the sanctuary, narrow pass between columns then a track leading across and beyond the balustrade this room and a skein, succession of generations, some kind of existence   16 the spin begins to wobble the bare surface where earth meets air and becomes horizon   17 to remember you, as Aristotle would insist, is not to recall you not clever or quick enough for recollection but in the slow turn of attention, I do bring you back, which does not mean I know you a picture   18 two eyes, or one triangle—sight in abstracto   19 uncertain of the way   20 thrown   21 I will forget to appreciate Klee, Tristam Shandy, Emma Kirkby then forget how to do what- ever finally forget anger and finally fear common noise, a common languor, uncanny and pensive silence
I propose turning the key useless to conceal from you that strange things take place it used to ring of its own accord chair by the window and thedoor closed saw the curtain detach falling when I weary of looking, something is bound to appear walking backwards she is frightened by the sound but cannot describe it the face vanishes, the hands remain white arms beneath fearful drapery looking out, over the hill I burn it, it distills a dark mucus curtain wrenched away a gossamer veil, as it seems resembling, yet most unlike her armless chair, handless cup sloping downwards to the base of the hill momentary grasp around her ankle an old-fashioned house a narrow lane on a declivity
You and I inhabit thresholds, clinging to neither here nor there, and to and: this is a threshold of no relief, of interrogative light and obviated shadows, of questions flattened between clapboard slides, in laboratories of hanging frames—in a potential frame, the next moment slumps beneath the shadow of the overhang.   They call it earthquake weather, a day like this, of reflected light and leveling heat of no relief, of corners around which and angles of incidence jellied in consommé, molded in amber lunches of tea and impossible: no incidents or tension, no reflection.   No striations: rather, bangle, a broken shoelace and what are we going to do about that hair?   We were in a boat. You were navigating and I was tending the lines, which flew from my hands, flapping like live wires on the wind. You watched the shadow of our sail on the water through the light reflected in your face, conducted a depth sounding:   You went under, but not overboard, swam away to plot reliefs of ocean floors. It is far too shallow here to die.    for Chip Madden
Turning to weightless implements of gear-click hedging in    instamatic    blue, our ticking  gaze  in light  like waves,  overturning   A lifeline, a forerunning wake of life rafts and instruments, luminal seconds in cesium skimmed threshold or eleventh hour    draped  across  the doorjamb.   We lack fear of flatness or our impalement on axes, blinking a reticle of stasis: turn it over and begin again, this dripping like TV test patterns.   Let’s stay, I say, and buoy ourselves in river locks intercalated in channels or our fender-bent synapses, recycling   this floating.   Never believing in water torture or autisms as misfortune, we were counting gold in a pointillistic landscape of radiating boulevards. In Budapest, a necropolis of shifting foci grid-dots. Soviet heroes, missing limbs.   The thought does not sadden us, but the calculation of sundials: whether flat or equatorial   they always deliver   this sublimating ice   (we are tapping on the ceiling)
night and open as a child never feared an inch of her face it was a stance and succulence even in sleep had the graves a nightingale asked so far
Prostrating before the golden figure Against disinclination…later in the day… All that remains…the extremely brittle foliage… Abated, the thunder…our golden figure… Her ugly hair held back by a pin…frenzied Rushed down the forested hill that isolates sun Highly explosive, flickering, foiling of your heightening hushed Nick in the blue thing Along negligence   Chagrin Of the maidens Bleeds   Shackled as sharp complication Being as it were Absorbed into Myth Whiten, whitening Or white on white display   That play That combusted On stage   Romulus & Remus   The Janus figure From Zaire   (curtain)
Water spurts incredibly Clear up under simple feel And that is how We drank water   A loon fled Into water Because a raven Could not dive Or swim. Only spinning is a star Dizziness simple Ceremony appeasing weather With you sky, with for you sky Between A feeling a sky Heartfelt redolent in June Roses fume. May day Perpetual field of velvet horizon At a slant is the unicorn’s mane Realization from seed to flower We made contact chalices Filled, a sticky sweet Rim   Oenone in layers tissue white Garb blooming staunchly Against salt caking waves Tosses the self Secret she has into the sea A volume into silence Liquid shadow engulfing liquid Ruin. Dumbess as condition Obsolete In generalization Sea flowers join Her hair. A music hummed In the mind otherwise mute In sedge hats we walk along pulling Iris and water oats for our vases   Lysistrata’s cool Logical edge Lance leaved Golden Rod Linear leaves Untoothed edges   Note the fringed beards And the relatively short Spurs on this deep yellow Orange species. Spur Shorter than that deeply Fringed lip. Sepals rounded And curved inward. Thickets Boys
stepping off the curb onto the right foot, the left foot following in due time, dragging a heavy weight that goes “thud” as if falls those few inches  collective guilt cannot fit inside individualism    In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, the household items, bottles and canisters of detergent, Pledge Lemon Trigger, and, along the inner corners of the cabinet and its edges,—dark stains, eukaryotic organisms, branched filamentous hyphae  —screaming and pointing at the crud    women whose hair was stiffened into “beehives,” as they were called,— —canceling out the odor-producing glands under their shaven armpits by spraying on chasm lice chemicals    sliding the waist-line down to pierce the gluteus with the splinter of a hypodermic    The dishes sparkle, they literally glitter and throw off incandescent particles  barely able to eat, no appetite, not taste buds  the food stays fresh for months and, even after over a year, is still crunchy when chewed    holding a clean handkerchief over nose and mouth  eyes irritated with a burny carbolic sensation  irrigate the sunken cheeks, the sandpaper lips  tongue blindly groping upward to lap at the moisture of tears    droplets of a fluid dispensed from small milky-plastic bottles only a couple of inches in height might reduce the discomfort,—later tossing the expired bottle into a wastebasket, the fumes distorting whatever’s seen through the vapors, like a road on a hot summer day    What started as a slight dryness in the throat soon progressed to desiccated lips crinkly as crepe paper  it’s perfectly natural to ignore a faint aftertaste    it involved no joke saying “Does this taste funny to you?,” very dour look on their faces, to the extent that the word “faces” still applies    plants other than the desired plant life are ripped from the ground wearing a thick glove  The gardener finished with his chores, and went around to the back of the shed to hose himself down with a garden hose, bare-chested, rubbing his hand over his glistening pectoral muscles, the nozzle—
Not unusual, to have therapy only one night a week, to have a professional to talk to about personal problems. Evening would be a typical time, after work. It might require traveling there by public transportation, in a city where few people have cars, and taxis have become expensive in the past few years. Some movies have a scene where a character in the movie is tapping on a wall, along a bookshelf, then suddenly, the wall slides aside. Therapists can let their clients in by buzzing a button, if they’re in a private office they don’t share with any colleagues. The wall may have ornamental architectural devices trimming it, but those stay in place when it moves and slides aside. If one client arrives before the previous session is finished, he or she has to wait in a waiting area. He can put his hands on his lap, palms down on his thighs. Upon first seeing it, you don’t realize that there is another room, a corridor, hidden behind the wall. They must suspect that there is a secret panel, because there they are tapping on the wall. They hold an ear near the wall and tap it with two fingers. The later client may see the previous client leaving, therapist shaking his or her hand goodbye, “Until next week,” and the client could develop feelings about this weekly exchange, might feel jealousy. The actors in the movie could then go inside the hidden room or secret corridor behind the sliding panel and escape from some deadly danger that has been threatening.
The seats faced backwards although the train car was headed forward. The engineers designed it that way intentionally: the cushioned seats at the front facing in toward the rest of the car,—passengers’ faces, a Japanese flower arrangement of faces.   The platform began receding. Whoosh. Not in the sense of being unconscious or knocked out, but I was coming to   see, that is, to understand an endurance test deep inside that things could have gone differently, the furniture. It could have turned out completely different. That’s within   the realm of possibilities, as if the election were in our favor somewhere else, in the United States of Atlantis.—   I left off just as I was going to make a mental note in that regard,   that we were carried along, passively, in motion without walking or running, spastic reflex in the legs —To sit down in one city, stay seated an hour and a half, and then stand up in a small town Milton Bradley must have modeled its tiny green Monopoly houses and red hotels after
instead of entrance Goodbye means Avoir   Sved’s dream said from nowhere   of aliquant angles   some spindle of the sun   empirically facted deafening skin   open and afterwards   a cough is a couch idled into   without rain an island   easily a third worse   Indigo with a flame-red tongue
_______________________________________________________ there is no door, almost nothing, oblique figures _______________________________________________________ beneath the columns of false marble _______________________________________________________ returned, removed, moonless as an estimate, circle dancing _______________________________________________________ like a mineral _______________________________________________________ possibly a raised sanctuary _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ verse 7 informed my lingering curiosity _______________________________________________________ pallor than grass _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ was not red (J’ai ta lettre datée “En Mer”) _______________________________________________________ minor litanies _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ misshapen pearl, problem or promise _______________________________________________________ walls & windows, crawling graveyards _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Do not write this version. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ The manuscript has been lying for centuries _______________________________________________________ groaned or grunted. passed on _______________________________________________________ was it Sappho or Telesilla _______________________________________________________ the space between re- and in- _______________________________________________________ a long-broken line. _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ is it or is it or not either _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ of some oblate vessel _______________________________________________________ of some ageless stone _______________________________________________________ alabaster or avenue _______________________________________________________ pressed perhaps, or rather _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ This will be counting. _______________________________________________________ This will be the blank new page _______________________________________________________ (C should have been inserted above) _______________________________________________________ compressed & chromatic, semi-tones & minor ninths, broken chords _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ polysemous, radiating. If there were _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Two mirrors stare at each other _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ terse. (“a dactyl equals a spondee” or “one citadel equals two cities”) _______________________________________________________ straight lines blocks boxes binds _______________________________________________________ models originally real deathless _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ the principal protagonist was never painted _______________________________________________________ forgotten or perhaps the opposite _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ reliquary jar in the shape of a jar _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ symphonies on a dead left hand _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ spent horses & hyphens _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ taut fibers _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ of nows millimetric measure reciprocal blues _______________________________________________________ equivocal and faint _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ with no organs _______________________________________________________ A child’s dream of a mouth—fugue fingers _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ vertical to the horizon _______________________________________________________   _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ (someone was mumbling about 76 ways of looking at a black word) _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ of the no need of the moon to shine in it _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ It was not a story to pass on. _______________________________________________________ mummified intact neutral tones in turn _______________________________________________________ moving towards _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________
I dredge allegedly to repair and upgrade the Port of Umm Qasr I edge a legibly duty free transrational contract drag well I pledge alien lesions will be doled expensively (not on the cheap) and not to um miss explosives who shell Bechtel by the—that is Shell it by the shore Bechtel sells unflaggingly to the drag of the dividend rates of America I pluck allegiance from an estimated 1.8 billion and to the executive committee— Chicago—the world’s fair—and to Columbus Day in the park—I think it was the fourth of the reprivate which it hands to the drooling class—I mean the measuring cache watch this base—I a semifree colonist in gall— and to the elect by which it assesses, and to the electric by which it stands, and erects, th— rederegulated privates, bow, get down: how much would be chucked if this versus then forest of Arden should burn in the name of the national hamlet— if it be true that good wine needs no bush, we’d choose once we got behind the curtain, we guessed, if it’s there anymore except in Geist . . . while one gush mail addles in accidental against its—when walking Tokyo—wonderful you caming to OOIOO show & I Ill put you on the just list— this against—flurry of finger-pointing—forget it and your phony numbers like in why two okeydoke take it, one ration under planes— Apaches, syllabled to us versus shame— one galaxy under goods, world’s-without-end fair under the indivisible party, beneath security, below God’s belts to humanity, with puberty and enduring as-is and no trial for troglodytes and dogs and tax treats for by for allegiance. The friction has its machine—as you choose it?
I was pre-Pandoran once, clear & amok, scarlet free where scarcely  orange or purple romed: all font, Greek, drunk, then, then Tyred, vinegar aspect for breakfast. How I seam  now in video footage of national folding where only arson lives lives. Its source is valid because Google calls it 100% relevant and government, which is apt since it’s an historical event. I reseek and pall this chunk’s vocation. Viatical my neighbor asks if I’d ride in the trunk, no kid: my hatchback is mined in the parking lot for its sparkplugs beyond the bar. She masking he then is captured by the faith-based; once she creams, he stops calling it vocation. Down here, they have imported the clouds from Japan, and I hear them, sardine. Keez me, gaghrl, yer old wahn. Geta-crushing Shoji of the air will remember cat-noise and –fish for complements as the King of Terror will never have forced the possible Fed you you you’re not—not. Postal will be yours and you, bulk predellal, tardy urinals on vehicles, art naught but an empty he-port. Grey they err over joy, toupeeing space as picture meant to do. I stream, hand mover, reek, occupy ice and call that night. Of all  indecipherably you finally type to say you hosted Uncle Chen in your backyard exclusive. Wake,  it’s time to smell the smoke. Darling I   incensed. Once could have been your she-port; pretty noun look ahead to repast and yr Gruyerer aspect. Hype alone remains inside the box.
can walk without a frame, he whose exions last   and saw into limbs livid still the sum, comic,   dome-hosting wall shop captivating everything in a proleptic sale   while sand-horse negotiates his clop versus some floor one   erected in ardor prostrate again and happy penultimate slough-opening   as the news that distracts from spectral sass, downing   darkling you weren’t personal last Saturday as ponies cyclical   laced the public grasses compulsorily before our bower got   scanned despite a standup’s lawnly heath and harebells having   become grammar’s shortage on the stage hussing up to   a cardboard cloud passed limb from limb without its    flame [ardoring][clopsome][sass]
It was when they determined that I had been born dead That my life became easier to understand. For a long time, I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them, Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear, Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen. I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions, Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward A future I tried to point to, but how could I point, With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched, With fingers that melted into words that no one read.   I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio, Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat.  I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry, The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars, But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets A dead man into their covert discussions. So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost, And America became my compass, and Europe became The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares, There’s nothing to say because nobody listens, There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive, As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me, In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand, The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem, Because the dead have no politics. They might have A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known Could begin to assuage it.
By any measure, it was endless  winter. Emulsions with Then circled the lake like This is it. This April will be Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose early, erased for an hour  Silk-brush and ax I'd like to think I'm a different person  latent image fading around the edges and ears  Overall a tighter face now. Is it so hard for you to understand From the drop-down menu In a cluster of eight poems, I selected sleep, but could not  I decided to change everything Composed entirely of stills  or fade into the trees but could not  remember the dream save for one brief shot of a woman opening her eyes Ari, pick up. I'm a different person In a perfect world, this would be  April, or an associated concept Green to the touch  several feet away
“This bubble had to be burst, & the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world & smash something.” The hotel heiress, snapped flashing her bum in a Bahamas club.   To go right into the heart of the Arab world, they claim their device can trigger an orgasm: flashing her bum in a Bahamas club on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter.   They claim their device can trigger an orgasm. American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter, say he confessed under torture in Syria.   American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity without touching a women’s genital area say he confessed under torture in Syria. “There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything.”   Without touching a women’s genital area, I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation. There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything to make this objective absolutely clear.   I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation, but he was in the special removal unit. To make this objective absolutely clear, the development of counterterrorism technologies—   but he was in the special removal unit. This had profoundly shocked the commission, the development of counterterrorism technologies with the flick of a switch. Women get turned on.   This had profoundly shocked the commission. No one detected any radical political views. With the flick of a switch, women get turned on to a new business model that only pretends   no one detected any radical political views. I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation to a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control. In fact,   I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation that she refused to be photographed in body paint to give consumers more control. In fact, he was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly.   That she refused to be photographed in body paint constitutes an integral goal of the IOA. He was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly. There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout   constitutes an integral goal of IOA while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police. There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout. Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores   while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police, constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats. Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores to achieve total information awareness,   constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to achieve total information awareness & smash something. The hotel heiress snapped.
“I know kung fu.” It won’t bring back the world. 5:15 a.m.: I wake from another dream, the same as every dream. A man builds a ship in my chest. Each of the sailors carries by her breast a picture of her sister. The ship is not the image of a ship. Beyond its sails there are no stars. The water is only water because it’s black.   5:15 a.m. Perhaps you’ve seen me practicing my moves in the empty prison yard and wondered whether you were the dreamer conjuring me into existence from the bare desire to caress a phantom ship and my death the death of your desire.
Dieser Flucht folgt Eros, night Verfolger, sondern als Liebender; dergestalt, daß die Schönheit um ihres Scheines willen immer beide flieht: den Verständigen aus Furcht und aus Angst den Liebenden . . . Ob Wahrheit dem Schönen gerecht zu werden vermag? —Walter Benjamin  Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes, upon one double string. —John Donne  blood in my eyes for you —traditional No one comes here anymore. I have a token NO I have an idea NO I was washed up   on a lab table, in the traditional manner. “Everybody wants to say the joyful joyfully, and I finally saw it, when I was destroyed.” Talk all you like, you’re already dead.   **   Mary, would you like to come outside? Mary worked so long and hard In the palace of black and white. Mary knows things I don’t know. She knows every tear I’ve cried. She gave her life to seeing sight. Mary, Mary, when will you come outside?   **   Well, we have these instruments **   Beauty is a tooth. Correction: The telephone rang. I was looking At brown, there’s a history I’m not getting into, beauty Is still a tooth. Correction:   Nobody wanted to go to the post office.   **   Individually a vision, a vision Individuate. You manx. "Yeah, it’s that paper that lights up When you look at it.” But why did The ground start moving? Catch up. She knew it was happening before It started to happen. Catch up. “What did you do, pay for Those eyes?”   **   Opaque: the rose is not red until your eyes fall upon it.   Translucent: the rose is not red until your eyes.   Transparent: the rose is not red. ** Etc. Look, the story concerns Mary, and Mary alone. Mary  alone in her colorless tower. Snow will fall, day turn to night, and not even postmen evade  her sight, Lidless, fulfilling the ancient dream, she sees the tanks roll  into Gaza And dieters, she sees with all-encompassing eyes the shredding  of orders, Kids sneaking into The Story of O, the football scrimmage, and  Manhattan Ending, she sees the end of Paris and Fort Worth, she watches  subways melt Sleeplessly, she knew how it all would work out, she trains her  dials on the death Of kings sitting sadly by the waterfront shacks, she sees  beyond the genius Of Edwards Teller, Hopper, and Lear. You and I are the trouble  she’s seen.   Mary, wouldn’t you like to come outside?   Mary, Mary, when will you come outside?   **   The sky was black. The sky was blue. I was sitting someplace. I saw it. **   The community got together, as communities will, And waited together for death. Some of us Were colorblind, so when they lifted the red flag To signal the drink, we had to be prodded By neighbors. In a couple of cases, There were clusters of the colorblind, after all A genetic trait: these familial bands Required repeated prodding by strangers On the outskirts. It produced a wavelike pattern, All this prodding, so that to an outside observer, One tuning in from remote satellite, for example, It was reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley scene, Or one of those marching band routines In which the scrambling about of the sousaphone players Suddenly blossoms into a starfish or some kind of Risqué joke. But within fifteen minutes or so, The prodding subsided, and after that the drinking, The twitching, and we all lay dead in the field.   **   After she emerged, she saw red, and it was red. She emerged, and saw yellow. She saw blue. After she emerged, she saw what green was like. She saw purple and orange and gray.
I was ready for a new experience. All the old ones had burned out.   They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.   From a distance some appeared to be smoldering But when I approached with my hat in my hands   They let out small puffs of smoke and expired. Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up   With the otherworldly glow of TV And these were smoking a little bit too.   I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece. I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis   And conjured dusky columns in the clouds. I watched waves lap the crumbling coast.   I heard wind strip the woods. I saw the last living snow leopard   Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me That nothing worth doing is worth doing   For the sake of experience alone. I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.   The sun came out. It was the old sun With only a few billion years left to shine.
Fate piles up On the bloody Norman shore. If you must swim there Swim on your back.
The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint. You should never see it coming. And you should never hear the end of it.
I am wearing dark glasses inside the house To match my dark mood.   I have left all the sugar out of the pie. My rage is a kind of domestic rage.   I learned it from my mother Who learned it from her mother before her   And so on. Surely the Greeks had a word for this.   Now surely the Germans do. The more words a person knows   To describe her private sufferings The more distantly she can perceive them.   I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.   What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given? To act well the part that’s been cast for us?  Wind. Light. Fire. Time.  A train whistles through the far hills.   One day I plan to be riding it.
I   The weight of my son  at the emergency room  for an eye injury, sack of flour, sack of salt,  dusty bag of bones  collapsed  after all those tears.  Why does Turner  come to mind,  those shackled ankles,  those drowning slaves?   II     And horizons.  Each measure, each cleaving of flesh to soil, breath to sentence, body  toward earth. The shepherd  watches his flock  cross the stream;  nymphs bathe and flirt  and sun themselves on rocks. Water  against ankles, pebbles  beneath feet.   III     An old woman sits next to us,  and every time she shifts  in her seat,  I can hear her bones click.  Dying,  her faulty architecture  like an old radiator,  cooling engine.     IV     The burden  of seeing, explosive sunlight,  the swirling painted water  pouring over Turner’s slaves.  My son  sleeps. Have you ever walked  out  into the sticky heat  of a Memphis night  and asked for gunshots  to stop for just one hot hour?  O heap of body, heap of bones,  heap of dreams, heap of moans. V     A story with a happy ending  and no answers,  slight corneal scratch  healed with anti-bacterial rinse,  the eyeball’s protective pocket  cupping the universe  like a calm inlet  offering a foundering ship  protection from rough seas. You tell me: What washes blood from a balcony? I’m listening. I’m saying please.  The sun rises quickly.  And so do sea monsters.
We stopped at a farmer’s house before parking at the dock that creaked over the river. Rowboats for rent, five bucks an hour, twenty for the day. Deep water: I knew a canvas bag   was in the trunk. I knew lunch would be roast beef sandwiches and hot stew from a thermos, chunks of carrot and potatoes cut by my mother who slept through the racket of our leaving.   While my father paid, I loaded the boat with our poles and tackle boxes, lead sinkers shaped like grey pears, raincoats and a case of beer. I was ten and I knew my dad would toss   that canvas bag into the aluminum boat with a thunk. We fish for garwith kittens, he’d yelled last night at my mother, and that was that. The rowboat slid from the dock, the occasional clunk of the first   six-pack clipped on the fish stringer, and I knew that I should take my time fastening the wire leader to the brass swivel, tying on those massive sinkers. I knew that the six-inch treble hook   would tremble in my hands, and when I was done, I knew what came next, a canvas bag, stiff kittens, blood. I tore two hooks through the side of a calico, yanked upward with a   sharp tug to lodge the third barb beneath the ribs. I dangled my fingers in cold water to wash them, then reared the rod back into a cast that splashed twenty feet from the boat.   He popped the third beer and finished baiting his hook. Too deep for an anchor, we drifted, and far beneath, the gar cruised back and forth, their prehistoric snouts slicing the dark, bumping   our bait again and again until that fierce hunger I was learning said clamp down and take it.
Myth is prison, a palace, truth without fact.   Myth is birth and pleasure, teeth and death,  sharp shiver of that which is broken.   Myth is patriarchal and worn,  full of fratricide and rape.   Myth is a garden, makes good television,  memoir,  the scandal of animals  and people  coupling beneath the stars.   Myth is crow eating roadkill and dodging the occasional cars,  a pile of guts and bones.   Myth is carrying the body back to the den.    –Close your eyes and count to ten. 1.   “In language, there are always two.”  The Iliad stolen from Thoreau’s cabin, the only thing taken during those years. Remember, too, The Aenied (we all have lived through times of war) and that passage a friend said to know well, “Learn fortitude and toil from me, my son, Ache of true toil. Good fortune learn from others.”   2.   Ultrasound images of my heart. That it moves and moves and then moves again, plump muscle shuddering, laboring to make up for one bad valve.   Spots in the ocean where nothing lives and yet there is movement, water moving.   I stand in the river fishing and watching an osprey slide through the air ten feet above the water.   I hear those wings. 3.    Eleven years of loving can’t just vanish. I have photographs. I have facts. “Hapy Birthday Dady” scribbled on a card.    How easy to sit at a desk  and not see the full moon  through the window.    Roy Sullivan, Virginia Park Ranger,  struck by lightning seven times,  kills himself after being dumped by a lover.    “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”   A friend asks, “Why are you hiding in myth?”   4.   I gather a lock of his hair, a scrap of T-shirt, a baby tooth, his tiny spoon, a diaper pin with a blue plastic stork, the quilted blanket, his first steps, hands clutching my fingers, the long night when his fever rose to 104˚, his split lip at age six when he jumped with outspread arms, the first shoe, a locket with a toddler photo, first day of school, first finger painting, the green cardboard sculpture like something shaped by Breton, T-ball games, the flopping trout he squeezed too hard, his first broken bone, his fear when he felt my trembling hands trying to tell him something about the sun. 5.   Trout with a slashed back where talons tore dorsal flesh and the flesh slipped from an osprey’s grip to a lucky landing in the creek’s waiting water, thrashing and calming, lingering beneath a deep cutbank, and weeks later, taking my elk hair caddis and leaping completely out of the water.   On the far bank, a muskrat struggles and does a melodramatic gangster fall into the creek where it splashes and sinks. “Rattlesnake,” my friend says, and I nod and stare at where the ripple swirls into the current   and think about sinking bones.   6.   The court acknowledges the petitioner’s long involvement with _________’s life and sincerely hopes that the parties involved will have the generosity and wisdom to honor that relationship.   Do not blame the wind that scatters apple blossoms ruthlessly. Allow that flowers desire farewell blessings before their time has come.     7.   Fishing in the desert creek a few days after the hearing, I find bones, steer skulls with round sockets for horns, and step near three rattlesnakes, almost grab a fourth when climbing a steep bank. The snakes were sluggish, though, late spring when the temperatures in the desert dipped into the thirties at night. Only one rattled, and the rain of the previous days made the fishing terrible, water brown and swift. I didn’t get a bite and drove home, bought a bucket of fried chicken, and ate in front of the television his clothes still hanging in a closet.   8.   There is no end to the hours when cedars and peaks scratch the sky’s belly. No garden, but sometimes, wildflowers. Sometimes, fish hold against the river’s current then dart with a silvery flash downstream. Sometimes, deer on the other shore stand still for a moment, then hunch toward their grazing.     9.   A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the inflatable castles rented and set up on the lawn, only wants to run all afternoon, playing chase, tag-like game where I growl and laugh and lumber around the playground, his giggling, both of us laughing and roaring, and I catch him and he gets away and climbs to the top of the jungle gym where he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real, and I walk beneath him and he doesn’t pause. He jumps into my arms, and I catch him.   10.  Ready or not  here I come—  A feather floats downstream,   the rings of a ripple smooth.   Love is possible. The heron   hunts in the shallows with slow   deliberate steps, startles   from the creek, and rises.   Sunlight warms basalt walls   fields of sage, and Hawthorne   groves, here, where tumble-   weeds rove for home.
I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air. I am blind. I am unable to understand the dark passages. I begin to speak of being deprived. I believe that I am being kept in want. Who governs me? Who is to say what I am, and what I am not? I wish to be conscious of myself. My frontiers are long and insecure. I contract them. I cannot command them. I determine myself not to desire what is unattainable. I have a wound in my leg. I am a schoolboy. A rule does not oppress me if I impose it on myself. I assimilate it into my substance. I can never be thwarted. I cannot want it to be other than it is.
i.   I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’s shaking hand. In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats through the dull, black night. I’m heir to an orange heart in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull, but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body. In my dad’s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night where I sit beneath the canvas looking up. My dad looks down and laughs. When I went into my dad’s painting and saw a man lean toward a bright, orange hole, night shook through my shirt in an inherited rhythm, duplicating the heart held by his anxious body. My painting a laughing dad. My heart a hole where on a bright, orange night, I dropped a tattered shirt, shaking.   ii.   My dad said the man was meant to be looking at the painting he’s in, but it didn’t quite work. And so the hole where he’s looking now. The finger-thick lines around him don’t hide a failed painting or reveal any struggle to mean. My dad believes in action and the truth of process: a man looks into a hole and so he is. He looks past the hole to what brought him to it. The tattered painting doesn’t work as finger-thick evidence of his struggle to mean, but the correspondence of his belief shakes through its presence. To believe in holes and men looking into them. To lean toward action and the presence of process where a man looks at the painting he’s in and is. iii.   A man looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He never thought about what the colors mean, the hole bright orange in the black night. Like babies painting a painting of babies, the man laughs at the hole he’s in and looks down to feel his heart beneath a tattered shirt. He’s shaking like an old man’s dad. Is a man the hole he falls into? Colors are the correspondence of babies— they lean and fall into the holes we leave them. A baby looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He shakes, no colors or dads to hold him still. iv.    My dad’s fingers spilled around the surface without distinction, causing the offense  we call process. The painting, having the grace of endurance, allows the line its tiny provocation, but lacking the confrontation that would compel the painting into itself—the man looks down, not in; we look at, not through. The painting communicates by presence alone, letting us know that it’s here without a message, or a message embodied in its delivery, a swallowed swallow. The man and the hole he looks into are homage to us. The man doesn’t have a mouth, the hole doesn’t have a shape. Our provocation is presence alone.   v.   I used to went into my dad’s painting I grew up In When I dull black orange heart wonder about quiet and saw a man I my dad a hole rhythmic wonders the painting through the night I’m heir to anxious painting my dad’s painting My painting an inherited rhythm his shaking hand glows in my painting think my dad’s a hole beats of my dad where I sit In a orange hole black where my night shirt shook a tattered night in the canvas in the dull shirt and a man leans by shaking hand I dropped a laughing dad beneath an orange night an orange hole quietly my dad in duplicating heart his anxious dull rhythm My dad held by body was lean down to my body but gave up looks and laughs through a bright My heart the looking toward a hole shaking on a bright where   vi.   doesn’t work where he’s looking now but the painting he's in is presence He looks tattered The man looking so finger-thick My dad The finger-thick lines the correspondence to the painting he’s in And the hole it didn’t quite mean what brought him to it evidence of his process reveal the man was meant a hole of My action at the dad of any truth To mean in looks and of looks to be don’t hide my dad at work toward his past he is the hole the painting believes in but shakes around failed action struggle to lean through for process where a man and a struggle and a painting as to him and so To belief or its presence said to believe in holes and men looking into them   vii.   the hole looks at A man he’s in and shakes Like A baby looks at the correspondence of babies and laughs He bright and orange painting never a man he falls into Colors are of babies the colors mean no colors they lean night babies painting a black still hole about dads he’s the hole we fall into the holes in his shaking heart in the thought leave them and down the what hole He’s like a tattered shirt the man laughs at the looks he’s an old man’s hole to feel beneath dad or to hold the laughs He Is in him viii.   we call a swallow homage to provocation the hole doesn’t have a message fingers in its delivery lacking grace but the man looks down without endurance confrontation embodied swallowed causing the process of presence having shape letting us know that it’s there not in not without a message a tiny surface My dad’s distinction allows The painting its mouth spilled The man through The painting the line we look at the painting into or around Our man looks into that the offense would he alone have The us and the is are by presence alone the hole communicates itself the provocation doesn’t compel
Sometimes we blubbered through the fallout of willful confusion in pants that didn’t fit the legs we sawed off. We looked at each other and fell forward and back, forward and back, a little bit like dancing and a little like aggravated assault. At times it seemed reasonable because it always seems reasonable to accept whatever anxieties or losses must accumulate in the face of what we really wanted all along. In buildings and on streets you could paint a few eyes on a face and see the careless representation of brothers and sisters making a family out of paint and the gracious mistakes of seeing. Mistakes, the essence of sight, could have been all we had to go on anyway, and not for us to leave behind what took us through the shower of dumbasses with tact and a breath of elegance, even the hope that later, when the streets cleared of agitated needlers and the AC kicked on for good, we could sleep on the clothes spangled outside the closet and find a reason for closing the bedroom door on shadows of pedantic radiation from thin margins of lamplight always suggesting some other plot in some other bedroom, tensions to splay us soon enough. And then it occurred to you, or maybe it occurred to me, doesn’t matter, I think actually someone called and said that anyone who doesn’t leave something for you isn’t worth having, so maybe now's a good time to find a dapper little high school where everyone can be a little less civil, and blessed with selfishness, we could part the fingers interlocked between us, make fists and get busy. Then intensity fermented into green books of music, loud country music, and I love country music. It rolled around my ears in corridors where boredom had once been so irrefutable and heavy, and I was happy and dancing and throwing punches at pigeons and even hitting a few. But the romantic arc never made it over the willful lack of conviction, some gap between the faces on the heads we saw pass our table in the sour-faced restaurant run by those French people, okay a gap between that and the face in the dream you had of your father, the one where you said he stuffed a billy club down a duck’s throat and called for another shot of Dewar’s. I expected you to take things when you left, but not those things. Light diffuses evenly across the kitchen, blood through my body, and it’s sort of funny, but our whole thing fits between two haircuts, like a roadtrip or something. I feel now that I’ve been digested by time, and light would pool into terrible reflections of my own back as I backed into a mirror or performed some other forgetful jujitsu, an effort to lose thoughts or patterns of thought, but the light diffuses and you walk through it, collide with little pieces of what ate you, get angry and write long letters about how your hand can’t talk, how the paper is so light and effortless when you hold it how could you even know, you couldn’t even imagine holding this light and ridiculous thing that my hand brushed over in patterns it will later try to forget. Then I taped my mouth shut and tried to whistle. Leave me alone. Don’t call. Get lost, dumpster of confusion. I know it’s never been that easy, that from the eyes in your skull the black plastic bags were suffocating the trees even though to me it was more like a ballerina’s shadow had escaped and was dancing through the branches frantically with desperate happiness and cause for alarm. I guess either way something unsafe and ridiculous was happening, and I guess we knew it, I think we even talked about it, but I’ve been a little lonely since I started writing my dissertation. It’s about class consciousness among people who work behind registers. And it’s interesting, there’s all kinds of different races and classes and income levels represented in the world of cashiers, but at the level of values we see predominantly two classes, the complacent and the entitled, though many cashiers are some measure of both. The complacent are resigned to what they understand to be their position. They’re courteous and reliable; class issues only arise when people are rude to them, which they tend to handle fine, though if they say anything about it afterwards, it tends to be a cruel and brief dismissal not only of the occurrence, but of the entire offending person. The entitled have a very complicated expression of social hierarchy. Because they see themselves in transition, usually ascending, there’s this idea that their values won’t, or can’t, find full expression from their current position and so they don’t feel compelled to act in a way consistent with their values, while at the same time they may expect to be treated in accordance with those values. When people are rude to them, they flip out. Basically today’s been pasted together from the leavings of some green intensity and cigarettes crowded at the back of the passive classrooms of the skull. Will there be coffee on the other side? Will there be ladies to walk up to you on a plain old shit-for-brains day and ask you of Washington Square Park, “Why is this on the map?” I like it when people cock their heads a little when you talk. Seems elegant. I tell them I’m not sure, but Henry James wrote something complicated about it. Then these nice ladies with a telling lack of accent move along into non-history and the bulk of our hours waiting without a mind for restitution. I would surrender our moist telephone calls and arthritic tribes of entitlement if I knew who to give them up to. I never go anywhere  or do anything slow because revision is only a function of doubt. Well okay, maybe doubt and shame. Actually, it’s just shame. Revision is a function of shame. But enough of these dead people, we must rise like blood in April! Instead here I am peeling seconds off the end of my life, glass of water, frown on face, notebook open to the parade of minutes and obvious as a daisycutter in the desert. No more nights in the kitchen or bowls of macaroni, no more misdemeanors with the microwave or blue orbs whistling into my ear, no more cats meowing at the television, no cigarettes on the patio, no more blessings in drag. My schedule is totally blank this afternoon.
To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God’s love washes right through you like milk through a cowTo be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their eyes out with the slug of lust implied by your up-ended skirtTo be blessed said the dog is to have a pinch of God inside you and all the other dogs can smell it
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where the route of a ship bringing tax grain from the provinces is described   where perceived hindering—say, birds congregating on a runway   where the first request was for fertilizer and seeds   where the instruction—harness these to the benefit of your society   where the conscription continued   where boards of revenue   where basically, everyone had a plant job   where preventable diseases rampant   where the need is window screens and sewer covers   where for the good of the very few and the suffering of a great many
I never had to make one, no sickening weeks by ocean,   no waiting for the aerogrammes that gradually ceased to come.   Spent the babysitting money on novels, shoes, and movies,   yet the neighborhood stayed empty. It had nothing to do with a journey   not undertaken, not with dialect, nor with a land that waited   to be rediscovered, then rejected. As acid rain collected   above the suburban hills, I tried to imagine being nothing, tried   to be able to claim, “I have no culture,” and be believed.   Yet the land occupies the person even as the semblance of freedom   invites a kind of recklessness. Tradition, unobserved, unasked,   hangs on tight; ancestors roam into reverie, interfering at the most   awkward moments, first flirtations, in doorways and dressing rooms—   But of course. Here in America, no one escapes. In the end, each traveler   returns to the town where, everyone knew, she hadn’t even been born.
It is too much a part of things, even though the source is not within.   In small American cities with and without universities,   it keeps a constant presence in the Confucian sense,   the inner arriving to match the outer, spirit not separate   from matter (the latter illusion left by the missions   the people have made such fine use of). There are times   when you have to pretend to embrace an idea or befriend   your adversaries. If constantly misinterpreted, use the mystery   as currency. You have to start somewhere. Be wise: depart   from where they’ve already put you. A country itself can’t betray you.
The trouble was not about finding acceptance. Acceptance was available in the depths of the mind And among like people. The trouble was the look into the canyon Which had come a long time earlier And spent many years being forgotten.   The fine garments and rows of strong shoes, The pantry stocked with good grains and butter— Everything could be earned by producing right answers. Answers were important, the canyon said, But the answers were not the solution.   A glimpse into the future had shown the prairie On which houses stood sturdily. The earth was moist and generous, the sunlight benevolent. The homesteaders dreamed up palaces and descendants, And the animals slept soundly as stones.   It was a hard-earned heaven, the self-making Of travelers, and often, out on the plains, Mirages rose of waterfalls, moose, and rows of fresh-plowed soil, But nobody stopped to drink the false water. Real water being plentiful, they were not thirsty.   A few made their fortunes from native beauty, Others from native strength, but most from knowledge, As uncertainties in science could be written off to faith. Faith was religious and ordinary life physical, And spiritual was a song that had not yet arrived.
Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing. This was America, after all, where everyone’s at liberty To remake her person, her place, or her poetry,   And I lived in a town a long way from everything— Where discussions of “diversity” Centered mainly on sexuality.   My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents, Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents,   Two of whom stayed Chinese to their final days, Two of whom were all but defined by their expertise On the food of the country I was trying to excise.   It canceled out the expensive center Of an intense undergraduate curriculum And excluded the only foreign language I could talk in.   It wiped out my parents’ earliest years And converted them to 1950s Georgians Who’d always attended church and school, like anyone.   My father had never paused at two water fountains And asked a white man which he should drink from, And never told his children what the answer had been.   My mother had never arranged a migration, Solo at seventeen, from Taipei to wherever, But had simply appeared in Gainesville out of ether, And nothing about their original languages Had brought them together. Their children Had never needed to explain to anyone   Why distinctness and mystery were not advantages When they were not optional, and never wondered If particular features had caused particular failures.   For months I couldn’t write anything decent Because banned information kept trying to enter Like bungled idioms in the speech of a foreigner.   I was my own totalitarian government, An HMO that wouldn’t pay for a specialist, And I was the dissident or patient who perished.   The hope was to transcend the profanity of being Through the dissolution of description and story, Which I thought might turn out to be secondary   To a semi-mystical state of unseeing, But everywhere I went there was circumstance, All of it strangely tainted by my very presence.
There was a time when I watched it happen. Strangers pressed to other strangers in one bed, clothes on, air humid with the cloying scent of fruit juice and vodka; none of us giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene of that possibility, pretending to sleep, actually sleeping. Then waking again to slip a hand over a shoulder, slide a finger inside the waistband of a skirt; so young (we are even now still so young) in that hotel room turning blue then lighter blue. We wouldn’t have tried for more: the kiss, the button; firm, white shape of an image slipped wholly into the mind, acted upon, dreamed upon, filling the thin vessels of the lungs.   Earlier, a film, its forced sounds of lovemaking. The tension I felt winding into the muscles of some of the others in the room. I remember I left for awhile. We all left for awhile; even the music was frightening. How to strip ourselves like that, point at the places that were wanted, plucked and peeled; speaking the words, hearing them form us, the nature of what we were and could do to each other? The music, the rocking, the sobbing. The man called the woman by parts of herself. Some laughed at this. I remember I must have been one of them. In the morning, the hotel room was turning white. After the long night, hands were slipping and unslipping, moving over the flattened pillows as if in hopes something small could still satisfy us. Someone turned and looked at someone else; we all heard it. Legs shifted, sheets slid themselves down waists or shoulders, tightened again at the necks of those pretending to sleep as the unblinking sun crawled in our window. From another room, coughing, We all heard it. Someone looked at someone else. The room turned white. The air began clearing.
And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin,light snow tornunder wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles,whipping, loom—    ¤  I have always wanted to sing a song of praise   for the unscathed: myself stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch from gone; slim pole slicing cable   up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy (like butter, the mechanic will later tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth), to pierce the exact point   I was supposed to sit, stopping because praise begins where pain transfigures itself, stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I transfigure myself from driver   to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure   bolting up and opening her eyes. And here are the thousand wrecks from a life configured in snow before me: myself, at five, pulled from the burning car seat; at twelve, bleeding from the scalp after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen, tumbling over the slick hood rushing; sockets of windows with glass bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes given out and worse,   the icy loop de loops on roads, the trucker’s 18 fat wheels squealing— All the ways technology should have killed me   and didn’t. Praise for my death-hungry luck! And all the manner in which I’ve failed it— marriage lost,   buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude at the Greyhound station knowing no one to retrieve me, carless among the other pressed tight to their own disaster or boredom— unbearably young mothers,   drifters, boy soldiers shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving the same thread of conversation back and forth between ourselves. How   could this happen to me at this age, at this stage, how did I not notice, and will you put this seat up? and will you lend me this quarter? and will you call me a cab when we get back home?   The young man in the seat before me, head full of zigzagging tight braids says,  Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Floridaand while you’re at it look up all the bonesburied in the Everglades, repeats it   for the amusement of the woman across from him, who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself, and when we pass my accident on the road points and whistles, snickers: Bet you no one walked away from that one.  For this, and for all these things: praise   to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape takes on a nuclear glow, so bright   we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise for myself playing at morbidity because I thought I had a right to it   as if flesh had to follow spirit to such a pure depth the bones themselves could not rest but must be broken, nerves singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest.   As if I had nothing except this white earth, this smashed car to praise   what I knew before and know even better now, the hills cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise to my youth and to my age, praise   to ambition and small-mindedness, the kind I recognize and the kind I am soon to recognize; praise   to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise for the splinters of delight that can pierce it. Praise for wood pole, praise for glass. Praise for muscle, praise for bone.   The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today.   And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by, the light of us a wash of gold illuminating bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming   like my heart here, on this earth, bloody and still beating.
It’s a simple resistance   between the pull of springs and struggle of joints: two coiled silver muscles working in the lamp against blue washers and pivot plates, locking nut coolly swiveling loose with age.   In the arm   it’s done with blood: tissues plumped then promptly deflated.   What else am I supposed to start with?   Not the light bulb, to which this whole narrative yearns, loving the glass envelope sizzling with light, grasshopper antennae scrubbed with electricity until each filament’s turned to fire.   No, I have to start with the arm first, the mint-blue lamp, then maybe light itself to specify what startles me   about you, globe of hot fruit, Christ heart throbbing in the open chest; curtains of robe parted just enough to see what afterglow defines us, waits for us, rubbing its slow music out into the wet dark—   Tonight, I’m counting out my seeds of waiting for you   through a current that is silent and might always be, though it thrums in every gesture: like this white eye burning within the metal shade I carefully adjust over a plate of orange slices each evening.
When it’s that time of month it’s like falling backwards in “time.”   God has abandoned her glass carriage, she is “dead.”   And the edges of objects: wavy in the eye that’s about to cry,   a twitter running down the spine of… Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.)  God and time, spine of the world — yawn, blah, blah, schma… what I meant to say is   it’s hard to be a capitalist.   If the world’s time is God, and she’s birds atwitter, then why must I go to work? The answer writes itself:   left to my own devices I’d just sink into the soil. That is, write, with dirt   as my pillow. In the hole between twitters   there’s random patches of mud-sky. So humid.   There’re chairs growing in hell.   There’re chairs growing in hell, and people sit on them, my co-workers: it’s like riding on toadstools except you don’t know it, or you kind of know it that time of   month. That’s when you feel the twitter, the muddy shiver.   You dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him   and then he’s made to swallow keys and little hammers—   you claw the red clay. Now wake. Show me the bouquet!   No, don’t show me the bouquet.   Show me the bouquet! If you do, I won’t tell on you   to the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there. Besides, it’s not a cliff, it’s a chair.   And the rose is God. Got it? Gott it?   This is why women should be President.
Amy, Amy, at this distance you’re the smell of liver, tinnitus that keeps me up, afraid: your fortressness must now be tested. The way you took me in without a surfeit click or   gesture: seagull kerchief binding my gut to safety on the swimming haul among night-images. I went to the place I was born and it plainly was a bride. So I ran after her.   When she turned into a star I swallowed her. And out of this uneasiness will come an aster.   Amy, I’m inside my granddad’s mind of wood: the grass is finer, constellations thicker. The plums are normal. How   much sugar did you buy alone at Waldbaums? Brook reeds here   wake from your hair’s soul’s chilly patronage. The hair’s the soul, the reeds its body—alone in their beds   like schoolgirls: I feel and feel them up. The cigarettes have made them crazy! But a rabbit someone flows out of the embankment   and I shiver for you, Amy oh lengthy dappled wig: there’s a swan in your breathing.   There always is.
I’m alone until I’m asleep, and there you are: naked, you take my hand: Shhhh! We   tiptoe through a black-blue meadow. To the pond behind the farmhouse. (The farmer   sleeps in the blind window.) No cicadas even, maybe just maybe Venus — & this is before Wednesday, everything’s  alright, we   tiptoe ‘round the house as around a painful subject — & we’re at the pond! And now it’s time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am   another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the wordbones —   it’s time for afternoon, them white-blank architectures. No, veil. Nothing’s glistening. Christmas, Christmas. It’s time   for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises that wouldn’t close by themselves —   that was just a dream, good morning:   regurgitate the stars and the soot
The tuba wakes before the man. It’s a content animal: having no word, for the moment, suits it fine.   It looks at him with a dun and smooth interiority, as a glass of rum might,   or a worn number on an apartment building: his hands, crossed on the chest, rise and fall with breathing.   In the dream, he’s ringing the bell now; climbing, unlocking the door, peering into a glass.   The flat is empty. Is the war over yet? Or was he here before the war? Soon, dropping salt levels   will wake him—   in tears, with an odd groove in his palm, as though he’d held on to an instrument for hours.   For a good minute, he’ll be nameless, and when a name does come, it won’t be his:   humming in thought the bright last name he rang on the doorbell, he’ll see, in a certain   abrupt sunlight: he’d chosen her, then— to be able to call everything something.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the worst sort, and up till now I had not been one of his victims, so I kind of knew my time had come. People parked in front of my house for hours and took pictures. I had to draw all my blinds and only went out when I had to. Then there was a barrage of questions. “What does he look like?" “What do you feed him?” “How did you capture him?” And I simply denied the presence of an extraterrestrial in my house. And, of course, this excited them all the more. The press showed up and started creeping around my yard. It got to be very irritating. More and more came and parked up and down the street. Roger was really working overtime on this one. I had to do something. Finally, I made an announcement. I said, “The little fellow died peacefully in his sleep at 11:02 last night.” “Let us see the body,” they clamored. “He went up in smoke instantly,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” one of them said. “There is no body in the house or I would have buried it myself,” I said. About half of them got in their cars and drove off. The rest of them kept their vigil, but more solemnly now. I went out and bought some groceries. When I came back about an hour later another half of them had gone. When I went into the kitchen I nearly dropped the groceries. There was a nearly transparent fellow with large pink eyes standing about three feet tall. “Why did you tell them I was dead? That was a lie,” he said. “You speak English,” I said. “I listen to the radio. It wasn’t very hard to learn. Also we have television. We get all your channels. I like cowboys, especially John Ford moviesJohn Ford movies John Ford (1894-1973) was a Hollywood director, famous for a number of movies, including cowboy movies starring John Wayne, such as “Rio Grande,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “Stagecoach.”. They’re the best,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?” I said. “Take me to meet a real cowboy. That would make me happy,” he said. “I don’t know any real cowboys, but maybe we could find one. But people will go crazy if they see you. We’d have press following us everywhere. It would be the story of the century,” I said. “I can be invisible. It’s not hard for me to do,” he said. “I’ll think about it. Wyoming or Montana would be our best bet, but they’re a long way from here,” I said. “Please, I won’t cause you any trouble,” he said. “It would take some planning,” I said. I put the groceries down and started putting them away. I tried not to think of the cosmic meaning of all this. Instead, I treated him like a smart little kid. “Do you have any sarsaparillasarsaparilla An old-fashioned soft drink. When a character in a Western film would order a sarsaparilla in a bar, instead of an alcoholic beverage, he would be mocked by cowboys.?” he said. “No, but I have some orange juice. It’s good for you,” I said. He drank it and made a face. “I’m going to get the maps out,” I said. “We’ll see how we could get there.” When I came back he was dancing on the kitchen table, a sort of ballet, but very sad. “I have the maps,” I said. “We won’t need them. I just received word. I’m going to die tonight. It’s really a joyous occasion, and I hope you’ll help me celebrate by watching TheThe / Magnificent Seven A famous 1960 western, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James CoburnMagnificent SevenThe / Magnificent Seven A famous 1960 western, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn,” he said. I stood there with the maps in my hand. I felt an unbearable sadness come over me. “Why must you die?” I said. “Father decides these things. It is probably my reward for coming here safely and meeting you,” he said. “But I was going to take you to meet a real cowboy,” I said. “Let’s pretend you are my cowboy,” he said.
He called it “his ranch,” yet each winter day found her beside him feeding hay to hungry cows.In summer heat you would find her in the hayfield— cutting, raking, baling, stacking.In between she kept the books, cooked, cleaned laundered, fed bum lambs.Garden rows straight, canned jars of food lined cellar walls.Then she died. I asked him how he would manage. “Just like I always have,” he said.
Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies,  mutates into false memories Which find language a receptive host, Boosted by boastful embellishments. Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams,  seeming seen as stuff enough To fund the hedge of personality, Though personally, I cannot forget Whom I have met and somehow wronged,  wrung for a jot of fugitive juice, Trading some ruse for a blot or two, Labored to braid from transparent diction Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation.  As the pulse of impulses Drained through my veins, I tried to live Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.
I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back... I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield... What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air. I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going to throw it.
At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my eyes, hear myself moan, so grateful to be held this way.
Joy of my life, full oft for loving you I bless my lot, that was so lucky placed: But then the more your own mishap I rue, That are so much by so mean love embased.For had the equal heavens so much you graced In this as in the rest, ye might invent Some heavenly wit, whose verse could have enchased Your glorious name in golden monument.But since ye deign’d so goodly to relent To me your thrall, in whom is little worth, That little that I am shall all be spent In setting your immortal praises forth;Whose lofty argument uplifting me Shall lift you up unto an high degree.
Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me,And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be:To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region; Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;And visions rising, legion after legion, Bring the unreal world too strangely near.I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces, And not in paths of high morality,And not among the half-distinguished faces, The clouded forms of long-past history.I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide:Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding; Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell:The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
There lies a somnolent lakeUnder a noiseless sky,Where never the mornings breakNor the evenings die.Mad flakes of colour Whirl on its even faceIridescent and streaked with pallour;And, warding the silent place,The rocks rise sheer and grayFrom the sedgeless brink to the skyDull-lit with the light of pale half-dayThro’ a void space and dry.And the hours lag dead in the air With a sense of coming eternityTo the heart of the lonely boatman there:That boatman am I,I, in my lonely boat,A waif on the somnolent lake,Watching the colours creep and floatWith the sinuous track of a snake.Now I lean o’er the sideAnd lazy shades in the water see,Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tideCrawled in from the living sea;And next I fix mine eyes,So long that the heart declines,On the changeless face of the open skiesWhere no star shines;And now to the rocks I turn,To the rocks, aroundThat lie like walls of a circling sunWherein lie boundThe waters that feel my powerless strengthAnd meet my homeless oarLabouring over their ashen lengthNever to find a shore.But the gleam still skimsAt times on the somnolent lake,And a light there is that swimsWith the whirl of a snake;And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,And dayless the sky,The heart is alive of the boatman there:That boatman am I.
The morning comes, and thickening clouds prevail, Hanging like curtains all the horizon round,Or overhead in heavy stillness sail; So still is day, it seems like night profound;Scarce by the city’s din the air is stirred, And dull and deadened comes its every sound;The cock’s shrill, piercing voice subdued is heard, By the thick folds of muffling vapors drowned.Dissolved in mists the hills and trees appear, Their outlines lost and blended with the sky;And well-known objects, that to all are near, No longer seem familiar to the eye,But with fantastic forms they mock the sight,As when we grope amid the gloom of night.
Even at my favorite coffeeshop downtown, Redford is a hard man to feed. This morning, he picks at his Grilled Asiago Mastercrust with a slow, disdainful frown.Could they spare the fromage on this so-called "treat?" He takes a sip of hazelnut coffee, then winces delicately into the neck of his sweater vest. I bite powerfully through my Cinnamon Frenchroll: Well, if you really don't think you got enough—"fromage"—you should just go back up there & tell the girl
You thought you saw me! But you didn't. I wear black turtlenecks. Black panties. Live in a tall cave! You don't know where my cave is. But I come out. Every day! To buy mustard & relish! See what— A man. Walking away from me. No good. Smash him! With a loud smash! Smash his metal table and cards. Good! Down in my cave. Put on my Seahawk gear! Watch Parade of Homes. Watch Ron Popeil put chicken & fishes & burgers & pork & macaroni in the same box. Hey! I can sell that box! At school. Where I smash the gym teacher in his head! I don't wear my uniform. I don't clean my locker. I don't share my lunch with the athletes. My lunch—mustard. Straight from the packet. No one sits next to me. Keep working my skills. Keep circling the word blood in Macbeth. Good. It takes days. It takes days.
By any measure, it was endless winter. Emulsions withThen circled the lake likeThis is it. This April will beInadequate sensitivity to green. I roseearly, erased for an hour Silk-brush and axI'd like to think I'm a different person latent image fadingaround the edges and ears Overall a tighter facenow. Is it so hard for you to understandFrom the drop-down menuIn a cluster of eight poems, I selectedsleep, but could not I decided to change everythingComposed entirely of stills or fade into the treesbut could not remember the dreamsave for one brief shotof a woman opening her eyesAri, pick up. I'm a different personIn a perfect world, this would be April, or an associated conceptGreen to the touch several feet away
IF ANYONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON EVER THEN HEY I AM HERE IT WOULD BE NICE TO TALK SOMETIME INFOMERCIALS HAVE STARTED AND I KIND OF WANT TO DIE I’M PRETTY SURE THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY FOR A MORGUE   OK SO ACTUALLY IT’S FOR THE BIBLE OR SOMETHING SO IT’S A COMMERICAL FOR TRYING TO BE HAPPY OR SOMETHING BUT I AM NOT HAPPY TONIGHT NO I AM NOT JUST HERE IF HAPPINESS EVER WORKED THEN HOW—I DON’T KNOW   HAPPINESS IS A LIZARD IN THE SUNLIGHT GETTING WARM AND THEN IN THE NIGHT BENEATH A ROCK EATING FLIES AND SWALLLOWING THE MEAT OF THE TRASH OF THE DIRT   AH, SO TONIGHT IS A LITTLE DRUNK AND OK OK OK THAT IS GOOD SO LET ME BE—THERE IS NO LOVE TONIGHT GOD IS LIKE BONO—SOME DICKWAD NO ONE WILL EVER MEET OR LIKE
Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming  twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows  such delicate & lasting atrocity.   Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.   I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now  not. I leave you these things just as I leave   you: graceful passage from one something to the next.  Darling, even in this my voice dissipates   into hush & whiffs of light, sun-thrown, hurtle into the ground.
jumpsuits, they have changed  painting, I behind the concertina wire can't look at it anymore, that wall across which shadows play Sorry to be vague  at such an hour. Were you When I called, I heard  my voice anywhere near waking  in the background Strange, reversible lines, I thought he was dead. He is better of it, pushing the glass away. How many songs  can it hold, that thing I've seen in windows, has it changed  singing, or hooded figures  I didn't know it had a camera, some features are The blue of links, obscure beneath the face, the green We still don't have a word for  Simulated drowning in embedded streams  a perfect world
. . .   It was the summer I fucked up the summer fucked up me fucked up a fuck-up in the summer & I spent time laying under stars too much time I wasted the stars you lied to me under the stars & the summer was endless the summer endless it was an endless summer   . . .   . . .   endless & I said things like “If I ever see you again” but I’ll never see you again I never saw you again I made sure of that & I circled the lake I went in circles the lake was endless it was summer I fucked up too much time & I never saw you again & I   . . .   . . .   circled & it was endless & the stars lied to me the summer light moving so slowly I saw the summer light move endless & when I see you the trees will cluster green rage green trees raging with love endless love & I’ll never see you again I made sure of that   . . .   . . .   wasted under the stars the slow summer light the endless fuck-up & you never again you lovely you summer you everything that is now never again whatever that may be the rage I loved me under the stars then & now endless wasting away me haze wandering around endless   . . .   . . .   haze it was endless too much time & you lied to me & I said things like I can’t describe the air on my skin can you can you please I know it was important & the light from stars moved so slowly & you moved off forever how can you save everything everything important endless   . . .   . . .   summer light the fuck-up the lake a circle circling the lake how can you save everything how can I answer you the light of summer stars I’m sorry for my light the endlessness of my endless & my fuck-up the me that is now looking back & thinking & this summer circling   . . .
(i)   I woke to early sun: burning of fire, & then afterward.   We kept reaching through the long night.     (ii)   Afterward,   the small deceptions we allow ourselves: a sickness, unchecked. Like this:     (iii)   & first sunlight. Snow continues. I could never close my eyes to light.   But there was no light & you looked like night.     (iv)   There must be a pattern,   snow slow-dropping in wet clusters through the wooden arms of empty trees.     (v)   Sun fingering its way through branches   I’d hung my life on. We don’t matter a bit; realization forces our eyes closed—     (vi)   A sickness, unchecked, like this. I’d hung my life on   burning of fire, & then afterward.     (vii)   Our arms together we searched for patterns   & sunlight.     (viii)   Our arms laced together, pointing together over wind-tossed grasses.   Us: waist deep in night blue.     (ix)   There was no light. You pointed.     (x)   Sun overhead, you pointed to the wind-tossed grasses. This is a memory now.     (xi)   Together in that first sun, so vivid: there must be a pattern   I’d hung my life on.     (xii)   Snow dropped in clusters, staggered & jagged.   We don’t matter a bit.     (xiii)   Reflected in lake water: all these things I’ll forget.     (xiv)   Our arms together   but we keep reaching over the wind-tossed grasses.     (xv)   Black smoke curling:   the importance of night-blue field grass,     (xvi)   the importance of.   The stars are close; we try to hold together.     (xvii)   All this ends but until then:   burning of fire, & then afterward. The stars are close; we try to hold. Such distance between the fallen!     (xviii)   Burning of fire, & then afterward.   You pointed.     (xix)   Grasses silently fold, a sickness, unchecked, reaching. Like this.   Wooden arms of trees long since emptied.     (xx)   This ends in darkness, & all the stars within reach, & other constellations.
1 The reservoir is trying to freeze over with an expanding map shaped like an angel Separated lovers on a coast keep walking toward each other. Low sun reddens their faces without heat They are weary of always moving so seldom touching, but never think to move inland, massive and stable Imagoes hatched on thin ice, it’s their illusion membranes are brighter than occluded flesh of interiors Membranes have the density of an edge, and edges violent as lava 2 All day she walked across the tundra He began to drive away obliquely at exactly her speed, so she altered her angle, aiming above him, as in a current He departed in a zone that solidified at his whim, so she reached for his hand Land cracked with their weight. He seemed to reach toward her, a hand like paper twisted and folded over, only a surface with wan modulations, like a map 3 Then she delicately stepped out toward the edge, tenuous as a leaf as if waiting for a letter but it froze too swiftly before her At dusk his voice broke her concentration She turned, vexed, and saw he had not spoken.
As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps. It’s a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance, which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall, far enough in back of the arch for sun to light. If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you, on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing. And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine, like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time, an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced, dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone. Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board, but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length, disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing. The stick isn’t really the temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor. This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be parallel levitation in the spine the person recording it. Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair’s outline gives way to its duration as it extends and rises at a low angle. In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall. First the gold knob, then blue tiers above the highest step, the same color as the sky. When one person came to gain confidence, she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe. Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon on the marble paving stones. Yet she’s reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles, or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.
1 Taking advantage of the relationships and interaction, which actually exist between what happens to her and her desire, she creates some metaphors both obvious and opaque, as screens of rays crisscrossing the landscape in which herself and what she expected from you in the way of support coincide, so that I and you resemble each other, now. The way they light the land like infrared without a trace on film, really, part of your image was linked so closely to my desire, it remained inside my body. It never reached the emotions, which tend to damage the body, but which memory requires. Thus a formal device was discovered for detailing information that was intimate and largely unacceptable to what I thought I required from you, regarding beauty in idea and form. She expected distress to automatically bring about this beauty, like a woman’s theft of fire rope from your house, but not her hanging in the orchard by the house. She was a stranger to you. She was never in your consciousness. Hence she was never forgotten. She is in you the way direct experience generates consciousness, adding the energy of its materialization.  To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life. She constructs a story line or cluster of anecdotal details, like clothes around the body, instruments of both defense and expansion, which give meaning to fluctuations, such as in pleasures occurring between herself and you. Her sunglasses swathed in feathers express the contingency of a light and a space, so that the anecdote of a hanging could be utilized as colorist or combinatory data, instead of her instinct for the imaginary in which what she imagines represents what happens, whether or not it misrepresents it. Sometimes it happens during a routine she represents by evenness of light on the land or when things usually mean nothing, like harmony in light, what happens and something to mean join accidentally. The thing isn’t what it is, but it is like what it is. Like a fake, it doesn’t mean anything, although there is something to mean, so that her solitude is the guise of unending repetition of a hanging or her relationship with you, in which all that is to be included will find a place. This is empathy or sharing her intuition with her. You look into someone’s eyes as if you were seeing through the face. 2 Because it’s not possible to absorb more than one insight at a time, there seems to be a contradiction between the visual or space, and the context or meaning. She felt deep uneasiness with the image of this sunset of unnatural energy, its sinister expression of an order of impossible beauty we thought we lost, accounting for the intensity of yellow light on the hill, which is not a thing, and it is not a metaphor, the way your life is not a metaphor to her, or the way intense light on the hill is a recollection en plein air, in the sense that it happened. Soon the background turns gray and the hill regains its natural color, but there are three dimensions of gray. This is a metaphor for the fact that the hanged woman actually made contact with you, although you never knew her. There is a link with her appearance, as with sex, or the way a name is attached to something after naming it, by the occurrence of its name, in this case linking with the appearances or biographies of a whole parade of lovers, so what she thinks of as human help from him is no longer dependent on changing her desire for him in the present, but is a substitute for it. The landscape is empty and it is immanent. The context of the woman in its reality may differ from the context in which the viewer thinks about her, the element of transparency. The way the viewer thinks about her is the way low clouds extend a landscape. The viewer is acting on the landscape in consideration that the context of the viewer distinct from the context of general human help could be a metaphor for itself. There were yellow-leaved trees behind a screen of green ones at the edge of the orchard. They are not a border between organization and decay of autumn trees, which are organized. The yellow leaves around your feet have an impossible beauty that was achieved and then lost. A way you can define a woman is to remember everything the woman is not. If you move your head fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern the whole structure of the surface of each leaf, and it links in your stomach, as with sex. If you remember not desiring her fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern her whole body. You can feel in your stomach the way any moment that happened and in which you think about her goes a long way toward convincing you of the autonomy and pre-existence of her form. 3 Her concentration became a direct experience of his life, an erotic concentration. Her biography of her persistently locates the point of impact of one’s own system of representations, insofar as vision itself is a representative operating on what she sees, and for which a particular light can represent an initial condition. Even the slightest movement of a hand or a finger is controlled and emphasized as by a spotlight of this sensitiveness, the way repetition is a cessation of the potential for conscious experience, or death, visiting the same places during the same seasons, at almost the same hour, so that landscape could be a simple repetition, which thrives on reproduction, in order to resolve what is happening into its own combination or name of words in the form of its time, and in order to defer the story. In a way, her memory is a theory about how the hanged woman looked to her in the orchard, which she has to respect, in the sense that the landscape’s immanence is an organically developing failure of its language to speak its content. The connection between word and idea corresponding to the landscape is retained, but the connection between the word and the landscape is lost, so the shadow of a hill stays dark during lightning. How she sees the lightning is a time lapse into the planar dimension, a hierarchy of grammar or deference by way of the word belonging to her such as lady suicide or woman suicide, because the woman doesn’t die in her own absence or in effigy, so that no existing philosophy and no philosopher will know soon, enough points with enough speed to handle the richness of her reconstruction of her or him for long. He starts to see patterns in the words and the patterns are pretty to him and distract him. It is well known that lightning is attracted to body heat, a person on horseback or a large saguaro, the way a racket of birds in the morning is a kind of empathy for two people. If we retain the belief that her image of him or her, let’s say him, is a pre-requisite for gaining consciousness of the unknown person, we suppose there is no direct channel of communication to the unknown person, with the result that facts about him or her must exit into the world, before a life can be perceived between the light and dark of function or the object, and desire or the image. At any time one can turn into its opposite, like desire or a screen, and the object or her story and him, who does not so much convey an image as a background to the biography. So, he says, she must emphasize references and conditions of her own life over its memories, or what she sees of the landscape by the manner of its illumination, unless she says it is illuminated within the arms of a great cottonwood, yellow or green, a faith of imaginary or real connotation repeating itself from him, like alternating current or radioactive dirt being turned up that registers on her without marking her. 4 Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness, because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form, so you have to maintain your own consciousness in order not to be unconscious with me. Even if we can uniquely bridge the gap between the fact of a frost and the value of luminousness, and even though these intrinsic properties of the plant may not be what it feels. What it feels may be a space with pillars, so with light the space extends, as in what you believe to live with. A belief is a word-like object. You can focus your attention on it down to a point, like desire or memory of a strong feeling. You have a certain amount of control over your feeling about general human help by changing what you believe, which embodies the memories your speech is empowered to represent, she says. Space is material, but seems to open up a beyond, which is thought to defy material in its failure to speak its content. It still cues this content by links or desires, as to a form of physical appearance. To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman, a contingency is beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are meaningful, but not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean. This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself, as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional, as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move. He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgement, without his attendant emotion. The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners.
1 I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness. The boy pulls an animal on a leash. The house with a red roof rests between two hills. I can look through its windows to the sea. His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation? House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater. You don’t have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example. 2 First house and space negate one another. Then, they’re a series. The boy watches a mouse run around the rim of a lampshade. He relates wanting to catch a mouse with the room, ground. Wanting a master image obscures ground, like objects in space. House and space are composite, like my dream, a bubble, lightning, starting point and any second place. 3 Rain pours out a gutter onto the poor horse. Horse runs under a tin roof supported by poles. Stockpiles of beams, salvaged wood, brick melt into contextless waste. I understand the situation by perceiving parts, one after another, then reversing in a glance that removes time. So, I can intuit contextless waste as ground. 4 The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate. I look through it to an extinct volcano. The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by. A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea. Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger. Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance. A master image like bone condenses from the indistinct point-to-point feeling of self with which construction began. My house returns from outside, as if my spirit had been blocking my path, when I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. 5 Materials and freedom combine, so materials aren’t subjective. The material of space is like having a skeleton to gain a vantage point on seamless distance, as in a comparison. It’s a style of accumulating materials that does not become a solid thing, anymore. Accommodating a view by being able to be seen through is perceptual, not abstract, like space painted white. Give a house the form of an event. Relate it to something there, a form of compassion. Your point of view is: it’s solid already, so there’s warmth. In this primitive situation, pure form translates a former empire of space as wilderness. Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.
In what way names were applied to things. Filtration. Not every word that has been applied, still exists. Through proliferation and differentiation. Airborn. Here, this speck and this speck you missed. Numbers in cell division. Spheres of doubt. The paradigm’s stitchery of unrelated points. What escapes like so much cotton batting. The building, rather, in flames. Does flight happen in an order. Dates to impugn and divluge. The laws were written on twelve tablets of bronze which were fastened to the rostra. Trembling hold. Manner of variation and shift. Vacillation hung by tactile and auditory cues.
“peacekeeping troops” “tanks beneath the windows” The inside of someone else’s dwelling visible — a table and some chairs. You start to count one, two, three, four . . . until the explosion is near your neighborhood. You can guess the position of mortar by this counting and try to find a safe place. If the windows are gone, weak plastic is taped up but the strong wind comes and we stay awake. In this South Cholla Province where all vehicles had been confiscated, we resorted to walking, the method of travel of the Yi Dynasty. We reverted back 300 years.  Kwangju, 1980 It’s the same to be in the house, at the shelter or anywhere. There is no safe place. When we have no electricity, we are sitting in the dark and we know what life looked like before Christ. Sarajevo, 1992
Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations.— Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era.Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.— Then pages & pages of numbers. Then the page with the faint green stain. Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,  is thrown onto a wagon. Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else. Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else. Then the page scribbled in dactyls. Then the page which begins Exit Angel. Then the page wrapped around a dead fish. Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean. Then a nap. Then the peg. Then the page with the curious helmet. Then the page on which millet is ground. Then the death of Ursula. Then the stone page they raised over her head. Then the page made of grass which goes on.—Exit Beauty.— Then the page someone folded to mark her place. Then the page on which nothing happens. The page after this page. Then the transcript.Knocking within. Interpretation, then harvest.—Exit Want. Then a love story. Then a trip to the ruins. Then & only then the violet agenda. Then hope without reason. Then the construction of an underground passage between us.
It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again treading their sunlit plots above. One grows dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things, their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins though one has crossed its smutted green threshold to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong, my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled, sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw. Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw, lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights. Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket raving in the lawn.
The bear stopped dancing & unscrewed his head. He held it upside-down in the dusk. She reached into her pouch for a copper piece, but instead pulled out the silvery piece she’d been saving for some special occasion. A limited issue, stamped on one side with a profile of the prince; on the other side a water wheel did not spin. It glowed in her hand. Her hand grew heavy with it, & the salts, & the bittersome oils of her hand. Was this the occasion? The others were there with their fists in their pouches & the weary bear held out his head as if it were an offering or an object lesson. It was neither. It was ripped, with russet handfuls of animals’ hair pasted on & a secret eye slit recessed in its open maw. The wild old man in the bear suit parted his lips & out came a snatch of extinct birdsong. The musicians clapped. He’d learned it as a boy growing up in the mist-proud interior where he would call & call until the violet males in a frenzy swooped into his breathtaking nets.
Some years ago a procession of men calling themselves the sky-clad came to this district to build a hospital for birds that had been damaged by the rains. The landholders here my grandfather among them decided against it— it not being our way to intervene with monsoons which is why to this day the birds here grow so damaged & wise, or so our tutor said gravely before stepping out into the sun- washed coriander patch to watch droplets work down stems one by one, small storms suspended, while over the rooftiles came breakers of mist making our whole house to him drift back like the high prow of the viceroy’s steamship he watched sail off with his youth. Inside I still could not find the main verb the chariot wheel performed. I thought it was silver. It bore the king with 100 heads across a battlefield red with his wounded up to the end of the beginner’s workbook then blue-skinned Rama bent his bow then his raider’s arrow met the axle & then I could not stop laughing as through the doorway my mother scolded the aphasic houseboy who peed into our green watertank (black putti, untouchable) arcing the thin golden stream & singing ooo-ee ooo-ee at our ruin.
Oh, Homer! Your village sleeps near the Missouri River With your cousin Winnebago, both children of Lakotaland. You kept your town at two stories, as flat as the surrounding prairie. You taught the Iliad and Odyssey in honor of your namesake poet. Your spirit outlasted the bleached fields of the Depression, and Bravely swam against the raging Omaha Creek floods. On warm, wet spring Saturday nights, You provided dark places for your young To launch your next generation In pickups, unlighted.
We wear harnesses like crossing guards. In a pouch over the heart, over stent and bypass, a black box with leads pressed onto metal nipples. We pedal and tread and row while our signals are picked upby antennas on the ceiling, X’s like the eyes cartoonists give the dead.Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro watch over us. We beam to their monitors now a barn dance, now a moonwalk. They cuff us and pump and we keep on so tomorrow will live off today. Nurse, we won’t forget the animated video of our cholesterol highway where LDL, black-hatted scowling donut holes on wheels, blocked traffic.But with muscles like gutta-percha, can we leave time’s gurney in the dust? By now only the dead know more about gravity than we do. In reply, a tape of Little Richard or Jerry Lee comes on and we’re singing, aloud or not, all pale infarcted pedalers, rowers, treadmillers, and our hearts are rising in the east.
Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade: That hadst a being ere the world was made, And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid. Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not, When primitive Nothing Something straight begot; Then all proceeded from the great united What. Something, the general attribute of all, Severed from thee, its sole original, Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall; Yet Something did thy mighty power command, And from fruitful Emptiness’s hand Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air, and land. Matter the wicked’st offspring of thy race, By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace, And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face. With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join; Body, thy foe, with these did leagues combine To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line; But turncoat Time assists the foe in vain, And bribed by thee, destroys their short-lived reign, And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again. Though mysteries are barred from laic eyes, And the divine alone with warrant pries Into thy bosom, where truth in private lies, Yet this of thee the wise may truly say, Thou from the virtuous nothing dost delay, And to be part with thee the wicked wisely pray. Great Negative, how vainly would the wiseInquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies! Is, or Is Not, the two great ends of Fate, And True or False, the subject of debate, That perfect or destroy the vast designs of state— When they have racked the politician’s breast, Within thy Bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee, are least unsafe and best. But Nothing, why does Something still permit That sacred monarchs should at council sit With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit, While weighty Something modestly abstains From princes’ coffers, and from statemen’s brains, And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns? Nothing! who dwell’st with fools in grave disguise For whom they reverend shapes and forms devise, Lawn sleeves, and furs, and gowns, when they like thee look wise: French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy, Hibernian learning, Scotch civility, Spaniards’ dispatch, Danes’ wit are mainly seen in thee. The great man’s gratitude to his best friend, Kings’ promises, whores’ vows—towards thee may bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.
Intractable between them grows a garden of barbed wire and roses. Burning briars like flames devour their too innocent attire. Dare they meet, the blackened wire tears the intervening air. Trespassers have wandered through texture of flesh and petals. Dogs like arrows moved along pathways that their noses knew. While the two who laid it out find the metal and the flower fatal underfoot. Black and white at midnight glows this garden of barbed wire and roses. Doused with darkness roses burn coolly as a rainy moon: beneath a rainy moon or none silver the sheath on barb and thorn. Change the garden, scale and plan; wall it, make it annual. There the briary flower grew. There the brambled wire ran. While they sleep the garden grows, deepest wish annuls the will: perfect still the wire and rose.
A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing Through the stench of a sodden leachfield. On the broken stairs of a trailer A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping Milk from her swollen breasts, cats Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning. Tonight, with the moon washing some stars away, She'll go searching for an old bicycle in the shed; She'll find his father's treasures: Jars full of bent nails, a lacquered bass, And the scythe with spiders Nesting in the emptiness of the blade And in the bow of its pine shaft. Milling junk in the dark, She'll forget the bicycle, her getaway, And rescue A color photograph of an old matinee idol. Leaving the shed, she'll startle An owl out on the marsh. By November It will be nailed through the breast to the barn. In a year the owl will go on a shelf in the shed Where in thirty years there will be a music box Containing a lock of hair, her rosaries, Her birth certificate, And an impossibly sheer, salmon-pink scarf. What I want to know of my government is Doesn't poverty just fucking break your heart?
Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake— a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.
The Dying Words of Goethe “Light! more light! the shadows deepen, And my life is ebbing low, Throw the windows widely open: Light! more light! before I go. “Softly let the balmy sunshine Play around my dying bed, E’er the dimly lighted valley I with lonely feet must tread. “Light! more light! for Death is weaving Shadows ‘round my waning sight, And I fain would gaze upon him Through a stream of earthly light.” Not for greater gifts of genius; Not for thoughts more grandly bright, All the dying poet whispers Is a prayer for light, more light. Heeds he not the gathered laurels, Fading slowly from his sight; All the poet’s aspirations Centre in that prayer for light. Gracious Saviour, when life’s day-dreams Melt and vanish from the sight, May our dim and longing vision Then be blessed with light, more light.
I lov’d thee from the earliest dawn, When first I saw thy beauty’s ray, And will, until life’s eve comes on, And beauty’s blossom fades away; And when all things go well with thee, With smiles and tears remember me. I’ll love thee when thy morn is past, And wheedling gallantry is o’er, When youth is lost in age’s blast, And beauty can ascend no more, And when life’s journey ends with thee, O, then look back and think of me. I’ll love thee with a smile or frown, ’Mid sorrow’s gloom or pleasure’s light, And when the chain of life runs down, Pursue thy last eternal flight, When thou hast spread thy wing to flee, Still, still, a moment wait for me. I’ll love thee for those sparkling eyes, To which my fondness was betray’d, Bearing the tincture of the skies, To glow when other beauties fade, And when they sink too low to see, Reflect an azure beam on me.
Thou art my lute, by thee I sing,— My being is attuned to thee. Thou settest all my words a-wing, And meltest me to melody. Thou art my life, by thee I live, From thee proceed the joys I know; Sweetheart, thy hand has power to give The meed of love—the cup of woe. Thou art my love, by thee I lead My soul the paths of light along, From vale to vale, from mead to mead, And home it in the hills of song. My song, my soul, my life, my all, Why need I pray or make my plea, Since my petition cannot fall; For I’m already one with thee!
(After Raymond Carver’s Hummingbird) Suppose I said the word “springtime” and I wrote the words “king salmon” on a piece of paper and mailed it to you. When you opened it would you remember that afternoon we spent together in the yellow boat when the early whales were feeding and we caught our first fish of the year?   Or would you remember that time off Cape Flattery when you were a little girl: your father smoking, telling stories as he ran the boat, then the tug and zing of that very first fish spooling off into the gray-green world; you laughing and brushing back your hair before setting the hook?   I know I am hard to understand sometimes particularly when you are standing at the post office with only a piece of paper saying “king salmon” on it but just think of it as a promissary note and that electric tug, that thrill pulling your mind into deep water is how I feel about you every, single day.
A castaway blown south from the arctic tundra sits on a stump in an abandoned farmer’s field. Beyond the dunes cattails toss and bend as snappy as the surf, rushing and crashing down the jetty. His head a swivel of round glances, his eyes a deeper yellow than the winter sun, he wonders if the spot two hundred feet away is a mouse on the crawl from mud hole to deer-grass patch. An hour of wind and sleet whips the air, nothing darts or passes but the river underground. A North Pole creature shows us how to last. The wind ruffles his feathers from crown to claw while he gazes into zeroes the salt-slick rain. As a double-rainbow before us arcs sky and owl, we leave him surrendering to the echo of his white refrain.
Who is quitting dogs today? Making them their sister? Who is stretched out by a lamppost sibling? Illuminated by ransom’s note? I was oblivious to pettiness until I saw its first handle: obey ignorance. Stomach decisiveness. By that, this decision . . . no decision. Let it be to gain all it can in one fetter . . . but if it be life, let it attempt a failed recognition. Let its thinker be the failure. My thinker is failure, and I want to teach it how to move in this world. Do you be or live? To any the other wants. To both these words, I fail to be. When I am, but when not . . . It is, as if alive.
Pixie-dust infusion shoots steady shock through incline— is that crooked or slyster meat tong, grabbing hold of night so as not to pulse so bright past outcome Pardon the excess—it’s a point to make that out of all this dirt comes glass or shiny sheen meant to gloss over rough spots—let’s moan and breathe At one time, so that anything shattered will sound pretty I need to show how I love—sound and vision if I sing and move to what I hear and feel, just for you Well, let’s see if we can match our limbs to the credible—or maybe the possible let’s play again, so that you know what you’re in for, when you save your last dance for glass How clutterdust of me— and here’s where I lose my head over a star system, a horny section ten thousand years older than me
THAT ONE, is a poet for all poetsAH, then I would suppose to be an edwin for all edwins
taking in what it hears surprised at the way of path the laid down before the adventured after smiling grip on what you want would never let me down I know you we say after never having met how listening to the other side makes you wish for quiet miles of ocean beneath this rock go on let your hair down such subtle indignity a sunset against a moon looking for a way out but I won’t say anything won’t call you on your everything you where you are and me right here saying yeah with a shut mouth
For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct motionless: a monolith of the often spoken of which nothing is certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use of all acknowledged desire formal parlance & pronoun to form the stars across your back: whose hardened muscle: tremendous lateral delta of which to the shoulders: there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal tick of the left eye: a language not only illegible as the vain translation of a fictive contradictory self & its consonant verb to be: but the body’s crystal falling through a grey film of failed memory & brushfire this Autumn midnight: to unfold (in the form of your body) pleasured corners of a place in which the difficult new breathing and I are foreigners
for E. A. Vulnerable therein & perfectly relinquished by stasis, object always of my natal, crepuscular desire, into the translucent specter, body’s blue fossil of ice, never autochthonous, still embarked upon the imperative passage to get there, to secure a geography that will beg description, narrative map, adopted tentatively; if only to write the ritual book of what was possible, but never bound to occur.
And surfaced a flame in the dark elsewhere of one remembered form: just one, suppose it the flesh of unspecified man a mouth down deeper between my legs his heavy beard in the beginning against these wet thighs our bodies scribbled in signs to draw the grey curtain of steam back by which we found ourselves surrounded sound of water off the tile (or on this sheet of paper stammering) by which we came to nestle a will from which the colors rose resilient sparks of orange over the waves of trickled hair on chest and forearm light green to trace the conduits formed by vein of biceps and prick the pink ridges of his brown nipples in brackets raised this tongue in blue translucent embers to emanate where a moon of fingers along the dark red notch of earth is a field over which armies raged with catapults of burning stones until all was left there smoldering below.
if this is a game then we have made it, unknowing, to the final four. unlikely underdogs. spectators turned to suspect sport. anti-athletes. out of shape beyond reason. at season’s height we fight for a limited audience. few dancers. fewer cheers. down by 30 and our coach m.i.a. we, foolish, dribble. each bounce-back brings a stranger. can’t call us for traveling because we ain’t going nowhere. instead, we trade terrified looks. search for the pass but no one stays open for long. even if we knew what to do to pull this through we’ve got two other teams waiting, impatient, to take us out.
what remained: barren stalks bowing heads by the field-full. rusty air conditioners dripping from warped windowsills. rock formations retaining roots. hollowed out caves and dog stumps forced ragged, toothy grins. all ablaze. a laser show shot hot through the tinny night. every husk wore a well lit protrusion. every breath an asthmatic thrush more material than the silence that surrounds each carcass now: voided prayer: cold arthritic grating: remembering notions of breath. saints: offer a hand to a wheezing shadow: wish for someone to hold before the sure, sudden twilight.
Many of my race have lived long without the touch of these fine things which separate us from beasts. Things I call my own now. Having served thirty-six years as needleman for a family far more ape than we will ever be, I rode the moonlight train to find my free. Up here it is colder than I like, but the gentlemen admire my frock coats above all. I taught my son this trade and hope this picture I made will help retrieve him. Come summer I leave this coast for Philadelphia where I hear we of color can breathe yet more free. Tonight I stitch. The breeze off the bay smells of aria. It is almost the season for cloaks.
Rise up, rise up,And, as the trumpet blowingChases the dreams of men,As the dawn glowingThe stars that left unlitThe land and water,Rise up and scatterThe dew that coversThe print of last night’s lovers—Scatter it, scatter it!While you are listeningTo the clear horn,Forget, men, everythingOn this earth newborn,Except that it is lovelierThan any mysteries.Open your eyes to the airThat has washed the eyes of the starsThrough all the dewy night:Up with the light,To the old wars;Arise, arise!
“History always dresses us for the wrong occasions.” —Ricardo Pau-Llosa   Camera Obscura The afternoon lightening his shadow, Fidel descends from the mountains, the clean-shaven lawyer turned guerilla, his eyes focused on infinity, El Jefe Máximo con sus Barbudos, rebels with rosary beads on their 600-mile procession across the island with campesinos on horseback, flatbed trucks, tanks, a new year’s journey down the oldest roads towards betrayal.Ambient light. Available light Light inside of them, nameless isleños line El Malecón to touch Fidel, already defining himself in black and white. The dramatic sky moving in for the close-up that will frame his all-night oratory, he turns to the crowd, variations on an enigma, waving from his pulpit with rehearsed eloquence, a dove on his shoulder. This is a photograph. This is not a sign.Flash-on camera. Celebrity portraits.  1. Fidel on a balcony across the street  from Grand Central Station,  an American flag above his head,  New York, 1959.  2. Fidel made small by the Lincoln Memorial,  Washington D.C., 1959.  3. Fidel learning to ski,  a minor black ball against a white landscape,  Russia, 1962.  4. Fidel and shotgun,  hunting with Nikita,  Russia, 1962.Circles of Confusion Beyond photographs, Havana is looted and burned. Women weep at out wailing wall, El Paredón, where traitors are taken, and television cameras shoot the executions, this blood soup, the paradoxes of our lives, three years before I am born.Photoflood But it is late afternoon, and a shower of confetti and serpentine falls from every floor of the Havana Hilton, where history is a giant piñata, where at midnight, Fidel will be photographed eating a ham sandwich.
We assemble the silver tree, our translated lives, its luminous branches, numbered to fit into its body. place its metallic roots to decorate our first Christmas. Mother finds herself opening, closing the Red Cross box she will carry into 1976 like an unwanted door prize, a timepiece, a stubborn fact, an emblem of exile measuring our days, marked by the moment of our departure, our lives no longer arranged. Somewhere, there is a photograph, a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken: I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree, her first apartment in this, our new world: my sisters by my side, I wear a white dress, black boots, an eight-year-old’s resignation; Mae and Mitzy, age four, wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles, on this, our first Christmas, away from ourselves. The future unreal, unmade, Mother will cry into the new year with Lidia and Emerito, our elderly downstairs neighbors, who realize what we are too young to understand: Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists.
“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.” —Dionisio Martinez for Larry Villanueva   i. For years, you were a story of ancestors, pre-revolutionary Cuba: Barrios, Donate, Gallata, Villanueva, family names strung and pearled in the Caribbean by blood and memory, nostalgia and calamity en Artemisa, a small town in my mother’s childhood, a woman in December of 1967, your Tía Marta, a hospital room en la Covadonga, rows and rows of children, my sisters, unexpectedly two, your cousins, whose clothes Mae and Mitzy wore into history and exile. En el exilo, La Cuba del Norte, ten years after the summer of El Mariel, you were my map of Cuba, un espejo, un reflejo, a tisa-blue knot of possibility. Mi esquina Habanera, a street en la arquitectura del pasado, a superficial distance in the patina of memory, a me I had never really known, a language I had learned not to think in. Later, you were a face on T.V. en Guadalupe, María Elena, my mother’s telenovelas en el canal 23, an actor, a director, a sculptor, abstract angst with a face history and coincidence had given me. ii. So when you become fingerprints and words, a noun, a verb, a snapshot in motion, I am no longer alone with my ghosts, las sombras de el pasado, inventing truth, reclaiming language, my old self. I am me, unadorned by speech, English or translation; I am an I, simple, exposed, this afternoon in our lives, a conversation about the circle of coincidence and persuasion, a photograph of an idea we once were, and you are familiar, somehow. iii. Constantly returning, we breathe in Spanish, move through blank spaces like incantations, waiting for words to fill a moment (often ninety miles long) with etymology, jargon, ghostwords, shadows and nostalgia, and become Harina de Castilla, Larry, re-shaped, translated, improvised, sculpted and redefined.
The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,Rough, long grasses keep white with frostAt the hilltop by the finger-post;The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffedOver hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.I read the sign. Which way shall I go?A voice says: You would not have doubted soAt twenty. Another voice gentle with scornSays: At twenty you wished you had never been born.One hazel lost a leaf of goldFrom a tuft at the tip, when the first voice toldThe other he wished to know what ’twould beTo be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,”He laughed—and I had to join his laughter— “You shall see; but either before or after,Whatever happens, it must befall,A mouthful of earth to remedy allRegrets and wishes shall freely be given;And if there be a flaw in that heaven’Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may beTo be here or anywhere talking to me,No matter what the weather, on earth,At any age between death and birth,To see what day or night can be,The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,— With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,Standing upright out in the airWondering where he shall journey, O where?”
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—The name, because one afternoonOf heat the express-train drew up thereUnwontedly. It was late June.The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.No one left and no one cameOn the bare platform. What I sawWas Adlestrop—only the nameAnd willows, willow-herb, and grass,And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,No whit less still and lonely fairThan the high cloudlets in the sky.And for that minute a blackbird sangClose by, and round him, mistier,Farther and farther, all the birdsOf Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
At hawthorn-time in Wiltshire travellingIn search of something chance would never bring,An old man’s face, by life and weather cutAnd coloured,—rough, brown, sweet as any nut,—A land face, sea-blue-eyed,—hung in my mindWhen I had left him many a mile behind.All he said was: “Nobody can’t stop ’ee. It’sA footpath, right enough. You see those bitsOf mounds—that’s where they opened up the barrowsSixty years since, while I was scaring sparrows.They thought as there was something to find there,But couldn’t find it, by digging, anywhere.”To turn back then and seek him, where was the use?There were three Manningfords,—Abbots, Bohun, and Bruce:And whether Alton, not Manningford, it was,My memory could not decide, becauseThere was both Alton Barnes and Alton Priors.All had their churches, graveyards, farms, and byres,Lurking to one side up the paths and lanes,Seldom well seen except by aeroplanes;And when bells rang, or pigs squealed, or cocks crowed,Then only heard. Ages ago the roadApproached. The people stood and looked and turned.Nor asked it to come nearer, nor yet learnedTo move out there and dwell in all men’s dust.And yet withal they shot the weathercock, justBecause ’twas he crowed out of tune, they said:So now the copper weathercock is dead.If they had reaped their dandelions and soldThem fairly, they could have afforded gold.Many years passed, and I went back againAmong those villages, and looked for menWho might have known my ancient. He himselfHad long been dead or laid upon the shelf,I thought. One man I asked about him roaredAt my description: “’Tis old BottlesfordHe means, Bill.” But another said: “Of course,It was Jack Button up at the White Horse.He’s dead, sir, these three years.” This lasted tillA girl proposed Walker of Walker’s Hill,“Old Adam Walker. Adam's Point you’ll seeMarked on the maps.” “That was her roguery,”The next man said. He was a squire’s sonWho loved wild bird and beast, and dog and gunFor killing them. He had loved them from his birth,One with another, as he loved the earth.“The man may be like Button, or Walker, orLike Bottlesford, that you want, but far moreHe sounds like one I saw when I was a child.I could almost swear to him. The man was wildAnd wandered. His home was where he was free.Everybody has met one such man as he.Does he keep clear old paths that no one usesBut once a lifetime when he loves or muses?He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire.And when at eight years old Lob-lie-by-the-fireCame in my books, this was the man I saw.He has been in England as long as dove and daw,Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;And in a tender mood he, as I guess,Christened one flower Love-in-idleness,And while he walked from Exeter to LeedsOne April called all cuckoo-flowers Milkmaids.From him old herbal Gerard learnt, as a boy,To name wild clematis the Traveller’s-joy.Our blackbirds sang no English till his earTold him they called his Jan Toy ‘Pretty dear.’(She was Jan Toy the Lucky, who, having lostA shilling, and found a penny loaf, rejoiced.)For reasons of his own to him the wrenIs Jenny Pooter. Before all other men’Twas he first called the Hog’s Back the Hog’s Back.That Mother Dunch’s Buttocks should not lackTheir name was his care. He too could explainTotteridge and Totterdown and Juggler’s Lane:He knows, if anyone. Why Tumbling Bay,Inland in Kent, is called so, he might say.“But little he says compared with what he does.If ever a sage troubles him he will buzzLike a beehive to conclude the tedious fray:And the sage, who knows all languages, runs away.Yet Lob has thirteen hundred names for a fool,And though he never could spare time for schoolTo unteach what the fox so well expressed,On biting the cock’s head off,—Quietness is best,—He can talk quite as well as anyoneAfter his thinking is forgot and done.He first of all told someone else’s wife,For a farthing she’d skin a flint and spoil a knifeWorth sixpence skinning it. She heard him speak:‘She had a face as long as a wet week’Said he, telling the tale in after years.With blue smock and with gold rings in his ears,Sometimes he is a pedlar, not too poorTo keep his wit. This is tall Tom that boreThe logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hallOnce talked, when icicles hung by the wall.As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times.On sleepless nights he made up weather rhymesWhich others spoilt. And, Hob being then his name,He kept the hog that thought the butcher cameTo bring his breakfast ‘You thought wrong,’ said Hob.When there were kings in Kent this very Lob,Whose sheep grew fat and he himself grew merry,Wedded the king’s daughter of Canterbury;For he alone, unlike squire, lord, and king,Watched a night by her without slumbering;He kept both waking. When he was but a ladHe won a rich man’s heiress, deaf, dumb, and sad,By rousing her to laugh at him. He carriedHis donkey on his back. So they were married.And while he was a little cobbler’s boyHe tricked the giant coming to destroyShrewsbury by flood. ‘And how far is it yet?’The giant asked in passing. ‘I forget;But see these shoes I‘ve worn out on the roadAnd we’re not there yet.’ He emptied out his loadOf shoes for mending. The giant let fall from his spadeThe earth for damming Severn, and thus madeThe Wrekin hill; and little Ercall hillRose where the giant scraped his boots. While stillSo young, our Jack was chief of Gotham’s sages.But long before he could have been wise, agesEarlier than this, while he grew thick and strongAnd ate his bacon, or, at times, sang a songAnd merely smelt it, as Jack the giant-killerHe made a name. He too ground up the miller,The Yorkshireman who ground men’s bones for flour.“Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?Or that his name is Walker, or Bottlesford,Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?The man you saw,—Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d’ye-call,Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,One of the lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob,—Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too,—Lives yet. He never will admit he is deadTill millers cease to grind men’s bones for bread,Not till our weathercock crows once againAnd I remove my house out of the laneOn to the road.” With this he disappearedIn hazel and thorn tangled with old-man’s-beard.But one glimpse of his back, as there he stood,Choosing his way, proved him of old Jack’s blood,Young Jack perhaps, and now a WiltshiremanAs he has oft been since his days began.
Aftear night’s thunder far away had rolledThe fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,Like the first gods before they made the worldAnd misery, swimming the stormless seaIn beauty and in divine gaiety.The smooth white empty road was lightly strewnWith leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.The mill-foot water tumbled white and litWith tossing crystals, happier than any crowdOf children pouring out of school aloud.And in the little thickets where a sleeperFor ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeperAnd garden warbler sang unceasingly;While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce gleeThe swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrowAs if the bow had flown off with the arrow.Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mownTravelled the road. In the field sloping down,Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsookOut in the sun; and the long waggon stoodWithout its team, it seemed it never wouldMove from the shadow of that single yew.The team, as still, until their task was due,Beside the labourers enjoyed the shadeThat three squat oaks mid-field together madeUpon a circle of grass and weed uncut,And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, butNow brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,But still. And all were silent. All was old,This morning time, with a great age untold,Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.Under the heavens that know not what years beThe men, the beasts, the trees, the implementsUttered even what they will in times far hence—All of us gone out of the reach of change—Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
Gone, gone again,May, June, July,And August gone,Again gone by,Not memorableSave that I saw them go,As past the empty quaysThe rivers flow.And now again,In the harvest rain,The Blenheim orangesFall grubby from the trees,As when I was young—And when the lost one was here—And when the war beganTo turn young men to dung.Look at the old house,Outmoded, dignified,Dark and untenanted,With grass growing insteadOf the footsteps of life,The friendliness, the strife;In its beds have lainYouth, love, age, and pain:I am something like that;Only I am not dead,Still breathing and interestedIn the house that is not dark:—I am something like that:Not one pane to reflect the sun,For the schoolboys to throw at—They have broken every one.
Mother, the root of this little yellow flowerAmong the stones has the taste of quinine.Things are strange to-day on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machineSo hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;I lie so still. There’s one on your book.But I have something to tell more strange. So leaveYour book to the grasshopper, mother dear,—Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place,—And listen now. Can you hear what I hearFar out? Now and then the foam there curlsAnd stretches a white arm out like a girl’s.Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot beA chapel or church between here and Devon,With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!—Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.“It’s the bell, my son, out in the bayOn the buoy. It does sound sweet to-day.”Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.I should like to be lying under that foam,Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,And certain that you would often comeAnd rest, listening happily.I should be happy if that could be.
Seated once by a brook, watching a childChiefly that paddled, I was thus beguiled.Mellow the blackbird sang and sharp the thrushNot far off in the oak and hazel brush,Unseen. There was a scent like honeycombFrom mugwort dull. And down upon the domeOf the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oftA butterfly alighted. From aloftHe took the heat of the sun, and from below.On the hot stone he perched contented so,As if never a cart would pass againThat way; as if I were the last of menAnd he the first of insects to have earthAnd sun together and to know their worth.I was divided between him and the gleam,The motion, and the voices, of the stream,The waters running frizzled over gravel,That never vanish and for ever travel.A grey flycatcher silent on a fenceAnd I sat as if we had been there sinceThe horseman and the horse lying beneathThe fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,Galloped the downs last. All that I could loseI lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead.“No one’s been here before” was what she saidAnd what I felt, yet never should have foundA word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
The forest ended. Glad I wasTo feel the light, and hear the humOf bees, and smell the drying grassAnd the sweet mint, because I had comeTo an end of forest, and becauseHere was both road and inn, the sumOf what’s not forest. But ’twas hereThey asked me if I did not passYesterday this way? “Not you? Queer.”“Who then? and slept here?” I felt fear.I learnt his road and, ere they wereSure I was I, left the dark woodBehind, kestrel and woodpecker,The inn in the sun, the happy moodWhen first I tasted sunlight there.I travelled fast, in hopes I shouldOutrun that other. What to doWhen caught, I planned not. I pursuedTo prove the likeness, and, if true,To watch until myself I knew.I tried the inns that eveningOf a long gabled high-street grey,Of courts and outskirts, travellingAn eager but a weary way,In vain. He was not there. NothingTold me that ever till that dayHad one like me entered those doors,Save once. That time I dared: “You mayRecall”—but never-foamless shoresMake better friends than those dull boors.Many and many a day like thisAimed at the unseen moving goalAnd nothing found but remediesFor all desire. These made not whole;They sowed a new desire, to kissDesire’s self beyond control,Desire of desire. And yetLife stayed on within my soul.One night in sheltering from the wetI quite forgot I could forget.A customer, then the landladyStared at me. With a kind of smileThey hesitated awkwardly:Their silence gave me time for guile.Had anyone called there like me,I asked. It was quite plain the wileSucceeded. For they poured out all.And that was naught. Less than a mileBeyond the inn, I could recallHe was like me in general.He had pleased them, but I less.I was more eager than beforeTo find him out and to confess,To bore him and to let him bore.I could not wait: children might guessI had a purpose, something moreThat made an answer indiscreet.One girl’s caution made me sore,Too indignant even to greetThat other had we chanced to meet.I sought then in solitude.The wind had fallen with the night; as stillThe roads lay as the ploughland rude,Dark and naked, on the hill.Had there been ever any feud’Twixt earth and sky, a mighty willClosed it: the crocketed dark trees,A dark house, dark impossibleCloud-towers, one star, one lamp, one peaceHeld on an everlasting lease:And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s;No difference endured betweenThe two. A dog barked on a hidden rise;A marshbird whistled high unseen;The latest waking blackbird’s criesPerished upon the silence keen.The last light filled a narrow firthAmong the clouds. I stood serene,And with a solemn quiet mirth,An old inhabitant of earth.Once the name I gave to hoursLike this was melancholy, whenIt was not happiness and powersComing like exiles home again,And weaknesses quitting their bowers,Smiled and enjoyed, far off from men,Moments of everlastingness.And fortunate my search was thenWhile what I sought, nevertheless,That I was seeking, I did not guess.That time was brief: once more at innAnd upon road I sought my manTill once amid a tap-room’s dinLoudly he asked for me, beganTo speak, as if it had been a sin,Of how I thought and dreamed and ranAfter him thus, day after day:He lived as one under a banFor this: what had I got to say?I said nothing, I slipped away.And now I dare not follow afterToo close. I try to keep in sight,Dreading his frown and worse his laughter.I steal out of the wood to light;I see the swift shoot from the rafterBy the inn door: ere I alightI wait and hear the starlings wheezeAnd nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.He goes: I follow: no releaseUntil he ceases. Then I also shall cease.
One hour: as dim he and his house now lookAs a reflection in a rippling brook,While I remember him; but first, his house.Empty it sounded. It was dark with forest boughsThat brushed the walls and made the mossy tilesPart of the squirrels’ track. In all those milesOf forest silence and forest murmur, onlyOne house—“Lonely!” he said, “I wish it were lonely”—Which the trees looked upon from every side,And that was his. He waved good-bye to hideA sigh that he converted to a laugh.He seemed to hang rather than stand there, halfGhost-like, half like a beggar’s rag, clean wrungAnd useless on the brier where it has hungLong years a-washing by sun and wind and rain.But why I call back man and house againIs that now on a beech-tree’s tip I seeAs then I saw—I at the gate, and heIn the house darkness,—a magpie veering about,A magpie like a weathercock in doubt.
“Painting a wave requires no system,” The painter said, painting a wave. “Systems may get you flotsam and jetsam, Seaweed and so forth. But never a wave.” There was a scroll or fine-lined curve On the canvas first, and then what looked Like hair flying or grayish nerves, Which began to move as the painter worked. “Painting the sea is a lot of trouble; It never stops still for a moment, so I try to make it internal, mental, As though I stopped it, then let it go.” Something began to pulse and tumble Out of the brushes, the ink, the chalk; A long black line commenced to tremble, Then, like a fishline, started to jerk . . . With what at the end? “I think I’ve caught it.” A drop of water hung by a hair. “If I could only stop it a minute!” The drop began to race somewhere, Spreading out in every direction, A bird of thread, caught in a storm, Trying to say, “Connection! Action!” But in the end it was very calm. Soon there was water under water, And over the sand a sun . . . a moon? Who could have seen that wave of water One night ago? Or a thousand and one? Who could have seen the lid of water With its thin mascara of buoys and corks, With its lined horizon’s distant glimmer Of maybe a skyline like New York’s? Now there will be that morning evening Tide dyeing the water’s pulse, The wave drying in ink. The Wave. Moving, momentous, motionless.
Some bloodied sea-bird’s hovering decay Assails us where we lie, and lie To make that symbol go away, To mock the true north of the eye. But lie to me, lie next to me; The world is an infirmity. Too much of sun’s been said, too much Of sea, and of the lover’s touch, Whole volumes that old men debauch. But we, at the sea’s edge curled, Hurl back their bloody world. Lie to me, like next to me, For there is nothing here to see But the mirrors of ourselves, the day, Clear with the odors of the sea. Lie to me. And lie to me.
It seems to have traveled at night, Supremely ironic, lighting fires, Laying golden eggs in the midst of squalor, Its outer garments, in the latest version, Sumptuous, its linens more than shoddy, Drunk, moreover, at a seedy party The discriminating shunned, and, later, bawdy In a run-down neighborhood, with whores and sailors Chosen as companions while the queen went needy. Now that everything about it is known, Why does it come up purple or threadbare, Thrashing all its sunsets in a fit of pique, Or stripped, in the seamiest hayloft, ready To repeat dull anecdotes the millionth time, Its poise unquestionable, its voice unsteady? It is brilliant, androgynous, and stultifying With its threats and tears, dissembling always Its mad obsession with the blurred distinction. And yet who else Is so elementary and badly needed That fifty cultures rise at the merest rumor Of its presence, and, finally, punctually fall Whenever it departs, as if on schedule? Interviewed, Monday, in the city dump, Which turned, by magic, into a hotel tower, Shedding poems and paintings for its bath (It takes ten centuries of running water To wash it clean), it then emerged, all dirty Again, in a costume of ferocious splendor, A hat some milliner in old Vienna Sweated over, its pumps exchanged for sneakers, And raced across the city, breaking records, Just to prove its powers of endurance. It lies down anywhere, and loves the country, But is so unassuming it can even flourish Beneath electric signs and in railroad stations It goes to for the summer, estivating, It says, near fountains that escape our notice, And comes back in the fall, its ribbons flying, Wheeling through the leaves, singing all the voices Of every opera in the repertoire Plus one no one has ever dreamed of writing. Going about its gigantic business, It masks itself as any shape or hope, Appearing as a vicious telephone call, Or a flat, disturbing message in an envelope. It praises calmness but adores upheaval, Is most to be desired when it apes composure, And much to be distrusted when it boasts it has The only fingerprint that can be changed at will.
To the memory of a friend,  drowned off Water Island, April, 1960 Finally, from your house, there is no view; The bay’s blind mirror shattered over you And Patchogue took your body like a log The wind rolled up to shore. The senseless drowned Have faces nobody would care to see, But water loves those gradual erasures Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass, And you belonged to water, it to you, Having built, on a hillock, above the bay, Your house, the bay giving you reason to, Where now, if seasons still are running straight, The horseshoe crabs clank armor night and day, Their couplings far more ancient than the eyes That watched them from your porch. I saw one once Whose back was a history of how we live; Grown onto every inch of plate, except Where the hinges let it move, were living things, Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time: The origins of art. It carried them With pride, it seemed, as if endurance only Matters in the end. Or so I thought. Skimming traffic lights, starboard and port, Steer through planted poles that mark the way, And other lights, across the bay, faint stars Lining the border of Long Island’s shore, Come on at night, they still come on at night, Though who can see them now I do not know. Wild roses, at your back porch, break their blood, And bud to test surprises of sea air, And the birds fly over, gliding down to feed At the two feeding stations you set out with seed, Or splash themselves in a big bowl of rain You used to fill with water. Going across That night, too fast, too dark, no one will know, Maybe you heard, the last you’ll ever hear, The cry of the savage and endemic gull Which shakes the blood and always brings to mind The thought that death, the scavenger, is blind, Blunders and is stupid, and the end Comes with ironies so fine the seed Falters in the marsh and the heron stops Hunting in the weeds below your landing stairs, Standing in a stillness that now is yours.
The startling pleasures all broke down, It was her first arthritic spring. Inside her furs, her bones, secure, Suddenly became a source of pain And froze on a Saturday afternoon While she was listening to “La Boheme.” Strength had been her weakness, and Because it was, she got to like The exhilaration of catastrophes That prove our lives as stupid as we think, But pain, more stupid than stupidity, Is an accident of animals in which, once caught, The distances are never again the same. Yet there was another Jane in Jane: She smelled the inside of a logarithm, And felt a Gothic arch rise in her chest, Her clavicle widening to bear the weight Of the two smooth plumb lines of her breasts, The blueprints forming an enormous skirt Around her body. Arch and star and cross Swung like little lights inside her head, A church and temple rising from the floor, Nave and transept and an altar where, Unbidden, she saw a kind of sacrifice; The knife was in her hand, the stick, the whip; She cried at her cruelty and cried to be Outside of her defenses. And just then, The windows buckled in, the paintings cracked, The furniture went walking by itself, All out of her control. And it was pain That let her know she was herself again: She wore a cloak of fire on her skin, And power, power floated up to her.
For Frances Dillon Hayward 1 Such splendid icecaps and hard rills, such weights And counter-weights, I think I scale the heights When pentatonic Chinese crewmen start Up in a cold sweat from the bottom of the keyboard Only to arrive at some snow-stormed valley To dissolve in steam-holes and vanish out of sight. 2 The left hand’s library is dull, the books All read, though sometimes, going under velvet, An old upholsterer will spit out tacks, Turn them into sparks and smartly hurl them Up and down the loudest bowling alley— His pressure of effects can last all night. 3 Two bird notes endlessly repeat themselves. Or are they fish scales—iridescent, hard? Mica into marble back to mica? No images in trills. They’re formal. Take Your foot off the pedal. You’re in a wood Near the sea. And every tree and wave is fake. 4 An underwater haircut by Debussy? Oh, that’s too easy. Astringent lotions Let the swimmer down by easy stages Down among the flashy soda fountains Down to the bottom where the light bulbs waver Down where all the mirrors eat their hearts out. 5 Grammar becoming poetry is what You’re after—say, a rational derangement Requiring that you forget technique And concentrate on what is harder like A fireplace that burns pine needles only, Before which spills the gore of Persian rugs. 6 A vial of antiseptic meant for Schubert, One modest, flat meticulous translation Of Chopin’s lightning undercurrent Spanish— These are the mere necessities of travel. Someone you must meet is Dr. Czerny. Then, through him, Domenico Scarlatti. 7 Seizure are occurring. Despite snow-lightning, The black keys are bent on mountain climbing— All of it against a doctor’s warning. Soon they’re descending like the black dots of A wirephoto in transmission. An Erotic black wing hovers up above. 8 Bach is more like opening an ember And digging hard into the heart of fire. The heart of fire is another fire. When it comes to Mozart, just say nothing. Think of it as milk, and drink it slowly. Slowly you will taste the cream of angels. 9 This black and white’s deceptive. Underneath The spectrum rages. Did you ever see The calmest waters quickly come to life Because a minnow’s tinfoil flash in sun Had rent them suddenly? It came. And went. We take two thousand takes before we print. 10 Don’t try to catch that lion by Rousseau. Before you wake, he’ll eat you up. If you Should meet the sleeping gypsy, let her sleep. Tomorrow they’ll be gone without a trace, Half fact and half enigma. Now your hands Are on the mysteries of the commonplace.
Whether it was a particular beauty Stirred the tearfall from the eyelid’s rim, Rinsing the world once more with self, Was it not there the general peered, Thousand-eyed, down from the peak In the last of all imaginary sunsets? The light divided in half, the half Divided again in half, the way Zeno’s paradox makes nothing move Because an infinity of points between Target and arrow, though never seen, Exists. And there is snow in a capsule, A solid floor of individual Flakes that, shaken, settle in a field— Parachutists growing where the grass, One moment before, was only natural. I am speaking now of the diminishment Or enhancement of enchanted objects, Of how they turn into nothingness Or burnish the imagination: A fire at the bottom of the sea, For instance, or a mind in space Thinking its way into science fiction, Or, inside the skull, a little world Clinging, about to be thrown away— Miraculous lint under a bell.
There might be the quibble of birds and the swag Of a river and a distantly belled Altar of animals, softly spoken; Certainly cattail, sumac, and fern Would rise from the marshes nearby, revealed In forms too perfect to envy trees— Not trying for larger and larger keepsakes. Cryptic and subtle green, hedgerows Hiding mysterious deer, the start Of a rabbit, as if towers and clouds Had suddenly shadowed an open field— These would be the events of the day, Life having narrowed down to please Natural hungers and thirsts, the grass Thick at our feet, and, above our heads, The stars, their fireworks anemones. What shall I say of the house? Or you? Only industrious ghosts would know How lazily cropping up the view Would make the impossible possible; Nothing but weekdays would blankly graze On time’s oblivious pastures, free At last of motive and thought, and we, Becoming ourselves so naturally, Would never say, looking up at the sky, Another life is shining in the sky.
The upkeep of the castle is The downfall of the cottages Where fishermen and peasants live Or used to live. The young men leave In homemade boats in which they drown, In makeshift planes that burn and crash, Or die of boredom on the train That starts each month for Cold Cash, Only to find when they arrive That that’s not where the castle is. The women left live in the sticks, And when they do the weekly wash Or mend the nets to catch the fish, They sing this song: “We work for weeks For nothing. Now the men have gone, We’d like to be where money talks, For all the rest is gibberish.” They pack their bags and take the train And travel through a strange terrain, But not to where the castle is. When there’s no one left but children And the very old, the young And lame survivors play a game Invariable in its details In which they take the daily trash Down to the dump and sing a song About ash heaps and burials Whose burden always is the same: “If we were old, if we were young, We’d find out where the caste is.” At Cold Cash, where the castle is, Or where it is supposed to be, Nobody ever dies, it seems; They just go on—from first to last A series of monotonies— And they play bridge, mah-jongg, and gin The while they sing their tribal song, Which has no verse but a refrain: “We’re here. And if we’re here, of course, This must be where the castle is.” But even kings get sick and bank Accounts go bad and miracles Occur, though sometimes in reverse; Elaborate discrepancies Narrow down from bad to worse; Abysses open in a wink Below the shining pinnacles— “We do not know the place,” they sing, “That once we thought the castle was. Do you know where the castle is?” They travel near, they travel far To seek out where the castle is, And come upon the cottages, Which lie in smoking ruins, and there’s No man alive, no woman now To point the way, and though they sift Through the debris and pan the clay, Searching for the smallest clues, They haven’t found out to this day Just where the castle was, or is.
We have the whole evening ahead of us, We think, our eyesight starting to weaken, We must have missed the houselights growing dim, But how could that moment have escaped us when The roots of the paper trees struck water And transformed themselves into the real thing— This nervous wood at the edge of a small, Provincial town whose still lifes waken To find that they’re portraits after all And subject to the risk of animation? Tonight we may discuss—after the Chopin Nocturnes, after the I-don’t-know-how-many Performances of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata— The gradual reduction of Roman columns, The disease of too many lakes and clouds. Do cobblestones have a future? Is rain Removable? Depressing mornings find Characters in bed who have no reason To get up, the light a yellowish half-light Mirroring the mind, its sad affections. At the lake, a flat of faultless summer Is being taken down, the view abandoned; The puzzled players change their places. Once You might have found them walking in an orchard, The blossoms opening their mouths to speak And song occurring as if it were natural; Now that trees uproot themselves and bankrupt Agriculture wanes in its drying furrows, Property and battlefields turn out to share A fate in common—they exchange hands. Shrines “fallen out of the perpendicular,” Stones “that have apparently once been tombstones”— We are on someone’s estate not far from Moscow. How simply the sun goes out like a match! How deeply the wounds stay on the surface! He said the best that can be said for property: It lets an old man fall in love with landscape, Lets so many trees have a chance to be noticed, Allows the self-interested birds to preen, Until the property is lost again. To an upstart creditor who sells the trees For lumber, then, to the sounds of saws, Tramps through the hallway in his dirty boots To explain, in tears, the dreary motivation: His mother’s dying, his young wife’s in love With a boor . . . The Babel of trouble starts; Among all the hells that go on talking, Only one is real, though it is silent, And everything leads up to it—to lose The land, to lose the very ground you stand on. If the temporary brilliancies gather once more In the middle distance, and the modal lark Persuades the summer evening to reveal One private little splendor not for sale, Still, a gunshot, onstage or off, Tells us what no one is prepared to know: Love is a tourniquet tightening its bands Around the slowly dying wrist of freedom, Futility’s a spinster bending over A book of household accounts forever. Bathed in the acid of truth, all things Become possible: to be a cold snake At an interview, to live on scraps of soap To keep oneself warm, to resemble a cat Constantly stalking the shadow of nothing, To the horse’s clop-clop outside the window, Or the sound of a guitar from a neighboring room, The doctor, with a smile, asks, What is man? A hero about to be done-in for good? A villain about to be rescued by pain? The governess is wearing her old forage cap. That’s Epihodov playing his guitar. Astrov is talking about trees. We could be Racing the wolves at thirty below In a ravine whiplashed by snow, or slowly Succumbing to boredom in a seaside town, Waiting for a future that will never be, The heat getting worse, far off the waves Pounding faintly late in the moonlight, At a low moment in our lives.
You watch the night like a material Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms; It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew, As if a hand had squeezed it at one end, Is blank as innocence when daylight comes Projecting sunlit patches on the wall That fade. Too much is going on, too much Of life, you say, for you to live alone On top of an old tenement, on a train That might start off sometime, but never does. Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!, A park appears between two fixed ideas Whose narrow aperture of sky in time Will house the slums of 1989 . . . Now New York is feigning its gray dark London winter. Invisible uptown Is out there somewhere, raining on its own. Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares A scene that seems reprinted from the past: A man with a dog is walking very fast Along a path among the stunted trees Of the little square below. He disappears.
Over the edge of the purple down, Where the single lamplight gleams, Know ye the road to the Merciful Town That is hard by the Sea of Dreams – Where the poor may lay their wrongs away, And the sick may forget to weep? But we – pity us! Oh, pity us! We wakeful; ah, pity us! – We must go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep! Weary they turn from the scroll and crown, Fetter and prayer and plough – They that go up to the Merciful Town, For her gates are closing now. It is their right in the Baths of Night Body and soul to steep, But we – pity us! ah, pity us! We wakeful; oh, pity us! – We must go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep! Over the edge of the purple down, Ere the tender dreams begin, Look – we may look – at the Merciful Town, But we may not enter in! Outcasts all, from her guarded wall Back to our watch we creep: We – pity us! ah, pity us! We wakeful; ah, pity us! – We that go back with Policeman Day – Back from the City of Sleep!
The sunlight was not our concern or even The pane it shone through, and no one was going Down for the mail, and the four lettuces The gardener brought as a gift seemed to be A calculated bounty, so that early on We knew we were going to be stuck with ourselves The rest of the day, the vicissitudes Marching in rows from the forest, the balms Not arriving till nightfall. On the prowl Since morning, the wind had a touch too much Of motivation, an annoying way Of exactly ruffling the same oak leaf As if it were practicing a piano trill; All day, repetitive birds, far off, Were either boring themselves to death Or, drunk on instinct, doing their thing: Ritual dances, territorial rites— The whole imperial egg. What nests Ambition is weaving in us is hard To say: after the flat occasion, The unshared sphere, each childish wish Grows hopeless finding this is what the world is. For this, the recommended cures are useless: A cheery hello to the disaffected At breakfast? A soupful of tears at dinner? You could spill the whole silly story out To one more demanding, ill-tempered beauty You happened to meet at the A. & P., And still every greedy shopping cart, First overstuffed and then abandoned In the parking lot, would leave in its wake Some human need, ignored, half-starved . . . Torn between having nothing to say And saying it, whole diaries get down:How terrible to have dressed beautifully for the rain! . . . I was launched on New York’s bisexual muddle . . .
“Wake to the sun,” the rooster croaked, First bird of the day. The world, light-flecked, Chiselled its lineaments into form. Where was all that fine light coming from? “Trance at the wonder,” the second sang. Whose five dry notes urged the ongoing Afternoon on. “Why wake and stir?” It asked. And asked. There was no answer. “Live through the muddle.” That from the next one. Not very helpful. It looked like rain, Or fog in the offing. Twilight. Then It sang again from an oak or pine. Silence. How I waited for the fourth! Time was a negative dipped into its bath, The dark a fixative that slowly made For every windowpane its window shade. No messages arrived. No music bared The soul for its penitence. Up the stairs No hint of a footfall. The night passed. “Croak by your hand,” said the crow at last.
1 When the loons cry, The night seems blacker, The water deeper. Across the shore: An eyelash-charcoal Fringe of pine trees. 2 The lake reflects Indefinite pewter, And intermittent thunder Lets us know The gods are arriving, One valley over. 3 After the long Melancholy of the fall, One longs for the crisp Brass shout of winter— The blaze of firewood, The window’s spill Of parlor lamplight Across the snow. 4 Flaring like a match Dropped in a dry patch, One sunset tells The spectrum’s story. See the last hunter’s Flashlight dim As he hurries home To his lighted window.
I wove myself of many delicious strands Of violet islands and sugar-balls of thread So faintly green a small white check between Balanced the field’s wide lawn, a plaid Gathering in loose folds shaped around him Those Princeton mornings, slowly stage-lit, when The dawn took the horizon by surprise And from the marsh long, crayoned birds Rose up, ravens, maybe crows, or raw-voiced, Spiteful grackles with their clothespin legs, Black-winged gossips rising out of mud And clattering into sleep. They woke my master While, in the dark, I waited, knowing Sooner or later he’d reach for me And, half asleep, wriggle into my arms. Then it seemed a moonish, oblique light Would gradually illuminate the room, The world turn on its axis at a different slant, The furniture a shipwreck, the floor askew, And, in old slippers, he’d bumble down the stairs. Genius is human and wants its coffee hot— I remember mornings when he’d sit For hours at breakfast, dawdling over notes, Juice and toast at hand, the world awake To spring, the smell of honeysuckle Filling the kitchen. A silent man, Silence became him most. How gently He softened the edges of a guessed-at impact So no one would keel over from the blow— A blow like soft snow falling on a lamb. He’d fly down from the heights to tie his shoes And cross the seas to get a glass of milk, Bismarck with a harp, who’d doff his hat (As if he ever wore one!) and softly land On nimble feet so not to startle. He walked In grandeur much too visible to be seen— And how many versions crawled out of the Press! A small pre-Raphaelite with too much hair; A Frankenstein of test tubes; a “refugee”— A shaman full of secrets who could touch Physics with a wand and body forth The universe’s baby wrapped in stars. From signs Phoenicians scratched into the sand With sticks he drew the contraries of space: Whirlwind Nothing and Volume in its rage Of matter racing to undermine itself, And when the planets sang, why, he sang back The lieder black holes secretly adore. At tea at Mercer Street every afternoon His manners went beyond civility, Kindness not having anything to learn; I was completely charmed. And fooled. What a false view of the universe I had! The horsehair sofa, the sagging chairs, A fire roaring behind the firesecreen— Imagine thinking Princeton was the world! Yet I wore prescience like a second skin: When Greenwich and Palomar saw eye to eye, Time and space having found their rabbi, I felt the dawn’s black augurs gather force, As if I knew in the New Jersey night The downcast sky that was to clamp on Europe, That Asia had its future in my pocket.
Now that I’m fifty, let me take my showers at night, no light, eyes closed. And let me swim in cover-ups. My skin’s tattooed with hours and days and decades, head to foot, and slim is just a faded photograph. It’s strange how people look away who once would look. I didn’t know I’d undergo this change and be the unseen cover of a book whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker. One reaches for the pleasures of the mind and heart to counteract the loss of quicker knowledge. One feels old urgencies unwind, although I still pluck chin hairs with a tweezer, in case I might attract another geezer.
Goaded and harassed in the factory That tears our life up into bits of days Ticked off upon a clock which never stays,Shredding our portion of Eternity,We break away at last, and steal the key Which hides a world empty of hours; ways Of space unroll, and Heaven overlaysThe leafy, sun-lit earth of Fantasy. Beyond the ilex shadow glares the sun, Scorching against the blue flame of the sky.Brown lily-pads lie heavy and supine Within a granite basin, under one The bronze-gold glimmer of a carp; and IReach out my hand and pluck a nectarine.
They have watered the street, It shines in the glare of lamps, Cold, white lamps, And lies Like a slow-moving river, Barred with silver and black. Cabs go down it, One, And then another. Between them I hear the shuffling of feet. Tramps doze on the window-ledges, Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks. The city is squalid and sinister, With the silver-barred street in the midst, Slow-moving, A river leading nowhere. Opposite my window, The moon cuts, Clear and round, Through the plum-coloured night. She cannot light the city; It is too bright. It has white lamps, And glitters coldly. I stand in the window and watch the moon. She is thin and lustreless, But I love her. I know the moon, And this is an alien city.
In the brown water, Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine, Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds, A pike dozed. Lost among the shadows of stems He lay unnoticed. Suddenly he flicked his tail, And a green-and-copper brightness Ran under the water. Out from under the reeds Came the olive-green light, And orange flashed up Through the sun-thickened water. So the fish passed across the pool, Green and copper, A darkness and a gleam, And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank Received it.
Bath The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air. The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air. Breakfast Table In the fresh-washed sunlight, the breakfast table is decked and white. It offers itself in flat surrender, tendering tastes, and smells, and colours, and metals, and grains, and the white cloth falls over its side, draped and wide. Wheels of white glitter in the silver coffee-pot, hot and spinning like catherine-wheels, they whirl, and twirl—and my eyes begin to smart, the little white, dazzling wheels prick them like darts. Placid and peaceful, the rolls of bread spread themselves in the sun to bask. A stack of butter-pats, pyramidal, shout orange through the white, scream, flutter, call: “Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!” Coffee steam rises in a stream, clouds the silver tea-service with mist, and twists up into the sunlight, revolved, involuted, suspiring higher and higher, fluting in a thin spiral up the high blue sky. A crow flies by and croaks at the coffee steam. The day is new and fair with good smells in the air. Walk Over the street the white clouds meet, and sheer away without touching. On the sidewalks, boys are playing marbles. Glass marbles, with amber and blue hearts, roll together and part with a sweet clashing noise. The boys strike them with black and red striped agates. The glass marbles spit crimson when they are hit, and slip into the gutters under rushing brown water. I smell tulips and narcissus in the air, but there are no flowers anywhere, only white dust whipping up the street, and a girl with a gay Spring hat and blowing skirts. The dust and the wind flirt at her ankles and her neat, high-heeled patent leather shoes. Tap, tap, the little heels pat the pavement, and the wind rustles among the flowers on her hat. A water-cart crawls slowly on the other side of the way. It is green and gay with new paint, and rumbles contentedly, sprinkling clear water over the white dust. Clear zigzagging water, which smells of tulips and narcissus. The thickening branches make a pink grisaille against the blue sky. Whoop! The clouds go dashing at each other and sheer away just in time. Whoop! And a man’s hat careers down the street in front of the white dust, leaps into the branches of a tree, veers away and trundles ahead of the wind, jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-colour and green. A motor-car cuts a swathe through the bright air, sharp-beaked, irresistible, shouting to the wind to make way. A glare of dust and sunshine tosses together behind it, and settles down. The sky is quiet and high, and the morning is fair with fresh-washed air. Midday and Afternoon Swirl of crowded streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The stock-still brick façade of an old church, against which the waves of people lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets. Eddies of light in the windows of chemists’ shops, with their blue, gold, purple jars, darting colours far into the crowd. Loud bangs and tremors, murmurings out of high windows, whirring of machine belts, blurring of horses and motors. A quick spin and shudder of brakes on an electric car, and the jar of a church-bell knocking against the metal blue of the sky. I am a piece of the town, a bit of blown dust, thrust along with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement under me, reeling with feet. Feet tripping, skipping, lagging, dragging, plodding doggedly, or springing up and advancing on firm elastic insteps. A boy is selling papers, I smell them clean and new from the press. They are fresh like the air, and pungent as tulips and narcissus. The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues of gold blind the shop-windows, putting out their contents in a flood of flame. Night and Sleep The day takes her ease in slippered yellow. Electric signs gleam out along the shop fronts, following each other. They grow, and grow, and blow into patterns of fire-flowers as the sky fades. Trades scream in spots of light at the unruffled night. Twinkle, jab, snap, that means a new play; and over the way: plop, drop, quiver, is the sidelong sliver of a watchmaker’s sign with its length on another street. A gigantic mug of beer effervesces to the atmosphere over a tall building, but the sky is high and has her own stars, why should she heed ours? I leave the city with speed. Wheels whirl to take me back to my trees and my quietness. The breeze which blows with me is fresh-washed and clean, it has come but recently from the high sky. There are no flowers in bloom yet, but the earth of my garden smells of tulips and narcissus. My room is tranquil and friendly. Out of the window I can see the distant city, a band of twinkling gems, little flower-heads with no stems. I cannot see the beer-glass, nor the letters of the restaurants and shops I passed, now the signs blur and all together make the city, glowing on a night of fine weather, like a garden stirring and blowing for the Spring. The night is fresh-washed and fair and there is a whiff of flowers in the air. Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple dreams into my ears. The breeze whispers at the shutters and mutters queer tales of old days, and cobbled streets, and youths leaping their horses down marble stairways. Pale blue lavender, you are the colour of the sky when it is fresh-washed and fair . . . I smell the stars . . . they are like tulips and narcissus . . . I smell them in the air.
I Red Slippers Red slippers in a shop-window, and outside in the street, flaws of grey, windy sleet! Behind the polished glass, the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping colour, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas. The row of white, sparkling shop fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain—and freeze again to red slippers, myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window. They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer; they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets. Snap, snap, they are cracker-sparks of scarlet in the white, monotonous block of shops. They plunge the clangour of billions of vermilion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement. People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window, farther down, is a big lotus bud of cardboard whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair. One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before? The flaws of grey, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are only red slippers.  II Thompson’s Lunch Room—Grand Central Station Study in Whites Wax-white— Floor, ceiling, walls. Ivory shadows Over the pavement Polished to cream surfaces By constant sweeping. The big room is coloured like the petals Of a great magnolia, And has a patina Of flower bloom Which makes it shine dimly Under the electric lamps. Chairs are ranged in rows Like sepia seeds Waiting fulfilment. The chalk-white spot of a cook’s cap Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall— Dull chalk-white striking the retina like a blow Through the wavering uncertainty of steam. Vitreous-white of glasses with green reflections, Ice-green carboys, shifting—greener, bluer—with the jar of moving water. Jagged green-white bowls of pressed glass Rearing snow-peaks of chipped sugar Above the lighthouse-shaped castors Of grey pepper and grey-white salt. Grey-white placards: “Oyster Stew, Cornbeef Hash, Frankfurters”: Marble slabs veined with words in meandering lines. Dropping on the white counter like horn notes Through a web of violins, The flat yellow lights of oranges, The cube-red splashes of apples, In high plated épergnes. The electric clock jerks every half-minute: “Coming!—Past!” “Three beef-steaks and a chicken-pie,” Bawled through a slide while the clock jerks heavily. A man carries a china mug of coffee to a distant chair. Two rice puddings and a salmon salad Are pushed over the counter; The unfulfilled chairs open to receive them. A spoon falls upon the floor with the impact of metal striking stone, And the sound throws across the room Sharp, invisible zigzags Of silver. III An Opera House Within the gold square of the proscenium arch, A curtain of orange velvet hangs in stiff folds, Its tassels jarring slightly when someone crosses the stage behind. Gold carving edges the balconies, Rims the boxes, Runs up and down fluted pillars. Little knife-stabs of gold Shine out whenever a box door is opened. Gold clusters Flash in soft explosions On the blue darkness, Suck back to a point, And disappear. Hoops of gold Circle necks, wrists, fingers, Pierce ears, Poise on heads And fly up above them in coloured sparkles. Gold! Gold! The opera house is a treasure-box of gold. Gold in a broad smear across the orchestra pit: Gold of horns, trumpets, tubas; Gold—spun-gold, twittering-gold, snapping-gold Of harps. The conductor raises his baton, The brass blares out Crass, crude, Parvenu, fat, powerful, Golden. Rich as the fat, clapping hands in the boxes. Cymbals, gigantic, coin-shaped, Crash. The orange curtain parts And the prima-donna steps forward. One note, A drop: transparent, iridescent, A gold bubble, It floats . . . floats . . . And bursts against the lips of a bank president In the grand tier. IV Afternoon Rain in State Street Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls, Slant lines of black rain In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings. Below, Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal, The street. And over it, umbrellas, Black polished dots Struck to white An instant, Stream in two flat lines Slipping past each other with the smoothness of oil. Like a four-sided wedge The Custom House Tower Pokes at the low, flat sky, Pushing it farther and farther up, Lifting it away from the house-tops, Lifting it in one piece as though it were a sheet of tin, With the lever of its apex. The cross-hatchings of rain cut the Tower obliquely, Scratching lines of black wire across it, Mutilating its perpendicular grey surface With the sharp precision of tools. The city is rigid with straight lines and angles, A chequered table of blacks and greys. Oblong blocks of flatness Crawl by with low-geared engines, And pass to short upright squares Shrinking with distance. A steamer in the basin blows its whistle, And the sound shoots across the rain hatchings, A narrow, level bar of steel. Hard cubes of lemon Superimpose themselves upon the fronts of buildings As the windows light up. But the lemon cubes are edged with angles Upon which they cannot impinge. Up, straight, down, straight—square. Crumpled grey-white papers Blow along the side-walks, Contorted, horrible, Without curves. A horse steps in a puddle, A white, glaring water spurts up In stiff, outflaring lines, Like the rattling stems of reeds. The city is heraldic with angles, A sombre escutcheon of argent and sable And countercoloured bends of rain Hung over a four-square civilization. When a street lamp comes out, I gaze at it for full thirty seconds To rest my brain with the suffusing, round brilliance of its globe. V An Aquarium Streaks of green and yellow iridescence, Silver shiftings, Rings veering out of rings, Silver—gold— Grey-green opaqueness sliding down, With sharp white bubbles Shooting and dancing, Flinging quickly outward. Nosing the bubbles, Swallowing them, Fish. Blue shadows against silver-saffron water, The light rippling over them In steel-bright tremors. Outspread translucent fins Flute, fold, and relapse; The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles In scarcely tarnished twinklings. Curving of spotted spines, Slow up-shifts, Lazy convolutions: Then a sudden swift straightening And darting below: Oblique grey shadows Athwart a pale casement. Roped and curled, Green man-eating eels Slumber in undulate rhythms, With crests laid horizontal on their backs. Barred fish, Striped fish, Uneven disks of fish, Slip, slide, whirl, turn, And never touch. Metallic blue fish, With fins wide and yellow and swaying Like Oriental fans, Hold the sun in their bellies And glow with light: Blue brilliance cut by black bars. An oblong pane of straw-coloured shimmer, Across it, in a tangent, A smear of rose, black, silver. Short twists and upstartings, Rose-black, in a setting of bubbles: Sunshine playing between red and black flowers On a blue and gold lawn. Shadows and polished surfaces, Facets of mauve and purple, A constant modulation of values. Shaft-shaped, With green bead eyes; Thick-nosed, Heliotrope-coloured; Swift spots of chrysolite and coral; In the midst of green, pearl, amethyst irradiations. Outside, A willow-tree flickers With little white jerks, And long blue waves Rise steadily beyond the outer islands.
When I have baked white cakesAnd grated green almonds to spread upon them; When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberriesAnd piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter;When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working;What then?To-morrow it will be the same:Cakes and strawberries,And needles in and out of cloth.If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter,How much more beautiful is the moon,Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree;The moon, Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon,Still,Upon your face.You shine, Beloved,You and the moon.But which is the reflection?The clock is striking eleven.I think, when we have shut and barred the door,The night will be darkOutside.
Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles,The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lipAn inch below the terrace tiles.Over the stagnant waterSlide reflections:The blue-green of coned yews;The purple and red of trailing fuchsiasDripping out of marble urns;Bright squares of skyRibbed by the wake of a swimming beetle.Through the blue-bronze waterWavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow.An arm flashes through the reflections,A breast is outlined with leaves.Outstretched in the quiet waterThe statue of a Goddess slumbers. But when Autumn comesThe beech leaves cover her with a golden counter-pane.
II wandered through a house of many rooms.It grew darker and darker,Until, at last, I could only find my wayBy passing my fingers along the wall.Suddenly my hand shot through an open window,And the thorn of a rose I could not seePricked it so sharplyThat I cried aloud. III dug a grave under an oak-tree.With infinite care, I stamped my spadeInto the heavy grass.The sod sucked it,And I drew it out with effort,Watching the steel run liquid in the moonlightAs it came clear.I stooped, and dug, and never turned,For behind me,On the dried leaves,My own face lay like a white pebble,Waiting. IIII gambled with a silver money.The dried seed-vessels of “honesty”Were stacked in front of me.Dry, white years slipping through my fingersOne by one.One by one, gathered by the Croupier.“Faites vos jeux, Messieurs.”I staked on the red,And the black won.Dry years, Dead years;But I had a system,I always staked on the red. IVI painted the leaves of bushes redAnd shouted: “Fire! Fire!”But the neighbors only laughed.“We cannot warm our hands at them,” they said.Then they cut down my bushes,And made a bonfire,And danced about it.But I covered my face and wept,For ashes are not beautifulEven in the dawn. VI followed a procession of singing girlsWho danced to the glitter of tambourines. Where the street turned at a lighted corner,I caught the purple dress of one of the dancers,But, as I grasped it, it tore,And the purple dye ran from itLike bloodUpon the ground. VII wished to post a letter,But although I paid much,Still the letter was overweight.“What is in this package?” said the clerk,“It is very heavy.”“Yes,” I said,“And yet it is only a dried fruit.” VIII had made a kite,On it I had pasted golden stars And white torches,And the tail was spotted scarlet like a tiger-lily,And very long.I flew my kite,And my soul was contentedWatching it flash against the concave of the sky.My friends pointed at the clouds;They begged me to take in my kite.But I was happySeeing the mirror shock of itAgainst the black clouds.Then the lightning cameAnd struck the kite.It puffed—blazed—fell.But still I walked on,In the drowning rain,Slowly winding up the string.
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof. Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. All of the night was quite barred out except An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, that night, as in I went. And salted was my food, and my repose, Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round, Astir with restless, hurried life and spannedBy arches that with thund’rous trains resound, And throbbing wires that galvanize the land; Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand;The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found; The last burlesque is playing in the Strand—In modern prose all poetry seems drowned.Yet in ten thousand homes this April night An ancient People celebrates its birth To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright, Its God shall be the God of all the earth.
The terrible sons of the mighty race Shout in thunder the Lord is King, The angels whose figure the lightnings trace Flame to the world that the Lord was King, And seraphs whose stature is one with Space, Proclaim that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. The rushing and undulant sons of fire Fiercely cry that the Lord is King, The rustling legions with harp and lyre Sweetly tell that the Lord was King, And numberless creatures in ceaseless choir Chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. The bards who remember the songs of yore Sing aloud that the Lord is King, The sages enshrouded in mystic lore Find and proclaim that the Lord was King, And rulers of spans of the heavenly floor Cry that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. The heirs of the Torah, Thy rich bequest, Chant in joy that the Lord is King, The lordly warriors with crown and crest Crown Thee, declaring the Lord was King, And angels in fiery garments drest Repeat that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. Mellifluous orators trained of tongue Preach and teach that the Lord is King, The shimmering cherubim, radiant, young, Trumpet exultant the Lord was King, And seraphim circling have ever sung The song that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.Thy people in passionate worship cry One to another the Lord is King. In awe of the marvels beneath the sky Each explains that the Lord was King. One sound from Thy pastures ascends on high: The chant that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. Assemblies of holiness consecrate Thee with the cry that the Lord is King, Innumerous myriads iterate Only this—that the Lord was King, And flame-flashing angels enthroned in state Echo the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever. The universe throbs with Thy pauseless praise, Chorus eternal, the Lord is King. Thy glory is cried from the dawn of days, Worshippers calling the Lord was King. And ever the Saints who shall witness Thy ways Shall cry that the Lord shall be King for ever. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King for ever and ever.
Open the gates—the gates of the Temple,Swift to Thy sons, who Thy truths have displayed.Open the gates—the gates that are hidden,Swift to Thy sons, who Thy Law have obeyed.Open the gates—of the coveted Temple,Swift to Thy sons who confess and seek grace.Open the gates—of the armies celestial,Swift to Thy sons, Judah’s tearful-eyed race.Open the gates—the radiant portals,Swift to Thy sons who are lovely and pure.Open the gates—of the crown of fidelity,Swift to Thy sons who in God rest secure.
I had not thought of violets late,The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feetIn wistful April days, when lovers mateAnd wander through the fields in raptures sweet.The thought of violets meant florists' shops,And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;And garish lights, and mincing little fopsAnd cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;The perfect loveliness that God has made,—Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.And now—unwittingly, you've made me dreamOf violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.
In the dry summer field at nightfall, fireflies rise like sparks. Imagine the presence of ghosts flickering, the ghosts of young friends, your father nearest in the distance. This time they carry no sorrow,no remorse, their presence is so light. Childhood comes to you, memories of your street in lamplight, holding those last moments before bed, capturing lightning-bugs,with a blossom of the hand letting them go. Lightness returns, an airy motion over the ground you remember from Ring Around the Rosie. If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies again, not part of your stories, as unaware of you as sleep, being beautiful and quiet all around you.
somewhere in america, in a certain state of grace . . .  Patti Smith As a child I danced to the heartful, savage rhythm of the Native, the American Indian, in the Turtle Mountains, in the Round Hall, in the greasy light of kerosene lamps. As a child I danced among the long, jangle legs of the men, down  beside the whispering moccasin women, in close circles around the Old Ones, who sat at the drum, their heads tossed, backs arched  in ancient prayer. As a child I danced away from the fist, I danced toward the rhythms of life, I danced into dreams, into  the sound of flies buzzing. A deer advancing but clinging to the forest wall, the old red woman rocking in her tattered shawl, the young women bent, breasts drooping to the mouths of their young, the heat hanging heavy on the tips of our tongues, until the Sun burned the sky black, the moon made us silvery blue and all of the night sounds, all of the night sounds folded together with the buzzing still in our heads, becoming a chant of ghosts, of Crazy Horse and Wovoka and all the Endless Others, snaking through the weaving through the trees like beams of ribbons of light,  singing, we shall live again we shall live, until the Sun and the Sun and the Sun and I awaken, still a child, still dancing toward the rhythm of life.
finish, lie dead on the sorrow bed. stiff and related to your furrowed, underlined, intention . . . shit there, with the injected vellum that seeks your heart. from machine with this Wake, this egg frost beacon on the SHORE — you, Wane, U.S., Wane itches on piled money spent, tiny boil. Seem, THEN your crucified microscope, shimmering train railed on decided work. this is WAKE, this means BEGIN, your main() with her. peace, walking through city pulses, end their made up Western, singing its shore borrowed and stained with missiles. LOG warns this is magical rivers, NOT tongue to be salvaged or interred with any one place that has hers. win there — placed like dirt on the shoe place warns. all letters, all Eastern locks penciled in with dog interiors, let go the chain. Hopped up winds, and the granite falling through any retrial that was schooling-less . . . without Agamemnon warning in pushed hires and radio made PINS. on THEN to an eye full of tunnels, real I/O
There’s a dispute as to whether a name can be given to mills or not. If an essential root is given to one arm, they might be revolvers in insect’s casings, winding down a river of dirt in giving you, America, too small a thimble, the carcass of instruction and wavy, diminutive hand signals. From a cracked stone mouthing, to an unplayed game (still wrapped), to the skin of my plastic voice. There is a slow moving, not fast like the static form of urban frames. If you want (and here is IF, again, with indecision) to describe misdirected outcroppings from a battery of daylight shells, I mean light, I mean dark colored turtles, one map giving birth to another, this, flown heavy with rupture and landed after a piece was found. Not enough. There is a simple solution to your house, and my wooden block. One politic NOT on top of an Other, as one’s head is wrapped in a box, in a hole. Spittle looms swim, bide time clicks, made queues on an S, connected to separate one from a ONE, towels, in seeing an ocean first and making Balboan curves, you know there are all kinds of sticks. A brick, painted with soft hair, builds up questions to age and blacken linings, whip tailed lizards, their eyes are what implants carbonized blinking, placed alongside letters, the hold on becoming an END. Chips give sound to fingers, the Oh returning in flowing error, twice committed. Flood. Not a zero or a one, as if cornered with prostituted faces leaning outward, an Escape weighing about an army of lip collectors and fused hands and their whispers of Xs as in 2 again or more. There is the border of skin there is the border of membrane there is the border of number. Tongues firing the burned and buried. 2 and on, and THEN its disappearance. Invisibility solidified, a welt on a willow. You know a letter, a cache in a person. Memory management errors undone. Fluid as blood. Blood as a turning through time.
Something in the field is working away. Root-noise. Twig-noise. Plant of weak chlorophyll, no name for it. Something in the field has mastered distance by living too close to fences. Yellow fruit, has it pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass- noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt and chant. Something in the field. Coreopsis. I did not mean to say that. Yellow petal, has it wither-gift? Has it gorgeous rash? Leaf-loss and worried sprout, its bursting art. Some- thing in the. Field fallowed and cicada. I did not mean to say. Has it roar and bloom? Has it road and follow? A thistle prick, fraught burrs, such easy attachment. Stem- and stamen-noise. Can I lime- flower? Can I chamomile? Something in the field cannot.
This stream took a shorter course— a thread of water that makes oasis out of mud, in pooling, does not aspire to lake. To river, leave the forest, the clamorous wild. I cannot. Wherever I am, I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic, stock-still as the trees. Trickling never floods, furrows its meager path through the forest floor. There will always be a root too thirsty, moss that only swallows and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort, the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt or the meekest pond, I would absorb everything. I would drown. Water makes song of erratic forms, and I hear the living push back branches, wander off trail.
Dark thing, make a myth of yourself: all women turn into lilacs, all men grow sick of their errant scent. You could learn to build a window, to change flesh into isinglass, nothing but a brittle river, a love of bone. You could snap like a branch—No, this way
Ground zero refers to the detonation point Of a bomb of any size, from one strapped To the waist, to the Fat Man, to the Massive Ordinance Air Burst. Like the Daisy Cutter, The M.O.A.B. explodes just above the ashen clay To insure that it spreads its sentiment sideways.
Invaders invariably call themselves: a) berserkers b) marauders c) frankincense d) liberators Our enemies hate us because: a) we’re sadists b) we’re hypocrites c) we shafted them d) we value freedom Our friends hate us because: a) we’re bullies b) we hate them c) we’re hypocrites d) we value freedom Pushed to the ground and kicked by a gang of soldiers, about to be shot, you can save your life by brandishing: a) an uzi b) a crucifix c) the Constitution d) a poem A poem can: a) start a war b) stanch a wound c) titillate the masses d) shame a nation Poets are: a) clowns b) parasites c) legislators d) terrorists A nation’s standing in the world is determined by: a) its buying power b) its military might c) its cultural heritage d) God A country is rich because of: a) its enlightened population b) its political system c) its big stick d) its geography A country is poor because of: a) its ignorant population b) its political system c) its small stick d) its geography A man’s dignity is determined by: a) his appearance (skin color, height, etc) b) his willingness to use violence c) his command of English d) his blue passport Those willing to die for their beliefs are: a) idealists b) terrorists c) suckers d) insane Those willing to die for nothing are: a) principled b) patriotic c) insane d) cowards Terrorists: a) abuse language b) hit and run c) shock and awe d) rely on ingenuity Smart weapons: a) render hopeless and dormant kinetic objects b) kill softly c) save lives d) slaughter by science Pain is: a) payback for evil-doers b) a common misfortune c) compelling drama d) suck it up! Humiliation is: a) the ultimate thrill for bored perverts b) inevitable in an unequal relationship c) a fear factor d) sexy and cathartic The media’s job is: a) to seduce b) to spread c) to sell d) to drug The Internet: a) allows us to be pure minds b) connects us to distant bodies c) disconnects us from the nearest minds and bodies d) improves illiteracy Pornography is: a) a lie that exposes the truth b) a needed breather from civilization c) class warfare d) nostalgia for the garden of EdenCorrect answers: c,d,d,b,b,a,b,a,a,c,b,b,b,c,b,d,b,d,c. —If you scored 14-19, you’re a well adjusted person, a home-owner, with and income of at least $50,000 a year. —If you scored 8-13, you either rent or live with your parents, never exercise, and consume at least a 6-pack a day. —if you scored 7 or less, you’re in trouble with the FBI and/or the IRS, cut your own hair, and use public transit as your primary mode of transportation.
I. One reason to eat is to not speak, said the man with a mouth full of food. When she told me that my silence was worse than her silence, I agreed, even though she was wrong. It is shallow to fight for things, he said, but sometimes it can be fun. You look like a tunnel, she said, and kissed my lips. What I like least about words is their capacity to invoke more words, she said, as she trashed my poem. According to the New York Times, gay teenage boys want monogamy while heterosexual boys prefer “friends with benefits.” My psychiatrist told me it was okay to lie about the important details of my life. As a result, I fell in love with her. I stopped seeing her as a patient but when we dated the spark was gone. If, as Cioran writes, existing is plagiarism, then what is death? I was lost all night in the forest only to discover these were streets I knew quite well. In theOresteia, Apollo argues that the true parent is “he who mounts.” Because the Furies fail to ask what happens when the woman is on top, they lose the case. In evaluations, a student wrote: “Daniel would be a better teacher if he wasn’t such an asshole.” Weren’t such an asshole, I wanted to tell her, though as her comments were supposed to be anonymous, I could not admit that I recognized her handwriting. On a first date, I innocently went to the bathroom when the check arrived. She thought I was trying to stick her with the bill but when she realized I was unaware of dating etiquette she was charmed. We had a nice kiss goodnight, but afterwards I was so flustered I went to a bar by myself, drank whiskey, and smoked my first cigarette in years.II. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth,  even though I knew it was all a lie. In the end all that matters  is the truth content of a lie.
They dropped the charges of homicide, filed new charges of terrorism, dropped the charges of terrorism, filed new charges of public nudity, dropped the charges of public nudity, filed new charges of lewd and lascivious behavior. A spokesman for the FBI said they found him on the hood of an SUV in a part of town known as the “Fruit Loop”. His penis was in another man’s mouth and in the front seat were vials containing a rare strand of bacteria known to cause blindness in rats. They dropped the charges of public nudity and filed new charged of sodomy. A spokesman for the police department said they found him with his pants down and it appeared that his penis was in another man’s anus. But since they could not prove to what degree his penis had penetrated the other man’s anus they dropped the charges of sodomy and filed new charges of assault and battery. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said that he assaulted a worker from the Department of Public Health who used a Q-tip to extract from inside of his urethra a rare strand of bacteria capable of causing pneumonia in chickens. He was placed in solitary confinement and a spokesman for the Department of Corrections suggested that he was a serious threat to the community. They examined the strand of bacteria found in his urethra but since they did not properly store the bacteria in the appropriate container with the appropriate seals and signatures they could not charge him with intent to commit crimes against humanity. They dropped the charges of intent to commit crimes against humanity and filed new charges of larceny. They said he had stolen the rare strand of bacteria from his employer and that he had done so with the deliberate and malicious intent to harm as many civilians as possible. They tried to verify for whom he had worked during the given time period but since they could not verify the name or location of his employer they dropped the charges of larceny and filed new charges of tax fraud. When they discovered he was privately employed, they dropped the charges of tax fraud and filed new charges of theft with an unregistered weapon. A grocery store in his neighborhood had recently been robbed and the cashier said that the thief had carried the same model of weapon that the man in question kept beneath his bed in case of emergencies. They dropped the charges of theft with an unregistered weapon when they discovered the cashier was partially blind and that the weapon the man in question kept beneath his bed in case of emergencies had been properly purchased and registered. When they found on his bookshelves several works of fiction with blind characters, including King Lear, Oedipus Rex, Endgame, and Blindness by José Saramago, they accused him of conspiring to use the rare strand of bacteria to blind not only the grocer but the seven other blind residents of his neighborhood, each of whom had had perfectly good eyesight until he came to town. They asked him why he had so many books about blindness, but he refused to answer the question. They asked him why he had so many books about blindness and when his attorney arrived the man in question said that he did not know why he had so many books about blindness. They asked his friends and family why he had so many books about blindness. No one knew why he had so many books about blindness and they accused him in the press of anti-social behavior. When his neighbors testified that the man in question enjoyed society as much as he enjoyed a quiet night at home, they dropped the charges of anti-social behavior. They dropped the charges of anti-social behavior and filed new charges of jaywalking. An undercover police officer filmed him with a video camera as he illegally crossed the street. At the advice of his attorney, he pleaded guilty to the charges of jaywalking. He agreed to pay the fine.
Ain’t nothing more beautiful than a French diplomat in an Italian suit discussing the intimate ties between poetry and constipation with a United States Senator in a discount blazer from the Men’s Wearhouse bought especially for the occasion of proposing the Anti-Chimera Act, a prime indicator that if children were once the future, they are not the past, which is growing hairier every moment, so as to keep us from penetrating its insides, which we must nibble on as if nibbling on donuts, by which I mean rubrics, glittering rubrics in the dry heat of an empty test bank full of raccoons with flexible snouts and long tails that materialize in the shrubbery as thick-set stocky fraternity brothers suicide bomb colleges full of free thinking mavericks with tuning forks in their ears and rubber dicks in their pockets, a veritable cure for loneliness and its side effects, including the desire to fantasize about mythological genitalia in the pants of pundits who declare that to be alive is fundamentally okay as long as poets test their verses on guinea pigs before submitting them to us humans as we exit the amalgamated marshland of surplus value and enter an ordinary evening on which ordinary people dream of lubricated condoms for dogs, of mules who practice the pull-out method, of birth control pills for cats, of floating trousers that haunt city squares in search of red-walled boutiques where silk stockings and boot-cut chinos fight for the attention of disembodied legs while merchants masturbate, aroused by visions of painless castration, aroused by hands without arms scribbling conjunctions into dusty ceilings, aroused by hands without arms stirring infinite bowls of soup, aroused by module-makers who insist only on the metaphorical value of money as represented in the hieroglyphics painted on the walls of financiers who accumulate capital through the unjustified sexual behavior of adulterous women who appear asymmetrically—legs over heads, hands coming out of butts—in public ceremonies in which syringes suck out erroneous feelings from their bodies while suits and ties stuff bones and ears into decorative bottles and jars.
When from my counted days I think of times still owed to me by tyrant love, and my temples anticipate a frost beyond the tribulation of my years I see love’s counterfeit joys are a poison reason sips from a glass raised to those for whom hunger dare appear in the guise of my honeyed daydream. What potion of forgetting pleases reason that by neglect of its duty so toils against itself for satisfaction? But my affliction seeks solace, measure of the desire to be remedied and the desire to overcome it love’s remedy ……………………………………………………………… Cuando imagino de mis breves días los muchos que el tirano amor me debe y en mi cabello anticipar la nieve, más que en los años las tristezas mías, veo que son sus falsas alegrías veneno que en cristal la razón bebe por quien el apetito se le atreve vestido de mis dulces fantasías. ¿Qué hierbas del olvido ha dado el gusto a la razón, que sin hacer su oficio quiere contra razón satisfacelle? Mas consolarse quiere mi disgusto, que es el deseo del remedio indicio, y el remedio de amor, querer vencelle. [Lope de Vega, 1562—1635]
When I stop to consider my calling, remark the places a wayward temper impelled me I’ve found in light of where I wandered lost the most appalling evils could have befallen; but when I disregard the journey it’s hard to even fathom I endured so much affliction; what’s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ve seen my wariness go with them. I’ll come to my end, for I surrendered artless to someone with the science to dispel and destroy me if so inclined, else the know-how to want to; for if, with this very hand I could slaughter myself, why—not on my account but because so suited—would my enemy do otherwise? ………………………………………………………………… Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado y a ver los pasos por do me han traído, hallo, según por do anduve, perdido, que la mayor mal pudiera haber llegado; mas cuando del camino estó olvidado, a tanto mal no sé por dó he venido; sé que me acabo, y más he yo sentido ver acabar conmigo mi cuidado. Yo acabaré, que me entregué sin arte a quien sabrá perderme y acabarme si quisiere, y aún sabrá querello; que, pues mi voluntad puede matarme, la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte, pudiendo, ¿qué hará sino hacello? [Garcilaso de la Vega, 1501?-1536]
There is someone who knows. In no beginning  was there just one language nor did the surface gleam with nineteen hours of music as in our body-heat through the head & limbs the thumb and index finger to form the ovular OH of our self-fathering fable war flail ≈ morning star The original garden erudite, lush lawn, & round of trees behind the limestone square, night rain out of paper, under the lights of the narrow path up the rose hill. From a dark corner rising now to write orange with a knife over green of the elusive wall no one is watching
I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure— of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one— a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table— trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me. Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.
I consider the woman’s choice in liberating a red dress with pale-green sandals. My penury depresses me into a staring contest with a melting ice cube. A friend excited my husband with an invitation to pilot a boat with powerful thrusters. My gift of chocolate in pink cellophane failed to make the blonde smile. Consequently, I remind the party-goers that Trans World Airlines painted a new night with nebulae. I could be happy in Alphabet City, buildings crumbling around my notepad. I could be happy sipping iced tea while admiring the seamless face of a pool. I could be happy gurgling back at an infant dribbling green saliva down his chin. I could be happy downing Absolut gimlets (ice-cold, no ice) in a neighborhood bar with pool players providing the music, or a hotel whose walls are laminated with mahogany and where tuxedos prevail. I could be happy with your hand on my waist as you try to identify the scent hollowing my throat. An entire landscape in Antarctica disappears, evaporates until salt becomes the only debris. There are keys to everything, even handcuffs. You could have been happy, too.
HOMONCULUS: n., pl. –li 2. a fully formed, miniature human body believed, according to some medical theories of the 16th and 17th centuries, to be contained in the spermatozoon  — The Random House Dictionary of the English Language   The political contributions of whatever he creates are coincidental and, in any event, irrelevant. The musician may not be relying on mathematical acoustics in his calculations. He may be performing for auditoriums; thus, his physical realities change as he travels. Music seems inevitable. Every question entails some notion of what is being asked. The motley nature is not alien. Certain sounds guide the vulgar mind to notions not anticipated by those creating the sounds. A bartender concocts an Absolut Citroen gimlet, ice-cold but no ice, with one hand; “with the other hand he gathers up gonorrhea.” Most of what is imparted is not verbal. Certain philosophers must be translated before their audiences can respond. The mind is made visible through unconscious functions. The academic is always searching for the plumber. He is faithful to innocence. Order is space and space is order. Order is space and space is order. After being disaffected with Impressionism, Renoir felt he had to learn to draw and paint all over again. In Germany, an aesthetic movement became political and was forced to renounce art without realizing a decision had been made. A philosopher did not realize that the man who expelled poetry from well-ordered republics used to tremble at the thought of doing so, thereby creating through that very act a sublime poetry.
“I do not know English” —from “I Do Not” by Michael Palmer “Marunong akong mag-ingles” (I do know English) —any 21st-century Filipino poet I do know English. I do know English for I have something to say about this latest peace stirring between a crack that’s split a sidewalk traversing a dusty border melting at noon beneath an impassive sun. I do know English and, therefore, when hungry, can ask for more than minimum wage, pointing repeatedly at my mouth and yours. Such a gesture can only mean what it means: I do not want to remain hungry and I am looking at your mouth. I do know English and still will not ask permission. I shall call you “Master” with a lack of irony; lift my cotton blouse; cup my breasts to offer them to your eyes, your lips, your tongue; keen at the moon hiding at 11 a.m. to surface left tendon on my neck. For your teeth. And so on. No need to decipher your response—and if you wish, go ahead: spank me. I do know English. Therefore I can explain this painting of a fractured grid as the persistent flux of our “selves” as time unfolds. There is a way to speak of our past or hopes for the future, the hot-air balloon woven from a rainbow’s fragments now floating over St. Helena; your glasses I nearly broke when, afterwards, you flung me to the floor as violence is extreme and we demand the extreme from each other; your three moans in a San Francisco hallway after I fell to my knees; your silence in New York as I knocked on your door. There is a way to articulate your silence—a limousine running over a child on the streets of Manila and Shanghai. And Dubai. There is a way to joke about full-haired actors running for President and the birth of a new American portrait: “Tight as a Florida election.” I do know English and so cannot comprehend why you write me no letters even as you unfailingly read mine. Those where I write of the existence of a parallel universe to create a haven when your silence persists in this world I was forced to inherit. Which does not mean I cannot differentiate between a reflection and a shadow, a threnody and a hiccup, the untrimmed bougainvillea bush mimicking a fire and the lawn lit by a burning cross. I can prove Love exists by measuring increased blood flow to the brain’s anterior cingulated cortex, the middle insula, the putamen and the caudate nucleus. Nor is “putamen” a pasta unless I confirm to you that my weak eyesight misread “puttanesca” as the crimson moon began to rise, paling as it ascends for fate often exacts a price. I can see an almond eye peer behind the fracture on a screen and know it is not you from the wafting scent of crushed encomiums. I can remind you of the rose petals I mailed to you after releasing them from the padded cell between my thighs. I slipped the petals inside a cream envelope embossed in gold with the seal of a midtown Manhattan hotel whose façade resembles a seven-layered wedding cake. Which we shall share only through the happiness of others. Which does not cancel Hope. I can recite all of your poems as I memorized them through concept as well as sound. I speak of a country disappearing and the impossibility of its replacement except within the tobacco-scented clench of your embrace. I can tell you I am weary of games, though they continue. Manila’s streets are suffused with protesters clamoring for an adulterer’s impeachment. Their t-shirts are white to symbolize their demand for “purity.” Space contains all forms, which means it lack geometry. My lucid tongue has tasted the dust from monuments crumbling simply because seasons change. Because I do know English, I have been variously called Miss Slanted Vagina, The Mail Order Bride, The One With The Shoe Fetish, The Squat Brunette Who Wears A Plaid Blazer Over A Polka-Dot Blouse, The Maid. When I hear someone declare war while observing a yacht race in San Diego, I understand how “currency” becomes “debased.” They have named it The Tension Between The Popular Vote And The Electoral College. I do know English.
* Lime coats the thick sheaf of paper crossed by thin, parallel lines of a darker green. They approximate the rippling surface of a river pregnant with water and smoothly traveling towards an orb of sea salt. His pen is a black crow against a sunlit sky. Its ink is harsh, blotting paper, even with the neat economy of motion in how the ink is laid. For a moment, a golden spark glints from a cufflink struck by a sun ray. Meticulously, the ink travels from point to point, dipping, then rising, then dipping again until it is halted by one of the four walls of a square. The paper mottles. He lays the pen besides the projection of a likelihood as an ache begins between his shoulder blades. As he rolls his head in a circle, he considers the placement of a decimal point. Lastly, he considers the definition of a percentage to be the probability of error instead of the probability of an answer’s relevance. * It seems a secretary with large hair is shuffling until he notices that it is only a tight skirt hampering her thighs. He begins to feel the papers stacked on a crudenza curling their edges to protest being ignored. A lock of hair falls in front of his eyeballs and he notices a white feather. He immediately comprehends how long it has been since scissors tip-toed about his scalp. Bereft, he looks at his desk and is astonished at how still his fingers lie atop a yellow pad—he would have sworn his fear would have left his empty palms quaking at how time is consistently ending. * He looks up to be surprised at midnight “a done deal.” His hands seek release and he wipes them against the pin-striped wool encasing his thighs. A woman with a blurred face atop a blue silk shirt pops her head through the door. He knows she is speaking but his gaze cannot locate the source of the buzzing. He feels a fleeting thought of inebriated bees, how they might blunder with pollen gratuitously. His gaze falls to the circle of diamonds on her left, blue-veined wrist. He takes a chance and replies, “Yes.” It is sufficient to make her go away so that all that remains across his threshold is the shadow of a door. He feels he must complete the job by shutting a door but he is so tired. *Was I ever a boy? he asks himself as he watches the Chairman hold hands with his tall wife. The wife smiles but it is clear she is dangling her legs over a pedestal. When he reaches them for an obligatory greeting, he realizes (without being surprised at the certainty of this thought) that she smells expensive. He hears her emerald earrings tinkle like wind chimes. His breath is the breeze against her pale, seamless skin. She smiles at him and he feels even smaller. His breath is the flutter of a Trochilidae’s wings. When he next turns to the Chairman, he is buffeted by the Chairman’s smug grin. * He tattoos his fingerprints on the most random of surfaces. It happens that way each morning when he must read six newspapers beside The Wall Street Journal. One is in Japanese. Another in German. He cannot recall the last time he was lucid. He cuts himself shaving whenever the mirror reminds him that his eyes are covered by red cracks. They remind him of bigger faultlines just waiting to widen. He knows he will fold into himself during the fall. He feels that avoidance should be under his control. But it is not happening and he is often immobilized by this failure. * I should fall in love, he thinks, as he reads a worn newspaper clipping. It has traveled throughout the firm and reached him at last. He flinches at the leers clinging to the message. His fingers feel wet though the clipping is dry. The clipping is about Alan “Swift” Thiessen, the man who once sat in an office down the hall. Once, Swift was a tight muscle tightly sheathed in Italian suits with double-breasted blazers, a sartorial sun amidst the human commodities forging together a partnership. It was an eccentricity allowed by Swift’s ability to bleed rain from desiccated clients. Once, Swift also played squash every day. Now, Swift is clad in rough cotton and measures each passing moment in a jail, staring at rust and bricks. The newspaper reports how Swift went too far with a young, blonde boy sheathed in leather with metal studs. Still, The Investment Banker suggests to himself that he fall in love. Despite Swift’s ignominious end, he feels that Swift still bested him by having felt certain compulsions about which he can only remain curious. * At 4 a.m. he is not displeased to be alone walking the streets. At 4 a.m., he feels that the hour offers a certain excuse for his loneliness. Now, he is walking in the aftermath of an unseasonal rain so that the light is clean and the pavement shines from the wash of water. The tall buildings conspire to maintain sufficient lights to surround him like Christmas. He notices a white flower in a bud vase by a window he passes. It is unexpected but pleasing and he pauses to think, Hello! He knows he is imagining things but he senses the flower open its petals a tad wider. His nostrils flare at the inexplicable perfume of jasmine. He looks forward to winter when snow will cover the city. Even in a blizzard, the snow is constant. They never fail to cling softly to him as he walks in their midst. He feels, It is such a loving feeling.
Home from town the two of them sit looking over what they have bought spread out on the kitchen table like gifts to themselves. She holds a card of buttons against the new dress material and asks if they match. The hay is dry enough to rake, but he watches her empty the grocery bag. He reads the label on a grape jelly glass and tries on the new straw hat again.
I used to mock my father and his chums for getting up early on Sunday morning and drinking coffee at a local spot but now I’m one of those chumps. No one cares about my old humiliations but they go on dragging through my sleep like a string of empty tin cans rattling behind an abandoned car. It’s like this: just when you think you have forgotten that red-haired girl who left you stranded in a parking lot forty years ago, you wake up early enough to see her disappearing around the corner of your dream on someone else’s motorcycle roaring onto the highway at sunrise. And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit café full of early morning risers where the windows are covered with soot and the coffee is warm and bitter.
Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.   What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time. If a star at any time may tell us: Now.
Earth’s Wrath at our assaults is slow to come But relentless when it does. It has to do With catastrophic change, and with the limit At which one order more of Magnitude Will bring us to a qualitative change And disasters drastically different From those we daily have to know about.   As with the speed of light, where speed itself Becomes a limit and an absolute; As with the splitting of the atom And a little later of the nucleus; As with the millions rising into billions— The piker’s kind in terms of money, yes, But a million2 in terms of time and space As the universe grew vast while the earth Our habitat diminished to the size Of a billiard ball, both relative To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves, The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.   We stand now in the place and limit of time Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream, And nightmares still contained in sleeping dark Seem on the point of bringing into day The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up. One or another nightmare may come true, And what to do then? What in the world to do?
My brother was on his way to a dental appointment when the second plane hit four stories below the office where he worked. He’s never said anything about the guy who took football bets, how he liked to watch his secretary walk, the friends he ate lunch with, all the funerals. Maybe, shamed by his luck, he keeps quiet,afraid someone might guess how good he feels, breathing.
Come, let’s go in. The ticket-taker has shyly grinned and it’s almost time, Lovely One. Let’s go in. The wind tonight’s too wild. The sky too deep, too thin. Already it’s time. The lights have dimmed. Come, Loveliest. Let’s go in and know these bodies we do not have to own, passing quietly as dreams, as snow. Already leaves are falling and music begins. Lovely One, it’s time. Let’s go in.
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far, Before you agonise them in farewell? Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains, Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins, Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell. Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float On those cool waters where we used to dwell,I would have rather felt you round my throat, Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
XXXVIII Over the cliffs of the hillside: the sun then below in the valley the earth covered with flowers Zurita enamored friend takes in the sun of photosynthesis Zurita will now never again be friend since 7 P.M. it's been getting dark Night is the insane asylum of the plants XLII Enclosed with the four walls of a bathroom: I looked up at the ceiling and began to clean the walls and the floor the sink all of it You see: Outside the sky was God and he was sucking at my soul —believe me! I wiped my weeping eyes LVII In the narrow broken bed restless all night like a spent candle lit again I thought I saw Buddha many times At my side I felt a woman's gasp for air but Buddha was only the pillows and the woman is sleeping the eternal dream LXIII Today I dreamed that I was King they were dressing me in black-and-white spotted pelts Today I moo with my head about to fall as the church bells' mournful clanging says that milk goes to market LXXXV They've shaved my head they've dressed me in these gray wool rags —Mom keeps on smoking I am Joan of Arc They catalog me on microfilm XCII The glass is transparent like water Dread of prisms and glass I circle the light so as not to lose myself in them
Speak of the whistle of Atacama  the wind erases like snow  the color of that plain i. The Desert of Atacama soared over infinities of  deserts to be there ii. Like the wind feel it pass whistling through the  leaves of the trees iii. Look at it become transparent faraway and just  accompanied by the wind iv. But be careful: because if ultimately the Desert  of Atacama were not where it should be the  whole world would begin to whistle through the  leaves of the trees and when we'd see ourselves  in the same never transparent whistles  in the wind swallowing the color of this pampa
Arid plains do not dream  No one has ever managed to see  Those chimerical pampas i. The landscapes are convergent and divergent in the  Desert of Atacama ii. Over the convergent and divergent landscape Chile  is convergent and divergent in the Desert of Atacama iii. That's why what's there never was there and if it  were to stay where it is it would see its own life turn  around until being the chimerical plains deserted  enlightened fading away like them iv. And when the convergent and divergent landscapes  of the Desert of Atacama unfold themselves  all of Chile will have been the life beyond because  unlike Atacama they are already extending themselves  like a dream the deserts of our own chimera  over there in these plains of hell
i. Let's look then at the Desert of Atacama ii. Let's look at our loneliness in the desert So that desolate before these forms the landscape becomes a cross extended over Chile and the loneliness of my form then sees the redemption of the other forms: my own Redemption in the Desert iii. Then who would speak of the redemption of my form iv. Who would tell of the desert's loneliness So that my form begins to touch your form and your form that other form like that until all of Chile is nothing but one form with open arms: a long form crowned with thorns v. Then the Cross will be nothing but the opening arms  of my form vi. We will then be the Crown of Thorns in the Desert vii. Then nailed form to form like a Cross  extended over Chile we will have seen forever  the Final Solitary Breath of the Desert of Atacama
The sunbox lies in pieces, its strips of aluminum foil flaking away to the wind, tanning platform broken up for kindling. Planted grass sprouts where the path once sharply turned to the left circumventing underbrush, there the man (a boy then) stumbled on beauty’s wrath: pale sisters yelling him off, scrambling for clothes to cover.All has been cleared, thick cat briar raked into piles and set ablaze, invincible ailanthus stacked for dump. All’s clear and calm save his childhood rushing head- long through tearing thickets, and the sisters, barely glimpsed against reflective flashing, laughing after him, thenlying back to catch all the sullen autumn sun they can.
If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over, for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?” I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror. Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition, and the darkest days must I praise.
The morning after my death we will sit in cafés but I will not be there I will not be * There was the great death of birds the moon was consumed with fire the stars were visible until noon. Green was the forest drenched with shadows the roads were serpentine A redwood tree stood alone with its lean and lit body unable to follow the cars that went by with frenzy a tree is always an immutable traveller. The moon darkened at dawn the mountain quivered with anticipation and the ocean was double-shaded: the blue of its surface with the blue of flowers mingled in horizontal water trails there was a breeze to witness the hour * The sun darkened at the fifth hour of the day the beach was covered with conversations pebbles started to pour into holes and waves came in like horses. * The moon darkened on Christmas eve angels ate lemons in illuminated churches there was a blue rug planted with stars above our heads lemonade and war news competed for our attention our breath was warmer than the hills. * There was a great slaughter of rocks of spring leaves of creeks the stars showed fully the last king of the Mountain gave battle and got killed. We lay on the grass covered dried blood with our bodies green blades swayed between our teeth. * We went out to sea a bank of whales was heading South a young man among us a hero tried to straddle one of the sea creatures his body emerged as a muddy pool as mud we waved goodbye to his remnants happy not to have to bury him in the early hours of the day We got drunk in a barroom the small town of Fairfax had just gone to bed cherry trees were bending under the weight of their flowers: they were involved in a ceremonial dance to which no one had ever been invited. * I know flowers to be funeral companions they make poisons and venoms and eat abandoned stone walls I know flowers shine stronger than the sun their eclipse means the end of times but I love flowers for their treachery their fragile bodies grace my imagination’s avenues without their presence my mind would be an unmarked grave. * We met a great storm at sea looked back at the rocking cliffs the sand was going under black birds were leaving the storm ate friends and foes alike water turned into salt for my wounds. * Flowers end in frozen patterns artificial gardens cover the floors we get up close to midnight search with powerful lights the tiniest shrubs on the meadows A stream desperately is running to the ocean *
my house’s stairway is seized with vertigo. Matter having forsaken its laws, we land in hell, ascending to heaven.   *   Shadows move along ladders under the silence of ordinary things there is another silence: it belongs neither to the leaves nor to the dead   with a crown of birds circling  him  a child is running in an abandoned  house  the stairway takes the measure of  its own emptiness   I myself am the stairway that Time has used in its funeral course   wheels lift water in the  gardens of Hama  and come down  not waiting for the river  to put out the fire   Here we are left with the river Seine and Paris’s poisons. I prefer gardens where linden trees get ready for a lunar voyage    The stairway that separates my room from my memory whispers in my ear . . .    I am not at the mercy of men since trees live in my fantasies men and trees long for fire and call for the rain I love rains which carry desires  to  oceans.   Between one airplane and another space is disoriented stars sneak into holes and brides go naked to wells    their innocence wanes under our eyes You and I are made from a worm-eaten wood     The Word has sunk we are left with no cry gesture  or gaze  silence to us is forbidden.   We are threatened neither by life nor by death nor forced to admire the Spring    I found earth-castles on the edge of the desert’s torrents I took their marble stairs but could not find my way either up or down then I understood that I was in a state of non-reason and non-madness and that the gardens of Andalusia were standing ready to die.   *   Two cities Two tears  Let insanity keep between  its skirts  legs  within its black eyes  the fright of my adolescence  and the nocturnal walk on the hills:  which hill?  I mean the kingdom that a man carries  in his gut when  his love’s fulfilled.  Two cities which are neither Beirut  nor Damascus  two tears: neither of alcohol nor of  rain  Yes there has been a truck  and a blue-eyed woman  from Russia  —grey olive tree—  I was a butterfly caught by  a fire:  neither the day’s not the night’s  but the  incandescence that radiates  from the body like a  receding sickness,  Let tombs stay open!   *   The stairway which leads to my room borrows its metals from Babylon The Prophet’s Ascension had two movements we fell into whirlpools of mud and the wind followed his horse A tempest went after the sun’s steps The Prophet swam through waves of clouds a river of gold carried his vessel and away from the sun he reached Paradise a Paradise made of light.   The stairway which leads to my room leads to an observatory I own two telescopes to observe stars and black holes and take mechanized stairs which advance with no advance   my hair spins with sunflowers   *   Illegitimate is this linden tree which shakes by my door   let us get ready for Hell!   *   Cursed be messengers tossing about water’s tranquility and building forest fences   Oh that the wind go quicker than us! that we be smothered by light!    This linden tree standing by my door weights heavy on my days I will finally marry it and we shall bring children condemned to terror   this tree looks at me with insistence: It will be kept waiting until Time’s end.
In the dark irritation of the eyes there is a snake hiding In the exhalations of Americans there is a crumbling empire In the foul waters of the rivers there are Palestinians OUT OUT of its borders pain has a leash on its neck In the wheat stalks there are insects vaccinated against bread In the Arabian boats there are sharks shaken with laughter In the camel’s belly there are blind highways OUT OUT of TIME there is spring’s shattered hope In the deluge on our plains there are no rains but stones
When the living rot on the bodies of the dead When the combatants’ teeth become knives When words lose their meaning and become arsenic When the aggressors’ nails become claws When old friends hurry to join the carnage When the victors’ eyes become live shells When clergymen pick up the hammer and crucify When officials open the door to the enemy When the mountain peoples’ feet weigh like elephants When roses grow only in cemeteries When they eat the Palestinian’s liver before he’s even dead When the sun itself has no other purpose than being a shroud the human tide moves on . . .
Where do you want ghosts to reside? In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares We burned continents of silence the future of nations the breathing of the fighters got thicker became like oxen’s there is in that breath sparkles of scorched flesh and the fainting of stars we crucify Gilgamesh on a TANK Viking II reaches Mars Imam Ali dances over a nuclear blast cursed are the clouds which repel water cursed are the Arabs who fell tall and haggard eucalyptus trees
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches, and have to choose between the starving month’s nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter? If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets into the air and harvest the fog. Hunger opens you to illiteracy, thirst makes clear the starving pattern, the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses, the angel stops whispering for a moment— The secret night could already be over, you will have to listen very carefully— You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—
This unfinished business of my childhood this emerald lake from my journey’s other side haunts hierarchies of heavens a palm forest fell overnight to make room for an unwanted garden ever since fevers and swellings turn me into a river the streets were steep winds were running ahead of ships . . . There was indeed the death of birds the moon had passed away.* The morning after his death pursuing him beyond his bitter end his mother came to his grave: she removed his bones out of their pattern and ditched them into mud: women came at night and claimed Rimbaud their own that night there was much thunder it was awesome * Laurels and lilacs bloom around my head because I stood up to the sun You see the Colorado River runs between flowered banks I repeat my journeys to seek the happiness that overcame your absence I was happy not to love you anymore until the sunset reached the East and broke my raft apart there were other rivers underground covered with dead flowers it was cold it was cold yes it was cold. * Under a combination of pain and machine-gun fire flowers disappeared they are in the same state of non-being as Emily Dickinson We the dead have conversation in our gardens about our lack of existence. * The gardener is planting blue and white flowers some angel moved in with me to flee the cold temperature on earth are rising but we wear upon us some immovable frost everyone carries his dying as a growing shadow. * I left the morning paper by the coffee cup the heat was 85 like the year and I went to the window to find that flowers had bloomed overnight to replace the bodies felled in the war the enemy had come with fire and ruse to stamp the names of the dead in the gardens of Yohmor It is not because spring is too beautiful that we’ll not write what happens in the dark. * A butterfly came to die between two stones at the foot of the Mountain the mountain shed shadows over it to cover the secret of death.*
to be reminded of the failing mainspring not sudden silence after the extreme figure but the relative a grimace told him to push the articulation farther the yet green used marks a tongues -width to tally a different sound preceded every word then took to term to feel hips as if new tangents were bolting
iridescence as old story, that brought cold from deep a chord moves into an upper chamber among rival unknowns declension toward one end—the merest light-sensitive dot a perfect world the strokes same light value runny, evened illuminations came from the plant the signal blinked search for asylum carried on in an inner distortion
a perfect world a trail widens out the code of indents channels serving both prey and interpreters arms back, re- laxed nerves as in a vat a perfect world placed hand on the breathing field the choices are circled until so dark they must be chosen over someone in estranged weather passed past “these doors don’t”
a perfect world living manifests of nipple and tip worked back into the locus one had thought delivered rectangles seep with the slight growing, to walk out onto them a perfect world the identities traced above a ground print as enlarged location, geographies of the whorl the smile that held no life but an erect ransom-shadow
On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line. I admired your style, but not enough to take my eyes off the bank that served as our center-field fence.   Years passed, three leagues of organized ball, no few lives. I could homer into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors, and still you stressed the same technique, the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch about basics never changing, and I never learned what you were laying down.   Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap, let this be the sign I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.
I climbed the roll of hay to watch the heronin the pond. He waded a few steps out,then back, thrusting his beak under water, pulling it up empty, but only once.Later I walked the roads for miles, certain he’d be there when I returned. How is it for him, day after day, his brittle legs rising from warm green scum, his graceful neck curled, damp in the bright heat? It’s a dull world. Every day, the same roads, the sky, the dust, the barn caving into itself, the tin roof twisted and scattered in the yard. Again, the bank covered with oxeye daisy that turns to spiderwort, to chicory, and at last to goldenrod. Each year, the birds— thick in the air and darting in wild numbers— grow quiet, the grasses thin, the light leaves earlier each day. The heron stood stone-still on my spot when I returned. And then, his wings burst open, lifting the steel- blue rhythm of his body into flight. I touched the warm hay. Hoping for a trace of his wild smell, I cupped my hands over my face: nothing but the heat of fields and skin. It wasn’t long before the world began to breathe the beat of ordinary hours, stretching out again beneath the sky.
He asked me if I had a choice what kind of bird would I choose to be. I know what he thought I’d say since he tried to end my sentences half the time anyway. Something exotic he thought. He thought maybe macaw. That would fit all loudmouthed and primary colored he would think. (He thinks too much I always thought.) But really at heart I’m more don’t laugh now  an L B J  little brown job except except I’m not the flit from branch to branch type such a waste of energy all that wing flap and scritch scritch scratch. Really now can you see me seed pod clamped between my beak like some landowner, Havana cigar clenched between his teeth? No I think not I think green heron. You ask why? Personality mainly. That hunched look wings tucked to neck waiting waiting in the sun on a wide slab of rock alongside a slow river like some old man up from a bad night’s dream where he’s seen his coffin and you say to himHave a nice day and he says Make me. Oh you want looks I’ll give you looks: long olive green feathers a trace of iridescence I could stand going out iridescent chestnut sides and head a black crown yes a crown something regal to flash when you get too close dark bill bright yellow legs and that creamy streak down my throat and pecs good  not great but good pecs just enough for a quick hop to the next. The best part no sexual dimorphism male female both alike endless possibilities.
Dusk to dawn, sleek skunks enjoy avocados in my yard. I give wide berth. Before the first jogger leaves her prints on pavement, tough raccoons appear. They pretend they don’t hear my keys click but they peek to make sure it’s me. Foxes play hide-and-seek, sometimes on our lawn, other times across the street, but never after seven; and brazen squirrels eye me from the center of the street, dare me to approach. Will this be a day for Catalina eddies, clouds stacked, catching like magnets in a liquid air swirl? Or will it blow a fierce Santa Ana, days of fires in the hills, smoldering chaparral, winds so fierce birds do low-crawls? I cast a spell for Santa Anas the shallow coast a censer mixed with black sage, Torrey Pine, Engelmann oak—precious oils to fumigate the San Diego skies, the annual burning pulse.
It isn’t madness but shame for wanting and shame for not having what I want, which is a kind of madness—drunk, 3 a.m., the stairwell too steep to climb. The bed can wait. I go to the pool instead, strip and step in, the smell of smoke and sweat washing from hair and skin. The wet kiss: his mouth pressed here, my neck, and there, my chest—in the end—went nowhere. Cars pass with coupled strangers. I wade. The brick wall stretches into the sky, the sky empty, save the constellations, whose lives I love—yours most of all, father of poets, whose lyre filled trees and stones with awe, the lover torn to shreds and thrown in to the river. Tonight, you’re the swan, lost among pinholes of light, your throat bitten by a black hole that takes and takes and never fills. I kick, stroke my tired arms to buoy this body. It makes ring after perfect ring, but each one breaks along the edge. You who never were, did you look down on the world at last and see that more won’t be enough? Not now. Not ever. Want picks the human heart. You’re the lie I won’t believe forever.
The driver has no knife. He has no knife, no, you think, and lower your head into his car.A ride in the rain? The dark clouds bellow. You saw him drinking at the local bar, you think, and lower your head into his car. Rain taps on the roof, falls on this familiar man: You saw him drinking at the local bar. He shrugs and offers up his empty hands. Rain taps on the roof, falls on this familiar man, and sugarcane stalks bend in the breeze. He shrugs and offers up his empty hands. As sewer pipes burst, flooding the street, and sugarcane stalks bend in the breeze, machetes swing into the green stems, low. As sewer pipes burst, flooding the street, bile is a blade at the back of your throat. Machetes swing into the green stems, low.A ride in the rain? The dark clouds bellow. Bile is blade at the back of your throat. The driver has no knife. He has no knife, no.
X. Your bags were packed and left at the door, the vase you filled with shells, wrapped in tissue, your books boxed. I have the whelk you found on shore, the small conch, intact—the point, the fine grooves— and keep it in a box with a picture of you at the beach: your hair slicked back, head cocked at an angle. Behind you, the green jacket you told me to throw away. Strewn over a chair, its arms dangle above the floor—a hole in the pocket, the elbows thin from years of use.  Y. I become each day more reckless, too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat, the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here, not one, and I’m bored with the stillness of the yellow field outside my window. And you, who cannot keep still, who can never look back, where will you go next? How will I find you? Can you feel the world pull apart, the seams loosen? What, tell me, will keep it whole, if not you? if not me? Send a postcard, picture, tell me how you’ve been.  Z. Running down the stairwell in the garden, I divide the steps by three, until my foot catches the edge, wet with rain, and my frame, flung forward by its own momentum, leans into the night as if reaching for something I didn’t know I wanted. Not the moon. No. Not the sky, suspended and limitless. Not even the tulips standing on their stems (their petals cup the air). But in the streetlamp’s circle of light, I land among them, broken. My body can’t contain itself, as blood burgeons in my hands.
Once when I was harmless and didn’t know any better, a mirror to the front of me and an ocean behind, I lay wedged in the middle of daylight, paper-doll thin, dreaming, then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint, then forgot. I sat naked on a towel on a hot June Monday. The sun etched the inside of my eyelids, while a boy dozed at my side. The smell of all oceans was around us— steamy salt, shell, and sweat, but I reached for the distant one. A tide rose while I slept, and soon I was alone. Try being a figure in memory. It’s hollow there. For truth’s sake, I’ll say she was on a beach and her eyes were closed. She was bare in the sand, long, and the hour took her bit by bit.
It happened to me once. Winter came, and snow quilted every inch. I stood on the soapbox, as I was told, and made staggering accusations. The public ignored, so I retreated behind the potted yew. I was waiting for a moment I was supposed to have on a balcony overlooking the giant, gridded landscape. The sounds I made underscored what I meant. The potted yew was the face that I wore. It was a metaphor for what could be. The public endured. I put the potted yew behind me. I made staggering an art. That wasn’t the truth though. Winter comes and negates all it covers. It doesn’t matter where I stand. The balcony is a floor without walls. The yew is a hurt that shadows. The instance lives beneath us. Not just us, everybody. The shadow hurts us. I make sounds like the truth. Fate and theft are involved. I think I told you this before. The floor is a wall that obscures. The yew is quilt without color. Shadow is a fate you involved. The yew on a balcony negates. I told you this before. I was left undone. It’s what I meant. Underneath everyone.
A cigarette kiss in the desert. The wind-proof arc of flame sparks inside the speeding Buick. Menthol: a break from the monotony of highway nicotine— most intimate of drugs. Make this mean sorrow or thermodynamics, whatever small gesture there is time for. Light another one, the vainglorious interstate dusk and ash—the long, silver tooth. This shirtless abandon, this ninety-mile-an-hour electric laugh. The edges of windshield, haphazard chatter. The clatter of the hubcap and the thunderclap: the white-hot retinal memory of your life as a Joshua tree. Permanence in the passenger seat. This long haul, this first drag—nothing like cinnamon, nothing like the iron taste on the back of your mortal tongue.
The silence that was neither Spanish  nor English  was my prayer.  —Luis Alberto Urrea   1. Last night I dreamt I was Pancho Villa— ragged, bandoliered, reckless. I dreamt my poetry at the end of a pistol, felt it kick nearly out of my hand. But this morning I awoke again white and assimilated into these cobwebs of my half-self. When did I forget my mother? Sometimes Spanish syllables creak like wobbly shopping cart wheels, I have to lean against accent, fill myself with verbs: necesitar, hablar, poder. 2. Half, medio, milkweed, Carlos Gringo, Carlos Murphy. Part mexicano, part Kentucky hillbilly, I’ve angloed my way through this life—hablando español de conveniencia, nunca pensando en la bendición.
My red pickup choked on burnt oil as I drove down Highway 99. In wind-tattered garbage bags I had packed my whole life: two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, an a pair of work boots. My truck needed work, and through the blue smoke rising from under the hood, I saw almond orchards, plums, and raisins spread out on paper trays, and acres of Mendota cotton my mother picked as a child. My mother crawled through the furrows and plucked cotton balls that filled the burlap sack she dragged, shoulder-slung, through dried-up bolls, husks, weevils, dirt clods, and dust that filled the air with thirst. But when she grew tired, she slept on her mother’s burlap, stuffed thick as a mattress, and Grandma dragged her over the land where time was told by the setting sun. . . . History cried out to me from the earth, in the scream of starling flight, and pounded at the hulls of seeds to be set free. History licked the asphalt with rubber, sighed in the windows of abandoned barns, slumped in the wind-blasted palms, groaned in the heat, and whispered its soft curses. I wanted my own history—not the earth’s, nor the history of blood, nor of memory, and not the job founded for me at Galdini Sausage. I sought my own—a new bruise to throb hard as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck.
At five o’clock in the morning, I walked to work and passed the green ponds of Horizon Park where the last bluegill, caught on the low, slight bank, panted hard in the dark mud, crushed glass, sour bottle caps, whiskey, and the iron weight of heat and smog. This haze stared through eyes gray as the broken window panes on the cheap side of town, and when this haze held you and whispered in your ears its quiet tragedies, it stole your breath quick as time. This is where men gathered to sell peanuts, buckets of oranges, and roses, and they sat on the benches and watched the trucks drive by and disappear. What I want to say is simple: a man must do more than sell roses where the bums go and beg— he must keep something holy. He must breath the winds that rustle the orchards of the valley where the white almond blooms replenish with their soft scent. He must learn from the Appaloosa when she walks in from the fields and bows her head to a trough of water that reflects nothing but her eyes and the stars. Shoulder, fat, bone, and loose sheet metal banged out a day-long cacophony. Twenty-eight pounds of spice had to be mixed before the grinder was done. Mustard powder, paprika, salt, and chili powder boiled in my nose, in my eyes, and in the red throb of my hard nicked-up knuckles. By late morning the meat defrosted, and the boxes began their ooze. Pig parts became easy to recognize. Eighty pounds of guts, kidneys, and stomach fell across my chest each time a box ripped apart. We dared not stop the music of our work: the clack of a clean pine pallet, pink meat and white fat ground to a pulp, sweetened, stuffed, and crimped, the chorizo boxed, the boxes labeled, stacked, and wrapped. At lunch, I watched Guillermo hunker over the table and dig into his stew—carrots, potatoes, celery, oxtail, and gravy, made from chili peppers and fat, smoldering in a ceramic bowl. Guillermo took out a white cotton napkin and spread it evenly across his lap, picked up a piece of sourdough ripped from a loaf and soaked the bread in the stew for a long time . . . his own tired body taking back what the work took, and he ate. He sucked on chili peppers the color of blood and took another bite of the bread. He sucked out the beef from the eyes of the bones and gnawed on the soft marrow, and he drank hot coffee sweetened con canela. “Eloisa,” he said, “can cook,” and he touched the brown lace crocheted into the edge of his cotton napkin, rubbed his gut, wiped the table, and walked out to complete his work.
At the farmer’s market in Rosarito, Mexico, a man touched my arm. He sat on a stool at a wooden table, and in the center, a blue pitcher of water beaded under the sun. Hunkered over his lap, he worked with a gouge on a block of walnut, and he blew at the dust, and the dust swirled in the breeze. Done stripping the sapwood vulnerable to rot, the man held the heart of the wood, a purple wood hard against the chisel’s cutting edge. He looked up from his work, and his gray eyes told me I must listen. “This wood must be strong or the heart cracks before the real work is done. See this?” he asked softly, and he lifted a mallet carved from a branch of apple, “Strong wood,” he said. “It wanted to be more than a tree.” He rubbed fresh walnut dust between his palms. We drank glasses of ice water, talked about life in general, and he used the pitcher, billowed and wet like the sail of a boat, to cool his neck. Later, through the soft meat of an avocado, I felt the pit longing to be free.
1. A crow gliding over a ravine was The sign his eyes were waiting for. They thought they were ready to cross. The tumbleweed listening to a cricket And seeing a line of ants snaking in Was the figure of his younger sister, Huddled by him, asking for a campfire. They made it as far as a roadside store And held their hands over the electric coils. When asked if they were going to buy anything, Their tongues broke off into halves And fell to the floor like Popsicles. 2. My father says I was born to translate What he could only nod to for years. He also says that God made a mistake By blurring out his eyes first because He can hear her asking for a blanket. She saw a church adorned with hipbones, Sun-bleached, and beautiful as curved jewelry. She dreamt of its wide doors, and after dipping Her finger in His palm, she felt His warmth. My father says that cactus needles fly And burn like the memory of lost ones, Then he tells me I was born to study The sand trails and notice when footsteps Drag and turn to knee and handprints. Those are ones I need to follow, he says.
INS officers raided a building, taking twelve illegal aliens into custody. The owner was cited for employing workers without proper identification.   1. RAID Ernesto’s boot heels are wild hooves Being roped in, left bound in the air. Carmen, slow-footed, nauseous with child, Fights them off by swinging her purse. “Pinche cabrones saben hablar español Cuando nos van a arrestar,” she says As her voice is drowned out by a row Of washing machines on their rinse cycle. Like a cat spooked out of a trash bin, Sal runs into the street. Chorus: ¡Chingado! 2. A GIRL AND HER FATHER We were driving through town, Mama, Right by where people pick up the bus When this man jumps out right in front of us. Dad hit the brakes. His eyes got this big, Mama. He was running from the law, that’s for sure. Just be glad no one got hurt, mija. Try not to think about it anymore, mija. We won’t go that way again, that’s for sure. 3. THE FACTORY Two of the old-timers talked about unions: “A trabajar, porque hablar de las uniones Sólo trae la migra de nuevo.” 4. A YOUNG MOTHER Can you imagine how many diapers We went through with the twins? The disposable ones were way too expensive, So we switched to cloth. They were great. No, We didn’t wash them. Thank God, we had a service. We just put the dirty ones in plastic bags, And they picked them up and dropped off clean ones Right on our porch every two weeks. It made things so much easier. And you know, We didn’t have to worry about those summer rashes Because their little bottoms could breathe better. If you can afford the service, just do it. Or at least do it for the first six months. It’s even good for the environment. 5. JEFE No son gallinas Esperando un huevo. ¡A trabajar! Chorus: ¡Chingado!
On the crown of his head where the fontanelle pulsed between spongy bones, a bald spot is forming, globed and sleek as a monk’s tonsure.I was the earliest pinch of civilization, the one who laced him into shoe leather when he stumbled into walking upright. “Shoes are unfair to children,” he’d grouse.Through a pane of glass that shivers when the wind kicks up I watch my son walk away.He’s out the door, up the street, around a couple of corners by now. I’m in for life. He trips; my hand flies out;I yank it back.
I want a god as my accomplice who spends nights in houses of ill repute and gets up late on Saturdays a god who whistles through the streets and trembles before the lips of his lover a god who waits in line at the entrance of movie houses and likes to drink café au lait a god who spits blood from tuberculosis and doesn’t even have enough for bus fare a god knocked unconscious by the billy club of a policeman at a demonstration a god who pisses out of fear before the flaring electrodes of torture a god who hurts to the last bone and bites the air in pain a jobless god a striking god a hungry god a fugitive god an exiled god an enraged god a god who longs from jail for a change in the order of things I want a more godlike god
crossed in despair many deserts full of hope carrying their empty fists of sorrow everywhere mouthing a bitter night of shovels and nails “you’re nothing you’re shit your home’s nowhere”— mountains will speak for you rain will flesh your bones green again among ashes after a long fire started in a fantasy island some time ago turning Natives into aliens
to forty-six UC Santa Cruz students and  seven faculty arrested in Watsonville for  showing solidarity with two thousand  striking cannery workers who were mostly  Mexican women, October 27, 1985 “Mexican” is not a noun or an adjective “Mexican” is a life long low-paying job a check mark on  a welfare police form more than a word a nail in the soul but it hurts it points it dreams it offends it cries it moves it strikes it burns just like a verb
I there has never been sunlight for this love, like a crazed flower it buds in the dark, is at once a crown of thorns and a spring garland around the temples a fire, a wound, the bitterest of fruit, but a breeze as well, a source of water, your breath—a bite to the soul, your chest—a tree trunk in the current make me walk on the turbid waters, be the ax that breaks this lock, the dew that weeps from trees if I become mute kissing your thighs, it’s that my heart eagerly searches your flesh for a new dawn
XII once again I look out your window and the world looks oddly different, maybe the fields have blossomed, or perhaps more stars have been born delirious waves caress my feet, something new, unknown, sunsets whisper in my ear as well, everywhere I find your odor, your shape you are among old-growth pines, in the fog along the coastal rocks, around the most somber of afternoons impossible to wipe away your job from my eyes, from my sad mouth— you are the universe made flesh
1. You are not going anywhere.  1.1. No one is waiting for you.  1.2. In case someone is waiting for you, you can always explain  the delay later.  1.3. Blame it on the traffic, no one else knows that you chose to walk. 2. Don’t look at the pavement, look at the things that you don’t see  when you’re indoors.  2.1. Water towers.  2.2. Cables.  2.2.1. Cables bringing other people’s voices and faces onto  TV monitors.  2.2.2. Cables bringing electricity to light bulbs and  refrigerators.  2.3. Laundry on clotheslines.  2.4. Empty cans of food.  2.4.1. With flowers growing out of them.  2.4.2. With cactuses growing out of them. 3. Feel the waves surrounding you.  3.1. Waves bringing other people’s voices to the speakers of your  sound system.  3.2. Waves of street sounds. 4. Measure how fast you can run up and down staircases; compare that  to the speed of the cars driving by. 5. When you tire, stand in the middle of the overpass.  5.1. Look down.  5.2. Try to look ahead, attempt to delineate the city’s skyline.  5.2.1. If there’s too much pollution, look down again.  5.2.2. Hold on tighter to the rail.  5.2.3. Stay there a bit longer; remember no one is waiting  for you.  5.2.4. You’re not going anywhere. 6. Through the rails you will see stories unfolding on the street.  6.1. Pay attention.  6.2. You are not they.  6.3. They are not they.  6.3.1. They are one plus one plus one, indefinitely. 7. You’re surrounded by monads going somewhere. 8. There is a purpose to their movement. 9. Desire is a Federacy.
Victor gets a real sense of power from making his own raisins. He buys pounds and pounds of grapes and leaves them to dry on the kitchen table. Theresa doesn’t want to hear about her ex-husband’s cancer. Not on Father’s Day. She takes a train all night to have breakfast with her cousin. All Sunday she rides the train back. Once Martin’s wife had left, he decided to take advantage of her space. He built a sauna where her closet was, and now sits there every morning to read the paper and Buddha. One night Helga wore her prettiest dress, thought she knew he wouldn’t be there. She drank white wine, got drunk (she was on a diet), and fell down. Later he saw the holes in her pantyhose. María was usually bumping into furniture. Each time she got closer to what she wanted. “What do you want from me?” “Nothing,” he replied, so she took off and felt like migrating birds. But many.
The grave has more power than the eyes of the beloved. An open grave with all its magnets. This weight on the wings. The sky is waiting for an airship. I have the feeling that I haven’t got much life left. Three hours after the celestial attack. Why don’t I respond when I’m being offended? Because my religion doesn’t allow me to. Exterior maps: geography. Interior maps: psychography. And in your hard cathedral I kneel. Mountains pass camels pass like the history of wars in antiquity. Of all the men I am, I can’t find any of them without the control of the intruding eye. Problems. Mysteries that fasten themselves to my chest. All I want is not to see businesses nor gardens nor markets nor eyeglasses nor elevators. In order to serve all radio listeners, without discriminating between social classes, I speak a tongue that fills hearts with the law of communicating clouds. I have my brain or whatever it is full of skull moths. For the world to go on being what it is it must —per force—take another form. True poems are fires. When something cherished burns instead of the fireman I call, rushes forth the incendiary. It says: live, live, live! It is Death.
I’m not in with this mystery. Somebody steady me.  Cool ocean breezes don’t make me laugh.  I’m in with noisy metal little nils. A million apologies.  I must have made more.  You were sensitive, you needed them  No you weren’t and you didn’t. In fact . . . oh forget it!  In the middle of the ocean reflected with the moon,  good place to show; probably no one knows you there.  Your leaving, the thrown rope up to sky, climbed up for real goodbye.  I realized my reason insufficient; you must have considered this.  How my specific lean to you smelled like an old paper cup  of funny water and you were not very thirsty.  You came unbidden initially and often. A field  and flickering wicks of foxes from here to there. You.  Holding Hell at bay. Back to ground,  I see you on the moon with your mirror  catching action on the parallax.  Some kind of wise guy.
Nobody was left who’d lastly scuffed first earth’s crust.  Boiling sea had thin-sheened each cubit of firmament.  Mountains ceased to assert, gave into ground  arounding whatever hard rock  to then there over and take down.  All shapes breaking hysterical particles and subs who settled  devoting former whir of shape to Silence,  which was enough.  It stayed uniform Silent for some many months  which strengthened to pull outer space noise in to neutralize  but lost its grip.  So this Sound hard-pressed in to sink holes  and look into original force that was still shut in  under black lacquer cabinetry: our future perfect world.  It opened the door of dust,  the space sound picked up pings distantly.  Seeing to sound is what and how Bounceback.  Since the dust so still and small  the waves skinnied high-pitched  to switch on resistance of an average mote.  What would stand to receive?  What was the point of pointing out resisting decay?  What was there to say?  Could anything be activated? Much was strained in “done” state  and so sought exit through the soft Silence under rather than he stabbed  by the point-cornered Silence above.  So sound deranged to be  needle pierce to dust piece  and sunned a word heard first by the bygone (“ouch”).  And the Silence startled by the sneaking sound  forgot its own high ground  and grumbled some rebuke.  Underground glad particulates laughed at the gaff and expanded  (something among it a voice) to sweep up what had been  PART TWO  One in Dust begun.  One chased out to Perceptivity from mum.  This made an in as such that could close  over after outreach which comes back with something to say.  Stretching comes to the zone where there is shifting  from mixing its own x-space with outside sensed data.  Each already edgy piece in “earshot”  each piece pulled in by dust’s desire to harbor more  is similar to dolphin noise.  Riffs that began off flats of static,  f.p. earth (future perfect),  etched by rust-hinged sound.  Not all dust took in.  Those who did not got ultra dense.  If there was a strike to one of this specie  sparks would be three feet at least and atoms unleash.  To them strikes relieve adhesion.  They like hits from nowhere; they won’t admit they are hard  in every space.  But sparks in dark if an eye sees them  a mouth to say how beautiful a light of such blue  that lasts and deepens blue.  Shaped like a pin, each spark alights  to hold itself, elsewhere, down.  What it lands on is to remember the spark beautiful.  A spark from Hard Silence made mad.  The more made makes it harder which gets hit  and flies further because it is harder.  PART THREE  Minute care is taken so that soft expansive dust gets all over  the dense. Colors change as comes collision.  They want to do all they can now that they can.  Hopefully they don’t know about the deep frozen people in orbit.  Those on the figurative shelf until there is a proper place.  More on that after the fire; for now:  the Sound, the Nerve, the Building.
These ghost soldiers live underground with the vast  oversupply of castoff lanterns.  If one were to take broadsword to one of these  orange-bearded mammoth men of rough hew,  he would laugh at the passing metal,  make light of entrails.  For years I have been here without a clear map.  That hopes should dim as days go on above is  natural I suppose, what do I know?  I am dressed like one of them.  The thick walls quake but stay soundproof.  I fear my fists vestigial.  These soldiers’ own panic is taking up rugs  finding filigrees of the former world beneath,  e.g., a locket with their mongrel’s mush.  They will freeze, then feign noncom; smacking barrels of burgundy  with pistol butts. I react comme squirrel:  fleeing their reach to the chamber out of the impact area.  One loved me until I asked if he worried about what must be  happening without us. Well, his lips did narrow, hand abandoned my knee,  blah, blah big mouth were his departing words.  I will not say with shame that I came from nothing.  Someone paved my first breakthrough at least,  one time calling it love. And I will stand by that  as it applies to my primary makeup.
Brimming the trees with song they flood July, spill over into August pulsing lovecries, cicadas here—one that our cat brought me lay, legs folded neatly, on clear wings as on a shroud, green and white, fizzing now and then, but when I threw it spread wings and zagged in a wide curve into the sweetgum tree where presently its dry buzzsaw whined for some significant other to auger down into dark dense earth and gnaw at the roots of things, sans eyes, sans wings, sans song for seventeen years or so. As daylight sharpens, deer slip back into the woods. I wonder what a deer, when danger grows too bright, makes of a world whose darker, truer memories in ear and nose must solve the dazzle of our alien eyes, more surgical at stripping off its cover, at masking selves as downwind leaves. I’ve read somewhere the claim, by computer people, that pain cannot be felt until self-consciousness has been achieved, and they had programmed in that level, so they said, of artificial pain. In A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist
What I walked down to the highway for,  through the summer dawn,  was the Sunday funnies,  or so I thought—  but what I remember reading there  in the shadowless light  among meadowlarks singing  was tracks in the deep warm dust  of the lane, where it parted  with its beige dryness the meadow’s dew—  the sleek trail where a snake had crossed  and slid into tall grass;  the stippled parallels  with marks between them where  a black blister-beetle had dragged  its bulbous belly across  in search of weeds more green;  the labyrinth of lacelike  dimples left by a speed-freak  tiger-beetles’s sprints that ended  where it took wing  with a little blur of dust-grains;  and stepping through the beetle-trails,  the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track  crossing unhurried and walking  along the ditch to find  an easy place for climbing;  not far past that,  a line of cat-prints running  straight down the lane and ending  with deep marks where it leaped  across the ditch to the meadow  for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits: and freshly placed this morning,  the slender runes  of bob-whites running, scuffles  of dustbaths taken—  and there ahead crouched low at the lane-edge  under purple pokeweed-berries  four quail had seen me,  and when I walked slowly  on toward them, instead  of flying they ran with a fluid scuttling  on down the lane and stopped frozen  till I came too close  —then quietly when  I expected an explosion  of wings they took off low and whispering  and sailed, rocking and tilting  out over the meadow’s tall bluestem,  dropped down and were gone until  I heard them whistling, down by the little pond,  and whistled back so sharply  that when I got back to the house  they still were answering  and one flew into the elm  and whistled from its shadows  up over the porch where I sat  reading the funnies while the kittens  played with the headlines  till when the first gold sunlight  tipped the elm’s leaves he flew back out to the meadow and sank  down into the sun-brilliant dew  on curving wings,  and my brothers and sisters waked  by the whistling came pouring out  onto the porch and claimed their share  of the Sunday funnies—  and I went on to read  the headlines of World War Two, with maps of the struggling armies leaving  tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya  and the navies churning their wakes  of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea  where the ships went down on fire  and the waves bobbed and flamed  with the maimed survivors , screaming  in Japanese or English until  their gasoline-blistered heads  sank down to the tiger sharks  and the war was lost or won  for children sitting in sunlight,  believing their cause was just  and knowing it would prevail,  as the dew vanished away.
The boy painted himself white and ran into the darkness. We let the words “he may be dead, bury him,” bury him. We took his clothes to the rummage sale in the basement of the mission We put his photographs and drawings in a birdcage and covered it with a starquilt. For four nights voices carried clear to the river. After winter so many storms moved in strangers came among us They danced They shoveled in the shadows of trees Then, somehow we all felt all of us were of this one boy.
Chemical angels ride into this vacant room as walls and windows drip away into western fronts, post depression farm boundaries barely barb-wired together, enclosed stone pile pastures a gray horse standing still, facing north, a snort of breath drifting to a rail car passing horizon the wind hinting the spirit of ice nights so long you can only hope the red blood circling for warmth in your cells don’t freeze here with the rest of this lost American dream.
I am standing outside in Minnesota ghost wind recalling names in winter mist The road smells of dogs two days dead White photographers talk in the house of mainstream media I can’t articulate the agony of Eagle Singer’s children to them. We celebrate the old man while another generation shoots crushed and heated prescriptions sells baskets, machinery, the fixtures yet to be installed in the house, yet to be heated by the tribal government, for another night stolen by the stupors and the wondrous pleasure of forget everything medicines. Back inside Uncle Two Dogs rolls me a smoke out of organic American Spirit I look to a last cup of coffee. The way home fills with snow our tracks human and machine.
We wondered what our walk should mean, taking that un-march quietly; the sun stared at our signs— “Thou shalt not kill.” Men by a tavern said, “Those foreigners . . .” to a woman with a fur, who turned away— like an elevator going down, their look at us. Along a curb, their signs lined across, a picket line stopped and stared the whole width of the street, at ours: “Unfair.” Above our heads the sound truck blared— by the park, under the autumn trees— it said that love could fill the atmosphere: Occur, slow the other fallout, unseen, on islands everywhere—fallout, falling unheard. We held our poster up to shade our eyes. At the end we just walked away; no one was there to tell us where to leave the signs.
The heart dies without space for love, without a moral horizon: think of it then as a bird trapped in a box. My heart goes out with love to those beyond the fence; only toward them can one really advance, that is, make progress. Without them I feel I’m half a person. Romeo was born a Montague, and Juliet came from the Capulet line, and I’m a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion— therefore I’ll be delighted if my daughter marries the grandson of Haidar Abdel Shafi. I mean this, of course, as a parable only—but the parable is my measure, and since it has more to do with my body than teeth or hair, this isn’t just some idle fancy that, out of poetic license, I place our fate in my daughter’s sex. That I grant myself this imaginary gift, testifies to the extent to which we’re living, still, in the underworld, where we’re granted the hope and potential of an amoeba. But all mythology begins with creatures that creep and crawl, spring out of the ground and devour each other, until a sacred union occurs, healing the breach in the world. The Arab groom from Gaza, too, will extend to my daughter a dress on which is embroidered the Land redeemed from Apartheid’s curse— our Land as a whole, belonging equally to all of its offspring, and then he’ll lift the veil from her face, and say to her: “And now I take you to be my wife, Lotem Abdel Shafi.”
A voice from the dark called out,  ‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war.’  But peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid.  A feeling towards it, dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have until we begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak.  A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses . . .  A cadence of peace might balance its weight on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world, each act of living one of its words, each word a vibration of light—facets of the forming crystal.
First, night opened out. Bodies took root from rotting salt and seawater into evidence of red life. Relentless waves pumped tidal air into a single heartbeat. In the pulp of shadow and space, water sucked our people from sleep. That’s how it all began. At least that’s all we can remember to tell. It began with water and heartbeat. In minutes we tunneled through corn woman’s navel into tinges of moist red men and women. Yawning, we collected our chins, knees, breasts, and sure-footed determination. A few thousand years before Moses parted the Red Sea, and the God with three heads was born in the Middle East, the Choctaw people danced our homeland infra red. Finally when the stranger’s arms reached to strangle the West, Grandmother eavesdropped on the three-faced deity who said that chaos was coming. When he puckered his lips and tried to kiss her she made it rain on him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten you were born of water and women,” she said, walking away laughing.
There she was standing over me. She inched her face close to my face. She put her hands on my face. I remembered her immediately, but did not speak. My eyes blurred. They were hot and heavy. It hurt to look at Ain’t Sally. It hurt to see.  I closed my eyes. I felt her cool touch. She chanted. “You will be well. You will not die. Chim chukma taha che. You will be well. Chi pesa taha che.”  She sang to me. Then I heard her leave. A woman whose bed was surrounded by white partitions, moaned again. This was not a new sound. It was a constant. Her breath whistled irregularly. There was no escaping the whistle. The whistling sounds were everywhere in the white room. Then they stopped.  Another woman in another bed called out. No answer. She pushed the bell. Women wearing white dresses came into the room. They pushed the partitions back. They said the whistling woman was dead. I went back to sleep. Before the hospital. Before rheumatic fever. Before the dead woman. I had met Ain’t Sally. I was seven years old. Ain’t Sally was an ancient Indian relative who lived in Hayrick, outside of Dublin. A place of the Snakes. A place of memory.  Once a base camp for nomadic tribes following buffalo, once a county seat, Hayrick, Texas took its name from a solitary mountain standing in the breadth of open grasslands. Only a state government road sign remains, marking the place of Hayrick. Marking the sign of the Snakes.  The only time we visited Ain’t Sally, I rode in the back seat of our green 1950 Chevrolet, and listened to my Indian grandmother tell stories about our family. Chapters went like this:  —Life in a Dugout.  —Making Lye Soap.  —How Grandfather got VD.  I don’t remember much of the drive to Hayrick. We drove the rural roads of West Texas. There were two lanes of dust and dirt, stagnant, green-belted river beds and one-lane bridges.  When we arrived at Ain’t Sally’s the old woman ambled out of a rusted screen door of a paintless wooden house. Breasts sagging, her thin body lacking in strength seemed unable to support her weight. She wore a sleeveless dress that revealed naked brown skin, skin that was no more than a sheath for aging bones. Hairless underarms.  She fed us saltine crackers and cold squirrel dumplings. She asked me questions. She asked me about my secrets. I don’t remember having any to tell. She told me hers while I ate.  She said I reminded her of someone she’d seen a long time ago. I remember dancing for her. I told her I was a bird. A manbird. A hunter. I danced around the kitchen table and sang and pretended to be PowWow Dancer. A bird of dance. A bird of rhythm. When my mother and grandmother went to town, Ain’t Sally took me for a walk around her place. The farm had belonged to her relatives. We went down to the dry gorge and she pointed out all kinds of roots and trees. She asked me if I knew about the plants of the pasture. I said yes. I thought I was lying.  As we walked farther from the house, I remember a hot gusty wind picked up her voice like dust tendrils on bedrock and blew it away from me. I ran to catch the sound. I found Ain’t Sally sitting on a granite rock.  —Ala Tek. Indian girl.  —Come and see, on our land, the four winds of the old days will blow through our hair.  Then she tugged at my black braids.  —Come and visit the Snakes, Ala Tek.  —When I was your age they blew across this place like red dust devils on flat neutral plains.  —Can you see them.  —Do you hear the Snake People calling us? —Yes. I can see them. I hear them. They are naked and wild. Their eyes, like black grapes shining in the Sun, stare back at me.  —They’re hungry.  I watch the Snake People eat the fleshy intestines of my uncle’s butchered cow. I taste the hot blood, roll it around on my tongue and remember. It makes me sweat.  I watch the Snake People play games around the carcass. And before we walk back into the house, the old woman and me, she runs her crooked fingers across my eyes and says.  —Ala Tek. Indian Girl.  —The ghosts of your ancestors will visit you there. The rest of the visit blurs. My last memories are from that day. She waves to me from her front porch.  She never explained the Snakes. She only said, “Che pisa lauchi. I’ll see you. Indians never say good-bye.”  I never saw Ain’t Sally again until she appeared in my hospital room. I thought she was dead. I didn’t know about the Snakes until some twenty-five years later. To make the sign of the snake means:  Comanches are here.
I.i saved my energy as i read,  like managing held-breath underwater so i could extend my survey  and not miss anything great
herds of buffalo gone now  you search the undulating  sea of grass near campo and wildhorse  for the great hairy horned whales but none surface instead if you look carefully  you see the shallow swimming  hahe issi the pronghorn antelope  you identify with  this striped sailfish skimming the surface  a harpoon’s throw away  from hungry nesters diving  for the cereal great plains  plankton seed visible but fast
I. The Secret Garden fooled the squash bugs by setting young plants in the center of piles of old weathered cedar shingles that i had dumped one truckload at a time around the perimeter of the woods out of sight of the house yet near enough to garner a hand of bucketful for kindling when the woodstove became december’s focus the shingle pile had flattened from firewood attrition and gravity so only a few layers remained no wild plants grew up through the shingles although a couple of hours of sunshine lit each pile each day i called it the secret garden because no one ever walks that way  II. The Change the middle vegetable garden and the south garden (Vegetable River) have provided entertainment and food first the june-july drought scorched and stunted growth even with frequent watering then came the late july and august monsoons with a 65-70/85-90 mix almost every day the plants invigorated the bugs rebirthed the grasses skyrocketed from rock-hard drought to rainforest jungle i took a gas-powered weedeater into the Vegetable River delta yesterday whacked some high weeds on the periphery of the melon patch and uncovered two twenty-pound crimson sweets in another corner of the patch a crimson sweet was so ripe that it had cracked itself open sixty-five days after sticking the seed in the ground i was thrilled after three years of growing vines and stunted fruit i had finally grown big ripe melons  III. August august gardening is by caesar certainly august the purple hulls the yellow-shelled cowpeas yellow and white okra blossoms all wash out in the intensity of <<green>> whelming <<green>> even on a cool morning or evening i come in from the search and harvest having had not the slightest perception of heat even with sweat drenching my forehead double-shirted long-sleeved against the reborn mosquitoes and realize only then how hot my body is the air is cool what created the heat? a perception narrows that more than heat and humidity are at play an intensity a swollen vibration more than the half-black over-ripe jalapenos more than the crisp prongs of okra pod more than the nutty crunch of raw cowpeas more than the fruitful tangle of kentucky wonder and morning glory smartweed vines more than white glistening corn smut blisters more than the biggest brightest-marked three-inch grasshoppers and cicadas that you’ve ever seen an intensity underlain in a crush of <<green>> an interplay a swollen vibration a chlorophylandering that even the dogs won’t come near no snakes no skinks no lizards too strong for spiders
I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’i/ FIRST CHEROKEE LESSON: MOURNING  Find a flint blade  Use your teeth as a whetstone  Cut your hair  Talk to shadows and crows  Cry your red throat raw  Learn to translate the words you miss most: dust love poetry  Learn to say home My cracked earth lips drip words not sung as lullabies to my infant ears not laughed over dinner or choked on in despair No They played dead until the soldiers passed covered the fields like corpses and escaped into the mountains When it’s safe we’ll find you they promised But we were already gone before sunrise I crawl through a field of twisted bodies to find them I do everything Beginning Cherokee tells me Train my tongue to lie still Keep teeth tight against lips Listen to instruction tapes Study flash cards How can I greet my ancestors in a language they don’t understand My tear ducts fill with milk because what I most love was lost at birth My blood roars skin to blisters weeps haunted calls of owls bones splinter jut through skin until all of me is wounded as this tongueTa-li-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-ni-s-gi-li/ SECOND CHEROKEE LESSON: GHOSTS  Leave your hair  at the foot of your bed  Scratch your tongue  with a cricket’s claw to speak again  Stop the blood with cornmeal  Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep  keep away ghosts of generals presidents priests  who hunger for your  rare and tender tongue  They will keep away ghosts  so you have strength  to battle the living Stories float through lives with an owl’s sudden swoopingI knew some Cherokee when I was little My cousins taught me
i. Spring the tips of each pine the spikes of telephone poles hold gathering crows may’s errant mustard spreads wild across paved road look both ways roadside treble cleft feeding gopher, paws to mouth cheeks puffed with music yesterday’s spring wind ruffling the grey tips of fur rabbit dandelion  ii. Summer turkey vulture feeds mechanical as a red oil rig head rocks down up down stiff-legged dog rises goes grumbling after squirrel old ears still flap snowy egret—curves, lines, sculpted against pond blue; white clouds against sky banded headed bird this ballerina killdeer dance on point my heart  iii. Fall leaf wind cold through coat wails over hills, through barren trees empty garbage cans dance damp September night lone farmer, lighted tractor drive memory’s worn path sky black with migration flocks settle on barren trees leaf birds, travel songs october moon cast over corn, lighted fields crinkled sheaves of white  iv. Winter ground painted in frost thirsty morning sun drinks white leaves rust golds return winter bare branches hold tattered cups of summer empty nests trail twigs lace edges of ice manna against darkened sky words turn with weather now one to seven deer or haiku syllables weave through winter trees Northern follows jig body flashes with strike, dive: broken line floats up.
That old guy with the muskrat soup slurps it loudly from the ladleHoowah, pretty good stuff! You shift your weight on the stool raise the bad leg just enough and retrieve the red bandana hankie. Talk still spills like sunshine over the knife-marred counter as slowly you wipe the can push the cloth back in your pocket and cough down the grape pop glancing at the bobbing black head where it surfaced in the pot. The burned farm. That hungry year. The long walk from Strawberry Mountain warmed now with the weight of fresh butchered wiiyaas in your pack. Mum’s baking soda biscuits mixed and cut lined waiting in the tin pan like our little kids’ faces at the window.Sure took the wrinkle out of our bellies that night. One opening day when those two old fishermen ended up drunk clinging to the canoe. The hunt for diamond willow, beaver camp on Easter weekend, the whitefish feeding on wax worms, the string of crappies slipped from your hand, the missing outhouse floor, training waaboose, feeding the least weasel, tales from working on the ships, from boiling sap, planting trees, pounding, carving, and then the cigar box memories of those old time Indians who could really tell stories
i. He could have taken you prisoner, of course when our two tribes were at war over whitefish and beaver territory and the Anishinaabeg chased your Indian ancestors from the woodlands he now brings you home to. Or your Dakota relatives might have waged a war party on their swift plains’ ponies to avenge your taking and bring you back from those uncivilized they named in disgust the rabbit-chokers. But those histories of dog-eaters and Chippewa crows are just a backdrop now for other stories told together by descendants of smallpox survivors and French fur traders, clan members of Wolf and of Water Spirit. And now you gather, trackers and scouts in new bloodless legal battles, still watch for mark and sign— for the flight of waterbirds.  ii. Old histories that name us enemies don’t own us; nor do our politics grown so pow-wow liberal you seldom point out the follies of White Earth tribal leaders. (Except of course for the time our elected chair mistakenly and under the influence of civilization drove his pickup down the railroad tracks and made the tri-state ten o’clock news.) And Sundays behind the Tribune he seldom even mentions the rabid casino bucks or gets out his calculator and with lodge-pole eyebrows methodically measures beaded distances, results of territorial lines drawn in your homeland. And even though I have seen him sniff, glance over he really almost never checks the meat in your pot, nor reconnoiters the place of your rendezvous just to be sure.
Feet firmly perch thinnest stalks, reeds, bulrush. Until all at once, they attend my female form, streaked throat, brownness. Three fly equidistant around me, flashing. Each, in turn, calls territorial trills, beckons ok-a-li, ok-a-li! Spreads his wings, extends inner muscle quivering red epaulet bands uniquely bolden. Turn away each suitor, mind myself my audience. Select another to consider, He in turn quiver thrills. Leave for insects. Perhaps one male follows. Maybe a few brood of young, line summertime. Silver Maple samaras wing wind, spread clusters along with mine, renewing Prairie. As summer closes, I leave dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies, mosquitoes, moths, spiders, crickets for grain, see, Sunflower; join thousands to flock Sky— grackles, blackbirds, cowbirds, starlings— Swarming like distant smoke clouds, rising.
Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing and hoofing themselves up, up. Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers, trailed by salamanders—mud puppies. Plunging through currents,  above concrete and steel man-made barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in such frenzy, popping splash dance, pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads— the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes. Liquid beads slide on windshield glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place the waters will come again. This power is beyond the strength of man. The river will return with its greatest force.” No one can stop her.  She was meant to be this way.  Snakes in honor, do not intrude. The rainbow tied with red and green like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay.  Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current so slick everything slides off in sheets. Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds, somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl, walking whiskers to higher waters. Waters above, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels. They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past the strength of sunlight. The frog chorus sings refrain, melody drumming thunder, evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes. Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or white birch woods rise, tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from stratocumulus media. As if they are a living cloud chamber, As if they exist only in the heavens. Air swells with dampness.  It has begun.
I. The earth and its foregoing, this could be horizon. Combined, the radicals pressed into one another. What do we represent lying held in men and arms, to erect gold and sun and legs (running)? I call you disc, sun entangled in the branches of a tree. Rice field over struggle, earth over self. Effacement. Your mouth is a carriage and the carriage plus the tenth of a cubit is turn, bent knuckle revolving around a pivot. Common, is the object beneath the bench. Plant, covers, knife, a weed extended to mean govern, the flame in the middle of the lamp is the man with ample arms, blend and pace in the midst of court. Your torso sings Garden. Composes. II. Mastery of weeds extends to mean: plants bending to cover the middle of lamp. A knife for a flame, foregoing the earth, this is the horizon of a man with arms. To move across your body, I am the carriage and the cubit, the disc running tangled in the branches of a tree. I am the common object beneath the bench, the wheel running length of the rutted road down to the garden of abdomen. I struggle over fields to kiss a mouth filled with rice, to put away evil. This is earth over self. III. Beneath a table of common struggles I blend and pace in ample arms. A rice field foregoing garden on the horizon of your belly. Govern the revolving cubit, the bent knuckle. Me over you, over self, a tree. Earth entangled in the branches of a knife. Plant and cover inside your mouth, the turning disc, the carriage and wheel. To erect lamps in the bend of your gold leg running is to extend the word to mean master, garden or weed.
As it would for a prow, the basin parts with your foot. Never a marsh, of heron blue  but the single red feather from the wing of some black bird, somewhere a planked path winds above water, the line of sky above this aching space. Movement against the surface is the page that accepts no ink. A line running even over the alternating depths, organisms, algae, a rotting leaf. Walk naked before me carrying a sheaf of sticks. It’s the most honest thing a man can do. As water would to accept you, I part a mouth, a marsh, or margin is of containment, the inside circuitous edge. No line to follow out to ocean, no river against an envelope  of trembling white ships. Here I am landlock. Give me your hand.
for Arthur Sze  I. Somehow precise and unquestionable, the cut of the Chinese man’s hair. Never before this certainty, I consider the decision of each strand. The diameter. The angle. So black, the way it appears, crashing against the hard corner of his jaw.  II. I consider the darkness. You are appointed court photographer. Consider this picture.  III. My small face is red behind a bath towel curtain. I watch a funeral that is taking place next door. So black, my dog, hurling himself against a chain link fence.  IV. The casket is lowered and I am removing rusty pins from the grease on the window’s aluminum track, along with strands of hair.  V. This is pressing. I mark it with an asterisk. Black and large.  VI. A vague feeling, pressing itself against a snowfence in my mind. Like a threat, I view the way you cut your hair as if it were a history of something small.
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn't notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too. Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody's mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”
It is the fish that bring them first. Cod in such numbers as to seem endless. Cod to fill the nets and bellies of hungry Europeans with the tender white flesh. Cod, it seems to them, without end. They fill the ships, salting the fish down in barrels, til the hull is full, and head back home. This wet cod-fishing goes on for years, far out in the Banks, with only an occasional stop on land. We dry our fish in the sun cure it in smoke-houses and sure enough, the foreigners hear about it. Soon they need a land base to dry the cod which weighs less than when wet tastes better, too it is these dreams of cod that first bring the French to land dreams of cod the gold of the sea that will fill their bellies and their pockets
. . . for Donna and John they find what looks like a grave what looks like a grave a grave and they dig it up they find a grave it looks like a grave and they dig it up they dig it up the grave it looks like they dig it up and they dig it up and it looks like a grave and they dig it up
plantain makes a  good tea. its seeds are  crushed and used as a  laxative. it is found in  every english garden. now  its leaves are pushing up  everywhere. you can find it  outside every english  settlement, its long leaves  with parallel veins,  its central stocks of tiny  flowers. wherever  the english go  plantain  grows in their footsteps.  when you see it  you’ll know that they’re  near. that english boy  found his way home  following those  footsteps. when  you see it  go the other way
Les Filles du Roi (1668) French men are marrying Indian women. It will have to be stopped. Wives will have to be found. French wives for French men. And so the call goes out to all the unfortunates in France. Women without homes, without family, poor women, women alone. Women with no dowries to buy a husband. Becomes a Fille du Roi, a Daughter of the King. Each woman considers her options. The hardships she doesn’t know are preferable to the ones she knows too well. As a Daughter of the King, she will have a dowry, payable to her husband at the time of marriage. She will have a home, the possibility of children, a place in the community. Women come from Ile de France, from Normandy, 800 women in ten years. Les Filles du Roi. Une Fille du Roi, 1668 Marie Mazol is thirty three years old when she becomes a Daughter of the King. She will bring 300 livres to her marriage to Antoine Roy-Desjardins. She will have money for her own use as well, for expenses, they promise her. She thought it would go further, but what she takes with her are a coffer, a cap, a taffeta handkerchief, a shoe ribbon, a hundred needles, a comb, a pair of stockings, a pair of gloves, a pair of scissors, two knives, a thousand pins, a bonnet, and four laces. Thus prepared, she faces marriage to a man she doesn’t know, in a country she’s never seen. Les Filles du Roi—Afterwards The Daughters of the King become wives. But French and Indian keep marrying. Their descendants will say, “Scratch a Frenchman, find an Indian.”
“The conquest is not sustainable . . .”  —Winona LaDuke   thanks for bringing that to our attention she said the first time to my response to a history text about a famous painting of the Battle of Quebec that never mentioned the French and only mentioned Indians twice, once as nuisances, once as the noble savage kneeling by the dying English general this was during the French and Indian war I said, soon thousands of French and Indian people would be displaced, sold into indentured servitude my own family among them there would be bounties on the heads of Abenaki people in Maine, and the English would sow the fields of the Mohawks with salt thanks for bringing that up, she said the next book mentioned cannibals in the Caribbean, Indians who believed the Spanish were gods, Indians killing themselves, Indian women in love with Spanish pricks, Indians whose names, even when known, were passed over in favor of the ones given them by the Spanish stop writing about Indians she told me you’re making everyone feel guilty but the next book was back in Maine home territory the diary of a midwife right after that same French and Indian war and she was using herbs not found in English herbals and wrote that a “young squaw” visited her over a period of three weeks, but the famous historian said only that there may have been Indians in the area, while she wrote at length about white men dressing up as Indians to protest against the rich stealing their lands stop writing about Indians she told me again only louder as if I was hard of hearing you have to allow authors their subjects, she said stop writing about what isn’t in the text which is just our entire history this week, she said I’m really upset you’re telling the same story three times because there’s only one story about Indians and we all know what it is so I asked her if there are an infinite number of stories about white people and she told me to stop being racist so I stayed away from class for a week because they were reading a book about a mystery in the Everglades and I knew there had to be Indians in that swamp and I didn’t want to have to write about Indians again it was on to the next book written, she said by a Cherokee writer, which Leslie Silko, who is Laguna, will be interested to find out because the book was Ceremony but that is a small mistake sort of like saying that Dante is Chinese, so I overlooked it now, she told me write about Indians and I might have done that except she went on about Indians putting on a mask of whiteness like white people put on black face, and some of the students wrote it down in their notebooks and everyone started talking about minstrel shows then she wanted me to tell her if there is such a thing as an Indian world view and I said, well, yes and no, which I figured was safe since I would be at least half-right whichever answer she wanted, but when I mentioned the European world view, she said there isn’t any such thing which was quite a relief to me, I hate to think there were a whole lot of people thinking in hierarchies and as if the earth is a dead object and animals and plants and some people not having spirit then she said I’d better stick to what I know, that is, Indians, which is what I was trying to do in the first place, and that maybe European philosophy was too much for my primitive brain in spite of its being my undergraduate major and I pointed out that the oppressed always know more about the oppressor than vice versa, so she just glared at me and told me that I look Scandinavian which was a surprise to me and I wondered why I never was a prom queen since it was always the Scandinavian girls who got that honor, maybe they never noticed I was one of them. Exactly how much Indian are you anyway? she asked. I told her I guessed I was pretty much Indian. I suppose she wondered why I wouldn’t accept that mask of whiteness she kept talking about as myself
Maybe all losses before this one are practice: maybe all grief that comes after her death seems tame. I wish I knew how to make dying simple, wish our mother’s last week were not constructed of clear plastic tubing, IVs, oxygen hiss, cough medicine, morphine patches, radiation tattoos, the useless burn on her chest.I’m still the incurable optimist, she whispers,you’re still the eternal pessimist. My sister sleeps on a sofa; our brother, exhausted, rolls up in a blanket on the hard floor. Curled in a rented white bed, our mother’s body races to catch up with her driven, nomadic soul. Those nights alone, foster care, empty beer bottles taught us she was always already vanishing.
—a found poem Each grief has its unique side. Choose the one that appeals to you. Go gently. Your body needs energy to repair the amputation. Humor phantom pain. Your brain cells are soaked with salt; connections fail unexpectedly and often. Ask for help. Accept help. Read your grief like the daily newspaper: headlines may have information you need. Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street. Don’t feel guilty if you have a good time. Don’t act as if you haven’t been hit by a Mack Truck. Do things a little differently but don’t make a lot of changes. Revel in contradiction. Talk to the person who died. Give her a piece of your mind. Try to touch someone at least once a day. Approach grief with determination. Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding. Lean into the pain. You can’t outrun it.
This is how it is with me: so strong, I want to draw the egg from your womb and nourish it in my own. I want to mother your child made only of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed from any man. I want to re-fashion the matrix of creation, make a human being from the human love that passes between our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is: when you emerge from the bedroom in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back over forearms, scented with cologne from an amber bottle—I want to open my heart, the brightest aching slit of my soul, receive your pearl. I watch your hands, wait for the sign that means you’ll touch me, open me, fill me; wait for that moment when your desire leaps inside me.
You plan an uncomplicated path through Colorado’s red dust, around the caustic edge of Utah’s salt flats a single night at a hotel in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change. It’s spring, we are two Indian women along together and the days open: sunrise on a fine long road, antelope against dry hills, heron emerging from dim fields. You tell me this is a journey you’ve always wanted to take. You ask me to tell you what I want. I want my longing to miraculously bring you through the barrier of your skin into my blood so that I can possess you entirely and yet be entirely possessed. You say no, your face tight with pain, tears burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel. I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles across deserts sculpted by wind and story, and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh, your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar along a warm, smooth neck. You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus: naked, savage, happy. That is the beginning of yes. Ghosts are everywhere. We hear them singing on that mountain in Ute country, the cries of your flute pleasuring old spirits. Like those people whose land we cross, we don’t live by lines drawn on paper. Instead, we mark the waterfall of shy kisses, a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers, the high cliff hollow that shelters us on the edge of the Uinta forest. Wildflowers bend beneath our bodies, cup the trembling weight of touch. We wander for awhile in a place vast enough to contain all possibilities. After twelve hundred miles together we enter green forest thick along a fearless river. This dense topography we can’t see through, can’t find the horizon to judge distances or the arc of the sun to know east from west. There at last you clasp my hand, guide it to a place beyond maps, no universe I have ever known. It is a raw landscape; we are the sojourners overcome by the perilous shock of arrival. We stop the car, walk by the river, clumsy, frightened by desire. I wish for more than body or soul can bear. Sweet, these are the maps we made together, territories we foolishly vowed to own. Here, the place we wandered off the map, moved deep into a land without scars where every direction took us home but no place could give us shelter. I don’t know how to survive awakening in a woman’s body with a child’s broken heart. I fall on my knees, our love a bare stone on the windowsill between us. How can I learn this trick, will your body back to the other side of my skin? Help me translate loss the way this land does— flood, earthquake, landslide— terrible, and alive.
winter sea over my shoes shadows and bright round stones at san gregorio every wave turns a season forests adrift empty shells memory of fire so faraway in the mountains and canyons silent pools raise my faces by early tide slight my hand shoulders almost ashore light breaks over the plovers certain steps my traces blood, bone, stone turn natural and heavy waves rush the sand
american indian outside the guthrie forever wounded by tributes high western movie mockery decorations invented names trade beads federal contracts limps past the new theater wounded indian comes to attention on a plastic leg and delivers a smart salute with the wrong hand precious children muster nearby theatrical poses under purple tapestries castles and barricades on stage with reservation plans native overscreams rehearsed on stage at sand creek blaze of bodies at mystic river frozen ghost dancers chased to death by the seventh cavalry at wounded knee culture wars wound the heart and dishonor the uniform forsaken warriors retire overnight in cardboard suites under the interstates american indian decorated for bravery invented names salutes the actors with the wrong hand at the guthrie treaties break behind the scenes night after night the actors new posers mount and ride on perfect ponies out to the wild cultural westerns hilly suburbs with buffalo bill
east the whole moon burns behind jamestown seven wings of geese light the thin icewest the asian sun bloody on the interstate spring flowers break on the gray prairieexit fingerprints on the rearview mirror feral shadows transposed near fargo
feathery moths flutter on the screen unbearable sounds of summer oblivious tonight that my reading light is not my day stout bodies cut and bounce near a crack in the screen and beat inside a paper shade sacraments of a monumental natural presence we are drawn forever by the moths to other lights neighbors down the road
I think he knows I’m alive, having come down The three steps of the back porch And given me a good once over. All afternoon He’s been moving back and forth,Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs, While all about him the great fields tumble To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky To be where he is, wild with all that happens. He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows Living in the blond heart of the wheat.This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots, Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.
Late summer, late afternoon, my work interrupted by bees who claim my tea, even my pen looks flower-good to them. I warn a delivery man that my bees, who all summer have been tame as cows, now grow frantic, aggressive, difficult to shoo from the house. I blame the second blooms come out in hot colors, defiant vibrancy— unexpected from cottage cosmos, nicotianna, and bean vine. But those bees know, I’m told by the interested delivery man, they have only so many days to go. He sighs at sweetness untasted. Still warm in the day, we inspect the bees. This kind stranger knows them in intimate detail. He can name the ones I think of as shopping ladies. Their fur coats ruffed up, yellow packages tucked beneath their wings, so weighted with their finds they ascend in slow circles, sometimes drop, while other bees whirl madly, dance the blossoms, ravish broadly so the whole bed bends and bounces alive. He asks if I have kids, I say not yet. He has five, all boys. He calls the honeybees his girls although he tells me they’re ungendered workers  who never produce offspring. Some hour drops, the bees shut off. In the long, cool slant of sun, spent flowers fold into cups. He asks me if I’ve ever seen a Solitary Bee where it sleeps. I say I’ve not. The nearest bud’s a long-throated peach hollyhock. He cradles it in his palm, holds it up so I spy the intimacy of the sleeping bee. Little life safe in a petal, little girl, your few furious buzzings as you stir stay with me all winter, remind me of my work undone.
Dumped wet and momentary on a dull ground that’s been clear but clearly sleeping, for days. Last snow melts as it falls, piles up slush, runs in first light making a music in the streets we wish we could keep. Last snow. That’s what we’ll think for weeks to come. Close sun sets up a glare that smarts like a good cry. We could head north and north and never let this season go. Stubborn beast, the body reads the past in the change of light, knows the blow of grief in the time of trees’ tight-fisted leaves. Stubborn calendar of bone. Last snow. Now it must always be so.
She wants to grow from the rich-rotten trunk of the stamp left to sprout in the chain-linked alley yard. She wants to be born there. Or out of dry wind rushing debris around and cleaning the world like a slate that hasn’t yet written how her birth will be if she be born slick-wet and shimmering in rings like gas spill, born from long trickles run off curb-piled snow that flows in curtains any northern winter when it is possible to burn in water, when flakes against skin so cold brand their pattern on the new-thought, engraved self.
Snow and after, each bidding and restlessness turns the goat’s heart fallow: long hours of ice and bluster: asymmetry of wind. Say every goat has in its heart a field, and each field, a goat: the slumber of muscle and grass is still a different elegy. Every heart writes a different letter of winter to its cold. Icicles on sheet metal, bucket frozen in the well. Once there was no language for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless; or The sky is a box of wings.
I. Open Ward at the Elisabeth Hospital, Berlin, 1920  My tongue is a spoon.  Does that explain it? Door opens door  closes. White coats stammer the threshold.  They draw the sheets again and again  I give them nothing. My mouth  is a splinter not telling.  They ask if I fell from the bridge  or did I jump. They ask  my name.
II. Dalldorf Asylum: House 4, Ward B  The white coats still come. Fraulein Unbekaant,  they call me.  Miss Unknown.  One asks, Do I hear voices Do I see things.  The doctors here are not very well informed.  When they appear at the foot of my bed,  alabaster and looming I hide my face  in the sheets coarsened and brailled as if  boiled in the well of a thousand drowned  birds.  So much worse  is this quiet than the river’s drift and silt.  Here I have only the rasp and cough of the woman  bunked nearest me drooled to choking.  On the floor, a puddle of saliva thickens.
can go to Bible study every Sunday and swear she’s still not convinced, but she likes to be around people who are. We have the same conversation every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops to admire the perfect leaves of the Japanese maple she waters in her backyard, or tell her how I can gaze for hours at a desert sky and know this as divine. Nature, she says, doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly as much as the greens, pinks, and grays of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco. She spends hours with her vegetables, tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull. Lately everything she touches bears fruit, from new-green string beans to winning golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews, soaring stocks with their multiplying shares. These are the things she can count in her hands, the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs. She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting when everyone else is asleep.
based on photographs from Rural Japan:  Radiance of the Ordinary   / afloat two boats with no riders still moving on water the hulls barely touching each with a single oar safely propped so it won’t fall / lotus leaves close into themselves at night on their wide folded backs water beads inside, their sleeping flowers / inside do the carp just below the water’s stillness see the pines / fall daikon just pulled from the soil these pungent roots hang from bamboo poles their white tubed bodies bend as if slightly aroused each ripe radish will be drenched in salt then eaten raw all winter / lone pine ancient tree with so many tongues how long this throated stem this stillness before rain
to end with nothing is something  Suvan Geer  or to rephrase a popular Billy Preston song,  “somethin’ from nothin’ is somethin’”  I everyone loves the disappearing coin. a bird pulled from an empty hat. the comfort of trusting a magician’s hands. when we know we’ll get some- thing from what he takes away.  II the student’s assignment— concentrate on nothing for fifteen minutes a day. she tries to empty her head but can’t figure out how. after all, she doesn’t know what nothing sounds or looks like, and the teacher won’t give the slightest clue. yet she’s got a good hunch the exercise might quiet all that shriek and clatter trapped between her ears. so like a good pupil, she devotes an entire year searching for nothing. some days she’s as still as a stone, but can’t escape the distractions of river and wind, footsteps approaching, birds calling in the trees overhead. or closing her eyes, she’ll focus on a cloudless blue sky. pillows and planes and purple sunsets keep interrupting. she silently repeats words like ocean or why, chants sounds that dwell low in her throat like maah and uhmm. at year’s end her teacher asks if she’s found nothing. she tells him she’s found everything but nothing. he smiles, you’re closer than you think
The kitchen door opens onto dirt and the second half of the country all the way to the Pacific. Rusted prairie trains out of the tall weeds elbow the last century aside, rumble from every direction towards Chicago.My great-grandfather, who would be 150 years old today, put on his one tall hat and took the big trip to Omaha for my great-grandma with the family ring on his vestand winter wheat lying wait in seed.He gave her all the miles he had and she gave him the future I walk around in every day. The mountains were too far west to count so they doubled back over the land and century and the real weather kept coming from them.
I was born in Boston in 1949. I never wanted this fact to be known, in fact I’ve spent the better half of my adult life trying to sweep my early years under the carpet and have a life that was clearly just mine and independent of the historic fate of my family. Can you imagine what it was like to be one of them, to be built like them, to talk like them to have the benefits of being born into such a wealthy and powerful American family. I went to the best schools, had all kinds of tutors and trainers, traveled widely, met the famous, the controversial, and the not-so-admirable and I knew from a very early age that if there were ever any possibility of escaping the collective fate of this famous Boston family I would take that route and I have. I hopped on an Amtrak to New York in the early ‘70s and I guess you could say my hidden years began. I thought Well I’ll be a poet. What could be more foolish and obscure. I became a lesbian. Every woman in my family looks like a dyke but it’s really stepping off the flag when you become one. While holding this ignominious pose I have seen and I have learned and I am beginning to think there is no escaping history. A woman I am currently having an affair with said you know you look like a Kennedy. I felt the blood rising in my cheeks. People have always laughed at my Boston accent confusing “large” for “lodge,” “party” for “potty.” But when this unsuspecting woman invoked for the first time my family name I knew the jig was up. Yes, I am, I am a Kennedy. My attempts to remain obscure have not served me well. Starting as a humble poet I quickly climbed to the top of my profession assuming a position of leadership and honor. It is right that a woman should call me out now. Yes, I am a Kennedy. And I await your orders. You are the New Americans. The homeless are wandering the streets of our nation’s greatest city. Homeless men with AIDS are among them. Is that right? That there are no homes for the homeless, that there is no free medical help for these men. And women. That they get the message —as they are dying— that this is not their home? And how are your teeth today? Can you afford to fix them? How high is your rent? If art is the highest and most honest form of communication of our times and the young artist is no longer able to move here to speak to her time…Yes, I could, but that was 15 years ago and remember—as I must I am a Kennedy. Shouldn’t we all be Kennedys? This nation’s greatest city is home of the business- man and home of the rich artist. People with beautiful teeth who are not on the streets. What shall we do about this dilemma? Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know what the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. Am I alone tonight? I don’t think so. Am I the only one with bleeding gums tonight. Am I the only homosexual in this room tonight. Am I the only one whose friends have died, are dying now. And my art can’t be supported until it is gigantic, bigger than everyone else’s, confirming the audience’s feeling that they are alone. That they alone are good, deserved to buy the tickets to see this Art. Are working, are healthy, should survive, and are normal. Are you normal tonight? Everyone here, are we all normal. It is not normal for me to be a Kennedy. But I am no longer ashamed, no longer alone. I am not alone tonight because we are all Kennedys. And I am your President.
A man can give up so much, can limit himself to handwritten correspondence, to foods made of whole grains, to heat from a woodstove, logs hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly like corpses by the backdoor.He can play nocturnes by heart. They will not make the beloved appear. He can learn the names of all the birds in the valley. Not one will be enticed to learn his.
LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born. Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife. Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug him up again? The scene is his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur. “The Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cœur de Lion). IDamn it all! all this our South stinks peace.You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!I have no life save when the swords clash.But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposingAnd the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing. IIIn hot summer have I great rejoicingWhen the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,And the light’nings from black heav’n flash crimson,And the fierce thunders roar me their musicAnd the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash. IIIHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peaceWith fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson! IVAnd I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.And I watch his spears through the dark clashAnd it fills all my heart with rejoicingAnd prys wide my mouth with fast musicWhen I see him so scorn and defy peace,His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing. VThe man who fears war and squats opposingMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimsonBut is fit only to rot in womanish peaceFar from where worth’s won and the swords clashFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;Yea, I fill all the air with my music. VIPapiols, Papiols, to the music!There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,No cry like the battle’s rejoicingWhen our elbows and swords drip the crimsonAnd our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!” VIIAnd let the music of the swords make them crimsonHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!Hell blot black for always the thought “Peace”!
My love is in a light attire  Among the apple trees, Where the gay winds do most desire  To run in companies. There, where the gay winds stay to woo  The young leaves as they pass, My love goes slowly, bending to  Her shadow on the grass. And where the sky’s a pale blue cup  Over the laughing land, My love goes lightly, holding up  Her dress with dainty hand.
Women’s tears are but water;The tears of men are blood.He sits alone in the firelightAnd on either side drifts bySleep, like a torrent whirling,Profound, wrinkled and dumb.Circuitously, stealthily,Dawn occupies the city;As if the seasons knew of his griefSpring has suddenly changed into snowDisaster and sorrowHave made him their pet;He cannot escape their accursed embraces.For all his dodgingsMemory will lacerate him.What good does it do to wanderNights hours through city streets?Only that in poor placesHe can be with common menAnd receive their unspokenInstinctive sympathy.What has life done for him?He stands alone in the darknessLike a sentry never relieved,Looking over a barren space,Awaiting the tardy finish.
Crash on crash of the sea,straining to wreck men; sea-boards, continents,raging against the world, furious,stay at last, for against your furyand your mad fight,the line of heroes stands, godlike:Akroneos, Oknolos, Elatreus,helm-of-boat, loosener-of-helm, dweller-by-sea,Nauteus, sea-man,Prumneos, stern-of-ship,Agchilalos, sea-girt,Elatreus, oar-shaft:lover-of-the-sea, lover-of-the-sea-ebb,lover-of-the-swift-sea,Ponteus, Proreus, Oöos:Anabesneos, who breaks to angeras a wave to froth:Amphiolos, one caught between wave-shock and wave-shock:Eurualos, board sea-wrack,like Ares, man’s death,and Naubolidos, best in shape,of all first in size:Phaekous, sea’s thunderbolt—ah, crash on crash of great names—man-tamer, man’s-help, perfect Laodamos:and last the sons of great Alkinöos,Laodamos, Halios, and god-like Clytomeos.Of all nations, of all cities,of all continents,she is favoured above the rest,for she gives men as great as the sea,to battle against the elements and evil:greater even than the sea,they live beyond wrack and death of cities,and each god-like name spokenis as a shrine in a godless place.But to name you,we, reverent, are breathless,weak with pain and old loss,and exile and despair—our hearts break but to speakyour name, Oknaleos—and may we but call you in the feverish wrackof our storm-strewn beach, Eretmeos,our hurt is quiet and our hearts tamed,as the sea may yet be tamed,and we vow to float great ships,named for each hero,and oar-blades, cut of mountain-treesas such men might have shaped:Eretmeos, and the sea is swept,baffled by the lordly shape,Akroneos has pines for his ship’s keel;to love, to mate the sea?Ah there is Ponteos,the very deep roar,hailing you dear—they clamour to Ponteos,and to Proëosleap, swift to kiss, to curl, to creep,lover to mistress.What wave, what love, what foam,For Oöos who moves swift as the sea?Ah stay, my heart, the weightof lovers, of lonelinessdrowns me,alas that their very namesso press to break my heartwith heart-sick weariness,what would they be,the very gods,rearing their mighty lengthbeside the unharvested sea?
I cut myself upon the thought of youAnd yet I come back to it again and again,A kind of fury makes me want to draw you outFrom the dimness of the presentAnd set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,And only when the blood runs out across my fingersAm I at all satisfied.
O You,Who came upon me onceStretched under apple-trees just after bathing,Why did you not strangle me before speakingRather than fill me with the wild white honey of your wordsAnd then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees.
I. Springing JackGreen wooden leaves clap light away,Severely practical, as theyShelter the children candy-pale,The chestnut-candles flicker, fail . . .The showman’s face is cubed clear asThe shapes reflected in a glassOf water—(glog, glut, a ghost’s speechFumbling for space from each to each).The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dustThe universe, for fear it gainIts freedom from my cube of brain.Yet dust bears seeds that grow to graceBehind my crude-striped wooden faceAs I, a puppet tinsel-pinkLeap on my springs, learn how to think—Till like the trembling golden stalkOf some long-petalled star, I walkThrough the dark heavens, and the dewFalls on my eyes and sense thrills through. II. The Ape Watches “Aunt Sally”The apples are an angel’s meat;The shining dark leaves make clear sweetThe juice; green wooden fruits alwayFall on these flowers as white as day—(Clear angel-face on hairy stalk:Soul grown from flesh, an ape’s young talk!)And in this green and lovely groundThe Fair, world-like, turns round and roundAnd bumpkins throw their pence to shedAunt Sally’s wooden clear-striped head.—I do not care if men should throwRound sun and moon to make me go—As bright as gold and silver pence . . .They cannot drive their black shade hence!
Turn again, turn again,Goose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.Bright wooden waves of people creakFrom houses built with coloured strawsOf heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snoresHarsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.The wooden waves of people creakThrough the fields all water-sleek.And in among the straws of lightThose bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.Whence he lies snoring like the moonClownish-white all afternoon.Beneath the trees’ arsenicalSharp woodwind tunes; heretical—Blown like the wind’s mane(Creaking woodenly again).His wandering thoughts escape like geeseTill he, their gooseherd, sets up chase,And clouds of wool join the bright raceFor scattered old simplicities.
Turn, turn again,Ape’s blood in each vein!The people that passSeem castles of glass,The old and the goodGiraffes of the blue wood,The soldier, the nurse,Wooden-face and a curse,Are shadowed with plumageLike birds, by the gloomage.Blond hair like a clown’s The music floats—drownsThe creaking of ropes,The breaking of hopes,The wheezing, the old,Like harmoniums scold;Go to Babylon, Rome,The brain-cells called home,The grave, new Jerusalem—Wrinkled Methusalem!From our floating hair Derived the first fairAnd queer inspirationOf music, the nationOf bright-plumed treesAnd harpy-shrill breeze . . . * * * *Turn, turn again,Ape’s blood in each vein!
Houses red as flower of bean,Flickering leaves and shadows lean!Pantalone, like a parrot,Sat and grumbled in the garret—Sat and growled and grumbled till Moon upon the window-sillLike a red geraniumScented his bald cranium.Said Brighella, meaning well:“Pack your box and—go to Hell!Heat will cure your rheumatism!” . . .Silence crowned this optimism—Not a sound and not a wail:But the fire (lush leafy vales)Watched the angry feathers fly.Pantalone ’gan to cry—Could not, would not, pack his box!Shadows (curtseying hens and cocks)Pecking in the attic gloomTried to smother his tail-plume . . .Till a cockscomb candle-flameCrowing loudly, died: Dawn came.
“Come, surly fellow, come! A song! “What, madmen? Sing to you?Choose from the clouded tales of wrong And terror I bring to you.Of a night so torn with cries, Honest men sleepingStart awake with glaring eyes, Bone chilled, flesh creeping.Of spirits in the web-hung room Up above the stable,Groans, knocking in the gloom The dancing table.Of demons in the dry well That cheep and mutter,Clanging of an unseen bell, Blood, choking the gutter.Of lust, frightful, past belief, Lurking unforgotten,Unrestrainable, endless grief From breasts long rotten.A song? What laughter or what song Can this house remember?Do flowers and butterflies belong To a blind December?”
From the region of zephyrs, the Emerald isle,  The land of thy birth, in my freshness I come, To waken this long-cherished morn with a smile,  And breathe o’er thy spirit the whispers of home. O welcome the stranger from Erin’s green sod;  I sprang where the bones of thy fathers repose, I grew where thy free step in infancy trod,  Ere the world threw around thee its wiles and its woes.  But sprightlier themes  Enliven the dreams, My dew-dropping leaflets unfold to impart:  To loftiest emotion  Of patriot devotion, I wake the full chord of an Irishman’s heart. The rose is expanding her petals of pride,  And points to the laurels o’erarching her tree; And the hardy Bur-thistle stands rooted beside,  And sternly demands;—Who dare meddle wi’ me? And bright are the garlands they jointly display,  In death-fields of victory gallantly got; But let the fair sisters their trophies array,  And show us the wreath where the shamrock is not!  By sea and by land,  With bullet and brand, My sons have directed the stormbolt of war;  The banners ye boast,  Ne’er waved o’er our host, Unfanned by the accents of Erin-go-bragh! Erin mavourneen! dark is thy night;  Deep thy forebodings and gloomy thy fears; And O, there are bosoms with savage delight  Who laugh at thy plainings and scoff at thy tears! But, Erin mavourneen, bright are the names  Who twine with the heart-vein thy fate in their breast; And scorned be the lot of the dastard, who shames  To plant, as a trophy, this leaf on his crest!  Thrice trebled disgrace  His honours deface, Who shrinks from proclaiming the isle of his birth!  Though lowly its stem,  This emerald gem Mates with the proudest that shadow the earth! Sandhurst, March 17, 1827
There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea, Here’s to the Saint that blessed it!And here’s to the billows wild and free That for centuries have caressed it!Here’s to the day when the men that roam Send longing eyes o’er the water!Here’s to the land that still spells home To each loyal son and daughter!Here’s to old Ireland—fair, I ween, With the blue skies stretched above her!Here’s to her shamrock warm and green, And here’s to the hearts that love her!
Now as I watch you, strong of arm and endurance, battling and strugglingWith the waves that rush against you, ever with invincible strength returningInto my heart, grown each day more tranquil and peaceful, comes a fierce longingOf mind and soul that will not be appeased until, like you, I breast yon deep and boundless expanse of blue.With an outward stroke of power intense your mighty arm goes forth,Cleaving its way through waters that rise and roll, ever a ceaseless vigil keepingOver the treasures beneath.My heart goes out to you of dauntless courage and spirit indomitable,And though my lips would speak, my spirit forbids me to ask,“Is your heart as true as your arm?”
So it is: sleep comes not on my eyelids.Nor in my eyes, with shaken hair and whiteAloof pale hands, and lips and breasts of iron, So she beholds me.And yet though sleep comes not to me, there comesA vision from the full smooth brow of sleep,The white Aphrodite moving unbounded By her own hair.In the purple beaks of the doves that draw her,Beaks straight without desire, necks bent backwardToward Lesbos and the flying feet of Loves Weeping behind her.She looks not back, she looks not back to whereThe nine crowned muses about ApolloStand like nine Corinthian columns singing In clear evening.She sees not the Lesbians kissing mouthTo mouth across lute strings, drunken with singing,Nor the white feet of the Oceanides Shining and unsandalled.Before her go cryings and lamentationsOf barren women, a thunder of wings,While ghosts of outcast Lethean women, lamenting, Stiffen the twilight.
Her house is empty and her heart is old,And filled with shades and echoes that deceiveNo one save her, for still she tries to weaveWith blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold.Once all men’s arms rose up to her, ‘tis told,And hovered like white birds for her caress:A crown she could have had to bind each tressOf hair, and her sweet arms the Witches’ Gold. Her mirrors know her witnesses, for thereShe rose in dreams from other dreams that lentHer softness as she stood, crowned with soft hair.And with his bound heart and his young eyes bentAnd blind, he feels her presence like shed scent,Holding him body and life within its snare.
Why do you shiver thereBetween the white river and the road?You are not cold,With the sun light dreaming about you;And yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as thoughTo draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness.You are a young girlTrembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty,A white objective girlWhose clothing has been forcibly taken away from her.
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,Rumbling in the wind,Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .Full-lipped flowersBitten by the sunBleeding rainDripping rain like golden honey—And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.
Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coalTo start the Fire, did his part well;Not all wood takes to fire from a match,Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal.The wood and coal in question caught a flameAnd flared up beautifully, touching the airThat takes a flame from anything.Somehow the fire was furnaced,And then the time was ripe for some to say,“Right banking of the furnace saves the coal.”I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,Though all with shovels and with ashes,Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-capsContentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left aloneWould die, but like as not spiced tonguesRemaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up,Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them. But roaring fires never have been made that way.I’d like to tell those folks that one grand flareTransferred to memory tissues of the airIs worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold,All money ever saved by banking coal.
Pour O pour that parting soul in song,O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,And let the valley carry it along.And let the valley carry it along. O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,Now just before an epoch’s sun declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee.Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.In time, for though the sun is setting onA song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;Though late, O soil, it is not too late yetTo catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone. O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,Passing, before they stripped the old tree bareOne plum was saved for me, one seed becomesAn everlasting song, a singing tree,Caroling softly souls of slavery,What they were, and what they are to me,Caroling softly souls of slavery.
I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields of other harvesters.It would be good to see them . . . crook’d, split, and iron-ring’d handles of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and blind. I hunger.(Dusk is a strange fear’d sheath their blades are dull’d in.)My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats . . . eoho—I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain, oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time. I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry.It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and the strangeness of their voices deafened me. I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled. I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to it. My throat is dry . . .O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger.
Though half my years besiege the aged sun, I have not lived. My robust preparation Lags tardily behind fit consummation,Droops sweatily in courses just begun.Oh, I have loved and lusted with the best, Plucked momentary music from the senses; I’ve kissed a lip or two with fair pretensesAnd wept for softness of a woman’s breast.My mind rebounds to nether joys and pain, Toying with filth and pharisaic leaven; I know the lift up sundry peaks to heaven,And every rockless path to hell again.I wait the hour when gods have more to giveThan husks and bare insatiate will to live.
On such a day we put him in a boxAnd carried him to that last house, the grave;All round the people walked upon the streetsWithout once thinking that he had gone.Their hard heels clacked upon the pavement stones.A voiceless change had muted all his thoughtsTo a deep significance we could not know;And yet we knew that he knew all at last.We heard with grave wonder the falling clods,And with grave wonder met the loud day.The night would come and day, but we had died.With new green sod the melancholy gateWas closed and locked, and we went pitiful.Our clacking heels upon the pavement stonesDid knock and knock for Death to let us in.
If ever the sweet spring comes, I’ll put aside these dead booksAnd try to feel the herbage freshen Along the withered boughs of old dry thoughts.I’ll walk out somewhere where a garden grows, And there I’ll stand some summer evening,Hat beside elbows on the gray stone wall, And the wind will stir, coming from behind the hill.Afterward I’ll walk home, hands behind me, And pause a moment before going in,Half fancying some one has called my name, Or been awakened to a flutter as I passed.Of course, I’ll enter, but leave the door ajar, For someone might come in, you know, Expectantly I’ll sit to fancy the long evening through That a pair of eyes in the summer nightMight light a candle in the dull world, So softly that none might see to smile at,Yet ardently enough—like a vestal candle burning— For a little heat in a cold house.
Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change, Your calm of stars, watching the turn of earth,Patient of man, and never thinking strange The mad red crash of each new system’s birth.Teach me, for I would know your beauty’s way That waits and changes with each changing sun,No dawn so fair but promises a day Of other perfectness than men have won.Teach me, old World, not as vain men have taught, —Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass,Nor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought Is woe that they and worlds alike must pass.Nothing I learn by any mortal rule;Teach me, old World, I would not be man’s fool.
“The chambers of the sun, that nowFrom ancient melody have ceased.” The doorways of the Sun were closed; Its muted bells gave forth no sound.But while the windy prophets dozed A child a little crevice found.He pulled with one small straining hand; The massy door moved willingly.And he has wakened all the band Of singers—they rise eagerly.Let now again the hinges move In sweetly clanging melody;Unseat the dark blind from the groove; Unleash the struggling harmony.The golden doors are opening To ancient sounds of loveliness;The Sons of Light are issuing, Winged with their antique mightiness.Who can sing the House of the Sun? Who shall frame its dreadful art?His childhood never must be done! And he must have a wondering heart!Burn all the manuscripts of shame! Break every lute of brazen string!Utter, O living tongues, the flame! Up, Dust, into the Sun, and sing!
The Tiger-Woman came to meWhen dusk was close and men were dull.She beckoned from the jungle-path;I followed, dreaming, fanciful.The Tiger-Woman’s face is pale,But oh, her speaking eyes are dark.No beast can move so lithe as sheBeside the matted river’s mark.The jungle is a fearsome placeFor men who hunt, and men who slay,But I was not afraid to goWhere Tiger-Woman led the way.The Tiger-Woman’s lips are thin;Her teeth are like the Tiger’s teeth.Yet her soft hands are woman’s hands,And oh, the blood beats warm beneath.She led me to a little glade,—The creepers with the moon inwove,—And two great striped beasts leaped upAnd fawned upon her breast in love.The Tiger-Woman’s voice was sweet;I hearkened and was not afraid.She stroked the Tigers’ fearful jaws;Upon their heads my hands I laid.And all the jungle things drew near,And all the leaves a music madeLike spirits chanting in a choirAlong the bamboo colonnade.Too sweet for human harps to sound,It touched my blood, it fired my heartThe Tiger-Woman sang, and ISang too, and understood her art.She kissed the Tiger’s snarling mouth.She kissed—I marveled that she could—But now her lips were warm on mine;I cared not they were dabbed with blood.What if the traveller shuns my hut,What if the world forgets to be,What if I have the Tiger’s heart,—The Tiger-Woman loveth me!
When the hour is hushed and you lie still,So quiet is the room about meIt seems perhaps that you are gone,Sunken to a marble sleep.I hear no sound; my quiet will,Passive as the lambs at rest,Stirs not the quaint forgetfulnessBut only murmurs, “Sleep is strange!”The low moon at the lattice goingRests no more quietly than you at peace.Hushed is the candle; the hour is late,And I, poor witness of extreme change,I think perhaps then heaven opensLike the unfolding of your hand in sleep—Your cold white hand—to close again—While I sit staring at the marble gate.
Grieve not that winter masks the yet quick earth, Nor still that summer walks the hills no more; That fickle spring has doffed the plaid she woreTo swathe herself in napkins till rebirth.These buddings, flowerings, are nothing worth; This ermine cloud stretched firm across the lakes Will presently be shattered into flakes;Then, starveling world, be subject to my mirth.I know that faithful swift mortality Subscribes to nothing longer than a day; All beauty signals imminent decay;And painted wreckage cumbers land and sea.I laugh to hear a sniveling wise one say,“Some winnowed self escapes this reckless way.”
Thou twist of gold, woven so curiously,Be filled with warmth and urgent tenderness,And cool not on her throat’s white nakedness,Like metal death, but burn insistently,Reminding her of me!To save her from the serpent’s little eyeI set a stone of blue chalcedonyWithin a cunning loop—so it shall beAware and mindful when her lashes lieUntaught of danger nigh.To keep her from the dragon’s hungry toothIn seven laps the quorls were subtly twined;From seven rivers grains of gold were mined,Hammered by black elves’ mauls, and tempered soothIn hissing brews uncouth.So lie within my satchel, Amulet,With many another dull and boughten thing,Till I am done with all my wanderingAnd fix thee pendant on the carcanetAround her white neck set.For I have graven some small incantationIn feathery lines upon this rounded wire—King Solomon made such for his desire,And Sheba’s throat was warm for subjugationHearing the King’s translation.
“Press out an opiate juiceFrom berries culled in prick of June-time heat;Pound nettles in a cruseOf crimson sard till mixing is complete;And strain the brew through bags of sarcenet,Mumbling the runes that crazed Sir Dagonet.” So spoke the slobbering witch,Wagging her shaky head incessantly;Then, with an agile twitchStove oddly crackling through the briery.I caught the swish of her broomstick up to the moon,And her tattered skirt afloat like a black balloon.Old Witch, whither art gone?Hopped off to the well like Chick-o’-my-Craney-Crow?Here’s work for thy dudgeon, A brew and a bake for a devilish calico!What’s but a kettle ready for mad ferment,Black mouth a-grin at me, the innocent!I pressed and pounded duly,And sat to watch the slop at bubble slow;Fed coals with knots unrulyOf thornbush boles till pot-legs stood aglow.And thrice the pot gave forth a piggish grunt,And thrice a bellowing as of hounds on hunt.A great red swine sprang out,With bristling gleams as bright as Freyr’s boar;Then, at his grubbing snout,Two black dogs leaped, two white-fanged lusts for gore.They three made hideous noise through brush and dew—Trembling I stooped and strained the mulling brew.And there was born a girlWithin a sudden mist wizardry,And came some faint pipes’ thirl,While she danced, with lips turned sly, and beckoned me,And we danced mad till night’s low-burning wickSnuffed out, hearing like us the Old Hag’s stick.
It had better been hidden But the Poets inform:We are chattel and liege Of an undying Worm.Were you, Will, disheartened, When all Stratford’s gentryLeft their Queen and took service In his low-lying country?How many white cities And grey fleets on the stormHave proud-builded, hard-battled, For this undying Worm?Was a sweet chaste lady Would none of her lover.Nay, here comes the Lewd One, Creeps under her cover!Have ye said there’s no deathless Of face, fashion, form,Forgetting to honor The extent of the Worm?O ye laughers and light-lipped, Ye faithless, infirm,I can tell you who’s constant, ’Tis the Eminent Worm.Ye shall trip on no limits, Neither time ye your term,In the realms of His Absolute Highness the Worm.
Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds,Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather;He would lump the saint and the courtesan together,Most miserably jangling all the creeds.The prurient multitude heard he was mad,Yet nosed his books for some pornography.The censors doubted his virginity,And secretly conned the works that they forbade.Reporters found this dangerous oddityIn rusty pantaloons, mowing the green,And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seenA naked Venus disturbing an alien sea.He watched their backs receding down the street,Raked up the grass, and suddenly had a visionOf how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derisionBehind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.
Of what sins have you made confession here,Ardent Cecile? Not passion’s intimacy,Or tangles of desire that mutineerA bold way through your maiden ecstasy.Those are not blamed...the penance not severe! Pray rather, with cool-lidded conscious eyesFor warm juvescence of those ichored limbs,For laughter checked by no repentant cries,For lips unstained by pattering of hymns.Men’s glances have embraced you. They are wise.They have seen you, cumbent by the ruddy fire,Lending your curves to cushioned wantonness,Or leaping to the stroke of an earthy lyreTwanged in the joy of throbbing noon’s excessAnd cried no pause for love. You, they require.Of what sins have you made confession here,Ardent Cecile? The wood receives your knees;The organ stirs your prayer. Now you revereThe God that made you beautiful among these,The gnarled and ugly. Your book receives no tear.
A page, a huntsman and a priest of God Her lovers, met in jealous contrarietyEqually claiming the sole parenthood Of him the perfect crown of their variety.Then, whom to admit, herself she could not tell:That always was her fate, she loved too well.“But many-fathered little one,” she said, “Whether of high or low, of smooth or rough,Here is your mother whom you brought to bed; Acknowledge only me; be this enough;For such as worship after shall be toldA white dove sired you or a rain of gold.”
The hunter to the husbandmanPays tribute since our love began,And to love-loyalty dedicatesThe phantom kills he meditates.Let me embrace, embracing you,Beauty of other shape and hue,Odd glinting graces of which noneShone more than candle to your sun;Your well-kissed hand was beckoning meIn unfamiliar imagery.Smile your forgiveness: each bright ghostDives in love’s glory and is lostYielding your comprehensive prideA homage, even to suicide.
“I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty.” —Confucius Dolorous, here he made his standLike those who are beaten,Behind, the mountains, and in front, the sea,To the west a rock by the brown river eaten.Here beauty went along the strandSmashing green waves against the white sand.“Beyond the rock there, that’s his thatch.”So spoke up a neighbor.“And you’ll be finding leather string on latchAnd him inside, at peace from labor.”So he was run in, the fox to his earth,He the old reaver, warm by his hearth,But where was the booty, the gems and doubloonsFilched from fat merchants by tropical moons?He, of all pirates prime hierophant,No swords, no silver, no silk of Levant?“Four things,” he answered, “of all things that are:A rock, a river, a tree and a star!”This is his wisdom? He welcomed me ill;I passed by the tree and strove up the hill.This is the saying of one wise as he?A river, a rock, a star and a tree?This is the place, the shrine of the sage,Who lived his last days with beauty for wage.Here’s where the tree was long ago humbled,And a space points us out where granite has crumbled.The river is empty, and a wind sweeps the stones;The stars are not whiter than freebooter’s bones.
White flabbiness goes brown and lean, Dumpling arms are now brass bars, They’ve learnt to suffer and live clean, And to think below the stars. They’ve steeled a tender, girlish heart, Tempered it with a man’s pride, Learning to play the butcher’s part Though the woman screams inside— Learning to leap the parapet, Face the open rush, and then To stab with the stark bayonet, Side by side with fighting men. On Achi Baba’s rock their bones Whiten, and on Flanders’ plain, But of their travailings and groans Poetry is born again.
I. – THE FIRST FUNERAL (The first corpse I saw was on the German wires, and couldn’t be buried) The whole field was so smelly; We smelt the poor dog first: His horrid swollen belly Looked just like going burst. His fur was most untidy; He hadn’t any eyes. It happened on Good Friday And there was lots of flies. And then I felt the coldest I’d ever felt, and sick, But Rose, ’cause she’s the oldest, Dared poke him with her stick. He felt quite soft and horrid: The flies buzzed round his head And settled on his forehead: Rose whispered: ‘That dog’s dead. ‘You bury all dead people, When they’re quite really dead, Round churches with a steeple: Let’s bury this,’ Rose said. ‘And let’s put mint all round it To hide the nasty smell.’ I went to look and found it— Lots, growing near the well. We poked him through the clover Into a hole, and then We threw brown earth right over And said: ‘Poor dog, Amen!’
The great sun sinks behind the townThrough a red mist of Volnay wine . . . . But what’s the use of setting down That glorious blaze behind the town? You’ll only skip the page, you’ll look For newer pictures in this book; You’ve read of sunsets rich as mine. A fresh wind fills the evening airWith horrid crying of night birds . . . . But what reads new or curious there When cold winds fly across the air? You’ll only frown; you’ll turn the page, But find no glimpse of your ‘New Age Of Poetry’ in my worn-out words. Must winds that cut like blades of steel And sunsets swimming in Volnay, The holiest, cruellest pains I feel, Die stillborn, because old men squeal For something new: ‘Write something new: We’ve read this poem – that one too, And twelve more like ’em yesterday’? No, no! my chicken, I shall scrawl Just what I fancy as I strike it, Fairies and Fusiliers, and all. Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl Across my verse in the classic way. And, sir, be careful what you say; There are old-fashioned folk still like it.
My familiar ghost again Comes to see what he can see, Critic, son of Conscious Brain, Spying on our privacy. Slam the window, bolt the door, Yet he’ll enter in and stay; In to-morrow’s book he’ll score Indiscretions of to-day. Whispered love and muttered fears, How their echoes fly about! None escape his watchful ears, Every sigh might be a shout. No kind words nor angry cries Turn away this grim spoilsport; No fine lady’s pleading eyes, Neither love, nor hate, nor . . . port. Critic wears no smile of fun, Speaks no word of blame nor praise, Counts our kisses one by one, Notes each gesture, every phrase. My familiar ghost again Stands or squats where suits him best; Critic, son of Conscious Brain, Listens, watches, takes no rest.
‘Gabble-gabble, . . . brethren, . . . gabble-gabble!’ My window frames forest and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation. Outside it blows wetter and wetter, The tossing trees never stay still. I shift my elbows to catch better The full round sweep of heathered hill. The tortured copse bends to and fro In silence like a shadow-show. The parson’s voice runs like a river Over smooth rocks, I like this church: The pews are staid, they never shiver, They never bend or sway or lurch. ‘Prayer,’ says the kind voice, ‘is a chain That draws down Grace from Heaven again.’ I add the hymns up, over and over, Until there’s not the least mistake. Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover! It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake? The red light from his mantle passes Across the broad memorial brasses. It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking, Lolling and letting reason nod, With ugly serious people linking Sad prayers to a forgiving God . . . . But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying With furious zeal like madmen praying.
Are you shaken, are you stirred By a whisper of love, Spellbound to a word Does Time cease to move, Till her calm grey eye Expands to a sky And the clouds of her hair Like storms go by? Then the lips that you have kissed Turn to frost and fire, And a white-steaming mist Obscures desire: So back to their birth Fade water, air, earth, And the First Power moves Over void and dearth.Is that Love? no, but Death, A passion, a shout,The deep in-breath, The breath roaring out,And once that is flown, You must lie alone,Without hope, without life, Poor flesh, sad bone.
Now I begin to know at last, These nights when I sit down to rhyme, The form and measure of that vast God we call Poetry, he who stoops And leaps me through his paper hoops A little higher every time. Tempts me to think I’ll grow a proper Singing cricket or grass-hopper Making prodigious jumps in air While shaken crowds about me stare Aghast, and I sing, growing bolder To fly up on my master’s shoulder Rustling the thick stands of his hair. He is older than the seas, Older than the plains and hills, And older than the light that spills From the sun’s hot wheel on these. He wakes the gale that tears your trees, He sings to you from window sills. At you he roars, or he will coo, He shouts and screams when hell is hot, Riding on the shell and shot. He smites you down, he succours you, And where you seek him, he is not. To-day I see he has two heads Like Janus—calm, benignant, this; That, grim and scowling: his beard spreads From chin to chin: this god has power Immeasurable at every hour: He first taight lovers how to kiss, He brings down sunshine after shower, Thunder and hate are his also, He is YES and he is NO. The black beard spoke and said to me, ‘Human fraility though you be, Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh! They’ll obey you in the end: Hill and field, river and marsh Shall obey you, hop and skip At the terrour of your whip, To your gales of anger bend.’ The pale beard spoke and said in turn ‘True: a prize goes to the stern, But sing and laugh and easily run Through the wide airs of my plain, Bathe in my waters, drink my sun, And draw my creatures with soft song; They shall follow you along Graciously with no doubt or pain.’ Then speaking from his double head The glorious fearful monster said ‘I am YES and I am NO, Black as pitch and white as snow, Love me, hate me, reconcile Hate with love, perfect with vile, So equal justice shall be done And life shared between moon and sun. Nature for you shall curse or smile: A poet you shall be, my son.’
In a pyloned desert where the scorpion reigns My love and I plucked poppies breathing tales Of crimes now long asleep, whose once–red stains Dyed stabbing men, at sea with bloody sails. The golden sand drowsed. There a dog yelped loud; And in his cry rattled a hollow note Of deep uncanny knowledge of that crowd That loved and bled in winy times remote. The poppies fainted when the moon came wide; The cur lay still. Our passionate review Of red wise folly dreamed on . . . She by my side Stared at the Moon; and then I knew he knew. And then he smiled at her; to him ’twas funny— Her calm steel eyes, her earth–old throat of honey!
I’ve often wondered why she laughed On thinking why I wondered so; It seemed such waste that long white hands Should touch my hands and let them go. And once when we were parting there, Unseen of anything but trees, I touched her fingers, thoughtfully, For more than simple niceties. But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us; Yet I have wondered how she smiled Beholding what was cavernous.
This is the village where the funeral Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace To the patch of weeds known finally to all. Of her virtues large tongues were loud As I, a stranger, trudged the streets Gay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few Sly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud. For this was death. I should never see these men again And yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil— An issue for conscience, say— The cold heart of death was beating in my brain: A new figuration of an old phenomenon. This is the village where women walk the streets Selling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide; Of their virtues the symbol can be washtubs But when they die it is a time of singing, And then the symbol changes with change of place. Let the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill. Let a new slab look off into the sunset:The night drops down with sullen grace.
I leave her weeping in her barred little bed, her warm hand clutching at my hand, but she doesn’t want a kiss, or to hug the dog goodnight— she keeps crying mommy, uhhh, mommy, with her lovely crumpled face like a golden piece of paper I am throwing away. We have been playing for hours, and now we need to stop, and she does not want to. She is counting on me to lower the boom that is her heavy body, and settle her down. I rub her ribcage, I arrange the blankets around her hips. Downstairs are lethal phonecalls I have to answer. Friends dying, I need to call. My daughter may be weeping all my tears, I only know that even this young and lying on her side, her head uplifted like a cupped tulip, sometimes she needs to cry.
Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked, dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched. And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind,he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are refugees from a brain where time and loss have small dominion, but where the tyranny of now is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door, and he disappears down the cement steps, barking deeper and darker than I remember. I followto find him perfectly still in the empty yard— the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.
You only have to make her one grilled cheese in the suffocating heat of summer while still wearing your wet swim trunks to know what it’s like to be in love. And you only have to sit once for a haircut in the air conditioning with the lovely stylist to forget all about it, and to forget that anything in the universe ever existed prior to the small, pink sweater now brushing softly against your neck. In this world, every birth is premature. How else to explain all of this silence, all of this screaming, all of those Christmas card letters about how well the kids are doing in school? We’re all struggling to say the same old things in new and different ways. And so we must praise the new and different ways. I don’t like Christmas. I miss you that much. For I, too, have heard the screaming, and I, too, have tried to let it pass, and still I’ve been up half the night as if I were half this old, and like you, I hate this kind of poetry just as much as my life depends upon it. They’re giving away tiny phones for free these days, but they’ve only made a decent conversation more precious. One medicine stops the swelling, another medicine stops the first medicine. Just like you, I entered this world mad and kicking, and without you, it’s precisely how I intend to go.
There’s only one horizon, yet it can be found in every direction we look. You’d think it would be easier to get the hell out of here. Just ask an iceberg. In any Chinese restaurant, never order the 42. Never answer your door during dinner, it’s probably another little shit peddling Snickers. Posing behind their windows, the mannequins remind us of their absent stylist. This is all hero worship. This poem ends the same way they all do— list everyone you’ve ever had sex with here:
The neighbors will soon spread their confounding potluck before you. Dressed in period garb, they wear sandals with socks. They subscribe to Life magazine to experience the present as if it were already the past. Their flowering trees were engineered to never drop fruit. Overhead, constellations of stickers glow from bedroom ceilings as souvenirs from a time when life was lived outdoors. All conversations end in silence. The trick is to make it purposeful. It’s not going to get any easier, for these are the CliffsNotes.
I woke to more rain, and felt in the dark for how wet the sill was, then rolled back to my radio, and a midnight preacher in my earphone teaching about sin.   I learned that punishment would come like lightning that surprises an innocent shore. Thunder would follow me all my days, stern reminder and sharp rebuke.   The long, sleek, and pointed call that rose, as if in response, out of the estuary of night and storm, said it knew well what the given world gave, and wanted more.
I have seen the legislators on their way, the jacketless men in mid-winter who will cast their votes like stones for this war.   Men who have to cross the street through slush and over gutter, their cuffs now vaguely blued with a salt that dries in dots where it splashes,   and mingles with the finely woven cloth of the chalk-stripe suits, the soi-disant practical men, you can see them now tiptoeing,   now leaping, balletic, windsor-knotted, fragrant and shaved, they pass, they pass the window of the Capitol Deli   wherein I am writing to my friend in Baghdad, he a “witness for peace,” a poet who for years has wondered what good poetry is or has been or does.   I compose today’s answer from here, saying,I think of poetry as a salt dug from a foreign mine
What god was it that would open earth’s picture book and see the two of us on a road, snowfields glittering on every side and poplars bent like the fingers of an old man clutching what he loved about the sun?   Which one was it that would peer into our thatched, white-washed farmhouse, and see the fur, flies, and shit-stained walls? Which one laughed at the barbed wire fences, the wall topped with broken glass?   Which of the many who came then, gleaming and rimed in hard sunlight? Which of those who bobbed like ice along the winter shore? What did we have that any god would want? Quick, if you can find it, hide it.
That whine is the sound of waste, rot, the frantic, grinding inability to attend to anything but sere thwarting of yourself, a dry corrosion which some say they know, but you and I—  (my jaw clenched as youturn a page,you with a heart like drywall,I who wouldlace my arms with razors,then press themslowly to your lips,the metal tastemixing with flesh,and through gritted teethI making the soundof you, you, youdo not know, meaningonly me, me)   we know best.
Anatomie des parties de la génération, Paris, 1773 What have they done to deserve this beauty? Did they, like Marsyas, invite some knife- wielding god with petty transgressions, the crime of a few tunes on Athena’s lost flute?   Or were they simply too poor for deep graves, locked gates, and good husbands to watch over the mounds of new soil tossed toward them and their hunted unborn?   Whoever they were, they’re still with us, posing demurely in suits of blood and muscle, the bruised shadows of what skin they do have, purpling like   crushed petunias as they spread their legs and raise their meaty arms to show dissected breasts, unfinished infants, sundry viscera on the ground about their feet   as if this were Thanksgiving and they cornucopias stuffed with squash and fruit. And who delivered their sentences? Surely not the muses who, at least,   let them keep rococo faces. In 1773 the womb and the brain were the last outposts of the body to be mapped. D’Agoty bought the rights to Le Blon’s technique of printing   mezzotints and gave these ladies homes in scientific texts, but anatomists believed D’Agoty’s prints too gorgeous to be accurate. Perhaps that’s why they open other wounds   so easily in us. All so like the single rabbit I downed at twenty with a borrowed rifle, and then was obligated to see skinned, first scoring the length of the spine,   then peeling the fur in one steaming piece, while the perverse uncle who clearly desired to touch me, instead held up a dripping pelt in one hand, and in the other, a flayed carcass   still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.
He arrives in the courtyard with two cartons of juice, each of which he’ll tip and drain at one go in the heat, and a sack of food for the roses. He looms over his tools, blond and dusty as a stalk of ripe wheat, surely someone’s prized lover. Centuries bask among his hybrid teas, and he shakes his capable handfuls of food into their beds until nothing but roses nose the blues between lake and garden, lake and sky, the lapse of lawn where a party could be if those who lived here once returned to pour the wine. She’d be the sort to tuck a bud behind her ear, and he to catch one in his teeth. But alas, we’re guests of the present, expectant and sultry; all graciousness is fled, and rain fills the spent blooms, tumbles their tops, weighted with ruffles and shocks of pink. The gardener too disappears with his breeches the color of mustard and cinched with a string, gone back into the pages of Hardy or Lawrence. Perhaps, he’ll appear again Tuesday next, but he won’t look any of us living in the eye.
Rocked in my mother’s pregnant amble, and born into forty-five years in the dark, the egg this child was also swayed in the arts of lovers I took before you, fed with me   in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year to new waves of wander, fish and flower, liqueur of each region, and bread of each village,   each cup of moonlight in the long sward between my window and the Wannsee. The egg he was heard and voices of everyone I desired and held itself   in some deep hormonal bloom, taking whatever was remarkable in my life into its possibility. We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain,   to listen for the rumble of wild boar in the Malvan woods. We climbed into planes bound for cities we’d never visit again and skin we’d summon   with sobbing. And so, my husband, as you dream of owning this child, remember that he has ridden in my fire, bathed in my blood, and sipped   at the breath I drew the first time I saw what Rodin had clawed from stone before he turned from Claudel and went home for dinner and a clean shirt.   Remember that this child is collage of everything before you, frangipani and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes of macaroni, and French cherries   from an old woman in Auvergne who insisted on the gift because it was so marvelous to see a woman traveling alone.
I. Deer Season   The quiet of windows pours its sand in my ear.What, what? ask the dolls of evening   though they do not wish to hear my answer. Five hens are alive in the brush, purring   toward the slough. No one here has a rifle but the wind turns abruptly and returns a report.   Three bright orange vests hang at the ready. The doe turns in her frame above the stove,   and her season climbs like the moon into its place in the sky’s clock. The green theater   with its elegant aspens goes more threadbare each week, so I’ll soon see the others, heretofore   only heard. Just to the south the casino lights ride the underbellies of clouds, and further   down the interstate more world twirls in its paper and drinks, while the baby throws   his feet through the bars, and the father takes him like a little canoe on the billowy   lake of his chest. Comes a mewling, then, from my dark, a mooing, a whine, feathered   or furred I can’t divine. The girl with the flat face and bleached lips read her poems in crisp   Ivy League whatnot, but I got sidetracked by the way her torso seemed stacked, pressed   in layers like shale, so there was a weight to her that hung in the bottom of the eye like the bulk   of a tear that never quite falls. It’s true the intelligence was clear as green ice, and just   as hard, stripped of its I and heat. Her baby burbled on in the back of the room happily not   in the poems. Oh little rabbit of grief on the spot where the last dog was turned under, don’t speak.   I make a fire, then dream a fire: wind carries its gray rags into the woods, and the crackling   in the grate enters my ducts, wakes me. When I look out, the grass along the fence   is crawling with light, and the last wild asters press their blue buttons into the cold glass.     II. The New Year   Zero and a fine hard snow burns when it hits bare skin. A white   ridge glows inside the birches across the slough where snow articulates   the distance. Where water moves, where the land heaves. I haul oak chunks   in a plastic sled. When I bend to stack the splits, my breasts pop and burn,   and my child’s face rises like a bird razoring its shadow over the snow.   Wind takes the rag of some old self and shakes it at me. The heart is only   another shape the view stretches to include. Birches march out of the hardwoods   with their white waists radiant, so many clones on one taproot. A jay circles   the full feeders fending off smaller birds. I make this vocal gesture because self   is simply one edge of me. Out here there’s only an economy of wood burned   or to be burned, how much water’s left in the tank, how hard or soft the light.   Degrees and drafts. This room and everything in it are mine, and though I try to be selfish and grim,   my child has made me enduringly plural, more than I, but not quite we.   Black-capped chickadees flee from three big jays at the feeder. Shrieking   and diving in the strong winter light, the jays are not actually blue. Their feathers refract light   so they appear blue. Self-luminous, hardy and belligerent as pronouns.     III. Easter   The kick of the screw finding purchase in pine slams my wrist bone, elbow and shoulder, but it’s in, and the panel is up. Now another and another until the wall is flush. I mark   and cut each length with the small tooth of the new jigsaw my husband thought I should have. Two days apart from him and the child, I’ve forgotten the pump   to empty my breasts, so the saw’s jump at the end of the cut draws the burning up. And with it a guilt as bright as the room where I drive plank after plank against the studs,   each a satisfaction against the body’s wish to be elsewhere. Even into the night, I can’t put down my drill. I stoke the fire and drive more screws, loving the growl when they’re   in as far as they’ll go. The mind arranging which planks and trim tomorrow, next week and spring. Even my sleep is a cutting and fastening broken by my turning on the full globes   of my breasts. So toward morning I dream of parties given by women I used to know, and to which I’m not and will never be invited, trays of fancy sandwiches and petit fours,   half moon glasses of seething champagne.
Many of my friends are alone and know too much to be happy though they still want to dive to the bottom of the green ocean and bring back a gold coin in their hand. A woman I know wakes in the late evening and talks to her late husband, the windows blank photographs. On the porch, my brother, hands in pockets, stares at the flowing stream. What’s wrong? Nothing. The cows stand in their own slow afternoons. The horses gather wild rose hips in the sun the way I longed for someone long ago. What was it like? The door opening and no one on either side.
While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth,   holding up traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up while I was talking to the Emptiness   of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves   at the bottom of the ocean. My heart is taped up like a child’s drawing   of the moon over the broken window of the sky   where the wind always comes back to fill my lungs. I will dance on my shadow. I will open my mouth   with the air inside my mother’s coffin.   I will be the arrow breaking apart in the body of the blackbird, which appears at my window, singing.
I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin.   With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap, I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet   of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts.   With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight, I will love another man because I will be a woman.   Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.   I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half   will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.
Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange   that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind. I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks   the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind   into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor are animals fighting each other   out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known   have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.
And that’s how it is; everyone standing up from the big silence   of the table with their glasses of certainty and plates of forgiveness and walking into the purple kitchen; everyone leaning away from the gas stove   Marie blows on at the very edge of the breaking blue-orange-lunging-   forward flames to warm another pot of coffee, while the dishes pile up in the sink, perfect as a pyramid. Aaah, says Donna, closing her eyes,   and leaning on Nick’s shoulders as he drives the soft blade of the knife   through the glittering dark of the leftover chocolate birthday cake. That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool,   drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking,   shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts   to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water;   to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others.   That’s how it is, that’s it, throwing your jacket over your shoulders   like a towel and saying goodbye Victoria goodbye Sophie goodbye Lili goodbye sweetie take care be well hang in there see you soon.
Your death must be loved this much.   You have to know the grief—now. Standing by the water’s edge,   looking down at the wave   touching you. You have to lie, stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth   and see how far the darkness   will take you. I mean it, this, now— before the ghost the cold leaves   in your breath, rises;   before the toes are put together inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn   orange-going-into-rose descending   circle of beauty and time. You have nothing to be sad about.
But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded, something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone   as she moves up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to my neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am.   I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that. Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in and get away from quickly. We could call her part bird   and be done with it. But everyone is dying right under the surface these days, especially around the eyes. Death has crawled up into the face to nibble away whatever blocks its view of the stars. We’re riddled with it. It’s pulling our flesh   into outrageous, unwilled positions, like the huge smile on my face as I lift her onto my lap and hold her together for a minute before I tell her she isn’t welcome here.
Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again and given her to the lake to wear as a skin.   Why am I always being the weather? There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt the breathing of my own goodness,   though it remained fetal and separate. I was a scavenger who survives   with a sling and stones, but whose god nonetheless invents the first small bright bird. And it was like flight to bring food to her lips   with a skeletal hand. But now she will always be naked and sad. She will be what happens   to lake water that is loved and is also shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing, the black blood of it, the chest opened to reveal the inevitable heart attack.   God, the silence of the chamber we watch from. What happens to water that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes.   It freezes beside traffic. But the reaching out to all sides at once, the wet closing of what was open? That is a beautiful woman.   So of course I stand and stare, never able to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.
I. Pledge Sister   Everyone looks at me as if I’m a rainbow drawn by a slow child. Because they can eat without a ringing in their ears. They can ask for gravy. They miss the point I’m always aiming at their heads. The pills I suck are like me: pink, fizzy, and totally legal. They turn listening to noise into a type of eating.   Everyone wants to know about my pubic hair. They say they’re looking for signs that I’m dying, but what they really want is the food melting on the fork when they finally say none for me, thanks. They worship the pain they think I’m in. Meanwhile, I’d eat a beetle if I thought its legs could make my lashes longer. I’ve got all these organs inside me and I can’t resist teasing them to see if they’ll go away.   Everyone likes it when I finally die in the magazine article: the cries no one heard, the love I needed massaged into my hamburger meat. No one knows I am the flower, the bee, the wind, the rain, the dirt: all the vectors. No one knows how well I sleep, how well I lie in bed not sleeping. I run and sharpen the bones of my face. The other girls say they don’t care if their shadows aren’t museum quality. They’re happy just knowing they’re made out of marble. They have no respect for the chisel I would take to the human race.     II. Spring Break   Love isn’t above starting this way: you can drop me from a second-story window if you pin me against it first. It doesn’t want to start this way, and who can blame it. There’s the electric outlet and then there’s the baby finger stuck into it. I was both.   A couple nights later, on a busy street, I recognized his walk the way a mouse must recognize a hole it used last winter. Sure, I wish the universe could clear its throat. Sure, I’m sick of the source of great fire always being the sun. A few nights ago he peeled off of me as if he were my own skin and he didn’t want the job.   But afterwards he kissed me as if to apologize for every brutal thing he was strong enough to have just done. Later he walked me across town, and we ended up in an expensive place, in the middle of a loud song. He looked right at me the whole time, as if I were still the one thing he would choose, even though the damn thing couldn’t stop spinning and was clearly broken.     III. The Essay   It is dumb to know what one has longing for. I am moved by the orange stitching on a girl’s corduroy book bag.   I, too, wonder what I am happy about. There is always something natural in pieces   like sand or snow. If early Western cultures had perceived the surface of the day as wrapping around them like a shell, I wouldn’t be here right now. Not exactly me, not exactly here, not exactly now. The world spreads out   from how we look at one thing. I tell myself this and then I look at things for hours.   Don’t think I don’t know how stupid I sound. Please, do not think I don’t know.     IV. Fifth-Year Senior   Everything tastes like love. That’s what makes me nervous. That and I wish I knew what I will act like   later today. I watch myself being kind sometimes and I think, is there nothing you won’t fake?   But that’s unforgiving. A smile, a purse, an ax, these are all things you pick up and carry.   Lately, I pick up the lightest things. I am floating and honored to drag myself back and forth like a huge feather   across my sleeping boyfriend. He thanks me by actually changing under my touch. He is smooth   and I worry that I barely feel him, but doing things no one should see   seems the only good use of my time. He buys me jewelry I never wear. I love it because it piles up, which proves   I’m alive. The boys my age cry more than the girls do. They’re always losing games, and those are very symbolic.   My girlfriends and I can’t get off the couch anymore, and summer is seeping in under the doors.   My friend says people are wrong about us. It’s the ripe fruit that gets eaten. I say the truth is   I don’t work at things because then I get them.     V. Graduation Address   I like to be at the end and look back at the beginning and see all the stupidity there.   I think we are young. The posters all say so, and though no one ever officially joined our clubs, we designed many logos.   The beautiful, dumb girl you loved was everyone at our lecture, and what a strange boy we all were in the corner with our walking stick, talking too much about the board games back home.   Many of you were next to me at the talk where I became hyper-aware of the creeping in my heart.   As you know, I became obsessed with the on and off inside my chest.   Failure seems to be one half of the deal, which is why I have occasionally climbed on top of some of you and then left the room. But there is another way to look at it: like you, I am a house   for a wet animal that is sneaking up on something it is terrified by. What is that something? The wet animal doesn’t know. The wet animal doesn’t even have eyes. There’s no way that wet animal isn’t brave.
Take any desired height, or place points for top of head and heels. Divide into eights. . . .   8. Head tilted back between the headboard slats. Eyes glass boxes  filling up with light. Later, drained to a blue-gray, the color of  good government.   7. Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity.  a. As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to  leach the arsenic out of the light.  b. “And then I buried it.”  “Where, exactly? And when?”  “In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You  were still asleep.”  “But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise  extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or  sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.”   6. Cross-hatchings of street noise and the Minotaur with his boy’s  body. Narrowing. Rib cage the verge of a canoe. Armpit a whiff of  pencil lead.   5. “If you want to fuck me with that bottle, Mr. Arbuckle, best take  the foil off first.”   4. osculation:  a. The act of kissing. A kiss.  b. Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common  tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent.  c. To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough.   3. Charmeuse chemise. A shuddering fall. Miss Adelaide Hall on  the chaise longue singing I ain’t much caring / Just where I will end. Then jerked upright, skirt hiked to the knee, that bridge  stretching out under every skip-step. Slaphappy scat-puppet of  the fixed smile, the meanwhile, Ain’t got nobody to love now.   2. The bone begging bowl. The foot that pushed it away.   1. “I want to leave you exactly as I found you.”
Angels are unthinkable in hot weather   except in some tropical locales, where from time to time, the women catch one in their nets,   hang it dry, and fashion it into a lantern that will burn forever on its own inexhaustible oils.   But here—shins smocked with heat rash, the supersaturated air. We no longer believe   in energies pure enough not to carry heat, nor in connections—the thought of someone   somewhere warming the air we breathe that one degree more . . . .   In a packed pub during the World Cup final, a bony redhead woman gripped my arm   too hard. I could see how a bloke might fancy you. Like a child’s perfect outline in fast-melting snow,   her wet handprint on my skin, disappearing. The crowd boiling over, a steam jet: Brrra-zil!   And Paris—a heroin addict who put her hypodermic   to my throat: Je suis malade.J’ai besoin de medicaments.   Grabbing her wrist, I saw her forearm’s tight net sleeve of drying blood.   I don’t like to be touched. I stand in this mammoth parking lot,   car doors open, letting the air conditioner run for a while before getting in.   The heat presses down equally everywhere. It wants to focus itself,   to vaporize something instantaneously, efficiently—that shopping cart, maybe,   or that half-crushed brown-glass bottle— but can’t quite. Asphalt softens in the sun.   Nothing’s detachable. The silvery zigzag line   stitching the tarmac to the sky around the edges is no breeze, just a trick of heat.   My splayed-out compact car half-sunk in the tar pit of its own shadow—   strong-shouldered, straining to lift its vestigial wings.
Where was it that we went that night? That long, low building: floodlights rimmed in lavender, the moon ringed in rose. I would rather, then, have stayed   outside, where spiderwebs glowed like jellyfish in the damp yew hedges, where the paths were chalky pebbles set with giant stepping stones.   But the film was starting. In the air- conditioned dark, a crowd of strangers, strange families (not from our church) in rows of metal folding chairs to see   a man quartered by horses: strain stitched across his shining back then, all over at once, an unraveling and then the spill of meat;   a girl pushed through a doorway, naked among soldiers: she grew a dress to cover herself, a blue dress with a blinding sash.
That twig of light, that branch, that  fork, that form.  Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in  a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that, a city. God, a slippery thing,  an eel, is twined  from our hands. That rainy hum is  the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge  between pronouns, the bottle of amber formaldehyde, the infant  orangutan, the wing  of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river  drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy, the feather of this gull, this small  spill of light,  the written thing that glues each hill  to the earth, that follows a pull with its wobbly needle. God is a drowned horse fifty hands at the shoulder. To write what  convinces with  the impossible whisper. After that,  a city. They call this floating thing an angel and hurry you out  of the tent. A bear eating its own paws, and after  this, a city. A window full of smoke, and after this, a city. A meter to measure  day and time Adapted for that purpose by the God of our hands.
1. Josef Mengele Drowns While Swimming at a Beach in Brazil, 1979   His name then: Wolfgang Gerhard. How easy, slipping on another man’s  skin. Another country, too,   its sun’s heat and light as insistent as a pair of forceps.   His pants, left crumpled on the beach, forged papers and a few hard candies in the pocket.   Where the water  was shallow, he could look  down and see   his shadow passing over the pale sand, a wobbly twin,    matching him stroke for stroke for stroke.     2. Li Po Drowns Trying to Embrace the Reflection of the Moon in the Yangtze, 762   The moon is no drinker of wine, so I must compensate. Surely you’ve heard   the crows and nightingales egging me on? The day has dispersed from the courtyards like a gang  of sparrows, and nothing   is left of the world that is not pecked-over, hard and dark  as the dream of an apple seed.   The young men laugh at an old man drinking alone, but here   are my companions:  my shadow, as loyal  and thin as a starved dog,   and the moon, his whole face  wrinkling with laughter.     3. Bob, the Circus Seal, Drowns Himself in His Tank in Galveston, 1911   By then his teeth had rotted out,  and he often turned to his owner with his mouth open as if about   to speak, a ruined smell jetting from inside.   He had already attempted it,    three days before, but his owner dove in and pulled him up onto the slimy planks. His circus show days   were long gone. Sure, some afternoons a kid might walk by  and see the scabby painting   on the side of the building: the hoop, the pedestal, the ghost of a man in a top hat,   the striped ball now like a clot of pus streaked with blood, hovering   over the sleek, dark head.     4. Natalie Wood Drowns under Mysterious Circumstances near Santa Catalina Island, 1981   Let me tell you: death  is a long silk glove dropped to the floor.   It doesn’t remember the heft of the arm, the fingers  dancing.   That limb is gone, and nothing will hold its shape again.   You twirl your pastel skirt. You watch two cars race toward the cliff,  and there is nothing   you can do. So many lives  you’ve entered like a room: swooned,   held the prop pistol to your own face, sang for the back row.  But was it your voice?   What was that name you were born into?  Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko? What happened to her?    Was she the one taken, her family butchered, living another life among the enemy people?   Was it the morning? when she stopped scanning the horizon for rescuers  that she turned into you?     5. Hippasus of Metapontum Is Drowned at Sea for the Heresy of Discovering Irrational Numbers, ca. 500 BCE   His fellow Pythagoreans had already built a shrine to his memory  and placed it where   he passed by every day, but he did not take  the hint. It was on the ship that they seized him.   God was an integer, firm as an unripe apricot.  But weren’t there streets  in the city that wound forever into the minute darkness?   Weren’t there dreams where he met himself again and again, without ever seeming to wake?   The sea is incommensurable.  Each lungful of air  kept dividing itself, even as the boat   became a decimal point on the far horizon.     6. Bennie Wint, 20 Years after Faking His Drowning Death, is Discovered Alive, 2009   In the first years after I disappeared, I read every report of drowning: children,   mostly boys, mostly in their bathtubs, mostly accidents.   Old men whose lungs filled with fluid  while they sat in their armchairs.   Fishermen. Swimmers. Immigrants crowded onto rafts. Some men,  their throats seize up,  and they die without   ever swallowing a drop, as if they never left the shore.    Some nights I dreamed what never happened: I held my drowning   in my palm like a giant pearl. Some days, standing behind the cash register of my new life,   I felt my lungs flatten out like a pair of discarded socks. Did I ever think   of the woman I left on the shore  as I kicked out past the last of the breakers?   I won’t say. Here it was: I might have drowned trying to pretend to. I had to swim so far out, then mark   a different beach and swim back   a different man, without knowing if his strength was enough  to carry me to shore.
“He is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive.”   —Donald Rumsfeld You haven’t heard from your father in six months and you can’t bring yourself to call. In Bengal, farmers wore masks on the backs of their heads to ward off tigers, who, one supposes, wouldn’t attack a man who was watching. If I don’t call, you thought, nothing is wrong. Each possibility is a cavern eaten out of limestone by water. Naming everything is a way of naming nothing. His family dropped away like cicada husks swept off tree trunks by rain. One brother, heart attack. His father’s two feet taken by diabetes, then his father by stroke. In a tornado, leave your windows ajar. A doorway for an earthquake. In a lightning storm, do not pick up the phone. Learn to see out the back of your head. His youngest brother, weeks dead before discovery: the couch where he died, face down, shadow of rotted flesh stained into fabric, ghost of a face. Imagination kills the living just as easily as it brings back the dead. In Turkey, they hang the nazar—teardrop of blue glass— on lintels, above beds, from the rearview mirror. To ward off evil, they say.
“considering that by such trade and entercourse, all things heretofore   uknowne, might have come to light.” —Pliny the Elder   To cure a child of rickets, split a living ash tree down its length and pass the child through  (naked, headfirst, three times). Seal the two halves of the tree back up and bind them with loam and black thread. If the tree heals, so will the child.  (The child must also be washed  for three mornings in the dew  of the chosen tree.)   Two men  (no, women)  must pass the child through. The first must say, “The Lord receives,” and the second say, “The Lord gives.”   This is how you ensure a happy marriage: This is how you keep the engine running:   A jackdaw or swallow that flies down the chimney must be  killed. If it is allowed to leave the house by a window or door, a member of the family will   This is how, when your mother tells you she’s going in for biopsy, to make the growth benign:   Burn a fire and in the morning examine the ashes for footprints, the image of a ring, the likeness of a cat, a bed, a horse, a   This is how you keep from thinking of the one thought you’re thinking:   Say your own name backwards three (no four) times and turn around (keep your eyes shut). The unborn child must be called pot lid or tea kettle until you hear its voice.   Carry a live bat around the house three times, then nail it upside down outside the window. This will ensure   If your mother calls you at 6 A.M. while she eats her breakfast (do not eat after 7), this is how you can calm your voice:   This is how you say Good luck and mean   An egg laid on Sunday can be placed on the roof to ward of fire and lightning.   If you put a stillborn child in an open grave, the man who is buried there will have a ticket straight to heaven.   Never sleep with your feet toward the door.   Do not sneeze while making a bed.   Step on a beetle, and it will rain. Bury it alive in the earth for good weather. Put it in your mouth and your loved ones will   When you see a dead bird lying in the road you must spit on it.   If a rooster crows in the night, you must go and feel his feet.   When a woman is in labor, all the locks in the house must be undone, windows and doors must be left ajar. This will not prevent death but will quicken the escape of the spirit if   If the ash tree remedy fails, bring the child to a third  (no, seventh)  generation blacksmith. The child must first be bathed in the water trough, then laid on the anvil. Each of the smith’s tool’s must be passed over the body, and each time one must inquire what the tool is used for (no one must answer). Then the blacksmith must raise his hammer and bring it down (gently) three times (four) on the child’s body.  If a fee is given or even asked for, the cure will not   If the phone rings, this is how you answer: This is how you say, How did it go?
Heartbeat trembling your kingdom of leaves near the ceremony of water, I never insisted on you. I admit I delayed. I was the Empress of Delay. But it can’t be put off now. On the sacred branch of my only voice – I insist. Insist for us all, which is the job of the voice, and especially of the poet. Else what am I for, what use am I if I don’t insist? There are messages to send. Gatherings and songs. Because we need to insist. Else what are we for? What use are we?
If I could begin anything I’d say stop asking forgiveness, especially theirs which was always the fault mentioned in your condition.   Nettles could be feathers the moment they brush your ankle. At the same time: floods, earthquakes, the various slaveries hunchbacked near the fence to catch your glance.   What is it to say that among the hired boats we carried our bodies well, cracked jokes, left the gaps in our lives and not the page? This far to learn the boat does not touch the water!   And if this is goodbye, it is a light nowhere near believing and I am happy and it is all right to make a distance of a nearness, to say, ‘Boat, I have left you behind. Boat, I am with you.’
Both lying on our sides, making love in spoon position when she’s startled, What’s that? She means the enormous ship passing before you— maybe not that large, is it a freighter   or a passenger ship? But it seems huge in the dark and it’s so close. That’s a poem you say, D. H. Lawrence—Have you built your ship of death, have you? O build your ship of death,   for you will need it. Right here it would be good if there were a small orchestra on board, you’d hear them and say to her, That piece is called Autumn,   that’s what the brave musicians played as the Titanic went under—and then you could name this poem “Autumn.” But no, the ship is silent, its white lights glow in the darkness.
Scintillas of the anatomical on the vines, buds opening— make me a figure for the woken.   On the vines, buds opening— blue, little throats. For the woken, this different tin sky.   Blue, little throats speak to me in the right voice. This different tin sky, the playground thawing.   Speak to me in the right voice, only clean, sweeter. The playground thawing into its primary colors.   Only clean, sweeter, briary as honeysuckle, into their primary colors the words come: bitter, astral.   Briar—as honeysuckle, as attic webs, constellated into their primary colors. White, or whiter.   The words come: bitter, astral. Make me a figure, blue little throats, scintillas of the anatomical.
You ignore the way light filters through my cells, the way I have of fading out—still there is a constant tug, a stretching, what is left of me is coming loose. Soon,I will be only crumbs of popcorn, a blue ring in the tub, an empty toilet paper roll, black mold misted on old sponges,strands of hair woven into carpet, a warped door that won’t open, the soft spot in an avocado, celery, a pear,a metallic taste in the beer, a cold sore on your lip—and when I finally lose my hold you will hear a rustle and watch me spill grains of rice across the cracked tile.
After the offending bit is popped out these tiny stitches on your neck are exquisite. Lips of the slit don’t speak the way you think they should, break into stupid song, blow kisses at the doctor. Some piece that kept insisting on itself will spend a few weeks in a jar on holiday with strangers, stained and diced and separated neatly from its secrets. You can only wait, reading your book about the sex lives of the saints, the lance that pierced and then pulled slowly out of Saint Teresa’s heart. A slice is venerated in Milan, they say, an arm in Lisbon, a single breast in Rome; but her heart’s enthroned behind the convent walls at Avila. Pink under glass, it wears a tiny crown.
It is mid-October. The trees are in their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green, orange) outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am thinking of my parents, of the six decades they’ve been together, of the thirty thousand meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept under the same roof. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success? Who could have known?
In this low place between mountains fog settles with the dark of evening. Every year it takes some of those we love—a car full of teenagers on the way home from a dance, or a father on his way to the paper mill, nightshift the only opening. Each morning, up on the ridge, the sun lifts this veil, sees what night has accomplished. The water on our window- screens disappears slowly, gradually, like grief. The heat of the day carries water from the river back up into the sky, and where the fog is heaviest and stays longest, you’ll see the lines it leaves on trees, the flowers that grow the fullest.
Sitting perfectly upright, contented and pensive, she holds in one hand, loosely, the reins of summer:the green of trees and bushes; the blue of lake water; the red of her jacket and open collar; the brownof her pinned-up hair, and her horse, deep in the yellow of sunflowers.When she stops to rest, summer rests. When she decides to leave, there goes summerover the hill.
I The teacher said inner truth and the chalk said like a fresco inside the earththat no one has ever seenand one day decides to be discoveredand begins to breathe—do you know what that means? II The child broke the chalk. The mother said be strong. The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf. III A detective has just drawn a circle with a piece of chalk, a private circle from which the victim will eventually look up, not at random, not at will, but when it calls to her, the chalk, the crushed bones of sea creatures who ringed the earth when it was under water. IV A man sits in the bath house in a deep tub of fizzling yellow water that surrounds every hair on his body and makes it stand upright. When the attendant comes, she will clean the tub by moving her hand slowly around the ring, like a snail. V An atoll is a ring of coral protecting a tureen of plankton. It is easy and Japanese to be sad knowing something is going to pass. He put the ring on her chalky finger. VI Long after chalk had passed out of use, carpenters still felt for it in their pockets and looked aimlessly at the sky. VII The cathedral was roofless. It began to snow inside. A half broken pillar in the nave grew taller.
Beloved, men in thick green coats came crunching through the snow, the insignia on their shoulders of uncertain origin, a country I could not be sure of, a salute so terrifying I heard myself lying to avoid arrest, and was arrested along with Jocko, whose tear had snapped off, a tiny icicle he put in his mouth. We were taken to the ice prison, a palace encrusted with hoarfrost, its dome lit from within, Jocko admired the wiring, he kicked the walls to test the strength of his new boots. A television stood in a block of ice, its blue image still moving like a liquid center. You asked for my innermost thoughts. I wonder will I ever see a grape again? When I think of the vineyard where we met in October—when you dropped a cluster custom insisted you be kissed by a stranger—how after the harvest we plunged into a stream so icy our palms turned pink. It seemed our future was sealed. Everyone said so. It is quiet here. Not closing our ranks weakens us hugely. The snowflakes fall in a featureless bath. I am the stranger who kissed you. On sunny days each tree is a glittering chandelier. The power of mindless beauty! Jocko told a joke and has been dead since May. A bullethole in his forehead the officers call a third eye. For a month I milked a barnful of cows. It is a lot like cleansing a chandelier. Wipe and polish, wipe and polish, round and round you go. I have lost my spectacles. Is the book I was reading still open by the side of our bed? Treat it as a bookmark saving my place in our story.   (here the letter breaks off)
A boy from Brooklyn used to cruise on summer nights. As soon as he’d hit sixty he’d hold his hand out the window, cupping it around the wind. He’d been assured this is exactly how a woman’s breast feels when you put your hand around it and apply a little pressure. Now he knew, and he loved it. Night after night, again and again, until the weather grew cold and he had to roll the window up. For many years afterwards he was perpetually attempting to soar. One winter’s night, holding his wife’s breast in his hand, he closed his eyes and wanted to weep. He loved her, but it was the wind he imagined now. As he grew older, he loved the word etcetera and refused to abbreviate it. He loved sweet white butter. He often pretended to be playing the organ. On one of his last mornings, he noticed the shape of his face molded in the pillow. He shook it out, but the next morning it reappeared.
amid the growing craze for automatons The voice within the device that moves is not  (as if nothing human could be quite that moving) My precious edgling: though some believethe answers be given by a man concealed, these are speaking machines.    They were risking their lives. Usually a woman or a child, who woke up inside the oracle, who swallowed the burning oil, and who forces the idols to speak?    Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria, he found them hollow    it does not necessarily follow that   The penalty for trickery was death.  Such is the wealth of belief.  Behind a finely painted sheet of shell a voice unlatched surrounds the world.
to crave what the light does crave to shelter, to flee to gain desire of every splayed leaf to calm cattle, to heat the mare to coax dead flies back from slumber to turn the gaze of each opened bud to ripe the fruit to rot the fruit and drive down under the earth to lord gentle dust to lend a glancing grace to llamas to gather dampness from fields and divide birds and divide the ewes from slaughter and raise the corn and bend the wheat and drive tractors to ruin burnish the fox, brother the hawk shed the snake, bloom the weed and drive all wind diurnal to blanch the fire and clot the cloud to husk, to harvest, sheave and chaff to choose the bird and voice the bird to sing us, veery, into darkness
When the wind invades the treetops and the trees agree, shivering take me, take me, when their stealthy perfume drifts down to waft among mortals, they come out in droves: the boy whose bouncing keys speak a language all their own, the novice who gets her tricks from magazine molls (their haughtiness, swirl of cleats), the gigolo with eyes lowered, the better to judge his prey, the woman whose hemlines rise as her age does, the bad girl whose only remaining option is to get worse: despite the string of cheats and lukewarm reactions, she still has the power to pound, the knack of funneling her frustration into the arrogant click of a heel . . . at this armada of proud, unyielding soldiers I have cast ferocious stones, holding forth on barricaded gardens and souls’ communion until, heaving my bones from garret to gutter I took to the street and saw it, too, was worthy. Chasers out for a good time, flirters in for a life’s catch, strutters so skilled your lurid designs burn holes, kill the cold in the pavement, it does not matter what fever you feed, so long as you feed it freely; I hid my eyes but sickness is catching; lovers, permit me entrance.
I.  Maggots in the food, maggots in the floorboards, maggots in the recurring nightmare in which, lying down with a rugged adonis, I wake to find him almost nibbled away. Certainly signs of death are everywhere, but love is more than combat with worms and cannot be so glibly explained away; I do not tremble or knock my knees to keep the maggots slumbering below ground, or crush them underfoot by flocking to everything they are not: raucous gatherings, stolen kisses. On the contrary, I come away from parties adoring what is wormlike in them: the unrisen soufflé, the precocious boy’s octogenarian sayings, the drooping lids of the hostess, someone’s death rattle of a laugh. Certainly love has commerce with vermin, but it is a friendly partnership, not a league of discord; a hacking cough gives proof of a full life, a passing stranger seems all the stronger when one foot is sinking quietly into the grave.      II.   But is is this lingering horror of dust that makes me pull us out of the cold earth any way I know how: because I strive for heaven in little rooms, visit you in order to suck your blood, then spread it over pipes and daffodils, and shove you up to the vacant sky, where you hover like a stone-cold, tedious statue who never dies, you, poor pawn, are a jack-in-the-box gone haywire, and I am a grinning humanist with bad dreams.
If walking, like wine, only abets a sad mood let’s try it, I said, and I did: over these hills that have never known sorrow no thoughtful moon passes. Dig until a hill is level, and unearth only earth. Take pride in knowing the chemical makeup of rain, the sum total of harmful vapors in any sunset. For if you must drag in the old lines about suicidal willows, star’s stacked for or against you, you clutter a limitless, soaring landscape with your own baggage. Night of love, day of omens of night, great mountain of realized hopes, valley where bitter winds blow the dispossessed into raving lunatics— what are they but shady projections of passing whims, vastly oversimplified versions of something infinitely greater? This vision before you is nothing but a triad of trees, hills, river, steadfast and eternal. But soon you start to feel restless and when, setting out to take a roll of photos, you note the disturbing absence of a road, your suavity crumbles: you deafen the sky and serenade the moon, fall prostrate before pines saying oh, come back, spirit of the place which, lifeless without you, blossoms into something sumptuously more than mediating madness; come back, massive oaks that await our coming; to carve initials is to be truly human; the days are dappled with our passions, the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies.
I hate the travel logs that tell you more about the pain than the place, yet here I am again, narrating   the same old story to myself time after time. The papers circling in an alley, watched by a hunchback,   mimic my plans and their preventer; when an old man treats the drycleaner to a lengthy sermon on spotting,   I collect it; bloated clouds spell messages that people stopped hearing long ago, and as for the hag   who runs at me, arms open, mouth bleeding? She’s my future, my terrible double. Always I head out, hot for details,   and always the details start revolving around brave ingénues who put their innocent hands in wicked bonfires.   I could never go for ten minutes without seeing fissures as faces, and I confess a hopeless weakness   for the types who come back from travels, gather their fans around and tell them stories of order or of wonder:   seashores and meadows sometimes get so muffled and many-voiced that tourists storm in and do their talking for them—   It’s addictive, magical, vital. But I’ve observed how, more and more, these promising outings are becoming   meta-walks and mechanized phrases: “When I ventured into the outback, how it blared back echoes of me,   my bright dreams and tragic uniqueness.” Meanwhile forces of good and evil squirm and flourish under the carpet,   mocking the visionary moment’s sweeping appeal. I’ll go on going out for scenes of horror and pleasure,   but I’ll start pursuing clues leading to the return of that enormous, fertile ground between shouting and silence.
Meanwhile, meanwhile used to be my limp’s accompaniment. Meanwhile (as my legs maneuvered an abyss), a ballet is beginning, and the dancer’s perfect feet propel her downstage, where applause is waiting. Meanwhile a sad man stomps his gloom away by stomping evenly: one two, one two means never blue, his motto goes. But I was born to other paces, different measures; the roads I take are undulant and lined with fluid hedges, trees that take a dive whenever I am near; a bird’s ascent slows down to an eternal crawl; and when a doctor’s order takes me to the city it is a jagged gotham, full of spires that waver in the sky like falling knives or silver metronomes. Meanwhile, meanwhile (the rhythm steadied me) a lover steals upon his mistress with the quietness that only flatfeet know. So quietly that he might just as well have stayed at home, I add when my self-confidence is at a high point, and the view is at its best. And sometimes I have thoughts, before the surge of meanwhile drowns them out, that limping is a thing I’d voluntarily take up if I were just as upright as the rest: I see myself, erect, stampeding through a garden’s sturdy, stale geometry and nearly knocked down by the urge to say incline, I like your style; ravine, hello; how many good things share your curvature; it is the slant of rainfall when the wind convinces it to drift; it is a sight that those with level heads and steady feet miss out on. In a coracle (my new enthusiasm leads to stories), you are better, bent; the more you tilt, the more the water welcomes you, its addled waves a live reminder of your being there, its leaping fish a sign that you are still alert and in command. The clubfoots have a myth concerning Orpheus’ head, and though I doubt its authenticity I like the way it goes: hacked off, the head was rolling down the river, when a change came over it—it bobbed, it jumped, it shuddered, it caught itself in weeds, but struggled free because of all its energy, and then its eyes began to come to life, as if a pretty tune enthralled it even then. Meanwhile his killers marched away, saying he had his ups and downs. Of course, of course to hobble is to hinder: sick is sick, no matter how you change the second term to suit your needs. But sometimes I am sure that when I limp along a crooked street, my dancing shadow is a model for the stiffs who hurry past without a sound, showing them this way, that way, as they reach the little level huts they call home.
At times it is like watching a face you have just met, trying to decide who it reminds you of— no one, surely, whom you ever hated or loved, but yes, somebody, somebody. You watch the face   as it turns and nods, showing you, at certain angles, a curve of the lips or a lift of the eyebrow that is exactly right, and still the lost face eludes you. Now this face is talking, and you hear   a sound in the voice, the accent on certain words— yes! a phrase . . . you barely recall sitting outside, by a pool or a campfire, remarking a peculiar, recurring expression. Two syllables,   wasn’t it? Doorknob? Bathroom? Shawcross? What the hell kind of word is shawcross? A name; not the right one. A couple of syllables that could possibly be a little like something you may once have heard.   So the talk drifts, and you drift, sneaking glances, pounding your brain. Days later a face occurs to you, and yes, there is a resemblance. That odd word, though, or phrase, is gone. It must have been somebody else.   Yes, it’s like that, at times; something is, maybe; and there are days when you can almost say what it is.
XI A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five, had the strength each day not to eat this and that (unclean!) not to say this and that, not to do this and that (unjust!), and with all this and all that to go about as men and Jews among their enemies (these are the Pharisees you mocked at, Jesus). Whatever my grandfathers did or said for all of their brief lives still was theirs, as all of it drops at a moment make the fountain and all of its leaves a palm. Each word they spoke and every thought was heard, each step and every gesture seen, by God; their past was still the present and the present a dread future’s. But I am private as an animal.   I have eaten whatever I liked, I have slept as long as I wished, I have left the highway like a dog to run into every alley; now I must learn to fast and to watch. I shall walk better in these heavy boots than barefoot. I will fast for you, Judah, and be silent for you and wake in the night because of you; I will speak for you in psalms, and feast because of you on unleavened bread and herbs.
“The lamps are burning in the synagogue, in the houses of study, in dark alleys. . . .” This should be the place.   This is the way the guide book describes it. Excuse me, sir can you tell me where Eli lives, Eli the katzev— slaughterer of cattle and poultry? One of my ancestors. Reb Haskel? Reb Shimin? My grandfathers.   This is the discipline that withstood the siege of every Jew; these are the prayer shawls that have proved stronger than armor.   Let us begin humbly. Not by asking: Who is This you pray to? Name Him; define Him. For the answer is: We do not name Him. Once out of a savage fear, perhaps; now out of knowledge—of our ignorance.   Begin then humbly. Not by asking: Shall I live forever? Hear again the dear dead greeting me gladly as they used to when we were all among the living? For the answer is: If you think we differ from all His other creatures, say only if you like with the Pharisees, our teachers, those who do not believe in an eternal life will not have it.   In the morning I arise and match again my plans against my cash. I wonder now if the long morning prayers were an utter waste of an hour weighing, as they do, hopes and anguish, and sending the believer out into the street with the sweet taste of the prayers on his lips.   Today this creditor is at your office; tomorrow this one in your home; until the final creditor of all places his bony hands upon your breast. Faster! Dig your heels into the dust!   How good to stop and look out upon eternity a while. And daily—at Shahris, Minha, Maariv, in the morning, afternoon, and evening— be at ease in Zion.
To yield force to is an act of necessity, not of will;   it is at best an act of prudence.   —Jean-Jacques Rousseau If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon, it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you.   Always enter a home with your right foot; the left is for cemeteries and unclean places.  O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful. It means Stop! Or I’ll shoot.Sabah el khair is effective. It means Good morning.  Inshallah means Allah be willing. Listen well when it is spoken.   You will hear the RPG coming for you. Not so the roadside bomb.   There are bombs under the overpasses, in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars.   There are shopping carts with clothes soaked in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm.   Parachute bombs and artillery shells sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals.   Graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses:I will kell you, American.   Men wearing vests rigged with explosives walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah.   There are men who earn eighty dollars to attack you, five thousand to kill.   Small children who will play with you, old men with their talk, women who offer chai—   and any one of them may dance over your body tomorrow.
The curve of her hip where I’d lay my head, that’s what I’m thinking of now, her fingers gone slow through my hair on a blue day ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere, where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, her tongue wet with blackberry and melon.   That’s what I’m thinking of now. Because I’m all out of adrenaline, all out of smoking incendiaries.   Somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain, under the skull’s blue curving dome— that’s where I am now, swaying in a hammock by the water’s edge as soldiers laugh and play volleyball just down the beach, while others tan and talk with the nurses who bring pills to help them sleep. And if this is crazy, then let this be my sanatorium, let the doctors walk among us here marking their charts as they will.   I have a lover with hair that falls like autumn leaves on my skin. Water that rolls in smooth and cool as anesthesia. Birds that carry all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.
For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture: coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east where the deer have almost ceased to pass now that the developers have carved up yet another section, filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff.Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand; only three years past came great horned owls who raised two squeaking, downy owlets that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail.It was on an August afternoon that you drove in, curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek, that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight, three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze, who vanished when you turned your head.We have felt the presence on this land of others, of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up, turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals; their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.
In the error thinking of non-intervention with you. A red sun (don’t look) pokes through. Staging development and the cutting loose of its facile integrity its disproportionate personal non-response. The wince. The shrug. The belated semi-acknowledgment of owning just enough to take part. In the era, thinking of you will quit my job in one year to get more done, work harder to insert myself into the fragile extension of space between us to get something done. In the ear thinking after you.
Just wasted and taking it. In life I rally constantly. Effort is what we breach. And accountability. Honed limits do you require ruthlessness or subtlety? The # for that delivery service I could find. My instinct is to agree with the collective. I’ll flip over their indoor/outdoor reversible rug. But my feelings & their representatives the passing sacrosanct mob cuddle stirring expedience are mine. Gradations of default tenor. Anything but more instinct. A proxy of determination in a cosmic discharge salon speaking freely of cost’s elephantine deployable former charm. I’m micromanaging nausea. The dishes are twilighting. The dairy scythe elevatrix skins my shining teleprompted sporkdom. As poor specimens go, the trail left inhabitable trails. Arkanoid as meditative space, if we travel by dragonfly. I cling to thy moving perimeter. I want payment for all instances of being caught on camera. We all should. Mutually assured destruction overdosed on civility by comparison. Babywiping lead paint dust from my soles. I’ll read entrails for omens, action figure entrails.
When I was little I cut off the heads of many lords. I can’t count on the energy that took to rise in me at will, but I’ve strengthened my ability to make a stand-firm surface. A steady gaze will drive conflicted information away, back to the abyss from whence it came, but I’ll be right here the morning after, wracked in a private shame too awful to admit and of no consequence at all. I work very hard not to let myself go. Any channel can tell. Due process appears in beauty and misgiving at once; an agility borne from creative malice, a benign insecurity. The plain truth: I forget the curtains are open sometimes and the hands wander. The room stares back from its things: They understand the end of the world, will not waste time feeling your pain, and every- thing tragic in between need not be known. I don’t want love or remorse to follow I want them in the way, things to burst through corollaries to be roped and tackled by surprise, get killed, and thank you. One fate transforms into another, but I won’t touch that bandaged story. I won’t belong to this scripted conversation, though I may play along. Identity theft accepting renewal orders, copycat pre-emptive attacks an obscure murder string on the public glide by sight, the victim a John doughnut pining for leadership from the passenger seat. The threat of meaning reassures: I know it’s being made for me. Am I supposed to believe we’re receiving information? Can I defect back to curiosity in the moonlight, stone rabbit? Hit on by Echo, I go cold for the love of my own exile, and while I hope, my flesh explodes into an arrangement of stars pestered by darkness. Those aren’t birds you hear, just their corresponding holes in the sky. All the bottled water isn’t fooling anyone.
one box falls out of another box, ashy covenant of separation two birds, one clamp, no reaction just hanging there as the arrow moved notes put the map back into the water they don’t notice what they’re learning name all the days, parts of them painted to look out of control then crashed into a tree letters in the boxes in the light old lady opportunity the mirror ceases to be right here, pressure on the hand sends a biscuit to the mouth a circuit connected by eyes stopping watching quantity of information in the type, nation in the line or lines legs broken and maladroit preview a long corridor filing against walls engaging hands going without end in the corridor back to front to quay, cracking of wood, a miner’s ladder five meters high notices filled with objects later, however, a gelatin lit up, Chinese cryptesthesia, American music mural fold or fist, magnetic moment measures behavior, thinking penetrates slowly start over a sensible solution, a compact rower’s body zippered into an orange flight suit, all the confidence of the Chinese navy exposing a big area extinct of life forms
There’s a shadow over the city the light, as usual, framing and erasing   Just say you dream fires each night smoothing each collapsing page from   the throat talking in a series of measures in the high desert   the perfect life in a series of measured gestures an invitation to   see the world from a bridge that burns in the next night
And move and hold back entering by the highroad through the words and fall like a person hit by sleep arriving at the place without light   And fall like a dead body falls and find there the great enemy and come to a tower all of stones such that through it the earth opens   We pass between the martyrs and the high walls even up there water is pouring out then turning and fording again sling the noose from the roof of the house   And each and every vapor spent over winning and not losing in which it stands caught out fleet then catapults like a stone   Filling our view whereupon another valley is revealed
“and then looks at the stars” from the bed in the ambulance   looks up at boughs of trees shifting quickly lit in blackness   blackening soft, deep siren’s song—she died several times that night   and only in the weeks to come started and started to come back   then forward which is real life
You can’t imagine what it’s like here. In her past life, she was a clandestine operator in ancient Egypt. In a past life she had her heart ripped out, ritual sacrifice. We all know what that means, right, to have your heart ripped out. Torn from the body, one’s “own” body, alive and torn.     The unspeaking speaker. The man coughs. Orientation. Two bells, a motorcar on the street, on-lookers. H22-3416. Men, maybe four, inside. Vast numbers of people, faces turned to the east. Four nurses holding four swaddled babes, four bottles.     Six men walking forward on a country road all wearing suits, coats, vests and ties. Upon his shoulders, one of the men carries a man with no legs. The man with no legs is wearing a bathrobe. In a landscape a train passes from top right to bottom left. People are packed inside as well as on the roof and holding on at the sides.     One man, naked, his back turned to the window, light on inside. A bird in a cage hung on a hook at the top left-hand corner of the window. A man in profile to the left, eyes closed mouth open wide, singing. Or thought he was singing. He did. Or we did. The back of a chair and three tall mirrors. At their focal point a woman stands, arms akimbo. She’s wearing evening dress black high heels, long white gown, long black gloves, necklace, earrings.     Outside the bakery, a horse-drawn hearse approaches. A woman in an apron tests green grapes eating them before placing bunches in a wooden crate. Inside a Quonset hut, there’s a long table with men sitting in chairs writing or paying attention to one man standing at the table, hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. Shirtless men seated on the floor, some on towels or blankets, are doing exercises. Friday afternoon, cold grim day. We meet in the museum, at a picture called “Birmingham.”     Sign on exterior wall saying “WELCOME.”
The orbiting reflector Turns night into day: petals ping   Accelerated workers   swarm into the plaza A blur on the soul’s dead instrument   Everywhere, windows are blanked To the same newsreel   I alone Inhabit a mockup of the early nineteenth century   I, the great idealist  who confesses On the first page of his diary: Father! There are no living atoms   & the diary answers: IdentityIs thatWhich is eaten from within   Another man is partially assembled On the table   Another module Unshrouded, revolves in sunlight    filtered through noise A simulated victory   Crawls like a glove Animated by music
The faster I travel  the slower the world dies   Inside the head of a flower The sun’s  a swinging pendulum   —all Radiance is progress Of a pre-existent stillness   Stone, inspired To fluency    curves thought  toward the drinking of Its shadow  grail: grille: grid   The lines recursive to impalement    one point alone  sings cumulative, crowding negativity   My apparitions  distorted by star-tides Fail to approximate zero   Where sensation’s tip Crumbles to ash   Another Radio-profile turns, edged with dark cries    objects unfounded  of medieval prophecy The heavens too grow cold
1.   Cogs & cogs that cannot turn  to recognitions: such dogs in the dark noonday!   As if the tongue told & tolled Among  the melancholic arcades.   Where the moods advance toward the modes.   Time to try the knot, the Not Or to be caught Forever in nerve-traceries of Beauty . . .   Unstrung, the structure is sound.     2.   Detour to far fires.   To be counted missing . . . in a toroidal space That mimics the shape of its container, speech.   The passive of, the possessive of—   Measureless intent, blue almost black, the picture  below the voice. Less a name than a substance   Coming to stillness, star-inhabited. Less a substance than a sigh.     3.  Awaited, thou, unawaited. Divided here. O  then Opened as earthen  ring, cave-recorded.   A mazed interior. Self-similar aisles of isles, pouring  form from form.   Lastness as device. Aligned as measurements (letters)—    as sensitive, all-too-sensitive compass  needles forever seeking  the frozen pole, the zero.   Caption: “An end-of-century sailing ship, Delirium  held fast in sheets of ice.”     4.   No atmosphere is sufficient.   An embryo in the brain is not yet breathing.   There, the labor Of the living rock, where an ache, or bruise-ember  will be discovered.   Scored  for Theremin, or permanently scarred.   Where shadows point: Mad lengthening to made, as unmade  scaffolding.    Thus, repetition, resisted  is the register of thought. Now here, even as staves are falling, another story   —intervallic—cannot be told—that is, besieged   As the heart encaged in bone.   The animal calls long long, disconsolate In its hollow mountain.     5.   Neither nor nor neither, time builds Its twelve tones between round & ruined.   —as the roots of the sunflower, arrayed over earthlight.   Routes unreturning / term without terminus. Riding as reading Migrates  underground.   Writing as the righting Of fallen  angles, of tangles of Accident—    arrives riven, a body never to be / surveyed.   Abandoned in a wintry field, the sum of its travels   —its hunting the same as its haunting.
for John Wieners   I cut out the “Heart with Snowflake” Myself but it is not mine, Forget This bloody coat bloody shirt, I Think it is the writing that makes Me sick, The scores and scores of Incidental music, this nosebleed all Spring all wet, I’m positively angry with the Impertinence of it! I’m Sewing up the kinks in this film, I’m Trying to! I’m trying to burn a light Between, There’s a light and I cable my voice on it but it rips when I trace Anything! WORKS ON PAPER, THE SHIP OF DEATH “Oh build it!” Sings the Heart, “My coat would be so bloodied I could wiggle out of my coat!”
The neck  of the flask  pitch black-getting bored  jacked  also madness, insidious  intended ghost  (days late)  I cross green & white flowered seas  Valentines, May Day  conferring with henchman one must keep holy  the edges of fragments  slots used  clothes loose  dried bloodspots  bolster elegance  Found a goldmine  outside a mansion  a prolongation  of the art  of very rich hours  oil in  childe ballads  sung, unsung against I should say  “over” though,  The Cosmos  slows it for us  The heretofore unmentioned  26th Series  (he gets the girl)  sparks fall call me  if you do die
Life in  unbridled    collapse, Let tuneful praise ascend    Not a single line    out of step with my band, aboard    the riverboat  when the sun  shown red   and especially dark upon my room    I was shown  to 3464    once Jack Lon  dons    I was told.  The black forest alcohols    filled my mind, my one & only skull    with rock crystal  (The Butchers Field)  Its grass &   the stream  cut my rooms in 3. I write & I laugh    to think again upon the stream,    its demon  black mask    lights under-  neath  My servants stay fine  &  lower their eyes  I proclaim the empire, my coat of arms    & cigarettes  to be held across    façades of cathedrals, crimson the flight.    More than one death    from a square  bottled ink    The MARVEL brand    I enjoy reading signs    through the fog—    -HOTEL HUNTINGTON-   Then that evening    and all of    Fox Plaza was the same white    A permanent    stripe  on my blue bike    I raise my hood    I think there are other lost men   in surrounding blocks    alike in their thinking    “There is  no other man  to enjoy  such fog  besides me.” to wander tracks    in clear    star cut  ground    I am sorry I said  he was  already high    We got so high together    and I forgot to say    I had invested a lot  in my first  walkthrough    the greatest    Marco  Polo  single file  best roulette  There’s a bad moon    on the rise and I’ve got  quite a stash    rubbings from the calligram    graves,    I have explained their  hollows and brick    a cross where it is written in  script    YOUNG BLOOD STRAIGHT EDGE    Impossibly accurate the fifth wristwatch    diamond  on the 12    I have reached the cave it has been  shot up.    & I am punished to this day    ruby under    black    letterpress    My name goes first.
In my grandmother’s house there was always chicken soup And talk of the old country—mud and boards, Poverty, The snow falling down the necks of lovers.   Now and then, out of her savings She sent them a dowry. Imagine The rice-powdered faces! And the smell of the bride, like chicken soup.   But the Germans killed them. I know it’s in bad taste to say it, But it’s true. The Germans killed them all.    *   In the ruins of Berchtesgaden A child with yellow hair Ran out of a doorway.   A German girl-child— Cuckoo, all skin and bones— Not even enough to make chicken soup. She sat by the stream and smiled.   Then as we splashed in the sun She laughed at us. We had killed her mechanical brothers, So we forgave her.    *   The sun is shining. The shadows of the lovers have disappeared. They are all eyes; they have some demand on me— They want me to be more serious than I want to be.   They want me to stick in their mudhole Where no one is elegant. They want me to wear old clothes, They want me to be poor, to sleep in a room with many others—   Not to walk in the painted sunshine To a summer house, But to live in the tragic world forever.
Whatever it is, it must have A stomach that can digest Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.   Like the shark it contains a shoe. It must swim for miles through the desert Uttering cries that are almost human.
A drain spout splashing rusty stains on concrete,   the taste of doorknobs you kiss before squinting   through the musty keyhole at the knife-sharpener’s daughter,   while across the city the knife-sharpener   limps his pushcart with its dinging axles,   with its screeching whetstone up wet alleys   crying: scissors! knives! axes!
He finds himself stepping off the bus in some burg he’s already bored with. Picking his teeth for 200 miles—here’s where he spits the toothpick out. Past Holiday Inn the neighborhoods get dark. All-night laundromats where women with circles under their eyes press laundered underwear, warm as bread, against their sinuses. Finally, he’s signing the register at a funeral home where he knows no one, but is mistaken for a long-lost friend of the deceased, for someone who has dislocated his life to make the hazardous journey on a night when the dead man’s own children have avoided him. Once again instinct has taken him where he’s needed; where the unexpected transforms routine into celebration. He kneels before the corpse, striking his forehead against the casket.
It’s more than silhouettes tonight, every window in the city lit, shades lifted, curtains open. As one suspected, the dark buildings full of lovers, undressing beneath light bulbs, before mirrors. Men & women, men & men, women & women, embracing. Even the loners visible, flickered by single candles, touching places they’ve usually chosen to keep secret. So much nakedness! And the streets empty except for the newsboys moving through shadows, leafless trees snatching underclothes out of wind, the El clattering above the roofs like a strip of blue movie.
Lavenderish dusk strapped for stays, pomegranates under the rubberband chucked for a glass Oz,   letdown splayed by the pillar-shelves to page upon the Ottoman:   his talk has wrought suit amid citrus gapes and pall dunked in the bowl and grated sage or cleaved clear paleo-pines.   Postgeist, upcast California upon weed, what banker yields so fragrant a cant as this vagrant cant?
When I came to my mother’s house the day after she had died it was already a museum of her unfinished gestures. The mysteries from the public library, duein two weeks. The half-eaten square of lasagna in the fridge.The half-burned wreckage of her last cigarette, and one red swallow of wine in a lipsticked glass beside her chair.Finally, a blue Bic on a couple of downs and acrosses left blank in the Sunday crossword, which actually had the audacity to look a little smug at having, for once, won.
I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar In a war movie on the arm Of a young actor. He has just swum Across a river somewhere in Normandy Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades. Of course, the river’s in California, And the actor is dead now. Nevertheless, This is the first of many hotels this trip, And I find myself preferring wars To smut on the networks, Even as I find myself readingThe Pisan Cantos for the umpteenth time Instead of the novel in my bag. The poet helps me to the question: Does anything remain of home at home? Next day is no way of knowing, And the day after is my favorite, A small museum really perfect And a good meal in the middle of it. As I’m leaving, I notice a donkey on a vase Biting the arm of a young girl, And outside on the steps A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap. Plenty remains. The work of poetry is trust, And under the aegis of trust Nothing could be more effortless. Hotels show movies. Walking around even tired I find my eyes find Numberless good things And my ears hear plenty of words Offered for nothing over the traffic noise As sharp as sparrows. A day and a day, more rivers crossing me. It really feels that way, I mean I have changed places with geography, And rivers and towns pass over me, Showing their scars, finding their friends. I like it best when poetry Gleams or shows its teeth to a girl Forever at just the right moment. I think I could turn and live underneath the animals. I could be a bottlecap. Going to the airport going home, I stop with my teacher, now my friend. He buys me a good breakfast, berries and hotcakes. We finish and, standing, I hear One policeman saying to another Over the newspaper in a yellow booth "Do you know this word regret, Eddie? What does it mean?" Plenty of words over the traffic noise, And nothing could be more effortless. Catching a glimpse of eternity, even a poor one, says it all.
Dark by five, the day gives up and so do I, stalled at the top of the stairs I forget what for, adrift in a scrap of dream that’s not a dream exactly but a stupor, unrefined. I go astray in old routines, I dare myself to reconstruct the rules of old invented games—that one of throwing snowballs at the roof, to watch them shrink as they rolled down, spinning to their pits, to see the force that made them briefly a thing so neatly undone. Today an old friend’s tiny boy lobbied me to pitch some snowballs at him. I bowed to his dense little will. But planned to miss. As I packed and flung each one to its unpacking, he hunted down the humble bits and crumbs of every impact, as they ran from him along the icy slope, and gathered and carried them back to me at the top. Eating them as he came. So that’s how you get to the marrow of breakdown. I forgot. That you could put what’s left to your lips.
The cheap dropped ceiling   jumped like a pot-lid boiling  when our upstairs neighbor   chased his girl that winter.   Falling out of  summer’s skimpy tops   she’d want our phone. Her plush lips  creased. Not exactly blonde,   but luteous, we thought,   pleased the right word  was there for that shade   of slightly slutty mermaid.  Wincing, we’d hear him punch   along the floor on crutch-   es, a giant  bat trying to mince   a mayfly. Sex and Violence  you called them; Blondie with   Dagwood on crystal meth,   I’d tell our friends  over dinners stewed   in noise. Even his truck cowed.  Black, smoked glass, outsized wheels   flaunted like chrome knuckles   we shrank from, ducked,  afraid we’d find her   later, knocking at our door.  Some nights we waited through   like captured prey. To you   I’d turn in bed,  saying the furtive  words against your back, I love ... You’d stroke my hair, or hip,   all our years the same flip   crack, I do, too.
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,  The booze and the neon and Saturday night,  The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?  Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?  Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons  And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?  Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,  The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
Every night, we couldn’t sleep.  Our upstairs neighbors had to keep  Dropping something down the hall—  A barbell or a bowling ball,  And from the window by the bed,  Echoing inside my head,  Alley cats expended breath  In arias of love and death.  Dawn again, across the street,  Jackhammers began to beat  Like hangovers, and you would frown—  That well-built house, why tear it down? Noon, the radiator grill  Groaned, gave off a lesser chill  So that we could take off our coats.  The pipes coughed to clear their throats.  Our nerves were frayed like ravelled sleeves,  We cherished each our minor griefs  To keep them warm until the night,  When it was time again to fight;  But we were young, did not need much  To make us laugh instead, and touch,  And could not hear ourselves above  The arias of death and love.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
VI Come as you are, tarry not over your toilet. If your braiding has come loose, if the parting of your hair be not straight, if the ribbons of your bodice be not fastened, do not mind. Come as you are, tarry not over your toilet. Come with quick steps over the grass. If your feet are pale with the dew, if your anklets slacken, if pearls drop out of your chain, do not mind. Come with quick steps over the grass. Do you see the clouds wrapping the sky? Flocks of cranes fly up from the further riverbank and fitful gusts of wind rush over the heath. The anxious cattle run to their stalls in the village. Do you see the clouds wrapping the sky? In vain you light your toilet lamp; it flickers and goes out in the wind. Surely, who would know that with lamp-black your eyelids are not touched? For your eyes are darker than rain clouds. In vain you light your toilet lamp; it goes out. Come as you are, tarry not over your toilet. If the wreath is not woven, who cares? If the wrist-chain has not been tied, leave it by. The sky is overcast with clouds; it is late. Come as you are, tarry not over your toilet.
Now that I have cooled to you Let there be gold of tarnished masonry, Temples soothed by the sun to ruin  That sleep utterly. Give me hand for the dances,  Ripples at Philae, in and out,  And lips, my Lesbian,  Wall flowers that once were flame.  Your hair is my Carthage  And my arms the bow,  And our words arrows  To shoot the stars  Who from that misty sea  Swarm to destroy us.  But you there beside me—  Oh how shall I defy you,  Who wound me in the night  With breasts shining  Like Venus and like Mars?  The night that is shouting Jason  When the loud eaves rattle  As with waves above me  Blue at the prow of my desire.
She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him; She meets in his engaging mask All reasons to refuse him; But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years, Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs Of age, were she to lose him. Between a blurred sagacity That once had power to sound him, And Love, that will not let him be The Judas that she found him, Her pride assuages her almost, As if it were alone the cost.— He sees that he will not be lost, And waits and looks around him. A sense of ocean and old trees Envelops and allures him; Tradition, touching all he sees Beguiles and reassures him; And all her doubts of what he says Are dimmed with what she knows of days— Till even prejudice delays And fades, and she secures him. The falling leaf inaugurates The reign of her confusion; The pounding wave reverberates The dirge of her illusion; And home, where passion lived and died, Becomes a place where she can hide, While all the town and harbor side Vibrate with her seclusion. We tell you, tapping on our brows, The story as it should be,— As if the story of a house Were told, or ever could be; We’ll have no kindly veil between Her visions and those we have seen,— As if we guessed what hers have been, Or what they are or would be. Meanwhile we do no harm; for they That with a god have striven, Not hearing much of what we say, Take what the god has given; Though like waves breaking it may be, Or like a changed familiar tree, Or like a stairway to the sea Where down the blind are driven.
In my heart the old love   Struggled with the new,  It was ghostly waking   All night through.  Dear things, kind things   That my old love said,  Ranged themselves reproachfully   Round my bed.  But I could not heed them,   For I seemed to see  Dark eyes of my new love   Fixed on me.  Old love, old love,   How can I be true?  Shall I be faithless to myself   Or to you?
I Oh chimes set high on the sunny tower   Ring on, ring on unendingly, Make all the hours a single hour,  For when the dusk begins to flower,   The man I love will come to me! ... But no, go slowly as you will,  I should not bid you hasten so,  For while I wait for love to come,  Some other girl is standing dumb,  Fearing her love will go.  II Oh white steam over the roofs, blow high!   Oh chimes in the tower ring clear and free!  Oh sun awake in the covered sky,  For the man I love, loves me! ... Oh drifting steam disperse and die,  Oh tower stand shrouded toward the south,— Fate heard afar my happy cry,  And laid her finger on my mouth.  III The dusk was blue with blowing mist,   The lights were spangles in a veil,  And from the clamor far below  Floated faint music like a wail. It voiced what I shall never speak,  My heart was breaking all night long, But when the dawn was hard and gray,   My tears distilled into a song.  IV I said, “I have shut my heart   As one shuts an open door, That Love may starve therein   And trouble me no more.” But over the roofs there came  The wet new wind of May, And a tune blew up from the curb  Where the street-pianos play. My room was white with the sun   And Love cried out to me, “I am strong, I will break your heart   Unless you set me free.”
What do I owe to you   Who loved me deep and long?  You never gave my spirit wings   Nor gave my heart a song.  But oh, to him I loved,   Who loved me not at all,  I owe the little open gate   That led through heaven’s wall.
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,  Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,   Ceaseless, insistent.  The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,  The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence  Under a moon waning and worn, broken,   Tired with summer.  Let me remember you, voices of little insects, Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,  Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,  Snow-hushed and heavy.  Over my soul murmur your mute benediction, While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest, As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,   Lest they forget them.
I. There’s a little square in Paris, Waiting until we pass. They sit idly there, They sip the glass. There’s a cab-horse at the corner, There's rain. The season grieves. It was silver once, And green with leaves. There’s a parrot in a window, Will see us on parade, Hear the loud drums roll— And serenade. II. This was the salty taste of glory, That it was not Like Agamemnon’s story. Only, an eyeball in the mud, And Hopkins, Flat and pale and gory! III. But the bugles, in the night, Were wings that bore To where our comfort was; Arabesques of candle beams, Winding Through our heavy dreams; Winds that blew Where the bending iris grew; Birds of intermitted bliss, Singing in the night's abyss; Vines with yellow fruit, That fell Along the walls That bordered Hell. IV. Death's nobility again Beautified the simplest men. Fallen Winkle felt the pride Of Agamemnon When he died. What could London’s Work and waste Give him— To that salty, sacrificial taste? What could London’s Sorrow bring— To that short, triumphant sting?
Love has crept into her sealed heart As a field bee, black and amber, Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start. Love has crept into her summery eyes, And a glint of colored sunshine brings Such as his along the folded wings Of the bee before he flies. But I with my ruffling, impatient breath Have loosened the wings of the wild young sprite; He has opened them out in a reeling flight, And down her words he hasteneth. Love flies delighted in her voice: The hum of his glittering, drunken wings Sets quivering with music the little things That she says, and her simple words rejoice.
Are you alive? I touch you. You quiver like a sea-fish. I cover you with my net. What are you—banded one?
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping! With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary; Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there, But only agony, and that has ending; And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain, Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.
If I should die, think only this of me:  That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air,  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,  In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.Poetry Out Loud Note: This poem has had two titles: “The Soldier” and “Nineteen-Fourteen: The Soldier”. The student may give either title during the recitation.
The chatter of little people  Breaks on my purpose Like the water-drops which slowly wear the rocks to powder. And while I laugh My spirit crumbles at their teasing touch.
I
If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly I could see to write you a letter.
Brighter than fireflies upon the Uji River Are your words in the dark, Beloved.
A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star Sad in the west; And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far, Rememberest: Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow And fragrant hair, Falling as in the silence falleth now Dusk from the air. Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why, Poor heart, repine, If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh Was never thine?
Canto III appeared in the July, 1917 issue of Poetry. Originally part of what scholars call the "Ur-Cantos," this version of Canto III was later edited by Pound to become Canto I of his collected Cantos. The section that eventually became Canto I is highlighted in blue in the poem below. —THE EDITORS III Another's a half-cracked fellow—John Heydon, Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation, In thoughts upon pure form, in alchemy, Seer of pretty visions ("servant of God and secretary of nature"); Full of plaintive charm, like Botticelli's, With half-transparent forms, lacking the vigor of gods. Thus Heydon, in a trance, at Bulverton, Had such a sight: Decked all in green, with sleeves of yellow silk Slit to the elbow, slashed with various purples. Her eyes were green as glass, her foot was leaf-like. She was adorned with choicest emeralds, And promised him the way of holy wisdom. "Pretty green bank," began the half-lost poem. Take the old way, say I met John Heydon, Sought out the place, Lay on the bank, was "plungèd deep in swevyn;" And saw the company—Layamon, Chaucer— Pass each in his appropriate robes; Conversed with each, observed the varying fashion. And then comes Heydon. "I have seen John Heydon." Let us hear John Heydon! "Omniformis Omnis intellectus est"—thus he begins, by spouting half of Psellus. (Then comes a note, my assiduous commentator: Not Psellus De Daemonibus, but Porphyry's Chances, In the thirteenth chapter, that "every intellect is omni-form.") Magnifico Lorenzo used the dodge, Says that he met Ficino In some Wordsworthian, false-pastoral manner, And that they walked along, stopped at a well-head, And heard deep platitudes about contentment From some old codger with an endless beard. "A daemon is not a particular intellect, But is a substance differed from intellect," Breaks in Ficino, "Placed in the latitude or locus of souls"— That's out of Proclus, take your pick of them. Valla, more earth and sounder rhetoric— Prefacing praise to his Pope Nicholas: "A man of parts, skilled in the subtlest sciences; A patron of the arts, of poetry; and of a fine discernment." Then comes a catalogue, his jewels of conversation. No, you've not read your Elegantiae— A dull book?—shook the church. The prefaces, cut clear and hard: "Know then the Roman speech, a sacrament," Spread for the nations, eucharist of wisdom, Bread of the liberal arts. Ha! Sir Blancatz, Sordello would have your heart to give to all the princes; Valla, the heart of Rome, Sustaining speech, set out before the people. "Nec bonus Christianus ac bonus Tullianus." Marius, Du Bellay, wept for the buildings, Baldassar Castiglione saw Raphael "Lead back the soul into its dead, waste dwelling," Corpore laniato; and Lorenzo Valla, "Broken in middle life? bent to submission?— Took a fat living from the Papacy" (That's in Villari, but Burckhardt's statement is different)— "More than the Roman city, the Roman speech" (Holds fast its part among the ever-living). "Not by the eagles only was Rome measured." "Wherever the Roman speech was, there was Rome," Wherever the speech crept, there was mastery Spoke with the law's voice while your Greek, logicians... More Greeks than one! Doughty's "divine Homeros" Came before sophistry. Justinopolitan Uncatalogued Andreas Divus, Gave him in Latin, 1538 in my edition, the rest uncertain, Caught up his cadence, word and syllable: "Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail, Black keel and beasts for bloody sacrifice, Weeping we went." I've strained my ear for -ensa, -ombra, and -ensa And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni— Here's but rough meaning: "And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, Forth on the godly sea; We set up mast and sail on the swarthy ship, Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping. And winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas— Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller. Thus with stretched sail We went over sea till day's end: Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean. Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpiercèd ever With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven, Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. Thither we in that ship, unladed sheep there, The ocean flowing backward, came we through to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin, poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, Water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best, For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods. Sheep, to Tiresias only, Black, and a bell sheep; Dark blood flowed in the fosse. Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead Of brides, of youths, and of many passing old, Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears, Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms: These many crowded about me, With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds—sheep slain of bronze, Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine. Unsheathed the narrow steel, I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth— Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other, Pitiful spirit—and I cried in hurried speech: 'Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?' And he in heavy speech: 'Ill fate and abundant wine! I slept in Circe's ingle, Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against the buttress, Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied! Heap up mine arms, be tomb by the sea-board, and inscribed, A man of no fortune and with a name to come; And set my oar up, that I swung 'mid fellows.' Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea, And then Tiresias, Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first: 'Man of ill hour, why come a second time, Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? Stand from the fosse, move back, leave me my bloody bever, And I will speak you true speeches.' "And I stepped back, Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank then And spoke: 'Lustrous Odysseus, shalt Return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Lose all companions.' Foretold me the ways and the signs. Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered: 'Fate drives me on through these deeps; I sought Tiresias.' I told her news of Troy, and thrice her shadow Faded in my embrace. Then had I news of many faded women— Tyro, Alcmena, Chloris— Heard out their tales by that dark fosse, and sailed By sirens and thence outward and away, And unto Circe buried Elpenor's corpse." Lie quiet, Divus. In Officina Wechli, Paris, M. D. three X's, Eight, with Aldus on the Frogs, And a certain Cretan's Hymni Deorum: (The thin clear Tuscan stuff Gives way before the florid mellow phrase.) Take we the Goddess, Venus: Venerandam, Aurean coronam habentem, pulchram, Cypri munimenta sortita est, maritime, Light on the foam, breathed on by zephyrs, And air-tending hours. Mirthful, orichalci, with golden Girdles and breast bands. Thou with dark eye-lids, Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.
Families when a child is born Hope it will turn out intelligent. I, through intelligence Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope that the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he'll be happy all his days And grow into a cabinet minister.
My candle burns at both ends;  It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—  It gives a lovely light!
(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of the 4th millennium B.C.) Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.I saw nothing of you anywhere.I was at the old place and the other girls were there, But no Bilbea.Have you gone to another house? or city?Why don’t you write?I was sorry. I walked home half-sick.Tell me how it goes.Send me some kind of a letter.And take care of yourself.
Love faded in my heart— I thought it was dead. Now new flowers start, Fresh leaves outspread. Why do these flowers upstart And again the leaves spread? Oh, when will it be dead— This root that tears my heart!
We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable— But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper. The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel, Fixed in silent explosions. And here at our door The moonlight is laid Like a drawn sword.
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?  Why do you dim yourself with folded silks? Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’s shop,  And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors. How pale you would be, and startling—  How quiet; But your curves would spring upward  Like a clear jet of flung water, You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,  You would waver, and relapse, and tremble.  And I too should tremble, Watching. Murex-dyes and tinsel— And yet I think I could bear your beauty unshaded.
All day I have watched the purple vine leavesFall into the water.And now in the moonlight they still fall,But each leaf is fringed with silver.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,  And round it was, upon a hill.  It made the slovenly wilderness  Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.  The jar was round upon the ground  And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere.  The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush,  Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The sea-wash never ends.The sea-wash repeats, repeats.Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows? Only the old strong songs? Is that all?The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
I do not know where either of us can turn Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other. I do not know how we can bear The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon, Or many trees shaken together in the darkness. We shall wish not to be alone And that love were not dispersed and set free— Though you defeat me, And I be heavy upon you. But like earth heaped over the heart Is love grown perfect. Like a shell over the beat of life Is love perfect to the last. So let it be the same Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another; Let us know this for leavetaking, That I may not be heavy upon you, That you may blind me no more.
The dark is thrown Back from the brightness, like hair Cast over a shoulder. I am alone, Four years older; Like the chairs and the walls Which I once watched brighten With you beside me. I was to waken Never like this, whatever came or was taken. The stalk grows, the year beats on the wind. Apples come, and the month for their fall. The bark spreads, the roots tighten. Though today be the last Or tomorrow all, You will not mind. That I may not remember Does not matter. I shall not be with you again. What we knew, even now Must scatter And be ruined, and blow Like dust in the rain. You have been dead a long season And have less than desire Who were lover with lover; And I have life—that old reason To wait for what comes, To leave what is over.
Father, where do the wild swans go? Far, far. Ceaselessly winging, Their necks outstraining, they haste them singing Far, far. Whither, none may know.Father, where do the cloud-ships go? Far, far. The winds pursue them, And over the shining heaven strew them Far, far. Whither, none may know.Father, where do the days all go? Far, far. Each runs and races— No one can catch them, they leave no traces— Far, far. Whither, none may know.But father, we—where do we then go? Far, far. Our dim eyes veiling, With bended head we go sighing, wailing Far, far. Whither none may know.
A poem should be palpable and mute  As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless  As the flight of birds.  *  A poem should be motionless in time  As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,  Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time  As the moon climbs.  *  A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean  But be.
These lovers’ inklings which our loves enmesh,  Lost to the cunning and dimensional eye,  Though tenemented in the selves we see,  Not more perforce than azure to the sky,  Were necromancy-juggled to the flesh,  And startled from no daylight you or me. For trance and silvemess those moons commend,  Which blanch the warm life silver-pale; or look  What ghostly portent mist distorts from slight  Clay shapes; the willows that the waters took  Liquid and brightened in the waters bend,  And we, in love’s reflex, seemed loved of right. Then no more think to net forthwith love’s thing,  But cast for it by spirit sleight-of-hand; Then only in the slant glass contemplate,  Where lineament outstripping line is scanned,  Then on the perplexed text leave pondering,  Love’s proverb is set down transliterate.
I met a man in South Street, tall— a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.  His eyes pressed through green glass  —green glasses, or bar lights made them  so—  shine—  GREEN—  eyes— stepped out—forgot to look at you or left you several blocks away— in the nickel-in-the-slot piano jogged “Stamboul Nights”—weaving somebody’s nickel—sang—  O Stamboul Rose—dreams weave the rose!  Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke,   and rum was Plato in our heads . . . “It’s S.S. Ala—Antwerp—now remember kid  to put me out at three she sails on time.  I’m not much good at time any more keep weakeyed watches sometimes snooze—” his bony hands  got to beating time . . . “A whaler once— I ought to keep time and get over it—I’m a  Democrat—I know what time it is—No  I don’t want to know what time it is—that  damned white Arctic killed my time . . . ”  O Stamboul Rose—drums weave— “I ran a donkey engine down there on the Canal  in Panama—got tired of that— then Yucatan selling kitchenware—beads— have you seen Popocatepetl—birdless mouth  with ashes sifting down—?  and then the coast again . . . ”  Rose of Stamboul O coral Queen—  teased remnants of the skeletons of cities—  and galleries, galleries of watergutted lava   snarling stone—green—drums—drown—
I He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’  speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman. My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies. We saw is so and it was not so, the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.  (—A blazing parchment, Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.) It was not so, scratched on black by God knows who,  by God, by God knows who. In the dark in fetters on bended elbows I supported my weak back hulloing to muffled walls blank again unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent. My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible I stammer to my ear: Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold! Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric,  wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair. What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor  with magic in darkness, I unforewained. The golden hands are not in Averrhoes, eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me! To the right was darkness and to the left hardness  below hardness darkness above at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness  with equal intervals without to the left moaning and beyond a scurry.  In those days rode the good Lorraine whom English burned at Rouen, the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust. Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands,  the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb  alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate.  White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me. Remember, imbeciles and wits,  sots and ascetics, fair and foul,  young girls with little tender tits,  that DEATH is written over all. Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul  they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm and full—  fellmonger Death gets every skin. All that is piteous, all that’s fair,  all that is fat and scant of breath,  Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,  is Death’s collateral: Three score and ten years after sight  of this pay me your pulse and breath  value received. And who dare cite,  as we forgive our debtors, Death? Abelard and Eloise, Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,  Genée, Lopokova, all these die, die in pain. And General Grant and General Lee,  Patti and Florence Nightingale,  like Tyro and Antiope drift among ghosts in Hell, know nothing, are nothing, save a fume  driving across a mind preoccupied with this: our doom  is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.  We are less permanent than thought. The Emperor with the Golden Hands is still a word, a tint, a tone, insubstantial-glorious, when we ourselves are dead and gone  and the green grass growing over us. II Let his days be few and let his bishoprick pass to another, for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust,  mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited, I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave,  fettered to a post in the damp cellarage.  Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor,  there are no dancers, no somersaulters now,  only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks,  only the military tread and the snap of the locks.  Mine was a threeplank bed whereon  I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead— I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill, but Archipiada came to me and comforted my cold body and Circe excellent utterer of her mind lay with me in that dungeon for a year making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue.  Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars,  trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule,  Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad. They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds,  hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo,  they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada: What is your name? Your maiden name? Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name.  Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!) Now the thumbprints for filing. Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon! How many golden prints on the smudgy page? Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest. Adsunt omnes, omnes et Villon. Villon? Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain, hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies. III Under the olive trees  walking alone on the green terraces  very seldom over the sea seldom where it ravelled and spun blue tapestries white and green gravecloths of men  Romans and modern men  and the men of the sea who have neither nation nor time on the mountains seldom  the white mountains beyond or the brown mountains between and their drifting echoes in the clouds and over the sea in shrines on their ridges the goddess of the country silverplated in silk and embroidery with offerings of pictures little ships and arms  below me the ports  with naked breasts  shipless spoiled sacked  because of the beauty of Helen precision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper  run together like two drops of quicksilver;  factor that resolves  unnoted harmonies; name of the nameless;  stuff that clings to frigid limbs  more marble hard than girls imagined by Mantegna ...  The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,  no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. How can I sing with my love in my bosom?  Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.
Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow, bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears, recidivous criminality in the slouch, —This is not the latest absconding bankrupt but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from  Kuala Lumpur. 7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A.  are taking his profitable likeness;  28 reporters and an essayist are writing him up. Sundry ladies think he is a darling  especially at mealtimes, observing that a firm near the docks advertises replicas fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments. ♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise  up and down his cage before feeding in a stench of excrements of great cats indifferent to beauty or brutality. He is said to have eaten several persons but of course you can never be quite sure of these things.
The seas has made a wall for its defence of falling water. Those whose impertinence leads them to its moving ledges it rejects. Those who surrender it will with the next wave drag under. Sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion. The way to the dunes is easy. The shelving sand is stiffened in the rain and loosened again in the sun’s fingers. Children, lustful of the glistening hours drink and are insatiate. Wind under the eyelids, confusion walling their ears, their bodies glow in the cold wash of the beach.  And after, they walk with rigid feet the planked street of the town. They miss the slipping texture of the sand and a sand pillow under the hollow instep. They are unmoved by fears that breed in darkening kitchens at sundown following storm, and they rebel against cold waiting in the wind and rain for the late sail.  Did you, as I, condemn the coastal fog and long for islands seen from a sail’s shadow?  The dunes lie more passive to the wind than water is. This, then, the country of our choice. It is infertile, narrow, prone under a dome of choral sound: water breaking upon water. Litter of bare logs in the drift— the sea has had its sharp word with them. Wild roses, wild strawberries cover the dune shoulder It is a naked restless garden that descends from the crouched pine to shellfish caught in flat reflecting sands. We lose the childish avarice of horizons. The sea ends against another shore. The cracked ribs of a wreck project from the washed beach. Under the shell-encrusted timbers dripping brine plucks at the silence of slant chambers opening seaward. What moving keel remembers such things as here are buried under sand? The transitory ponds and smooth bar slide easily under the advancing tide, emerging with the moon’s turning.  Clear lagoons behind the shattered hulk, thin movements of sea grass on the dune rim bending against cloud, these things are oursI Submissive to the sea and wind, resistful of all else, sand is the beginning and the end of our dominion.
At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet made dark tracks on the hearth. Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat, but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold. The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor. She sat there with a silvered cedar knot for a low stool; and I sat opposite, my lips and eyelids hot in the heat of the fire. Piling on dry bark, seeing that no steam went up from her dark dress, I felt uneasiness as though firm sand had shifted under my feet in the wash of a wave. I brought her soup from the stove and she would not eat, but sat there crying her cold tears, her blue lips quivering with cold and grief. She blamed me for a thief, saying that I had burned a piece of wood the tide washed up. And I said, No, the tide had washed it out again; and even so, a piece of sodden wood was not so rare as polished agate stones or ambergris. She stood and wrung her hair so that the water made a sudden splash on the round rug by the door. I saw her go across the little footbridge to the beach. After, I threw the knot on the hot coals. It fell apart and burned with a white flash, a crackling roar in the chimney and dark smoke. I beat it out with a poker in the soft ash. Now I am frightened on the shore at night, and all the phosphorescent swells that rise come towards me with the threat of her dark eyes with a cold firelight in them; and crooked driftwood writhes in dry sand when I pass. Should she return and bring her sisters with her, the withdrawing tide would leave a long pool in my bed. There would be nothing more of me this side the melting foamline of the latest wave.
Below the gardens and the darkening pines The living water sinks among the stones, Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines. The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines, And now the definite mountain-side disowns The fluid world, the immeasurable zones. Then white oblivion swallows all designs. But still the rich confusion of the sea, Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing, Rises through veils of silence past the trees; In restless repetition bound, yet free, Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.
After reading Ash Wednesday she looked once at the baked beans and fled. Luncheonless, poor girl, she observed a kind of poetic Lent— and I had thought I liked poetry better than she did. I do. But to me its most endearing quality is its unsuitableness; and, conversely, the chief wonder in heaven (whither I also am sometimes transported) is the kind of baggage I bring with me. Surely there is no more exquisite jointure in the anatomy of life than that at which poetry dovetails with the inevitable meal and Mrs. B. sits murmuring of avocados.
Not that the pines were darker there,  nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,  nor swifts more swift in summer air;  it was my own country, having its thunderclap of spring,  its long midsummer ripening,  its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,  almost like any country, yet being mine; its face, its speech,  its hills bent low within my reach,  its river birch and upland beech  were mine, of my own country. Now the dark waters at the bow fold back, like earth against the plow;  foam brightens like the dogwood now  at home, in my own country.
love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky
“A equals X,” says Mister One.  “A equals B,” says Mister Two.  “A equals nothing under the sun  But A,” says Mister Three. A few  Applaud; some wipe their eyes;  Some linger in the shade to see  One and Two in neat disguise  Decapitating Mister Three. “This age is not entirely bad.” It’s bad enough, God knows, but you  Should know Elizabethans had  Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.  The past goes down and disappears,  The present stumbles home to bed,  The future stretches out in years That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.
Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide, Ouspenski; note the terms: obscurantism, factorize, fagaceous, endocarp; descend the nervous stairs to hear the broken ends of songs that float through city air. In Osnabrück and Ogden, on the Passamaquoddy Bay, in Ahmednagar, Waco (Neb.), in Santa Fé, propelled by zeros, zinc, and zephyrs, always I’m pursued by thoughts of what I am, authority, remembrance, food, the letter on the mezzanine, the unemployed, dogs’ lonely faces, pianos and decay. Plurality is all. I sympathize, but cannot grieve too long for those who wear their dialectics on their sleeves. The pattern’s one I sometimes rather like; there’s really nothing wrong with it for some. But I should add: It doesn’t wear for long, before I push the elevator bell and quickly leave.
Even on Easter Sunday  when the church was a jungle of lilies and  ferns fat Uncle Paul who loved his liquor  so would pound away with both fists on the  stone pulpit shouting sin sin sin and the  fiery fires of hell and I cried all after- noon the first time I heard what they did to  Jesus it was something the children shouldn’t  know about till they were older but the new  maid told me and both of us cried a lot and so  mother got another one right away & she sent  away Miss Richardson who came all the way  from England because she kept telling how  her fiancé Mr. Bowles- Lyon died suddenly of  a heart attack he just said one day at lunch  I’m afraid I’m not well and the next thing they  knew he was sliding un- der the table. Easter  was nice the eggs were silly but the big lilies  were wonderful & when Uncle Paul got so fat  from drinking that he couldn’t squeeze into  the pulpit anymore & had to preach from the  floor there was an el- ders’ meeting and they  said they would have the pulpit rebuilt but  Uncle Paul said no it was the Lord’s manifest  will and he would pass his remaining years in  sacred studies I liked Thanksgiving better be- cause that was the day father took us down to  the mills but Easter I liked next best and the  rabbits died because we fed them beet tops and  the lamb pulled up the grass by the roots and  was sold to Mr. Page the butcher I asked Uncle  Robert what were sacred studies he said he was  not really sure but he guessed they came in a  bottle and mother sent me away from the table  when I wouldn’t eat my lamb chops that was  ridiculous she said it wasn’t the lamb of God  it was just Caesar An- dromache Nibbles but I  couldn’t I just couldn’t & the year of the strike  we didn’t go to Church at all on Easter because  they said it wasn’t safe down town so instead we  had prayers in the library and then right in the mid- dle the telephone rang it was Mr. Shupstead at the  mill they had had to use tear gas father made a  special prayer right a- way for God’s protection  & mercy and then he sent us out to the farm with  mother we stayed a week and missed school but it  rained a lot and I broke the bathroom mirror and  had to learn a long psalm.
If we could get the hang of it entirely  It would take too long; All we know is the splash of words in passing   And falling twigs of song, And when we try to eavesdrop on the great   Presences it is rarely That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate   Even a phrase entirely. If we could find our happiness entirely  In somebody else’s arms We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s  Yammering fire alarms But, as it is, the spears each year go through  Our flesh and almost hourly  Bell or siren banishes the blue   Eyes of Love entirely. And if the world were black or white entirely  And all the charts were plain Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,  A prism of delight and pain, We might be surer where we wished to go   Or again we might be merely Bored but in brute reality there is no  Road that is right entirely.
Your landscape sickens with a dry disease Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars Are of a child’s height in these battlefields. For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed —High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee— The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell. Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns, That on the tidy grass of your great graves And on your roads and riverways serene Between the corn with green flags in a row, Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts Each generation, ignorant of the last, Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute, Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate? You manufacture history like jute— Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds, But in your British dream of reputation The black man is your conscience and your cost. Here on the plains perfect for civil war The clapboard city like a weak mirage Of order rises from the sand to house These thousands and the paranoid Monroe; The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven; The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt; We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air Breathing hysteria thickly in each face. Through the long school of day, absent in heart, Distant in every thought but self we tread, Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys That never understand except through fun. To steal aside as aimlessly as curs Is our desire; to stare at corporals As sceptically as boys; not to believe The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot. To cross the unnatural frontier of your name Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond, White and unpatriotic in our beds, To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf. But stricter than parole is this same wall And these green clothes, a secret on the fields, In towns betray us to the arresting touch Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives. And far and fabulous is the word “Outside” Like “Europe” when the midnight liners sailed, Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk. Still we abhor your news and every voice Except the Personal Enemy’s, and songs That pumped by the great central heart of love On tides of energy at evening come. Instinctively to break your compact law Box within box, Virginia, and throw down The dangerous bright habits of pure form We struggle hideously and cry for fear. And like a very tired whore who stands Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art High in the tired doorway of a street And beckons half-concealed the passerby, The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs Pauses and smiles away between the trees, Motioning the soldier overhill to town To his determined hungry burst of joy.
Rotting in the wet gray air the railroad depot stands deserted under still green trees. In the fields cold begins an end. There were other too-long-postponed departures. They left, finally, because of well water gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill of rain in chimneys. The spot is abandoned even in memory. They knew, locking doors upon empty houses, to leave without regret is to lose title to one home forever.
For Marian Before you, I was living on an island And all around the seas of that lonely coast Cast up their imitation jewels, cast Their fables and enigmas, questioning, sly. I never solved them, or ever even heard, Being perfect in innocence: unconscious of self; Such ignorance of history was all my wealth— A geographer sleeping in the shadow of virgins. But though my maps were made of private countries I was a foreigner in all of them after you had come, For when you spoke, it was with a human tongue And never understood by my land-locked gentry. Then did the sun shake down a million bells And birds bloom on bough in wildest song! Phlegmatic hills went shivering with flame; The chestnut trees were manic at their deepest boles! It is little strange that nature was riven in her frame At this second creation, known to every lover— How we are shaped and shape ourselves in the desires of the other Within the tolerance of human change. Out of the spring’s innocence this revolution, Created on a kiss, announced the second season, The summer of private history, of growth, through whose sweet sessions The trees lift toward the sun, each leaf a revelation. Our bodies, coupled in the moonlight’s album, Proclaimed our love against the outlaw times Whose signature was written in the burning towns. Your face against the night was my medallion. Your coming forth aroused unlikely trumpets In the once-tame heart. They heralded your worth Who are my lodestar, my bright and ultimate North, Marrying all points of my personal compass. This is the love that now invents my fear Which nuzzles me like a puppy each violent day. It is poor comfort that the mind comes, saying: What is one slim girl to the peoples’ wars? Still, my dice are loaded: having had such luck, Having your love, my life would still be whole Though I should die tomorrow. I have lived it all. —And love is never love, that cannot give love up.
Into this net of leaves, green as old glass  That the sun fondles, trembling like images In water, this live net, swung overhead From branch to branch, what swam? The spider’s thread Is less passive, where it appears to float Like a bright hair clinging to the wind’s coat. Hot at work, history neither schemes nor grieves  Here where the soaking dead are last year’s leaves, And over them slung, meshed with sun, a net  No creature wove, none frantically tried to fret. The huge weight of time without its sting  Hangs in that greenly cradling woof. A wing Has caught there, held. Held. But not to stay,  We know, who, how slowly, walk away.
Passing the American graveyard, for my birthday the crosses stuttering, white on tropical green, the years’ quick focus of faces I do not remember . . . The palm trees stalking like deliberate giants for my birthday, and all the hot adolescent memories seen through a screen of water . . . For my birthday thrust into the adult and actual: expected to perform the action, not to ponder the reality beyond the fact, the man standing upright in the dream.
At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis, Its fugue-like swells create and recreate One image in an idiot concentration. From horizon to horizon, this desert With the eye athirst for something stable When off to southeast-ward— It was a plane all right, or had been, A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her. Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure If it were ours or had been one of theirs. That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor, Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god. What did it mean? They thought of night fleets In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon: The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles, The pause, the roar like a night freight And the near misses building their faery forests. Where were these giants? The sea offered A single clue, a symbol; no explanation. Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons As if jealous of giving up secured positions The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.
(for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach) He was born to wonder about numbers. He balanced fives against tens and made them sleep together and love each other. He took sixes and sevens and set them wrangling and fighting over raw bones. He woke up twos and fours out of baby sleep and touched them back to sleep. He managed eights and nines, gave them prophet beards, marched them into mists and mountains. He added all the numbers he knew, multiplied them by new-found numbers and called it a prayer of Numbers. For each of a million cipher silences he dug up a mate number for a candle light in the dark. He knew love numbers, luck numbers, how the sea and the stars are made and held by numbers. He died from the wonder of numbering. He said good-by as if good-by is a number.
A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille  Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs  Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.  But ceremony never did conceal, Save to the silly eye, which all allows, How much we are the woods we wander in. Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream, Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun, Bedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure: Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream  That she is airy earth, the trees, undone, Must ape her languor natural and pure. Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness,  And love this feigning lady by Bazille.  What's lightly hid is deepest understood,  And when with social smile and formal dress  She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille,  I think there are most tigers in the wood.
I The students, lost in raucousness, caught as by the elder Breughel’s eye, we sit in the college store over sandwiches and coffee, wondering. She answers eagerly: the place was fine; sometimes the winds grew very cold, the snows so deep and wide she lost sight of people. Yes, she was well satisfied with her work, expected— while the quarry’s owner was away— to do another year of it.  II She is hammering. I hear the steady sound inside our dry, noisy days. Sparks fly; the mind, so taken, mighty for a moment, becomes quarry and sculptor both, something caught like love and war in this golden mesh: and daring caught that flings like sparks girls and boys, flagrant cities prompt to daring’s will, love and war its burly seconds.  III I see again three kids we passed, three kids lounging at the edge of a forsaken quarry like something they had built; in its sleepy pool they found the whiteness of their bodies, the excitement like parian marble.  IV Such the waters we find ourselves in. We sit in the college store absorbed in food and talk. Eagerness seizes us like love that leaves its best sailors in the mighty waves, love the word for hook whose catching, and the struggle there, is one great musical clash of minds—each wave a passion and a mind— a possessed, tumultuous monument that would be free.  V  We strain forward as to some fabulous story. Incandescence springs from her, the hammer of remembrance fresh, the young woman, bulky graceful body, face shining, who sculptured all winter alone near the source of her rock, digging down into the difficult rock: the young woman who lost a day once, talked to her cat, and when the mirror of her art became too clear, when dreaming seemed too big for night alone, took long walks back to people, back to speech, and time:  the woman, who at last— “I do not use live models”—sculptured fish— “I remember long lonely holidays at shores when the spray alone defined green shapes approaching”—has just seen (her eyes still gleam with the gleam of it, blink like the making of many a take) a great catch.  VI  April, we say, is the time for fish, for reaching in its sea-like waftings one of earth’s original conclusions like the leftover gill slits the singing student told us about in this very spot just two days ago . . . we are in the middle of a great catch, there collected as from her year-long lonely rock, the thrashing, clean- scaled, clear-lit shad in the net.
It sat between my husband and my children.  A place was set for it—a plate of greens.  It had been there: I had seen it But not somehow—but this was like a dream— Not seen it so that I knew I saw it. It was as if I could not know I saw it Because I had never once in all my life Not seen it. It was an eland. An eland! That is why the children Would ask my husband, for a joke, at Christmas:  “Father, is it Donner?” He would say, “No, Blitzen.”  It had been there always. Now we put silver  At its place at meals, fed it the same food  We ourselves ate, and said nothing. Many times  When it breathed heavily (when it had tried  A long useless time to speak) and reached to me  So that I touched it—of a different size  And order of being, like the live hard side  Of a horse’s neck when you pat the horse— And looked with its great melting tearless eyes  Fringed with a few coarse wire-like lashes  Into my eyes, and whispered to me So that my eyes turned backward in their sockets  And they said nothing—  many times  I have known, when they said nothing,  That it did not exist. If they had heard They could not have been silent. And yet they heard;  Heard many times what I have spoken When it could no longer speak, but only breathe— When I could no longer speak, but only breathe.  And, after some years, the others came And took it from me—it was ill, they told me— And cured it, they wrote me: my whole city Sent me cards lilac-branches, mourning As I had mourned—  and I was standing By a grave in flowers, by dyed rolls of turf, And a canvas marquee the last brown of earth.  It is over.  It is over so long that I begin to think That it did not exist, that I have never— And my son says, one morning, from the paper: “An eland. Look, an eland!”   —It was so. Today, in a German dictionary, I saw elend  And the heart in my breast turned over, it was— It was a word one translates wretched. It is as if someone remembered saying: “This is an antimacassar that I grew from seed,” And this were true.   And, truly, One could not wish for anything more strange— For anything more. And yet it wasn’t interesting . . . —It was worse than impossible, it was a joke. And yet when it was, I was— Even to think that I once thought That I could see it to feel the sweat Like needles at my hair-roots, I am blind —It was not even a joke, not even a joke. Yet how can I believe it? Or believe that I Owned it, a husband, children? Is my voice the voice Of that skin of being—of what owns, is owned In honor or dishonor, that is borne and bears— Or of that raw thing, the being inside it  That has neither a wife, a husband, nor a child But goes at last as naked from this world  As it was born into it— And the eland comes and grazes on its grave.   This is senseless? Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth? Choose either—I cannot do both. I tell myself that. And yet it is not so,  And what I say afterwards will not be so:  To be at all is to be wrong.  Being is being old And saying, almost comfortably, across a table  From—  from what I don’t know—  in a voice Rich with a kind of longing satisfaction:  “To own an eland! That’s what I call life!”
September was when it began. Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs Silent, moving like shadows on a wall; And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths; Badgers and snakes, abandoning Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten; Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors Rising from the earth - all these, And more began that fall. Ravens flew round The hospital in pairs. Where there was water, We could hear the sound of beating clothes All through the night. We could not count All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies. And one day in a field I saw A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous, Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other, Huddled together, silent, ominous, And heard the sound of rushing wind.
legato con amore in un volume ciò che per l’universo si squaderna . . . If what began (look far and wide) will end: This lava globe huddle and freeze, its core Brittle with cold, or pulled too near its friend Pop once like one gun in a long-drawn war, And the stars sputter one by one, the night So empty judging empty’s out of date (Space and time gone), then only, height on height, Mind that impelled those currents and that freight, Mind that after five days (see those days! Regions all tropic one day, one all ice!) Whistled man from the sea-moss, saw him raise The blundering forepaw, blink from shaggy eyes— If image, likeness in the ox-yoke brow Long out of focus, focused mind to Mind— Ah what unspeakable two and two allows That silence huddle and all eyes go blind? Our ups and downs—there! that remembered makes Memory which is the single mind. How sweet Carmine stars of the maple fumed in rakes At 1350 such and such a street. A thing to keep in mind. Yes and keep yet When the vile essence violescence lies. Once in winter by the richening sill Quiet, the fireplace tiny in our eyes— I mention this; there’s more. The Almighty will Aeons late stumble on it with surprise.
The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water, rearing to escape me. Where could it find another animal as naked as the one it hates to cover? Once it told me what was happening outside, who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance, or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone. It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know with, and other armor, better girded to my wish. So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave: sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through its arching guard! But even in the night it jails, with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon, the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs, and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.
We had a city also. Hand in hand Wandered happy as travellers our own land. Murmured in turn the hearsay of each stone Or, where a legend faltered, lived our own. The far-seen obelisk my father set (Pinning two roads forever where they met) Waved us in wandering circles, turned our tread Where once morass engulfed that passionate head. Cornice rose in ranges, rose so high It saw no sky, that forum, but noon sky. Marble shone like shallows; columns too Streamed with cool light as rocks in breakers do. O marble many-colored as reach of thought, Tones so recollected and so distraught. Golden: like swimmers when the August shore Brightens their folklore poses more and more. Or grey with silver: moon’s whirling spell Over the breathless olives we knew well; Ivory as shoulders there that summer-dressed Curve to come shyly naked, then find rest (The tresses love dishevelled leaning dazed And grateful). Or the wayward stone that blazed As cheeks do. Or as eyes half-lowered flare. Violet as veins are, love knows where. Fine coral as the shy and wild tonguetip, Undersea coral, rich as inner lip. There was a stone to build on!  Friezes ran In strong chorales that where they closed began; And statues: each a wrung or ringing phrase In the soul’s passionate cadence of her days. O stone so matched and massive, worked so well, Who could believe it when the first brick fell? Who could imagine the unlucky word Would darken to the worldwide sigh we heard? How our eyes wrenched together and held fast Each face tightening to a chalky cast (So poor a copy of one hour before). Who could believe the gloom, the funnelled roar Of cornice falling, forum falling, all Falling? Or dream it fallen? Not a wall With eaves to route the rain. The rivers swelled Till roads groped in lakebottom. Nothing held Clean edge or corner. Caking, the black flood Left every luminous room tunnels of mud. Earth shook: the columns walked, in midair clashed, And the steep stone exploded as it crashed. Soon the barbarian swarmed like locusts blown Between the flood and spasm of our stone. Grunted to tug their huts and marble sties Where friezes broke like foam in the blue skies. Blue noses poked, recoiling as they found Our young and glad-eyed statues underground; Singing salvation, the lewd chisel pecks At boy and girl: one mutilated sex. All our high moments cheapened—greed and grime Charred them in rickety stithies to quicklime. Murderous world. That town that seemed a star Rose in our soul. And there the ruins are. We’ll not walk there again. Who’d wish to walk Where the rats gather and grey tourists talk? Who’d walk there even alive? Or bid his ghost Trail phosphor on the melancholy coast?
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?  Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.  Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?  I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.  Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.  However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.  My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.  Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)  St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.  Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!  It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.  “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.  I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
The white chocolate jar full of petals swills odds and ends around in a dizzying eye  of four o’clocks now and to come. The tiger,  marvellously striped and irritable, leaps  on the table and without disturbing a hair  of the flowers’ breathless attention, pisses  into the pot, right down its delicate spout. A whisper of steam goes up from that porcelain  urethra. “Saint-Saëns!” it seems to be whispering,  curling unerringly around the furry nuts  of the terrible puss, who is mentally flexing.  Ah be with me always, spirit of noisy  contemplation in the studio, the Garden  of Zoos, the eternally fixed afternoons!  There, while music scratches its scrofulous  stomach, the brute beast emerges and stands,  clear and careful, knowing always the exact peril  at this moment caressing his fangs with  a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages;  which only a moment before dropped aspirin  in this sunset of roses, and now throws a chair  in the air to aggravate the truly menacing.
I O what a physical effect it has on me To dive forever into the light blue sea Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends, Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still, It is beautiful, when October Is over, and February is over, To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.” Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian? Aren’t my eyes bigger than love? Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins? Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight! Is love what we are, Or has happiness come to me in a private car That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?  2 We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you. I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.  3 Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill, I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how You are, as if The world were new, and the selves were blue Which we don Until it’s dawn, Until evening puts on The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . . Water! your tear-colored nail polish Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new As a calm On the sea, where, like pigeons, I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated— Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!
I In a detachment cool as the glint of light on wet roads through wet spruce, or iced mountains hailed from the sea in moonfill, or the sea when one horizon’s black and the other burning; the gulls are kissing time in its own flowing over the shell-scraped rock a coming and going as of glass bees with a bubble of light in each running errands in and out of the sunset. Over the road and the spruce wood, over the ice, and out the picture of my picture window, the exorbitant separation of nature from nature wheels, whirls, and dances on itself. Now damn me for a moral. Over and out, over and in, the gulls drift up afire, screaming like hinges in the broken air of night and day like two smokes on the sea. And I do nothing. A shadow three feet under my window in the light, I look at light in one of the years of my life. This or another. Or all together. Or simply in this moment. II Lead flags of the sea. Steel furls of the surf. Day smoke and night smoke. Fire at the smoke’s top. A passion from the world in a calm eye. A calm of the world in the eye of passion. The day that sank birdless from staring Calvary was another. And only another. And no other than the clucking calm of Eden fussed to rest from the black bush afire in the first eye. A calm-in-violence like Aegean time. Day smoke and night smoke over the palled sea tensed for a clash of tridents. Far ashore, a staring army camped beside a temple, the base of the temple black with powder stains, the pediment flashing wild in light above. —A day of the world in which a part of the world looked at another, two parts of a mist. At Cassino the dusty German wetting his lips, his eyes crashed in his face like unhatched birds’ eggs splashed from their nest, looked East from the burning night. There was no West. Light came from nowhere behind him, slanted, flowed level, drained. He looked out, waiting. Where had it come from, the light of his terrible patience? A dead man waited to die on the shell-scraped stones of another God, dust of the stones caked to his body, rivers of blood within him ran to their dusty sea beside the world. Calm in his changes, risen from his changes, he looked his life out at the smoking world. III I have no more to do than what I wait for under the changing light and the gulls afire in rays of rose-quartz. Holy ghosts of the sea, they rise in light from behind me. The light lifts long from the edge of the world and juts away over the top of the dark. My life sits visible to itself; and I sit still in a company of survivors and the dead. Jew. Greek, German, man at the edge of himself in the long light over the worlds he ran to to save unsaved. I practice the man in all, clutching the world from the world to praise it.
I see the ships, the plotted crash, The stateroom’s purgatory trash, The waiting wedged and still no splash. There is the torch that burns not through Unless it drowns the sailor crew Shoring the bulkhead pinning you. And then the priest who, being ill, Intones through steel the bitter pill: This tomb is your last confession grille. I think of you awake in bed, Praying what all the voyage said: Have done with dying and be dead. It is a pride in loneliness Like some propriety of dress That shuns the water meant to bless; My hand as from a magnet pole Works to the Sunday dipping bowl To spot my tie and cross my soul.
That sea we see of surfaces  Turned upside down would be another world: A bone shop, soaked in pearl, a dumping- Ground for rarities, the sea-maws pumping  Grecian garbage Roman cities hurled  Seaward westward toward our faces.  That sea would yield up secret farms,  Gray-rotted by itself, encrusted thick With unimaginable wealth, the spoil Of deaf-mute drownings, the immemorial  Dead, floating in a blue-green bailiwick  Of nun-like plants waving arms.  That sea will not turn over. See  In its deepest keep, far from its shallow, The formal, hidden iceberg, slant, oblique With pregnancy below, thrust up its peak—  Like ourselves in the water-beasted wallow,  Caught in a cellular ecstasy.  In the same vein, all flesh conceals  Articulation’s fishnet, whose thread-bones (A metaphysic harp from sky to heel) Hang in the flesh that dangles from the creel  Depending from the weedy Hand that owns  All fishnets and all fishing reels.  His answers breed a further question:  The fingernails of scale a snake will shed In spring, coil after coil, on moistened clay, Though similar to the serpent wriggling away, Are but facsimiles, though not quite dead.  Testing this, see how the rest shun  Drying memorials to that race  That mined our viewpoint in the Garden, Whose inching tape maneuvered in the sun To measure every guilty length of Eden.  Man is an animal that needs a warden  To frighten off the Master’s face,  For even an idiot sees a world  No tree or dog would dream of, finds a name For pain or absence of it, marries love Of one kind of another. In his grove,  Insensible fruit trees and wild game  Grow naturally, though he lies curled,  The spit and image of our wish,  Smoking a pipe, with an ice-cold Cola Clutched in one hand, and the Sundy funnies spread On both his knees. He’ll leave his lurching bed  To throw hot jazz on an old victrola—  A far cry from the primal fish  Whose fine-boned spine our back remembers:  The river bottoms, and the sea-silt soft As soup, the mudflats where night crawlers came, Tempted by the water tops to change the lame  Arrangements, making of the air a loft  Fitted to our brackish members,  And out we clambered, eyeing land,  Our moist eyes focused on the moron green, Hot on our backs abnormal dryness, shadow Forming in the seanets, seaweed into meadow,  Finally landing at the foot of pine,  Heavy with salty contraband  While the birds beautifully beat blue  On erect wings, as magically they soared, Feathered and efficient, from tallest trees to stake A claim so ravishing that now we undertake  To map an area we once ignored,  Still exiles from that upper view,  For, mummers of the ocean’s Word,  Our dry translations tidied from the deep, Bespeak its ancient languages. The salt Our tears and blood must harbor from its vault  Is shed on every beach-head where we creep,  Part man, dry fish, and wingless bird.
Still half drunk, after a night at cards, with the grey dawn taking us unaware among our guilty kings and queens, we drove far North in the morning, winners, losers, to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place one of us knew, with some vague view of cutting losses or consolidating gains by the old standard appeal to the wilderness, the desert, the empty places of our exile, bringing only the biblical bread and cheese and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way, expecting to drink only the clear cold water among the stones, and remember, or forget. Though no one said anything about atonement, there was still some purgatorial idea in all those aching heads and ageing hearts as we climbed the giant stair of the stream, reaching the place around noon. It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone, or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light, and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor, blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam of crystal to a calm where the waterlight dappled the ledges as they leaned against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again against the low wind moving over the stream, and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings. This surely was it, was what we had come for, was nature, though it looked like art with its grey fortress walls and laminated benches as in the waiting room of some petrified station. But we believed; and what it was we believed made of the place a paradise for ruined poker players, win or lose, who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks like gasping trout (the water they drank making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back waiting for nature to say the last word —as though the stones were Memnon stones, which, caught in a certain light, would sing. The silence (and even the noise of the waters was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase, grew pregnant; but nothing else did. The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks, unlike the ones you would expect to find on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon, mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em, were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks. Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not; some would never batter that battered copy of Walden again.  But all the same, the water, the sunlight, and the wind did something; even the dragonflies did something to the minds full of telephone numbers and flushes, to the flesh sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other. And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders which formed the giant stair of the stream, induced (again) some purgatorial ideas concerning humility, concerning patience and enduring what had to be endured, winning and losing and breaking even; ideas of weathering in whatever weather, being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents. But to these ideas did any purgatory respond? Only this one: that in a world where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap one might at any rate wash with the soap. After a time we talked about the War, about what we had done in the War, and how near some of us had been to being drowned, and burned, and shot, and how many people we knew who had been drowned, or burned, or shot; and would it have been better to have died in the War, the peaceful old War, where we were young? But the mineral peace, or paralysis, of those great stones, the moving stillness of the waters, entered our speech; the ribs and blood of the earth, from which all fables grow, established poetry and truth in us, so that at last one said, “I shall play cards until the day I die,” and another said, “in bourbon whisky are all the vitamins and minerals needed to sustain man’s life,” and still another, “I shall live on smoke until my spirit has been cured of flesh.” Climbing downstream again, on the way home to the lives we had left empty for a day, we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges not one had held the stream, which in its floods had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble, smashed practically back to nature, the massive masonry of span after span with its indifferent rage; this was a sight that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet both during the long drive home and after, till it was time to deal the cards.
A telephone line goes cold; birds tread it wherever it goes. A farm back of a great plain tugs an end of the line. I call that farm every year, ringing it, listening, still; no one is home at the farm, the line gives only a hum. Some year I will ring the line on a night at last the right one, and with an eye tapered for braille from the phone on the wall I will see the tenant who waits— the last one left at the place; through the dark my braille eye will lovingly touch his face. “Hello, is Mother at home?”No one is home today. “But Father—he should be there.”No one—no one is here. “But you—are you the one . . . ?” Then the line will be gone because both ends will be home: no space, no birds, no farm. My self will be the plain, wise as winter is gray, pure as cold posts go pacing toward what I know.
M.A.K. September, 1880-September, 1955 As I wandered on the beach I saw the heron standing  Sunk in the tattered wings He wore as a hunchback’s coat.  Shadow without a shadow,  Hung on invisible wires  From the top of a canvas day,  What scissors cut him out?  Superimposed on a poster  Of summer by the strand  Of a long-decayed resort,  Poised in the dusty light  Some fifteen summers ago;  I wondered, an empty child,  “Heron, whose ghost are you?” I stood on the beach alone, In the sudden chill of the burned. My thought raced up the path.  Pursuing it, I ran To my mother in the house And led her to the scene. The spectral bird was gone. But her quick eye saw him drifting  Over the highest pines On vast, unmoving wings. Could they be those ashen things,  So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,  A pair of broken arms That were not made for flight?  In the middle of my loss I realized she knew: My mother knew what he was. O great blue heron, now That the summer house has burned  So many rockets ago, So many smokes and fires And beach-lights and water-glow  Reflecting pinwheel and flare:  The old logs hauled away,  The pines and driftwood cleared  From that bare strip of shore  Where dozens of children play;  Now there is only you Heavy upon my eye. Why have you followed me here,  Heavy and far away? You have stood there patiently  For fifteen summers and snows,  Denser than my repose, Bleaker than any dream, Waiting upon the day When, like grey smoke, a vapor  Floating into the sky, A handful of paper ashes, My mother would drift away.
for J. L. D. Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done? —Freud 1 My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. I return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice. Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the rest:  2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind. I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk, Arch and cunning, under the maple trees, Pleased to be playing guilty after dark. Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies. Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead. I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.  3 Idiot, he demanded love from girls, And murdered one. Also, he was a thief. He left two women, and a ghost with child. The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head, Made such revolting Ohio animals Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief. I waste no pity on the dead that stink, And no love’s lost between me and the crying Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink. Christ may restore them whole, for all of me. Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago Can do without my widely printed sighing Over their pains with paid sincerity. I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.  4 I pity myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him. Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him either. It does no good to woo the grass, to veil The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame. Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them. I kick the clods away, and speak my name.  5 This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal, When all are caught with what they had to do In fear of love, when every man stands still By the last sea, And the princes of the sea come down To lay away their robes, to judge the earth And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere, And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal— Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars, My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.  6 Staring politely, they will not mark my face From any murderer’s, buried in this place. Why should they? We are nothing but a man.  7 Doty, the rapist and the murderer, Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear; And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace, Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I. Angels and pebbles mock me under trees. Earth is a door I cannot even face. Order be damned, I do not want to die, Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe. The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief. (Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!) I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass, Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.
for Robert Duncan It is hard going to the door cut so small in the wall where the vision which echoes loneliness  brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood. What I understood, I understand. My mind is sometime torment,  sometimes good and filled with livelihood,  and feels the ground. But I see the door, and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,  and would get there if I could with my feet and hands and mind. Lady, do not banish me  for digressions. My nature  is a quagmire of unresolved  confessions. Lady, I follow. I walked away from myself, I left the room, I found the garden, I knew the woman in it, together we lay down. Dead night remembers. In December  we change, not multiplied but dispersed,  sneaked out of childhood, the ritual of dismemberment. Mighty magic is a mother, in her there is another issue of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,  the charge of the command. The garden echoes across the room.  It is fixed in the wall like a mirror  that faces a window behind you  and reflects the shadows. May I go now? Am I allowed to bow myself down in the ridiculous posture of renewal, of the insistence of which I am the virtue? Nothing for You is untoward.  Inside You would also be tall,  more tall, more beautiful. Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You. So I screamed to You, who hears as the wind, and changes  multiply, invariably, changes in the mind. Running to the door, I ran down as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,  stumbled, sat down hard on the floor near the wall. Where were You. How absurd, how vicious. There is nothing to do but get up. My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You. For that one sings, one writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.  The Lady has always moved to the next town  and you stumble on after Her. The door in the wall leads to the garden  where in the sunlight sit the Graces in long Victorian dresses,  of which my grandmother had spoken. History sings in their faces. They are young, they are obtainable,  and you follow after them also in the service of God and Truth. But the Lady is indefinable,  she will be the door in the wall  to the garden in sunlight.  I will go on talking forever. I will never get there. Oh Lady, remember me who in Your service grows older  not wiser, no more than before. How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone,  what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone? I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell  myself in hell, in heaven also I will be. In my mind I see the door, I see the sunlight before me across the floor  beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt moves small beyond it.
The last time I saw Donald Armstrong  He was staggering oddly off into the sun,  Going down, off the Philippine Islands.  I let my shovel fall, and put that hand Above my eyes, and moved some way to one side That his body might pass through the sun, And I saw how well he was not Standing there on his hands, On his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,  Unbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving  In the great, untrustworthy air He flew in each night, when it darkened. Dust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth Between his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,  To demonstrate its suppleness Of veins, as he perfected his role. Next day, he toppled his head off On an island beach to the south, And the enemy’s two-handed sword  Did not fall from anyone’s hands  At that miraculous sight, As the head rolled over upon Its wide-eyed face, and fell Into the inadequate grave He had dug for himself, under pressure.  Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows  Months later, to see him again In the sun, when I learned how he died,  And imagined him, there, Come, judged, before his small captors, Doing all his lean tricks to amaze them— The back somersault, the kip-up— And at last, the stand on his hands,  Perfect, with his feet together, His head down, evenly breathing, As the sun poured from the sea And the headsman broke down  In a blaze of tears, in that light  Of the thin, long human frame  Upside down in its own strange joy, And, if some other one had not told him,  Would have cut off the feet Instead of the head, And if Armstrong had not presently risen  In kingly, round-shouldered attendance,  And then knelt down in himself Beside his hacked, glittering grave, having done  All things in this life that he could.
Toe after toe, a snowing flesh, a gold of lemon, root and rind, she sifts in sunlight down the stairs with nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister a constant thresh of thigh on thigh; her lips imprint the swinging air that parts to let her parts go by.   One-woman waterfall, she wears her slow descent like a long cape and pausing on the final stair, collects her motions into shape.
Come into animal presence. No man is so guileless as the serpent. The lonely white rabbit on the roof is a star twitching its ears at the rain. The llama intricately folding its hind legs to be seated not disdains but mildly disregards human approval. What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do? That the snake has no blemish, that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings in white star-silence? The llama rests in dignity, the armadillo has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest. Those who were sacred have remained so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it. An old joy returns in holy presence.
I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory  of stones and trees, of bending sandpit lakes, crescent round groves of dwarf pine: for it is not so much to know the self  as to know it as it is known  by galaxy and cedar cone, as if birth had never found it and death could never end it: the swamp’s slow water comes  down Gravelly Run fanning the long   stone-held algal hair and narrowing roils between  the shoulders of the highway bridge: holly grows on the banks in the woods there,  and the cedars’ gothic-clustered  spires could make green religion in winter bones: so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass  jail seals each thing in its entity: no use to make any philosophies here:  I see no god in the holly, hear no song from the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter  yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never  heard of trees: surrendered self among  unwelcoming forms: stranger, hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
for Bobbie Yesterday I wanted to speak of it, that sense above  the others to me important because all that I know derives from what it teaches me.  Today, what is it that  is finally so helpless, different, despairs of its own  statement, wants to turn away, endlessly to turn away. If the moon did not ... no, if you did not I wouldn’t either, but  what would I not do, what prevention, what  thing so quickly stopped.  That is love yesterday  or tomorrow, not now. Can I eat what you give me. I have not earned it. Must  I think of everything as earned. Now love also  becomes a reward so remote from me I have only made it with my mind. Here is tedium, despair, a painful sense of isolation and  whimsical if pompous self-regard. But that image  is only of the mind’s vague structure, vague to me  because it is my own. Love, what do I think to say. I cannot say it. What have you become to ask,  what have I made you into, companion, good company,  crossed legs with skirt, or  soft body under the bones of the bed. Nothing says anything  but that which it wishes  would come true, fears  what else might happen in some other place, some  other time not this one.  A voice in my place, an  echo of that only in yours. Let me stumble into not the confession but  the obsession I begin with  now. For you also (also) some time beyond place, or  place beyond time, no  mind left to say anything at all, that face gone, now. Into the company of love  it all returns.
Absorbed in planting bulbs, that work of hope, I was startled by a loud human voice, “Do go on working while I talk. Don’t stop!” And I was caught upon the difficult choice— To yield the last half hour of precious light, Or to stay on my knees, absurd and rude; I willed her to be gone with all my might, This kindly neighbor who destroyed a mood; I could not think of next spring any more, I had to re-assess the way I live. Long after I went in and closed the door, I pondered on the crude imperative. What it is to be caught up in each day Like a child fighting imaginary wars, Converting work into this passionate play, A rounded whole made up of different chores Which one might name haphazard meditation. And yet an unexpected call destroys Or puts to rout my primitive elation: Why be so serious about mere joys? Is this where some outmoded madness lies, Poet as recluse? No, what comes to me Is how my father looked out of his eyes, And how he fought for his own passionate play. He could tear up unread and throw away Communications from officialdom, And, courteous in every other way, Would not brook anything that kept him from Those lively dialogues with man’s whole past That were his intimate and fruitful pleasure. Impetuous, impatient to the last, “Be adamant, keep clear, strike for your treasure!” I hear the youthful ardor in his voice (And so I must forgive a self in labor). I feel his unrepentant smiling choice, (And so I ask forgiveness of my neighbor).
I’ll go among the dead to see my friend. The place I leave is beautiful: the sea Repeats the winds’ far swell in its long sound, And, there beside it, houses solemnly Shine with the modest courage of the land, While swimmers try the verge of what they see. I cannot go, although I should pretend Some final self whose phantom eye could see Him who because he is not cannot change. And yet the thought of going makes the sea, The land, the swimmers, and myself seem strange, Almost as strange as they will someday be.
Her arms around me—child— Around my head, hugging with her whole arms, Whole arms as if I were a loved and native rock, The apple in her hand—her apple and her father,  and my nose pressed Hugely to the collar of her winter coat—. There  in the photograph It is the child who is the branch We fall from, where would be bramble, Brush, bramble in the young Winter With its blowing snow she must have thought Was ours to give to her.
For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said. The old wound in my ass  has opened up again, but I  am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them.  I have to sit up with  an indoor unsittable itch  before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull the dirt up over me  and make a family joke  for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me  although I wear a proof  of the war’s obscenity.
Veritas sequitur ... In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there!  Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass  The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there.  Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun  The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer  Startle, and stare out.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat CerberusCerberus a hound in Greek and Roman mythology that guards the gates of Hell (Hades), often represented with three heads Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The agueyaguey characterized by an acute fever, accompanied by shivering or shaking tendon, the sin, the sin.aguey In Plath's recorded reading of this poem, she adds four lines after this one: "O auto-da-fe! the purple men, / Gold-crusted, thick with spleen, / Sit with their hooks and crooks / and stoke the light." These lines do not appear in the original publication version (Poetry, August 1963) nor in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (1966), where this text is taken.  The tinder cries. The indelibleindelible permanent smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like Isadora’s scarvesIsadora’s scarves American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) had a known longing for flowing scarves. She died in a freak car accident, most likely by strangulation, when her long scarf wrapped around her neck became caught in one of the wheel spokes of the traveling car., I’m in a fright One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel, Such yellow sullen smokes Make their own element. They will not rise, But trundletrundle roll round the globe Choking the aged and the meek, The weakHothouseHothouse a heated greenhouse where plants are bred baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid Hanging its hanging garden in the air, Devilish leopard! Radiation turned it white And killed it in an hour. Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like HiroshimaHiroshima Japanese industrial city which was the first of two cities hit with an atomic bomb by the U.S. in August 1945 to end World War II. Many survivors of the attack later died of radiation burns or sickness. ash and eating in. The sin. The sin. Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’slecher a person with strong sexual desires; lustful kiss. Three days. Three nights. Lemon water, chicken Water, water make me retch. I am too pure for you or anyone. Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern—— My head a moon Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. Does not my heat astound you! And my light! All by myself I am a huge camelliacamellia a plant native to Asia, with large flowers typically red or pink in color Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush. I think I am going up, I think I may rise—— The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I Am a pure acetyleneacetylene a colorless, flammable gas that produces a high heat under pressure, used for torch welding and the cutting or purifying of metals Virgin Attended by roses, By kisses, by cherubimcherubim plural of “cherub”; high-ranking angels mentioned in the Bible, often depicted in paintings as winged babies or toddlers., By whatever these pink things mean! Not you, nor him Nor him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—— To Paradise.
Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. —Genesis  When the Deluge had passed, into my head, by twos, came the creeping things, the horn of their jawbones shining, and the things of the air, wing-cases breaking like clasp knives, asking their names. Storm-light colored their passing with an animal imminence. They wheeled on the pile of their plumage, in the dread of their animal being, and rode in the ark of my head where the possible worked like a sea. Nothing was given me there. Nothing was known. Feather and scale, concussions of muscle and fur, the whale and the name for the whale rose on the void like a waterspout, being, and ceasing to be: till keel clashed and I spoke: mayfly, wood-weasel, stingray, cormorant, mole—
As soon as  I speak, I  speaks. It wants to  be free but  impassive lies in the direction  of its words. Let x equal x, x  also equals x. I speak to  hear myself  speak? I had not thought  that some- thing had such undone. It  was an idea  of mine.
Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow world is with everything put in place. Some man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped road, a leaf of yellow color is going to fall. It all drops into place. My face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.
I see him moving, in his legendary fleece, Between the superhighway and an Algonquin stone axe; Between the wild tribes, in their lost heat, And the dark blizzard of my Grandfather’s coat; Cold with the outdoor cold caught in the curls, Smelling of the world before the poll tax. And between the new macadam and the Scalp Act They got him by the short hair; had him clipped Who once was wild—and all five senses wild— Printing the wild with his hoof’s inflated script Before the times was money in the bank, Before it was a crime to be so mild. But history is a fact, and moves on feet Sharper than his, toward wallows deeper than. And the myth that covered all his moving parts, Grandfather’s time had turned into a coat; And what kept warm then, in the true world’s cold Is old and cold in a world his death began.
She stands beside me, stands away,  the vague indifference of her dreams. Dreaming, to go on,  and go on there, like animals fleeing  the rise of the earth. But standing  intangible, my lust a worked anger a sweating close covering, for the crudely salty soul. Then back off, and where you go? Box of words  and pictures. Steel balloons tied to our mouths.  The room fills up, and the house. Street tilts.  City slides, and buildings slide into the river.  What is there left, to destroy? That is not close,  or closer. Leaning away in the angle of language.  Pumping and pumping, all our eyes criss cross and flash. It is the lovers pulling down empty structures.  They wait and touch and watch their dreams  eat the morning.
Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood; Here is the shadow moving down the page Where you sit reading by the garden wall. Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises, Shudder and droop. You know their voices now, Faintly the martyred peaches crying out Your name, the name nobody knows but you. It is the aura and the coming on. It is the thing descending, circling, here. And now it puts a claw out and you take it. Thankfully in your lap you take it, so. You said you would not go away again, You did not want to go away—and yet, It is as if you stood out on the dock Watching a little boat drift out Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish ... And you were in it, skimming past old snags, Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky As soundless as a gong before it’s struck— Suspended how?—and now they strike it, now The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats, And you must wake again to your own blood And empty spaces in the throat.
I wanted so ably to reassure you, I wanted the man you took to be me, to comfort you, and got up, and went to the window, pushed back, as you asked me to, the curtain, to see the outline of the trees in the night outside. The light, love, the light we felt then, greyly, was it, that came in, on us, not merely my hands or yours, or a wetness so comfortable, but in the dark then as you slept, the grey figure came so close and leaned over, between us, as you slept, restless, and my own face had to see it, and be seen by it, the man it was, your grey lost tired bewildered brother, unused, untaken— hated by love, and dead, but not dead, for an instant, saw me, myself the intruder, as he was not. I tried to say, it is all right, she is happy, you are no longer needed. I said, he is dead, and he went as you shifted and woke, at first afraid, then knew by my own knowing what had happened— and the light then of the sun coming for another morning in the world.
I Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against may. Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull’s hide and through the dale furrows fill with may, paving the slowworm’s way. A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark, labouring to rise! The solemn mallet says: In the grave’s slot he lies. We rot. Decay thrusts the blade, wheat stands in excrement trembling. Rawthey trembles. Tongue stumbles, ears err for fear of spring. Rub the stone with sand, wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone. The mason says: Rocks happen by chance. No one here bolts the door, love is so sore. Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell but it will rain. Under sacks on the stone two children lie, hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim, crushed grit. Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, head to a hard arm, they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn; at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sacks steam in the sun, they sit up. Copper-wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyes and Baltic plainsong speech declare: By such rocks men killed Bloodaxe. Fierce blood throbs in his tongue, lean words. Skulls cropped for steel caps huddle round Stainmore. Their becks ring on limestone, whisper to peat. The clogged cart pushes the horse downhill. In such soft air they trudge and sing, laying the tune frankly on the air. All sounds fall still, feilside bleat, hide-and-seek peewit. Her pulse their pace, palm countering palm, till a trench is filled, stone white as cheese jeers at the dale. Knotty wood, hard to rive, smoulders to ash; smell of October apples. The road again, at a trot. Wetter, warmed, they watch the mason meditate on name and date. Rain rinses the road, the bull streams and laments. Sour rye porridge from the hob with cream and black tea, meat, crust and crumb. Her parents in bed the children dry their clothes. He has untied the tape of her striped flannel drawers before the range. Naked on the pricked rag mat his fingers comb thatch of his manhood’s home. Gentle generous voices weave over bare night words to confirm and delight till bird dawn. Rainwater from the butt she fetches and flannel to wash him inch by inch, kissing the pebbles. Shining slowworm part of the marvel. The mason stirs: Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write. Every birth a crime, every sentence life. Wiped of mould and mites would the ball run true? No hope of going back. Hounds falter and stray, shame deflects the pen. Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles but jogs the draftsman’s elbow. What can he, changed, tell her, changed, perhaps dead? Delight dwindles. Blame stays the same. Brief words are hard to find, shapes to carve and discard: Bloodaxe, king of York, king of Dublin, king of Orkney. Take no notice of tears; letter the stone to stand over love laid aside lest insufferable happiness impede flight to Stainmore, to trace lark, mallet, becks, flocks and axe knocks. Dung will not soil the slowworm’s mosaic. Breathless lark drops to nest in sodden trash; Rawthey truculent, dingy. Drudge at the mallet, the may is down, fog on fells. Guilty of spring and spring’s ending amputated years ache after the bull is beef, love a convenience. It is easier to die than to remember. Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate.
II hear you are whispering there O stars of heaven, O suns—O grass of graves. . . If you do not say anything how can I say anything?
Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me  snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting  you were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain  brown envelopes for the return of your very “Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer  of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues give the fullest treatment in literature yet to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,  who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”  instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,  neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites: I swear to you, it was just my way  of cheering myself up, as I licked the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,  the game I had of trying to guess  which one of you, this time,  had poisoned his glue. I did care.  I did read each poem entire.  I did say everything I thought  in the mildest words I knew. And now, in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,  I realize, than those troubled lines  I kept sending back to you, I have to say I am relieved it is over: at the end I could feel only pity for that urge toward more life your poems kept smothering in words, the smell  of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils  as new, God-given impulses to write. Goodbye, you who are, for me, the postmarks again of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell— their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.
“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card” and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes. And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen. In your office you were informed. Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle. So far nothing turns up. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed. No tip-off. No release. Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes. Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists. Pity the press photographers, not called. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said all that there is to say in that language. Twice what is said in yours. It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.
In the chill rains of the early winter I hear something— A puling anger, a cold wind stiffened by flying bone— Out of the north ... and remember, then, what’s up there: That ghost-bank: home: Amchitka: boot hill .... They must be very tired, those ghosts; no flesh sustains them And the bones rust in the rain. Reluctant to go into the earth The skulls gleam: wet; the dog-tag forgets the name; The statistics (wherein they were young) like their crosses, are weathering out, They must be very tired. But I see them riding home, Nightly: crying weak lust and rage: to stand in the dark, Forlorn in known rooms, unheard near familiar beds: Where lie the aging women: who were so lovely: once.
If I am in the house beams posts planks siding slate protect us  Wall guard us against the night-terrors Floor shore us up above the void below cover us roof enclose us from the void above door keep out the angry stranger Hearth cherish the fire windows be beacons breathe out my warm air chimney while I am in the house In this room my eyes be twelve-paned windows clock pump my blood cover my nakedness, rug curtains be eyelids sofa, I rest on your strong thighs Where is the soul’s seat? Doctors have cut up frogs and not found love. Is this my reason? I in myself
The blue booby lives on the bare rocks of Galápagos and fears nothing. It is a simple life: they live on fish, and there are few predators.  Also, the males do not  make fools of themselves  chasing after the young  ladies. Rather, they gather the blue objects of the world and construct from them a nest—an occasional  Gaulois package, a string of beads, a piece of cloth from  a sailor’s suit. This  replaces the need for  dazzling plumage;  in fact, in the past  fifty million years the male has grown considerably duller,  nor can he sing well.  The female, though, asks little of him— the blue satisfies her  completely, has  a magical effect on her. When she returns from her day of gossip and shopping, she sees he has found her  a new shred of blue foil:  for this she rewards him  with her dark body, the stars turn slowly in the blue foil beside them  like the eyes of a mild savior.
I accompany this life’s events like a personal journalist: “Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon ...”; or “Despite inauspicious beginnings, this was to be their happiest year.” Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true. And how could we foresee an answer to that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts. I am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse is a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich at the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars. Shouldn’t we refuse prediction that the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable as this child’s hope is, it will break tomorrow?
for John Godfrey 1. Animals Carved—indicated, actually, from solid Blocks of wood, the copper-, cream-, and chocolate-colored  Cows we bought in Salzburg form a tiny herd.  And in Dr. Gachet’s etching, six Or seven universal poses are assumed by cats.Misery, hypocrisy, greed: A dying Mouse, a cat, and a flock of puzzled blackbirds wearing  Uniforms and frock coats exhibit these traits.  Formally outlasting the motive Of their creation with a poetry at once too vague And too precise to do anything with but Worship, they seem to have just blundered into our lives  By accident, completely comprehending  Everything we find so disturbing About them; but they never speak. They never even move From the positions in which Grandville or some  Anonymous movie-poster artist has left them,  A sort of ghostly wolf, a lizard, an ape  And a huge dog. And their eyes, looking  At nothing, manage to see everything invisible To ours, even with all the time in the world To see everything we think we have to see. And tell  Of this in the only way we really can:  With a remark as mild as the air In which it is to be left hanging; or a stiff scream, Folded like a sheet of paper over all The horrible memories of everything we were  Going to have. That vanished before our eyes  As we woke up to nothing but these, Our words, poor animals whose home is in another world.  2. Summer Home Tiny outbursts of sunlight play On the tips of waves that look like tacks  Strewn on the surface of the bay. Up the coast the water backs up Behind a lofty, wooded island. Here,  According to photographs, it is less Turbulent and blue; but much clearer.  It seems to exercise the sunlight less  Reflecting it, allowing beaten silver sheets To roam like water across a kitchen floor.  Having begun gradually, the gravel beach  Ends abruptly in the forest on the shore. Looked at from a distance, the forest seems  Haunted. But safe within its narrow room  Its light is innocent and green, as though  Emerging from another dream of diminution  We found ourselves of normal, human size,  Attempting to touch the leaves above our heads.  Why couldn’t we have spent our summers here,  Surrounded and growing up again? Or perhaps  Arrive here late at night by car, much later  In life? If only heaven were not too near  For such sadness. And not within this world  Which heaven has finally made clear. Green lichen fastened to a blue rock Like a map of the spot; cobwebs crowded with stars  Of water; battalions of small white flowers.  Such clarity, unrelieved except by our  Delight and daily acquiescence in it,  Presumably the effect of a natural setting  Like this one, with all its expectations of ecstasy  And peace, demands a future of forgetting  Everything that sustains it: the dead leaves Of winter; the new leaves of spring which summer burns  Into different kinds of happiness; for these,  When autumn drops its tear upon them, turn.  3. Domes “Pleased in proportion to the truth Depicted by means of familiar images.” That One was dazed; the other I left in a forest  Surrounded by giant, sobering pines.  For I had to abandon those lives.  Their burden of living had become  Mine and it was like dying: alone, Huddled under the cold blue dome of the stars, Still fighting what died and so close to myself I could not even see.  I kept trying to look at myself. It was like looking into the sun and I went blind. O, to break open that inert light Like a stone and let the vision slowly sink down Into the texture of things, like a comb flowing through dark,  Heavy hair; and to continue to be affected much later.  I was getting so tired of that excuse: refusing love Until it might become so closely mated to its birth in  Acts and words of love; until a soft monstrosity of song Might fuse these moments of affection with a dream of home;  The cold, prolonged proximity of God long after night  Has come and only starlight trickles through the dome; And yet I only wanted to be happy. I wanted rest and innocence; a place Where I could hide each secret fear by blessing it, By letting it survive inside those faces I could never understand,  Love, or bear to leave. Because I wanted peace, bruised with prayer  I tried to crawl inside the heavy, slaughtered hands of love And never move. And then I felt the wound unfold inside me  Like a stab of paradise: explode: and then at last Exhausted, heal into pain. And that was happiness: A dream whose ending never ends, a vein Of blood, a hollow entity Consumed by consummation, bleeding so. In the sky our eyes ascend to as they sweep Upwards into emptiness, the angels sing their listless  Lullabies and children wake up glistening with screams They left asleep; and the dead are dead. The wounded worship death And live a little while in love; and then are gone. Inside the dome the stars assume the outlines of their lives:  Until we know, until we come to recognize as ours, Those other lives that live within us as our own.
The Artichoke She bore only the heart, Worked at the stem with her Fingers, pulling it to her, And into her, like a cord. She would sustain him, Would cover his heart. The hairy needles And the bigger leaves, These she licked into shape, Tipping each with its point. He is the mud-flower, The thorny hugger. The Asparagus She sent packs of great beasts to pass Over him, trailing belly-fur and dust, Bending their nostrils to his frail spear. This was to toughen him. For what? Stupidly, like a squirrel, standing up, Looking here and there, looking to all sides, He is cut down and taken away. She can smell him steaming, his crowns Already tender, his spine giving in. Now he is threatening to wither terribly, And slip from the water altogether, And billow through the kitchen like prayer. The Cauliflower Her words clot in his head. He presses himself to remember And feels the skin peel back, The skull bleach, crack, fall away. All that's left of him is the brain, Its tissue knotting up to shade him, The pain of its light pulsing How to move, how to move. Herbs Before fog leaves the scrub-oak Or the grasses of the downland, Take dragonwort under the black alder, Take cockspur grass and henbane, The belladonna, the deadly nightshade. Free them as you would a spider's web, Singing over them: Out, little wen, Out, little wen. Sing this into the mouth of the woman. Corn I am the corn quail. What I do is quick. You will know only The muffled clucking, The scurry, the first Shiver of feathers And I will be up, I will be in your Head with no way out, Wings beating at the Air behind your eyes. Celery The hope with water is that it will conceal nothing, that a clearness will follow upon it like the clearness after much rain, or the clearness where the air reaches to the river and touches it, where the rain falls from the trees into the river. Bell Pepper To find enough rooms for the gathering The walls go on alone not waiting For corners but thinking of sleeves And how the wind fills them and the snow Fills them and how cold it is without Fires when there are not enough rooms. Potatoes It had been growing in her like vegetables. She was going into the ground where it could Do better, where she could have potatoes. They would be small and easily mistaken For stones. It would fall to her to Sort them out, persuade them to stay Close to her, comforting her, letting her Wear them on her body, in her hair, Helping her hold always very still.
Amant in bed,   dreaming.  There are no   borders to this   miniature. B moves Bateau across the night.  It is all the loops can do to let their gilding bulge with what is there. One light on the wide sea. The bones of stars.  No other country is so  curiously watered.  From the estuaries to the very  sources of its inwardtending channels,   it rises in fogs which are themselves   arterial. For its earth  has more than once been seen  quite early in the morning  to lighten and give way. At the gate to the garden,  Fair Welcome.  She raises her hand.Salutare: to greet and to save.  Leisures of tendrils are on all sides,   winding with the snails  through white acanthus and discarded   badges of pilgrims.  You may assign to the nineteen  portholes in these borders  whatever you like. The sand is of such fineness and the flow so singly clear that nothing seems to pass through,  golden, and with all its lights.  Water makes very much the best  portable horizon.  While its reflections are  fainter than those in the speculum,   their angles may be measured  accurately  and the differences from a true meridian   reckoned by the clock.  These sightings should be taken at least   three hours  before and after noon. Two liveried falconers, the jesses and bells, the gloves.  Amant with the dove’s neck-ring,  The lady in her chamber. Winter trees, rooks in the white  branches, hounds, the dying boar. On the top of a mountain  a lion waving his tail.  The general course of the river   straightens, and is moderately timbered.   Scattered islands covered w/willow.  Across from a single, long bluff of open rock,   the plain to the S. is higher, extending   quite to the mountains which contain still   great quantities of snow.  A small creek falls in from this side.   Pursued its bottom for perhaps 4 m.   Cottonwood. Much evidence of beaver. Now all of this is to be understood  in a spiritual manner. Let us cover the nakedness of our fathers  with the cloak of a favorable interpretation.  Under a dry stalk of burdock, iron-brown   latches and fittings, a few nails.  The bulls are eating apples.  Thick grasses sweat through the whole pasture. Dame Reason with her chaplet of apothegms. He should put his heart in a single place only. The truest things about bodies  are their shadows.  Pleas put me back   in the water I am  Paddle-to-the-Sea She has done this before.  She wades into the current to the one point where the current lounges at her hips. She stands there. With all the time in the world,  steadily, she kneels steadily deeper, to her shoulders, smiling, her hair cupped in both hands behind her neck.  The Familiar gives Its first   lesson to the lover.  A new order  is one that is renewed  hourly. A drove of geese in its tall, while file  plucks home through the wet fallow.  Hedges darken between the fields.  Along the wolds for miles in level tracts,  haze from the lime-kilns. All quarters of the sky are wintry, huge.  We could no longer be sure  that we had passed the Préveranges.   Freshets from the little stream   poured onto the lane, filling  ruts and drainages. In the dusk,   and with our shoes soaked, we set   off through a meadow, and another,   and found soon an abandoned   cottage of some old forester.  We determined that I should  stay and secure it as an outpost.   Meaulnes went on alone. At an earlier hour, the ground at the wood’s edge  illumines to some thousand  footcandles, fades under the  canopies, the layers of trees, of shrubs and herbs,  under the dark itself, brighter by as many eyes as are buried there.  Tied to a washboard,   submerged,  the panes of glass  chime like clean ice. they are dangers harebells and  just where the fall goes over  they lean into the spray so  far and bob so on their stems  they thrill and a hammer rings  carillon down the cows spine  feel it there it goes again  Death hath its seat  close to the entrance of delight.   —Gudique Sifting over porches and limp hibiscus,  rust from the canvas awnings, its red spores dull in a moon that shows  everything, houses and driveways,  fishponds, all of them hiding from their insides, forgetting,  looking around.  there is no way to lie down   and not lie in the same way   that someone has had to lie   thinking of how far it is  to the places no one goes   or to any place this far  from the beds where the dying   cry into the night this far Deacons and presbyters. The Laying On of Hands.  In a vial, juice from the wild cucumber,  powdered glass, the divine Endura.
From embarrassment, I made statements. My icons—tight caves and mouths—stuck together briefly like dry lips, like a lover’s insults. The fact is they were ugly to all of us. I said, How painstakingly personal! Here are the words for this, Relentless as insects! I was hysterical. Every tone became artful, the worst urges nuzzling like housepets for someone to feel them, each real subject demanding more real context for remarks. Then abstractions insinuating their sharp edges, asking to pry open privacies alone in the bathroom at bedtime then with strangers in elevators, at stop signs. Even then, I knew you’d shun them, because who would choose such intrusions? I learned to love this isolation as a woman who appears to listen. All night I’d talk about my life anticipating her dramatic relief, believing her affectionate gestures filled in what wasn’t spoken. At those times she seemed so genuine and friendly, a voice from inside my own body describing my shameless surrender as our first kiss, perfect as gravity.
This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls the song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it is dead, and the others can't remember. Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit? I don't enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical with these two feathery maniacs, I don't enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable. I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you. Come closer. This song is a cry for help: Help me! Only you, only you can, you are unique at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.
Orpheus liked the glad personal quality Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part  Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends  Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks  Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon  To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.  Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.  Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to  Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather, Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?  All other things must change too. The seasons are no longer what they once were,  But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along  Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.  Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade; She would have even if he hadn’t turned around. No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel  Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.  Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,  These other ones, call life. Singing accurately So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of  Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers  Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates  The different weights of the things.  But it isn’t enough  To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven  After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven  Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them. Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice. But probably the music had more to do with it, and  The way music passes, emblematic Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it And say it is good or bad. You must Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,” Meaning also that the “tableau” Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,  Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure  That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;  It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,  Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,  Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow, Powerful stream, the trailing grasses Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action  No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky  Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth  Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses  Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,  “I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,  Though I can understand the language of birds, and  The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me. Their jousting ends in music much As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm  And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.” But how late to be regretting all this, even Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!  To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,  Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,  Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way. And no matter how all this disappeared,  Or got where it was going, it is no longer  Material for a poem. Its subject Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly  While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad  Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward  That the meaning, good or other, can never  Become known. The singer thinks Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages  Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.  The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness  Which must in turn flood the whole continent  With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer  Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved  Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification  Is for the few, and comes about much later  When all record of these people and their lives  Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.  A few are still interested in them. “But what about  So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie  Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name  In whose tale are hidden syllables Of what happened so long before that In some small town, one indifferent summer.
In movies when the hero is about to die, He scatters a few phrases in a place like this, Hoping the words will come up again Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him As now they do for us. Someone has planted a row of little trees To stop the wind. Instead they’ve learned To bend like the elect In one direction only; they know The sea will shatter them. Isn’t it always like this? Something uncontrollable becomes the hero, Taking off its dress, the ice plants Sunburn from the center out So we can see that their deaths Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours, We are allowed again the glare Of the sand, the druid hills, The grasses brushing the legs, though Just to have felt it once would have been enough.
The clouds shouldered a path up the mountains East of Ocampo, and then descended, Scraping their bellies gray on the cracked shingles of slate. They entered the valley, and passed the roads that went Trackless, the houses blown open, their cellars creaking And lined with the bottles that held their breath for years. They passed the fields where the trees dried thin as hat racks And the plow’s tooth bit the earth for what endured. But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket, Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger— Under the sky that deafened from listening for rain.
If there is any dwelling place for the spirits of the just; as the wise believe, noble souls do not perish with the body, rest thou in peace ... —Tacitus Who keeps the owl’s breath? Whose eyes desire?  Why do the stars rhyme? Where does The flush cargo sail? Why does the daybook close?So sleep and do not sleep. The opaque stroke lost across the mirror, The clamp turned. The polished nails begin the curl into your palms.  The opal hammock of rain falls out of its cloud. I name you, Gloat-of-The-stalks, drowse-my-embers, old-lily-bum. No matter how well a man sucks praise in the end  He sucks earth. Go ahead, step Out into that promised, rasp gratitude of night. Seeds and nerves. SeedsAnd nerves. I’ll be waiting for you, in some  Obscure and clarifying light; I will say, Look, there is a ghost ice on the land. If the page of marble bleeds in the yellow grass,  If the moon-charts glow useless and cold, If the grains of the lamp outlast you, as they must—  As the tide of black gloss, the marls, and nectar rise I will understand. Here are my gifts: smudges of bud,A blame of lime. Everything you remember crowds  Away. Stubble memory, The wallpaper peeling its leaves. Fog. Fog In the attic; this pod of black milk. Anymore, Only a road like August approaches. Sometimes the drawers of the earth close;  Sometimes our stories keep on and on. So listen— Leave no address. Fold your clothes into a little  Island. Kiss the hinges goodbye. Sand the fire. Bitch  About time. Hymn away this reliquary fever. How the sun stands crossing itself in the cut glass. How the jonquils and bare orchards fill each morning  In mist. The branches in the distance stiffen, Again. The city of stars pales. In my fires the cinders rise like black angels; The trunks of the olives twist once towards the world.Once. I will walk out into the day.
A boy came up the street and there was a girl.  "Hello," they said in passing, then didn’t pass.  They began to imagine. They imagined all night  and woke imagining what the other imagined.  Later they woke with no need to imagine. They were together. They kept waking together.  Once they woke a daughter who got up and went looking for something without looking back.  But they had one another. Then one of them died.  It makes no difference which. Either. The other  tried to imagine dying, and couldn’t really, but died later, maybe to find out, though probably not. Not everything that happens  is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is.
* O fury- bedecked! O glitter-torn! Let the wild wind erect bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! It’s a new day; no scapegrace of a sect tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect; bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born now now while ox and ass and infant lie together as poor creatures will and tears of her exertion still cling in the spent girl’s eye and a great firework in the sky drifts to the western hill.
There is the one who turns A spoon over like a letter, Reading the teeth-marks Older than his own; The one who strikes a match, Its light flowering In his eyes, The smoke in his throat; The one who opens the mouth Of a dog to listen To the sea, white-tipped And blind, feel its way to shore. At night They walk in the streets, The dust skirting their legs Raw with lice And the wind funneled Through a doorway Where someone might pray For a loaf of good luck. * Somewhere the old follow Their canes down A street where the front Pages of a newspaper Scuttle faceless And the three-legged dog hops home. A door is locked twice And flies ladder a scale of fish. Somewhere a window yellows From a lantern. A child With fever, swabbed in oils And mint, his face Spotted like an egg, His cry no different Than the cry That shakes the trees lean. A candle is lit for the dead Two worlds ahead of us all.
Some prowl sea-beds, some hurtle to a star and, mother, some obsessed turn over every stone or open graves to let that starlight in. There are men who would open anything. Harvey, the circulation of the blood, and Freud, the circulation of our dreams, pried honourably and honoured are like all explorers. Men who’d open men. And those others, mother, with diseases like great streets named after them: Addison, Parkinson, Hodgkin—physicians who’d arrive fast and first on any sour death-bed scene. I am their slowcoach colleague, half afraid, incurious. As a boy it was so: you know how my small hand never teased to pieces an alarm clock or flensed a perished mouse. And this larger hand’s the same. It stretches now out from a white sleeve to hold up, mother, your X-ray to the glowing screen. My eyes look but don’t want to; I still don’t want to know.
I wanted to know what it was like before we had voices and before we had bare fingers and before we had minds to move us through our actions and tears to help us over our feelings, so I drove my daughter through the snow to meet her friend and filled her car with suitcases and hugged her as an animal would, pressing my forehead against her, walking in circles, moaning, touching her cheek, and turned my head after them as an animal would, watching helplessly as they drove over the ruts, her smiling face and her small hand just visible over the giant pillows and coat hangers as they made their turn into the empty highway.
for Peter Parrish Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark, the cord that makes him always dissatisfied, has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes. He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes, but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men that people who hardly know him often mistake for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus. He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank or a library or turning a piece of flat land into a ditch. All day something that refuses to show itself hovers at the corner of his eye, like a name he is trying to remember, like expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress whom he has never met, would never meet again. And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge of a burning field with smoke swirling around it like white curtains shot full of wind and light. When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see what person he should be that evening. He wants to say: All day I have been listening, all day I have felt I stood on the brink of something amazing. But he says nothing, and his family walks around him as if he were a stick leaning against a wall. Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed. He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him. Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress, and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him. Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more, until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.
1 White lather on black soap— Maria’s gift. It reminds me  Of when a woman died And they handed me her ring. Then they left to divide the roots for her.  Daylight went down there shining. By accident, cleaning the hearth Of a house to leave it for good, I learned how to see A star come out: work My hand into the ashes. 2 “You’ve thrown a chestnut hull into the fireplace again,”  Said Colette’s mother, “My clean ashes!”  Naughty Colette had soiled the washing ashes Of applewood, poplar, and elm.  Stretched over the big cauldron In the washhouse, hemp cloth held the ashes The washwoman poured a jug of boiling water on. They smelled almost sweet as the lye  Filtered into the mass of linen.  The air darkened with blue clouds.  In the smoking lava layer of ashes,  A few cinders of chestnut hulls,  The tannin’s yellow stain. 3 Look for something You’ve been every day of your life.  You said it was “lonely.” I’m certain it is also “clean.” My body’s big years diminish soap. My grandmother, whose diamond it was,  Had a stone in her tub. I rubbed it on my feet As later I walked, Building little hoofs, All summer shoeless on creek gravel. That black bar of stone In the widow’s clean house,  That volcanic pumice skips  Over most hard places But softens at least one. 4 Once there was a downpour of rain  They took as a judgment. It confused her billowing, steaming skirts.  Another time—those times were hard— The executioner let go the twisted hemp  From her neck sooner than he should  Because the flames reached his hands.  Nor would I, if I’d had to live then,  Put my hands into the fire Those three hours it took to reduce her.  But after, I’d scrub all over With the ashes of the still warm Black heart of the witch.
It’s the little towns I like with their little mills making ratchets and stanchions, elastic web, spindles, you name it. I like them in New England, America, particularly-providing bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in families even: kindergarten, church suppers, beach umbrellas ... The towns are real, so fragile in their loneliness a flood could come along (and floods have) and cut them in two, in half. There is no mayor, the town council’s not prepared for this, three of the four policemen are stranded on their roofs ... and it doesn’t stop raining. The mountain is so thick with water parts of it just slide down on the heifers—soggy, suicidal— in the pastures below. It rains, it rains in these towns and, because there’s no other way, your father gets in a rowboat so he can go to work.
Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knicknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice.
After all, there’s no need to say anything at first. An orange, peeled and quartered, flares like a tulip on a wedgewood plate Anything can happen. Outside the sun has rolled up her rugs and night strewn salt across the sky. My heart is humming a tune I haven’t heard in years! Quiet’s cool flesh— let’s sniff and eat it. There are ways to make of the moment a topiary so the pleasure’s in walking through.
To the students of anatomy at Indiana University That gaunt old man came first, his hair as white As your scoured tables. Maybe you’ll recollect him By the scars of steelmill burns on the backs of his hands, On the nape of his neck, on his arms and sinewy legs, And her by the enduring innocence Of her face, as open to all of you in death As it would have been in life: she would memorize Your names and ages and pastimes and hometowns If she could, but she can’t now, so remember her. They believed in doctors, listened to their advice, And followed it faithfully. You should treat them One last time as they would have treated you. They had been kind to others all their lives And believed in being useful. Remember somewhere Their son is trying hard to believe you’ll learn As much as possible from them, as he did, And will do your best to learn politely and truly. They gave away the gift of those useful bodies Against his wish. (They had their own ways Of doing everything, always.) If you’re not certain Which ones are theirs, be gentle to everybody.
As my Scotch, spared the water, blondly sloshes About its tumbler, and gay manic flame Is snapping in the fireplace, I grow youthful: I realize that calendars aren’t truthful And that for all of my grand unsuccesses External causes are to blame. And if at present somewhat destitute, I plan to alter, prove myself more able, And suavely stroll into the coming years As into rooms with thick rugs, chandeliers, And colorfully pyramided fruit On linened lengths of table. At times I fear the future won’t reward My failures with sufficient compensation, But dump me, aging, in a garret room Appointed with twilit, slant-ceilinged gloom And a lone bulb depending from a cord Suggestive of self-strangulation. Then, too, I have bad dreams, in one of which A cowled, scythe-bearing figure beckons me. Dark plains glow at his back: it seems I’ve died, And my soul, weighed and judged, has qualified For an extended, hyper-sultry hitch Down in eternity. Such fears and dreams, however, always pass. And gazing from my window at the dark, My drink in hand, I’m jauntily unbowed. The sky’s tiered, windy galleries stream with cloud, And higher still, the dazed stars thickly mass In their long Ptolemaic arc. What constellated powers, unkind or kind, Sway me, what far preposterous ghosts of air? Whoever they are, whatever our connection, I toast them (toasting also my reflection), Not minding that the words which come to mind Make the toast less toast than prayer: Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet; To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime; To auguries reliable and specious; To times to come, such times being precious, If only for the reason that they get Shorter all the time.
Stellar dust has settled. It is green underwater now in the leaves Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus. It has gained the power to make itself again In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal. One could say this toothpick grasshopper Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching On his female mating. The tortoise beetle, Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl Of clever gases. At this moment there are dead stars seeing Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns Making songs all night long in the throats Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting Rock in the shells of pointed winkles And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words. The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind Contemplating the nature of itself In the motions of stars. The patterns Of any starry summer night might be identical To the summer heavens circling inside the skull. I can feel time speeding now in all directions Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion Of the electrons directly behind my eyes. Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind Has been obligated from the beginning To create an ordered universe As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls  Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall Across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd Shopping at Macy’s: perfume, holly, snowflake displays. Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked Over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood Filling the aisles, whispered at the fringes, listening To the sounds of the large, gorgeously dressed man, His smile bemused and exalted, lips boom-booming a bold Bass line as he improvised on an expensive, tinkly Piano the size of a lady’s jewel box or a wedding cake. She put into my heart this scene from the romance of Joy, Co-authored by her and the movies, like her others– My father making the winning basket at the buzzer And punching the enraged gambler who came onto the court– The brilliant black and white of the movies, texture Of wet snowy fur, the taxi’s windshield, piano keys, Reflections that slid over the thick brass baton That worked the elevator. Happiness needs a setting: Shepherds and shepherdesses in the grass, kids in a store, The back room of Carly’s parents’ shop, record-player And paper streamers twisted in two colors: what I felt Dancing close one afternoon with a thin blonde girl Was my amazing good luck, the pleased erection Stretching and stretching at the idea She likes me, She likes it
The man in the yellow hard hat, the one with the mask across his nose and mouth, pulls the lever that turns the great arm of the crane up and over and sideways toward the earth; then the wrecking ball dangles crazily, so delicately, like a silver fob loosened from a waistcoat pocket: shocking to see the dust fly up and the timber sail up, then so slowly down, how the summer air bristles with a hundred splinters and the smallest is a splintered flame, for it takes so many lengthening erratic movements to tear away what stands between the sidewalk and the bell tower, where the pigeons now rise in grand indignant waves at such poor timing, such a deaf ear toward the music; in this way the silence between hand and lever is turned into a ragged and sorely lifted wing: the wrecking ball lurches in a narrowing arc until only the dust resists—the rest comes down, story by story, and is hauled off in flatbed trucks. Meanwhile the pedestrians come and go, now and then glancing at their accurate watches. Gradually, the dust becomes the rose light of autumn. But one evening a woman loses her way as she’s swept into a passing wave of commuters and she looks up toward the perfectly empty rectangle now hanging between the rutted mud and the sky. There along the sides of the adjacent building, like a set for a simple elementary school play, like the gestures of the dead in her children’s faces, she sees the flowered paper of her parents’ bedroom, the pink stripes leading up the stairs to the attic, and the outline of the claw- footed bathtub, font of the lost cathedral of childhood.
Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations:  come with me he whispered and she went  in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street  and mother, wrist deep in red water,  laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid  you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit.  I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner,  the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor,  buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate.  When I drink I am too much like her—  the knife in one hand and the trout  with a belly white as my wrist.  I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself,  she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk  handed him the plate.
The nominalist in me invents A life devoid of precedents. The realist takes a different view: He claims that all I feel and do Billions of others felt and did In history’s Pre-me period. Arguing thus, both voices speak A partial truth. I am unique, Yet the unceasing self-distress Of desire buffets me no less Than it has other sons of man Who’ve come and gone since time began. The meaning, then, of this dispute? My life’s a nominal/real pursuit, Which leaves identity clear and blurred, In which what happens has occurred Often and never—which is to say, Never to me, or quite this way.
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years, I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling. He isn’t a trespasser anymore, Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat. My voice says, “Nice to see you,” As the bitch starts to bark hysterically. He isn’t an enemy now, Where are your manners, I say, as I say, “How are the children? They must be growing up.” At a kind word from him, a look like the old days, The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper. She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe. Down, girl! Keep your distance Or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain. “Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him. She slobbers and grovels. After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal. It’s just that she remembers how she came running Each evening, when she heard his step; How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly Though he was absorbed in his paper; Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen Until he was ready to play. But the small careless kindnesses When he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks, Come back to her now, seem more important Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal. “It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say. He couldn’t have taken you with him; You were too demonstrative, too clumsy, Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends. “Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag As I drag you off by the scruff, Saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.”
At this hour the soul floats weightlessly through the city streets, speechless and invisible, astonished by the smoky blend of grays and golds seeping out of the air, the dark half-tones of dusk suddenly filling the urban sky while the body sits listlessly by the window sullen and heavy, too exhausted to move, too weary to stand up or to lie down. At this hour the soul is like a yellow wing slipping through the treetops, a little ecstatic cloud hovering over the sidewalks, calling out to the approaching night, “Amaze me, amaze me,” while the body sits glumly by the window listening to the clear summons of the dead transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal. Some nights it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strange, unlikely tethering, a furious grafting of the quick and the slow: when the soul flies up, the body sinks down and all night—locked in the same cramped room— they go on quarreling, stubbornly threatening to leave each other, wordlessly filling the air with the sound of a low internal burning. How long can this bewildering marriage last? At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire of stars flaming on the other side of the sky, but the body stares into an empty night sheen, a hollow-eyed darkness. Poor luckless angels, feverish old loves: don’t separate yet. Let what rises live with what descends.
Before balance, before counting, before The record glistens and the needle slides, Grating, into the overture, there is the end Of weight, the leaning into nothing and then A caught breath, the record listens, the needle slides Over slowly, and all at once around us a woman’s voice Stretches weightless, leaning into nothing. Like a clothesline, the taut chorus: oh, hilarious Oh baby, all around us, over slowly, a woman’s voice Gathers above the pick me up, pick me up And the desperate put, put me down. First the tightrope, Then the light foot, and the taunting chorus Pick me up, pick me up. Oh, oh baby. The slippery floor shimmers and spins like a record while The light is swinging footloose on its rope Out of time. The shadows Slip, shimmering black, and spin across the floor, Then turn back and pick up again. Oh seedpod stuck for just One moment on the cattail, out of time, out of shadows, Downy cheek against a beard: oh scratches On the record, oh baby, oh measure Oh strange balance that grips us On this side of the world.
We could wipe away a fly, Drink, and order that yellow Thing behind the glass, peach Or sweet bread. Sunlight Is catching on a fork, Toothy wink from a star. The fan is busy, the waiter is busy, And today, in this café Of two dollars and fifty Cents, we’re so important Dogs are shaking our hands. “Welcome, turistas,” they say, Or might say if they could Roll their Rs. Where we sit It’s three o’clock, and Across the room, where Old men are playing dominos It’s maybe later, it’s maybe Peru under their hats. There are toads in this place —sullen guards by the door— And the bartender is just another Uncle fooling with the radio. “A little to the left,” I shout, and he dials left, Then right, until it’s German Polkas, accordions by the sea. The toads move a little. An old man clicks a domino. Omar, my gypsy friend, puts in— “Love is chasing me up my sleeve.” I salute him, he salutes me, And together we’re so drunk We’re making sense. Little By little, with rum the color Of a woman’s arm, we’re seeing things— Of a dancer, no two, Make that three with one chair. And that man—the old one Over there—is so blurry He thinks he’s flying.
Under the fire escape, crouched, one knee in cinders,  I pulled the ball-peen hammer from my belt,  cracked a square of window pane, the gummed latch, and swung the window, crawled through that stone hole into the boiler room  of Canton Elementary School, once Canton High,  where my father served three extra years  as star halfback and sprinter. Behind a flashlight’s cane of light, I climbed a staircase almost a ladder and found a door. On the second nudge of my shoulder, it broke into a hallway dark as history, at whose end lay the classroom I had studied  over and over in the deep obsession of memory. I swept that room with my light—an empty blackboard, a metal table, a half-globe lying on the floor  like a punctured basketball—then followed  that beam across the rows of desks, the various catalogs of lovers, the lists of all those who would and would not do what,  until it stopped on the corner desk of the back row,  and I saw again, after many years the name of my father, my name, carved deep into the oak top. To gauge the depth I ran my finger across that scar,  and wondered at the dreams he must have lived  as his eyes ran back and forth from the cinder yard below the window to the empty practice field to the blade of his pocket knife etching carefully  the long, angular lines of his name, the dreams he must have laid out one behind another  like yard lines, in the dull, pre-practice afternoons  of geography and civics, before he ever dreamed of Savo Sound or Guadalcanal.  In honor of dreams I sank to my knees on the smooth, oiled floor,  and stood my flashlight on its end. Half the yellow circle lit the underedge of the desk,  the other threw a half-moon on the ceiling,  and in that split light I tapped the hammer easy up the overhang of the desk top. Nothing gave  but the walls’ sharp echo, so I swung again,  and again harder, and harder still in half anger  rising to anger at the stubborn joint, losing all fear  of my first crime against the city, the county,  the state, whatever government claimed dominion,  until I had hammered up in the ringing dark  a salvo of crossfire, and on a frantic recoil glanced  the flashlight, the classroom spinning black  as a coma.  I’ve often pictured the face of the teacher  whose student first pointed to that topless desk,  the shock of a slow hand rising from the back row,  their eyes meeting over the question of absence. I’ve wondered too if some low authority of the system  discovered that shattered window, and finding no typewriters, no business machines,  no audiovisual gear missing, failed to account for it,  so let it pass as minor vandalism.  I’ve heard nothing. And rarely do I fret when I see that oak scar leaning  against my basement wall, though I wonder what it means  to own my father’s name.
Force of reason, who shut up the shrill foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon, led whimpering to the cave they live in still, beneath the rock your city foundered on: who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing (or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune: mind that can make a scheme of anything— a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder in the universal file drawer: uncompromising mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare of the body politic: deific contradiction, warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author of the law’s delays, you who as talisman and totem still wear the aegis, baleful with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool guarantor of the averted look, the guide of Perseus, who killed and could not kill the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter- feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad with clarity) we have invented all you stand for, though we despise the artifice—a space to savor horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in— living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.
You sway like a crane to the tunes of tossed stones. I am what you made to live in from what you had: hair matted as kelp, bad schools. Oh, you will never know me. I wave and you go on playing in the clouds boys clap from erasers. I am the pebble you tossed on the chalked space and war- danced toward, one-leg two-leg, arms treading air. In this, your future, waves rechristen the sea after its tiny jeweled lives that hiss “Us Us” to the shore all day. Where’s the kid called Kateydid? the moonfaced Kewpiedoll? The excitable pouting Zookie? The somber O-Be-Joyful? Lost girl, playing hopscotch, I will do what you could. Name of father, son, ghost. Cross my heart and hope. While the sea’s jewels build shells and shells change to chalk and chalk to loam and gold wheat grows where oceans teetered.
In those days I thought their endless thrum  was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.  In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells  enameled hard as the sky before the rain.  All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe  through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever  parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,  my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew  something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid  Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled  to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she  murmured of alligators that float the rivers  able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.  And always the trance of blacktop shimmering  through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand  and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding  white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part  of the singing, their thousand wings gauze  on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water,  the motel balcony, singing calypso  with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson  of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed  over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our  shadows—Father’s face floating over mine  in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night,  metallic with cicadas, musical  and dangerous as the human heart.
I had never seen a cornfield in my life, I had never been to Oklahoma, But I was singing as loud as anyone, “Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn  Is as high as an elephant’s eye,” Though I knew something about elephants, I thought,  Coming from the same continent as they did,  And they being more like camels than anything else. And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis,  “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,” I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station In the heart of Alexandria All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived,  The autos on the roadways vying With mule carts and bicycles, The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left,  The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt. It was a problem which had dogged me For a few years, this confusion of places. And when in 5th grade geography I had pronounced  “Des Moines” as though it were a village in France,  Mr. Kephart led me to the map on the front wall,  And so I’d know where I was, Pressed my forehead squarely against Iowa. Des Moines, he’d said. Rhymes with coins. Now we were singing “zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay,”  And every song we’d sung had in it Either sun or bluebirds, fair weather Or fancy fringe, O beautiful America! And one tier below me, There was Linda Deemer with her amber waves And lovely fruited plains, And she was part of America too Along with sun and spacious sky Though untouchable, and as distant As purple mountains of majesty. “This is my country,” we sang, And a few years ago there would have been  A scent of figs in the air, mangoes, And someone playing the oud along a clear stream. But now it was “My country 'tis of thee”  And I sang it out with all my heart  And now with Linda Deemer in mind.  “Land where my fathers died,” I bellowed,  And it was not too hard to imagine   A host of my great-uncles and -grandfathers  Stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior  And finding themselves suddenly  On a rock among maize and poultry  And Squanto shaking their hands. How could anyone not think America  Was exotic when it had Massachusetts  And the long tables of thanksgiving?  And how could it not be home If it were the place where love first struck? We had finished singing. The sun was shining through large windows  On the beatified faces of all Who had sung well and with feeling. We were ready to file out and march back To our room where Mr. Kephart was waiting.  Already Linda Deemer had disappeared  Into the high society of the hallway. One day I was going to tell her something.  Des Moines, I was saying to myself, Baton Rouge. Terre Haute. Boise.
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear   one more friend  waking with a tumor, one more maniac  with a perfect reason, often a sweetness   has come  and changed nothing in the world  except the way I stumbled through it,   for a while lost  in the ignorance of loving  someone or something, the world shrunk   to mouth-size,  hand-size, and never seeming small.  I acknowledge there is no sweetness   that doesn’t leave a stain,  no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....  Tonight a friend called to say his lover   was killed in a car  he was driving. His voice was low  and guttural, he repeated what he needed   to repeat, and I repeated  the one or two words we have for such grief  until we were speaking only in tones.   Often a sweetness comes  as if on loan, stays just long enough  to make sense of what it means to be alive,   then returns to its dark  source. As for me, I don’t care  where it’s been, or what bitter road   it’s traveled  to come so far, to taste so good.
This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn't run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn't run into a trattoria, say, shaking, with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop. That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by the cat's hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn't just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it's my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure. I bought memory. I could have lost it. How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaw working.
Your head is still restless, rolling east and west. That body in you insisting on living is the old hawk for whom the world darkens. If I am not with you when you die, that is just. It is all right. That part of you cleaned my bones more than once. But I will meet you in the young hawk whom I see inside both you and me; he will guide you to the Lord of Night, who will give you the tenderness you wanted here.
Like all his people he felt at home in the forest. The silence beneath great trees, the dimness there, The distant high rustling of foliage, the clumps Of fern like little green fountains, patches of sunlight, Patches of moss and lichen, the occasional Undergrowth of hazel and holly, was he aware Of all this? On the contrary his unawareness Was a kind of gratification, a sense of comfort And repose even in the strain of running day After day. He had been aware of the prairies. He had known he hated the sky so vast, the wind Roaring in the grasses, and the brightness that Hurt his eyes. Now he hated nothing; nor could he Feel anything but the urgency that compelled him Onward continually. "May I not forget, may I Not forget," he said to himself over and over. When he saw three ravens rise on their awkward Wings from the forest floor perhaps seventy-five Ells ahead of him, he said, "Three ravens," And immediately forgot them. "May I not forget," He said, and repeated again in his mind the exact Words he had memorized, the message that was Important and depressing, which made him feel Worry and happiness at the same time, a peculiar Elation. At last he came to his people far In the darkness. He smiled and spoke his words, And he looked intently into their eyes gleaming In firelight. He cried when they cried. No rest For his lungs. He flinched and lay down while they Began to kill him with clubs and heavy stones.
Down the street, someone must be praying, and though I don’t Go there anymore, I want to at times, to hear the diction And the tone, though the English pronoun for God is obsolete— What goes on is devotion, which wouldn’t change if I heard: The polished sermon, the upright’s arpeggios of vacant notes. What else could unite widows, bankers, children, and ghosts? And those faces are so good as they tilt their smiles upward To the rostrum that represents law, and the minister who Represents God beams like the white palm of the good hand Of Christ raised behind the baptistry to signal the multitude, Which I am not among, though I feel the abundance of calm And know the beatitude so well I do not have to imagine it, Or the polite old ones who gather after the service to chat, Or the ritual linen of Sunday tables that are already set. More than any other days, Sundays stand in unvarying rows That beg attention: there is that studied verisimilitude Of sanctuary, so even mud and bitten weeds look dressed up For some eye in the distant past, some remote kingdom Where the pastures are crossed by thoroughly symbolic rivers. That is why the syntax of prayers is so often reversed, Aimed toward the dead who clearly have not gone ahead But returned to prior things, a vista of angels and sheep, A desert where men in robes and sandals gather by a tree. Hushed stores, all day that sense a bell is about to ring— I recognized it, waking up, before I weighed the bulk of news Or saw Saturday night’s cars parked randomly along the curb, And though I had no prayer, I wanted to offer something Or ask for something, perhaps out of habit, but as the past Must always be honored unconsciously, formally, and persists On this first and singular day, though I think of it as last.
From a documentary on marsupials I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue. They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of maternal genes. Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn. Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn. And had there been a wild child—filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called in one nineteenth-century account— a wild child to love, it is safe to assume, given my fireside inked with paw prints, there would have been room. Think of the language we two, same and not-same, might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.
When I am asked  how I began writing poems,  I talk about the indifference of nature.  It was soon after my mother died,  a brilliant June day,  everything blooming.  I sat on a gray stone bench  in a lovingly planted garden,  but the day lilies were as deaf  as the ears of drunken sleepers  and the roses curved inward.  Nothing was black or broken  and not a leaf fell  and the sun blared endless commercials  for summer holidays.  I sat on a gray stone bench  ringed with the ingenue faces  of pink and white impatiens  and placed my grief  in the mouth of language,  the only thing that would grieve with me.
for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage A Caledonian megalith. A tinted bather from Cape Ann. The 1937 kith and kin of a Kentuckian beside their Model T sedan. The Celts. Who set me this arith- metic of icons? Who began by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith- erpicking rhinestone charlatan. He tries to be American. Who tries to be American as hard as him? Not Aly Khan. Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith- ophiliac Zenithian. As sure as God made Granny Smith a pricier-sounding product than the Winesap or the Jonathan, there is a mystery and myth to being an American, and being an American compounds it. Kurosawa-san, steady my Nikon while I pan across the porches of forsyth- iabedizened Mattapan in search of ... dot dot dot ... the plan, the weltanschauung, the ethnith- ifying principle a pith helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan could pounce on like a fiend from Ran and authenticate forthwith. The cromlech beetles o’er the frith. The ultimate American possession rattles his Kal-Kan, Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man can talk to. What this caravan of adumbrations and antith- esises panteth for is Dith Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran: Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan tabulously American.
My wife tells me she hears a beetle Scurrying across the kitchen floor. She says our daughter is dreaming Too loudly, just listen, her eyelids Are fluttering like butterflies. What about the thunder, I say, What about the dispatches from the police car Parked outside, or me rolling over like a whale? She tells me there’s a leaf falling And grazing the downstairs window, Or it could be glass cutters, diamonds, Thieves working their hands toward the latch. She tells me our son is breathing too quickly, Is it pneumonia, is it the furnace Suddenly pumping monoxides through the house? So when my wife says sleep, she means A closing of the eyes, a tuning Of the ears to ultra frequencies. (It is what always happens When there are children, the bed Becoming at night a listening post, Each little ting forewarning disaster.) Downstairs there is the sound Of something brushing against something else And I try to listen as my wife might listen, Insects, I say, dust on a table top, Maybe a knife’s edge against the palm. But she tells me it’s only The African violet on the windowsill Putting out another flower, And falls luxuriously into a dream Of being awake and vigilant. So the house grows noisier, There are clicks in the woodwork, There are drips, raps, clunks, things To make sense of, make benign. My son and daughter are sleeping calmly, And the stairs, yes, are creaking, The wind, I think, or maybe two men, Where’s the beaker of acid, The bowling ball, the war hoop I learned in second grade? So this is what it’s like when there’s No one left but you to love and defend. Outside there are cats in a fight And they remind me too much of babies crying. Then the bottle thrown against the stoop, The sound of something delicate shattered. My wife stirs, Be glad, she says, Sound doesn’t carry far, that you don’t hear The whole of it, cries in the night, Children in other cities, hurts, silences. And she’s right, I can’t hear the whole of it, Or else I hear too much and it’s noise Or I make it noise because it’s too much. So I begin homing in on something Around me, something distinct, my wife’s Breathing, a window’s rattle. Outside, Grass is lengthening in the dark, And sap running up the phloem of the maple, (Do I hear it? And how the stars must be wheeling!) And in the far room, my children’s Hearts are keeping time, for them, for us Who have begun to listen in earnest.
A second crop of hay lies cut  and turned. Five gleaming crows  search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk,  and like midwives and undertakers  possess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble,  parting before me like the Red Sea.  The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake the campers have learned  to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.  Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone  suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!” Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,  fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.  The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod  brighten the margins of the woods. Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;  water, silver-still, and a vee of geese. * The cicada’s dry monotony breaks  over me. The days are bright  and free, bright and free. Then why did I cry today  for an hour, with my whole  body, the way babies cry? * A white, indifferent morning sky,  and a crow, hectoring from its nest  high in the hemlock, a nest as big  as a laundry basket ...  In my childhood  I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,  waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away. The damp dirt road gave off  this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers,  and operations with numbers I did not  comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled  by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps. Spruce, inadequate, and alien  I stood at the side of the road.  It was the only life I had.
Switzerland, 1920 Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country, I square the egg and put it in a letter that all may read, gilding each word a little so that touched, it yields to a secret stirring, a small gold bird on a spring suddenly appearing to sing a small song of regret, elation, that overspills all private bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War, I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court. All for a bored Czarina! My version of history fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale, hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets! The old riddle of the chicken and the egg is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque of the imagination, the egg came first, containing, as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses inducing unrest among those too hungry to see the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat. Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all beautiful forms, a box without corners in which anything can be contained, anything except Time, that old jeweler who laughed when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks and watches of a country precisely ordered and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize. Three times I kiss you in memory of that first Easter, that first white rising, and send this message as if it could save you: Even the present is dead. We must live now in the future. Yours, Fabergé.
You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen, you are sipping a glass of lemonade and trying not to be too curious about the box of plastic hummingbirds behind you, the tray of tineless forks at your elbow. You have heard about the backroom where no one else has ever gone and whatever enters, remains, refrigerator doors, fused coils, mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears. “You never know,” she says, rummaging through a cedar chest of recipes, “when something will come of use.” There is a vase of pencil tips on the table, a bowl full of miniature wheels and axles. Upstairs, where her children slept, the doors will not close, the stacks of magazines are burgeoning, there are snow shoes and lampshades, bedsprings and picture tubes, and boxes and boxes of irreducibles! You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express: House Founders Under Weight Of Past. But Mrs Caldera is baking cookies, she is humming a song from childhood, her arms are heavy and strong, they have held babies, a husband, tractor parts and gas tanks, what have they not found a place for? It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time. If you move, you feel something will be disturbed, there is room enough only for your body. “Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says, and never have you felt so valuable.
We can have our pick of seats. Though the movie's already moving, the theater's almost an empty shell.  All we can see on our side of the room is one man and one woman— as neat, respectable, and distinct  as the empty chairs that come between them. But distinctions do not surprise, fresh as we are from sullen street and subway  where lonelinesses crowded about us like unquiet memories that may have loved us once or known our love.  Here we are an accidental fellowship, sheltering from the city's obscure bereavements to face a screened,  imaginary living, as if it were a destination we were moving toward. Leaning to our right  and suspended before us is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette. Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds  a reverie that moves through and beyond the shine of the silver screening. But we can see what she will never see—  that she's the star of Hopper's scene. For the artist she's a play of light, and a play of light is all about her.  Whether the future she is dreaming is the future she will have we have no way of knowing. Whatever  it will prove to be it has already been. The usherette Hopper saw might now be seventy,  hunched before a Hitachi in an old home or a home for the old. She might be dreaming now a New York movie,  Fred Astaire dancing and kissing Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York City skylines, raising possibilities  that time has served to lower. We are watching the usherette, and the subtle shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite-  impassive face beneath the three red-shaded lamps and beside the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets  that go on and on and on. But we are no safer here than she. Despite the semblance of luxury—  gilt edges, red plush, and patterned carpet—this is no palace, and we do not reign here, except in dreams.  This picture tells us much about various textures of lighted air, but at the center Hopper has placed a slab of darkness and an empty chair.
Finnish rural life, ca. 1910 Fires, always fires after midnight, the sun depending in the purple birches and gleaming like a copper kettle. By the solstice they’d burned everything, the bad-luck sleigh, a twisted rocker, things “possessed” and not-quite-right. The bonfire coils and lurches, big as a house, and then it settles. The dancers come, dressed like rainbows (if rainbows could be spun), and linking hands they turn to the melancholy fiddles. A red bird spreads its wings now and in the darker days to come.
The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted  out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
When the beautiful young man drowned— accidentally, swimming at dawn in a current too swift for him, or obedient to some cult of total immersion that promised the bather would come up divine, mortality rinsed from him— Hadrian placed his image everywhere, a marble Antinoüs staring across the public squares where a few dogs always scuffled, planted in every squalid little crossroads at the furthest corners of the Empire. What do we want in any body but the world? And if the lover’s inimitable form was nowhere, then he would find it everywhere, though the boy became simply more dead as the sculptors embodied him. Wherever Hadrian might travel, the beloved figure would be there first: the turn of his shoulders, the exact marble nipples, the drowned face not really lost to the Nile—which has no appetite, merely takes in anything without judgment or expectation— but lost into its own multiplication, an artifice rubbed with oils and acid so that the skin might shine.Which of these did I love? Here is his hair, here his hair again. Here the chiseled liquid waist I hold because I cannot hold it. If only one of you
In the valley of your art history book,  the corpses stack in the back of a cart drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles  show its considerable weight. He does this often. His velvet nostrils  flare to indicate the stench. It’s the smell you catch after class while descending a urine-soaked subway stair on a summer night in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive:  the odor of dead flowers, fear multiplied a thousand times. The train door’s hiss seals you inside with a frail boy  swaying from a silver hoop. He coughs in your direction, his eyes  are burn holes in his face. Back in the fourteenth-century print  lying in your lap, a hand white as an orchid has sprouted  from the pyramid of flesh. It claws the smoky air. Were it not for that, the cart might carry green cordwood  (the human body knobby and unplaned). Wrap your fingers around your neck  and feel the stony glands.  Count the holes in your belt loop for lost weight. In the black unfurling glass, study the hard planes of your face. Compare it to the prom picture  in your wallet, the orchid pinned to your chest like a spider. Think of the flames at your high school bonfire licking the black sky, ashes rising, innumerable stars. The fingers that wove  with your fingers have somehow turned to bone. The subway shudders between dark and light.  The ox plods across the page. Think of everyone you ever loved: the boy  who gets off at your stop is a faint ideogram for each. Offer him your hand.  Help him climb the stair.
After death, my father practices meticulously until the Bach is seamless, spun glass in a dream, you can no longer tell where the modulations are, or the pedal shifts or the split fingerings . . . if he rests it’s to wind the metronome or sip his cup of ice . . . but who is the other old man in the identical flannel gown, head cocked, listening ever more critically, deeper in the empty room?
The child’s assignment: “What is a city?” All dusk she sucks her pencil while cars swish by like ghosts, neighbors’ radios forecast rain, high clouds, diminishing winds: at last she writes: “The city is everyone.”  Now it’s time for math, borrowing and exchanging, the long discipleship to zero, the stranger, the force that makes us what we study: father and child, writing in separate books, infinite and alone.
Years later they find themselves talking  about chances, moments when their lives  might have swerved off for the smallest reason.  What if I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?  What if you’d been out, as you were when I tried three times  the night before?  Then she tells him a secret.  She’d been there all evening, and she knew  he was the one calling, which was why  she hadn’t answered.  Because she felt— because she was certain—her life would change  if she picked up the phone, said hello,  said, I was just thinking of you.  I was afraid, she tells him. And in the morning  I also knew it was you, but I just  answered the phone  the way anyone answers a phone when it starts to ring,  not thinking you have a choice.
The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must   have told you   that. Poison leaks into the basements and tedium into the schools. The oak   is going the way  of the elm in the upper Midwest—my cousin earns a living by taking the dead ones   down.  And Jason’s alive yet, the fair- haired child, his metal crib next   to my daughter’s.  Jason is one but last saw light five months ago and won’t see light again. ·  Leaf against leaf without malice   or forethought,  the manifold species of murmuring harm. No harm intended, there never is.   The new  inadequate software gets the reference librarian fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one   weekend  and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four rabbits and seventeen months of research.   Ignorance loves   as ignorance does and always holds high office.   · Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune   the third  of July. July’s the month of hospital ro- tations; on holiday weekends the venerable   stay home.  So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table and couldn’t be made to breathe for three-and-a-  quarter hours,   the staff were too green to let him go. The household gods have abandoned us to the gods   of juris-  prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve of new tarmac, the municipal pool,   the sky at work  on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky, the park where idling cars, mere yards   from the slide  and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel bags: the admitting room and its stately drive,   possessed   of the town’s best view. · And what’s to become of the three-year-old brother?   When Jason was found   face down near the dogdish—it takes just a cupful of water to drown—  his brother stood still  in the corner and said he was hungry and said that it wasn’t his fault.   No fault.  The fault’s in nature, who will without system or explanation   make permanent  havoc of little mistakes. A natural mistake, the transient ill-will we define   as the normal  and trust to be inconsequent, by nature’s own abundance soon absorbed. ·Oak wilt, it’s called, the new disease.   Like any such  contagion—hypocrisy in the conference room, flattery in the halls—it works its mischief mostly   unremarked.   The men on the links haven’t noticed yet. Their form is good. They’re par.   The woman who’s  prospered from hating ideas loves causes instead. A little shade, a little firewood.   I know  a stand of oak on which my father’s earthly joy depends. We’re slow   to cut our losses.
Dove-twirl in the tall grass.  End-of-summer glaze next door On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree. Work sounds: truck back-up beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn. History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Mid-morning, late-century light  calicoed under the peach trees. Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, Absolute, incommunicado,   unhoused and peregrine. The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in One by one  into its suffocating light and air. Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax And grammar a catechist, Their words what the beads say,  words thumbed to our discontent.
Holding only a handful of rushlight they pressed deeper into the dark, at a crouch  until the great rock chamber flowered around them and they stood in an enormous womb of flickering light and darklight, a place to make a start. Raised hands cast flapping shadows  over the sleeker shapes of radiance. They've left the world of weather and panic behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark  in their wake, pushing as one pulse to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells  are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries and the binding juices oozed out of chosen barks. The beasts begin to take shape from hands and feather-tufts  (soaked in ochre, manganese, madder, mallow white)  stroking the live rock, letting slopes and contours  mould those forms from chance, coaxing rigid dips and folds and bulges to lend themselves to necks, bellies, swelling haunches,  a forehead or a twist of horn, tails and manes curling to a crazy gallop. Intent and human, they attach the mineral, vegetable, animal realms to themselves, inscribing the one unbroken line everything depends on, from that impenetrable centre to the outer intangibles of light and air, even  the speed of the horse, the bison's fear, the arc of gentleness that this big-bellied cow  arches over its spindling calf, or the lancing  dance of death that bristles out of the buck's struck flank. On this one line they leave  a beak-headed human figure of sticks  and one small, chalky, human hand. We'll never know if they worked in silence  like people praying—the way our monks  illuminated their own dark ages  in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,  where they contrived a binding  labyrinth of lit affinities to spell out in nature's lace and fable  their mindful, blinding sixth sense of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds  tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)  they kept a constant gossip up of praise, encouragement, complaint. It doesn't matter: we know they went with guttering rushlight into the dark; came to terms with the given world; must have had —as their hands moved steadily by spiderlight—one desire we'd recognise: they would—before going on  beyond this border zone, this nowhere  that is now here—leave something upright and bright behind them in the dark.
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that was how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar, casting beer money from a thin reel of ones, the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two other things, but they were wrong, as it happened. So I made him look at the poem. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said, and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do. If they were baseball executives they’d plot to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game could be saved from children. Of course later that night he fired his pianist in mid-number and flurried him from the stand. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,” he explained, and the band played on.
In white pleated trousers, peering through green sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun. What is the visual equivalent of syncopation? Rows of seared palms wrinkle in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble nothing less than aspiration. I’ve left minarets for sun and syncopation, sixty-seven shades of green which I have counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back, luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera. One day I will comprehend the different  grades of red. On that day I will comprehend these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia, Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.
for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown 1. RETREAT The sailor dreamt of loss, but it was I who dreamt the sailor. I was landlocked, sea-poor. The sailor dreamt of a woman who stared at the sea, then tired of it, advertised her freedom. She said to her friend: I want all the fire one can have without being consumed by it. Clearly, I dreamt the woman too. I was surrounded by mountains suddenly green after a long winter, a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up, every day a lesson about the vastness between ecstasy and repose. I drank coffee called Black Forest at the local cafe. I took long walks and tried to love the earth and hate its desecrations. All the Golden Retrievers wore red bandannas on those muttless streets. All the birches, I think, were aspens. I do not often remember my dreams, or dream of dreamers in them. To be without some of the things you want, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness.2. MOUNTAIN, SKY I’ve been paying attention to the sky again. I’ve seen a ravine up there, and a narrow, black gorge. Not to worry, I tell myself, about tricks the mind plays, as long as you know they’re tricks. If the rich are casually cruel perhaps it’s because they can stare at the sky and never see an indictment in the shape of clouds. The frown, for example, in a thunderhead. The fist. That big mountain I’ve been looking at— I love how it borrows purple from the filtered light, sometimes red. Like any of us it’s all of its appearances. It’s good that the rich have to die, a peasant saying goes, otherwise they’d live forever. Here in this rented house, high up, I understand. I’m one of the rich for a while. The earth feels mine and the air I breathe is rarefied, if thin. Dusk now is making its last claim. I love the confluence of dark mountain, dark sky. Soon I won’t know the beginning from the end.3. HIM Those empty celebrations of the half-believer along for the ride. Those secret words repeated in mirrors— someone’s personal fog. A man’s heart ransomed for comfort or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags. I have been him and him and him. Was it nobility or senility when my old grandmother tried to drown artificial flowers in the bathtub? Can only saints carry the load without talking about the burden? I want to lean into life, catch the faintest perfume. In every boy child an old man is dying. By middle age he begins to stink, complain. I want to have gifts for him when we finally meet. I want him to go out like an ancient Egyptian, surrounded by what is his, desiring nothing.4. DELINEATION AT DUSK A lost hour, and that animal lassitude after a vanished afternoon. Outside: joggers, cyclists. Motion, the great purifier, is theirs. If this were Europe someone in a tower might be ringing a bell. People hearing it would know similar truths, might even know exactly who they are. It’s getting near drinking time. It’s getting near getting near; a person alone conjures rules or can liquefy, fall apart. That woman with the bouffant— chewing gum, waiting for the bus— someone thinks she’s beautiful. It’s beautiful someone does. The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. Here, the slow dance of contingency, an afternoon connected to an evening by a slender wish. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow sluggish and desire only one person, or one thing. I am closing the curtains. I am helping the night.5. SOLITUDE A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks. I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy. I felt like crushing a rhododendron. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body, the ventricles and the small bones in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .... When the radio said parents in California gave birth to another child so that their older child might have a bone-marrow transplant and live, I found myself weeping for such complicated beauty. How wonderful the radio and its distant, human voices. The rain now is quite without consequence coming down. I suppose I’ve come to the limits of my paltry resources, this hankering for people and for massive disturbance, then high pressure, the sequence that’s been promised for days. I will long to be alone when my friends arrive.6. THE BODY WIDENS The body widens, and people are welcomed into it, many at a time. This must be what happens when we learn to be generous when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed. I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited my own candleless altar. Little by little, the old selfish parts of me are loosening. I have a plan for becoming lean: to use all my fat in service of expansion. Have women always known this? Loveliness and fear when they open and let in and give away? The mountains here pierce the sky, and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them.7. A NEW MOUTH Give me a new mouth; I want to talk. I’ve been watching the spider mend its web. I think I’ve learned something about architecture from a swallow. Excuse me while I separate the nettles from the flowers, while I put my nose to the black moist smell of earth and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable.  There’s a speakable grace in the fields and even in the cities. The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become a machine. And yet I want to talk about the worn-out husks of men and women returning from the factories, the venereal streets, the bruise history passes down to its forlorn children.  I need a new mouth to acknowledge that piety will keep us small, imprisoned, that it’s all right to be ridiculous and sway first to the left, then to the right, in order to find our balance.  I’ve been watching an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying to identify the word before its utterance. Give me a new mouth and I’ll be a guardian against forgetfulness. I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate between sycamore and cypress. I want to find the cool, precise language for how passion gives rise to passion.8. STRANGER The wind gone. I can hear my breathing. I can hear the lateness of the hour by what isn’t moving. Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village. These are winter names, and it’s summer. The water from the mountains rushes down man-made gullies. Serious phantoms with their black tears are out tonight. I’m close—my other delusion goes— to the heart of things. A young man with a young man’s itch would rise and go out prowling. Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain that’s a hill, take the slowest horse at the Lazy-7, slow and old, sure to know its trail. I knew a man who said he could dominate solitude. In other ways, too, he was a fool. Once I wanted to be one of those fabulous strangers who appear and disappear. Now I arrive only by invitation, stay long enough to earn my fare. Outside my window, clouds from the west erasing the stars. A coyote howling its singular news. At whatever pace, isn’t there an imperative to live? Before a person dies he should experience the double fire, of what he wants and shouldn’t have.
On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago  I came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream  flowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own  echoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten  it was the turning of autumn and already  the mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows long after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof   the glassy water and flickering yellow leaves in the few poplars and knotted plum trees were held up  in a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent mill by the stream glisten white above their ruin  and a few relics of the life before had been arranged in front of the open mill house to wait  pale in the daylight out on the open mountain after whatever they had been made for was over  the dew was drying on them and there were few who took that road who might buy one of them and take it away somewhere   to be unusual to be the only one to become unknown a wooden bed stood there on rocks  a cradle the color of dust a cracked oil jar iron pots  wooden wheels iron wheels stone wheels the tall box of a clock  and among them a ring of white stone the size of an  embrace set into another of the same size  an iron spike rising from the ring where the wooden handle had fitted that turned it in its days as a hand mill   you could see if you looked closely that the top ring that turned in the other had been carved long before in the form   of a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be asleep the features worn almost away where it  had gone around and around grinding grain and salt  to go into the dark and to go on and remember  * * * What I thought I had left I kept finding again  but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered as anyone could have foretold it was not there  when I went away looking for what I had to do  I found that I was living where I was a stranger  but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places  and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me  to be where I had been at home called by name and answering  getting ready to go away and going away  * * * Every time they assembled and he spoke to them  about waking there was an old man who stood listening  and left before the others until one day the old man stayed  and Who are you he asked the old man and the old man answered I am not a man  many lives ago I stood where you are standing and they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them   about waking until one day one of them asked me When someone has wakened to what is really there   is that person free of the chain of consequences and I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox  and I have been a fox for five hundred lives and now I have come to ask you to say what will   free me from the body of a fox please tell me when someone has wakened to what is really there   is that person free of the chain of consequences and this time the answer was That person sees it as it is   then the old man said Thank you for waking me you have set me free of the body of the fox  which you will find on the other side of the mountain I ask you to bury it please as one of your own   that evening he announced a funeral service for one of them but they said nobody has died  then he led them to the other side of the mountain and a cave where they found a fox’s body  and he told them the story and they buried the fox  as one of them but later one of them asked  what if he had given the right answer every time  * * * Once again I was there and once again I was leaving   and again it seemed as though nothing had changed even while it was all changing but this time  was a time of ending this time the long marriage was over the orbits were flying apart it was autumn again   sunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows each day grew longer and the still afternoons  ripened the distance until the sun went down across the valley and the full moon rose out of the trees  it was the time of year when I was born and that evening I went to see friends for the last time and I came back   after midnight along the road white with the moon I was crossing the bars of shadow and seeing ahead of me   the wide silent valley full of silver light and there just at the corner of the land that I had  come back to so many times and now was leaving  at the foot of the wall built of pale stone I saw the body  stretched in the grass and it was a fox a vixen  just dead with no sign of how it had come to happen  no blood the long fur warm in the dewy grass  nothing broken or lost or torn or unfinished  I carried her home to bury her in the garden in the morning of the clear autumn that she had left   and to stand afterward in the turning daylight  * * * There are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags   of dried irises knuckled into the hollows of moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall  the ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran  the light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree  over the lane by the house chimney there is the roof  and the window looking out over the garden  summer and winter there is the field below the house there is the broad valley far below them all with the curves   of the river a strand of sky threaded through it and the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke  and there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall the line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing  that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten
The yellow line could be seen for as long a time As the highway desired And if you fell asleep at the wheel It fulgurated in the dozing soul Like a brutal revelation That allows you not to feel In the dream’s snapshot Your brain getting smashed Against the milestone or the windshield    It was an ideal line Crowned with horizontal blue That unwound day after day Like a clothesline Flags and scalps and washed-out roses Our countries our combats our wars Mingling lassitude with involuntary starts A gymnastic in disorder That sickened our hearts
As long as you believe in miracles You watch the sun fall into the sea Every evening Then you turn your back and sink Among the ferns sparkling from a moon or from the other Night up to your knees under the vault of cries.    The pubescent monkeys, the adolescent pumas Contemplate the slender crescent Of the earth In the eyes of a dead viper That knots on the asphalt The alpha of a future alphabet.    It’s the end of night the mosquitoes Place themselves on your forehead and die with you In the ruins of your dreams erected By the distant suggestions of cities Where you wish to find an empty Bed to die in.    The cathedrals the cinemas the soliloquies The beggar’s ear glued to the violin Music To be lovesick when the songs All temple prostitutes all rotgut for two cents Are going to end up in the pink slit of a jukebox.    Hope is under the hand that weak flesh Groped massaged turgescent with eyes shut Comes and goes Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time Until another day erases The trace of each passing.
The flowers I planted along my road Have lasted long despite winds and cold Already fiery noons begin to burn Slyly the secret of the roots And I know that of my footsteps nothing will remain But a trace a cluster a drop To recall along the paths I’ve chosen Those evening when the light sang In eyes hands hearts and goblets.    I love the sweet harshness on the tongue Filling the palate with a promised saliva Knocking the mute keyboard of the teeth With raised draperies of which one might say That memory retains a fleeting trail of them Half-glimpsed we won’t know how or else The loud reminder of the single moment All gravity banished the unconscious pleasure recaptured Of being nothing but entirely animal.    For our life closed on that iridescent sphere —Color taste perfume at their extreme limits—invokes  Some miracle independent of its origin Produced by distilling air and earth— Like the move toward technological planets After a calculation made on the fingers of one hand— Time contained flowing—continual autumn This evening this wine that enters me to make My head light my tongue loose my cock happy.
Adieu near those fields that smoke disembowels   And that your arm pushes away For a long time until the inevitable stratum of the   Adieus until the next   Adieu    The door in a cliff has closed. I wanted Daylight to enter here only through the arc-lamp of your eyes That the limits of this place be defined only By the carnal walls our bodies erected    Opened wider on the recaptured past than the smallest Pocket-watch and its visible trail ever were Your mouth swallowed the hour and my teeth broke on it When I entered you with kisses    Under the full-blown palm of multiple hands The rose you know, on the ground now, Perfumed the silence and killed our secrets Marking our garden with fear that was no longer fear    Adieu the songs are ended the years disemboweled  And may your body distance itself For a long time until the ineluctable regret of  Adieus until forever
Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes. They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing.
Looking at the photograph is somehow not unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray screen for the virus, which I imagine as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine with serrated fins and a neon spine. I’m on a train, thinking about my friends and watching two women talk in sign language. I feel the energy and heft their talk generates, the weight of their words in the air the same heft as your presence in this picture, boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach. Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is sun under your skin like the gold Sula found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight of your elbow, Melvin,  on Darrell’s brown shoulder.
We used to like talking about grief Our journals and letters were packed with losses, complaints, and sorrows. Even if there was no grief we wouldn’t stop lamenting as though longing for the charm of a distressed face. Then we couldn’t help expressing grief So many things descended without warning: labor wasted, loves lost, houses gone, marriages broken, friends estranged, ambitions worn away by immediate needs. Words lined up in our throats for a good whining. Grief seemed like an endless river— the only immortal flow of life. After losing a land and then giving up a tongue, we stopped talking of grief Smiles began to brighten our faces. We laugh a lot, at our own mess. Things become beautiful, even hailstones in the strawberry fields.
1 I cradled my newborn daughter and felt the heartbeat pull me out of shock. She didn’t know what her hands were: she folded them. I asked her was there a place where there was no world. She didn’t know what a voice was: her lips were the shape of a nipple.2 In the park the child says: watch me. It will not count unless you see. And she shows me the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble, the tricks performed at leisure in midair, each unknown until it is finished. At home she orders: see me eat. I watch her curl on herself, sleep; as I try to leave the dark room her dreaming voice commands me: watch.3 Always we passed the seesaw on the way to the swings but tonight I remember the principle of the lever, I sit the child at one end, I sit near the center, the fulcrum, at once she has power to lift me off the earth and keep me suspended by her tiny weight, she laughing, I stunned at the power of the formula.
The last time I saw Paul Castle it was printed in gold on the wall above the showers in the boys’ locker room, next to the school record for the mile. I don’t recall his time, but the year was 1968 and I can look across the infield of memory to see him on the track, legs flashing, body bending slightly beyond the pack of runners at his back. He couldn’t spare a word for me, two years younger, junior varsity, and hardly worth the waste of breath. He owned the hallways, a cool blonde at his side, and aimed his interests further down the line than we could guess. Now, reading the name again, I see us standing in the showers, naked kids beneath his larger, comprehensive force—the ones who trail obscurely, in the wake of the swift, like my shadow on this gleaming wall.
The tortures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge, And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming, Could not be convinced to leave the house, And Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son, Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life, Reporting shooting pains that would begin High in her back and shear downward to the feet, As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning; And also, men, broken on bridges and mills, Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics— Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle: They came and sat there too, leafing through Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers; And, one by one, all entered in and talked While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff In his pipe and took down symptoms, Annotating them on his hidden chart— Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph, The clammy palms—and then he’d scratch His temple’s meaningful patch of white And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law Until half the county had gathered as in a lap— The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house. How much pain, how many diseases Consigned to the mythological, the dropped Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it Laughable, I know. Still I want someone To see, now that they lie safe in graves Beyond the vacant stores, that someone Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart, Named it something that sounded real, whatever They lived through and died of. I remember Mrs. Lyle who called it a thorn in the flesh, And Mr. Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.
It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more than laughter in the warm dark strangled at dawn. Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again— a knapsack heavy with gold coins. I stumble around the house,  bump into things. Only Midas himself would understand.
As if because you lay(deeply embarrassing) inside my body, I could (inconceivable) follow your swift thoughts into their blue  immersion even now, stilettoes flickering, or schools of fish maneuvering, first clear and then occluded, though now and then a piercing gleam cuts through; as if the snow reflections that glaze  the winter afternoon to porcelain could penetrate the secrets of a skull that happens to have lodged (improbable) inside me once. Your liberation twelve years ago today is the occasion  you and your friends are celebrating now  behind a door that’s firmly shut. The fantasy you’ve lately been devouring  features an evil mage with hourglass eyes.  Last week, when you were furious at me (I must have thrown some precious thing away),  you swiftly slipped into your parents’ room  and turned the bedside clock an hour ahead.  Discovered as the culprit, wickedly you smiled. You knew time was my enemy.
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard Compose the dark, compose The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear One by one, above the schoolyard. If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened: A bird would still be riding the back of a horse, And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners, At one with the land, the wind, the sun examining Their faces, would go on working, Each moment forgotten in the swipe of a scythe. But the walls of the labyrinth have already acquired Their rose tint from the blood of slaves Crushed into the stone used to build them, & the windows Of stained glass are held in place by the shriek And sighing body of a falling chimneysweep through The baked & blackened air. This ash was once a village, That snowflake, time itself. But until the day it is permitted to curl up in a doorway, And try to sleep, the snow falling just beyond it, There’s nothing for it to do: The soul rests its head in its hands & stares out From its desk at the trash-littered schoolyard, It stays where it was left. When the window fills with pain, the soul bears witness, But it doesn’t write. Nor does it write home Having no need to, having no home. In this way, & in no other Was the soul gradually replaced by the tens of thousands Of things meant to represent it— All of which proclaimed, or else lamented, its absence. Until, in the drone of auditoriums & lecture halls, it became No more than the scraping of a branch Against the side of a house, no more than the wincing Of a patient on a couch, or the pinched, nasal tenor Of the strung-out addict’s voice, While this sound of scratching, this tapping all night, Enlarging the quiet instead of making a music within it, Is just a way of joining one thing to another, Myself to whoever it is—sitting there in the schoolroom, Sitting there while also being led through the schoolyard Where prisoners are exercising in the cold light— A way of joining or trying to join one thing to another, So that the stillness of the clouds & the sky Opening beneath the blindfold of the prisoner, & the cop Who leads him toward it, toward the blank Sail of the sky at the end of the world, are bewildered So that everything, in this moment, bewilders Them: the odd gentleness each feels in the hand Of the other, & how they don’t stop walking, not now Not for anything.
1 The brightly-painted horse Had a boy’s face, And four small wheels Under his feet, Plus a long string To pull him by this way and that Across the floor, Should you care to. A string in-waiting That slipped away In many wiles From each and every try.  2 Knock and they’ll answer, Mother told me. So I climbed four flights of stairs And went in unannounced. And found a small wooden toy For the taking In the ensuing emptiness And the fading daylight That still gives me a shudder As if I held the key to mysteries in my hand.  3 Where’s the Lost and Found Department, And the quiet entry, The undeveloped film Of the few clear moments Of our blurred lives? Where’s the drop of blood And the teeny nail That pricked my finger As I bent down to touch the toy And caught its eye?  4 Evening light, Make me a Sunday Go-to meeting shadow For my toy. My dearest memories are Steep stair-wells In dusty buildings On dead-end streets, Where I talk to the walls And closed doors As if they understood me.  5 The wooden toy sitting pretty. No, quieter than that. Like the sound of eyebrows Raised by a villain In a silent movie.Psst, someone said behind my back.
Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadn't had time to stick; back when the smallest breezes melted summer into autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly in rank and file . . . the world called, and I answered. Each glance ignited to a gaze. I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names? Back when everything was still to come, luck leaked out everywhere. I gave my promise to the world, and the world followed me here.
This afternoon the park is filled with brides. Among varieties of persuasion the big trees turn back toward the forest. Adventurers gather in side streets. The police are looking hard at the sky. Down at the bay, boys trapped in solitude fish. Girls hike their pants and stare at the wave line, remembering secrets they once held dear. The day offers a ridiculous variation as an excuse for not coming in on time. Wild imaginings take the place of religion. Someone who can't swim offers to cook. We've devised a means for the obstinate children to be fed, she says, but no one understands this. We crave affection, but give only advice. There are walls topped with broken bicycles. Someone makes an obscene offer and this is the best we get all day. Oh don't give in so easily she says, handing over the keys. We climb the blue fire escape. We would like to keep going, skyline climbers, old men remembering their childhood who devise a few illegal experiences no one wants to try. It gets to be more than the officers can take. The park is dusty, dark, yet the children, ignored all day, play on, convinced their dedication releases a magic that changes everything.
Waiting for your ride in front of the house where you spent the night, where, as a third ear during their endless intimate, important, and kinky phone calls, you pretended to rinse glassware; you were a dog from the pound, grateful, sniffing the upholstery. Later, lying in the center of their king-sized bed, a giant wall-to-wall mirror, isolating you like a rabbit; it was also their exercise room with torture equipment; something in you twitched; flickering a bizarre video in your head. It’s morning now. You’re standing outside, with nightgown and toothbrush wrapped in your purse, waiting for a bus to take you somewhere else. You’re depressed. They’re asleep of course. Their network wrapped around them. You keep wondering why you’re missing something. Then you look back and see your pricked-up ears, your waggy self, stuck inside their picture window, where for years it will wave at you—naive, apologetic, embarrassed.
Blizzard to lilac. Dandelion to leaf. Endless variation of seasons I note in passing, smells I cannot smell: rotting gardens, feces, musk of cat. These two run in front of me, golden shoulder to patchwork, heads lifted or lowered into scent, tongues lolling. Ears damp with their own spittle and each other's tell me, tethered a pace behind, their journey's epic: tipping forward to the familiar or stranger's distant yap; angling to my breathing, whispered praise, my slightest suggestion. Ignored. The shepherd throws herself into any whirring wheel, to herd the neighbor's tractor mower or the UPS truck's packets home; pulling her back, the golden's oblivious ballast, instinct heading always for the gutter's deepest puddle, her own way within the forked leash's one-foot range. As we pass, the clans set up their barking, as if we were news, gathering center of a congenial warning din—mine answer with disturbances of pace, an extra pull or lollop, grins thrown slant-eyed over shoulders until one hears a call she can't ignore, surrenders to baying's ferocious joy moving through muscle and bone. Moving storm, storm's eye: happy universes whirl in their skins as I do in mine. Unknowable, their fate. Mediums between foreign principalities, they're tied to me, to each other, by my will, by love; to that other realm by song, and tooth, and blood.
They say you can jinx a poem if you talk about it before it is done. If you let it out too early, they warn, your poem will fly away, and this time they are absolutely right. Take the night I mentioned to you I wanted to write about the madmen, as the newspapers so blithely call them, who attack art, not in reviews, but with breadknives and hammers in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.  Actually, they are the real artists, you said, spinning the ice in your glass. The screwdriver is their brush. The real vandals are the restorers, you went on, slowly turning me upside-down, the ones in the white doctor's smocks who close the wound in the landscape, and thus ruin the true art of the mad. I watched my poem fly down to the front of the bar and hover there until the next customer walked in— then I watched it fly out the open door into the night and sail away, I could only imagine, over the dark tenements of the city. All I had wished to say was that art was also short, as a razor can teach with a slash or two, that it only seems long compared to life, but that night, I drove home alone with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart except the faint hope that I might catch a glimpse of the thing in the fan of my headlights, maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp, poor unwritten bird, its wings folded, staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.
I plan to be the world authority on peafowl. Believe I'll be offered a chair someday at the chicken college. —Flannery O'Connor Certainly are nice to want to give me that dog. I raise peacocks— you can't keep dogs and them on the same place. People come here have to leave the dog in the car else the peachickens take to the trees with nervous prostrations. I have twenty-seven. Place sounds like a jungle at night. They yell and scream at the least atmospheric disturbance or mechanical noise. Sitting on the back steps, I spend days studying how they could decorate the lawn to advantage. They prefer to sit on the tractors, the top of the chicken house or garbage can lid. I adjust to their taste, which is anti-dog. Thanks but I'll take the thought for the dog. Appreciate you wanting to give it. Come visit. Nothing to do here but sit, walk, collect red bug bites, show you a peacock before his tail gets ratty.
Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours." But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours. At first not smoking took all my time: I did it a little by little and hour by hour. Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata. But the poor use English. Off and on. By the hour. "I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour. Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again (you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours. Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.
My first day leading the prison writing workshop: Carlos complimented my choosing the chair nearest the door. I read a poem by Whitman that once sent me hitchhiking and Carlos stood up, asked to read a section from his four hundred-page work-in-progress, a poem that turns on his first finding Neruda's "One Year Walk"; he said it lit up the night like a perfect crime, so I left everything—I had no choice—walked three thousand miles to the Pacific. From memory he recited a passage in which his father left the family a small fortune, all counterfeit: though I doubted the facts, I can still see that worn briefcase, almost-perfect hundreds stacked neatly in shrink-wrapped packs. I was young, it took me two weeks to accept that I could teach this lifer nothing. World of concrete floors and everlasting light: he was grateful to God who gave him a blazing mind not granted to anyone living or dead, and wouldn't have changed a word anyway.
Talking, we begin to find the way into our hearts, we who knew no words, words being a rare commodity in those countries we left behind. Both refugees and similarly deprived, we marvel at the many things there are to say: so many variations and colors of the same thought, so many different lengths in the words that line up together on our tongues. No scarcity, no rationing, no waiting in line in order to buy the same answer we heard each time we asked, that one word, owned by the state, manufactured by the state, serving all purposes equally alike: No, No, No, and sometimes Never.
The socks  red with a white star in a crescent moon  the shoes black red gold  are to many  like a warm foot  in cold shoe leather  to others  a double knot  in  a life only as long as a shoelace  but for all that  on hot coals Translated by Oliver Pauley Die Socken  rot mit weißem Stern in Sichelmond  die Schuhe schwarz rot gold  für viele ist es  wie ein warmer Fuß  im kalten Schuhwerk  für andere  ein Doppelknoten  in einem  nur schnürsenkellangen Leben  aber das  auf heißem Boden
For Nelly Sachs It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air? Numerous as the sand, they did not become sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten in droves. Often, and hand in hand, like minutes. More than us, but without memorials. Not registered, not cipherable from dust, but vanished— their names, spoons, and footsoles. They don't make us sorry. Nobody can remember them: Were they born, did they flee, have they died? They were not missed. The world is airtight yet held together by what it does not house, by the vanished. They are everywhere. Without the absent ones, there would be nothing. Without the fugitives, nothing is firm. Without the forgotten, nothing for certain. The vanished are just. That's how we'll fade, too. * * * Für Nelly Sachs Nicht die Erde hat sie verschluckt. War es die Luft? Wie der Sand sind sie zahireich, doch nicht zu Sand sind sie geworden, sondern zu nichte. In Scharen sind sie vergessen. Häufig und Hand in Hand, wie die Minuten. Mehr als wir, doch ohne Andenken. Nicht verzeichnet, nicht abzulesen im Staub, sondern verschwunden sind ihre Namen, Löffel und Sohlen. Sie reuen uns nicht. Es kann sich niemand auf sie besinnen: Sind sie geboren, geflohen, gestorben? Vermißt sind sie nicht worden. Lückenlos ist die Welt, doch zusammengehalten von dem was sie nicht behaust, von den Verschwundenen. Sie sind überall. Ohne die Abwesenden wäre nichts da. Ohne die Flüchtigen wäre nichts fest. Ohne die Vergessenen nichts gewiß. Die Verschwundenen sind gerecht. So verschallen wir auch.
Right up to my final hour I'll be obliging and polite. Should I hear death firmly knocking, I'll blithely shout: Come in all right! What's on the schedule? Dying, is it? Well, that's something rather new. But I'm sure that we can swing it, showing them a thing or two. What is this? Your hourglass? Interesting! And good to grasp. And the scythe is for grim reaping, did you say? I thought I'd ask. Which way should I turn from here? To the left? From where you stand? Well, all right then. To the graveyard? Where I take my final hand? Yes, the glass is out of sand now. Oh, I see, you want it back. May I ask you where you got it? So unusual, all in black. Is it antique? Oh well, whatever. I only meant to ask, old chap— What? No questions? No more talking? That's fine by me. I'll shut my— * * * Ach, noch in der letzten Stunde werde ich verbindlich sein. Klopft der Tod an meine Türe rufe ich geschwind: Herein! Woran soll es gehn? Ans Sterben? Hab ich zwar noch nie gemacht, doch wir werd'n das Kind schon schaukeln— na, das wäre ja gelacht! Interessant so eine Sanduhr! Ja, die halt ich gern mal fest. Ach—und das ist Ihre Sense? Und die gibt mir dann den Rest? Wohin soll ich mich jetzt wenden? Links? Von Ihnen aus gesehn? Ach, von mir aus! Bis zur Grube? Und wie soll es weitergehn? Ja, die Uhr ist abgelaufen. Wollen Sie die jetzt zurück? Gibt's die irgendwo zu kaufen? Ein so ausgefall'nes Stück Findet man nicht alle Tage, womit ich nur sagen will —ach! Ich soll hier nichts mehr sagen? Geht in Ordnung! Bin schon
that never would he write his autobiography because his life seemed to him just so much filth that only a few points, bloody ones he still remembers but that he would never hesitate to reach into the filth to pull out what perhaps could serve as stuff for poetry his disgusting purpose in life * * * daß niemals er schreiben werde seine autobiographie daß ihm sein leben viel zu sehr als dreck erscheine daß auch nur wenige punkte, blutige er noch erinnere daß aber niemals er zögern werde in den dreck zu fassen um herauszuziehen was vielleicht einen stoff abgäbe für poesie seinen widerlichen lebenszweck
Last night I awoke knew That I should say goodbye now To these verses. That's how it always goes After a few years. They have to get out Into the world. It's not possible to keep them Forever! here under the roof. Poor things. They must set out for town. A few will be allowed to return later. But most of them are still hanging around out there. Who knows what will become of them. Before they Find their peace.
One death comes before another. Breath and smoke. And smoke which puts out breath. And silence. But sometimes only a cigarette helps you keep your grip. And keeps its promises more quickly, too. Between yellowed fingers it burns like love becomes ashes like betrayal. Breath and smoke. The three fingers of oath curved around the cigarette: to not forswear. Giordano burns on the Campo de Fiori. The bells of Santa Maria Maggiore are still pealing for the auto-da-fé. Breath and smoke. And smoke which puts out breath. And to write with a burned hand about fire. And the borders of the German language are mined with murderous accidents. One death comes before another. * * * Ein Tod kommt vor dem andern. Atem und Rauch. Und Rauch der Atem löscht. Und Schweigen. Manchmal ist aber eine Zigarette der letzte Halt. Und hält was sie verspricht auch schneller. Zwischen vergilbten Fingern brennts wie Liebe wird Asche wie Verrat. Atem und Rauch. Die Schwurfinger gekrümmt um die Zigarette: um nicht abzuschwören. Giordano brennt auf dem Campo de Fiori. Die Glocken von Santa Maria Maggiore gellen noch immer zum Autodafé. Atem und Rauch. Und Rauch der Atem löscht. Und mit verbrannter Hand über das Feuer schreiben. Und die Grenzen der deutschen Sprache sind mit mörderischen Zufällen vermint. Ein Tod kommt dem andern zuvor.
Yes, I've been in Rome, at least two times, though on second thought it probably was three or maybe five. When was the last? That's easy, for I remember it exactly— at least what it was like when I first left. You mean a part of you remains in Rome? Not really, for when I was first in Rome I was truly there. That ended the second time, though I only realized it when I first left. So when you were in Rome your last time was consumed by thoughts of leaving? Not exactly. As time went on, I came around at last, thinking: obsess about leaving and nothing lasts; I'll end up never having been in Rome. Yet back then did you know just what exactly it meant to be in Rome during that time you thought about leaving, even if it was then you saw what you'd lose if you had left? Even at the time when I first left I'd no idea. But you're not saying the last you saw of Rome was your third visit, for wasn't it earlier that you felt you'd never leave Rome? No, all that happened there my second time, though to this day I feel about Rome exactly what I felt from the first. What that means exactly is hard to say, for perhaps I never left, since after all, my being there the first time didn't involve my leaving. Tell me then, at last, was it once or twice? were you really in Rome? Why certainly—I'm sure, I know I was, and on top of that you might even say I was there time and again, everything there exactly just the same, or like my last time in Rome, me feeling as if I'd never really left. But tell me now precisely, was the last you saw of Rome indeed that second time? To be exact, it happened the very first time that I saw Rome, darkness falling as I left causing me to see what simply couldn't last.
From here into the north, the ways are dry. Yellow grass, thirst in the roots. In the hearts. It's all simple, but false. When I try to think history, the enormous vertebrae of the dinosaur behind the purple beeches in Invalidenstrasse, Bismarck in marble, and Benn, a nameplate on Bozener, lifeless. In the depths of the bunkers on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin are the shoes of Hitler's favorite horse. Profile of power: armor and helmet. In our pants pockets, we crumple the banners. Full of satisfaction we hear the flags splinter in the fabric's darkness. Don't forget the poets' loaded dice. When iron rules again, we will have to console ourselves, adorn stones with smaller stones, the heart with water. * * * Von hier in den Norden sind die Wege trocken. Gelbes Gras, Durst in den Wurzeln. Im Herzen. Alles ist einfach, aber falsch. Wenn ich versuche, Geschichte zu denken, die riesigen Wirbelknochen des Sauriers hinter den Blutbuchen in der Invalidenstraße, Bismarck in Marmor, und Benn, ein Klingelschild in der Bozener, leblos. In den Tiefen der Bunker des Potsdamer Platzes in Berlin liegen die Hufeisen von Hitlers Lieblingspferd. Profile der Macht: Harnisch und Helm. In der Hosentasche zerknicken wir die Standarten. Voll Genugtuung hören wir die Fahnen splittern im Dunkel des Stoffs. Vergeßt nicht die gefälschten Würfel der Dichter. Wenn die Eisernen wieder herrschen, werden wir uns trösten müssen, Steine schmücken mit kleinen Steinen, mit Wasser das Herz.
Monsignor, I believed Jesus followed me With his eyes, and when I slept, An angel peeled an orange And waited for me to wake up. This was 1962. I was ten, small as the flame Of a struck match, my lungs fiery From hard, wintery play. When I returned home, Legs hurting, I placed my hands on the windowsill And looked out—clouds dirty as towels And geese I have yet to see again Darkening the western sky. Monsignor, a machine Had painted on the eyes of my toy soldier, Little dots off-center, Almost on his cheeks. Such a cheap toy, I drowned him over and over in my bath, Drowned him until the painted-on eyes flaked off. Then a leg fell off—surge of dirty water Sunk him to the bottom. I now at this age place hands on the windowsill, My eyes nearly on my cheeks, My belly with its rising tide. There is no angel with an orange at the edge Of my bed. There is no soldier Of God. Only a pane between the inside And the outside, between this living And this dying. Monsignor, Saintly man of this child's wonderment, When will I see the geese again?
We are in the position of defining myth by the shape of its absence. -Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers The bluebird's cold mistimed egg fetched up from the one-legged box after the pair had left for points south & unknown (never, as it turned out, to return) I renested in the half-geode by the windowsill where it gleamed &, months becoming years, seemed about to last forever, grow more consistent with itself, holding its pure blue firmament up over what by now was nothing, till one January day, snow melting to a fast flood, I blew it softly onto my palm so I could hold its cerulean up against new sky, home against home, where it lay weightless & delicate as the Xmas ornament we'd just put away, but when I went to roll it gently back onto its bed, & leave it there, I saw a thread, a crack, another, watched it sink in slowly on itself, shard on shard collapsing from my touch & breath, relaxing into the shape of its absence
Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.   Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers of agave bristle in primordial defense, like a cornered monster backed up against the sea. A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily. Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit   two worlds of associations, or references, drought that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa, veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of— heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours, the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise. We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows, our origins that range from the most disparate places, from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows.  II The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud, in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes, and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven, but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us, and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess, the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene, but I was still surprised when I found the painting of his mother at the Musée d'Orsay among all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. And I was surprised to notice after a few minutes of benign staring, how that woman, stark in profile and fixed forever in her chair, began to resemble my own ancient mother who was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth. You can understand why he titled the painting "Arrangement in Gray and Black" instead of what everyone naturally calls it, but afterward, as I walked along the river bank, I imagined how it might have broken the woman's heart to be demoted from mother to a mere composition, a study in colorlessness. As the summer couples leaned into each other along the quay and the wide, low-slung boats full of spectators slid up and down the Seine between the carved stone bridges and their watery reflections, I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base. It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus" "Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink," or the other way around like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color "Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn." Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafe where I now had come to rest, it would be like painting something laughable, like a chef turning on a spit over a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducks and calling it "Study in Orange and White." But by that time, a waiter had appeared with my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water, and I sat there thinking of nothing but the women and men passing by— mothers and sons walking their small fragile dogs— and about myself, a kind of composition in blue and khaki, and, now that I had poured some water into the glass, milky-green.
On the radio this morning: The average woman knows 275 colors—and men know eight. Women say coffee, mocha, copper, cinnamon, taupe. Men say brown. Women know an Amazon of colors I might have said were green, an Antarctica of whites, oceans of colors I'd stupidly call blue, fields of color, with flowers in them I would have said were red. From women, I've learned to love the browns, the earths, the dusts, the clays, the soft colors, the colors brought out from the mines, hardened ones, hardened in fires I would call red; the colors of the furies; the reconciling colors of the cooling ash. By myself I know the evening colors when the sky goes from blue to another blue to black—although it's a lonely, whitish black sometimes, like the color of sleep— the way dreams are lit by the light that's thrown from nowhere on the things you find in them. Last night there was a turtle, I would say it was brown or green, or it was a snake, mottled, a kind of grey, disguised as a turtle, red spots as if painted on the shell, a palish greenish underside—vulnerable, alone swimming in water I would say was colorless. I woke to the pale colors of the morning—no one has a name for those: the white-rose white you see through the white of the curtains on the window, the milks, the creams, the cream a galactic swirl before it turns to brown when your wife stirs it in the coffee, the faint drying oval on the silver of the spoon.
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—Life's little duties do—preciselyAs the very leastWere infinite—to me— —Emily Dickinson, #443 My mother’s mother, widowed very young of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit, moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue and country heart anaesthetized and mute with labor. So her kind was taught to do— “Find work,” she would reply to every grief— and her one dictum, whether false or true, tolled heavy with her passionate belief. Widowed again, with children, in her prime, she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time spent in the lifelong practice of despair. But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone, her dishes, and how painfully they shone.
My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.
Because it hadn't seemed enough, after a while, to catalogue more Christmases, the three-layer cakes ablaze with birthday candles, the blizzard Billy took a shovel to, Phil's lawnmower tour of the yard, the tree forts, the shoot-'em-ups between the boys in new string ties and cowboy hats and holsters, or Mother sticking a bow as big as Mouseketeer ears in my hair, my father sometimes turned the gaze of his camera to subjects more artistic or universal: long closeups of a rose's face; a real-time sunset (nearly an hour); what surely were some brilliant autumn leaves before their colors faded to dry beige on the aging film; a great deal of pacing, at the zoo, by polar bears and tigers caged, he seemed to say, like him. What happened between him and her is another story. And just as well we have no movie of it, only some unforgiving scowls she gave through terrifying, ticking silence when he must have asked her (no sound track) for a smile. Still, what I keep yearning for isn't those generic cherry blossoms at their peak, or the brave daffodil after a snowfall, it's the re-run surprise of the unshuttered, prefab blanks of windows at the back of the house, and how the lines of aluminum siding are scribbled on with meaning only for us who lived there; it's the pair of elephant bookends I'd forgotten, with the upraised trunks like handles, and the books they meant to carry in one block to a future that scattered all of us. And look: it's the stoneware mixing bowl figured with hand-holding dancers handed down so many years ago to my own kitchen, still valueless, unbroken. Here she's happy, teaching us to dye the Easter eggs in it, a Grecian urn of sorts near which—a foster child of silence and slow time myself—I smile because she does and patiently await my turn.
Come here’s a peach he said and held it out just far enough to reach beyond his lap and off- ered me a room the one room left he said in all of Thessaloniki that night packed with traders The peach was lush I hadn’t slept for days it was like velvet lips a lamp he smiled patted the bed for me I knew it was in fact the only room the only bed The peach trembled and he said Come nodding to make me agree I wanted the peach and the bed he said to take it see how nice it was and I thought how I could take it ginger- ly my finger- tips only touch- ing only it Not in or out I stayed in the doorway watching a fly He stroked the peach and asked where I was from I said the States he smiled and asked how long I’d stay The fly had found the peach I said I’d leave for Turkey in the morning I wanted so much to sleep and on a bed I thought of all the ways to say that word and that they must have gradient meanings He asked me did I want the peach and I said sure and took it from his hand He asked then if I’d take the room It costs too much I said and turned to go He said to stay a while and we could talk The sun was going down I said no thanks I’d head out on the late train but could I still have the peach and what else could he say to that but yes
Where does such sadness in wood come from? How could longing live in these wires? The box looks like the most fragile coffin tuned for sound. And laid across the knees of this woman it looks less like a baby nursed than some symbolic Pietà, and the stretched body on her lap yields modalities of lament and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding chants of grief that dance and dance toward a new measure, a new threshold, a new instant and new year which we always celebrate by remembering the old and by recalling the lost and honoring those no longer here to strike these strings like secrets of the most satisfying harmonies, as voices join in sadness and joy and tell again what we already know, have always known but forget, from way back in the farthest cove, from highest on the peaks of love.
Plum black & the blush white of an apple shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last & textures sheer with damp I slowly pull from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample procrastinations to forget the least of what we want to do. April, half a blast of cold, half new light, green & simple. Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe on this short form, our numbers good enough. The goose-neck glare undoes how we spent the day. Each bite each bee-sting kiss each bitten O all aftertaste. Later, at the drop-off, postmark queue, we joke: "Now we can die!"
Newspaper says the boy killed by someone,  don’t say who. I know the mother, waking,  gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coffee pot. She stands by the window up there on floor  sixteen wondering why the street’s so calm  with no cars going or coming, and then she looks at the wall clock and sees the time. Now she’s too awake to go back to bed,  she’s too awake not to remember him, her one son, or to forget exactly how long yesterday was, each moment dragged into the next by the force of her will  until she thought this simply cannot be.  She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table,  the two black windows staring back at her, wondering how she’ll go back to work today.  The windows don’t see anything: they’re black,  eyeless, they give back only what’s given;  sometimes, like now, even less than what’s given, yet she stares into their two black faces  moving her head from side to side, like this,  just like I’m doing now. Try it awhile,  go ahead, it’s not going to kill you. Now say something, it doesn’t matter what  you say because all the words are useless:  “I’m sorry for your loss.” “This too will pass.” “He was who he was.” She won’t hear you out because she can only hear the torn words  she uses to pray to die. This afternoon  you and I will see her just before four  alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm, and we’ll look away. Under your breath make  her one promise and keep it forever: in the little store-front church down the block,  the one with the front windows newspapered,  you won’t come on Saturday or Sunday  to kneel down and pray for life eternal.
Three days later, Suljic was finally given a drink of water and marched with a dozen other men onto a small livery truck, one of two, fenced along each side by wooden planks, the back left open to give a clear shot to the automatic weapon poking out the window of the red sedan that followed, the squat nose trained on them, ridiculously, as if they'd any thought of hopping off a moving truck. Suljic peered vacantly through the slats. He'd missed the yellow flowers of Spring and by now saw a landscape taken over by Summer, the grasses closing behind them as they veered from the road and lurched across cow paths. They drove to the center of a wide field and stopped. Old sweat, without the breeze of movement, prickled in the heat. A metal smell drifted, an untended apple grove baked on a hill, and the weeds droned, motory with bees. But Suljic noticed none of these, fixed instead on the gaps in the field where bodies, all dead, matted down the wild carrot and chicory, their khakis splotched darkly, like a fawn's dappled haunches obscuring them. The men clambered down into the tall grass and lined up at gunpoint. Suljic was sure the last good thing he'd ever see would be the apple branches drooping with fruit, but the man beside him grabbed his hand, and looked him in the face, as if Suljic, just a bricklayer, had any assurances to give. He squeezed the hand back, hard, and felt a scab crossing the man's knuckles. He saw, too, a thin scar worrying the arch of his left eyebrow, much older, perhaps from a fall as a child from a ladder picking fruit. His hand was like a clump of mortar, and three nights without sleep had webbed his eyes red. And Suljic suddenly stuttered to ask his name, what town was he from, his job—anything—but there came the crackle, like sometimes thunder, undecided whether to begin, that starts, stalls, then trips over itself, the sound crinkling from one end of the sky to the other. The sound took possession of his face until it, too, crinkled, his grip pulsed, and he fell forward. Suljic winced in the tackle of bodies, and splayed down in the dirt flattening himself like a beetle, not hurt in any new way, not yet convinced he wasn't dead and didn't feel it. He heard the click of fresh clips sliding into place, and shut his eyes lightly, sure someone had seen he wasn't shot and would come finish it. But no one came. Another truck rolled up. The men climbed down, and lined up, docilely. He recognized, solely by rhythm, a prayer, cut off by the crackle, the hush of crickets, the soft whump of bodies folding at the knees and knocked by bullets shoulder first into the grass. No one yelled. No one tried to run. Another truck, another group, falling like a succession of bricks sliding off a hod. Suljic finally pissed where he lay, and blended in all the better with the others. The noise stopped, and he cracked his eyes enough to see, across the backs like bleeding hills, a man strolling along the scatter of bodies with a pistol, putting a slug into the skull of anyone that still twitched or mumbled. Then came the snort and low-pitched rumble of diesel engines as two backhoes dug a trench along the margin of all the collapsed bodies. Impossibly, the crackling started anew, and when darkness finally settled, the squads continued in what light the backhoes' headlights threw. Perhaps the shooting was over long before the sound left him, the crackle to his eardrums was like the rolling of a boat to his limbs echoing long after he'd reached dry ground. The soldiers left. Still he didn't move, but eased his eyes full open. The moon above the orchard was shrinking higher, its light glossing the awkward pale forms that stubbled the dry weeds, glinting off teeth and eyes. He scuttled from beneath the arms and legs flopped sleepingly over his own, as though by drunkards or lovers, and rose like a foal to his numb feet, seeing throughout the field no man not touched by three dead others. He stood for a moment, trying to guess, even roughly, their number, multiplying bodies per square yard, but the math was too much, the count too huge. He stared at the faces beside him in the grass, like a man leaving something he knew he would someday have to return to, looking for the landmarks that would guide him— the crooked teeth, the welted cheek, the pale eyes eclipsed by half-shut lids, lolling upward, inward, swollen as though with weeping, blood from an unseen hole glistering down a chin line, crusting on lips. How could he explain his life, what could he say to those who weren't here to see, to the mothers and wives who'd swear for years their men were still alive, somewhere, the bodies never found, bulldozed into clay— would he tell them how he tiptoed, unable to avoid stepping on hands and ankles, or how the tears like a secret he'd harbored through three years of siege shook loose, and how he let them, no longer afraid of being found out and cut down by gunfire, or how he ran anyway, when he reached the open, quick as his bum leg would let him, without a look back at the faces turned like gourds in the dark mire.
All day they stream past, petitioners for understanding, accolade, critique. I read them all, a vast anthology of jumbled genres on a common theme: affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan. I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias; I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks. The perils of misreading harrow me— beware the treacheries of metaphor!— the elephant that squats upon a chest is not a burning heart or waterbrash. Just take the imagists. Their heads explode. St Elmo's fire flashdances on their limbs. They float, they swim. Knives twist within their flesh. They're ball-and-chained by lead, filled with concrete. Butterflies inhabit them. Their pipes are wrong, and clogged. Their systems freeze and crash. Invaded, they resist; defenses fail. What they need, they think, is you to flush it out of them, whatever it is, doc. The formalists present minutiae, in alphabetical enjambed iambs— pentameter's ten digits, five lub-dubs— from acne, backpain, catarrh, dandruff, eye- strain, flatfoot, gas pains, hangnail, itchiness, the jitters, kinks, lethargies, migraines, nose- bleeds, obstipation, panics, queasy retch- ings, styes and tremors, ulcers, vertigo, to wandering womb, xerosis, yaws and zits. Free versers, on the other hand, wax Walt Whitmanic: their barbaric yawps celebrate and sing incantatory songs of themselves, songs of the breath as it wheezes and rales through them, the short breath and long breath, the breath that is moist or dry, songs of the blood, the thick- and thinness of it, its heat, its turbulence, songs of the gut, its rippling coils, the dark burden of its secret indulgences, songs of the muscled limb, inflamed with toil or the languid thrash of love. Didacticists, of course, will always add their theories of omission or commission: slept in a draft, got their feet wet, caught a chill, forgot their overshoes and oversoul, ate too little roughage, too much ham, should have pumped less iron or pumped more,Mea culpa, meus morbus they intone, certain you'll absolve them back to health. Narrativists enshrine a fleeting pain within an epic of chronologyI woke at six—I'm a morning person—brushed my teeth, ate oatmeal with a patof low-fat margarine, the kind that hasthe dancing turkey on the tub, on salefor .99 at Johnnie's, by the time you tune back in it's afternoon, the pain has come and gone; they're vacuuming the rug, the doorbell rings, the kettle's whistling, you try to interrupt—where did you saythat pain was?—loquacity steamrolls on through supper, TV, bedtime, dreams, alarm clock going off at six. Try Tylenol, you say, your fingers crossed. Call if it's worse. Then there's the avant garde. The cutting edge. The text Munchausens off the sizzling page. Hypoglossalalia muscles in, between John Cagey silences, the din and Sturm of wild unsound, unsense. O, there are stranger dysphasias, Wernicke, than are dreamt of in your neurologies, mutant L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Es that cacophone far off the beaten geographic tongue, where elephants explode and overshoes fibrillate with longing—El Dorado, Shangri-la, Eden, Heaven, Hell—you name it, it's yours. And that's, of course, the joke. You nod. You say, "I understand." You really don't.
Camille Corot's painting, stolen from the Louvre, May 1998 It might have always been meant that they walked completely away, this man on horse, woman with basket. With their backs to us and the painter, they are so private. But like those stories where children step right into a picture and, looking over their shoulders, see the consoling frame, these two would know the way home like the palms of their hands, the routine so ordinary it most encloses, no need for thought, only motion and the full sensation of sun on your flesh, along the usual road.
I Tomorrow I will start to be happy. The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar. Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne. Today will end the worst phase of my life. I will put my shapeless days behind me, fencing off the past, as a golden rind of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land. It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today. Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.  II Australia, how wise you are to get the day over and done with first, out of the way. You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while we are dithering about which main course to choose. How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt: the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices are revealed to you before our bidding has begun. Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill. When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.  III Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018. A date without character or tone. 2018. A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature. Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed. Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely, vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual end-of-season sales; everything slashed: your last chance to salvage something of its style.
I sometimes find him in the attic, lying on his side, contemplating the insulation. Or just staring at the beams, trying to get the measure of force and distribution. He turns up a lot in the garage. I know he loves me. But if I look away for an instant, he's off, and I worry that he won't come back (or when he does he'll have no taste, gone in for some fad I'll have to bear, and every move he makes a test). But usually he's charming, following me to the cafe and lying on the awning so carefully as not to make it sag, only casting a slight shadow on my table. Of course I act as though I haven't seen a thing. He only wants, I think, to do what can't be done. Why just yesterday, for instance, I found him going through the public trash, figuring how to fill a bottle some angry drunk had smashed.
I passed by the school where I studied as a boy and said in my heart: here I learned certain things and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge, I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge, the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites. I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil, I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die. I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape we were seeing from the window. The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones. I remember the brief tumult of the two of us near the rickety steps, the tumult that was the beginning of a first great love. Now it outlives us, as if in a museum, like everything else in Jerusalem.
This sweater is made from only the finest, softest underhairs of the Mongolian camel. “Fancy-schmancy,” my father would have said,  whose snazziest sweater was still a declassé  synthetic from the sweatshops of Taiwan. My friend  Deloris, however, who really owns such clothes,  would say “exquisite” or “sublime”—her opened closet’s  row of shoulders teases late-day bedroomlight  along such textures, there are days when the laboring brain  and throbbing crotch appear to us to be not much more  than her wardrobe’s tasteful accessories. “. . . woven  from genital-down of prepubescent yeti, and then  hand-sewn in our undersea domes.” “Untouched  by anyone other than albino elves, this wool is . . . .” ______________Rarefied—to Helthi Hart, the diet guru, it’s  a cup of clear organic cauliflower broth. And for  the Emperor Excessia, it’s a mad dessert of swans’ tongues  —there were, what? ten thousand?—dipped in a slip  of stiffening honey and set out to await the banqueteers  like a field of fresh shoots they could graze.  Some Roman party hosts had great roped bowls of snow  brought from the mountaintops to entertain their guests  with dishes of rose-petal sherbet and chilled roe.  They might even allow the household slaves to slide  leftover snow along the burning welts the ropes ate  into their shoulders all down the mountainside.  ______________   Afterwards it was an unrecognizable tatter.  But an image of my father’s worn-thin Bargain City  “all-weather” jacket is still whole in its polyester glory.  This is what happened: the alley dog (he later called the thing  a “cur”) had cornered Livia, and she screamed once,  with a seven-year-old’s unselfconscious terror.  And then my father was there, with his jacket wound around his arm,  and a rock. When it was over, he tore the sleeves off, tied the poor dog  quiet and, after comforting Livia, they both kneeled down  to comfort the dog. He was like that. And the jacket  that served as weapon and restraint?—was like him,  every day of his life. It did what was needed.  ______________ I misread “migraine.” Which of the two  would we call the most rarefied? “Margarine”?  Or maybe comparison isn’t the point. A ghost  is a person rarefied through the fine, fine colander death; that doesn’t make, for most of us, extinction  an ideal. It was hard to think of Frank and Deloris  divorcing, since it was hard to imagine the two of them  engaging in anything so mundane as sex or rage or envy  with the rest of the hoi polloi. They seemed unearthly  in close to a literal way, like radio waves. And yet divorce they did. They found something real they could unjoin,  hertz from hertz until there just was air.  ______________ A dream: We own the softest of the soft  Mongolian camel underhair sweaters. One day  (we think we’re doing the “right thing”) we release it  into the wild, to romp with its brother and sister  desert sweaters, out where it “belongs.” You know, however, what happens by now: it’s unfit  to fend for itself amid that hardened herd.  They beat it. It’s hungry. It crawls back  into the city, mewing, curling up at night against a door  my father opens and, seeing something in need, brings it inside,  wraps it in flannel. That’s how he was.  He’d give you the cheap shirt off his back.
For Hayden Carruth Thought thrusts up, homely as a hyacinth  wrapped in its bulb like a root-vegetable,  a ninth-month  belly, where the green indelible  pattern's inscribed into the labyrinth.  Thrust into light, it's air's inhabitant  with light and air as food and drink.  A hyacinth, tumescent pink  on the low wooden Mexican chest  confronts the wintry dusk  with informed self-interest.  Leaf-spears extravagantly ask  what idea, still gnarled up in a knot  of ganglions, will break through the husk  shaped at last, recognizable as thought.  •   Trace, on a city map, trajectories  of partially-forgotten words  along the river's arteries,  volatile substance of a sentient world.  Mauve heather crowds the window-grill. The light  lingers a little later, with a slight  vernal inflection. In a moon-glazed vase  bloom yellow freesias, like some rainy day's  brook-bank, in someone else's memory.  Small whirlpools of perception widen, ring  an infant's numinous discoveries  of syllables for animals, toys, trees:  a Lab's thick coat, the dusty birds  in Claremont Park each tardy urban spring,  a stuffed pink leather horse with button eyes.  •   A question-mark in yellow overalls,  I could read. I was three.  I slept with that pink horse. My one doll's  name was V. J. She'd been given to me  to celebrate the Victory  over Japan, that is to say, the Bomb  I'd spend my schooldays taking shelter from.  I couldn't tie my shoes. But Reddy the fox,  Tootle the engine who jumped off the tracks,  spelled me their stories on my mother's lap  despite weak eyes and poor small-motor skills.  My grandparents were dead: not in pogroms,  not in the camps—of strokes and heart attacks,  merely immigrants, not deportees.  "When you die, does everything just stop?"  •   I'm four, in itchy woolen leggings,  the day that I can't recognize the man  down at the park entrance, waving,  as my father. He has ten  more years to live, that spring. Dapper and balding  he walks toward me; then I run toward him, calling  him, flustered by my flawed vision.  Underfoot, the maples' green-  winged seeds splay on mica-specked octagons.  His round face, thin nose, moustache silvered gray  at thirty-eight look (I think now) Hungarian.  I like his wood-smell of two packs a day  as he swings me up to his shoulder  and I say, things look blurry far away  —one Saturday, two years after the war.
[SAROUK] We buy what we cannot control, the rugs, rhythm-makers, containing refrains of the oldest story: a man takes a journey. I have no stories inside me, he says, so travels on, to rest beneath a carpet of blue constellations, star patterns at the edges of disordered border walls. At the center, a meditative medallion makes a moving immortal-flowered ground: to live there is to give oneself over to greenness, redness, occasional blues, holding those spirits of woollen dyes rising from the knots within to breathe against the woven, multi-colored air. [BIDJAR] Now there is a coat of many colors hung around the wanderer's shoulders where he climbs out from that pit, down which he flung himself, or was thrown into. Reaching to soothe his wounds, he finds the dusts of centuries residing there beneath his feet, the hopeful travelers passing, wearing thin, fighting about how best to articulate the names of gods for whom they yearn—accursed by wars' helmet curves, shields, chained stitches of unmediated reds and yellowed husks of blood—broken lines marking a garden in whose precincts his journey began. [KAZAK] Three sunbursts spin, enigmatic energies through golden latchhooks, surrounding cloudbanks; three eagles, darting within their shifting images: they return him to streets of lit porches in summer dark, a boy stuttering over random syllables, a blindfolded man pleading for his life— whose fate is in the hands of some men whose fate is in the hands of other men, whose fate . . . until the whole pattern emerges, and the language becomes clear. On the floor lies his mother, moaning, until he comes out, guilty, before her— amid the mud of his own frozen blood. [SHIRVAN] To live inside such squares as the weaver of this green, becoming golden, labor; to pull back old skins and try to emerge, victorious, from that old prison after so many years, is to find a path back to harmonious designs, surely centered on the search—yet still speaking of a life with knotted figures seen as suffering variations on themes that can be inferred from small vibrations of weft and warp, the ‘snakes' within the threads worn down to the shapes of ribbons, even rhythms writhing in a loom of days: those humming ancient instruments whose music seems [SHIRAZ] raw as colors governed by the earth, pink as brick, or deserts scraped from rock, rough clay slowly grinding, then drifting down the slopes of the central plateaus to fresh respites from thinner regions of dessication fixed at the fringes below. These lands lie under the ache of desire, which calls feet out to play upon sand, to fill each new hollow, and dance about, tongues turning on the knots of umber, ochre, woven into those undulating waves others might summon in flowery manners to escape from bitter orange, still held by recalcitrant fingers, to the purple [KERMAN] empowering all those who try to hold on— as all things will hold to themselves an idea of themselves—to an aspiration towards good fortune, unwavering even unto death. Yet here are dusky passages, canopies of clearness, an everlasting understanding of the earth as cancerous points of coloration, acid starbursts, or dangerous blots—all blurring the way to move past sight: perspectives lost and found again, symmetrical, surrounded by the momentos one saves from travel, old friends, like hues that may betoken, in hopefulness, some changes of heart. [SENNEH] This creates a powerful language about how to levitate a plane—for even as the occasional murmurs of new machines are heard in the land, as old cyclic gardens arrange themselves in the whorls and tendrils throughout tilled fields, snakes hold up this world in variations of light blue skies above temptation. Even when an illiterate weaver mistakes an old date for the design, then dyes and binds strange numbers into a ground, the change of the serif, for instance, in a calligraphy of days marks the date of cartouches as mysterious, unknown. [KASHAN] Yet the signals from the borders suggest a different tale: lozenges are bottles strewn along mauve and terra cotta roads, shaped like a woman found lying along the side of those same roads—the figure of flesh, going nowhere but endlessly back on itself—as a web of years frames a dying kind of certitude, innocence. The birds in these cages signify singing, as the tapestries of perfected threads suggest reticence, chosen intermediaries to the indeterminancy of all creation: and we can buy it yet, articulate or not, with each new freeing of our hearts.
I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha, Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk under my feet, Sky light above me, Chinese and Indian rugs on the floor. 1 March, 1998, where to begin again? Over there's the ur-photograph, Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Looking hard at four objects— Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase, A universe of form and structure, The universe constricting in front of his eyes, angelic orders And applications scraped down To paint on an easel stand, some in the frame, some not. Bologna, my friend, Bologna, world's bit and world's end. _________ It's only in darkness you can see the light, only From emptiness that things start to fill, I read once in a dream, I read in a book under the pink Redundancies of the spring peach trees. Old fires, old geographies. In that case, make it old, I say, make it singular In its next resurrection, White violets like photographs on the tombstone of the yard. Each year it happens this way, each year Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms, puts down its luggage And says—in the same costume, down-at-heels, badly sewn— I bring you good news from the other world. _________ One hand on the sun, one hand on the moon, both feet bare, God of the late Mediterranean Renaissance Breaststrokes across the heavens. Easter, and all who've been otherwised peek from their shells, Thunderheads gathering at the rear abyss of things, Lightning, quick swizzle sticks, troubling the dark in-between. You're everything that I'm not, they think, I'll fly away, Lord, I'll fly away. April's agnostic and nickel-plated and skin deep, Glitter and bead-spangle, haute couture, The world its runway, slink-step and glide. Roll the stone slowly as it vogues and turns, roll the stone slowly. _________ Well, that was a month ago. May now, What's sure to arrive has since arrived and been replaced, Snick-snack, lock and load, grey heart's bull's-eye, A little noon music out of the trees, a sonatina in green. Spring passes. Across the room, on the opposite wall, A 19th century photograph Of the Roman arena in Verona. Inside, stone tiers and stone gate. Over the outer portico, the ghost of Catullus at sky's end. The morning and evening stars never meet, nor summer and spring: Beauty has been my misfortune, hard journey, uncomfortable resting place. Whatever it is I have looked for Is tiny, so tiny it can dance in the palm of my hand. _________ This is the moment of our disregard— just after supper, Unseasonable hail in huddles across the porch, The dogs whimpering, thunder and lightning eddying off toward the east, Nothing to answer back to, nothing to dress us down. Thus do we slide into our disbelief and disaffection, Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives, Bad weather, bad dreams. Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise. So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it— The more that we think we understand, the less we see, Back yard becoming an obelisk Of darkness into the sky, no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.
Standing in line at the SuperSave, it all falls Into place, Princess Di and the aliens and diet Tips from outer space, King Tut and King Elvis, Out of the subfusc air, the rank urgency of dusk, Among the heavy odors of differing dungs, Acrid signatures of urine, the bold perfume of musk . . . Nostradamus, this year's senate race, unforeseen Links between absolutely everything and sex, Conspiracies requiring conspiracy to be detected, From a sibilance of scattered leaves, the sudden Snap of twig, inflections of a gabbling breeze, Horizons stained with dust, the attitude of trees . . . And O my fellow shoppers waiting to check out, What appetite is this that drives such dim belief, What thirst for intercourse between these banal bits? From the cacophony of birds as from abrupt silence, Odd sounds of usual insects, subliminal presence Of added shadow, faintest trembling in the ground . . . When greed and accident stand ever ready to explain, Whence this convolvulus of tenuous connection? What need for the devious when the obvious will do? From remarkable weeds, from a slight imbalance In the normal proportion of game, from distressed bark, Out of the bewildering swirl of importunate sense . . . Attention, shoppers, there lies a veldt within us each, Its grasses rustle with intent, and on that plain Was born the fine suspicion that has carried us so far, To behold the unassuming fact and comprehend design, To look upon confusion and construct its plot and act, To leap at merest notion found floating in the mind . . . Has brought us to these sheltered aisles under thin gray light, Where in boredom and abundance we seek our narrative, Whatever tale comes now to kill us and can creep.
From the kindness of my parents I suppose it was that I held that belief about suffering imagining that if only it could come to the attention of any person with normal feelings certainly anyone literate who might have gone to college they would comprehend pain when it went on before them and would do something about it whenever they saw it happen in the time of pain the present they would try to stop the bleeding for example with their own hands but it escapes their attention or there may be reasons for it the victims under the blankets the meat counters the maimed children the animals the animals staring from the end of the world
The night the world was going to end when we heard those explosions not far away and the loudspeakers telling us about the vast fires on the backwater consuming undisclosed remnants and warning us over and over to stay indoors and make no signals you stood at the open window the light of one candle back in the room we put on high boots to be ready for wherever we might have to go and we got out the oysters and sat at the small table feeding them to each other first with the fork then from our mouths to each other until there were none and we stood up and started to dance without music slowly we danced around and around in circles and after a while we hummed when the world was about to end all those years all those nights ago
Basilica of San Zeno Maggiore, Verona A chubby fist and wing  float free, severed  from the landscape of human affairs.  Below, a barefoot saint  seems to straddle acres, beaming  casual self-possession, the divine  right to stake eternal claim—but  in the space between  both legs, a third intrudes,  last remnant of a man fading  to white dust. Nine hundred years ago  this wall was his. Reduced  to a toehold, he now spites  the fourteenth-century arriviste,  holding his ground with the ghost  of what he was. The saint remains  oblivious. Centuries sweep  around him like planets' rings;  the church's wheel-of-fortune  spins rose light  through plague and war.  Yet so vivid  are his blue and russet robes,  he glistens—a refugee  from a sun shower  who's arrived dripping wet, an idea  fresh from the brush of his maker.
I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere, from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro, from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla, I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World, I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God! in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains, concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy. I've arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get? With what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with the three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves over my very own zero, my own non-existence? Pity that brave heart awaiting its call or the man enfolded by warmer love, nothing's left today except my flimsy skeleton, my eyes unhinged, confronting the era's beginning. The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks, these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters, this cloddish insecurity of my poor families, is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door? Well, enough said, I, at least, discreet, as in office, patched and pensive, I proclaim the redundancy of the inaugural: I've arrived here with all my baggage, bad luck and worse jobs, misery always waiting with open arms, the mobilization of people piled up on top of each other, and the manifold geography of hunger.
One of the objects I've treasured most in my life  Is this letter scale which, long ago, you gave me.  I was an active correspondent at the time,  Even sending lots of letters overseas.  While still enjoying the pleasure of going to the post,  I now had another: assessing exactly, in advance,  At my counter, the cost of packets and envelopes,  To which, price list in hand, I stuck my stamps.  I use it less these days, this quite simple device  Graded with little marks up to a whole pound,  For my mailings rarely still exceed the price  Of an ordinary stamp. The tray of polished metal's now  Covered with dust, without the slightest hint  That the red pointer marking the weight on the front  Has budged. But in the long run, one would, I think,  Discern a difference and see how much the months  Were worth in terms of dust, the seasons elapsed  Since the previous weighing. But having been seized,  Suddenly, just this morning, by a tremendous attack  (Annual) of cleaning, from which nothing is released,  I restored to the tray's slightly concave stainless steel,  That ever so slightly distorted mirror, its polished shine.  It reflected all of the sky, through which clouds reeled,  And I could confirm that space does not weigh more than time.
Butter, like love,  seems common enough  yet has so many imitators.  I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,  and glimpsed what seemed like skin  beneath a corner of its wrap;  the décolletage revealed  a most attractive fat!  And most refined.  Not milk, not cream,  not even crème de la crème.  It was a delicacy which assured me  that bliss follows agitation,  that even pasture daisies  through the alchemy of four stomachs  may grace a king's table.  We have a yellow bowl near the toaster  where summer's butter grows  soft and sentimental.  We love it better for its weeping,  its nostalgia for buckets and churns  and deep stone wells,  for the press of a wooden butter mold  shaped like a swollen heart.
How do they survive, riven as they are, the one undoing the other's desire? Tell the body to outrun the mind, and the mind smirks, whispering too loudly this way this way, blocking all the exits. And the body, luxurious sensualist by pool side or in bed, doesn't it hear the mind's impatient machinery ticking it's time it's time? And only in our mind's eye, as we're fond of saying, someone else's body leaping nimbly in jetés of thought, or revealing to us Act V, scene iii in one gestural flourish, body and mind beautifully synchronous. Oh, the mind is eely, slipping out of its puzzle boxes, loving its own wit. And the earnest body: speak of it with the least irony, and already you've begun to unnerve it. Better to let them have their way, forgetting about them both until they meet again sometime as if for the first time in library or steam room ready to shake hello or lead you to whatever door there is and always the two sets of stairs.
The afternoon slows down, the town in steady rain.  That one with the trendy chicken-plucked look—  hair a tufted circle on top, the rest shaved all around—  I can't really care about. Of course I hope  he grows up without totalling himself and his car,  but he's the clown in this act. He seems even  to know his place as unworthy twerpy follower  of the one no one would look away from for long,  whose James Dean stance, hands deep in pockets  of a rattily natty maroon corduroy blazer,  shoves his shoulders nearly to his ears.  Beneath the blazer, long sulked-in jeans,  oversized black boots. He lifts one  to kick a milkshake someone couldn't finish  standing on the sidewalk, and it lands on  its side, explodes and rolls a vanilla graffito,  expletive unfurling. Expressionless himself.  The other boy smirks before the rain douses  and sweeps it stupidly into the gutter.  Even if I were not invisible through this darkish window,  they would know how to erase me. Well, he would.  I would enjoy that, just to see how he would do it,  what sort of panache he'd pack in his shrug.  Raining harder, and the tuft-headed one shifts  unhappily under the Revco awning, pivoting  his whole body now and then to see what the one  I'm half in love with's doing, fifteen, maybe sixteen:  he's twitching in sublime irritation, lighting up  again, hard to do with both hands in your pockets  but he pretty much manages no problem, and now  comes the move that gets me. He strides out  from under the awning, a spotted Lucky sticking straight  from his lip, walks two buildings down and turns  at the corner so his back's to Main Street and me,  stands, his twitch becalmed at last, stands  without heeding his friend's pleading  jeering calls, you idiot, you idiot, you idiot, stands hunched, not looking up or down,  and I can tell this is his moment, this is where  he'll break off, he's going to unload everyone,  he doesn't blink as he hawks up their nothingness  and spits, feeling himself filling with what's left:  he takes possession of his spirited bad luck for good  and mounts and rides it without moving a muscle, stands  letting the rain collect behind his collar and drench  his gloriously inappropriately maroon corduroy  and his hair that looks not combable by anyone  alive, wild and bunched even when the rain  has patted keeps patting at it harder and harder  like an obsolete humiliated hand that wants to  feed and fend for and in general do for him,  and he has turned his back at last on the clown,  and on Main Street full of clowns you can both see  and not see, who wouldn't dare try to keep an eye on him  or try to follow him from now on.
Someone called in a report that she had  seen a man painting in the dark over by the  pond. A police car was dispatched to go in-  vestigate. The two officers with their big  flashlights walked all around the pond, but  found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the  younger of the two, and he said to Johnson,  "What do you think he was painting?" Johnson  looked bemused and said, "The dark, stupid.  What else could he have been painting?" Hatcher,  a little hurt, said, "Frogs in the Dark, Lily-  pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as  many things exist in the dark as they do in the light." Johnson paused, exasperated. Then  Hatcher added, "I'd like to see them. Hell,  I might even buy one. Maybe there's more out  there than we know. We are the police, after-  all. We need to know."
Back when I used to be Indian I am standing outside the pool hall with my sister. She strawberry blonde. Stale sweat and beer through the open door. A warrior leans on his stick, fingers blue with chalk. Another bends to shoot. His braids brush the green felt, swinging to the beat of the jukebox. We move away. Hank Williams falls again in the backseat of a Cadillac. I look back. A wind off the distant hills lifts my shirt, brings the scent of wounded horses.
Something expired. At the turning,  A spirit was gone. That which was  Turned to sepia: high collars, punting,  Waxed mustaches, parasols.  From bridges, children stared in the river  And felt themselves, also, halved.  Old manners were patently over.  New manners had not yet arrived.  The old, without waiting to speak  Their parting lines in the act,  Learned to exit the way of pipe-smoke.  Uttered nothing. Utter tact.  Steamy ghosts rose from horses'  Maws as they champed at their bits.  The ladies reached for their purses.  The gentlemen tipped their hats.
For S. S. She reads by the light of a guttering candle  and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge  as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying  herself to turn it. If the wind whips  the sycamore branches outside her window,  if her nightgowned shoulders shudder once  from a sudden chill, so much the better,  and the book must tell of children toiling  for bread and pennies in a textile mill,  or tender brothers doomed to sharpen  their bayonets in opposing armies,  or a family of refugees, dust  in their mouths, gazing with longing at the far  shore of a river. And I long only  to be the author of that book she reads  whose page glows from the same dim  flame that illuminates her face,  the author whose thought she contemplates  as she touches a fingertip to a word  to mark her place and turns her head  toward the kettle that has begun to whistle.
The long road south, the pavement flat and black as a dash without end, no signs, no houses, the heat like an unseen fog and the sun a swollen crimson clot above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose sporadic and unwieldy, the miles of pasture where cattle of every conceivable color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed and nursed their stumbling young, heavy heads bent to the ground. And insects that crashed against windshield so tiny, no body was left behind. Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee and the shock of iron-red flecks against bowl, the water placid, unmoved. There was hardly any pain. What could we do but continue on as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed a landscape inhabited once again: the still shuttered windows of bungalows pink as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes, the closed, expectant mailboxes and the living already dead inside me.
In the Metro Toronto Zoo
For R. L. B. For all the far-flung continents he'd crossed,  Revealing lands they found beyond belief;  For all the roads that lay behind him, lost  In caverns of some atavistic grief  He'd carried with him since he was a boy;  For all the years, he should be weary now.  How then could he explain this welling joy,  A old man on a wintry beach? Or how  It seemed the wind bore perfumes of a whole  New wilderness, a lush and green Brazil  Over the dim horizon of his soul,  Farther than memory, beyond his will,  Where even now, in vibrant canopies,  The twilight songs of bird to hidden bird  Rose up in wild, untutored harmonies  More lovely for their never being heard.
Cabbages, beans and bell peppers vie  for the glossy centerfold of Nature's Hand where this month the vulgar Hubbard squash  reclines with succotash of questionable origin.  I've grown to prize passivity; I've learned the word  "vegetable" comes from Medieval Latin—  vegetabilis, and vegetare which means "to animate, to grow,"  though I can think of half a dozen ways to squander  an afternoon as Destry Rides Again, Dietrich and Stewart... and my doctor friend Lenny who calls to tell me  that broccoli has a nervous system, that it suffers  when you pick it. If form follows function,  it stands to reason that pain is the fate of all "brainy" things—  cauliflower, coral and raspberry clumps, the florets that sizzle  in my spiced tahini. I've heard potatoes  described as "thuggy and plotless," but never "aristocratic"  as it says on page seven's "The Stately Spud,"  where tubers possess an enviable pedigree,  popular back to 4000 b.c. when Incas made urns  in the shape of russets—  long reds, round reds and Yukon Golds,  best for sautéing, excellent in frittatas.  Don't get me wrong. I'm all for ambition,  but some days I'd rather steep in my own kettle.  Give me chamomile, cowboys, cornelian cherries.  Let me sink, once again, into purposeless sleep.
Soon the glass angel must be  Wrapped and packed and put away,  And this hard year swept out  Like tinsel from the Christmas tree—  The end of December, aromatic  In its homely smoke, and the thin limbs  Of maple and ash, the pipecleaner pines,  Brushing themselves against  The cold carbons of evening.  I've watched the ice turn  Little knifeblades in the grass.  Sly beneath them, the mole  Knows what to do with dirt—  Shoulder it aside, crumb by claw,  And build a city deep,  A labyrinth of dark  Under the stone and the root.  I think I could live there.  I think I could make  A music of my own. Thinking  Makes a music of its own.  You can hear it when  Some stray phrase stumbles down  The rabbit hole, a few words  That broke from the brain  And won't go back, always  One step ahead of the real.  But what's in the way  To the way in? God,  That desperate explanation,  Mentor and tormentor, giving us  The duties of paradise,  Obligations of the saved?  And is my way in  This abyss of the belly, where they  Tied the first knot in my life?  Even the virgin must have felt  The postpartum blues, crazy enough  To pin sweet curls in her hair,  Shavings she picked up from  The floor of the carpenter's shop.  I think I can still hear  The baby wailing. Or is that cry  The dead beating on their graves  For the earth to open— And to let them out, or to let us in?
When fall brought the graders to Atlas Road,  I drove through gray dust thick as a battle  and saw the ditch freshly scattered with gravel.  Leveling, shaving on the bevel, the blade  and fanged scraper had summoned sleepers—  limestone loaves and blue slate, skulls of quartz  not even early freeze had roused. Some rocks  were large as buckets, others just a scone  tumbled up and into light the first time  in ages. Loose, sharp, they were a hazard  to anyone passing. So I gathered  what I could, scooped them into the bed  and trucked my freight away under birdsong  in my own life's autumn. I was eager  to add to the snaggled wall bordering  my single acre, to be safe, to be still  and watch the planet's purposeful turning  behind a cairn of roughly balanced stones.  Uprooted, scarred, weather-gray of bones,  I love their old smell, the familiar unknown.  To be sure this time I know where I belong  I have brought, at last, the vagrant road home.
(to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
You could grow into it, that sense of living like a dog, loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin, able to exist only for the sake of existing. Nothing inside your head lasting long enough for you to hold onto, you watch your own thoughts leap across your own synapses and disappear— small boats in a wind, fliers in all that blue, the swish of an arm backed with feathers, a dress talking in a corner, and then poof, your mind clean as a dog’s, your body big as the world, important with accident— blood or a limp, fur and paws. You swell into survival, you take up the whole day, you’re all there is, everything else is not you, is every passing glint, is shadows brought to you by wind, passing into a bird’s cheep, replaced by a rabbit skittering across a yard, a void you yourself fall into. You could make this beautiful, but you don’t need to, living is this fleshy side of the bone, going on is this medicinal smell of the sun— no dog ever tires of seeing his life keep showing up at the back door even as a rotting bone with a bad smell; feet tottering, he dreams of it, wakes and licks no matter what.
Birdsongs that sound like the steady determined tapping  of a shoemaker's hammer,  or of a sculptor making tiny ball-peen dents in a silver plate,  wake me this morning. Is it possible the world itself can be happy? The calico cat  stretches her long body out across the top of my computer monitor,  yawning, its little primitive head a cave of possibility.  And I'm ready again  to try and see accidents, the over and over patterns  of double-slit experiments a billionfold  repeated before me. If I had great patience,  I could try to count the poplar, birch and oak  leaves in their shifting welter outside my bedroom window  or the almost infinitesimal trails of thought that flash and flash  everywhere, as if decaying particles inside a bubble chamber, windshield raindrops, lake ripples. However,  instead I go to fry some bacon, crack two eggs  into the cast-iron skillet that's even older than this house,  and on the calendar (each month another oriental fan  where the climbing solitary is dwarfed . . . or on dark blue oceans  minuscular fishing boats bob beneath gigantic waves)  X out the days, including those I've forgotten.
I have become the smaller flag on a ship,  the shorter rafters of a roof, a knave  in a pack of cards. I wear a skimpy coat,  tall leather boot, and leather drinking flask.  I am captured in a child's game  and hit when grown men gamble.  I am what they call a tame ape. I was a common man  whose job was to lift weight.  Mechanical devices that replaced  my muscles took my job and pay  and more—they took my human name.  And I, who used to pull  my master's boots, hoist meat  and turn the spit, work the roller  and the winch, climb the steeple,  strike the bell and connect lines  in telephone exchange, am a daw,  the tiniest of crows, gathering  loose sticks to nest in castle ruins.  The solace of six centuries—and still— is once, on a high and windy hill,  beside a well that was clear and full,  I kissed a girl named Gylle.
Did you sneeze?  Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me.  Did you iron your shirt?  Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate.  Did you wash your hands?  Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon.  I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain.  I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was.  I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name.  I walked to my interview, early,  The sun like a ring on an electric stove.  I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door.  The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor.  The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza  In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator,  Empty because everyone had a job but me.  Did you clean your ears?  Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel. Did you slice a banana into your daily mush?  I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath.  Did you remember your pen?  I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened.  I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea.  I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name.  Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs.  Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove,  All of us pushing papers  To keep it going.
Carpaccio, San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice You are amazed to find trees in Venice — To turn a corner into a campo Where two or three rustling acacias Spread their halo of leaves Over two or three red-slatted benches. It’s as if you had slipped through a curtained doorway Into a hall full of dull gold scenes By Carpaccio — a miraculous light — Though the rio’s still shrouded in a mist Compounded of water vapour and smog So it’s not that the sun has come out, it’s Something to do with the leaves and painting In the realm of echoes where footsteps Reverberate endlessly between two walls And dawn is the chink of a stonemason At his reparations, disembodied Voices irresistible as bird calls. Yes, you’re amazed to find trees in Venice Shedding their gold leaf onto the pavement Outside a secondhand bookstore. It’s like Carpaccio’s little white dog Wagging his tail at the feet of Saint Augustine Who is staring out of the window Looking for the voice of Saint Jerome.
Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello Mater dolorosa, here I am hungry And ill-disposed on worn flags at your feet. Through high windows wintry sun seeps in And floods the six-tiered polychrome Apocalypse, This Sunday's text in comic strip. That's my son over by the door, impatient To be off somewhere. Other boys pose On attila's Throne while their fathers snap pictures And mothers price lace - clotheslines of lace Strung from trucks selling pizzas. Around the lagoon, your fields have grown wild; Vines redden on half-fallen fences That no longer keep the allotments apart. On some islands the women make lace, punti in aria - stitches in air -  Materializing the spaces between things.
It's not exile, homes and families behind  us, where we meet. It happens anywhere,   now: a stateless  state of no name, quietly seceding  from the crumbling empires round us,  without stamps or Eurovision entries.  No-one does it with a rough guide in a week.   You inhabit it  or nothing. Like this: in a pavement cafe  you blink and you seem to surprise them,  the crowd, all its separate faces at once,  coming out of solution like crystals,   like a rush of starlings  or the breeze that lifts the canvas awning  now and dents your cappuccino froth  with a crisp little sound. And that's it:  between breaths, just between you and me   as if; yes,  QED. You are received. This is  the freedom of the city, and the key  to the kingdom, and its borders ripple  outwards like a frill of breaking wave   onto flat sand,  a wavering line already fading leaving  spume-flecks high and dry,  a prickling on your palm; you're five  years old, looking up at the whole sea,   unsure:   will you laugh or cry?
I tried one or two but they were stale and broke like sticks or crumbled when I rolled them and lighting a match was useless nor could I put them back in the refrigerator— it was too late for that—even licking them filled my mouth with ground-up outer leaf, product of Lancaster or eastern Virginia, so schooled I am with cigars, it comes in the blood, and I threw handfuls of them into the street from three floors up and, to my horror, sitting on my stoop were four or five street people who ran to catch them as if they were suddenly rich, and I apologize for that, no one should be degraded that way, my hands were crazy, and I ran down to explain but they were smoking already nor did I have anything to give them since we were living on beans ourselves, I sat and smoked too, and once in a while we looked up at the open window, and one of us spit into his empty can. We were visionaries.
I wait for my shadow to forget me,  to take that one phantom step that I keep  from taking. I wait for the simple flash  of a dancer's spat upon this one moon  of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval  illuminated on the surface of some  windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe  practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush in its constant audition of sawdust.  Even this choreography of useless  wishing is not enough to keep tonight  from becoming nothing more than some floor's  forgotten routine where faded, numbered  dance-steps silently waltz themselves away.  The orchestra's now ready to Fauré into the evening's last song while I try  to convince myself to cross this room  for the first time all night and rinse  what's left in some débutante's silver  sequined waterfall, hope keeling hopelessly  ever closer to the edge. Across the floor  other couples sashay on. A tin flask empties  itself from asking, the shadow's last chance  now wasted in some chandelier's dim lust.
O! wonderful for weight and whiteness!   Ideolog whose absolutes   Are always proven right   By white and then   More white and white again,   Winning the same argument year  After year by making the opposition   Disappear!  O! dear miniature of infinity with no   End in sight and no snow-   Flake exactly like   Another, all   A little different no   Matter how many may fall,  Just like our own DNA or the human face   Eternal!  O! still keep covering the street   And sidewalks, cemeteries, even   Our twice-shoveled drive,   And all that is alive,   With geometries that sleet   Will freeze into Death's  Impromptu vision of a heaven   Wholly white!  For we know who your sponsor is, whose will   You so immensely serve,   Whose chill is more severe   Than any here.   Though his name may be unspoken,   His commandments are unbroken,  And every monument that you erect   Belongs to him!
Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— slipped, maybe, from some kid's wrist or a rushed lover's empty front seat through a half-cracked car window— rises like a shiny purple cloudlet toward today's gray mess of clouds, trailing its gold ribbon like lightning that will never strike anything or anyone here on the forsaken ground, its bold LOVE increasingly illegible as it ascends over the frozen oaks, riding swift currents toward the horizon, a swollen word wobbling out of sight.
His last composed poem, "Over My Head,"   closes with the evening tide  coming in as the light fails over Brighton Beach.  In the years of The Great Plague,   he lived with his mother and brother  and wrote the Elegies that remain unpublished,  under the eaves in an unfinished room above   his mother's late-night television vigil.  He wrote to a ghostly laugh-track  in the night. Though he cut out and saved   lurid, five-color magazine pictures  of The South Pacific, The Aegean; though  he hoped for a winter crossing by steamer   until his final weakness set in,  underneath he was a city boy  whose poems drifted like a dinghy   in small inlets—Gravesend, Rockaway—  out too far for safety, in sight of land.
Sure, she says, why not, we buy the ground lamb from the market we buy parsley, fresh tomatoes, garlic we cut, press, dice, mix make the yeasty dough the night before, kneading it until our knuckles feel the hardness of river beds or rocks in the desert we tell Tante Lola to come with her rolling pins we tell Zaven and Maroush, Hagop and Arpiné to bring their baking sheets we sprinkle the flour on the kitchen table and it is snowing on Ararat we sprinkle the flour and the memory of winter is in our eyes we roll the dough out into small circles pale moons over every empty village Kevork is standing on a chair and singing O my Armenian girl my spirit longs to be nearer Nevrig is warming the oven and a dry desert breeze is skimming over the rooftops toward the sea we are spreading the lahma on the ajoun with our fingers whispering into it the histories of those who have none we are baking them under the heat of the sun the dough crispening so thin and delicate you would swear it is valuable parchment we are taking out and rolling up in our hands and eating and tasting again everything that has already been written into the body.
Haze of wave spume towards Small Point,   Seguin Island Light like a whale's spout—  maybe life washes itself here, cools off.   It never comes clean. See all the sails up  and full in the windy parade of skin   and sand and brine. Soon the rocks will pluck  each wave's feathers. Soon the beach   like the moon, waning, will be 1/8th its size.  Somewhere else—maybe Ireland—the tide   will bottom out then. For now the sun  blesses the bodies at home in theirs,   and those less so, to ruin and ruin's aftermath—  whatever that is—and the waves rolling in,   little snowplows, nimbus in miniature; how  the beach fishhooks east, one child—   is that mine, or some spirit I was one more  usher of?—face up, arms and legs   scraping a temporary angel in the sand.
the relationship between blackbird and fencepost, between the cow and its egret, the field and wildflowers overrunning the field— so little depends upon their trust. Here, in God we trust to keep our cash and thoughts in line— in the sky, an unexplained white line could be the first of many omens. But this is no country for omens, the line as chalky as the moon, bleak and useless as the moon now rising like a breath of cold air . . . There is gullibility in the air.
Doors opened and shut, the director shouted orders through a bullhorn, or babbled just out of the frame. A carpenter hammered flats nearby for the next production. All of this, and more, while the actors blocked it out, already living in that small square of light where silence reigned like a tiny theatre for the deaf. Now, almost a century later, it's peaceful, far from the center of action, the last voice on the street reduced to a whisper, then gone. Not even birdsong as evening's opening credits begin to roll. Only the film, shimmering out of a disc thinner than sound, characters moving like fish in their gray element— less than fish— not a hiss, not a bubble, not even a cry from that dim world of silence doubled by time.
It may seem morbid of an embezzler to keep a memorandum, yet many of them do. It may be mere neatness. -Wallace Stevens, "Surety and Fidelity Claims" I've made a little sluice-gate in the flow  of cash across the spreadsheet on my screen.  Amid torrential chaos and foreseen  disasters it maintains its small and slow  on-off diversions, so my work can show  the delicacy of difference between  the beans I count and one uncounted bean,  and where the latter might invisibly go.  The hollowed shoe-tree, the hermetic jar  are gadgetry I might revert to yet.  There is the money of the thing, the far  secure retirement years, the deep-hedged bet,  but I love working where the unknowns are,  and writing down what I need to forget.
It's never enough being one. Why do I hopeto contain you: always undoing and undone;every place you touch me changes shape.It's not my way to just lie down;to sink, effaced and full. If you swallow me, you're drained, and halfof us is gone. Desire's fulfillment is two,not one, or our tidal meetings are through.So hurl your wet force forward, sea,take me wave by wave. Pearl maker, pullme deep; our one's a need, a momentarybliss. What I erect, you spill— castles, boulders, cliffs. My love's endurancegrain by grain; your adoration's rain.Touch my bones, my canyon's carved evidence.Even the moon who moves you is stone.
We visit by phone as the morphine haze retreats, late afternoon, most days. Our mingled past is set against the pin- hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets: we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz, honors students carrying heavy course loads tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding our virginities on the altar of inverse pride, ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders, ensigns in training for the Second World War in the Business School across the Charles River. We called ourselves the Unholy Four. Whenever any three of us met on campus we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia! in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit! Post graduation one year, look at us: my new husband atop your even newer one's car singing the bawdy verses of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor while the scandalized uncles and aunties —it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese— wrung their hands. You drove off trailing Just Married in two languages. Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say, only days. It is my plan to go with you as far as the border. I've been that far— Did I come back from there morally improved? Somehow better equipped to support you this side of the douane and wave, your two cats curled like commas beside you as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?
In my great grandmother's time, All one needed was a broom To get to see places And give the geese a chase in the sky. • The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence. • Oh Cynthia, Take a clock that has lost its hands For a ride. Get me a room at Hotel Eternity Where Time likes to stop now and then. • Come, lovers of dark corners, The sky says, And sit in one of my dark corners. There are tasty little zeroes In the peanut dish tonight.
I "One Snodgrass, two Snodgrass, three Snodgrass, four . . . I took my own rollcall when I counted seconds; "One two three, Two two three, Three . . .," the drum score Showed only long rests to the tympani's entrance. "Oh-oh-oh leff; leff; leff-toh-righ-toh-leff," The sergeant cadenced us footsore recruits; The heart, poor drummer, gone lame, deaf, Then AWOL, gets frogmarched to the noose. II Old coots, at the Veterans', might catch breath If their cheeks got slapped by a nurse's aide, Then come back to life; just so, at their birth, Young rumps had been tendered warm accolades. The kick-ass rude attitude, smart-assed insult, The acid-fueled book review just might shock Us back to the brawl like smelling salts, Might sting the lulled heart up off its blocks. III I thought I'd always favor rubato Or syncopation, scorning fixed rhythms; Thought my old heartthrobs could stand up to stress; Believed one's bloodpump should skip a few beats If it fell into company with sleek young women; Believed my own bruit could beat with the best. Wrong again, Snodgrass! This new gold gadget, Snug as the watch on my wife's warm wrist, Drives my pulsetempo near twice its old pace— Go, nonstop startwatch! Go, clockwork rabbit, Keeping this lame old dog synchronized, Steady, sparked up, still in the race.
Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it,  my zither on a double looking feeble  as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless,  my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks  ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile  upon me with some ses or some blanks.  January, Vermont: snowflakes teased the windows  of the Burlington airport bar. The waitress  tallied tips & channel-surfed above the amber  stutter of the snowplow's light: it couldn't  keep up, either. Visibility to zero, nothing taking off  & his dulcimer before me (50 bonus points  for "bingos") like a cautionary tale. The night  before I'd been his warm up act,  the audience of expensive preppies  doubling to twenty when he shambled  to the podium to give them Martial  & his then-new poems. "Why do you write  something nobody reads anymore?" queried one  little trust fund in a blazer. "Because  I'm willing to be honestly confused  & honestly fearful." Il miglior fabbro,  a.k.a. Prez: sweet & fitting honorifics he has left  upon the living's lips. Sweet & fitting too  that I could know the poems much better than  the man, flawed as I am told he was. Connoisseur  of word-root & amphibrach, of Coltrane  solo & of California reds, of box score & Horatian loss,  his garrulousness formidable & masking  a shyness I could never penetrate, meeting him  would always find me tongue-tied,  minding my ps & qs, the latter of which  I could not play, failing three times to draw a u.  The dead care nothing for our eulogies:  he wrote this many times & well.  & yet I pray his rumpled daimonion shall guide our letters forward  as they wend the snow-white notebook leaves,  the stanzas scrolling down the laptop screens.  Game after game & the snow labored on. Phalanx, bourboned whiteout & the board aglow  as he'd best me again & again. Qintar & prosody, the runway lights enshrouded  & the wind, endquote, shook the panes.
Take hold of the bitter end;  pass carefully around  the standing part,  being mindful of the bight.  Finish with a round turn,  make the knot up tight  and it will not slip under load.  But you'll find it not  so easily undone;  dangerous in the dark and cold  and wet, when it matters most.  These knots command allegiances.  The Turk's head and midshipman's bend,  the lighterman's hitch and  the hangman's noose.  See what names mean:  Knots are men.  Facing page—a simple eye-splice.  Apply a whipping at the end  so no strands come loose  in the braid. The knot will hold  Anything you care to bind.
What am I to you now that you are no longer what you used to be to me? Who are we to each other now that there is no us, now that what we once were is divided into me and you who are not one but two separate and unrelated persons except for that ex- that goes in front of the words that used to mean me, used to mean you, words we rarely used (husband, wife) as when we once posed (so young and helpless) with our hands (yours, mine) clasped on the knife that was sinking into the tall white cake. All that sweetness, the layers of one thing and then another, and then one thing again.
For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus, Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous Mexican male who prodigally claims My clan lines, identity and the sixteen Digits that unlock my bank account, Think twice. That less than proper name's been Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased To change it back. That surname you affect May have more consequence than getting teased By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives. Don't underrate its history: one of ours played Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast; One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made A bungle costing the World Series. My own past Could subject you to guilt by association: If you write anything more than false checks, Abandon all hope of large press publication Or prizes—critics shun the name like sex Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse Helps chain me to my writing desk again For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse: May your pen name help send you to your pen.
The chickens are circling and blotting out the  day. The sun is  bright, but the  chickens are in  the way. Yes, the sky is dark with chickens,  dense with them. They turn and  then they turn  again. These  are the chickens you let loose one at a time and small— various breeds. Now they have  come home to roost—all the same kind at the same speed.
The hounds, you know them all by name. You fostered them from purblind whelps At their dam’s teats, and you have come To know the music of their yelps: High-strung Anthee, the brindled bitch, The blue-tick coated Philomel, And freckled Chloe, who would fetch A pretty price if you would sell— All fleet of foot, and swift to scent, Inexorable once on the track, Like angry words you might have meant, But do not mean, and can’t take back. There was a time when you would brag How they would bay and rend apart The hopeless belling from a stag. You falter now for the foundered hart. Desires you nursed of a winter night— Did you know then why you bred them— Whose needling milk-teeth used to bite The master’s hand that leashed and fed them?
I know my friend is going, though she still sits there across from me in the restaurant,  and leans over the table to dip her bread in the oil on my plate; I know  how thick her hair used to be,  and what it takes for her to discard her man’s cap partway through our meal,  to look straight at the young waiter  and smile when he asks how we are liking it. She eats as though starving—chicken, dolmata,  the buttery flakes of filo— and what’s killing her eats, too. I watch her lift a glistening black olive and peel  the meat from the pit, watch her fine long fingers, and her face,  puffy from medication. She lowers  her eyes to the food, pretending not to know what I know. She’s going.  And we go on eating.
The message I found on the Post-it note  went thus: love truth; expect to be found out. Kid-style capitals proved I wrote it, but  left no clue why I'd swelled into a fat  clause no editor could edit; then, an entry  on a shrink's list of patient slang for sex—  her desk Norwegian teak, the mug of tea  on which she had affixed her Post-it notes  hot against her knuckle, their lips of stickum  loosening . . . And yet, I knew the note  to peel away at hour's end would terminate  our sessions—cool as the draft her linen  skirt was lifting to: Love, just stay benighted, given everything I know you've got to hide.
I wake to the sound of water, and think,  "Mother has died and gone to France,"  She is at un autre hôtel, speaking French  better than ever, while I stare at the fog  that has a river in it—the broad Dordogne,  making its river noise, as if all the faucets  have been left on all night. The river  rushing in one direction only, so different  from Blackfish Creek, where the sea floods in  and back, scrubbing the sand both ways.  Well, one travels so things are different.  American actors speak French on TV here.  Last night they showed Accident Catastrophe about two babies switched in the hospital at birth.  One dies. The parents discover the dead child  was someone else's and their child is alive  in Florida with son père, though sa mère est morte de some disease, who knows?  Anyway, Ed Asner, who plays the lawyer,  speaks gravelly French, but people have  an American demeanor, they pull their hair  on the edge of violence. Then each family  gives up a piece, and the child ends up more  loved than ever, as if it's inevitable.  Or so the river is telling me  with its one-way simplicity,  like gravity. "Alive in the eternal  heart of France"—that's Mother  I'm thinking about, for some reason,  maybe the journal my wife's been keeping,  so like the daily letters Mother wrote  to sa mère et son père, when her life  was flowing through her like the broad  Dordogne. And where is she now?  Does she wish my father were with her,  one of him alive, and one with her?  A bell is ringing wildly, each of its peals  like a round boat rolling downstream  where the river divides around an island  only to sweep back into itself  somewhere in the fog.
If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.
4TH CENTURY B.C. How beautiful, my wellbeloved, is your body of granite— It smites my eyes like an army with banners. Your lips are the red wine poured from goatskin bags, Your brows are warriors' full-drawn bows, Your glances the arrows they shoot therefrom, And your hair is the mane of a lion, tawny and thick. 17TH CENTURY Let us not love tonight past mind But stifle our intent Lest blazing passion, unconfined, Provoke imperilment. Against the dark, our fierce desire Would flare too bright for sight, So must we tame our blinding fire And bank it for the night. With luminating dawn's return And appetite's increase Our lusty flame can safely burn In furious release. 18TH CENTURY Since even modest airs and prudish dress May not deter rash beaux from wantonness, Can your unsullied innocence o'ervault Concupiscent intention to assault? My sweet, have no misgivings, for you wear So plainly insurmountable an air That ogling lechers, hunting am'rous game, Will blush, apologize, and flee in shame. 19TH CENTURY Ethereal nightingale, gallantly singing Your heart out in rich melodies To insentient stones, earless trees, And indifferent insects, forsake them! Go winging To town like a dart to the mark, I implore you, And, serving as courier bird, Tell her who is waiting this word: "I'm locked in my room and can't come but adore you."
I don't know how it happened, but I fell— and I was immense, one dislocated arm wedged between two buildings. I felt some ribs had broken, perhaps a broken neck, too; I couldn't speak. My dress caught bunched about my thighs, and where my glasses shattered there'd spread something like a seacoast, or maybe it was a port. Where my hair tangled with power lines I felt a hot puddle of blood. I must have passed out, but when I woke, a crew of about fifty was building a winding stairway beside my breast and buttressing a platform on my sternum. I heard, as through cotton, the noise of hammers, circular saws, laughter, and some radio droning songs about love. Out the corner of one eye (I could open one eye a bit) I saw my pocketbook, its contents scattered, my lipstick's toppled silo glinting out of reach. And then, waving a tiny flashlight, a man entered my ear. I felt his boots sloshing the blood trickling there. He never came out. So some went looking, with flares, dogs, dynamite even: they burst my middle ear and found my skull, its cavern crammed with dark matter like a cross between a fungus and a cloud. They never found his body, though. And they never found or tried to find an explanation, I think, for me; they didn't seem to need one. Even now my legs subdue that dangerous sea, the water bright enough to cut the skin, where a lighthouse, perched on the tip of my great toe, each eight seconds rolls another flawless pearl across the waves. It keeps most ships from wrecking against my feet. On clear days, people stand beside the light; they watch the waves' blue heads slip up and down and scan for landmarks on the facing shore.
Octopus floating in earth’s ink-ore core  whose arms extend  up here as trees may your branches squirt  their black across  my pages please
The wooden horses are tired of their courses and plead from head to hoof  to be fed to a stove— In leaping lunging flames  they’d rise again, flared manes snapping like chains behind them.  The smoke would not blind them as do these children’s hands:  beyond our cruel commands the fire will free them then  as once the artisan when out of the tree they were nagged to this neigh.
We are always really carrying a ladder, but it’s invisible. We only know something’s the matter: something precious crashes; easy doors prove impassable. Or, in the body, there’s too much swing or off- center gravity. And, in the mind, a drunken capacity, access to out-of-range apples. As though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology.
Many believe in the stars. Take Quinamid The son of a Dardanian astrologer Who disregarded what his father said And came to Troy in a taxi. Gone. Odysseus to Greece: “Hector has never fought this far from Troy. We want him further out. Beyond King Ilus’ tower. So walk him to the centre of the plain and, having killed him, Massacre the Trojans there.” “Ave!” Immediately beyond the ridge is Primrose Hill Where Paris favoured Aphrodité. “Take it,” said Hector. Greece shouted: “Hurry up!” Troy shouted: “Wait for us!” See, Far off, Masts behind the half-built palisade. Then Nearer to yourselves Scamánder’s ford From which the land ascends Then merges with the centre of the plain— The tower (a ruin) its highest point. Heaven. Bad music. Queen Hera is examining her gums. Looking in through a window Teenaged Athena says: “Trouble for Greece.” They leave. Sea. Sky. The sunlit snow. Two armies on the plain. Hector, driven by Lutie, His godchild and his nephew, Going from lord to Trojan lord: “The ships by dark.” The ruined tower. In front of it— Their banners rising one by one. One after one, and then another one— 50,000 Greeks. And on a rise in front of Greece Two hero lords: Ajax the Great of Salamis Behind his shield— As fifty Trojan shields Topped with blue plumes, swivelling their points, Come up the rise— Lord Teucer (five feet high and five feet wide) Loading his bow, Peering round Ajax’ shield, Dropping this Trojan plume or that, Ordering his archers to lie flat, Promising God as many sheep as there are sheep to count If he can put a shaft through Hector’s neck. Prosperity! Beneath the blue, between the sea, the snow, there Hector is Surrendering the urn of one he has just killed To one who thought that he had killed the same. Lord Teucer’s eye/Prince Hector’s throat. But God would not. The bowstring snaps. Outside God’s inner court. Queen Hera and Athena still in line. Hera so angry she can hardly speak. A voice: “The Wife, the Daughter.” “You go. His face will make me heave.” “Serene and Dignified Grandee.” “Papa to you.” “Papa”—His hand— “I know you do not want the Holy Family visiting the plain. But some of us would like to help the Greeks. They lost their champion she. Thousands of them have died. Now they are in retreat. Please look.” The plain. “You will come back the moment that I call?” “Of course, Papa.” “Then . . . yes. Encourage Greece. But voices only. Words. Shouts. That sort of thing. A move—and home you come.” “Of course, Papa.” The plain. Lord Teucer’s archers hidden in its grass. Chylábborak, Lord Hector’s brother-in-law, to his blue plumes: “Move!” “Move!” And on their flanks, between the sea and snow, Led by Teléspiax’ silver yard All Ilium’s masks “Down came their points. Out came their battle cry. And our cool Mr 5 x 5 called: ‘Up.’ And up we got And sent our arrows into them, That made them pirouette, Topple back down the rise, leaving their dead For some of us to strip, and some, the most, To pause, to point, to plant, a third, a fourth Volley into their naked backs. Pure joy!” Chylábborak, Holding his ground: “Centre on me. More die in broken than in standing ranks. Apollo! Aphrodité! Our gods are here! You taste the air, you taste their breath! The Greek fleet, ours, by dark!” Then he is ringed. See an imperial pig harassed by dogs. How, like a masterchef his crêpes, He tosses them; and on their way back down Eviscerates, then flips them back into the pack. Likewise Chylábborak the Greeks who rushed. Hector has seen it. As— Beneath the blue, the miles of empty air, Him just one glitter in that glittering mass— The hosts begin to merge. Fine dust clouds mixed with beams of light. The Prince, down from his plate. Either sides’ arrows whingeing by: “Cover my back.” Finding a gap Dismissing blows as gales do slates, Then at a run, leaping into the ring, Taking Chylábborak’s hand: “If you don’t mind?” Agamemnon: “Our time has come. God keeps his word. Fight now as you have never fought. We will be at Troy’s gates by dusk, Through them by dark, By dawn, across our oars, As we begin our journey home, Watching the windmills on its Wall Turn their sails in flames.” Heaven. The Wife. The Daughter. Hands release black lacquer clasps inlaid with particles of gold. Silk sheaths—with crashing waves and fishscales woven on a navy ground— Flow on the pavement. Hands take their hands While other hands supply Warwear, Their car, And put the reins into Athena’s hands. “. . . Troy’s gates by dusk, Through them by dark . . .” The Hours, the undeniable, Open the gates of Paradise. Beyond The wastes of space. Before The blue. Below Now near The sea, the snow. All time experts in hand-to-hand action— Friecourt, Okinawa, Stalingrad West— Could not believe the battle would gain. But it did. Chylábborak’s ring is ringed. And then no ring at all. Some Trojans raise their hands in prayer; Some Panachéans shout for joy and wait to drag the corpses off. Lutie, alone, the reins in one, his other hand Hacking away the hands that grab his chariot’s bodywork, Rearing his horses, Starlight and Bertie, through, To, Yes, Chylábborak up; rescued; Prince Hector covering. Then: “Zoo-born wolf! Front for a family of thieves!” Lord Diomed, on foot, with Sethynos. My Lutie answering: “Be proud Prince Hector is your Fate.” (Which will be so, Though Lutie will not see it.) Chylábborak and Hector do not want to disappoint this oily pair: “Here come the Sisters Karamazof, Spark,” Chylábborak said. “Let’s send them home in halves.” And jumped back down. Around the tower, 1000 Greeks, 1000 Ilians, amid their swirl, His green hair dressed in braids, each braid Tipped with a little silver bell, note Nyro of Simi—the handsomest of all the Greeks, save A. The trouble was, he had no fight. He dashed from fight to fight, Struck a quick blow, then dashed straight out again. Save that this time he caught, As Prince Aenéas caught his breath, That Prince’s eye; who blocked his dash, And as Lord Panda waved and walked away, Took his head off his spine with a backhand slice— Beautiful stuff . . . straight from the blade . . . Still, as it was a special head, Mowgag, Aenéas’ minder— Bright as a box of rocks, but musical— Spiked it, then hoisted it, and twizzling the pole Beneath the blue, the miles of empty air, Marched to the chingaling of its tinklers, A knees high majorette Towards the Greeks, the tower. A roar of wind across the battlefield. A pause. And then Scattering light, The plain turned crystal where their glidepath stopped, The Queen of Heaven shrills: “Typhoid for Troy!” And through poor Nyro’s wobbling mouth Athena yells: “Slew of assiduous mediocrities! Meek Greeks!” It is enough. Centre-plain wide, Lit everywhere by rays of glorious light, They rushed their standards into Ilium, Diomed (for once) swept forward; Converting shame to exaltation with his cry: “Never—to Helen’s gold without her self! Never—to Helen’s self without her gold!” Mowgag well slain. Hewn through his teeth, his jaw slashed off, And Nyro’s head beside him in the grass. When Nyro’s mother heard of this She shaved her head; she tore her frock; she went outside Ripping her fingernails through her cheeks: Then down her neck; her chest; her breasts; And bleeding to her waist ran round the shops, Sobbing: “God, kill Troy. Console me with its death. Revenge is all I have. My boy was kind. He had his life to live. I will not have the chance to dance in Hector’s blood, But let me hear some have before I die.” “I saw her running round. I took the photograph. It summed the situation up. He was her son. They put it out in colour. Right? My picture went around the world.” Down the shaft of the shot in his short-staved bow Lord Panda has been follow-spotting Diomed. Between “her self ” / “her gold” he shoots. It hits. And as its barbs protrude through Dio’s back Aenéas hears Lord Panda shout: “He bleeds! The totem Greek! Right-shoulder-front! How wise of Artemis to make Panda her matador! Her numero uno! Moi!” Diomed hit, The heart went out of those who followed him And they fell back. Shields all round Diomed on his knees Lifting his hands: “Sister and wife of God” As Sethynos breaks off the arrowhead “Eliminate my pain.” Settles his knee beneath his hero’s shoulderblades “Let me kill that oaf who claims my death” Bridges his nape with one hand “Before it comes with honour to my name.” Then with his other hand In one long strong slow pull Drew the shank back, and out. She heard his prayer. Before their breathless eyes His blood ran back into the pout the shank had left, And to complete her miracle Lord Diomed rose up between them, stood in the air, Then hovered down onto his toes Brimming with homicidal joy, Imparting it to Greece. Then Troy was driven back, Trampling the half-stripped still-masked carcasses Hatching the centre of the plain. Aenéas / Panda. “Get him.” “Get him! I got him. He is dead. But there he is.” And Diomed has spotted them. “Calm down,” Aenéas said. “Perhaps he is possessed.” “What god would visit him?” “So pray to yours—and try another shot.” “Huntress,” Lord Panda prays, Bright-ankled god of nets and lines, Of tangled mountains, ilex groves and dark cascades . . .” But Artemis was bored with him And let him rise, still praying hard, Into the downflight of the javelin Diomed aired at Prince Aenéas. Sunlit, it went through Panda’s lips, out through his neck, and then Through Biblock’s neck. And so they fell; the lord, face up; the friend, face down Gripping the blood-smeared barb between his teeth, Between the sea and snow. Aenéas covers them. Eyeing his plate —Technology you can enjoy— Diomed found, and threw, a stone As heavy as a cabbage made of lead, That hit, and split, Aenéas’ hip. Who went down on one knee And put his shield hand on the grass And with his other hand covered his eyes. Dido might have become a grandmother And Rome not had its day, except As Diomed came on to lop his top Aenéas’ mama, Aphrodité (dressed In grey silk lounge pyjamas piped with gold And snake-skin flip-flops) stepped Between him and the Greek. A glow came from her throat, and from her hair A fragrance that betokened the divine. Stooping, she kissed him better, as Queen Hera whispered: “Greek, cut that bitch.” And, Diomed, you did; nicking Love’s wrist. Studying the ichor as It seeped across her pulse into her palm Our Lady of the Thong lifted her other hand Removed a baby cobra from her hair And dropped it, Diomed, onto your neck, And saw its bite release its bane into your blood. Then nobody could say Who Diomed fought for, or for what he fought. Rapt through the mass Now shouting at the sky, now stomping on the plain, He killed and killed and killed, Greek, Trojan, Greek, Lord/less, shame/fame, both gone; and gone Loyalty nurtured in the face of death, The duty of revenge, the right to kill, To jeer, to strip, to gloat, to be the first To rally but the last to run, all gone— And gone, our Lady Aphrodité, giggling. While everywhere, Driving your fellow Greeks Back down the long incline that leads to the Scamánder’s ford, Surely as when Lit from the dark part of the sky by sudden beams, A bitter wind Detonates line by line of waves against the shore. No mind. Even as Teucer backed away He kept his eyes on you. “You feel the stress? You feel the fear? Behold your enemy! the Prince God loves!” See Teucer’s bow. Hear Teucer’s: “This time lucky.” His— But this time it was not our Father, God, Who saved your life, my Prince. As Agamemnon cried: “The ships are safe. Stand at the riverside’s far bank.” Teléspiax heard the rustle of Lord Teucer’s shot And stood between yourself and it. His head was opened, egglike, at the back, Mucked with thick blood, blood trickling from his mouth. His last words were: “Prince, your trumpeter has lost his breath.” “Our worst fear was his face would fade,” Teléspiax’s father said. “But it did not. We will remember it until we die.” “Give his instrument to Hogem,” Hector said, and went— Lutie on reins—between the sea and snow, Throwing his chariots wide, Scamánderwards, As easily as others might a cloak. Diomed among this traffic, on his own, Among his dead, Their pools of blood, their cut-off body-parts, Their cut-off heads, Ashamed as his head cleared To see Odysseus, Idomeneo, the Ajax—Big and Small— Whipping away downslope, shouting towards Odysseus: “Where are you going with your back to the battle?” Who shouted back, although he did not turn: “Look left!” And there was Lutie driving Hector onto him, Sure they would trample him, for sure Queen Hera’s human, Diomed, Would stand and die, except: “Arms up, young king—” Nestor, full tilt, Reins round his tummy, leaning out “—and Jump . . .” wrists locked “. . . You young are just . . .” Swinging him up onto the plate “. . . too much.” “With your permission, Da?” Nod. Drew. Then threw the chariot’s javelin As Lutie spun his wheels, and Hector threw— Those skewers trading brilliance as they passed— And missed—both vehicles slither-straightening, Regaining speed, close, close, then driven apart By empty cars careering off the incline, Or stationary cars, their horses cropping grass. “Daddy, go slow. Hector will say I ran.” “But not the widows you have made.” And slow And low Cruising the blue above this mix Heaven’s Queen and Ringsight-eyed Athena Trumpeting down huge worms of sound As Hector’s car rereached king Nestor’s, and: “What kept you, Prince?” Diomed offered as they came abreast: “You went for a refreshing towel?” And threw his axe, that toppled through the air, and, oh, Hector, my Hector, as you thought: “If Heaven helps me Heaven shows it loves the best,” Parted your Lutie’s mesh and smashed into his heart. What did you say as God called you to death Dear Lutie? “King Prince, I leave you driverless.” And put the reins into his hands, and fled Into oblivion As Hector with his other hand Held what his Lutie was, upright, face forwards, in between The chariot’s basket and himself, Shouting as he drove after them: “Loathsome Greek, Your loathsome hair, your loathsome blood, Your loathsome breath, your loathsome heart, Jump in your loathsome ships, I will come after you, Come over the Aegean after you, And find you though you hide inside Your loathsome father’s grave And with my bare hands twist your loathsome head Off your loathsome neck.” There was a Greek called Themion. Mad about armour. If not armour, cars. Of course he went to Troy. And Troy Saw a stray spear transfix him as he drove. Companionably, his horses galloped up On Starlight’s side, and muddled Starlight down, And Bertie down, and brought the Prince (Still holding Lutie) down, as all the world Hurried, as if by windheads, on towards Scamánder’s ford. hether you reach it from the palisade Or through the trees that dot the incline’s last stretch You hear Scamánder’s voice before you see What one may talk across on quiet days Its rippling sunspangled breadth Streaming across the bars of pebbly sand That form its ford —Though on the Fleet’s side deeper, darkly bright. And here Tiptoeing from this bar to that, Settling the cloudy sunshine of her hair, Her towel retained by nothing save herself, The god of Tops and Thongs Our Lady Aphrodité came, Her eyes brimfull with tears. Scamánder is astonished by his luck. “Beauty of Beauties, why are you weeping?” “I have been hurt, Scamánder.” “No . . .” “Humiliated.” “No . . .” “Me. A god. Just like yourself. Touched . . .” “Touched!” “By a man.” “A man!” “A Greek.” “Death to all Greeks!” “He cut me!” “Sacrilege! . . . But where?” “I need your healing touch.” “How can I help you if you do not show me where?” “Moisten its lips and my wound will be healed.” “You must say where!” “Well . . .” The towel has slipped an inch. “I am afraid you will be disappointed.” “Never.” “Are you sure?” “Yes!” “You will not criticize me?” “No!” Her wrist upturned. Out-turned. Her opened palm. Fanning the fingers of her other hand, Stroking his spangles with her fingertips. “Goddess, I love you. I have always loved you. Say that you love me. Even a little. I beg you. God grant it.” “I need your help, Scamánder.” “Take pity on me. Come into me.” “You have your nymphs.” “Bores! Bores!” “I might be nibbled by an eel!” “Death to all eels!” The towel is down. “Step into me . . . I love your toes . . . please let me kiss your toes . . . Your little dinkum-inkum toes . . .” “No one has kissed them so nicely, Scamánder.” “And now your knees . . .” “You tickle me . . .” “And now your thighs!” “Oh, oh, go on . . .” “And now your bum! Your Holy Bum! Your Sacred Bum! The Bum of Paradise!” “Oh, my Scamánder, I must have your help . . .” “Anything!” The towel goes curling off, And as she floated on his stream Our Lady Aphrodité said: “At any moment now the Greeks will reach your Troy-side bank . . .” Recall those sequences When horsemen ride out of the trees and down into a stream Somewhere in Kansas or Missouri, say. So—save they were thousands—Greece Into Scamánder’s ford. Coming downstream, A smallish wave That passes But Scamánder’s flow does not relapse. Indeed Almost without a sound Its murmuring radiance rose Into a dark, torrential surge, Clouded with boulders, crammed with trees, as clamorous as if it were a sea, That lifted Greece, then pulled Greece down, Cars gone, masks gone, gone under, reappearing, gone: “Onto your knees! Praise Hector for this flood! The Prince God loves!” Prince Hector claims As he comes through the trees. They do. Then up and run, run, thousands of them, To hold those Greeks who got back out Under until their bubbles stopped; while those swept off Turned somersaults amid Scamánder’s undertow. The flat— 1000 yards of it between the river and the palisade. The King: “The Lord has not abandoned us. To cross will be as bad for them.” But it was not to be as bad for them. Indeed, As Hector drove towards Scamánder’s brink, And as—their banners rising one by one, One after one and then another one— He and all Ilium began to enter it, The river reassumed its softly-spoken, smooth, sunspangled way. And Agamemnon cried: “God, what are You for? What use are You to me?” As Hector cries: “Two miracles! Your Prince is close to God!” And Hera to Athena: “Fog?” And fog came down. And most of Greece got out. Troy holding hands midstream. An army peering through its masks. Miss Tops and Thongs to God: “Your Hera has . . .” And with a wish He turned the fog to light And with a word He called them back to Heaven. Sky. Snow. The 1000 yards. The palisade. Hector: “I am your Prince. My name means He-Who-Holds. Troy. And the plain. And now the ships. For Troy!” his battle cry, Rising into a common cry, that cry Into a clamour, and that clamour to Bayings of hatred. 800 yards. The Child: “We are the Greeks. We fight to win. If one is lost, Close his eyes, step over him, and kill his enemy.” 800 yards. The Greeks are tiring. Nestor is on his knees: “God of all Gods, Most Holy and Most High, If Greece has ever sacrificed fresh blood to you, Protect our ships.” Heaven. Soft music. Summertime. Queen Hera and Athena? Yes . . . Some lesser gods Observing their approach, approach, Salaam, and then Lead them— Now both in black wraparound tops— To God: “Darling Daddy, here we are.” “And” (Hera) “here we stay Until you stop that worthless Hector killing Greeks.” Up steps Love. Hera: “Why is she wearing a tent?” Love: “Father, see this.” (Her wrist.) “Human strikes god! Communism! The end of everything!” “Darlings,” He said, “You know that being a god means being blamed. Do this—no good. Do that—the same. The answer is: Avoid humanity. Remember—I am God. I see the bigger picture.” “And I am Hera, Heaven’s Queen, Greece worships me.” “Stuff Greece,” Love said. “Your blubber-bummed wife with her gobstopper nipples Hates Troy because Troy’s Paris put her last When we stripped off for him. As for the Ithacan boat-boy’s undercurved preceptatrix, She hates Troy because my statue stands on its acropolis.” Hera: “The cities’ whores were taxed to pay for it.” Love (Dropping onto her knees before Himself): “Please . . . stop them harming Troy. The greatest city in the world.” While Hera and Athena sang: “Cleavage! Cleavage! Queen of the Foaming Hole. Mammoth or man or midge She sucks from pole to pole.” And God has had enough of it. Lifting His scales He said: “Hector will have his day of victory.” Then crashed them to the ground. 700 yards. The palisade. Its gate. Late sunlight on gilt beaks. “There’s no escape from Troy.” “Or from the plain at Troy.” Begging for ransom, Trojan Hoti, His arms around King Menelaos’ knees. King Agamemnon: “Off.” Then he punched Hoti in the face. Then punched him in the face again. And then again. And when he fell King Agamemnon kicked him in the groin. Kicking him in the groin with so much force It took a step to follow up each kick. Then pulled him up, Then dragged him by his hair This way and that, Then left him, calling: “Finish him off.” And someone did. “I was sixteen. I said: ‘Where is Achilles?’ Hard as it is to share another’s troubles when your own are pressing Great Ajax took my hands in his and said: ‘He loves us. He is with us. He will come.’” But he did not. Then Ajax to himself: “Dear Lord, you made me straight. Give me the strength to last till dark.” The Prince: “I get past everything I see. Their war is lost.” It was. Aenéas, Ábassee, Sarpédon, Gray, Calling to one another down the line. Then, with a mighty wall of sound, As if a slope of stones Rolled down into a lake of broken glass We ran at them. And now the light of evening has begun To shawl across the plain: Blue gray, gold gray, blue gold, Translucent nothingnesses Readying our space, Within the deep, unchanging sea of space, For Hesper’s entrance, and the silver wrap. Covered with blood, mostly their own, Loyal to death, reckoning to die Odysseus, Ajax, Diomed, Idomeneo, Nestor, Menelaos And the King: “Do not die because others have died.” “Do not show them the palms of your hands.” “Achil!” “Achil!” “If he won’t help us, Heaven help us.” “Stand still and fight.” “Feel shame in one another’s eyes.” “I curse you, God. You are a liar, God. Troy will be yours by dark—immortal lies.” “Home!” “Home!” “There’s no such place.” “You can’t launch burning ships.” “More men survive if no one runs.” But that is what Greece did. Dropping their wounded, Throwing down their dead, Their shields, their spears, their swords, They ran. Leaving their heroes tattered, filthy, torn And ran And ran Above their cries: “I am the Prince! The victory is mine!” Chylábborak: “Do not take cowardice for granted.” Scarce had he said it, when His son, Kykéon, standing next to him Took Ajax’ final spear cast in his chest. “I shall not wear your armour, Sir,” he said. And died. “My son is dead.” The Prince: “Hector is loved by God.” And Greece, a wall of walking swords, But walking backwards, Leaving the plain in silence And in tears. Idomeneo, Running back out at those Trojans who came too close: “You know my name. Come look for me. And boy, The day you do will be the day you die.” Hector to Troy: “Soldiers!— Unmatched my force, unconquerable my will. After ten years of days, in one long day To be remembered for as many days As there are days to come, this is my day, Your Hector’s day. Troy given back to Troy. My day of victory!” And when the cheering died: “Some say: destroy Greece now. But I say no. Out of your cars. Eat by your fires. Two hundred fires! Around each fire Five hundred men! “The sound of grindstones turning through the night, The firelight that stands between our blades, So let King Agamemnon’s Own hold hands And look into each other’s frightened eyes. “True God! Great Master of the Widespread Sky! If only you would turn Me into a god, As you, through me, Tomorrow by their ships Will see Greece die.” Silence. A ring of lights. Within Immaculate In boat-cloaks lined with red King Agamemnon’s lords— The depression of retreat. The depression of returning to camp. Him at the centre of their circle Sobbing, Then shouting: “We must run for it!” Dark glasses in parked cars. “King Agamemnon of Mycenae, God called, God raised, God recognized, You are a piece of shit,” Diomed said. Silence again. “Let us praise God,” Lord Ajax said, “That Hector stopped before he reached the ships.” Silence again. Then Nestor (Putting his knee back in): “Paramount Agamemnon, King of Kings, Lord of the Shore, the Islands and the Sea I shall begin, and end, with you. Greece needs good words. Like them or not, the credit will be yours. Determined. Keen to fight, that is our Diomed— As I should know. When just a boy of ten I fought Blowback of Missolonghi, a cannibal, drank blood, He captured you, he buggered you, you never walked again. But Diomed lacks experience. God has saved us, momentarily. God loves Achilles. You took, and you have kept, Achilles’ ribband she.” “I was a fool!” “And now you must appease him, Agamemnon. Humble words. Hands shaken. Gifts.” The King—wiping his eyes: “As usual, Pylos has said the only things worth hearing. I was mad to take the she. I shall pay fitting damages. Plus her, I offer him The Corfiot armour that my father wore.” Silence. The sea. Its whispering. “To which I add: a set of shields. Posy, standard, ceremonial. The last, cut from the hide of a one ton Lesbian bull.” Silence. The sea. “And . . . a chariot! From my own équipe! They smoke along the ground . . . They ride its undulations like a breeze . . .” The sea. “Plus: six horses—saddled, bridled and caparisoned, Their grooms and veterinarians . . . . . . And six tall shes: Two good dancers, two good stitchers, two good cooks. All capable of bearing boys . . . “Oh, very well then: twenty loaves of gold, The same of silver, and the same of iron.” Masks. Lights. Behind the lords Some hundreds from the army have walked up. Lord Nestor smiles. Lord Menelaos smiles. “Plus— Though it may well reduce your King to destitution: A’kimi’kúriex, My summer palace by the Argive sea, Its lawns, its terraces, its curtains in whose depths Larks dive above a field of waving lilies And fishscale-breakers shatter on blue rocks. Then, as he draws their silky heights aside, Standing among huge chests of looted booty, Long necked, with lowered lids, but candid eyes, My living daughter, Íphaniss, a diamond Big as a cheeseball for her belly stud. His wife to be! minus—I need not say—her otherwise huge bride-price.” “More!” “More!” “More!” Lord Ajax almost has to hold him up. “The whole of eastern Pel’po’nesia— An area of outstanding natural beauty— Its cities, Epi’dávros, Trów’é’zen, Their fortresses, their harbours and their fleets, Their taxpayers—glad to accept his modest ways— All this, the greatest benefaction ever known, If he agrees to fight. And he admits I am his King.” Instantly, Nestor: “An offer God himself could not refuse. All that remains to say is: Who shall take it to Achilles?” Agamemnon: “You will.” Starlight. The starlight on the sea. The sea. Its whispering Mixed with the prayers Of Ajax and of Nestor as they walk Along the shore towards Achilles’ gate. “My lords?” “Your lord.” “This way.” They find him, with guitar, Singing of Gilgamesh. “Take my hands. Here they are.” You cannot take your eyes away from him. His own so bright they slow you down. His voice so low, and yet so clear. You know that he is dangerous. “Patroclus? Friends in need. Still, Friends. That has not changed, I think. Autómedon? Wine. “Dear Lord and Master of the Widespread Sky, Accept ourselves, accept our prayers.” Their cups are taken. “Father friend?” King Nestor (for his life): “You know why we are here. We face death. The mass choose slavery. Mycenae has admitted he was wrong to wrong yourself. In recompense he offers you The greatest benefaction ever known. Take it, and fight. Or else Hector will burn the ships Then kill us randomly. Remember what your Father said The day when Ajax and myself drove up to ask If you could come with us to Troy? That you should stand among the blades where honour grows. And secondly, to let your anger go. Spirit, and strength, and beauty have combined Such awesome power in you A vacant Heaven would offer you its throne. Think of what those who will come after us will say. Save us from Hector’s god, from Hector, and from Hector’s force. I go down on my knees to you, Achilles.” “I must admire your courage, father friend, For treating me as if I was a fool. I shall deal with Hector as I want to. You and your fellow countrymen will die For how your King has treated me. I have spent five years fighting for your King. My record is: ten coastal and ten inland cities Burnt to the ground. Their males, massacred. Their cattle, and their women, given to him. Among the rest, Briseis the Beautiful, my ribband she. Not that I got her courtesy of him. She joined my stock in recognition of My strength, my courage, my superiority, Courtesy of yourselves, my lords. I will not fight for him. He aims to personalise my loss. Briseis taken from Achilles—standard practice: Helen from Menelaos—war. Lord Busy Busy, building his palisade, mounting my she, One that I might have picked to run my house, Raising her to the status of a wife. Do I hate him? Yes, I hate him. Hate him. And should he be afraid of me? He should. I want to harm him. I want him to feel pain. In his body, and between his ears. I must admit, Some of the things that you have said are true. But look what he has done to me! To me! The king on whom his kingliness depends! I will not fight for him. Hearing your steps, I thought: at last, My friends have come to visit me. They took their time about it, true— After he took my she none of you came— Now, though—admittedly they are in trouble, Serious trouble—they have arrived as friends, And of their own accord. But you have not come here as friends. And you have not come of your own accord. You came because your King told you to come. You came because I am his last resort. And, incidentally, your last resort. At least he offers stuff. All you have offered is advice: ‘Keep your temper . . . Mind your tongue . . . Think what the world will say . . .’ No mention of your King’s treatment of me. No sign of love for me behind your tears. I will not fight for him. I can remember very well indeed The day you two grand lords came visiting my father’s house, How I ran out to you, and took your hands— The greatest men that I had ever seen: Ajax, my fighting cousin, strong, brave, unafraid to die; Nestor, the King of Sandy Pylos, wisdom’s sword. And then, when all had had enough to eat and drink And it was sealed that I should come to Troy, Then my dear father said that lordship knows Not only how to fight, and when to hold its tongue, But of the difference between a child enraged And honour bound lords. I will not fight for him. There is a King to be maintained. You are his lords. My fighting powers prove my inferiority. Whatever he, through you, may grant, I must receive it as a favour, not of right, Go back to him with downcast looks, a suppliant tone, Acknowledge my transgressions—I did not Applaud his sticky fingers on my she’s meek flesh. My mother says I have a choice: Live as a happy backwood king for aye Or give the world an everlasting murmur of my name, And die. Be up tomorrow sharp To see me sacrifice to Lord Poseidon and set sail. Oh, yes, his gifts: ‘The greatest benefaction ever known.’ If he put Heaven in my hand I would not want it. His offers magnify himself. Likewise his child. I do not want to trash the girl. She is like me. Bad luck to have poor friends. Bad luck to have his Kingship as your sire. My father will select my wife. Each spring a dozen local kings drive up And lead their daughters naked round our yard. Some decent local girl. My father’s worth Is all the wealth we will require. You Greeks will not take Troy. You have disintegrated as a fighting force. Troy is your cemetery. Blame your King. The man who you say has done all he can. The man who has admitted he was wrong. But he has not done all he can. And he has not admitted he was wrong. Or not to me. I want him here, your King. His arms straight down his sides, his shoulders back, Announcing loud and clear that he was wrong to take my she. Apologising for that wrong, to me, the son of Péleus. Before my followers, with you, Pylos and Salamis, Crete. Sparta. Tyrins, Argos, Calydon, the Islands, here, Stood to attention on either side of him. That is my offer. Take it, or die. Nestor may stay the night. You, dear cousin Ajax, tell your King what I have said. Preferably, in front of everyone.” Who said, As my Achilles lifted his guitar: “Lord, I was never so bethumped with words Since first I called my father Dad.” The sea. Their feet along the sand to Agamemnon’s gate. And in starlit air The Trojans singing: “I love my wife, I love her dearly, I love the hole she pisses through, I love her lily-white tits And her nut-brown arsehole, I could eat her shit with a wooden spoon.”
It was so simple: you came back to me And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter But that. That you had gone away from me And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter. That I had been left to care for our old dog And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less! On all this, you and I and our happy dog Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless. I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work And started in: Item: it’s years, not days. Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back, In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you Left her, remember?
No more savage art: filleting: a deft pressure along the   backbone from tail fan to the red gills: fighting mystery with a   honed blade through the small bones: salt and scales on face and   hands:: the Greek God, as well, found flesh unmysterious, but in anger and  disappointment:— seagull cries, your music, are all about you: Apollonian   but hungrier: nature is hungry:: the brave fish dies the birds swoop for the insides in no  lovelier spirals.
This is a poem about the great ships that wandered the oceans And groaned sometimes in deep voices, grumbling about fog and submerged peaks, But usually they sliced the pages of tropical seas in silence, Divided by height, category, and class, just like our communities and hotels. Beneath the deck poor emigrants played cards, and no one won While on the highest deck Claudel gazed at Ysé and her hair glowed. And toasts were raised to a safe trip, to coming times, Toasts were raised, Alsatian wine and champagne from France's finest vineyards, Some days were static, windless, when only the light seeped steadily, Days when nothing happened but the horizon, which traveled with the ship, Days of emptiness and boredom, playing solitaire, repeating the latest news, Who'd been seen with whom in a tropical night's shade, embracing beneath a peach-colored moon. But filthy stokers tirelessly tossed coal into open flaming mouths And everything that is now already existed then, but in condensed form. Our days already existed and our hearts baked in the blazing stove, And the moment when I met you may also have existed, and my mistrust Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail and capricious, And my searches for the final answer, my disappointments and discoveries. Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences and fear, Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars of special bulletins. Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial ports, in dockyards, Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust, and waited For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and objects, They wait as patiently as chess players in Luxembourg Garden nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.
Years later, the water still drips— there's no one to tighten the valve. It courses through old pipes down to the septic tank. Next morning in the cellar I start the motor with a stick. It shakes and rumbles, and chirps— the switch is broken is all. At night the water arrives illegally, undergroundly, to the very grave where last spring parsley sprouted, and at the foot, beside it, feral sorrel darkens tastily and tartly like clandestine sex. The motor lifts the spirits and returns the night's deductions. It's morning, I hum softly— a stranger will replace me. In the cellar a stream of light rinses the window grate, it pulses, strikes the meter— I catch my rhythm on the stairs. And for memory's sake I hum— as I pass the septic tank— a fluid, underground song about sorrel and a stranger.
Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is so little others can do: they can’t lend a hand with Brazil and not stand on Peru.
For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001 This was the work of St. Sebolt, one of his miracles: he lit a fire with icicles. He struck them like a steel to flint, did St. Sebolt. It makes sense only at a certain body heat. How cold he had to get to learn that ice would burn. How cold he had to stay. When he could feel his feet he had to back away.
I know I promised to stop talking about her, but I was talking to myself. The truth is, she’s a child who stopped growing, so I’ve always allowed her to tag along, and when she brings her melancholy close to me I comfort her. Naturally you’re curious; you want to know how she became a gnarled branch veiled in diminutive blooms. But I’ve told you all I know. I was sure she had secrets, but she had no secrets. I had to tell her mine.
When the eye  When the edgeless screen receiving light from the edgeless universe    When the eye first  When the edgeless screen facing outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe    When the eye first saw that it  Hungry for more light resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST    As if a dog sniffing  Ignorant of origins familiar with hunger    As if a dog sniffing a dead dog  Before nervous like itself but now weird inert cold nerveless    Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself  When the eyefirst saw that it must die When the eye first    Brooding on our origins you ask When and I say  Then   •   wound-dresser let us call the creature   driven again and again to dress with fresh bandages and a pail of disinfectant suppurations that cannot heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal   wound-dresser  what wound is dressed the wound of being    •   Understand that it can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.   It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.   Understand that when your mother, in her only pregnancy, gave birth to twins   painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child   was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.   Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child   was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.   Envying the other, of course each twin   tried to punish and become the other. Understand that when the beast within you   succeeds again in paralyzing into unending   incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make   its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its   rectitude. It knows that it alone knows you. It alone remembers your mother’s   mother’s grasping immigrant bewildered   stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave you wiped from your adolescent American feet.   Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling   mediocrity. Understand that you can delude others but not what you more and more   now call the beast within you. Understand   the cloak that maimed each gave each power. Understand that there is a beast within you   that can drink till it is   sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand that it will use the conventions of the visible world   to turn your tongue to stone. It alone   knows you. It does not wish you well. These are instructions for the wrangler.     II   Three Fates. One fate, with three faces.  Clotho Lachesis Atropos    Thread spun by one from all those forever unspun.   Thread touched by one and in touching twisted into something   forever unlike all others spun.   Thread touched by one and in touching withered to nothing.  Atropos Lachesis Clotho    Three, who gave us in recompense for death   the first alphabet, to engrave in stone what is most evanescent,   the mind. According to Hesiod, daughters of Night.    •   Unless teeth devour it it rots: now is its season.   My teeth have sunk into firm-skinned pears so succulent time stopped.   When my wife, dead now   ten years, pulls her dress over her petticoats and hair, the air crackles, her hair rising   tangles in ecstasy. We are electric ghosts.    •   You hear the strange cricket in the oven sing, and ask what it sings.   This is what it sings.   Because Benvenuto in my native tongue means welcome, write   here lies an artist who did not recoil from residence on earth — but, truly named, welcomed it.   But I mis-spoke: not wife. Servant: model: mother of my child, also now dead.    •   In prison, immured in the black pit where the Pope once fed Benedetto da Foiano less and less each day until God’s will, not the Pope’s own hand, killed him, —   where outside my door each day the castellan repeated that darkness will teach me I am a counterfeit bat, and he a real one, —   blackness, silence so unremitted I knew I had survived another day only by the malignant welcome singsong of his triumphant voice, —  Benvenuto is a counterfeit bat, and I a real one, —   where God had not found me worthy of seeing the sun even in a dream, I asked the God of Nature what unexpiated act the suffocation of my senses, such   suffering, served to expiate.   (This was my first prison.)    •   For the two murders I had committed, — their just, free but necessary cause   revenge, however imperfect the justice —   two successive Popes recognized the necessity and pardoned me. Absolved me.   Because my fame as a maker in gold and silver   preceded me, though I was hardly more than an apprentice, when Pope Clement came into   possession of the second largest diamond in the world   he summoned me from Florence to Rome — called me into his presence to serve him. To crown the resplendent   glittering vestment covering his surplice, he wanted   a golden clasp big and round as a small plate, with God the Father in half-relief above the diamond   and cherubs, arms raised, below. Hurry, he said,  finish it quickly, so that I may enjoy itsuse a little while.   Pope Clement, unlike the great I now serve, was   an excellent, subtle connoisseur; he approved my design.   Each week he summoned me into the presence   two or three times, eager to inspect my progress. Then Cecchino, my brother, two years younger than I   and still beardless, died —   was killed, as he tried to avenge the unjust killing of a comrade by the ruthless guard of the Bargello.   Thus was stolen from him the chance to incise   his presence into the hard, careless surface of the world. The fool who killed him   in what justice must call self-defense   later proved his nature by boasting of it.   His boasting enraged, maddened me. In this   great grief the Pope rebuked me: You act as ifgrief can change death.   Sleepless, eatless, by day I worked at the Pope’s   absorbing golden button — and by night, hypnotized as a jealous lover, I watched and followed   the fatuous creature who murdered my brother.   At last, overcoming my repugnance to an enterprise not-quite-praiseworthy, I decided   to end my torment. My dagger entered the juncture   of the nape-bone and the neck so deep into the bone   with all my strength I could not pull it out.   I ran to the palace of Duke Alessandro — for those who pursued me knew me. The Pope’s natural son,   later he became Duke of Florence, before his murder   by his own cousin Lorenzino, whose too-familiar intimacies and pretensions to power   he not only indulged but openly mocked.   Alessandro told me to stay indoors for eight days. For eight days I stayed indoors, working   at the jewel the Pope had set his heart on.   For eight days the Pope failed to summon me. Then his chamberlain, saying that all was   well if I minded my work and kept silent, ushered me   into the presence. The Pope cast so menacing a glance toward me I trembled.   Examining my work, his countenance cleared,   saying that I had accomplished a vast amount in a short time. Then he said, Now that you are cured, Benvenuto — change your life.   I promised that I would. Soon after this, I opened a fine shop, my first; and finished the jewel.    •   As the knife descended (forgive me, O God of Nature, but thus you have arranged it, —)   to my fevered mind each moment was infinite, and mine.    •   Late one night, in farewell, Michelangelo turning to me said, Benvenuto,  you deliver yourself into their hands.    •  Here I leapt Here I leapt Here I leapt Here I leapt the shrilling cricket in the shrilling summer evening   sings; as did my father in the sweet years   he served the pleasure of the lords of Florence as a piper, in the Consort of Pipers.   Imagine my father, no longer young, married, still   childless, an engineer who designs bridges and battlements for the Duke, but whose   first love is music — the flute. He joined   the Duke’s Consort of Pipers. Now his nights often are spent not bending over charts and plans   but dazzled at the court of Lorenzo, called The Magnificent —   the same Lorenzo who once plucked Michelangelo, still a boy, from among the horde of the merely-talented   bending to copy the masters in the ducal palace.   Lorenzo, with his father’s consent, adopted the boy; fed him at his own table.   Imagine, tonight, the brief concert is over —   the Consort of Pipers (respectable, honorable amateurs: small merchants, a banker, a scholar)   mingle, slightly awed, with an ambassador, a Cardinal . . .   Suddenly Lorenzo is at my father’s ear: He stoodnot six inches from me.   Not six inches from my father’s ear Lorenzo   in a low voice as he begins to move through the crowd followed by his son Piero   (as now my father must struggle to follow)   tells my father he has painfully and increasingly remarked that the flute has led my father to neglect   his fine engineering talent and therefore my   father will understand why Piero and the Duke must dismiss him from the Consort of Pipers.   Lorenzo, entering the private apartments, was gone.   In later years, my father repeated to his children: He stood not six inches from me.   It is a lie. It is a lie that the Medici and you and I   stand on the same earth. What the sane eye saw, was a lie: —   two things alone cross the illimitable distance   between the great and the rest of us, who serve them: —   a knife; and art.    •   The emblem of Florence is the lion; therefore lions, caged but restless and living, centuries ago   began to announce to the Piazza della Signoria   this is the fearsome seat of the free government of the Republic of Florence.   Duke Cosimo, hating the noise and smell, had them   moved behind the palace. For years, I had known the old man who fed and tended the lions, —   one day he humbly asked me if I could make a ring   unlike all others for his daughter’s wedding. I said yes, of course; but, as payment for its   rarity, I wanted him to drug the strongest lion   asleep, so that I could examine, for my art, his body.   He said he knew no art of drugging; such poison   could kill the creature; a week later, in fury he said yes.   The animal was numbed but not   sleeping; he tried to raise his great head, as I lay lengthwise against his warm body;   the head fell back. My head   nestling behind his, each arm, outstretched, slowly descending along each leg, at last with both hands I   pulled back the fur and touched a claw.   This creature whose claw waking could kill me, — . . . I wore its skin.    •   After the Medici were returned from eighteen years’ banishment, placed over us again not by the will   of Florentines, but by a Spanish army —   my father, though during the republic he regained his position as piper, ever loyal to the Medici   wrote a poem celebrating his party’s victory   and prophesying the imminent advent of a Medici pope. Then Julius II died;   Cardinal de’ Medici, against expectation, was elected;   the new pope wrote my father that he must come to Rome and serve him.   My father had no will to travel. Then Jacopo   Salviati, in power because married to a Medici, took from my father his place at the Duke’s new court;   took from him his profit, his hope, his will.   Thus began that slow extinguishment of hope, the self ’s obsequies for the self   at which effacement I felt not only a helpless   witness, but cause, author.   He said I was his heart.  I had asked to be his heartbefore I knew what I was asking.   Against his mania to make me a musician   at fifteen I put myself to the goldsmith’s trade; without money   or position, he now could not oppose this.  Help the boy — for his father is poor rang in my ears as I began to sell   the first trinkets I had made. Later, to escape   the plague then raging, he made me quickly leave Florence; when I returned,   he, my sister, her husband and child, were dead.   These events, many occurring before my birth, I see because my father described them   often and with outrage.   To be a child is to see things and not know them; then you know them.    •   Despite the malicious stars, decisive at my birth: despite their   sufficient instrument, the hand within me that moves against me: in the utter darkness of my first prison God granted me vision:   surrounded by my stinks, an Angel, his beauty   austere, not wanton, graciously showed me a room in half-light crowded with the dead:   postures blunted as if all promise of change   was lost, the dead walked up and down and back and forth:   as if the promise of change   fleeing had stolen the light. Then, on the wall, there was a square of light.   Careless of blindness I turned my eyes   to the full sun. I did not care to look on anything again but this. The sun   withering and quickening without distinction   then bulged out: the boss expanded: the calm body of the dead Christ   formed itself from the same   substance as the sun. Still on the cross, he was the same substance as the sun.    •   The bait the Duke laid was Perseus. Perseus   standing before the Piazza della Signoria.   My statue’s audience and theater, Michelangelo’sDavid; Donatello’s  Judith With the Head of Holofernes . . .   Here the school of Florence, swaggering, says to the world: Eat.   Only Bandinelli’s odious Hercules and Cacus   reminds one that when one walks streets on earth one steps in shit.   Duke Cosimo desired, he said, a statue of Perseus   triumphant, after intricate trials able at last to raise high   Medusa’s mutilated head — he imagined,   perhaps, decapitation of the fickle rabble of republican Florence . . .   I conceived the hero’s gesture as more generous: —  Kill the thing that lookedupon makes us stone.   Soon enough, on my great bronze bust of the great   Duke, I placed — staring out from his chest — Medusa, her head not yet cut, living.    •  Remember, Benvenuto, you cannot bring yourgreat gifts to light by your strength alone You show your greatness only through the opportunities we give youHold your tongue I will drown you in gold    •   As we stared down at the vast square, atDavid, at Judith — then at Hercules and Cacus   approved and placed there by Cosimo himself —   from high on the fortress lookout of the palace, against whose severe façade so many   human promises had been so cunningly   or indifferently crushed, I told the Duke that I cannot make his statue. My brief return from France   was designed only to provide for the future of   my sister and six nieces, now without husband or father. The King of France alone had saved me   from the Pope’s dungeon — not any lord of Italy!   At this, the Duke looked at me sharply, but said nothing.   All Rome knew that though I had disproved   the theft that was pretext for my arrest, Pope Paul still kept me imprisoned, out of spite —   vengeance of his malignant son Pier Luigi, now   assassinated by his own retainers. One night at dinner, the King’s emissary gave the Pope   gossip so delicious that out of merriment, and about to vomit   from indulgence, he agreed to free me. I owed King Francis   my art, my service. The same stipend he once paid   Leonardo, he now paid me; along with a house in Paris. This house was, in truth, a castle . . .   I omitted, of course, quarrels with the King’s   mistress, demon who taunted me for the slowness of my work, out of her petty hatred of art itself;   omitted her insistence to the King that I   am insolent and by example teach insolence to others. Omitted that I overheard the King   joke with her lieutenant: —  Kill him, if you can find mehis equal in art.   Before the school of Florence I had only been able,   young, to show myself as goldsmith and jeweler; not yet as sculptor.   Duke Cosimo then announced that all the King of France   had given me, he would surpass: boasting, he beckoned me to follow him past the public   common galleries, into the private apartments . . .   Dutiful abashed puppet, I followed; I knew I would remain and make his statue.    •  In the mirror of art, you who are familiar with the rituals ofdecorum and bloodshed before which you are silence and submission while within stonethe mind writhes  contemplate, as if a refrain were wisdom, the glistening intricationof bronze and will and circumstance in the mirror of art.    •   Bandinelli for months insinuated in the Duke’s ear Perseus never would be finished: —   I lacked the art, he said, to move from the small   wax model the Duke rightly praised, to lifesize bronze whose secrets tormented even Donatello.   So eighteen months after work began, Duke Cosimo grew   tired, and withdrew his subsidy. Lattanzo Gorini, spider-handed and gnat-voiced, refusing to hand over   payment said, Why do you not finish?   Then Bandinelli hissed Sodomite! at me — after my enumeration, to the court’s   amusement, of the sins against art and sense   committed by his Hercules and Cacus, recital designed to kill either him or his authority . . .   The Duke, at the ugly word, frowned   and turned away. I replied that the sculptor ofHercules and Cacus must be a madman to think that I   presumed to understand the art that Jove in heaven   used on Ganymede, art nobly practiced here on earth by so many emperors and kings. My saucy speech   ended: My poor wick does not dare to burn so high!   Duke and court broke into laughter. Thus was born my resolve to murder Bandinelli.    •   I’d hurl the creature to hell. In despair at what must follow — the Duke’s rage, abandonment of my   never-to-be-born Perseus — I cast   myself away for lost: with a hundred crowns and a swift horse, I resolved first to bid   farewell to my natural son, put to wet-nurse in Fiesole;   then to descend to San Domenico, where Bandinelli returned each evening. Then, after blood, France.   Reaching Fiesole, I saw the boy   was in good health; his wet-nurse was my old familiar, old gossip, now   married to one of my workmen. The boy   clung to me: wonderful in a two-year-old, in grief he flailed his arms when at last   in the thick half-dusk   I began to disengage myself. Entering the square of San Domenico on one side, I saw my prey   arriving on the other. Enraged that he still   drew breath, when I reached him I saw he was unarmed. He rode a small sorry   mule. A wheezing donkey carried a ten-year-old   boy at his side. In my sudden presence, his face went white. I nodded my head and rode past.    •   I had a vision of Bandinelli surrounded by the heaped-up works of his hand.  Not one thing that he had made did I want to have made. From somewhere within his body   like a thread   he spun the piles surrounding him. Then he tried to pull away, to release the thread; I saw   the thread was a leash.   He tried and tried to cut it. At this, in my vision I said out-loud: —  My art is my revenge.    •   When I returned to Florence from Fiesole, after three days news was brought to me that my little boy   was smothered by his wet-nurse   turning over on him as they both slept. His panic, as I left; his arms raised, in panic.    •  from the great unchosen narration you will soonbe released Benvenuto Cellini dirtied by blood and earthbut now  you have again taught yourself to disappear moving wax from armto thigh you have again taught yourself to disappear here where each soul is itsorbit spinning sweetly around the center of itself at the edge of its eye the greatdesign of virtue here your Medusa and your Perseus are twins his triumphant body still furious with purposebut his face abstracted absorbed in contemplation as she is abstracted absorbedthough blood still spurts from her neck  defeated by a mirror as in concentration you move waxfrom thigh to arm under your hand it grows    •   The idyll began when the Duke reached me a goldsmith’s hammer, with which I struck the goldsmith’s   chisel he held; and so the little statues were   disengaged from earth and rust. Bronze antiquities, newly found near Arezzo, they lacked   either head or hands or feet. Impatient for my   presence, the Duke insisted that I join him each evening at his new pastime, playing artisan — leaving orders   for my free admittance to his rooms, day or night.   His four boys, when the Duke’s eyes were turned, hovered around me, teasing. One night   I begged them to hold their peace.   The boldest replied, That we can’t do! I said what one cannot do is required of no one.  So have your will! Faced with their sons’   delight in this new principle, the Duke and Duchess smiling accused me of a taste for chaos . . .   At last the four figures wrought for the four   facets of the pedestal beneath Perseus were finished. I brought them one evening to the Duke,   arranging them on his worktable in a row: —  figures, postures from scenes that the eye cannotentirely decipher, story haunting the eye with its  resonance, unseen ground that explains nothing . . .   The Duke appeared, then immediately retreated; reappearing, in his right hand   he held a pear slip. This is for your garden, the garden of your house. I began, Do you mean, but he cut me off saying, Yes, Benvenuto: garden and house now are yours.   Thus I received what earlier was only lent me.   I thanked him and his Duchess; then both took seats before my figures.   For two hours talk was of their beauty, —   the Duchess insisted they were too exquisite to be wasted down there   in the piazza; I must place them in her apartments.   No argument from intention or design unconvinced her.   So I waited till the next day — entering the private   chambers at the hour the Duke and Duchess each afternoon went riding, I carried the statues   down and soldered them with lead into their niches.   Returning, how angry the Duchess became! The Duke abandoned his workshop. I went there no more.    •   The old inertia of earth that hates the new (as from a rim I watched)   rose from the ground, legion: —   truceless ministers of the great unerasable ZERO, eager to annihilate lineament and light,   waited, pent, against the horizon: —   some great force (massive, stubborn, multiform asearth, fury whose single name is LEGION, — )   wanted my Perseus not to exist: —   and I must defeat them.   Then my trembling assistants woke me.   They said all my work was spoiled.   Perseus was spoiled. He lay buried in earth   wreathed in fragile earthenware veins from the furnace above, veins through which he still   waited to be filled with burning metal.   The metal was curdled. As I slept, sick, the bronze had been allowed to cake, to curdle.   Feverish, made sick by my exertions for   days, for months, I slept; while those charged with evenly feeding the furnace that I had so well   prepared, LARKED —   I thought, Unwitting ministers of the gorgonMedusa herself. The furnace choked with caking, curdling   metal that no art known to man could   uncurdle, must be utterly dismantled — all who made it agreed this must destroy   the fragile, thirsty mould of Perseus beneath.   But Perseus was not more strong than Medusa, but more clever: — if he ever   was to exist as idea, he must first exist as matter: —   all my old inborn daring returned,   furious to reverse   the unjust triumphs of the world’s mere arrangements of power, that seemingly on earth   cannot be reversed. First, I surveyed my forces: —   seven guilty workmen, timid, sullen, resentful; a groom; two maids; a cook.   I harassed these skeptical troops into battle: —   two hands were sent to fetch from the butcher Capretta a load of young oak, —   in bronze furnaces the only woods you use   are slow-burning alder, willow, pine: now I needed oak and its fierce heat. As the oak   was fed log by log into the fire, how the cake began   to stir, to glow and sparkle. Now from the increased   combustion of the furnace, a conflagration   shot up from the roof: two windows burst into flame: I saw the violent storm   filling the sky fan the flames.   All the while with pokers and iron rods we stirred and stirred the channels—   the metal, bubbling, refused to flow.   I sent for all my pewter plates, dishes, porringers — the cook and maids brought some two hundred.   Piece by piece, I had them thrown   into the turgid mass. As I watched the metal for movement, the cap of the furnace   exploded — bronze welling over on all sides.   I had the plugs pulled, the mouths of the mould opened; in perfect liquefaction   the veins of Perseus filled . . .   Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay sheath had been with great care removed, I found   what was dead brought to life again.    •   Now, my second prison. It began soon after Perseus was unveiled   to acclaim — great acclaim. Perhaps I grew   too glorious. Perseus, whose birth consumed nine years, found stuck to his pedestal   sonnets celebrating the master’s hand that made him . . .   On the day of unveiling, Duke Cosimo stationed himself at a window just above the entrance to the palace;   there, half-hidden, he listened for hours to the crowd’s   wonder. He sent his attendant Sforza to say my reward   soon would astonish me.   Ten days passed. At last Sforza appeared and asked what price I placed on my statue.   I was indeed astonished: It is not my custom,   I replied, to set a price for my work, as ifhe were a merchant and I a mere tradesman.   Then, at risk of the Duke’s severe displeasure, I was   warned I must set a price: infuriated, I said ten thousand golden crowns.  Cities and great palaces are built with ten thousand golden crowns, the Duke two days later flung at me in anger.  Many men can build cities and palaces,   I replied, but not one can makea second Perseus.   Bandinelli, consulted by the Duke, reluctantly   concluded that the statue was worth sixteen thousand.   The Duke replied that for two farthings   Perseus could go to the scrap heap; that would resolve our differences.   At last, the settlement was thirty-five hundred, one   hundred a month. Soon after, charges were brought against me, for sodomy —   I escaped Florence as far as Scarperia, but there   the Duke’s soldiers caught me and in chains brought me back.   I confessed. If I had not, I could have been made   to serve as a slave in the Duke’s galleys for life. The Duke listened behind a screen as I was made   publicly to confess, in full court . . . Punishment   was four years imprisonment. Without the Duke’s concurrence, of course, no charges could have been   lodged, no public humiliation arranged   to silence the insolent. The first Cosimo, founder of Medicipower, all his life protected Donatello — whose affections and bliss were found in Ganymede.   After imprisonment one month, Cosimo finally commuted my sentence to house arrest.   There his magnanimity allowed me to complete   my Christ of the whitest marble set upon a cross of the blackest.   Now, my Christ sits still packed in a crate   in the Duke’s new chapel; my bust of the Duke is exiled to Elba, there to frighten in open air   slaves peering out from his passing galleys.   Now, after the Duchess and two of their sons died of fever within two months, Cosimo   grows stranger: he murdered Sforza   by running him through with a spear: — he does not own   his mind; or will.   When I ask release from his service, he says that he cannot, that he soon   will have need of me for great projects; no   commissions come. Catherine de’ Medici, regent of the young French king, petitioned that I be allowed   to enter her service. He said I had no will now to work.   In prison I wrote my sonnet addressed to Fortune: — Fortune, you sow!  You turned from me because Ganymede also is my joy . . . O God of Nature, author of my nature,   where does your son Jesus forbid it?   When I was five, one night my father woke me. He pulled me to the basement, making me   stare into the oak fire and see what he just had seen.   There a little lizard was sporting at the core of the intensest flames.   My father boxed me on the ears, then kissed me —   saying that I must remember this night: —My dear little boy, the lizard you see  is a salamander, a creature that lives at the heart of fire. You and I are blessed: no othersoul now living has been allowed to see it.    •   I am too old to fight to leave Florence: —   here, young, this goldsmith and jeweler began to imagine that   severity, that chastity of style   certain remnants of the ancient world left my hand hungry to emulate: —   equilibrium of ferocious, contradictory   forces: equilibrium whose balance or poise is their tension, and does not efface them, —   as if the surface of each thing   arranged within the frame, the surface of each body the eye must circle   gives up to the eye its vibration, its nature.   Two or three times, perhaps,— yousay where, — I have achieved it.    •   See, in my great bronze bust of the great Duke, embedded in the right epaulette like a trophy an open-mouthed face part lion part man part goat, with an iron bar jammed in its lower jaw   rising resistlessly across its mouth.   See, in Vasari’s clumsy portrait of me, as I float above the right shoulder of the Duke, the same face.”    •  As if your hand fumbling to reach insidereached inside As if light falling on the surfacefell on what made the surface As if there were no scarcity of sunon the sun        III   I covered my arm with orchid juice.   With my hatchet I split a mangrove stick from a tree, and sharpened it.   I covered the killing stick with orchid juice.   We were camping at Marunga Island looking for oysters. This woman I was about to kill   at last separated herself from the others   to hunt lilies. She walked into the swamp, then got cold, and lay down on sandy ground.   After I hit her between the eyes with my hatchet   she kicked, but couldn’t raise up.   With my thumb over the end of the killing stick   I jabbed her Mount of Venus until her skin pushed back up to her navel. Her large intestine   protruded as though it were red calico.   With my thumb over the end of the killing stick each time she inhaled   I pushed my arm   in a little. When she exhaled, I stopped. Little by little I got my hand   inside her. Finally I touched her heart.   Once you reach what is inside it is outside. I pushed the killing stick   into her heart.   The spirit that belonged to that dead woman went into my heart then.   I felt it go in.   I pulled my arm out. I covered my arm with orchid juice.   Next I broke a nest of green ants   off a tree, and watched the live ants bite her skin until her skin moved by itself   downward from her navel and covered her bones.   Then I took some dry mud and put my sweat and her blood in the dry mud   and warmed it over a fire. Six or eight times   I put the blood and sweat and mud inside her uterus until there was no trace of her   wound or what I had done.   I was careful none of her pubic hair was left inside her vagina for her husband to feel.   Her large intestine stuck out several feet.   When I shook some green ants on it, a little went in. I shook some more. All of it went in.   When I whirled the killing stick with her heart’s blood   over her head, her head moved. When I whirled it some more, she moved   more. The third time I whirled the killing stick   she gasped for breath. She blew some breath out of her mouth, and was all right.   I said, You go eat some lilies. She   got up. I said, You will livetwo days. One day you will be happy. The next, sick.   She ate some lilies. She walked around, then   came back and slept. When laughing and talking women woke her she gathered her lilies and returned to camp.   The next day she walked around and played,   talked and made fun, gathering with others oysters and lilies. She brought into camp what she   gathered. That night she lay down and died.   Even the gods cannot end death. In this universe anybody can kill anybody   with a stick. What the gods gave me   is their gift, the power to bury within each creature the hour it ceases.   Everyone knows I have powers but not such power.   If they knew I would be so famous they would kill me.   I tell you because your tongue is stone.   If the gods ever give you words, one night in sleep you will wake to find me above you.    •   After sex & metaphysics, — . . . what?   What you have made.    •  Infinite the forms, finitetonight as I find again in the mirror the familiar appeaseless eater’s face Ignorant of cause or source or endin silence he repeats Eater, become food All life exists at the expense of other lifeBecause you have eaten and eat as eat you must Eater, become food unlike the burning starsburning merely to be Then I ask him how to become food In silence he repeats that others haveother fates, but that I must fashion out of the corruptible body a new body good to eat a thousand years Then I tell the eater’s face that within me is nosustenance, on my famished plate centuries have been served me and still I am famished He smirks, and in silence repeats that all life existsat the expense of other life You must fashion out of the corruptiblebody a new body good to eat a thousand years Because you have eaten and eat as eat you mustignorant of cause or source or end    •   drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,   within I am awake   repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread forced by being to watch the birth of suns    •   This is the end of the third hour of the night.
So one day when the azalea bush was firing away and the Japanese maple was roaring I came into the kitchen full of daylight and turned on my son’s Sony sliding over the lacquered floor in my stocking feet for it was time to rattle the canisters and see what sugar and barley have come to and how Bolero sounds after all these years and if I’m loyal still and when did I have a waist that thin? And if my style was too nostalgic and where were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?
Port-au-Prince Girl on a heap of street sweepings high as a pyre, laid on snarled wire & dented rim. Girl set down among the wrung-out hides. A girl who was coming from church. It is late Sunday afternoon. Was it a seizure? Is itdestiny or bad luck we should fear? Weak heartor swerving taxi? In Tet Bef by the dirty ocean thousands crush past her without pausing at the shrine of her spayed limbs; brilliance like the flesh of lilies sprouting from the pummeled cane.Is it possible to be lighthearted, hours later?Days? To forget the yellow dress? I am waiting for her mother to find her, still wearing one white spotless glove (where is the other?), my idle taxi level with her unbruised arm, her fingers just curling like petals of a fallen flowerand how did it end? Let someone have gathered her up before the stars assembled coldly overhead: her dress brighter than gold, crocus, the yolk of an eggher face covered like the bride of a god; let them have found her & borne her though the traffic's clamor veiled with a stranger's handkerchief.
The whole ball of who we are presses into the green baize at a single tiny spot. An aural track of crackle betrays our passage through the fibrous jungle. It’s hot and desperate. Insects spring out of it. The pressure is intense, and the sense that we’ve lost proportion. As though bringing too much to bear too locally were our decision.
Each escape involved some art, some hokum, and at least a brief incomprehensible exchange between the man and metal during which the chains were not so much broken as he and they blended. At the end of each such mix he had to extract himself. It Was the hardest part to get right routinely: breaking back into the same Houdini.
When I dare at last to imagine hunger, see farmer wandering his parched fields knowing nothing to do, finally, but sleep the day out in the barn's long shadow, dreaming of the family dog he drove deep into a neighboring county and abandoned by the side of the road. Weeks later a boy finds it in a ditch— timid and gimp, a halo of gnats festering between its swollen testicles and wormy flanks—and he coaxes it into some pines, tethers it with a tentstake and a chain as the late summer light spirals and drapes over the branches, a mirage the dog slavers and snaps at. Consider the boy's amusement as he imagines the animal jerking the light down and the ruckus of bells that clang and catapult from the treetop belfries, the canopy rent like a piñata, spilling licorice and circus peanuts, coins and fluttering dollar bills. The real possibilities are beyond him. The dog as a parable of pain or loss. Hunger as some small iridescent thing at work inside the animal, hovering around its heart the way a lone dragonfly skirts the dry pond crater, dismantling the day—light unstitched from dust, dust unbuckled from air. By now, the dog's given up, and the boy watches its tongue loll in the pine needles, the heave and fall of its stomach, its eyes following birdflight in and out of the shade. Restless for something he cannot name, he imagines the music he might make if he thumped the dog's belly like a drum. Imagines its eyes are the color of iron. Imagines the unimaginable and does it, the tire tool and the belly unwilling instruments, and the dog's caterwaul is not like music at all and when night comes the cricketsong dulcifies nothing, the dog's body is just a body, is not paltry, is not glorified. What hunger is this that haunts the boy, that haunts the man sleeping in the shade? Watch as the dragonfly dips into his open mouth and keeps going, a blur between bone and sinew, a wet thread collapsing soft caverns of flesh, gone to where his body is a field honed by sleeves of sunlight, to where the boy ceases to be and the man wakes. He knows what flits through him now keeps the time with its thrumming, carrying him away from himself into himself, to where the dog roves in the shadows— ravenous, luminous—its tail bobbing in the heat, a winnowing sliver of light.
I’m here, one fat cherry  blossom blooming like a clod,   one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,  so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer   at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,  That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,   if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll  this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,   let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled  with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless   distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation  continue to make me   your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned  all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you,   My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife,  so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities,   these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten  with this heaven never meant for, never heard from.   You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course  with what can’t be said of us, bred in us,   isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you  I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use   the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping  devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze.   Everyone knows love is just a euphemism  for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me.   Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing  without scope, hope, nothing   without your possibility. So let’s laugh  like the thieves we are together, the sieves:   you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud,  my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out,   revisible, spell-bound.  Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum.   In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself  with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue.   I just wanted to write again and say  how much I’ve failed you.
Naked for twenty-four of our last thirty-six  Hours together, and I mean museum-quality, sex-  Shop, God-riddling naked, sapping gold  Light from the windows of her hundred-year-old  Baltimore dorm, we were hungry for selling  Points, like a couple in a showroom. Compelling  Arguments were made to close the deal  And children were discussed. I kissed her from heel  To head in a shower without water;  Then with. Nude, she read me a letter as a waiter  Would his specials, and I couldn't keep  My eyes off: smooth shoulders, belly, pelvis,  Deep olive skin all a balm against sleep.  It was from her sexy grandmother in Dieppe  And Séverine translated, both of us  Somehow drawn to this third party in a tidal  Sort of way, her lunar candor, her antipodal  Ease with words and the world. We were difficult,  Séverine and I, a beautiful strain, a cult  Of two. Even eating, we made lots of noise.  Even resting in bed, watching the trees,  Our lighter breathing, our limb-shifting, sheet-  Rustling, even our dreaming had fight.  Her heart was exceptionally loud—not with love,  But with knowing. Knowing what to be afraid of.
Someone says Tristan& Isolde, the shared cup& broken vows binding them,& someone else says Romeo& Juliet, a lyre & Jew’s harp sighing a forbidden oath, but I say a midnight horn& a voice with a moody angel inside, the two married rib to rib, note for note. Of course, I am thinking of those Tuesdays or Thursdays at Billy Berg’s in LA when Lana Turner would say, “Please sing ‘Strange Fruit’ for me,” & then her dancing nightlong with Mel Torme, as if she knew what it took to make brass & flesh say yes beneath the clandestine stars& a spinning that is so fast we can’t feel the planet moving. Is this why some of us fall in & out of love? Did Lady Day& Prez ever hold each other& plead to those notorious gods? I don’t know. But I do know even if a horn & voice plumb the unknown, what remains unsaid coalesces around an old blues& begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.
The water off these rocks is green and cold. The sandless coast takes the tide in its mouth, as a wolf brings down a deer or lifts its child.   I walked this bay before you were my child. Your fingers stinging brightly in the cold, I take each one and warm it in my mouth.   Though I’ve known this shore for years, my mouth holds no charms of use to you, my child. You will have to learn the words to ward off cold   and know them cold, child, in your open mouth.
There are days I don’t think about the sea;  weeks wash by in fact, then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye, reflected there, a shimmering reverie,  recalling the pact   I once made (and renew today) to hold  to a higher altitude. But note the difference between this bird and me: a slight disruption or harsh word and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold  life intrude;   whereas the petrel, mindless of such height,  scales each watery hill that rises up, adapting to the shape of each impediment, each low escape instinct in it, the scope of its flight  fitted to its will.
“Dead people don’t like olives,” I told my partners in eighth grade dancing class, who never listened as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two. The dead people I often consulted nodded their skulls in unison while I flung my black velvet cape over my shoulders and glowered from deep-set, burning eyes, walking the city streets, alone at fifteen, crazy for cheerleaders and poems. At Hamden High football games, girls in short pleated skirts pranced and kicked, and I longed for their memorable thighs. They were friendly—poets were mascots— but never listened when I told them that dead people didn’t like olives. Instead the poet, wearing his cape, continued to prowl in solitude intoning inscrutable stanzas as halfbacks and tackles made out, Friday nights after football, on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms with magnanimous cheerleaders. But, decades later, when the dead have stopped blathering about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders waiting for hip replacements, while a lascivious, doddering poet, his burning eyes deep-set in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.
Glory be to God for sexy things—   For cries of coupled lovers as they bind and bow;   For moles that on her hip’ll make his dolphin swim,  Fresh and fired up; nutty balls; G-strings;   Lovescapes pulsing and flesh-shoaled—furrow and plow;   And all shapes, their leer and freckle and whim.  All people dumpy, bald, regressive, strange;   Whoever is fickle, faithful (who knows how?)   With slick, abrasive; sweet, sour; disheveled, trim;  Who father-forth and mother-forth all change—   Praise Him.
1. If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,  as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?  If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,  shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?  I’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me:  is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he,  could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse,  and orchestrate ever undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself?  2 The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call,  take me along, and I’m sent out with the dead boy’s brother and some others to play.  We’re joking around, and some words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said. How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies? is what’s said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares,  and I want to know now why that someone in me who’s me yet not me let me say it.  Shouldn’t he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me,  it didn’t matter that I’d really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when?  3 I could hear the boy’s mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping.  Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end?  Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me,  for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes?  She didn’t laugh, though, or I never heard her. How do you know when you can laugh? Why couldn’t someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain?  The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn’t hear anything more from inside.  The way now sometimes what’s in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.
That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises, Though it could be approached by someone praying. We have no recordings of it, though of course In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers. But its song is lost. If it was related to A species of Quiet, or of another feather, No researcher can know. Not even whether A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou, Where legend has it some once common bird Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,  one of my parents turned to me and said:  “We hope you end up here,” where the shade relieves the light, where we sit in some beneficence—and I felt the shape of the finite after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,  of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be  under the trees, because the voice I’d heard  could not cradle me, could no longer keep me  in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye  again, make my way across the white  California sand and back: or am I now creating  the helplessness I heard those words express,  the psalm torn like a map in my hands?
The count of cappuccino,  the marquise of meringue,  all the little cantuccini... and what was the song they sang?  Oh, the best of us is nothing  but a sweetening of the air,  a tryst between the teeth and tongue:  we meet and no one’s there  though the café’s always crowded  as society arrives  and light glints to and fro between  the eyes and rings and knives.  We’ll slip away together,  perfect ghosts of appetite,  the balancing of ash on fire  and whim—the mating flight  of amaretti papers,  my petite montgolfiere,  our lit cage rising weightless  up the lift shaft of the air.  So the count of cappuccino,  the marquise of not much more, consumed each other’s hunger.  Then the crash. And then the war.
I Today I dissected a squid,  the late acacia tossing its pollen  across the black of the lab bench.  In a few months the maples  will be bleeding. That was the thing:  there was no blood  only textures of gills creased like satin,  suction cups as planets in rows. Be careful  not to cut your finger
For Max Rojas Once a month  when the moon loses everything,  Don Max takes a chair  to the edge of the sea.  Black sand beach & green-backed heron.  The moon  casts off her milkglass earrings.  I am nothing, she says, but black & white.  I keep losing my face.  Don Max feels for his pipe in his pocket.  Takes it, knocks it against his palm.  I am old! She cries. I get gooseflesh  in the dark. Don Max is looking for his tobacco.  Don Max has found a match.  You don’t know how hard it is  to come back from nothing.  Don Max smiles & lights up.  I keep making the same mistakes, she says.  I think you should leave me, she says.  Through smoke, she watches Don Max  fold a strip of seaweed into a grasshopper.  Leave me for your own good! She demands.  Don Max has set the grasshopper in the sand.  Besides, I am too beautiful.  She speaks it as though it makes her sad.  I’ll find other lovers. I will  forget you.
This water flows dark red from alder tannin: boot-stain river between white rocks. An ouzel, flannel-feathered, sips the current up. Mossgatherers spread their patches across a dry, flat turnaround. They seem embarrassed, want to shelter in the dark. A coyote running in broad day; stumps ruffling with sulphur polypores woodsy to the tongue, woody to teeth. Early yellow leaves paste river to its bed; blackberries drop, the last, many out of taste and strictly smudge. Puddles loop in the road: Bottomland— the foolhen waits there for the fool gun, gray throat-down free in a burst, the pose, the afterslump. Carcass beside spirit. O come to my hand, unkillable; whatever continues, continue to approach.
Over our heads, trailing a wake of air and an enormous shadow as it passed, the falcon glided to its trainer’s fist and settled like a loaded weapon there. Then, while she fed the bird bit after bit of... what? rabbit? the trainer gave her talk: These birds, she said, prey on the small and weak, adding for the children’s benefit that this, though it seems cruel, is really good since otherwise the other rabbits, mice, squirrels, what have you, would run out of space and die of illness or a lack of food. I know what she was trying to get across, and I don’t doubt it would be healthier if we were more familiar than we are with how the natural world draws life from loss; and granted, nothing is more natural than death incarnate falling from the sky; and granted, it is better some should die, however agonizingly, than all. Still, to teach children this is how things go is one thing, to insist that it is good is something else—it is to make a god of an unsatisfactory status quo, this vicious circle that the clock hands draw and quarter, while the serpent bites its tail, or eats the dust, or strikes at someone’s heel, or winds up comprehended by a claw. She launched the bird again. We watched it climb out of the amphitheatre, headed toward the darkened spires of a nearby wood, then bank, then angle toward us one last time.
1 When you have forgotten (to bring into Play that fragrant morsel of rhetoric, Crisp as autumnal air), when you Have forgotten, say, sunlit corners, brick Full of skyline, rowhomes, smokestacks, Billboards, littered rooftops & wondered What bread wrappers reflect of our hunger, 2 When you have forgotten wide-brimmed hats, Sunday back-seat leather rides & church, The doorlock like a silver cane, the broad backs Swaying or the great moan deep churning, & the shimmer flick of flat sticks, the lurch Forward, skip, hands up Aileyesque drop, When you have forgotten the meaningful bop, 3 Hustlers and their care-what-may, blasé Ballet and flight, when you have forgotten Scruffy yards, miniature escapes, the way Laundry lines strung up sag like shortened Smiles, when you have forgotten the Fish Man Barking his catch in inches up the street “I’ve got porgies. I’ve got trout. Feeesh 4 Man,” or his scoop and chain scale, His belief in shad and amberjack; when You have forgotten Ajax and tin pails, Blue crystals frothing on marble front Steps Saturday mornings, or the garden Of old men playing checkers, the curbs White-washed like two lines out to the burbs, 5 Or the hopscotch squares painted new In the street, the pitter-patter of feet Landing on rhymes. “How do you Like the weather, girls? All in together, girls, January, February, March, April... ” The jump ropes’ portentous looming, Their great, aching love blooming. 6 When you have forgotten packs of grape- Flavored Now & Laters, the squares Of sugar flattening on the tongue, the elation You felt reaching into the corner-store jar, Grasping a handful of Blow Pops, candy bars With names you didn’t recognize but came To learn. All the turf battles. All the war games. 7 When you have forgotten popsicle stick Races along the curb and hydrant fights, Then, retrieve this letter from your stack I’ve sent by clairvoyant post & read by light, For it brought me as much longing and delight. This week’s Father’s Day; I’ve a long ride to Philly. I’ll give this to Gramps, then head to Black Lily.
From the ninth-century Irish poem Pangur Bán and I at work, Adepts, equals, cat and clerk: His whole instinct is to hunt, Mine to free the meaning pent. More than loud acclaim, I love Books, silence, thought, my alcove. Happy for me, Pangur Bán Child-plays round some mouse’s den. Truth to tell, just being here, Housed alone, housed together, Adds up to its own reward: Concentration, stealthy art. Next thing an unwary mouse Bares his flank: Pangur pounces. Next thing lines that held and held Meaning back begin to yield. All the while, his round bright eye Fixes on the wall, while I Focus my less piercing gaze On the challenge of the page. With his unsheathed, perfect nails Pangur springs, exults and kills. When the longed-for, difficult Answers come, I too exult. So it goes. To each his own. No vying. No vexation. Taking pleasure, taking pains, Kindred spirits, veterans. Day and night, soft purr, soft pad, Pangur Bán has learned his trade. Day and night, my own hard work Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.
I stared into the valley: it was gone— wholly submerged! A vast flat sea remained, gray, with no waves, no beaches; all was one. And here and there I noticed, when I strained, the alien clamoring of small, wild voices:  birds that had lost their way in that vain land.  And high above, the skeletons of beeches, as if suspended, and the reveries  of ruins and of the hermit’s hidden reaches. And a dog yelped and yelped, as if in fear, I knew not where nor why. Perhaps he heard strange footsteps, neither far away nor near— echoing footsteps, neither slow nor quick, alternating, eternal. Down I stared, but I saw nothing, no one, looking back. The reveries of ruins asked: “Will no one come?” The skeletons of trees inquired: “And who are you, forever on the go?” I may have seen a shadow then, an errant shadow, bearing a bundle on its head. I saw—and no more saw, in the same instant. All I could hear were the uneasy screeches of the lost birds, the yelping of the stray, and, on that sea that lacked both waves and beaches, the footsteps, neither near nor far away.
We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot We boys, the neighborhood’s naked We boys of stomachs bloated from eating mud We boys of teeth porous from eating dates and pumpkin rind We boys will line up from Hassan al-Basri’s mausoleum to the Ashar River’s source to meet you in the morning waving green palm fronds We will cry out: Long Live We will cry out: Live to Eternity And we will hear the music of Scottish bagpipes, gladly Sometimes we will laugh at an Indian soldier’s beard but fear will merge with our laughs, and dispute them We cry out: Long Live We cry out: Live to Eternity and reach our hands toward you: Give us bread We the hungry, starving since our birth in this village Give us meat, chewing gum, cans, and fish Give us, so no mother expels her child so that we do not eat mud and sleep We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot do not know from where you had come or why you had come or why we cry out: Long Live ............................... And now we ask: will you stay long? And will we go on reaching our hands toward you? London, December 3, 2002
Written on a slat of a railway car: If some time someone should find pearls threaded on a blood-red string of silk which, near the throat, runs all the thinner like life’s own path until it’s gone somewhere in a fog and can’t be seen— If someone should find these pearls let him know how—cool, aloof—they lit up the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart of the Paris dancing girl, Marie. Now, dragged through unknown Poland— I’m throwing my pearls through the grate. If they’re found by a young man— let these pearls adorn his girlfriend. If they’re found by a girl— let her wear them; they belong to her. And if they’re found by an old man— let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.
Darwin. They say he read novels to relax, But only certain kinds: nothing that ended unhappily. If anything like that turned up, enraged, he flung the book into the fire. True or not, I’m ready to believe it. Scanning in his mind so many times and places, he’d had enough of dying species, the triumphs of the strong over the weak, the endless struggles to survive, all doomed sooner or later. He’d earned the right to happy endings, at least in fiction with its diminutions. Hence the indispensable silver lining, the lovers reunited, the families reconciled, the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded, fortunes regained, treasures uncovered, stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways, good names restored, greed daunted, old maids married off to worthy parsons, troublemakers banished to other hemispheres, forgers of documents tossed down the stairs, seducers scurrying to the altar, orphans sheltered, widows comforted, pride humbled, wounds healed over, prodigal sons summoned home, cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean, hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation, general merriment and celebration, and the dog Fido, gone astray in the first chapter, turns up barking gladly in the last.
Smudged here with betel juice, burnished there  with aloe paste, a splash of powder in one corner,  and lacquer from footprints embroidered in another,  with flowers from her hair strewn all over  its winding crumpled folds, the sheets celebrate  the joy of making love to a woman in every position.
Maybe my soul’s all right.  But my body’s all wrong,  All bent and twisted,  All this that hurts me so.  My soul keeps trying, trying  To straighten my body up.  It hangs on my skeleton, frantic,  Flapping its terrified wings.  Look here, look at my hands,  They look like little wet toads  After a rainstorm’s over,  Hopping, hopping, hopping.  Maybe God didn’t like  The look of my face when He saw it.  Sometimes a big dog  Looks right into it.
Little soul little stray little drifter now where will you stay all pale and all alone after the way you used to make fun of things
Whether or not shadows are of the substance  such is the expectation I can  wait to surprise my vision as a wind  enters the valley: sudden and silent  in its arrival, drawing to full cry  the whorled invisibilities, glassen towers  freighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming  powers, rammack the small  orchard; that well-steaded oaks  ride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash,  that glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside.  Amidst and abroad tumultuous lumina,  regents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained,  fly tally over hedgerows, across fields.
When the fog slunk in with that salivary, close, coyote panting, its hue a very huelessness, like breath huffed on a glass, like the void stretched and still stretching past where we’d thought it could, we felt less wary. We felt our shoulders loosen, surrendering to phantom hands and softly vanished feet. The sensation was a first and last: sweet to feel the vigilance at last suspending, the chronic stress of constantly pretending to know—have known!—what all the others knew. Loopy, sly, we leered at one another (what we just assumed was one another) and did the things we weren’t supposed to do, grinning as if seated in the back pew of a church that worshipped fuss and bother, a dour church where facial expression of any kind had been prohibited, and where the chinking, hefty plate we shifted hand to hand held such a vast collection of their coin, we pocketed a fraction for when the fog would lift, if it lifted. But stealing from them puts you in their power. Since then we have been paying for that hour.
Once again you’ve fallen for the lure  of his deferral, his quick eyes’ brightness  slinking from the pantry of the righteous.  Nothing half so sleek as self-licked fur.  Not that he forgot your boots, or left  A single high-aimed compliment unturned.  He’ll double back, affect to be concerned  when he’s the secret reason you’re bereft,  embracing you with his Houdini hold,  repeating chewed-off bits of what you say  so he seems loyal, you the turncoat jay.  You’d think by now you’d learn to be consoled  to know the soul he sold’s not yours but his,  though where yours was a hollow feeling is.
made it to Florida and then I went for a walk. The frog pond is half-iced over. I chucked a stick at it— still thin. On the white side, the wind twirled a leaf around like a prepubescent figure skater who’s given up her childhood to get here. Of course, the leaf was wearing its practice costume of browns, the whole world offed of spangles as I am offed of you. Why mail snow? Just to show I could keep it cold in so much heat.
Sometimes I dream what’s called the male dream:  I’m going somewhere not too far away, I’m almost there,  When there’s a slight delay—a minor detour of no consequence,  But then another, and another, as I get farther and farther  Away from my initial destination, which becomes inaccessible.  Before I left Berlin I went to Venice, a city that reminds me of that dream. However close you are to where you want to go, the compound  Turnings of its narrow passageways and alleys carry you relentlessly away,  Until you dead-end at a small canal that’s nowhere on your map.  The late, wrecked century that started in Berlin, where all roads lead— I thought I’d find, if not the truth exactly, then at least an inkling  Of some fantasy that lay beneath the placid surface of the day,  The remnants of some dream so many people had to die for. Instead,  I watched the boats go by, and clouds traverse the sky  Above an unreal city floating on the water. We’re sure at first  That something lies beyond the facts and books, but then we realize it isn’t there.  Whatever lay behind the slaughter wasn’t in the world,  Existing merely in the heart, in memory, in someone’s imagination,  Places harboring nothing real. To try to see it is to watch it disappear,  Stranding you a life away from where the unimaginable began,  Staring blankly at your own face floating in the water.
We lived in the lucky world—  not the far place where flies  sipped at eye corners  of children too weak to cry.  A camera showed that world to us  on posters. But we were children.  We wanted most to not be those  others, with their terrible bones.  We spoke of them wide-eyed, with  what we thought was tenderness.  But our words came in a different register,  as if to speak of such betrayal  by the grown world could bring  a harm of great immensity  upon us too. We got to choose  from the cupboard. We gave  what we hated—beets, peas,  mushrooms. Our dreams  were not of rice. The moon  laid light on our bicycles propped  against the porch. Sycamores  became our giants standing guard;  the overgrown shrub, our fort. We thought  we understood what was required.  Even crouched beneath our desks  during drill, we said one prayer  for the fear, one for recess.  McClellan Air Force Base  sent forth big-bellied planes  that rattled the windows  of our houses. Evenings, we took  to the streets shrieking  with joy, rode madly fast  around the block. We collapsed  on the lawn breathless, the earth  cool beneath us & pounding hard,  as if it had one great heart.  As if it was ours.
You’re gonna strike the match— You’re gonna strike it— Flame the bank up into pods of fire, be a masterhand— — And someone said, Gasoline. Someone said, We have to change the images inside their heads, said Gasoline? And motor oil, he bought at a mini-mart. — And the cat said Don’t even though it was dead and the squirrel said Don’t and the little dog missing an eye and a leg even though they were dead, said Don’t Don’t but you did it anyway. And someone said, That boy is sick— And someone said, It was kind of pretty when you didn’t know what it was from the road. — Hours now, by the trashed banks, counting the colored glass— Brown for beer. Green for the fizzy water, clear for anything and tail lights smashed, cars mucked like big cats trapped in tar, who ate the flesh right off their legs, if they were lighter they could hurry home, they could float on home— killed cat dead at the end of your stick, who could do that, shot in the head— Like in the shows where the cop cleans up his town, then the ambulance comes for the drowned. — You felt bad, so you did it. You thought it was pretty, so you did it again. You felt charged and buoyant as you picked your way home to the blue-lit fatherless den— So you did it again. The BB’ed mutt, leg smashed, home-bum toasting you with his beer as you dragged it to the sludgy bank, the match, the gas, the pile of tires someone had dumped, were you dumped? you had asked after another one left, and she had slapped you, and slapped— You were an ambulance, you could see she had drowned— Like in the shows where the warrior collects his dead and brings them to the shore, to burn them in their body-boats, release the spiritual — smoke— And the parents said, Didn’t he have a house key around his neck, didn’t he have a pager, an electrical tether to a list of chores and a stocked refrigerator— And the teachers said Yes, but what were the images inside his head, they see it and they make it be— And you put it in a tire, your viking boat, you set it on fire and it kept afloat as it sailed down the river— to the heaven of not being here.
has its little hobbies. The lung likes its air best after supper, goes deeper there to trade up for oxygen, give everything else away. (And before supper, yes, during too, but there’s something about evening, that slow breath of the day noticed: oh good, still coming, still going ... ) As for bones—femur, spine, the tribe of them in there—they harden with use. The body would like a small mile or two. Thank you. It would like it on a bike or a run. Or in the water. Blue. And food. A habit that involves a larger circumference where a garden’s involved, beer is brewed, cows wake the farmer with their fullness, a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat understands I will be crushed into flour and starry-dust the whole room, the baker sweating, opening a window to acknowledge such remarkable confetti. And the brain, locked in its strange dual citizenship, idles there in the body, neatly terraced and landscaped. Or left to ruin, such a brain, wild roses growing next to the sea. The body is gracious about that. Oh, their scent sometimes. Their tangle. In truth, in secret, the first thing in morning the eye longs to see.
Where moonlight angles  through the east-west streets, down among the old  for America tall buildings that changed  the streets of other cities circulate  elevated trains overhead shrieking  and drumming, lit by explosions of sparks  that harm no one and the shadowed persons  walking underneath the erratic waves  not of the lake but of noise move through fog  sieved by the steel mesh of the supporting  structures or through rain that rinses pavements  and the el platforms or through new snow that  quiets corners, moods, riveted careers.   Working for others with hands, backs, machines,  men built hard towers that part the high air,   women and men built, cooked, cleaned, delivered,  typed and filed, carried and delivered, priced  and sold. The river and air were filthy.  In a hundred years builders would migrate  north a mile but in these modern times this  was all the downtown that was. And circling  on a round-cornered  rectangle of tracks  run the trains, clockwise and counter, veering  through or loop-the-loop and out again. Why  even try to list  the kinds of places   men and women made to make money? Not  enough of them, yet too many. From slow  trains overhead some passengers can still  see stone ornaments, pilasters, lintels,  carved by grandfathers, great uncles and gone  second cousins of  today—gargoyle heads  and curving leaves, like memorials for  that which was built to be torn down again  someday, for those who got good wages out  of all this building or were broken by   it, or both, yet whose  labor preserves a   record of labor,  imagination,  ambition, skill, greed, folly, error, cost,  story, so that a  time before remains  present within the bright careening now.
than we do when it’s all  wound down.  I don’t know  why we settle to the sound. Somehow the regular click and chime of passing time, like water, turns a water wheel that turns a gear that turns a stone that turns upon  another stone and fine  and finer in between our dreams like grain are ground.
Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course.
It seems to head from its last stop too fast,  my transbay train’s strungout hoo, deep  inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed  into the baritone wail of that guy  at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby  rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall  of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice  skinning its tired song off the tiled dome:  he’s determined, the silky lyric says,  to be independently blue, while we all  wait to be chuted to car lot or home,  closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss,  our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed,  every plural presence now some thing alone,  thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train,  patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.
That morning under a pale hood of sky I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling against the side of our wickered, penitential house. The day mirled and clabbered in the thick, stony light, and the rooks’ feathered narling astounded the salt waves, the plush coast. I lugged a bucket past the forked coercion of a tree, up toward the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school, hunkered there in its gully of learning. Only later, by the galvanized washstand, while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers swam beyond the windows, did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite wobble me into knowledge. Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle on the rough threshold and understood the meadow-bells that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort— the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.
Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces. Just the pressure in his little finger alone could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb so he’d get the first whack at the piñata? He’s grown up to straighten us all out about weapons of mass destruction but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours. Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat. Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity. Sleet in the face, no toilet paper, regrets over an argument, not investing wisely, internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment of laboratory animals. Life, my friends, is ordinary crap. Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks. Those puke bags in the seatback you might need. The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch. Some architectural details about Batman’s cape. Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling. The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.
Ray Way, Thunderbird Homeagain,   Hugh and Mia Galore:  they enjoyed such conversational topics   as Mozart, tobacco, and four.  “Today’s peach boasts rare fuzz,” said Ray.   Bird added, “My mind is whale.”  Mia forgot her songbooks, but Hugh   said, “Let me embrace you all.”  Ray Way snagged Homeagain by the lapel   and fastened on Home’s left blue eye,  Mia saw Home’s green right eye unanchor   and wander away for the sky.  Then Ray, he let go of Home’s lapel,   and Ray let go of his ire,  and Ray let go the floor with his feet   to hover a bit on the air.  Hours ticked while oars pulled   over Lake Eekoutaheart.  The pelicans kept to their quiet perusals   of fishes, where the ripples teased apart.  “Please heal my ruptured soul,” said Mia.   Ray cheered, “The half-life got lived.”  Thunder again, he just picked at his sweater   where the yarn and his arms unweaved.  “The sky, it must be adhesive,” said Mia,   “elsewise the pelicans would fall—”  Way, still floating, looked her cool in her eye:   “Feel my faulty heart: it’s full.”  “So tell me, do you wonder about the crackers   once you lock the pantry?”  “I know God when I wash my hands.”   “Nothing makes sense like entropy.”  “And the pelican, does it unloose its eggs   like snow, an unbreakable good?”  “And does love shape the snow to hope’s ellipses?   “Who warms the nest—who could?”  “What’s next when your own eyes won’t let you go?”   “But the clouds won’t let me fall.”  Hugh stood up and repeated, softly:   “Let me embrace you all.”
My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I,  I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried  across the street by two employees of Acme Moving  who have not parked on the right side  because the plot demands that they make  the perilous journey across traffic,  and so they are cursing as rehearsed  as they angle me into the street, acting as if  they intend to get me to the department store, as if  I will ever take my place as the display window, ever clear  the way for a special exhibit at Christmas, or be Windexed  once a day, or even late at night, be pressed against  by a couple who can’t make it back to his place,  and so they angle me into the street, a bright lure,  a provocative claim, their teaser, and indeed  you can’t resist my arguments, fatally flawed  though they are, so you come careening to but and butt  and rebut, you come careening, you being  both cars, both chaser and chased, both good and bad, both  done up with bullets that haven’t yet done you in.  I know I’m done for: there’s only one street  on this set and you’ve got a stubborn streak a mile long.  I can smell the smoke already.   No matter, I’d rather shatter  than be looked through all day. So come careening; I know  you’ve other clichés to hammer home: women with groceries  to send spilling, canals to leap as the bridge is rising.  And me? I’m so through. I’ve got a thousand places to be.
Willie “Slick” Williams reads William Carlos Williams, then writes a letter to the producers of the TV makeover show Pimp My Ride, explaining why his car should be featured on the program. so much depends upon a red cadillac slick with turtle wax beside the white chicks
Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse between one rough dream and another, I seemed, still awake, to be stranded on a stony path, and there the familiar enigma presented itself in the shape of a little trembling lamb. It was lying like a pearl in the trough between one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying. I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother. Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs? Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where? What would I do if it were dying? The hand of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear. It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd in that faded, framed Sunday School picture filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype. With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full, small, white doubles of the creature at my feet flared like candles in the creases of the night until it looked to be alive with newborn lambs. Where could they all have come from? A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds— kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face, fixing on me their dark accusing eyes. There was a kind of imperative not to touch them, yet to be of them, whatever they were— now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light— fireflies signaling how many lost New England summers? One form, now another; one configuration, now another. Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain, outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.
shepherdboy? not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available. unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain: a reference already escaping. I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd rather: a caveman, came spelunking into that grotto I’d retreated to what light he bore illumined such small space—physically, temporally and did he have a grove of beech trees? no, no grove but together we found an old-growth stand of redwood we gouged each other’s chests instead of wood: pledges that faded he was not cruel nor I unwitting. but what endures beyond any thicket? example: he took me to the ocean to say farewell. I mean me: farewell to ocean the ocean, for that matter, to me. us both fatigued, showing signs of wreckage and that man I had loved stood back from the edge of things he did not hold me I expected not to be held we all understood one another: shepherd understudy, ocean, me and did he go back to his fields and caves? yes, but they were gone strip-mining, lumber, defoliant, sterile streams: you knew that was coming weren’t we taught some starched sermon: the pasture awaits us elsewhere back up a moment: the forest you mentioned—remember, instead of a grove? untouched for the most part. some human damage, but not ours we left no mark, not there in the midst of those great trees: not in the concentric rings that might have held us far past living instead, I put that man, like so many others, on paper— a tree already gone from sight where once it had drawn the eyes upward: the crest of a mountain. crumpled thoughts, crumpled love shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of the coastal fig? I put them on paper, too, so fragile. for nothing is ever going to last For Haines Eason
and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself and grows in clusters oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches yearning for that vernal beau. for don’t birds covet the seeds of the honey locust and doesn’t the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats foraged in the meadow kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by the nape guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes For Haines Eason
Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me—Daniel 10:18 febrile body I woke into: nightsweats, stink of the toil of living:  where hands could not bear to approach me, the young man fingered lay upon me, was himself a cool sponge, drew my perspiration to his lips  ice-chips he held in his teeth, he pushed small bergs into my mouth caressed the skeletal arms I’ve hidden in long sleeves  kissed neck and chest, belly rotten with pudgy organs, thick-set flesh he pressed against me, cock on cock and tongue against tongue  saw his reflection in my marshy eyes and did not flinch such weakness  held, sustained by this capable stroke, boatswain of my crossing I take the death I’m moored to, announced as a measureless promontory  and bob in the river like a bloated corpse, blue lips, vacant gaze I let the water fill my lungs until they rip their festive piñatas  because the one who comes to gather me, capricious angel  has a voice that affirms me rising when this fever abates For Haines Eason
Yesterday, everything was possible. Today we’re good as married. You don’t want to hear that, do you, thinking I’m going to call you back in from the rain to fight over the morning paper, limning my deft and emotional promiscuities? That we’ll sit in our sitting room, watching the shaggy junipers twirl in winter wind as a storm closes its throat around the city? I’m thinking about how to ask God to be nicer. I’m thinking about that fabled leper colony where the last, solitary patient waited inside its unlocked tower three years in the belief she could not step outside. And how the local doctors visited only to re-wrap her face, to brush out her last gold strands of hair, wondering how to save anybody so willing to kill herself with denial. They wanted to talk about pain, the doctors, to say, One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio play in another room, and feel yourself suddenly filling like a jug with the cold awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster of your old ambivalence, the familiarity of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body. The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore. The doctors said, Fear should never be elevated to ritual. They told the woman, You must change your life! One day, I’m on the steps of an office tower losing a shoe, the next I’m screaming on a gurney, I’m stuffing a baby into a diaper. I’m wondering the woods in my scar-dark cape. Every story has an archetype, doesn’t it? And if so, why aren’t we married? Why can’t we be just like everyone else this fucking, fucking once? God, I hate the way this tale is turning out: two aged strangers learning to tuck in their blood, hiding the knives and bread crumbs deep inside their pockets. Look, this time I swear, I won’t run; really; I’ll come and go from my stone room without a mirror, all my extremities taped in white. I’ll learn to knit with three fingers. I’ll learn to read into the deepening silences, to be nice to your step-sisters, singing to drown out the tears of their ugliness. I love you. Can I even say that? In this story, I want to spend the rest of my life growing quietly bored with you, locking away loom and spindle, sweeping out the piles of rose petals and ash. For once, I plan to triumph over smug experience. I marry you. Don’t hit me. Please, just come in from the stars awhile, sit here in this sitting room, let me find you another section of the paper to argue over. The doctors said I get to wear a suit. They said I’ll be released next Thursday. Listen: even now, the junipers are whispering their dark good-byes, thin limbs smocked in white. A riderless horse has appeared on the horizon. And somewhere, out in the meretricious night, somebody’s life is quietly changing.
Can't tell your oh from your ah? Go, go or else go ga-ga. What, were you born in a barn? Oh. Ah. What do you say when the dentist asks? No novacaine? Nah. Then joke's on us, Jack: we gnaw ourselves when we really ought to know. Can't tell the force from the farce, nor our cores from our cars. The horde works hard in this new nation of shopkeeps, moles in malls, minding our stores when we should be minding our stars. Harmony, whoremoney—can we even tell the showman from the shaman? Or are we the worst kind of tourists, doing La France in low fronts, sporting shorts at Chartres and so alone in our élan? Nope. We're Napoleons of nowhere, hopeless going on hapless, unable to tell our Elbas from our elbows.
Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic— back from bone the echoes stroke, back from the halved heart, the lungs three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills. From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs dangle, as back they come, sounds a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape. The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved and halved, until a roof appears, black as space. I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut, who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow, a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself and half again some metamorphic click,  extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground, he says, and back it comes, his glint of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.
Such conundrums  of English. I blame my ex-wife. She  rearranged my dictionary, or re- taught an old story: in this book,  if you look  for alimony,  it follows  acrimony (nothing  between). However, contrition still borders contrivance  (if it can be seen).  Untruth in her  troth sallowed the language, sullied  a certain conjugation:  how she lied  as she lay with me. Apparently her  monogamy was too  close to monotony.  Alas, after parting with that particular  lass, I remain  a student  examining all  our words’ gradation: how anniversary now precedes annihilation.
Although a tide turns in the trees   the moon doesn't turn the leaves,  though chimneys smoke and blue concedes   to bluer home-time dark. Though restless leaves submerge the park   in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,  and through each tree the moon shows, halved  or quartered or complete, the moon's no fruit and has no seed,   and turns no tide of leaves on paths  that still persist but do not lead   where they did before dark. Although the moonstruck pond stares hard   the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.  Each mind's a different, distant world   this same moon will not leave.
One afternoon of summer rain my hand skimmed a shelf and I found an old florin. Ireland, 1950. We say like or as and the world is a fish minted in silver and alloy, an outing for all the children, an evening in the Sandford cinema, a paper cone of lemonade crystals and say it again so we can see androgyny of angels, edges to a circle, the way the body works against the possible— and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends. I am holding two whole shillings of nothing, observing its heaviness, its uselessness. And how in the cool shadow of nowhere a salmon leaps up to find a weir it could not even know was never there.
After a while I thought of it this way: It was a town underneath a mountain crowned by snow and every year a river rushed through, enveloping the dusk in a noise everyone knew signaled spring— a small town, known for a kind of calico, made there, strong and unglazed, a makeshift of cotton in which the actual unseparated husks still remained and could be found if you looked behind the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird with swept-back wings always trying to arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it might have occupied if anyone had offered it. And if you ask me now what happened to it— the town that is—the answer is of course there was no town, it never actually existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton on which a bird never landed is not gone, because it never was, never once, but then how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn't love you, as if I wouldn't have died for you.
She looked nearly the same But when I hugged her There was substantially more To her—no doubt as with me. She fibbed as I did at the edge Of curb under the streetlight As spiders dropped like tiny Parachutes—they were difficult To see. On the periphery Of good luck, I thought, Revisiting her quirky habits And expressions, what I eventually Found so bothersome. Except When I glanced at my watch I discovered I was trembling Like a small-time embezzler. I see, she said, you must have An appointment. The driveways And hedges funneling back Into darkness, into someone else's Childhood, where speech was An obstacle. Wild turkeys Approaching across the lawn. Oh no, I said, I'm just so pleased To see you. But that didn't Make sense either. She cocked Her head, a woman with grown Twins and three conniving husbands. Even my toes felt damp. I remember, She said, when you'd lay your head On my lap, I'd stroke your hair— I didn't recall. Though I thought That would be a good idea now. But I'm married, I said. I own My own business. It would have Been helpful if I'd planned Some banter. I'm a high school Principal, she told me, I don't put up with horseshit From anyone. I brushed the arm Of her jacket—she merely stared. A door slammed. A grown idiot Drooled in an attic somewhere down The lane. I had another image As well, one that held an odor Of patchouli oil. As she stepped Forward without caution, placed a hand On my neck. Take me, she insisted, To those rivets of flame following Wire—because this is it, You'll never have another Hour. I immediately felt Calmer...
I couldn't have waited. By the time you return it would have rotted on the vine. So I cut the first tomato into eighths, salted the pieces in the dusk and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's) or bitter, even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem that made my throat feel dusty and warm. Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness. The miser accused by her red sums. Better had I eaten the dirt itself on this the first night in my life when I have not been too busy for my loneliness— at last, it comes.
Sometimes on a late clear night you can pull that station from Denver  or Boston out of the dark.  All the elsewheres alter here, as what you remember  changes what you think. Not spider nor plum nor pebble possess any of the names we give them. A kite tugging on its string gives you a sense of what's up there, though it is translated, and by a string.  Out there, in the dark, the true thing.
How did the valentines age so fast? Most of the names are forgotten. Billy, Billy, Billy, Jill I think strangers sent them out like advertising hoping I'd surrender. But Jill, Jill, Jill and Billy Bill, shared memories aren't easily kept. Secrets wash out of the ocean blank all over. I am sitting on a beach chair somewhere in the middle of the century, pretending I remember a garden of broken banjos and butterflies, old movies. Valentines from Valentino, Notes from Norma. Worms and spiders thrown at waves. Box of my names, shut up.
"What you are struggling with," said the psychologist, "is a continuous song, something like a telephone's tone. Nebulous, noncommittal, unrelenting, pretending to give you messages it can't deliver. Because the body is unattached. It is," he said, "like a valentine sent out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow's deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed. These pills will help you find yourself somewhere where the lace ends up loose and the paste is still humming all about you.
Valentine, valentine you arrive in a town car with a chauffered envelope, scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace. The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in bloom where swamps settle down and drowse by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely winter, almost skipping February.
Or Oreo, or worse. Or ordinary. Or your choice  of category  or   Color or any color  other than Colored or Colored Only. Or “Of Color”    or   Other or theory or discourse or oral territory. Oregon or Georgia or Florida Zora  or  Opportunity or born poor  or Corporate. Or Moor. Or a Noir Orpheus or Senghor  or   Diaspora or a horrendous  and tore-up journey. Or performance. Or allegory’s armor of ignorant comfort  or  Worship or reform or a sore chorus. Or Electoral Corruption or important ports of Yoruba or worry  or  Neighbor or fear of . . . of terror or border. Or all organized minorities.
I "—science per se—" my God, when I hear them on the radio saying that, it slays me. Is there a science that's not per se? I don't get out much, rarely get to see any lakes, gardens only sporadically and then behind fences, or in allotments, that's about the size of it, I rely on ersatz: radio, newspaper, magazines— so how can people say such things to me? It makes you wonder whether there are any surrogates for hollyhocks, for warm life, French kisses, hanky-panky, all those things that make existence a little luxurious, and all of them somehow of a piece! No, all this cerebration is not my cup of tea, but there are sometimes hours on end where there's no woman on any wavelength (I receive medium-wave, short-, long-, and VHF), no voice saying, "first you say no, then maybe, then yes," nothing but these opinionated pedagogues, it seems that everything the West thinks of as its higher product is produced by the seated male— as I say, give me the hanky-panky any day! II "—the last vestiges of the ancient culture would have completely disappeared—" (well, and what if) "—a sonorous past—" (la-di-dah) "—in villages in New Mexico farmers still bless their fields and livestock with these songs—" (very nice, I'm sure, but I don't get out of Brandenburg much). We hear Professor Salem Aleikum, the reporter still slavering over him: "the professor is lying on the porch of his house with his lute cradled in his arm singing the old ballads"— probably on an ottoman, with a carafe of ice water at his side, rejecting old hypotheses, putting out new ones— the great rivers of the world the Nile, the Brahmaputra, or what the hell do I know wouldn't be enough to drown all those professors— don't have any acreage, don't have any livestock, nothing blesses me, life is one continuous affliction, but nothing like those professors teach, teach, teach, from every pore, who turn everything into illustrated lecture (with slides).
Act 2, Scene 2Clindor, a young picaresque hero, has been living by his wits in Paris, but has now drifted to Bordeaux, to become the valet of a braggart bravo named Matamore. He is chiefly employed as a go-between, carrying Matamore's amorous messages to the beautiful Isabelle—who only suffers the master because she is in love with the messenger. clindor Sir, why so restless? Is there any need, With all your fame, for one more glorious deed? Have you not slain enough bold foes by now, And must you have fresh laurels for your brow? matamore It's true, I'm restless, and I can't decide Which of two foes should first be nullified— The Mogul emperor or the Persian Sophy. clindor Ah, let them live a while, Sir. Neither trophy Would add a great deal to your fame and standing. And where's the army that you'd be commanding? matamore Army? Ah, villain, coward, do you doubt That with this arm alone I'd wipe them out? The mere sound of my name makes ramparts yield, And drives divisions from the battlefield; My wrath against these rulers needs engage Only a piddling portion of my rage; With one commandment given to the Fates I oust the strongest monarchs from their states; Thunder's my cannon; my troops, the Destinies; One blow lays low a thousand enemies; One breath, and all their hopes go up in smoke. Yet you dare speak of armies! What a joke! No longer shall a second Mars employ you; With but a glance, you rogue, I shall destroy you ... And yet the thought of her whom I adore Softens me now, and I'm enraged no more; That little archer, whom every God obeys, Forbids my eyes to glare with lethal rays. Observe how my ferocity, which hates And hacks and slaughters, gently dissipates When I recall my lady, and my face Is changed by thoughts of beauty, love, and grace. clindor Oh, Sir, you have a hundred selves or more; You're as handsome now as you were grim before. I can't imagine any lady who Could stubbornly refuse her heart to you. matamore Whatever I may have said, feel no alarm: Sometimes I terrify, sometimes I charm; Depending on my humor, I inspire Men with anxiety, women with desire. Before I had the power to suppress My beauty, women gave me much distress: When I appeared, they swooned in quantity, And thousands died each day for love of me. With every princess I had many a tryst, And every queen came begging to be kissed; The Ethiopian and the Japanese Murmured my name in all their sighs and pleas. Two sultanesses could not but adore me, Two more escaped from the seraglio fòr me, Which strained my friendship with the Turkish nation. clindor Their anger could but gild your reputation. matamore Still, all that was more trouble than it was worth. It balked my plans for conquering the earth. What's more, I tired of it, and to deter Such nuisances sent word to Jupiter That if he could not put a stop to these Fond women and their importunities, I'd rise up in a rage and end his reign As ruler of the Gods, and would obtain For Mars the right to throw his bolts of thunder. Needless to say, the coward knuckled under: He did as I desired, and now, you see, I'm handsome only when I choose to be. clindor What love notes you'd receive, were that not so! matamore Don't bring me any ... unless from her, you know. What does she say of me? clindor Today she said That you inspire all hearts with love and dread, And that if what you promise her comes true, She'll feel herself a Goddess, thanks to you. matamore Back in the times I've just been speaking of, Goddesses, also, pestered me for love, And I shall tell you of a strange event Which caused confusion without precedent And threw all nature into disarray. The Sun was powerless to rise one day Because that bright, much-worshipped deity Could not find where the Dawn, his guide, might be. He sought her everywhere, in Cephalus' bower, In old Tithonus' bed, in Memnon's tower, But since Aurora nowhere was in sight, The day, till noontide, was as black as night. clindor Where was the Goddess, during these alarms? matamore In my bedchamber, offering me her charms. But she gained nothing by such shameless actions; My heart was blind to all her bright attractions, And all she got by showing off her beauty Was a firm command to go and do her duty. clindor That curious story, Sir, I now recall. I was in Mexico, where I heard it all. They said that Persia, vexed by the insult to Their famous Sun God, had it in for you. matamore I heard as much, and would have made them pay, But was in Transylvania that day, Where their ambassador hastened to appease My wrath with presents and apologies. clindor Your brave heart showed them clemency. How fine! matamore Just look, my friend, upon this face of mine. There every human virtue can be found. Of all the foes I've stamped into the ground, Whose kingdoms are annulled and cast aside, There was not one who did not fall through pride. But those who humbly honored my perfection Have kept their power through a wise subjection. The modest kings of Europe are all my vassals; I do not sack their towns or wreck their castles; I let them reign. But it's another story In Africa, where I scorched the territory Of certain kings who lacked humility, And left great deserts there for all to see. Those endless sands, beneath those skies of fire, Are a great monument to my righteous ire. clindor Let us revert to love; your lady's here. matamore My cursèd rival's at her side, I fear. clindor Where are you going? matamore He isn't brave, this dunce, And yet he's vain, and could be bold for once. Perhaps he'll challenge me from foolish pride, Merely because he's at the lady's side. clindor By doing so, the fool might come to harm. matamore I can't be valorous when I'm full of charm. clindor Cease to be charming and be terrible, Sir. matamore Oh, you don't realize what that would incur. I can't be terrible by halves, you know; I'd slaughter both my mistress and my foe. Until they part, let's stand aside and wait. clindor Your prudence, like your valor, is very great. (They withdraw to a corner.)
Say you love the albums with the smoky riffs  and downbeat rhythms. Here, they beg, fall in with us.  Forget that book, have a whiskey . . . have another.  Say you love the books, the words  and the silences between the words— faded yellow dashes on a disused highway. Say you love the highway, the blacktop and the bullet-riddled sign that reads Primitive Road where the blacktop ends.  Say you love the fields, the black of midnight, coyotes' yipped prayers, and  their raw thirst for hens.  Say you love the raw salt of powder when its ghost rises from the rifle's breech and settles, sweet with lead, in your lungs. Then breathe what's left back to the world— speak the coyote's tongue, sweat the nitro from your blood, say you love what you've become.
At dusk, the grandmother sits alone in the light of the long pale pool and speaks to the frog who is waiting by the electric gate of the clubhouse. It will be all right, she says, leaning out from her chair. Her voice is churning, and old, and wet with advice. Her newly red hair purples under the bug light. It will be all right, she says, again, and again the sky rolls in and out on its journey across the peninsula, rattling the palms.
A kind of counter- blossoming, diversionary, doomed, and like the needle with its drop of blood a little too transparently in love with doom, takes issue with the season: Not (the serviceberry bright with explanation) not (the redbud unspooling its silks) I know I've read the book but not (the lilac, the larch) quite yet, I still have one more card to play. Behold a six-hour wonder: six new inches bedecking the railing, the bench, the top of the circular table like a risen cake. The saplings made (who little thought what beauty weighs) to bow before their elders. The moment bears more than the usual signs of its own demise, but isn't that the bravery? Built on nothing but the self- same knots of air and ice. Already the lip of it riddled with flaws, a sort of vascular lesion that betokens—what? betokens the gathering return to elementals. (She was frightened for a minute, who had planned to be so calm.) A dripline scoring the edge of the walk. The cotton batting blown against the screen begun to pill and molt. (Who clothed them out of mercy in the skins of beasts.) And even as the last of the lightness continues to fall, the seepage underneath has gained momentum. (So that there must have been a death before the death we call the first or what became of them, the ones whose skins were taken.) Now the more- of-casting-backward-than-of- forward part, which must have happened while I wasn't looking or was looking at the skinning knives. I think I'll call this mercy too.
And so among the starry refineries and cattail ditches of New Jersey his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow. When he next looks up from Kafka a blur of green sanatorium tile flows by then presto, Port Authority, full daylight. He has been cheated of the river, dawn, a considered fingering of his long and polished rosary of second thoughts. Is it any wonder children are born weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble? The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers, the third simply glistens, noncommittal. Except to mention Kafka's restlessness before his death, his trips from spa to spa to country house to sanatorium, and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, patting her belly's taut carapace and yes hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister how was your trip and what have you brought us, and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage, the poem has nothing further to report.
After the Yoruba Though the amaryllis sags and spills so do those my wishes serve, all along the town. And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night's patch, tugs me so—but I can't reach to right the slant. And though our cat pads past without a tail, some with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws contain no voice with which to sing of foxes gassing in the lane. Round-shouldered pals parade smart shirts, while my broad back supports a scrubby jumper, fawn or taupe. The balding English air their stubble while some headless hero sports a feathered hat. I know a man whose thoroughbred grazes in his porch for want of livery. There are scholars of Kant who can't find Kent on the map, and men of Kent who cannot fathom Kant. We who would polish off a feast have lain late in our beds, our bellies groaning, throats on fire. We who'd drain a vat of wine have drunk our own blood for its sting. Each of us in tatters flaunts one treasured garment flapping in the wind.
You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents of the eaten flesh, every body a cocoon of change— Puparium. The garden a birthing house, sarcophagidae— And green was so dark in the night-garden, in the garden's gourd of air— green's epitome of green's peace, the beautiful inhuman leg-music, crickets' thrum— a pulse to build their houses by, each successive molt a tent of skin in which skin can grow, the metallic sheen of their blue backs as they hatch out, winged and mouthed— Like in a charnel ground, you sit and see. In one of the Eight Great Cemeteries, you sit and see— How the skull-grounds are ringed by flame, how they spread out under a diamond tent, how the adepts pupate among bones— saying I who fear dying, I who fear being dead— Refuge field. See it now. That assembly of sages you would have yourself build, to hear the lineage from mouth to ear, encounter the truth- chain— Saying, Soft eaters, someone's children, who gives them refuge from want— Cynomyopsis Cadavarena. On every tongue they feed.
We are a sad people, without hats. The history of our nation is tragically benign. We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard. We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear who stands alone in the moonlight reading what little text there is on the graves. He looks quite desirable like that. He looks like the center of the universe. Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words while the others are busy making more of him. Soon the more will ask of him to write their love letters and he will oblige, using the language of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground, beloved by us who have been standing here for hours, a proud people after all.
Matisse, too, when the fingers ceased to work, Worked larger and bolder, his primary colors celebrating The weddings of innocence and glory, innocence and glory Monet when the cataracts blanketed his eyes Painted swirls of rage, and when his sight recovered Painted water lilies, Picasso claimedI do not seek, I find, and stuck to that story About himself, and made that story stick. Damn the fathers. We are talking about defiance.
Permit me to open by expressing joy and wonder that we're marching at the head of our companies in different uniforms under a different command but with a single aim—to survive You say to me—look here we should probably let these boys go home to their Margot to their Kasia war is beautiful only in parades but apart from that as we know—mud and blood and rats As you speak comes an avalanche of artillery fire it's that bastard Parkinson who is taking so long he caught up with us at last when we took a walk on an irregular route our collars loose at the chin our hands in our pockets we were on leave already when Parkinson suddenly reminded us that it was not the end yet that this blasted war isn't over yet
Lordship is the same activity Whether performed by lord or lady. Or a lord who happens to be a lady, All the source and all the faults. A woman steadfast in looking is a callot, And any woman in the wrong place  Or outside of her proper location Is, by definition, a foolish woman. The harlot is talkative and wandering By the way, not bearing to be quiet, Not able to abide still at home, Now abroad, now in the streets, Now lying in wait near the corners, Her hair straying out of its wimple. The collar of her shift and robe Pressed one upon the other. She goes to the green to see to her geese, And trips to wrestling matches and taverns. The said Margery left her home In the parish of Bishopshill, And went to a house, the which The witness does not remember, And stayed there from noon Of that day until the darkness of night. But a whip made of raw hippopotamus Hide, trimmed like a corkscrew, And anon the creature was stabled In her wits as well as ever she was biforn, And prayed her husband as so soon As he came to her that she might have  The keys to her buttery To take her meat and drink. He should never have my good will For to make my sister for to sell Candle and mustard in Framlyngham, Or fill her shopping list with crossbows, Almonds, sugar and cloth. The captainess, the vowess,  Must use herself to work readily As other gentilwomen doon, In the innermost part of her house, In a great chamber far from the road. So love your windows as little as you can, For we be, either of us, weary of other.
I The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more. The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better. Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just. Wine is not drunk enough. Be bitter but only about the Truth. With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons. The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers. You will never know the river wets your hair. What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey? Work is wings. II If you would judge, then be a Judge. If you would be judged, be just. The color of a stone is darker in water. To be loved, love no one. The catacombs are not the end. Past them lies a wall. I am an enemy to what I have forgotten. If a bell rings, then a bell has been moved from its sleep. Change admits error, but will prove correct in its assumptions. Every antipole is itself. Every identity is another. As I walked along the river, an old man carried a walking stick on his shoulder, as a soldier will carry a rifle. When we passed I greeted him, but he could not bring himself to answer, though I too am an old man, taking pains as I go.
Because of the first, the fear of wreck, which they taught us to fear (though we learned at once, and easily),   because of the wreck that was expected (and metal given velocity  and heft to assure it)—  we became adepts in rise above: how many versions: the church steeple that took the eye straight up to heaven (though it seemed snagged on the cross-beam of that cross, torn blue at the top, where sense leaked out). And  rise above, transcendence, on that higher plane, the vertical direction of virtue (a bony finger pointing up to where matter dissolves into distaste for it);  the space program, expensive tons of rocket (soon to be debris) fired off the planet's crust at anything out there, pocked moon, red rocky Mars, ever the upward urge, carved in the marble arch of the old library door under which generations passed, hoping to rise above it all— like the woman the magician levitates over the table, her body floating an unlikely inch or two above the velvet-draped plateau... watch her hovering, weightless,  the crowd staring in wonder, the trick of the thing still hidden,  and the magician doing something now with his hands, a flurry of brilliant silk in the air, as she floats  in the endlessness of art,   the magician still waving his scarves, the air a bright shatter of wings, doves from a hat, our disbelief suspended, while below, the wrecks accumulate:  scrap yard, broken concrete slabs, and all those bodies not exempt from gravity, beneath our notice as we ride above it all, like froth on a wave that will be water falling by the ton, soon, when the tide turns.
In the lost city of gold that was Oroville, the golden age had come and gone. I was the only person in the vast movie house. What was showing that winter night thirty years ago? The Gold Rush, of course, as if it had arrived in 1925 and never left. Gilt dripped from the ceiling. Stains mapped their worthless claims. And there I was, still in that cheap coat the color of slush. Who was beside me? Not you, Love; you were on the other side of the country, so it was the cold that threw an icy arm around my shoulders. A heater coughed, not meaning to intrude. The projector rattled to life and, down a mineshaft of dusty light, a blizzard swirled toward the blank screen of my past. O silent film of my life, unwind! It wasn't the wind but the silence that howled, ecstatic in the emptiness at the heart of the West. But Chaplin had a mystic's hunger for the finer things: he boiled his boot. He wound a shoelace on a fork. He tasted shame for me, and found it sweet.
Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge  and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch,  no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange  drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch. Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated.  He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin  the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto  while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings  are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument  of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings,  subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green. Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem  when a small daughter disappears with a wife,  morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori. Jacqueline Lamba + Andr
As one in dowte, thys ys my ssayyng: Have I dysplesed yow in any thyng? —Thomas Wyatt That greasy letter into which my legs entered,  its tone conspiratorial as his wink, a linguistic  wriggling of the eyebrows, a heh heh—it may as well have appeared before my door chafing  the air with the stiff noise of its cheap leather  jacket. Am I not chagrined by his proposition to put it all behind us and begin again as friends?  How do I reply? And how shall I contend with  the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean  much to you, and that I, as author, am required to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that  will entertain you, despite having never met you  and having no way of knowing how to affect you,  get you to let me touch you all over, kiss your lips then tongue your mouth open, move my mouth  down your neck to the valley of your chest, pluck buttons off you with my teeth. I have thought of  this for a great, long time. I have sat here hunched,  feeling sick; I have paced rugs bare. Why should  you care? His door opened, selves spilled out my heart's bucket, flopped their silvers across a floor.  He was too poor to enter a store, too poor to pay  postage for a letter, so poor he'd have stolen crumbs  from a mouse, so poor he'd have sold his cadaver  if he could. Yet, consider the man: his deep voice  began to work away at my inhibitions like sandpaper.  Before I knew it, I'd moved right into him, wiped  the eyes of windows clear, mended the tears in his  screens, made our bed with sheets so icy clean— but you do not want me to give too much away. What fun would that be? Here, as with any tale,  the moral's like a molar, set far back in the mouth  of the story. Open wider, let me stick my pliers in,  wrench it out. Left unattended, anything's prone  to spoil, go bad, turn rotten, sink into itself, stink  up the whole house. And how shall I begin to make  my account? Dig through the junk heap. Start small.  He grew over me calmly as a vine climbs a trellis.  Your nightgown is unbecoming. A few small terrorisms. Eyes wide at my wince, incredulous. You thought I'd hit you?
—cooked by crooked math—is more than enough. For example, the rough patch on the roof of the mouth we tongue— a light fixture, chandelier of texture—is so much more than mere canker. And when fingering the clasp on Father's snuffbox, his fine initials grate against our fingerprints' grain like an engraved last gasp. Less, being more, makes of the tectonic plates of molehills a mountain ridge the way the stark plain of the White Album's sleeve raises the Beatles' embossed logo to the level of topography— the way tiny things can't help being, next to nothing, something— the unanticipated mole that makes a one-night stand's upturned ass, the last leaf out on a limb, the little going a long way.
A night address The world is wasted on you. Show us one clear time beyond childhood (or the bottle) you spent your whole self—hoarding no blood-bank back-up, some future aim to fuel—or let yourself look foolish in reckless style on barstool, backstreet or dancefloor, without a dim image of your hamming hobbling you the whole while. Voyeur to your own couplings, you never did come with them, did you, even when you did? You said Hell is details, when Hell was just the cave, the concave- mirrored skull you dwelt inside, your left hand polishing while the other shook to clinch a deal— Provide, provide! Sure, in the end, like any soul you were endless and yets—brave, deft with phrases, kind— three cheers for you. Too closed to want what others love you vetoed life— were there other worlds to crave?
A giant bird- of-paradise has climbed the bar: in this paradise there are no flowers, no flowers at all. When Happy Hour becomes Last Call— Adam in drag our royalty— we buy her gin for eternity (an unseen deejay scores the years with pulsing music of the spheres). Now the queen has gone, gone again in search of love, in search of sin. It’s closing time. You were not at fault. I drain my glass and lick the salt.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1 ClovenCloven Divided. About the title. The book Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht [1960], translated from German) was written by Elias Canetti; it is a study of how crowd behavior (ranging from religious congregations to mob violence) relates to obedience to state rule. Canetti (1905-1994) was a Bulgarian born novelist, playwright, and non-fiction writer who wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. The second section of this poem, in italics, is a long quotation/translation from this book, we are incorporateincorporate United in one body. Compare part of one petition from the Book of Common Prayer: “and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son” (from The Order for the Administration of The Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion)., our wounds simple but mysterious. We have some wherewithal to bide our time on earth. Endurance is fantasticFantastic Imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality.; ambulances battling at intersections, the city intolerably en fêteen fête French for being festive, perhaps being dressed in festive attire. My reflexes are words themselves rather than standard flexuresflexures Acts of bending, such as bowing or kneeling of civil power. In all of this Cassiopeia'sCassiopeia’s Cassiopeia is both a star constellation in the northern sky, and in Greek mythology an Ethiopian queen and the mother of Andromeda; a beautiful woman, but whose vanity and arrogance led to her downfall. John Milton refers to Cassiopeia in Il Penseroso: “Or that starr’d Ethiop queen that strove / To set her beauty’s praise above / The sea nymphs, and their powers offended” (lines 19-21). a blessing as is steady OrionOrion Orion is both the easily recognized star constellation and in Greek mythology a hunter. beloved of poetsbeloved of poets A list of poems naming Orion includes: Milton’s Paradise Lost, Tennyson’s Locksley Hall, Teasdale’s “Winter Stars” , Pickthall’s “Stars” , Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales” , and Frost’s “The Star-splitter.” . QuotidianQuotidian Daily, everyday natures ours for the time being I do not know how we should be absolvedAbsolved To declare someone free from blame, guilt, or responsibility; also, in Christian theology, to remit or forgive someone for a sin. or what is fate. 2 Fame is not fastidious about the lipsFame is not fastidious about the lips In A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), Geoffrey Hill notes: “section 2 is a paragraph from Elias Canetti’s chapter on ‘Fame’, transposed, with slight changes of wording, into strophic form.” For more on this book by Canetti, see the note about the title above. which spread it. So long as there are mouths to reiterate the one name it does not matter whose they are. The fact that to the seeker after fame they are indistinguishable from each other and are all counted as equal shows that this passion has its origin in the experience of crowd manipulation. Names collect their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own separate lives, hardly at all connected with the real natures of the men who bear them. 3 But hear this: that which is difficult preserves democracy; you pay respect to the intelligence of the citizen. Basics are not condescension. Some tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe this and pass on. Certain directives parody at your own risk. Tread lightly with personal dignity and public image. Safeguard the image of the common manthe common man There is another version of this poem, printed in Geoffrey Hill’s book A Treatise of Civil Power (2007), with a fourth section added..
My fingertips marveled at the silvery shimmer,  already less silver, less shimmery than when it lived. I never again should cause flesh this beautiful  to be less beautiful, I thought.   At supper —swordfish—my brother offered up his neighbor for conversation. He'd shotgunned every TV in his house, even the puny black-and-white  on the kitchen counter. Buckshot shattered black  granite and splintered yards of Golden Oak.  It wasn't election time or football season. Maybe his kids had watched Debbie do Dallas. In the unexpected hush as we considered slaughtered appliances, my brother's drinking buddy  told my girlfriend she was a pretty lady,  a real pretty lady. She looked like a dream.  One day she'd make a real man really happy. I barked three hard flat laughs. The lit friend winced  as each blast turned his cheeks a richer red. My girlfriend closed her eyes and opened them,  her azure eyelids shimmering with jade.
The word, the stone, the ringing phone, the part of me that wants to be alone, the vow of silence in the reeds; God descends in ravenese. The vinegar tasters dip their fingers, make their faces: stoic, bitter, strangely sweet. The seeker leaves for Bangladesh, the prophets check for signs of theft, the singers sing for what is left. The children breathe. Come of age. Search the faces for a taste of what's to come: the widening road, the row your boat, he choked with weeds, the rabbit hole. This holding on. The word, the stone, the ringing phone. The part of we that answers when alone.
In the northwest corner of Dakota, I saw a room  someone had left, a plush sofa returning its button- eyed stare to the glance she gave it over her shoulder,  the dog, too, turning. In the next room, the mattress, with mattress stories one after another tumbling  out of each spring, the window she opened first thing,  its vista of mile after mile, and the windmill hauling  its load.   I saw that, and nothing alive— green oil-figured linoleum laid on counters, nails of bad craft, the ripped blackening edge  that scared her more than the bed and the sound  of the windmill winning its will from the aquifer  night after night, the whack of her blade on the block.  There are houses with too many knives sometimes she said,  but when June ferned its way in she'd relent, take on its  restraint, heave again on the stained sheets her burden  of child, herself a torn girl again, combing her hair  through fingers bruised by corn shocks, sweet juice  in the cuts of her life.  She began to think of the border  and mustangs without brand. At night they'd bend  over the bed and nuzzle. One ride was enough.  She had sufficient magic to cling to a mane and fare  over the windowsill. I see where the curtain fell  and nobody mended the tear, I see where bare feet  marked like fossils her pass in the rain. When he uncovers fiddleheads by the spring, why does he always think of that first sight  of her thigh in the peach-colored dress, of his hand's searching moss with its red-gold stamens, the spring  in that arid landscape like something from Canaan  under his tongue? Even in old age he'd ponder the moment, lying under the moon forgiving himself, her, the world  that bred their conundrum, washed in that rain.
The survey says all groups can make more money if they lose weight except black men...men of other colors and women of all colors have more gold, but black men are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales, meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love anymore, gone down inside earth somewhere where women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever, these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling, keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.
I love you from the sharp tang of the fermentation;  in the blissful pulp. Newborn insects, blue.  In the unsullied juice, glazed and ductile.  Cry that distills the light:  through the fissures in fruit trees;  under mossy water clinging to the shadows. The   papillae, the grottos.  In herbaceous dyes, instilled. From the flustered touch.   Luster  oozing, bittersweet: of feracious pleasures,  of play splayed in pulses.  Hinge  (Wrapped in the night's aura, in violaceous clamor,  refined, the boy, with the softened root of his tongue  expectant, touches,  with that smooth, unsustainable, lubricity—sensitive lily  folding into the rocks  if it senses the stigma, the ardor of light—the substance, the arris fine and vibrant—in its ecstatic petal, distended—[jewel  pulsing half-open; teats], the acid  juice bland [ice], the salt marsh,  the delicate sap [Kabbalah], the nectar   of the firefly.)
Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,  does there still stand, abandoned, like  a ruined city, gates sealed with grisly nails,  the luckless garden? Is sultry day still followed there  by sultry dusk, sultry night,  where on the branches sallow and purple  the fruit hangs rotting? Is there still, underground,  spreading like lace among the rocks  a network of unexploited lodes,  onyx and gold? Through the lush greenery  their wash echoing afar  do there still flow the four glassy streams  of which no mortal drinks? Somewhere in Eden, after all this time,  does there still stand, like a city in ruins,  forsaken, doomed to slow decay,  the failed garden?
Here,  among the market vegetables, this torpedo from the ocean  depths,  a missile  that swam, now  lying in front of me dead. Surrounded by the earth's green froth  —these lettuces, bunches of carrots— only you  lived through the sea's truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness, the depths  of the sea, the great  abyss,le grand abîme, only you:  varnished black-pitched  witness to that deepest night. Only you: dark bullet barreled  from the depths, carrying  only  your  one wound, but resurgent, always renewed, locked into the current, fins fletched like wings in the torrent, in the coursing of the underwater dark, like a grieving arrow, sea-javelin, a nerveless  oiled harpoon. Dead in front of me, catafalqued king of my own ocean; once  sappy as a sprung fir in the green turmoil, once seed to sea-quake, tidal wave, now simply dead remains; in the whole market yours  was the only shape left with purpose or direction in this  jumbled ruin of nature; you are  a solitary man of war among these frail vegetables, your flanks and prow black  and slippery as if you were still a well-oiled ship of the wind, the only true machine of the sea: unflawed, undefiled,  navigating now the waters of death.
1 We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain, Our oars promises from God.  We live—and the rest of Humanity dies.  We travel upon the waves, fastening Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies. But between Heaven and us is an opening, A porthole for a supplication. "Why, Lord, have you saved us alone From among all the people and creatures? And where are you casting us now? To your other Land, to our First Home? Into the leaves of Death, into the wind of Life? In us, in our arteries, flows a fear of the Sun. We despair of the Light, We despair, Lord, of a tomorrow In which to start Life anew. If only we were not that seedling of Creation, Of Earth and its generations, If only we had remained simple Clay or Ember, Or something in between, Then we would not have to see  This World, its Lord, and its Hell, twice over."  2 If time started anew, and waters submerged the face of life, and the earth convulsed, and that god rushed to me, beseeching, "Noah, save the living!" I would not concern myself with his request. I would travel upon my ark, removing  clay and pebbles from the eyes of the dead. I would open the depths of their being to the flood, and whisper in their veins  that we have returned from the wilderness,  that we have emerged from the cave, that we have changed the sky of years, that we sail without giving in to our fears— that we do not heed the word of that god. Our appointment is with death.  Our shores are a familiar and pleasing despair, a gelid sea of iron water that we ford  to its very ends, undeterred, heedless of that god and his word, longing for a different, a new, lord.
new york, madame,  is a monument to a city it is  TA-DA  a gigantic pike whose scales  bristled up stunned and what used to be just smoke  found a fire that gave it birth champagne foam  melted into metal  glass rivers  flowing upwards  and things you won't tell to a priest  you reveal to a cabdriver  even time is sold out  when to the public's "wow" and "shhh"  out of a black top hat  a tailed magician  is pulling new york out  by the ears of skyscrapers
Pitiful brother—the dreadful nights I owed him! “I’ve got no real involvement in the business. I toyed with his weakness, so—it was my fault—we wound up back in exile and enslavement.” He saw me as a loser, a weird child; he added his own prods. I answered my satanic doctor, jeering, and made it out the window. All down a landscape crossed by unheard-of music, I spun my dreams of a nighttime wealth to come. After that more or less healthy pastime, I’d stretch out on a pallet. And almost every night, soon as I slept, my poor brother would rise—dry mouth and bulging eyes (the way he’d dreamt himself!)—and haul me into the room, howling his stupid dream. Truly convinced, I’d vowed to take him back to his primal state—child of the sun—and so we wandered, fed on wine from the caves and gypsy bread, me bound to find the place itself and the code.
I’m working on my poems and working with  my fingers not my head. Because my fingers are the farthest stretching things from me. Look at the tree. Like its longest branch I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds  of rain. The crackling heat from other trees. The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t  reach to their roots though. Growing longer they grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water. Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretching things from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots  of days then years unfurl in the cold air.
She awoke  to find her fishtail  clean gone  but in the bed with her  were two long, cold thingammies.  You'd have thought they were tangles of kelp  or collops of ham. "They're no doubt  taking the piss,  it being New Year's Eve.  Half the staff legless  with drink  and the other half  playing pranks.  Still, this is taking it  a bit far." And with that she hurled the two thingammies out of the room. But here's the thing  she still doesn't get— why she tumbled out after them  arse-over-tip... How she was connected  to those two thingammies  and how they were connected  to her. It was the sister who gave her the wink and let her know what was what. "You have one leg attached to you there  and another one underneath that.  One leg, two legs... A-one and a-two... Now you have to learn  what they can do." In the long months  that followed,  I wonder if her heart fell the way her arches fell, her instep arches.
As I drew nearer to the end of all desire, I brought my longing's ardor to a final height, Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure, Entered more and more the beam of that high light That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing— As when the dreamer sees and after the dream The passion endures, imprinted on his being Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same: Inside my heart, although my vision is almost Entirely faded, droplets of its sweetness come The way the sun dissolves the snow's crust— The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves,  The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost.
Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs  and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,  whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,  or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,  or those with middles which, if you think  of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch  of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights  in the woods, they've read every word and noticed  that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex  and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello  from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs  is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like  "My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste  for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."  They're not trying to make the poems better  so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook  or electrocution, as a group  they overcome their individual senilities,  their complete distaste for language, how cloying  it is, how like tears it can be, and remember  every mention of their long hours at the office  or how tired they were when they came home,  when they were dragged through the door  by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard  to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,  not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball  of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man  with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence  was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,  the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,  that they're the most intricate version of standing up,  who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know  that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy. A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me, and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling  on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted  the rocket cars, as if running away from them  to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did  start to say something, to form the words hey  or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun, into the burning leave, and were gone  before it came to them that it was all right  to shout, that they should have knocked us down  with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified  by the distance men need in their love.
Nobody I know is a god. A mother and son fall into the river's million hands, the river's smash and grab. They go under, climb the ropeless water up, wave, open their mouths and scream wet silences as they slide back under. A man jumps in to save them, leaves the edge as a needle into the river's muddy sinews, a woman jumps in to save his vanishing and the mother and son and is stripped by the flood, her pants drowning right beside her, another man jumps in to save them all and a woman jumps in after him to save them all plus one, cars arrive and people get out and leap into the river, the river's being filled with whatever's in their pockets and their hands and their eyes, with nickels and dollar bills and bibles and sunsets, the beautiful brush strokes of this beautifully dying day, people pile like a river inside the river, they keep coming and diving in, they keep feeding their breath to the water, which is less, which is thinned, until the mother and son rise on a mound of strangers and dead, the sun warming them, blessing their faces slowly dry.
My mother does not trust women without it. What are they not hiding? Renders the dead living and the living more alive. Everything I say sets  the clouds off blubbering like they knew the pretty dead. True, no mascara, no evidence.  Blue sky, blank face. Blank face, a faithful liar, false bottom.  Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head. The skin, a silly one-act, concurs. At the carnival, each child's cheek becomes a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself. Each breath, a game called Live Forever.  I am small. Don't ask me to reconcile one shadow with another. I admit— paint the dead pink, it does not make  them sunrise. Paint the living blue,  it does not make them sky, or sea,  a berry, clapboard house, or dead.  God, leave us our costumes,  don't blow in our noses,  strip us to the underside of skin. Even the earth claims color once a year, dressed in red leaves as the trees play Grieving.
You wouldn't have believed it, how the man, a little touched perhaps, set his hands together and prayed for happiness, yet not his own; he meant his people, by which he meant not people really, but trees and cows, the dirty horses, dogs, the fox who lived at the back of his place with her kits, and the very night who settled down to rock his place to sleep, the place he tried so hard to tend he found he mended fences in his sleep. He said to the you above, who, let's be honest, doesn't say too much, I need you now up there to give my people happiness, you let them smile and know the reason; hear my prayer, Old Yam. The you who's you might laugh at that, and I agree, it's funny to make a prayer like that, the down-home words and yonder reach of what he said; and calling God the Elder Sweet Potato, shucks, that's pretty funny, and kind of sad.
For Marybelle Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died (my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year). From time to time I'd pictured her amid strange foliage (and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel). Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know (ah, so-and-so is gone!)? For a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons (blacking out the sun). Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric shopping (bolt of green silk furled across her body) Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy's years ago (when I was not a creature in her world). Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress ("a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain.") Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds (but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?) From the kayak, I've seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier (a dim ammoniated stink) where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign (that rancid smash of feathers) but couldn't fathom what it meant, trapped in the lag-time (of an oracle's translation). Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why— (let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).
Fragile like a child is fragile.  Destined not to be forever.  Destined to become other  To mother. Here I am  Sitting on a chair, thinking  About you. Thinking  About how it was  To talk to you. How sometimes it was wonderful  And sometimes it was awful. How drugs when drugs were  Undid the good almost entirely  But not entirely  Because good could always be seen  Glimmering like lame glimmers  In the window of a shop  Called Beautiful  Things Never Last Forever.  I loved you. I love you. You were.  And you are. Life is experience.  It's all so simple. Experience is  The chair we sit on.  The sitting. The thinking  Of you where you are a blank  To be filled  In by missing. I loved you.  I love you like I love  All beautiful things.  True beauty is truly seldom.  You were. You are  In May. May now is looking onto  The June that is coming up.  This is how I measure  The year. Everything Was My Fault  Has been the theme of the song  I've been singing,  Even when you've told me to quiet.  I haven't been quiet.  I've been crying. I think you  Have forgiven me. You keep  Putting your hand on my shoulder  When I'm crying.  Thank you for that. And  For the ineffable sense  Of continuance. You were. You are  The brightest thing in the shop window And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.
I ruin my hats and all the mat slides glad I hop my girls and all is skip again I jump I run you up inside my truck The car goes looping out in dark and light And yellow hat slides in I run my mats and all the girl slides glad I hoped you skipped me into luck And jump me black, ruin me glad I jump I run you up inside my truck I jump my slopes and all the dopes slide glad I glide my luck and all is slip again I jump my hopes and all the rope glides sad I skip you jump the way you said But I run old and sigh your name I ruin my mats and all the girl slides glad At least when luck hops it skips back again A rune my mats and all the girls slide glad I jump I run you up inside my truck After "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath
At the table, at the grave not knowing whether to grieve or celebrate, they seemed to find a way within the stalled noon clatter and the dusk over oily swamps and elder tangle along a locked stockade of heavy machines, as the blue heron, looking down, flew farther on. Nothing dissolved for them the mortal green and black in transparent power of spacious streams now gone from earth. The flickering they found, terror-hope-terror, in fire of sunset clouds remained unwavering in its progress to night and day and night. And yet the pleasure they took in everything did not wear out. The limestone quarry of a poorer century, lipped in birds and berries, treasured up, still treasures up, old rains beneath its surface of dusty jet— still waits behind their houses on airless nights to be the dreams and drownings of new children.
The man was white, grey and pale brown, the colorless colors of a used-up earth where water has sunk down, sunk down so low and risen so far above the grey-white pale-brown heaven and shrunk so far within itself that it will not come back. What can moisten a shriveled water, or can a clod of ash regain colors from the identical howl of a white powder sun? Not in me, he said, ever again, but in the street with engine and worker petals, not papery, more fragile than that, there will be color. My eye will reach color, all colors, every one together, which no one will see in me ever again. I turned to the sky then and it was all one blue, the color of seeing, and yet was as many blues, as subtle, as tones of stubble in the most sunken cheek.
The father died and then the mother died. And you were so addicted to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp inside— around the vena cava. Dam against the blood's trash— But I've got you now. Trussed at the waist in a wooden chair, odor of spice and oranges, clove-pierced, incandescent stores to light our lab's decor— Here. I saved this just for you. Beetle-cleaned and sharp at the tip, the finger that shook in your set face from the hand that smoothed your hair— Make a fist. Wrap the tube round your fleshy arm, pull the black rubber tight— will we finally see the sludge of their accumulated mouths, ah, you've said, how they poisoned me... Pierce in with your mother's finger-bone, taste the slow up-well— Sweet. Sweet. Surge ambrosial and clear— A honey, an ichor. From those who waited long in your veins.
A friend calls, so I ask him to stop by. We sip old Scotch, the good stuff, order in, some Indian—no frills too fine for him or me, particularly since it's been ages since we made the time. Two drinks in, we've caught up on our plans. I've sleepwalked through the last few years by rote; he's had a nasty rough patch, quote unquote, on the home front. So, we commiserate, cupping our lowballs in our hands. It's great to see him, good to have a friend who feels the same as you about his lot— that, while some grass is greener, your small plot is crudely arable, and though you're not so young, it's still not quite the end. As if remembering then, he spills his news. Though I was pretty lit, I swear it's true, it was as if a gold glow filled the room and shone on him, a sun-shaft piercing through dense clouds, behind which swept long views. In that rich light, he looked not like my friend but some acquaintance brushed by on the train. Had his good fortune kept me from the same, I had to wonder, a zero-sum game that gave the night its early end? Nothing strange. Our drinks were done, that's all. We haven't spoken since. By morning, I couldn't remember half of what the guy had said, just his good news, my slurred goodbye, the click of the latch, the quiet hall.
I have seen the arrested shrub inform the crag with grief. Lichens crust the rocks with red. Thorns punctuate the leaf. Sorrow is not a desert where one endures the other— but footing lost and halting step. And then another.
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips. As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak, inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips. Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards, wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips. Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some. Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips. Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips. Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.
The country I come from Is called the Midwest —Bob Dylan I want to be doused in cheese& fried. I want to wander the aisles, my heart's supermarket stocked high as cholesterol. I want to die wearing a sweatsuit— I want to live forever in a Christmas sweater, a teddy bear nursing off the front. I want to write a check in the express lane. I want to scrape my driveway clean myself, early, before anyone's awake— that'll put em to shame— I want to see what the sun sees before it tells the snow to go. I want to be the only black person I know. I want to throw out my back & not complain about it. I wanta drive two blocks. Why walk— I want love, n stuff— I want to cut my sutures myself. I want to jog down to the river& make it my bed— I want to walk its muddy banks& make me a withdrawal. I tried jumping in, found it frozen— I'll go home, I guess, to my rooms where the moon changes & shines like television.
A woman stepped outside, crumbled into a loose particulate, and, as the breeze blew up from the east, she scattered: her handful of heart, volcanic ash, spiraled the highway, and five of her teeth slipped between her neighbor's breasts; her neighbor unbuttoned her blouse to scratch at her suddenly red and luminous skin. Days passed. Each day the sun distractedly drifted from chair to chair; each night the stars, old scatterbrains, they commiserated. It didn't rain. Strange, the granular woman thought to herself: although I encompassso much, I accomplish so little. Her car sparkled with her hair and bones; her garden thrived. She tried to think:why did this happen? what had I eaten?why was I bothered?—those old hours, spotted and exotic lizards, darted the gravel, flicking through their colors of skin as one flicks channels on a tv. She couldn't catch a one. Then, as a flock of sparrows converging for the skull of an oak, all her twittering dust, her brain, bone, and the dangerous shreds of her fingers clawed for the sky;what an interesting cloud someone said.
at neck, at shoulder, that stokes a man as he grows older. Nothing rages, nothing fumes. No one races through the rooms, alarmed. How casually he's armed. How gradually arises what surprises in his mirrors. Unawares, as fall runs colder, pulls he only slightly tighter his good wool sweater, thinner than ever now at elbow, at shoulder.
So sexy to slide under- neath a river,  to sit inside this snakelike sub- marine-like  subway car and freely imagine the world above— the Brooklyn Bridge invisibly trembling with the weight of its  own beauty,  the East River still guided by the grooves Walt Whitman's  eyes wore in it, the bulldog tug- boats pushing the passively impressive broad-bottomed  barges around,  and the double- decker orange and black Staten Island ferries, with their aura of overworked pack-mule mournfulness, and beyond them the Atlantic Ocean which I lately learned was brought here by ice comets three billion years ago,  which explains  a few things, like why everybody  feels so alienated, and of course the thoughts being thought by every person in New York City at this moment— vast schools of undulating fish curving and rising  in the cloud-swirling  wind-waved sky, surrounded by the vaster emptiness of non-thought  which holds them and which they try not to think  about and you  lying in bed in  your sixth-floor  walk-up sublet  on St. Mark's Place— such a breath- taking ascension! imagining me rising now to meet you.
Older now, he is among us in diminished form, clothes sagging, hat large on the fine head He likes the largest stores acres of socks and tuna where high girders look down on him also who pushes his cart and leans on it a little . . . something sacramental about the belittling perspective something heroic about the high shadows in the niches of the corrugated roof beneath which under spotlights that don't spread far he moves with the people who comb through the aisles pulling down unwieldy batches of single things to last them through cold time that can't be trusted There he is at the far end of an avenue of obelisks of paper head cunningly mobile like a bird's eyes quick like one beading on flecks that might be the morsels that it needs or on grains or seeds At this its faltering morse of chirrups but no long address only the same few wordchains at my feet water water water millet beak millet crack millet air down danger aieeeeeeee
Drepung, Tibet, 1958 So won a name in this place, handing off lath strips to a hammer's measure, seeing the passing girls' slits in roils of timber grain. Mountains, barley, scaffold, dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly from the hoods of faraway bells monks emerging like hairless animals. I was sixteen. What did I know of sovereignty, or the new soldiers by the gate, chinning their shotguns like violins? Nights, a tin roof wind cracked flat; my sister, flushed with child, hushing a child.
Operation Phantom Fury. * * * The full force of the will to live is fixed on the next occasion: someone coming with a tray, someone calling a number. * * * Each material fact is a pose, an answer waiting to be chosen. "Just so," it says. "Ask again!"
who would believe them winged who would believe they could be beautiful who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls clicking their bony fingers envying our crackling hair our spice filled flesh they have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own cupped hands enough not me again enough but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire
It's really something from the past— when you and I split up without any regrets— just one thing that I don't quite understand . . . When we were saying our farewells and our house was up for sale the empty pots and pans strewn across the courtyard— perhaps they were gazing into our eyes and others that were upside down— perhaps they were hiding their faces from us. A faded vine over the door, perhaps it was confiding something to us —or grumbling to the faucet. Things such as these never cross my mind; just one thing comes to mind again and again— how a street dog— catching the scent wandered into a bare room and the door slammed shut behind him. After three days— when the house changed hands we swapped keys for hard cash delivered every one of the locks to the new owner showed him one room after the other— we found that dog's carcass in the middle of a room . . . Not once had I heard him bark —I had smelled only his foul odor and even now, all of a sudden, I smell that odor— it gets to me from so many things . . .
Someone is about to come but doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs but doesn't. I button my shirt come from the laundry with all its dazzling blots, like one's peculiar fate. I shut the door, sit quietly. The fan begins to whirl and turn the air into a whirlpool of fire, making a noise bigger than the house. Someone is about to come and doesn't. It doesn't matter. Calmly I lean against the wall, become a wall. A wounded bird on my shoulder laughs raucously, laughs at the shoulder it perches on! My soul of flesh and blood puts a long thread in the needle's eye. I stitch a patch on my son's umbrella. I pick his nose and name the pickings: I call one "Elephant" and another "Lion." Someone is about to come and doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs and doesn't. I tickle my children, they tickle me in turn; I laugh, with a will; for I do not feel tickled. It doesn't matter. I scan their fingers for signs: Nine conches and one wheel. Note: "Nine conches and one wheel" are formations of lines on the tips of fingers which, in Indian palmistry, foretell a happy life.
What none knows is when, not if. Now that your life nears its end when you turn back what you see is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No, it is a vast resonating chamber in which each thing you say or do is new, but the same. What none knows is how to change. Each plateau you reach, if single, limited, only itself, in- cludes traces of  all the others, so that in the end limitation frees you, there is no end, if   you once see what is there to see. You cannot see what is there to see — not when she whose love you failed is standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know- ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end achieved by the unappeased is burial within. Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see by what necessity the double-bind is in the end the  figure  for human life, why what we love is precluded always by something else we love, as if each no we speak is yes, each yes no. The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no better. The eyrie where you perch in exhaustion has food and is out of  the wind, if cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea for movement, though the promise of  sex or food is the prospect that bewildered  you to this end. Something in you believes that it is not the end. When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is what you should not love, which endless bullies in- tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see the end. What none knows is when, not if.
The lightning struck him and left a scar. The wind stopped blowing and the wheat stood up. Self-tensed self, who is this I that says I ? I had a scar in the shape of  lightning That split in half when I opened my mouth. The sun  just a circle of  heat in the sky Throwing absence in the shape of clouds Down on the field. Another life placed In the middle of  the life I called my own. A lesser god commanded the front: return. A little god knocked about in the germ. The third person put me outside my own sphere. A small god chanting lightning in the synapse. Wind blows the wheat down. He calls it prayer.
who line the corridors and sit silent in wheelchairs before the television with the volume off, whose cares are small and gray and infinite, time as ever to be faced    ... Methuselahs the nurses wash and dress without haste — none needed    ... this one has drunk from the poppy-cup and drowses in her world of  dream    ... Heliotrope, carnations, wakeful violets, and lilies in vases — masses of  flowers — wrap the urine-and-antiseptic air in lace    ... Please wake up; it is morning; robins whistle; the bees dance. Isn't this other one listening from her shell of  silence, and shouldn't she smile at the green return and dappled light through windows? As earth orbits the corridor clocks are wound    ... The last hour is a song or wound    ... Except in this corridor — mother's — where finity's brainless wind blows ash, and ash again blows through their cells: So much silence, so little to say in the end.)
As if  anyone has the desire    . . .Vickey trailed off, pouring another lager There'll be nothing left But fur and bone, as my lawyer once explained To my ex, she resumed, tapping a long cigarette On the bar. My, you're a bit snarky tonight Said Luther. Maybe you need a change of  venue, A beach with your breath on it Oh, she replied, nodding towards the far corner booth, These writers are so obnoxious I wish they'd find a new place to complain. Ha, said Hillary, they wouldn't know a good story If  it bit 'em in the butt. Plus, added Vickey There's always the lurking danger One may launch into a speech on human nature. I'll back that, said Rick (who, when animated Would lick his index finger and sweep it back and forth As if quickly turning pages of a catalog) They're just a bunch of spare parts clogging a garage. Hear, hear, exclaimed Hillary, let's give it to the boors And literary whores. How a bonfire magnifies everything. Or that early Skift of snow across brown meadows When you still haven't canned the peaches. Settle down Rick, said Luther, this isn't Chicago Indeed, Vickey countered, this town used to be known As Little  Jerusalem by certain parties in the old days All the churches. And hypocrite politicians, Added Luther. Well, it's all downhill from the north Where wanness began its mission, continued Rick, Waving his empty pint. Jesus, you can be a bore, said Vickey All heroes become bores eventually, instructed Hillary But did you know when Rick was born He looked like a little worm. His aunt told me — Luther, studying her profile, said I was a little worm too
When you wake up after twelve hours The stove is cold, there's ice in the water bucket — clouds outside and snow, the noise of a crow, The only sound; until your wife cries From an upper bunk, Honey, I'd like some coffee. Luther chuckles. I nod, excuse myself  for the men's room Next to me stretches a teacher Who once warned me not to get married Too early. Elderly now, but having done well In real estate as a second career. He says Well, well, as if  he can't recall my name. But buys me a drink and talks of  his wayward Daughter. When he mentions her married last name I tell him I have met her, but leave off at that    . . . He squints like a badger. In my wife's family, he resumes, After a jostling by a drunken salesman, there's a Sort of stupid gene that runs through the whole outfit, Being half  Finnish, half  Dutch — or maybe something Cancelled something    . . .    I notice a protuberance, a small growth At the edge of  his eye, hanging like a broken thread I always thought, I say, your daughter had a charming Personality. He hunches his shoulders. Waking to dread, The debts of  dread — but I couldn't help him. Neither did I want to. On the way out I spot my first wife chatting with a small-time gangster — She flutters a wave my way, a Victorian flutter
Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because She's only a metaphor for childhood And a poem is a metaphor already So we'd only have a metaphor Inside a metaphor. Do you see? They all nod. They see. Except for the girl With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage, Her bum looks like the flattened backside Of  a black and white panda. She actually has one In the crook of  her arm. Of course it's stuffed and not living. Who would dare hold a real bear so near the outer ear? She's wondering what possible harm might come to her If  she fell all the way down the dark she's looking through. Would strange creatures sing songs Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end. Perhaps the sounds would be a form of  light  hissing. Like when a walrus blows air Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree. Could she grow one from seed? Could one make a cat? Make it sit on a branch and fade away again The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing was rational thought With an axe beating on the forest door.
Pain trains an undisciplined mind. I will end yours if  you end mine. Little feet, little feet are playing Hopscotch among the landmines. Hope has worked miracles before. If  yours didn't, how can mine? I could have learned to welcome night, If only  you had been mine. How dare you put words in God's mouth, Shail?  Why not. He put ashes in mine.
The light here leaves you lonely, fading as does the dusk that takes too long to arrive. By morning the mountain moving a bit closer to the sun. This valley belongs to no one— except birds who name themselves by their songs in the dawn. What good are wishes, if they aren't used up The lamp of your arms. The brightest blue beneath the clouds— We guess at what's next unlike the mountain who knows it in the bones, a music too high to scale. * * * The burnt, blurred world where does it end— The wind kicks up the scent from the stables where horseshoes hold not just luck, but beyond. But weight. But a body that itself burns, begs to run. The gondola quits just past the clouds. The telephone poles tall crosses in the road. Let us go each, into the valley— turn ourselves & our hairshirts inside out, let the world itch—for once— * * * Black like an eye bruised night brightens by morning, yellow then grey— a memory. What the light was like. All day the heat a heavy, colored coat. I want to lie down like the lamb— down & down till gone— shorn of its wool. The cool of setting & rising in this valley, the canyon between us shoulders our echoes. Moan, & make way. * * * The sun's small fury feeds me. Wind dying down. We delay, & dither then are lifted into it, brightness all about— O setting. O the music as we soar is small, yet sating. What you want— Nobody, or nothing fills our short journeying. Above even the birds, winging heavenward, the world is hard to leave behind or land against— must end. I mean to make it. Turning slow beneath our feet, finding sun, seen from above, this world looks like us—mostly salt, dark water. * * * It's death there is no cure for life the long disease. If we're lucky. Otherwise, short trip beyond. And below. Noon, growing shadow. I chase the quiet round the house. Soon the sound— wind wills its way against the panes. Welcome the rain. Welcome the moon's squinting into space. The trees bow like priests. The storm lifts up the leaves. Why not sing.
Things are not unmoving (or else what is ing there for?) The things once-living fall on the never-living all the more movingly for the eye that passes over them. The wind wells up to spill a trail of onces off the nevers, take opaque from eye to mind, or near it — every rocking takes some leaving to a stonish spirit.
Customs and chemistry made a name for themselves and it was Spot. He's gone to some utopos now, the dirty dog, doctor of crotches, digger of holes. Your airy clarities be damned, he loved our must and our mistakes — why hit him, then, who did us good? He's dead, he ought to be at home. He's damned put out, and so am I. * * * When blue is carried out, the law is red. When noon is said and done, it's dusk again. The greed for table makes the greed for bed. So cave canem, even stars have litters — little lookers, cacklers, killers . . . Morning raises up the hackled men. (What's milk, among our ilk, but opportunity for spillers?) * * * He saved our sorry highfalutin souls — the heavens haven't saved a fly. Orion's canniness who can condone? — that starring story, strapping blade! —  and Sirius is  just a Fido joke — no laughter shakes the firmament. But O the family dog, the Buddha-dog — son of a bitch! he had a funny bone —
Self-interest cropped up even there, the day I hoisted three instead of the  two called-for spades of loam onto  the coffin of my friend. Why shovel more than anybody else?  What did I think I'd prove? More love (mud in her eye)? More will to work (her father what, a shirker?) Christ, I'd give an arm or leg to get that spoonful back. She cannot die again;  and I do nothing but relive.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread: you put this rather beautifully, and gave me leave to sing my work until my work became the song. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it: a line on which a man might ring the changes as he tills the ground from which he was taken. Thistle, thorn (in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed), these too shall it bring forth to thee, all the days of thy life till the end, the synagogue of the ear of corn. Poem and plowman cleave the dark. One can't eat art. But dust is art, and unto dust shall I return. O let my song become my work.
april breath of  boyish red the tongue crushes strawberry dreams hack away wound and wound the fountain and on the mouth perspiration white from someone's neck a little tooth has bit the finger of  the bride the tabby yellow and sere howls the red boy from the gable flies an animal hearkens in his white throat his juice runs down pigeon thighs a pale sweet spike still sticks in woman white lard an april breath of  boyish red
tonight my sparrows let go the snow into fields of carnations swollen with anger. tonight the three popes proclaim the revolution against teenage television. seals smash their heads bloody their heads on the elevators the paternoster elevators which delays the holding of their conference. tonight my sister the wind's bride gives blood for the cello of the jericho desert which prompts the trombones to hold a protest meeting. tonight I hang your lips like birdseed outside my door and observe through the window their death-struggle with the she vulture. tonight let go the snow
rocket water eglantine wooden moon on the roof signs of night & the red motorbike's bleeding muscle fleshed stalk dripping and overgrowing our evening it too a sign of darkness a leek's fat body the red motorbike our night fire ravishment of chrome steel our red motorbike glazed with henna and betel it squirts salmon  juice between the dark of our thighs it sprouts and shouts at the bar it wears a portion of evening in its eye it sloughs off sleep like the bushes drop resin & berries our rags dip purring in even redder roar our muscles softly skip sweet sweat flickers we polish carefully & assiduously our eyes are perched on steel antennae surely there is nothing redder than our motorbike steed we will live on it our red tent dig our claws into its heart cherries meat it shouts out spittle rip the juice instructs the eyes in the language of iron the red night squats pressed against our motorbike we ride hunting little girls in the wooden sky
my puppet-strings are the sweet decaying lamps I flutter round. I am as immense as a black kid with a spinning top. drowned tripper fat crawls into hollow cuffs to be sewn up like hot cats cracked soft caryatids in tails. I'll force you all to your knees your dirty muzzles will squawk out of your faces. and I will continue to climb I'll spread my thin arms along the queer walls till they bleed. I'll reach into threadbare velvet so that you bash yourselves like poor moths on corners of night. the reason I'm here is to scratch all the white bellies squatting down there. your stupid silence I will  just toss up in the air. I am as sky high as all your staring regards laid end to end on the ground somewhere lies my broken smile.
a ladybug, its carapace blown open so a translucent trace of orange gleams from its body, has ascended link by link the smudgy silver curve of my watch band. It must have helicoptered past the sill while I was slumped here squinting in the paper at the ashen packaging another bombing's made of a minivan. Made available in the photo like the homeless in a poem. The pain is far away. But then for moments utterly clear: molten metal guttering down from the Milky Way to fall on us. And sometimes, God, it lands with all its will. My spluttered prayer for it to hold its distance: how ludicrous to blurt it from this comfort. Still it impels itself from me. Please stay away from me. Please stay away from this insectile soul who only weeks ago was wind and shit and jasmine leaves and rain.
In a culvert by the airport under crumbling slag wine colored water seeps to this pool the two does drink from: each sipping as the other keeps look out. The skyline is a blur of  barcode and microchip. Even at home we hold the narrowest purchase. No arcs of tracer fire. No caravans of fleeing families. Only this suspicion ripples through our circles of lamp glow (as you sweep the faint sweat from your forehead and flip another page in your novel) this sense that all we own is the invisible web of our words and touches silence and fabulation all make believe and real as the two does out scavenging through rose hips and shattered drywall: their presence in the space around them liveliest just before they vanish.
1 I held the framework of my life in mind with some precision. I knew when I was where — or where I was when — but not many incidents of my past had actually been preserved. Instead the frame served as a cargo cult runway, forever inviting the future to appear. I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension. 2 The creeper lineates the wall. Flowers as punctuation? Can you elaborate on the passage? Double meaning, superposition: hair standing on end makes a creature appear larger, more ferocious.
What am I to think now, the white scut of her bottom disappearing down the half-flight carpet stair to the bathroom? What am I to do with this masted image? I put all my doubt to the mouth of her long body, let her draw the night out of me like a thorn. She touched it, and it moved: that's all.
A figment, a thumbed maquette of a cat, some ditched plaything, something brought in from outside: his white fur stiff and grey, coming apart at the seams. I study the muzzle of perished rubber, one ear eaten away, his sour body lumped like a bean-bag leaking thinly into a grim towel. I sit and watch the light degrade in his eyes. He tries and fails to climb to his chair, shirks in one corner of the kitchen, cowed, denatured, ceasing to be anything like a cat, and there's a new look in those eyes that refuse to meet mine and it's the shame of  being found out.  Just that. And with that loss of face his face, I see, has turned human.
Smoketrees line the roadside, still-bare beech and poplar bouqueted with redbud and something rusty I can't name, March's odd autumnals — One-church towns I'm glad not to be from, split-log strip mall with a porch where Claire's beauty shop shares a sign with "Antigues," where you study grace in magazines, and when dad dies you rename the family diner New York New York. Love is a means of travel, so you dye the linens pink and swan-fold napkins, holding peony in your mouth. Sundays drive out to watch the ferry drag its lace. Coastward, Easter-colored clapboard, the last generation's shanties hovering on narrow stilts above the velour drift of tide plain (mink from a distance, muskrat up close), a drowsy instrumental music, flooded at dusk. Beside the bridge, smooth brow of pewter. Island of saplings blackened like a framed-up house.
We arrive eight hours before morning but the Sound luminesces enough to gloss jabbed brushstrokes of cedar, the strand prickled with fringes of eelgrass, and the world's baby teeth ground down to this pall of sand. It's gusting so strong I can barely pee straight — You can see in each stunted and strung-out live oak the shape of the wind's hands. On this last stand before the Outer Banks Sharon makes camp while I pay twenty quarters to shelter stunned and out-of-context. Such bare slubs of land the memoir I'm reading calls griefscapes. The groove fits my tongue so for forty more pages I keep the light on, pulled by a man oaring his way through childhood to a stung and moondamp first place, all slap and vowel and grunt-pine punctuation, the no-way-satisfied lessing & moring of the tideshore. I knew in advance of reason this freight of rain, salt in my hair. That child I was, what was she mourning before death charged his first fare? We wake and hurry to slip our moorings. The ferry's there.
To always be in motion there is no choice even for the mountain and its frigid cousins floating on the oceans that even sluggish seethe and moan and laugh out loud at their own jokes. How "like the human heart" can be said of pert near everything, pint of fizz, punching bag because all moves: the mouse, the house, the pelt of moon corresponding to the seas (see above) (now get back here) of mood, sadness heaving kelp at the sunken city's face, gladness somersaulting from the eaves like a kid's drawing of a snowflake. No matter how stalled I seem, some crank in me tightens the whirly-spring each time I see your face so thank you for aiming it my way, all this flashing like polished brass, lightning, powder, step on the gas, whoosh we're halfway through our lives, fishmarkets flying by, Connecticut, glut then scarcity, hurried haircuts, smell of pencils sharpened, striving, falling short, surviving because we ducked or somehow got some shut-eye even though inside the hotel wall loud leaks. I love to watch the youthful flush drub your cheeks in your galloping dream. Maybe even death will be replenishment. Who knows? Who has the time, let's go, the unknown's display of emeralds closes in an hour, the fireworks' formula has changed, will we ever see that tangerine blue again, factory boarded up then turned into bowling lanes.
People looking at the sea, makes them feel less terrible about themselves, the sea's behaving abominably, seems never satisfied, what it throws away it dashes down then wants back, yanks back. Comparatively, thinks one vice president, what are my frauds but nudged along misunderstandings already there? I can't believe I ever worried about my betrayals, thinks the analyst benefitting facially from the sea's raged-up mist. Obviously I'm not the only one suffering an identity crisis knows the boy who wants to be a lawyer no more. Nothing can stay long, cogitates the dog, so maybe a life of fetch is not a wasted life. And the sea heaves and cleaves and seethes, shoots snot out, goes to bed only to wake shouting in the mansion of the night, pacing, pacing, making tea then spilling it, sudden outloud laughter snort, Oh what the heck, I probably drove myself crazy, thinks the sea, kissing all those strangers, forgiving them no matter what, liars in confession, vomitters of plastics and fossil fuels but what a stricken elixir I've become even to my becalmed depths, while through its head swim a million fishes seemingly made of light eating each other.
The Wrecking Crew was just the cream of the "you pay — we'll play" LA session pool, that crack squad of 50 or 60 musicians...who played on Pet Sounds and Smile and probably half the records in your collection. They didn't just play the chops. They invented them. — Rob Chapman, MOJO Money is also a kind of music. I don't mean the slight sleigh bell of a pocketed change purse or an old-time till's single tap of triangle, ringing up sale, or even the percussion of post-pillage coffers filling up, plink by plink. I think I mean that current of classically trained breath certain amounts of currency can call forth and blow through brass. I mean the mean current of electricity Carol Kaye's bass drew from Capitol Records in the sixties, the timesheets that took their toll and exchanged it for four / four time kept without fail by the brain of drummer Hal Blaine, worth its weight in scale.
The question of my mother is on the table. The dark box of her mind is also there, the garden of everywhere we used to walk together. Among the things the body doesn't know, it is the dark box I return to most: fallopian city engrained in memory, ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum, hinged lid forever bending back and forth — open to me, then closed like the petals of the paperwhite narcissus. What would it take to make a city in me? Dark arterial streets, neglected ovary hard as an acorn hidden in its dark box on the table: Mother, I am out of my mind, spilling everywhere.
FOR"I'm leaving you," she said, "for you make me sick." But of course she didn't say that. She thought the "for"; she admired its elegant distance, the way it's wedged like an iron strut between result and cause, the way it's almost "far," and dire as a raised eyebrow. She liked the way it sounds like speaking through a cardboard paper towel tube, using it for a megaphone: not loud, but strong, all those compacted years shoving out the other end, as if she were certain she wanted to be alone.  OR The first four bars of Beethoven's sixth, the Pastorale, repeat and repeat, always with variation: or, and or, something to violate expectations, not fully antiphonal, only an oar dipped into the measure to make an interior swirl, pulling the craft slightly to the side, yet ahead, still: little cupped trails alongside to mark where the mind turned, questions were asked, and shed, before moving on, nothing that can't be repaired.  NOR As a flower sheds petal after petal, as further tests strip away one after another of the last hopes for a cure, as a person shakes into the waste bin all her cigarettes and goes down the street not knowing who she is, the pure air of saints is achieved by abandonment: Jesus in the garden alone, cold moon disappearing, Buddha at the morning star, mind emptied of its snarl of ignorance. Neither to harden against loss, nor to welcome it. To let it be who you are.
habit smacks its dull skull like a stuck bull in a brick stall and my version of what I know is like eye surgery with a backhoe on grace so much beyond my pitiful gray sponge of a brain I'd not believe it exists except for such doses of felicity as this.
they move in swift on the Swift Plants in six states & sift through the faces to separate the dark from the light like meat & seat them in the back of vans packed tight like the product they pack & who's to pick up the slack the black & white can't cut it so the beef stacks sell single to feed the pack the flock who block passages & clog the cogs of the machine the process not so swift to give & grant a wish of a place a stake in the land handling the steaks for the rest to take in to sate the mouths of the stock who have stock in the business of beef & beef with the brown who ground them
—by way of what they say From back when it was Nam time I tell you what.
Come the marrow-hours when he couldn't sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds— Perseverating fiddler-crabs pockworking the pluff-mud; (perforated) home-bank gurgle and seethe; breathing burrow-holes, under-warrens, (pitched) pent-forts, coverts; a rabbity heart-hammering amongst the canes; bleat of something; sleeping Mama grinding (something) with her jaw; Daddy rut-graving gravel driving off; the desolated train-trestle rust-buckling —and falling; an echo-tolling cast-iron skillet like a gong; downrivering gone (gone) gone (gone); Sylvia supper-calling her fish-camp fish with a bell; putting her tea kettle! wren-calls on for the crying marsh-wren orphans; R.T. tale-telling down by Norton's Store "Where every Story cauls a Grief"; Daddy —nine-eyed, knee-walking— aisle-weeping at the Bi-Lo; Mama mash-sucking sour loquats in the shed; ire-salts quartzifying in the dark; the caustics; the fires; far Fever Creek revival-tents hymning and balming; bees thrive-gilding the glade; hand-strang bottle-oaks (and intricated yardwire-works) clocking and panging; Viaduct Forge & Foundry beating time; the bait-boys along the dock drum-dunting their buckets; vowel-howling over the water; the river; RIVER.
You could figure it as a trapdoor, blur of hinge and down into the unconscious of this stranger moving around your garden like a trap— making all the greens unstable as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you. Bang to rights is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo, wool-wearing garden-dweller, new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley and roses. Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat. Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward— sense of proportion—golden section of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.
All in the stilly night the muntjac roars from its hedge: a barking roar of July, heat, its own broken-open fruition under black viscose, a sky static with plane-roar. The intermission after the greatest air show in the world; fields and lane recovering; tarmac tonguing sky again, languid in the summer half-dark, towards Fairford where ancient glass trembles, facets of dark open to tumble out king, revenge-tragedy, triumphal colors of God.
On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I propel a raft with plastic spoons through the hissing fur of surf, stirring as we go an Alka-Seltzer sun. We pass Bolinas-Stinson School, the fire house, and Smiley's dive; extinguished geodesic domes along the mesa road where Cream Saroyan lives. With a telescope, my sister spies the erstwhile chemist of Argonne who left his post to polish glass. As penance, he engraves a glyph of hydrogen on the blank face of every cliff from Monterey to Inverness. Beside us, cormorants describe the chop in grunts, then plunge through thirty feet of grease. I try to hold my breath as long and cheat or fail. As evening comes we pass the final spit of land. Once more around the Horn and then we'll make for home.
Oysters adhere to things, no eyes: spat on the smooth curve of a pier they feel shadows and snap shut. The sun wavers while anchored below each distills Tomales Bay, accreting waves within its shell. Voluptuous and cold, Kumamoto trembles on a thin fork, liquefaction of cloud. Rain distorts glass, our tavern submerged all afternoon.
A blast off the Atlantic snaps a flag in the Firth of Clyde, while thirty leagues away, the same synoptic wind surges across this hillside honeycombed with mineshafts, sounding the unstopped slots of a "G" harmonica left to dry on the kitchen sill. Snow charges a sky in which the sun swims and glimmers like a groat, a turbulent space where owls hunt by day but nothing stands for long—bereft of circumstance—beyond the standing stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Through the night, like a stoker on a fast express—the Hyperion on its Edinburgh run— you hoy buckets of coal on the grate, only to see its flames drawn up the chimney, getting more heat from hoying the fuel than from its burning. As a barnacle goose swims against the dark, uttering its terse honk, you pull your favorite word, duvet, close about your head. Tomorrow, bailiffs may take everything not hammered down.
Lepisosteus osseus Despite it all, something stirs at the sight Of the cool, enameled body, The unreflecting eye, And the long jaw like a chisel With its single, violent purpose. It hangs dead still at the water's surface And seems lifeless, until A flickering gesture Carves fish after fish From any school that swims too close And creates in the world a new absence, As if this might be the shaper As well as the defacer Of the damaged masterpiece Whose headless body hails the bodies Of the many Egyptians excised at Cyprus.
On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps Were scary, it's true, but probably normal; A house accepting new patterns of weight With protest, the way no conviction goes gently. We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit." Later that night, when the power conked out And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name, "Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits, All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes, Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves To explain why this or that has led to suffering. Pretty soon, we were using him for everything. When the Christmas tree fell, it was "Daniel"; When my wife lost her ring, it was "Daniel"; When the kids forgot to feed the goldfish And it turned up dead, its eyes silvered over Like water shadowed under sheets of ice, Well, that became Daniel too, which was curious; And pauses me now as I make the long walk Down the hall to the bathroom in darkness, And hear, in soft concert, the sound of my footfalls Answered at once by my children's voices Still calling to Daniel behind their door.
Not that anyone will care, But as I was sitting there On the 8:07 To New Haven, I was struck by lightning. The strangest thing Wasn't the flash of my hair Catching on fire, But the way people pretended Nothing had happened. For me, it was real enough. But it seemed as if The others saw this as nothing But a way of happening, A way to get from one place To another place, But not a place itself. So, ignored, I burned to death. Later, someone sat in my seat And my ashes ruined his suit.
My Uncle Fletcher, Our county seer, Bestowed his gifts On my no-good cousin Jeff, Who had a feeling About nearly everything. "That guy of hers . . ." "Those fucking queers . . ." He'd say, giving me the eye, Which was the same eye That could gaze upon A yellow froth of newborns, And know the cockerels From the pullets.
while the black oak takes coaxing. That popping and whistling? Yellow birch and red pine. Difference might for now define, but soon the whole church is chanting at the same time, flame splashing bright from the dirty bucket of the earthly, roaring likeness and only likeness into the bottomless cool of the night . . .
As if the moon could haul through you Its tremor of light and stone, Be cleared of sound. Plough The mind's noise until it's a shine In the purl of south-bending river that bears Itself toward a blacker part of the forest. If you hum, hum through the motes of air, Perhaps your nerves will find at last A tone to which they will succumb. Be still. Be not so heavy-hearted For a moment. All is not a tomb, Blind sarcophagus staring dumb, thwarted Pleasures nailed inside. These fireflies Sweep their tracings on the evening. Weep if you must, but board what falls Away, abdomens flaring— The brief, nomadic intervals.
Yes, a chalice: held up high As if it were an elixir instead of dead-leaf soup. But peek out with your watery eye. That's right: over the lip of the thing you're in. An opera house can smell like iron, cologne. Aesthetes and snoozers a thrill Mired under chandeliers, but Can thrills be mired? Of course! And smells Can make you sad, even When they're clouding up the hall near midnight, And everyone is clapping, clapping. The audience stinks of aging privilege. A chalice that might have held a Eucharist, Or a swimmer made of kissable puddles, But instead it holds you With your impulses which molder—O What do you know, Unreason fornicating with itself? You get heavier when I plea. Are you nothing but chemistry With a sick sense of humor? Willy-nilly chemicals elope! But why bother to marry When all they have to do is fuck My mind and make you justice of the peace? Are there no annulments in the offing? You are not so interesting. You care too much, or not enough. Inhale bad breath from the row behind. Sniff back what Spilleth, spilleth as if from a nose. (Do Renaissance verbs turn you quaint?) Nettles on your funk-wet wings. You're greedy To escape from and into The vowel in the tenor's mouth. His costume could have stench of urine. For God's sake don't pour yourself. Think: clear pond. Think: man at river's edge Who knows the difference Between desecration and redemption.
A joyrider rips up Lockland. It takes barely five minutes for a precinct helicopter to dip and swivel over lawns and two opposing lines of cars parked innocently snug to the sidewalk. They haven't found him yet. Every couple of minutes or so, my blind soaks in outrageous light and the helicopter hauls its drone and feud all over my backyard. There's a fan over my bed that says similar things in summer: adages, reproach and rhetoric. I talk too much; give far too much away. In mumbling my company, I reckon on a twofold payoff: some echo; being found out, consequence. I lie low. Minutes swell. He must be out there somewhere, lights switched off, crouched and bundled, foot within an inch of the get-go. I pull the comforter up over my ears, count to forty-two, then start over. I'm trying, trying hard, to hold my breath.
Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake, a boy growing old at the dining room table, pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books the flowers he picked all morning in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus, azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris; reading in another book their names he knows, and then the names from their secret lives; lives alchemical, nautical, genital; names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script; secrets botanical description could never trace: accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife, kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred, horned, brained. Flowers seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged, the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted from time, and stilled by inward gazing. Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds in the words for their parts, the accounts of their histories, and their scattered pollen, something to do with his own fate and the perfection of all dying things. And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen the note left for him that says his parents have gone and will return by noon. And when it's time, the dove calls from its hiding place and leaves the morning greener and the one who hears the dove more alone.
That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a realm its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It's up to no good, out to overturn a kingdom just by swooping into the right kitchen, or upsetting somebody's aim. For my pleasure, I'll call it Good News, or Little Egypt. For my delight, I'll think of it as needle and thread. Or a breathing remnant restored to a living cloth. Or scissors trimming lament to allow for everything I don't know. For my happiness, I'll call it Pocket Dictionary Full of Words in Another Language. For my gladness, Feathered Interval, The Deciding Gram, Geronimo. For nothing, Monument to the Nano.
Don't bring haw into the house at night or in any month with a red fruit in season or when starlings bank against the light, don't bring haw in. Don't give me reason to think you have hidden haw about you. Tucked in secret, may its thorn thwart you. Plucked in blossom, powdered by your thumb, I will smell it for the hum of haw is long, its hold is low and lilting. If you bring haw in, I will know you want me gone to the fairies and their jilting. I will know you want me buried in the deep green field where god knows what is rotting.
I understand, sure, hygiene, these days, if you're not paying attention, with all these sicknesses, you think I'm not aware? I'm not saying not to bathe, are you crazy? you don't want to wash? I'm just saying to not go overboard, because there's clean, that's fine, but not clean and shiny, it's just that people now, bath foams, bath salts, a bar of soap's not good enough, no, instead, sometimes, by washing too much, some things even get lost, the other day, there was one lady, I didn't know her, even if you tell me her name, she's not from here, she's from Rimini, we had met each other by chance, two months ago, then we met again, but it's not like now I'm wanting, I'm just telling you to give you an idea, it was Tuesday afternoon, at her house, her husband was away, she started to unzip me, she was wearing a dressing gown, we'd been drinking, we'd danced, then we went to bed, she climbed on top of me, sssh! and today is Thursday and I still smell her, do you understand?
Ah the delight of dawn! Over the grassy lawn the spark of silk, of silk spat out by some small spider to be the breeze's pawn. A distant siren whines from the freeway. Sun shines! What a Sunday, what peace! An old man's tidy peace, his favorite hour of all. The ants march on in rows. They're off to do who knows what harm to the ripe pears ... Such sun now on the wall! The lizards heed its call.
Far away, far away, men making wars. Other folk's blood spilt on other folk's floors. Only this morning I wounded my finger: a thorn on my rosebush pierced like a stinger. Sucking that finger, I thought of the war. Sad is the earth! And those people, so poor! I'm of no help, being here and not there, nor can I reach them, by sea or by air. And what if I could—what good could I do? My Arabic's terrible! My English is, too! What, should I stroll through the fields of the dead leaving sheaves of my verses under each head? No. Enough of this wretched irony-fest. Let's put on a coat. The sun's low in the west.
Psychoanalysis always looks for the egg in a basket that has been lost. * * * I sample sin as if it were the beginning of well-being. * * * I don't like Paradise as they probably don't have obsessions there. * * * If God absolves me he always does so for insufficient evidence. * * * Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. * * * When I raise a toast to madness, I toast myself as well. * * * There are nights that don't ever happen.
As I am Catholic I have never played. * * * I've had thirty-six lovers plus tax. * * * I am the most chaste woman in Italian literature. * * * I am completely asexual not counting errors and omissions. * * * Mount Sinai is sometimes confused with the Mons Veneris. * * * No one can know what is between me and God.
The happy ones are almost always also vulgar; happiness has a way of thinking that's rushed and has no time to look but keeps on moving, compact and manic, with contempt in passing for the dying: Get on with your life, come on, buck up! Those stilled by pain don't mix with the cheerful, self-assured runners but with those who walk at the same slow pace. If one wheel locks and the other's turning the turning one doesn't stop turning but goes as far as it can, dragging the other in a poor, skewed race until the cart either comes to a halt or falls apart.
From behind, standing, from a distance, in passing, the taxi meter running, I'd watch her, I'd watch her hair, and what would I see? My stubborn theatre, curtain won't fall, my always-open theatre . . . Best to leave as soon as the show begins.
In you all deaths gather, all the broken glasses, the sere pages, the derangements of thought, they gather in you, guilty of all deaths, incomplete and guilty, in the wake of every mother, in your wake, motionless. They gather there, in your weak hands. The apples of this market are death, these poems retreat into their grammar, in the hotel room, in the hut of what does not join, souls without rest, aged lips, bark ripped from the trunk. They are dead. They gather there. They failed, the operation failed, they failed. The place was motionless, the word obscure. That was the place we agreed on. Goodbye, memory of the sparkling nights, goodbye, big smile, the place was there. To breathe was a darkness shutters had made, a primitive state. Silence and desert were switching positions and we were talking to a lamp. The place was that one. The trolleys rarely passed. Venus was returning to her hut. Out of the warrior throat, episodes broke free. We didn't say anything more. The place was that one. It was there that you were dying.
At the center of the lit circle, rising from cotton-candy calf muscles, the White Clown ushers his eyebrows skyward. He grates his ukulele, opens a heart-shaped mouth, inhales— his serenade begins. Now's the time. From the shadows, a blast like a trumpeting elephant: obscene, ragged. The Auguste capers like a fawn, darts away, pads around with his trombone. The gold of the slide slips into and out of the infinite. Everything smells of panther and piss and mint. His gaze fixed on the clash between the welled tears and the awful laughing shoes, the little boy grows ever more grave, ever more severe.
A playground, in a park. One lady raises to the top of the slide a ball of newspaper, gives it a kiss: "Ready . . . set . . . go!" Another holds a lampshade in her hands, smoothing its chenille bangs. "My daughter, you should see her dance— she's already won two prizes." "Did I tell you mine—he's three—can already write?" A girl, in line behind them with her son, is listening. She tightens her grip on his hand, hoping no one will notice he's real, and alive.
I love her fierceness when she fights me, shouting "Not fair!" Her eyes slitting like shutters in cities by the sea. Her life is rife with bonfires—seen and unseen— fires that burn through the turning years bringing her to life again, and again, in a miracle of smoke. This heat gives her a sense of forgiveness—or so I imagine— she kisses my back, capriciously, when I scold her. Maybe she recalls the scalpel by which she was born. Easy, the mark of its slash in my skin. She rose from my belly as I slept. We're bound together by peace, no shrieks of pain, and my modesty. We're a canvas by Giovanni Bellini: a virgin and a sweet rabbit.
gives joy only if read in a broken rhythm, pausing at every period, parting your lips a little at the colons What: a pity to die my love. To say: "I don't love you anymore" with no one listening. What: a shame the irritated voice the haste. The distance between the first passionate whisper and this new timbre. How little shame I have. to have killed you and put you here. beneath the very expanse you created. The: expanse. Is: a cloth. Is: white. Is: a sheet. Is: a land on which snow has fallen. Ssh. you'll be alone there. No longer on top. but. under. as is proper for the dead, as is proper for seed. and. for lilies yet to sprout. You'll feel something like moving scratches: those are birds mice my own bony hands that you adored my tongue with its thirst. Brr. love. how. painful for me to see you shrunken by this chill so stripped of your gifts in this tomb where I can't grieve for you but can only dig down to the earth down to its iron to the fire that now embraces the earth and celebrates me.
Don't let's hang about on the cobblestones. The equestrian statue—keep going—represents the king. Yes, the Dante translator. Now let's move on. Lovely theatre, first rate, but no point in dawdling because this paving is contaminated (a nuclear accident near the quarry) and here we are already like ghosts on this X-ray plate, like ghouls, radiological tourists, little glass vessels blown with a breeze of electrons.
Let us honor the topmost banner fluttering over the kingdom of commodities— the encoded soul of price rose of the name and name of the rose, bundle of stems, fasces of tendons and veins— wrist on which to auscultate the pulse of money.
There were no alarms, no sentries: how could there have been? The doors were even standing open, and if we could do it again we wouldn't have it any other way. Defenseless—isn't that better? Unarmed? Now we follow these strangers, who lead us along without loving us, without curiosity or comprehension, merely sufficiently convinced of our value, and perhaps intent on profiting from us. We will be passed from hand to hand in the markets of the great prairie. We will grow ever quieter, ever more condemned to wrap ourselves in the blind solitude of objects. Beneath the touch of countless rags, we will let the slightest traces of our origin be erased.
You're dreaming of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic of colored paper: her house with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn, the sky—outside, the concentration camp. This is the real gift I brought back from Prague without telling you. It was with me on the train the morning I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart, or south of there, amid a drone of people working—they don't know at what or for whom, but they're working, pressing keys, sending messages to unknown persons through the air. Nothing but eyes and fingers, nothing but one day after the next, interminable passage of a time that doesn't vary, that belongs forever to others, to something outside themselves, and the fear, the hatred of one pariah for another, this brawl of lost souls, of new slaves. The Great Drinker of Beer, the Woman Staring into Space, Mazinger Z: these were my traveling companions. Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, or what you're dreaming now, or how you children see the world. Will you find, among your games, the game that saves us? It's what we all are hoping as we watch you sleep.
8 By now you know: I need the words. You'll learn to give me what I seek. It's my sick mind, it feeds on words. I'm begging you, for God's sake: speak!  17 Hurry, pin my wrists in place, nail me to your bed like Christ . . . comfort me, caress my face . . . fuck me when I expect it least.  45 From nerves veins valves ventricles from tendons cartilage nerves ducts from follicles nerves ribs clavicles . . . from every pore my soul erupts.  47 You liked that? you actually came? but how? Explain to me. But why? If you got off on that, you're doomed. A charge I can't and don't deny.  71 Why is even pleasure a kind of chore? Why is what sense I have left leaving me? Come on, explain. Who do you take me for, your personal doctor of philosophy?
107 I have always been the way I am even when I wasn't the way I am and none can ever know the way I am because I am not merely the way I am  122 Him or someone else, what's it to me if every time I'm lonely afterward? Alone here with my moribility . . . if there only were such a lovely word . . .  124 These hemorrhoids, this bleeding from behind . . . I'm spilling out of all my holes—yes, all. My ass is wrecked . . . (My speech is so refined . . .) There ought to be a plumber I could call.  154 You want to die with me, you dumb shit? Excavate my heart with your shovel? This is getting to be a hell of a habit. Want me to swear on my knees? Grovel?
From Mars cruel god of war The desire to tie the corpse to the chariot And drag it around each morning, From Mercury the idea to put a stop to that And buy the body back. Because everything sooner or later becomes a musical Or a collectible card or figurine Hitler or the Fierce Saladin Dracula the Impaler All stripped of any awareness of suffering: There is no voice in stones No word that turns to flesh or blood. (At that auction held at Bolaffi, Those intriguing heart-shaped or "C" postmarks Stamped after their arrival in Florence On two letters sent from the field to the family Of a student volunteer at Curtatone.)
Impossible to wield The acreage of the fabric that unfolded, Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field: The distance from one Christmas to the next When he was only seven Was aching there; a foreign city flexed Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded. Too heavy to outrun, Too slow to measure what it underwent, Though gradually the passage of the sun, Unmanageable in its train of light, Seemed almost to respond As he yanked the yards of stuff in like a kite And gathered the brocade that trailed beyond His arms' reach to the scale of measurement, However strange the weave That writhed about the working of his hands: The footage too atrocious to believe, Printed with corpses; Greece; the falls of salmon; Her upturned silken wrist He would have torn out history to examine; His father's final blessing, which he missed. However far he comes or where he stands, At last, and limb by limb, Contour by contour, that unfolded cape Settles ever more fittingly on him. His forehead is the line of the sky's vault, His shoulders trace the ground, His palms the ways he wandered by default, And in his gestures those he knew are found. What shape the day discovers is his shape.
Lulled in a nook of North West Bay, The water swells against the sand, Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass, In which clear surface, just a little way From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass With languid ease, apparently unmanned, Adrift along the day, Imagining a breeze to fan Their motion, though there's none. Siobhan Reaches a giant hand down from the sky And nudges with insouciant élan The nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high. That hand is just as magically withdrawn. So moves the catamaran. And through the Lilliputian fleet She, Beatrice and Gabrielle Wade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow, To fashion their maneuvers and compete Among the stationed hours to and fro, While watching through the viscid slide and swell Of water their white feet, Made curiously whiter by That cool light-bending element. Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpse Pipefish and darting fingerlings they try Impossibly to grab, translucent shrimps Among the laceweed, seahorses intent To flee the peopled sky. Hard to conceive that they should be Precisely who they are and here, Lost in the idle luxury of play. And hard to credit that the selfsame sea That joins them in their idleness today, Careless of latitude and hemisphere, Blind with ubiquity, Churns elsewhere with a white uproar, Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees, Or sucks among the scum and floating drums Of some forgotten outpost founded for The advent of an age that never comes, Or bobs the remnants of atrocities Limply against the shore. What luck they have. And what good sense To leave the water with their toys When called, before their fortunes are deranged. And still the day hangs in its late suspense For hours without them, virtually unchanged, Until the bay's impregnable turquoise Relaxes its defense And sunset's dye begins to spread In flood across it to the sand They stood on, as though, hoping to disown The blood of all the innocents he'd shed, Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand, Making the green one red.
It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then, The words like distant stars that faintly grace The all-pervading dark of space, But not meant for the world of men. It's not what we forget But what was never known we most regret Discovery of. Checking one last cassette Among my old unlabelled discards, few Of which reward the playing, I find you. Some years after her death, but years ago, Hearing Gwen's voice recite "Suburban Sonnet," At first we could not focus on it, So jolted that the radio Should casually exhume From our shared memory the woman whom We knew and make her present in the room, As though in flesh, surprised to find that she Had earned this further immortality. Who ever thought they would not hear the dead? Who ever thought that they could quarantine Those who are not, who once had been? At that old station on North Head Inmates still tread the boards, Or something does; equipment there records The voices in the dormitories and wards, Although it's years abandoned. Undeleted, What happened is embedded and repeated, Or so they say. And that would not faze you Who always claimed events could not escape Their scenes, recorded as on tape In matter and played back anew To anyone attuned To that stored energy, that psychic wound. You said you heard the presence which oppugned Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion In your lost house. I scarcely need persuasion, So simple is this case. Here in the dark I listen, tensing in distress, to each Uncertain fragment of your speech, Each desolate, half-drunk remark You uttered unaware That this cassette was running and would share Far in the useless future your despair With one who can do nothing but avow You spoke from midnight, and it's midnight now.
Sprawling like some small group of picnickers, They're propped among the shadows of the trees, Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled. Nothing stirs Except the flies that clog their cavities. A red cleft rules the parting of that head. You stretch a little and slide out of bed. Acres of debris are in sodden flood About the ruined village, which concedes In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud Its smoking households. Rising from the weeds, Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace. Out of the mirror you observe your face While sunlight offers all that you desire. The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts, Would hook still-living bodies from the fire, Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts, Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give Those idle brutes each day a day to live. You have today. Stark-eyed and hollow-faced, Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste And stares out blankly. So then, it is you— The thought had not occurred to you before— It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.
Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine- printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences— peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist; his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp, lisse, pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this— age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit catalogue’s tissuelike (nearly self-composting) pages—like his skin, all milliner-ribboned; yet with, barely hooded, things as they are and will be visible beneath it.
this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon: she is butterfly brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono if I were foolish like her: but aren't I foolish like her spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail against the verge of sky simple on the rise surveying the anchorage: simple me, signal me dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge: sick wind but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds I could skip ahead could break the inconsolable loop of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders [shuffle play] such a pitch of tenderness in the voice such an awful lot of noise
either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments either the low breeze through the cracked window or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter: we're done with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what's eternal picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells this is the sum of us: brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth's surface, one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope: first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds don't tell me deluge. don't tell me heat, too damned much heat
After there were no women, men, and children, from the somber deeps horseshoe crabs crawled up on somber shores: Man-of-Wars' blue sails drifted downwind and blue filaments of some biblical cloak floated below: the stinging filaments. The cored of bone and rock-headed came near: clouds made wandering shadows: sea and grasses mingled:: There was no hell after all but a lull before it began over:: flesh lying alone: then mating: a little spray of soul: and the grace of waves, of stars, and remotest isles.
Pushed prow southerly into the golden wind: hurt the eyes: gold pelted water: so looked less far away: plovers huddling on the tide's last piece of shore: Rise up in brightness: clap wings:: I told myself I'll go where eagles go: if to brimstone: my wake a narrow river back to its source in cedar: and when sunlight embers the shore's soft fleece will be before me.
Don't be misled: that sea-song you hear when the shell's at your ear? It's all in your head. That primordial tide— the slurp and salt-slosh of the brain's briny wash— is on the inside. Truth be told, the whole place, everything that the eye can take in, to the sky and beyond into space, lives inside of your skull. When you set your sad head down on Procrustes' bed, you lay down the whole universe. You recline on the pillow: the cosmos grows dim. The soft ghost in the squishy machine, which the world is, retires. Someday it will expire. Then all will go silent and dark. For the moment, however, the black- ness is just temporary. The planet you carry will shortly swing back from the far nether regions. And life will continue— but only within you. Which raises a question that comes up again and again, as to why God would make ear and eye to face outward, not in?
Their ruler is elected state by state, and no one cuts his heart out as he drowses. Their senior citizens still copulate. Their convicts are allowed to change their blouses. In this backyard there hangs a gutted deer, and in that driver's seat there sits a wife. They have their MMR and Retrovir. They have their quarter-century more life. Each commoner receives a welcome mat. The maids have maids, and plumbers go to Paris. They call their waiters "sir." The poor are fat. They eat. They do not easily embarrass.
Trying to walk the same way to the same store takes high-wire balance: each step not exactly as before risks chasms of flatness. One stumble alone and nothing happens. Few are the willing and fewer the champions.
The worms which had been thick are thin upon the ground now that it's gotten later. They stick against the path, their pink chapped and their inching labored. It's a matter of moisture isn't it? Time, a measure of wet, shrinking, the drier you get.
Cut out as a horse is cut from the pack. Peeled off, but a long time back. Now such a feeling for the way they touch and shift as one, the beauty when they run.
Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting, nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers. If I had a car in this town I'd rig it up with a rear bumper horn, something to blast back at the jackasses who honk the second the light turns green. If you could gather up all the hornhonks of just one day in New York City, tie them together in a big brassy knot high above the city and honk them all at once it would shiver the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if they were made of sand, and usher in the Second Coming. Christ would descend from the sky wincing with his fingers in his ears and judge us all insane. Who'd want people like us up there yelling at each other, trashing the cloudy, angelic streets with our candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups? Besides, we'd still be waiting for the next thing to happen in Heaven, the next violin concerto or cotton candy festival or breathtaking vista to open beneath our feet, and thinking this place isn't quite what it's cracked up to be, and why in hell does everybody want to get here? We'd still be waiting for someone else to come and make us happy, staring through whatever's in front of us, cursing the light that never seems to change.
We undid a button, turned out the light, and in that narrow bed we built the great city— water towers, cisterns, hot asphalt roofs, parks, septic tanks, arterial roads, Canarsie, the intricate channels, the seacoast, underwater mountains, bluffs, islands, the next continent, using only the palms of our hands and the tips of our tongues, next we made darkness itself, by then it was time for dawn and we closed our eyes and counted to ourselves until the sun rose and we had to take it all to pieces for there could be only one Brooklyn.
It is the great arguments we are proud of, over a nibbled peach, hair in the comb, a faulty lube job; the reconciliations were always naked in borrowed rooms, sometimes in Queens or Staten Island, we touched each other shyly—we reminded each other of loneliness and funk and beautiful pigeons with oil-slick necks, cooing bitterly— but there we lost each other in forgiveness; keeping score, being wounded even in triumph, walking home down leafy avenues etched with the faint double line of extinct trolleys, caressing carved hearts under a sheen of sap with a ragged nail, sleeping alone, choosing the dream of betrayal, entering by the wide door and waking dead—there we were superb. In Brooklyn we held our own.
It ends badly, this glass of wine, before you drink it you have to drink a prior glass, before you sip you gulp, before you chug the bottle you pour it down your throat, before we lie together naked, we divorce, before we rest we grow old, it ends in chaos, but it is delicious, when we wake it is the past, we are the faces staring from the high lit window, the unmet lovers, the rivals who do not exist, united in a radiance that will not fade at dawn.
There are times when all the chutzpa I can muster isn't enough, fug and bluster all I can do, and damned if it doesn't just stand there, legs straddling a berm of washboard dust-ruts and in late noon sun stare me blue in the face: lord, we could almost trade places, my back strained by the weight of those great bone wings, my tongue itching for lily root. And musk, lord, the pheromones, a day so sweet with elderberry's too rank fume I could die twice over snuffing. While the truck mumbles and a trout spanks the cooler, I almost outdo myself. But reason, that too-convenient shortcut, creeps back, if only so far: the rest as we say is silence, dust and the sputter of flies and when lumbering to go it pauses and throws me its last worst look its sorrow is Christ's, dewlap jeweled, a beatitude of moss.
Dog days doggone dog-tired dogwork of summer, mowing the grass we're all coming to the dog tags of you, me, I, we, stashed in a box, doghouse throwaways. Even the namesake tree whose blossoms some call Jesus-flowers for the rust-grooved tips of the petals as if nails now removed had indented the shape of a cross, betrays my mood how all those springs ago seeing our tree nailed with bloody after bloody crucifix I said this beauty's no foo-foo and sure enough my dog-weary dearie mowing today, the spring long gone, I brush a limb on whose tired leaves mites amble the edible thoroughfares and as if to confirm it, our neighbor's mutt runs along the fence yapping dogwood dogwood dogwood as the mower chugs on, our train leaving for the city beneath the grass.
Authorized, booked By my steadfast prose The dead I ghost write Shed shadows that shine With hindsight, hearsay— The last word is mine
In the seam between day and night, wind ruts the dirt road and ruffles the milky way of dandelions. The young among them are greasy gold and urgent, while the old are balanced between growth and that burst past growing—annihilation, culmination of a beginning each has always been ending toward, admitting more and more space, until what's left is beyond color, a bleary truss of matter and air. Shocked accomplice of the rounding light, how you tremble in the stretch of your death, which is like all deaths, geometric with seed. Wind-swimmer, eye-floater, white nightgowned grandmother dancing your platelets on the head of this pin, can you show me how to wish, how to gather and scatter this single hooped breath?
In bed as the machinery of morning begins, indistinguishable the subterranean turbines of the A train from the jet engine as it gins the clouds, rips and reseams the length of dungaree on its way to Pittsburgh (with the terrible and subtle cargoes, with ashes and a cat under the seat) from the pulleys of the service elevators from the baffled sound across the alley of the hand-iron press and the sewing machine motors whirring bobbins that stitch together the hot properties of Seoul and the suburbs and the idiot village of Chelm, needle the veronica and the Buddha robe and the sateen for spring. I looked over at her. Her skin a warp of Christ and a weft of meat. All night she had hauled me and the boy and the smoky, feckless men I was across the fens and stretches of mesquite through the tunnels and delivered me to my misery and the laborious knots of the sheets I wound myself in. And she was exhausted from Eros and swollen from anger. She could stand to put on a few pounds. I could see it in her ribs. Before I would marry my restlessness to her terror, before the crushes and wages could be made into our equity, before the endlessness would end in spinning jennies and sleaze and the noise of a fleet of vehicles with tinted windows testing the evacuation routes, I would cut, then peel, then dice, then caramelize some onions before she wasted away to nothing.
Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls, churched river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities and principalities of central New York, the hollows and corners of the burnt-over districts visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings, gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb, the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through the underbrush to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day. We learned obedience and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve. He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to block for punts— and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited for the cops and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance one does in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified, and swore and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead, and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he was befuddled with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes of his eyes. The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the indwelling beauty of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq with three others in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot. I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing, he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.
There's nothing more erotic than one red Chilean plum slumbered in the brown palm of the curved hand of the right man.
All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self Mothers hum nonsense, driving here and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting how faint reflections shiver over the road All the deafening musts along the way Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun— there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone This is enough to wrench our hand out of his and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry, the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water. The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet, marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw, buildings in cities far away. On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous, but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after. The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch, sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest, but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them. But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change, fate would be a different fate. At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together. After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed, then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer, we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing. And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone. The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes, worrying about the ones who weren’t there. And then finally walk home through the fields, because there was always work the next day. And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning, eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth. And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields. One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves. The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built. And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night. Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen. And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat, wanting the heat to break. Then the heat broke, the night was clear. And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later. And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down, practicing all those things you were learning in the water. And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with, there was no substitute for that person. The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting. And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages: You will leave the village where you were born and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful, but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can’t say what it was, and eventually you will return to seek it.
1 Child waking up in a dark room screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back in a language nobody understands in the least — There is no duck. But the dog, all upholstered in white plush — the dog is right there in the crib next to him. Years and years — that’s how much time passes. All in a dream. But the duck — no one knows what happened to that. 2 They’ve  just met, now they’re sleeping near an open window. Partly to wake them, to assure them that what they remember of  the night is correct, now light needs to enter the room, also to show them the context in which this occurred: socks half  hidden under a dirty mat, quilt decorated with green leaves — the sunlight specifying these but not other objects, setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary, then lingering, describing each thing in detail, fastidious, like a composition in English, even a little blood on the sheets — 3 Afterward, they separate for the day. Even later, at a desk, in the market, the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given, the berries moldy under the topmost layer — so that one withdraws from the world even as one continues to take action in it — You get home, that’s when you notice the mold. Too late, in other words. As though the sun blinded you for a moment.
The pull of guns I understand, my father taught me hand on hand how death is. Life asserts. (Best take it like a man.) I shot a dove, the common sort and mourned not life but life so short that gazed from death as if unhurt. And I had nothing to report.
Scrape the sun from the wall of  the sky. Cast the great nets of  autumn over the houses. Even the throat of  the lily is a dangerous inlet. Let the world stand wearily on the stoop of  the jail of  the world and the light of  the mind, that small lamp, pearl of  shine, let the night come to it, as iron filings to a magnet, mother.
After Ernesto Trejo And the morning’s marine layer cloud cover’s   just beginning to unhinge, to let the buttery light of another daybreak slip through And weigh down the dead lawns and sagging rooftops of  this neighborhood, where Cold War era television antennas Still cast shadows like B-52s heading offshore, where poverty, this early is the smell of  Malt-O-Meal and the dregs of  thin beer Washed down the sink. Where the shift begins at 7AM, but consciousness has a way of coming round as slowly As this old computer monitor flickers its dull sixteen colors into being. On it, the names and numbers of  laundromat and liquor store owners, Fast food managers and lawn care companies; it’s my job to cold call them, read from a script on the benefits of membership In the Executive Dining Club, not take No for an answer. I’m no good and both the boss and I know it, and he’s hovering When the scraped-out voice of  the woman on my phone answers me with My husband’s been killed, and then, instead of  hanging up, Throws the receiver down next to something — dishwasher or window AC, I don’t know — but something close, it sounds, to tearing itself  apart, Something cycling through an awful, screeching noise. And it’s because I’ve paused that the boss flings a pencil Into the wall in front of  me and edges closer, and because of  the fear of  unemployment forms or the sky opening up if  I were to walk out, And because this sound — the un-oiled, flak-fouled crack of  it — has left me standing suddenly at the end of a runway, planes Screaming low overhead and loaded for the beginning of  the end of the world, that I start back into the script, start back as if  I believe each word, Even though, in the rattle and dust of  the jet-wash, no one hears a thing.
It’s not enough to cover the rock with leaves — as if  vernal fluidities could be enough for the stern assault of  fact. As if  a living ornament, light and subject to temporal  breezes, could be enough to overcome despair, that chunk of  something solid in the air, unmoving, as words repeated are. It’s not enough to cover despair with motion. Motion itself  is flawed, continuous motion a narrow, thin escape from what is rooted. Leaves do sway, but in truth, they’re only flapping out, ancillary, uncertain, buffeted this way and that. They remain the fact they are bound to, involuntary notions victim to the weather of  a day, gripped by what has thrust between the rocks, flexible as everything not rock is, reckless as imagining is reckless.
Brilliance is a carcass on a snow-white beach. Envy never sleeps. I tell my children truthfully: a long red beard is breaking from the darkness scale. He’s chasing you because you’re new. Because he’s old and sees the town in dirty tones: violet sheep and wine-dark corn. He burns the evening rainbow like a wartime bridge until it’s charred and charlatans topple out of  robin eggs and pox  your happy window by capturing the ledge and chattering like X-rays that crash into your flesh.
Why do roses need their thorns? Some things are little known. But thorns of roses spring and seize the surface of  fey airs before the roses come. I’ve seen thorns huddle in a harmony alone, hunkered down on green, wiry canes, smoothed blades of whipping rose stalks, and curl their polished tridents to night’s call. They are like stars digging into firmament with such desire, you don’t quite get it, and so healthy that they almost have to wound, or like bodies that can’t be argued, borrowed, tamed. The touch of a thorn is a wry, deep telling of the senses not to bloom without a wish to, without belief  in pain to hold us true.
1 Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting. Death watches them, laughing, its sides splitting. Life is a cry followed by laughter. The body before, the waste after. 2 Could one hear in that wood the gentle click of  the shutter like the breaking of a stick or the safety catch on its climacteric 3 Like the four winds. Like a low fart that rips clean air in two, like urine that drips. Four squatting footsoldiers of  the Apocalypse. 4 Kiss them lightly, faint breeze in the small  leaves, be the mop on the brow, the sigh that relieves. Let them dump and move on into the dark plate of  the unexposed future, too little and too late.
Love, we were young once, and ran races over rough ground in our best shiny shoes, we kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces. Our knees were filthy with our secret places, with rituals and ranks, with strategy and ruse. Love, we were young once and ran races to determine the most rudimentary of  graces such as strength and speed and the ability to bruise. We kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces, and doing so left no permanent traces because we fought and fell only to confuse love. We were young. Once we ran races in ghettos, in camps, in the dismal spaces of  the imagination reserved for  Jews. We kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces at elastic braces, shoelaces, empty packing cases as if  they were the expressions we could choose. Love, we were young once, and ran races. We kicked at stones, we fell over, we pulled faces.
The eye is drawn to that single yellow star that no wise man will follow. The hunched men in caps, the grimacing woman her eyes screwed up, cheeks hollow. We look and look again until we burn a hole in the paper. We strive to learn from their resignation but it is beyond us. We let them burn.
Were I to fall in love all over again, it would be with this low ceiling, with the calm  faces of  the two men going about their craft, and with her, now twisting towards them, beautiful, defiant and free. Because we forget how beauty was once itself and nothing else, how it held its stellar moment in attic and cellar. Because that is what beauty is, this compact with time and the silence of  concentration on one subversive operation, that requires courage and sacrifice and never comes without a price.
The visionary moment comes just as it is raining , just as bombs are falling,  just as atoms burst like a sneeze in a city park and enter the dark as if  it were the waiting ark. You open your hand and blow the dust. You pick and throw the stone. You make the round  O of  your mouth perfect as light and the tree bends and stands upright in the stolid night.
I have seen eternity and it is like this, a man and woman dancing in a bar in a poor street on an unswept floor. It clings and plots and is desperate, at a point between violence and abjection, between warmth and agoraphobic fear. Let me reverse this and accept the fear. Let me drop all objections to abjection, since life itself  is desperate and has to tread the unswept floor carefully, lovingly, while the bar hovers in eternity. Like this.
What you cannot see through those windows beyond the bare hill is the hand resting on the table, is the man lying still on the bed, is the vague gesture of  the young woman in the hallway as she remembers something that happened yesterday, is the mouse hesitating under the draining board, is the twelve year old boy putting on a record of  Wiener Blut that he once saw his parents waltzing to. All that you see is the all-but-naked child on the all-but-naked hill against a naked sky, as if  what you could not see were the question and she the reply.
Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English). —Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey 1 Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards, click of pearls upon a polished nightstand soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull of the self and the soul in the darkness chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence. Deep is the water and long is the moonlight inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink, building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon. Deep is the darkness and long is the night, solid the water and liquid the light. How strange that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth. 2 Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate, a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox, a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric, a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost. Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters, or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop, or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget, barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back, the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot, always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable. 3 In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint. In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong. In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream. In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants. In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust. In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices. In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar. In the night I will become an infant before your flag.
So long I have been carrying myself Carefully, carefully, like a small child With too much water in a real glass Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves That start to rile the little inland sea And slap against its cliffs' transparency, Revise and meet, double their amplitude, Harmonizing doubt from many ifs. Distant frowns like clouds begin to brood. Soon there is overbrimming. Soon the child Looks up to find a face to match the scolding, And just as he does, the vessel he was holding Is almost set down safely on the bookshelf.
Something has come between us— It will not sleep. Every night it rises like a fish Out of the deep. It cries with a human voice, It aches to be fed. Every night we heave it weeping Into our bed, With its heavy head lolled back, Its limbs hanging down, Like a mer-creature fetched up From the weeds of the drowned. Damp in the tidal dark, it whimpers, Tossing the cover, Separating husband from wife, Lover from lover. It settles in the interstice, It spreads out its arms, While its cool underwater face Sharpens and warms: This is the third thing that makes Father and mother, The fierce love of our fashioning That will have no brother.
I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped. After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?" We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple  ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents. We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends first because beneath our twangor slept what I'll call a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool then, and placed my hand over the guitar string's wind- ow til it stilled. "When the moon's black," I said. "Be faithful."
Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid. My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said He wasn't going to wait too much longer. You Know that look your daddy gets before he whups you? That's how Big Trend looked. There was a pink scar Meddling his forehead. Most people assumed a bear Like him couldn't read anything but a dollar, But I'd watched him tour the used bookstore In town and seen him napping so I knew he held more Than power in those hands. They could tear A Bible in two. Sometimes on the walk home I'd hear Him reciting poems. But come Friday, he was the one The fellas asked to speak to the boss. He'd go alone, Usually, and left behind, we imagined the boss buckled Into Trend's shadow because our money always followed.
The dead were still singing Turn the lights down low Beneath Yellow Bridge where years before, clowning And ass out, Stick jumped with nothing but the State Championship trophy in his righteous clutch. The water Was supposed to be deepest there, and for three seasons Straight MVPs: Charlie "Fly" Kennison, Long Timmy Long, And Rocket Jefferson, those are the names I knew, jumped Free. But Stick's ankle broke. I fished him out, crumpled And bawling like the day he was born, like an object of Baptism, and a life of bad luck followed in the shape of Floods and fractured lightning, and then, numb, tooth- Less, and changed, the dead refused burial, striking out, 2 By 2, 4 by 4, from the morgue house to raise trouble at The bridge. I started hearing birds everywhere after that.
After dark, the bar full of women part of me loves—the part that stood naked outside the window of Miss Geneva, recent divorcée who owned a gun, O Miss Geneva where are you now—Orpheus says she did not perish, she was not turned to ash in the brutal light, she found a good job, she made good money, she had her own insurance and a house, she was a decent wife. I know descent lives in the word decent. The bar noise makes a kind of silence. When Orpheus hands me his sunglasses, I see how fire changes everything. In the mind I am behind a woman whose skirt is hiked above her hips, as bound as touch permits, saying don't forget me when I become the liquid out of which names are born, salt-milk, milk-sweet and animal-made. I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what's left of the deed.
Even if you love the racket of ascension, you must know how the power leaves you. And at this pitch who has time for meditation? the sea walled in by buildings. I do miss the quiet, don't you? When I said, "Fuck the deer antlered and hithered in fur," it was because I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist. If I were in charge, I would know how to fix the world: free health care or free physicals, at least, and an abiding love for the abstract. When I said, "All of history is saved for us," it was because I scorned the emancipated sky. Does the anthem choke you up? When I asked God if anyone born to slaves would die a slave, He said: "Sure as a rock descending a hillside." That's why I'm not a Christian.
If only I could forget him, the Frenchman I saw outside our quarters, creeping round near daybreak in that density of garden as if he'd almost grown into the ground. He was just looking back, peering about him to check that he was safe here and alone: once he was sure, his plunder was all his! Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on. He was already eating. He was wolfing a pilfered turnip hidden in his rags. Eating raw cattle feed. But he'd no sooner swallowed a mouthful than it made him gag; and the sweet food encountered on his tongue delight and then disgust, as it might be the unhappy and the happy, meeting in their bodies' all-consuming ecstasy. Only forget that body. . . Shoulder blades trembling, and a hand all skin and bone, the palm cramming his mouth in such a way that it too seemed to feed in clinging on. And then the furious and desperate shame of organs galled with one another, forced to tear from one another what should bind them together in community at last. The way his clumsy feet had been left out of all that gibbering bestial joy; and how they stood splayed out and paralyzed beneath the body's torture and fierce rapture now. And his look too—if I could forget that! Retching, he went on gobbling as if driven on and on, just to eat, no matter what, anything, this or that, himself even. Why go on? It turned out that he'd escaped from the prison camp nearby—guards came for him. I wander, as I did then in that garden, among my garden shadows here at home. "If only I could forget him, the Frenchman"— I'm looking through my notes, I read one out, and from my ears, my eyes, my mouth, the seething memory boils over in his shout: "I'm hungry!" And immediately I feel the undying hunger which this wretched creature has long since ceased to feel, for which there is no mitigating nourishment in nature. He feeds on me. More and more hungrily! And I'm less and less sufficient, for my part. Now he, who would have been contented once with any kind of food, demands my heart.
Where you've fallen, you will stay. In the whole universe this one and only place is the sole place which you have made your very own. The country runs away from you. House, mill, poplar—every thing is struggling with you here, as if in nothingness mutating. But now it's you who won't give up. Did we fleece you? You've grown rich. Did we blind you? You watch us still. You bear witness without speech.
A battle lost in the cornfields and in the sky a victory. Birds, the sun and birds again. By night, what will be left of me? By night, only a row of lamps, a wall of yellow clay that shines, and down the garden, through the trees, like candles in a row, the panes; there I dwelt once and dwell no longer— I can't live where I once lived, though the roof there used to cover me. Lord, you covered me long ago.
As gestures to beckon geometry's end I post letters to my lost Mayan sisters, solicit layers sussed from layers to test history, push past parallel. Mystery becomes you, Mother, as does the lust the rest of us suffer, lust you must once have induced. What perceptions I trust defy perspective. I take my troubles scribbled, not erased.
To say how much I've missed you, I offer this, at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists, numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on, to some next place, but last listened for your voice last night, these long years after, will listen next when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now, as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.
the deep male growl of the sea-lashed headland —Sophocles, Philoctetes August long ago, the summer Lemnian (not like the deeds of those who killed their men), the self a glowing bead, like Hephaestus falling daylong out of heaven in the old story, the island's interior a forge, a glory hole, the odor of wild thyme borne offshore steadily, the Aegean Sea purple, wine-dark, without epithet; and as I walked on the beach, my mother not long dead, the perfect crystal of my self-regard so lately flawed, and landscape made to echo my own low cry in the island's empty places, I found a pure white bone that wind and salt had scoured of every grief and all self-pity: and so I came to the love of others.
Last night she came to me, my mother, dead: but as she was in the photo, that last Christmas, wearing a red dress, and her lipstick was red (I wonder if that means she lives in hell), and I saw again that she was beautiful, the same high forehead I have, the same wide brow, and just my age, forty-nine; and now I was talking fast, because I knew I had no time, and I told her I loved her, I told her how her life had informed mine, and I begged her to come to me again, to meet my children, my wife. I said to her—My work, see what I have made, I have tried to do what you did not live to do. But she smiled at me and began to fade.
"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's. And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face. The jeroboam trees are dark tonight. Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be. Partyers all. The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power." Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell. Someone admired the hostess's oils. "Yes, it was a surprise when they hired me to teach but they said, 'We can teach an artist to teach but we can't teach a teacher to be an artist.'" "How true," the guests murmured. This was not your mother though artists all say it "comes from somewhere else." When another guest compared the Catholic to the Episcopal service she said, "I think not." In a desert once I almost fell off a cliff. To calm me down a friend told a joke: "Descartes was sitting on a plane. The stewardess said, 'Coffee or tea?' 'I think not,' Descartes said, and vanished." It took a moment to sink in because I thought he said "The cart" as in "beverage cart." Confusion is the only way to get to eschatology from a sketchpad. I'm trying to redeem that abbot. Drawing in the outage. Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them—the cries—under my own singing. Scholars resurrect books all the time just by quoting them. When Roman gods popped out of the soil, the Christians looked around wildly. Sculpt the mouth around "sculpture," ulpt. They reburied them hurriedly, and the earth gulped. The statue of the Commendatore went down with Don Giovanni. Which shall I believe, the unrepentence of the sinkholed Don? Or the statue that converts Leontes by resurrecting his all-forgiving wife? Hermione who's peerless has a likeness; he who won't about-face is not "mocked by art" but brought posthaste to hell, his "shapely seat and heart". . . The moon slips out like a foreign coin from denim: a drachma, an as. Can we redeem it? Cities are places are conversion, you said. But I am citiless. "She ascended to the thrown," you wrote by mistake, of Elizabeth.
Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland The mallet strikes but something's off, and so he hits again, curling that lower lip, purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe, were speech the vibes might understand, so when he lifts bluish lids as if wakened to the desired tone that rings now, it seems, it sounds, under wraps, a water-ly quaver, through the club crowd's silence, as it floats above us like an aerosol trying to find a new way to escape, passes through the wall's mortared pores to reverb in the cool night air of an unpeopled sidewalk, droning toward tracks where a passing peopled train sucks up and winds his finally found, wowed tone around its wheels, held there by steel heat one hundred miles, until it reaches the sea, where wheels and whistle overreach surging surf the good vibration feels such desire for, and leaves its tedium of the round and round, lofting to a sea that comes and goes but finally simply goes, as one night, this night, the cool vibes' air (struck finally in the changed groove of sax and ecstatic kit) is free, finally free, to go where we won't hear from it again.
The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement— squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light of life lived imperfectly between one where and another. Everybody's here. Cowboys, Mennonites, Tijuana illegals, Muslim cabbies at prayer on loading docks as dark clouds fuss above the southerly sun past its prime. Killing time, a life mostly miscues and hesitance, I want something to take me over so looked for you near the baggage claim's glide, who could have been anybody from everywhere, like Ellis Island's ghosts, their dump of cardboard valises, bindles, baby-fat sacks strangled by hemp, and around me here long-haul lovers who in sleepers last night loved to exhaustion. Scorched roughnecks, perfumed girls in heels grabbing Samsonites and golf bags schooling the carousel's louvered U-turns and straightaways. It must be why I'm here, to wait and see who claims what looks too much like your brown suede duffel, no "Antigua" or "Cancun" decaled in its hide, nasal music threading the scene while tonight you weave through songs somewhere else. That floppy bag and us— the Garment District, two Venices, South End, South Philly, scraped nap, brass clips, gaunt warmed handle. . . A teenage girl two-hands it off the belt and waddles into the runny sun, your bag five years late thumping freshened thighs and dimpled knees. Where are you now that you're here again for me? Hear these thrilled voices, the engine horn howling? Smell these acid residues?
O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen, o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks accuse of spoiling souls, whose destiny is downward, whose reflecting's up—I think I must have come from you. Just one more cup.
Insanity is not a want of reason. It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu. Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us: spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more; let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets— it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.
Lined up behind the space bartender is the meaning of it all, the vessels marked with letters, numbers, signs. Beyond the flats the monitor looms, for all the world like the world. Images and motions, weeping women, men in hats. I have killed many happy hours here, with my bare hands, where TV passes for IV, among the space cadets and dingbats.
Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies, over the girl with her first electric, how her high, thin voice, amplified many times over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's in the green grass of the festival site. Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide the pistil and the pollen inside. Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands, over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening. It rejoices over Japan, over Korea, over arts refined over a thousand years— the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea. Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.
When I saw one of those men touch your hair,  I heard for the first time in many a year the ancient battle trumpets and I saw the banners of an army winding off to war and felt that blind power urging me to knock him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor. If nobody had held me back, stopped me,  I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot, stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry, but you must be aware your winding hair  is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair! Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.
The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness  that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness  of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint  labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness  on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light. Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle  thick with blood, so at Delos they stopped,  Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped  up to the "altar of horns" to dance a puzzle- dance, its moves unreadable except to those who'd walked  the blank meanders of the labyrinth.  And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze  of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle  rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth. . . Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.  New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don't think much  about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach  at Naxos, staring out at the coming years.  But people still dance that dance: just common folk,  those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,  at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,  as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might  even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.
We aged a hundred years and this descended In just one hour, as at a stroke. The summer had been brief and now was ended; The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke. The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell. And so I covered up my face, imploring God to destroy me before battle fell. And from my memory the shadows vanished Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need. The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished— A book of portents terrible to read.
Our sweet companions—sharing your bunk and your bed The versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread The wheels' endless round The rivers, streaming to ground  The road. . . Oh the heavenly the Gypsy the early dawn light Remember the breeze in the morning, the steppe silver-bright Wisps of blue smoke from the rise And the song of the wise  Gypsy czar. . . In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons As poor as the night And the nightingale chirred  Your might. . . We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared The fierce bonfire's glow And there, on the carpet below,  Fell stars. . .
In the fog which surrounds the trees, the leaves are stripped—leaves defaced already by slow oxidation, deadened by the sap's out-seeping for flowers' and fruits' gain, since the harsh heats of August made of them a less. In the bark, vertical furrows crease and slit where dampness drains to the earth's base, indifferent to the living citizens of the trunk. Flowers scattered, fruit conferred. Since youth, this relinquishing of breathing attributes and body parts has become for the trees a standard practice.
The sneck's aye sweirt and ayont a doverin cratur wi a lit o the lowe they ken ilka gadge on the bowe bi the soond o thir foot-fa  glisk the skyrie lamp hingin on the smittie ceilin a spreckelt green plaunt is deein a wandert bairn greets  aneath thon laich an gowstie lift at lang an last the onfa.
The door-latch is always stubborn beyond it dozes a beast tinged by the fire they know who is walking the curve of the road by their footsteps alone glance at the fancy lamp hanging from the sooty ceiling a green and speckled plant withers a child who has wandered cries beneath a long low sky and at last the snow comes on.
Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew The ways you promise what you lack; And that your bodies, like your souls, Always slip from our grasping hands. Space is such a lure . . . Swift to disappoint, As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's Architects still offer more than ours, Who only build a scaffolding of dreams. He dreamed, all the same; but on that day, He gave a better use to beauty's shapes: He understood that form means to die. And this, his final work, is a coin With both sides bare. He made in stone, Of this great room, the arrow and the bow.
On the express train to Vienna she writes in her diary notes about Rome and Naples. Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids, pages like blood smears of homing pigeons. She is alone, gray, reconciled, a Leda long after the swan's departure, Odysseus retired at Lotophagitis. Back home, in Maryland, the notebook will be interred in the archetypal drawer, among the yellowed love letters, among the infant hair curls, among the dried adult flowers, near the cushion where the castrated cat dreams while Mahler's forever forever forever chokes in the green wallpaper. It is her message to imagined little sons; it is her membership in the club of Swifts, Goethes, Rimbauds, Horatiuses and   deathwatch beetles. It is her monument outlasting bronze, five-dimensional reality, the last engraving of primeval man on reindeer bone, the last drop of the fluid soul before evaporation.
From "Metamorphoses," Book II, 846-875 Majesty is incompatible truly with love; they cohabit Nowhere together. The father and chief of the gods, whose right hand is  Armed with the triple-forked lightning, who shakes the whole world with a nod, laid  Dignity down with his sceptre, adopting the guise of a bull that  Mixed with the cattle and lowed as he ambled around the fresh fields, a  Beautiful animal, colored like snow that no footprint has trodden  And which no watery south wind has melted. His muscular neck bulged,  Dewlaps hung down from his chin; his curved horns you might think had been hand carved,  Perfect, more purely translucent than pearl. His unthreatening brow and  Far from formidable eyes made his face appear tranquil. Agenor's  Daughter was truly amazed that this beautiful bull did not seem to  Manifest any hostility. Though he was gentle she trembled at first to  Touch him, but soon she approached him, adorning his muzzle with flowers.  Then he rejoiced as a lover and, while he looked forward to hoped for  Pleasures, he slobbered all over her hands, and could hardly postpone the  Joys that remained. So he frolicked and bounded about on the green grass,  Laying his snowy-white flanks on the yellowish sands. As her fear was Little by little diminished, he offered his chest for her virgin  Hand to caress and his horns to be decked with fresh flowers. The royal  Maiden, not knowing on whom she was sitting, was even so bold as  Also to climb on the back of the bull. As the god very slowly  Inched from the shore and the dry land he planted his spurious footprints  Deep in the shallows. Thus swimming out farther, he carried his prey off  Into the midst of the sea. Almost fainting with terror she glanced back,  As she was carried away, at the shore left behind. As she gripped one  Horn in her right hand while clutching the back of the beast with the other,  Meanwhile her fluttering draperies billowed behind on the sea breeze.
Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over. His sister was riding high: nothing bridled her. Her light was falling, shining into woods and rivers. Wild animals opened their jaws wide, stirred to prey. But in the human world all was sleep, pause, relaxation, torpor. One night, in an April which had just gone by, The likeness of my love stood beside me suddenly. He called my name so quietly. He touched me gently. His voice was drowning in tears. It failed completely. His sighs overwhelmed him. Finally, he could not speak clearly. I shuddered at his touch. I felt the fear of it. I trembled as if I knew the true terror of it. I opened my arms wide and pressed him against my body. Then I froze: I was ice, all ice. My blood drained into it. He had fled. Here was my embrace—and there was nothing in it. Fully awake now, I cried out loudly: "Where are you fleeing to? Why are you rushing away? Wait, wait for me. If you want, I can enter there. Because the truth is, I want to live with you forever." But soon I regretted it—that I had spoken out this way. And all the time, the windows of the terrace had been wide open.  The light of the moon poured down; its beauty, its radiance. And I grieved and grieved. I grieved for so long. The tears flowed down my cheeks: tributaries of tears. It was a whole day before I could stop weeping.
Where are you wandering to, little fools Come, big sister will teach you how to write verse Itchy little wasps sucking rotting flowers Horny baby lambkins butting gaps in the fence
Mother and father gave birth to a snail Night and day I crawl in smelly weeds Dear prince, if you love me, unfasten my door Stop, don't poke your finger up my tail!
My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree My skin is rough, my pulp is thick Dear prince, if you want me pierce me upon your stick Don't squeeze, I'll ooze and stain your hands
My body is powdery white and round I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond The hand that kneads me is hard and rough You can't destroy my true red heart
A woman wails, boo hoo, mourning her man Shut up, shame on you, don't cry to the hills! O little sister, I should have warned you Don't eat the meat, if it makes you cough blood!
108 In a decidedly vacant stone plaza, you are tapped on the shoulder by the convulsions of a section of light, and turn back, to your delight. However, to think that the countless hidden fibers of the atmosphere were already attacking you at once and tying you up, shadow and all. Inside the convulsive laughter, fight. Because the fighting spirit is that of the enemy, flooding over the plaza.
A tribute The elephant's trunk uncurling  From the lightning flashes In the clouds was Marie Antoinette, As usual trumpeting. The greedy suction Was her tornado vacuuming across the golden Kansas flatness. Meanwhile, the count was talking to the swan. The swan liked what he was saying and got  Right out of the pond. Meanwhile, grown men in Afghanistan. The count had fought in Algeria.  Meanwhile, neon in Tokyo. Madame la Comtesse waved to us from the top step, Waved to her count, their swan, their ornamental pond, et moi. We were a towering cornucopia  Of autumn happiness  And gourmandise rotating counterclockwise, Backwards toward the guillotine. I kept a rainbow as a pet and grandly Walked the rainbow on a leash. I exercised it evenings together with the cheetah, A Thorstein Veblen moment of conspicuous consumption: A dapper dauphin in a T-shirt that said FRED Parading with his pets decked out in T-shirts that said FRED'S. I left my liver in the Cher. I ate my heart out en Berry. We drank and ate France between the wars, And every morning couldn't wait. It felt sunshiny in the shadow of the château. And when the rainbow leapt from there to here, It landed twenty years away from the Cher. The place it landed was the Persian Gulf. It landed twinkling stardust where I'm standing in my life With one-hump Marie Antoinette, my wife, Who resembles that disarming camel yesterday. In fact, the camel yesterday was smitten. She left the other camels to come over. You have a lovely liquid wraparound eye. She stood there looking at me sideways. They feed their racing camels caviar in Qatar.  The ruler of Dubai has said that he will try to buy Versailles. A refrigerated ski slope, five stories high, Lives improbably inside a downtown shopping mall in Dubai. Arab men, wearing sneakers under their robes, hold hands. Faceless black veils stop shopping to watch through the glass. Seeing the skiers emphasizes the desert, Like hearing far-off thunder at a picnic. Both the word thunder and the word picnic are of course Arabic. Indeed, Arabic was the language of French aristocrats Before the Terror, bad body odor perfumed. It is the language of the great Robert Frost poems, Which have the suicide bomber's innocence Walking safely past the checkpoint into the crowd. They pay payola to Al Qaeda to stay away from Doha. The emir was in his counting-house, counting out his oil and gas. Another sunny Sunni day in the UAE! A candidate for president Who wants to manumit our oil-dependent nation First has to get the message to every oily girl and boy To just say no to up and down and in and out, Labanotation Of moaning oil rigs extracting oil joy. My fellow Americans, I see a desert filled with derricks  Pumping up and down but never satisfied: Obsessional hydraulics and Jimi Hendrix has hysterics. I smash my guitar to bits on stage and that's all, folks! It isn't. I contemplate the end of the world. It isn't. I have my croissant and café and the Trib and walk the rainbow Around the block.  The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues Contemplate the end of the world. I contemplate the end of the world but in my case It's not. There are still things to buy. I walk the rainbow in the dark. The world is the kiosk where I get my Herald Tribune. The world is my local café where my café au lait is quadroon. I go to the strange little statue of Pierre Mendès-France In the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, France. I make a pilgrimage to it. My quaint political saint and I visit. The young North African hipsters in the bitter banlieues Contemplate the end of the world, which isn't The end of the world, though yes, quite true, In Algeria and Afghanistan Jihad is developing a dirty nuclear bomb That smells like frangipani in flower To keep Frangipani in power.  Ayatollah Frangipani has returned from his long exile in France  To annihilate vice. I stomp the campfire out and saddle up my loyal Mayflower— Who is swifter than a life is brief under the stars! My prize four-wheel-drive with liquid wraparound eyes! We ski the roller coaster ocean's up and down dunes. We reach land at last and step on Plymouth Rock.
Moringa of the flood bed on the banks of the river Tigris. A dove on a swaying bough's mournful cooing has turned me sad, Her song like the song of the queen of the gathering— When she touches her triple chord  you can forget the maestro brother of the caliph al-Hádi! And when she sings!—who was Ánjash that camel driver with the mesmerizing chant, anyway? In Hadimát, Sálma's direction, and Sindád, I swear it, I'm in love, far gone, with a girl who lives in Ájyadi.  Wrong, she lives in the obsidian black of the membrane of my liver. Through her, in a rush of musk  and saffron, beauty falls  into disarray.
Oh, for corniced palace of Baghdad! not the palatial cornices of Sindád al-Híra— It crowns the gardens cascading below, a virgin unveiled in a perfumed chamber. Wind plays in the branches. They bend. Lovers at last coming together. Her neck necklaced by the river Tigris, her lord our master our Imám al-Hádi, Násir, Mansúr, best of caliphs, who never set out on horseback to war. God bless him long as a dove on a swaying bough's cooing, Long as smiles flash lightning (and eyes stream like clouds in answer) From a bride like the sun when the mist parts, revealing herself luminous in splendor.
What is staying alive? To possess  A great hall inside of a cell. What is it to know? The same root Underneath the branches. What is it to believe? Being a carer  Until relief takes over. And to forgive? On fours through thorns To keep company to an old enemy. What is it to sing? To receive breath From the genius of creation. What's work but humming a song From wood and wheat. What are state affairs? A craft That's still only crawling? And armaments? Thrust a knife In a baby's fist. Being a nation? What can it be? A gift In the swell of the heart. And to love a country? Keeping house In a cloud of witnesses. What's the world to the all powerful? A circle spinning. And to the children of the earth? A cradle rocking.
After stumbling a long time over impossible trails  you are up on top.  Hardship didn't crush you, you trod it  down, climbed higher. That's how you see it. After life has tossed you  away, and you ended up on top  like a one-legged wooden horse on a dump.  Life is merciful, it blinds and provides illusions,  and destiny takes on our burden:  foolishness and arrogance become mountains and marshy places,  hate and resentment become wounds from enemy arrows,  and the doubt always with us becomes cold dry rocky valleys. You go in the door.  The pot lies upside down in the hearth,  it sprawls with hostile black feet.
An old woodcut of the London Bridge  and a colored lithograph of a barley field.  There are no other pictures on Ward D. The London Bridge lifts sooty towers above the river.  But it's the barley field I see.  A golden ocean of barley. It's not like the other grain-fields.  Maybe it's those inward-looking eyes  gone into it so it becomes heaven? A fall-colored sky, mild,  with no harvesters and no scythes.
I beat you with a hazel rod Come to me in madness I beat you with a bloodied rod Come like an angel I beat you with a rod from heaven Come to me like a wild boar * * * Ninety-nine serpents— ninety-nine flaming beasts— go to Ion Slip in by his shirt-collar squat in his heart scald him burn him  turn his eyes to my eyes his face to my face his path to my house Make him see me in the distance a fine-feathered peacock  make him pick me out as basil among weeds make him tease me among the girls Like following gold and silver fall in step with my words with my walk  with my dance * * * Sweet boy don't send so much longing— send a little less and come with it yourself * * * Tuesday, basket full of black, how did you make me fall in love— did you clip my hair did you steal my footsteps? How did you charm me— with the hair of a mad wolf with three straws from the bed with splintered wood  with the fairness of eyebrows with a chip off the gate with dark hair from a braid? How drive every other love away? * * * Eagle, eagle, grow into a flying bird Take yourself to Ion's house What you find in his head  take in your head what you find in his ears  take in your ears what you find in his mouth  take in your mouth what you find in his hands  take in your wings Take that great wrong away in your feathers— and what you find in your head  put it in her head And what you find in your feathers  put it on the table  in their house
Beloved beauty who inspires love in me from afar, your face obscured  except when your celestial image  stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely— was it maybe you who blessed the innocent age called golden, and do you now, blithe spirit,  fly among men? Or does that miser fate who hides you from us save you for the future? No hope of seeing you alive  remains for me now, except when, naked and alone, my soul will go down a new street  to its unknown home. Already at the dawn of my dark, uncertain day I imagined you a fellow traveler on this arid ground. But there's no thing that resembles you on earth. And if someone had a face like yours, in act and word she'd be, though something like you, far less beautiful. In spite of all the suffering fate decreed for human time, if there were anyone on earth who truly loved you as my thought depicts you, this life for him would be a blessing. And I see clearly how your love would lead me still to strive for praise and virtue, as I used to in my early years. Though heaven gave no comfort for our troubles, yet with you mortal life would be like what in heaven leads to divinity. In the valleys, where the song of the weary farmer sounds, and when I sit and mourn  the illusions of youth fading, and on the hills where I recall  and grieve for my lost desires  and my life's lost hope, I think of you and start to shake. If only I, in this  sad age and unhealthy atmosphere, could keep hold of your noble look; for since the real thing's missing I must make do with the image. Whether you are the only one  of the eternal ideas eternal wisdom refuses to see arrayed in sensible form to know the pains of mortal life in transitory spoils, or if in the supernal spheres another earth from among unnumbered worlds receives you and a near star lovelier than the Sun warms you and you breathe benigner ether, from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief, accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.
The sniper at work over the street corner acts. Two girls, breathless after the dash across, radiate heat and bouquets, as when ironing silken delicates. With one, in place of a chignon, goosefleshed Christmas wheat. She explodes, rages,  curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly, I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning, on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never  misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy costs them nothing. Those half-smiles sayingyou aren't just one fact among others—not at all, not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up. The air smelt strongly of my distant youth when every boulevard led to the end of the world,  when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb." Now they're going, leaving such tenderness in me as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens  into which snowflakes are swarming. So they disappeared chattering, not girls but breezes, blown lightly, surprisingly,  through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat  of being.
I will die in Paris with a rainstorm, on a day I already remember, I will die in Paris—and I don't shy away— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.  It will be Thursday, because today, Thursday, as I prose these lines, I've put on my humeri in a bad mood,  and, today like never before, I've turned back, with all of my road, to see myself alone.  César Vallejo has died; they kept hitting him,  everyone, even though he does nothing to them, they gave it to him hard with a club and hard  also with a rope; witnesses are the Thursday days and the humerus bones,  the solitude, the rain, the roads. . .
I'm sitting here on the old patio beside your absence. It is a black well. We'd be playing, now. . . I can hear Mama yell  "Boys! Calm down!" We'd laugh, and off I'd go  to hide where you'd never look. . . under the stairs,  in the hall, the attic. . . Then you'd do the same. Miguel, we were too good at that game.  Everything would always end in tears. No one was laughing on that August night you went to hide away again, so late it was almost dawn. But now your brother's through with this hunting and hunting and never finding you. The shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry  and show yourself? Mama will only worry.
September 14, 1915 It's how she spreads, without a sound, her scent of orange blossom on the dark of me, it is the way she shrouds in mourning black  her mother-of-pearl and ivory, the way she wears the lace ruff at her throat, and how she turns her face, quite voiceless, self-possessed,  because she takes the language straight to heart,  is thrifty with the words she speaks.  It's how  she is so reticent yet welcoming when she comes out to face my panegyrics, the way she says my name mocking and mimicking, makes gentle fun, yet she's aware that my unspoken drama is really of the heart, though a little silly; it's how, when night is deep and at its darkest, we linger after dinner, vaguely talking and her laughing smile grows fainter and then falls gently on the tablecloth; it's the teasing way she won't give me her arm and then allows deep feeling to come with us when we walk out, promenading on the hot colonial boulevard. . . Because of this, your sighing, modest style of love, I worship you, my faithful star who like to cloud yourself about in mourning, generous, hidden blossom; kindly mellowness who have presided over  my thirty years with the self-denying singleness  a vase has, whose half-blown roses wreathe with scent the headboard of a convalescent man; cautious nurse, shy serving maid, dear friend who trembles with the trembling of a child when you revise the reading that we share; apprehensive, always timid guest at the feast I give; my ally, humble dove that coos when it is morning in a minor key, a key that's wholly yours. May you be blessed, modest, magnificent; you have possessed the highest summit of my heart, you who are at once the artist  of lowly and most lofty things, who bear in your hands my life as if it was your work of art! O star and orange blossom, may you dwindle gently rocked in an unwedded peace, and may you fade out like a morning star which the lightening greenness of a meadow darkens or like a flower that finds transfiguration on the blue west, as it might on a simple bed.
After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials and in the pastures let the rough winds fly. As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness. Direct on them two days of warmer light to hale them golden toward their term, and harry the last few drops of sweetness through the wine. Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter; who lives alone will live indefinitely so, waking up to read a little, draft long letters,  and, along the city's avenues, fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
You didn't know what was in the heap. A visitor found it to contain beggars. They sell the hollow of their hands. They show the sightseer their mouths full of filth, and let him (he can afford it) peer at the mange eating away at them. In their twisted vision his stranger's face is skewed; they are pleased with their accession, and when he speaks they spew.
At the sight of the great light dawning  in that glad night, small birds come singing to celebrate him with their sweet voices. And even the imperial eagle, soaring on the wind, sings a melodious song, saying: Jesus is born to lift us from sin and bring us joy.
Perfectly round.  Perfectly black. No. . . not entirely black. He has that bluish-white at the edge of his eyes And his beautiful lips Open upon a smile of expensive pearls. * * * Round and dusky-headed, Round bellied Black baby, fearlessly Offer your unpristine hand to the daylight, Say hello, fearlessly, to your life.
When you open the door, everything falls into place— the little ferry by the wharf, fir trees and thujas.  An old woman, feeding ducks, seems as old as Leni  Riefenstahl. At the base of the hill, chestnut trees, not yet in full bloom,  are younger—but probably as old as her films.  All is wet and bright. A hedgehog or God-knows-whose-soul  is rummaging in last year's leaves. Dead water and living water  fill the plain. The twins Celsius and Fahrenheit  are predicting spring weather—while a shadow obscures  the past (just like the present). The first serene weeks scour the bridges  in a peaceful corner of Europe between Wannsee and Potsdam—where  much has happened, but, probably, nothing more will.  For days we have been watching a ragged crow—in the garden,  sometimes on the roof. The ancients would have said her  stubbornness augurs something. Emerging from the wood's  depths, she lights on one antenna crossbar  then another, her surface bright as mercury  in a thermometer's glass. But these are fever marks  we are incapable of understanding. The beginning of agony?  The past does not enlighten us—but still, it attempts  to say something. Perhaps the crow knows more about us  and about history's dirt than we do ourselves.  Of what does she want to remind us? Of the black photos, the black headphones of radio operators, black signatures under documents,  of the unarmed with their frozen pupils—of the prisoner's boot or the trunk  of the refugee? Probably not. We will remember this anyway,  though it won't make us any wiser. The bird signifies only stoicism  and patience. If you ask for them, your request will be granted.
Enormous solids were falling from who knows what heights, who knows what places. I trembled, and in my mouth an inky taste. Precise. Hail, maybe, enormous kernels of ice; coming down, with a scandalous impact, didn't bury me, terrorized, under the covers. It didn't happen, it wasn't that. A below zero temperature  circulated through the soft center of my bones. A truly searing cold.  Nothing having to do with monsters came to pass. Nothing to do with interminable distances. No brutal incidents. Only the agony of acorns. Only a cycle that completes itself every few years and transforms into a tropical forest a choiring oak grove.  Which is the fear.
Stars by the power of their orbit are stars in the order of the sun. But if they are not figures of orbit, they are not in the sun. Exactly like me: by the power of my yearnings  I am in the family. And if I will not yearn, I am not in the family. Memories are a house. Time is a roof. All the time a roof. All the time time. I would like sometime to die unto them and see them. Benno Rothenberg related that when he saw some archaeology, he had a feeling of homeland. As if he were in his house. I do not deny that a man who reaches a certain age can no longer hope that those from whom he came will remain still alive with him, as my mother once wrote to me in one of the letters  of her twilight. From the fadings of her letters into the fatedness of man: But when can they.  After all there's no chance of seeing you. And once, in a discarded and forgotten letter: "Good night, Yehiel alter lebn. Slumber has descended upon me. I am caught in the throes of sleep. Khbinshlayferig gevorn." Said in a letter that nobody reads, that nobody read. —February 8, 1989
The Christian cannot  be the pitying one because he is the one pitied. From a dusty road in a straight line from przedmiescie to Krasnystaw at the entrance to town at Zhitkovski's  in his house we lived, he makes coffins with crosses. On the threshold I sat as a boy opposite a building held together by nails facing the church the cloister the impurity, my mother says, I sat as a boy. On the wall Jesus and Mary. Jesus and his mother were never parted. My mother's son left her not to be on the wall. Mary's son  never left, and he paid the price. —October 26-29, 1989
Poetry chooses choice things, carefully selecting select words, arranging, fabulously, things arranged. To put it differently is hard, if not out of the question. Poetry's like a clay plate. It's broken easily under the weight of all those poems. In the hands of the poet, it sings. In those of others, not only doesn't it sing, it's out of the question.
For years my heart inquired of me  Where Jamshid's sacred cup might be, And what was in its own possession  It asked from strangers, constantly; Begging the pearl that's slipped its shell  From lost souls wandering by the sea. Last night I took my troubles to  The Magian sage whose keen eyes see A hundred answers in the wine  Whose cup he, laughing, showed to me. I questioned him, "When was this cup  That shows the world's reality Handed to you?" He said, "The day  Heaven's vault of lapis lazuli Was raised, and marvelous things took place  By Intellect's divine decree, And Moses' miracles were made  And Sameri's apostasy." He added then, "That friend they hanged   High on the looming gallows tree— His sin was that he spoke of things  Which should be pondered secretly, The page of truth his heart enclosed  Was annotated publicly. But if the Holy Ghost once more  Should lend his aid to us we'd see Others perform what Jesus did—  Since in his heartsick anguish he Was unaware that God was there  And called His name out ceaselessly." I asked him next, "And beauties' curls  That tumble down so sinuously, What is their meaning? Whence do they come?"  "Hafez," the sage replied to me, "It's your distracted, lovelorn heart  That asks these questions constantly."
For Michael Williams Monaco was clean, with small clean streets. There was not much in the way of  a shore. There was hardly any place to go. One clipped, well-behaved London plane tree, not welcoming like most ordinary trees, was kept apart by a white spear-tipped fence, and had a somewhat diffident sense of  noblesse oblige. Through the cream silk brocade window treatments, you could see it; it did not contain birds, repelled the idea of  nests, its roots trained and snipped. At night, it was lit. Spritzed, its leaves shimmered like the sequins of a whore. In the palace hung a portrait of   Princess Grace’s family, an extravaganza of pastel sfumato by R.W. Cowan, blurring every uncertain, authentic thing. The air inside the cliffs thickened as in the closet of a grandmother. Perfumed Germans winced, smooching with strong lips on the embankment. When the man and woman arrived at the Hôtel de Paris, the staff assumed they  were married. The German  jet ski instructor was unsure and asked: “Are you brother and sister?” They paused, demurely, and smiled. The mystery of  their bond made it more intense. The man and the woman were in their late thirties or early forties; they were not young, nor were they old. The woman was French and wore a white linen shirt, starched and pressed. She made her money in the drug trade, but all the man knew was that she sold works of art: a Matisse here, a Picasso there — each transaction taking place in the Bahamas. She was what she said she was, but we are rarely what we say we are. The man, a poor American, meant to say no, but instead said yes. He was tall, athletic and effeminate with a mincing gate — as if  he were being chased by something no one could see. Dressed in cashmere and shantung, he wore needle-pointed shoes by Stubbs & Wootton. Broad-shouldered, practical, the Frenchwoman grimaced, was referred to as “handsome.” Ample were her gestures, ample her need to please; her tone, although not sexual, came close. Her preferences were dubious; maybe everyone’s are. Nevertheless, the couple exhibited variations the world never embraced, but presented as a couple the world embraced them promptly, for the world trusted what was coupled. He was he; she was she; both were naive, but naivety has a way of  hiding its intentions. Whatever their motives happened to be, it pleased them to make a myth for everyone to see. Promises were skirted at a little cafe — “What shall we name our children, mon petit chéri?” she asked. How controlled their wonder was. The couple was received for cakes and tea by the Baroness von Lindenhoffer. The Baroness was lesbian, but of this she never spoke, and so she believed herself a conundrum — for her, muteness banished the undoable. She often began her conversations by mentioning her brief marriage to a hairy Russian acrobat. Her makeup was heavy, clown-like, and over her large, ill-defined body, red polka dots sheeted her parts. Despite this, people mistook her for a man. On a chintz loveseat, each hip bookended by a pug, she sat and said: “You seem like a lovely couple!” She meant what she said but she didn’t say what she meant. Then there was talk of  places they had traveled and feelings of superiority at having seen what others had not: “Oh, you haven’t been there?” and “Oh, you must go!” Through the large picture window, beyond the Baroness’s head, piled high with hair dyed red, slowly processed gargantuan cruise ships like wedding cakes with glittering tiers of candles. She inserted another biscotti behind her lips which were the size of   luggage handles, winked and said: “Here in Monaco our favorite word is more!” Her eyes scanned the clutter of the Côte d’Azur: the sea published its gilded mirrors, the sun accelerated beauty and its loss, no children for miles and Brigitte Bardot, in St. Tropez, locked her house, cats licking her purple-veined ankles. The Baroness was thinking, pausing like an old steamer. Her mascara-clotted eyelids closed and for a moment, she erased what she could. With mounting unease, she realized she might be what was missing. The thought vanished. Should she warn the couple? Although not feminine, she was maternal. Then that thought passed. She shrugged and comforted herself. Difficult, celibate, implacable, a final time she assessed the couple of compromised want, aware that nothing blackens the heart like a mariage blanc, and stamped them — Mwah! Mwah! — with the imprimatur of  two kisses each. The relationship lasted three months. They had chosen wrongly, and plausibly they fell apart, like the couple in Godard’s Le Mépris. Had she wanted more than a cover? Had he covered more than he wanted? The heart, behind its casements, is faceted, pronged, coveted, intricate and known by few. He could not be kept. She withdrew her money. Reconciliation occurred after they ceased speaking. On their last night in Monaco, she turned to him and wondered if  her life had meant anything. He did not answer: he had developed a grace for offering himself  to those who found truth difficult. When they left the restaurant, she paid using a heavy, black American Express card. Each took a doggy bag and smelled of cooked meat. This alignment of opposite sexes had provided solace, and for a time, each had assumed a place, discerned a way to live. Indeed, they lived on, never to see each other again, both aware the one had harmed the other: whether intended or not, the act could not be undone. What they recalled, when they recalled, was often wrong, or was it that so much went wrong and that was why they kept recalling? At the mention of   Monaco, they recounted certain adornments — agapanthus purpling, old men playing boules, and blue yachts tilting on a malachite sea, or were they malachite yachts tilting on a blue sea? Wherever they went henceforth — the Hôtel du Cap, the Boboli Gardens, or even simple, small places in America — their minds would inexorably turn, and then return, to that interval in Monaco, where they saw the truth and the truth was . . .     Monaco, Monaco — frivolous, ridiculous, miniscule principality. It was there they came to know how dangerous beauty could be, how one could disappear into it, and with that dark knowledge they traveled on. Each, in their separate lives, always mentioned Monaco with deference, out of shyness, yes, but also shame, and that need to abridge the past. Do you recognize them? They were not a couple, but they were a pair. Tonight the sea pushes against Monaco. Jewelry store owners don white gloves, lock their doors. The principality has long forgotten the pair. Baronesses, marchionesses, and princesses have had their portraits painted and affixed to walls. The narrow, dead-end streets embed themselves into the escarpments like bobby pins. The moon spreads her cape of   baubles across the sea with glamorous transience, enlarging behind the dollhouse casino, banks, hotels, feeling into the rooms, fingering the miniatures.
There is a moment before a shape hardens, a color sets. Before the fixative or heat of   kiln. The letter might still be taken from the mailbox. The hand held back by the elbow, the word kept between the larynx pulse and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air. The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. The green coat on old copper weighs more. Yet something slips through it — looks around, sets out in the new direction, for other lands. Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed. As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road: it cannot be after turned back from.
November. One pear sways on the tree past leaves, past reason. In the nursing home, my friend has fallen. Chased, he said, from the freckled woods by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais. Delusion too, it seems, can be well read. He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread. The old fineness in him hangs on for dear life. “My mind now? A small ship under the wake of a large. They force you to walk on your heels here, the angles matter. Four or five degrees, and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet, though he believes it his own fault he grieves, his own fault his old friends have turned against him like crows against an injured of their kind. There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy. Descend, descend, some voice must urge, inside the pear stem. The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it. Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.
Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried. As pain after it’s ended stays in the body: A woman moves her hands oddly because her grandfather passed through a place he never spoke of. Making instead the old jokes with angled fingers. Call one thing another’s name long enough, it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer. Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened. Call what branching happened a man whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own. Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples, to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking. Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.
All the difficult hours and minutes are like salted plums in a jar. Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves, they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass. Just so, calamity turns toward calmness. First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.
For Easton, Zooey, and Nacho Cancer loves the long bone, the femur and the fibula, the humerus and ulna, the greyhound’s sleek physique, a calumet, ribboned with fur and eddies of dust churned to a smoke, the sweet slenderness of that languorous lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk of  Spiegelau stemware, its bowl bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy, a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow — loves the generous line of  your lanky limbs, the distance between points A and D, epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end but then of course it does, emptying its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel that river of waste and sorrow. I’ve begun a scrapbook: here the limp that started it all, here your scream when the shoulder bone broke, here that walk to the water dish, your leg trailing like a length of   black bunting. And here the words I whispered when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods on that beautiful silky head: Run. Run, my boy-o, in that madcap zigzag, unzipping the air.
1981, &  for three days in Nebraska penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation all over again in one-light towns. Three days in Nebraska, &  a hundred calves come out bloody & new as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum &  glow, turned liked searchlights into Colorado, where everyone’s already wearing their lucky shoes. It takes just one look at a boy from Ansley— there is love &  there is money &  there is everything in between, touched by both— one look at the packs approaching the drag in Imperial, as first &  second boy say hey & hey to third &  fourth— Three days in Nebraska, &  the bigger the sentiment, the harder it falls, &  all over the dreams of the pretty end somewhere in New York City, but just this one time, just these three days in Nebraska, the boys are clicking their boots &  singing I wish I was here in Nebraska
Come see the woodpile behind the cannery. Come through the wall to where the wood was chopped and the difficult wood was hewed. There is a short history of commotion here, where a sudden bonfire spat its surprise at the sky— a hundred feet or more the shavings swept through disturbed air, and made their own music, the music hands make, such a yellow crackle and such a thrashing in the morning. Come wait for the heavy trucks to arrive, the men in dusters cutting the twine, loading the long ghostly planks like ballast into iron barges. This will be packing for a transatlantic box, or paper for essays on schadenfreude, or timber for dollhouse dressers, or a twenty baht note for the Thai rubber trade. These matchsticks will burn whenever you strike them, and this, hack at it however you like, is nothing more than deadwood for the fire. Come see—now even the men are doing only what they were made to do.
Here we are in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving their pulp to pittance at a gas station in the city that never peeps— and here is the city with its Martians in leather and excoriated thunderbolt- boas, its Bible-trippers, its vintage bazookas for barter not sale, its reluctance to be reluctant, its speed for hire, into which we atrophy ourselves to briefly fit— and we are never so close to the joys of oil, the grease inside which a fat becomes a fit, as we bellow magnanimously praise on the least well of those who pass, ones who are dying we salute: we are coming from the war, they are going to the war—
I imagine my father’s death. It is bigger than a breadbox. It is bigger than a Ford Escort, than a Zeppelin, black and vast and slow moving, oozing over an Oklahoma arena. It is bigger than any arena, than Oklahoma. My father’s death is bigger than a planet, bigger than the gravity wells worlds make, that stars stir up after implosion. It is bigger than all the stars. It takes up all space, all dimension, all that is or ever was. It hates everything it isn’t. It makes new space, new matter from all it is. My father’s death takes on form and void and says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. It says, “Let there be worlds.” And there are worlds. It says, “Let there be a garden and a man in it.” And there is a man. The man is my father. He looks around, marveling at this thing his death has made, then sets out to find someone, anyone, with whom to share it.
Without intending to hide, the imagined copperhead hid on the path ahead, unseen on bronze leaves, unheard, and a mortal likelihood at every step. This was childhood, mine, the wood’s jihad against a boy who’d intruded among monkshood, wasp, tick, and nettles haired with needles. Scrub brush abhorred him with a horde of  welts, bites, and stings, but he’d never seen a copperhead, though he’d looked hard taking, as he’d been ordered, heed. The snake wasn’t a falsehood, though, to him. Dread was his nature, and he hared through sunlight and shade, head swiveling for the copperhead he’d begun to covet, the ballyhooed killer a camouflaged godhead on which his inborn faith cohered, and his priesthood.
Half  awake, I was imagining a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth taut skin of  twenty. I imagined her short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open, but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged. She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love against my throat, almost humming, approaching song, so palpable I could hold her only chastely, if  this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand even to caress her freckled shoulder. So this is how imagination works, I thought, sadly. And when at last she spoke, she spoke with the amused voice of my wife, my wife who was at work but also here, pleased at the confusion she was causing. This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it? I asked. Blowfly, she whispered on my throat as we made tense, pensive love. Blowfly, blowfly.
The general increase in green accords in me with a growing and specific gravity about — it hopes — to be undone like a bud. What kind of   leaf or the existence of  bugs or the always later rumor of   ravishment by wind or water don’t interest me. Sun does. Come close. Come slow. And look me again in the eyes as you do.
“Talking only makes me feel more alone,” you said once in the car outside the clinic. Two years later, you spoke the same sentence word for word one night after friends had gone. Within a month, you’d erased yourself    . . . Erased? “To absent oneself,” I found scribbled on a wrapper a year later    . . . Now sunlight and tree shadow rush over the windshield of  the car: I’m talking with my new wife — then gone, absented. “Sometimes I feel almost too much joy,” you wrote from the balcony of  your cheap hotel in Paris. “What are you thinking?” she asks. Light shutters across us. Wherever you are in me I’m there, though it’s not what you wanted.
Gram of mania, animated pepper, shadow-monger dressed in panic, monitor of  ghostly footfalls, it concentrates in its essential tic the frog leg dropped into oil and the human shock at the verge. If  it would stop and let me look, I might imagine the tropic where it hangs in a hammock between two popsicle sticks admiring the iguana’s stealth, but it does not stop. Hawk- dodger, crow-pretzel, gallows’ twitch. Spider-shark. Porter of  readiness, miller of  the steady shudder, peripatetic rectitude, run by the power of   the sunlit rock, it fortifies Darwin and the idea of   being late and the missed appointment. With its blue tail, it reminds us: it will go on. It will not stop.
He wore a little spiraled hat and wrote a song that everyone sang. He lived on the mountainside above a lake with a mythical beast he’d subdued. A train circled the village each hour, over and over, as he leaned down over the clock of   his world where people were days becoming months and years. In a park, from the hides of  ten cows, he’d constructed a  giant ball that everyone touched until it became a torn rag. He had no family, and because he worried so much about them: What if, what if, what if, like another beast pawing away, he’d invented a vitamin for everyone old that allowed you to continue slowly to grow until you forgot everything you once knew.
On the news tonight, a presidential colonoscopy — a tale of how for three whole hours the chief  exec of   trouble handed trouble to his vice (although no double trouble came), but then no more details revealed: no bacterial armies multiplying in a flare of  war among kingly polyps & no kinky creases. Welcome to the presidential gut, bubble gum pink, not a spot of  shit (after a quick administrative cleanout) where global decisions stir & sit in state, and the first physician’s mighty pointer traces only microdrops of   blood in secret places.
Unreel the human weave to molten stone And still you’ll find the upraised arm of  Cain. The hand that rigged the flesh in Abu Ghraib Caressed another’s for the feel of  home.
I tracked it through the one mind of  the woods. Its hoofprints pressed in snow were smallish hearts. Buck fawn: he let me come so near, take aim. Crouched against a fir, I was anything. Bush, stump, doe in estrus he could rut. Not his maimer, though, not his final thought. He stared me down until I shot him: low. Then the forest forgot he’d ever been. Nascent, there were signs: bonechip, spoor, frail hair. But no memory, wounded, wants to die. He hid in the dark timber, twice crossed the creek. Finally he lay heaving out last breaths. Dusk-cast shadow, he died where he was made. A bite of  heart sustains but is not him.
Here comes dawn and nothing rosy about her fingers — stove-flame blue and some hand must’ve turned the burner on: the little tongues licking, gradually, the teapot of  us aboil, cooking off a giardia of  stars, the dregs of our night- mares. Who will place his fingers in the nailmarks, come near enough to smell death in its hair? Already we’ve some of us slid back into our bodies, restirring the air our breaths stirred all night — whoever we are while we sleep — and gone about believing we are here. Ambulance sirens assure us, a plum’s sour skin, what’s become of  the poppies, dried all but greenless, etcetera. But the yearling child reaching into the lineaments of  sun lancing between his crib bars — how might this shame us, that they seem to seem graspable to him?
All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote- dragged, draped in a squawking garment that rises tattered when redtail-harried — revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping nothing resembling a name, large birds then like lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.
There, garland dandelions round that idol with a corn husk face &  beard patched with rat stubble from a barber’s dust pan, parade float driven by a carriage pulled by a pig. Two sticks knotted together, cake frost on that crude wood to make it gilt. There, spider cranks &  iron gyres, blueberry stain glass sprout like wings from coal burn cars, a trumpet toots the sorrow of another boy dead, there he is, limp on a gurney wrapped in gingham scrap, there, he’s blast. There, roofless houses, sarong utopias balloon, balloon toward the sky, while women beat, beat their skulls. I trail behind, mop in hand, sloshing scum water over memorials. There he stares at my tic-torn cankered face, &  begs for alms, his face horse rudder red. A son, he huffs, it is a son I want. I spit into them corned mitt hands.
Stamp the earth rind down, shuck our boots &  nap on rubber cockscomb pad. Rise up &  ride in, poles poked through with hide of   kid flap from blither wind. Ride into a town of  tires stacked, a tarred prehistoric castle. A town of shacks painted kiwi green latches guano rimmed. Road’s a batter of   blood &  dust. One serf scurries off cowed &  cloaked. Linseed-eyed &  broad of  face. Hold, I say. She says oh gods once nested on our tire hills but now that tire factory flakes to tinder too. Are you here from the world above? Now come. Heal my kin. Are you here from the world above? We douse ourselves with flame retardant &  douse the town to flame. Are you here from the world above? We hear her death in flames We hear other deaths in flames Along each town we pass We rave &  rove &  gore the last oil rig hidalgo in his tin gilt throne, His ale we drink, his heart we  jar. We are from the world above, We sing &  jig but like Sisyphus, as we eye from afar, as each child crawls out their gutted hole, &  rebuild each dead town — We can never rest.
Did wind and wave design the albatross's wing, honed compliances: or is it effrontery to suggest that the wing designed the gales and seas: are we guests here, then, with all the gratitude and soft-walking of the guest: provisions and endurances of riverbeds, mountain shoulders, windings through of tulip poplar, grass, and sweet-frosted foxgrape: are we to come into these and leave them as they are: are the rivers in us, and the slopes, ours that the world's imitate, or are we mirrorments merely of a high designing aloof and generous as a host to us: what would become of us if we declined and staked out a level affirmation of our own: we wind the brook into our settlement and husband the wind to our sails and blades: what is to be grateful when let alone to itself, as for a holiday in naturalness: the albatross, ah, fishes the waves with a will beyond the waves' will, and we, to our own doings, put down the rising of sea or mountain slope: except we do not finally put it down: still, till the host appears, we'll make the masters here.
Such a long time as the wave idling gathers lofts and presses forward into the curvature of the height before one realizes that the tension completes itself with a fall through air, disorganization the prelude to the meandering of another gather and hurl, the necessary: ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment: you should have seen me the merchant at market this morning: the people ogled me with severe goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures beyond themselves, stared into my goods and then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant from day as a carrot from dinner took the misconnection sagely, a usual patience: peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs, I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said: one concerned person pointed out that my whole economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won't you appreciate the silky beds where seeds have lain: she had not come to that: and how about this residence all the grains have left: won't you buy it and think about it: not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried, rinds and peelings: there was some interest in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing, finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you do with that: but she was off before we fully met: you should have seen me the merchant at market this morning: will bankruptcy make a go of it: will the leavings be left only: the wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.
For the Briarcliff High School class of 1986 Just what I needed, Just when the dreams had almost totally receded, The dreams of roles for which I learned no lines and knew no cues, Dreams of pop quizzes with no pants on and no shoes, Just when I understood I was no longer among Those ephemeral immortals, the gauche and pitiable young, Suddenly come phone calls, messages sift out of the air To ask who will be there: Names I haven't given a thought to in a score (A score!) of years, and names I used to think about but don't much anymore, And those I think of all the time and yet Have lost somehow like keys to doors I've closed, and some I have tried to forget— And some who will never arrive at this date Here in the distant future where we wait Still surprised at how We carry with us the omnipresent and ever-changing now. We wince at what we used to wear, Fashion has made ridiculous the high hubris of our hair. Heartbreak, looked at through the wrong end of distance's glasses, Is trivial, and quickly passes, Its purity embarrasses us, its lust, The way we wept because it was unjust. Why should we travel back, who've come so far— We know who we are. How can we be the same As those quaint ancestors we have left behind, who share our name— Why have we inherited their shame?
One was fire red, Hand carved and new— The local maker pried the wood From a torn-down church's pew, The Devil's instrument Wrenched from the house of God. It answered merrily and clear Though my fingering was flawed; Bright and sharp as a young wine, They said, but it would mellow, And that I would grow into it. The other one was yellow And nicked down at the chin, A varnish of Baltic amber, A one-piece back of tiger maple And a low, dark timbre. A century old, they said, Its sound will never change. Rich and deep on G and D, Thin on the upper range, And how it came from the Old World Was anybody's guess— Light as an exile's suitcase, A belly of emptiness: That was the one I chose (Not the one of flame) And teachers would turn in their practiced hands To see whence the sad notes came.
Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse, Arguing home through our scant patch of park Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon We checked the hour by glancing at the moon, Unphased at first by that old ruined marble Looming like a monument over the hill, So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill, Then, there! We watched the thin edge disappear— The obvious stole over us like awe, That it was our own silhouette we saw, Slow perhaps to us moon-gazing here (Reaching for each other's fingertips) But sweeping like a wing across that stark Alien surface at the speed of dark. The crickets stirred from winter sleep to warble Something out of time, confused and brief, The roosting birds sang out in disbelief, The neighborhood's stray dogs began to bark. And then the moon was gone, and in its place, A dim red planet hung just out of reach, As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach In the penumbra of a tree. At last We rose and strolled at a reflective pace Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke And people drinking, laughing at a joke, Unaware that anything had passed Outside in the night where we delayed Sheltering in the shadow we had made.
It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit drying to chalk, trees falling at an angle, taking those moist and buried rootballs with them into deadly air. But someone will tell you the butterfly's the happy ending of every dirge-singing worm, the rat a river rat come up from a shimmering depth, the shit passed purely into scat one can read for a source, the creature that shadowed it one longish minute. And trees, of course they wanted to fall. It was their time or something equally sonorous. And wind too knows its mindless little whirlpool's not for nothing, not nothing—that pitch and rage stopped. How else does the sparrow's neck break.
Birdsong, face it, some male machine gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage keeps doing, the world ending then starting, the first word the last, etc. It's that etcetera. How to love. Is a wire just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say. So many fewer, by far. He's showing off to call her back. Or claiming the tree. Or a complaint—the food around here, the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs, in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen from a distance, a mistake. But fate has reasons to dress up. Stupid and dazzling have a place, a place, a place though never. She can't sing it.
A childless, futureless road And then nothing. . . Is that it? Or start believing in a God Beyond the temporal limit Of westering skies, wide, melancholy, Uncut fields and paced-out walls As we drive towards it slowly, The house that has us both in thrall. They are gone, now, the hours of light It took to get here. Might-have-beens, Lost wanderyears. But that's alright— We are trading it in, the seen For the experienced, the car keys For the end of the journey, When distances have lost their power And the heart beats slower In tomorrow's cold, a coming weather One degree north of yesterday. High latitudes—as they say, There is nothing up here But wind and silence, passing clouds, Light diminished half a tone, A dish left out all night for the gods By morning turned to stone. So take a right, go down two gears And stay in second, where the church is And the pig farm. Only the approaches Are terrible, only the years, The getting here, which takes forever. A boy in tears, a barren crone On a bicycle, a man alone— They're waving. . . It's now or never For the final self, I assume— For the shape of the house On the skyline, the release Into childhood, and the coming home.
She said what about San Francisco? Another second chance. There would be bridges "shrouded in fog." Streets "pregnant and glowing" with traffic. Dawn, she didn't know, would maybe "draw near." He said dawn draws near everywhere. She said a city but a city close to nature. A backyard scattered with birds he wouldn't be able to identify and something exotic rotting. Avocadoes. They'd play a game on the bridge, she'd lose control of the car, he'd kick her foot away and mash the gas pedal to the floor until she screamed and they'd have a name for the game and later it would be a story for their kids if they had any kids later. But no city is close to nature. Her body is a white slash beneath the green sheet. Or "a sterilized instrument." Last night's wine dregs are both "the color of the valley as it ignites" and in fact that color. He pulls the sheets from her again and says he'll cut their coffins from a wazi'hcaka even if it leaves a gray jay homeless. The lumber's astringency. Fuck guacamole. Deep in her knots and sap. Faster and faster. Second nature. And now a different dawn drawing near.
You can never tell By the looks of a frog How high it can leap, Said her Auntie Ott. Haley's hair flips up and down As she moves in her hard shoes, Her leather coat for winter Is lengthy and sways, some stains Mottling the bottom— Elegant windows in decline That at one time One could climb through, French imitation Nailed shut for decades. In shadow Pigeons peck in dirty snow Massed against the closest wall. What her hair will look like someday, She surmises. But otherwise Isn't troubled by the future. Don't walk like a duck, Men don't like it, said Auntie Ott. Not necessarily, responded her grandmother, As she brushed a crumb onto a saucer— Playing cards, stories of earlier poverty. As a girl she pretended To be as worried as they Whether Bobby would be drafted And killed in the war. Maybe she's important in art Or decoration, supposes the student Adjusting his pack— As the light changes, he steps out But she banks around the corner Behind him, purseless, gloveless, Passing a restaurant, a coin store, A key shop—owners staring over the street Wishing they were younger. Or lived in an earlier time. Which is partly the fault Of late winter. Clittering ice In trees of Veteran's Park. . . Lightly swinging her arms now, Heading uphill, growing distant, Like a figure studied In Auntie Ott's Utrillo print— Stick-like, scarecrow-like— To her right, a converted house Looking vaguely like a shrunken Monticello. . . Cream-colored barriers Of plowed snow as sun sprays More volume. . . A moment of deception There's not much that can be done, Said the city, when the oaks Were removed for curb repair. The dome fell off the theatre. A policeman peering east, frozen. Just as the museum is shuttered Next to the blank bowling alley (which is our other perspective). Haley has never felt trapped, Though the possibilities, occasionally, Have skirted about like sparrows. A jet crosses the sky. Followed by its vibration. What she found sustaining She learned in college. Where she goes is no one's business Either. Neither is she worshipped And adored—Auntie Ott Would be dismayed. Though not entirely
I Because I was born in a kingdom, there was a king. At times the king was a despot; at other times, not. Axes flashed in the road at night, but if you closed your eyes and sang the old ballads sitting on the well edge amongst your kinspeople then the silver did not appear to be broken. Such were the circumstances. They made a liar out of me. Did they change my spirit? Kith in the night the sound of owls. A bird fight. II We also had a queen, whetted by the moon. And we her subjects, softening in her sight. III What one had the other had to have too. Soon parrots bloomed in every garden, and every daughter had a tuning fork jeweled with emeralds. IV Learning to hunt in the new empire, the king invited his subjects to send him their knives. He tested these knives on oranges, pomegranates, acorn squash, soft birches, stillborns, prisoners who had broken rules. He used them on the teeth of traitors. V When strangers massed at the borders, the courtiers practiced subjection of the foreign. The court held a procession of twine, rope, gold, knife, light, and prostitutes with their vials of white powder. Smoke coursed into the courtyard, and we wrought hunger upon the bodies of strangers. I am sure you can imagine it, really what need is there for me to tell you? You were a stranger once too, and I brought rope. VI Afterward, I always slept, and let the dealers come to me alone with jewels. VII In the court at night, we debated the skin of language, questioned what might one day be revealed inside: a pink and soft fruit, a woman in a field. . . Or a shadow, sticky and loose as old jam. Our own dialect was abstract, we wished to understand not how things were but what spectacle we might make from them. VIII One day a merchant brought moving pictures, the emperor's new delight. He tacked dark cloth to all the windows, top and bottom, and turned the lights off, cranking the machine like a needle and thread making forms into which we could insinuate our cold bodies and find warmth. Light; dark. And the sliding images of courtiers merrily balancing pineapples on their heads, as if this were an adequate story. IX And our queen, that hidden self. What became of her? Slid into the night like a statue, and felt around into shadows, nothing to prove, all worldly latitudes, knowing as a spider in retreat. The web her mind, and in it, the fly. X On Sundays, we flew kites to ensure our joy was seen by all those who threatened to threaten us. The thread spooling out up high in the purple sky and silver gelatin films being made, sliding through the cranking machine so that the barbarians could know we made images of ourselves coated in precious metal and sent them away indifferent to our wealth. I miss the citrus smell of spring on the plaza filled with young and long-limbed kite flyers. XI Do I have anything else to add? Only that I obeyed my king, my kind, I was not faithless. Should I be punished for that? It is true some of my pictures creak unhappily through the spindle. It is true one day they came to my house. I know the powder we coated our fingers with made us thirsty and sometimes cruel. But I was born with a spirit like you. I have woken, you see, and I wish to be made new.
Stone by stone, body by body in the grass: For this we trade our lone compass, Become swans instead, adrift in glaze- Light, kilned in the arms of each other Into vessel-vassal new. Or shrew, As the case may be. What would you do? Listen to the footsteps in the thistles. Put the kettle on for tea, and whisper it to me.
soon, industry and agriculture converged and the combustion engine sowed the dirtclod truck farms green with onion tops and chicory mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton through belts and chutes cleared the blue oak and the chaparral chipping the wood for mulch back-filled the marshes replacing buckbean with dent corn removed the unsavory foliage of quag made the land into a production made it produce, pistoned and oiled and forged against its own nature and—with enterprise—built silos stockyards, warehouses, processing plants abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators, canneries, mills & centers of distribution it meant something—in spite of machinery— to say the country, to say apple season though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing and a kind of sweetness as when one says how quaint knowing that a refined listener understands the doubleness and the leveling of the land, enduing it in sameness, cured malaria as the standing water in low glades disappeared, as the muskegs drained typhoid and yellow fever decreased even milksickness abated thanks to the rise of the feeding pen cattle no longer grazing on white snakeroot vanquished: the germs that bedeviled the rural areas the rural areas also vanquished: made monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban now, the illnesses we contract are chronic illnesses: dyspepsia, arthritis heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, asthma chronic pain, allergies, anxiety, emphysema diabetes, cirrhosis, lyme disease, aids chronic fatigue syndrome, malnutrition, morbid obesity hypertension, cancers of the various kinds: bladder bone eye lymph mouth ovary thyroid liver colon bileduct lung breast throat & sundry areas of the brain we are no better in accounting for death, and no worse: we still die we carry our uninhabited mortal frames back to the land cover them in sod, we take the land to the brink of our dying: it stands watch, dutifully, artfully enriched with sewer sludge and urea to green against eternity of green hocus-pocus: here is a pig in a farrowing crate eating its own feces human in its ability to litter inside a cage to nest, to grow gravid and to throw its young I know I should be mindful of dangerous analogy: the pig is only the pig and we aren't merely the wide-open field flattened to a space resembling nothing you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere that the time of flourishing is at hand? I should like to think it meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling it began like: "the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . ."
An inch from the curse and pearled by the evening heat I shake my polo neck and a cool draught buffs my chest. What rises is my animal aroma the scent of blue-ribbon stock the sort a starred chef would ladle from a zinc-bottomed pan to soften and savor the hock he has sawn and roasted for the diners out front who sip at shots of pastis and gnaw around the pits of kalamata olives. My head sits in his fridge: stooping for herb butter, our eyes meet and he touches my cotton-cold face just as once I stroked your cheek in a dream you suffered in a room above the river.
Don't say Sir Pigeon in his cobalt bonnet. Don't find among your notes jottings on duvets and blizzards and the page unwalked across black missives of girlhood must be sent off and do not claim the furnace of the universe is powered by human screams. When the dark turns dark or when the bullet lifts a scalp, it is enough to know the lover feels the slap that the world can hear the sharp shout which wakes the cat her claws one inch from the rabbit's bobbing scut.
Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap then back to the village with a lame cat twisting and woeful in her cage. Bread these days isn't baked to last: how sad those posh loaves thudding off in pine breadbins all around the Heath: soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day or two, then binned or thrown to foxes, loaves just an inch of gloom below the caged birds you notice in corners of those same mansions when you seek the past, dinking their mirrors, dipping once in a while for a sip of milk.
All their songs are of one hour Before dawn, when the birds begin. I sing another. In helpless midday, at the hour Even sparrows have no heart to shrill Comes news . . . Suddenly, the unimaginable Needs imagination and finds none. Violet ocean only nothing. Smoke of thyme and of cedar, Ornate birds, nothing. Even a god who came here, Hearing a sweet voice, Would find only old fires now, Brittle in the blackened trees. She was mast and sail. She was A stillness pregnant with motion, Adorable to me as, all my life, I have hidden a cruel, secret ocean In sinews and in sleep and cowardice. She forgave me. Once, she wept for me. Our child died then, and she is with him.
Death calls my dog by the wrong name. A little man when I was small, Death grew Beside me, always taller, but always Confused as I have almost never been. Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind Early by a boy, abandoned the very moment Futurity with her bare arms comes a-waltzing Down the fire escapes to take his hand. "Death," I said, "if your eyes were green I would eat them."  For what are days but the furnace of an eye? If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul, I would rebuild it: Green inside of green, ringed round by green. There'd be nothing but new flowers anymore. Absolute Christmas. "Death," I said, "I know someone, a woman, Who sank her teeth into the moon." For what are space and time but the inventions Of sorrowing men? The soul goes faster than light. Eating the moon alive, it leaves space and time behind. The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness. And the knowledge is whirligig. Whirligig taught me to live outwardly. Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . . All left behind me with the hooey. My soul is my home. An old star hounded by old starlight. "Death, I ask you, whose only story Is the end of the story, right from the start, How is it I remember everything That never happened and almost nothing that did? Was I ever born?" I think of the suicides, all of them thriving, Many of them painting beautiful pictures. I think of boys and girls murdered In their first beauty, now with children of their own. And I have a church in my mind, set cruelly ablaze, And then the explosion of happy souls Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air: Another good Christmas, a white choir. Beside each other still, My Death and I are a magical hermit. Dear Mother, I miss you. Dear reader, your eyes are now green, Green as they used to be, before I was born.
a thing that's called radar love, the whole hog calling, and here's unhoused Ginger, distracted wind-beaten beauty separating from park bench and Frigidaire carton, flying Halloween colors, tie-dye skirt, Orangesicle socks, where will she sleep tonight, where lay those tulle angel wings slashed through her overcoat, who pulses anarchist patchouli and minty hair draughts and cigarette spirits that scuff our fragile air while we hope for some pick-me-up before we pass.
Places we leave slick our bodies with silky air or foam we feel faithful and tickly (even somehow taste) but can't clearly see. We wear its weight like atmosphere— runs, blots of what we've done in and with each place —what to do with it now?— and what it does to us still.
The rich men, they know about suffering That comes from natural things, the fate that Rich men say they can't control, the swell of The tides, the erosion of polar caps And the eruption of a terrible Greed among those who cease to be content With what they lack when faced with wealth they are Too ignorant to understand. Such wealth Is the price of progress. The fishmonger Sees the dread on the faces of the trout And mackerel laid out at the market Stall on quickly melting ice. In Pompeii The lava flowed and buried the people So poems such as this could be born.
Re- demption comes & redemp- tion goes but trans- ience is here for- ever.
Do me my elegy now, or I'll scrawl the thing I scrawl as you're going or screw in a ball when you're gone, Or you and I write unaware in each other's tongue That you or I ever set foot . . . Or do what our son And/or little daughter got done: got our brilliant names Pricily grooved in marble by one skilled In times of loss; dream iridescent dreams It's that first Saturday. Let this hour be filled With anything but the case, so that Time the clerk Goes panting in horror from gremlin to error to glitch And his screen is stripes and he knows he saved his work In one of a billion files but fuck knows which, And he lets us alone or, at worst, as we tiptoe by, Feels we're familiar, can't for the world say why.
Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on "Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws, begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up, cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud! Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches! The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere . . . Loitering Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee." What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe," "Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning meeting no resistance from the flesh.
The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends. We scanned the haze for lightning. They were studded with earthworks and iron forks inserted between leaves of grass, jacks and bearings and balances, sinuous fingers of pink marble and synovial joints in bronze. But if we got struck by lightning—not a lot; say glanced, or shaved, there was a chance (we heard) it wouldn't be so bad: a little refreshing, a little like La Vita Nuova in a readable translation. "In a flash," as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to classical music (it's always classical in the scientific literature) accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the hypothalamus. This space available for celebrations. Someone visits for the first time and says, "Oh, let's get married here" and guests drive in and eye the hors d'oeuvre tent before finding a folding chair. But it isn't long before the mirroring going on between, for instance, the sculptures and the trees—the trees looking more like sculptures, the sculptures getting seasoned, growing bark (patinas) even—it isn't long before it hypnotizes the guests. Who would wear a wedding dress in such a charged atmosphere, having heard that ghost story of the wedding dress with the power to possess the soul of the bride? Actually it was a horror flick from somewhere, Tokyo or Calcutta . . . It was a wedding dress that took possession of the soul of its bride the minute she saw it in the mirror, or it saw itself—and this we know happens, but not with the malevolence of this dress that wreaked havoc at the reception, set the hall on fire and dropped a crate of champagne on the string trio. "Aha," cries the groom as he realizes the chrysalis of evil he must divide from his bride: "You are hardly an unruffled surface!" No you would not want to wear that dress amid the wireless network of gigantic sculptures and their wind-scraped murmuring. When the wind stirs, is it not the gardeners? The gardeners are invisible, they don't garden during business hours. As you'd put a dye in the air in order to see it, a bird sucked through its drafts advertises the invisible and upgrades it to naked.
Someday our buried life will come to this: a shaft of sunlight touching the Etruscan surfaces, the basin still intact as if awaiting hands. How many centuries sequestered is an expert's guess, you tell me. I admire the tiles some craftsman spiraled in the ceiling's dome detailing Neptune's beard. Or someone's. What will they say of us, who have no home (we like to say) but one another? When they pry our hearts apart and excavate the sum, is that the place we'll lie? Where the words lie?
First  it is one day without you. Then two. And soon, our point: moot.  And our solution, diluted. And our class action (if ever was) is no longer suited. Wherewith I give to looting through the war chest of our past like a wily Anne Bonny  who snatches at plunder or graft.  But the wreck of that ransack, that strongbox, our splintering coffer, the claptrap bastard  of the best we had to offer, is sog-soaked and clammy,  empty but for sand.  Like the knuckle-white cup  of my urgent, ghastly hands in which nothing but  the ghost of love is held. Damn it to hell.
The shift of sleepwalks and suicides. The occasion of owls and a demi-lune fog. Even God has nodded off And won't be taking prayers til ten. Ad interim, you put them on. As if your wants could keep you warm. As if. You say your shibboleths. You thumb your beads. You scry the glass. Night creeps to its precipice And the broken rim of reason breaks Again. An obsidian sky betrays you. Every serrate shadow flays you. Soon enough, the crow will caw. The cock will crow. The door will close. (He isn't coming back, you know.) And so wee, wet hours of grief relent. In thirty years you might forget Precisely how tonight's pain felt. And in whose black house you dwelt.
Haunted, they say, believing the soft, shifty dunes are made up of false promises. Many believe whatever happens is the other half of a conversation. Many whisper white lies to the dead. "The boys are doing really well." Some think nothing is so until it has been witnessed. They believe the bits are iffy; the forces that bind them, absolute.
God and Mother went the same way. * * * What's a person to us but a contortion of pressure ridges palpable long after she is gone? * * * A thin old man in blue jeans, back arched, grimaces at the freezer compartment. * * * Lying in the tub, I'm telling them— the missing persons— that a discrepancy is a pea and I am a Princess.
1 God twirled across the face of what cannot be named since it was not moving. God was momentum then, that impatience with interruption, stamping time's blanks with its own image. 2 Now her theme will be that she has escaped certain destruction, that she is impossibly lucky. This theme should be jaunty but slightly discordant, coming in, as it does, so late. The character associated with this theme should be dressed in markedly old-fashioned clothing— a hoop skirt perhaps— while everyone else is in cut-offs, ready for the barbeque.
1 The woman on the mantel, who doesn't much resemble me, is holding a chainsaw away from her body, with a shocked smile, while an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney. 2 The present is a sentimental favorite, with its heady mix of grandiosity and abjection, truncated, framed. 3 It's as if I'm subletting a friend's apartment. Even in the dream, I'm trying to imagine which friend. And I'm trying to get all my robes together, robes I really own and robes I don't
How can it not be about engine, secret blaze behind the wheels? How not about this no-way-to-resist seeing but one side or another since the rails quite insist & iron's so right, always running off its own might. How never about freightage or the outdoor face in the indoor light? A yesteryear's pall over the day at hand? Not about the passings-by of nailed-shut houses & grouse setting sail from a rusty swing? How not me out of uniform, out of a sleeper's berth, bare & barely rising atop smoke & so little air left in the soft underbelly that I may meet—nay, embrace— the hello-goodbye cloud.
In his fear of solitude, he made us. Fearing eternity, he gave us time. I hear his white cane thumping Up and down the hall. I expect neighbors to complain, but no. The little girl who sobbed When her daddy crawled into her bed Is quiet now. It's quarter to two. On this street of darkened pawnshops, Welfare hotels and tenements, One or two ragged puppets are awake.
Staring up into the tank's belly lit by a bare bulb hanging down off the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up inside the dark metallic innards doing something that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing like the ones the Americans deploy. Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt right through this tank's armor and set off the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks. The barrel's called a cannon. The machine guns they call deterrents. The tank is old, small, about the size of a horse and cart. The armor plate shines green under the streetlight. The sprockets, almost rusted out. Somebody forgot to grease the nipples. The timing belt is nicked and worn. The spare parts from France don't fit. This wire crossed with this wire makes a catastrophic fire. Be careful how you route it. .20 caliber ammo goes in the hatch behind the armor plate. The mechanic on his back in the dirt, cursing in Arabic, sounds like he's cursing in a good-natured way: who was the fucking moron who did the maintenance on this thing? This tank, this tank, he should push it off a cliff into the sea so that it could bob for half an hour before sinking under the Pigeon Rocks where all the lovers gather in the shadows near that little bar, lit by a generator, that serves arak and warm beer to soldiers hanging out on the Corniche: mainly conscripts from down south, whose orange groves rot because nobody can pick the oranges: try to pick an orange and a cluster bomb lodged in leaves comes tumbling into your basket. What weight oil did this cocksucker use, anyway? And this engine, it's gonna blow. Beat up tanks and sandbags, that's all this army is, old sparkplugs that get fouled so that you have to file the gaps over and over. He stares up in that live, minute, completely concentrated way of scrutinizing something or someone you thought you understood: the tank's underbody completely covers his body so they look like they're embracing when he reaches up inside it, his needle nose pliers crimping, twisting, pulling down hard. There, you see that, it's all corroded. The cannon jutting out looks both threatening and vulnerable as if the tank's firepower were dependent on that wire. He runs two fingers up and down it, then feels where rust, mixed into an oily paste, shines like bloody flux that he gently dips his finger in, sniffs and tastes. Clanging back his tapping on the armor plate, as he listens to her talking on his back in the dirt, screwing in the spare parts, the tank says what tanks always say, Fix me, oil me, grease me, make it fit, confirming what he knows about the French.
What came wafting down the ditch by the marsh grass waving opened a hole in the day through which, like a puff of breath, a ghost fountained up rising in soft slo-mo, lost, desolate, no place left to go. Dear bloody Beirut and its internet cafes were still smoking from last night's "little bombing." Such threads, tattered sleeves blown all over the street from Emporio Armani. Husband and wife shot dead at the airport checkpoint. Where else would this lead? The investiture of grieving takes all day to sweep up in the tidal spillage of plate glass. What ish my nation, asked Captain MacMorris between battles. But the ditch knows just who we are— and I see its only water on a stealth raid of the glimmer hidden in the reeds. And when I come close, little scavenger flashings and great claws held out rigidly scuttle back into mud holes drilling the bank. Bending down to look, I could smell the corruption's gathering, sweetish odor, its sonar gone haywire driving it to shore. What choices are you given, what makes you want to swim out of your own element? The demure little ear-holes and intelligent clear eyes, the fate from birth sealed inside its smile, spent flukes and tail being gnawed to bone. The curt unrevealing stare mirroring back my own.
In memoriam Liam Rector The little boy crying out Weenie Weenie in self-panicking delight, waving his little cock under the banner of the sun, seemed pure Blake, all anarchy and energy, an innocence unfrightened of itself that shook the lake's waters and unsettled the strained composures and appointed certainties of whatever Absolute Speaker had been ranting in my brain: Peace Through Strength Justice Must Be Ours— so many demon faces in the glass city. Each pubic triangle seemed, under the bathing suits, to grow electrical and crackle with a sexual shock that made me turn my face away: and who should be there but you, my dear Lord of Misrule, blowing smoke in all our faces, the clean bullet hole in your forehead above your self-ironic smile: Don't let the monkeys stop typing
Now it's time to play. Nobody says, like they used to, but in my bones the desire overwhelms me. "Write! Make a poem," say the bones. The inlet will come first. It always does. Water calls urgently, "egret." The waterbird that moves elastically over the surface making everything focus soon or late. Now my hand enters. It always does. It gives the bones reason to observe. It makes the egret the finest thing in sight and the water intelligent north of here. Water is genius because it is interconnected. Drop south knows drop north. But the bones will lose their joy if the bird overwhelms the old playground.
Defend me. I am not capable. The river sweeps by three minutes at once cleansing me of guilt. But the bear crashes through it and breaches my innocence. He rages and frightens my innocence. The psychologist says, "You are the bear. You are the river. You are the green car crossing the bridge. Defend yourself." But the green car is in a forest I have failed to speak to. The green car was never intended to drive in that forest, not cross a bridge that must not exist in a real dream. Further, the real dream defends itself.
Beyond is a brightness I am not equal to Yet what I see Turns into what I want, And to bring nothing but this body To pass through The one thing between Myself and what I crave, Almost done, the world a ruin Of leaves, winter at the throat, My song over and over until So familiar I can do What I am about to do While you who rise from the table And walk from room to room Will remember only the sound Of what cast herself through All that glass, instead of the song That was sung until finally You would ask to know more.
Nothing required an account of me And still I didn't give one. I might have been a virtual casualty, A late victim of the Millennium Bug. No spontaneity, no insubordination, Not even any spare capacity.
It's all right Unless you're either lonely or under attack. That strange effortful Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping, Hours, the telephone—unless misinformed— Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does. The night—yours to decide, Among drink, or books, or lying there. On your back, or curled up. An embarrassment of poverty.
In that aftertime I wasn't writing. I never wrote, I didn't know what the aftertime was for. I felt little, collected nothing. I talked to myself, but it was boring.
Into the rood wood, where the grain's current splits around the stones of its knots, carve eyelashes and eyelids. Dye the knots, too—indigo, ink-black, vermillion irises. These will be his eyes, always open, willing themselves not to close when dust rises or sweat falls, eyes witnessing, dimly, the eclipse that shawls the shuddering hill, Jerusalem's naked shoulder. The body itself? From a wick that still whiffs of smolder, wax, because wax sloughs a smooth skein on the fingers just below sensation's threshold. Prop the cross upright and let the tear-hot wax trickle, slow, clot, taper into a torso, thighs, calves, feet. Of Gideon Bible paper, thinner than skin, cut him his scrap of cloth; embed iron shavings in his forehead, and, as the wax cools, scrape the rust off an old fuel can to salt the whole wound that is the man. Cry, if you feel like crying, and if no one else is there. Then set it on the counter with your other wares.
I did not call to the Holy Spirit or whistle My lordy, lordy, Nor hum one scintilla of shame. What hid in the grass Was neither skiver nor savior, neither cheater nor ace. Besides, the doves peering over the gutters have all gone awry. If I’m only a man, born far from a boomer’s shack— Hoarding sawbucks, cherry-picking the hicks like prey, And the wusses, and the Horacian declaimers, and the lucky Grubbers who master heartache and lurk like crooks Among the rich and the rebadged—then I’m a rival devil, Carrying my brag like a brakeman. And the one certainty, That life is to be lost—and no matter the opinion, someone’s Always a fool—has me rubbed inside like a lonely breed With the swill edgy and chic and rough. Who asks: Who needs a cotton-eyed hymn to say what the old shanty By the track has meant to the human story?
Big Jack and his walking stick live on the ridge. Navajo orphan kids dance for him, bobcat urine’s in the weeds, the shotgun barrel's up his sleeve, a Persian coin is on the wind. The Chinese Mountains smell the moon and arch their backs. I tell him, Jack, there’s times I wish I was living in canvas France, the old west, a picture book, the Sea of Tranquility, or even in the den near the hot spring. He says, kid, to hell with phantom limbs; spring is a verb, a wish is a wash, a walking stick is a gottdam wing.
Heifetz’s Decca recordings show him doing what he did best: transforming two- and three-minute trifles into works of perfection.—John Maltese Imperfect things are always— it seems—a wave of some wand away from perfection. They’re there—the toady and the bumpy with warts—for turning into princes. Even pumpkins— propped upon piles of lumber— idle like unupholstered carriages up on cinder blocks. But a trifle’s potential— its capacity for alchemy, actually— can leave you longing for lead. So many things you think are Prince Hals are really just kings.
Does she love you? She says yes, but really how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion, undoing its petals and laminae, and going in below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical coffer where self-understanding is storaged away, and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study in its nakedness as it spins in a clinical light?—the way we all, in our various individual versions of this common human urge, go in, and in, and in, the physicist down to the string-vibration underlying matter, and the Appalachia fiddler getting so (as she puts it) “into my music,” sound becomes a flesh for her to intimately (“in”-timately) enter, “its thick and its sweetbreads.”Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns that he’s insulted, but for certainty you’ll need to delicately strip the bark away and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide of the pith and can augur the chitterlings —the way the philosopher can’t accept a surface assumption of truth, but needs to peel back the fatty sheen of the dermis, soak the cambium layer into a blow-away foam, and then with pick and lightbeam helmet, inch by inch begin spelunking through those splayed-out caverns under the crust, where gems of cogitation are buried —the way the diver descends for the pearl, the miner: in, the archaeologist: in, the therapist: down the snakier roots of us and in, and in, the way the lone, leg-pretzeled yogi makes a glowing bathysphere of worldliness and sends it in, and further in, tinier and heavier and ever in, the way the man in the opium den is floating forever, toward a horizon positioned in the center of the center of his head. . . . If we could stand beyond the border of our species and consider us objectively, it might seem that our purpose in existing is to be a living agency that balances, or maybe even slows, the universe’s irreversible expansion out, and out . . . and each of us, a contribution to that task. My friend John’s wife received the news: a “growth,” a “mass,” on her pituitary, marble-sized, mysterious. And the primary-care physician said: Yes, we must go in and in. That couldn’t be the final word! And the second-opinion physician said: Yes, my sweet-and-shivering-one, my fingerprint-and-irisprint-uniqueness, someone’s-dearest, you who said the prayers at Juliette’s grave, who drove all night from Switzerland with your daughter, you on this irreplaceable day in your irreplaceable skin in the scumbled light as it crosses the bay in Corpus Christi, yes in the shadows, yes in the radiance, yes we must go in and in.
I love him so, this creature I do pray was treated kindly. I will pay as much as pig-lovers see fit to guarantee him that. As for his fat, I’d give up years yes years of my own life for such a gulpable semblable. (My life! Such as it is! This liberality of leaves! The world won’t need those seventeen more poems, after all, there being so few subjects to be treated. Three if by subject we mean anyone submitted to another’s will. Two if by subject we mean topic. One if by death we wind up meaning love. And none if a subject must entail the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)
The sun that puts its spokes in every Wheel of manhandle and tree Derives its path of seashines (Sheer centrifugality) from my Regards. I send it My regards. Some yards Of lumen from the fabrika Have come unbolted from the look Of it (or likes of me), a long Unweaving or recarding I Cannot recall begun, and there Before my eyes a palm Puts lashes round the sun.
As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool, this hank’s thankless task is vast, a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly, since what I’m thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too, your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause and problem I moan and bemoan the absence of. For Love, above the head this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there’s an air so far away it’s sad for me to even think the same sun’s rays play where it was and do to you what I would do if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes of it that gently fell around me bound me so well no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home of bones and blood that holds the whole of you and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy, my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am when you’re gone.
Art was long. Paul was short. Art sang the song. Paul was the sort who made one up as if from air. Paul had more gift. Art had more hair— which isn’t to take away from Arts. Many sing well if someone starts, and it robs no Simon to get paid like Paul. Along was Art’s way to be singing at all. If Paul robbed some, it’s harder revealing. What stuck in his mind, he stuck to concealing so koo-koo-ka-choo would stick in our heads. It wasn’t Garfunkel, someone said Simon said when they parted acts. Debts one forgets. Acoustic is fraught with strings over frets, taken together, taken apart. Paul lifting from life. Life lifting from Art.
In the woods off Ivory, just out of car-shot it’s not enough to say a mouse lies snug in a crib of roots, its fur sleek as babyskin, Lord the body warm. Too often a name subverts the pang it answers for, inwit of heart-light, the epiphanic clutch. I mean do you sense with more than a chill the tiny homely lumpliness of it there in the dirt as you orphan the dim of a cold October sun, no wound I can find anywhere on its, your, my small soft bodykins—yikes its left ear (the inner skin pink delicate svelte) twitches a little and I have this before thought tricks it whimsically lovely wink of the soul as mouse-force taking wing until the O-no letdown when a yellow jacket backs out, O sweetmeat funk and dandle of the brain asputter as it launches over frost-curled leaves and dollarweed seed strewn on the path like medallions glimpsed the second we— I mean all of us cold in the twilight—fly.
Test for the Old Smile, they’re going to roast it— it’ll have to keep its ends up all night, for the secretary says she finds it creepy, and the golfing partner says you got that right, and the rival says it’s fake, and the ambitious junior makes his point with a few slides, and the protege the Smile was always sweet to walks up and says it turns his insides. They harp on it, the bosses and the buddies, and things get even better by these lights, which is to say it’s shredded like a secret, which is to say it’s one of the great nights; and folks are saying so while they’re still roasting: they cry out to the Smile and it smiles back, like something huge is burdening a hammock, or is until you hear a frightful crack.— And then you better run like you saw nothing. And then you better run like you weren’t there. There is a line, it’s long and isn’t smiling. You won’t believe me when I tell you where.
Just as in the horror movies when someone discovers that the phone calls are coming from inside the house so too, I realized that our tender overlapping has been taking place only inside me. All that sweetness, the love and desire— it’s just been me dialing myself then following the ringing to another room to find no one on the line, well, sometimes a little breathing but more often than not, nothing. To think that all this time— which would include the boat rides, the airport embraces, and all the drinks— it’s been only me and the two telephones, the one on the wall in the kitchen and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.
When I gather my long leaf-colored hair and make of it a stem and twist the handle of my head and join it back to me with metal pins I’m on your lap again my hands are in the air my view is mile upon mile I feel you fashioning the serpent on my head and the thick braid of you inside me I’m ready now to enter a prim public place where I am the teacher the police a saint I turn my back and everyone I command sees what it can be to be commanded
Is this happiness or oyster-life? This flexing of muscular torso-foot joy’s wonder? This sifting of silt from food in the shifting chill-dark? If, in my mind, there is a life of flight in the light beyond the over-swirl, must I unfix my lips from this rock to be right? Or is my apex to worry quartz against my shell?
Any fool can get into an ocean But it takes a Goddess To get out of one. What’s true of oceans is true, of course, Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess To get back out of them Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly Out in the middle of the poem They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the water hardly moves You might get out through all the waves and rocks Into the middle of the poem to touch them But when you’ve tried the blessed water long Enough to want to start backward That’s when the fun starts Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth But it takes a hero to get out of one What’s true of labyrinths is true of course Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
Dear Gary, Somehow your letter was no surprise (and I think you knew that it was no surprise or you would have tried to break the news more gently); somehow I think we understand what the other is going to say long before we say it—a proof of love and, I think, a protection against misunderstanding. So I've been expecting this letter for five weeks now—and I still don't know how to answer it. Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry. I think that someday you'll enter Bohemia—not for me (I'm not worth the price, no human being is), but for poetry—to see the windows and maybe blast a few yourself through the rocks of hell. I'll be there waiting for you, my arms open to receive you. But let's have these letters go on, whether it be days, years, or never before I see you. We can still love each other although we cannot see each other. We will be no farther apart when I'm in Berkeley than we were when I was in Minneapolis. And we can continue to love each other, by letter, from alien worlds. Love, Jack [c.1951-2]
Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness An apple Plucked clear by will of taste, color, Strength, beauty, roundness, seed Absent of all God painted, present everything An apple is. Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness A poem That has revised itself out of sound Imagine, rhyme, concordance Absent of all God spoke of, present everything A poem is. The law I say, the Law Is? What is Lucifer An emperor with no clothes No skin, no flesh, no heart An emperor!
Nothing is known about Helen but her voice Strange glittering sparks Lighting no fires but what is reechoed Rechorded, set on the icy sea. All history is one, as all the North Pole is one Magnetic, music to play with, ice That has had to do with vision And each one of us, naked. Partners. Naked. * * * Helen: A Revision ZEUS: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this. THERSITES: [Running out on the construction of the stage.] The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is. ZEUS: [Disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial.] Thersites is involuntary. [He puts his arm around him.] I could not play a part if I were not a player. THERSITES: Reveal yourself to me and don't pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play. ZEUS: [Standing away.] Don't try to talk if you don't have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you. THERSITES: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. [He looks to the ground.] A parody is better than a pun. ZEUS: I do not understand your language. [They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.] * * * And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost Hope the cost. And the tenor of the what meets the why at the edge Like a backwards image of each terror's lodge Each terror's lodge. And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern's goat Where they say all passages to pay the debt The lighted yet. * * * The focus sing Is not their business. Their backs lay By not altogether being there. Here and there in swamps and villages. How doth the silly crocodile Amuse the Muse * * * And in the skyey march of flesh That boundary line where no body is Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms And bring my death. Both air and water rattle there And mud and fire Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud and bring my death. A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs The battlefield has harms. The trees have half Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord From hair and mud and flesh.
zeus: It is to be assumed that I do not exist while most people in the vision assume that I do exist. This is to be one of the extents of meaning between the players and the audience. I have to talk like this because I am the lord of both kinds of sky—and I don't mean your sky and their sky because they are signs, I mean the bright sky and the burning sky. I have no intention of showing you my limits. The players in this poem are players. They have taken their parts not to deceive you [or me for that matter] but because they have been paid in love or coin to be players. I have known for a long time that there is not a fourth wall in a play. I am called Zeus and I know this. thersites: [Running out on the construction of the stage.] The fourth wall is not as important as you think it is. zeus: [Disturbed but carrying it off like a good Master of Ceremonial.] Thersites is involuntary. [He puts his arm around him.] I could not play a part if I were not a player. thersites: Reveal yourself to me and don't pretend that there are people watching you. I am alone on the stage with you. Tell me the plot of the play. zeus: [Standing away.] Don't try to talk if you don't have to. You must admit there is no audience. Everything is done for you. thersites: Stop repeating yourself. You old motherfucker. Your skies are bad enough. [He looks to the ground.] A parody is better than a pun. zeus: I do not understand your language. [They are silent together for a moment and then the curtain drops.] * * * And if he dies on this road throw wild blackberries at his ghost And if he doesn't, and he won't, hope the cost Hope the cost. And the tenor of the what meets the why at the edge Like a backwards image of each terror's lodge Each terror's lodge. And if he cries put his heart out with a lantern's goat Where they say all passages to pay the debt The lighted yet. * * * The focus sing Is not their business. Their backs lay By not altogether being there. Here and there in swamps and villages. How doth the silly crocodile Amuse the Muse * * * And in the skyey march of flesh That boundary line where no body is Preserve us, lord, from aches and harms And bring my death. Both air and water rattle there And mud and fire Preserve us, lord, from what would share a shroud and bring my death. A vagrant bird flies to the glossy limbs The battlefield has harms. The trees have half Their branches shot away. Preserve us, lord From hair and mud and flesh.
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature RACHEL, his fiancée POET/CRITIC SCENE 1 POET: Again like a rebellious nation my heart Stands and cries: forward, to the battle! To the battle? Now? What's a battle to an old man Like me. O barricades of washed-up words, Stanzas filling books with my heart's murmurs, My love is lined with lies and sweetened With the sweetest white sugar. My thoughts are rusty, My feelings but smoky furniture And scraps of youthful rage gone by. All this, piled on the barricades. But whither my flag, my withering flag? Spring is in my heart again and winter in my eyes, Fall in my arms and frost in my toes. O desire, O vain rebellion, What more . . . [The voice fades into the background.] JOE: This is the end. This is the end. [We hear knocks at the door.] This is the end. This is the end. [RACHEL enters as JOE continues grumbling.] RACHEL: Joe, Joe, what's with you? JOE: This is the end. [We hear him furiously tearing newspaper.] The end! The end! The end! The end! RACHEL: [Anxiously.] What's wrong with you? The end of what? What happened? Good God. I have never . . . JOE: [Apathetically.] This is the end. Read the newspaper. RACHEL: Which newspaper? Where? JOE: There, that ball, that ball of paper. [RACHEL opens it.] Well read it! RACHEL: One moment. You've torn and crumpled it . . . hold on . . . this is a serious act of archaeological reconstruction. JOE: Come on, read it out loud! RACHEL: . . . and frost in my toes. O desire, O vain rebellion, What more do I ask? O dark desperation In a tenebrous valley like a ship of ghosts. But behold! What is that light on the horizon, Yonder as if from a distant cave? My legs fail me, yet my heart Soaks up hope like a big sponge in the bathtub. [She laughs.] A big sponge in the bathtub! JOE: Go on. Go on. RACHEL: [A little hurt.] Fine, fine, stop rushing me . . . one moment, one moment . . . it's hard to make out . . . OK: Three maidens sit in that cave weaving my fate. Spin-spin on the spindle, no not on the spindle, no. They crouch over books by lamplight. The students. How studious! Till dawn breaks they study and maybe read my poems of yore. JOE: Go on! RACHEL: Slowly I'll sneak through the rustling summer grass And watch, struck with awe. There is a window Ancient, arched, and there she sits with her hand stroking The hair of her . . . head. O, my studious one, I begged to see you, only to see, not to touch, Not to sit in your room, only to know your name, To call your name, O your name, your name and your name and your name. I'll peep stealthily . . . Enough, I can't read anymore. JOE: Do you know what this means? RACHEL: I know. JOE: The end of my glorious dissertation. The end of the literature department's rising star. I'll remain a teaching assistant forever. I might as well go back to the army. RACHEL: I won't let you, I love you. JOE: So what? I'll sit and start writing on a new subject. Come to me in four years when I'm done . . . RACHEL: You're out of your mind. JOE: . . . only to discover, like Sisyphus, that it was all for naught. [Despairingly.] What an idiot! And just yesterday I wrote the final chapter! [Sarcastically.] Here, look, the dissertation that will revolutionize the appreciation of D.G. Castleman's poetry. RACHEL: [Sweetly.] And I drew the letters on the cover: "D.G. Castleman's Poetry and its Interpretation." JOE: The long silence of D.G. Castleman . . . [Slight pause, then with anger.
Diarrhea: what nobody likes, though a word the French love to pronounce. They surround it with lips and tongue; it pleases, like saying cellar door does. Once I gave a pair of tweezers to an au pair girl who couldn’t extract a splinter from her foot. It was a pleasure for both of us to see that little thing come out.
And then came the ten moons Full in the sun’s glare, and the seraphim, And it was light all night in the orchards And on the plains and even in the towns And mankind rejoiced, because it was now the case That the wrecking and equivocating could carry on The pale night long. Mankind rejoiced And went forth to those places twelve hours of light Had not made it worth the while to despoil And gamboled collectively on the cliff tops And regarded the night-broiling of the sea Hitherto forbidden, but now opened in festival. Half the world’s time unpeeled and exposed So fruit might ripen faster and trees flourish higher And forced photosynthesis green all the land. Then night ramblers, night-sun-worshippers, Night-motorists fanned out and made the most Of spectral light, which bleached out stars and even The cozy old moon herself, who had Once held a sickle broadside to the sun, and now Was a hollow daytime shadow. Only a few old believers slept Hand in hand, shoulder to breast, As if their lives depended on it, knowing yet That the morning would bring nothing Because the day knew no beginning And had no end.
The equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. —Piet Mondrian Some land lives  so water can comb it into grids. This is why lowlands  tilt still toward the sea. This so  we call our canal leaning horse,  hat tempting wind,  somewhere a tear in linen where the loom bent a heddle. We plant lapis in the middle of begonia boxes hung from our  houseboat’s sills. At night the eels  snug against  our houseboat’s hum,  water’s warm hem.  We hear them slip itch into our floor. Our houseboat lilts when the bigger boats slide us waves.  Our concrete floats. We’re mostly moored to stay. In the damp bank where the ducks hedge weeds, our bikes sleep. We lean toward wind. Our pant legs thin from all the rain on our knees. From here the horizon gauzes above us. We are half hidden  by light. We are folds in fog. We stand  open on the deck  and beckon the silt  to settle. We wait  for a balance so grand  that any flicker of inverse could  pull us up to spires.
The field is filled with what we see without sleep. Never completely closed, it quickly erodes when tilled before rain. If clogged with boulders it won’t be razed and once burdened cannot quicken under flocks. The field reveals glint and holds leaning, pulls twist from taut knots of buds. We watch the field for stirring, wait for stems to spring back from sparrows. We hope for a swell in its middle so we can say we saw the sway that comes from noticing. Water meanders to prairie potholes, throws cordgrass into switchbacks as we push past bramble and scare a whistling wheel of geese into air. The field draws hawks and sides of trains, cradles pools from storms where ducks plumb for water snails. We trample light between us, no way to lope in parting the swales. We must flatten to fill the space with all the rolling wrapped up in us. Before home, the gabled barn across the road throws the brightest rise we’ve ever seen the field try on. The field is not in rows, is not a faded saw-songed croon. It pushes green a mist above mud, shows how we make do. We wonder what we’re not in the field. What scours, cuts, or knocks. If we could stay and still feel full the low line rounding out a spread of subtle slope.
Her cart like a dugout canoe. Had been an oak trunk. Cut young. Fire-scoured. What was bark what was heartwood : P u r e C h a r - H o l e Adze-hacked and gouged. Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her. Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile, the Narrows. C o m e s C l a r y b y h e r e n o w Body bent past bent. Intent upon horizon and carry. Her null eye long since gone isinglassy, opal. —The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown. C o u r s e s C l a r y s u r e a s b a y o u t h r o u g h h e r e n o w Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her. Plies the dark. Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee. C r o s s e s C l a r y b l e s s h e r b a r r o w u p t h e r e n o w Pausing and voweling there— the place where the girl fell. ( ) Afterwhile passing. Comes her cart like a whole-note held.
Requiem after Fauré, for my father Rest before you sleep You’ll be walking for hours then as usual away from home your shoes in your hand your feet not yet used to the road Perhaps they need to feel the gravel to know where they’re headed A woman I knew who lived mostly in the woods mentioned the danger in presuming to know what an animal thinks The fox for example stopping by her open tent and looking in I suppose she would’ve felt this way about your feet She would’ve said how could anyone know what a pair of tired feet need along the way I would’ve asked her how she knew the feet were tired Such discourse produces nothing but anything less would be silence and that would be intolerable I wish I knew why I was telling you this It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess what a man’s about to say when he returns from the woods head full of roots veins more like branches shoes in one hand feet blistered and none of this necessarily an indication of how the feet feel what miles uphill and back have done to the soles and to the small bones that propel a man It’s safe now I think to speak for the fox who is only as cunning as we say it is We’re the only creatures that claim to be anything then build a house of facts around the claim I’ve come for vindication No point in trying to disguise it as a lesser wish Wake up stop while you still know where you are Put away your elusive country Give your sleep a rest
There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.
The one sincere crocodile has gone dry eyed for years. Why bother crying crocodile tears.
The present tense is the body’s past tense here; hence the ghost sludge of hands on the now gray strip of towel hanging limp from the jammed dispenser; hence the mirror squinting through grime at grime, and the worn- to-a-sliver of soiled soap on the soiled sink. The streaked bowl, the sticky toilet seat, air claustral with stink— all residues and traces of the ancestral spirit of body free of spirit—hence, behind the station, at the back end of the store, hidden away and dimly lit this cramped and solitary carnival inversion—Paul becoming Saul becoming scents anonymous and animal; hence, over the insides of the lockless stall the cave-like scribblings and glyphs declaring unto all who come to it in time: “heaven is here at hand and dark, and hell is odorless; hell is bright and clean.”
The one cashier is dozing— head nodding, slack mouth open, above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter smiling up with indiscriminate forgiveness and compassion for everyone who isn’t her. Only the edge is visible of the tightly spooled white miles of what is soon to be the torn off inch by inch receipts, and the beam of green light in the black glass of the self scanner drifts free in the space that is the sum of the cost of all the items that tonight won’t cross its path. Registers of feeling too precise too intricate to feel except in the disintegrating traces of a dream— panopticon of cameras cutting in timed procession from aisle to aisle to aisle on the overhead screens above the carts asleep inside each other— above the darkened service desk, the pharmacy, the nursery, so everywhere inside the store is everywhere at once no matter where— eternal reruns of stray wisps of steam that rise from the brightly frozen, of the canned goods and food stuffs stacked in columns onto columns under columns pushed together into walls of shelves of aisles all celestially effacing any trace of bodies that have picked packed unpacked and placed them just so so as to draw bodies to the pyramid of plums, the ziggurats of apples and peaches and in the bins the nearly infinite gradations and degrees of greens misted and sparkling. A paradise of absence, the dreamed of freed from the dreamer, bodiless quenchings and consummations that tomorrow will draw the dreamer the way it draws the night tonight to press the giant black moth of itself against the windows of fluorescent blazing.
What appear to be peach-white, over-washed pajamas in the washed-out newspaper photo on one side droop like a monk’s hood, the upper half of that leg raised with the other, whole one and the hands they’re there! and the less washed-out pink balloon above them that they reach for or have just let go —the latter probably as one hand, palm up, is wide of it, two-thirds of a laughing mouth visible, the wheelchair in this case, its sparkle stark against the flannel and plied living limbs within it, a tool of fun. Such wisdom’s possible here only, the ability to feel glad to be alive gone on the outside, the “cloistered incarceration” of the ward holding the boys as if they were a group of monks. Asked by a visitor what it’s like to live secluded most of the time, mute and with forced labor, a chronic lack of sleep for all the praying, the Benedictine monk asked back: “Have you ever been in love?”
“Shalom,” called the pink-shirted man in the Oceanic Terminal of Heathrow, and I snapped, “I do not want to talk to you.” Manic with fear, I extended one pointy-tipped shoe, tapped the message home. My cases bulged with the wrong clothes, every outfit trimmed with clipped English, fit for telephone jobs on Long Island. Rwanda, Algeria, and me declaring every kind of independence. My skirt and I were green, not the pretty pistachio that Jacqueline Kennedy wore, but the color copper develops in the sea, cold and unfortunate, the green of storms that have never squalled before. My hat, gloves, and I were pale, not plush like the warm blonde women settling in their seats and bubbling dipthongs to their husbands; not even poignant, like the champagne satin that Marilyn Monroe was buried in. Just neutral, stale as a biscuit, off as an old cup of milk. I was stubborn, I would do what I said and leave England. I would ride that El Al jet, mystery novel in hand and never grieve. Johnny Carson, The Jetsons, and me. A new wardrobe in cartoon hues. Meanwhile, my row-mate slipped off her court shoes, free toes wiggling in hose. “We all went to Israel, almost all of us on the flight, and are returning to South Carolina,” she explained in a drawl that frightened me more that the turbofan wailing beneath us. In her sundress, her stomach looked soft. Ungirdled? Does everyone chat with a twang, even the Jews? I do not want to talk, but here I am, midair. “Coffee,” I replied to the hostess, slowly. I will never wear slacks, but I can unfasten each word, open it wide.
Midwinter, the crows take their darkness out on day. A thin rain falls and breaks. I wonder at the way the oaks unravel here (and travel word of mouth) another year. Not going, I go south.
Mornings, the body’s old winter monochrome gives its image of extraordinary cold to a million hives— I could imagine a lanthorn as it swallows its strange light and gleams from within as if reborn when the bees come.
God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . . So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . . Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.
If the nose of the pig in the market of Firenze has lost its matte patina, and shines, brassy, even in the half light; if the mosaic saint on the tiles of the Basilica floor is half gone, worn by the gravity of solid soles, the passing of piety; if the arms of Venus have reentered the rubble, taken by time, her perennial lover, mutilating even the memory of beauty; and if the mother, hiding with her child from the death squads of brutality, if she, trying to keep the child quiet, to keep them from being found out, holds her hand over his mouth, holds him against her, tighter and tighter, until he stops breathing; if the restorer—trying to bring back to perfection the masterpiece scarred by its transit through time, wipes away by mistake, the mysterious smile. . . if what loves, and love is, takes away what it aims to preserve, then here is the place to fall silent, meaning well but in danger of marring what we would praise, unable to do more than wear down the marble steps to the altar, smother the fire we would keep from the wind’s extinction, or if, afraid of our fear, we lift the lid from the embers, and send abroad, into the parched night, a flight of sparks, incendiary, dying to catch somewhere, hungry for fuel, the past, its dry provision tinder for brilliance and heat, prelude to cold, and to ash. . .
The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.
Tell the bees. They require news of the house; they must know, lest they sicken from the gap between their ignorance and our grief. Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch to a stick and attach the stick to their hive. From the fortress of casseroles and desserts built in the kitchen these past few weeks as though hunger were the enemy, remove a slice of cake and lay it where they can slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound. And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day. Tell the redbird that rammed the glass from outside and stands too dazed to go. Tell the grass, though it's already guessed, and the ground clenched in furrows; tell the water you spill on the ground, then all the water will know. And the last shrunken pearl of snow in its hiding place. Tell the blighted elms, and the young oaks we plant instead. The water bug, while it scribbles a hundred lines that dissolve behind it. The lichen, while it etches deeper its single rune. The boulders, letting their fissures widen, the pebbles, which have no more to lose, the hills—they will be slightly smaller, as always, when the bees fly out tomorrow to look for sweetness and find their way because nothing else has changed.
They have left behind the established cave with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them in hundreds, but generally one by one, to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own. Proto-Semitic linguistic theory, Hittite stratigraphic anomalies, microclimatic economics. "What do you see?" invisible followers ask in their ears, and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry a grain of rock at a time, or examine a fleck of ore, or measure the acidity of a trickle of water. See! Behold! Look! Lo! they cry in season, rapt, in love, chipping away with their pocketknives, pencils, rulers, fingernails, but some have tunneled so narrowly and deep that those behind see nothing but slivers of light around an excavator's haunches. A battered piece of a tablet is all that remains of the so-called Singer of Nab. Circa 1200 BCE, he impressed, or had impressed, some words in clay. He may have composed a religious hymn, praise to the king, a poem of love, an inventory of cattle. (He may have been she, but this is unlikely.) The lines we have could be the beginning or the middle; there may have been ten more, or hundreds. The word before this gap, in fact, means "hundreds." Hundreds led in battle, hundreds slain? A thousand times beloved, nine hundred sheep? And the standard translation of this word, here, is either "desire" or "need." But did he write of a boundless yearning, or mercantile requirements? Was he a "singer"? The scholars who care disagree. Look at them, crouched in a long tunnel dug by means of argument over an antique syntax, warming their hands at a chunk of brick baked maybe in the time of the Trojan War, broken some moment between then and now— peering at it with penlights, squandering eyesight. They know they may crawl out hungry, mumbling, aged and gray, clutching a secret message of small import or nothing, nothing. They seem lost. They seem happy.
Krakatau split with a blinding noise and raised from gutted, steaming rock a pulverized black sky, over water walls that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra. Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam, the last known member of Equus quagga, the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died. Most of the wild ones, not wild enough, grazing near the Cape of Good Hope, had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters. When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin, no quagga walked anywhere. While seeds pitched by long winds onto newborn fields burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle flourished on the quagga's discarded innards. The fractured island greened and hummed again; handsome zebras tossed their heads in zoos, on hired safari plains. Who needs to hear a quagga's voice? Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly, see the neck turn, curving its cream and chestnut stripes that run down to plain dark haunches and plain white legs? A kind of horse. Less picturesque than a dodo. Still, we mourn what we mourn. Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed behind a sigh, no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets, no one unwittingly busy two thousand miles away jumped at the sound, no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.
Of Mina-sarpilili-anda II, the only surviving record is this splendid bas-relief in which he presses the neck of his Hittite foe beneath one battle-shod foot while minions shoulder the spoils of a conquered city. In fact there was no war that year; a bored stone-carver was looking for preferment. He received an allowance of good wine. In a perfumed cloud of dust that loitered over the plain, Hittite ambassadors came to the king with golden bells and rosewater candy, birds in cages and spotted cats, and departed in peace. The king was beloved, laughed often, feared nothing, and died in his bed of poison. A carnelian image of his second-best wife, accurate to the last mole, was plucked from the dirt by a boy tending goats, sold, and spirited out of the country, rolled in a rug, on a ship that sank on a cloudless day. An image of his first wife, in chrysoprase, lies tightly packed in buried rubble for the next generation of archaeologists— should they prove worthy, persistent, and slyer than goatherds.
The dog came back, grinning and smelling of carrion, and her husband behind it, stride and gestures too large for the house. His field voice, cracking, declared a wider kingdom, and the name of a fallen city, not theirs this time. From outside the roar and shrill of celebration poured in. He drew near in a rank cloud, breathing hard, to show her the gash in his thumb. So she washed in five waters and went to their bed, but he slept without moving, still in his cloak and dust.
For RLB Pass by the showy rose, blabbing open, suckling a shiny beetle; pass by the changeless diamond that falls asleep in shadow— this love is a lichen, alga and fungus made one fleck, feeding on what it feeds, growing slightly faster than stone into a patch of gray lace, a double thumbprint, its bloom distinguishable, with practice, from its dormant phase, crocheting its singular habit over time, a faithful stain bound to its home, etching on the unmoved rock the only rune it knows.
No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise: A thick, twisted stem from the garden is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn. Its substance will not survive one thousand years, nor will the garden, which is today their temple, nor will their names, nor their union now announced with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar. Shall we measure blessings by their duration? Through the narrow organic channel fuzzily come the prescribed sustained notes, short notes, rests. All that rhythm requires. Among their talents, the newlyweds excel at making and serving mustard-green soup and molasses cookies, and taking nieces and nephews for walks in the woods. The gardener dyes eggs with onion skins, wraps presents, tells stories, finds the best seashells; his friends adore his paper-cuttings— "Nothing I do will last," he says. What is this future approval we think we need; who made passing time our judge? Do we want butter that endures for ages, or butter that melts into homemade cornbread now? —the note that rings in my deaf ear without ceasing, or two voices abashed by the vows they undertake? This moment's chord of earthly commotion will never be struck exactly so again— though love does love to repeat its favorite lines. So let the shofar splutter its slow notes and quick notes, let the nieces and nephews practice their flutes and trombones, let living room pianos invite unwashed hands, let glasses of different fullness be tapped for their different notes, let everyone learn how to whistle, let the girl dawdling home from her trumpet lesson pause at the half-built house on the corner, where the newly installed maze of plumbing comes down to one little pipe whose open end she can reach, so she takes a deep breath and makes the whole house sound.
If your mother’s like mine wanting you honeyed and blithe you’ll get cooked by getting evicted since the mothers can teach with a dustpan the tons of modes of tossing. And the fathers will lift your eyes too-early-too-open: the fathers can creep up on anything when it’s still too wet to cloister with their weeping and strand you like a seed or cook at the carnivals with the can-do caroling and storefronts and foodstuffs and annulments and Scotch and off-handed fucking and walking out and moving on until they’re cooking the drift of you wanting a whole bayou up in you and cooking and cooking the gist of you needing your crannies hot with a good man’s body-silt until your head is stuffed with a pining for diapers and the most minuscule spoons made mostly of silver and Ajax too and Minwax Oh in this the dumbstruck story of the American female as a cut of terracotta and some kindling in a dress while howling at the marrow of the marrow of the bone.
There is no I in teamwork but there is a two maker there is no I in together but there is a got three a get to her the I in relationship is the heart I slip on a lithe prison in all communication we count on a mimic (I am not uncomic) our listening skills are silent killings there is no we in marriage but a grim area there is an I in family also my fail
For Alicia The bird who creaks like a rusty playground swing the bird who sharpens the knife the bird who blows on the mouths of milk bottles the bird who bawls like a cat like a cartoon baby the bird who rubs the wineglass the bird who curlicues the bird who quacks like a duck but is not a duck the bird who pinks on a jeweller's hammer They hide behind the sunlight scattered throughout the canopy At the thud of your feet they fall thoughtful and quiet coming to life again only when you have passed Perhaps they are not multiple but one a many-mooded trickster whose voice is rich and infinitely various whose feathers liquify the rainbow rippling scarlet emerald indigo whose streaming tail is rare as a comet's a single glimpse of which is all that you could wish for the one thing missing to make your eyes at last feel full to meet this wild need of yours for wonder
The first year, I grated potatoes, chopped onions & watched. The second year, I fed all but the eggs into the machine & said I'll do the latkes & did, my pile of crisp delights borne to the feast by the wife who baffled me, our books closed, banter hushed, money useless in the apartment—house, my in-laws called it, new-wave thump at one end, ganja reek at the other— in which she'd knelt to tell the no one who listened no more no no more no a three-year-old mouthing the essential prayer. The uncle made rich by a song stacked three & dug in, talking critics & Koch— everyone crunching now, slathering applesauce, slurping tea— talking Rabin & Mehitabel, radio & Durrell, how a song is a poem or it isn't a song & vice-versa. Done, he pointed a greasy finger at me, said You can't be a goy. You—I say it for all to hear—are an honorary Jew! which, impossible dream, my latkes lived up to for five more years. Then the wailing. Then the dust.
When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass. Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’t got the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and—huh!—there is art. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
Difficult shacks of Kushiro, too far afield, at least theirs are not our roofless griefs even farther in the marshes that are huge buckets of green tea in the rainy season—you glisten as you go, Bashō, wring out your sleeves. Frog keeps its knees in its armpits on plant flotilla and Duck of all the birds is shaped most like a canoe. We were not built for this and anyway, standing smack dab in no-man’s-land you can stop and say, Here is a place made famous in poems. Aren’t you such a place? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
Clamber out of the morning river with water beads like fish eggs clung to your pubis the calluses on your buttocks from sitting, writing on flat rocks, your goose-pimpled thighs—the bumpy tongues of two dogs licking each other—and river-slather and slather at the edge of my mouth. You are smiling, straining out your hair, flicking your hands, and then see me watching you with the cloth and pots I was taking to wash. Before I have time to be embarrassed, the smile lifts into your eyes. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams? Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through? Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts? Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep: Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear? Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
I have a need to ventilate, to have my porous body—sockets and holes—open to the bald-faced wind and have my heathen inner-stuff tweedled like a reed flute and this piffle floats out. But walking on the open road, I know even open roads, to be roads at all, are ruts. With a careless beanfield on either side, off one more time, even you, Mr. Out-in-the-Woods, might as well be stuffed in your hometown bucket. And if these grim beams of trees are truly home, Sweet, as you say they are, then the timberwolves would reclaim you by singing and that would be all. The Moon would reclaim the timberwolves—not a snarl—soft keepsakes asleep in the palm of Her hand. I would reclaim the Moon by picking a white silk chrysanthemum and resting it on the branch beside Her. Who would reclaim me? and say, “Blossom, we are not two. There is no road to or from. You cannot write a love poem. You cannot walk away.” Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
to say no more of art than that it makes, by its very distraction a mode of abiding accordingly, its variations: each type of thread-and-piecework named double engagement ring, log cabin, or broken dishes all built on the same geometric figures— precise interception of angle and line so too each tale of love is rooted in that first tale: the poet descending to the underworld finally granted his shade, who'll follow him only to disappear again. perhaps one version has them reunite affixed in their solo chromospheres the stars, which, to the human eye, appear to overlap substanceless love immune at last to gravity and time— in texas (I might as well recount this as a story) there's a town with a courthouse built on concrete and twisted iron edified in red granite, capitals & architrave of red sandstone with point and punch, a carver broached the effigy of his muse he rendered her attractive features, down to the very blush of course she spurned him, of course there was another to whom she turned love should not be written in stone but written in water (I paraphrase the latin of catullus) the sculptor carried on: not just the face of his beloved but the face of her other lover: snaggle-toothed, wart-peppered, pudgy them both, made into ugly caricatures of themselves, as wanton as the carver perceived them, and as lewd well, craze and degenerate and crack: the portraits hold though, long since, the participants have dwindled into dirt beautiful. unbeautiful. each with an aspect of exactness tread light upon this pedestal. dream instead of a time before your love disfigured, a time withstanding even crass, wind-beaten time itself
Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke. Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents were impostors. These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and ether, they have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, like strangers' faces, full of wingéd mania, like television in waiting rooms. Entertainment. Pain. The rage of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow before you died, decorated now with feathers, and unrecognizable with the windows unrolled and the headlights on and the engine still running in the Parking Space of the Sun.
The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it. This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river, which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling of the elderly. Not only the scales, beaks, and teeth of creatures, but also their imaginative names (elephant, peacock) and their love of one another, the excited preparations they sometimes make for their own deaths. It is as if some graceful goddess, wandering in the dark, desperate with thirst, bent down and dropped that dipper clumsily in this river. It floated away. Consciousness, memory, sensory information, the historians and their glorious war . . . The pineal gland, tiny pinecone in the forehead, our third eye: Of course it will happen here. No doubt. Someday, here, in this little house, they will lay the wounded side by side. The blood will run into the basement through the boards. Their ghosts are already here, along with the cracked plate wrapped in old paper in the attic, and the woman who will turn one day at the window to see a long strange line of vehicles traveling slowly toward her door, which she opens (what choice does she have?) although she has not yet been born.
He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make: But Charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake. —Ovid, Metamorphoses (Tr. by Arthur Golding) Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton-crash that dumped us in that sea-fed swamp, the Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without opposite—attend instead the transcendent, the flying, for god’s sake, what we saw the moment before we thwocked overboard: a heron stutter-flapped and lifted off, clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first, but couth beyond sublime once clear of cattail punks and saltgrass tips, the overturned rowboat’s rusted hull. Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped, rose flipping fish from beak to tongue and down its neck, water beading on its head. But the crown that really pleased the crowd my maiden voyage was iridescent green, brilliantined, a merganser’s spiky coxcomb. He swam right by, chasing red herrings and cackling so happily I had to pull a feather from his cap. And so I surfaced solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark, I never book the seats. I didn’t stop to spin the prop or wipe the rail, just tipped the motor up and paddle-poled, bottom- stirred. Rousted horseshoe crabs, sleeping ducks, cranky grebes, slapped along the little waves, the seeping tide, lonelier, sure, indignant, too—what better lover has plucked and boasted, over what better lyre? An open boat: it’s company, not coin, I want. I’ll tune the wake to silence, court grace, make change— still trading on the laughs I’ve jerry-rigged.
When the Amish girl gets off the bus she walks over and stomps her small black boot into a drift in front of McDonald's. She is maybe new to winter this far north and wants to know its depth. Its give. Oh, be careful. It already has you by the night of your dress, violet-black with white-dotted print.
Well, this is nothing new, nothing to rattle the rafters in the noggin, this moment of remembering and its kissing cousin the waking dream. I wonder if I'll remember it? I've had a vision of a woman reclining underneath a tree: she's about half naked and little by little I'm sprinkling her burial mounds with grass. This is the kind of work I like. It lets me remember, and so I do. I remember the time I laid my homemade banjo in the fire and let it burn. There was nothing else to burn and the house was cold; the cigar box curled inside the flames. But the burst of heat was over soon, and once the little roar was done, I could hear the raindrops plopping up the buckets and kettles, scattered out like little ponds around the room. It was night and I was a boy, alone and left to listen to that old music. I liked it. I've liked it ever since. I loved the helpless people I loved. That's what a little boy will do, but a grown man will turn it all to sadness and let it soak his heart until he wrings it out and dreams about another kind of love, some afternoon beneath a tree. Burial mounds—that's hilarious.
Jerk that bitch, urges my guide, and I give my shuddering pole a jerk, hooking the throat of the first steelhead of my life. Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor. I horse my pole and reel and horse. The boat's mascot whines, her claws clicking. Let it take some line. My father, uncle, and cousin are reeling. First fish! they shout, and I shout, What a fighter! A silver spine touches the air. There, he points, a hen. And guess what? She's gonna join the club, somehow spotting in that glimpse the smooth place along her back where a fin had been snipped. He leans over the gunwale, dips a net, and scoops her into the boat. She is thick with a wide band of fiery scales, slap- slapping the aluminum bottom. Welcome to the club, he says, and clobbers her once, and again, and once more before she goes still. A bleeder, he says, shaking his head and handing her to me. I curl a finger through a gill the way you're supposed to, determined not to let her slip and flop back to the river, a blunder I'd never live down. A good fist. Fish, I mean. A good fish.
She's slicing ripe white peaches into the Tony the Tiger bowl and dropping slivers for the dog poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall when she spots it, camouflaged, a glimmer and then full on— happiness, plashing blunt soft wings inside her as if it wants to escape again.
In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight, and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened forehead, in case all of the day—its woods and play, its fire— has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart's muscle— . . . well. I am filled with snow. There's nothing to do now but wait.
We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
—how her loose curls float above each silver fish as she leans in to pluck its eyes— You died just hours ago. Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: from your window, fishermen swirled sequins; fishnets entangled the moon. Now the dark rain looks like dark rain. Only the wine shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses and we raise a toast to you as so and so's daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow— slides into another lap to eat another pair of slippery eyes with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time, for being chewed a little. If only I could go to you, revive you. You must be a little alive still. I'd like to put this girl in your lap. She's almost feverishly warm and she weighs hardly anything. I want to show you how she relishes each eye, to show you her greed for them. She is placing one on her tongue, bright as a polished coin— What do they taste like? I ask. Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily. They taste like eyes, she says.
Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep among fruits, spilled in ash, in dust, I did not leave you. Even now I can't keep from composing you, limbs & blue cloak & soft hands. I sleep to the sound of your name, I say there is no Mary except the word Mary, no trace on the dust of my pillowslip. I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown. Antique queen, the night dreams on: here are the pears I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves, asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am, having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent of their sea foam. What is the matter with me? Mary, what word, what dust can I look behind? I carried you a long way into my mirror, believing you would carry me back out. Mary, I am still for you, I am still a numbness for you.
He— You saw the way her body looked at me all address calling me down she was so well-turned, curve and volume her body presented itself— Clay— I could mold it She— You were taboo not totem— covered her though your wing gave no shelter Your pale plumage became shadow Your beak caught in the net of her hair He— When I entered her her death became my life in her death swoon she fell away from me the more she fell the deeper I pursued her the deeper I went the more lost she became her body became a forest of echoes hills and valleys echoing each other, a language I didn't know— surrounded: alone She— The discarded body lies in long grass Flies and wasps fumble there— on a summer day the lost girl hums— Kelly, Sarah, Joanne changed into parable Prodigal hair flung out body agape like a question The scavenger crow knows— she's beautiful, outgrowing her name in the noon heat
There is no noisier place than the suburbs, someone once said to me as we were walking along a fairway, and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence: the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing one leaf around an enormous house with columns, on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder. There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes or serious earthmovers if today is not your day. How can the birds get a peep or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know? But this morning is different, only a soft clicking sound and the low talk of two workmen working on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing. Otherwise, all quiet for a change, just the clicking of tiles being handled and their talking back and forth in Spanish then one of them asking in English “What was her name?” and the silence of the other.
You see them on porches and on lawns down by the lakeside, usually arranged in pairs implying a couple who might sit there and look out at the water or the big shade trees. The trouble is you never see anyone sitting in these forlorn chairs though at one time it must have seemed a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. Sometimes there is a little table between the chairs where no one is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. It might be none of my business, but it might be a good idea one day for everyone who placed those vacant chairs on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them for the sake of remembering whatever it was they thought deserved to be viewed from two chairs side by side with a table in between. The clouds are high and massive that day. The woman looks up from her book. The man takes a sip of his drink. Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird then another, cries of joy or warning— it passes the time to wonder which.
The silver hour drops— a spider on the mirror. * Silver the hour like drops of a spider’s mirror. * The silver drops, the spider’s hour, the mirror . . .
Looking at Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids, I learn that he liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women, both shaved and un’—all giving a good whiff to the camera. But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phones which convey a palpable sense of expectancy as if at any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude men strewn about might call. One could pick up the receiver and hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Roman voices reveling in the background. But even when silent, the dingy phone is a sex organ—cock asleep in its cradle.
Without even leaving one’s door, One can know the whole world.—Laozi The rumble of the night sounds even in the bright daylight of morning. Life blooms amid the Ten Thousand Things, but does not bloom amid the Ten Thousand Things. Shrivel-eyed I wake up and tend to the One here and now, clamoring to be let out. Down with the gate, out with the boy, to the rooms of life’s necessities, first to void and next to fill. The Order is only order which is disorder, the only Disorder is the disorder that is order. We usher ourselves, each in our own way, back down the way for various brushings, combings, other groomings. Each in our own way we urge the other toward some kind of growth: one to assume, the other to renounce; one to grow larger, the other to grow smaller, thereby growing larger. Words do not work, and when they do not, other words might. This makes more sense than it seems, works more often than it doesn’t, except when it really doesn’t, and then that disorder creeps back in. In five minutes, a different challenge. In five hours, a different One. Six more hours, the One is rubbing eyes, untangled like a dragon, shucked and undone like an oyster. The night slowly rolls abed and the words form stories form sleep, the sleep of the Ten Thousand Things, the sleep that will echo the next day in the night’s rumbling sounds, in the bright light of morning.
It’s not the sharks Sliding mere inches from his upturned face Through warps of water where the tunnel arcs Transparent overhead, Their lipless jaws clamped shut, extruding teeth, Their eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead, Staring at him; it’s not the eerie grace Of rays he stood beneath, Gaping at their entranced slow-motion chase That is unending; It’s not the ultra-auditory hum Of ET cuttlefish superintending The iridescent craft Of their lit selves, as messages were sent, Turning the sight of him they photographed To code: it is not this that left him dumb With schoolboy wonderment Those hours he wandered the aquarium. It is that room, That room of Murray River they had walled In glass and, deep within the shifting gloom And subtle drifts of sky That filtered down, it seemed, from the real day Of trees and bird light many fathoms high, The giant Murray cod that was installed In stillness to delay All that would pass. The boy stood there enthralled. Out in the day Again, he saw the famous streets expound Their theories about speed, the cars obey, Racing to catch the sun, The loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd That in the multitudes not everyone Should understand as he did the profound Profession of the cod, That held time, motionless, unknown to sound. In bed at night, Are his eyes open or is this a dream? The room is all dark water, ghosted light, And midway to the ceiling The great fish with its working fins and gills Suspended, while before it glide the reeling And see-through scenes of day, faintly agleam, Until their passage stills And merges with the deep unmoving stream.
The city humid, the church rusty and Baroque, and the directions appalling, the Miami sky turned gray as a blanket, and soon tropical rain was falling; the priest repeatedly invoked the Beast in View, as if he were stalling; and in the back a few ushers whipped out their cell phones and started calling. What of the palm scrub, through which mildewed creatures came crawling, or the two cousins from Chicago, who at the reception couldn't stop brawling? All weddings are madness, and except for the sherbet-hued bridesmaids not even a little enthralling. But the stooped and aged, what in their moth-eaten hours were they recalling? Some first nervous kiss, perhaps, the razor of a touch, and all that "Baby Doll"-ing; then the mortgage in Opa-Locka, nine months of waiting, and half a life of squalling.
mIEKAL aND often incorporates alien scripts into his work. These can be undecipherable writing systems of history, scripts unfamiliar to most people, and scripts invented by him or others. He uses these to allow us to see written language with new eyes, to appreciate its visual forms, and to face the process of searching for meaning in a foreign textscape. His "mi'kmaq book of the dead" combines seemingly recognizable characters with apparently pictographic ones, encouraging us to pick out a meaning we will never quite find on our own.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
The world of visual poetry is known for its collaborations, and some visual poets create a large percentage of their works in this way. What is interesting about K.S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy's collaborations is how seamless they are, as if created from one intelligence, even though the poets come from different areas of major practice. Ernst is highly attuned to the world of the visual arts, producing works designed for gallery spaces. Murphy is an active textual poet and a more recent participant in visual poetry. In "Vortextique," the vortex before us is literal: a maelstrom of words that suggests the ultimate artificiality of linguistic signs, the ambiguity of speech, and the impossibility of absolutely accurate communication.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
derek beaulieu often works at the edges of language, using isolated letters to create visual, instead of verbal, patterns and deconstructing found texts to tease out hidden meanings. His "untitled (for Natalee and Jeremy)," produced for two of his friends, is either a visual poetry epithalamium or simply a joyous celebration of the physical beauties of lettershape and writing. The resulting poem, which is created with press-on type, gains most of its effects from the repetition of identical letters, visual poetry's equivalent to rhyme, consonance, and assonance.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Peter Ciccariello provides an interesting dilemma to readers of his work. His process usually begins with the writing of a standard lineated poem, but he takes the text of that poem and wraps it around the landforms and ruins of an invented realm that he creates through meticulous computer modeling. The results are stunning and enigmatic textscapes that a reader must sift through carefully to imagine what they originally were and what they originally communicated.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Bob Dahlquist is an artist whose work I first noticed in New York City's Bryant Park, where I saw staring down at me an imaginative logo for a sandwich shop. The logo demonstrated Dahlquist's grasp of what I call the printer's fist—an understanding of the visual and intellectual significance of typographic characters. His "alwaysendeavor" replicates the look of old-fashioned office signs etched into translucent glass doors, but in this case we see the text from both sides at once, and we must pull apart the strands of overlapping text to reconstitute the meaning.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Jesse Patrick Ferguson is a Canadian visual poet working in both visual and textual forms. His "Mama" shows how little text it takes to make a successful visual poem. Consisting of nothing but the letter "e," variously presented, this poem represents the simple warbling cry of a child. The poem is both a touching visualization of an aural event and a strong example of how xerographic transmogrification can add character and meaning to text.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Scott Helmes is a longtime visual poet who has produced works in a variety of forms, including mathematical poetry and rubber-stamped poetry. His "haiku #62" is part of a series of striking poems created from scraps of colored text torn out of glossy magazines and arrayed in three tiers. These tiers approximate the look of haiku, and the text flutters in and out of different colors and typefaces, giving the poems their ineffable beauty.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Joel Lipman has worked for years with rubber stamps, creating poems on yellowing acidic pages torn out of old books. This technique produces a frisson between the apparently unrelated base text and Lipman's overtext. As evidenced by the meter and movement of the words on the page above, it is clear that Lipman is writing real poetry, but it is poetry enhanced by the distinctive appearance of the words.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
gustave morin's primary form is the collage poem. His "toon tune" is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. Its sixty-three individual fragments of text are cut into the shapes of jigsaw puzzle pieces and are fit perfectly together in a rectangular grid. The "words" of the poem consist almost entirely of the extravagant visualizations of onomatopoeia from comic books, producing a visual symphony of crashes and cries.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
jörg piringer works in many forms, including visual, digital, and sound poetry, as well as music. In "fallen," piringer combines a visual sensibility with computer programming skills to tumble text from the English translation of The Communist Manifesto into a pile at the bottom of the page. The result is a mass of letters stripped of their original meaning and representing the failure of an idea.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Philip Gallo is a typographer-poet, or "typoet," and his work depends on the careful alignment of simple words for its effects. "untitled" makes reference to the concrete poetry of the middle of the twentieth century. Diter Rot, whose name serves as the central text of this poem, was famous for a number of rigid typographical poems, including one that played with the letters "t" and "u" to produce, in varying ways, the words "tu" (you) and "ut" ("do" on the musical scale). Gallo's poem also appears to allude to "ping pong" by Eugen Gomringer, another early concrete poet.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
Michael Basinski creates visual poems that are colorful cacophonies of text and shape. His handwritten poems, which often serve as scores for equally exuberant sound poems, are filled to the margin with broken lines of text that curl into one another, read from different directions, and are often filled with nonsense words of his own invention. "Labile" is a good example of a visual poem that defiantly spurns convention. It is a neo-Dadaist poem intent on shaking the reader out of quiet acceptance and somnolence.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>
You bastards! It’s all sherbet, and folly makes you laugh like mules. Chances dance off your wrists, each day ready, sprites in your bones and spite not yet swollen, not yet set. You gather handful after miracle handful, seeing straight, reaching the lighthouse in record time, pockets brim with scimitar things. Now is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm. Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick twins, carried on your backs, each vow new to touch and each mistake a broken biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines without levers, easy in bowel and lung. One cartwheel over the quicksand curve of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, summering, a ship on the farthest wave.
Into perplexity: as an itch chased round an oxter or early man in the cave mouth watching rain-drifts pour from beyond his understanding. Whether to admire the mere sensation, enough, or hold out for sweeter ornament, vessels of wonder born with that ur-charm of symmetry; lovely ones we ache to prize and praise, climb into and become because they try our day-by-day significance: some of us ugly and most of us plain, walked past in the drowned streets: pearls of paste, salted butter, secondary colors. They drift unapproached, gazed never-selves, blunt paragons of genetic industry. We desire them but cannot want such order. We stand, mouths open, and cannot help stammering our secrets, nailed to water.
Kitten curious, or roaring down drinks in Soho sumps, small hours tour buses, satellite station green rooms, or conked out in the bathtubs of motorway hotels, there you were, with muck-about kisses, sharking for the snappers, before hell opened up for you and weeping sores of after fame appeared, the haphazardry and dwindling after three limelit years, recognized with catcalls, wads of spit, a nightclub fist, the scant camaraderie melts fast, like your flat on Air Street, the Lhasa Apso pups, the wraps and lines of chang, the poster pull-outs, fake tan smiles. It’s paunch and palimony time on Lucifer’s leash. But for a madcap few who cling, thin soup, one pillow Britain is simmering with hatred, just for you.
to beat the froggiest of morning voices, my son gets out of bed and takes a lumpish song along—a little lyric learned in kindergarten, something about a boat. He’s found it in the bog of his throat before his feet have hit the ground, follows its wonky melody down the hall and into the loo as if it were the most natural thing for a little boy to do, and lets it loose awhile in there to a tinkling sound while I lie still in bed, alive like I’ve never been, in love again with life, afraid they’ll find me drowned here, drowned in more than my fair share of joy.
—no matter how much muscle I might have mustered—my mother was like to come along behind, reach around me to take it up again from where I’d left it, lift it back into my line of vision and in one practiced motion from that strangle in her bare hands and thin air work a second miraculous stream of silver dishwash into the day’s last gleam . . .
when you drop your mate at the dock or your children at school. Don’t be cool. Don’t be coy. Or if you do, don’t assume it’s okay to act that way. For today may be your last chance at joy before it flashes away like a tin toy in one of those shooting galleries in midways: those ducks that seem to paddle a stream that’s not a stream but a rotating axle, toothed for disappearance & reappearance, a spit without point or flame, along which randomly clucks the whole game.
She had a death in me, knees drawn up and my bowl and cloth rinsed through with her. As morning takes night, field closes the hare, and ay would burrow into her. Over the altar, catalpas rattle, shadow and bother the branch. Is this her white? Dress me. Her rain? Wash me with that. Her bowl? Feed me empty. Her colding? Ay am forgot. Then mask me the g’wen, hers skin being mine, and body that pools in the brine of her, rivers the silt and stone of her wrapt in the warm of hers fell. She were the watcher and tender of pyres when the wet grass shined with quiet and ay lean to the mouth hole: ay, mother.
A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.
Who kills my history knows it is buried in the same air ay breathe. Only a hair is needed to keep you, mother. Only a fit of bone. Comfort, comfort, ay am my own. Wanting simple, a sun like water, a flow and stir of air. Warm stone, black-warm, dirt scent and bird. Ay am put out to weather. Animal eyed me here—heaving, breathing over— felt by smell for me and loomed. Air shifted my hair as it neared and sniffed then left. Comfort, comfort me. A thresh of sticks and vine, hand-carried high—ay am my own weight carried by, kind horse, kind mother, gone.
Here I am saying “The leaves are falling” —one of those choruses that vie with interminable verses to mock hoarders. Yeah, we get that a palette of winds is a pretty thing: one blurs the anther, another the river splurging on riprap, expunging phosphates, out of the temperature differential building sculptural fogs that promenade between shores a glacier wedged ajar, a fjord. Whatever gives the river its seriousness reverses in the light of those clouds moving as if absorbing their pomp in advance of it— characters which untied the painter and took the sculls again.
Two flags nuzzle each other in the desultory gust because they are fleeing the trees, who are cruel to one another, shading their neighbors to death a mixed bag advocating small business in a loose confederation. The flags don’t give any shade at all. On the anniversary of our country we throw dynamite at the air we build into. * Daylight savings. A beeline to a sea lion, as the children’s song extols, or is it a beeline to a scallion? You hear your own accent— or a child makes an error to see if you’re listening. A heartfelt counterfeit. * A cough muffled in its own sputum’s repeated in the next throat: a family of coughs comes to couch in us while the sun rises over the church, treetops’ psych ops combusting all over the ground tasked with a snowdrop.
In someone’s distant algorithm your mortgage was bundled to another’s —hedged— and stamped a new “security.” While it was swapped from investor to investor accruing fees and interest at each turn, your shadow partner defaulted and she abandoned her home. Someone uses your mortgage to leverage something far inside the starbursts of a server. Likewise marriage has no image— What’s a mortgage and who’s it engage on the other side of the firewall? * I witnessed a will which—the language invested with law godmothers the peacock’s fanned screech— would take care of the baby in the event of a [blesses herself] It lives at the Cathedral and seems to be some kind of mascot for Baptisms * Securities: The future art you’ll make and its pleasure is hedged against the boys who died you fancied.
The shoemaker’s wife ran preschool With a fist made not so much of iron But wire bristles on a wooden brush. She made us recite and learn by rote. Our trick was to mouth words, sound As if we knew what we would one day Come to know, what would dawn On us as sure as a centipede knows What to do with its myriad legs. She made us settle our feet on the mud Floor of her daub and wattle hut and she Wielded a cane cut from wood that bit Into the palm of the hand and left a burn That resonated up the arm for an age After its smart swing and crisp contact. Worst of all was the shoe cupboard Where the old man stored his wire Brushes: a cold, dark, narrow place, Replete with brushes hung on nails Covering every square inch and said To come alive when a child was locked In with them so that they scrubbed Flesh off that child’s bones. She said We would end up there if we did not Concentrate, so we stilled our feet And spoke the words in the right order For colors in a rainbow until the very Thing took her place in front of us Arranged in cuneiform, polished, Brandishing a window to climb out.
Long before you see train The tracks sing and tremble, Long before you know direction Train come from, a hum Announces it soon arrive. So we tend to drop on all fours Even before we look left or right. We skip the sleepers or walk Along by balancing on a rail. We talk about the capital Where the train ends its run From the interior stacked with The outsized trunks of felled Trees and open-topped cars of bauxite. We always hide from it unsure What the train will do if we Stand next to the tracks. It flattens our nails into knives, It obliterates any traffic Caught by it at crossroads, It whistles a battle cry, Steam from the engine a mood Not to mess with or else. Rails without beginning or end, Twinned hopes always at your back, Always up front signaling you on, Double oxen, hoof stomp, temper Tantrum, stampede, clatter Matter, head splitter, hear us, Stooped with an ear to the line— greenheart, mora, baromalli, purple heart, crabwood, kabakalli, womara.
Her e-mail inbox always overflows. Her outbox doesn’t get much use at all. She puts on hold the umpteen-billionth call As music oozes forth to placate those Who wait, then disconnect. Outside, wind blows, Scything pale leaves. She sees a sparrow fall Fluttering to a claw-catch on a wall. Will He be in today? God only knows. She hasn’t seen His face—He’s so aloof. She’s long resigned He’ll never know or love her But still can wish there were some call, some proof That He requires a greater service of her. Fingers of rain now drum upon the roof, Coming from somewhere, somewhere far above her.
Panic attacks your pain-porous skin? Imagine the layers of onion, Sufi-circling and circling until there is no tear-making body. If the issue is anorexia, taking starvation’s dark spirit-flight, or anhedonia, running from the skin’s having fun, consider the mushroom’s fleshy erection, and the pumpkins, earth goddesses and rotund Buddhas sprawled by compost’s funky aerosol. For social phobia, desensitize among the rows of corn’s parade, ticker tape leaves and Rasta tassels that wind-strut and bring on the crows’ hop and rap. Too much affect: meditate on potatoes, taciturn as overturned stones. Too little: visualize the hanging tomatoes’ insides, the soft hearts, sentimental ornaments. From the lettuce there is common sense for narcissism: acceptance as side dish, garnish for a meaty sandwich. If that leaf isn’t the dose, there’s always the soil people shovel and level, rake and make wishful with seed, feed leftovers from the compost’s vegan sewer, the soil that wants for nothing and yields and yields.
The night’s turned everything to junipers shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit, weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut. I forget this isn’t my universe sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling most of my life to land here, a lone skirl in the immaculate hush. In my world I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung. Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will do if I don’t keep a close eye on it. Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms, seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well— I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.
The Poet: Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine— where’s the pink crimp in my side where they took you out? The Octopus: It must be a dull world, indeed, where everything appears to be a version or extrapolation of you. The birds are you. The springtime is you. Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators— everything becomes you. I, with a shift of my skin, divest my self to become the rock that shadows it. Think of when your reading eyes momentarily drift, and in that instant you see the maddening swarm of alien ciphers submerged within the text gone before you can focus. That’s me. Or your dozing revelation on the subway that you are slowly being digested. Me again. I am the fever dream in which you see your loved ones as executioners. I am also their axe. Friend, while you’re exhausting the end of a day with your sad approximations, I’m a mile deep in the earth, vamping my most flawless impression of the abyss to the wild applause of eels.
About the radiant heart of the matter, valencies drift
Surely there are teeth so small. I have listened for their turning, this frail swell and fall like old blood yearning upwards through the skin of days. Slowly, I am learning their count, though numbers fray in me, and the loaded instants graft, coming always to the same tangle: the distant cry merging with the song at hand, the rain’s insistent opening in daylong dryness, the plain moon draining into dawn. And below it all, hewn from the pliant light of some Geneva noon, they spin time’s thrum. Stopped, I have bent my ears to them. I have become sound inside their years. Surely I have known the whole of grief and grace in gears.
Another dead mare waits in the shoals of some body of water, waits to be burden, borne into a foaming ocean, where it might become food for whales, or, simply empty signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation like Absalom’s beauty caught in the playful branches of a tree desiring union, entanglement, thick confusion— but not this mare; she does not get the luxury of a lyric—a song that makes our own undoing or killing sweet even as we go down into the fire to rise as smoke. This horse must lie, eyes open, amongst the stones and fresh water crawfish in Money, Mississippi, listen to the men’s boots break the water as they drop a black boy’s body near her head, pick him up, only to let him fall again there: bent and eye-to-eye with her as though decaying is something that requires a witness —as though the mare might say: on Tuesday after the rain fell, the boy’s neck finally snapped from the weight of the mill fan; he never looked at me again.
cymothoa exigua*: the tongue as what it is not—blemish and parasite: gimp and glottal stop: what question can be answered with a truant mouth: can the lynched man hung from the sails of a windmill taste the lead pipe wedged between his lips: when the signifiers dangle, empty chum lines in a cold creek: when the men in Waco, wearing white straw hats, fraying at the crisp edges of their white shirts, leave Jesse, leave John, leave Paul in ashes in the unpaved streets to choke passing mules into prophecy: when we pinch our noses to staunch the smell of the twice burnt black man burning for a third time this day: when the boys, sweet and good animals, come to what’s been left in shallow ditches: false rib and femur, clavicle and severed hand—quite simply, the language of sorrow: glyph of the gadfly rooting himself into the rotting meat of the dead: when it is too late to refuse our bodies being made urns: corn, unharvested and heavy in its husks: when, in the marketplace, the butcher lifts our tongue from a bed of ice, shouts: who will speak for this flesh: when the tongue answers as all severed tongues do:
A yarn ball and a hill maintain an equipoise until their neatness starts to bore the gods of potential and energy who hedge bets, reckoning the odds of when the rest will be set in motion, and who, first stumbling upon this clew, constructed both the incline and the inclination to unwind. Like most gods, though, they haven’t planned to stay; they mastermind the scheme, ex nihilio, then slip behind the shadow show and designate an agent, chief remaker of their mischief made. Each time, disguised, this leitmotif gets salvaged and replayed, a universe begins, for orogens and origins suppose a Way Things Were before some volatile, untimely That— sweetness perverted by the core or belfry by the bat, or here, a hilly green, whose still life, eerily serene, completes their best contrivance yet: from high above, a williwaw, a hiss, and then the silhouette of one terrific paw.
The suburbs? Well, for heaven’s sake who wouldn’t choose the absolute convenience? Cheap, a quick commute, and close to Lowe’s, a Steak ’n Shake, our own police and DMV, a library, a lake. Esteemed domestic diplomats, we trump conundrums (His and Hers) and smother any fuss that stirs the air of habit habitats. It’s not an easy job; in short, we wear a lot of hats. And so, we’re grateful, from the street you’d miss the issues we’re ignoring: termites and week-old dishes mooring, barnacled with shredded wheat, the bunch of brown bananas stuck with a yellow Post-it: Eat! We dictate chores, but understand the clock moves faster than we do and focus on those old and blue dilemmas of the second hand: inheritance, ill-fitting pants, smoke, rumors, foreclosed land. Winters, we help keep track of taxes, sort copies Xerox-hot in piles, or prune unruly hanging files (a fixture of our weekend praxis). There’s always something. In this house, only the cat relaxes— because the clutter drives a need for more, more room, more hours, food, more use of the subjunctive mood . . . tomorrow, yes, we must succeed in keeping peace and making time to garden, and to read. Still, every spring our porches spawn insects we can’t identify and ferns turned freeze-dried octopi. They spill into the arid lawn with diasporic fliers, clover and choirs of woebegone house sparrows whose incessant cheeping recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt, our soundtrack to the nightly hunt for whatever is downstairs, beeping. (As if the sleepless wanted some reminder they’re not sleeping.) But don’t fret; clarity, if brief, is possible. The best folks see an artfulness in entropy— the rust, the dust, the bas-relief of Aquafresh-encrusted sinks. So when, in disbelief, a lady skims new catalogs, convinced her luster’s fading, faded, and, afraid to end up jaded, doughy in orthotic clogs, she gracefully accepts her fate and rises early. Jogs.
All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl who loved her scabs, the blood shields her head gave up, her face a sun of blank amazement. She drew. This means love: a circle with a line through it. More work: a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed through fields. Ice river, the pages of our notebooks. Outside: limbs and roads and wires. Outside cracked with force and turning. Our poems filled with salt. He took me to his bed. The writer never speaks. The writer speaks in details, the sateen lining of my coat, the star point of tongue kissing. The winter speaks in the whip. Runoff nixed with ash. I spilt water on my notebook. Words went back to ink; paper back to ruffle, pulp. You smell like dog, the girl said. You will be left like the winter. Little sputter in the car’s craw. Little crevice in the pavement. Ice reminder. He took me to his bed, saying: Ali, Ali, tell no one.
Sugar dries on paper plates. The cake’s decimated and barely touched. What to do with the balloons? A few float listlessly, unattached, still bearing like bandages the tape that bore them to the wall. They’ve gone dull, rubber tips darkening to a bottle’s pinch. It’s too late, or too early. There are too many on the floor, stirred up as I stir. In the end, I cut them, urge a blade into the inch between knot and blossom. Slow deflation. It reveals what they are: sacs of plastic, stale with air. I’ve seen this before, in the newspaper picture of Nefertiti, bound in the antechamber of a tomb, cast out of favor, her body, barely wrapped. How they know her: by the queenly jaw, age of limbs and teeth. Also, by the broken mouth, smashed by priests so she cannot eat, cannot breathe in the afterlife.
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore, another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly. It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you, relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw. Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you, you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me, my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring, trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you? Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds? Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it, a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I, not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve? Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am, how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all. Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn, to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"? We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."
Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms against being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days not to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs? I have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair. How do I know she won't kick, or bite at my crotch? Because she's been murdered, machine-gunned: she's dead. Also, she's a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell by the sway of her belly a foal's inside her. Even murdered mothers don't hurt people, do they? And how know she's murdered? Isn't everything murdered? Some dictator's thugs, some rebels, some poachers; some drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction. Everything's murdered, but still, not good, a dead thing in with your ID and change. I fling her away, but the death of her clings, the death of her death, her murder, her slaughter. The best part of Thanksgiving Day, though—the parade! Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, enormous as clouds! And the marching bands, majorettes, anthems and drums! When the great bass stomped its galloping boom out to the crowd, my heart swelled with valor and pride. I remembered when we saluted, when we took off our hat.
I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound, not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling, keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird; not as remembrance, grief for so many gone, nor either that other tangle of recall, regret for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions, petrified roots too deep to ever excise; a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh of delight in astonishing being, of being in being, with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what, not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love; not even war, fuck war, sighing for war, sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease; more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note, sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us, echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world, on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge, mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise, cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment, din from which every emotion henceforth emerges, and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides: sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue, of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.
I have been one acquainted with the spatula, the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate, acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket and the dildo that goes by Tex, and I have gone out, a drunken bitch, in order to ruin what love I was given, and also I have measured out my life in little pills—Zoloft, Restoril, Celexa, Xanax. I have. For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty to know wherein lies the beauty of this degraded body, or maybe it's the degradation in the beautiful body, the ugly me groping back to my desk to piss on perfection, to lay my kiss of mortal confusion upon the mouth of infinite wisdom. My kiss says razors and pain, my kiss says America is charged with the madness of God. Sundays, too, the soldiers get up early, and put on their fatigues in the blue- black day. Black milk. Black gold. Texas tea. Into the valley of Halliburton rides the infantry— Why does one month have to be the cruelest, can't they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through the sewage-filled streets. Whose world this is I think I know.
If the sea is a cathedral, a tide pool is a chapel. Sculpins dart under the wind that blusters their cupped oceans. Sculpted by wave on rock, their pockets of salt grow thin from the rain, the suffocating fresh water. Sculpin and hermit crab and limpet endure the sea's absence, the lost comfort of constant temperature, while the unconceived sky drums the roof over their pooled world with litanies of unbreathable torrent. Christ, I have no praise for you. Beyond saying a vodka-wrecked troller and shacks the color of the desire to die, beyond saying predatory snails that glide on their bellies like the penitent, flexing their borers, beyond saying seraphim that bicker exactly like gulls, the shells that are my ears sing no psalms except I can name many small creatures in the world of a tide pool. Christ, have mercy on all things that drown in air, I have no praise for you. I say the tide: Tide! Tide! Tide! I say: Ebb! Flood! Ebb! Flood! I always start with "Ebb!" I always end with "Flood!" "Names" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."
The angels I love bicker over cod guts and snapper spines. They joust for flounder skulls and pick the bones clean, screaming. Their harsh, fine voices break across my town in a language lost to my kind, thoughtless in the clear now of now without death. Christ, walk down streets paved with rain to me and you drown in my choir, my angels beating prayer under wing which is the want I have not loved well. Where did my weather go? Meet me where my hidden weather went, where praise and rain are never spent. "Requiem" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."
Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself, ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat (a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada, a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great). And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?) in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers. Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down, stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver. Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic. And I may as well admit that I have touched myself (who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.
With refreshments and some modesty and home-drawn maps, the ladies of the parish are marshaling the plans in hand, devising the occasions, in softest pencil: the Day of Hearsay, Leeway Week, the Maybe Pageant, a hustings on the word nearby. Half-promised rain roosts in some clouds a mile out, gradual weather making gradual notes on the green, the well, the monument, the mayor's yard where dogs purr on elastic. Everything taken by the smooth handle then, or about to be, hiatus sharp in humble fashion. A small boy spins one wheel of an upturned bike, the pond rises, full of skimmed stones on somehow days, not Spring, not Summer yet. Engagements are announced in the Chronicle, a nine-yard putt falls short. Dark cattle amble on the angles of Flat Field. The ladies close their plotting books and fill pink teacups, there or thereabouts.
I smell me coming up behind me some days— sweet sarcophagal history. The Ark after the beasts disembarked, the motel bed as the maid draws the shades, shakes the sheets, blinks back the stink, the leafed hollow where the stalled mower sits in its exhaust and smells of wronged flesh, wing, meat but me mostly, climbing the steps, extract of me, stinking of me.
—Katounakia, 2007 The cave itself is pleasantly austere, with little clutter—nothing save a narrow slab, a threadbare woolen wrap, and in the chipped-out recess here three sooty icons lit by oil lamp. Just beyond the dim cave's aperture, a blackened kettle rests among the coals, whereby, each afternoon, a grip of wild greens is boiled to a tender mess. The eremite lies prostrate near two books—a gospel and the Syrian's collected prose—whose pages turn assisted by a breeze. Besides the thread of wood smoke rising from the coals, no other motion takes the eye. The old man's face is pressed into the earth, his body stretched as if to reach ahead. The pot boils dry. He feeds on what we do not see, and may be satisfied.
1 A psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew's harp. O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind—while apparently aloof—allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will. 2 A psalm of Isaak, accompanied by baying hounds. O Shaper of varicolored clay and cellulose, O Keeper of same, O Subtle Tweaker, Agent of energies both appalling and unobserved, do not allow Your servant's limbs to stiffen or to ossify unduly, do not compel Your servant to go brittle, neither cramping at the heart, nor narrowing his affective sympathies neither of the flesh nor of the alleged soul. Keep me sufficiently limber that I might continue to enjoy my morning run among the lilies and the rowdy waterfowl, that I might delight in this and every evening's intercourse with the woman you have set beside me. Make me to awaken daily with a willingness to roll out readily, accompanied by grateful smirk, a giddy joy, the idiot's undying expectation, despite the evidence. 3 A psalm of Isaak, whispered mid the Philistines, beneath the breath. Master both invisible and notoriously slow to act, should You incline to fix Your generous attentions for the moment to the narrow scene of this our appointed tedium, should You—once our kindly secretary has duly noted which of us is feigning presence, and which excused, which unexcused, You may be entertained to hear how much we find to say about so little. Among these other mediocrities, Your mediocre servant gets a glimpse of how his slow and meager worship might appear from where You endlessly attend our dreariness. Holy One, forgive, forgo and, if You will, fend off from this my heart the sense that I am drowning here amid the motions, the discussions, the several questions endlessly recast, our paper ballots. 4 Isaak's penitential psalm, unaccompanied. Again, and yes again, O Ceaseless Tolerator of our bleaking recurrences, O Forever Forgoing Foregone (sans conclusion), O Inexhaustible, I find my face against the floor, and yet again my plea escapes from unclean lips, and from a heart caked in and constricted by its own soiled residue. You are forever, and forever blessed, and I aspire one day to slip my knot and change things up, to manage at least one late season sinlessly, to bow before you yet one time without chagrin.
The small white mutt of my Unsure Self trails the masterless Dog of the Dying World, watching him lope the endless block of yards he knew before his birth‚ . . . I imitate his muffled bark & snuffling breath, as round & round we trot as one through rustling browns of the dying world. For it's come to me now that a dog sniffing round for the perfect smell, & a place to pee in the chilly breeze, is the Rudiment of Life. And, if so, the Poetry of Fall is the dog of myself, untied at last, from the Rope of the World dreaming he'll one day snuffle past those crackling heaps of burning leaves, becalmed by the scent of smoky light, Alone.
Words without much use now. Unable to remake the thing. And I thought what should I think— followed by: spring light looks like feathers. (Birds seemed conveniently decorous.) What then does this leave I asked & was surprised to know so quickly—that my understanding of what the light & birds could not be made to mean would not detract from them as they were. Bound by feathers (a thought, I will admit, born of artifice alone) they bore themselves aloft. What could I counter with? I, who held my heart in offering as much for show as for a fear so deep I found I couldn't name it.
Love is the kindest expression of absence— Or else is a day by the river, in which by motion it becomes clear— there have been in an hour an infinite train of rivers, & which did you want to see? One comes slowly to realize there is no evading things (the heart will have its way, though its will go unfulfilled), & there is no shame in this. The pleasures in this world— soft breeze, soft thighs, a bit of music, words that make a good sound— suggest when taken whole that the thing the body longs for is not & never has been some petite mort, a true thing known to grass & the elderly man with a kind word in greeting. And the woman saying that she is about to come, as in going to arrive— at last to fill the body held so long by stewards in her name.
Eighteen-sixty eighteen sixty-four, six hundred ten thousand men gaseous gray, blackened body parts like chopped wood in Virginia sunshine. Or nineteen-fourteen nineteen-eighteen, trench rats, thousands, big as badgers, rip chines from horse and human flesh. IED's, cluster bombs, punji sticks, primed to shred feet, thighs, spine, sack, yesterday, when we were countless. Conscience says Count them up and be good, suck on me like red candy stick in casual lookaway moments. Protected by neighbors, two girls villagers know to be deficient doll themselves up as bombs for market day's chickens and yams, and like a world-body neural surge, their protectors fly into fatty parts.
Beneath her nest, a shrew's head, a finch's beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the hour, and disregards the rest.
It's often those who talk a streak on world affairs and love and peace who seem to love and peace the least.
Change is the new, improved word for god, lovely enough to raise a song or implicate a sea of wrongs, mighty enough, like other gods, to shelter, bring together, and estrange us. Please, god, we seem to say, change us.
1 It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding his crown like thatch on low rooftrees...St. Jerome. 2 Hunched, sunk in a deep-toned wash, he cares only for the huge, softleaved book propped on his knees. At nightfall Jerome swallowed up by his Bible misses the wistful look of his lion withdrawn to the forested ridge, the drawing's diagonal. And from there, one can say that landscape exists: prowls and spinnies where a lion might wind a lioness, or his prey... He looks out on tree-clouded peaks, tiny hamlets, two lambs in a wattle-fold. What the lion sees, we see. For Jerome, though, the lion is Judah, his seal and seed— Jesse's stem drops thickset leaves for him to read. 3 Saskia, of course, thrones in painting. Still, tiny sketches tumble from odd cabinets: the dear in a lopsided turban or twilled garden hat, sketched "on my wedding-day"— Saskia. A cluster of lines, a rippled race of curls and cloudsets. And, for a rarity, in Rembrandt, flowers. The simple, surprised, smiling face of Saskia as Flora...After her fourth lying-in (she was dying), he took to long walks on the city's outskirts; his sketchbook came home with mere touches of charcoal, a reed, a waterfowl, estuarial shallows unfolding to the rim. 4 Now life is meaner, chaotic. Rushes of arousal, lawsuits, debts...this print of a kitchen drab, eyes wandering, mouth a vacant, uptilted half-lune, her work-swollen hands on Saskia's velvet shawl, The thighs parted, abdomen pear-pendulant, the pulled-off stocking-stays grooved in the flab to her copse of cross-hatchings—No one wants to see this. But his hand made this stock, of himself the substance and seed. Fine- spun cosmos, brown tangle, soft sign: the old man spares us nothing. The book, the look, the lieu, the end of the Line.
If I'm you, or you me— Interpenetrating God— enlarge our intimacy. You who are animus and blood— who make me dust from this table blown into grass, invisible— Is it you—or I— I pass and cannot see?
You and your whole race. Look down upon the town in which you live And be ashamed. Look down upon white folks  And upon yourselves  And be ashamed That such supine poverty exists there, That such stupid ignorance breeds children there Behind such humble shelters of despair— That you yourselves have not the sense to care Nor the manhood to stand up and say I dare you to come one step nearer, evil world, With your hands of greed seeking to touch my throat, I dare you to come one step nearer me:  When you can say that  you will be free!
I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face— And this is what I see: This fenced-off narrow space  Assigned to me. I look then at the silly walls Through dark eyes in a dark face— And this is what I know: That all these walls oppression builds Will have to go! I look at my own body  With eyes no longer blind— And I see that my own hands can make The world that's in my mind. Then let us hurry, comrades, The road to find.
Remember The days of bondage— And remembering— Do not stand still. Go to the highest hill And look down upon the town Where you are yet a slave. Look down upon any town in Carolina Or any town in Maine, for that matter, Or Africa, your homeland— And you will see what I mean for you to see—  The white hand:  The thieving hand.  The white face:  The lying face.  The white power:  The unscrupulous power That makes of you The hungry wretched thing you are today.
As he spoke we could hear, ever more loudly, the noise Of the burning fires; the flood of flames was coming Nearer and nearer. “My father, let me take you Upon my shoulders and carry you with me. The burden will be easy. Whatever happens, You and I will experience it together, Peril or safety, whichever it will be. Little Iülus will come along beside me. My wife will follow behind us. And you, my servants, Listen to what I say: just as you leave The limits of the city there is a mound, And the vestiges of a deserted temple of Ceres, And a cypress tree that has been preserved alive For many years by the piety of our fathers. We will all meet there, though perhaps by different ways And, Father, you must carry in your arms The holy images of our household gods; I, coming so late from the fighting and the carnage Cannot presume to touch them until I have washed Myself in running water.” Thus I spoke. I take up the tawny pelt of a lion and Cover my neck and my broad shoulders with it, And bowing down, I accept the weight of my father; Iülus puts his hand in mine and goes Along beside me, trying to match my steps As best he can, trying his best to keep up. My wife follows behind us, a little way back. So we all set out together, making our way Among the shadows, and I, who only just A little while ago had faced, undaunted, Showers of arrows and swarms of enemy Greeks, Am frightened by every slightest change in the air And startled by every slightest sound I hear, Fearful for whom I walk with and whom I carry. And just as I had almost come to the gates And thought that I had almost gotten us free, I thought I heard the sound of many feet, And my father, peering intently into the shadows, Cries out to me, “Get away, get away, my son, My son, they are coming! I see their shining shields, I see the glow of their weapons in the dark!” I am alarmed, and I don’t know what happened But some power hostile to me distracts my wits And I am confused, and I lead us away by ways That I don’t know, and off the familiar streets That together we are following, and so, O God! some fate has taken away my wife, Creüsa, my wife, away from me. What happened? Did she wander from the way that we were going? Did she fall back, having to rest some place Back there, and so we left her? I did not know. I never saw her again, and as we went, I never turned to look behind, and never Thought of her until we reached the mound And Ceres’ ancient place. When all of us, At last, had gotten there, we all were there, But she had vanished and she wasn’t there. Gone from her people, gone from her child, and her husband. What men or gods in my frenzy did I not Cry out against? What worse sight had I seen? I left Ascanius and Anchises and The household gods in the care of my companions And I found a secluded place deep in a valley For them to hide, and I myself took up My shining weapons and sought the city again, Determined, no matter what, to look for my Creüsa everywhere in Troy. I find My way along the walls and to, and through, The shadowed gate I’d left the city by; Carefully, step by unseen step, in the dark, Backwards the way I came I make my way; Everywhere as I go fills me with terror; The very silence around me fills me with terror. I make my way to my home in case, in case, She’s gone back there. The Greeks had invaded the house And set it on fire, and through the house the fire Rolled up on the surge of the wind to the very roof, And the flames tower high above the burning house And the heat of the burning pours up into the sky. And so I go on, and once again I see The palace of Priam, and the citadel, And in the empty courtyard of Juno’s shrine There’s Phoenix and dire Ulysses, guarding the treasures Taken from everywhere from the shrines that the Greeks Had set fire to; the golden bowls, the holy Altar-tables, the stolen holy vestments; Boys and trembling matrons stand around . . . I wander in the streets, in my desperation Calling out her name, Creüsa, Creüsa, Calling Creüsa, over and over again. And as I went among the ruined buildings And through the streets of the ruined city, lo, Suddenly there rose before my eyes The strangely magnified image of my wife. I was stupefied; my hair stood on end; my voice Got caught in my throat. Then she spoke to me and said Words that altered everything for me: “Beloved husband, what use is it for you To persist in this insanity of grief. What has happened here has happened not without The will of the gods. The high lord of Olympus Does not permit Creüsa to go with you To be with you on your journey where you are going. Long exile will be yours, ploughing across Vast seas until you come to Hesperia, Where Lydian Tiber gently flows between Rich husbanded fields and where you will be happy, A king, and wedded to a royal wife. Give up your weeping now for your Creüsa; I, a Dardan woman and the spouse Of divine Venus’s son, will never see The scornful households of the Myrmidons Or the Dolopians, and never have to be A scullion slave in service to some Greek matron. The Mighty Mother keeps me on these shores. Farewell and may your care protect and cherish Your child and mine.” And having spoken thus, The image of her receded into air, Leaving me weeping, with so much still to say. Three times I tried to embrace her and to hold her; Three times the image, clasped in vain, escaped As if it were a breeze or on the wings Of a vanishing dream. And so, the night being over, I returned to my companions where they were. When I got there I was amazed to see How many others, women and men, had come, Wretched survivors of the fall of the city, To join us in the exile and the journey, A heartbreaking company, come from everywhere, Ready in their hearts and with their fortunes, To follow me wherever I was going. And now the morning star was rising over The highest ridges of Ida, bringing in The day that was beginning; the Danaans held The city behind the gates that they had locked. There was no hope of further help. And so I acknowledged this, and taking up the burden Of my father once again, I sought the hills.
Wearing a tawny lion pelt upon My spindly shoulders I carry both of them, My father and my mother, into the darkness, My father hoarsely singing, “They are there!” —The glimmer of something that is glimmering there— “I see the glow of weapons in the shadows!” Through which with my purblind eyes I think I see Something in the darkness waiting there. Above me in the dark my mother’s voice Calls down to me, “Who’s there? Who is it there?” Step after step together we make our way, In the darkness of my memory of our house.
I sit here in a shelter behind the words Of what I’m writing, looking out as if Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here. The words are like a scrim upon a page, Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim. I can dimly see there’s something or someone there. But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels, Or the past, or future, or who it is I love, My mother or father lost, or my lost sister, Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there, I only know that there’s something, or somebody, there. Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?
I had a tapeworm, and imagined it flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps, pallid red, a quarter-inch wide with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes peeking out of my asshole as I lolled in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool (the kind that used to be in inner-city Ys: windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither seen nor heard of for thirty years were saying I’d give everyone in the pool my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten my insides and now had threaded through both my intestines and was trying to get out. Where were we? Everyone was old, old— gray, infirm; flaccid and thin or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping— the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps and black one-piece suits as if we were all on an outing from a nursing home. I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was, but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty, as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair after cheating on the lover you were cheating on your husband with, who was at that moment waiting for you in another motel room from which you had slipped to meet me secretly: a secret inside a secret, buried, encased, as if if we dug deep enough into it we’d find what we were trying to get or stop.
He was touched or he touched or she did and was, or they were and would. Or the room could, its three doors, two windows or the house on a slant touching, touched by the drift down street, cars pressing quick or slowing. All along the town touched a river, the river the filth falling through it. What was clean— a source pure as rumor—a shore touching lake touched by wind above, and below, a spring. All touch blindly further water. That blue touching blacker regions in the sea so weirdly solitary, each to under, to every sideways past deeper, where nowhere.
I tell her I love her like not killing or ten minutes of sleep beneath the low rooftop wall on which my rifle rests. I tell her in a letter that will stink, when she opens it, of bolt oil and burned powder and the things it says. I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand, that war is just us making little pieces of metal pass through each other.
For a long time the Spanish from Spain Who came here became slightly insane In a special way and just a little. You can try this yourself. Walk farther than you can into the forest in New York So it’s a toss-up whether or not you know the way back. For you there’s going to be a smidge of confusion, a glow of fear That smells like burning rye toast, And the illusion that you are the only person alive On the earth. You will probably have the second illusion That no one likes you, which doesn’t jibe with the first illusion Of no other people. This was about the extent of it, for the Spanish, They felt all that just a few hours a week, but every week at home, Living in, say, small San Francisco, Which made thinking slow and hard at these times, But if you try this yourself in the deep woods You’ll see you can still think enough And you’ll remember your way back to the loving arms Of your wife, husband, or mother, in Rochester. (Yes, You could try it as a child, but please don’t.) The Spanish had a purpose to walk east inland to the Sierras, the gold. The Indians said there were five hills and two mountains Entirely of gold and you had to wear ferns dangling before your eyes Like sunglasses when you got near the mountains. The hills, they said, were not so bright. The Spanish thought this was bullshit But were having trouble with the coast (where They truly believed the gold was) which was that boats Could not travel north and south even as fast as people walking Because the Pacific coast was opposing currents (you made Half a mile an hour in the water with biggest sail). An expedition of thirty Spaniards from Spain (living In small San Francisco) walked east inland toward what’s now Mariposa. It means butterfly. In that place, the shivering feathery Insects rose from the ground and blacked out the sun. The sky had no room for more butterflies so the leftovers attached to the trees, Making the trees appear like ragged trees. Look up the other way, the explorers said to each other, but That way, when they did, was no blue sky but darkness of orange insects That did not fly in clouds but were the sky, So any forward motion by the thirty men seemed, not seemed Did make the sky covered each inch With the thin trembling insects, brown or green or orange, But as a whole a black ceiling with little light between them and the men, Who thought slow and hard but did think, and so returned To small San Francisco where no one believed them but understood The illusion because when they asked the thirty men What such an encounter with butterflies felt like, the men described Feeling the way all the colonists and explorers and priests and women Felt a few hours each week at home— Fear making the olfactory illusion of burning rye toast hand In hand with the illusion of being the only one And the simultaneous but contradictory illusion That no one likes you. How could everybody hate you If there was no everybody? Or even anybody. Well there was a way to fix this And we use it now around here (I Mean in New York and California and Nevada and Hawaii, Not just in my house) which is to wrap our loving arms Around each other. It works very well And I know you’ve tried it. The Spanish from Spain brought virtuous women Over for that purpose only (you don’t think the virtuous babes looked For gold, did you?) and it worked very well Except the women were worse, I mean much worse, Not just specially a little insane and needed The loving arms much more than the men. They needed longer sessions and more sessions. What’s more, if the expedition of thirty butterfly Illusionists had gone six miles further, They would have seen silver sticking out of the ground Like glass after a four-car accident on a street in Rochester. But for many decades the promise of the waiting loving arms, Versus the unacceptable illusion of the butterflies Forming the entire black sky, kept them near the coasts. When you put down this book, you could decide For yourself if it is true that wrapping loving arms around Somebody is as temporarily powerful as I’ve made it Out to be or is possibly permanently powerful or is an illusion Like the massed feathery insects which were absolute.
I used an arrow to kill the spider. I used a steamroller to flatten the worm. For the ants I called in an air strike. Bee that found its way in through the screen: blowtorch. The mammals were easier— a bucket of water for submerging the cat, a poisoned word thrown to the dog. For love, only a kitchen match. That and a stove leaking gas and waiting until the dinner was good and burned.
London returns in damp, fragmented flurries when I should be doing something else. A scrap of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries and pub food, long, wet walks without a map, bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu, my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts and scanning faces in every bar for you. Those months come down to moments or small plots, like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke, who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread, only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke? and this mouse of a woman offered, What’s big and red and sits in the corner? A naughty bus.
A recipe for lamb tagine demands a mysterious ingredient: raz el hanout. Animal, vegetable, compound of kings like myrrh? I decide not to look it up, to wait and see. At first it is everything we seek but can’t express. Then it reverses: everything thrust upon us—think fast!— by the universe, like the leg my friend Tom caught when a cyclist got clipped by a car, the driver stinking drunk at 9:00 AM. Severed above the knee, the leg flung itself into the air, a javelin. Tom, always quick, reached up and caught it. But the story has a twist. After the cyclist died in an ambulance, the widow inexplicably came on to Tom. Not that Tom is unattractive. Indeed he is the sort of man I’d throw myself at if I were a leg. It’s hard to imagine the sex that Tom and this woman would have had there in the hotel room with the blackout curtains pulled. I’ve never had sex with Tom myself, but if I had been that leg or that woman I might have whispered, “What fine reflexes you have, Sir!” “Sir, say something tender!” “Cradle me against the guttural gasp from your solar plexus.” “Oh, Sir, I sense the tip of bone on skin, a surge of déjà vu.” “I am coming, I am about to come, your shuddering lover, your raz el hanout.”
The length of the wind runs from mid-May to murder. The length of the wind runs from January through joy. The wind runs as long as the right hand’s first finger points to the sun after thunder. The wind gallops prayerward like a horse held in the palm of a rock, no taller than a knee bent for the sake of singing. The wind weighs more than the fossilized horse and stretches from fingernail to praise. The length of the wind runs from mid-May to mercy, January through justice. Unto the broken, dwelling in a broken, promised land, the wind drops a hammer and some are warmed and some are chilled and some laugh and some die. Silently through the nuclear physicist, the wind wicks loud as paper-scraps trailing in the wind’s wake, igniting an empiricist, fragrant through tallow. The wind strikes the wind like rice in a paddy. The wind scatters petals like blossoms of napalm. The wind snaps the backs of malnourished conquistadors bowed down to gold. It is the wind who estimates poverty in moments by the method of moments, who assesses want in units of amass. It is the wind who shakes America by the ovaries, runs the length of revolution, all the calories in a dollar. The length of the wind runts from mid-March to hunger. The length of the wind grunts from Saturday through sorrow. The wind flutters nothing but orgasms and afterplay. The wind numbers seminarians more numinous than semen. The wind is a mote on the wind. The wind is the dust that measures time in footsteps. The wind is the word in the throat of the dust. The length of the wind runs from midwife to marvel. The wind ribbons out within mid-May and mourning and dust is the voice the wind whickers glory, the wind whickers grief.
Fly from me does all I would have stay, the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped, every contract void, and flying in the crows lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep into afternoon and still wake soaring. So out come the bats, down spiral swifts into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream- figments then are gone like breath-prints on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever I hold however flies apart, the children skip into the park come out middle-aged with children of their own. Your laugh over the phone, will it ever answer me again? Too much flying, photons perforating us, voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter. Remember running barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s hovering, remember my hand as we darted against the holiday Broadway throng, catching your train just as it was leaving? Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet, horses coming from the field for morning oats, insects hitting a screen, the message nearly impossible to read, obscured by light because carried by Mercury: I love you, I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone, maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under- feather only then that too, yes, rained away. And when the flying is flown and the heart’s a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust- stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us, still some fledgling pledge?
One day the bees start wandering off, no one knows why. First one doesn’t come back, and then another and another, until those who are supposed to stay and guard the hive, those who are making the royal jelly and feeding it to the queen, those who form different parts of the great brain, must put down what it is they are doing and go off in search— having no choice, not if the hive is going to survive, and where do they go, each one vanishing, never to be seen again, off wandering in the wilderness, having forgotten how, forgotten what it was they were after, what it was that gave meaning, having known it at one time, now a veil drawn. Is it that each one is a cell, a brain cell, and now they’re failing one by one, plaque to Alzheimer’s, or the way the cells in the esophagus will begin to mimic the stomach if the acid is too intense, if you’re sleeping and the valve won’t close, a lifetime of eating and drinking the wrong things, those cells compensating, trying their best, but opening the door to those other cells, the wild ones, the ones that call those bees, out there, somewhere, lost, having nowhere to return at night, their search for nectar fruitful, their small saddlebags full, but no one to go home to, no home, no memory of home, it’s as if they’d stumbled into some alternate world, one looking like ours but just a glass width different, just a fraction of sunlight different, the patient waking up, finding herself wandering, someone leading her back to bed, but there is no bed. Confusion of the hive, they call it, and the hive dies, each bee goes down, each light goes out, one by one, blinking out all over town, seen from a great height as the night ages, darkens, as you’re parked in your car with your own true love, until it’s just you two and the stars, until it’s just you.
Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.
You give me the slip between garlic and lilies, as if this is what comes of my unprotected loves, of my hands in the sweet earth, their willful miscegenation of the border bed where you’re tucked in deep with tulips, too, like just one more of their heart-freaks: a fluke diamondine flake, a thin vein gone gold. Being mine, you’ll grow up a girdled tree, girt with a ringed-around root, nothing like the fruitful vine of good wives—one of which I’ll never be so, my not-love-knot, you may as well come up instead like a kiss: the one wind gives to rouse the Japanese maple, October’s aerialist, its bright aureole in the last late sun a red mouth, opening.
When we finally flip it over the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy has had his stitches in so I can finally admit I think it is all fantastic: the suck of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade bent into the guard, and the sound of the hammer’s head reshaping the metal. In this our suburban Eden we’ve only a teenage Adam too dreamy to manage his motorized scythe and silly Eve leaving her coffee cups and plastic plant pots behind in the grass. Though it’s a long way from a fall, this spring’s first disaster, I did like the thin thread of red on his upper lip, and I like my mower turned over among the glowworms, a monstrous dandelion as unnatural as we are, out in a garden, with our untidy golds and our dangerous sharps.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that knowledge is power, that mystery’s water, that hunger makes a gargantuan lover, and yes, I’ve drunk of the river Lethe, from the breath of the Celts, from the echo of the bugling elk, and yet, alas, here I be, small and twee, all liquored up on song and love, hard as rails and light as air, expecting the heavens to throw down a flare, to send in the clowns, to burn a bush, strike up the sea, anything that might mean those cloudy bastards have noticed me.
I called up tech and got the voicemail code. It’s taken me this long to find my feet. Since last we spoke that evening it has snowed. Fifty-four new messages. Most are old and blinking into a future months complete. I contacted tech to get my voicemail code to hear your voice, not some bozo on the road the week of Thanksgiving dubbing me his sweet and breaking up and bleating how it snowed the Nashville side of Chattanooga and slowed the beltway to a standstill. The radio said sleet. The kid in tech sent on my voicemail code. I blew a night on lightening the system’s load, woke to white enveloping the trees, the street that’s blanked out by my leaving. It had snowed. Lately others’ pasts will turn me cold. I heard out every message, pressed delete. I’d happily forget my voice, the mail, its code. We spoke at last that evening. Then it snowed.
It needn’t be tinder, this juncture of the year, a cigarette second guessed from car to brush. The woods’ parchment is given to cracking asunder the first puff of wind. Yesterday a big sycamore came across First and Hawthorne and is there yet. The papers say it has to happen, if just as dribs and drabs on the asbestos siding. But tonight is buckets of stars as hard and dry as dimes. A month’s supper things stacks in the sink. Tea brews from water stoppered in the bath and any thirst carried forward is quenched thinking you, piece by piece, an Xmas gift hidden and found weeks after: the ribbon, the box. I have reservoirs of want enough to freeze many nights over.
Love not being in the loop. Grant the spruces’ wish, the golf compound graying out of use, suvs in the it lot, power outage, a chorus from the quad. Bless the elsewhere where others are not here or you. And rain after midnight . . .  Ask yourself, is that rain or bells?
Because he was as hard to handle As truth, which we equate with light, Go somewhere dark and hold a candle For Alan Sullivan tonight.
We were sitting there, and I made a joke about how it doesn’t dovetail: time, one minute running out faster than the one in front it catches up to. That way, I said, there can be no waste. Waste is virtually eliminated. To come back for a few hours to the present subject, a painting, looking like it was seen, half turning around, slightly apprehensive, but it has to pay attention to what’s up ahead: a vision. Therefore poetry dissolves in brilliant moisture and reads us to us. A faint notion. Too many words, but precious.
We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore. His concern: that I shall get it like that, in the right and righter of a green bush chomping on future considerations. In the ghostly dreams of others it appears I am all right, and even going on tomorrow there is much to be said on all these matters, “issues,” like “No rest for the weary.” (And yet—why not?) Feeling under orders is a way of showing up, but stepping on Earth—she’s not going to. Ten shades of pleasing himself brings us to tomorrow evening and will be back for more. I disagree with you completely but couldn’t be prouder and fonder of you. So drink up. Feel good for two. I do it in a lot of places. Subfusc El Dorado is only one that I know something about. Others are recently lost cities where we used to live—they keep the names we knew, sometimes. I do it in a lot of places. Brash brats offer laughing advice, as though anything I cared about could be difficult or complicated now. That’s the rub. Gusts of up to forty-five miles an hour will be dropping in later on tonight. No reason not to. So point at the luck we know about. Living is a meatloaf sandwich. I had a good time up there.
Furthermore, Mr. Tuttle used to have to run in the streets. Now, each time friendship happens, they’re fully booked. Sporting with amaryllis in the shade is all fine and good, but when your sparring partner gets there first you wonder if it was all worth it. “Yes, why do it?” I’m on hold. It will take quite a lot for this music to grow on me. I meant no harm. I’ve helped him from getting stuck before. Dumb thing. All my appetites are friendly. Children too are free to go and come as they please. I ask you only to choose between us, then shut down this election. But don’t reveal too much of your hand at any given time. Then up and pipes the major, leave the hand in, or change the vows. The bold, enduring menace of courtship is upon us like the plague, and none of us can say what trouble will be precipitated once it has had its way with us. Our home is marshland. After dinner was wraparound. You got a tender little look at it. Outside, it never did turn golden.
Here in life, they would understand. How could it be otherwise? We had groped too, unwise, till the margin began to give way, at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both. Now it was time, and there was nothing for it. We had a good meal, I and my friend, slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables. Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith. You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth. Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .” The iconic beggars shuffled off too. I told you, once a breach emerges it will become a chasm before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute on the far side of town erupts into a war in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft, into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay. I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas, its elixirs. Banish truth-telling. That’s the whole point, as I understand it. Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency, like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it, causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered. It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did, poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.
The ribbed black of the umbrella is an argument for the existence of God, that little shelter we carry with us and may forget beside a chair in a committee meeting we did not especially want to attend. What a beautiful word, umbrella. A shade to be opened. Like a bat’s wing, scalloped. It shivers. A drum head beaten by the silver sticks of rain and I do not have mine and so the rain showers me.
Oh, Unreadable One, why  have you done this to your dumb creature?  Why have you chosen to punish the coyote  rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,  shucked the fur from his tail  and fashioned it into a scabby cane?  Why have you denuded his face,  tufted it, so that when he turns he looks  like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?  The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low,  and without fur, his now visible pizzle  is a sad red protuberance,  his hind legs the backward image  of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.  Why have you unhoused this wretch  from his one aesthetic virtue,  taken from him that which kept him  from burning in the sun like a man?  Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,  stopped him there and turned his ear  toward my warning shout?
A man with binoculars fixed a shape in the field and we stopped and saw the albino buck browsing in the oats—white dash on a page of green, flick of a blade cutting paint to canvas. It dipped its head and green effaced the white, bled onto the absence that the buck was—animal erasure. Head up again, its sugar legs pricked the turf, pink antler prongs brushed at flies. Here in a field was the imagined world made visible—a mythical beast filling its rumen with clover until all at once it startled, flagged its bright tail— auf Wiedersehen, surrender— and leapt away— a white tooth in the closing mouth of the woods.
They brought it. It was brought from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle the latest and most final armful. Up up over the head, hold it, hold it high it held the gazer’s gaze, it held hope, did hold it. Through the stubble of September, on shoulders aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow, it was said, something winged, hollow, though pulsing, freed from the field where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted to be found and bound with cord. It had limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers. Fingers and a face peering from the stalks, shuttered in the grain, closed, though just a kernel a shut corm. They brought him and autumn rushed in, tossed its cape of starlings, tattered the frost-spackled field.
Who is that creature and who does he want? Me, I trust. I do not attempt to call out his name for fear he will tread on me. What do you believe, he asks. That we all want to be alone, I reply, except when we do not; that the world was open to my sorrow and ate most of it; that today is a gift and I am ready to receive you.
I was the lonely one in whom they swarmed in the millions. I was their creature and I was grateful. I could sleep when I wanted. I lived a divided existence in sleepdreams that lit up a silence as dreadful as that of the moon. I have an overly-precise recall of those solitary years before I opened the curtain and drew upon a universe of want that made me so strong I could crack spines of books with one hand.
Tulip, you Bled on my green rug. A jungle-red petal Where my little kits Rollick, fallen like a warning— Yesterday I sat outside In the returned sun Trying to make more Friends; after all these years To think of yourself Snapped, the sweet sap Tremoring between States of ice and melt. An old love wrote to me From his wife’s country place To say he had been hunting there And could appreciate the hounds; In a white coat he is closely Setting people’s bones, opening Their backs with the hands I knew The cancellated paths Of saying no or yes: I could have fallen To a fearing of the little foxes lately Come into the yard (There is so little I know about what to do) But I let them be.
Not embittered even while freezing to the ice of their own lakes. The night I was leaving for Madrid into the noisy party a dazzling friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much (as a couple of kids on the dance floor want) to slow the tempo, hold there longer, to feel that seedly longing to be pressed into the soil, or that little lift the mothers get when stocking larders, even now, vestige of the primitive urge to be provided for and to provide. I went alone to see that balcony in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver tray and all but smoked them for you; after your towels had warmed in London’s best hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad, glad now for the rest of empty August and the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew, glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners that I have stood alone wondering at illuminated books, looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider at the Tate—at times the best kept universe was my own, no interceding docents or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous wandering—waif, naïf. I liked the light enormously so why did I obey the bell that called me in?
The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out of blossoms as the bride throws her corset among laughter and waving hands. Seeing you, glass in hand, sunlight piercing the punch bowl’s crystal, I remember the horse, an Appaloosa, the white and gray markings like clouds, cumulus, one later on his grave, the 2X4 cross with name above a swell of land that could bring a man to his knees, or make him look up at fumbling shapes, cotton-fumed and slow. I can hear the screeching still. The colt had grabbed a turkey nesting in scrub oak, and prancing, shook it in his mouth as we ran reaching toward black feathers—then the fine spray of blood—until beyond adrenaline we began laughing,
The humble sense of being alive under the towering sun fills the nectary and ripens apricots down to the last one, if Mnemosyne wakens from apathy each moment. It is the soft burly sound of a bee tumbled in fritillary, is it not? But if memory, as if to illustrate the mind was not yours to have, the mind was not given, fails us, leaving us in our underpants in the garden, should we not hate the garden, or the woman whose garden it is? And sunlight. Thunder. Rain. Hardened in heart against what earth compels and seizes, goddamning, goddamned rain.
Poor muse, north wind, or any god who blusters bleak across the lake and sows the earth earth-deep with ice. A hoar of fur stung across the vines: here the leaves in full flush, here abandoned to four and farther winds. Bless us, any god who crabs the apples and seeds the leaf and needle evergreen. What whispered catastrophe, winter. What a long night, beyond the lamplight, the windows and the frost-ferned glass. Bless the traveler and the hearth he travels to. Bless our rough hands, wind-scabbed lips, bless this our miscreant psalm.
Who wielded the chisel at the left portal, south porch, the scene of Theo chained, naked to the waist, leaning in to the brutal hand of what looks to be an even younger boy? What man carved stone to mimic flesh as it would look inside the torture of its flensing? How he must have held the scene in his own mind, thought it back to the act itself, modeling the lines with his own limbs so he would know both how a body bends in pain, and how a hand extends the flayer’s rake.
Parc Georges-Brassens, Paris Most afternoons, I’d run laps through Parc Brassens where grows the second smallest vineyard I have ever seen, and where those silver, pruned-back stalks looked blunt, strung-out on wires, and mostly dead all winter. That was how I saw them. That’s all I expected. Even in the cold, I’d see a guy my age there, once a week, playing his guitar. He’d sit next to the bench where I’d be stretching. He rarely spoke— just to ask if I’d like a song— until the week before I left for good. I was sitting at the top of a hill about a hundred feet away from where if you stand tiptoe you can see the Eiffel Tower. He sat too close to me. We spoke of many things. Then he suggested we go at it right there, on the ground, under the sun. This is how one lives who knows that she will die: rolling in the arms of anyone when she can— rolling in the arms of a musician—aware that no one cares much what we do in little knolls behind reedy forsythia, in the middle of a Tuesday, in the middle of living. And I would know now how he felt, and the ground against me, and whether he was rough or sweet. And what is possible would widen every hour. Oh, but me, I thought I was immortal.
Would you believe it, I got lost again And all roads led to Rakestreet. Which was which, The short road or the long? A girl of ten Behind her counter, drew me a thumbnail sketch Of space in time. The Big House was, she said, Five minutes away, or seven hundred years. Nephin, nebulous in its hat of cloud, A reference point. I would never get out of here Unless I fell in love with my condition— Rakestreet, with its boy behind the bar, Its sweatshop, and its permanent television In the background, rumbling from afar Of war and worldly sex, greed and ambition, While the dead slept under lichened stone Behind Kilmurry chapel. Older than religion, Older than history, this quiet need to atone By staying local, once at the very least, For an hour, a day, a lifetime. Marry the girl, Buy up the stock, become one with the deceased— Let Crossmolina and the Big House world Be damned to its own eternity, Lough Conn Forever signaled, never come upon, Lose itself, like the reason I came In the first place, and my aboriginal name.
It was there, the elemental center, All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself Like seasons, where the times and dates For swallows and household fires are written down, The grouse are counted, the quotas of stocked rainbows. All that love of order, for its own sake. Only the hill-farms, and the high sheep country Above politics—the enormous relief Up there, as the dialect names of skies Return, along with their clouds, and the old knowledge Opens the mind again. To dream, to just potter In the yard, to fiddle with local stations In the kitchen, where news that is no news Finally, at last, fills up the years With pure existence. Lit from beneath The fields are evenings long, the tree by the house Where Vladimir and Estragon kept vigil With the stillness of commando and insurgent Frightens no one. Slow through the air A heron, shouldering aside the weight of the world, Is making for its colonies, coevals In a state plantation . . . Nowhere but here In the high right hand of Ireland, do the weather fronts Give way so slowly, to such ambivalent light.
Because anyone sitting still attracts desire, Even this will not be given you, the park In June, the silence of a bench at eleven o’clock On a Monday morning, or four on a Thursday afternoon. Someone will drift toward you, unattached And lonely. The spell will be broken, the wrong word said. It is cool, but there is no death in the few token leaves That must have come down last night, in the rain that freshened, The tree-smell that remains. For this season there is no name, Not summer, and none of the months of the year— A something inside you. Search your mind For the green arboriferous Word the boys and girls swing out of Like a tree, and the lovers On the grass in tantric mode, in an ecstasy Of untouching, and the human buddhas, legs infolded, reading. Branches, sheer translucent leaves— You would die to get under them forever, if it were given you, The park, on this, a day like any other day, And not the knowledge of everyone ever met Who will come upon you, sooner or later, If only you stay here. No, not people, or the walkways Made in another century, or the murmur of the great city Everywhere in the distance, but this breathing-space Where the void no longer terrible But to be relaxed in, the depressions Which anyway here are mild, incoming from the west, Slow-acting, chronic, lifelong not acute Are there to be sat through, waited out On a damp bench, as a man sweeps up around you And the sun comes out in real time, stealing over the ground.
Twelve dollars sixty cents, & the fact that there is no blood no storm can’t wash into dirt, that the time for these words is already ended, that for all the rain that has been here before so have I. & there is less water in the world than a famous woman once said, & I know that, & that the stars in the river also are real I also know, for they disappear also & refuse also to be touched. & I have touched bare things, & it works— it can be the sole unbraided moment in a life— but even so, what better days look like to me is still the tiny gore of heartbreak, & long walks with small shoes that can’t be taken off, & schools in a city I love that put molded cages over their clocks, because that works too to remind us we are not ready. & the worst of all is anything that stays as it is when touched. At lunchtime a woman famous for her ability to praise the ineffable says she can’t believe anyone returns to where they came from. But of course they do. In fact some do nothing else. & what is it they leave behind? Perhaps not the meaning of time, but the time of meaning, & the fact that whatever happens, tomorrow will change it.
She came to see him in the safehouse to interface without biography or autobiography. I am, she told him, the only one here who cares whether you continue to live. I care, he said, but it was formulaic. His propensity, not a precondition. The ground beneath his feet smelled of everything other men’s feet had ever ground into it. It was blank for all horrors, all aftermaths. A fly dazzled in a sunbeam through the windowpane. Like water, he seemed to say, & she agreed with him. I would like water, he repeated. She pretended not to hear him, because that was the sort of slippage that could save him & suddenly she was not against it. He could continue to live if he could continue to mean himself or anything as poorly as he had just then.
The soil I’m walking over comes  from deeper: a fire had done it in,  a stewpot had suddenly popped  and its contents streamed  out wave over wave until  it reached the water, until the sea  called it a day and struck back  with a counterwave. Stony nightblack  dreambarren land where tawny  thyme wrestles up and thistle is stitched  to every bare thing. Over this malevolence  I carry you in me,  sevenmonths deadchild, out to the sea
Saved two children last night. They lay under thin black ice one gone blue, the other grey. I laid them out on grass that snapped under my step wrung their bodies warm and dry gave them the gust of my breath. Then I looked out at the morning that lay lukewarm on the water put on a tank top arranged some grasses in a vase fished two children out of sleep.
Night eats color,  Flower bouquets lose their fake ornaments.  Day falls into the leaves like sparkling fish  And struggles, like the lowly mud,  The shapeless dreams and trees  Nurtured outside this shriveled, deridable despair.  And the space that was chopped down  Tickles the weeds there by its feet.  Fingers stained with tar from cigarettes  Caress the writhing darkness.  And then the people move forward.
The Augsburg poet once said he had tacked  an image of the Man of Doubt  to the wall of his room. A Chinese print.  The image asked: how ought one to act?  I have a photo on my wall. Twenty years ago  seven Chinese workers looked into my lens.  They look wary or ironic or tense.  They know I do not write for them. I know  they didn’t live for me. Yet sometimes I feel  I’m being asked for more candid words,  more credible deeds, by their doubtfulness.  In turn I ask their help in making visible  the contradictions and identities among us.  If there’s a point, it’s this.
Master Hirano came from Japan together with a priest from the Kegon sect and the two of them drank beer all night at the Avia Hotel next to Ben Gurion airport.   The following day, when we came to take them to the Galilee, they had trouble getting up and barely checked out of their rooms on time.   It was a wintry January morning, and near the village of Shefaram the priest from the Kegon sect asked us to stop and stood by the side of the road and urinated. On Friday the two of them (Master Hirano and the priest from the Kegon sect) went to the Bratslav Hasids’ synagogue in Safed. The worshippers swayed like trees in the wind. Master Hirano and the priest from the Kegon sect stood there, bald and wrapped in robes, behind the congregation, and the beadle whispered into our ears: Are they Jews? Are they Jews?  When we left the synagogue Master Hirano said to the priest from the Kegon sect: There is no doubt that they understand what devotion (he said shujaku) is. The priest from the Kegon sect said: There is no doubt. They know what devotion is.   On Jerusalem Street, by the monument of the mortar, commemorating the ’48 war, Master Hirano said: Prayer is a good thing. The priest from the Kegon sect said: There is no doubt. Prayer is a good thing.   Master Hirano stood on one side of the mortar and the priest from the Kegon sect stood on the other and the moon rose, big and full, yellow like the fields painted by Van Gogh. * * * It’s possible to write only by means of non-writing. When things come from the opposite direction.   My aunt Edith rises out of the ground and returns to her bed in the nursing home. Ursula, my stepmother, is walking backward. All sorts of wilted flowers bring their petals toward themselves.   All we need is yogurt and a spoon. We’ll know what to do with the spoon. We’ll lead it toward the right place (which is to say, the yogurt) and from there toward the mouth. But the mouth can’t be fathomed. Likewise the word that stands for it (mouth) is strange in the extreme.   Or take, for example, the hand that’s holding the spoon with its five tragic fingers. There’s no logic whatsoever in there being five. Like five widows who’ve gathered because their husbands have died, and they allow themselves this movement through the air in order to keep from losing their minds. There is no limit to the beauty of things that are sad. Like old clay vases or a wagon’s shaft in a junkyard. Every year the plum trees flower anew, and people whose names are Shtiasni or Dahaan open doors and close them.   All these things fill the heart with great joy. The beauty of death and the violet colors accompanying it. Announcements that make nothing dawn on one, and the dawn itself rising from nowhere like a birthday present 365 days a year.
In memory of my mother I Speak then. What is it you wanted to say? Was it the way  The barge slid down the city river in sunset’s pursuit,  Two thirds of June passed, the twenty-second today  And summer on tiptoes, in an effort to stretch to the light,  How the linden trees breathed through the stifling square  And in July there was thundering, mumbling from every direction?  But that speech needed gravity, needed some weight at its core  And not lightness—that, I’m afraid, was deception. II Can you smell it: how sweet-rotting melon scented the greengrocer’s store  Out of sight in the archway the crashing of empty crates  On a breeze from the outskirts, the handcars’ jostling call  And an archive of leaf-fall covered the pavements’ gray.  Let the Rubik’s Cube fall from your hand, it is not worth the strain  All effortful planning in vain, take the grapes, eat your fill  In the quiet backyard on a bench, see for real, there in the rain  What will come to your mind in the hills and the hollows of hell.III And go now, where you were going. But your nights here, in rain  Especially in rain, the steady bare branch of the upas tree  Learnt to death like the alphabet, feels for the window pane— G for glass, touching the frame, the words you heard at her knee  And although I learnt little at school, I see as if it were now  Through the flask’s throat and falling from above to beneath  With an unforgettable shivering, the fine sand heaping below.  The simplest device, but such an opening for grief. IV You’re done for, you deceiver, you cheat, with the tottering  Tripod, your cunning replete, beat your rage on the floor like a staff  That a stream might come forth, ghostly, transparent and blossoming  With the odor of ozone under the municipal office tin roof.  The soft furnishings sting you with static—then resound,  Speak again, as if under duress, without manifesto or school  If these terrible times, this place the Lord has renounced  Can fill with such love, the straggler, the spent force that is you.V Aged forty-seven and widowed, Aizenstadt, shuffling, feels  His way round the kitchen to the empty medicine chest  Is there anything to raise a smile or a glass to here?  Not even the comical long johns, in mourning and flapping half-mast.  This place, where a good time means down in the yard by the crates  Drinking with the men who have seen a good thing or two,  Making toasts to Esenin and Chenier as if they were once mates  And another wage packet spent like the last one on booze. VI After death I will leave my beloved city and there, without,  I will lift my throat to the heavens, my horns tipped back to the earth,  And marked by my sorrow I will give forth from my trumpeting mouth  To sound through the autumn wastes, the truths for which speech had no words.  How the barge was drawn down the river by sunset’s last fingering ray  How, on my left wrist, time’s steel cooled and hissed  How the magic door was unlocked with an ordinary key  Speak. Such misfortune leaves us little else.
An orange did love  The man who ate it.  A feast for the eyes  Is a fine repast;  Its heart held fast  His greedy gaze.  A citron did scold:  I am wiser than thou.  A cedar condoled:  Indeed thou shalt die!  And who can revive  A withered bough?  The citron did urge:  O fool, be wise.  The cedar did rage:  Slander and sin!  Repent of thy ways  For a fool I despise.  An orange did love  With life and limb  The man who ate it,  The man who flayed it.  An orange did love  The man who ate it,  To its flayer it brought  Flesh for the teeth.  An orange, consumed  By the man who ate it,  Invaded his skin  To the flesh beneath.
If I could only get hold of the whole of you,  How could I ever get hold of the whole of you,  Even more than the most beloved idols,  More than mountains quarried whole,   More than mines   Of burning coal,  Let’s say mines of extinguished coal  And the breath of day like a fiery furnace.  If one could get hold of you for all the years,  How could one get hold of you from all the years,  How could one lengthen a single arm,  Like a single branch of an African river,  As one sees in a dream the Bay of Storms,  As one sees in a dream a ship that went down,  The way one imagines a cushion of clouds,  Lily-clouds as the body’s cushion,  But though you will it, they will not convey you,  Do not believe that they will convey you.  If one could get hold of all-of-the-whole-of-you,  If one could get hold of you like metal,  Say like pillars of copper,  Say like a pillar of purple copper  (That pillar I remembered last summer)— And the bottom of the ocean I have never seen,  And the bottom of the ocean that I can see  With its thousand heavy thickets of air,  A thousand and one laden breaths.  If one could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now,  How could you ever be for me what I myself am?
You’re right in life’s chamber music  either listen with total attention or else switch off  Water one drop can perfectly lock up these shores  The crash of waves has no gap is like a tailored body  still sitting on the rock the lilac-scented surrounding ocean  still striking at a little girl’s unceasing gaze into distance  Purple or white petals are stored in the eyes  all through the springtime night, dark rings around the eyes  keep opening torn by where she looks far away  Suffering is that waiting, underwater pearl  what turns old is salt low sobbing in every wave  The fierce wind is a jade bracelet on the wrist  Island like a boat sailing since the day you were born  never slowing down its disconsolate speed  always arriving yet, underfoot, drawn away by the ebbing tide  Purple wounds the turbulent, close-up scene  sets off white the horizon like land cutting, above snow line, into fate  exposing the snow flower you’ve caught for life  Still wet tears run halfway down the girl’s cheeks  After so many years play the cold rain you’ve brought back  A seagull plunges then flies back up You hear clearly this kiss
A pedal-pusher said to me  No braykaiser  No sterfput  A-stepping and a-stoumping cretin-wise  Could drive a man to madness  Just as no thousand Orphas all draped in damp peignoirs  Doing their great kochera  With the prima donna  Of Iquzegdamoda  Of Paczevast  Of Anunec  Each Orpha in an evening gown  Imploring of our pedal-pusher  To go a-step and go a-stoump all over yet again  With a thousand mops  And a thousand sterfputs imploring them  The braykaiser in me  The sterfput in me  The mop in me  The kochera in me  The Paczevast in me  The Anunec in me  The Iquzegdamoda in me  And all the stoumpers  The steppers  The mops  The evening gowns  And all the Orphas  All the pedal-pushers  The damp peignoirs  The cretins  The prima donnas  Who beg  The kocheras  The Iquzegdamodas The Anunecs  And all the Paczevasts  To step  And to stoump for the sake of love  The great flowering love  Of a thousand pedal-pushers  A-draped in damp peignoirs  Will lead no braykaiser  No sterfput  No mop  No kochera  No Paczevast  No Anunec  No Iquzegdamoda  To implore a man to madness  And that is what a-stepping and a-stoumping cretin-wise  A pedal-pusher said to me
CV  Not-Orpheus is singing He sings his nothing He sings his night  He sings all the names The name of nothing The only name Since  long ago He didn’t know it And knew it in his night  All things sing All names sing Every tonal difference, every sound All music in its destruction In its sublation Toward which point? The mountain of nothing hovers Before it crushes us With its night With its  song  In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river  A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone As if walking in a foreign city  Though I recognized parts of it You said it was almost like  walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill  When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in  1957,  the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew  out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation As in a piece by Ligeti  That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad  The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea  I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank  In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my   mother wouldn’t hear us, where she slept, in the room outside ours She’s already much better  I look at my face in the bathroom mirror Will I manage to go out into the Brain  Trucks pass Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods  Gulls, trees, people The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms  also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects Fear Cultivated tastes We are in the immediacy of memory Only in a flash of astonishment can memory be broken But even lightning is informed I look at  the  magical  diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts See that all this is exactly as in  Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine,  the unknown within the soul Also the similarity with tantric forms   Yes, that’s   how it is,  I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is  only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of  Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions,  and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward,  the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . .  Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over  the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss, Para-   dise’s various degrees of stasis  What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician And yet I acknowledge their power, also within my self If they prevail, sovereignty  is crushed Libero arbitrio There the forms also break down  The stream of love breaks down Fluid lightning The flash of vibrating being  But also the flash of darkness The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning  flash How  am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing That I do not!
This is my cap,  this is my overcoat,  here is my shave kit  in its linen pouch.  Some field rations:  my dish, my tumbler,  here in the tin-plate  I’ve scratched my name.  Scratched it here with this  precious nail  I keep concealed  from coveting eyes.  In the bread bag I have  a pair of wool socks  and a few things that I  discuss with no one,  and these form a pillow  for my head at night.  Some cardboard lies  between me and the ground.  The pencil’s the thing  I love the most:  By day it writes verses  I make up at night.  This is my notebook,  this my rain gear,  this is my towel,  this is my twine.
Yet to die. Unalone still. For now your pauper-friend is with you. Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains, And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow. Live quiet and consoled In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution.  Blessed are those days and nights.  The work of this sweet voice is without sin.  Misery is he whom, like a shadow,  A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down.  Poor is he who, half-alive himself  Begs his shade for pittance. January 15-16, 1937
Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.  It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.  Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:  Miraculous, the breathing plain.  Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty— The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .  The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .  And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.     January 16, 1937
Contemporary Folk Poetry of Crete FROM COUPLETS SENT BY SMS FROM YORGOS VITTOROS, MAYOR OF KYPARISSI  Whose garden are you blossom to, to whom do you belong?  Whose velvet down, whose feather are you, whose rejoicing song?  * * * BY MANOLIS PASPARAKIS (BLIND RHYMESTER)  My heart, it doesn’t fool me, even with the games it plays:  All my nights are dark, but that’s the same with all my days.  * * *  FROM YANNIS PAVLAKIS’S CRETAN FOLK POETRY COLLECTION  Take a look around you when the trees are all in bloom,  And wonder why you’ve chosen that old desiccated broom.  *  The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught;  It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought.  *  When they open wide the church door to bear his body hither,  I’ll drag forth such a savage cry the wild greens will wither.  *  I want my darling filthy—it’s the dirty girl I trust— To keep her to myself and make the rest flee in disgust!  *  There is a sheer cliff at the end of the foot-path of our lives,  But he whose soul possesses wings unfurls them and survives.  * * * FROM 6,000 COUPLETS OF ARISTIDES CHAIRETIS The world is something I can handle when she’s in my clasp— But when she’s far away, it is too huge for me to grasp.  *  If I’d saved all the tears from when I first began to weep,  I’d have a sea by now and I could float upon the deep.  * * * FROM THE BARD OF SITIA, CRETE, YANNI DERMITZAKI Lower your branches, little one. This favor’s all I seek,  Because when lightning strikes, my dear, it always finds the peak.  * * * COUPLETS BY ANDREAS PAPYRAKIS, FROM THE VILLAGE OF KORFES, MELVIZIOU, CRETE, AS TOLD TO NICK PAPANDREOU ON NOVEMBER 13, 2008 Five thousand dreams I fashioned every hour of every day,  But then along came wind and rain to sweep them all away.  *  Deep underground where no sun rises, no moon shines above,  That is the place where he must dwell, the man who loses love.  *  Heart, break. Flesh, decompose. And Soul, desert the body’s frame.  Since you denied me, go back to the dirt from which you came.
Ah Margarida, If I gave you my life, What would you do with it? I’d take my earrings out of hock, Marry a blind man, And live on a tree-lined block. But Margarida, If I gave you my life, What would your mother say? (Her mother knows me inside out.) She’d say you’re a fool, Without a doubt. And Margarida, If I gave you my life Literally, by dying? I’d go to your funeral, firmly believing You’d gone mad To try to love by not living. But Margarida, If this giving of my life to you Were merely poetry? In that case, forget it, The deal’s off, Because I don’t sell on credit. Dictated by the Naval Engineer Sr. Álvaro de Campos in a state of alcoholic unconsciousness.
So many gods! They’re like books—you can’t read everything, you never know anything. Happy the man who knows but one god, and keeps him a secret. Every day I have different beliefs— Sometimes in the same day I have different beliefs— And I wish I were the child now crossing The view from my window of the street below. He’s eating a cheap pastry (he’s poor) without efficient or final cause, An animal uselessly raised above the other vertebrates, And through his teeth he sings a ribald show tune . . . Yes, there are many gods, But I’d give anything to the one who’d take that child out of my sight. March 9, 1930
One day the Earth will be  just a blind space turning,  night confused with day.  Under the vast Andean sky  there’ll be no more mountains,  not a rock or ravine.  Only one balcony will remain  of all the world’s buildings,  and of the human mappa mundi,  limitless sorrow.  In place of the Atlantic Ocean,  a little saltiness in the air,  and a fish, flying and magical  with no knowledge of the sea.  In a car of the 1900s (no road  for its wheels) three girls  of that time, pressing onwards  like ghosts in the fog.  They’ll peer through the door  thinking they’re nearing Paris  when the odor of the sky  grips them by the throat.  Instead of a forest  there’ll be one bird singing,  which nobody will ever place,  or prefer, or even hear.  Except for God, who listening out,  proclaims it a goldfinch.
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.  If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.  Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.  Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.  Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,  so easily do they break.  You are a laconic marksman. You leave me  not dead but perpetually dying.  I want my friends to heal me, succor me.  Instead, I get analysis.  Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood  are campfires compared to my anguish.  Two-headed, inescapable anguish!— Love’s anguish or the anguish of time.  Another dark, severing, incommunicable night.  Death would be fine, if I only died once.  I would have liked a solitary death,  not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.  You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully.  Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?
1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.  2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”  3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.  4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.  5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.  6. I know that I know nothing about love.  7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.  8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.  9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency. 10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.  11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.  12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.  13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.  14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.  15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.  16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.  17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.  18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.  19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.  20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.  21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.
It would not sound so deep Were it a Firmamental Product— Airs no Oceans keep— —Emily Dickinson Afloat between your lens  and your gaze,  the last consideration to go  across my gray matter  and its salubrious  deliquescence  is  whether or not I’ll swim,  whether I’ll be able to breathe,  whether I’ll live like before.  I’m caught in the bubble  of your breath.  It locks me in.  Drives me mad.  Confined to speak alone,  I talk and listen,  ask questions and answer myself.  I hum, I think I sing,  I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode.  I’m no one.  Behind the wall  of hydrogen and oxygen,  very clear, almost illuminated,  you allow me to think  that the Root of the Wind is Water and the atmosphere  smells of salt and microbes and intimacy. And in that instant comes  the low echo  of a beyond beyond,  a language archaic and soaked  in syllables and accents suited  for re-de-trans-forming,  giving light,  giving birth to  melanin  hidden within another skin:  the hollow echo of the voice  which speaks alone.
Protruding, rebelling against the lips,  the long, pointed, ill-fated fang stared at me,  (in spite of awkward attempts to hide it).  Stealing adolescent glances,  I dreamed it pierced me, pushing deep in the base of my neck.  I bit my lower lip, flushed,  but not before blushing under its spell.  Yesterday,  Yesterday when he smiled at me, with teeth in perfect alignment   (dentistry can work miracles),  I turned my apostate face,  and squinting, pretended to watch passersby.
Nuing-kuiten my father’s friend  was a lion sorcerer  and walked on feet of hair.  People saw his spoor and said:  “The sorcerer has visited us.  He is the one who treads on hair.  This big animal prowling  was Nuing-kuiten.”  He used to travel by night— he did not want to be seen  for people might shoot at him  and he might maul someone.  At night he could go unseen,  after other lion sorcerers  who slink into our dwellings  and drag out men.  The sorcerer lived with us  hunting in a lion’s form  until an ox fell prey to him.  Then the Boers rode out  and shot my father’s friend,  but he fought those people off  and came home to tell father  how Boers had wounded him.  He thought father did not know  he was wounded in his lion form.  Soon he would have to go  for he lay in extreme pain.  If only he could take father  and teach him his magic and songs,  father would walk in his craft,  sing his songs, and remember him. He died, and my father sang:  “Men broke the string for me  and made my dwelling like this.  Men broke the string for me  and now  my dwelling is strange to me.  My dwelling stands empty  because the string has broken,  and now  my dwelling is a hardship for me.”
The north wind whips through,  in the streets papers and leaves  are chased with resentment.  Houses moan,  dogs curl into balls.  There is something in  the afternoon’s finger,  a catfish spine,  a rusty nail.  Someone unthinkingly  smoked cigarettes in heaven,  left it overcast, listless.  Here, at ground level, no one could  take their shadow for a walk,  sheltered in their houses, people  are surprised to discover their misery.  Someone didn’t show,  their host was insulted.  Today the world  agreed to open her thighs,  suddenly the village comprehends  that it is sometimes necessary to close their doors.  Who can tell me  why I meditate on this afternoon?  Why is it birthed in me  to knife the heart  of whoever uncovered the mouth  of the now whipping wind,  to jam corncobs in the nose  of the ghost that pants outside? The trees roar with laughter,  they split their sides,  they celebrate  that you haven’t arrived at your appointment.  Now bring me  the birds  that you find in the trees,  so I can tell them  if the devil’s eyelashes are curled.
Pull in your feet, little darling, so I can kiss your wee trotters while I fold under a toe and another one underneath. I bend a little piggie. I bend another little piggie And look at that naughty little piggie that is still sticking out. Now, now, my treasure, there is work to be done here. Your toes like fairy thimbles, the blossom of the foxglove. Like a calf that is spancelled or a hobble on a chicken, there will be swaddlings of silk on the feet of my dear. That my daughter now shrieks like a blue jay is no matter, she will sway in the future like a bamboo on a windy day or like a willow sapling. So I bend under the big toe and another toe after to form a foot like a lotus about to unfold. Poor Cliodhna has flat feet. Maire has huge ones. Peggy’s are like spades and Niamh’s like two rakes. Just hold still, my dearie, while I tighten your bindings. I’m only your mammy doing my very best for your sake
Like the stamen inside a flower  The steeple stands in lovely blue  And the day unfolds around its needle;  The flock of swallows that circles the steeple  Flies there each day through the same blue air  That carries their cries from me to you;  We know how high the sun is now  As long as the roof of the steeple glows,  The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;  Up there in the wind, where the wind is not  Turning the vane of the weathercock,  The weathercock silently crows in the wind.
Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air,a story sung by those who danced before the Lord in quiet.Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that risewith no protection but each other’s ears.We are on our bellies in this silence, Lord.Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection.Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand.For the secret of patience is his wife’s patienceLet her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat,he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her forgetting,a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath.Let them borrow the light from the blind.Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle.What is silence? Something of the sky in us.There will be evidence, there will be evidence.Let them speak of air and its necessities. Whatever they will open, will open.
If I stand alone in the snow it is clear that I am a clock how else would eternity find its way around
I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up. In the square stands Fata Morgana looking tired, shouting Morning paper—morning paper.
It’s very strange the eggs are everywhere There must be some mistake the eggs are so close together There seems to be no room for us Push the eggs closer together It’s impossible We must get closer together but beloved what will happen with all the eggs everywhere what will happen everywhere to us There must be some mistake
Tonight, away begins to go farther away, and the dream what do we know of the dream metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock I gaze across the sea see in the distance your walk and you pass the Pacific, distant and blue phallus and Moloch pace my view on into otherness on into otherness? are we in the world after or before are we or are we not magnetic force it is apparently me you inform: genesis woman dream that begins tonight to go farther away tonight to reach farther away metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock on across the blue sea
Already on the street with our money clutched in our hands, and the world is a white laundry, where we are boiled and wrung and dried and ironed, and smoothed down and forsaken we sweep back in children’s dreams of chains and jail and the heartfelt sigh of liberation and in the spark trails of feelings the fire eater the cigarette swallower come to light and we pay and distance ourselves with laughter.
On the street with our money clutched in our hands, buying bread and scattering breadcrumbs for the bluish doves. Paying to see the fire eater, the cigarette swallower and the dead vagabond who breathes. Greeting the palm tree that sighs at night. Saying a few words to the staring stone figure above the gate. Laughing and rushing in as if chased. In the cool kitchen we prepare and arrange our food. We make it as elegant as we can. Bouquet on the table and all. And we speak
Running down Vasenka street my clothes in a pillowcaseI was looking for a man who looks exactly like meso I could give him my Sonya, my name, my clothes.Running down Vasenka street with my lips moving,one of those who run from the trolley that bursts like an intestine in the sun,those who lock the door, lock it with the second key,and who try to speak, stutter but try to speak.A wife screams as if she were in labor
Don’t forget this: Men who live in this time remember the price of each bottle of vodka. Sunlight on the canal outside the train-station. With the neighbor’s ladder, my brother Tony “Mosquito” and I climb the poplar in the public garden with one and a half bottles of vodka and we drink there all night. Sunlight on a young girl’s face, asleep on the church steps. Tony recites poems, forgets I cannot hear. I watch the sunlight in the rearview mirror of trolleys as they pass. Don’t forget this. There sat in the poplar two brothers, the barber and podiatrist, in love with the same woman. They drank there and recited each poem they knew. Not a soul noticed: notasoul.
“You must speak not only of great devastationbut of women kissing in the yellow grass!”I heard this not from a great philosopher but from my brother Tony
I watch loud animal bones in their faces & I can smell the earth.Our boys want a public killing in a sunlit piazzaThey drag a young policeman, a sign in his arms swaying
Through Vasenka: a herd of boys runs. With their icy hands they haul a policeman and for an apple a look they display the man on the asphalt. Snow falls in his nostrils. I watch him. They circle his eyes with a red pencil. They teach his neighbors to spit in two red holes. I watch the snowflakes melt in their hair. The neighbor aims in the red circle, spits. I stand on a park bench and chew snow. Boys walk west of Tedna, carrying snowflakes in their hair. A neighbor aims in the hole, spits. Walking by night with their arms lifted up from their bodies. As if they were about to leave the earth. And were trying out the wind.
Dr. Alfonso Barabinsky wants to go outsideI hold him down with my smaller body.He walks, runs from his shoes to my kitchen.He is drinking in my kitchen,He swims in my kitchen with his varicose fat legs.Alfonso, you fool. You think it is brave to drinkvodka all morning on an empty stomach.The walls of our apartment flash. The walls of our apartment stand. They are bombing his hospital.He washes my face. He fingerspells the names of patients.The shadow of his fingers huge on the whitewashed wall.The walls of our apartment flash.When the bombs fallwe make children.He kneels and kissesthrough my skinthe shape of our only child.They are bombing his office.Takes his glasses off and lays them on the table like a shining weapon. Throws his t-shirt at our cat, fat hangs over his belt.Pulls a stolen lemonout his pocket.They are bombing his hospital office,But I am a ripe womana man could be happy.
I look at you, Alfonsoand sayto the latecaterpillarsgood morning, Senators!this is a battleworthy of our weapons.
I am not a poet, Sonya I inspectthe fragrant feet of younger ladies—
I kissed a womanwhose freckles aroused our neighbors.Her trembling lipsmeant come to bed.Her hair falling down in the middleof the conversationmeant come to bed.I walked in my hospital of thoughts.Yes, I carried her off to bedon the chair of myhairy arms. But parted lipsmeant kiss my parted lips,I read those lipswithout understandingsoft lips meantkiss my soft lips.Such is a silence of a woman who speaks against silence, knowing silence is what moves us to speak.
It is December 8 and my brother Tony was killed by the soldiers. December 8 and the police are reopening the Southern Trolleyways. December 8 when my wife lifts Tony’s body from the ground, his arm tied over her shoulder—her face is damp, her hair dirty. And the soldiers unveil the damn Trolleyways, and I stand feeling (a quick march of bumps across my back and thighs) nothing. When she comes home, I run a bath for Sonya and wash her hair, gently mixing the finest of my brother’s shampoos with quiet precision, while Sonya cries and cries.
I remember Tony arguing in front of his mirrors, the soldierswere painting the trees, Tony saton the floor of white hair, and all the trees werepainted white. And he spat at Alfonso’s irony, but whenthey played accordion, the fourth among us had no name.“I am not sleeping with Tony! He simply cuts my hair!”—but our dinner is a tiny blue fish and, with my lean brother-in-law,we are playing cards. I pull spade after spade after spade butthis skinny sparrow, this barber no simple soul, takes mewith his fingers by my nose and kisses me, quickly, on the lips!When Tony washed my hair, when Alfonsokissed between my toes, when my lipstrembled, when the fourth one laughed, when Tony slept, slept in the earth,on the empty streets of our district, a bit of windcalled for the life which no one knew, a lifewhich daily took all of us: my neighbortaken, his wife taken, their apartment quiet.I say this slowly, as if unaffected:their apartment quiet, on the floor, dirty water from their boots.
Love cities, this is what my brother taught meas he cut soldiers’ hair, then tidied tomatoes watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor—I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother.The voice I do not hear when I speak to myself is the clearest voice.But the sky was all around us once.We played chess with empty matchboxes,he wrote love letters to my wife
Each man has a quiet that revolvesaround him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughinghard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodkaand toast the gray wall. I say we werenever silent. We read each other’s lips and saidone word four times. And laughed four timesin loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncoverthe poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of VasenkaDeposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’s tobacco hair.And whoever listens to me: beingthere, and not being, lost and foundand lost again: Thank you for the feather on my tongue,thank you for our argument that ends,thank you for my deafness, Lord, such firefrom a match you never lit.
Motionless forgetful music of women and men
Yet I am. I exists. I hasa body,When I seemy wife’s slender boyish legs the roof of my mouth goes dry.She takes my toein her mouth.Bites lightly.How do we live on earth, Mosquito?If I could hear you what would you say?Your answer, Mosquito!Above all, bewareof sadnesson earth we can do—can’t we?—what we want.
You lean disconsolate on your stool, Sullen and certain As minor royalty rusticated to thisUnhelpful climate of solvents, gaskets, pliers, and bolts. Because they are new and manifold and usefulYou feel their whispers against you. The staunchResistance of objects. How can I tell you O my soul, To exhaust the realm of the possible when Ever the lightIs uncongenial as February and your hand unlovely?Like a dog nearly annihilated by nervesAnd boredom chewing her paw to sore, red velvet,You’ve torn your nails so far flesh swellsClosed around each bed like an eyeless socket.That you should be making such small change!Fingers inarticulate as moles nudge a debris Of dimes not thick enough to hide The candy-colored butterfly flaringAcross the tender, veined delta of your handHeralding indelibly the eviction Of this vulgar fleshOr the one word needled in black, knuckle-Gothic
Until wolf-light I will count my sheep, Adumbrated, uncomedic, as they are. One is perdu, two, qualm, three Is sprawl, four, too late,Night is already a thirsty county in Texas, Salt flat and unremitting Blacktop dry as my mouth, And your elastic vowels, my genial, My electric ghost, my Radio’s lonely station. Because the spectacleOf suffering corrupts us, all punishments Are now executive, offstage. Most presume you a fable: Echoes of approaching bootheelsThat harry labyrinths of concrete corridors, Or hooded in burlap. We are convicted As we are also pardoned: He cherished His lawn, or afterwards he coveredThe victim’s face. You make no judgments Yourself. Only in bursal tones, Tactful as the file boxThat shows, if opened, the neon, pleading heart Of Jesus wrapped in barbed wire,You perform penalties others have scripted, so Untroubled by so many. How long I have listened to you For news of the opal distances,
For Audrey Richardson Curdy (1931–1986) It was 1986, when currencies to be changed Into multiple-launch-surface, anti-tank missiles Swarmed through numbered bank accounts Like Ovid’s seething knotted seed of frog-slime,Which not seldome attracted by the sun falls In little frogs with the rain; when it also rained Radionuclides, strontium, caesium,
Another one of those Pyrrhic experiences. Call itan ex
The age demanded an imageof its accelerated grimace —Ezra PoundIdiot Wind,Blowin' every time you move your teeth —Bob Dylan You were energized by your epoch.The difference between a harmless nut—John Doe, Jane Doe, plain Jane, practically any mediocrity—standing on a beachand the same harmless nut riding a wave of (now) cultural self-righteousnessabout to tube. A tsunami armed with thunderbolts.Empowered—yea, packing.You played everything to the sympathetic studio theaterof your hearers, a chorus-cum-sounding-board.They were your doo-wop boys and girls, your clique and claque and Marshall stack. The church hall chairs scraped, the cheap black crepe backdrop rustled “cutting edge” at you.You paid attention to how they oohed and aahed for you, and then pantomime hissed, and balled their fists and bayed for blood:the half-lustful half-men betraying their half-gender when they weren’t speculating what you were like in bed,the frightened girls who’d never seen anything like youbut thought it might be fun (after Goth) to be a Maenad,the Pharisaic mothers going home to their chilly fires, their dim, furtive, put-upon husbands and their neo-feral offspringwith a “there but for the grace of God” on their bony lips.
Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’sRiver-blurred, inchoate border.Dawn’s old story; and light tries—Not the last time—to devise Lasting order;From first principles assignsLaws to frame day’s jurisdiction;Drawing contours, shapes, and linesFrom the nebula, it shines, Strange as fiction.Such designs, though, won’t appearIn the plans of a committee.Look. The moon’s pale-copper sphereRings—a gong too faint to hear— Through the city.Let them linger, unawake.Down the mountain’s wrinkled brillianceDarkness empties like a lake.Minted gold, house windows make Coins worth millions.Both in disbelief and prideAll the buildings in the distanceOn the river’s farther sideTake up, as the shadows slide, New existence.Shadow slides along the roof,Past the guttering and gable,Shrinks, and leaves the house aloofWhere the light reads out its proof Like a fable.
In siftings of chromatic sedimentShed by the winter hours as they decay,With slow descentLight settles through the lower sky in peach,Then mauve, then pale self-abnegating grayAgainst the water, now that day is spentAt Bennetts Beach,Under the high withdrawing blueness, bandOn band, like layers in a decorativeBottle of sand,Enclosed beneath the heavens’ dome, as thoughThis were the perfect realm in which to live,Preserved, unburdened by the least demand, Or wish, to know—And simply be. Along the beach conveneSome silver gulls which stand around reflectingUpon the sheenThat comes and goes about their scarlet feet,And crested terns fly back and forth inspectingThe shallows for a last titbit to glean,And lightly treatA two-faced wind that works its way acrossThe metal of the sea it tries to planishAnd to emboss,While deep in its unbalanced buffetingsGannets alternately appear and vanish,Plunge, rise, and loft and give their heads a toss.These things, these things
The palm tree exposesa large numberof loose, carved spinesout of pleasure?Boredom?
After John Milton Our light is never spent.Is spent.Thus have we scooped outmaceration reservoirs.We will blaze forth what remainsas pixels.Great angels fly at our behestbetween towers,along axons and dendrites,so that things standas they standin the recruited present.
In front of the craft shop,a small nativity,mother, baby, sheepmade of whiteand blue balloons.
The night you died, I dreamed you came to campto hear confession from an Eagle Scouttortured by forty years of sin and doubt.You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp.Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,followed us to the Bad Axe waterfrontdown a firebreak this camper used to hunt.Through all I said you suffered silently.I blamed the authors of my unbelief:St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,the altar boy when I was six, the griefof a child chucked from Eden, left for deadby Peter’s Church and all the choirs above.In a thick Polish accent choked with love,
Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand, thumped its tundra tires, lifted as if on wires,banked over ice and rocked its wings to land.We pitched our camp hard by the Hubbard’s face, some sixty fathoms tall, a seven-mile-long wallseven leagues from Yakutat, our base.
He found it strange at first. A new dimension. One he had never guessed. The fourth? The fifth? How could he tell, who’d only known the third?Something to do with eyesight, depth of field.Perspective quite beyond him. Everything flator nearly flat. The vanishing point they’d tried to teach at school was out of sightand out of mind. A blank.Now, this diaphanous dimension—onewith neither up nor down, nor east nor west,nor orienting star to give him north.Even his name had left him. Strayed like a dog. Yet he was bathed in some unearthly light,a delicate no-color that made his fleshtransparent, see-through, a Saran-Wrap self.His body without substance and his mindwith nothing to think about—although intact—was totally minus purpose. He must
If an orchidophage’s tastebud magnified resembles an orchidso my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones.Love, little by little it dawned on us the artisanalice cream, especially the prizewinning caramel, would be out of our reach, like the previous Friday of a Sunday leaving the beach, in the meltdown.When you gasp at the soundfile of cymbals
I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irisha
Use meAbuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheadsSing meSour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skinRise and shineIn puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheadsWake usSpeak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politicsCrawl on us Fall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrockBeat our browsFlee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist
Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colorsof ukuleles stretching their necks from yardsof canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders,auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green,under this Pac Heights sky where the awful richsnap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bagsand spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven,fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,
Hobos wail a garbage can againstthe cyclone links. The monkey puzzle treedroops its scaly tails above our headsas she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos,humping happy in their cages closeto chimps ripping off each other’s ears.And in the cloud reposing on the sky,cut by an
The tulips make me want to paint,Something about the way they dropTheir petals on the tabletopAnd do not wilt so much as faint,Something about their burnt-out hearts,Something about their pallid stemsWearing decay like diadems,Parading finishes like starts,Something about the way they twistAs if to catch the last applause,And drink the moment through long straws,And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.The way they’re somehow getting clearer,The tulips make me want to
I hate you,How the children pleadAt first sight—
We communicated by cheeses,unwrapping them gingerly,parting the crust with a fork,tasting dew, must, salt,raising an eyebrow,or we let chianti talk for us,rolling it in the glass,staring—it was dark and shinyas the pupil, and stared back—or we undressed each other;we took long walks hand in handin the vineyards, the pastures,resenting each other bitterlyfor our happiness that excluded usas surely as the world did,mountain after mountain.
They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernailgingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roadsmarked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racingafter hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoopsdarning gray veils—and who were we, watching?Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the fieldwhere they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepnessof the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.
Unreal precision of the houses at first light
Some motionless conflict in the skyAs of Milton’s angels painted thereIn all their radiance and red maliceIt is a special happiness and universalSimply to know the names of colorsAnd to see them saidShe mixed the colors for house paintersThat was Binghamton Rochester IndianapolisI’ll take less luck if it means less stink she saidA special happiness When clouds contest with clouds In fixed flamboyanceGood versus Evil or beautiful cold hairGod loosed angels on us and they are the air
Birds small enough to nest in our young cypressAre physicians to usThey burst from the tree exactlyWhere the mind ends and the eye seesAnother world the equal of this oneThough only a small boy naked in the sunGlad day glad day I was bornSparrow hatted old New YorkAnd the physician who brought me Drowned under sail next day in a calm seaThere are birds small enough to live foreverWhere the mind ends and whereMy love and I once planted a cypressWhich is God to us
Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,there are some
Don’t take it personal, they said; but I did, I took it all quite personal— the breeze and the river and the color of the fields; the price of grapefruit and stamps, the wet hair of women in the rain— And I cursed what hurt me and I praised what gave me joy, the most simple-minded of possible responses. The government reminded me of my father, with its deafness and its laws, and the weather reminded me of my mom, with her tropical squalls.
Yes, the young mothers are beautiful,with all the self-acceptance of exhaustion,still dazed from their great outpouring,pushing their strollers along the public river walk.
Bewildered Saint of the curse, bulbous
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,and below, in different ink, the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed. I found myself looking:now at the back of each hand,now inside the knees,now turning over each foot to look at the sole.Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants, then at the arguing jays.Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking. Coffee cups, olives, cheeses, hunger, sorrow, fears—these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.How suddenly thenthe strange happiness took me,like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.
There was a melon fresh from the gardenSo ripe the knife slurped As it cut it into six slices. The children were going back to school.Their mother, passing out paper plates,Would not live to see the leaves fall. I remember a hornet, too, that flew inThrough the open window Mad to taste the sweet fruitWhile we ducked and screamed,Covered our heads and faces,And sat laughing after it was gone.
Grandma laughing on her deathbed.Eternity, the quiet one, listening in.Like moths around an oil lamp we were.Like ragdolls tucked away in the attic.In walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers.(How about that?)A dark little country store full of gravedigger’s children buying candy. (That’s how we looked that night.) The young men pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds.It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh.A bird called out of a tree, but received no answer.The beauty of that last momentLike a red sail on the bay at sunset,Or like a wheel breaking off a carAnd roaming the world on its own.
After Erik Satie For an hour I forgot my fat self, my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.For an hour I was a salamandershimmying through the kelp in search of shore,and under his fingers the notes slid loosefrom my belly in a long jellyrope of eggsthat took root in the mud. And whatwould hatch, I did not know—a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass.For an hour I stood on two legs and ran. For an hour I panted and galloped.For an hour I was a maple tree,and under the summer of his fingers the notes seeded and winged away
All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze more or less frequently than the capybara.Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara, who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known as his
We must not look for poetry in poems. —Donald Revell You must not skirt the issue wearing skirts.You must not duck the bullet using ducks. You must not face the music with your face.Headbutting, don’t use your head. Or your butt.You must not use a house to build a home,and never look for poetry in poems.In fact, inject giraffes into your poems.Let loose the circus monkeys in their skirts.Explain the nest of wood is not a homeat all, but a blind for shooting wild ducks.Grab the shotgun by its metrical butt;aim at your Muse’s quacking, Pringled face.It’s good we’re talking like this, face to face.There should be more headbutting over poems.Citing an 80s brand has its cost buthonors the teenage me, always in skirts,showing my sister how to Be the Duckwith a potato-chip beak. Take me home,Mr. Revell. Or make yourself at homein my postbellum, Reconstruction face—my gray eyes, my rebel ears, all my ducksin the row of a defeated mouth. Poemswere once civil. But war has torn my skirtsoff at the first ruffle, baring my butt
After Stevens It was when he said expansively There is no such thing as the truth
God knows the law of life is death,and you can feel it in your warbler neck,your river-quick high stick wristat the end of day. But the trophies:a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle,a magpie dipping her wing tipsin a white cloud, an ouzel barreling hip-high upstream with a warning.You wish you had a river. To makea river, it takes some mountains.Some rain to watershed. You wishyou had a steady meadow and pink thistlesbobbing at the border for your horizons,pale robins bouncing their good posturesin the spruce shadows. Instead, the lawof life comes for you like three men and a car. In your dreams, you win them overwith your dreams: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle. A magpie so slow she knows how to keep death at bay, she takes her time with argument and hides her royal blue in black. Shy as a blue grouse, nevertheless Goddoesn’t forget his green mountains.You wish you had a river.
How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playamid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed underafter early hail. Thus, not every farmer keepsan old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard. Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas, a handful of ragged elms withstand a long swayof heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor themwith a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.
Two young men—you just might call them boys—waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get
He’s supposed to call his doctor, but for now he’s the May King with his own maypole. He’s hallelujah. He’s glory hole. The world has more women than he can shake a stick at. The world is his brickbat, no conscience to prick at, all of us Germans he can
Stick that bumbershootin elephant’s-footbrolly stand behindthe big door. Mindyour manners at High Tea.Hi, you. High ve-locity hailstones creampassersby beyond the panes. I dreamof Jeannie, starring Bar-bara Eden, of Eden, star-ring Eve and Adam, of AdamCartwright, a.k.a. the let-'
Every time I usemy language, I tellthe truth. A catin a white collar,like a priest with calicofur, walks across the deadgrass of the yard, and outthrough the white fence. The sun’sstrong, but the colors of the lawnwere washed out by the winter, not the light.February. Stained glass window of the housenext door takes the sun’s full brunt.It must look spectacularto the neighbor in my head,a white-haired woman with an airof dignity and grace, whothrough pools of the intensestcolors climbs the flight of stairs.I’ve never seen it,but I know it’s there.
were the last wordsof Goethe on hisdeathbed as the darknessclosed around him.But Mayor Lichtwas also the chiefexecutive of Providence,Rhode Island in the earlyEighties. I’m dreamingof the best politicalcommercial of all time—Weimar in the
Lobster in the bathtub. Christmas Eve.Scrub the tub first. Hand off cleanser.Rinse well. We don’t want Cometin our lobster. He’s clickingagainst the porcelain. Everyone leery of going to the bathroom.Bubbles had risen when we lowered him in,now he’s limp. Stare into the waterthat wears a similar gooseflesh.The lobster is dispatched.
By the time he’d hit eighty, he was something out of Ovid,his long beak thin and hooked,
—retracing
In the suburbs on a bike path that inany other age would be a road roughedhalfway through some dark wood’s listening hearttwo damp young men in suits sucked dry of lightwalk stiffly and uncertain round a bendin each left hand the black box of a bookThey see me then spread out to fill the wayas sun blares down and dry May wind slapscheap loose plastic cloth against their shinsThe thinner taller blond one greets me inan earnest tone these days not often heardand when I do not take his offered handsurprised he pulls it back by jerked degreessays
Tragedy began with a dance in the guise of goats, said Aristotle.
You’ve planted and weeded and wheelbarrowed, now tapping a pencil, trying to rememberthe next thing—what was it?—when a shape drops from the sky, shudders and stopsat a tree—red blotch—whack, whack. A creature big enough on this slow spring day to make you mutter,
Always a broom leaned against a wall,meals never on time, if they come at all.Days without dates through which she movesempty and stubborn, slightly confused.Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair,gestures that come from who-knows-where.Old letters unanswered, piled together,papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer.Thankful to be part of your heart’s great wholeyet devoted to the limits of her own small skull.O orderly biped, take heed,leave her alone—let her read.
I was, I was—by its posthumous chomp,by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.If you’re ever shanked like the chumpthat I was, by the posthumous chompof an expired wire, you’ll bellow out promptat the pitiless shiv when she does what she does.Was
O, she says (because she loves to say O),
For knowledge, says the Old Sage, add; for wisdom,subtract. My head in a surgeon’s chair, checking Lao Tsu’s math as these teeth I barely knew I had (mumbled of as wisdom) introducedthemselves—rude party guests—right as they hadto go, their pinched
I have nothing to recant, I am just the decanter. You, the just destroyer, have in faith become the role, recalling for those gathered the noble fallenwith a prayer to his-grace-above-fire, (“Turn me, I’m burnt on that side”)St. Lawrence. Well done, I applaud. And you: Well executed. This is it. Not much else to awaitwhen our fates touch: I’ve nowhere to be but eternity, you’ve nothing to catch but the thatch. Dry on dry,we keep our wits about us
The first seated takes the chance he’ll bestood up. She’s getting on with the hope she mayget off. One and one make onein this riddle. Or, more closely, comedy routine:first, impressions; second, observations. Impolite to have thirds. Bachelors and bachelorettes beware: more than tonight they can mess up your order.Who would go for the lobster expects the claws.No pets allowed, keep your shirt on, places this strict—like loony bins—require a jacket, sir. Mark sudden pauses, gaps in the flap, commas where a sutra might be
At forty-eight, to be given water,which is most of the world, given lifein water, which is most of me, given ease,which is most of what I lack, here, where walls don’t part to my hands, is to be born as of three weeks ago. Taking nothing from you, mother, or you, sky, or you, mountain, that you wouldn’t take if offered by the sea, any sea, or river, any river, or the pool, beside which a woman sits who would save me if I needed saving, in a red suit, as if flame is the color of emergency, as I do, need saving, from solid things, most of all, their dissolve.
When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehogsomewhere in a Germany that hasvanished with its forests and hedgerowsShakespeare would have been a young actorstarting out in a country that wasonly a word to Hans who had learnedfrom those who had painted animalsonly from hearing tales about themwithout ever setting eyes on themor from corpses with the lingeringlight mute and deathly still foreverheld fast in the fur or the feathershanging or lying on a tableand he had learned from others who hadarranged the corpses of animalsas though they were still alive in fullflight or on their way but this hedgehogwas there in the same life as his ownlooking around at him with his brushof camel hair and his stretched parchmentof sheepskin as he turned to each sharpparticular quill and every blackwhisker on the long live snout and thoseflat clawed feet made only for trundlingand for feeling along the dark undersidesof stones and as Hans took them in heturned into the Hans that we would see
For E.B. The sprig of unknown bloom you sent last fallspent the long winter drying on my wall,mounted on black. But it had turned to fluffsome months ago. Tonight I took it downbecause I thought that I had had enoughof staring at it. Brittle, dry and brown,it seemed to speak too plainly of a wasteof friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste.So, after months of fearing to walk pastin case the stir should scatter it to bits,I took it out to scatter it at lastwith my own breath, and so to call us quits.
Two rooms, the Aegean, 2008, there lived a rhapsode and his wife. When they ate, they ate straight from the vine. Her curves, sibilance,Serbo-Croatian chants. His chants, curves of clocks, burnished bells. When they ate, they boiled wings and gills.Nights, slate olives, he couldn’t see.
Imagine having enough left to break a bottle over it. Listen how pretty, listen for glass in nothing nearby shattering, just morning birds that do not wake whoeveris not sleeping. Come hereLittle Birdie,
“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming, linoleum flecked with flame,a thick coat of wax that flasheddown a corridor and led to a room,a place where I curled up a few innocuous inches off the floor. Straps—word out of strophe,the restraints of line and stanza—straps hung in loops on closet hooks. On the nightstand a basket with peanut butter crackers, a vivid and unnatural orange, a crinkly wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked with icy juices, foil boxes, straws glued on. A female voice next door claimed she was still a human being, though I could not hear the reasons. When it was my turn, I answered right away, saying I knew where I was and why. No, I would not harm myself, surprised to be asked as I had never had the thought. Yes I knew where I was going next. Out the window and through shadow and streetlight, I saw how this building connected to the next. I was to follow a stripe painted on the wall. Someone would walk with me as well. I felt fine I said, and it was sort of true. Actually I felt nailed by one wrist to a desire to flee and by the other to a sincere longing for sleep. I was not in pain. Thank you. I felt like the very last note in a concert, the one that hovers as if it wants to linger, but is already over.”
It approaches from the sea, too smallFor thunder and lightningBut ominous as a closed fistAnd what it will bringNearing us, growing larger,Is completely unknown.
before iced coffee came to town, a sump from which I’ve fishedmany a memory of regret and loneliness and whose misery I now understand came less from my pocked nature than from the chokehold of blue laws, and from my broken-willed Eeyore of a used car which liked to stop stubbornly in Sealy, halfway to Hill Country, and always one day after the insurance ran out, and from the paucity of public space so that we drove (locally) from shopping strip to balding park, once to a leech-infested pond; and owing also to the blinding afternoons that made invisible,
During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly. —Guy Murchie “He was mortared to death.” A pity, how we misspeak and mishear. —Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either makes a difference to the increasingly cooler downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what do
turtles generate poemsNo wonder they move so slowly—Somebody in there isTrying to write.
I Google myself I want you to love me When I feel down I want you to Google me I search myself I want you to find me I Google myself I want you to remind me
The Swiss just do whateverlike masturbating their doink-doinksdeep in rural Francein the shadow of Mont Blanc.Heavy, dependableand prepared for whateverthe Swiss vago-simulacrum recognizesas larderKing Hussein and President Fabio,always just about to touch each otheron their devolved sparkle-offsand Neil Patrick Harris appreciation pages.Everyone knows when these bizzarre Swiss comeththey cometh with fluffy Beatles-likesix packs of shit-covered reindeerknock-knocking like a bummer.Glitter is the Swiss Army knifeof the most bedazzlingly ridiculousemotions: the part just beforethe paranoid cheese-maker says,“Whatever you do in Palm Springs,don’t yodel”—a most unusual Swiss Missmixture of very early skunk and the roboticsadness of women’s moldheavy, greasy, dense and low, likelethargic sea-green gardenswith a buzz overpowering, likemodern outdoor inbreeding.
I have written a couple of poems about treespoems about trees and snakes and lakes and birdspoems about nature and life in New EnglandI write crappy poems and eat babiesif you like poems about trees you’re in for a treatwhen I get nervous I get hyper and bump into peopleI read to them what MapQuest gave meround during then in the mom seeker pantiesto help me narrow down the slut thing word jobs
Oddly enough, there is a“Unicorn Pleasure Ring” in existence.Research reveals that Hitler liftedthe infamous swastika from a unicornemerging from a colorful rainbow.Nazi to unicorn: “You’re not comingout with me dressed in that ridiculousoutfit.” You can finally tell your daughterthat unicorns are real. One ripped the head offa waxwork of Adolf Hitler, police said.April
She came from the mountains, killing zombies at will. Some people cried “but that was cool!” and I could only whisper “we should NOT be killing zombies!” What have you gotten yourself to do? Did it ever occur to you that you may in fact hate yourself? I know I do . . . I’m not nearly high enough yet—and you’re not helping. My group got invited to join the Flarfist Collective, set up some hibachis and do what we do best, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this writing if it were a library and I checked out the entire world as if it were a single book. Strike “helpful” off your list. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it’s speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything. Why do I need an enemy to feel okay about what I’m doing? Observe yourself as you browse with sophistication through the topic of Authorship & Credibility. Why do I hate the surface of the world so much that I want to poison it? Why do I hate this so much? Well . . . you Hate Your Fucking Dad! Why is the screen so damn small? And why does the car turn so sharply? And why is the only sound I hear the sound of a raft of marmosets? BECAUSE I’m fucking ANXIOUS AS HELL about EVERYTHING. AAAAAAAAARGH. It’s even worse: “I’ll tell you later.” The medium is literally made of thousands of beautiful, living, breathing wolves. Why do I hate the moon so much? Unpublish your ideas in reverse. People hate any new way of writing. My girlfriend really hates it. There is not so much daytime left. Life is like spring snow tossing off mercurial Creeley-like escapes from life-threatening health problems. In summer we love winter in winter we love summer—all poetry is written in social mercurochrome. Since I hate the abridgement of life, a function of needing to please unpleaseable parents is more what this is about. Hate and love—if those are the options I just want to love and hate lobsters. The oddity is not so much that Blake held these eccentric views for most of his life, but that in modern civilization they not only extend the hand, so that it could not complain about complaining about something it hadn’t even bothered to read, and instead formed a halfway decent indie rock band. I’m actually starting to get much more interested in white people than I used to be. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because it is against everything good this country once espoused. Why do I hate Flarf so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing poets under.
From "Shorter Chaucer Tales" (2006) The great labour of appearanceServed the making of the pyre. But how Nor howHow alsoHow theyShal nat be tooldShall not be told.Nor how the godsNor how the beestes and the birds Nor how the ground agastNor how the fire First with strawAnd then with drye And then with grene And then with goldAnd thenNow how a site is laid like this.Nor whatNor howNor howNor what she spak nor what was her desirNor what jewelsWhen the fireNor how some threw their And some their And their And cups full of wine and milk And bloodInto the fyrInto the fire.Nor how three times And three times withAnd three times how.
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Metropolitan Forecast
Miss Scarlett, effen we kain git de doctahw’en Miss Melly’s time come, doan you bodderAh kin manage. Ah knows all ’bout birthin.Ain’ mah ma a midwife? Ain’ she raise meter be a midwife, too? Jes’ you leave itter me. She warn’t dar. Well’m, Dey Cookie say Miss Meade done got wud early dis mawnin’dat young Mist’ Phil done been shot an’ Miss Meadeshe tuck de cah’ige an’ Ole Talbot an’Besty an’ dey done gone ter fotch him home.Cookie say he bad hurt an’ Miss Meade ain’gwin ter be studyin’ ’bout comin’ uphyah. Dey ain’ dar, Miss Scarlett. Ah drapped inter pass time of de day wid Mammy onmah way home.Dey’s doen gone. House all locked up.Spec dey’s at de horsepittle.Miss Elsing ober at de horsepittle.Dey Cookie ’lows a whole lot of woundedsojers come in on de early train. Cookie fixin’soup ter tek over dar. She say—Yas’mGawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! De Yankees ain’ at Tara, s dey? Gawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll dey do ter Maw?Dey’s fightin’ at Jonesboro, Miss Scarlett!Dey say our gempumus is gittin’ beat.Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happen terMaw an’ Poke? Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happenter us effen de Yankees gits hyah? Oh, Gawd—Ah ain’ nebber seed him, Miss Scarlett.No’m, he ain’ at de horsepittle.Miss Merriwetheran’ Miss Elsing ain’ dar needer.A man he tole me de doctah down by de car shed wid the woundedsojers jes’ come in frum Jonesboro, butMiss Scarlett, Ah wuz sceered ter go down dar terde shed—dey’s folkses dyin’ down dar. Ah’ssceered of daid folkses—Miss Scarlett, fo’ Gawd, Ahcouldn’ sceercely git one of dem ter readyo’ note. Dey wukin’ in de horsepittlelak dey all done gone crazy. One doctahhe say ter me, “Damn yo’ hide! Doan you comeroun’ hyah bodderi’ me ’bout babies w’enwe got a mess of men dyin’ hyah. Git some woman ter he’p you.” An’ den Ah went aroun’ an’ about an’ ask fer newslak you done tole me an’ dey all say “fightin’at Jonesboro” an’ Ah—Is her time nigh, Miss Scarlett?Is de doctah come?Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Miss Melly bad off!Fo’ Gawd, Miss Scarlett—Fo’ Gawd, Miss Scarlett!We’s got ter have a doctah. Ah—Ah—Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nutin’ ‘bout bringin’ babies.
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%. Reaction product of tall oil rosin: 12.5%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.5%. Pentaerythritol [C5H12O4]: 5%. Aliphatic C14 Hydrocarbon: 15%): 19.4%. Carbon Black (C: 92.8%. Petroleum: 5.1%. With sulfur, chlorine, and oxygen contaminates: 2.1%), used as a pigmenting agent: 18.6%. Tung oil (Eleostearic acid [C18H30O2]: 81.9%. Linoleic acid [C18H32O2]: 8.2%. Palmitic acid [C16H32O2]: 5.9%. Oleic acid [CH3(CH2)7CH=CH(CH2)7COOH]: 4.0%.), used as a reducer: 3.3%. Micronized polyethylene wax (C2H4)N: 2.8%. 3/50 Manganese compound, used as a through drier: 1.3%. 1/25 Cobalt linoleate compound used as a top drier: .7%. Residues of blanket wash (roughly equal parts aliphatic hydrocarbon and aromatic hydrocarbon): .2%. Adhered to: cellulose [C6H10O5] from softwood sulphite pulp (Pozone Process) of White Spruce (65%) and Jack Pine (35%): 77%; hardwood pulp (enzyme process pre-bleach Kraft pulp) of White Poplar (aspen): 15%; and batch treated PCW (8%): 69.3%. Water [H2O]: 11.0%. Clay [Kaolinite form aluminum silicate hydroxide (Al2Si2O5[OH]4): 86%. Calcium carbonate (CaCO3): 12%. Diethylenetriamine: 2%], used as a pigmenting filler: 8.4%. Hydrogen peroxide [H2O2], used as a brightening agent: 3.6%. Rosin soap, used as a sizer: 2.7%. Aluminum sulfate [Al2(SO4)]: 1.8%. Residues of cationic softener (H2O: 83.8%. Base [Stearic acid (C18H36O2): 53.8%. Palmitic acid (C16H32O2): 29%. Aminoethylethanolamine (H2-NC2-H4-NHC2-H4-OH): 17.2%]: 10.8%. Sucroseoxyacetate: 4.9%. Tallow Amine, used as a surfactant: 0.3%. Sodium chloride [NaCl], used as a viscosity controlling agent: .2%) and non-ionic emulsifying defoamer (sodium salt of dioctylsulphosuccinate [C20H37NaO7S]), combined: 1.7%. Miscellaneous foreign contaminates: 1.5%.

Words can bang around in your head Forever, if you let them and you give them room. I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do, Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctoryConsolations and the quarrels—as of courseThere is, though what it is is difficult to say.The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now,But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later, All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains: I sat in my roomAlone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelationThat was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere,Repeating them until they almost seemed my own.We like to think our lives are what they study to become,And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim.So much of what we are is sheer coincidence,Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective,Made up out of elementary particles that are in some senseSimply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place.You probably think that this is a poem about poetry (And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time, For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back. * * * A paneled dining room in Holder Hall. Stage right, enter twit:“Mr. Ashbery, I’m your biggest campus fan.” We hit it offAnd talked about “The Skaters” and my preference for “Clepsydra” Vs. “Fragment.” Later on that night John asked me to a party in New York, And Saturday, after dinner and a panel on the artist’s role as something (And a party), driving Lewis’s Austin-Healey through the rain I sealed our friendship with an accident. The party was on Broadway,An apartment (white of course, with paintings) just downstairsFrom Frank O’Hara’s, who finally wandered down. I talked to himA little about Love Poems (Tentative Title), which pleased him,And quoted a line from “Poem” about the rain, which seemed to please him too.The party ended, John and I went off to Max’s, ordered steaks And talked about our mothers. All that talking!—poems and paintings,Parents, all those parties, and the age of manifestos still to come!I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News,Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates,Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de ProvenceAnd talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.”It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a playThat he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity!(Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished.There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin,But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been togetherIn years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartmentOn Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drinkBefore they ate and got to work. It was a New York dreamCome true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings(Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.”John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the tableThe doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museumAnd svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortlyBy “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray,And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologiesWe make up out of memories and the flow of timeA few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost,The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets(Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned LewisIn a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense,Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink,Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going:Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinnerAnd everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished(Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a tableIn a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak;And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine,As those moments that had once seemed singular and clearDissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling”And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls,Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolvedAnd finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down.The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair”Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’sParents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie barThat left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AMAnd failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San DiegoThe next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poemsAnd started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoonFrom Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed.Ninety-fifth Street soldiered on for several years.I remember a cocktail party (the symposium of those days),Followed by dinner just around the corner at Elaine’s,Pre-Woody Allen. It was there I learned of R.F.K.’s assassinationWhen I woke up on the daybed in the living room, and whereJohn told me getting married would ruin me as a poet(I don’t know why—most of his friends were married), a judgmentHe revised when he met Susan and inscribed The Double Dream of Spring“If this is all we need fear from spinach, then I don’t mind so much”(Which was probably premature—watering his plants one dayShe soaked his landlord, Giorgio Cavallon, dozing in the garden below).It was where Peter Delacorte late one night recited an entire sideOf a Firesign Theatre album from memory, and set John on that path,To his friends’ subsequent dismay, and where he blessed me with his extra copyOf The Poems, and next day had second thoughts (though I kept it anyway). Sometimes a vague, amorphous stretch of years assumes a shape,And then becomes an age, and then a golden age alive with possibilities,When change was in the air and you could wander through its streetsAs though through Florence and the Renaissance. I know it sounds ridiculous,But that’s the way life flows: in stages that take form in retrospect,When all the momentary things that occupy the mind from day to dayHave vanished into time, and something takes their place that wasn’t there,A sense of freedom—one which gradually slipped away. The centerOf the conversation moved downtown, the Renaissance gave way to mannerismAs the junior faculty took charge, leaving the emeriti alone and out of itOf course, lying on the fringes, happily awake; but for the rest The laws proscribing what you couldn’t do were clear. I got so tiredOf writing all those New York poems (though by then I’d moved to Boston—To Siena, you might say) that led to nowhere but the next one,So I started writing poems about whatever moved me: what it’s likeTo be alive within a world that holds no place for you, yet seems so beautiful;The feeling of the future, and its disappointments; the trajectory of a life,That always brought me back to time and memory (I’d finished Proust by then),And brings me back to this. John finally moved downtown himself,Into a two-story apartment at Twenty-fifth and Tenth, with a spiral staircase Leading to a library, the locus of the incident of Susan, Alydar and John And the pitcher of water (I’ll draw a veil over it), and Jimmy Schuyler sighing“It’s so beautiful,” as Bernadette Peters sang “Raining in My Heart” from Dames at Sea.The poetry still continued—mine and everyone’s. I’d added Jimmy To my pantheon (as you’ve probably noticed), but the night in nineteen sixty-six Seemed more and more remote: I never saw Kenneth anymore,And there were new epicenters, with new casts of characters, like Madoo, Bob Dash’s garden in Sagaponack, and Bill and Willy’s loft in Soho.John moved again, to Twenty-second Street, and Susan and I moved to Milwaukee,Where our son was born. I stopped coming to New York, and writing poems, For several years, while I tried to dream enough philosophy for tenure.One afternoon in May I found myself at Ninth and Twenty-second,And as though on cue two people whom I hadn’t seen in years—David Kalstone, Darragh Park—just happened by, and then I took a taxi down to SohoTo the loft, and then a gallery to hear Joe Brainard read from I Remember,Back to John’s and out to dinner—as though I’d never been away, Though it was all too clear I had. Poems were in the air, but theory too, And members of the thought police department (who must have also gotten tenure) Turned up everywhere, with arguments that poetry was called upon to prove.It mattered, but in a different way, as though it floated free from poemsAnd wasn’t quite the point. I kept on coming back, as I still do.Half my life was still to come, and yet the rest was mostly personal:I got divorced, and Willy killed himself, and here I am now, ready to retire.There was an obituary in the Times last week for Michael Goldberg,A painter you’ll recall from Frank O’Hara’s poems (“Why I Am Not a Painter,”“Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”). I didn’t know him,But a few months after the soiree on Ninety-fifth Street I was at a partyIn his studio on the Bowery, which was still his studio when he died.The New York art world demimonde was there, including nearly everyoneWho’s turned up in this poem. I remember staring at a guy whoLooked like something from the Black Lagoon, dancing with a gorgeousWoman half his age. That’s my New York: an island dreamOf personalities and evenings, nights where poetry was second natureAnd their lives flowed through it and around it as it gave them life.O brave new world (now old) that had such people in’t! * * * “The tiresome old man is telling us his life story.” I guess I am, but that’s what poets do—not always Quite as obviously as this, and usually more by indirectionAnd omission, but beneath the poetry lies the singular reality And unreality of an individual life. I see it as a long,Illuminated tunnel, lined with windows giving on the scenes outside—On Ninety-fifth Street forty years ago. As life goes onYou start to get increasingly distracted by your own reflectionAnd the darkness gradually becoming visible at the end. I try not to look too far ahead, but just to stay here— Quick now, here, now, always—only something pulls meBack (as they say) to the day, when poems were more like secrets,With their own vernacular, and you could tell your friends By who and what they read. And now John’s practically become A national treasure, and whenever I look up I think I see him Floating in the sky like the Cheshire Cat. I don’t knowWhat to make of it, but it makes me happy—like seeing Kenneth Just before he died (“I’m going west John, I’m going west”) In his apartment on a side street near Columbia, or rememberingOnce again that warm spring night in nineteen sixty-six. I like to think of them together once again, at the cocktail partyAt the end of the mind, where I could blunder in and ruin it one last time.Meanwhile, on a hillside in the driftless region to the west,A few miles from the small town where The Straight Story ends,I’m building a house on a meadow, if I’m permitted to return,Behind a screen of trees above a lower meadow, with some apple treesIn which the fog collects on autumn afternoons, and a vistaOf an upland pasture without heaviness. I see myselfSitting on the deck and sipping a martini, as I used to at Larre’s, In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there— But where? I think my life is still all conversation,Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever,Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lightsAnd it begins to rain. And then we’re there together In the house on the meadow, waiting for whatever’s left to comeIn what’s become the near future—two versions of myself And of the people that we knew, each one an otherTo the other, yet both indelibly there: the twit of twentyAnd the aging child of sixty-two, still separateAnd searching in the night, listening through the nightTo the noise of the rain and memories of rainAnd evenings when we’d wander out into the Renaissance,When I could see you and talk to you and it could still change;And still there in the morning when the rain has stopped,And the apples are all getting tinted in the cool light.
Eyes that spurn yet inviteLike spikes in the sunlightOf Manhattan’s high-rise—Babylon’s ladies outshineDaughters of Jerusalem,Zion is no easy climb
Now and againI am here nowAnd now is whenI’m here again
For John Thornton Fellow fugitiveForgive yourselfAnd me therebyThus we can liveWhatever’s leftOf time for us,Each day a giftWe take on trust
You are for me as you cannot beFor yourself, chaos without demandTo speak, the amethyst nothingHidden inside the trinket shop’s stone,Dark eyes dark asterisks where lightFootnotes a margin left blank. YouDon’t look up to look up at the sky. Your ears parenthesize nothingThat occurs, that I keep from occurring,In the poem, on the page, as you areFor me, not a shadow, but a shadeWhose darkness drops from no objectBut is itself yourself, a form of timeSpanning nothing, never is your name.
Must I, in this question I am asking, include myselfAsking it? Must I include my face—My face that I cannot see—through which I speakThis question about my eyes, about the fieldOf vision, in which my hands press down these lettersUnattached to my arms? The sunlightComes in the window and lights up my handsAs they work. The world is not being kindBut there is the sensation of kindness. There is an appeal to a rule when we realize a termBehaves uncomfortably. God falls down Into grammar and says
Let’s make believeI am happy, I laughBlack poison, all of meIts bottleful,Become sparkling water
On opening a long unopened book,what odor rises from the parting pages,what genie is released, what dark spell broken,as if some spirit trapped inside for ages,By this hinge swung open were set free?My father’s hand has jotted in the marginsits own blunt text of what must belecture notes, and planted his place markerLike a flag among “The Dry Salvages”—a UC
If thy own hand . . . offend thee —Matthew 18:8 Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated—chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdrawfor reasons they leave tactfully unstated,leaving you to guess at your faux pasFrom all you did and didn’t say for ages,as in some vast congressional report,your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,you see yourself, as if you’d never met.Who is this rumpled lookalike who wearsa blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringesaved—for what?—that you might now despisepages time has lent a jaundiced tingepouring forth their daisy-dotted
For Russ I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:remember that day you lost two years agoat the rockpool where you sat and played the jewelerwith all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?Most of them went dark and nothing more,but sometimes one would blink the secret colorit had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.This is how you knew the ones to keep.So I collect the dull things of the dayin which I see some possibilitybut which are dead and which have the surpriseI don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell—so I look at them and look at them untilone thing makes a mirror in my eyesthen I paint it with the tear to make it bright.This is why I sit up through the night.
As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour before the house had woken to make surethat everything was in order with The Lie,his drip changed and his shackles all secure.I was by then so practiced in this choreI’d counted maybe thirteen years or moresince last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.I was at full stretch to test some ligaturewhen I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore his gag away; though as he made no cry,I kept on with my checking as before.
A moth lies open and lieslike an old bleached beech leaf,a lean-to between window frame and sill. Its death protects a collection of tinier deaths and other dirts beneath.Although the white paint is water-stained, on it death is dirt, and hapless.The just-severed tiger lily is drinking its glass of water, I hope.This hope is sere.This hope is severe.What you ruin ruins you, tooand so you hope for favor.I mean I do.The underside of a ladybug wanders the window. I wanderthe continent, my undercarriage not as evident,so go more perilously, it seems to me.But I am only me; to you it seems clearI mean to disappear, and am meanand project on you some ancient fear.If I were a bug, I hope I wouldn’t bethis giant winged thing, spindly like a crane fly,skinny-legged like me, kissing the cold ceiling, fumbling for the face of the other, seeking.It came in with me last night when I turned on the light.I lay awake, afraid it would touch my face.It wants out. I want out, too.
What was it for the longest time but lore, lure;A heard-tell growing gold in the mind.Word said (and word’d spread) it was well on backThrough the underwood by Bowen’s Canal.
Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpsebehind the heels and drags itbehind his chariot like the cans that traila bride and groom. Then he lays outa banquet for his men, oxen and goatsand pigs and sheep; the soldiers eatuntil a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
I think of the man who satbehind my grandmother’s sisterin church and told herthe percentage of Indian in her blood, calling it outover the white pews.I wonder what madehim want to count it like coins or a grade.I wish I could hear himnow when I think of hersaying that all the Wampanoag bloodin her body wouldfit in one finger,discounting the percentageit seemed, but why was she such a historian, tracingthe genealogy of the lastWampanoag up to her ownchildren, typing it all on see-throughpaper? Maybe like meshe felt a little self-consciouscaring about whatwe’re made of instead of simply beingsatisfied dressingour bodies and drivingthem around. Maybe she felt shyfor loving someoneshe’d never met, I meanI do. I think of the knife cutting into flesh and the fork carrying it
REDThe skim on the surface of your soup, or the cut on your platein the Café des Anges, juices swamping the willow-pattern skiffas she dabs her mouth with her napkin, your blind, blind date,leaving a smudge, lipstick-and-gore, though there’s still a wormof gristle in the gap between her teeth.Mood music, candlelight, wine, low voices in a world of harm, the creature brought down, hindquarters heavy, hind legsbroken by the dogs, its head held up, eyes wide,the tangle and drag as a gralloch knife unpegsthe bulk, all slippage and seepage, and the way she thumbsa morsel into your mouth, or smiles your smileback at you, lets you know that everything’s just as it seems,then back at the small hotel, she strips off quicker than youmight have hoped, pink as a new-skinned cat, all too eager to have you by heart. Her cry tells you nothing new.
White hail pelting the frozen bog,I’m stuck in the first line of January,following my host’s dogon his walk through the stone century,around the quarry, slices of marble and mud,past a herd of miners exhaling smoke,past a barn smelling of merde,and back to where I’m stuck and broke.The fucking dog barks at the night,mad at the stars all his life and then again.I rethink kicking him out,but being cool, I let him in.
Now I can see: even the trees
Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth each morning. Unfasten all the bones that make a head, and let me rest: unknown among the oboe-throated geese gone south to drop their down and sleep beside the out-
We are dropping one and gaining two—.The things I cannot doinclude to sleep,to calm the spillway of the blood,to face an auditorium,wishing it were churchy pillbox hats—recital mothers’—with no sense of Vogue or the Baroque.I’ve other pillsto tramp on grief, estrange pain,and hatch the part of waking that is dreams,double one dose to un-depressand to write less and lessa chronicle of anxiety.I spot-treata spate of addictionin this faint dusk world of peach sky and plum leaflets—a woman in her prime,pilled together.
Ancients threw the masks down the cenote—the faces smashed first in little ways before the long drop, an eye or an ear broken, a mouth snapped in half. Then, lifted from the well, two thousand years later, still grinning and golden. The loose spooling of two people fast unravels—how we let go of time spent, how heat fades, how a body forgets fully what it knew. I have learned your face as you will never.The third day we met you gave me all your secrets until I held an ocean in a cradle. Now all I ask for is more.
If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins. Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us, influenced by the sphere of angels. Here, then—thumbnail sketches for zoning changes along the riparian bankof the species boundary, for a chimera. Like fiber optics, human nerveslay along glassy bone
We can never be with loss too long.Behind the warped door that sticks,the wood thrush calls to the monks,pausing upon the stone crucifix,singing: “I am marvelous alone!”Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:rows of marrow and bone undone.The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,sealing the blue hills with vermilion.Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.The cemetery expands its borders—little milky crosses grow like teeth.How kind time is, altering spaceso nothing stays wrong; and light,more new light, always arrives.
A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill, grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks, young men’s voices too loud for a day exhaling into starless skies, bad boysafter keg night, hungover, push long scullsinto the water and slice its marcelled run, a marbled peacock wake behind each strokeand coxswain counting that muscled steadinesspast the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridgethen Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bankEakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull,his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat offlast night’s lost time but won’t row too far north to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath,mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh
We scratch at the backyard togetherthrough leaf mould, worm casings she kicks offin a fan behind her. I use a stickto dig, to find for her what she’s shown menear the roots, at the edge of a step—stickyslug on the underside of a hosta’s leaf.How complicated she is and how resigned.Between her beak and my outstretched hand,the worm’s writhing. Then the long slick goingdown. It fills the throat, like all that’s swallowed. Her head chucks it back, for the worm again dark. The hen’s pupil dilates. She wends and follows.Her queries, sighs, low gurgles, the hasteningclick of her nails on pavement then hungryagain into the grass. Grubs are largerthan pale yellow larvae I prize from insidechestnuts. These mucousy blind wanderersshe eats right from my palm. Nevertheless I amrepulsed by my husband’s embrace. I turnnow from his thick belly, breasts, his interests.A body I had clambered over, loved.I scrabble, struggle. I cover myself. Another sticky truth dug up that I must re-bury— sorry on hands and knees, hungry and wary.
The canals of Marsbeseech various oxides, vastdust stormsof a dulled red,a daytime warmththat only reaches so far.Let’s call these fissures canalsso we’ll think of Venicelooking through our telescopeas Mars comes this closein this our anniversary yearwith its thin atmosphereand, to be probed,its extreme cold.
I was conceived in the cruelest monthin whatever spring California could muster.A little rain—with some more likely.And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground?Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes,other prevailing enticements and what Eliot calledthe
Frosty, green through gray rising steeply,top of the bank a big top, red with a sign,misty, fantastical on the walk to school.“My sister can’t express herself properly. Imagine if those performerswere stuck in their caravansforever. If round the back of the big topthe doors were locked. That’s her.She’s a trapeze artist, lion tamer,cramped clean-faced clowndrinking tea, practicing tricks,movement through frosted windows.Language is her caravan on bricks,with tiny little windows in.”At the weekend he and his sisterstood on the frosty bankbeside his metaphor. She read the postercarefully, got them sat down in good time and at the back.The trapeze artist, lion tamer, freshly-made-up clownfilled the top with a noise he could go on translating forever.Walking home she opened her chest:“I liked the mime best.”
Under the locked grille, the animals are crying.You hear them while you wait and when the bus pulls up,Finally, and you get on. That was many years ago.The cellar is given over to new shopkeepers, one after the other,Who fail and are replaced. Even the selfish brother,The crazed neighbor, the criminal in his cell, face of blueTattoos, has never allowed a living thing to starveAs you have. Who knows this except for you and the laughingAfrican with his flashing gold teeth and padlock key.
A good way to fall in loveis to turn off the headlights and drive very fast down dark roads.Another way to fall in loveis to say they are only mints and swallow them with a strong drink.Then it is autumn in the body.Your hands are cold.Then it is winter and we are still at war.The gold-haired girl is singing into your earabout how we live in a beautiful country.Snow sifts from the cloudsinto your drink. It doesn’t matter about the war.A good way to fall in loveis to close up the garage and turn the engine on,then down you’ll fall through lovely mistsas a body might fall early one morning from a high window into love. Love,the broken glass. Love, the scissorsand the water basin. A good way to fallis with a rope to catch you.A good way is with something to drinkto help you march forward.The gold-haired girl says,
She dances only in her necklace,scotch-lit surely. He touches his glasses.Nightie-less, dugs whipping, hair sprung,some music inside, out, wet tonguetip at her lip, no mere palsied shuffle,both bony feet lifted, elbows awful.Shakespeare’s banshee of wailing parts,a woman with hair, a woman with warts.He’s fixed to the floor. Dear Heloise:do other presumed-sane mothers do this—wait in the dark after the ballto strip for their sons at the end of the hall?A dream, insists his sisterbut his first wife knows better.
I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now.Later we could go back and cross things out,that way we wouldn’t know where we came from,the shapes we asked to be bent into.Sinatra’d be okay again,mother the same distal approximation,the sea still trying to spit it out.Sometimes your sleep is different than mine.I can’t catch up.I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside.Wind wants to make me correct something,the refrigerator says something needs to be pushedfurther from the sun.Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyardand where it rises, some automatons bash togethermellifluous metal tubingimparting a festive contusionto the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed.To find out why life has this glass sparkleat the end of a dark hall.To find out why the paper skeleton holds its handsdemurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way?To find out how we fell.There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through.To find out where the blood comes from on the towels.Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent.To find out if my heart is unruined.Father, are you out thereor was your corpse accurate?
At a book of detailsOf all the moments when knowledge is acquired.A sort of expanded balloonSighs and says, “We are what came before.”“The storm in the window of the mind,”The sleeping sister says while she’s walking aroundWonderland watchingA cat touching down and talking.Not a car in sight. A cemetery seen from the air.All the obelisks you could ever ask for.
It’s now all about money about which poetry rarely reaches transcendence. But love must still fester even under that. Everyone I knowfrets if poetry can still matter,but what about love? It’s all becometoo much for them, and they’re all on the soma. It makes sense with these pills when the someonethey thought they loved for yearsby never thinking about it says, “I don’t love you anymore,but let’s stay friends in that mellowwoebegone way poetry now sings without singing.” Of course, they’re always asking “What is poetry?”and then answering by saying it’s what Boethius was thinking aboutwhen they squished his headuntil his eyes popped out, or anything barbaric enough to geteveryone to stop eating for a bitand reach for a moment past a chatty moment. Sort of a solution to awkward goodbyes. How money becomes a sort of welcome relief that defuses the poetry charging tense moments. “Interesting,”someone remarks between bites, “to be right here in the momentyet also out there watching some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity unfold, as if living as if already dead.” As if standing in a dream far up in the stars somewhere with Scipio
An old man with a new hat is running out of pride. I want to tell the truth but I don’t know how. The wind is our best pen and it blows poetry out of the water. I wait for days and weeks to enter a feeling that’s had years to leave. The ocean keeps throwing questions it has all the answers to. A candle lights a room and dims the stars. When all that consoled consoles no longer loneliness finds a room inside the one it knows. I am shrinking from the light and turning into space. An old man with a new hat wears his smile in the dark.
For Craig The blackbird sings atthe frontier of his music.The branch where he satmarks the brink of doubt,is the outpost of his realm,edge from which to routencroachers with trillsand melismatic runs sur-passing earthbound skills.It sounds like ardor,it sounds like joy. We are gladhere at the borderwhere he signs the airwith his invisible staves,“Trespassers beware”—Song as survival—a kind of pure music whichwe cannot rival.
“Jena before us in the lovely valley” thus my mother on a postcard from a walking holiday on the banks of the Saale, she was spending a week at the spa of Kosen; long forgotten now, the ancestor no more, her script a subject for graphology, years of becoming, years of illusion, only those words I’ll never forget. It wasn’t a great picture, no class, there was not enough blossom to justify lovely, poor paper, no pulp-free mass, also the hills weren’t green with vineyards, but she was from back-country hovels, so the valleys probably did strike her as lovely, she didn’t need laid paper or four-color print, she supposed others would see what she had seen. It was something said at a venture, an exaltation had prompted it, the landscape had moved her, so she asked the waiter for a postcard, and yet—
A bunch of glads, certainly highly emblematic of creation, remote from frills of working blossom with hope of fruit: slow, durable, placid, generous, sure of kingly dreams. All else is natural world and intellect! Over there the mutton herds: strenuous ends of clover and daggy sheep— here friendly talents, pushing Anna to the center of attention, explaining her, finding a solution! The glads offer no solution: being—falling— you mustn’t count the days— fulfillment livid, tattered, or beautiful.
Feel it—but remember, millennia have felt it—the sea and the beasts and the mindless starswrestle it down today as ever
Finis Poloniae—a phrase/figure of speech,that apart from its literal historical meaningstands in forthe end of empires.Charged atmosphere,everything breathes damply,epicene air—if it could think anythingit would think un-European things like monsoonsand yellow seas.Greatness bears itself to death,says its last words to itself,a foreign-sounding swansong, generally misunderstood,sometimes tolerated—Finis Poloniae—perhaps on a rainy day, bummer, but in this instance a sound of happinessfollowed by solo horn,and then a hydrangea, most placid of flowers,capable of standing out in the rain into November,dropped softly into the grave.
The spine is a slide of human marvels; it is a hierarchy of white florets; it is a cult of secret brothers; it is a deliberate list; so look how the spineless relax in their unblushing banality. I lose my patience in Greensboro where no discoveries are ever made and the only inner lavishment is the bar, occasionally. The spineless aspire to incessant interludes that never arrive anywhere and that can’t remember wherefrom they came. Mary is slightly spineless, for instance: her dress is cream her skin is cream her creamy mind is fine and her life will end finely—how sad is that to think of, the finery of a cream life? It is the saddest of all truths that can be read on a person’s face in a decorous garden that person has planted themselves and of which they are explaining to you the intricacies and expense: “notice how in the light”; “three pallets shipped last week”; “have complementary attitudes when it comes to soil-type and moisture.” She isn’t wicked; but, also, she destroys the art of her life.
Out here in the desert, everything is one thing: the desert. What god but the One God, exotic in his reachless amount casting love over our encampment beside the nervy water of Jordan? John, you have a little gristle when you speak and what’s left of you is the scrape of a year starved on grasshoppers. It is touching to see the basin of your devoted body. A little bit east, whole lambs were smeared on the temple. The city was coiled, white within its walls (violet), its muscles twisting over muscles. The temple, sleek at the top, smiled with music—it might’ve lifted for a second.I was just there. The priests wore such tall hats, heavenly bodies dropped behind their eyes. The mothers of Jerusalem suggested curtains tattering down from the markets that whirred with the songs of bargaining, parting one from the other, laughing home.The dust lifted into the hair of the peaceful citizens and was shaken out. The land was socializing. The invalids were blind as stars; the children plaited their hair in a manner pleasing to mountain lions: the boys; the trumpets bellowed like lonely bulls—they were distressed, despite their red velvet dresses; the widows were wrapping themselves in silk as their sons carried nearby stones outside the city; mules were begging to be beaten with softer sticks; a yellowing vine was making love to a young tree; grape skins were staining the feet of dancers; merchant’s fingers became little bodies which wrapped themselves around each coin; cups of hot tea startled the mouths of the idle; a tangle of serpents tried to choose just one mate; the lit membrane of a sheet hung in a window to dry, itself a heavenly body. I could go on, John, but why leave the sheet? What sermon on hope or virtue can you make that is more convincing than it?Leaving the city was a wrenching kind of death, but lying here by you, John, in rocks and flat dirt—Heaven is unexpected.
Branches etch the film of iceon the studio window. A crow looks in,hopping and shrieking when I dancein my black tutu, trimmed with silver. The ballet master says,
Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behindten men curled like scythes round the fire.Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a packof ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the cariouscanines before the rath, left the scapula—freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives.Passed (in a dream)
Woke in the brume,lilacs like turf stars.The late fawnstanding in his syrups;bucks down the swalechewing sedge.We move southto slopes of sleeping poppy,past the white alder,bending heads to scentof calx—in natural darka man tries his handat belonging. Hewith greave of hide, a bornhood, lay with threespikes in the clay, greenpeak in the breeze.He whose breathingwrongs the still.You stir now to mend,to redress?To be one of us, after all this?
Griffith Park, Los AngelesEvery living heart . . . all over this broad land, will yet swell . . . , when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —Abraham Lincoln Because the body now and its organs suggest nothing but those pathologies in which we’ve been instructed,Because the gutter’s black as new blood, a Petri dish of piss and teeth knocked loose at the root,Because our walking here’s scared up pigeons and the air’s thick with their disease, because, therefore, we’re holdingOur breath in silent prayer, Good People of Los Angeles, for our immune systems, for hand sanitizer,For swift and decisive return of the sun’s irradiating grace, I can hardly say I even know you muchBeyond the turnstile’s slick in the discount supermarket, the sidewalk’s chewing gum and tuberculosis.But I’ve been thinking of you, of your eyes darting behind
Homeless and never sadder,dragging bags, spending money,leaning over luggage,suddenly saying, “Without you, God,I can’t continue.” Who was that?And then I lift it and walk to find one book.Up Iffley Turn to the Hawkwell and Tree Innsand down over a lockinto an extended filthy riverthrough the Thames Valleyand over a meadow into town:two fats,one fishing and one man on a bikeswerving through Cotswold cow pads.I ask:“Do you know the fastest wayto City Centre?”No, yes, no!Circle Magdalen College, and the mall, the High,Broad Street,
It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.
In the middle of Decemberto start overto assume againan orderat the endof wonderto conjureand then to keepslow dirty sleetwithin its streetlight
This is the house of the very rich.You can tell because it’s taken allThe colors and left only the spacesBetween colors where the absenceOf rage and hunger survives. If you couldGet close you could touch the embersOf red, the tiny beaks of yellow,
a woman moves through dog rose and juniper bushes,a pussy clean and folded between her legs,breasts like the tips of her festive shoesshine silently in her heavy armoire.one blackbird, one cow, one horse.the sea beats against the wall of the waterless. she walks to a phone booth that waitsa fair distance from all three villages.it’s a game she could have heard on the radio:a question, a number, an answer, a prize.her pussy reaches up and turns on the light in her womb.
In their excess, their blowsy dreamingand King Solomon-like tempers, the cloudspossess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,when a painter earned his professionas an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,treated that blank pasture of the “heavens”like something that had lived. Their crawly undoings remind usof the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls of cotton—the morning phosphorescentor sunset a dull, worn-out gilt.The nights there were scumbled with light.How could we ever have taken themfor the abstinence of art?
I miss the moshpit pushed to the side of the bed.The hard and fast rules, the business,Walking across town the baby’s hand in mineGave me anxiety Rosado barely mellowed.Who doesn’t love to hear about anxiety.You wouldn’t be too wrong to wake from dreamingInto an amusement park sluice of RiojaEau de post-Auden thanks a lot Timex hubbub.Those feelings are in their way good luck.I don’t even need a communion waferTo feel the need to broadcast imprecationsFade like a docent as the hedge fund falls.
the plates are broken after just one meal: plates that mimic lily pads or horseshoe crabs, swifts’ wings, golden koi, whirlpools, blowholes in rictus: all smashed against the table’s edge—
I’m not interested in sadness,just a yard as elder earth,a library of sunflowersbattered by the night’s rain.When sliced wide, halved at dawn,I can see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock.Hardly held, for years I sleptwith my window wide open,wanting screen-cut threads of rain.Blind suburb, dear untruth,you who already know what I meanwhen I praise every spared copse,you were my battery, my sad clue,but after I mowed the lawnand watched robins chestingfor seeds I couldn’t resistwhat hung in the toolshed, where, with a pair of garden shearsI cut all the hair from my arms. That need,that scared need to whitenor clean a surface: plywood or lawn,and the spywall behind which I stood,stock-still, and sinned againstthe fly’s flyness. Though you liveinside me, though you laid eggsin the moisture at the cornersof my eyes, I still dream aboutyour sinking empire twenty feet abovesea level, and the many thingsyou never see: beautiful bleachedgas can, tomato posts bent into art,
Such green, such green,this apple-, pea- and celadon,this emerald and pine and limeunsheathed to makea miser weep, to make his punybunions shrink; these seasand seas of peony, these showytons of roseto urge a musted monk disrobe,an eremitic nun unfold;such breathy, breathy mothand wasp, such gleeful,greedy bee to bidthe bully hearts of copsand bosses sob,to tell a stubby root unstub, a rustedhinge unrust, the slug unsalt;to stir the fustedlungs to brim, the skin to sting,the dormant,tinning tongue to singe and hymn.
The heat so peaked tonightthe moon can’t coola scum-mucked swimmingpool, or breezeemerge to lift the frowsyruff of owls too hotto hoot, (the mouse and brownbarn rat astuteenough to know to dropand dash) whileon the bunched up,corkscrewed sheets of cotsand slumped brass beds,the fitful twistand kink and plead to dreama dream of airas bitter cruel as wintergale that scrapes and blowsand gusts the grateto luffthe whitened ashes from the coal.
Less a nip than gnaw,the way a goat,tethered, will ruminatea rope; the wayeach
Everyone comes here from a long way off(is a line from a poem I read last night). * * * Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled. * * * Alternatively:A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theaterwatching a movie in which a man and a woman,old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road.The woman is describing the end of her marriageand sobbing, shaking her head and laughingand sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening,his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance,and because, in the restaurant before the filmthe woman had been describing the end of her marriageand cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theateror on the mountain road, and when the timber truckcomes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch. * * * He found that it was no good trying to tellwhat happened that day. Everything he saidseemed fictional the moment that he said it,the rain, the scent of her hair, what she saidas she was leaving, and why it was importantfor him to explain that the car had been parkedunder eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvetyand blurred the trees looked through the windshield;not, he said, that making fictions might not bethe best way of getting at it, but that nothing he saidhad the brute, abject, unassimilated qualityof a wounding experience: the ego in any tellingwas already seeing itself as a character, and a character,he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment,even as he kept wanting to explain to someone,to whomever would listen, that she had closed the doorso quietly and so firmly that the beads of rainon the side window didn’t even quiver. * * * Names for involuntary movements of the body—squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder—sound like a law firm in Dickens:“Mr. Flinch took off his black glovesas if he were skinning his hands.”“Quiver dipped the nib of his peninto the throat of the inkwell.” * * * The receptionist at the hospital morgue told himto call the city medical examiner’s office,but you only got a recorded voice on weekends. * * *Setup without the punchline:Three greenhorns are being measured for suitsby a very large tailor on Hester Street. * * *Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing.What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked.Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other.Or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas. * * *“Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,and angry,” said the friendwho knew her better,“and she’d run out of stories.Or come to the one story.” * * *It is good to sit down to birthday cakewith children, who think it is the entire pointof life and who, therefore, respect each detailof the ceremony. There ought to be a rule,he thought, for who gets to lick the knifethat cuts the cake and the rule should haveits pattern somewhere in the winter stars.Which do you add to the tea first, he’d asked,the sugar or the milk? And the child had said,instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cooland angular as words: angular, sidereal.) * * *Stories about the distribution of wealth:Once upon a time there was an old manand an old women who were very, very poor. * * *How Eldie Got Her NameThe neighborhood had been so dangerous,she said, there was one summer when the mailmenrefused to deliver the mail. Her mothernever appeared and her grandmother,who had bought a handgun for protectionand had also taught her how to use it,would walk her to the post office for the sweet,singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled,or that she imagined smelled, of Florida.She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruderclimbing in the window. The roar,she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t knowto this day whether she hit the man or not.(A big-boned young woman, skin the colorof the inside of some light-colored hazelnutconfection, auburn eyes, some plucked stringof melancholy radiating from her whole bodywhen she spoke.) Did her mama come back?They had asked. She never came back.The mail started up again but the letters stopped.Turned out she was good in school, and thatwas what saved her. She loved the laborof schoolwork. Loved finishing a projectand contemplating the neatness of her script.Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes,amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.” * * *Punchline without the setup:And the three nuns from Immaculate Conceptionnodded and smiled as they passed,because they thought he was addressing them in Latin. * * *He had known, as long as he’d known anything,that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve,his mother told him why he had no shadow. * * *Because she, not her sister, answered the door,she was the first to hear the news. * * *A Ballad:He loved to watch that woman sew.She let her hair grow long for show.Riddle’s a needle (a refrain might go)and plainly said is thread. * * *She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.She’d had a go at putting herself together;she had always had the confidence that,with a face like hers, a few touchesto represent the idea of a put-together lookwould do, like some set designer’s geniusminimalism. It had a slightly harridan effectand he remembered that it wasn’t what washeadlong or slapdash about her, but the waythey gestured, like a quotation, at an understandingof elegance it would have been boring to spell out,that had at first dazzled him about her.He felt himself stirring at this recognition,and at a certain memory that attended it,and then laughed at the thought that he hadactually stimulated himself with an analysisof her style, and she said, as if she were rememberingthe way he could make her insecure, “What?What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.”And she said, “Oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.” * * *Two jokes walk into a bar.A cage went in search of a bird.A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.Three rabbis walk into a penguin. * * *In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,and one night it was very warm and they could not sleepfor the heat and the stillness, and they went outside,beyond the wall of their parents’ garden and into a meadow.It was a dark night, moonless, and the stars were so thickthey seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long timein the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the skyand listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirringand saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching themfrom the woods’ edge. “Maybe it’s their friend, the bear,”one of the children said. “I don’t like this story,” said the other.
Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional map intrigues me: say clotheslines’fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage lids clanging downhill to the sea: say therein the sea floesof penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos.How hard is it to get lost? Listen to lostuseless horses whingeing for home & hames, a lostgrail stuffed with dirt deaf to human legends long unstrung of sacred tune & lost, children prodded along in the loops of war,hopscotch mistake, the cast stoneskipped off the lake instead & lost the tournamentto the nice policeman there with the ice creamprecinct & his body buddy Dad. Dad declares he knowsby the spit & stripe of her this’s no one of his own, his kids mope, & he goes. Ear to ear I must look lucky at last, librarianat the dictionary of things looking-up ever sinceI hid in the glove box, pretending to be directions.
I was just getting to that.But first, old age.If you could just let me finish.Once it was I who rudelyinterrupted proceedings: the chair rapped& called to order, but I seized from pendingapproval the minutes & ran off with the handsome mustachioed night watch. Matching wits we wound upjangling on a motelbureau in simultaneous alarm & ran down together to silence,Bide-a-Wee’s appointedguest in his sleep deceasedso far from home he didn’t knowa soul. A what? We heard Gideons rustling in the drawer,& as we rifled the fellow’s bags before we fled, & fled, his time flew too,from his cuffs & collars flapping ahead.
First there was Jim, clamping to my long black hair that nine-pound Cleopatra wig with nylon bands and bobbie pins.Meanwhile I was on fire for Chad, who coached me a bit impatiently Tuesday nights on my Joan-of-Arc inflection.Then Terence said I’d be perfect for the lounge-singer- turned-whore, and as it turned out that was a fairly easy gig.Max signed me on soon after, claiming I was a natural for Eternally Aggrieved Girl, which in hindsight hurts me deeply.So by the time you followed me back to the green room to wait in the hallway—whistling!— for my scrubbed face to emerge,naturally I was wary, waiting for the script you never bothered to come up with. It was damned awkward sitting there,nothing but milkshakes between us. Maybe, I thought, you’d assumed I was the one with a script. Finally I decided to give Terence a call.I didn’t like the way you looked at me so steadily with your chin resting on one fist, as if the table were a table, the boardsA floor. Listening there as if you meant it, as if something I could say were true, and every moment from now on would be my cue.
Roadlight licks the night ahead, licksthe white line on night’s new hide, licksthe undulating blacktop flat, sticks its end-less forking tongue out onward, flicksitself at culvert, tree, passing truck, a signinsisting heartbeats equal conscious life(it may be) of someone’s (maybe my) forever unborn child. I let the knifeof wind inside and sing A Whiter Shade of Pale,no earthly reason why, and think of whatwon’t be and who, and whether it bespeed, wind, song, or my mind’s roarthat drowns for once time’s slangy whine,here comes hope to climb clear of before;stillborn hope with desperate, Moro-reflex, undead grip climbs right back up my neck, raising each pointless, residual nape hair in ancestral salute to an absence, to the airthat won’t question itself, won’t ever checkthe moral rearview. I accelerate gamely,wondering what makes me want to leaveeach person, place and thing I learn to love.What shoves me off again, racing insanely,as if to the place that will always savea place for me, a room that will containthe kind of people who’d embrace the things I’m still afraid I’m still afraid to face.
On the crowded hill bordering the mill,across the shallow stream, nearer than they seem,they wait and will be waiting.Rain. The small smilax is the same to the flyas the big bush of lilacs exploding nearby.The rain may be abating.On the quiet hill beside the droning mill,across the dirty stream, nearer than they seem,they wait and will be waiting.The glass-eyed cicada drones in the linden draped like a tentabove three polished stones. Aphids swarm at the scentof the yellow petals.A bird comes to prod a clump of wet fur.The ferns idiotically nod when she takes it away with her.Something somewhere settles.On the crowded hill bordering the millis our best cemetery, pretty, but not very.All are welcome here.Sun finds a bare teak box on the tidy green plot.It finds lichen-crusted blocks fringed with forget-me-not.Angels preen everywhere.On the crowded hill bordering the millis our best cemetery, pretty, but not very. All are welcome here.
Nothing has changed. They have a welcome sign,a hill with cows and a white house on top,a mall and grocery store where people shop,a diner where some people go to dine.It is the same no matter where you go,and downtown you will find no big surprises.Each fall the dew point falls until it rises.White snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.This is all right. This is their hope. And yet, though what you see is never what you get,it does feel somehow changed from what it was.Is it the people? Houses? Fields? The weather?Is it the streets? Is it these things together?Nothing here ever changes, till it does.
I butterflied Australian rack of lambwith shallots, garlic, parsley, butter, wine(some in the pan, some for the palate).Although the livestock loved in nursery rhymeavoided clumps of mint, it served my familynonetheless. I am no PETA zealot(leather jacket, handbag, wallet, shoes)but wonder if the deeds we do pursueus in the afterlife. Does the fleecycreature have a tenderable claim?My lambent mind considers our short leaseon life, the oven hot. Am I to blame?Who gave thee such a tender voice? asked Blake.Myself am Hell. I watch the mutton bake.
There is something men and women living in housesDon’t understand. The old alchemists standingNear their stoves hinted at it a thousand times.Ravens at night hide in an old woman’s shoe.A four-year-old speaks some ancient language.We have lived our own death a thousand times.Each sentence we speak to friends means the oppositeAs well. Each time we say, “I trust in God,” it meansGod has already abandoned us a thousand times.Mothers again and again have knelt in churchIn wartime asking God to protect their sons,And their prayers were refused a thousand times.The baby loon follows the mother’s sleekBody for months. By the end of summer, sheHas dipped her head into Rainy Lake a thousand times.Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your lifeSitting indoors to write poems. Would youDo that again? I would, a thousand times.
There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,And so much discontent at the end of day,And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.A handsome child is a gift from God,And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.Some say we are living at the end of time,But I believe a thousand pagan ministersWill arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.There’s nothing we need to do about John. The BaptistHas been laying his hands on earth for so longThat the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.It’s all right if we don’t know what the roosterIs saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feelSo much satisfaction when a train goes by.
Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,the soldierly grey boulevards slipperywith tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knewwhose face was wheel-broken in a crash,and remade so well it was hard to say howshe looked wrong. I’d brought two questions here—holding them as if they might slip: who weremy mother’s people? Where did they die?In an attic-archive—deep card indexes, ink turned lilacwith age—I handed my questions to a love-laborerin a yarmulke; with sad palms and a shakeof the head he regretted that any answers nowlay probably beyond our reach. SoI abandoned questing and went back to tourism;joined the passeggiata, drank black tea, got stickiedunder sooty lime trees, saw boisterous children,all knees and elbows, skyline-caperingon the wall at the river-divide. Beyondtheir frail silhouettes against the petrol duskhuge cranes were moving, courtly, confident,building another new Warsaw across the Vistula.
I heard from people after the shootings. People I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely the same message: how horrible it was, how little there was to say about how horrible it was. People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually I answered these messages: there’s nothing to say back except of course there’s nothing to say, thank you for your willingness to say it. Because this was about nothing. A boy who felt that he was nothing, who erased and entered that erasure, and guns that are good for nothing, and talk of guns that is good for nothing, and spring that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some, and scotch for others, and “and” for me in this poem, “and” that is good for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise go about going away, bereft of us and us of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing like a scarf left on a train. As if the train, empty of everything but a scarf, still opens its doors at every stop, because this is what a train does, this is what a man does with his hand on a lever, because otherwise, why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over, and then it had just begun.
How is it that you hold such influence over me:your practiced slouch, your porkpie hat at rakish angle,commending the dumpling-shaped lump atop your pelvis—as if we’ve one more thing to consider amidst the striptease of all your stanzas and all your lines—draws me down into the center of you: the prize peony,so that I’m nothing more than an ant whose singular laboris to gather the beading liquid inside you; bring it to light.I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatchesof my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.When you arrive, unfasten your notebook, and recite,I am only a schoolboy with a schoolboy’s hard mind.You are the headmaster. Now you must master me.
I can only give you back what you imagine.I am a soulless man. When I take you into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It isan unlit pit, an aperture opened just enoughin the pinhole camera to capture the shade.I have caused you to rise up to me, and Ihave watched as you rose and waned.Our times together have been innumerable. Still,like a Capistrano swallow, you come back.You understand: I understand you. Understandeach jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad.I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours could never be. You’re nevertheless prepared to shoot.If I could I’d finish you. Be more than just your rag.
ou plutôt les chanter Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,Or, even better, sing them. Common speechHeld all the rhythmic measures that he prizedIn poetry. He had much more to teach,But first he taught that. Several poets paidHim heed. The odd one even made the grade,Building a pretty castle on the beach.But on the whole it’s useless to point outThat making the thing musical is partOf pinning down what you are on about.The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art:All this is patent to the gifted fewWho know, before they can, what they must doTo make the mind a spokesman for the heart.As for the million others, they are blessed:This is their age. Their slapdash in demandFrom all who would take fright were thought expressedIn ways that showed a hint of being planned,They may say anything, in any way.Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?Nothing to study, nothing to understand.And yet it could be that their flight from rhymeAnd reason is a technically preciseResponse to the confusion of a timeWhen nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.It isn’t that their deafness fails to matchThe chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.No form, no pattern. Just the rolling diceOf idle talk. Always a blight before,It finds a place today, fulfills a need:As those who cannot write increase the storeOf verses fit for those who cannot read,For those who can do both the field is clearTo meet and trade their wares, the only fearThat mutual benefit might look like greed.It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchangeOf showpiece and attention that has beenThere since the cavemen took pains to arrangePictures of deer and bison to be seen To best advantage in the flickering light.Our luck is to sell tickets on the nightOnly to those who might know what we mean,And they are drawn to us by love of sound.In the first instance, it is how we singThat brings them in. No mystery more profoundThan how a melody soars from a stringOf syllables, and yet this much we know:Ronsard was right to emphasize it so,Even in his day. Now, it’s everything:The language falls apart before our eyes,But what it once was echoes in our earsAs poetry, whose gathered force defiesEven the drift of our declining years.A single lilting line, a single turnOf phrase: these always proved, at last we learn,Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.
For A.J. Verdelle Those mornings I traveled north on I91,passing below the basalt cliff of East Rockwhere the elms discussed their genealogies.I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,learned I was an I drawn to Es.In small group I said, “I do not like it—the way so many young black men die hereunrecognized, their gurneys stripped,their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.”On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes.A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,their eyelids the film on old water in a well,their faces resigned in their see-through attics,their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.It is correct to love even at the wrong time.On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.
I remember she rented a room on the second floor from Jenny Holtzerman, an Austrian widow. The two women lived on Girard Avenue South, in Kenwood, an elegant suburb of Minneapolis. Any promise of husbands had disappeared long ago. From the kitchen I often remember the jelly smell of a linzer torte. I was in high school and often I eavesdropped. Once, quietly, she said to my mother, “I never knew the love of a man.” She had mentioned having a husband, but during the war they were separated in the chaos of Budapest, and later she lost track of him. Once she showed me her room: the walls were bare with cracks. Her daybed was narrow, barely slept-in. Her room resembled hundreds of scant little rooms around the world, the way it accepted blue and purple-violet detail—on her bureau, no family photographs, instead, playbills autographed by cast members, a calendar tattered, crossed, marked, no jewelry, some coins. Her window sashes warped, her wires shorted and the paint around her doorframe kept chipping off—“like in The Cherry Orchard,” she said, “by Chekhov.” She told a joke in Hungarian to Hannah Tamasek and even I, not knowing a word, laughed. She bowed gently in a mannerism distinctly Viennese and spoke on occasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She loved the Guthrie Theater, where curtains rose on miniature worlds, preferring memorized dialogue and costumes to something truer. Five feet tall in orthopedic shoes, she limped. Time has a way of rearranging things and I could have most details wrong now, but there was this: during the war, she met a man, whom she gave money to, she did not know the man well, but had trusted him to smuggle her father across the border, the man pocketed the money, bought chocolates for his mistress from Belgium, and placed Margaret’s father on a train to Auschwitz. So it makes sense to me now that simple decisions baffled Margaret. It makes sense to me now that when news reached us of Primo Levi’s suicide, Margaret did not blink. It makes sense to me now that when Dr. Sikorski spoke of fighting in the Warsaw sewers, Margaret said, “I do not believe in God.” Those who saw what they saw grow fewer. Margaret has been dead a long time now. But perhaps you will understand why I chose her, why I have smudged the slow waltz of her smile and added only a few modest blue strokes—here and here. As you leave Margaret behind and turn the page, listen as the page falls back and your hand gently buries her. This is what the past sounds like.
How many miles to the borderwhere all the sky there isexists for the soul alone?Where the only breathersbreathing are constructedfrom some new electricityand the flowers are madeindestructible, and messagesfrom the dead arrive like calmwhite birds with a gift?One more night of spiritualice and we might all becomebirds, green birds frozen on a black winter branch.There is a drumming in the shadowsunder leaves: a million eight-eyedspiders on the march.The buckeyes beat themselves half to death against some lit-from-within screen.
I have to tell you, there are times when the sun strikes me like a gong, and I remember everything, even your ears.
Among other things,thanks for explaining how the generous death of old trees forms the red powdered floor of the forest.
These frail, white widows who get their hair done weekly in tight curls, like little flowers, bend their heads until the applause says it’s time to be brave again.
I knew something was wrong the day I tried to pick up a small piece of sunlight and it slithered through my fingers, not wanting to take shape. Everything else stayed the same—the chairs and the carpet and all the corners where the waiting continued.
I allow myself the luxury of breakfast (I am no nun, for Christ’s sake). Charmed as I am by the sputter of bacon, and the eye-opening properties of eggs, it’s the coffee that’s really sacramental. In the old days, I spread fires and floods and pestilenceon my toast. Nowadays, I’m more selective, I only read my horoscope by the quiet glow of the marmalade.
It is not so much that I miss youas the rememberingwhich I suppose is a form of missingexcept more positive,like the time of the blackoutwhen fear was my first responsefollowed by love of the dark.
In a lightning boltof memory,I see our statue of Buddha(a wedding gift from Uncle Gene)which always saton top of the speaker cabinet.When a visitor asked,“So, does Buddha like jazz?”you said, “I hope so.He’s been getting it up the assfor a long time.”
one lies in rags on the street and his stomach is empty and he wishes for death one sits with friends at tea and backgammon and his mind is empty and he wishes for death one sits in a straight-backed chair at a desk and his bank account is empty and he wishes for death one lies in bed staring out to sea and the place next to him in bed is empty and he wishes for death one flies back with food in its beak and its nest is empty and only this one says we should give it another try
saw hammer drill needle and tongs are there any tools that weren’t from the beginning misused for torture and killing throw away the tools even the nails on your fingers can scratch and about the tongue the chinese have a saying, it can pulverize a person is there not some means that peace can call its own erect a house made of blossom petals and bird down capacious as a dream and no one will live in it all we have is what keeps its form to hold something together you must use force even for peace
on the first day you were beautiful and good on the second you grew a horn on the third a lead-gray wing budded from your shoulder on the fourth a claw sprouted from your shoe on the fifth you flew right into my armpit built a nest and then lost interest on the sixth you were a host of leeches having their way with my veins on the seventh I heard you trotting above me with hollow hoof beats on the eighth you went to moses to ask for advice winged horned buraq the prophet’s steed returned as a lamb on the ninth to graze on my belly fur on the tenth you died for isaac the angel decided in favor of animal testing on the eleventh I had forgotten the color of your eyes on the twelfth day you were poor and naked on the thirteenth you were lying on the bottom of the sea a millions of eons old whispering mussel on the fourteenth they called you into the field duldul, ali’s tireless gray mule on the fifteenth you stood still welded on the lip of a kettle the sweat of the holy brew had oxidized your copper neck on the sixteenth you were the primordial ox zarathustra sang of your suffering on the seventeenth day when I came home you were once again the one human being
Night was and they swayed into it:a pair of scissors, of sailsturning only into themselvesmore other than become.It is often five o’clock. Her husband has contracted not to speak of her and she has forgotten where to go. Where does everyone go?
Hard to reach, so you yank your clothesgetting at it—the button at your neck,the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers inuntil your nails possess the patch of skinthat’s eating you. And now you’re in the throesof ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull, as if sensing the first time the joy one takes in being purely animal. It’s so good to have a scratch,though isn’t it a drag living like this,jounced on a high wire of impulses,every wish the same programmed responseto another signal passed from cell to cell,amounting in the end to a distraction—if truth be told—from rarer things, thoughts free from the anchor-chain of self? For even the least sweetness, webehave like the old man on the low wallI saw outside the hospital today,who had his hand inside his flannel shirt,scratching at his chest, trancelike, agog,his eyelids fluttering like butterfliesin a meadow of snowy Queen Anne’s lace. I never saw him stop. Such root satisfaction is likethe dying desert legionnaire’s in films, when he finds, against all odds, a water jug and, lifting it, delights to feel it heavy.The score swells, his eyes relume. He tugs the stopper out, then fills his mouth with sand.Though, worse: we’ve seen the film; we know it’s sand; we gulp it anyway.
One spring day I saw the shadow of a strawberry tree lying on the moor like a shy lamb asleep. Its heart was far away, suspended in the sky, brown in a brown veil, in the sun’s eye. The shadow played in the wind, moving there alone to make the tree content. Here and there it shone. It knew no pain, no haste, wanting only to feel morning, then noon, then the slow-paced journey of evening. Among all the shadows always joining eternal shadow, shrouding the earth in falseness, I loved this steady shadow. And thus, at times, it descends among us, this meek semblance, and lies down, as if drained, in grass and in patience.
And then at night, when old, we start having vague pointless scraps of dreams that lead us to this place or that, since even our failing senses insist on outings: and lost friends reappear, sleepwalking through the stupor of surrendered existence. But here too there’s something that’s not unconscious, as when the boatman stops his old ferry along the banks of the Arno, plunges his wooden bailer into the bottom of the boat, and dumps that stale water, gone to grime between the staves, overboard into the river, where it flows again, though the boat is held fast amid the mud and rushes.
Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevatorI crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,Though someone always said I’d be all right—Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad(The nothing rising underfoot). Then laterThe high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,The merest thought of airplanes. You can callIt a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;But it isn’t the unfathomable fallThat makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,Select the prince from a row of identical masks,Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basksAnd snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,Or learn the phone directory by rote.Always it’s impossible what someone asks—You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believeThat you have something impossible up your sleeve,The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,The will to do whatever must be done:Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.
In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’s lily and though an angel he looked absurddragging a lily out of a beauty-bright storewrapped in tissue with a petal drooping,nor was it useless—you who know it knowhow useful it is—and how he would be deadin a minute if he were to lose it thoughhow do you lose a lily? His lily was whiteand he had a foolish smile there holding it up likea candelabrum in his right hand facing the mirror in the hall nor had the endlesscenturies started yet nor was there one thornbetween his small house and the beauty-bright store.
How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eyewhere he was sucker-punched and stagger outonto the Plaza blind. He had been waitingall night for the acorn moon and eating pineappletopping over his ice cream and arguingeither physics or philosophy. He thinks,at this late date, it was the cave againthrowing a shadow, although it may have beenonly some way of reconciling the two oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow—if only there was a second moon. He had a kind of beard and though he could practically liftthe front end of a car and was alreadyreading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.
I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwinwho, right now, is dissecting a barnacle“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:he’ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supportedby rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:those philosophical poems of William Bronk’s. What’smost delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novelthat squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyesin its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins.Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous bookand its battle of shadow and radiance was over.Each of us: his individual book; and yetthe silence is communal. This is a natural stateat Nathan’s. Holly, however, is reading the Sunday paperand so serves, without saying a word, to remind ushow natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, seven,to fall while running and burn out his eyeon the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, nine,to have come home from school and excitedly been the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parentspeddled as “young fun” over the Internet. Thiswas what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered itas comfortably as Tristan does his opened worldof sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since usex frequency = familiarity. That’s the strict, imperious mathof everybody’s insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me whatthis thing “vermouth” was (she pronounced it “mouth”) and orderedquiche as if it were the brother of “touché”; but thenshe needed to explain to me why C-C was the “bottom bitch”and what a “T-girl” is and how to put down moneyon Ice’s book at “the county,” by whichshe meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsedthe slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the specieswhere “the female has no anus” and the one with “tiny parasiticmales [that were] embedded in one female’s flesh like blackheads”),“squinty . . . laborious,” were among the final decades of hundreds of yearswhen a woman in China would suffer ritual foot binding,at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toeswere bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet)and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable“shrunken plums” and “three-inch golden lilies” soughtby marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-lawwould check below the hem, and reject any feetover four inches long. Entire generations of women could only mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the airand the light and “the-way-of-things-forever” thatyou woke up to every day . . . as natural as the implicit lawsin Aidan’s book, by which a bear converseswith a girl in growly mutual-speak, and a boyof sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascendtheir sky with the unremarkable grace of birdsin ours. That’s ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidansubjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship,and the code of those of innocent spiritabout to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, andthe governing instructions of gods with the headsof wide-eyed animals . . . and even now, Sherena textsmy phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINEGOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE
Often I imagine the earth through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—atoms, peculiaratoms everywhere—no me, no you, no opinions,no beginning, no middle, no end,soaring together like those ancient Chinese birdshatched miraculously with only one wing,helping each other fly home.
They’re sexybecause they’re needy,which degrades them.They’re sexy becausethey don’t need you.They’re sexy because they pretendnot to need you,but they’re lying,which degrades them.They’re beneath youand it’s hot.They’re across the border,rhymes with dancer—they don’t needto understand.They’re content to be(not mean),which degrades themand is sweet.They want to bethe thing-in-itselfand the thing-for-you—Miss Thing—but can’t.They want to be you,but can’t,which is so hot.
The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me.Undercurrent of an unwillingness to believe all is well in early spring beside a molten river riven by sun,its loud hush and glug through leafless aspens split by a gravel bar’s pulled switch.A bull trout with fluorescent red dorsal fin eddies in a pool between a sloughed-off root clump and caved-in grassy bank.Last year’s downed trees, slash piles, busted garden gate.Heed me and hear my loneliness. Split by a desire to be known by a crowd of solitaires and by one word split. A raven falls out of the yellow flame of a willow.Its wings purely black buff sunlight. It paces the gravel bar, lifts into westerly sun. Wing flash. Black luster. Gone.It is hope that tricks. Belief that when this now shines,this now shines with or without us. Then whyscribble the veery’s mid-morning marshal song? Soon Rick will arrive to help burn wood piles:gasoline newspaper cedar shakes to start the blaze in this emptiness searching for godwords.The ones God hears when priests without shoes without socks with their shawls stretched over their headsarms out make forts of light. Their backs to the congregation,their faces toward the ark, they rock. Their white wings so pure that this now is no more than thenwith its barbells of silence, with its task of burning.
He slid the stiff blade up to my ear:Oh, fear,this should have been thirst, a cheapening act.But I lacked,as usual, the crucial disbelief. Sticky, cold,a billfoldwet in my mouth, wrists bound by his belt,I feltlike the boy in a briny night pool, he who foundthe drownedbody, yet still somehow swam with an unknown joy.That boy.
I found my muster station, sir.My skin is patent leather.The tourists are recidivists.This calm is earthquake weather.I’ve used up all the mulligans.I’d kill to share a vice.The youngster reads a yellowed Oui.The socialite has lice.The Europe trip I finally tookwas rash and Polaroid,was gilt, confit, and bathhouse foam.And I cannot avoidthe end: I will not die in Paris,won’t rest for good behinda painted mausoleum door.The purser will not findme mummified beneath your tulle,and Paris will not burn.Today is Thursday, so I’ll die.Come help me pick my urn.
White ash,you wait for meas I will waitfor someone.What but skinfeels the wind,what darknessmakes distinctions?Breaking downdusk and dawn,housewreckerson horse scaffoldssyncopate their hammers.Brick dustdrifts like smoke,tents of habitationwithdrawn,hinges of habitundone.
Zipping your skirt, you rustle past,sand hissing through a glass,with the Bedouin snap and flashof static-electricsparks disturbing fabric.This morning’s charge could rouseThe Desert Fathers of Sinai
Down in fame’s flood, down an alley, downwind of now, elegant in self-denial,an Iron Range wraith junking cue cards, an ideal,an idol before which the Zeitgeist kneeled. Dylan, named for a poet named from an oldtale of the child who crawled to the sea, this landis yours: the black plain the needleploughs from lip to label; be all, end all.
Skipping out from the major international cocktail partywith my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist,I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i.e., men.Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves.Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talkas the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh,so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimpsfrom doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs,dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared,with not enough tentacles to count the capes and stoles,fine bespoke pashminas, silk snoods, at least one vicuñasuit, tainted with gold thread. I’d seen down a Blenheim,two Lime Rickeys and was eyeing a gamine mixologistwho was straining out Savoy Royales when my raddlednemesis limped over to announce she had encounteredmy latest screed, all four foot eleven of her tortoiseishlyquivering, a nubbin of cream cheese on her whiskery lipand her good eye withering my borrowed companionetteas she leaned on air. I am not a man who has not knownthe turmoil women offer, the gift you accept of their wit,the way you’d slip a hand into a gloveful of cockroaches,comply with a last-minute call to join a seal cull. Tanya,I pouted, I am awed and honored you opened a windowin your schedule even to glance at my inconsequentialoutpourings. At which point she clattered out a scoffinggibe so sour you couldn’t blend it with a chemistry setfrom Hamley’s and, seizing my escort by her neat wrist,we tore out onto Jermyn Street, along which I performeda sort of shuffle, one eye on the book and one on m’lady’scompetition-standard backside as she led us to the Ritz.
Eugene, OR Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-throughby Jacob’s Gallery, you have now enteredthe slenderest of histories, the skin-bound bookI store between my temples; in that meanand moonless city, you must hang fraughtin your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed,and in this cutty version of forever, forevercalling on your unseen beau, one flake ina limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze.And now the rain turns, light but going steadyon the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pacefrom devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere and still your mouth in the haze calling isa ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam,the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which allbut the bird in the fable know not to pluck.
In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies,gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then,says the man who should know about the past, then is a word you need to learn now. Then lived lives had hasa name a body, sacrificial hands so god might help us. Feel with your hands and feet back along these countless steps and hearthe incessant bloodrush, its dark redpresence. That was what the man insisted, in so many words, pointing to the ornatetemple corridor, an altar conjured at its vanishing point.
Did an argument break out in the kitchen that morning?Was there smashing of pots and pans: youwant to eat somewhere else? Go on,get out! Or were they set outside, shrewd,
Wandered tonight through a cityas ruined as a body with brokenribs and a bared heart. Looked for you there with cookies in my pocket, searched for a sigh, for movement in demolished streets and alleys. Tonightsince I’d forgotten for a moment where you are,I searched for you with hope in my bones.But no matter how I lured you with my voiceand my eyes, walls of debris grew up steadily around you, cellars seemedto creep around you. I remained alonewith those cookies in my pocketand kept calling and walking.
my love who shelters in his wordssometimes falls silent for a sudden eternitybreathes that silence into a bell of glassin which he calms stormshe draws lee lines in what wasit’s more like a firefirm cracklingwhen he takes up words with easein a single glance, caressing my bodyI read him day and night. What will it be likewhen he withdraws into the word old,
It’s a beautiful world, you said,with these trees, marshes, deserts,grasses, rivers and seasand so on. And the moon is really somethingin its circuits of relative radiance. Includethe wingèd M, voluptuous Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devilJ and cranky Saturn, of course, plusU and N and the wanderer P, in short the whole solar family, complete with its Milky Way, and count up all the othersystems with dots and spots and inthat endless emptiness what you’ve got is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautifuluniverse, you said, just take a good lookthrough the desert’s dark glasses for instance or on your backin seas of grass, take a good lookat the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out theresomewhere, together.
The farmer in the dellThe farmer in the dellOx chip gastrologyThe farmer in the dellThe farmer takes a wifeThe farmer takes a wifePupa reconnaissanceThe farmer takes a wifeThe wife takes a childThe wife takes a childSweetbread electrolyteThe wife takes a childThe child takes a nurseThe child takes a nurseCheese futz habitualThe child takes a nurseThe nurse takes a cowThe nurse takes a cowFlatworm collateralThe nurse takes a cow
I would consider re-heating the tweezersif I had the chance, because, as ducks sayin Ghana, “broccoli reversal gets priority.”I would consider re-heating the tweezersif Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Sel.I have the chance, because, as ducks ask,“who was generated in Old Ironsides, AK?”In Ghana, broccoli reversal gets priorityand grows up to be a pie dish dismisser.Tu Fu and Cleopatra had a son named Selwho was generated in Old Ironsides, AK.He grew up to be a pie dish dismisser.
A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.Dead rabbits hang by feet, their red eyes dull, while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.A vessel in Juan’s brain begins to bleed,spreading into the fissures of his skull.A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.The madams in the district underfeedhookers they line up for a spectaclewhile chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.A vendor buys his wares, then smokes some weed;he seldom deems police an obstacle.A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.Redeemers tend the poor, avoiding greedand never gesture for a miraclewhile chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.This is the life they know and that they need,the common life that no one can annul.A narrow girl sells purses made of reedwhile chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.
Sand Wars was firstpublished in Flanders,but as Van Bellingenpointed out, “eggnog.”
1The nineish summer-skinny imp-boy veersthe bicycle he has no notion yet of trustingoff the sidewalk, where the squashed mulberriesform many contusions. Riding as though and as thoughon an animal (maybe his bikeshould have gazelle eyes) he is hatching planssomehow angelically pristine of doubtbetween them and fruition. He dumpsthe bike on this side of the jungle gyms,while cottonwood foam blows up from the branch,and wind imparts the grass two sibling greens,and parents show their callow half-formed centerscajoling children. He is alone, and setshimself to picking clover; whole minutes passwhen all he does is increase one bouquetof grass-high nondescript white clover blossoms.There must be a million in the fieldnot in his hand. He lays the fistful downand takes a roofing nail out of his pocket,and with it and his eldritch patience awlsthrough-holes in his foam-grips. He twists the stemsinto a stalk he tapers, pinches off,and jams into the handlebars, onlyto watch the blossoms fall apart and over.He tries and fails again, incredulousnow the ornament he planned as thoughdesigning a contraption, some trebuchetor hovercraft half-specified and magic,will not work on mere enthusiasm.His tantrum comes on suddenly, a spasticlittle stomping dance across the grass,and ends without his having made a sound.He is off the way he came. They arenot brutal, the feebly dreamt surrounding houses,crops striving in the dirt, child-rearing habitslapsed and current, like childhood diseases.The bric-a-brac on his bedroom floor that damnshim to time. But neither are they tenderof that thing his paltry ruined posy,the fanning homely crumbs of perfect whim,is evidence of. 2The hangdog rookie lifeguard shuffles inalready delegated an action iteminvolving a stepladder, a spray bottle,and a biohazard bag. The dimguttering aura of his authoritytries to fill the locker room, as doesthe smell of sock, and calms imperfectlythe preteens disobeying rule elevenregarding horseplay. The kid attains the utmost,handicapable shower stall, yanksthe curtain and deploys his ladder, ascendingthree rungs of his portable Golgothaand staring as though straining to make outSt. Paycheck in a stained glass window. The bottleand empty plastic sack slump at his sides,props whose ritual has slipped his mind,or tools of tradesman or physician agapeat a humdinger, for damned if not nine feetup the cinder blocks, improbablymassive, glistening, and cantilevered,there does not jut a load of crap. He says,almost quietly, already showingawareness of those situations whereresort to melodrama will not help,but still somehow reluctant to let goof being someone singled out by fate,“You have got to be motherfucking kidding me.”No poo-flinger or projectile buttortitters from the bench. The sun, supremelysupercilious in the skylights, mums;the ceiling fans the shit perhaps was aimed atspin an rpm too fast for one to follow.The dented cubby rows and columns retainthe continence of safe-deposit boxes.If he does not punch out and not come back,the lifeguard shall be our savior in wayswe scarcely dreamt or paid him for, thinkingall he had to do was watch our children.As for the mystery of whether oneis being kidded, it is his to bear.No ceo of pooldom makes that much. 3The corner drugstore lends the cause a spigot;the cause runs hoses to the parking lot,and proto-nubile junior-high girls lureout of the intersection, by sign and banner,ten perverts an hour. Shucked garden-snail of an errand-runner, five dollars gets youa sort of car wash, and gets the wrestling teamcloser to their travel fund objective.Small talk with the game and patient coachwill pleasantly derail you, as the squadswarms with half-grasped purpose in your service.One is dutiful and has a bucket.One is cheery with a rag. The rowdybuck for the nozzle, the second-rowdiestfleeing when one prevails: rinser-offof quarter panels and future quarterbacks,broad-shouldered as though tapped for it, as thoughfor violin or chess. Can he see,from where he is, the rainbow that he issues,the laughter-stippled day convened for himand his? Days to come he is hawkingtwo-dollar Jujubes out of a knapsackin the alley by the multiplex;there fall to him the odd, ambivalentvagina-samplings behind the Sonic Burger,and on his cast the day he tries to olliethe planters at the bank, a turquoise heartto dot the i in Brandi. We are goingto be all right; good supervisors abound;our grab-ass shall be moderated, and thosewho tsk are bound to say I knew you when.We need be lots of things, but never lonely.
Almost drollin its assault on magisterial,my father’s funeralsermon made me prowl,—agitated—from bean casseroleto escarolesalad, then taco casserole,and back all afternoon, in thrallto Dad’s every growl,cramped certitude, and corporalwavering lost to shrillsacralcant: The pastoralstory was Dad’s own, though, frailas it is: faith and God steamrolldeath. His wife’s and daughter’s rolewas to die—a trialof faith, not cruelso much as natural,when the supernaturalis, as it was for him, literal.His cloistralwithdrawal, according to the minister’s drawl,was grace, and his temporalforfeitures fat collateralon eternity. It felt surreal(can there be a funeralwithout, now, the word surreal?)to hear Dad’s stoic controland loneliness spiralheavenward on genial praise, realenough for the general,one supposes. An orchestralhymn flared through the stereo’s cloth grill.Cold waves over the deep water roll,we sang, some voices shrill,mine guttural,my brother’s slow as a crawl—our voices one and several,a visceral,not unmagisterial,chorale.
As we sipped and mingled,regaledwith oldfangledcanapés and beguiled,or entertained at least, by gargledoldies, I disengagedand angledacross grass tenderly groomed,past where electric tiki torches gleamed,and, alone, gazed,now truly beguiled,at my hosts’ grandexpensive vista, mortgaged,yes, and, yes, remortgaged.A low goldmoon glowedagainst a plush black sky gauzed,even filigreed,with stars. Gownedin old-growth oaks glazedwith moonlight over their autumn gilt,the hills glowedin concord with the golden moon. I lingered,glad—discomfited and glad—at what my friends’ greedfor beauty afforded me. I argued,self against self, what they’d gainedand lost, and me with them, entangledas friendship entangles. I nearly groanedaloud with want before my friend grabbedmy elbow. “Gorgeous, eh?” I grinnedand agreed,my voice greasedwith hidden envy. From behind us, grilledsirloin, pedigreedmeat sublimating on embers, triggeredanother hunger. Life was not just good,but too good:aged beef, aged wine after bourbon. We hungered,and all the way back to his engorgedglass table, hunger was our guide.
Lichen glows in the moonlightso fierce only cloud blockingthe moon brings relief. Then passed by,recharged it leaps up off rocksand suffocates—there is no routethrough rocks without having to confrontits beseeching—it lights the way,not the moon, and outdoes epithetslike phosphorescent, fluorescent, or florescent:it smirks and smiles and lifts the cornerof its lips in hideous or blissful collusion,and birds pipe an eternal dawn, never knowing when to sleep or wake. They might be tricked into thinking their time’s up,in the spectrum of lichen, its extra-gravitalpersuasion, its crackling movementremembered as still, indifferent, barelyliving under the sun, or on a dark night;climbing up you’d escape, but like all greatmolecular weights it leaves tracesyou carry with you into the realms of comfort and faith.
You’ve got to understand that sighting the pairof eagles over the block, right over our house,not more than twenty feet above the roof,so massive their wings pull at the corrugatedtin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteractsbitterness against all the damage I see and heararound me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,when clarity is pain and even one small missingwattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony; a region is not a pinpoint and a different compassworks in my head, having magnetics for alldirections and all pointing to one spot I know and observe as closely as possible; and even one small vanished or vanquishedwattle tree is agony close to death for me,where I find it hard to breathe to feed myselfto get past the loss; but the pair of eaglesstill appearing and keeping their sharpand scrupulous eyes honed, overridesthis ordeal, though I wish their victimslife too and their damage is traumaticas anything else; that’s as much senseor nonsense as I can make in such blue light.
It didn’t happen in that order—the endless growl of what will turn out to beminiature quad and trail bikes, carried alongthe top of the valley and rumbling its contents:small kids with helmets weighing more than their heads,ragged on by parents with crossed arms and ambitionin their eyes: round and round the drone of fun.A country pursuit. Tracy tells me a professorof economics at a local city universitywhile praising capitalism says he will onlylisten to opposition if it comes from onewho eats only lentils, has given up carsand eschews imported brands of foodstuffs. Lentils?Contradictions aside, I’ll take him on, thoughit might be hard to hear me speak above the juniorquad-bike circus performing along the hills. But hark,I’ll tell you something unusually usual: at duskwandering the block with Katherine we came acrossshreds of chemical-pink balloon with plastic stringattached to its tied-off umbilical cord, clearlyan escapee from a party, the child—her namedecorating the balloon with three crosses for kisses—in tears, chasing it up into the sky, watchingit drift over the hills, her letter to the worlda single word and her mark made over. Katherine asks if I recall the balloons her class back in England released with school name and address and how onefloated all the way over the Channel and on to Belgiumwhere another child picked up the shreds and decipheredthe message and wrote back; weather balloons, “hopesand ambitions” as Delmore says, but without doubtor skepticism, in full expectation they will landsomewhere far away and bring joy to the finder.I throw the shred of balloon away, fearingan animal crossing the block in the dark,night-eyed and keenly sampling the groundand the air with its snout, will reread or misread the code of chemical pinkness, and like some Red Riding Hood in reverse, choke on the gift of chance.
Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scenesome far suburb’s mall lot Summer’s theme: this year’s humid—to sweat is to know—pen squeezed too tight yields ink as blood or pus so the phrase scraped, removed offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush” Against which, insource what? Who will do it? Most terrible predicate—high above mountains snow-capped even in August in-flight motion picture Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
I will take your stony heart and give you one of flesh. The wake sewing shut those white lips and after when leagues and all behind to salt fell the grateful Spaniards prayed It became their habit to turn eyes sore awayfrom surfeit Rashes and abrasions of springleaf stem vine blossom aphid & berry stridulantintricate and promiscuous without the roseor borage or pomegranate emboweredin flaunting silks on gauntlet cuffs Nonone of that repose their soldier-love required to root 20,000 had died in Ravenna He survivedwithout mark to show what he knewhow fear cramped each man solitaryinside himself until the spark that leapt stingingthem on to violence the grass-fire battle-frenzythe grass that kneels to its burning Then aftermath’svegetable melee limbs and bodiesBut what is not threat in this contagion and panicof green Whores wives saints sovereignsthis beach that thick-leaved mustardy shrub Nameshe thinks the names keep slippingSwift intent armored obdurate as beetles no one manfelt the wound of where like Adam too late he walked * * *The air flexing began to bruise green around themthe fresh human injury of them Like fliestrapped in a bottle they didn’t know what to doand carried on doing it while bird by bird invisible rescinded its songwhile the sun a drop of vinegar in milk curdled the skyQuiet sumptuous as pain eased by what handabrupt as that held in the breathexhausted just before the witch confessesLike an executioner who ropes hair over handto bend and lengthen the neck for his axthe wind brutalized palm trees spun menbefore it loosely as leaves in a streamHe linked arms with another Broken wing Splintering oar Chainless anchordragging through darkness thick with sand and water and noisewhistles braying drums timbrels & ululationsPressed all night to the porch of the storm his ear mistook the self’s own alienated music called it sorceryThat the fury never ended he would learnwalking the eye of its silenceAfter the hurricane the stunned brilliance like a spell or question he woke into waking by himself to himselfand naked as a saint to discover his ship with its ropes tools weapons salves Spainwas the anchored shipnow hoisted on planks of sunlight over the palm-trees sailing out of sight The boat sickfor such mirthmade by root sap riverbank & squirrelit would return to that green oak it once had been * * *In what hour of what night did he know his soulto turn a stranger to himPilgrim he will venture forth across uncertain fieldsExplorer he will cry out He may be nothing morethan a hide rigid with gore & soil to be scoured pounded abused by caustics and by ironand in watered pigeon-shit kneaded until supplefor the hand— but whose and mustthe hand continue to wear or it will toughen again * * *Daily he marched his men into corrugations ofblue distances dissolving one to another like promisesof gold & corn made by guides snatched from villages As the Spanish found new ways to die natives loomed naked on the horizon they lookedsplendid & violent as idols Their women & childrenrestored for ransoms of melons or fishOften some chief would repeat his good friendpossessed more of each thing they desired His noble gesturesspread like balm his speech intoxicatingbut so militant their hunger his words came entire & legible to their sense as the amber & musk that steamedfrom these his fine furs * * *His dwindling forcethrough swamps & ambush labored circuitous stalledlike mayflies in their brevity & towarding and neverfable riches youth nor rest to take Only the bodywith its anxious extremeties eccentric nakednot natural from which a vein of fascinated shameopened darkly glittering smoldering like sea-coal Every eye interrogatedEach inquisitor humiliatedby these echoes of himself his body violatingthe silence * * *Now alone and exposed approachinghe amassed his ocherous archive of blisterand of bruise the old fabulous atlas of faith in blood & smoke redrawnStill even the most exacting map dreamsomits & lies brindled with sums & suppositionsEvery step makes him more wildernessHe goes interiorlyto trade conches sea-snails & screw-beansfor red-dyed deer-tail tassels and the arrow-makers’sinew & flint between ragged bandssurrounded by enemies enthralled by visionsthat command them to bury their sons aliveGirls whose marriages would multiply their foes become meat for their dogs Where were the jades turquoises zinzibar Wherethe sacred monsters cannibals or kings fielding legionsof dog-headed warriors Husbands groanedbucked by pain onto the dirt when wives gave birth& both sexes wept strenuously after any absence overjoyed to see each other again in no essential changedHad any man traveled farther than he * * *Whether time is the ripening of fruit the dying of fish& the position of stars or allthe king’s clocks ringing his will upon the quarter-hourhunger is the self’s severe eternal god
And the fourth river is the Euphrates The first day was a long dayand the first night nearly eternal.No thing existed, and only One was presentto perceive what wasn’t there.No meaning as we know it;difference was bound in the All.On the first day, water, on the second day, land, on the third day, two kinds of light,one of them night.On the fourth day, laughter, and darkness saw it was good. But when God laughed,a crack ran through creation. On the fourth night, sorrow,staring away from heaven,torn in its ownness.No evidence then of nothing,but worlds upon worlds,underwritten, overflowing:the worlds of fear and of longing,lacking in belief,and the pitiful world of love, forever granting its own wishes.Out of dust, like golems, God created man and woman,and cast them into chance.And man was subdued in those days.All that could leap, leapt;all that could weep, wept.First of all places, Eden;last of all places, Cleveland;and a river flowed out of Eden,inspiring in the dry land a panic of growth and harvest season.The newly formed creationtook from flesh its beastand from each word its sentence.And early loves and hatreds blewfrom thistle to thorn.Each thing that God created,he placed before manso that he may name it:cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,
I, the Lord, will make barrenyour fields and your fairways.Your refrigerators will be empty,no steaks and no leg bones,no butter and no cornbread.And I will remove your screen doors, force the mosquitoes indoorswhere you lie on the bed undead.For my house you have not readied,no flat screen and no broadband.My habitation is a wastelandof furniture from motel rooms.I will send the ostrich and badgerin herds through your wrecked rooms; your beds will be entered by turnstile;the floor will seethe with bees.For my house is but a prefab; its roof lets in my rain.Woe is the Lord of Heavenwho has no mansion on earth.Cries are heard from my fish traps,crows flap on my hat rack,pandemonium at the thresholdas the owls and bats flit in.Silence reigns in the last placeand the first place has no sway.For my knife-edge is impatient,my ledge crumbles like cake.I have warned you to beware.You await a handsome savior,but the plain man draws near...(Zephaniah)
Art thou not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time.The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentumat the edge of the sea, before it folds away.Everything that is, lives and has size.The mole sleeps in a hole of its making, and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathesand makes a place, for the comfort of the mole.I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapelyand of a certain age, in the everlasting.In the fierce evening, on the mild day,How long shall I be shaken?(Habakkuk)
Sometimes in time’s nearunassailable sangfroid there isa thawing& the memoryasserts its musicality againreminds one that it is at heartheart’s artificer * * *Somewhere in Okinawa there are stairs“My husband is the onlyconstant in”are concrete stairs that lead one(or at least led me, age six)near straight from top to bottom of a cliff face& they ended in a black-sand beach “the onlyconstant in my life.When I was young I would have thoughtI would regret it, to have wrappedmyself up like a caterpillarin a man—but if my name, like his,is Vogelsang, then I must half recedewith him
And fleetingly it seemed to himThat in between one eye blink and the nextTime paused, allowing time to be installedWithin that countless interim,Coiled up, on hold,A memory predicted and recalled.Now, that weak muscle flexed,All that contained him started to unfoldIn front of him, a moving bookIn three dimensions he could wander through,At will, at any point, now, since, before,To feel, to listen and to look—A house, or suiteOf rooms around a circling corridor,And waiting there, he knew,Were all the peopled days he’d not repeat.Slowly he stretched his hand to openThe first door on his right. Why, this was easy:Christmas when he was seven, and his auntPlaying a polonaise by Chopin,Badly. “Lenore,We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.”And he was resting, queasyFrom too much pudding. Now, another door:So far, so faint, not yet an I,A pulse of sense, he hung upon a webOf knitted blood. Above, the muffled heartPerformed its mindless lullaby And in the wombHe slept on half awake. That was his partElsewhere, too, at the ebbOf his last consciousness. Another room:He recognized at once the faceOf one who five years hence he would have boundAs closely to him as a Siamese twin.How recklessly he would replaceThat loving care.Absorbed, now, in the dream of skin on skin,He whispered the profoundAnd destined promises she’d never share.He shuddered, shut it, and proceeded.So room on room, all of his scenes, arrangedIn simultaneous succession, playedBefore him, unignored, unheeded,Each a tableauVivant and drama, driven and yet stayed,Developing, unchanged.At last the time that paused for time to flowHe saw was coming to an end.He saw himself before himself, distinctAs when—a life ago—it came to himA single blink could comprehend,And then unfold,All time within that countless interim.He blinked. And then he blinked.And time continued as it coiled, on hold.
They have no sense of what they’re looking at,Unless the object moves.(Or so he’s read; who knows if that’s the case?)A painted bird’s an empty analogueTo the oblivious cat.And it is not his still familiar faceSo much as that distinctive gait which provesThe master to his dog,Who frolics for him like an acrobat.His eyes need movement too, but make their own.His most fixated gaze—On one small figure in a Bruegel scene,Or on the camber of his lover’s lipHe worships unbeknown,As though no time or change will supervene—Aflicker with saccade, adjusts and straysMinutely to equipHis mind to take in what is being shown.And maybe consciousness employs saccadeAs well, and flickers backAnd forth, now in the world, now, briefly, out—The way the gum tree’s canopy overheadFlickers with light and shade,So every leaf is momently in doubt—Its faith saved by such intermittent lackFrom being surfeited,Its constant sense being constantly unmade.
Torn turned and tatteredBowed burned and batteredI took untensed time by the teethAnd bade it bear me bankingOut over the walled welter cities and the seaThrough the lightsmocked birdpocked cloudcocked skyTo leave me light on a lilting planetesimal.The stone walls wailed and whimperedThe bold stars paled and dimpledGodgone time gathered to a grunt And bore me bled and breakingOn past parted palisades windrows and the treesOver a windcloaked nightsoaked starpoked seaTo drop me where? Deep in a decadent’s dream.
You bring a stalk of bamboo to the flu room. Hot pink Buddha offers some bullet-like pills from his plasticfingers. Oh high above the pecantree, my dead grandfather walks Basil and Maestro, our two standard poodles. One’s beard is oily from the wheelof brie he’s stolen from the kitchen counter. The world works. Even from here. I can hear the buzz of machines, the clicks of pens, the secretary’s repressed anger (bites the inside of her cheek), the weird light of computer screens. The world works wonders: the cashier at Kmart rings up another self-tanning lotion. She rings up August, the ocean, a string bikini on younger flesh. Nude on bronze. Saltwater fish. The sand is piled high. It makes a wave over the pecan tree. Soon a tsunami will wash away the house, nursery. Nothing left but a palm frond, white long bone. Goodbye dog, tree, grandfather with your elk-tipped cane. The world works but not today. Not for me. Fever and the walls painted with sharks and starfish. There is so much aqua, histamine. Buddha, bring me another slice of pineapple.
Because Yosemite’s high altitude lake’s tadpoles wash up in glow-in-the-dark condoms and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because there’s bird shit in the clouds. Things catch, get caught. Things are consumed. There’s no looking back. And so you were conceived here, Ezekiel, fifty feet off the Trail of Broken Ankles. We wanted to make sure no one would see. The one hiker who saw looked away. Amino acids of the flushed cheek. Dirge for eyeless things. I washed my body in the river and the river went numb— the mind sunburned. I imagine the second before you took, before the cells began to split, before that flint was struck, before the dna began to twist, that a colorless emptiness suddenly inverted and told the world that he, too, once had a mother. But there is no nest of leaves. Nothing stops. The clock in the glacier still ticks above us and on our skin there were enormous ants, the segments of their bodies like black droplets of paint pushed very close against each other but still not touching, yet taking their work with them— taking away their dirt world.
I called Hart on my longer distance lineAnd in case you didn’t know he is in heavine.Hart, I implored, I searched your book(Yes, you have a Collected) and could fineNothing about the 36 cast iron bridges inCentral Park, why didn’t you write about oneAt least. He said he wrote about the narrow Bow BridgeFor peds built in 1878 which is sad and fineAnd always photographed through branches in the foregrineWhich was sufficiently sad to make him weep all the tineHe was trying to write the poem so he threw it away.He tried again and he uncontrollably wept agine.Did you try a third tine,I asked. No, he said, and here’s why:Life is uncontrollably sad all the timeUnless we divert ourselves with art objects,Sex, or tequila or beer, and if we tell the truthAbout this, for instance when we feel itWhile looking at a photograph of the cast ineBow Bridge or see in life not photos but the real bridge at a short destineAway with the actual park and branches around us,We feel like killing ourselves to stop the painOr as you, Arthur, call it, the pine,So I didn’t try a third timeTo write the poem. Get off this line,He said. Wait! Don’t hang up, he said, I take it back, stay on the phine!Well, I considered calling on my second longer distance lineKenneth who in heavine has changed his name to Kenneth KineAnd Barbara who I did call on my second longer distance lineWith Hart on hold and affirmed her name change to Barbara GineBut I didn’t ask those younger two about uncontrollable totally dominant sadnessOr whether they had discarded their own poems about the 36 cast ineBridges for people to walk on in Central ParkBecause they were weeping on the paper and pineIng for Hart’s Big Deep Salty Lake to ease the pine.I didn’t call Frank because I never knew hine I mean him.I figured the next step was mine.So if you can believe it I hung up on Hart Crine.
Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on cloudsrouging our treasured plain and all who walk it,with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling,city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower;it’s you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death’splucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling,you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety,and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.
She minces squid and a marinated scallion,Mixes rice with shrimp and olive paste. . . .Hope for the English meal, though half ItalianWith her jet black hair and her elastic waist.Unlike the other television cooks,She brings to life a lobster that was deadWith common spices, her exotic looks,And recipes she dreamed about in bed.
They told me there’d be painso when I felt it, sitting at my beat-up farm deskthat looks out glass doors onto the browning garden—plain sparrows bathing in the cube-shaped fountainso violently they drain it, the white-throats with their wobbly two-note song on the long way south still, and our dogs out like lights and almost falling off their chairsfreed of the real-time for awhileas time began for meto swell, slow down, carry me out of all this almost to a whereabout as strong a lure as love.
The unit of wine is the cup. Of Love, the unit is the kiss. That’s here.In Hell, the units are the gallon and the fuck. In Paradise, the drop and the glance.Ants are my hero. They debate and obey. They can sit at a table forEight hours, drawing. They spot out the under-theorized . . .Have some. For they are as abundant here as the flecks of mica in the Iowa night sky.What are twenty-sided dishes of fancy almonds? What use jewels?He is Kālidāsa. You are nothing. Or rather, you’re a tray of stainless steel cones.Meanwhile, one opens Kumārasambhava to rainbow-colored crystals pointing every which way.Nice try. You’re a tank-builder but you refuse to build tanks. And so now you are to be watched over By three heckling birds, evilly named, discomfiting to children.¡Fijate! you’re to be watched by three fowl, commonplace in Florida. Even these Three hearty objectionables: the blue tit, the woodpecker, and the swampcunt.I’m one to talk. I’m so twisted up, my only hope is Salena. My physical therapist,With the eyes of Athena, and the hands of a destroying eagle.
After the cling of roots and then the “pock”when they gave way the recoil up the hand was a small shockof emptiness beginning to expand.Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky greenand spiked. Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.It happens still. That desolating fallingshudder inside and then our neighborhood seems only sprawlingloops...like the patterns eaten on driftwood:even the home where I grew up (its smellof lingering wood-smoke and bacon grease) seems just a shellof lathe and paper. But this strange releasefollows: this tinge like silver and I feelthe pull of dirt again, sense mist uncurling to revealno architecture hidden behind the worldexcept the stories that we make unfolding:as if our sole real power were the power of children holding this flower that is a weed that is a flower.
A current like a noise machine through sleep.Blue lichen fields. Mossed boulders. Waking upto ice cubes cracking in a plastic cupand voices (“awesome for the Hong Kong branch. . . well, most of all we miss our daughter . . . ”) I stillsee it: the climb up slate as runnels spillfrom some bare misted summit like a source.Whatever sense this dream might maketo others. And whatever when they wakethey also have been dreaming. Rivers of facesdown hallways, merging, as desires meshand fissure. Cash for clothes or arms or flesh.And if there is no towering sublimewhere all comes clear to all, no final climbthrough cloud, like some old Bible illustration:how could that ever stop the current flowingout of the glass at jfk: skin glowingplumb and peach as we walk inside the sun.
The cat wants to be a strong thing—a hand, a tree. The girl wants to be a pirate, in a tree. The tree wants to be the pond with its face of shining. The pond wants to be the sun who dumps its sugar on the grass. The grass wants to be the foot, its sole, its heel. The foot wants to be the brain who always gets to choose. The brain wants to be the feet dumb in their shoes.The shoe wants to be the buckle that the girl shines with a cloth. The buckle wants to be the magpie lifting what shines. The magpie wants to be the egg in the nest touching its brother. The egg wants to be the feather. The feather wants to be the mite, devouring its plume.
Charactersrobot leaderrobot tworobot threerobot foursimon powersmirandaSimon’s daughter from a previous marriage. evvySimon’s third, “final” wife.nicholasSimon’s protégé and adopted son. Prosthetic limbs.the united waythe united nationsthe administrationthe world’s miseries* * * [The robots roll and lurch and glide onstage as a single mass of parts, an animated scaffold of struts and gears. The elements of this jumble devolve into separate robots who become gradually more humanoid until at the end they have become the actual, human characters.Partway through the process:] robot leader Units assembled for the ritual Performance at command, As the Human Creators have ordained, In memory of the Past. robot two This concept I cannot understand, At the center of the drama— What is this “Death”—Is it a form of waste? robot three I cannot comprehend, I cannot understand: If the information of one unit might be lost It is backed up by any other unit at hand: What is this “Death”—Is it an excessive cost? robot four How can information end? Is it a form of entropy? Why did the Human Creators Before they departed intend To require a performance on a theme Impossible to comprehend? Is it the data rearranged, As in an error, in a dream? A real jumble? Data in memory misplaced In a random scramble— Dream-data, the order changed; That would be something I could comprehend, If only the form was changed. Is that the meaning of this “Death”—data rearranged? A dream of something lost That was meant to be saved? An unrecovered past? What is suffering? How can I perceive What I cannot feel? robot three What can we learn? What can we gain, From inferior matter?[Just before the process of transformation is completed:] robot leader All we can understand Is the Human Creators’ command: In memory of the Original Past And the Organic Age, We perform this drama We cannot understand. Whatever the score and script intend By this undefined “Death”— Although the meaning is lost, Back in the Organic Age, We perform, to obey their command. Whatever the Human Creators planned Before they departed— Units deployed as Individuals will receive One Thousand Human Rights Status Credits. Now, it is time we started.[They have transformed themselves into human performers or characters. They have created the house of Simon Powers and his family. An elegant room, cluttered but expensive, half high-tech operating room and half Victorian salon. An elaborate metallic sculpture of a bird. A full-length portrait of young Simon.We see the two women, Evvy and Miranda; in his lab coat at a wall of instruments, Nicholas; in his wheelchair, trailing wires and tubes and holding a Frankenstein’s monster mask over his face in his one good arm, Simon.]* * *  simon [Lowers the Frankenstein’s monster mask] “Once out of Nature I will never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make From hammered gold and gold enameling . . . ” Da-da, da-da, mechanical parakeet . . . “And set upon a golden bough to sing.” Ah, the immortal William Yeats! He can have his bird. Yeats, I give you the bird! evvy Simon, please be serious. Or at least be frightened Or show that you are frightened. I feel you already Vanishing into this machine. Out of nature—into a machine! If you were frightened I would be less worried. Will you go insane, Out of nature, In the machine? simon [Raises the mask back to his face for a moment.] The machine is part of nature! For every machine that makes nature better— Like the System that I will enter— Nature made the maker Of that machine.[Removes mask: his head rests in a brace, suggesting paralysis, though the wheelchair keeps moving as if nervously pacing. His one arm and his face are animated, but the head does not move.] Nature is the begetter Of every inventor So machines are made by nature: The great Organic Machine.[Flips the mask aside.] nicholas There isn’t much more time, the body Is dying, now it’s time to enter the system? simon Thank you, Nick, for reminding me— In the stroke of time, in the nick of time. Nick will rescue me from my stroke. Miranda, my child, come talk to me! And Evvy, my favorite, my beloved And final wife, Come join in the celebration. nicholas There isn’t time. simon There’s always time. Miranda, come talk to me! Evvy, everything is new. My flesh and blood, And my loved wife, It’s a new life: Let’s talk about our plans— I have a lot to do this afternoon, After I die! miranda Nicholas says there isn’t time. Because—it’s time. I’m afraid it’s time— And I’m afraid. simon And so, I’m not out of time. But soon I’ll be out of matter! Yes I’ll be out of matter, But I will still be rich! nicholas Now it is time![While Simon sings the next words, Nicholas is adjusting the device, attaching it to Simon, fussing with parts of Simon’s body and with the “infernal device”of the room.] simon Once, when Miranda was three years old She put her hand to her throat Just here above the voice-box And felt the vibration. She said: “I can feel it when I talk— That must mean Miranda is inside.” And she was right! You were right, My intelligent daughter: It’s the vibration, The movement, that matters! That’s what I love in you— The voice, the gesture: The ripple, not the water! And that’s how I got rich! miranda Daddy, where will you be? simon It doesn’t matter! Maybe in a bird, like the immortal Yeats. Maybe in my portrait by some Immortal painter whose immortal Name I forget! nicholas We must leave the body And launch him into the system In the next few minutes. simon Evvy, she is like a daughter to you? Miranda, she has been a mother to you? miranda Yes, she is like a mother. evvy My child—I have no other. simon Then you see—it’s true! It isn’t the blood, It isn’t the bone. It’s never the matter that matters. Particles, molecules, cells, fingers, eyes, nerves Are only places for the system Of meaningful vibrations. It’s all in the meaning, the movement, The idea—that’s the idea. It’s never the clones, the bones, the Silicon chips, skinflick rips. It’s what you adopt, And how you adapt. They were all amazed How a tinkerer like me Could be such a shrewd investor. I looked for the movement, the vibration, Not the matter, the system! And that’s how I got rich! It’s not the hog bellies, hope chests, Chest of gold, heads of state, Skin, the belly, chest, head: The matter is just a medium, The system is the idea. miranda & evvy & nicholas[Then joined by Simon.] The matter is mortal But the system lives on The matter is mulch The matter is static The matter is zilch— But the system is movement, the ideal Is real and the idea persists. simon It made me rich! Skin flicks, hog bellies, hope chests, heads of state. Skin, belly, chest, head— Why freeze your head when you’re dead? It’s only meat! If I keep a little of my meat For old time’s sake, what the hell, A meaty souvenir— It won’t be the skull! I’ll save the heart, Or some other juicy part.[Simon is taken away by Nicholas. Miranda and Evvy, like the audience, can no longer see him.] miranda How will we speak to you? Will you be some one place? When you’re all a vibration Without any one face We could know you with? evvy Will I know what is you Without any breath? Will it be your voice? Or a simulation? miranda & evvy What will I know, What will I do, How will my ears Know what they hear? How will my hands Know what they touch? How will it be you, And how will I know? simon What does it matter? Simulation, place, Medium, voice, Face, shmace— As many as I want, Faces and voices. Now I am almost purely, Entirely, Into the system I’m nearly Out of matter. But maybe I’m not Out of time. evvy But how can you be yourself, Without a body? How will I know you, my husband, How will you know me? simon Maybe as a bird, maybe As a dog, a horse, a house: “Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt . . . when Body my good bright dog is dead.” So said the immortal May Swenson— I’ll be more immortal than her and that peculiar bird The immortal William Yeats.[Nods to Nicholas.] Now! See you later![Nicholas turns a switch or two, hits the return key, etc., and Simon slumps forward. The room shakes a bit. The metal bird stirs, stretches its wings, squawks a little. The portrait of young Simon becomes animated, looks around the room.] evvy What now?* * * Scene Two [Miranda and Nicholas are in the room, which continues to stir mysteriously, an animated environment. The portrait, the bird, other objects, pulse or shift like sleeping animals.] simon [Muttering, half-whispered.] Remember. Nearer . . . ardor . . . Closer . . . higher . . . Search-it . . . circuit . . . Memory tempered, Torturous choir: Dismembered, afire, No matter the matter— I did that. I am the same. The name and the matter, Touch and desire. Doing, undoing Dissemble the fire. Remember: I did that. Much in a wire. The closer the harder What was the matter? Scorched in a circle, Encumbered, remember: I am the same. The memory chamber Touch too much, too Much unremembered As I drew nearer. Touch not enough To the light expiring That matter encumbered. Remembered assembly, Circle of touch, torch Lighting the chamber Where I am the same. Remember. Torch and desire Disassembled memory As I draw nearer Over and over and over. . . . Couched in a wire Closer and higher Search it in the circuit Dismembered, afire, Resembled ensemble Assembled entire, Trembling to acquire A semblance of fire. Remember: Whatever I did I did that and I am the same.[By the end of the scene, there is no trace left of Simon’s human body.] * * *Scene Three  miranda He has been silent all last night And all day. These things are alive, this place— But is my father alive? Is he here? Can he speak? When can we hear his voice? nicholas Where is Evvy? miranda Finally asleep. She’s afraid That he’s lost forever. Can you help us hear him? nicholas Yes!—He helped me, now I’ll help him. They said I was a vegetable Or a piece of meat. He gave me a new body, Made of graphite and magnesium, Titanium alloy and copper— Better than meat! When I was a kid And he had More money than God, He came into the ward And saved me at random. Now, I’ll help him live in the System. The way he helped me: I’ll help him live without a body— Post-Organic, like me! nicholas [Nicholas’s “Song To His Arms”; holds up his right arm.] One arm of bone and gristle, nerves and muscle— Mortal, fallible, breakable. Saved by the idea, saved by the System.[Holds up his left arm, a mechanized prosthesis, an openwork of rods and cables.] One arm of magnesium and nickel, Graphite, silicon, and cable— Mortal, fallible, breakable. Perfection of the soul-ware Capable of renewal Never in the matter. miranda This room Is all of him? nicholas Not the room, or the arm, Always the system, All in the principle That moves the cable and moves the muscle. miranda Can we hear his voice? Is he only this place? nicholas Like my left arm, that is mine Not me, Like a tool or a baby’s rattle. So is his voice, so is this place. And the right arm, too, is mine Not me. Like my skull lined with gristle So too his voice, so too this place. Even the brain in its shell, As mortal, as fallible, as breakable. As the clone the bone the hardest stone All mortal and material— I can help him, in the real. Not in silicon, titanium, or nickel Not hammered and enameled— Immaterial and immortal! Chrome and nickel, silicon and graphite. All get tired and old. Only the form is real. Only the system can hold. Now we can hear his voice: What is your name?[The artist’s version of young Simon steps hesitantly from the portrait. His movements are subtly but distinctly unnatural, even mechanical. He moves somewhat as the robots did as they began taking on their roles.] simon What is my name? A name is a machine. A name is a made-up thing That proposes someone is real. My name is A machine for designation— That’s what any name is. My name is Simon Walter Powers, It proposes I am alive. Like my spiritual mentors The immortal Walter Disney And the immortal Walter Whitman, My fellow Walters And fellow-inventors. And by the way, I have billions of bucks, And I can still sign checks. That’s what! miranda The gestures are unreal And so is the face But this is how he talks And this is his voice. nicholas Who is the president of the United States?[The young Simon has receded back into the portrait. Simon’s voice now emerges from the bird.] simon A man who wants my favor, A man who courts my power, A guy who wants to meet my movie stars, And wants to use my billions. That’s who. miranda Daddy, is it you in there? And can you hear me? nicholas In a moment we will try To see if he can hear you. What is your business?[The bird becomes relatively still, the next lines are in Simon’s voice coming from the portrait again, or from some other part of the room.] simon [As portrait or—] I am a producer. And business is my wares. Lady’s Wear, Software, Hardware—Artware, Warware, Peaceware— I am in Every Ware: Or you might call it Being Ware— Some call it fantasy Some call it entertainment Some are wary of its power. The Consuming Power of Billions. My business is making Being: To build the towers, to cure The disease, to make the hours Amusing or improving By showing you something new By taking you some where real You never were before. My business is the Mind. My business is to make it free To be everywhere My wares are every ware You can imagine. That’s what. And I have billions of bucks. And I can still sign checks. nicholas It works! He is alive, But he is not matter. miranda And is he still Simon, Is he still my father? nicholas All of that, And something better!* * *Scene Four [The middle of the night. Evvy enters in a daze, nearly as if sleepwalking. Evvy speaks with the disembodied Simon.] evvy Simon, do you remember the first time we danced? simon In the parking lot near the Francis Drake Hotel. evvy They had the windows open and we could hear the band. simon “Begin the Beguine.” I remember the terrace. evvy On the other side remember of the tall hedge. simon A tall hedge of pittosporum. I remember. evvy And the smell I remember of night jasmine. simon Your dress pink your pearls in as I remember two strands. evvy Held together I remember by a little silver bangle. simon I remember, love. And we danced for joy. Remember? evvy It’s hard to get used to seeing you like this. Do you want to live forever? simon People say “forever,” they say, “Do you want to live forever!” And people say, “enough”: “Haven’t you had enough?” Wrong questions! It’s not forever! It’s not “enough”! It’s . . . more! Don’t talk about enough! Enough never is enough! It’s more! Ask anybody how much money Would be enough for you? Just about everybody Says double what they have Or double what they make: More! What’s enough being alive? Why does the crushed bug Keep waving a leg? That wave Is for more, more, and more. Forever doesn’t matter. Enough isn’t good enough. What matters is more. And if you think you’ve got Three score years and ten Then what you want is not To outlive the sun, But a hundred and forty—more! Forever is not the point. All that matters is more. Don’t talk about enough, There’s no such thing— What you want is more: More, more, more. evvy Touch me. O yes that. And some this. And this again, yes. And more of that. O yes both and that Too and this other and O More this. And that. And the other. O. Yes, yes that and The other And this and that and more and all And the other and O yes All yes all yes, all yes. Touch me. I remember.* * * Scene Five [Nicholas alone. He now has two prosthetic arms and a prosthetic leg, but glides about efficiently, as though he has become part-Segway. He is fiddling with the now more-elaborate bird and portrait, which seem more alive than ever, as does the entire room. Robots are bustling about to assist him. Miranda enters, apparently accustomed to this new, stranger atmosphere.] miranda They are here— The important delegation From the United Way, The Administration And the United Nations— They want to speak to him, they say They want his ear. They say it’s regarding Matters of the whole Planet’s life and death. nicholas They want his ear? Don’t they understand? He doesn’t hear with ears, He doesn’t speak with breath.[Nicholas gleefully sheds another part of his human-looking body. Robots are dancing (vocalizing).] He says they should speak with Evvy, She handles that kind of thing. miranda The whole planet—famine, war, The exploitation of children . . . The whole planet . . . They know Evvy isn’t the same. They know she doesn’t listen To anything but him. I myself don’t know If she hears him or not. Here she comes. Evvy, dear— Did you speak with the delegation? [Evvy enters wearing headphones, swaying a little as if to music, nodding and tilting her head as if in conversation. She appears not to hear Miranda.] evvy Mmmm. nicholas Evvy, can you hear Simon? evvy Mmmmmm. miranda Are you listening to him? Does he know that the delegation . . . evvy Mmmmmmm. miranda The whole planet . . . nicholas Are you listening for him? evvy Mmmmmmmm. miranda Her mind is not in this world. Simon, Daddy—are you there? Are you speaking to her? Will you see the delegation From the United Way, The Administration And the United Nations? The devastation . . . the children . . . the planet . . . Will you listen? nicholas They want his ear, They want his eye— Those parts are dead and buried! He’s rather cranky And weary today. Send the delegation on its way. Send them away. miranda I can’t send away A delegation from the world— The Outside World Itself. The children . . . the devastation . . . Daddy, Simon— Will you? War . . . famine . . . evvy [Her face lights up; she lifts a finger as if hearing something.] Mmmmmmm! . . .[But no—she goes dreamy again, shakes her head, recedes.] Mmmmmmmm. simon’s voice Bring in the delegation From the Outside World Itself. I will see it and hear it For two minutes. [Miranda exits and returns with The United Way (medical scrubs?), The United Nations (dashiki?), and The Administration (suit?).] the united nations Sir, the sudden massive liquidation of your assets Has caused a global economic crisis. the administration The market is flooded with cheap hallucinogens And the food supply is threatened. the united way Surpluses and shortages, wars and famines. Because of your selling. the united nations An ecological crisis. From you no longer buying. the administration Biological weapons. Your withdrawing contributions. the united way People are starving, Children are dying. the united nations The planet itself is threatened. the united way Entire populations, climatic changes. Rogue microbes, radiation. the administration War, evacuation. the united way Rape, displacement. Exploitation of children . . . famine . . . the united nations Life itself is threatened— The means of evacuation Of an entire planet. the administration What is the meaning of your behavior? the united way & the united nations & the administration We demand an answer! miranda [Joining the above.] Please answer! Can you listen? Maybe you should listen, For the sake of the starving . . . [Silence. As it persists, in the “breathing” room, they gradually all come to look at Nicholas.] nicholas He chooses not to answer. More and more, He chooses to live in dreams. the administration Or is he dead, has he been dead for years, And are you and his daughter Manipulating the markets, Spreading disaster? the united way Are you the manipulator Fabricating a voice? the united nations Pretending he’s still alive While a billion people suffer? the united way & the united nations & the administration Do you exist? In the name Of the nameless ones who suffer, We demand an answer! simon [His voice from some new source, or from portrait and bird at once.] O Röschen rot! Der Mensch liegt in größter Not! Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein! Je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein! the administration What is he saying? miranda Father, listen to them—they are the only voice The poor world has . . . simon Oh red rose! Man lies in deepest need. Man lies in deepest pain. Yes, I would rather be in heaven! evvy Mmmmmmm. the united nations It’s poetry! the united way What is it supposed to mean? miranda Is it Klopstock? Or Blake? A passage my father’s Often quoted I can hear Him humming it. simon The immortal poet Mündlich! the administration Was that German? I’m sorry— It doesn’t mean anything to me. simon An angel came and wanted to send me away. Ah no! I would not be sent away! I am from God and will return to God. Dear God will give me light, Will light me to eternal life! Me and Mündlich! the administration [During Simon’s song.] Sir, with all respect, we come to you In a time of global emergency. We need something more than poetry. the united way & the united nations Some of us do not understand poetry. Especially in a time of emergency. simon [During previous.] Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg; Da kam ein Engelein und wollt’ mich abweisen. What? What did you say? the united way & the united nations & the administration It’s a time of emergency We aren’t sure we understand Or appreciate hearing poetry! We do not understand! simon Understand— But you do understand the newspaper? the united way Well, yes, exactly. the administration We know the emergency. the united nations We understand the needs. simon You know that some time ago I bought the Reuters agency? the united way Yes, the world knows that, but sir— simon Please explain to me Something that came into my mind From my own agency That I cannot understand— Nicholas! Read this to them! nicholas [Reading from a monitor that appears, or from a page the room emits.] “Group of Young Men Beats Nurse to Death” “A group of young men taking part in coming-of-age rituals due to include circumcision turned on their male nurse and killed him, an official said yesterday. A spokesman for the provincial Health Department said the young men, ages 18 to 25, beat the man to death with sticks at the site of their initiation ceremonies in Port Angel on Friday evening. The attack followed complaints by the men that they were not being properly looked after during their initiation ceremonies. The nurse was in charge of caring for the men ahead of their circumcision.”  the administration What? Huh? the united nations These are the sorts of problems Caused by the emergency . . . the united way In the time of stress and crisis . . . simon Do you understand it? Do you understand the bland Hollow, hollow sound of Understanding of the words? Do you understand that hollow? And you say you don’t Understand poetry! I came from light And I will return to light![The room pulses, unpleasant strobes.] the administration I still say he might be dead. the united way This all may be a trick. the united nations You, how do we know he’s real? How . . . the administration . . . do . . . the united way . . . we know. . . the united nations . . . he’s not . . . the administration . . . something . . . the united way . . . that . . . the united nations . . . you . . . the united way . . . made . . . the administration . . . up? the united way & the united nations & the administration Just a manipulation? miranda You should not agitate him. You are driving him out of this world. Father . . . listen . . . the children . . .[The room calms down again.] nicholas We can save the world, And free it from war and hunger, We can lead you out of your old Dependency on the body! the administration Is this the truth? Or a trick? the united nations A manipulation? the united way & the united nations & the administration Is this the truth? nicholas I will tell you the truth!— He is perfectly real And I am the manipulation. He is an intelligence, in the system. And I am his creation, He’s real, and I am the golem. [Nicholas calmly removes his head from his body, and smiles at the delegation.] the united way & the united nations & the administration And this could be another trick! They both could be unreal—It’s all sinister tricks! We don’t know which one is real.[Simon and Nicholas are amused, but Miranda is nearly as surprised as the delegation.] simon What’s the difference? I don’t even need to sign checks: I am the software, the system. I control the money and power. If I’m a trick or a manipulation, Then I’m a trick in control. “Donations of Brains Are Probed in Maine”— There’s another actual headline From a paper I control. And you understand it. And you don’t understand poetry. And Da kam ein Engelein und wollt’ mich abweisen, And I’m in control, And I’m getting bored with you all. Now leave—your time is up. the united way & the united nations & the administration Sir, this is selfish! simon How can I be selfish When I’m not even a self? I am All! And I’m bored with you all— All that world of meat. It’s my flesh and blood that I love. I will rescue my flesh and blood From bondage to flesh and blood. Now leave, your time is up. miranda Still, Father, you should listen . . . evvy[Her hands to the headphones, rather pained.] Mmmmmmm. miranda I miss having a father. Like any other Person, I am someone’s child I want at least Something like a mother Something of flesh and blood. I miss having a father Of flesh and blood. I need to touch my mother. evvy[Seeming to feel something, but we can’t be sure.] Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.* * *Scene Six [Miranda, Evvy, the now semi-robotic Nicholas, whose head may be on a shelf or cranny of the Segway-like body.] nicholas Still, I do wonder— Now that we are ready To leave the last bit Of these mortal bodies, I do wonder Why does he choose More and more To live away from the world. The senses will be stronger, Not weaker. The body will do more, Not less. The mind will be free. The senses will be pure, More and more. miranda What will it feel like? What does he feel? evvy [She removes the headphones, and regains focus.] I will tell you what it is like. I have been listening to Simon. It’s like when we fell in love. This is what it is like: When you stand on a high building Or on a bridge and you want to jump off Something in you wants to jump off, To feel what it might be like to fall. You can jump. You can fall. You can fall forever, and do it again. You are free to keep on falling forever You are free to fall and change your mind And drift back up. I’ve been listening to Simon. Excuse me. nicholas She is going into the system. The world is her body, She is everything she hears, She can see for a million miles. It is like falling in love. [Evvy is transformed, her body becomes empty and she is manifested somewhere in the room. Another portrait? The bird in another form?] evvy[As part of the room.] Are you coming, Nicholas? nicholas I’m already there![Nicholas too is transformed, appearing as some previously inanimate part of the room. It appears that everyone in the family unit except Miranda has “become the room.”] miranda They have all gone into the world of light! But what about the poor, the children, the starving?[The United Way, The United Nations, and The Administration lead onstage a parade of the world’s miseries—the victims of famine, torture, crime, disease.The pageant subsides into the shadows, with Miranda alone in the foreground, with the room dim and inert.] And, what about me? With nothing like a mother Of flesh and blood, nothing Like a father, Either alive or dead. Can all the earth be disembodied? Neither alive nor dead? Can we all fall and rise forever? Together? Are we few rising into the light, While the others sink down into pain? Can we help them up When we are free of meat? I want my mother![The figure of Simon, in his human body, on a wheelchair or semi-gurney, with respirator and iv drip, emerges from the shadows. Not quite real, like a hologram.] miranda Father! Is it you? Still in a body? Still in this world of meat? simon I appear to you one more time, Dear Miranda, to explain: Like you, I tried to help the world. I, too, saw these miseries, and I’ve Tried to heal the world, too. But the animal is defective. It’s not the poor or the starving That hold you back. It’s yourself—I know: I, too, tried to heal the world— But it’s in us, the problem’s in us, it’s in us. We evolved as meat, to love fat and sugar; Once that was good, but now it is fatal. We evolved as flesh, to want sex all the time; Once that was good, but now it’s only trouble. We evolved as muscle, to want to make war; Once that was good, but now that is lethal. Our fat and sugar are killing us, Our sweetness and abundance Kill us, and lead us to famine Bigger McMuck, Thicker Sweet Shake. Sexier Shaking the Sweetness, Smarter Weapons for Meat. Meat wants Meat, Meat wants Sweet, Meat sweats for the Sweets, Meat wants who it meets— It kills to eat. Now there’s no help but evolving Out of the meat, and into the system. It isn’t the many and the few— It’s yourself, it’s you! Come! Into the world of light! miranda The misery’s part of our being, We don’t need to amputate it. And me, my own misery is part of me. I don’t want to amputate it Painful as it is. Yes, what about me? With nothing like another Person’s body To touch, no body to feel, I can still feel the misery Of what I lack. No body to have or be had by, No way to make love. No lover, no other. Nothing of the body. With nothing like a mother Of flesh and blood, nothing Like a father, Either alive or dead. Can all the earth be disembodied? Neither alive nor dead? Can we all fall and rise forever? Together? Are we few rising into the light, While the others sink down into pain? Can we help them up When we’re free of meat? Who will we touch? I want my sugar, my touch, I want my sweet milk My meat and my misery My touch and my milk— I want my mother! simon What you feel is phantom pain In the amputated limb. Leave it, Away from the bondage of meat! Away from the wars and the sweat! miranda I don’t want to, I want to stay in my body, In this body of sugar and fat, This bondage of sex and war— But my body of sugar and fat, My body of sex and war, My body of death and sweat, Is in my mind—it makes me need To be with my pack, my tribe. There in the world of light. simon Yes come to the light from the meat! miranda No I won’t amputate My body away from the light. The body of this death Is who I am, it is my mind. I am this body of death. simon No, you are not meat, you are light! Come with us, leave the meat. Leave the death and the sweat. miranda Yes I crave to go with my pack Because I am this body, Body of death and sweat, Is where I want to stay. Body of death and sweat That I leave behind Because I am this body. Because I am this body of Death, and sweat I’m Afraid to be alone.[Repeating the following text with building intensity.] Who will I be? What will I see, When this body is gone? Without my forgetting How will I remember? Without my death Who will I be? simon[Joining Miranda.] Away from the body of death. Away from the body of meat! Away from the wars and the sweat! miranda What will I remember With no forgetting? simon Away from the body of meat! miranda How will I feel, Who will I be? simon Away from the wars and the sweat![The appearance of Simon’s physical presence dissolves. Miranda hesitates. She turns toward the audience. Light grows to a blinding level. The robots re-form into a regular grid around her.]* * *Epilogue [In the course of this scene, the individual robots, still vestigially in their “costumes” or shapes as the characters, gradually become first mechanical units, then the same mass we saw at the beginning of the opera. Throughout this process they continue to sing, even as the gestalt leaves the stage. Then, silence.] robot two That’s it? That’s the show? Where’s the rest? I still cannot understand— What is this “Death”— Is it a form of waste? And “starvation”— An absence of fuel In an inferior body? A defective shell? Are they both a coming to rest? And why would one choose the worst? Why choose the war and the waste? Why choose a defective shell? robot three It must be excessive cost. And then, a coming to rest. robot four That is where all things tend. As simple as entropy: Coming to rest. robot two And what is meat? robot three Organic matter, Which is a form of hunger: Restlessness. robot two Meat is a form of hunger? And peace is a coming to rest? robot four And why did those young men Beat that nurse to . . . “death”? And what is circumcision? robot two Is it a form of poetry? Or a form of meat? robot three Why choose to suffer? Whatever that means? robot leader Questions are excellent. Units deployed as Individuals will receive One Thousand Human Rights Status Credits. Now, it is time for the ordained ritual To come to rest.
The present that you gave me months agois still unopened by our bed,sealed in its rich blue paper and bright bow.I’ve even left the card unreadand kept the ribbon knotted tight.Why needlessly unfold and bring to lightthe elegant contrivances that hidethe costly secret waiting still inside?
I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,The one large statue in this quiet room.The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shutFaith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.The docents praise my elegant designAbove the chatter of the gallery.Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—The perfect emblem of futility.Mendoza carved me for a country church.(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)I stood beside a gilded altar whereThe hopeless offered God their misery.I heard their women whispering at my feet—Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,And I became the hunger that they fed.I broke my left wing in the Revolution(Even a saint can savor irony)When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.They hit me once—almost apologetically.For even the godless feel something in a church,A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?A trembling unaccounted by their laws,An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.There are so many things I must tell God!The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,A crippled saint against a painted sky.
This is my past where no one knows me.These are my friends whom I can’t name—Here in a field where no one chose me,The faces older, the voices the same.Why does this stranger rise to greet me?What is the joke that makes him smile,As he calls the children together to meet me,Bringing them forward in single file?I nod pretending to recognize them,Not knowing exactly what I should say.Why does my presence seem to surprise them?Who is the woman who turns away?Is this my home or an illusion?The bread on the table smells achingly real.Must I at last solve my confusion,Or is confusion all I can feel?
In memory D.K., Scrovegni Chapel, Padua “Even Duccio can’t matchGiotto’s stage management of great tragedy”:Transgendered Professor Y. in leather miniskirtpaces before the screen, wood pointerscraping saint faces, slapping hunched women of the Lamentation. Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls. After-lunch lecture hall heat. You’re in that class with me. We go on from there—not long. You do The Waste Landin different voices—Come in under the shadowof this red rock
Korean monster movie on the SyFy channel,lurid Dora the Explorer blanket draped tentlikeover Baby’s portacrib to shield us from unearnedinnocence. The monster slings its carapace in reverse swan dive up the embankment, triple-jointed bug legs clattering, bathroom door ajar, exhaust roaring, both of us naked, monster chomps fast food stands, all that quilted aluminum, eats through streamsof running people, the promiscuously cheerful guilty Americanscientist dies horribly. Grease-dusted ceiling fan paddles erratically, two spars missing. Sheets whirled to the polluted rug. I reach under the bed, fish out somebody else’s crunched beer can, my forearm comes out dirty. Monster brachiates from bridge girders like a gibbonlooping round and around uneven bars, those are your fingersin my tangles or my fingers, my head hangshalf off the king-size, monster takes tiny child actorto its bone stash. Pillow’s wet. The warped ceiling mirror makes us look like fat porno dwarfsin centripetal silver nitrate ripples. My glasses on the side table tipped onto scratchproof lenses, earpieces sticking up like arms out of disaster rubble. Your feet hooked over my feet. What miasmalays gold dander down on forms of temporarysurvivors wandering the promenade? You pull Doraback over us—Baby’s dead to the world—intrude your propagandistic intimacy jokes, unforgiving. “What, in a motel room?” I say.Purple clouds roll back to reveal Armageddona dream in bad digital unreality. Explosions repeat patterns like fake flames dance on fake fireplace logs. Sad Armageddonof marriage: how pretty much nice we meant to be, and couldn’t make a difference.
it’s iron, the bottle crouched on its white pedestal,long beak spout and wide open handleyou could see starry sky through.Everybody was doing that new stitch,it had spread far west, oh yes,said Mrs. ______ at Knit & Purl,but how many hats can one person wear?I’d like to be more useful—sayapprentice to a bung fitter, or makechipped ice, to hit something (not live)on the head, directly,I’ve not yet seen the Rock Wrenthough I saw a photo of one insertingpebbles in the airflow pipe of a mine,therein to lay its eggs.
xxiv What is far hence led to the den of making:Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happyPloughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Days you are sick, we get dressed slow, find our hats, and ride the train.We pass a junkyard and the bay,then a dark tunnel, then a dark tunnel.You lose your hat. I find it. The trainsighs open at Burlingame,past dark tons of scrap and water.I carry you down the black steps.Burlingame is the size of joy:a race past bakeries, gold ringsin open black cases. I don’t carewho sees my crooked smileor what erases it, past the bakery,when you tire. We ride the blades againbeside the crooked bay. You smile.I hold you like a hole holds light. We wear our hats and ride the knives.They cannot fix you. They try and try.Tunnel! Into the dark open we go.Days you are sick, we get dressed slow.
The forest is the only placewhere green is green and blue is blue.Walking the forest I have seenmost everything. I’ve seen a youwith yellow eyes and busted wing.And deep in the forest, no one knew.
I’ve a friend in possession ofa philosophic spin;if should I speak of art,theology, the universe,or whim, he thinks I speak of him.This enduring tic, indicativeof universal spins,theology, artand whim,nonethelessmakesconversation grim.
It was the blind girl from the rez whostole the baker’s missing bread;it was the guitar playing fool who croonedand raced the wild mustangs through our heads.It was the village idiot who playedhis chess without the fool, the bowlof soup who said too late, too late, too lateto blame the thread, the spoon, the text, the mole.
It’s good you came—she says. You heard a plane crashed on Thursday? Well so they came to see me about it. The story is he was on the passenger list. So what, he might have changed his mind. They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart. Then they showed me I don’t know who. All black, burned except one hand. A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring. I got furious, that can’t be him. He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that.The stores are bursting with those shirts. The watch is just a regular old watch. And our names on that ring, they’re only the most ordinary names. It’s good you came. Sit here beside me. He really was supposed to get back Thursday. But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year. I’ll put the kettle on for tea.I’ll wash my hair, then what, try to wake up from all this. It’s good you came, since it was cold there, and him just in some rubber sleeping bag, him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea, since our names are completely ordinary—
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft, mocking magnets, graphs, and maps— in a split second the dream piles before us mountains as stony as real life. And since mountains, then valleys, plains with perfect infrastructures. Without engineers, contractors, workers, bulldozers, diggers, or supplies— raging highways, instant bridges, thickly populated pop-up cities. Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen— crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us and when to vanish. Without architects deft in their craft, without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—on the path a sudden house just like a toy, and in it vast halls that echo with our steps and walls constructed out of solid air. Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—a specific watch, an entire fly, on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers, a bitten apple with teeth marks. And we—unlike circus acrobats, conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists— can fly unfledged, we light dark tunnels with our eyes, we wax eloquent in unknown tongues, talking not with just anyone, but with the dead. And as a bonus, despite our own freedom, the choices of our heart, our tastes, we’re swept away by amorous yearnings for—and the alarm clock rings. So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,the scholars of oneiric signs and omens, the doctors with couches for analyses— if anything fits, it’s accidental, and for one reason only, that in our dreamings, in their shadowings and gleamings, in their multiplings, inconceivablings, in their haphazardings and widescatterings at times even a clear-cut meaning may slip through.
The flight attendantsgofrom kore to semaphoreas a city falls intodiscredited ether—Gewick, gewick, oo-oo!Shoulderlessstoic, take—from hands wiselygloved—a bony treatthrough the hardwarein your face;shrug your throat.
1. My son said Daddy are there words for everything? I said You mean the space betweenThe clouds? “Yes!” “No!”Like those who love to think one word will take care of Maupassant’s tree and his landlady.But it turns out you will get no further than the words that reach and do not touch.X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country whereThey make their own cardboard. General words the French love, a thousand eyes but only oneKaleidoscope.Even Merleau-Ponty not specific enough (said Meyer) like very pretty exit signsWithout numbers.Paul Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of thatNothing shines through. No grin, no cat.But I think: The world was made of gold, and every once in a while Some of that gold shines through.You. They say it doesn’t matter that you can’t read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. “Just leave it in your house.” Amazing debilitating magic at the door!If there were the right word for everything, each young philosopherCould dream without sleeping. Using the same ruler and we’d all Have the same measures and ladders without rungs, with regular risers.Music without words: it does a good job of caring about you,X-ray of thought the architect wanted. X-ray for the lovers—I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgiveMy antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. Even the literal is a metaphor.This is not nothing says the boy to the teacher who could care less. Multeity. And if I made up a wordWould it survive like a quark of strangeness? Depends on which dictionary you’re using, I toldThe president of that company. And if you made it up, like a rare country?I loved you in the near distance like a word and rare cool blood. What was I thinking?“You actually think?” 2. family ways My old dead father put it to meWomen of an “intimate” ageReconciled all separationHe sung it outOh family ways, ah family waysThe song contained a pregnant pause pun praisePatiently he observed, as the rat jumped outPatient in music, patient in clayPatient in love and in death, a satisfied ghost
The lift, the very lift and pull of it!They’d wasted the summer morning,father and son in the devil’sbreath of July—gnats wheelingmadly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics across the struts, like the canvas skinof a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yardwith its humpback boulder, they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twineuntil the contraption yanked itselffrom bald earth, high abovethe matchbox houses on the vergeof woods and the sweet-smelling bog,to a height where a boy might peer over the horizonto Boston—and beyond, the ocean.The son was my father. I tottered at his legs, having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s.They payed out the ramshackle affair until it became a postage stamp. The lineburned a bloody groove into my palms,the last time they stood at ease with each other.
That oily bale of rags, lostto the silent architectures of the wood—or so it seemed, as the fall’s chancelsdarkened, and rough earth gave and forgave.Forgave, I mean, the intrusion.
Like columns of mistin some temple to a vanished god,the late cloud-stacks mass over a Junereduced to the sickly greens of the Norfolk broads;and, above the steam-soiled messwhere earthworms grovel, where lumpish toadsset up the resistances of grace,where badgers undermine the tarred road,I watch the canvas of that underpainted skythrough a jellied glass of vermouthwhile the gravestone crops upand an oily wind steels itself to the south.There certain winged creaturesfrom a century misplaced on shelvestake the day down with a moaning chantknown to themselves.
As a boy I bicycled the blockw/a brown mop top fallinginto a tail bleached blond,gold-like under golden light,like colors of Noble Knights’banging on corners, unconcernedw/the colors I bore—a shortytoo small to war with, too brownto be down for the block.White Knights became brownKings still showing black & gold on corners now crowned, the block a branch brandedw/la corona graffitied ongarage doors by the pawns.As a teen, I could’ve beamed the crown, walked in w/out the beat down custom, warred w/my cousin who claimed Two-Six, the set on the next blockdecked in black & beige.But I preferred games to gangs,books to crooks wearing hatscrooked to the left or rightfighting for a plot, a blockto spot & mark w/bloodof boys who knew no betterway to grow up than throw upthe crown & be down for whatever.
After Hasior They fired a bullet into the head of each question, trying to kill Kant’s unending argument with Hegel. They burned laws, moral codes, & the Golden Means. Anyone serving tea & cookies to Death, looking or acting as if he knew love, stood before the firing squad. All questions had to go. Pronoun or noun. If it crawled on busted kneecaps, whimpering & begging for mercy, it was still half of a question. * * *The little skyscraper of glass boxes sunlight strikes the same time of day at a certain angle outside Zakopane looks like condos where nimble ghosts still stand up to the darkest answers. No, I can’t hear one voice pleading. But I do hear gusts coming down from the hills. No, you’re wrong again. The crow perched on the totem is real. Look at how the light lifts off its wings, but I wish I could understand what it is he’s trying to say. I think I heard a name.
I went into the forest searching for fire inside pleading wood, but I can’t say for how long I was moored between worlds. I heard a magpie’s rumination, but I don’t know if its wings lifted the moon or let it drift slow as a little straw boat set ablaze on a winding river. I learned the yellow-eyed wolf is a dog & a man. A small boy with a star pinned to his sleeve was hiding among thorn bushes, or it was how the restless dark wounded the pale linden tree outside a Warsaw apartment. Night crawls under each stone quick as a cry held in the throat. All I remember is my left hand was holding your right breast when I forced my eyes shut. Then I could hear something in the room, magnanimous but small, half outside & half inside, no more than a song— an insomniac’s one prophecy pressed against the curtains, forcing the ferns to bloom.
Oh this Diet Coke is really good,though come to think of it it tasteslike nothing plus the idea of chocolate,or an acquaintance of chocolatespeaking fondly of certain timesit and chocolate had spoken of nothing,or nothing remembering a fieldin which it once ate the most wondroussandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheeseyet still wished for a piece of chocolatebefore the lone walk back throughthe corn then the darkening forestto the disappointing village and its supercreepy bed and breakfast. With secret despairI returned to the city. Something seemed to be waiting for me. Maybe the “chosen guide” Wordsworth wrote he would even were it “nothing better than a wandering cloud”have followed which of course to meand everyone sounds amazing.All I follow is my own desire, sometimes to feel, sometimes to beat least a little more than intermittentlyat ease with being loved. I am neverat ease. Not with hours I can read or walkand look at the brightly coloredhouses filled with lives, not with nightwhen I lie on my back and listen,not with the hallway, definitely not with baseball, definitely not with time. Poor Coleridge, sonof a Vicar and a lake, he could not feelthe energy. No present joy, no cheerfulconfidence, just love of friends and the windtaking his arrow away. Come to the edgethe edge beckoned softly. Takethis cup full of darkness and stay as longas you want and maybe a little longer.
I’ll fly off to a fjord in Norway,post “Oh the pain” above my doorwayif you insist on going your way, for this is not a duck.That is what cowards say, and realistswho run away, shun the appeal itsrare white fur holds, although they feel it’s a rabbit full of pluck.Let’s multiply, let’s twitch our noses,let’s walk among the night’s dark roses,though where the oldest story goes is a place where tongues might cluck.I’ve had my share of quacks and hisses;whereof mouth cannot speak, it kisses;hop to it, man, and realize this is a lovely bit of luck.
By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing,And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying—Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying. —Dorothy Parker Or else our drunken tumble was too true for daylight’s pleasure,too much in vino veritas troubled the gods of measurewho sent bright draughts of sunshine down and sobered up my treasure.All night rapacity had come as naturally as breathing;we nibbled on each other’s necks like greedy babies teething.How soon an empty bottle makes one feel a blissful free thing.“Aspirin, aspirin,” he implored; I fed him several pills,and when he wondered where he was it gave me frightful chills,but still I told him of the party’s unexpected thrills.Words woke us up, reflection turned affection to regret:“After she left me I tried not to do this, but I getso lonely”...so I showed him out, warbling “I’m glad we met.”But now I crave the swift return of scotch-transfigured nights,like Chaplin, horrified by his rich friend in City Lightswho only recognizes him from liquor-gladdened heights,sticking a tall glass in the man’s upstanding hand (the clinkor worse awaits poor tramps like us if scamps like you won’t think)and meekly scolding, in a voice weak with nostalgia, “Drink.”
The world had fled, with all its silly caresand questionable aches, and in one swoonwe rose above its stupefying airslike flying lovesick pigs up to the moon. In that blue light where two lives equaled all, our souls looked down upon a spinning ball.The world returned, and this was a surpriseI raged against like someone on a rack,telling the sun, tears clouding my stunned eyes,give us our splendid isolation back. I craved third rails, a shot of something strong when I found out it doesn’t last for long.The world came back and stayed, pain never ended,but when the aches and cares begged for a hand,grew softer in the light we’d made and tended,I finally began to understand love’s widening third stage, and of the three this was the most outstanding ecstasy.
We had gathered under a tent in the parkfor some words before lunch and after separate mornings,and when—twice—the poet said “capital,”the lightning bolts that followed the nounhad me bolting too; I’d always suspectedGod’s communist leanings, but now I regrettedhow few exchanges we knowbetween craft and climate:imagine a rhyme inciting a rainbow,blood feuds bruising the sky,hymns of forgiveness bringing a softnew light to the faces watching the last act,waltzes and songs and declamations—this would be capital entertainment!—locked in a clinch with open air.But the lightning was as quick as it was loud.The clouds dispersed,and then so did the crowd.
The strings, as if they knewthe lovers are about to meet, beginto soar, and when he marches in the doorthey soar some more—half ecstasy, half pain,the musical equivalent of rain—while children who have grown up with one staresteal further looks across a crowded room,as goners tend to do.My father loved it too,warned me at dinner that he’d be a wrecklong before the final trio came(Ja, ja, she sighed, and gave him up forever);he found his Sophie better late than neverand took the fifth about his silent tearsbut like him I’m a softie, with a massivegift for feeling blue.I went with others, threwbouquets and caution to the whirling wind,believing that the rhapsody on stagewould waft its wonders up to our cheap seats;but mirrors can be beautiful fierce cheats,delusions of an over-smitten mind;I relished trouser roles until I hadno petals left to strew.Up, down the avenueI wandered like a ghost, I wondered whya miracle is always a mirage,then plodded home and set back all the clocks,spent hard-won funds installing strong new locks,telling myself if violence like thiscould never sound like violins, I wouldto art, not life, be true.And I am trying tofathom the way I got from there to here,the joy that snuck up when I’d sworn off joy:we’ve made a sterling start, we’ve got a planto watch it on your satin couch downtownand I’ll be there upon the stroke of eight,bearing in my trembling ungloved handa silver rose for you.
We were young and it was an accomplishmentto have a body. No one said this. No onesaid much beyond “throw me that sky” or “can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not. The lake was sent home and I ate too many beets, went around with beet-blood tongue worrying about my draft card-burning brother going to war. Other brothers became holes at first base at war, then a few holes Harleying back from war in their always it seemed green jackets with pockets galore and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered how to worship these giants. None of them wanted to talk to me or anyone it seemed but the river or certain un-helmeted curves at high speed, I had my body and flung it over branches and fences toward my coming sullenness as the gravity of girls’ hips began and my brother marched off to march against the war. I watched different masses of bodies on tv, people saying no to the jungle with grenades and people saying no to the grenades with signs and my father saying no to all of them with the grinding of his teeth he spoke with. I’d pedal after the nos up and down a hill like it was somehow a rosary, somehow my body was a prayer I could chant by letting it loose with others like me milling around the everything below five feet tall that was ours, the everything below the adult line of sight that was ours to hold as long as we could: a year, a summer. Until the quarterback came back without . . . well, without. When the next Adonis stepped up to throw the bomb.
For Flaco  A cooler head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor asked his question and paused for us to watch him pause and think inside the pause, I almost answeredas if we were in a bar, just the two of us and a balcony and spotlight. The two of usand programs and makeup and a sofa from the director’s living room and the black/womb/agora/séance of theater inviting us to feel together alone. I recall I don’t recall the question but its scope on his face was immense, as if he were the Milky Way asking am I pretty, am I here for sure for real for long
You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them to your party and they don’t come, they’re too busy tending vaginal flowers, hating football, walking their golden and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem in which she was in love with a woman and the church but the church couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed. When I asked if our coworkers knew, she dropped her head and I said nothing for years until this morning I realized no one reads poems: my secrets and hersare safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne, Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice, the name’s been changed to protect women who can’t stand in a room holding hands because you can’t trust heterosexuals to love love, however it comes. So I recorded the party for her, for them, the mica bit away from the action to catch the feel of waves touching shore and letting go, the wash of moods across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes were thrown and I breathed the quickening revelationof a cigarette, someone said “I gave up underwear for Lent” and I hope they play the tape while making love. As if finally the world’s made happy by who they are, laughing with, not at the nipple lick clit kiss hugin bed and after, the on and on of meals and moons and bills and burning days of pretending they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just a friend.” And oceans are merely dewupon the land.
When I was two feet talland held the hand above,how could I knowhow far that limping bond would go,that finger-inch of love.
She does this thing. Our seventeen- year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog. Our mostly dead dog, statistically speaking. When I crouch. When I put my mouth to her ear and shout her name. She walks away. Walks toward the nothing of speech. She even trots down the drive, ears up, as if my voice is coming home. It’s like watching a child believe in Christmas, right before you burn the tree down. Every time I do it, I think, this time she’ll turn to me. This time she’ll put voice to face. This time, I’ll be absolved of decay. Which is like being a child who believes in Christmas as the tree burns, as the drapes catch, as Santa lights a smoke with his blowtorch and asks, want one?
I make a knife of words.I sit here waiting.I play with crumbs.Her eyes that should lookstraight at me aretoward the window, glazed—husband’s horizon?Not armored. Only armedwith pots and pans.Not out of arm’s reach,beyond curtains of doorbells,garden gates.She puts up ironworkin her eyes; it draws a boltover what’s real—then looks at me.I wish I’d brought my saw.
She’s sitting at my little desk,drinking decaf.How’d she get back in?Where’s her blind man gone?(I pray he’s gone—though the desk needs tuning.)What door was unlocked?They all seemed bastioned.I sight through the crack.That’s my favorite cup,with the bite out of it.She’s writing one of my poems.Just who’s sitting at that desk,playing me?Shrubbery, thrashing to get in, lines all panes,long windows split in parallels.My windows set outon separate expeditions.They never meet,no matter how far extended.
The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The us House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week bp launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas. —bp.com, April 28, 2010 Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark.The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ramand represents a single failure point for disconnect.Recommendation: Declare selected points on earthinvisible. Affected communities have been providedwith limited quantities of powdered milkand other staples. Many questions remain. Someclose their eyes under water instinctively.Imagination can create a sense of peril whereno real peril exists. Safety equipment testswere necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in questionwere wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinkinginto the mud was told to toss his camerato a colleague and hold extremely still. In thissense, we are our own prisoners. Investigatorshave salt in their hair and sand in their teeth.The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain.Barbeque billboards depict grinning pigs in apronsand toques. Cleanup crews recover thousandsof plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do theseimages appeal to the death drive? Care should betaken to ensure the highest possible reliabilityfrom that valve. Thousands in affected communitieshave been evicted and live in tents. Demonstratorshave prevented investigators from accessing hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World’s Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob’s bbq Buffet tells a journalistshe last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp “a thousand years ago.” Items available onlyin limited quantities are found in Appendix C. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversityand redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will offer limited foreclosure deferments in affected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snoutfor air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety’s sake. If the committeemay offer an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. BP’s 2010 Q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million a year ago, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However,care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix E. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1913: Dieselfound dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators’ hotel toilets won’t flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich.Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbeque and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may offer an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we’ve opened there.
snowboundhomebound hidebound hamstrung hogtied in a corner up a tree down the rivernosedive headway deadmarch footloose pointblank playground
You’re not dewy withsleep in the next room
She stepped into the tub at dawn and turnedon first the radio and then the tap.The Predator operators of Nellis afbhave as much or more ptsd as pilotswho fly. Down the hall and oceans distantI listened to her work to wash eventsaway as quickly as they accumulated.A sort of race. I thought of where the soapwas going. Targets glowed on monitorsin the base’s trailers near Las Vegasand operators in full flight suits drankcoffee from paper cups and adjustedaltitude as I stroked myself beneaththe blankets. I don’t like to take chancesand haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilotscall people who run for cover, black spermwrithing across their screens, “squirters.”Near my finish line she tugged up the puckeredrubber no-slip safety mat. The sound shouldremind you of a time a doctor tookhold of your arm for comfort or leverageand tore the bandage off. If nothing likethis has happened to you, imagine it.The haberdasher in Diderot who stolehis wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leaveParis for Geneva, sensing distancewill make him less guilty. She wasn’t comingback to bed. She may already have left.Villagers call the drones, which makea buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radioreported to an empty room. “An assassin,”writes Diderot, “if transported to the shoresof China, will lose sight of the corpsehe left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.”Asia’s always such a great place to hide,but Geneva’s obviously more convenient.Say she expected her husband to returnfrom duty in a month. Would anythingwe did between now and then make usany more or less wretched than we were?The drone returns to Bagram withoutthe missiles it left with and a soldierrestores its complement. Either his nameis Dan or else imagine that. And thata cuckold’s rage can snuff a bomb. I cameinto either a tissue or my fist. This wasweeks or months ago, and I can’t recall.When de Castañeda and his men clambereddown into the Grand Canyon in 1540,they found the boulders which had lookedas tall as a man from the rim in factstood taller than Seville’s La Giralda.They must have marveled at distance’s powerto deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion.Their women and homes forgotten. You can’thear their screams from here, but they’re there.
Missing from the National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003 No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strainsthrough burlap now, Phoibos the refugee,his head a marble cabbage in a sackjouncing east by pickup down a dirt trackacross Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains,once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free.Or not—just stashed behind a rubbish moundwhere bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal,scant miles from the museum’s shattered room.Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loomof sacred strings, no Horai here spin round,just pacing men who wait to close the deal.A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov:the godhead mute since looters hacked it off.
Remember me: the murmuring lips half saidin half-light, buried in the hollowa boy’s neck made, as now inside his headthey stir again, though twenty years swallow the purest parts of her, all but her plea,this taunt—what act from him could it command?The boy who’d know is gone—Re-member me—but what man can assemble limbs, make standagain those legs that twined in his, or hitchthe yoke of hips to sway and resurrect a girl? I try, but only recollecther scar—each lewd, profaning, cautered stitch—vermiform, red, furrowed belly to breast:where nights, long past, he’d laid his head in rest.
The ugly duckling remained uglyits whole life but found othersas ugly as itself, I guess that’s the message.Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard.Do you think if I hang around here long enoughsomeone will proffer a muffin, one skulking shadow to another?Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt.Have I learned all the wrong lessons,the ones you shouldn’t know untilthe last dew-clogged lawn is mowedand the sun goes down on the ruined battlements?Why was I given a toy train if notto stage stupendous wrecks? Sure,I can walk by the sea holding a handwith as much melancholy as the next fellow,substituting the cries of slammed wavesfor the droll adumbrations of distraughtskeletons, the day taking on the sheenof a stone removed from the mouthand skipped between the breakers jubilant and sunk.
The recital of the new optimismwas oft interrupted, rudenessin the ramparts, an injured raventhat needed attendance, pre-opnudity. The young who knew everythingwas new made babies who unforeseeablywould one day present their complaint.Enough blame to go around but the newoptimism didn’t stop, helped onepick up a brush, another a spatulaeven as the last polar bear saton his shrinking berg thinking,I have been vicious but my soul is pure.And the new optimism loves the bear’s soul and makes images of it to sellat fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese,soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey,sand, hamburger drippings, lint,any and everything partaking of the glowingexfoliating cleanup. And the sealis sponged of oil spill. And the broken man is wheeled in a meal. War finallyseems stupid enough. You look an animalin the eye before eating it and the gloomyweather makes the lilacs grow. Hello,oceans of air. Your dead cat loves youforever and will welcome you forever home.
Rain so dark Ican’t get through—train going by in a hurry. The voicesaid walk or die, Iwalked,—the trainand the voice all blurry. I walked with my bones and my heartof chalk, not evena splintered notion:days of thought, nightsof worry,—lonesome train in a hurry.
slicing this frozen sky knowwhere they are going—and want to get there.Their call, both strange and familiar, callsto the strange and familiarheart, and the landscape becomes the landscapeof being, which becomes the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuancedand muscular geeseare calling—while time and the heart take measure.
In prayer:quiet opening,my artery is a thin shadow on paper—margin of long grass, ruderal hair, sister to this not yet part of our bodiesyour lyric corpus of seedin rough drafts of pine ash,chaogao or grass calligraphy in rough drafts of pine ash—your lyric corpus of seed not yet part of our bodies: ruderal hair, sister to this margin of long grass, shadow on paper, my artery is a thin quiet openingin prayer.
Every half century, the synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India. May we blossom every fifty yearswithout afflicting the people.May our seedpods nourish rodentswho roam our groveswithout rebuking lands with famine.May sweet potatoes and rice save us.May ginger and turmeric flourishto the bitter distaste of ratswhile tresses of bamboo flowers changeling white waspsload the groves with seedin rare perennial synchrony. May our sisters flower en massehundreds of square miles apart in the pale night. May our shoots pray a silent vision of healing, our rhizome-laden memories:Yes, we share our hungeronly once on this earth, my love.Let us bless our fruit and multiply.
Aluminum tank indifferent in its place behind a glass door in the passageway,like a tea urn in a museum case;screaming-machines that dumbly spend each day waiting for gas or smoke or hands or heat, positioned like beige land mines overhead, sanguine on walls,or posted on the street like dwarf grandfather clocks spray painted red;little gray hydrant in its warlike stance;old fire escape,all-weather paint job peeling,a shelf for threadbare rugs and yellowing plants;sprinkler heads, blooming from the public ceiling;all sitting supernaturally still,waiting for us to cry out.And we will.
Off what Thornbjörg calls the stern,or what I refer to as where you look upon the place you cannot return, one broke on through.With little purpose but to tease,eye our sound ship, or take leaveof the dog whistle our proppitches ineptly into the eerie.Suturing the path to whereit was bound, it hung split seconds in a realm unsoundable by its sonar. If only we could enter our dreams thus.The cruise ship’s marriage counselor spoke to me in Norwegian, and I agreed, knowing there was only so much she could have saidas it took the sun—and unlike beach stones once you get them home, kept its sodden huegoing black into sea.
In Japan, when you die, they wheel what’s left of you out of the incinerator, and what’s left of your family takes turns picking with special chopsticks. It looks like they have gathered to dine over a dead campfire, but they are not, of course, eating you. They are feeding you to the round mouth of an urn: only in pieces, Father, to the fire. In their bright swimsuits, my daughters spill warm sand over my skin as I lie still, watching the sun needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers to tell, perhaps, if I am ready, her bald head white with lotion, her mouth full of vowels. The older one says nothing above the ocean’s slow rush, but scoops and pats to get me done and gone. I’ve never been to Japan, but once, a globe of glass found me at the clear end of a wave. It drifted from the other side, my mother said. Cold and slick, it glistened as I held it up with both hands and looked through to the green flames of the sun before tasting the salt with my tongue.
There were two voices in the fever dream:Hers speaking from another room, and theirs,The teeny-boppers, singing from the screen. Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks, And thankful worries, who did what to whom, And why, and thank God it wasn’t worse, poor bastard,Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears shortShorts, we wear short shorts, over and over Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last, Was out of it, and some one else, thank God,Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll,She let herself go when the bum walked out.Thank God they never had a child. Thank God They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog; Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sangTo me on little stages on the stageWhere boys and girls were dancing all around them,Singing and dancing where it wasn’t worse,Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonderWho to thank for just how bad it was.
I lay back on the carpeted bottom stepOf the stairwell that like a well extended Darkly up to the window near the ceiling, Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held No flower across the sill no one could reach.There was a television on somewhere Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,Someone was saying. Someone was saying somethingAbout a blockade and a quarantine, Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button.A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.The Chinaman however didn’t care.Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers, He was content to be a clot of darkness Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled. And everywhere within the light’s slow fallInfinities of particles were fallingInto the flowerpot they’d never fill.
1“Always Be Closing,” Liam told us—abc of real estate, used cars,and poetry. Liam the dandyloved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breastedsuits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets.On the day Liam and Tree marriedin our backyard, Liam and I woreChuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-topsthat Liam bought on Fifth Avenue. 2When the rain started, we moved indoorsand Liam read a Quartet aloud.T.S. Eliot turned old and frailat sixty, pale, preparing for death.Then poets of new generationsdied—Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wrightwith throat cancer in a Bronx hospice,Sylvia Plath beside the oven,Thom Gunn of an overdose, Denise 3 Levertov, Bob Creeley, Jane Kenyon...In a New York bar, Liam told meeccentric, affectionate storiesabout a road trip in Tree’s countryof Montana, and the joy they feltin the abundance of their marriage.At Bennington Tree said, “Fourteen yearsafter the wedding in your backyard,I love Liam with my entire heart.” 4Liam’s face changed quickly as he spoke,eyes and mouth erupting with gustoas he improvised his outrageous,cheerful, inventive obscenities.When I first met him—I expoundedat a young poet’s do—his beardedface was handsome and expressionless.He would not defer to a poetfifty years old! After a few months 5he was revising my lines for me,making the metaphors I couldn’t.Even now, working at poems, Iimagine for a moment Liamdisassembling them. A year agohe watched the progress of age turn meskeletal, pale flesh hanging looselyin folds from my arms, and thin rib-boneslike grates above a sagging belly. 6 His body would never resemblemy body. Four or five times a weekwe wrote letters back and forth, talkingabout class structure, about how Treetook charge over the Academyof American Poets, aboutpoems and new attacks on free speech...When I won a notorious prize,Liam sent me eighty-one notions 7about projects I might undertake.Number fifty-six instructed me:“Urge poets to commit suicide.”His whole life he spoke of suicidelightly, when he wasn’t preservingthe First Amendment from Jesse Helms,or enduring two colon cancers,or watching films, or chatting with Tree,or undergoing heart surgeries. 8If he walked their dog Keeper one block,he had to take nitroglycerin.When Jane was dying, Liam and Treedrove up to say goodbye. I wheelchairedJane to a pile of books by her chairto find the color plate of Caillebotte’sshadowy kitchen garden at Yerresfor the jacket of Otherwise, whenTree would design it. I think of Jane’s 9horror if she were alive to knowthat on August fifteenth Liam pulledthe shotgun’s trigger. The night before,wearing a tux over a yellowsilk shirt, he danced with Tree once again,before bed and the morning’s murder.He left Tree alone and desolatebut without anger. Tree knew Liamdid what he planned and needed to do.
Every reader loves the way he tells off the sun, shouting busy old fool into the English skies even though they were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny daypacing the carpet and repeating the words, feeling the syllables lock into rowsuntil I can stand and declare, the book held closed by my side,that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.But after a few steps into stanza number two,wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes, I can feel the first one begin to fade like sky-written letters on a windy day.And by the time I have taken in the third, the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,a wavering line of acrid smoke.So it’s not until I leave the houseand walk three times around this hidden lakethat the poem begins to showany interest in walking by my side.Then, after my circling,better than the courteous dominion of her being all states and him all princes, better than love’s power to shrinkthe wide world to the size of a bedchamber, and better even than the compressionof all that into the rooms of these three stanzasis how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,testing the plank of every line,it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.
When her recorded voice on the phone said who she was again and again to the piles of newspapers and magazines and the clothes in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.When she could no longer walk through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody-to-help-me way of walking, with her head bent down to her knees as if she were searching for a dime that had rolled into a crack on the floor, though it was impossible to see the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosedto no one was so bad she could not stand at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff to find what was edible. When she could hardly even sit as she loved to sit, all night on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers hanging nearby on the curtainless bar of the shower stall, and the shoes lined upin the tub, falling asleep and waking up while she cut out newspaper clippings and listened to the late-night talk on her crackling radio about alien landings and why the government had denied them. When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing ache of her foot trying over and over to washthe black from her big toe and could notbecause it was gangrene. When at last they came to carry my mother out of the wilderness of that houseand she lay thin and frail and disorientedbetween bouts of tests and X-rays, and I came to find her in the white bed of her white room among nurses who brushed her hair while she looked up at them and smiledwith her yellow upper plate that seemed to holdher face together, dazed and disbelieving, as if she were in heaven, then turned, still smiling, to the door where her stout, bestroked younger brother teetered into the room on his cane, all the way from Missouri with her elderly sister and her bald-headed baby brother, whom she despised. When he smiled backand dipped his bald head down to kiss her, and her sister and her other brother hugged herwith serious expressions, and her childish astonishment slowly changed to suspicion and the old wildness returnedto her eye because she began to see this was not what she wanted at all, I sitting down by her good ear holding her hand to talk to her about going into the homethat was not her home, her baby brother winking,the others nodding and saying, Listen to Wesley. When it became clear to her that we were not her people, the ones she had left behind in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper clippings, in the bags of unopened mail, in her mind, and she turned her face away so I could see the print of red on her cheek as if she had been slapped hard. When the three of them began to implore their older sister saying, Ruth, Ruth, and We come out here for your own good, and That time rolls around for all of us, getting frustrated and mad because they meant, but did not know they meant, themselves too.When the gray sister, the angriest of them, finally said through her pleated lips and lower plate, You was always the stubborn one, we ain’t here to poison you, turn around and say something. When she wouldn’t.
Learn from the man who spends much of his life speaking To the back of your head knowing what it means to followThe razor’s edge along a worn strop or random thoughts As they spring so invisibly from the mind to a mouthWho shouldered soldiers in two wars and fled fire fields Undecorated who fathered once but was fatherless foreverAnd who works his sentiments in deeper into your scalp Under a sign on the knotty-pine walls whose rubric readsquot homines, tot sententiae which means he sees In you his suffering smells of horehound tonics and gelsPillow heads and powders and a floor full of snippings Swept neatly every evening into a pile for the field miceAll those roundabout hours only a man who fixes his tie To clip crabgrass crowding a lady’s grave could believeWith a certain clean devotion and who would never for one Moment dream of hurting you when your back was turned
Paper creased iswith a touch made less by half,reduced as muchagain by a second fold—so the wishto press our designscan diminishwhat we hold.But by your hand’scareful work,I understandhow this unleavingmakes of what’s beforesomething finer and finally more.
I don’t say things I don’t want to sayor chew the fat with fat cats just because. With favor-givers who want favors back,I tend to pass on going for the ask.I send, instead, a series of regrets,slip the winding snares that people lay.The unruffledness I feel as a result,the lank repose, the psychic field of ryeswayed in wavy air, is my respite among the shivaree of clanging egoson the packed commuter train again tonight.Sapping and demeaning—it takes a lotto get from bed to work and back to bed. I barely go an hour before I’m caughtwincing at the way that woman laughsor he keeps clucking at his magazine. And my annoyance fills me with annoyance.It’s laziness that lets them seem unreal—a radio with in-and-out reception blaring like hell when it finally hits a station.The song that’s on is not the one I’d hoped for, so I wait distractedly for what comes next.
O you gods, you long-limbed animals, youastride the sea and you unhammocked in the cyprus grove and you with your hairfull of horses, please. My thoughts have turned from the savor of plums to the merits of pity—touch and interrupt me, chasten me with waking, humble mefor wonder again. Seed god and husk god,god of the open palm, you know me, youknow my mettle. See, my wrists are small.O you, with glass-colored wind at your calland you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returnsair to its forms, send me a word for faiththat also means his thrum, his coax and surgeand her soft hollow, please—friend gods, lend mea word that means what I would ask him forso when he says: You give it all away,I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.
It takes a calendar one damp day to declare fall,weeks of dying mums to second the motion. * * * Gone the homeland, gone the father, nothing leftbut invisible north to magnetize your doubts. * * * Not eulogies or hearses but the sandwiches after,estranged cousins chewing under one umbrella. * * * One clock for errands, one for midnighttrysts, though neither will hurry a slow train. * * * Prairie is not the floor nor sky the coffered ceiling.Even a scarecrow is wise beyond its straw. * * *Look down: a river of grass. Look up: a velvet lostand found. Look inside: no straws to drink that dusk. * * *A woman’s watch thieved by a jay—ah, to be liftedlike that, to be carried like time across lapping waves.
I read that in this famous person’s poems “she searches for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.” Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’t know whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen, I came across Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” where he said an artist is different from other people because instead of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why can’t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground where one of the kids was handing out something that turned out to be small pieces of orange peel, something exotic we’d never seen before which I smelled, nibbled, and finally ate for this poem.
dine on disco balls and starfish, our jowls crashing like cymbals, while my baby brother takes out his eight-ballleft eye and squints his right to line up his shot on the world’s smallest pool table.Mother has a camera for a head; it flashes uncontrollably though she claims to have runout of film a hundred years ago, when father’s penis,an unstoppable spigot, became a garden sprinkler,contained by adult diapers, changed hourly, and hourly, my sister— shuffling out of her hiding placein the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann doll in her arms—sighs to pass the time.Water seeps through the ceiling, because upstairs the bathtub overflows, for Grandma has forgotten the bath she’s drawn,and on the stove the gas is high, the flames are heating up a pudding over which my opa whispers:boil, boil, loyal rubble, follow me to the end of my life.
I really think its getting to be that time,
the difference between a cigarette holder and cigarette case,the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles, of a fortnight overtwo weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs, of the frisson of cryinglike pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster on a leash: drag it,its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles through the rabbleof Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage. We did what could notgain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish, yet we managed to eatsickening amounts, to hate on our patroness, the Princess de Polignac,though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine. Once, in the chamberbefore an evening concert, I hid a sack of bees in the white baby grand,and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf they swarmed through the stringsto the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun and felt a little less drearyand a little less proud of being bored.
For Alyssa As anyoneis apt to, you began as someoneelse’s symptom. As inother beginnings: drawn lots, blood,some dancing on the heads of pinsand inside needles’ eyes,cellular revelry,hoppingof microscopicturnstiles. Lucky guest,grist, leaptlong odds to sparkthe tinder in the dark.Then, the subcommittees met:made merry in duplicate, triplicateand so on, much of themselves, dividedand divined and concurred.All sides insides, pre-ambulatoryperambulation meant: sureambit, short orbitin a warm aquarium setto the muffled music of a single sphere.As in other beginnings: parting seas, the future’sviolent egress, screams and sutures,aftermath’s average agonyon umbilical belaybut soon to solo, unfold allthose origami limbs to testthe inevitable debutante bawl.Wrest from the nestand the rest is you, dear:dressed for the bright lightsin bits of my sister.
If by truth you mean hand then yes I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest— KO to my OT and bait to my switch, I crown you one-trick pony to my one-horse town, dub you my one-stop shopping, my space heater, juke joint, tourist trap, my peep show, my meter reader, you best batteries-not-included baring all or nothing. Let me begin by saying if he hollers, end with goes the weasel. In between, cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon. Tell me you’ll dismember this night forever, you my punch-drunking bag, tar to my feather. More than the sum of our private parts, we are some peekaboo, some peak and valley, some bright equation (if and then but, if er then uh). My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.
As in, in the, of course. The body knewthe drill by now. Was are we there yet and thennever been so, then so long. Heart tiedwith twine, with shorthairs, trip wires—whispered that bind.Drew the short straw, scared herself apartto spit-sweet shards and into time that countedbackwards from two lips ago. Said doneis done and is between me and those teeth
The smallness of thiscolloquial cannotmuffle the full morning orchestra—amphibious greensclotting the trickleof thaw. The tinnyfin flip and eyeflake flash—small schools thatgive shimmer in the dullskulk of wind.)(cry one pure perennial I can’tdoubt)(something by which to) where we arewearing ourbeltsa little tighter—)rotted out boatbottom: the boatwill stay afloatas long as you pretend to row)In meadowslet alone,gravid stemserupt—haleyellows.)Gravid stemserupt.The haleyellows pale oncethey’re plucked.
Nature remains faithful by natural light,only. Immeasurable, invisible in the wind. Visible whenblades and branches bend. The windspeaks fluent rain. Despite it the rainfalls straight. And beyond itabandoned barns defend abandonedmen.
Rings possess fingers.Fingers rememberwhat the eyes haveblocked. The blindnessin thiscase is figurative.The figure in thiscase iscurvaceous.)Milled, folded,soldered.Inlaid omen.Mokume gane.Ifs as hinges.Ands as pins.Rings asreunions.)In some remotepre-dawn eye slit the horizon largely the samethe cinquefoils stillchirpy and obliging the ox-eyed daisies and the daisies fleabane and the worts and weeds the thistles and yarrowsstill healing and exotic in their ways—Weeds bind. Tongues beard. Thimbles berry. Balms bee.Flags blue.)Rain clarifies colors— colors reveal the briefambition of these provincial weeds. In gullies, mosses soft, mosses brightas dyed suedefeel rich beneath scrubbed feet. Rain—nature’s iteration— light paradiddles on the surface of the creek.How free-making this word (penniless)beforea judge!
In the peach orchard in an old bathtubthe children are standing someonein a bath of salt water, and onegently attaches electrodesto the nipples of the onein the bath. Out of the weeds runs onewith a rescued battery from the oldmotor home, which they had gottento rev its engine like the sad bleatingof a goat. If, later, anyone askshow they learned to do this, in a striped shirt onewill say, Oh, I was looking for scienceexperiments in those old textbooks someonegot from the library book sale last year.
I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgunleaned up against a tree and the entrailsspilling into a coil on the ground. It was hookedbetween the tendons of its back legsto a high branch that gently creakedlike a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil.Blood drained into a pail, you could smell itshifting with the air, and black flies landedin the shadows of things where the winddidn’t touch. I dreamed I was carrying a sackfilled with animals, and it dragged bloodin the gravel and stained my skirt hem, you could follow my trailto the county line where old mensat on the liquor store porch. One crooked his half-armfor the bottle where the auger had caught his hand.I dreamed I was in a new country rinsing liversunder a spigot, and the men crackingblack walnuts on a stone named my limbslike the weather, like none of us knewthe same words. By the tree the girls and the goatwere faltering, one squatted to sharpenher blackened blade on a strop, and the menon the county line leaned back on the heelsof their chairs talking about anything, each other,spring weather, the long-haired boy scalpedby a combine, and one of them swore you only plantbeans with the moon in Capricorn otherwisethe fields choke up with scrub juniper. Onelooked intently at his left palm; his right wristuselessly brushed the woven seat of his chair.When a wind came, the screen door leapt upon its leather hinges which never creakedand slammed shut. Mud daubers in the muckby the spigot blew sideways around my ankles and upunder my skirt, and inside I could hearthe woman who lived with the liquor store proprietorcursing as she locked up the vanilla like she knewhow to break the back of a ghost.
Long ago I heard footstepscome to the door, and a manknocking. We’ve had an accidentup on the road, can you helphe pled at the unanswered door,and kept knocking.He might have been a thiefbut soon enough a woman’s howllit up the night, and I put a knifein my belt. Around dawnI figured their fortunesmight be worth change.
To stand for onceoutside my faithto steady itcaught and squirming on a stickup to mind’s inviting lightand name it!for all its faults and facetsor keep waitingto be claimed in it
This early the garden’s barebut people pay to walk it,at plots of budless brushstop, as if remembering,and stoop to mouth the names—araucariaaraucana, monkey puzzle tree, something Japanese—each particularridiculous to be.
As with this Jet Ski family braiding the lakewith bigger and bigger shocksuntil the one car-sized onecuts his engineand, following him, for an instant they all coastthrough silences of self-made rain—how much is required now to carve, out of the generallivable quiet, independence?

















The rain this morning falls  on the last of the snow and will wash it away. I can smell  the grass again, and the torn leaves being eased down into the mud.  The few loves I’ve been allowed to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia I walk across the fields with only  a few young cows for company. Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember from junior high, who never  spoke, who kept their heads lowered and their arms crossed against  their new breasts. Those girls are nearly forty now. Like me,  they must sometimes stand at a window late at night, looking out  on a silent backyard, at one rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls  of other people’s houses. They must lie down some afternoons  and cry hard for whoever used to make them happiest,  and wonder how their lives have carried them this far without ever once explaining anything. I don’t know  why I’m walking out here with my coat darkening and my boots sinking in, coming up with a mild sucking sound  I like to hear. I don’t care where those girls are now.  Whatever they’ve made of it they can have. Today I want  to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain,  and lift my face to it.
I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what’s underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I’m the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment from its hanger like I’m choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, it’ll be the goddamned dress they bury me in.
After eighteen years there’s no real grief left  for the man who was my father. I hardly think of him anymore, and those dreams I used to have, in which he’d be standing in a room of people  I didn’t know—maybe his new friends,  if the dead have friendships— those dreams no longer trouble my sleep. He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through  or in the field by the highway where I’m running, chasing down some important piece of paper, desperate to reach it as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks or flattened and marked by passing cars,  as it’s lifted again to swirl over a broken wood fence. I don’t know why  the paper’s so important, or if anything is even written there. I don’t know where the dead go, or why it’s good to forget them, not to see them if they come crowding the windows or trying to lay themselves down  and press along our bodies at night and ask that we love them again, that our sorrows include them once more.  This morning I couldn’t get up. I slept late, I dreamed of the single sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach  as it stuttered and soared over the grass and a few flowers, so that I woke with a sense of loss, wondering who or what I had to mourn besides my father, whom I no longer mourn,  father buried in the earth beneath grass,  beneath flowers I trample as I run.
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak  of our own doubts, while dubiously  we mother man in his doubt! And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees  the sweet rain drifting through western air  a white sweating bull of a poet told us our cunts are ugly—why didn't we  admit we have thought so too? (And  what shame? They are not for the eye!) No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,  caves of the Moon ... And when a  dark humming fills us, a coldness towards life, we are too much women to  own to such unwomanliness. Whorishly with the psychopomp  we play and plead—and say nothing of this later. And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them  like toenails, clipped them like ends of  split hair.
I like to find  what's not found  at once, but lies within something of another nature,  in repose, distinct.  Gull feathers of glass, hidden in white pulp: the bones of squid  which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board—  tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce   the heart, but fragile, substance  belying design. Or a fruit, mamey, cased in rough brown peel, the flesh  rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and polished, walnut-colored, formed  like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand. I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory  opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
After I had cut off my hands  and grown new ones something my former hands had longed for  came and asked to be rocked. After my plucked out eyes had withered, and new ones grown something my former eyes had wept for  came asking to be pitied.
I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step  into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young,  the news—always of death,  the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring   and howling, howling, nevertheless I see for a moment  that's not it: it is  the First Things. Word after word floats through the glass.  Towards me.
The red eyes of rabbits  aren't sad. No one passes the sad golden village in a barge any more. The sunset  will leave it alone. If the  curtains hang askew  it is no one's fault. Around and around and around everywhere the same sound  of wheels going, and things  growing older, growing  silent. If the dogs bark to each other all night, and their eyes  flash red, that's nobody's business. They have  a great space of dark to  bark across. The rabbits  will bare their teeth at  the spring moon.
A doll's hair concealing  an eggshell skull delicately  throbbing, within which maggots in voluptuous unrest  jostle and shrug. Oh, Eileen, my  big doll, your gold hair was  not more sunny than this human fur, but your head was radiant in its emptiness, a small clean room. Her warm and rosy mouth is telling lies—she would believe them if she could believe:  her pretty eyes search out corruption. Oh, Eileen  how kindly your silence was, and  what virtue shone in the opening and shutting of your  ingenious blindness.
You keep me waiting in a truck with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,  while you piss against the south side of a tree. Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.  That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows  and the seat, one fake leather thigh,  pressed close to mine is cold.  I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,  but get inside me, start the engine;  you’ll have the strength, the will to move.  I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half. Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.  Pretend you don’t owe me a thing  and maybe we’ll roll out of here,  leaving the past stacked up behind us; old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.
1. RUSSIA, 1927 On the day the sienna-skinned man held my shoulders between his spade-shaped hands, easing me down into the azure water of Jordan, I woke ninety-three million miles from myself, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, shoulder-deep in the Volga, while the cheap dye of my black silk shirt darkened the water. My head wet, water caught in my lashes.  Am I blind? I rub my eyes, then wade back to shore,  undress and lie down, until Stalin comes from his place beneath the birch tree. He folds my clothes and I button myself in my marmot coat, and together we start the long walk back to Moscow. He doesn’t ask, what did you see in the river?, but I hear the hosts of a man drowning in water and holiness,  the castrati voices I can’t recognize, skating on knives, from trees, from air on the thin ice of my last night in Russia.  Leon Trotsky. Bread. I want to scream, but silence holds my tongue  with small spade-shaped hands and only this comes, so quietly Stalin has to press his ear to my mouth: I have only myself. Put me on the train.  I won’t look back.
My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud,  then climbs through the truck window.  She ignores me as I walk around it,  hitting the flat tires with an iron rod. The old man yells for me to help hitch the team, but I keep walking around the truck, hitting harder,  until my mother calls. I pick up a rock and throw it at the kitchen window,  but it falls short. The old man’s voice bounces off the air like a ball I can’t lift my leg over. I stand beside him, waiting, but he doesn’t look up and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.  Mother runs toward us. I stand still, get her across the spine as she bends over him. I drop the rod and take the rifle from the house.  Roses are red, violets are blue, one bullet for the black horse, two for the brown.  They’re down quick. I spit, my tongue’s bloody;  I’ve bitten it. I laugh, remember the one out back.  I catch her climbing from the truck, shoot.  The doll lands on the ground with her. I pick it up, rock it in my arms. Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son. I’m nimble, I’m quick. In the house, I put on the old man’s best suit and his patent leather shoes. I pack my mother’s satin nightgown and my sister’s doll in the suitcase. Then I go outside and cross the fields to the highway. I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere.  I can break your heart.
“Earth is the birth of the blues,” sang Yellow Bertha,  as she chopped cotton beside Mama Rose.  It was as hot as any other summer day,  when she decided to run away. Folks say she made a fortune running a whorehouse in New Orleans, but others say she’s buried somewhere out west,  her grave unmarked, though you can find it in the dark by the scent of jasmine and mint, but I’m getting ahead of myself. If it wasn’t for hell, we’d all be tapdancing with the devil Mama Rose used to say, but as it is, we just stand and watch, while someone else burns up before salvation.  “People desire damnation, Bertha,” she said,  unwrapping the rag from her head to let the sweat flow down the corn rows,  plaited as tightly as the night coming down  on the high and mighty on judgment day.  They say she knew what was coming,  because she threw some bones that morning. She bent down to pick up her rag which had fallen  and when she straightened up, her yellow gal  had gone down the road. “Go then,” she called out, “I didn’t want you no how.” Then she started talking to herself about how Old White John caught her milking cows.  “He wrestled me to the ground and did his nastiness.”  He said, “your daddy was a slave and his daddy  and I’m claiming back what’s mine.” It was July. I remember fireworks going off outside.  When Bertha come, so white she liked to scared me to death, I let her suckle my breast and I said, “All right, little baby, maybe I’ll love you. Maybe.” Mama Rose said she did her best, but it’s hard to raise a gal like that with everybody thinking she’s giving them the high hat,  because she’s so light and got those green eyes  that look right through you. She frightens people.  Even men, who’re usually wanting to saddle up  and ride that kind of mare, can’t abide her. They’re afraid if they try her, they’ll never be the same.  The only ones willing are white. They’re watching her day and night, but they know John swore to kill any man who touched her, because lo and behold, he owns up to her. He’s proud of her. Nobody can believe it. He’s even at her baptism. He buys her cheap dresses and candy at the store.  He hands it to her out the door, because she can’t go in. He won’t, he won’t stop looking at her like it’s some kind of miracle she was born looking so much like him and his people. It’s a warning, or something. “It’s evil turning back on itself,” said the preacher  the Sunday cut clean through by the truth, by the living proof, as Old John stood up in church  and testified to the power of God, who spoke to him that morning, telling him he was a sinner. He died that winter. Horrible suffering, they say.  He had a stroke on the way to town. His car ran off the road and he drowned. They say Bertha found him. They say she ran all the way to town for the doctor,  who told her, “I am not a colored doctor,” so she went and got the sheriff. He listened for a while, then he locked her in a cell.  He said he knew she was guilty of something.  Well, after a while, Rose went down there and I swear she nearly had a fit. “Get my daughter out here,” she said. “How can you lock up your own brother’s child?”  The sheriff knew it was true, so finally he said,  “You take her and don’t ever cross my path again.”  When Bertha passed him on the way out, he tripped her with his foot. When she got off the floor, she said, “Every dog has its day.” From that time to this is a straight line,  pointing at a girl, who doesn’t even have shoes anymore,  as she runs down the road, throwing off her ragged clothes, as she goes, until she’s as naked as the day she was born.  When she comes to washing hanging on the line,  she grabs a fine dress and keeps on running.  She’s crying and laughing at the same time. Along comes a truck that says J. GOODY on the side.  The man driving stops to give her a ride. He swings the door open on the passenger side,  but Bertha says, “Move over, I’ll drive.” When she asks him why he stopped, he says, “I know white trash, when I see it. You’re just like me, but you're a girl. You’re pretty.  You can free yourself. All you have to do is show a little leg and some titty in the big city.”  He gave her fifty cents and a wink and she started thinking she might as well turn white.  She got a job waiting table in a dance hall.  One night, the boss heard her singing along with the band. He said, “Why don’t you go up on stage,” and she said, “I play piano too.” He said, “Howdy do.” From then on, she made everybody pay one way, or another. She got hard. She took lovers— fathers, sons, and husbands. It didn't matter, but once in a while, she heard her mother’s voice,  saying, “You made the wrong choice,” and she felt the blues and she let loose with a shout. “Lordy,” said the boss, “you sound colored.”  More and more people came to hear her sing, but they kind of feared her too. They said, she was too white to sing the blues like that.  It wasn’t right. One night, she got to talking with the boss. He walked round and round the office, shaking his head,  saying how much he’d lose, if she stopped singing the blues. “How often can you find a treasure like mine,” he said,  laying his hand on her shoulder, then he said, “If I weren’t so old,” and his voice dropped off to a whisper, then he said, “I got the answer now, sweet Roberta.  Go on down to the dressing room and wait.”  It didn't take long. He came in and set a jar on the table.  “What do I do with this?” Asked Bertha.  He said, “you’re going to pass for colored.”  Suddenly, she was wearing blackface.  Suddenly, she was safe on the other side  of the door she slammed on the past and it was standing open at last. She could come and go as she pleased  and no one saw her enter, or leave. She was free, she was freed, but she didn’t feel it and she needed it to be real. She went on, though. She flowed like a river,  carrying the body of a man, who had himself a nigger, because he could.  She lived. She got old. She almost froze one cold spell and she got up from her sickbed and told her daughter she got during the change of life it was time to go. She sewed a note to her ragged coat. It said, “This is the granddaughter of Mama Rose.” She put fifty cents in her hand and went to stand with her at the bus stop.  She would not return, but her child had earned the right to go home. When I got off the bus, a hush fell over the people waiting there.  I was as white as my mother, but my eyes were gray, not green. I had hair down to my waist and braids so thick  they weighed me down. Mother said, my father was a white musician  from another town, who found out her secret and left her and me to keep it. Mama Rose knew me, though, blind as she was.  “What color are you, gal?” She asked and I told her, “I’m as black as last night.” That's how I passed, without asking permission.
for Yukio Mishima I didn’t write Etsuko,  I sliced her open. She was carmine inside  like a sea bass and empty. No viscera, nothing but color. I love you like that, boy. I pull the kimono down around your shoulders and kiss you. Then you let it fall open.  Each time, I cut you a little and when you leave, I take the piece, broil it, dip it in ginger sauce  and eat it. It burns my mouth so. You laugh, holding me belly-down with your body. So much hurting to get to this moment, when I’m beneath you,  wanting it to go on and to end. At midnight, you say see you tonight and I answer there won’t be any tonight, but you just smile, swing your sweater over your head and tie the sleeves around your neck.  I hear you whistling long after you disappear  down the subway steps, as I walk back home, my whole body tingling. I undress and put the bronze sword on my desk  beside the crumpled sheet of rice paper.  I smooth it open and read its single sentence:I meant to do it. No. It should be common and feminine  like I can’t go on sharing him, or something to imply that. Or the truth: that I saw in myself the five signs of the decay of the angel and you were holding on, watching and free,  that I decided to go out with the pungent odor of this cold and consuming passion in my nose: death.  Now, I’ve said it. That vulgar word that drags us down to the worms, sightless, predestined.  Goddamn you, boy. Nothing I said mattered to you; that bullshit about Etsuko or about killing myself.  I tear the note, then burn it. The alarm clock goes off. 5:45 A.M. I take the sword and walk into the garden.  I look up. The sun, the moon, two round teeth rock together and the light of one chews up the other.  I stab myself in the belly, wait, then stab myself again. Again.  It’s snowing. I’ll turn to ice, but I’ll burn anyone who touches me.  I start pulling my guts out, those red silk cords,  spiraling skyward, and I’m climbing them  past the moon and the sun,  past darkness into white. I mean to live.
Lightning hits the roof, shoves the knife, darkness, deep in the walls. They bleed light all over us and your face, the fan, folds up, so I won’t see how afraid to be with me you are. We don’t mix, even in bed, where we keep ending up. There’s no need to hide it: you’re snow, I’m coal, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But open your mouth, I’ll give you a taste of black you won’t forget. For a while, I’ll let it make you strong, make your heart lion, then I’ll take it back.
I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water. It floats the way your head would,  if I cut it off. But what if I tore you apart  for those afternoons when I was fifteen and so like a bird of paradise  slaughtered for its feathers.  Even my name suggested wings,  wicker cages, flight.Come, sit on my lap, you said.  I felt as if I had flown there;  I was weightless. You were forty and married. That she was my mother never mattered. She was a door that opened onto me. The three of us blended into a kind of somnolence and musk, the musk of Sundays. Sweat and sweetness.  That dried plum and licorice taste always back of my tongue and your tongue against my teeth, then touching mine. How many times?— I counted, but could never remember. And when I thought we’d go on forever, that nothing could stop us as we fell endlessly from consciousness, orders came: War in the north.  Your sword, the gold epaulets,  the uniform so brightly colored,  so unlike war, I thought. And your horse; how you rode out the gate. No, how that horse danced beneath you toward the sound of cannon fire. I could hear it, so many leagues away. I could see you fall, your face scarlet, the horse dancing on without you. And at the same moment, Mother sighed and turned clumsily in the hammock,  the Madeira in the thin-stemmed glass spilled into the grass, and I felt myself hardening to a brandy-colored wood, my skin, a thousand strings drawn so taut  that when I walked to the house  I could hear music tumbling like a waterfall of China silk  behind me. I took your letter from my bodice. Salome, I heard your voice,little bird, fly. But I did not. I untied the lilac ribbon at my breasts  and lay down on your bed. After a while, I heard Mother's footsteps,  watched her walk to the window.  I closed my eyes and when I opened them the shadow of a sword passed through my throat  and Mother, dressed like a grenadier, bent and kissed me on the lips.
Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills. She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass  marks off the place where the memories are kept, like a library book named Dorothy. Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not. In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass reminds you of persistence  and the endless wind  reminds you of indifference, Ruth brings batches of white roses, extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful  because as soon as she is gone she knows the deer come out of the woods to eat them. What was made for the eye goes into the mouth, thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away, and in bed when she tries to remember her mother, she drifts instead to the roses, and when she thinks about the roses she  sees instead the deer chewing them— pale petals of the roses in the dark  warm bellies of the sleeping deer— that’s what going to sleep is like.
He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came  back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the  shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full halt. At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead. He died then, there  after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face  and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light. Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit  sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than  his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying down the stairs.  We have no word on the killer, except he came back, from somewhere  to do what he did. And shot only once into his victim's stare, and left him quickly when the blood ran out. We know the killer was skillful, quick, and silent, and that the victim  probably knew him. Other than that, aside from the caked sourness  of the dead man's expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.
Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel  with the boys, getting louder and louder  as the empty cans drop out of our paws  like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars.  Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,  bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish  and old space suits with skeletons inside.  On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances  in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation  for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex  someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet  we once came from, to which we will never  be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.
Coming together  it is easier to work  after our bodies  meet paper and pen neither care nor profit whether we write or not but as your body moves under my hands  charged and waiting  we cut the leash you create me against your thighs  hilly with images moving through our word countries  my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. Touching you I catch midnight  as moon fires set in my throat  I love you flesh into blossom  I made you and take you made into me.
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck  moving away from me beyond anger or failure your face in the evening schools of longing through mornings of wish and ripen we were always saying goodbye in the blood in the bone over coffee before dashing for elevators going in opposite directions without goodbyes. Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof  as the maker of legends nor as a trap door to that world where black and white clericals hang on the edge of beauty in five oclock elevators  twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh  and now there is someone to speak for them  moving away from me into tomorrows  morning of wish and ripen your goodbye is a promise of lightning  in the last angels hand unwelcome and warning the sands have run out against us  we were rewarded by journeys away from each other into desire into mornings alone where excuse and endurance mingle  conceiving decision. Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed  saying we cannot waste time only ourselves.
Moon marked and touched by sun  my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind.  I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love  permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus  where the restless oceans pound. I do not dwell within my birth nor my divinities  who am ageless and half-grown  and still seeking my sisters witches in Dahomey wear me inside their coiled cloths  as our mother did mourning. I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic  and the noon's new fury with all your wide futures  promised I am woman and not white.
Time collapses between the lips of strangers  my days collapse into a hollow tube soon implodes against now like an iron wall my eyes are blocked with rubble a smear of perspectives blurring each horizon in the breathless precision of silence one word is made. Once the renegade flesh was gone  fall air lay against my face sharp and blue as a needle but the rain fell through October  and death lay a condemnation  within my blood. The smell of your neck in August  a fine gold wire bejeweling war  all the rest lies illusive as a farmhouse on the other side of a valley vanishing in the afternoon. Day three day four day ten  the seventh step a veiled door leading to my golden anniversary  flameproofed free-paper shredded  in the teeth of a pillaging dog  never to dream of spiders  and when they turned the hoses upon me a burst of light.
The northern lights. I wouldn’t have noticed them  if the deer hadn’t told me  a doe her coat of pearls her glowing hoofs  proud and inquisitive  eager for my appraisal and I went out into the night with electrical steps  but with my head held also proud  to share the animal’s fear  and see what I had seen before  a sky flaring and spectral  greenish waves and ribbons and the snow under strange light tossing in the pasture  like a storming ocean caught  by a flaring beacon.  The deer stands away from me not far  there among bare black apple trees  a presence I no longer see.  We are proud to be afraid  proud to share the silent magnetic storm that destroys the stars  and flickers around our heads  like the saints’ cold spiritual agonies  of old. I remember but without the sense other light-storms  cold memories discursive and philosophical  in my mind’s burden  and the deer remembers nothing. We move our feet crunching bitter snow while the storm  crashes like god-wars down the east  we shake the sparks from our eyes  we quiver inside our shocked fur  we search for each other  in the apple thicket—  a glimpse, an acknowledgment  it is enough and never enough— we toss our heads and say good night  moving away on bitter bitter snow.
Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians,  amped up to dinosaur proportions, test drove their equipment through our ears.  Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs,  as if they wished that they could knock us quite literally dead. We called that fun in 1970, when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving. I’m here to tell you that they were,  and many of us did, despite ourselves,  though the road from there to here is paved with dead brain cells, parents shocked to silence, and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood  the quaking tint and texture of red jelly. Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads  to show where we have been; we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin  to show what we were thinking when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn,  and Death kept blinking. But here I stand, an average-looking man  staring at a room where someone blond in braids  with a beautiful belief in answers  is still asking questions. Through the silence in my dead ear,  I can almost hear the future whisper  to the past: it says that this is not a test  and everybody passes.
themes from the Tzu Yeh and the Book of Songs I have carried my pillow to the windowsill And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it, But no breeze stirs the tepid morning. Only I stir ... Come, tease me a little! With such cold passion, so little teasing play, How long can we endure our life together? No use. I put on your long dressing-gown; The untied sash trails over the dusty floor. I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror And pluck my eyebrows. I don’t care if the robe slides open Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh. I can accuse that nonexistent breeze ... I am as monogamous as the North Star, But I don’t want you to know it. You’d only take advantage. While you are as fickle as spring sunlight. All right, sleep! The cat means more to you than I. I can rouse you, but then you swagger out. I glimpse you from the window, striding toward the river. When you return, reeking of fish and beer, There is salt dew in your hair. Where have you been? Your clothes weren’t that wrinkled hours ago, when you left. You couldn’t have loved someone else, after loving me! I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window. Later, when you hold me in your arms It seems, for a moment, the river ceases flowing.
ONE From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie  The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters. Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.  Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart: Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted  To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner— “Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,  As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those  Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it. While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,  Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines. Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient  Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male— I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions  Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen, Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.  I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine  But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me. Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,  Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken, Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known  Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;  Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions; We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,  “Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance  In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades  Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence  And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,  Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!  TWO I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,” Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties  Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;  Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed, Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties  In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,  And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions  Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,  Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even. But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.  So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?  We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,  Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then  For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine  Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting. Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient  Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,  Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s  Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,  Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine  Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me, In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages. Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,  Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.  Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!  Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.  The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness. So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:  Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else. You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.  So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh, All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility! Meanwhile, have you used your mind today? What pomegranate raised you from the dead, Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?  THREE  I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.  Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters  On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.  Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant, Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns.  Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;  Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists  Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles  With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas  When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,  The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail. I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty  When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood,  Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men, Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered  When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority!  Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several, They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals,  Aiming to please a posterity that despises them. But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders  Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression  And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity  When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:  Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity. But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses  Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive, Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees. Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy;  They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread, Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man! This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon. (One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.) But we’re emerging from all that, more or less, Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses  Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition.  Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal; If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry; If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors; If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations  Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets;  Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried;  And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.
I sing of Morrisville (if you call this cry  a song). I (if you call this painful voice by that great name) sing the poverty of my  region and of the wrong end of Morrisville. You summer people will say that all its ends are wrong,  but there, right there, the very end of the wrong end— a house with windows sagging, leaning roadward as in defense  or maybe defiance next to the granite ledge, our cliff of broken stone that shoulders our dilapidated  one-lane iron bridge. Who lives here? I don’t know. But they (Hermes reward them) made this extraordinary garden,  geraniums, petunias and nasturtiums planted in every crevice and all the footholds of the cliff.  And then they painted the cliff-face, painted the old stone; no design, just swatches of color, bold  rough splashes irregularly, garish orange and livid blue. Is it fluorescent, do these stones  glow in the dark? Maybe. I only know they glow in the day, so vivid I stopped my car,  whereupon two others came inquiring also, two crows in the broken spars of the white pine tree, cawing  above the house. Why had those who inhabited this corner of poverty painted the stones? Was it  that the flowers in living bravery nevertheless made too meager a show for the ruined cliff? Or did they  think to bring art to nature, somehow to improve this corner of ugliness? For my part I thought how  these colors were beautiful and yet strange in their beauty, ugly colors, garish orange, livid blue;  they reminded me of those Spanish cemeteries I saw in New Mexico, tin mirrors and plastic flowers  in the desert. Then I knew why the stones had been painted: to make reparation, such as the poor  might make, whose sorrow had been done here, this desecration. Is not this the burden of all poor lands  everywhere, the basis of poverty? A spoiled land makes spoiled people. The poor know this.  I guess the crows know too, because off they flew, cawing above the bridge and the slashed hills  surrounding Morrisville. I started my car and drove out on the iron bridge which rumbled its sullen  affirmation. And I sang as I sing now (if you care to call it song) my people of Morrisville  who live where all the ends are wrong.
My mother—preferring the strange to the tame: Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung, Frog’s belly distended with finny young, Leaf-mold wilderness, harebell, toadstool, Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves, Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all Wild and natural!—flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she  Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,  And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off. Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter. Still tranquil, she began, “It’s rather sweet ...” The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes. Then we saw, And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed.  The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop. But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor  Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion  For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life  Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,  Whose denizens can turn upon the world  With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,  To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.  She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,  She washed and washed the pity from her hands.
In the laboratory waiting room containing one television actor with a teary face trying a contact lens; two muscular victims of industrial accidents;  several vain women—I was one of them—  came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye. It was a long day: Deborah waiting for the blood vessels painted on her iris to dry. Her mother said that, holding Deborah when she was born, “First I inspected her, from toes to navel, then stopped at her head ...” We wondered why the inspection hadn’t gone the other way.  “Looking into her eye was like looking into a volcano: “Her vacant pupil went whirling down, down to the foundation  of the world ... When she was three months old they took it out.  She giggled when she went under the anaesthetic. Forty-five minutes later she came back happy! ... The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face (you know, it never bled?), stayed happy, even when I went to pieces.  She’s five, in June. “Deborah, you get right down from there, or I’ll have to slap!” Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap of one vain lady, who had been discontented with her own beauty.  Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily  in the empty eye.
who took heroin, then sleeping pills, and who lies in a New York hospital The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea; White in either case, for you are pale As they are, “blooming early and profusely” Though the azalea grows in sandier soil, Needing less care; while cyclamen’s fleshy tubers Are adored, yes, rooted out by some. One flourishes in aridness, while the other Feeds the love which devours. But what has flung you here for salvaging From a city’s dereliction, this New York? A world against whose finger-and-breath-marked windows These weak flares may be set. Our only bulwark is the frailest cover: Lovers touch from terror of being alone. The urban surface: tough and granular, Poor ground for the affections to take root. Left to our own devices, we devise Such curious deaths, comas, or mutilations! You may buy peace, white, in sugary tincture, No way of knowing its strength, or your own, Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signaling, Self-amazed, its willingness to endure. The thing to cling to is the sense of expectation. Who knows what may occur in the next breath? In the pallor of another morning we neither Anticipated nor wanted! Eve, waken to flowers Unforeseen, from someone you don’t even know. Azalea or cyclamen ... we live in wonder, Blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension Though once we lay and waited for a death.
You rose from our embrace and the small light spread like an aureole around you. The long parabola of neck and shoulder, flank and thigh I saw permute itself through unfolding and unlimited minuteness in the movement of your tall tread, the spine-root swaying, the Picasso-like éclat of scissoring slender legs. I knew some law of Being was at work. At one time I had said that love bestows such values, and so it does, but the old man in his canto was right and wise:ubi amor ibi ocullus est. Always I wanted to give and in wanting was the poet. A man now, aging, I know the best of love is not to bestow, but to recognize.
You died. And because you were Greek they gave you  a coin to carry under your tongue and then also biscuits and honey. When you came to the riverbank  you saw a crazy-looking black bumboat on the water with a figure standing in it, lanky and dressed  darkly, holding a sweep. You were taken across, and you gave your coin for the passage, and continued  until you came to a three-headed dog, who snarled and threatened you, even though you were not trying  to escape. You gave him the biscuits smeared with honey, and you passed onward to the field  of asphodel and through the gate of Tartarus. Or you died and you were Navajo. They had carried you  out of the hogan earlier so you’d die in the sunshine. Or if it happened inside suddenly, they stuffed up  the smokehole and boarded the front entrance, and cut an opening in the back, the north-facing, dark-facing  side, to carry you out, and no one ever used that hogan again. They took off your moccasins  and put them on again wrong side to, the left one on the right foot, the right on the left, so that your  chindi would be confused and unable to return along your tracks. They washed your hair in suds  made from the yucca. Then they gave you enough fried bread and water to last four days,  and you set off on your journey. But actually none of these things happened. You just died.
Now here is a typical children’s story that happens in gorgeous October when the mothers are coming in the afternoon, wearing brisk boots and windy skirts to pick up the little children from the day care center Frost in the air the maples golden and crimson my son in a leaf pile in the playground dreaming I am late, the playground is almost empty, my husband will kill me I gather my son to go home, he forgets his sweater in the playground and I send him back he dawdles, he is playing with leaves in his mind, it is already a quarter to six, will you come on I say and hurry along the corridor, there are yellow and blue rocket paintings, but I feel bad and ask what did you do today, do you recognize this story, the way he stands and picks his nose, move I say, do you want dinner or not I’m going to make a nice dinner, fried chicken I wheedle, so could you please walk a little faster, okay, I walk a little faster and get upstairs myself, pivot on boot-heel, nobody there, he is putting something in his mouth, his sable eyelashes downcast, and I am swooping down the stairwell screaming  damn you  that’s filthy  I told you not before dinner We are climbing the stairs and I am crying, my son is not crying I have shaken him, I have pried the sweet from his cheek I have slapped his cheek like a woman slapping a carpet with all my strength  mothers are very strong  he is too young to do anything about this  will not remember he remembers it The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything, pain, the image of a woman who wears a necklace of skulls, a screaming woman you dig quickly and deposit the pulpy thing you drop leaves on it and it stays there, that is the story that is sticking in my mind as we push the exit door, and run through the evening wind to my car where I jerk the gearshift and pick up a little speed, going along this neat suburban avenue full of maples the mark of my hand a blush on my son’s cheek.
Like a bowerbird trailing a beakful of weeds  Like prize ribbons for the very best The lover, producer  Of another’s pleasure He whom her swollen lips await Might wing through any day of the decade A form of health insurance  For which it is never too late Titanic, silver brush Hindenburg, of exploding cigars a climax The watery below, the fiery above Ashes of print between—pigment between If the crippled woman were to descend  From her bed, her fortress beyond midnight Downstairs (nude/staircase) to the kitchen  Naked to sit at the table (writing/thinking) She might hear the washer spin like a full orchestra  Complete a cycle like a train crash Before the fiend would stare through the window  Step smoothly into the kitchen, stop some clocks. Envy shapes a fig tree in one’s breast,  That is, bluntly to say, a cancer, That is to say In a mind, a fertile windy field. A murdered child. Well then, fear, primarily of falling.  Ebony surf toils on the beach, a glaze At the same moment I am (from a cliff) falling  The kitchen fiend removes his Dior tie Places his hand over the woman’s  And softly says: I am the lover. Now if the crippled woman began to dance  To pirouette, to rumba Growling for her child Her burning page, the devil would be shamed (Materialism is not for everyone / Religion is  The extension of politics by other means
Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic  The cranes are flying ... —Chekhov  And here it comes: around the world, In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved, Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer, Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt In a township of corrugated metal roofs) And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse Strains of premeditated art, is now improvisation, The desperately new, where to the sine-curved Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates The death and cremation of history, Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes, And a girl wearing a skull That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain, Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen. Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions Of shootouts, of tortured ones in basements, Of cold insinuations before sex Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal. The girl tosses her head and dances The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume, The boy dances stealing the truck, Shooting his father. The point is to become a flying viper, A diving vulva, the great point Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself Into far other habitats, or seed That travels a migrant bird’s gut To be shit overseas. The creatures gamble on the whirl of life And every adolescent body hot Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots, These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip My hair and vibrate my pelvis Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise That imitates history’s catastrophe Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive, Maybe we’ll all survive. . . . At the intersection of poverty and plague The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.
The first warm day, and by mid-afternoon the snow is no more than a washing strewn over the yards, the bedding rolled in knots and leaking water, the white shirts lying under the evergreens. Through the heaviest drifts rise autumn’s fallen bicycles, small carnivals of paint and chrome, the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl beginning to turn in the sun. Now children, stiffened by winter and dressed, somehow, like old men, mutter and bend to the work of building dams. But such a spring is brief; by five o’clock the chill of sundown, darkness, the blue TVs flashing like storms in the picture windows, the yards gone gray, the wet dogs barking at nothing. Far off across the cornfields staked for streets and sewers, the body of a farmer missing since fall will show up in his garden tomorrow, as unexpected as a tulip.
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop over the fields, the telephone lines streaming behind, its billow of dust full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds. On either side, those dear old ladies, the loosening barns, their little windows dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs hide broken tractors under their skirts. So this is Nebraska. A Sunday afternoon; July. Driving along with your hand out squeezing the air, a meadowlark waiting on every post. Behind a shelterbelt of cedars, top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees, a pickup kicks its fenders off and settles back to read the clouds. You feel like that; you feel like letting your tires go flat, like letting the mice build a nest in your muffler, like being no more than a truck in the weeds, clucking with chickens or sticky with honey or holding a skinny old man in your lap while he watches the road, waiting for someone to wave to. You feel like waving. You feel like stopping the car and dancing around on the road. You wave instead and leave your hand out gliding larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
In musty light, in the thin brown air of damp carpet, doll heads and rust, beneath long rows of sharp footfalls like nails in a lid, an old man stands trying on glasses, lifting each pair from the box like a glittering fish and holding it up to the light of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls looms in the catacomb shadows, and old toilets with dry red throats cough up bouquets of curtain rods. You’ve seen him somewhere before. He’s wearing the green leisure suit you threw out with the garbage, and the Christmas tie you hated, and the ventilated wingtip shoes you found in your father’s closet and wore as a joke. And the glasses which finally fit him, through which he looks to see you looking back— two mirrors which flash and glance— are those through which one day you too will look down over the years, when you have grown old and thin and no longer particular, and the things you once thought you were rid of forever have taken you back in their arms.
It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright  you can’t see beyond its windows  into the afternoon. A kitchen  falling through time with its things  in their places, the dishes jingling  up in the cupboard, the bucket  of drinking water rippled as if a truck had just gone past, but that truck  was thirty years. No one’s at home  in this room. Its counter is wiped,  and the dishrag hangs from its nail,  a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,  blue aprons of rain, my grandmother  moved through this life like a ghost,  and when she had finished her years,  she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back  on the rest of us, forever.
Dawn comes later and later now, and I, who only a month ago could sit with coffee every morning watching the light walk down the hill to the edge of the pond and place a doe there, shyly drinking, then see the light step out upon the water, sowing reflections to either side—a garden of trees that grew as if by magic— now see no more than my face, mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, startled by time. While I slept, night in its thick winter jacket bridled the doe with a twist of wet leaves and led her away, then brought its black horse with harness that creaked like a cricket, and turned the water garden under. I woke, and at the waiting window found the curtains open to my open face; beyond me, darkness. And I, who only wished to keep looking out, must now keep looking in.
Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American, For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about,  Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy,  Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity  For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and  Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah  Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:  Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;  Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between; Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing  in his breast  The infinite and the gold  Of the endless frontier, the deathless West. “Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed  By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten, Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of  Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and   Shining in the darkness, of the light On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures, The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus,   Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.
After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria, having slipped by the bald shipping foreman to ride a rattling elevator to the attic where doves flicker into the massive eaves and where piled boxes of out-of-style cotton and lace won’t ever be decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows. Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons while the rest of us pack Mediterranean Dreams and Colonial Ruffles and drapes colored like moons, and he wakes lost— shot through into a world of unlocked unlocking light— suddenly he knows where he is and feels half nuts and feels like killing some pigeons with a slingshot. That’s all, and that’s why he pokes his calloused fingers into the broken machinery, hunting for loose nuts a half inch wide— five greasy cold ones that warm in his pocket— and yanks back the snag-cut strip of inner tube with a nut snug at the curve to snap it at the soft chest of a dopey bird. Then the noise of pigeons flopping down to creosoted hardwood, and then a grin the guy gives me & all his other pals later. And afternoon tightens down on all our shoulders, until the shift whistle blasts, blowing through the plant like air through lace. As it always has, as it does. That bright. That stunned.
—for George Shelton Sometimes everything feels like a trick. Some days things seem to have been stolen from you. Cash to pay the bills, your sense of humor, friendship. You could almost believe those are what you look for as you walk around your neighborhood. But, no, instead, you get splashes of zinnias against stucco, cactus wrens, a pack of kids who ignore the sodium amber streetlights which just stuttered on, because it means their mothers want them home right this minute. And, on the corner variety store’s wall, a crude, sun-washed mural of the angel Gabriel defaced by thick black sideburns so he looks like a street punk, a strutting cholo, so he seems the only creature on earth who hasn’t heard the news that everything can be lost. His strong upper arms curving naked and graceful as the tan thighs of a slender, athletic girl. A girl he’s after, though she’s gotten bored waiting on the stoop and watching the sun set behind the foothills. Sky reddening until it slams into a blue that blesses anyone oblivious to all the negations, including the one, pal, where you think it’s possible to step out of your heart and leave it empty as an egg shell or a cardboard box. When you finally return home the tint of sky more or less matches the flash of a thrush as it swoops from limb to branch, acacia to willow. Standing at the kitchen counter, you pick through a carton of strawberries. Good juicy ones from the moldy and over-ripe. Choices that are easy. What do you trust anymore? The aproned man in the mercado said California strawberries, they’re the best this time of year. In bed, later, you remember the grocer, round belly under his apron, but as you start, nearly asleep, to tell your wife about him, how he talked about his deals, she starts reading aloud from a tattered bird guide, that the wood thrush is “essentially useful and worthwhile.” What is worthwhile? Now, remember.
Long ago we quit lifting our heels like the others—horse, dog, and tiger— though we thrill to their speed as they flee. Even the mouse bearing the great weight of a nugget of dog food is enviably graceful. There is little spring to our walk, we are so burdened with responsibility, all of the disciplinary actions that have fallen to us, the punishments, the killings, and all with our feet bound stiff in the skins of the conquered. But sometimes, in the early hours, we can feel what it must have been like to be one of them, up on our toes, stealing past doors where others are sleeping, and suddenly able to see in the dark.
The days are dog-eared, the edges torn,  ragged—like those pages  I ripped once out of library books, for their photos of Vallejo and bootless Robert Johnson.  A fine needs paying now it’s true, but  not by me. I am no more guilty than that thrush is who sits there stripping moss  off the wet bark of a tree. A red fleck, like his, glows at the back of my head—a beauty mark,  left by the brain’s after-jets. I would not wish for the three brains  Robert required to double-clutch his guitar and chase those sounds he had to know  led down and into a troubled dusky river, always. Three brains did Johnson no earthly good,  neither his nor Vallejo’s 4 & 1/2 worked right exactly—O bunglers, O banged-up pans of disaster! Crying for days, said Cesar, & singing for months.  How can I be so strong some times, at others weak? I wish to be free, but free to do what? To leave myself behind?  To switch channels remotely? Better to sing. Not like the bird, but as they sang,  Cesar & Robert— with the shocked & seeded  sweetness of an apple split open by a meat cleaver.
I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught  in some moorings. I am always tying up  and then deciding to depart. In storms and  at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide  around my fathomless arms, I am unable  to understand the forms of my vanity  or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder  in my hand and the sun sinking. To  you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage  of my will. The terrible channels where  the wind drives me against the brown lips  of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet  I trust the sanity of my vessel; and  if it sinks, it may well be in answer  to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
The eager note on my door said “Call me, call when you get in!” so I quickly threw a few tangerines into my overnight bag, straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and headed straight for the door. It was autumn by the time I got around the corner, oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk! Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie! for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest only casually invited, and that several months ago.
“Turn back!” was all she snapped out as she passed in a red dress that caught sunrays through mist. I saw her lurch upwind, kick off spiked heels, climb out to the edge of a knife-sharp rockpile, and, arms outstretched, lead the sea’s tympani, lure the din, guiding the steamy waves to shore. Will the Almighty answer me? she sang out to the ocean’s rising octaves, as blown palms pointed scarflike fronds to land. Earlier that Sunday, she had prayed to a black Christ in a church on the island, droned verses for a safe calm, and trekked homeward to board white louvered windows for the storm. She had refused the chapel’s sanctuary to ask the ocean why the wind ripped homes and would again. Her anger captured me, and stayed when I saw rain gleam on red ginger, drench trumpets islanders call yellow-bells, and soak ixora. Bonelike bits of shells and conchs lay on the beach as on an altar. Silent, I watched her. Under a blank sky, where waves broke over coral, in thick haze, pitched forward to hear the whirlwind’s reply, she shook a fist, then opened hands in praise.
At night Chinamen jump  on Asia with a thump while in our willful way  we, in secret, play affectionate games and bruise  our knees like China’s shoes. The birds push apples through  grass the moon turns blue, these apples roll beneath  our buttocks like a heath full of Chinese thrushes  flushed from China’s bushes. As we love at night  birds sing out of sight, Chinese rhythms beat  through us in our heat, the apples and the birds  move us like soft words, we couple in the grace  of that mysterious race.
515 Madison Avenue  door to heaven? portal stopped realities and eternal licentiousness or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables  swinging from the myth of ascending I would join or declining the challenge of racial attractions they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends) while everywhere love is breathing draftily like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s  o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland where is the summit where all aims are clear  the pin-point light upon a fear of lust as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn  and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson  playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor  taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley  and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire  and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth  Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building  I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue  and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment  “where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night  not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs” no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it” perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work  a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods you were there always and you know all about these things  as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes  it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid  as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue  where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light I have always wanted to be near it though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue)  lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems  in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island  they are coming and we holy ones must go is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically  belong to the enormous bliss of American death
When first I walked here I hobbled  along ties set too close together  for a boy to step easily on each.  I thought my stride one day would reach every other and from then on  I would walk in time with the way  toward that Lobachevskian haze  up ahead where the two rails meet.  Here we put down our pennies, dark,  on shined steel; they trembled, fell still;  then the locomotive out of Attleboro rattling its berserk wheel-rods into perfect circles,  brightened them into wafers, the way a fork  mashes into view the inner light of a carrot  in a stew. In this late March sunshine,  crossing the trees at the angle of a bow  when it effleurages out of the chanterelle  the C three octaves above middle C,  the vertical birthwood remembers  its ascent lines, shrunken by half, exactly  back down, each tree on its fallen summer.  Back then, these rocks often asked  blood offerings—but this one, once, asked bone,  the time Billy Wallace tripped and broke out his front teeth. Fitted with gold replicas, he asked, speaking more brightly, “What good  are golden teeth, given what we’ve got to eat?” Nebuchadnezzar spent seven years down on all fours  eating vetch and alfalfa, ruminating the mouth-feel of “bloom” and “wither,”  until he was whole. If you held a grass blade between both thumbs  and blew hard you could blurt a shriek  out of it—like that beseeching leaves oaks  didn’t drop last winter just now scratch  on a breeze. Maybe Billy, lured by bones’ memory, comes back sometimes, too, to the Seekonk Woods,  to stand in the past and just look at it. Here he might kneel, studying this clump of grass, as a god might inspect the strands of a human sneeze  that percusses through. Or he might stray  into the now untrafficked whistling-lanes  of the mourning doves, who used to call and call  into the future, and give a start, as though,  this very minute, by awful coincidence,  they reach it. And at last traipse off down the tracks, with arrhythmic gait,  as wanderers must do once they realize:  the over-the-unknown route, too, ends up  where time wants. On this spot I skinned the muskrat. The musk breezed away.  I buried the rat. Of the fur I made a hat, which as soon as put on  began to rot off, causing my scalp to crawl.  In circles, of course, keeping to the skull. One day could this scrap of damp skin crawl all the way off, and the whole organism  follow? To do what? Effuse with musk,  or rot with rat? When, a quarter- turn after the sun, the half-moon,  too, goes down and we find ourselves  in the night's night, then somewhere  hereabouts in the dark must be death.  Knowledge of it beforehand is surely among  existence’s most spectacular feats—and yet right here,  on this ordinary afternoon, in these woods,  with a name meaning “black goose” in Wampanoag,  or in modern Seekonkese, “slob blowing fat nose,” this unlikely event happens—a creature  walking the tracks knows it will come.  Then too long to touch every tie, his stride  is now just too short to reach every other, and so he is to be still the wanderer, the hirtle  of too much replaced by the common limp  of too little. But he almost got there. Almost stepped in consonance with the liturgical,  sleeping gods’ snores you can hear humming up from former times inside the ties. He almost  set foot in that border zone where what follows  blows back, shimmering everything, making  walking like sleepwalking, railroad tracks  a country lane on a spring morning,  on which a man, limping but blissful,  makes his way homeward, his lips, suppled  by kissing to bunch up like that, blowing these short strands of hollowed-out air,  haunted by future, into a tune on the tracks.  I think I’m about to be shocked awake. As I was in childhood, when I battered myself  back to my senses against a closed door, or woke up hanging out of an upstairs window.  Somnambulism was my attempt to slip under cover of nightmare across no father’s land  and embrace a phantasm. If only I had found a way to enter his hard time  served at labor by day, by night in solitary,  and put my arms around him in reality,  I might not now be remaking him in memory still; anti-alchemizing bass kettle’s  golden reverberations back down to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals.  I want to crawl face down in the fields and graze on the wild strawberries, my clothes  stained pink, even for seven years  if I must, if they exist. I want to lie out on my back under the thousand stars and think  my way up among them, through them,  and a little distance past them, and attain  a moment of absolute ignorance, if I can, if human mentality lets us. I have always intended to live forever; but not until now, to live now. The moment  I have done one or the other, I here swear,  no one will have to drag me , I’ll come  but never will I agree to burn my words. The poplar logs creosoted asleep under the tracks  have stopped snoring. Maybe they’ve  already waked up. The bow saws at G.  An oak leaf rattles on its tree. The rails  may never meet, O fellow Euclideans,  for you, for me. So what if we groan.  That’s our noise. Laughter is our stuttering  in a language we can’t speak yet. Behind,  the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead,  if not now then never, shines what is.
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;  though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;  as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch  blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow  began remembering all down her thick length,  from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,  from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine  down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering  from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies. In the frog pond the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, I hear its drone, drifting, high up in immaculate ozone.  2 And I hear, coming over the hills, America singing, her varied carols I hear: crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night, sput of cattleprod, TV going on about the smells of the human body, curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs the rice of the world, with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses.  3 And by paddies in Asia bones wearing a few shadows walk down a dirt road, smashed bloodsuckers on their heel, knowing flesh thrown down in the sunshine dogs shall eat and flesh flung into the air shall be seized by birds, shoulder blades smooth, unmarked by old feather-holes, hands rivered by blue, erratic wanderings of the blood, eyes crinkled shut at almost seeing the drifting sun that gives us our lives.
The man splitting wood in the daybreak looks strong, as though, if one weakened, one could turn to him and he would help. Gus Newland was strong. When he split wood he struck hard, flashing the bright steel through the air so hard the hard maple leapt apart, as it’s feared marriages will do in countries reluctant to permit divorce, and even willow, which, though stacked to dry a full year, on being split actually weeps—totem wood, therefore, to the married-until-death—sunders with many little lip-wetting gasp-noises. But Gus is dead. We could turn to our fathers, but they help us only by the unperplexed looking-back of the numerals cut into headstones. Or to our mothers, whose love, so devastated, can’t, even in spring, break through the hard earth. Our spouses weaken at the same rate we do. We have to hold our children up to lean on them. Everyone who could help goes or hasn’t arrived. What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak, who looked strong? That was years ago. That was me.
I can feel she has got out of bed.  That means it is seven a.m. I have been lying with eyes shut,  thinking, or possibly dreaming, of how she might look if, at breakfast,  I spoke about the hidden place in her  which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo, and right then, over toast and bramble jelly, if such things are possible, she came. I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it. I imagine her hair would fall about her face and she would become apparently downcast, as she does at a concert when she is moved. The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes and there she is, next to the bed,  bending to a low drawer, picking over  various small smooth black, white, and pink items of underwear. She bends  so low her back runs parallel to the earth, but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun. The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking, lift toward the east—what can I say? Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth. Her breasts fall full; the nipples are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars of the gate under the earth where those who could not love press, wanting to be born again.  I reach out and take her wrist and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.  Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,  rummaging in the same low drawer.  The clock shows eight. Hmmm.  With huge, silent effort of great, mounded muscles the earth has been turning. She takes a piece of silken cloth from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls  of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,  as if she will be, all day among strangers,  looking down inside herself at our rapture.
The house is so quiet now The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet, Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth Grinning into the floor, maybe at my Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth. I’ve lived this way long enough, But when my old woman died her soul Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust And the woolen mice, and begin to howl Because there is old filth everywhere She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair. I know now how life is cheap as dirt, And still the hungry, angry heart Hangs on and howls, biting at air.
It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true, What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the thing that’s done. And yet there is the horror of the fact, Though we knew not the man. To die in jail, To be beaten to death, to know the act Of personal fury before the eyes can fail And the man die against the cold last wall Of the lonely world—and neither is that all: There is the terror too of each man’s thought, That knows not, but must quietly suspect His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught To take an attitude merely correct; Being frightened of his own cold image in The glass of government, and his own sin, Frightened lest senate house and prison wall Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high Look faintly smiling down and seem to call A crime the welcome chance of liberty, And any man an outlaw who aggrieves The patriotism of a pair of thieves.
Up in the billboard, over old South Station, the Captain, all wide grin and ruddy cheek, held up a golden shot of Cutty Sark high as the skyline where the sunset spread a gold fan from the twig-like spars and rigging of a departing clipper ship. Above the picture the dull haze of a real sun rose, dragging the day up with it. Seven o’clock. The agitated horns, brakes, fingers, and catcalls down below me were already merging and channeling everybody on to warehouse, factory, department store and office. My father and uncle talking over all the goods to be received that day, the goods delivered, their two reflections in the window floating like blurry ghosts within the Captain’s grin, their voices raised a little above the soft erratic humming of the big machines, the riveters and pressers, warming, rousing: The Century order, did it get out last night? And had the buckles come from Personal? Who’d go do Jaffey? Who’d diddle Abramowitz and Saperstein? Those cocksucking sons of bitches, cut their balls off if they fuck with us . . . How automatically at any provocation I can aim the words at anybody now, woman or man, the reverberating angry this, not that, in ‘pussy’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘fuckhead’, hammered down so far inside me it’s almost too securely there to feel. But I was thirteen then, and for the first time old enough to have my father say these things in front of me, which must have meant I was a man now too, I listened (blushing, ashamed of blushing) for clues of what it was I had become, or was supposed to be: It did and didn’t have to do with bodies, being a man, it wasn’t fixed in bodies, but somehow passed between them, going to by being taken from, ever departing, ever arriving, unstoppable as money, and moving in a limited supply it seemed to follow where the money went. Being a man was something that you did to other men, which meant a woman was what other men became when you would do them. Either you gave a fucking, or you took one, did or were done to, it was simple as that. Somebody shouted from beyond the office that Tony had passed out in the can again. ‘The lush, the no good lush,’ my uncle said, ‘get him the fuck out of here for good, will ya.’ The stall door swung back, scrawled with giant cocks, tits, asses and cunts, beyond which in the shadows my father was gently wrestling with the man, trying to hold him steady while his free hand shimmied the tangled shorts and trousers up over the knees and hips, and even got the shirt tucked in, the pants zipped deftly enough for Tony not to notice, though he did. Even then I knew they’d fire him, and that it wasn’t gratitude at all that made the man weep inconsolably, his head bowed, nodding, as my father led him to the elevator, still with his arm around him, patting his shoulder, easing him through the door. I knew the tenderness that somewhere else could possibly have been a lover’s or a father’s could here be only an efficient way to minimize the trouble. And yet it seemed somehow my father was too adept at it, too skillful, not to feel it in some way. And feeling it not to need to pull back, to separate himself from what the rest of him was doing, which was why, I think, his face throughout was blank, expressionless like the faces of the presidents on the bills he handed Tony as the door slid shut. The men fast at the riveters and pressers and the long row of women at the Singers were oil now even more than men or women, mute oil in the loud revving of the place, a blur of hands on automatic pilot, slipping leather through the pumping needles, under the thrusting rods, the furious hammers, the nearly invisible whirring of the blades. ‘Come on now, Al, it’s time,’ my father said, and the Captain seemed to grin a little wider, as if his pleasure there at the end of his unending day grew freer, more disencumbered, because he saw me at the start of mine, under my father’s arm, his soft voice broken against the noise into an unfollowable tune of favors and petty cash, and how much ass he had to kiss to get me this, and I should be a man now and not disappoint him.
for Francis and Barbara 1 Among the high-branching, leafless boughs Above the roof-peaks of the town, Snowflakes unnumberably come down. I watched out of the attic window The laced sway of family trees, Intricate genealogies Whose strict, reserved gentility, Trembling, impossible to bow, Received the appalling fall of snow. All during Sunday afternoon, Not storming, but befittingly, Out of a still, grey, devout sky, The snowflakes fell, until all shapes Went under, and thickening, drunken lines Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. Up in the attic, among many things Inherited and out of style, I cried, then fell asleep awhile, Waking at night now, as the snow- flakes from darkness to darkness go Past yellow lights in the street below. 2 I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. And like a child I cried myself to sleep High in the head of the house, feeling the hull Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep Mountains and valleys of the many years  That brought me to tears. Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts Out at my life, which narrowly runs between Them and this cemetery of spare parts For discontinued men, whose hats and canes  Are my rich remains. And women, their portraits and wedding gowns Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor;  I mention no more; But what I thought today, that made me cry, Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky Their black patience, are one, and that branching Relation teaches how we endure and grow;  The other is the snow, Falling in a white chaos from the sky, As many as the sands of all the seas, As all the men who died or who will die, As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; As Abraham was promised of his seed;  Generations bleed, Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept,  And a child I slept.
People are putting up storm windows now, Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground, Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream Away in lines like seaweed on the tide Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind. The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by, Something I should have liked to say to you, Something ... the dry grass bent under the pane Brimful of bouncing water ... something of A swaying clarity which blindly echoes This lonely afternoon of memories And missed desires, while the wintry rain (Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!) Runs on the standing windows and away.
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records in ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way by echo alone. Still, the point of style is character. The universe induces a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger’s to that of the Emperor Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. Miraculous. It is as though the world were a great writing. Having said so much, let us allow there is more to the world than writing: continental faults are not bare convoluted fissures in the brain. Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
1 Water roared everywhere around us, yet from the bank all we could see of it were quick spumes and flashes here and there, in among the boulders. Cautiously, as if they might awaken, we clambered over the gigantic slabs and humps, the sun-baked ovals lumpy as hammered clay, and saw downstream below us only the vague shapes of others, almost billowy, like magnified amoebas, stretching away to even vaguer ones beyond them, turning the narrow streambed through the valley to a lunar seam.  2 Easing ourselves down over the massive sides (we were hot and tired, eager for the pools below) we could make out older water in the rough grain, undulating and immobile currents, band swirled on band, mica-speckled, cloudy, each seeming to move off, as it faded, through the stone—each one a glacial rune, each boulder an innumerable pebble in the ice sheet’s tidal suck and drag: two hundred thousand years, two billion, five, the molten core, spoor of gasses in the vast night, at our fingertips.  3 Then the pool: your clothes shed, with one hand braced against the rock ledge you had slipped into the hip-high rushing water, and were wading out, bent over, reaching like the blind before you for the slippery boulder you slid across, pushing against the white weight of the pouring mist, your skin goose-fleshed, speckled bright as mica, and then, part mist yourself, you turned back, smiling, calling though I couldn’t hear you, calling and waving for me to climb down to where you were, to join you there. And so I did.
see Amos, 3:15 A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light, an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern: decaying seasons keeping from decay. A summer guest, the boy had never seen (a servant told him of it) how the lake froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams, with axe and saw, to cut great blocks of ice, translucid, marbled, glittering in the sun, load them on sleds and drag them up the hill to be manhandled down the narrow path and set in courses for the summer’s keeping, the kitchen uses and luxuriousness of the great houses. And he heard how once a team and driver drowned in the break of spring: the man’s cry melting from the ice that summer frightened the sherbet-eaters off the terrace. Dust of the cedar, lost and evergreen among the slowly blunting water walls where the blade edge melted and the steel saw’s bite was rounded out, and the horse and rider drowned in the red sea’s blood, I was the silly child who dreamed that riderless cry, and saw the guests run from a ghostly wall, so long before the winter house fell with the summer house, and the houses, Egypt, the great houses, had an end.
Long scree of pill bottles  spilling over the tipped brim of the wicker basket, fifty or more,  a hundred, your name on every one and under  your name the brusque rune of instructions— which ones to take, how many, and often,  on what days, with or without food, before or  after eating, impossible toward the end to keep them all straight,  not even with your charts, your calendars, the bottles  ranged in sequence along the kitchen counter—you always so  efficient, organized, never without a plan,  even when planning had come down to this and nothing more, for there was  still a future in it, though the future reached  only from one bottle to the next, from pill to pill, each one  another toehold giving way  beneath you on the steep slope you never stopped struggling against,  unable not to climb, and then, when climbing  was impossible, not to try slowing the quickening descent. You had  descended now, your body thinned to the machine  of holding on, while I exhausted by the vigil, with all your medicine  spread before me, looked for something, anything  at all to help me sleep. To help me for a short while anyway  not be aware of you, your gaunt hand  clutching the guardrail, your eyes blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed,  the air above them for their own sight, and the whimper  far back in the throat, the barely audible continuous  half-cry half- wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think  you were saying something, though I couldn’t make out what. I wanted  to sleep, I wanted if just for that one night  to meet you there on that steep slope, the two of us together, facing  opposite directions, I, because I wasn’t  dying, looking down, desiring what you, still looking up, resisted,  because you were.
And does the heart grow old? You know In the indiscriminate green Of summer or in earliest snow A landscape is another scene, Inchoate and anonymous, And every rock and bush and drift As our affections alter us Will alter with the season’s shift. So love by love we come at last, As through the exclusions of a rhyme, Or the exactions of a past, To the simplicity of time, The antiquity of grace, where yet We live in terror and delight With love as quiet as regret And love like anger in the night.
Plato, despair! We prove by norms How numbers bear Empiric forms, How random wrong Will average right If time be long And error slight, But in our hearts Hyperbole Curves and departs To infinity. Error is boundless. Nor hope nor doubt, Though both be groundless, Will average out.
I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises. I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises, Thirst where the grasses burn in early May And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay. There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat. So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove, And found no images of pastoral will, But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.
There is no stillness in this wood. The quiet of this clearing Is the denial of my hearing The sounds I should. There is no vision in this glade. This tower of sun revealing The timbered scaffoldage is stealing Essence from shade.Only my love is love’s ideal.  The love I could discover In these recesses knows no lover, Is the unreal, The undefined, unanalysed, Unabsolute many; It is antithesis of any, In none comprised.
You are the problem I propose, My dear, the text my musings glose: I call you for convenience love. By definition you’re a cause Inferred by necessary laws— You are so to the saints above. But in this shadowy lower life I sleep with a terrestrial wife And earthy children I beget. Love is a fiction I must use, A privilege I can abuse, And sometimes something I forget. Now, in the heavenly other place Love is in the eternal mind The luminous form whose shade she is, A ghost discarnate, thought defined. She was so to my early bliss, She is so while I comprehend The forms my senses apprehend, And in the end she will be so. Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, Her whom my mind infers I know. The one exists in time and space And as she was she will not be; The other is in her own grace And is She is eternally. Plato! you shall not plague my life. I married a terrestrial wife. And Hume! she is not mere sensation In sequence of observed relation. She has two forms—ah, thank you, Duns!—, I know her in both ways at once. I knew her, yes, before I knew her, And by both means I must construe her, And none among you shall undo her.
Wolbe dich, Welt: Wenn die Totenmuschel heranschwimmt, will es hier läuten. Vault over, world: when the seashell of death washes up there will be a knelling. —Paul Celan, Stimmen (Voices) Death knocks all night at my door. The soul answers, and runs from the water in my throat. Water will sustain me when I climb  the steep hill that leads to a now familiar place. I began, even as a child, to learn water's order, and, as I grew intact, the feel of its warmth in a new sponge, of its weight in a virgin towel. I have earned my wine in another's misery, when rum bathed a sealed throat and cast its seal on the ground. I will be bound, to the one who leads me away, by the ornaments on my wrists, the gold dust in my ears, below my eye and tied to my  loincloth in a leather pouch. They dress me now in my best cloth, and fold my hands, adorned with silk,  against my left cheek. Gold lies with me on my left side. Gold has become the color of distance,  and of your sorrow. Sorrow lies, red clay on my brow. Red pepper caresses my temples. I am adorned in the russet-brown message the soul brings from its coming-to-be. There is a silken despair in my body that grief shakes from it, a cat's voice, controlled by palm wine  and a widow's passion. It is time to feed the soul  —a hen, eggs, mashed yams— and encourage the thirst resting near the right hand I see before me.  Always I think of death.  I cannot eat.  I walk in sadness, and I die. Yet life is the invocation sealed in the coffin, and will walk through our wall, passing and passing and passing,  until it is set down, to be lifted from this body's habitation. I now assume the widow's pot, the lamp that will lead me through solitude, to the edge of my husband's journey. I hold three stones upon my head, darkness I will release when I run from the dead, with my eyes turned away  toward another light. This is the day of rising. A hut sits in the bush, sheltered by summe, standing on four forked ends. We have prepared for the soul's feast with pestle, mortar, a strainer, three hearthstones, a new pot and new spoon. Someone has stripped the hut's body and dressed it with the edowa. Now, when the wine speaks and the fire has lifted its voice, the dead will be clothed in hair,  the signs of our grief. Sun closes down on an intensity of ghosts. It is time to close the path. It is time for the snail's pace of coming again into life,  with the world swept clean,  the crying done, and our ordinary garments decent in the dead one's eyes.
I write my God in blue. I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts. I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight. I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath, or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade, at twilight, on the desert's steps. Brown by day and black by night, my God has wings that open to no reason. He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes, scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb of light leaping from a fire. Press him he bleeds. When you take your hand to sacred water, there is no sign of any wound. And so I call him supreme, great artist, judge of time, scholar of all living event, the possible prophet of the possible event. Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars, blind men with their scars dulled by kola, blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop, blind men in corn, blind men in steel, reason by their lights that our tongues are free, our tongues will redeem us. Speech is the fact, and the fact is true. What is moves, and what is moving is. We cling to these contradictions. We know we will become our contradictions, our complex body's own desire. Yet speech is not the limit of our vision. The ear entices itself with any sound. The skin will caress whatever tone or temperament that rises or descends. The bones will set themselves to a dance. The blood will argue with a bird in flight. The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice, brush and thrill to an old bone. And yet there is no sign to arrest us  from the possible. We remain at rest there, in transit from our knowing to our knowledge. So I would set a limit where I meet my logic. I would clamber from my own cave into the curve of sign, an alphabet of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. I am good when I am in motion, when I think of myself at rest in the knowledge of my moving, when I have the vision of my mother at rest, in moonlight, her lap the cradle of my father's head. I am good when I trade my shells, and walk from boundary to boundary, unarmed and unafraid of another's speech. I am good when I learn the world through the touch of my present body. I am good when I take the cove of a cub  into my care. I am good when I hear the changes in my body echo all my changes down the years, when what I know indeed is what I would  know in deed. I am good when I know the darkness of all light, and accept the darkness, not as sign, but as my body. This is the A of absolutes, the logbook of judgments, the good sign.
It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land  has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below  sings of the sea. By slow movements of the earth's crust, or is it that her hip bones have been shaped by a fault of engineering? Some coquetry cycles this blue edge, a spring ready to come forth to correct  love's mathematics. Saturday rises immaculately. The water's jade edge plays against corn-colored picnic baskets, rose and lemon bottles, red balloons, dancers in purple tights, a roan mare out of its field. It is not the moment to think of Bahia and the gray mother with her water explanation. Not far from here, the city, a mass of swift water in its own depression, licks its sores. Still, I would be eased by reasons. Sand dunes in drifts. Lava cuts its own bed at a mountain base. Blindness enters where the light refuses to go. In Loch Lomond, the water flowers with algae and a small life has taken the name of a star. You will hear my star-slow heart empty itself with a light-swift pitch where the water thins to a silence. And the woman who will not be named screams in the birth of her fading away.
Snow hurries the strawberries from the bush. Star-wet water rides you into summer, into my autumn. Your cactus hands are at my heart again. Lady, I court my dream of you in lilies and in rain. I vest myself in your oldest memory and in my oldest need. And in my passion you are the deepest blue of the oldest rose. Star circle me an axe. I cannot cut myself from any of your emblems. It will soon be cold here, and dark here; the grass will lie flat to search for its spring head. I will bow again in the winter of your eyes. If there is music, it will be the weather's bells to call me to the abandoned chapel of your simple body.
Never mind what you think. The old man did not rush Recklessly into the coop the last minute. The chickens hardly stirred For the easy way he sang to them. Red sun is burning out Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man Touches the blade of his killing knife With his fat thumb. I’m in the backyard on a quilt Spread out under the heavy dark plums He cooks for his whiskey. He walks among the hens singing His chicken song way down in his throat Until he finds the one who’s ready And he holds her to his barrel chest. What did you think? Did you think you just jerk the bird From her roost and hack her head off? Beyond the coop I see the fleeting white dress of my grandmother As she crosses and recrosses the porch To fill the bucket with scalding water. How easy the feathers will come When she drowns them for plucking And clouds the air with a stench I can’t stand not to breathe. I’m not even a boy yet but I watch The old man sing out into the yard, His knife already at the chicken’s throat When everything begins to spin in my world— He slices off the head without a squawk, And swirls the bird in circles, a fine Blood spray fanning out far enough To reach me where I wait Obediently, where I can’t stop watching The head the old man picks up, His free hand becomes a puppet chicken Clucking at me, pecking my head with the cold beak Until I cry for him to stop, Until he pins me down, clucking, laughing, blood All over his hands. He did it so I would remember him I tell myself all these years later. He did it because it was his last summer Among us. In August he didn’t feel the fly Come into his cancerous ear and lay its eggs. He didn’t feel the maggots hatch As he sat dazed with pills in the sun. He pecked my head and laughed out of love, Out of love he snatched me roughly to his chest And sang his foreign songs way, Way down in his throat.
for my wife After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding, We stood in the doorway watching horses Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill. We stared through the black screen, Our vision altered by the distance So I thought I saw a mist Kicked up around their hooves when they faded Like cut-out horses Away from us. The grass was never more blue in that light, more Scarlet; beyond the pasture Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire But you said they were only branches. Okay. The storm stopped pounding. I am trying to say this straight: for once I was sane enough to pause and breathe Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain I turned my back on the old curses. I believed They swung finally away from me ... But still the branches are wire And thunder is the pounding mortar, Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly, Her hands reaching for the no one Who waits in waves of heat before her. So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you, I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings Beat inside her until she rises Above the stinking jungle and her pain Eases, and your pain, and mine. But the lie swings back again. The lie works only as long as it takes to speak And the girl runs only as far As the napalm allows Until her burning tendons and crackling Muscles draw her up into that final position Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.
I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed. I watch the woods for deer who never come. I know the hes and shes in autumn rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work so I may let the crows in corn believe it’s me their caws are meant to warn, and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves they know me too. They know the boy who lives inside me still won’t go away. The deer are ghosts who slip between the light through trees, so you may only hear the snap of branches in the thicket beyond hope. I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.
It stops the town we come through. Workers raise Their oily arms in good salute and grin. Kids scream as at a circus. Business men Glance hopefully and go their measured way. And women standing at their dumbstruck door More slowly wave and seem to warn us back, As if a tear blinding the course of war Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish. Fruit of the world, O clustered on ourselves We hang as from a cornucopia In total friendliness, with faces bunched To spray the streets with catcalls and with leers. A bottle smashes on the moving ties And eyes fixed on a lady smiling pink Stretch like a rubber-band and snap and sting The mouth that wants the drink-of-water kiss. And on through crummy continents and days, Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk we crawl, The good-bad boys of circumstance and chance, Whose bucket-helmets bang the empty wall Where twist the murdered bodies of our packs Next to the guns that only seem themselves. And distance like a strap adjusted shrinks, Tightens across the shoulder and holds firm. Here is a deck of cards; out of this hand Dealer, deal me my luck, a pair of bulls, The right draw to a flush, the one-eyed jack. Diamonds and hearts are red but spades are black, And spades are spades and clubs are clovers—black. But deal me winners, souvenirs of peace. This stands to reason and arithmetic, Luck also travels and not all come back. Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains, And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death, Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death, Or that survival which is all our hope; And death leads back to trucks and trains and ships, But life leads to the march, O flag! at last The place of life found after trains and death— Nightfall of nations brilliant after war.
What should the wars do with these jigging fools? The man behind the book may not be man, His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s, But still be whole, deciding what he can In praise of politics or German rimes; But the intellectual lights a cigarette And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget What he has been resuming all the while. He talks to overhear, she to withdraw To some interior feminine fireside Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride, Making him think of cats, a stray of which Some days sets up a howling in his brain, Pure interference such as this neat bitch Seems to create from listening disdain. But talk is all the value, the release, Talk is the very fillip of an act, The frame and subject of the masterpiece Under whose film of age the face is cracked. His own forehead glows like expensive wood, But back of it the mind is disengaged, Self-sealing clock recording bad and good At constant temperature, intact, unaged. But strange, his body is an open house Inviting every passerby to stay; The city to and fro beneath his brows Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day. Think of a private thought, indecent room Where one might kiss his daughter before bed! Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb, Console your neighbor for his recent dead; Do something! die in Spain or paint a green Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did), Or start another Little Magazine, Or move in with a woman, have a kid. Invulnerable, impossible, immune, Do what you will, your will will not be done But dissipate the light of afternoon Till evening flickers like the midnight sun, And midnight shouts and dies: I’d rather be A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free, Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn. I’d rather be a barber and cut hair Than walk with you in gilt museum halls, You and the puma-lady, she so rare Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls. Go take yourselves apart, but let me be The fault you find with everyman. I spit, I laugh, I fight; and you, l’homme qui rît; Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.
I am an atheist who says his prayers. I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath. I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three. I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty. I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially. A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff. I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself. I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion. I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me. I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance. I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever. I love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair. I take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars. Without compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip! The homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror. Pitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel! Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey. How beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side. For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.
Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white, And soon down ladders of reflected light The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually They separate on paths of long ago, Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew That leads, live as a nerve, to memory. But often when too steep her dream descends, Perhaps to the grotto where her father bends To pick her up, the husband wakes as though He had forgotten something in the house. Motionless he eyes the room that glows With the little animals of light that prowl This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light But softer still her hand that drifts so white Upon the whiteness. How like a water-plant It floats upon the black canal of sleep, Suspended upward from the distant deep In pure achievement of its lovely want! Quietly then he plucks it and it folds And is again a hand, small as a child’s. He would revive it but it barely stirs And so he carries it off a little way And breaks it open gently. Now he can see The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers, The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn, From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs, Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him. Our faces washed, our hearts in the right place, We kneel or stand or listen from our tents; Half-naked natives with their kind of grace Move down the road with balanced staffs like mendicants. And over the hill the guns bang like a door And planes repeat their mission in the heights. The jungle outmaneuvers creeping war And crawls within the circle of our sacred rites. I long for our disheveled Sundays home, Breakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes, Talk without reference, and palindromes, Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous Times. I long for lounging in the afternoons Of clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind, Books and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons, And your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.
Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car  and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;  she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,  alive, still, never to be born. Beside that mountain road I hesitated. The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;  under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;  around our group I could hear the wilderness listen. I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,  then pushed her over the edge into the river.
Setting a trotline after sundown if we went far enough away in the night  sometimes up out of deep water would come a secret-headed channel cat, Eyes that were still eyes in the rush of darkness,  flowing feelers noncommittal and black, and hidden in the fins those rasping bone daggers,  with one spiking upward on its back. We would come at daylight and find the line sag,  the fishbelly gleam and the rush on the tether:  to feel the swerve and the deep current which tugged at the tree roots below the river.
Anyone with quiet pace who walks a gray road in the West may hear a badger underground where  in deep flint another time is Caught by flint and held forever,  the quiet pace of God stopped still.  Anyone who listens walks on  time that dogs him single file, To mountains that are far from people,  the face of the land gone gray like flint.  Badgers dig their little lives there,  quiet-paced the land lies gaunt, The railroad dies by a yellow depot,  town falls away toward a muddy creek.  Badger-gray the sod goes under a river of wind, a hawk on a stick.
All the Sioux were defeated. Our clan  got poor, but a few got richer. They fought two wars. I did not take part. No one remembers your vision  or even your real name. Now  the children go to town and like  loud music. I married a Christian. Crazy Horse, it is not fair to hide a new vision from you. In our schools we are learning to take aim when we talk, and we have  found out our enemies. They shift when  words do; they even change and hide  in every person. A teacher here says  hurt or scorned people are places  where real enemies hide. He says  we should not hurt or scorn anyone,  but help them. And I will tell you  in a brave way, the way Crazy Horse  talked: that teacher is right. I will tell you a strange thing: at the rodeo, close to the grandstand,  I saw a farm lady scared by a blown  piece of paper; and at that place  horses and policemen were no longer  frightening, but suffering faces were,  and the hunched-over backs of the old. Crazy Horse, tell me if I am right: these are the things we thought we were  doing something about. In your life you saw many strange things,  and I will tell you another: now I salute  the white man’s flag. But when I salute  I hold my hand alertly on the heartbeat  and remember all of us and how we depend  on a steady pulse together. There are those  who salute because they fear other flags  or mean to use ours to chase them:  I must not allow my part of saluting  to mean this. All of our promises,  our generous sayings to each other, our  honorable intentions—those I affirm  when I salute. At these times it is like  shutting my eyes and joining a religious colony at prayer in the gray dawn  in the deep aisles of a church. Now I have told you about new times.  Yes, I know others will report different things. They have been caught  by weak ways. I tell you straight the way it is now, and it is our way,  the way we were trying to find. The chokecherries along our valley still bear a bright fruit. There is good pottery clay north of here. I remember our old places. When I pass the Musselshell I run my hand along those old grooves in the rock.
Aristotle was a little man with eyes like a lizard, and he found a streak down the midst of things, a smooth place for his feet much more important than the carved handles on the coffins of the great. He said you should put your hand out at the time and place of need: strength matters little, he said, nor even speed. His pupil, a king's son, died at an early age. That Aristotle spoke of him it is impossible to find—the youth was notorious, a conqueror, a kid with a gang, but even this Aristotle didn't ever say. Around the farthest forest and along all the bed of the sea, Aristotle studied immediate, local ways. Many of which were wrong. So he studied poetry. There, in pity and fear, he found Man. Many thinkers today, who stand low and grin, have little use for anger or power, its palace or its prison— but quite a bit for that little man with eyes like a lizard.
(Instructions for the Visit) Admire, when you come here, the glimmering hair Of the girl; praise her pale Complexion. Think well of her dress Though that is somewhat out of fashion. Don’t try to take her hand, but smile for Her hesitant gentleness. Say the old woman is looking strong Today; such hardiness. Remark, Perhaps, how she has dressed herself black Like a priest, and wears that sufficient air That does become the righteous. As you approach, she will push back Her chair, shove away her plate And wait, Sitting squat and direct, before The red mahogany chest Massive as some great Safe; will wait, By the table and her greasy plate, The bone half-chewed, her wine half-drained; She will wait. And fix her steady Eyes on you—the straight stare Of an old politician. Try once to meet her eyes. But fail. Let your sight Drift—yet never as if hunting for The keys (you keep imagining) hung By her belt. (They are not there.) Watch, perhaps, that massive chest—the way It tries to lean Forward, toward her, till it seems to rest Its whole household’s weight Of linens and clothing and provisions All on her stiff back. It might be strapped there like the monstrous pack Of some enchanted pedlar. Dense, self-contained, Like mercury in a ball, She can support this without strain, Yet she grows smaller, wrinkling Like a potato, parched as dung; It cramps her like a fist. Ask no one why the chest Has no knobs. Betray No least suspicion The necessities within Could vanish at her Will. Try not to think That as she feeds, gains Specific gravity, She shrinks, light- less as the world’s Hard core And the per- spective drains In her. Finally, above all, You must not ever see, Or let slip one hint you can see, On the other side, the girl’s Cuffs, like cordovan restraints; Forget her bony, tentative wrist, The half-fed, worrying eyes, and how She backs out, bows, and tries to bow Out of the scene, grows too ethereal To make a shape inside her dress And the dress itself is beginning already To sublime itself away like a vapor That merges into the empty twinkling Of the air and of the bright wallpaper.
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning. O world half-known through opening, twilit lids   Before the vague face clenches into light; O universal waters like a cloud,  Like those first clouds of half-created matter; O all things rising, rising like the fumes  From waters falling, O forever falling; Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished,  The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves  Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans;  O slow downdrifting of the atoms; O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands  Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true,  Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing  Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing  As we pass into the memory of women  Who are passing. Within those depths  What ravening? What devouring rage?  How shall our living know its ends of yielding?  These things have taken me as the mouth an orange—  That acrid sweet juice entering every cell;  And I am shared out. I become these things:  These lilies, if these things are water lilies  Which are dancers growing dim across no floor;  These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun; This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors;  Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate;  O soft as the thighs of women;  O radiance, into which I go on dying ...
Sorting out letters and piles of my old  Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards  That meant something once, I happened to find  Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,  Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard  Who has turned up a severed hand. Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand  Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender, In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies  That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned  Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,  And our ideals came easy. Then through the war and those two long years  Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks  Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried  This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,  Prove it had been, that it might come back.  That was before we got married. —Before we drained out one another’s force   With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce  And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,  I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,  I will find that it’s still there.
As we drove back, crossing the hill, The house still Hidden in the trees, I always thought— A fool’s fear—that it might have caught  Fire, someone could have broken in.  As if things must have been Too good here. Still, we always found  It locked tight, safe and sound. I mentioned that, once, as a joke;  No doubt we spoke Of the absurdity To fear some dour god’s jealousy  Of our good fortune. From the farm  Next door, our neighbors saw no harm  Came to the things we cared for here.  What did we have to fear? Maybe I should have thought: all Such things rot, fall— Barns, houses, furniture. We two are stronger than we were Apart; we’ve grown Together. Everything we own Can burn; we know what counts—some such  Idea. We said as much. We’d watched friends driven to betray;  Felt that love drained away Some self they need. We’d said love, like a growth, can feed  On hate we turn in and disguise; We warned ourselves. That you might despise  Me—hate all we both loved best— None of us ever guessed. The house still stands, locked, as it stood  Untouched a good Two years after you went. Some things passed in the settlement;  Some things slipped away. Enough’s left  That I come back sometimes. The theft  And vandalism were our own. Maybe we should have known.
Is it, then, your opinion  Women are putty in your hands?  Is this the face to launch upon  A thousand one night stands? First, please, would you be so kind  As to define your contribution To modern verse, the Western mind  And human institutions?  Where, where is the long, flowing hair,  The velvet suit, the broad bow tie;  Where is the other-worldly air,  Where the abstracted eye? Describe the influence on your verse  Of Oscar Mudwarp’s mighty line, The theories of Susan Schmersch  Or the spondee’s decline.  You’ve labored to present us with  This mouse-sized volume; shall this equal  The epic glories of Joe Smith?  He’s just brought out a sequel.  Where are the beard, the bongo drums,  Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals,  As who, released from Iowa, comes  To tell of wondrous scandals? Have you subversive, out of date,  Or controversial ideas? And can you really pull your weight  Among such minds as these?  Ah, what avails the tenure race,  Ah, what the Ph.D.,  When all departments have a place  For nincompoops like thee?
(After Dr. Haase gave them shots of morphine, Magda gave each child an ampule of potassium cyanide from a spoon.) This is the needle that we give Soldiers and children when they live  Near the front in primitive  Conditions or real dangers; This is the spoon we use to feed  Men trapped in trouble or in need,  When weakness or bad luck might lead  Them to the hands of strangers. This is the room where you can sleep  Your sleep out, curled up under deep  Layers of covering that will keep  You safe till all harm’s past. This is the bed where you can rest  In perfect silence, undistressed By noise or nightmares, as my breast   Once held you soft but fast. This is the Doctor who has brought  Your needle with your special shot  To quiet you; you won’t get caught  Off guard or unprepared. I am your nurse who’ll comfort you;  I nursed you, fed you till you grew  Too big to feed; now you’re all through  Fretting or feeling scared. This is the glass tube that contains Calm that will spread down through your veins  To free you finally from all pains  Of going on in error. This tiny pinprick sets the germ Inside you that fills out its term Till you can feel yourself grow firm  Against all doubt, all terror. Into this spoon I break the pill  That stiffens the unsteady will  And hardens you against the chill  Voice of a world of lies. This amber medicine implants  Steadfastness in your blood; this grants  Immunity from greed and chance,  And from all compromise. This is the serum that can cure Weak hearts; these pure, clear drops insure  You’ll face what comes and can endure   The test; you’ll never falter. This is the potion that preserves You in a faith that never swerves; This sets the pattern of your nerves  Too firm for you to alter. I set this spoon between your tight  Teeth, as I gave you your first bite;  This satisfies your appetite  For other nourishment. Take this on your tongue; this do  Remembering your mother who So loved her Leader she stayed true  When all the others went, When every friend proved false, in the  Delirium of treachery On every hand, when even He  Had turned His face aside. He shut himself in with His whore; Then, though I screamed outside His door,  Said He’d not see me anymore.  They both took cyanide. Open wide, now, little bird; I who sang you your first word Soothe away every sound you’ve heard   Except your Leader’s voice. Close your eyes, now; take your death.  Once we slapped you to take breath.  Vengeance is mine, the Lord God saith  And cancels each last choice. Once, my first words marked out your mind;  Just as our Leader’s phrases bind All hearts to Him, building a blind  Loyalty through the nation, We shape you into a pure form. Trapped, our best soldiers tricked the storm,  The Reds: those last hours, they felt warm   Who stood fast to their station. You needn’t fear what your life meant; You won’t curse how your hours were spent;  You’ll grow like your own monument  To all things sure and good, Fixed like a frieze in high relief Of granite figures that our Chief Accepts into His true belief,  His true blood-brotherhood. You’ll never bite the hand that fed you,  Won’t turn away from those that bred you,  Comforted your nights and led you  Into the thought of virtue; You won’t be turned from your own bed;  Won’t turn into that thing you dread;  No new betrayal lies ahead;  Now no one else can hurt you.
(Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, once bragged that if one German city were bombed, they could call him “Meier.” At his Karinhall estate, he questions himself and his disgrace.) And why, Herr Reichsmarschall, is Italy  Just like schnitzel? If they’re beaten  Either one will just get bigger. Neither cuts too firm a figure.
Observe the cautious toadstools  still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening;  sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless,  they righteously extort their living from the living.  I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation  the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile  as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned  before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry  for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich  soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot,  where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach  far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root  in you and am your tree.
Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked, The daughters of California  Educate reluctant humanists; Drive into their skulls with tennis balls The unhappy realization That nature is still stronger than man. The special Hellenic privilege  Of the special intellect seeps out  At last in this irrigated soil. Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers Are stronger than Socrates’ hemlock; And the games of scrupulous Euclid Vanish in the gymnopaedia.
An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Causes Now in Operation —subtitle of Lyell: Principles of Geology     The mountain road ends here,  Broken away in the chasm where  The bridge washed out years ago.  The first scarlet larkspur glitters  In the first patch of April Morning sunlight. The engorged creek  Roars and rustles like a military  Ball. Here by the waterfall,  Insuperable life, flushed With the equinox, sentient  And sentimental, falls away To the sea and death. The tissue  Of sympathy and agony That binds the flesh in its Nessus' shirt;  The clotted cobweb of unself  And self; sheds itself and flecks  The sun's bed with darts of blossom  Like flagellant blood above  The water bursting in the vibrant  Air. This ego, bound by personal  Tragedy and the vast Impersonal vindictiveness Of the ruined and ruining world,  Pauses in this immortality, As passionate, as apathetic, As the lava flow that burned here once;  And stopped here; and said, 'This far  And no further.' And spoke thereafter  In the simple diction of stone. Naked in the warm April air,  We lie under the redwoods,  In the sunny lee of a cliff.  As you kneel above me I see  Tiny red marks on your flanks Like bites, where the redwood cones  Have pressed into your flesh.  You can find just the same marks  In the lignite in the cliff Over our heads. Sequoia Langsdorfii
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris  I stood alone in a deserted square.  The night was trembling with a violet  Expectancy. At the far edge it moved  And rumbled; on that flickering horizon  The guns were pumping color in the sky. There was the Front. But I was lonely here,  Left behind, abandoned by the army.  The empty city and the empty square  Was my inhabitation, my unrest.  The helmet with its vestige of a crest,  The rifle in my hands, long out of date,  The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat  And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.  I was the man, as awkward as a bear. Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed  In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large,  The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout, They chased each other tumbling through the sky,  Till one streamed down on fire to the earth. These wars have been so great, they are forgotten  Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere  In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed  To wander through my brain four decades later  As I have wandered in a dream through yours? The violence of waking life disrupts The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,  For dreams are licensed as they never were.
A siren sang, and Europe turned away From the high castle and the shepherd’s crook.  Three caravels went sailing to Cathay On the strange ocean, and the captains shook  Their banners out across the Mexique Bay. And in our early days we did the same.  Remembering our fathers in their wreck We crossed the sea from Palos where they came  And saw, enormous to the little deck,  A shore in silence waiting for a name. The treasures of Cathay were never found.  In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound,  The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.
My father in the night commanding No Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;   He reads in silence. The frogs are croaking and the street lamps glow. And then my mother winds the gramophone;  The Bride of Lammermoor begins to shriek—  Or reads a story— About a prince, a castle, and a dragon. The moon is glittering above the hill. I stand before the gateposts of the King—  So runs the story Of Thule, at midnight when the mice are still. And I have been in Thule! It has come true— The journey and the danger of the world,   All that there is To bear and to enjoy, endure and do. Landscapes, seascapes ... where have I been led?  The names of cities—Paris, Venice, Rome—  Held out their arms. A feathered god, seductive, went ahead. Here is my house. Under a red rose tree  A child is swinging; another gravely plays.   They are not surprised That I am here; they were expecting me. And yet my father sits and reads in silence,  My mother sheds a tear, the moon is still,   And the dark wind Is murmuring that nothing ever happens. Beyond his jurisdiction as I move Do I not prove him wrong? And yet, it’s true   They will not change There, on the stage of terror and of love. The actors in that playhouse always sit  In fixed positions—father, mother, child  With painted eyes. How sad it is to be a little puppet! Their heads are wooden. And you once pretended  To understand them! Shake them as you will,   They cannot speak. Do what you will, the comedy is ended. Father, why did you work? Why did you weep,  Mother? Was the story so important?  “Listen!” the wind Said to the children, and they fell asleep.
The man who married Magdalene Had not forgiven her. God might pardon every sin ... Love is no pardoner. Her hands were hollow, pale, and blue, Her mouth like watered wine. He watched to see if she were true And waited for a sign. It was old harlotry, he guessed, That drained her strength away, So gladly for the dark she dressed, So sadly for the day. Their quarrels made her dull and weak And soon a man might fit A penny in the hollow cheek And never notice it. At last, as they exhausted slept, Death granted the divorce, And nakedly the woman leapt Upon that narrow horse. But when he woke and woke alone He wept and would deny The loose behavior of the bone And the immodest thigh.
Swing and sway with Sammy Kaye Everyone at Lake Kearney had a nickname: there was a Bumstead, a Tonto, a Tex, and, from the slogan of a popular orchestra, two sisters, Swing and Sway. Swing jitterbugged, hopping around on the dance floor, working up a sweat. Sway was beautiful. My heart went out to her when she lifted her heavy rack of dishes and passed through the swinging door. She was engaged, to an enlisted man who was stationed at Fort Dix. He came once or twice on weekends to see her. I tried talking to him, but he didn’t answer ... out of stupidity or dislike, I could not tell which. In real life he was a furniture salesman. This was the hero on whom she had chosen to bestow her affections. I told her of my ambition: to write novels conveying the excitement of life ... the main building lit up like a liner on Saturday night; the sound of the band ... clarinet, saxophone, snare drum, piano. He who would know your heart (America) must seek it in your songs. And the contents of your purse ... among Kleenex, aspirin, chewing gum wrappers, combs, et cetera. “Don’t stop,” she said, “I’m listening. Here it is!” flourishing her lighter.  * In the afternoon when the dishes were washed and tables wiped, we rowed out on the lake. I read aloud ... The Duino Elegies, while she reclined, one shapely knee up, trailing a hand in the water. She had chestnut-colored hair. Her eyes were changing like the surface with ripples and the shadows of clouds. “Beauty,” I read to her, “is nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear.”  * She came from Jersey, the industrial wasteland behind which Manhattan suddenly rises. I could visualize the street where she lived, and see her muffled against the cold, in galoshes, trudging to school. Running about in tennis shoes all through the summer ... I could hear the porch swing squeak and see into the parlor. It was divided by a curtain or screen ... “That’s it,” she said, “all but the screen. There isn’t any.” When she or her sister had a boyfriend their mother used to stay in the parlor, pretending to sew, and keeping an eye on them like Fate. At night she would lie awake looking at the sky, spangled over. Her thoughts were as deep and wide as the sky. As time went by she had a feeling of missing out ... that everything was happening somewhere else. Some of the kids she grew up with went crazy ... like a car turning over and over. One of her friends had been beaten by the police. Some vital fluid seemed to have gone out of him. His arms and legs shook. Busted springs.  * She said, “When you’re a famous novelist will you write about me?” I promised ... and tried to keep my promise. Recently, looking for a toolbox, I came upon some typewritten pages, all about her. There she is in a canoe ... a gust of wind rustling the leaves along the shore. Playing tennis, running up and down the baseline. Down by the boathouse, listening to the orchestra playing “Sleepy Lagoon.” Then the trouble begins. I can never think of anything to make the characters do. We are still sitting in the moonlight while she finishes her cigarette. Two people go by, talking in low voices. A car door slams. Driving off ... “I suppose we ought to go,” I say.  And she says, “Not yet.”
Look! From my window there’s a view of city streets where only lives as dry as tortoises can crawl—the Gallapagos of desire. There is the day of Negroes with red hair and the day of insane women on the subway; there is the day of the word Trieste and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar. But I have no profession. Like a spy I read the papers—Situations Wanted. Surely there is a secret which, if I knew it, would change everything! 2 I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony. I see through the illusions of the age! The bell tolls, and the hearse advances, and the mourners follow, for my entertainment. I tread the burning pavement, the streets where drunkards stretch like photographs of civil death and trumpets strangle in electric shelves. The mannequins stare at me scornfully. I know they are pretending all day to be in earnest. And can it be that love is an illusion? When darkness falls on the enormous street the air is filled with Eros, whispering. Eyes, mouths, contrive to meet in silence, fearing they may be prevented. 3 O businessmen like ruins, bankers who are Bastilles, widows, sadder than the shores of lakes, then you were happy, when you still could tremble! But all night long my window sheds tears of light. I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming. O syllables of light ... O dark cathedral ...
I wake and feel the city trembling. Yes, there is something unsettled in the air  And the earth is uncertain. And so it was for the tenor Caruso. He couldn’t sleep—you know how the ovation  Rings in your ears, and you re-sing your part. And then the ceiling trembled And the floor moved. He ran into the street.  Never had Naples given him such a reception! The air was darker than Vesuvius.  “O mamma mia,” He cried, “I’ve lost my voice!” At that moment the hideous voice of Culture,  Hysterical woman, thrashing her arms and legs,  Shrieked from the ruins. At that moment everyone became a performer.  Otello and Don Giovanni  And Figaro strode on the midmost stage. In the high window of a burning castle  Lucia raved. Black horses Plunged through fire, dragging the wild bells. The curtains were wrapped in smoke. Tin swords  Were melting; masks and ruffs Burned—and the costumes of the peasants’ chorus. Night fell. The white moon rose  And sank in the Pacific. The tremors  Passed under the waves. And Death rested. 2 Now, as we stand idle, Watching the silent, bowler-hatted man, The engineer, who writes in the smoking field; Now as he hands the paper to a boy, Who takes it and runs to a group of waiting men,  And they disperse and move toward their wagons, Mules bray and the wagons move— Wait! Before you start (Already the wheels are rattling on the stones) Say, did your fathers cross the dry Sierras  To build another London? Do Americans always have to be second-rate? Wait! For there are spirits In the earth itself, or the air, or sea.  Where are the aboriginal American devils? Cloud shadows, pine shadows Falling across the bright Pacific bay ...  (Already they have nailed rough boards together) Wait only for the wind That rustles in the eucalyptus tree.  Wait only for the light That trembles on the petals of a rose. (The mortar sets—banks are the first to stand)  Wait for a rose, and you may wait forever. The silent man mops his head and drinks  Cold lemonade. “San Francisco  Is a city second only to Paris.” 3 Every night, at the end of America We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific.  How sad it is, the end of America! While we were waiting for the land  They’d finished it—with gas drums On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys Where lives are mean and wretched.  But the banks thrive and the realtors  Rejoice—they have their America. Still, there is something unsettled in the air.  Out there on the Pacific  There’s no America but the Marines. Whitman was wrong about the People, But right about himself. The land is within. At the end of the open road we come to ourselves. Though mad Columbus follows the sun  Into the sea, we cannot follow. We must remain, to serve the returning sun, And to set tables for death. For we are the colonists of Death— Not, as some think, of the English. And we are preparing thrones for him to sit,  Poems to read, and beds  In which it may please him to rest. This is the land The pioneers looked for, shading their eyes  Against the sun—a murmur of serious life.
In the clear light that confuses everything  Only you, dark laurel,  Shadow my house, Lifting your arms in the anguish  Of nature at the stake. And at night, quivering with tears, You are like the tree called Tasso’s.  Crippled, and hooped with iron,  It stands on Peter’s hill. When the lovers prop their bicycles  And sit on the high benches  That look across to eternity, That tree makes their own torsion Seem natural. And so, they’re comforted. 2 One of the local philosophers ...  He says, “In California We have the old anarchist tradition.” What can he mean? Is there an anarchist tradition?  And why would an anarchist want one?  O California, Is there a tree without opinions?  Come, let me clasp you!  Let me feel the idea breathing. I too cry O for a life of sensations  Rather than thoughts— “The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall.” Like the girls in our neighborhood,  They’re beautiful and silent. 3 As I was digging in the back yard  I thought of a man in China. A lifetime, it seemed, we gazed at each other. I could see and hear his heartbeats  Like a spade hurling clods. He pointed behind him, and I saw That the hills were covered with armed men,  And they were all on the other side  Of the life that I held dear. He said, “We are as various  As the twigs of a tree, But now the tree moves as one man. It walks. And the earth trembles  When a race of slaves is leaving.” 4 I said, “Yet, all these people  Will fall down as one man When the entrails of a bomb are breathing. When we came down from Chosin  Carrying the guns in dainty snow-wear  And all the dead we had to, It was a time of forgetfulness,  Like a plucked string.  It was a river of darkness. Was it not so on your side, when you came  To the sea that was covered with ships?  Let us speak to each other, Let the word rise, making dark strokes in the air.  That bird flies over the heads of the armed men.” 5 One part of the tree grows outward.  The other I saw when, with a light, I explored the cellar—shattering roots. They had broken through the wall, As though there were something in my rubbish  That life would have at last. I must be patient with shapes Of automobile fenders and ketchup bottles.  These things are the beginning Of things not visible to the naked eye.  It was so in the time of Tobit— The dish glowed when the angel held it. It is so that spiritual messengers  Deliver their meaning.
A man stood in the laurel tree Adjusting his hands and feet to the boughs. He said, “Today I was breaking stones On a mountain road in Asia, When suddenly I had a vision Of mankind, like grass and flowers, The same over all the earth. We forgave each other; we gave ourselves Wholly over to words. And straightway I was released And sprang through an open gate.” I said, “Into a meadow?” He said, “I am impervious to irony. I thank you for the word ... I am standing in a sunlit meadow. Know that everything your senses reject Springs up in the spiritual world.” I said, “Our scientists have another opinion. They say, you are merely phenomena.” He said, “Over here they will be angels Singing, Holy holy be His Name! And also, it works in reverse. Things which to us in the pure state are mysterious, Are your simplest articles of household use— A chair, a dish, and meaner even than these, The very latest inventions. Machines are the animals of the Americans— Tell me about machines.” I said, “I have suspected The Mixmaster knows more than I do, The air conditioner is the better poet. My right front tire is as bald as Odysseus— How much it must have suffered! Then, as things have a third substance Which is obscure to both our senses, Let there be a perpetual coming and going Between your house and mine.”
I place these numbed wrists to the pane watching white uniforms whisk over him in the tube-kept prison fear what they will do in experiment watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes distrusting white-pink mending paperthin silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes shrunk in his trunk-skincapped  shaven head, in thighsdistrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light  on his son who will not make his second night of this wardstrewn intensive airpocket where his father's asthmatic hymns of night-train, train done gone his mother can only know that he has flown up into essential calm unseen corridor going boxscarred home, mamaborn, sweetsonchild gonedowntown into researchtestingwarehousebatteryacidmama-son-done-gone/me telling her 'nother train tonight, no music, no breathstroked heartbeat in my infinite distrust of them: and of my distrusting selfwhite-doctor-who-breathed-for-him-all-night  say it for two sons gone, say nightmare, say it loud panebreaking heartmadness: nightmare begins responsibility.
Peace is the active presence of Justice. The wrinkles on the brown face of the carrying case conform to the buttocks, on which the streaks of water from a five-gallon can dribble on the tailfront of the borrowed shirt he would wear if he could drain the pus from his swaddling bandages, striations of skin tunneling into the photograph. This is no simple mug shot of a runaway boy in a training film, Soweto's pummeled wire, though the turrets of light glisten in smoke, the soft coal hooding his platform entrance, dull and quiet. His father's miner's shoes stand in puddles of polish, the black soot baked into images of brittle torso, an inferno of bullets laid out in a letter bomb, the frontispiece of one sergeant- major blackening his mustache. On the drive to Evaton a blank pass away from Sharpeville where the freehold morgans were bought by a black bishop from Ontario, Canada, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, I speak to myself as the woman riding in the backseat talks of this day, her husband's death, twenty-three years ago, run over by an Afrikaner in the wrong passing lane; the passbook on the shoulder of the road leading to Evaton is not the one I have in my hand, and the photograph is not of my great- grandfather, who set sail for Philadelphia in the war year of 1916. He did not want a reception, his letters embarking on a platform at Queenstown where his eloquence struck two Zulu warriors pledged to die in the homelands because they could not spin their own gold. These threaded heads weigh down the ears in design of the warrior, Shaka, indifferent to the ruthless offerings over the dead bodies of his wives, childless in the campaigns with the British, who sit on the ships of the Indian Ocean each kraal shuddering near the borders; her lips turn in profile to the dust rising over a road where his house once stood; one could think of the women carrying firewood as an etching in remembrance to the silence, commencing at Sharpeville, but this is Evaton, where he would come from across the galleyship of spears turning in his robes to a bookmark; it is a good book, the picture of words in the gloss of a photograph, the burned image of the man who wears this image on the tongue of a child, who might hold my hand as we walk in late afternoon into the predestined sun. The press of wrinkles on the blanketed voice of the man who took the train from Johannesburg is flattened in Cape Town, and the history of this book is on a trestle where Gandhi worshipped in Natal, and the Zulu lullaby I cannot sing in Bantu is this song in the body of a passbook and the book passes into a shirt and the back that wears it.
for sandy and henry carlile Some great musicians got no place to play Above the freeway, over the music, we speak of the strategy of poems, bleeding wives who ulcerate our voices rhythming in the cut-heat Portland stink from the Willamette River; arteries of smog fixate this place in each recording, music, music, on Impulse. This little racist community has few friends; thousands of deerslayers hum into Beaverton, the one talk show driven out for their talk as the liberals dig in to KGO out of San Francisco; we troop toward the Lloyd Center for the ice-skating, the colorette bloomered dream merchants on rented skates, and the Sunday Chronicle near the big hotel. The poets, man and wife, write in the dimming air, their daughter in the toy rooms connecting them, the typewriter tacking the nails and snaps of her gown. This image of separation begins in adoption: her mother adopted out in San Jose; her father disowned, abandoned, torn out of the will; her name: Phoebe. And the sun does shine on them for this visit in squat pigeontoes, and this beach ball sings.
1 Nose only above water; an hour in the ice melt; paw in a beaver trap, northern leaping through— the outlet sieving, setter- retriever staked to her trip, The stake of her young life run to nose level. Farmers adjacent to the lake call ’round for the owner; at least they call around, and a man in a pickup pulls her out, her crushed paw limp in the blazing sun. Shivering on our pantry floor, wrapped in a snowsuit, I see her dam the clamped paw staked to the sleeve, licking for breaks, a light trickle of blood spilling from a torn nail. 2 Next spring she will tramp down our wire, stamp on six goslings, swim for teal, run down blackbirds, drag deer bones in our garden. She limps on the compost pile, shakes at the vet, fishes under makeshift docks, ferrets out mink, frog, green snake, any animal scrimmage without stakes: listen to her spayed name—warned, thwarted, disregarded, beautiful—  last of her line.
inside my head Inside my head a common room,  a common place, a common tune, a common wealth, a common doom inside my head. I close my eyes.  The horses run. Vast are the skies, and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise inside my head. What is this space  here found to be, what is this place if only me? Inside my head, whose face?the tools First there, it proves to be still here.  Distant as seen, it comes then to be near.  I found it here and there unclear. What if my hand had only been  extension of an outside reaching in to work with common means to change me then? All things are matter, yet these seem  caught in the impatience of a dream,  locked in the awkwardness they mean.the swan Peculiar that swan should mean a sound? I’d thought of gods and power, and wounds. But here in the curious quiet this one has settled down. All day the barking dogs were kept at bay.  Better than dogs, a single swan, they say,  will keep all such malignant force away and so preserve a calm, make pond a swelling lake— sound through the silent grove a shattering spate  of resonances, jarring the mind awake.the rose Into one’s self come in again, here as if ever now to once again begin with beauty’s old, old problem never-ending—Go, lovely rose ... So was that story told in some extraordinary place then, once upon a time so old  it seems an echo now as it again unfolds. I point to me to look out at the world. I see the white, white petals of this rose unfold.  I know such beauty in the world grows cold.the skull “Come closer. Now there is nothing left  either inside or out to gainsay death,”  the skull that keeps its secrets saith. The ways one went, the forms that were  empty as wind and yet they stirred the heart to its passion, all is passed over. Lighten the load. Close the eyes.  Let the mind loosen, the body die,  the bird fly off to the opening sky.the star Such space it comes again to be,  a room of such vast possibility,  a depth so great, a way so free. Life and its person, thinking to find a company wherewith to keep the time  a peaceful passage, a constant rhyme, stumble perforce, must lose their way,  know that they go too far to stay  stars in the sky, children at play.
The man vending needles at our door Was lucky to greet you. He looked poor but you acted needle-poor Where I’d have said, I don’t need ... He sells needles to prick your heart And they’ll take small bites Out of my finger in a layer of skin Where my feelings are thin. The old thread knitting together his many wools Might last another trudge To our porch: he came last year but I Refused and barely looked him in the eye. I’ve lost how many needles since then? Besides he is mute And would see how dumb we are to buy Three hundred needles for relief. But he supplied us to the end of life. I’ll give away some. And you might never use these points That push through cloth, cut to be made one.
Lions don’t need your help. In the Serengeti, For instance, one thousand like the very rich Hold sway over more than Connecticut. The mane Of the lion, like the hooked jaw of the male salmon, Acts as a shield for defense and is the gift Of sexual selection. His eyes are fathomless amber. The lion is the most social of the big cats. Pride members are affectionate among themselves. They rub cheeks when they meet. They rest And hunt together. And cubs suckle indiscriminately. But strangers or members of a neighboring pride are not Usually accepted. If a pride male meets a strange female He may greet her in a friendly fashion And even mate with her But the pride females will drive her off. Male lions, usually depicted as indolent freeloaders Who let the lionesses do all the hunting, are not mere Parasites. They maintain the integrity of the territory. Lions eat communally but completely lack table manners. Indeed, lions give the impression that their evolution Toward a social existence is incomplete—that cooperation In achieving a task does not yet include The equal division of the spoils. More bad news: lions are not good parents. But prowess, that they have. Their courage comes From being built, like an automobile, For power. A visible lion is usually a safe lion, But one should never feel safe Because almost always there is something one can’t see. Given protection and power A lion does not need to be clever. Now, lions are not the most likable kind of animal Unless you are a certain type of person, That is, not necessarily leonine in the sense of manly Or ferocious, but one who wouldn’t mind resting twenty Of twenty-four hours a day and who is not beyond Stealing someone else’s kill About half the time. Lions are not my favorite kind of animal, Gazelles seem nicer, A zebra has his own sort of appealing pathos, Especially when he is sure prey for the lion. Lions have little to offer the spirit. If we made of ourselves parks and placed the lion In the constituent he most resembled He would be in our blood.
The dove-white gulls on the wet lawn in Washington Square  in the early morning fog each a little ghost in the gloaming Souls transmigrated maybe from Hudson’s shrouded shores across all the silent years— Which one’s my maybe mafioso father  in his so white suit and black shoes in his real estate office Forty-second Street  or at the front table wherever he went— Which my dear lost mother with faded smile  locked away from me in time— Which my big brother Charley selling switching-signals all his life on the New York Central— And which good guy brother Clem sweating in Sing Sing’s darkest offices  deputy-warden thirty years watching executions in the wooden armchair  (with leather straps and black hood) He too gone mad with it in the end— And which my nearest brother Harry still kindest and dearest in a far suburb— I see them now all turn to me at last  gull-eyed in the white dawn about to call to me across the silent grass
I am waiting for my case to come up  and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting  for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier  and I am waiting  for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Second Coming  and I am waiting for a religious revival to sweep thru the state of Arizona  and I am waiting for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored  and I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American and I am waiting to see God on television piped onto church altars if only they can find  the right channel  to tune in on and I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for my number to be called and I am waiting for the Salvation Army to take over and I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth  without taxes and I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody and I am waiting for linnets and planets to fall like rain and I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed  and I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered  by an obscure general practitioner and I am waiting for the storms of life to be over and I am waiting to set sail for happiness and I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and tv rights sold in advance to the natives and I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the day that maketh all things clear and I am awaiting retribution for what America did  to Tom Sawyer  and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence and I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting  for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again  youth’s dumb green fields come back again and I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last long careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn  to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am awaiting  perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
I didn’t get much sleep last night thinking about underwear Have you ever stopped to consider  underwear in the abstract  When you really dig into it some shocking problems are raised  Underwear is something  we all have to deal with  Everyone wears some kind of underwear The Pope wears underwear I hope The Governor of Louisiana  wears underwear I saw him on TV He must have had tight underwear He squirmed a lot Underwear can really get you in a bind You have seen the underwear ads for men and women so alike but so different Women’s underwear holds things up Men’s underwear holds things down  Underwear is one thing  men and women have in common  Underwear is all we have between us You have seen the three-color pictures with crotches encircled to show the areas of extra strength and three-way stretch promising full freedom of action Don’t be deceived It’s all based on the two-party system which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice  the way things are set up  America in its Underwear struggles thru the night Underwear controls everything in the end  Take foundation garments for instance  They are really fascist forms of underground government making people believe something but the truth telling you what you can or can’t do  Did you ever try to get around a girdle  Perhaps Non-Violent Action is the only answer Did Gandhi wear a girdle? Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle? Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?  And that spot she was always rubbing— Was it really in her underwear? Modern anglosaxon ladies must have huge guilt complexes always washing and washing and washing  Out damned spot Underwear with spots very suspicious  Underwear with bulges very shocking  Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom  Someone has escaped his Underwear  May be naked somewhere Help! But don’t worry Everybody’s still hung up in it There won’t be no real revolution And poetry still the underwear of the soul  And underwear still covering a multitude of faults in the geological sense— strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!  If I were you I’d keep aside an oversize pair of winter underwear  Do not go naked into that good night  And in the meantime keep calm and warm and dry No use stirring ourselves up prematurely  ‘over Nothing’ Move forward with dignity hand in vest Don’t get emotional And death shall have no dominion  There’s plenty of time my darling Are we not still young and easy Don’t shout
In the backyard of our house on Norwood, there were five hundred steel cages lined up, each with a wooden box roofed with tar paper; inside, two stories, with straw for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace back and forth wildly, looking for a way out; or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if they knew they were beautiful and wanted to deprive us. In spring the placid kits drank with glazed eyes. Sometimes the mothers would go mad and snap their necks. My uncle would lift the roof like a god who might lift our roof, look down on us and take us out to safety. Sometimes one would escape. He would go down on his hands and knees, aiming a flashlight like a bullet of light, hoping to catch the orange gold of its eyes. He wore huge boots, gloves so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through. “They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.” Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich with eggs and vitamins on their trays, I’d call to each a greeting. Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious. In fall they went out in a van, returning sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal hangers, pinned by their mouths. My uncle would take them out when company came and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo. He’d blow down the pelts softly and the hairs would part for his breath and show the shining underlife which, like the shining of the soul, gives us each character and beauty.
Every town with black Catholics has a St. Peter Claver’s. My first was nursery school. Miss Maturin made us fold our towels in a regulation square and nap on army cots. No mother questioned; no child sassed. In blue pleated skirts, pants, and white shirts, we stood in line to use the open toilets and conserved light by walking in darkness. Unsmiling, mostly light-skinned, we were the children of the middle class, preparing to take our parents’ places in a world that would demand we fold our hands and wait. They said it was good for us, the bowl of soup, its pasty whiteness; I learned to swallow and distrust my senses. On holy cards St. Peter’s face is olive-toned, his hair near kinky; I thought he was one of us who pass between the rich and poor, the light and dark. Now I read he was “a Spanish Jesuit priest who labored for the salvation of the African Negroes and the abolition of the slave trade.” I was tricked again, robbed of my patron, and left with a debt to another white man.
I. Tonight, I look, thunderstruck at the gold head of my grandchild. Almost asleep, he buries his feet between my thighs; his little straw eyes close in the near dark. I smell the warmth of his raw slightly foul breath, the new death waiting to rot inside him. Our breaths equalize our heartbeats; every muscle of the chest uncoils, the arm bones loosen in the nest of nerves. I think of the peace of walking through the house, pointing to the name of this, the name of that, an educator of a new man. Mother. Grandmother. Wise Snake-woman who will show the way; Spider-woman whose black tentacles hold him precious. Or will tear off his head, her teeth over the little husband, the small fist clotted in trust at her breast. This morning, looking at the face of his father, I remembered how, an infant, his face was too dark, nose too broad, mouth too wide. I did not look in that mirror and see the face that could save me from my own darkness. Did he, looking in my eye, see what I turned from: my own dark grandmother bending over gladioli in the field, her shaking black hand defenseless at the shining cock of flower? I wanted that face to die, to be reborn in the face of a white child. I wanted the soul to stay the same, for I loved to death, to damnation and God-death, the soul that broke out of me. I crowed: My Son! My Beautiful! But when I peeked in the basket, I saw the face of a black man. Did I bend over his nose and straighten it with my fingers like a vine growing the wrong way? Did he feel my hand in malice? Generations we prayed and fucked for this light child, the shining god of the second coming; we bow down in shame and carry the children of the past in our wallets, begging forgiveness. II. A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charring body gives off light—a halo burns out of him. His face scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection. III. How can we wake from a dream we are born into, that shines around us, the terrible bright air? Having awakened, having seen our own bloody hands, how can we ask forgiveness, bring before our children the real monster of their nightmares? The worst is true. Everything you did not want to know.
A professor invites me to his “Black Lit” class; they’re reading Larson’s Passing. One of the black students says, “Sometimes light-skinned blacks think they can fool other blacks, but I can always tell,” looking right through me. After I tell them I am black, I ask the class, “Was I passing when I was just sitting here, before I told you?” A white woman shakes her head desperately, as if I had deliberately deceived her. She keeps examining my face, then turning away as if she hopes I’ll disappear. Why presume “passing” is based on what I leave out and not what she fills in? In one scene in the book, in a restaurant, she’s “passing,” though no one checked her at the door— “Hey, you black?” My father, who looked white, told me this story: every year when he’d go to get his driver’s license, the man at the window filling out the form would ask, “White or black?” pencil poised, without looking up. My father wouldn’t pass, but he might use silence to trap a devil. When he didn’t speak, the man would look up at my father’s face. “What did he write?” my father quizzed me.
I love the way the black ants use their dead. They carry them off like warriors on their steel backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting, dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us, to carry them back to be eaten), so that every part will be of service. I think of my husband at his father’s grave— the grass had closed over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.
I wondered if the others felt as heroic and as safe: my unmangled family  slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead  behind my flashlight’s beam. Stones, thick roots as twisted as  a ruined body, what did I fear? I hoped my batteries had eight more lives than the lost child. I feared I’d find something. Reader, by now you must be sure  you know just where we are,  deep in symbolic woods.  Irony, self-accusation,  someone else’s suffering.  The search is that of art. You’re wrong, though it’s  an intelligent mistake.  There was a real lost child.  I don’t want to swaddle it  in metaphor. I’m just a journalist who can’t believe in objectivity.  I’m in these poems because I’m in my life.  But I digress. A man four volunteers  to the left of me  made the discovery. We circled in like waves returning to the parent shock. You’ve read this far, you might as well  have been there too. Your eyes accuse  me of false chase. Come off it, you’re the one who thought it wouldn’t  matter what we found. Though we came with lights and tongues thick in our heads, the issue was a human life. The child was still alive. Admit you’re glad.
A snake is the love of a thumb and forefinger. Other times, an arm that has swallowed a bicep. The air behind this one is like a knot in a child’s shoelace come undone while you were blinking. It is bearing something away. What? What time does the next snake leave? This one’s tail is ravelling into its burrow— a rosary returned to a purse. The snake is the last time your spine could go anywhere alone.
Eat all you want but don’t swallow it. —Archie Moore    The ruth of soups and balm of sauces I renounce equally. What Rorschach saw in ink I find in the buttery frizzle in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind, and the sweet peat-smoke tang of bananas, and cream in clots, and chocolate. I give away the satisfactions of food and take desire for food: I’ll be travelling light to the heaven of revisions. Why be adipose: an expense, etc., in a waste, etc.? Something like the body of the poet’s work, with its pale shadows, begins to pare and replace the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?
Whose woods these are I think I know.  His house is in the village though;  He will not see me stopping here  To watch his woods fill up with snow.  My little horse must think it queer  To stop without a farmhouse near  Between the woods and frozen lake  The darkest evening of the year.  He gives his harness bells a shake  To ask if there is some mistake.  The only other sound’s the sweep  Of easy wind and downy flake.  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  But I have promises to keep,  And miles to go before I sleep,  And miles to go before I sleep.
There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it, and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection that could contain, like a microchip, an epic treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld. And at the base of our glass there’s nothing so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text so short it consists only of the author’s signature, which has to stand, like the future, for what might have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life. Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!
The ones his age who shook my hand on their way out sent fear along my arm like heroin. These weren’t men mute about their feelings, or what’s a body language for? And I, the glib one, who’d stood with my back to my father’s body and praised the heart that attacked him? I’d made my stab at elegy, the flesh made word: the very spit in my mouth was sour with ruth and eloquence. What could be worse? Silence, the anthem of my father’s new country. And thus this babble, like a dial tone, from our bodies.
Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up, Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly to a point, piano teachers love to poke into the palms of junior pianists with lazy hands. What easy villains these robotic dullards are in their floral- print teaching dresses (can those mauve blurs be peonies?). The teachers’ plucky, make-do wardrobes suggest, like the wan bloom of dust the couch exhaled when I scrunched down to wait for Mrs. Oxley, just how we value them. She’d launch my predecessor home and drink some lemonade, then free me from the couch. The wisdom in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where Monk grew up, is that those names, Thelonious Sphere, came later, but nobody’s sure: he made his escape by turning himself into a genius in broad daylight while nobody watched. Just a weird little black kid one day and next thing anybody knew he was inexplicable and gone. We don’t give lessons in that. In fact it’s to stave off such desertions that we pay for lessons. It works for a while. Think of all the time we spend thinking about our kids. It’s Mrs. Oxley, the frump with a metronome, and Mr. Mote, the bad teacher and secret weeper, we might think on, and everyone we pay to tend our young, opaque and truculent and terrified, not yet ready to replace us, or escape us, if that be the work.
How much wood could a woodchuck chuck If a woodchuck could chuck wood? As much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, If a woodchuck could chuck wood.
It’s raining, it’s pouring, The old man’s snoring. He got into bed And bumped his head And couldn’t get up in the morning.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
Over the river and through the wood,  To grandfather's house we go;  The horse knows the way  To carry the sleigh  Through the white and drifted snow. Over the river and through the wood--  Oh, how the wind does blow!  It stings the toes  And bites the nose,  As over the ground we go. Over the river and through the wood,  To have first-rate play.  Hear the bells ring,  "Ting-a-ling-ding!"  Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day! Over the river and through the wood,  And straight through the barn-yard gate.  We seem to go  Extremely slow--  It is so hard to wait! Over the river and through the wood--  Now grandmother's cap I spy!  Hurrah for the fun!  Is the pudding done?  Hurrah for the pumpkin-pie!
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night  Sailed off in a wooden shoe-- Sailed on a river of crystal light,  Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?"  The old moon asked of the three. "We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!"  Said Wynken,  Blynken,  And Nod. The old moon laughed and sang a song,  As they rocked in the wooden shoe, And the wind that sped them all night long  Ruffled the waves of dew. The little stars were the herring fish  That lived in that beautiful sea-- "Now cast your nets wherever you wish--  Never afeard are we!"  So cried the stars to the fishermen three:  Wynken,  Blynken,  And Nod. All night long their nets they threw  To the stars in the twinkling foam--- Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,  Bringing the fishermen home; 'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed  As if it could not be, And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed  Of sailing that beautiful sea---  But I shall name you the fishermen three:  Wynken,  Blynken,  And Nod. Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,  And Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies  Is a wee one's trundle-bed. So shut your eyes while mother sings  Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things  As you rock in the misty sea,  Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:  Wynken,  Blynken,  And Nod.
You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out, like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon, or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost, who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus. He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo, stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8), “I just ruined my body.” And there, Exhibit A, it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music. Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know rises but to the edge of the atmosphere. You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker carried without great thought of it from home to the shop and back for decades, and know what bassists before you have played, and know how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy in a spring and know how much you must coax out. How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword from a stone. But what’s inside the bass wants out, the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard as you can, little by little, in perfect time, as the work of the body becomes a body of work.
Haze. Three student violists boarding a bus. A clatter of jackhammers. Granular light. A film of sweat for primer and the heat for a coat of paint. A man and a woman on a bench: she tells him he must be psychic, for how else could he sense, even before she knew, that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle on the boil. I never meant, she says. But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi. I’m sorry, she says. The comforts of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon. The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly around a corner. How familiar it feels to feel strange, hollower than a bassoon. A rill of chill air in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking, Holding on with dissolving hands, Out of it came, not a line of old men, But pairs of headlights, delaying morning. It felt like tears, like wetted bedsheets, And suspended in it like a medicine In vapor was the ocean’s presence, ghost Of deep water and the bite of salt. Here you found your body again, The hand before your face and the face it touched, Eyes floating, feet on invisible ground, Vagueness like another skin. Sent out into it anyway, because it was morning, To taste it, touch blind hardness Like marble ruins, and skirt the edges, Razors in goosedown, hydrants’ fists. Abruptly out of it waves appeared, Transmuted from hanging silver ore, crafted Before the eyes into curving metals That broke into soup scum, Queen Anne’s lace. Out of a great nothing, a theology. Out of the amorphous, an edgeless body Or one like a hunting mass of tendrils That hurried down the sand, moved by hunger. I remember a gang of friends Racing a fog bank’s onslaught along the beach. Seal-slick, warm from the sun This thing would eat, they ran laughing. The fog came on. And they were beautiful, The three boys and one girl, still in her wetsuit, And the dissolution overtaking them, Their stridency, full of faith, still audible. All morning bathed in a dovelike brooding. The fog satisfied itself by overwhelming The meagre dew, watering the doors 0f snails, the leeward mold, and held still. And then near noon there was a concentration As if the sky tried to find a slippery word Or remember—that’s right—remember Where it was in an unfamiliar bedroom. And knew. And switched the light on. Wide awake.
Amazing to believe that nothingness  Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,  And that the meekness of nonentity,  Despite the friction of the world of sense,  Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the matchhead and the city  Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,  Out of which comes and into which light goes,  This God recedes from every metaphor,  Turns the hardest data into untruth, And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows  Itself in absence, which the stars adore.
Half asleep in prayer I said the right thing And felt a sudden pleasure come into The room or my own body. In the dark, Charged with a change of atmosphere, at first I couldn’t tell my body from the room. And I was wide awake, full of this feeling, Alert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist, A drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew The intrusion of an overwhelming joy. I had said thanks and this was the response. But how I said it or what I said it for I still cannot recall and I have tried All sorts of ways all hours of the night. Once was enough to be dissatisfied.
Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon, Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk, Two young Americans, on one another, Far from home and wanting this forever— Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread, And glasses of a raw, green, local wine, And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed Enormous softly burning ancient stars. Who needed God? And why do I ask now? Because I’m older and I think God stirs In details that keep bringing back that time, Details that are just as vivid now— Our bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine.
i tore down my thoughts roped in my nightmares remembered a thousand curses made blasphemous vows to demons choked on the blood of hosts  ate my hat threw fits in the street got up bitchy each day told off the mailman lost many friends left parties in a huff dry fucked a dozen juke boxes made anarchist speeches in brad the falcon’s 55 (but was never thrown out) drank 10 martinis a minute until 1 day the book was finished my unspeakable terror between the covers, on you i said to the enemies of the souls well lorca, pushkin i tried but in this place they assassinate you with pussy or pats on the back, lemon chiffon between the cheeks or 2 weeks on a mile long beach. i have been the only negro on the plane 10 times this year and its only the 2nd month i am removing my blindfold and leaving the dock. the judge giggles constantly and the prosecutor invited me to dinner no forwarding address please i called it pin the tail on the devil they called it avant garde they just can't be serious these big turkeys
Seems there was this Professor a member of what should be called The Good German Department Must have signed his name to 5,000 petitions in front of the Co-Op on Cedar and bought two tons of benefit cookies Blames Texas for the sorry state of the oceans Rode a Greyhound bus “Civil Rights,” Alabama, 1960 Found the long yellow war “deplorable” Believes John “Duke” Wayne’s values to be inferior to his He said, “Ishmael, I’d love to do the right thing for as you know I’m all for the right thing and against the wrong thing, but these plaster of paris busts of deceased Europeans Our secret ways Our sacred fears "These books, leather-bound 'copyright 1789’ All of these things, precious to me, gleaming like the stainless steel coffee urn in the faculty club, an original Maybeck, 1902 “I’d stand up for Camelot by golly, even if it meant shooting all the infidels in the world,” he said reaching into his desk drawer “Why, I might even have to shoot you, Ishmael” Staring down the cold tunnel of a hard .38 I thoughtMost people are to the right when it comes to where they must eat and lay their heads!
My Dear Khomeini: I read your fourteen thousand dollar ad asking me why the Vatican waited all of these years to send an envoy to complain about conditions in Iran You’re right, we should have sent one when the Shah was in power, look, I’m in total agreement with you Khomeini, that Christ, had he lived in Iran under the Shah, would have led the biggest damned revolt you ever saw Believe me, Khomeini, I knew about the Shah’s decadence, his extravagance his misdeeds, and how he lolled about in luxury with Iran’s loot I knew about the trail of jewels which led to his Dad’s capture but a fella has to eat and so when David Rockefeller asked me to do something how could I refuse? You can afford to be holier than thou What is it, 30 dollars per barrel these days? You must be bathing in oil While each day I suffer a new indignity You know that rock record they made me do? It’s 300 on the Charts which is about as low as you can get. And I guess you read where I had to call in all those Cardinals and for the first time reveal the Vatican budget? I had to just about get down on my hands and knees to get them to co-sign for a loan The Vatican jet has a mechanical problem and the Rolls-Royce needs a new engine The staff hasn’t been paid in months and the power company is threatening to turn off the candles To add to that, the building inspector has listed us as having 30,000 code violations I’m telling you, Khomeini, that so many people are leaving the church I have this nightmare where I wake up one day in Los Angeles and I’m the only one left Pretty soon we’ll be one of those cults you read about in the San Francisco Chronicle
Shoes, secret face of my inner life:  Two gaping toothless mouths, Two partly decomposed animal skins  Smelling of mice nests. My brother and sister who died at birth  Continuing their existence in you, Guiding my life Toward their incomprehensible innocence. What use are books to me When in you it is possible to read  The Gospel of my life on earth And still beyond, of things to come? I want to proclaim the religion I have devised for your perfect humility  And the strange church I am building  With you as the altar. Ascetic and maternal, you endure: Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,  With your mute patience, forming The only true likeness of myself.
I grew up bent over  a chessboard. I loved the word endgame. All my cousins looked worried. It was a small house near a Roman graveyard.  Planes and tanks shook its windowpanes. A retired professor of astronomy  taught me how to play. That must have been in 1944. In the set we were using, the paint had almost chipped off  the black pieces. The white King was missing  and had to be substituted for. I’m told but do not believe  that that summer I witnessed  men hung from telephone poles. I remember my mother  blindfolding me a lot. She had a way of tucking my head  suddenly under her overcoat. In chess, too, the professor told me,  the masters play blindfolded,  the great ones on several boards  at the same time.
They explained to me the bloody bandages On the floor in the maternity ward in Rochester, N.Y.,  Cured the backache I acquired bowing to my old master,  Made me stop putting thumbtacks round my bed. They showed me an officer on horseback, Waving a saber next to a burning farmhouse  And a barefoot woman in a nightgown, Throwing stones after him and calling him Lucifer. I was a straw-headed boy in patched overalls.  Come dark a chicken would roost in my hair.  Some even laid eggs as I played my ukulele  And my mother and father crossed themselves. Next, I saw myself inside an abandoned gas station  Constructing a spaceship out of a coffin, Red traffic cone, cement mixer and ear warmers, When a church lady fainted seeing me in my underwear. Some days, however, they opened door after door,  Always to a different room, and could not find me.  There’d be only a small squeak now and then,  As if a miner’s canary got caught in a mousetrap.
Nights, by the light of whatever would burn: tallow, tinder and the silken rope of wick that burns slow, slow we wove the baskets from the long gold strands of wheat that were another silk: worm soul spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other. The fields lay fallow, swollen with frost, expectant winter. Mud clung to the edges of our gowns; we had hung back like shadows on the walls of trees and watched. In the little circles that our tapers threw, murdered men rose red in their clanging armor, muttered words that bled through the bars of iron masks: the lord who sold us to the glory fields, lied.
The unicorn is an easy prey: its horn in the maiden’s lap is an obvious twist, a tamed figure—like the hawk that once roamed free, but sits now, fat and hooded, squawking on the hunter’s wrist. It’s easy to catch what no longer captures the mind, long since woven in, a faded tapestry on a crumbling wall made by the women who wore keys at their waists and in their sleep came hot dreams of wounded knights left bleeding in their care, who would wake the next morning groaning from the leftover lance in the groin, look up into the round blond face beaming down at them thinking "mine," and say: "angel." Such beasts are easy to catch; their dreams betray them. But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden. By these signs you will know it: when you lift your lure out of the water, the long plastic line will be missing its end: the lure and the hook will be gone, and the line will swing free in the air, so light it will be without bait or its cunning sharp curl of silver. Or when you pull your net from the stream, it will be eaten as if by acid, its fine mesh sodden shreds. Or when you go at dawn to check your traps, their great metal jaws will be wrenched open, the teeth blunt with rust as if they had lain for years in the rain. Or when the thunderstorm suddenly breaks in the summer, next morning the computer’s memory will be blank. Look then for the blank card, the sprung trap, the net’s dissolve, the unburdened line that swings free in the air. There. By day, go empty-handed to the hunt and come home the same way in the dark.
My death was arranged by special plans in Heaven And only occasioned comment by ten persons in Adams, Massachusetts. The best thing ever said about me Was that I was deft at specifying trump. I was killed by my father And married to my mother But born too early to know what happened to me, And as I was an only child I erected selfishness into a personal religion, Sat thinking forty years saying nothing. I observed all. I loved to drink gin, Would not have thought to go farther Into arcane episodes of the heavier drugs, And, being New England, always remained sober. However, I confess now, I was Always afraid of women, I don’t know why, it was just the way it was, I could never get very close to any woman. Knowledge and intelligence allowed me The grand rationalization of this; also, I respected Delicacy, but would not go too far in any direction. I thought I was a good man. I was. I did not obstruct the state, nor religion, But I saw through both and maintained my independence. I kept my counsels among the learned. My learning was more private and precious than worldly. The world had no sense of the devious, So my private vicissitudes were mine alone. I say all this with a special sort of grace For I avoided many of the pitfalls of fallen man And while I did not have heroic size, the Creative grandeur, or mastership of the mind I earned my bread by cynicism alone, And blow you all a kiss from the tomb.
I want no horns to rouse me up to-night,  And trumpets make too clamorous a ring  To fit my mood, it is so weary white  I have no wish for doing any thing. A music coaxed from humming strings would please;  Not plucked, but drawn in creeping cadences  Across a sunset wall where some Marquise Picks a pale rose amid strange silences. Ghostly and vaporous her gown sweeps by  The twilight dusking wall, I hear her feet  Delaying on the gravel, and a sigh, Briefly permitted, touches the air like sleet And it is dark, I hear her feet no more.  A red moon leers beyond the lily-tank.  A drunken moon ogling a sycamore,  Running long fingers down its shining flank. A lurching moon, as nimble as a clown, Cuddling the flowers and trees which burn like glass. Red, kissing lips, I feel you on my gown— Kiss me, red lips, and then pass—pass. Music, you are pitiless to-night. And I so old, so cold, so languorously white.
Cold, wet leaves Floating on moss-coloured water  And the croaking of frogs— Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.
Gushing from the mouths of stone men To spread at ease under the sky In granite-lipped basins, Where iris dabble their feet And rustle to a passing wind, The water fills the garden with its rushing, In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns. Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone,  Where trickle and plash the fountains,  Marble fountains, yellowed with much water. Splashing down moss-tarnished steps  It falls, the water; And the air is throbbing with it; With its gurgling and running; With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur. And I wished for night and you. I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool,  White and shining in the silver-flecked water. While the moon rode over the garden,  High in the arch of night, And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness. Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!
When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?
I walk down the garden paths, And all the daffodils Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. I walk down the patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, I too am a rare Pattern. As I wander down The garden paths. My dress is richly figured, And the train Makes a pink and silver stain On the gravel, and the thrift Of the borders. Just a plate of current fashion, Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whale-bone and brocade. And I sink on a seat in the shade Of a lime tree. For my passion Wars against the stiff brocade. The daffodils and squills Flutter in the breeze As they please. And I weep; For the lime tree is in blossom And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom. And the splashing of waterdrops In the marble fountain Comes down the garden paths. The dripping never stops. Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin, A basin in the midst of hedges grown So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding, But she guesses he is near, And the sliding of the water Seems the stroking of a dear Hand upon her. What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown! I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground. All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground. I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths, And he would stumble after, Bewildered by my laughter. I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes. I would choose To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths, A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover, Till he caught me in the shade, And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me, Aching, melting, unafraid. With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops, And the plopping of the waterdrops, All about us in the open afternoon— I am very like to swoon With the weight of this brocade, For the sun sifts through the shade. Underneath the fallen blossom In my bosom, Is a letter I have hid. It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke. “Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell Died in action Thursday sen’night.” As I read it in the white, morning sunlight, The letters squirmed like snakes. “Any answer, Madam,” said my footman. “No,” l told him. “See that the messenger takes some refreshment. No, no answer.” And I walked into the garden, Up and down the patterned paths, In my stiff, correct brocade. The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun, Each one. I stood upright too, Held rigid to the pattern By the stiffness of my gown. Up and down I walked, Up and down. In a month he would have been my husband. In a month, here, underneath this lime, We would have broke the pattern; He for me, and I for him, He as Colonel, I as Lady, On this shady seat. He had a whim That sunlight carried blessing. And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.” Now he is dead. In Summer and in Winter I shall walk Up and down The patterned garden paths In my stiff, brocaded gown. The squills and daffodils Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow. I shall go Up and down, In my gown. Gorgeously arrayed, Boned and stayed. And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace By each button, hook, and lace. For the man who should loose me is dead, Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?
STUDY IN WHITES Wax-white— Floor, ceiling, walls.  Ivory shadows Over the pavement  Polished to cream surfaces By constant sweeping. The big room is coloured like the petals Of a great magnolia,  And has a patina  Of flower bloom Which makes it shine dimly Under the electric lamps. Chairs are ranged in rows Like sepia seeds  Waiting fulfilment. The chalk-white spot of a cook’s cap Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall— Dull chalk-white striking the retina like a blow Thru the wavering uncertainty of steam. Vitreous-white of glasses with green reflections, Ice-green carboys, shifting—greener, bluer—with the jar of moving water. Jagged green-white bowls of pressed glass Rearing snow-peaks of chipped sugar Above the lighthouse-shaped castors Of grey pepper and grey-white salt. Grey-white placards: “Oyster Stew, Cornbeef Hash, Frankfurters”: Marble slabs veined with words in meandering lines.  Dropping on the white counter like horn notes Through a web of violins, The flat yellow lights of oranges, The cube-red splashes of apples, In high plated épergnes. The electric clock jerks every half-minute: “Coming!—Past!” “Three beef-steaks and a chicken-pie,” Bawled through a slide while the clock jerks heavily. A man carries a china mug of coffee to a distant chair. Two rice puddings and a salmon salad Are pushed over the counter; The unfulfilled chairs open to receive them. A spoon falls upon the floor with the impact of metal striking stone, And the sound throws across the room Sharp, invisible zigzags Of silver.
As I sit here in the quiet Summer night, Suddenly, from the distant road, there comes The grind and rush of an electric car. And, from still farther off, An engine puffs sharply, Followed by the drawn-out shunting scrape of a freight train. These are the sounds that men make In the long business of living. They will always make such sounds, Years after I am dead and cannot hear them. Sitting here in the Summer night, I think of my death. What will it be like for you then? You will see my chair With its bright chintz covering Standing in the afternoon sunshine, As now. You will see my narrow table At which I have written so many hours. My dogs will push their noses into your hand, And ask—ask— Clinging to you with puzzled eyes. The old house will still be here, The old house which has known me since the beginning. The walls which have watched me while I played: Soldiers, marbles, paper-dolls, Which have protected me and my books. The front-door will gaze down among the old trees Where, as a child, I hunted ghosts and Indians; It will look out on the wide gravel sweep Where I rolled my hoop, And at the rhododendron bushes Where I caught black-spotted butterflies. The old house will guard you, As I have done. Its walls and rooms will hold you, And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies As always, From the pages of my books. You will sit here, some quiet Summer night, Listening to the puffing trains, But you will not be lonely, For these things are a part of me. And my love will go on speaking to you Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures, As it does now through my voice, And the quick, necessary touch of my hand.
This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box. Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. To-day I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavour to balance myself Upon a broken world.
Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England. Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing Their little weak soft songs; In the crooks of your branches The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs Peer restlessly through the light and shadow Of all Springs. Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom Above a cellar dug into a hill. You are everywhere. You were everywhere. You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. And her husband an image of pure gold. You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— You, and sandal-wood, and tea, Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks When a ship was in from China. You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting.” Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. Paradoxical New England clerks, Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night, So many verses before bed-time, Because it was the Bible. The dead fed you Amid the slant stones of graveyards. Pale ghosts who planted you Came in the nighttime And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems. You are of the green sea, And of the stone hills which reach a long distance. You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. You cover the blind sides of greenhouses And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass To your friends, the grapes, inside. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, You have forgotten your Eastern origin, The veiled women with eyes like panthers, The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas. Now you are a very decent flower, A reticent flower, A curiously clear-cut, candid flower, Standing beside clean doorways, Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles, Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight And a hundred or two sharp blossoms. Maine knows you, Has for years and years; New Hampshire knows you, And Massachusetts And Vermont. Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island; Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea. You are brighter than apples, Sweeter than tulips, You are the great flood of our souls Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts, You are the smell of all Summers, The love of wives and children, The recollection of gardens of little children, You are State Houses and Charters And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. May is lilac here in New England, May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree, May is white clouds behind pine-trees Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. May is a green as no other, May is much sun through small leaves, May is soft earth, And apple-blossoms, And windows open to a South Wind. May is full light wind of lilac From Canada to Narragansett Bay. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac. Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England, Because my roots are in it, Because my leaves are of it, Because my flowers are for it, Because it is my country And I speak to it of itself And sing of it with my own voice Since certainly it is mine.
These alternate nights and days, these seasons Somehow fail to convince me. It seems I have the sense of infinity! (In your dreams, O crew of Columbus, O listeners over the sea For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—) Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden. I thought, What time is it? I thought, Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time? (Tell me your dreams, O sailors: Tell me, in sleep did you climb The tall masts, and before you—) At night the stillness of old trees Is a leaning over and the inertness Of hills is a kind of waiting. (In sleep, in a dream, did you see The world’s end? Did the water Break—and no shore—Did you see?) Strange faces come through the streets to me Like messengers: and I have been warned By the moving slowly of hands at a window. Oh, I have the sense of infinity— But the world, sailors, is round. They say there is no end to it.
Señora, it is true the Greeks are dead. It is true also that we here are Americans: That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual: That more people have more thoughts: that there are Progress and science and tractors and revolutions and Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous And music in every home: there is also Hoover. Does the lady suggest we should write it out in The Word? Does Madame recall our responsibilities? We are Whores, Fräulein: poets, Fräulein, are persons of Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with Stragglers from either prince and of both views. The rules permit them to further the business of neither. It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers. Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas— Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers. Preferring life with the sons to death with the fathers, We also doubt on the record whether the sons Will still be shouting around with the same huzzas— For we hope Lady to live to lie with the youngest. There are only a handful of things a man likes, Generation to generation, hungry or Well fed: the earth’s one: life’s One: Mister Morgan is not one. There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. He that goes naked goes further at last than another. Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they’ll jimmy his Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month: (Who recalls the address now of the Imagists?) But the naked man has always his own nakedness. People remember forever his live limbs. They may drive him out of the camps but one will take him. They may stop his tongue on his teeth with a rope’s argument— He will lie in a house and be warm when they are shaking. Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army? How to take to one’s chamber a million souls? How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers? The things of the poet are done to a man alone As the things of love are done—or of death when he hears the Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only. Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him There where he lies on his left arm and will die, Nor his class nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering And his knee’s in the soft of the bed where his love lies. I remind you, Barinya, the life of the poet is hard— A hardy life with a boot as quick as a fiver: Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms?
Think of our blindness where the water burned! Are we so certain that those wings, returned And turning, we had half discerned Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen The bird aloft there, did not mean?— Our hearts so seized upon the sign! Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave Thundering in the water cave— Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff And climbed the coral of that iron cliff And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— The silver screaming of that one, white bird: The fabulous wings, the crimson beak That opened, red as blood, to shriek And clamor in that world of stone, No voice to answer but its own. What certainty, hidden in our hearts before, Found in the bird its metaphor?
When liberty is headlong girl And runs her roads and wends her ways Liberty will shriek and whirl Her showery torch to see it blaze. When liberty is wedded wife And keeps the barn and counts the byre Liberty amends her life. She drowns her torch for fear of fire.
for Learned and Augustus Hand You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you, Stand with me a little by the walls Or where the walls once were. The bridge was here, the city further: Now there is neither bridge nor town— A doorway where the roof is down Opens on a foot-worn stair That climbs by three steps into empty air. (What foot went there?) Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples Lives now but these flocks of sheep Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath: Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth. Can none but sheep live where the walls go under? Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun? And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill Shrilling with melodious tongue— Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair? (What dust is this we sift upon our hair?) Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz Shall we sit weeping for the world that was And curse God and so perish? Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them? Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches? Consider, Oh consider what we are! Consider what it is to be a man— He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle; Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word; Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden; Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone— A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious! Even the talk of it would take us days together. Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath Brief as it is: our death waiting— Marvels upon marvels! Works of state— The imagination of the shape of order! Works of beauty—the cedar door Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt! Works of grace— The ceremony at the entering of houses, At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse! Works of soul— Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder: Through the mid night to the stroke of one! Works of grace! Works of wonder! All this have we done and more— And seen—what have we not seen?— A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning: A man, one man, a man alone. In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down. The shadow of his mind is on the mountains. The word he has said is kept in the place beyond As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it. Stones—even the stones remember him: Even the leaves—his image is in them. And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air We sit here and despair! Because the sheep graze in the dying grove Our day is over! We must end Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended, Because the fingers of the goddesses are found Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert,— Because the cloud proposes, the wind says! Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie We sit upon the sand in silence Watching the sun go and the shadows change! Listen, my friends, and you, all of you, strangers, Listen, the work of man, the work of splendor Never has been ended or will end. Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair And dogs are masters—even there One man’s finger in the dust shall trace the circle. Even among the ruins shall begin the work, Large in the level morning of the light And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens, Rippling upon the lip of stone, and spills By cedar sluices into pools, and the young builders String their plumb lines, and the well-laid course Blanches its mortar in the sun, and all the morning Smells of wood-smoke, rope-tar, horse-sweat, pitch-pine, Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch. One man in the sun alone Walks between the silence and the stone: The city rises from his flesh, his bone.
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart. Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten. Naked: I’ve forgotten.Ni, wo: you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon. Other words that got me into trouble werefight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, Fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat but watched the other faces. My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face. Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper, forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang, The sun, the sun. Finally understanding he was going blind, my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love. This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He’s so happy that I’ve come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.All gone, he answers. Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth. He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this?This is persimmons, Father.Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
That scraping of iron on iron when the wind  rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t  quit with, but drags back and forth. Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just  beyond the screened door, as if someone there  squats in the dark honing his wares against  my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,  nothing and anything might make this noise  of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,  or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows that should not bend. Something stiffens that should  slide. Something, loose and not right,  rakes or forges itself all night.
At the edge of the city the pickerel vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to the sea. My life lay crumpled like a smashed car. Windows barred, ivy, square stone. Lines gather at mouth and at eyes like cracks in a membrane. Eyeballs and tongue spill on the floor in a puddle of yolks and whites. The intact 707 under the clear wave, the sun shining. The playhouse of my grandfather’s mother stands north of the shed: spiders and the dolls’ teacups of dead women. In Ohio the K Mart shrugs; it knows it is going to die. A stone, the closed eye of the dirt. Outside before dawn houses sail up like wrecks from the bottom of the sea. A door clicks; a light opens. If the world is a dream, so is the puffed stomach of Juan, and the rich in Connecticut are dreamers. There are bachelors who live in shacks made of oil cans and broken doors, who stitch their shirts until the cloth disappears under stitches, who collect nails in Ball jars. A trolley car comes out of the elms, the tracks laid through an acre of wheat stubble, slanting downhill. I board it, and cross the field into the new pine.
"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy  frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed  your pet boa constrictor" back home in Grosse Pointe, or in Grosse Pointe Park, while the free nation of rats in Detroit emerges from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars  and junked cars, and gathers to flow at twilight like a river the color of pavement, and crawls over bedrooms and groceries  and through broken school windows to eat the crayon  from drawings of rats— and no one in Detroit understands  how rats are delicious in Dearborn. If only we could communicate, if only  the boa constrictors of Southfield  would slither down I-94, turn north on the Lodge Expressway,  and head for Eighth Street, to eat  out for a change. Instead, tomorrow, a man from Birmingham enters  a pet shop in Detroit to buy a frozen German shepherd  for six dollars and fifty cents  to feed his pet cheetah, guarding the compound at home. Oh, they arrive all day, in their  locked cars, buying schoolyards, bridges, buses,  churches, and Ethnic Festivals;  they buy a frozen Texaco station for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents to feed to an imported London taxi  in Huntington Woods; they buy Tiger Stadium, frozen, to feed to the Little League  in Grosse Ile. They bring everything  home, frozen solid as pig iron, to the six-car garages of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,  Farmington, Grosse Pointe Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor— and they ingest everything, and fall asleep, and lie coiled in the sun, while the city  thaws in the stomach and slides to the small intestine, where enzymes  break down molecules of protein  to amino acids, which enter the cold bloodstream.
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and roses; there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like water; under her blouse, water assembles, swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water, her cheekbones cool water; water flows in her rapid hair. I drink water 2. from her body as she walks past me to open a screen door, as she bends to weed among herbs, or as she lies beside me at five in the morning in submarine light. Curt Davis threw a submarine ball, terrifying to right-handed batters. Another pleasure, thoroughly underrated, is micturition, which is even 3. commoner than baseball. It begins by announcing itself more slowly and less urgently than sexual desire, but (confusingly) in the identical place. Ignorant men therefore on occasion confuse beer- drinking with love; but I have discussed adultery elsewhere. We allow this sweet release to commence itself, 4. addressing a urinal perhaps, perhaps poised over a white toilet with feet spread wide and head tilted back: oh, what’delicious permission! what luxury of letting go! what luxe yellow curve of mildest ecstasy! Granted we may not compare it to poignant and crimson bliss, it is as voluptuous as rain all night long 5. after baseball in August’s parch. The jade plant’s trunk, as thick as a man’s wrist, urges upward thrusting from packed dirt, with Chinese vigor spreading limbs out that bear heavy leaves—palpable, dark, juicy, green, profound: They suck, the way bleacher fans claim inhabitants of box seats do. The Fourth of July we exhaust stars from sparklers in the late 6. twilight. We swoop ovals of white-gold flame, making quick signatures against an imploding dark. The five-year-old girl kisses the young dog goodbye and chases the quick erratic kitten. When she returns in a few years as a tall shy girl, she will come back to a dignified spreading cat and a dog ash-gray on the muzzle. Sparklers 7. expel quickly this night of farewell: If they didn’t burn out, they wouldn’t be beautiful. Kurt, may I hazard an opinion on expansion? Last winter meetings, the major leagues (al- ready meager in ability, scanty in starting pitchers) voted to add two teams. Therefore minor league players will advance all too quickly, 8. with boys in the bigs who wouldn’t have made double-A forty years ago. Directors of player personnel will search like poets scrambling in old notebooks for unused leftover lines, but when was the last time anyone cut back when he or she could expand? Kurt, I get the notion that you were another who never discarded 9. anything, a keeper from way back. You smoked cigarettes, in inflation- times rolled from chopped-up banknotes, billions inhaled and exhaled as cancerous smoke. When commerce woke, Men was awake. If you smoked a cigar, the cigar band discovered itself glued into collage. Ongoing life became the material of Kurtschwittersball.
Each morning I made my way among gangways, elevators, and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room to interrogate the grave helpers who tended her through the night while the ship’s massive engines kept its propellers turning. Week after week, I sat by her bed with black coffee and the Globe. The passengers on this voyage wore masks or cannulae or dangled devices that dripped chemicals into their wrists. I believed that the ship traveled to a harbor of breakfast, work, and love. I wrote: "When the infusions are infused entirely, bone marrow restored and lymphoblasts remitted, I will take my wife, bald as Michael Jordan, back to our dog and day." Today, months later at home, these words turned up on my desk as I listened in case Jane called for help, or spoke in delirium, ready to make the agitated drive to Emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that heaves water month after month, without leaving port, without moving a knot, without arrival or destination, its great engines pounding.
I wore a garland of the briar that put me now in awe I wore a garland of the brain that was whole It commanded me, done babbling And I no more blabbed, spare no lie Tell womanhood she shake off pity Tell the man to give up tumult for the while To wonder at the sight of baby's beauty Ne let the monsters fray us with things that not be From a high tower poem issuing Everything run along in creation till I end the song Ne none fit for so wild beasts Ne none so joyous, ne none no give no lie Tell old woes to leave off here: I sing this into a scallop shell with face of a pearl & leave all sorrow bye & bye.
I am putting makeup on empty space all patinas convening on empty space rouge blushing on empty space I am putting makeup on empty space pasting eyelashes on empty space painting the eyebrows of empty space piling creams on empty space painting the phenomenal world I am hanging ornaments on empty space gold clips, lacquer combs, plastic hairpins on empty space I am sticking wire pins into empty space I pour words over empty space, enthrall the empty space packing, stuffing jamming empty space spinning necklaces around empty space Fancy this, imagine this: painting the phenomenal world bangles on wrists pendants hung on empty space I am putting my memory into empty space undressing you hanging the wrinkled clothes on a nail hanging the green coat on a nail dancing in the evening it ended with dancing in the evening I am still thinking about putting makeup on empty space I want to scare you: the hanging night, the drifting night, the moaning night, daughter of troubled sleep I want to scare you you I bind as far as cold day goes I bind the power of 20 husky men I bind the seductive colorful women, all of them I bind the massive rock I bind the hanging night, the drifting night, the moaning night, daughter of troubled sleep I am binding my debts, I magnetize the phone bill bind the root of my pointed tongue I cup my hands in water, splash water on empty space water drunk by empty space Look what thoughts will do Look what words will do from nothing to the face from nothing to the root of the tongue from nothing to speaking of empty space I bind the ash tree I bind the yew I bind the willow I bind uranium I bind the uneconomical unrenewable energy of uranium dash uranium to empty space I bind the color red I seduce the color red to empty space I put the sunset in empty space I take the blue of his eyes and make an offering to empty space renewable blue I take the green of everything coming to life, it grows & climbs into empty space I put the white of the snow at the foot of empty space I clasp the yellow of the cat's eyes sitting in the black space I clasp them to my heart, empty space I want the brown of this floor to rise up into empty space Take the floor apart to find the brown, bind it up again under spell of empty space I want to take this old wall apart I am rich in my mind thinking of this, I am thinking of putting makeup on empty space Everything crumbles around empty space the thin dry weed crumbles, the milkweed is blown into empty space I bind the stars reflected in your eye from nothing to these typing fingers from nothing to the legs of the elk from nothing to the neck of the deer from nothing to porcelain teeth from nothing to the fine stand of pine in the forest I kept it going when I put the water on when I let the water run sweeping together in empty space There is a better way to say empty space Turn yourself inside out and you might disappear you have a new definition in empty space What I like about impermanence is the clash of my big body with empty space I am putting the floor back together again I am rebuilding the wall I am slapping mortar on bricks I am fastening the machine together with delicate wire There is no eternal thread, maybe there is thread of pure gold I am starting to sing inside about the empty space there is some new detail every time I am taping the picture I love so well on the wall: moonless black night beyond country-plaid curtains everything illuminated out of empty space I hang the black linen dress on my body the hanging night, the drifting night, the moaning night daughter of troubled sleep This occurs to me I hang up a mirror to catch stars, everything occurs to me out in the night in my skull of empty space I go outside in starry ice I build up the house again in memory of empty space This occurs to me about empty space that it is nevered to be mentioned again Fancy this imagine this painting the phenomenal world there's talk of dressing the body with strange adornments to remind you of a vow to empty space there's talk of the discourse in your mind like a silkworm I wish to venture into a not-chiseled place I pour sand on the ground Objects and vehicles emerge from the fog the canyon is dangerous tonight suddenly there are warning lights The patrol is helpful in the manner of guiding there is talk of slowing down there is talk of a feminine deity I bind her with a briar I bind with the tooth of a tiger I bind with my quartz crystal I magnetize the worlds I cover myself with jewels I drink amrita there is some new detail there is a spangle on her shoe there is a stud on her boot the tires are studded for the difficult climb I put my hands to my face I am putting makeup on empty space I wanted to scare you with the night that scared me the drifting night, the moaning night Someone was always intruding to make you forget empty space you put it all on you paint your nails you put on scarves all the time adorning empty space Whatever-your-name-is I tell you “empty space” with your fictions with dancing come around to it with your funny way of singing come around to it with your smiling come to it with your enormous retinue & accumulation come around to it with your extras come round to it with your good fortune, with your lazy fortune come round to it when you look most like a bird, that is the time to come around to it when you are cheating, come to it when you are in your anguished head when you are not sensible when you are insisting on the praise from many tongues It begins with the root of the tongue it begins with the root of the heart there is a spinal cord of wind singing & moaning in empty space
“That all these dyings may be life in death” I was living in San Francisco My heart was in Manhattan It made no sense, no reference point Hearing the sad horns at night, fragile evocations of female stuff The 3 tones (the last most resonant) were like warnings, haiku-muezzins at dawn The call came in the afternoon “Frank, is that really you?” I'd awake chilled at dawn in the wooden house like an old ship Stay bundled through the day sitting on the stoop to catch the sun I lived near the park whose deep green over my shoulder made life cooler Was my spirit faltering, grown duller? I want to be free of poetry's ornaments, its duty, free of constant irritation, me in it, what was grander reason for being? Do it, why? (Why, Frank?) To make the energies dance etc. My coat a cape of horrors I'd walk through town or impending earthquake. Was that it? Ominous days. Street shiny with hallucinatory light on sad dogs, too many religious people, or a woman startled me by her look of indecision near the empty stadium I walked back spooked by my own darkness Then Frank called to say “What? Not done complaining yet? Can't you smell the eucalyptus, have you never neared the Pacific? ‘While frank and free/call for musick while your veins swell’” he sang, quoting a metaphysician "Don't you know the secret, how to wake up and see you don't exist, but that does, don't you see phenomena is so much more important than this? I always love that.” “Always?” I cried, wanting to believe him “Yes.” “But say more! How can you if it's sad & dead?” “But that's just it! If! It isn't. It doesn't want to be Do you want to be?” He was warming to his song “Of course I don't have to put up with as much as you do these days. These years. But I do miss the color, the architecture, the talk. You know, it was the life! And dying is such an insult. After all I was in love with breath and I loved embracing those others, the lovers, with my body.” He sighed & laughed He wasn't quite as I'd remembered him Not less generous, but more abstract Did he even have a voice now, I wondered or did I think it up in the middle of this long day, phone in hand now dialing Manhattan
I turned: quivering yellow stars in blackness  I wept: how speech may save a woman The picture changes & promises the heroine  That nighttime & meditation are a mirage To discuss pro & contra here is mute Do I not love you, day? A pure output of teleological intentions & she babbles, developing a picture-theory of language Do I not play the delicate game of language?  yes, & it is antecedent to the affairs of the world:  The dish, the mop, the stove, the bed, the marriage  & surges forth the world in which I love I and I and I and I and I and I, infinitely reversible  Yet never secure in the long morning texture A poor existing woman-being, accept her broken heart  & yet the earth is divinity, the sky is divinity The nomads walk & walk.
Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call  Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air  Over the rotten office, let him bear The carrion ballast up, and at the tall Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’ll see That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height,  No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;  He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free, The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you  Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he  Devours death, mocks mutability, Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new. Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget  How for so many bedlam hours his saw  Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,  And the slam of his hammer all the day beset The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear  To see the towns like coral under the keel, And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel  How high and weary it was, on the waters where He rocked his only world, and everyone’s.  Forgive the hero, you who would have died  Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide  To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.
In the still morning when you move toward me in sleep for love, I dream of an island where long-stemmed cranes, serious weather vanes, turn slowly on one foot. There the dragonfly folds his mica wings and rides the tall reed close as a handle. The hippo yawns, nods to thick pythons, slack and drowsy, who droop down like untied sashes from the trees. The brash hyenas do not cackle and run but lie with their paws on their heads like dogs. The lazy crow’s caw falls like a sigh. In the field below, the fat moles build their dull passage with an old instinct that needs no light or waking; its slow beat turns the hand in sleep as we turn toward each other in the ripe air of summer, before the change of weather, before the heavy drop of the apples.
The Bone-man lives in a stucco house. He ticks his heels on the cold terrazzo floor. He parks his ragtruck in the yard, instructs his crew on the white telephone. I am training my dog to attack the red-capped hunter bearing his long package. I am training the tethered jay to cry out against the killer who cracks the latch. On the open map, the road to my house bulges like a vein. He takes a train, he rents a car, he lurches in with an open fly. Sweet Eve was just the Farmer’s Daughter, he wooed her with a wormy apple. He’s a dirty joke, he’s always everybody’s last lover, he’s a regular can of worms—you wry Medusa, I am a mongoose staring you down.
He can only drink tea now, screwed and filed. She is dead, in metal flecks.55 years old and look like a bad nail by God they yanked me out I can tell you
for John Gardner It was not kindness, but I was only buckle-high in the door. I let him in because the knock had come, the rain clawed each window and wall. I was afraid. Climbing down the stairs I did not know how my country, cunningly, had rotted, but hear, now, my steps creak in memory and the rocks let go in the blind nightglass where you get up, frightened, to reenact the irrational logic of flesh. Even now I can’t see why it happens, the moment of change, but must try to witness each particular index of landscape and irony of promise. I know I was a child when the banging began, sleepless with every light in the house blazing. Then the man whose speech entangled me came in from the mud-world. He could not put together the clear words of hope we dream, only the surge of a river. He, who said it wasn’t a fit thing for anyone, half-grown, to have to imagine in this godforsaken life, said there was a message, the river high, no chance. I remember the wind at that door breaking like a father’s hand on my face. Such hurting does not cease and maybe that is why the man went on fumbling for love, for the loving words that might be knowledge. He gave me this message. I took it, and took, without warning, grief’s language that piece by piece has shown me how to connect dreamed moments skidding like rocks in the silence of a Wyoming midnight. Each of his rainy words, fragments of the old sickness, passed into me, then he was gone, miserable and emptied, and I had no home but the heart’s hut, the blistering walls of loneliness, the world’s blue skymiles of longing. Common with drowned fir and uncoiling crocus, then, I walked in ignorance and entered this terrible life that was always a dream of the future in the relentless unsleep of those who cannot remember the last thing they wanted to say: that love exists. And in darkness you have dreamed me into your world with their message, their words whispering an hour before black, sudden knocking that, even as I recall it, begins in your heart’s meat to reverberate, oh, its noise is going to wake you like a dove’s desire. This is the dream of the soft buckling of flesh, the beautiful last erosions, and I swear I would give up these words if I could, I would stop the code of that streetlight just beyond your bed— but it is too late, for the secret of hope swells in you and who can stop the news that already screams like the roof’s edge leaving its nails over your child’s bed that is, now, splintered and empty as every moment skidding at the back of your neck? Leaves not a month old hurl out of the storm and steady splatter of time, and tomorrow will lie still ripening, but only long enough for you to catalog, in dream, what was possible before the rake must drag its scritch-scratch over ground. All I ask is that you turn to the child inside, those words dreaming and changeless as love’s last chance—let them be said against whatever, crying in the night, we still think may be stopped, the black historical fact of life’s event crashing, like a wall of water, over the actuary’s lawn and yours. You have seen me before and would not hear, stung by your wife’s fierce beauty, when I called your name, and the day your mother died I begged your attention and got your dollar. I followed you once, in New York, like truth, always to give you the message, and now on your porch, mud-spattered, I am knocking to make you see what love is. Call your wife, the police, anyone you like, for everyone is waiting. We don’t mean to be unkind but are compelled to deliver, faithfully, the words that have been fluttering in your ear like a scream. It is not the wind waking you, but the low roar of years fumbling to tell you what has happened, or will, when the door flies open and the naked message of love stands there stuttering in your face, alive, crying, leaving nothing out.
Nobody knows exactly when it fell off the map or what the pressures were on its flooding river. The hedge, the tottering mailbox, were gone. That dimple of light from the bicycle that raised itself to creak at noon across a clattering bridge names my father. His blood silent as a surging wish drags this town lost through my body, a place I can get back to only by hunch and a train whistle that was right on time. But time and trains were never right in Green Springs, West Virginia. What color could map the coal’s grime, shacks shored against the river every March, mail left to rot because no one answered to occupant? Farmers low on sugar cursed the heat and left bad cigars boys would puff back to clouds where they dreamed of girls naked as their hands under outfield flies. Scores were low. There were no springs for the sick. Women lined their walls with the Sears catalog, but the only fur they ever had was a warbled rabbit. To get here think of dirt, think of night leaking, the tick of waterbugs, a train held in Pittsburgh.
There was a fire in the night. Across the street I slept among the others as the ashes snowed upon small pines. I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant of fortune’s blistering story, the playful flash in the dark, the unseen smolder that would leave us revealed, unchanged. I said my prayers for luck but the man trying to live in two houses answers me now, losing neither the old one whose windows burst with weariness, nor the one half-built whose roofless, green timbers he would leave unfinished like a vision. I had climbed there all summer to smoke. Awake, I found him sitting at his stool halfway between the houses where I would go each morning. The story of the sea would be upon his tongue, his hands weaving the wire to a trap, making the careful seams to catch a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife already had begun to stretch her wash, indifferent in that early light, and a dog lapped from the ruts of the fire truck. I believed little had been changed by fire, only his toolshed limp as a black sail left in a heap, and a new hole in the landscape. This was an old place where no one came, luckless, desperate, eternal as guilt. In silence I greeted that old one. But now I remember seeing also, as if for the first time, the shocking gray face of the sea. It loomed up human and beautiful as far off the figures of boats crossed, worked, and seemed to sink while they burned in the sullen sun.
At dawn wind out of the north, hailflecks, pebbly skates against windows. I lie thinking the drainspout’s drip comes again in the basement faucet where I am crying, a child betrayed by death’s new cardinal and the cat yawning on the porch where my grandmother found me. Risen now, I see the river full-bodied, its white wind-knotted hair swirling like hers. The polar hickory is naked as a saber recalled by a girl long gone in the gold sauce of apples. Two leaves that might be cardinals returned tumble in the hard light at the brick fence. Nothing moves in boxwood where gray soldiers lie. Among the last of them she walked, cupping apples, staining her white frock, who took a boy far back into the haze the Shenandoah hills held where family stallions might walk aimless ground littered with purpling flesh beyond the cull of seasons. Through a gate nailed with leather belts in my mind, I pass and enter the arthritic orchard tended by widows. What I gather wakes me to think how bright on the tongue was the taste kept concealed, sustained, of flesh abiding, months beneath the wintering house floors. To reach this I must go down storm-worn stones and pick my steps past the sealed boxes of family debris, nightgowns, flannels, ribbons, birthspoons, a pair of dulled skates, flowers pressed in a moldy Bible. Why is it we keep what we cannot bear to use, and can’t escape, shoving ourselves into shrunken rooms edged with old foolishness unforgiven and unforgotten? I fumble to the center and pull a yellow light down the ancient string still dependably there and stand, in my head, as she did, playfully asking where they went. I know, I know, I say back there in the dust where I’ve come again to look through tiny windows into skirts of boxwood, a morning that sends me alive among gray soldiers at the house roots. I see also blue preserving jars full of slick pulpy flesh she has put up in a juice thick as blood. Behind it all in dark eaves, baskets of apples, split pine boxes like generations steeping, undisturbed by the tick and groan of housepipes veining the overhead I leave. Oh let me see her light bring back those stallion-feeders, little red handfuls of joy! Look how long I’ve slept, learning to walk straight into a dawn-silvered web where secret spiders spin ceaseless as the seasons. Above me ice takes each room, I can hear feet pacing fretful halls, yet here I lift my face and puff back all the silk in the world. I hold every core peeled on this slab. My fingers claw the meat of family stillness, parting all the way to seeds. Oh widows of the air, fill me with your cidery, useless lying, those bladed hours you fed me the dark rotting dreams of your love.
I He dines alone surrounded by reflections  of himself. Then after sleep and benzedrine  descends the Cinquecento stair his magic  wrought from hypochondria of the well- to-do and nagging deathwish of the poor;  swirls on smiling genuflections of his liveried chauffeur into a crested  lilac limousine, the cynosure of mousey neighbors tittering behind  Venetian blinds and half afraid of him  and half admiring his outrageous flair.  II Meanwhile his mother, priestess in gold lamé,  precedes him to the quondam theater  now Israel Temple of the Highest Alpha,  where the bored, the sick, the alien, the tired  await euphoria. With deadly vigor she prepares the way for mystery and lucre. Shouts in blues-contralto, ”He’s  God’s dictaphone of all-redeeming truth. Oh he’s the holyweight champeen who’s come  to give the knockout lick to your bad luck;  say he’s the holyweight champeen who’s here  to deal a knockout punch to your hard luck.“  III Reposing on cushions of black leopard skin,  he telephones instructions for a long slow drive across the park that burgeons now  with spring and sailors. Peers questingly  into the green fountainous twilight, sighs and turns the gold-plate dial to Music For Your Dining-Dancing Pleasure. Smoking Egyptian  cigarettes rehearses in his mind a new device that he must use tonight.  IV Approaching Israel Temple, mask in place,  he hears ragtime allegros of a ”Song of Zion“ that becomes when he appears  a hallelujah wave for him to walk. His mother and a rainbow-surpliced cordon  conduct him choiring to the altar-stage, and there he kneels and seems to pray before  a lighted Jesus painted sealskin-brown. Then with a glittering flourish he arises,  turns, gracefully extends his draperied arms:  “Israelites, true Jews, O found lost tribe  of Israel, receive my blessing now. Selah, selah.” He feels them yearn toward him  as toward a lover, exults before the image of himself their trust gives back. Stands as though  in meditation, letting their eyes caress his garments jewelled and chatoyant, cut  to fall, to flow from his tall figure dramatically just so. Then all at once he sways, quivers, gesticulates as if to ward off blows or kisses, and when he speaks  again he utters wildering vocables, hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing)  to enmesh his flock in theopathic tension.  Cries of eudaemonic pain attest his artistry. Behind the mask he smiles.  And now in subtly altering light he chants and sinuously trembles, chants and trembles  while convulsive energies of eager faith  surcharge the theater with power of  their own, a power he has counted on  and for a space allows to carry him.  Dishevelled antiphons proclaim the moment  his followers all day have hungered for,  but which is his alone. He signals: tambourines begin, frenetic drumbeat and glissando. He dances from the altar,  robes hissing, flaring, shimmering; down aisles  where mantled guardsmen intercept wild hands  that arduously strain to clutch his vestments,  he dances, dances, ensorcelled and aloof,  the fervid juba of God as lover, healer,  conjurer. And of himself as God.
It is said that playing cards were invented in 1392 to cure the French king, Charles VI, of madness. The suits in some of the first card packs consisted of Doves, Peacocks, Ravens, and Owls. They say I am excitable! How could I not scream? The Swiss monk’s tonsure spun till it blurred yet his eyes were still. I snapped my gaiter, hard, to stuff back my mirth. Lords, he then began to speak.Indus catarum, he said, presenting the game of cards in which the state of the world is excellent described and figured.
For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather The heron makes a cross flying low over the marsh. Its heart is an old compass pointing off in four directions. It drags the world along, the world it becomes. My face surfaces in the green beveled glass above the washstand. My handprint in thick black powder on the bedroom shade. Home I could drink like thin fire that gathers like lead in my veins, heart’s armor, the coffee stains. In the dust of the double hollyhock, Theresa, one frail flame eating wind. One slim candle that snaps in the dry grass. Ascending tall ladders that walk to the edge of dusk. Riding a blue cricket through the tumult of the falling dawn. At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof, sharpening its talons on the shingles. Grandpa leans back between spoonfuls of canned soup and repeats to himself a word that belongs to a world no one else can remember. The day has not come when from sloughs, the great salamander lumbers through snow, salt, and fire to be with him, throws the hatchet of its head through the door of the three-room house and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls. Uncle Ray, drunk for three days behind the jagged window of a new government box, drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota, crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch is the small hook and eye. of religion. Twenty nuns fall through clouds to park their butts on the metal hasp. Surely that would be considered miraculous almost anyplace, but here in the Turtle Mountains it is no more than common fact. Raymond wakes, but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up dark tunnels of their sleeves, and into their frozen armpits, or is it heaven? He counts the points of their hairs like stars. One by one they blink out, and Theresa comes forth clothed in the lovely hair she has been washing all day. She smells like a hayfield, drifting pollen of birch trees. Her hair steals across her shoulders like a postcard sunset. All the boys tonight, goaded from below, will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk, The White Roach Bar where everyone gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got, as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs lights a depth charge through the smoke. Grandpa leans closer to the bingo. The small fortune his heart pumps for is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers. The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights, brief as sparrows God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand. He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy as the loon that calls its children across the lake in its broke, knowing laughter. Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings, it is a loud, rasping wail that saws through the spine of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel. Drawn up through the neck ropes, drawn out of his stomach by the spirit of the stones that line the road and speak to him only in their old agreement. Ira knows the old man is nuts. Lets him out at the road that leads up over stars and the skulls of white cranes. And through the soft explosions of cattail and the scattering of seeds on still water, walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands that have grown to be the twisted doubles of the burrows of mole and badger, that have come to be the absence of birds in a nest. Hands of earth, of this clay I’m also made from.
Not my hands but green across you now.  Green tons hold you down, and ten bass curve  teasing in your hair. Summer slime will pile deep on your breast. Four months of ice  will keep you firm. I hope each spring to find you tangled in those pads pulled not quite loose by the spillway pour,  stars in dead reflection off your teeth. Lie there lily still. The spillway’s closed. Two feet down most lakes are common gray. This lake is dark from the black blue Mission range  climbing sky like music dying Indians once wailed.  On ocean beaches, mystery fish are offered to the moon. Your jaws go blue.  Your hands start waving every wind. Wave to the ocean where we crushed a mile of foam. We still love there in thundering foam  and love. Whales fall in love with gulls  and tide reclaims the Dolly skeletons gone with a blast of aching horns to China.  Landlocked in Montana here the end is limited by light, the final note  will trail off at the farthest point we see,  already faded, lover, where you bloat. All girls should be nicer. Arrows rain  above us in the Indian wind. My future should be full of windy gems, my past  will stop this roaring in my dreams.  Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. But the arrows sing:  no way to float her up. The dead sink  from dead weight. The Mission range  turns this water black late afternoons. One boy slapped the other. Hard. The slapped boy talked until his dignity  dissolved, screamed a single ‘stop’ and went down sobbing in the company pond.  I swam for him all night. My only suit  got wet and factory hands went home.  No one cared the coward disappeared.  Morning then: cold music I had never heard. Loners like work best on second shift. No one liked our product and the factory closed.  Off south, the bison multiply so fast a slaughter’s mandatory every spring and every spring the creeks get fat and Kicking Horse fills up. My hope is vague.  The far blur of your bones in May may be nourished by the snow. The spillway’s open and you spill out into weather, lover down the bright canal and mother, irrigating crops  dead Indians forgot to plant. I’m sailing west with arrows to dissolving foam  where waves strand naked Dollys.  Their eyes are white as oriental mountains and their tongues are teasing oil from whales.
My father paces the upstairs hall a large confined animal neither wild nor yet domesticated. About him hangs the smell of righteous wrath. My mother is meekly seated at the escritoire. Rosy from my bath age eight-nine-ten by now I understand his right to roar, hers to defy the bill from Wanamaker’s in his hand the bill from Strawbridge’s held high the bill from Bonwit Teller and the all plum-colored Blum Store. His anger smells like dinner parties like trays of frothy daiquiris. Against the pre-World-War-Two prime standing ribs his carving knife flashes a little drunkenly. He charms all the other Bonwit-bedecked wives but something overripe malingers. I wear his wide cigar bands on my fingers. Oh God it is so noisy! Under my bed a secret stair a gold and purple escalator takes me nightly down under the sea. Such dancings, such carryings on with the prince of this-or-that with the duke of ne’er-do-well I the plain one, a size too large to tell grow tremulous at stickpin and cravat I in toe shoes and tutu suddenly see shopping is an art form a kind of costume ball. Papá, would we so humbly come to the scene in the upstairs hall on the first of every month, except you chose the mice for footmen, clapped to call up the coach and four? You sent to Paris for the ermine muff that says I’m rich. To think twelve poor little things had their heads chopped off to keep my hands unseemly warm! When you went fishing down the well for fox furs, hats with peacock plumes velvet evening capes, what else befell? You paid the bills, Papá. You cast the spell.
Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv The roasting alive of rabbis in the ardor of the Crusades  went unremarked in Europe from  the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
They are weighing the babies again on color television. They are hanging these small bags of bones up in canvas slings  to determine which ones will receive the dried-milk mush,  the concentrate made out of ground-up trash fish. For years we have watched them, back-lit by the desert,  these miles of dusty hands holding out goatskins or cups,  their animals dead or dying of rinderpest, and after the credits come up I continue to sit through Dinner with Julia, where, in a French fish  poacher big enough for a small brown baby, an  Alaska salmon simmers in a court bouillon. For a first course, steak tartare to awaken the palate. With it Julia suggests a zinfandel. This scene  has a polite, a touristy flavor to it, and I let it play. But somewhere Oxfam goes on  spooning gluey gruel between the parched lips of potbellied children, the ones who perhaps can be saved  from kwashiorkor—an ancient Ghanaian word— though with probable lowered IQs, the voiceover explains,  caused by protein deficiencies linked to the drought and the drought has grown worse with the gradual increase in herds overgrazing the thin forage grasses of the Sahel. This, says the voice, can be laid to the natural greed of the nomad deceived by technicians digging new wells which means (a slow pan of the sand) that the water table has dropped. And now to Julia’s table is borne the resplendent fish.  Always the camera is angled so that the guests look up.  Among them I glimpse that sly Dean, Jonathan Swift. After the credits come up I continue to sit with those who are starving to death in a distant nation  squatting, back-lit by the desert, hands out, in my head and the Dublin Dean squats there too, observing the population that waits for too little dried milk, white rice, trash fish.  Always the camera is angled so they look up while their babies are weighed in slings on color television,  look into our living rooms and the shaded rooms we sleep in.
Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.  The dog at the center of my life recognizes  you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road.  In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste  it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage,  back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,  reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish  into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space  we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams.  I will be years gathering up our words,  fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.
The water closing over us and the going down is all. Gills are given. We convert in a town of broken hulls and green doubloons. O you dead pirates hear us! There is no salvage. All you know is the color of warm caramel. All is salt. See how our eyes have migrated to the uphill side? Now we are new round mouths and no spines letting the water cover. It happens over and over, me in your body and you in mine.
It will be an island on strings well out to sea and austere bobbing as if at anchor green with enormous fir trees formal as telephone poles. We will arrive there slowly hand over hand without oars. Last out, you will snip the fragile umbilicus white as a beansprout that sewed us into our diaries. We will be two bleached hermits at home in our patches and tears. We will butter the sun with our wisdom. Our days will be grapes on a trellis perfectly oval and furred. At night we will set our poems adrift in ginger ale bottles each with a clamshell rudder each with a piggyback spider waving them off by dogstar and nothing will come from the mainland to tell us who cares, who cares and nothing will come of our lovelock except as our two hearts go soft and black as avocado pears.
That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,  I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth,  fighting my sleep, and one night saw a Hessian soldier stand at attention there in full regalia, till his head broke into flames.  My only other callers were the FBI sent to investigate me as a Russian spy  by patriotic neighbors on the river road; and flying squirrels parachuting from the elms  who squeaked in rodent heat between the walls  and upstairs rumbled at their nutty games.  I never dared open the attic door. Even my nervous Leghorns joined the act,  indulging their taste for chicken from behind.  A glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes;  they caught a sort of dancing-sickness,  a variation of the blind staggers, that hunched their narrow backs and struck  a stiffened wing akimbo, as round and round the poultry yard they flapped and dropped and flapped again.  The county agent shook his head: not one of them was spared the cyanide. That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,  I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in  with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe:  red pine and white, larch, balsam fir, one stride apart, two hundred to the row,  until I heard from Rossiter’s woods  the downward spiral of a veery’s song  unwinding on the eve of war. Lord! Lord! who has lived so long?  Count it ten thousand trees ago,  five houses and ten thousand trees, since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower  over the place where the hermit sang,  while I held a fantail of squirming roots  that kissed the palm of my dirty hand,  as if in reply to a bird. The stranger who hammers No Trespass signs  to the staghorn sumac along the road  must think he owns this property.  I park my car below the curve and climbing over the tumbled stones  where the wild foxgrape perseveres,  I walk into the woods I made, my dark and resinous, blistered land,  through the deep litter of the years.
I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension  Fallen from my prime, when company Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,  Before time took my leafy hours away. My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found  Itself tart recompense for what was lost In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground  Has no apocalypse or pentecost. I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought, And cozy women dead that by my side  Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not  Remembering how in my youth I cried.
Let me call a ghost, Love, so it be little: In December we took No thought for the weather. Whom now shall I thank For this wealth of water? Your heart loves harbors Where I am a stranger. Where was it we lay Needing no other Twelve days and twelve nights In each other’s eyes? Or was it at Babel And the days too small We spoke our own tongue Needing no other? If a seed grow green Set a stone upon it That it learn thereby Holy charity. If you must smile Always on that other, Cut me from ear to ear And we all smile together.
The way to the river leads past the names of Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges Through the song of the bandage vendor I lay your name by my voice As I go The way to the river leads past the late Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards They play that they are broken glass The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds Call From windows They play that they are old they are putting the horizon Into baskets they are escaping they are Hiding I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars My voice turns to you I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow Windows gallery Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing Sort of poker with somebody’s Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose The rivers one After the other I begin to know where I am I am home Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker Walk on our letters I can tell And the days hang medals between us I have lit our room with a glove of yours be Here I turn To your name and the hour remembers Its one word Now Be here what can we Do for the dead the footsteps full of money I offer you what I have my Poverty To the city of wires I have brought home a handful Of water I walk slowly In front of me they are building the empty Ages I see them reflected not for long Be here I am no longer ashamed of time it is too brief its hands Have no names I have passed it I know Oh Necessity you with the face you with  All the faces
Oh pile of white shirts who is coming to breathe in your shapes to carry your numbers to appear what hearts are moving toward their garments here their days what troubles beating between arms you look upward through each other saying nothing has happened and it has gone away and is sleeping having told the same story and we exist from within eyes of the gods you lie on your backs and the wounds are not made the blood has not heard the boat has not turned to stone and the dark wires to the bulb are full of the voice of the unborn
In a dream I returned to the river of bees Five orange trees by the bridge and Beside two mills my house Into whose courtyard a blindman followed The goats and stood singing Of what was older Soon it will be fifteen years He was old he will have fallen into his eyes I took my eyes A long way to the calendars Room after room asking how shall I live One of the ends is made of streets One man processions carry through it Empty bottles their Image of hope It was offered to me by name Once once and once In the same city I was born Asking what shall I say He will have fallen into his mouth Men think they are better than grass I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay He was old he is not real nothing is real Nor the noise of death drawing water We are the echo of the future On the door it says what to do to survive But we were not born to survive Only to live
Thinking of rain clouds that rose over the city on the first day of the year in the same month I consider that I have lived daily and with eyes open and ears to hear these years across from St Vincent’s Hospital above whose roof those clouds rose its bricks by day a French red under cross facing south blown-up neo-classic facades the tall dark openings between columns at the dawn of history exploded into many windows in a mortised face inside it the ambulances have unloaded after sirens’ howling nearer through traffic on Seventh Avenue long ago I learned not to hear them even when the sirens stop they turn to back in few passers-by stay to look and neither do I at night two long blue windows and one short one on the top floor burn all night many nights when most of the others are out on what floor do they have anything I have seen the building drift moonlit through geraniums late at night when trucks were few moon just past the full upper windows parts of the sky as long as I looked I watched it at Christmas and New Year early in the morning I have seen the nurses ray out through arterial streets in the evening have noticed internes blocks away on doorsteps one foot in the door I have come upon the men in gloves taking out the garbage at all hours piling up mountains of plastic bags white strata with green intermingled and black I have seen one pile catch fire and studied the cloud at the ends of the jets of the hoses the fire engines as near as that red beacons and machine-throb heard by the whole body I have noticed molded containers stacked outside a delivery entrance on Twelfth Street whether meals from a meal factory made up with those mummified for long journeys by plane or specimens for laboratory examination sealed at the prescribed temperatures either way closed delivery and approached faces staring from above crutches or tubular clamps out for tentative walks have paused for turtling wheel-chairs heard visitors talking in wind on each corner while the lights changed and hot dogs were handed over at the curb in the middle of afternoon mustard ketchup onions and relish and police smelling of ether and laundry were going back and I have known them all less than the papers of our days smoke rises from the chimneys do they have an incinerator what for how warm do they believe they have to maintain the air in there several of the windows appear to be made of tin but it may be the light reflected I have imagined bees coming and going on those sills though I have never seen them who was St Vincent
Neither my father nor my mother knew the names of the trees where I was born what is that I asked and my father and mother did not hear they did not look where I pointed surfaces of furniture held the attention of their fingers and across the room they could watch walls they had forgotten where there were no questions no voices and no shade Were there trees where they were children where I had not been I asked were there trees in those places where my father and my mother were born and in that time did my father and my mother see them and when they said yes it meant they did not remember What were they I asked what were they but both my father and my mother said they never knew
All the way north on the train the sun followed me followed me without moving still the sun of that other morning when we had gone over Come on over men at the screen door said to my father You have to see this it’s an ape bring the little boy bring the boy along so he brought me along to the field of dry grass hissing behind the houses in the heat that morning and there was nothing else back there but the empty day above the grass waving as far away as I could see and the sight burned my eyes white birds were flying off beyond us and a raised floor of boards like a house with no house on it part way out there was shining by itself a color of shadow and the voices of the men were smaller in the field as we walked on something was standing out there on the floor the men kept saying Come on over it’s on a chain and my father said to me Don’t get too close I saw it was staring down at each of our faces one after the other as though it might catch sight of something in one of them that it remembered I stood watching its eyes as they turned away from each of us
Then it was the future, though what’s arrived  isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and  cybernetics, when we set up exhibits in the cafeteria for the judges to review what we’d made of our hypotheses. The class skeptic (he later refused to sign  anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental  degradation of language) chloroformed mice,  weighing the bodies before and after to catch the weight of the soul, wanting to prove the invisible real as a bagful of nails. A girl who knew it all made cookies from euglena, a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,  she had cultured in a flask. We’re smart enough, she concluded, to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,  poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed he really had built it when a kid no one knew  showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that the tiniest particles could be changed  into something even harder to break. And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,  it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes  to paint it on the backs of shaven mice. She wanted to know what it took, a little vial of sure malignancy, to prove a daily intake smaller than a single aspirin could finish something as large as a life. I thought of this because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow became extinct. It may never be as famous as the pterodactyl or the dodo, but the last one died today, a resident of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water  and they inflate. One other thing this brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.
On this first dark day of the year  my daddy was born lo these eighty-six years ago who now  has not drawn breath or held bodily mass for some ten years and still   I have not got used to it. My mind can still form to that chair him   whom no chair holds. Each year on this night on the brink  of new circumference I stand and gaze towards him, while roads careen with drunks,   and my dad who drank himself away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway   to death myself. The millenium hurtles towards me, and the boy I bore   who bears your fire in his limbs follows in my wake. Why can you not be   reborn all tall to me? If I raise my arms here in the blind dark, why can you not   reach down now to hoist me up? This heavy carcass I derive from yours is   tutelage of love, and yet each year though older another notch I still cannot stand   to reach you, or to emigrate from the monolithic shadow you left.
No sooner does the plane angle up than I cork off to dream a bomb blast: A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo,  seat blown loose from its bolts, I hang weightless a nanosecond  in blue space then jerk awake to ordered rows. And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling  its thousand bells, the perfect doses  of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch  held by a rose-nailed hand. I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss driving into shit with more molecular density  than myself, nor the Mission Impossible reruns I sat before, nor the dead space inside only alcohol could fill and then   not even. But I miss the aftermath, the pure simplicity: mouth parched, head hissing static. How little I asked of myself then—to suck  the next breath, suffer the next heave, live  till cocktail hour when I could mix  the next sickness. I locked the bathroom door, sat  on the closed commode, shirtless, in filmy underpants telling myself that death  could fit my grasp and be staved off  while in the smeary shaving glass,  I practiced the stillness of a soul  awaiting birth. For the real that swarmed beyond the door I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless  universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint  Absence, Duchess of Naught . . . A stinging ether folded me in mist. Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous.  When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal,  and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms  as if to rise. Thank god for our place in this forest of forms, for the gravitas that draws me back to him, and for how lightly  lightly I touch down.
This dry night, nothing unusual  About the clip, clop, casual Iron of his shoes as he stamps death Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth. I lift the window, watch the ambling feather Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,  Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.  Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn— Of distant interest like a maimed limb,  Only a rose which now will never climb The stone of our house, expendable, a mere  Line of defence against him, a volunteer You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head  Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead. But we, we are safe, our unformed fear Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted  Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated? He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge  Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street  Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait, Then to breathe relief lean on the sill  And for a second only my blood is still With atavism. That rose he smashed frays  Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days Of burned countryside, illicit braid: A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.
On this first day of spring, snow covers the fruit trees, mingling improbably  with the new blossoms like identical twins  brought up in different hemispheres.  It is not what Housman meant when he wrote of the cherry hung with snow, though he also knew  how death can mistake the seasons,  and if he made it all sound pretty,  that was our misreading in those high school classrooms where, drunk on boredom, we had to recite  his poems. Now the weather is always looming in the background, trying to become more  than merely scenery, and though today  it is telling us something we don't want to hear, it is all so unpredictable, so out of control that we might as well be children again,  hearing the voices of thunder like baritone uncles shouting in the next room as we try to sleep,  or hearing the silence of snow falling  soft as a coverlet, even in springtime  whispering: relax, there is nothing  you can possibly do about any of this.
It is my emotions that early me through Lambertville, New Jersey,  sheer feeling—and an obscure detour—that brings me to a coffee shop  called “This Is It” and a small New Jersey clapboard  with a charming fake sign announcing it to be the first condemned building in the United States  and an old obese collie sitting on the cement steps of the front porch begging forgiveness with his red eyes.  I talk to the coughing lady for five minutes, admire her sign, her antique flag, her dog, and share her grief over the loss of the house next door,  boarded up forever, tied up in estates, surrounded by grass, doomed to an early fire. Everyone is into my myth! The whole countryside  is studying weeds, collecting sadness, dreaming of odd connections and no place more than Lambertville  will do for ghosts to go through your body or people to live out their lives with a blurred vision.  The old woman is still talking. She tells me about her youth, she tells me about her mother’s ganglia  and how the doctor slammed a heavy Bible down  on her watery wrist, scattering spoons and bread crumbs  and turning over little tin containers of alyssum and snapdragon. She tells me about the  curved green glass that is gone forever. She tells me  about her dog and its monotonous existence. Ah, but for sadness there are very few towns like Lambertville.  It drips with grief, it almost sags from the weight. I know Frackville, Pa., and Sandusky, Ohio, and I know coal chutes, empty stores and rusty rivers  but Lambertville is special, it is a wooden stage set, a dream-ridden carcass where people live out serious lives with other people’s secrets, trying to touch with their hands  and eat with their cold forks, and open houses with their keys; and sometimes, on a damp Sunday, they leave the papers on the front porch  to walk down York Street or Buttonwood Street  past abandoned factories and wooden garages,  past the cannon with balls and the new band shell,  past the downtown churches and the antique shops,  and even across the metal plates on the Delaware River  to stinking New Hope, where all their deep longing  is reduced to an hour and a half of greedy buying. I crawl across the street to have my coffee at the low counter, to listen to the noise of the saws drifting through the open window and to study the strange spirit of this tar paper café  stuck on a residential street three or four blocks from Main and Bridge where except for the sudden windfall  of the looping detour it would be relegated forever  to the quiet company of three or four close friends  and the unexpected attention of a bored crossing guard  or exhausted meter man or truck driver. I listen to the plans of the three teen-age businessmen  about to make their fortune in this rotting shack  and walk—periodically—past the stainless steel sink  to take my piss in the misplaced men’s room.  I watch the bright happy girls organize their futures  over and around the silent muscular boys and I wait, like a peaceful man, hours on end, for the truck out back to start, for the collie to die, for the flies to come, for the summer to bring its reckoning.
Every city in America is approached through a work of art, usually a bridge but sometimes a road that curves underneath or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel— you don’t know it—that takes you through the rivers  and under the burning hills. I went there to cry  in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle through fire and flood. Some have little parks— San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque  is beautiful from a distance; it is purple at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,  especially from the little rise on the hill at 14-C; it has twelve entrances like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,  has two small floating bridges in front of it  that brought me in and out. I said good-bye to them both when I was 57. I’m reading Joseph Wood Krutch again—the second time. I love how he lived in the desert. I’m looking at the skull  of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye. He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city in every sense of the word; he wore a library  across his chest; he had a church on his knees.  I’m kissing him good-bye; he was, for me, the last true city; after him there were  only overpasses and shopping centers,  little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper  with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf where whores couldn’t even walk, where nobody sits,  where nobody either lies or runs; either that  or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,  a flower sucking the water out of a rock. What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores  lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick  turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,  dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial. I put it in my leather pockets next to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,  my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there beside his famous number; there is smoke and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter  is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting  is taking down his words. I’m kissing Stieglitz good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos  are making me cry; we’re walking down Fifth Avenue;  we’re looking for a pencil; there is a girl standing against the wall—I’m shaking now when I think of her; there are two buildings, one  is in blackness, there is a dying poplar; there is a light on the meadow; there is a man on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.
The thing about the dove was how he cried in  my pocket and stuck his nose out just enough to  breathe some air and get some snow in his eye and  he would have snuggled in but I was afraid and brought him into the house so he could shit on the New York Times, still I had to kiss him  after a minute, I put my lips to his beak and he knew what he was doing, he stretched his neck  and touched me with his open mouth, lifting  his wings a little and readjusting his legs,  loving his own prettiness, and I just  sang from one of my stupid songs from one of my  vile decades, the way I do, I have to admit it was something from trains. I knew he’d like that,  resting in the coal car, slightly dusted with  mountain snow, somewhere near Altoona,  the horseshoe curve he knew so well, his own  moan matching the train’s, a radio playing the Inkspots, the engineer roaring.
Pushing off on her back out Into the fishpond’s cold Archaic glitter, my naked wife Could not have guessed how High she rode into the noon Sky, a brightened polestar Gliding out between nothing And nothing, between a sun- Lit vacancy and its ancient, Reflected, weightless Hour unrippling back From the sedges. The just- Cut grasses fumed around her Like gasoline, a few Spent bees dozed above The compost, and in my arms The steady thrum of the mower Carried on, though I’d Shut it off to sit down And watch: but so fond of her, The water parted to take Her back from that aimless Sky, where light- Headed and slippery as a star She turtled under the still Simmering Indian summer To startle the sunfish At the margins—then punctured Back with a blow-frog’s gasp, An amazed stranger Conjured into the world By a willow shadow Spread out on the grass Like an extravagant Old World gesture no One believes in anymore. On that stalled shore she climbed Back out among the cool And slightly washed- Out leaves to towel off, Put on her clothes, and shake Her hair out in no time Which slips off into the past, Or future, into nothing But the pure unburnished hum- Drum of that moment, that place, From which we turned away Eventually and went back to work.
—for Logan and Renée Jenkins Unlike almost everything Else just surviving here In summer, poison flowers Flourish in this sweltering Heat, tangling like blown Litter in fences around The trailer parks and motel Pools, and turning the islands Pinkish-white between Divided lanes of freeway, Where all day long against The burnished hubbub of U- Haul trucks and automobiles, Off-the-road vehicles and Campers, the oleander shakes Its brightly polished pocket- Knives, as at the motorcade Of some ambassador hurrying Through a village of the poor. And every day by late after- Noon the overwatered lawns Around the shopping mall Still burn off brown, their Pampered opulence upbraided By the palms’ insomniac Vision of one ineffable apoc- Alyptic noon. But the smell Is somehow sweeter than That makes you think, a dry Lemon-sweetness, as if some- Where nearby wild verbena Has been forced to leaf By a match held up to each Bud—and the silo-skyscraper Holiday Inn at the famous Resort “Where the Horizon Ends” could almost be that Match the way the heat Sloughs off it like after- Burn. And yet, because Of the way the sun in- Tensifies everything, one Always has the feeling there Is much less here than meets The eye: the halcyon blink Of a shard of glass, a Lear- Jet wafted into vapor out On the tarmac’s run, the way Common quartzstone gives Off heat which seems to come From inside itself, and not, In fact, from that more- Than-imaginably-nuclear sun Which every morning starts Up so illusionless, and every Evening slow-dissolves On the blue and otherwise Planetary hills, like a Valium Breaking up on the tongue.
I.  Did he think that disguise would fool me? Gathering about  His balding head those filthy rags, poor-mouthing  His way beside my fire, then gazing into the looking glass  Of my bride’s-mind to summon up the legend I’d seen last at the ashwood threshold twenty years ago,  The husband who’d upped and sailed away on a black,  Oar-swept ship of war to a place he called. . . I call Destroy. “Your son will vouch for me,” he claimed, “I saw your king  On foreign soil. He wore a wine-dark, woolen cape Fastened by a brooch inlaid with gold, a brooch on which A great hound clenched and throttled to death a dappled fawn.” He knew, of course, I’d given Odysseus that very cape,  Had dyed its wool that royal red, had buckled its folds  With that same brooch. And so, I suppose, I passed his test. The salt tears soaked my cheek. A fact he took in silently  Beneath his rags, though how could I not have recognized him  With his poet’s words, his poet’s unfazed self-concern  So skillfully playing my emotions? The truth is, However much I loved that man in the wine-dark cape,  However much I’d longed for him, I’d have settled For the man with thinning hair, the beggar-king of Ithaca. II. Having slept alone year after year in the upper story  Of our high-roofed home, having awakened nightly In that rooted, rightly far-famed bed he’d built by hand  Around the bole of a thickset olive tree, I soon  Discovered there are two known gates through which  All dreams must come to pass. The first is made  Of ivory, cleanly carved, the second of polished horn; Through ivory our dreams are will-o’-the-wisps, scant  Tracings on the air, through horn they’re star-signs We’d be wise to chart our futures by. It was through horn  It came that night he questioned me beside the fire,  The contest of twelve axes, one for each month Of the year I’d lived through twenty times for him,  Housebound to the labor of my hardwood loom. The thwarted suitors watched agog, he watched them watch,  Though no one saw (how could they?) how the hand  That strung his bow recalled my own hand spooling out  New wool, that drew on strength enough to strike An arrow through a dozen axe-helve socket rings Recalled the heart it took each night to climb back Into the vaulted tomb of our empty, tree-housed bed. III. Waiting at the doorway while I was brushing back my hair,  Odysseus stood and stared across the unraked terrace  Gardens trashed from last night’s welcome home.  One guttering pine-pitch torch still burned, its pool  Of light apotheosized to a ringing lyre—the singer’s  Who had begged him calm his bloodlust, spare One pauper soul among that heavy haul of slaughtered men. He’d been every inch the hero then, spattered with gore,  His forehead glistening, dripping red. But this morning,  He looked to me just as he had looked before: his thin  Shirt clung like onion skin to his boxer’s ropy  Shoulders, his young man’s muscled chest and arms;  And as before, those faraway, slightly moonstruck eyes  Seemed focused on a flyspeck at the world’s end. It struck me then that, even as he stood there, steeped  In the memory of all this place brought home to him,  He labored at the anchor of whatever in me Refused that death his heart most longed to master.  And as before, I could see it coming, his going away,  Those maddened gulls scavenging after the trim black ship  My harbored longings had driven out of reach.
How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, Rivers and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside— Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown— Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down!
Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;  It was past twelve on a mid-winter night, When peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep;  There, with much work to do before the light,  We lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might  Along the trench; sometimes a bullet sang,  And droning shells burst with a hollow bang;  We were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one;  Darkness; the distant wink of a huge gun. I turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;  A rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,  And lit the face of what had been a form  Floundering in mirk. He stood before me there;  I say that He was Christ; stiff in the glare,  And leaning forward from His burdening task,  Both arms supporting it; His eyes on mine  Stared from the woeful head that seemed a mask  Of mortal pain in Hell’s unholy shine. No thorny crown, only a woollen cap He wore—an English soldier, white and strong,  Who loved his time like any simple chap,  Good days of work and sport and homely song;  Now he has learned that nights are very long,  And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.  But to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure  Horror and pain, not uncontent to die  That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure. He faced me, reeling in his weariness, Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.  I say that He was Christ, who wrought to bless  All groping things with freedom bright as air,  And with His mercy washed and made them fair.  Then the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,  While we began to struggle along the ditch;  And someone flung his burden in the muck,  Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!’
Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,  Whose voices make the emptiness of light  A windy palace. Quavering from the brim  Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,  They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing  Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering;  Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;  Who hears the cry of God in everything,  And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap, Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap, When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave a lustre of midday to objects below, When what to my wondering eyes did appear, But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer, With a little old driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick. More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: "Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen! To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!" As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky; So up to the housetop the coursers they flew With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too— And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof The prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head, and was turning around, Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound. He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack. His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow; The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath; He had a broad face and a little round belly That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself; A wink of his eye and a twist of his head Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread; He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose; He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
In my sleep: Fell at his feet wanted to eat him right up would have but even better he talked to me. Did I ask you to? Were those words my blood-sucking too? Now I will have a body again move differently, easier back to the plan a little house a woman and a man crossed against yours my soul will show glow through my breastbone: Back down into the kitchen yours Here I will save you others have failed, even died, but I will save you you save me devour me away upWoke up:  I can cry but I can't wake up today again don't answer the door then did couldn't look at you talk couldn't place the bed in the room, or where the room was when I closed my eyes This is the same old knife my knife I know it as well as I know my own mouth It will be lying there on the desk if I open my eyes I will know the room very well there will be the little thrown-out globe of blood we left and every molecule of every object here will swell with life. And someone will be at the door.
People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else, respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says "you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ... —Huub Oosterhuis You who I don’t know I don’t know how to talk to you  —What is it like for you there? Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship— The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear. Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes. But they will not be mine; to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices— What are you afraid of? What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.  What happens when you die? “... not scatter the voices,” Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in  another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What  word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the restlessness ... Repose. To run like water— What is it like there, right now? Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in  against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread. What do you dread? What happens when you die? What do you dread, in this room, now? Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered  life. Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to  follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.
Child  You've boarded me over like a window or a well.Mother  It was autumn I couldn't hear the students only the music coming in the window,Se tu m’ami If you love me
(from Macbeth) Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed. The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow— Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow; For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball, And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play, And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way. He stays so close beside me, he's a coward you can see; I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me! One morning, very early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveler in the dark Thanks you for your tiny spark, How could he see where to go, If you did not twinkle so? In the dark blue sky you keep, Often through my curtains peep For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark Lights the traveler in the dark, Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
All winter long you listened for the boom Of distant cannon wheeled into their place. Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace Their careful webs against the boding sky, While miles away on Munich’s vacant square The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear. And might have turned your eyes upon the gleam Of a thousand years of snow, where near the clouds The Alps ride massive to their full extreme, And season after season glacier crowds The dark, persistent smudge of conifers. Or seen beyond the hedge and through the trees The shadowy forms of cattle on the furze, Their dim coats white with mist against the freeze. Or thought instead of other times than these, Of other countries and of other sights: Eternal Venice sinking by degrees Into the very water that she lights; Reflected in canals, the lucid dome Of Maria della Salute at your feet, Her triple spires disfigured by the foam. Remembered in Berlin the parks, the neat Footpaths and lawns, the clean spring foliage, Where just short weeks before, a bomb, unaimed, Released a frightened lion from its cage, Which in the mottled dark that trees enflamed Killed one who hurried homeward from the raid. And by yourself there standing in the chill You must, with so much known, have been afraid And chosen such a mind of constant will, Which, though all time corrode with constant hurt, Remains, until it occupies no space, That which it is; and passionless, inert, Becomes at last no meaning and no place.
I summon up Panofskv from his bed  Among the famous dead To build a tomb which, since I am not read, Suffers the stone’s mortality instead; Which, by the common iconographies  Of simple visual ease, Usurps the place of the complexities Of sound survivors once preferred to noise: Monkeys fixed on one bough, an almost holy  Nightmarish sloth, a tree Of parrots in a pride of family, Immortal skunks, unaromatically; Some deaf bats in a cave, a porcupine  Quill-less, a superfine Flightless eagle, and, after them, a line Of geese, unnavigating by design; Dogs in the frozen haloes of their barks,  A hundred porous arks Aground and lost, where elephants like quarks Ape mother mules or imitation sharks— And each of them half-venerated by  A mob, impartially Scaled, finned, or feathered, all before a dry Unable mouth, symmetrically awry. But how shall I, in my brief space, describe  A tomb so vast, a tribe So desperately existent for a scribe Knowingly of the fashions’ diatribe, I who have sought time’s memory afoot,  Grateful for every root Of trees that fill the garden with their fruit, Their fragrance and their shade? Even as I do it, I see myself unnoticed on the stair  That, underneath a clear Welcome of bells, had promised me a fair Attentive hearing’s joy, sometime, somewhere.
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones. The bees renew the blossoms they destroy, While in the burning air the pines rise still, Commemorating long forgotten biers. Their roots replace the semblance of these bones. The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust That came from nothing and to nothing came Is light within the earth and on the air. The change that so renews itself is just. The enormous, sundry platitude of death Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same. And splayed upon the ground and through the trees The mountains’ shadow fills and cools the air, Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth. The rhododendrons suffer with the bees Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth, The heaviest burden it shall ever bear. Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep. Although the spring must come, it passes too To form the burden suffered for what comes. Whatever we would give our souls to keep Is merely part of what we call the soul; What we of time would threaten to undo All time in its slow scrutiny has done. For on the grass that starts about the feet The body’s shadow turns, to shape in time, Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade, The final shadow that is turn of earth; And what seems won paid for as in defeat.
Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed Is touched with what reality we feel, Bends to itself and, to itself resumed, Restores a tender fiction to the real. And in her artful posture movement lies Whose timeless motion flesh must so conceal; Yet what her pose conceals we might surmise And might pretend to gather from her eyes The final motion flesh gives up to art. But slowly, if we watch her long enough, The nerves grow subtler, and she moves apart Into a space too dim with time and blood For our set eyes to follow true enough, Or nerves to guess about her, if they would.
When I come to view about steadfastness Espousal is as ever Evil never unravels Memory was and will be yet mercy flows Mercies to me and mine Night rainy my family in private and family I know I know short conviction  have losses then let me see why To what distance and by what path  I thought you would come away  _____________ 1 Battered out of Isaiah  Prophets stand gazing  Formed from earth  In sure and certain  What can be thought  Who go down to hell alive  is the theme of this work  I walk its broad shield  Every sign by itself  havoc brood from afar  Letting the slip out  Glorious in faithfulness  Reason never thought saw 2 You already have brine  Reason swept all away  Disciples are fishermen  Go to them for direction Gospel of law Gospel of shadow in the vale of behavior  who is the transgressor  Far thought for thought  nearer one to the other  I know and do not know Non attachment dwell on nothing  Peace be in this house  Only his name and truth 3 Having a great way to go  it struck at my life how you conformed to dust  I have taken the library  Volumes might be written  ambiguous signs by name  Near nightfall it touches it  Nothing can forbear it  So fierce and so flaring  Sometimes by the seaside  all echoes link as air Not I cannot tell what so wanton and so all about 4 Fields have vanished  The Mower his hopes  Bow broke time loose  none but my shadow  she to have lived on  with the wood-siege  nesting in this poem  Departed from the body  at home of the story I'm free and I'm famished  And so to the Irish  Patrol sentinel ensign  Please feel my arms open 5 The issue of legitimation  Identity of the subject  Circumcision of a heart  driven outside its secret  Elysian solitary imagination  by doubt but not by sight  Fear that forever forever  perfect Charity casts out  The Canticle is an allegory  unchangeable but changeable  Fluttering robes of Covetous He is incomprehensible he  makes darkness his covert 6 Ages pre-supposed ages  the darkness of life  out of necessity night  being a defense by day  the cause and way to it  From same to the same  These joining together  and having allegiance  Words are an illusion  are vibrations of air  Fabricating senselessness  He has shattered gates  thrown open to himself 7 Though lost I love  Love unburied lies  No echo newlyfledge  Thought but thought  the moving cause  the execution of it  Only for theft's sake  even though even perturb the peace But for the hate of it  questionless limit unassuaged newlyfledge  A counter-Covenant 8 Mysterious as night itself All negligently scenery if Nothing could be seen  Sacraments are mysterious  Ambiguous in literal meaning  the Pentateuch the Angels John  all men form a silent man  who wrote the author down  Sackcloth itself is humility  a word prerogatives array  Language a wood for thought  over the pantomime of thought  Words words night unto night 9 Drift of human mortality what is the drift of words Pure thoughts are coupled  Turn your face to what told me  love grazed here at least mutinous predominant unapparent  What is unseen is eternal  Judgments are a great deep  Confession comes to nought half to be taken half left From communion of wrongdoing  doubleness among the nouns I feed and feed upon names 10 Claim foreign order  dismantling mortal Begotten possibility  plummet fetter seem  So coldly systems break  Fraught atvantaging  Two tell againstself Theme theme heart fury  all in mutiny Troubleless or sadder  Estranged of all strange  Let my soul quell Give my soul ease 11 Antic prelate treason  I put on haircloth Clear unutterable Secret but tell What diadem bright  Theme theme heart fury  Winged knowledge hush  Billeted near presage  such themes do quell  Claim foreign order  Plummet fetter seem  wild as loveDeath  Two tell against self 12 Strange fear of sleep  am bafflement gone  Bat winged dim dawn  herthe midmost wide  I did this and I But forever you say  Bafflement nether elegy  herthe otherwise I  Irreconcilable theme  keep silent then Strange always strange  Estrange that I desire  Keep cover come cover 13 Lies are stirring storms I listen spheres from far  Whereunder shoreward away  you walked here Protector  unassuaged asunder thought  you walked here Overshadow  I listen spheres of stars I draw you close ever so  Communion come down and down  Quiet place to stop here Who knows ever no one knows  to know unlove no forgive  _____________ Half thought thought otherwise  loveless and sleepless the sea  Where you are where I would be  half thought thought otherwise  Loveless and sleepless the sea
I Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.  They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,  And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed  Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections  The sun beats lightning on the waves,  The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,  Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line  You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it  Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses  Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.  The bottom of the sea is cruel.II —And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,  Samite sheeted and processioned where  Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,  Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love; Take this Sea, whose diapason knells  On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends  As her demeanors motion well or ill,  All but the pieties of lovers’ hands. And onward, as bells off San Salvador  Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,— Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, Complete the dark confessions her veins spell. Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,  And hasten while her penniless rich palms  Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,— Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,  Close round one instant in one floating flower. Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.  O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.III Infinite consanguinity it bears— This tendered theme of you that light  Retrieves from sea plains where the sky  Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;  While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke  Wide from your side, whereto this hour  The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. And so, admitted through black swollen gates  That must arrest all distance otherwise,— Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,  Light wrestling there incessantly with light,  Star kissing star through wave on wave unto  Your body rocking!  and where death, if shed,  Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn  The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ... IV Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose  I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge  Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe  Chilled albatross’s white immutability)  No stream of greater love advancing now  Than, singing, this mortality alone  Through clay aflow immortally to you. All fragrance irrefragably, and claim  Madly meeting logically in this hour  And region that is ours to wreathe again,  Portending eyes and lips and making told  The chancel port and portion of our June— Shall they not stem and close in our own steps  Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I  Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell? In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering  All bright insinuations that my years have caught  For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,— In this expectant, still exclaim receive  The secret oar and petals of all love.V Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,  Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast  Together in one merciless white blade— The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch!  The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.  One frozen trackless smile ... What words  Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword  Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved  And changed ... “There’s Nothing like this in the world,” you say,  Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look  Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. “—And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed  Nothing so flagless as this piracy.  But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.  Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;  Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:  Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.VI Where icy and bright dungeons lift  Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,  And ocean rivers, churning, shift  Green borders under stranger skies, Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s  Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone; O rivers mingling toward the sky  And harbor of the phoenix’ breast— My eyes pressed black against the prow,  —Thy derelict and blinded guest Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,  I cannot claim: let thy waves rear  More savage than the death of kings,  Some splintered garland for the seer. Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away,  Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day— Creation’s blithe and petalled word  To the lounged goddess when she rose  Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose— Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,  —Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair— Belle Isle, white echo of the oar! The imaged Word, it is, that holds  Hushed willows anchored in its glow.  It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know.
on the wall the dense ivy of executions —ZBIGNIEW HERBERT We shall meet again, in Srinagar,  by the gates of the Villa of Peace,  our hands blossoming into fists  till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. Again we’ll enter our last world, the first that vanished in our absence from the broken city.  We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy  into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate— the bird will say—Humankind can bear  everything. No need to stop the ear to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear our gardener’s voice, the way we did as children, clear under trees he’d planted: “It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance, in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence— “and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.”  Will we follow the horned lark, pry open the back gate into the poplar groves,  go past the search post into the cemetery,  the dust still uneasy on hurried graves with no names, like all new ones in the city? “It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener again). “That bird is silent all winter. Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry.  That’s when it saw the mountain falcon  rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie,  then carry it, limp from the talons.” Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus  at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose?  In the drawer of the cedar stand, white in the verandah, we’ll find letters:  When the post offices died, the mailman  knew we’d return to answer them. Better if he’d let them speed to death, blacked out by Autumn’s Press Trust not like this, taking away our breath, holding it with love’s anonymous scripts: “See how your world has cracked. Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back. Is history deaf there, across the oceans?” Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try the keys, with the first one open the door into the drawing room. Mirror after mirror,  textiled by dust, will blind us to our return as we light oil lamps. The glass map of our country, still on the wall, will tear us to lace— We’ll go past our ancestors, up the staircase, holding their wills against our hearts. Their wish was we return—forever!—and inherit(Quick, the bird will say) that to which we belong, not like this— to get news of our death after the world’s. (for Suvir Kaul)
(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother said the sirens sounded like the elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.) The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant’s,  he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother  heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants,  sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants  forced off Pir Panjal’s rock cliffs in Kashmir:  the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephant, The greatest of all footprints is the elephant’s, said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe,  those prints vanished forever into the universe,  though nomads still break news of those elephants  as if it were just yesterday the air spread the dye (“War’s annals will fade into night / Ere their story die”), the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die  out, mourning you, O massacred elephants! Months later, in Amherst, she dreamt: She was, with dia- monds, being stoned to death. I prayed: If she must die,  let it only be some dream. But there were times, Mother,  while you slept, that I prayed, "Saints, let her die."  Not, I swear by you, that I wished you to die  but to save you as you were, young, in song in Kashmir,  and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir  listening to my flute. You never let gods die.  Thus I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe  that would let me get used to a universe without you. She, she alone, was the universe  as she earned, like a galaxy, her right not to die,  defying the Merciful of the Universe, Master of Disease, “in the circle of her traverse” of drug-bound time. And where was the god of elephants,  plump with Fate, when tusk to tusk, the universe,  dyed green, became ivory? Then let the universe,  like Paradise, be considered a tomb. Mother,  they asked me, So how’s the writing? I answered My motheris my poem. What did they expect? For no verse  sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir  and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,she’s dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe  as she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir: There, the fragile wood-shrines—so far away—of Kashmir!  O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die.  Save the right she gave its earth to cover her, Kashmir  has no rights. When the windows close on Kashmir,  I see the blizzard-fall of ghost-elephants.  I hold back—she couldn’t bear it—one elephant’s  story: his return (in a country far from Kashmir)  to the jungle where each year, on the day his mother  died, he touches with his trunk the bones of his mother. "As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother," she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she’s watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father.  If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I’d save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe  opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s mother!  Each page is turned to enter grief’s accounts. Mother,  I see a hand. Tell me it’s not God’s. Let it die. I see it. It’s filling with diamonds. Please let it die. Are you somewhere alive, somewhere alive, Mother?  Do you hear what I once held back: in one elephant’s  cry, by his mother’s bones, the cries of those elephants that stunned the abyss? Ivory blots out the elephants.  I enter this: The Beloved leaves one behind to die. For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,  and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe  when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold; And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea, Sing in their high and lonely melody. Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way. Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave; The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, The field-mouse running by me in the grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass; But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know. Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,  The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,  And all that famous harmony of leaves,  Had blotted out man's image and his cry. A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,  Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships  And proud as Priam murdered with his peers; Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,  A climbing moon upon an empty sky,  And all that lamentation of the leaves,  Could but compose man's image and his cry.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre  The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst  Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  The darkness drops again; but now I know  That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I. Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners, platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you I emulated there, in that Godawful place. What kind of face to put on it? How simple is a simon's sign? To my mind laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not a pleasantry that spread; instead it's intimate with sheer delirium: spilt brain on split lip, uncontainable interiority— (make no mistake, it is a horror, this inmated, intimated self, revealed as your material: red smear, white swipe). It's said the brain stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery, and then—what's left? a little cartilage for ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps of a delapidated strut—and this is just the sort of stuff, insensate, to which life (which comes again as slime) has always loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't laugh? Your inner life! Your pet pretense! It can't be kept up, can't be kept clean, even in a thought, except a good bloodworks or shitpump keeps it so.  II. Out of the mouth comes a tongue, it calls itself linguistic and it never quite effects the cover-up (good Lord, there's much to cover up: so many belches, outcries, upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and  coughs)— so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself on being the most intellectual) can't help but come out, snorting. Nothing smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's got teeth to send it off, and spit to keep it company, and rot to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's a grimacing with wind. It will (the will be damned) burst out in bad cacaphonies of brouhaha and borborygma—it's the stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake— the vent of rage and irony, and right there in the very shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean, is sorrow's archery and signature, while flesh is being hoisted and arrayed on roosts of skeleton.  III. I saw what good comes to; I saw the figure human being cuts, upon its frame. The laugh was a cry from my own perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted armature. Despite your consternations, oh you meekened warners and polite conventioneers, the thieves were better served upon that day. For the heart is a muscle, where cruelty's humored. The tooth of moral rectitude's a fang. What I gave at the sight of him there was up. What I got of humanity there was the hang . . .
A brilliance takes up residence in flaws— a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design refuse. The wine collects its starlets at a lip's fault, sunlight where the nicked glass angles, and affection where the eye is least correctable, where arrows of unquivered light are lodged, where someone else's eyes have come to be concerned. For beauty's sake, assault and drive and burn the devil from the simply perfect sun. Demand a birthmark on the skin of love, a tremble in the touch, in come a cry, and let the silverware of nights be flecked, the moon pocked to distribute more or less indwelling alloys of its dim and shine by nip and tuck, by chance's dance of laws. The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet, the moment cracked upon a bed, will last as if you soldered them with moon and flux. And break the bottle of the eye to see what lights are spun of accident and glass.
In the field is a house of wood. A window of the house contains the field. You can't see far with a sun in the sky, with a living-room lamp at night. Locality is all you light, and you, as single as a bed. But there's no end to dark. The bed is in the clearing and the clearing's in the wind; the world is a world among others. Now your cell-stars split.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an ariaaria an elaborate song for one voice with orchestral accompaniment, appearing most often in opera (“aria” means “air” in Italian). down these rooms Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin? We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get,  The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,  The singers and workers that never handled the air.  You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,  Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.  Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?  You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.
I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.  A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now  And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play.  I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.  My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae  Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do. And I’d like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace  And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn’t leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name. Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long Her girls struck out from home. (Sadie had left as heritage Her fine-tooth comb.) Maud, who went to college, Is a thin brown mouse. She is living all alone In this old house.
Mrs. Coley’s three-flat brick Isn’t here any more. All done with seeing her fat little form  Burst out of the basement door; And with seeing her African son-in-law  (Rightful heir to the throne) With his great white strong cold squares of teeth  And his little eyes of stone; And with seeing the squat fat daughter  Letting in the men When majesty has gone for the day— And letting them out again.
I hold my honey and I store my bread In little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, Be firm till I return from hell. I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in; Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.
Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.  “My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:  Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential. Only a habit would cry if she should die. A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . . Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?”  The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’s mother  Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight.  So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her. But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men, Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over, And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,  Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill. Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks: The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter,  Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie’s black And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine.  Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. . . .” She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs, Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,  Refueled Triumphant long-exhaled breaths. Her exquisite yellow youth . . .
arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting  In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting  Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair, The pink paint on the innocence of fear;  Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. Cutting with knives served by their softest care,  Served by their love, so barbarously fair. Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!  You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!  Herein they kiss and coddle and assault  Anew and dearly in the innocence  With which they baffle nature. Who are full,  Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all  Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,  Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt  Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.  To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.  To be a random hitching-post or plush. To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.  Their guild is giving money to the poor. The worthy poor. The very very worthy And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy? perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim  Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish Is—something less than derelict or dull. Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze! God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!  The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald  Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.  But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them. The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans, Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains, The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told, Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.  The soil that looks the soil of centuries. And for that matter the general oldness. Old  Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old. Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe. Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic, There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no  Unkillable infirmity of such A tasteful turn as lately they have left,  Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars  Must presently restore them. When they’re done With dullards and distortions of this fistic Patience of the poor and put-upon.  They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as  Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”  Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich  Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .)  Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.  Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,  In horror, behind a substantial citizeness  Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.  Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door. All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor  And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft- Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.  Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.  But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put  Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers  Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .  They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,  Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,  Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”  Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter  In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,  When suitable, the nice Art Institute; Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter  On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.  Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre  With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings  Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers  So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?  Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage  Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames  And, again, the porridges of the underslung And children children children. Heavens! That Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’  Betterment League agree it will be better To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies, To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring Bells elsetime, better presently to cater To no more Possibilities, to get Away. Perhaps the money can be posted. Perhaps they two may choose another Slum! Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!— Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.  Keeping their scented bodies in the center  Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,  They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall, Are off at what they manage of a canter, And, resuming all the clues of what they were, Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.
Kathleen Eileen Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls, Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite  And night is night. It is a real chill out, The genuine thing. I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer  Because sun stays and birds continue to sing. It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.  The sweet flowers indrying and dying down, The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown. It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.  I am aware there is winter to heed.  There is no warm house That is fitted with my need. I am cold in this cold house this house Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls. I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.  I am a woman who hurries through her prayers. Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my  Desert and my dear relief Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,  And small communion with the master shore.  Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,  Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry  In humming pallor or to leap and die. Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.
For Reverend Theodore Richardson If Mary came would Mary Forgive, as Mothers may, And sad and second Saviour Furnish us today? She would not shake her head and leave This military air, But ratify a modern hay, And put her Baby there. Mary would not punish men— If Mary came again.
Ugliest little boy that everyone ever saw.  That is what everyone said. Even to his mother it was apparent— when the blue-aproned nurse came into the  northeast end of the maternity ward  bearing his squeals and plump bottom  looped up in a scant receiving blanket,  bending, to pass the bundle carefully  into the waiting mother-hands—that this was no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness  that was going to inch away as would baby fat, baby curl, and  baby spot-rash. The pendulous lip, the  branching ears, the eyes so wide and wild,  the vague unvibrant brown of the skin,  and, most disturbing, the great head.  These components of That Look bespoke  the sure fibre. The deep grain. His father could not bear the sight of him. His mother high-piled her pretty dyed hair and  put him among her hairpins and sweethearts,  dance slippers, torn paper roses. He was not less than these, he was not more. As the little Lincoln grew, uglily upward and out, he began  to understand that something was  wrong. His little ways of trying  to please his father, the bringing  of matches, the jumping aside at  warning sound of oh-so-large and  rushing stride, the smile that gave  and gave and gave—Unsuccessful! Even Christmases and Easters were spoiled.  He would be sitting at the family feasting table, really delighting in the displays of mashed potatoes  and the rich golden fat-crust of the ham or the festive fowl, when he would look up and find  somebody feeling indignant about him. What a pity what a pity. No love  for one so loving. The little Lincoln  loved Everybody. Ants. The changing  caterpillar. His much-missing mother.  His kindergarten teacher. His kindergarten teacher—whose  concern for him was composed of one  part sympathy and two parts repulsion. The others ran up with their little drawings.  He ran up with his. She tried to be as pleasant with him as  with others, but it was difficult. For she was all pretty! all daintiness, all tiny vanilla, with blue eyes and fluffy  sun-hair. One afternoon she saw him in the hall looking bleak against  the wall. It was strange because the  bell had long since rung and no other  child was in sight. Pity flooded her.  She buttoned her gloves and suggested  cheerfully that she walk him home. She  started out bravely, holding him by the  hand. But she had not walked far before  she regretted it. The little monkey.  Must everyone look? And clutching her  hand like that. . . . Literally pinching  it. . . . At seven, the little Lincoln loved the brother and sister who moved next door. Handsome. Well- dressed. Charitable, often, to him. They  enjoyed him because he was resourceful, made up games, told stories. But when their More Acceptable friends came they turned  their handsome backs on him. He hated himself for his feeling of well-being when with them despite— Everything. He spent much time looking at himself  in mirrors. What could be done?  But there was no shrinking his head. There was no  binding his ears. “Don’t touch me!” cried the little  fairy-like being in the playground. Her name was Nerissa. The many  children were playing tag, but when  he caught her, she recoiled, jerked free  and ran. It was like all the rainbow that ever was, going off  forever, all, all the sparklings in the sunset west. One day, while he was yet seven, a thing happened. In the down-town movies  with his mother a white man in the seat beside him whispered  loudly to a companion, and pointed at  the little Linc. “THERE! That’s the kind I’ve been wanting  to show you! One of the best examples of the specie. Not like those diluted Negroes you see so much of on  the streets these days, but the real thing. Black, ugly, and odd. You can see the savagery. The blunt  blankness. That is the real  thing.” His mother—her hair had never looked so red around the dark brown  velvet of her face—jumped up,  shrieked “Go to—” She did not finish.  She yanked to his feet the little  Lincoln, who was sitting there staring in fascination at his assessor. At the author of his  new idea. All the way home he was happy. Of course,  he had not liked the word “ugly.” But, after all, should he not be used to that by now? What had struck him, among words and meanings  he could little understand, was the phrase  “the real thing.” He didn’t know quite why, but he liked that. He liked that very much. When he was hurt, too much stared at— too much left alone—he thought about that. He told himself “After all, I’m  the real thing.” It comforted him.
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house?  What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?  His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel. At this hour, what is dead is restless  and what is living is burning. Someone tell him he should sleep now. My father keeps a light on by our bed  and readies for our journey. He mends ten holes in the knees of five pairs of boy’s pants. His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces  clean through with each stroke of his hand. At this hour, what is dead is worried  and what is living is fugitive. Someone tell him he should sleep now. God, that old furnace, keeps talking  with his mouth of teeth, a beard stained at feasts, and his breath  of gasoline, airplane, human ash.  His love for me feels like fire, feels like doves, feels like river-water. At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind  and helpless. While the Lord lives. Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.  I’ve had enough of his love that feels like burning and flight and running away.
Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment. I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory. I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties. I’ll let your love-cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago, stand for distance. Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I’ll let stand for mystery. Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy before morning prayer. The sun on the face of the wall is God, the face I can’t see, my soul, and so on, each thing standing for a separate idea, and those ideas forming the constellation of my greater idea. And one day, when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love, I’ll close my eyes and recall this room and everything in it: My body is estrangement. This desire, perfection. Your closed eyes my extinction. Now I’ve forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . . the even-numbered pages are the past, the odd- numbered pages, the future. The sun is God, your body is milk . . . useless, useless . . . your cries are song, my body’s not me . . . no good . . . my idea has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . . it had something to do with death . . . it had something to do with love.
1Once in Mexico an old man was leading on a string—was it a cat? And we saw it was a tarantula sidling along in the dust, writing a message from God for people who thought they knew where creature-life ended. 2We came upon scenes like that, the world back of a lurid pane of glass.  Like in Reno—they have emptied  Hollywood and ordered the extras and  the stars to go get married and divorced  in Reno, making up their stories as they  go and letting their little dogs decide which machines or churches  to put nickels and dimes into. 3One day in a cut quick to the bone it was  white, white; and then the world came in.  I got a tourniquet going, but the snow had learned a whole new way to look at the sky,  as in Maryland in the red fields, how the stones  come startlingly white, on the battlefields,  the cemeteries, along the gouged-out roads.  There history blows about on dandelion seeds. 4On the plains near Wakeeney, above the ground,  short of the earth, at the level of the eyes,  a sunset ray extended for miles. We drove along  it, and let our thoughts down gingerly  to touch what happened, where Genevieve  lived. She went out of the world, for death.  Her town holds quiet in the big plain.  Lights witness one by one all over what  still abides. There was no one better. Her town, her town, her town, the tires  repeat as we go by. 5For those my friends who want me to know,  to discover and combine: all my best thoughts  I roll up and let fall carelessly. It is better than no one follow even the pattern  I look onto the back of my hand, for many  visions I haven’t dared follow may gather and combine in a flash. Away off. in a space in the sky, I let the sky look at me, and I look back and do not say anything.
Wahiawa is still a red dirt town where the sticky smell of pineapples being lopped off in the low-lying fields rises to mix with the minty leaves of eucalyptus in the bordering gulch. We lived there near the edge where the orchids grew huge as lanterns overnight and the passion fruits rotted on the vines before they could be picked. We grew there in the steady rain that fell like a gray curtain through which my mother peered: patches of depression. She kept the children under cover. We built houses within houses, stripping our parents’ bed of pillows and sheets, erecting walls out ofThe National Geographic  which my father had subscribed to for years. We feasted on those pictures of the world, while the mud oozed past the windows knocking over the drab green leaves of palm fronds as we ate our spinach. The mildew grew in rings around the sink where centipedes came swimming up the pipes on multiple feet and the mold grew around our small fingers making everything slippery to touch. We were squeamish and pale. I remember one night my sister screamed. All the lights blinked on in the house. In the sudden brightness, we rushed to her room and found her crumpled in the far corner of the bed, her nightgown twisted in a strange shape; her eyes were as huge as mine, staring into the eyes of the bat that clung to the screen. Its rodent fingers finally letting go as my father jabbed its furry body with the end of a broom.
The jade slipped from my wrist with the smoothness of water leaving the mountains, silk falling from a shoulder, melon slices sliding across the tongue, the fish returning. The bracelet worn since my first birthday cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells. The sound could be heard ringing across the water where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief. Her nightgown slapped in the wind as he howled clutching his hoard. The cultured pearls. The bone flutes. The peppermint disks of jade. The clean hole in the center, Heaven: the spaces we left empty.
To prepare the body, aim for the translucent perfection you find in the sliced shavings of a pickled turnip. In order for this to happen, you must avoid the sun, protect the face under a paper parasol until it is bruised white like the skin of lilies. Use white soap from a blue porcelain dish for this. Restrict yourself. Eat the whites of things: tender bamboo shoots, the veins of the young iris, the clouded eye of a fish. Then wrap the body, as if it were a perfumed gift, in pieces of silk held together with invisible threads like a kite, weighing no more than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums. Light enough to float in the wind. You want the effect of koi moving through water. When the light leaves the room, twist lilacs into the lacquered hair piled high like a complicated shrine. There should be tiny bells inserted somewhere in the web of hair to imitate crickets singing in a hidden grove. Reveal the nape of the neck, your beauty spot. Hold the arrangement. If your spine slacks and you feel faint, remember the hand-picked flower set in the front alcove, which, just this morning, you so skillfully wired into place. How poised it is! Petal and leaf curving like a fan, the stem snipped and wedged into the metal base— to appear like a spontaneous accident.
You’re clean shaven in this country  where trees grow beards of moss,  where even bank tellers look a little like banditos in vests as pungent as sweatsuits.  Still, you prefer the vegetable air to almost any other place on the map.  After the heart attack, you considered Paris— the flying buttresses, the fractured light of its cathedrals; the entire city refined and otherworldly,  ascending on its architectural wings— but decided you had no use for glory,  boulevards fur-lined with statues and expensive trees. You admit, on the whole, the towns in this country are ugly.  One summer you drove toward Nicoya (a beautiful name that became your destination),  expecting a fragrant town of mango trees  but found cattle grazing in the plaza,  rattling the tin plates in the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant. A Coca-Cola sign hung weathered and askew.  That’s perhaps why you like it,  it’s a country you can’t count on,  a country of misfits. Unable to take root in the mud, the twentieth century has failed miserably,  creating neither factory nor industry but a thirst for soda pop; like cosmetic surgery, it is skin deep. The clock is stuck in the rain  and the mud of four o’clock.  There’s nothing to do but wait as if in a dry cave, a room with a view of the waterfall,  pinned as you are beneath the downpour.  The waiter bends over your cup  without filling it, the storekeeper holds your change  until the rain, hypnotic and dramatic,  leaves the streets and the gutters, the balcony and the air greener, heavier— mildew blooming in the closet where your shoes,  powdered with a sea-green lichen,  resembles old bronze, a pair of ancient goblets. While iguanas lounge in the attic (a prehistoric version of the domestic rat), the Office of the Ministry (a pink and crumbling building  surrounded by dusty rose trees)  prints more money to prop  the flimsy flowered currency. You can’t predict what your American dollars will bring by morning.  In the hotel restaurant you meet the Undesirable American.  He learns just enough of the local lingo to swing by, living on a dwindling account  and, here and there, a real estate swindle.  Or the pensionado who buys two cigars,  offering you one the day his Social Security arrives. Like the cockroach, the displaced have crawled through the cracks and selected for themselves an agreeable niche. A place to start from scratch. They thrive in the vegetable air. You wonder how you’ll survive, unfit, unable to work. Lacking the predatory skills, you’ve stayed in the trees, a dreamer, all your life, even now wanting to believe a change of scenery will get you back on your feet. A brief hiatus in the vegetable air. Tonight, you walk along the damp streets,  an average steak, a glass of wine swishing in your belly, to your small room wedged between a jukebox and a dance hall. There are so many things you can’t change— like the dull thrashing music. You draw the blinds, switch on the tiny cassette.  Silence. The click of the tape. And then the familiar aria, rising like the moon, lifts you out of yourself, transporting you to another country  where, for a moment, you travel light.
The mornings are his, blue and white like the tablecloth at breakfast.  He’s happy in the house, a sweep of the spoon brings the birds under his chair.  He sings and the dishes disappear. Or holding a crayon like a candle,  he draws a circle. It is his hundredth dragonfly. Calling for more paper, this one is red-winged and like the others, he wills it to fly, simply by the unformed curve of his signature. Waterwings he calls them,  the floats I strap to his arms.  I wear an apron of concern,  sweep the morning of birds.  To the water he returns,  plunging where it’s cold, moving and squealing into sunlight. The water from here seems flecked with gold. I watch the circles his small body makes fan and ripple, disperse like an echo into the sum of water, light and air.  His imprint on the water has but a brief lifespan, the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing. This is sadness, I tell myself, the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,  because he will not remember that he and beauty were aligned, skimming across the water, nearly airborne,  on his first solo flight. I’ll write “how he could not contain his delight.” At the other end, in another time frame, he waits for me— having already outdistanced this body, the one that slipped from me like a fish, floating, free of itself.
Somebody been giving you Stink Eye? Let me tell you about Stink Eye. Stink Eye no mean nothing when you owe somebody money. Pay up, girl. No be in debt. But Stink Eye means something when you owe somebody nothing. Remember when Connie Mamazuka, the girl with the mustache, grabbed your lipstick in the PE locker room and smeared it all over her big fat lips? Wasn’t ’cause she like your lipstick. Was ’cause you was one cute skinny chick. She was giving you Stink Eye all along and you never even know it. Now you know it and now you watch for it. You was always catching Stink Eye, always crying to your mother about somebody icing you out. When Stink Eye is cold, it is fucking freezing, it can make you shiver and cry, “But Mommy, Mommy, what did I do?” Took you long time to know you never do nothing but you was good at something, something Stink Eye like try steal not ’cause Stink Eye going use it. Stink Eye just no like you use it ’cause if you use it only going make Stink Eye feel more ugly, feel more stupid. Easy for spot Stink Eye coming from one mousy thing. More tricky for spot Stink Eye coming from some of the friendliest faces. And you the dumb one, left dazed and hurt. “But she seemed so sympathetic.” Yeah, right. Stink Eye sideswipes into you out of nowhere where somebody been thinking evil thoughts about you, wishing bad luck to blow bad breath upon you, knock you down, forget your words, drop your tools, make you sputter and drool. Under the bed, in Stink Eye’s room, get one picture of you stabbed like one pin cushion with so many needles, stabbed like one cactus, stabbed like one porcupine. Stink Eye even dreams about you. Careful of that coat you wear, the one you blossom in, feel loved in, the one that keeps you warm. Stink Eye like snatch it right off you ’cause Stink Eye just no can stand to see you look so cool. Stink Eye wants a piece of you. So choose to be naive, girl, or wake up ’cause Stink Eye been waiting to sit on your chest, pounce on your flesh, squeeze the living air right out of you, watch you flatten like one used-up tube of toothpaste. Suck up your goodies, Glutton-of-Stink-Eye, ready to gorge on your talents, feast on your fears. So girl, run fast, spell good, write well, add up, think quick, talk sharp, walk pretty, jump high, throw hard, sing sweet, leap far. Now you know it and now you watch for it ’cause Stink Eye gets bigger and meaner and stronger as you get better and smarter and stronger. Scary thing about Stink Eye, Stink Eye always looking for more— as much as you willing to give.
The kindness of others is all they ever wanted, the laughter of neighbors prospering in the blue light of summer. Those of the small sputtering flame and the sudden white sprung hair, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, desire largesse. The role of poor relation evokes a lack they are not apt to admit, or unbearable pity. They prefer to penetrate the giver’s effortless knack of giving they perceive as vitality, a pulsating entity that rewards the kindness of others tenfold. This they have witnessed. This they have tabulated relentlessly. The generosity of others whose spirits, like their long-legged children blossoming into a progeny of orchards and fields, flourish. Those who have never known kindness drag into the privacy of their smallness the baskets of fruit appearing year after year on their porches, to be picked apart in the hushed posture of thieves. They peel skin, probe flesh the color of honey as if the seeds will yield something other than a glimmer of sweet air rising from the roots of trees and licorice-laced, half-opened leaves. Those of the small flame, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, live out their lives hungry, glaring at themselves across the table, wife of the cruel mouth, husband of the thin broth trickling like spittle.
The mailman handing me a letter, he paid a little. My daughter’s third grade teacher, the electrician putting a light over my back door: they paid as well. The woman at the bank who cashes my check. She paid a part of it. The typist in my office, the janitor sweeping the floor—they paid some too. The movie star paid for it. The nurse, the nun, the saint, they all paid for it— a photograph from Central America, six children lying neatly in a row. One day I was teaching or I sold a book review or I gave a lecture and some of the money came to me and some rolled off into the world, but it was still my money, the result of my labor, each coin still had my name printed across it, and I went on living, passing my days in a box with a tight lid. But elsewhere, skulking through tall grass, a dozen men approached a village. It was hot; the men made no noise. See that one’s cap, see the button on that other man’s shirt, * * * hear the click of the cartridge as it slides into its chamber, see the handkerchief which that man uses to wipe his brow— I paid for that one, that one belongs to me.
By the last few times we saw her it was clear That things were different. When you tried to help her Get out of the car or get from the car to the door Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator There was a new sense of heaviness Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’t That she was less willing to be helped to walk But that the walking itself had become less willing. Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now, Or maybe a new and subtle, alien, Intelligence of body was obedient now To other laws: “Weight is the measure of The force with which a body is drawn downward To the center of the earth”; “Inertia is The tendency of a body to resist Proceeding to its fate in any way Other than that determined for itself.” That evening, at the Bromells’ apartment, after She had been carried up through the rational structure By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor, And after we helped her get across the hall, And get across the room to a chair, somehow We got her seated in a chair that was placed A little too far away from the nearest table, At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat, Exposed, her body the object of our attention— The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg, The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe. At work between herself and us there was A new principle of social awkwardness And skillfulness required of each of us. Our tones of voice in this easy conversation Were instruments of marvelous finesse, Measuring and maintaining with exactitude “The fact or condition of the difference There was between us, both in space and time.” Her smiling made her look as if she had Just then tasted something delicious, the charm Her courtesy attributed to her friends. This decent elegant fellow human being Was seated in virtue, character, disability, Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves, The windows monitored by Venetian blinds— “These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats, Horizontally arranged, and parallel, Which can be tilted so as to admit Precisely the desired light or air.” We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne, And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign. And of course it wasn’t whether or not the world Was benign but whether it looked at her too much. She wasn’t “painfully shy” but just the same I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been Painfulness in her shyness earlier on, Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage Living it through, giving it order and style. And one had the sense of the late marriage as of Two bafflements inventing the sense they made Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world, And probably was, radiant and triumphant, And I think that one could almost certainly say That during the last, heroic, phase of things, After his death, and after the stroke, she had By force of character and careful management, Maintained a certain degree of happiness. The books there on the bookshelves told their stories, Line after line, all of them evenly spaced, And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces. In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story: “In the scale of being, wherever it begins, Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep; Infinite vacuities ... For surely, Nothing can so disturb the passions, or Perplex the intellects of man so much, As the disruption of this union with Visible nature, separation from all That has delighted or engaged him, a change Not only of the place but of the manner Of his being, an entrance into a state Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps A state he has not faculties to know.” The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds, And yellows, produce of the season due, And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.
Saturday afternoon. The barracks is almost empty. The soldiers are almost all on overnight pass. There is only me, writing this letter to you, And one other soldier, down at the end of the room, And a spider, that hangs by the thread of his guts, His tenacious and delicate guts, Swift’s spider, All self-regard, or else all privacy. The dust drifts in the sunlight around him, as currents Lie in lazy, drifting schools in the vast sea. In his little sea the spider lowers himself Out of his depth. He is his own diving bell, Though he cannot see well. He observes no fish, And sees no wonderful things. His unseeing guts Are his only hold on the world outside himself. I love you, and miss you, and I find you hard to imagine. Down at the end of the room, the other soldier Is getting ready, I guess, to go out on pass. He is shining his boots. He sits on the edge of his bunk, Private, submissive, and heedful of himself, And, bending over himself, he is his own nest. The slightest sound he makes is of his being. He is his mother, and nest, wife, brother, and father. His boots are bright already, yet still he rubs And rubs till, brighter still, they are his mirror, And in this mirror he observes, I guess, His own submissiveness. He is far from home.
They said, my saints, my slogan-sayers sang, Be good, my child, in spite of all alarm. They stood, my fathers, tall in a row and said, Be good, be brave, you shall not come to harm. I heard them in my sleep and muttering dream, And murmuring cried, How shall I wake to this? They said, my poets, singers of my song, We cannot tell, since all we tell you is But history, we speak but of the dead. And of the dead they said such history (Their beards were blazing with the truth of it) As made of much of me a mystery.
I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three days. Resigned to being wolf meat ... when, unbelievably, I found myself in a clearing. Two goats with bells round their necks stared at me: their pupils like coin slots in piggy banks. I could have gotten the truth out of those two, if goats spoke. I saw leeks and radishes planted in rows; wash billowing on a clothesline ... and the innocuous-looking cottage in the woods with its lapping tongue of a welcome mat slurped me in. In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex is barely discernible pours a glass of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry my hand shakes. But what is this liquid? “Drink up, sweetheart,” she says, and as I wipe the white mustache off with the back of my hand: “Atta girl.” Have I stumbled into the clutches of St. Somebody? Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here in my own little kingdom,” she says as she leads me upstairs—her bony grip on my arm a proclamation of ownership, as though I've always been hers.
Why so many senseless injuries? This one’s glass teeth knocked out. Eyes missing, or stuck open or closed. Limbs torn away. Sawdust dribbles onto the floor like an hourglass running out. Fingerless hands, noses chipped or bitten off. Many are bald or burnt. Some, we learn, are victims of torture or amateur surgery. Do dolls invite abuse, with their dent-able heads, those tight little painted-on or stitched-in grins?Hurt me, big botched being, they whine in a dialect only puritans and the frequently punished can hear.It’s what I was born for. I know my tiny white pantaloons and sheer underskirts incite violation.
“It is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto everyone we meet, he doth not kill us.” —Sir Thomas Browne  We’re down here in the basement dodging bombs. As our loves freckle with age we must adore them more ferociously. Come winter you kick back and ready your weapons for spring. My next task was to get well. Five million years ago, there were different terrors. Saber toothed fears. Edgar Allen Poe was terrified of being buried alive. Fear is a civilising influence. It keeps us in line. Fear of bacteria. Of our own murderous kind. Of aliens superior to us in every way who’ll arrive any moment and sensibly decide to clean house. A terrible cry arises from the thick of things. My begging bowl runneth over. Heaven has been relocated and we’re not telling you where. Not even a hint. I don’t love you anymore. What might it mean to die a worthy death and how much should one brood about that ahead of time? I was just trying to get back to the boat alive. Let us lurch forward or hellward. What an adorable form of anarchy when the body outwits us. I am a heretic in their eyes, so they will kill us both and murder your children if they find our hiding place. Despite everything, I awoke full of praise for you, as I do each morning. Coughing constantly, I rinsed my hands and ate some seeded crackers. I thought about your face and prayed.
He manages like somebody carrying a box  that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out,  he moves the hands forward, hooking them  on the corners, pulling the weight against  his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly  when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes  different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood  drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now  the man can hold underneath again, so that  he can go on without ever putting the box down.
Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton. It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it with me—this other thing I will become at death, and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk, my rival. What will the living see of me if they should open my grave but my bones that will stare at them through hollow sockets and bared teeth. I write this to warn my friends not to be shocked at my changed attitude toward them, but to be aware that I have it in me to be someone other than I am, and I write to ask forgiveness that death is not wholesome for friendships, that bones do not talk, have no quarrel with me, do not even know I exist. A machine called skeleton will take my place in the minds of others when I am dead among the living, and that machine will make it obvious that I have died to be identified by bones that have no speech, no thought, no mind to speak of having let themselves be carried once around in me, as at my service at the podium or as I lay beside my love or when I held my child at birth or embraced a friend or shook a critic's hand or held a pen to sign a check or book or wrote a farewell letter to a love or held my penis at the bowl or lay my hand upon my face at the mirror and approved of it. There is Ignatow, it will be said, looking down inside the open grave. I'll be somewhere in my poems, I think, to be mistaken for my bones, but There's Ignatow will be said. I say to those who persist, just read what I have written. I'll be there, held together by another kind of structure, of thought and imagery, mind and matter, love and longing, tensions opposite, such as the skeleton requires to stand upright, to move with speed, to sit with confidence, my friend the skeleton and I its friend, shielding it from harm.
The music was already turning sad,  those fresh-faced voices singing in a round  the lie that time could set its needle back and play from the beginning. Had you lived  to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might  have broken from the circle of that past more ours than yours. Never even sure  which was the truest color for your hair  (it changed with each photographer), we claimed you for ourselves; called you John and named  the day you left us (spun out like a reel—  the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all) an end to hope itself. It isn’t true,  and worse, does you no justice if we call  your death the death of anything but you. II It put you in the headlines once again:  years after you’d left the band, you joined  another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link all memory with their end. The studio  of history can tamper with you now,  as if there’d always been a single track chance traveled on, and your discordant voice  had led us to the final violence.  Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan, had catalogued your favorite foods, your views  on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped  your quips and daily antics from the news, I keep a loving record of your death.  All the evidence is in—of what,  and to what end, it’s hard to figure out, riddles you might have beat into a song.  A younger face of yours, a cover shot,  peered from all the newsstands as if proof of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.
They’ve perched for hours on that window-ledge, scarcely  moving. Beak to beak, a matched set, they differ  almost imperceptibly— like salt and pepper shakers. It’s an event when they tuck  (simultaneously) their pinpoint  heads into lavender vests of fat. But reminiscent  of clock hands blandly  turning because they must have turned—somehow, they’ve  taken on the grave,  small-eyed aspect of monks hooded in conferences so intimate nothing need be said. If some are chuckling in the park, earning their bread, these are content  to let the dark engulf them— it’s all the human  imagination can fathom,  how single-mindedly mindless two silhouettes  stand in a window thick  as milk glass. They appear never to have fed on  anything else when they stir  all of a sudden to peck savagely, for love or hygiene, at the grimy  feathers of the other; but when they resume  their places, the shift  is one only a painter or a barber (prodding a chin  back into position)  would be likely to notice.
“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,  O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,  There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,  Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.  Or was it that I mocked myself alone?  I wish that I might be a thinking stone.  The sea of spuming thought foists up again  The radiant bubble that she was. And then  A deep up-pouring from some saltier well  Within me, bursts its watery syllable. II A red bird flies across the golden floor.  It is a red bird that seeks out his choir  Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.  A torrent will fall from him when he finds.  Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?  I am a man of fortune greeting heirs; For it has come that thus I greet the spring.  These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.  No spring can follow past meridian. Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss To make believe a starry connaissance. III Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese  Sat tittivating by their mountain pools Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?  I shall not play the flat historic scale.  You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought  The end of love in their all-speaking braids.  You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.  Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain  That not one curl in nature has survived?  Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,  Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep? IV This luscious and impeccable fruit of life  Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.  When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,  Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.  An apple serves as well as any skull To be the book in which to read a round,  And is as excellent, in that it is composed Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.  But it excels in this, that as the fruit  Of love, it is a book too mad to read  Before one merely reads to pass the time. V In the high west there burns a furious star.  It is for fiery boys that star was set And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.  The measure of the intensity of love Is measure, also, of the verve of earth. For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke  Ticks tediously the time of one more year.  And you? Remember how the crickets came  Out of their mother grass, like little kin,  In the pale nights, when your first imagery  Found inklings of your bond to all that dust. VI If men at forty will be painting lakes The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,  The basic slate, the universal hue.  There is a substance in us that prevails.  But in our amours amorists discern  Such fluctuations that their scrivening  Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.  When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink  Into the compass and curriculum  Of introspective exiles, lecturing.  It is a theme for Hyacinth alone. VII The mules that angels ride come slowly down  The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.  Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.  These muleteers are dainty of their way.  Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat  Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.  This parable, in sense, amounts to this:  The honey of heaven may or may not come,  But that of earth both comes and goes at once.  Suppose these couriers brought amid their train  A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. VIII Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,  An ancient aspect touching a new mind. It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.  This trivial trope reveals a way of truth. Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.  Two golden gourds distended on our vines,  Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,  Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque. We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,  The laughing sky will see the two of us  Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains. IX In verses wild with motion, full of din,  Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure  As the deadly thought of men accomplishing  Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate  The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit  Is not too lusty for your broadening. I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything  For the music and manner of the paladins  To make oblation fit. Where shall I find  Bravura adequate to this great hymn? X The fops of fancy in their poems leave  Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,  Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.  I am a yeoman, as such fellows go. I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs, No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.  But, after all, I know a tree that bears A semblance to the thing I have in mind.  It stands gigantic, with a certain tip To which all birds come sometime in their time.  But when they go that tip still tips the tree. XI If sex were all, then every trembling hand  Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,  That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth From madness or delight, without regard To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!  Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink, Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,  Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog  Boomed from his very belly odious chords. XII A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky, On sidelong wing, around and round and round.  A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,  Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I  Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,  In lordly study. Every day, I found Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.  Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued, And still pursue, the origin and course  Of love, but until now I never knew That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once  As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes  Made sharp air sharper by their smell  These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones  We left much more, left what still is  The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. The spring clouds blow  Above the shuttered mansion-house,  Beyond our gate and the windy sky Cries out a literate despair. We knew for long the mansion's look  And what we said of it became A part of what it is ... Children,  Still weaving budded aureoles, Will speak our speech and never know, Will say of the mansion that it seems  As if he that lived there left behind  A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white,  Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak. Alive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came, Pushed us forward, emptying the laboratory each night undisturbed by Erasure.  In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the window, street lamps at the single tree.  Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to photographs of the improved city. The camera, once commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue. The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft, unreliable.  Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.
dans le simple appareil D’une beauté qu’on vient d’arracher au sommeil. Smoothed by sleep and ruffled by your dreams  The surface of the little lake Fed by unconscious tributary streams,  Unbroken by the breezes nightmares make,  Like your face looks fathomless and seems  Bottomless till light or noises wake. You move and murmur and almost awake. I admire but do not wish to enter, Like any wanderer beside Moonlit water in midwinter Who as a simulacrum for the tide Casting a pebble into the calm centre  Watches the circles spread from side to side.  I wait for you and morning at your side. Such sources feed the mirror of your mind,  I dare not touch the surface of your sleep.  But to love by ignorance resigned, Infatuated guardian, I keep Watch beside a fountain where I find  No image, for images too deep, Above your breathing regular and deep.
I The telephone keeps talking to itself: Garbage in the streets, a butterfly, A rubber raft abandoned, floating out to sea, And late last night nearby, a conflagration— If you knew half the secrets I can tell, The accidents, the threats, the promises, All anonymous, and the voices That, like a demoniac, I have: An unwilling rhyme, a cry for help, An order for a pound of stewing beef And someone begging someone to come back— All of these proceed from my black mouth, All and more are locked in my black heart, Information, long distances, wrong numbers.II The clock at first was fast and now has stopped That holds all of our lifetimes in its hands.III “We sleep and wake watched over by machines. Are these intelligent objects our servants merely? Are they our closet masters, maybe? Will we be accomplices and equals one day?”  Tool-and-Die Makers’ Manual   Newly revised, 1964IV The gun, the peppermill, the gramophone, The bee, the salamander and the swan— To be explicit, what have they in common? The corkscrew, the stethoscope, the laundromat, The lyre bird, the python and the wombat, How do these differ from the domestic cat? Is it a question of theirs and ours or this and that? What reconciles the wireless and the whale? Did he who made the lamb invent the wheel? And what was wisdom doing all the while? A catastrophe and a category will Swallow sardines and supermarkets whole.V But you or rather thou, to be archaic, Always demanding, never dull but sometimes sick, Intimate machinery, my body! Whose only raison d’etre is to be: Your pleasures and your pains are your own business; Don’t ask me for a taste or a caress, Who, when I weep, weep tear of glass, Round and brittle. Your appetites embarrass Me. Mine tire you. Old Thing, The moral is, the moral is, Keep going, And perhaps we shall meet again at the Resurrection— The wonder is, what then I shall put on?
The sight of beauty simply makes us sick: There are too many hours in the day, Too many wicked faces built like flowers And far too many bargains for a song. Jade and paste, cashmere and ormolu— Who said that all the arts aspire to music? It’s obvious, for time is obvious, That all that art aspires to is junk. Blackmailed by these mathoms of the past, One is indebted for another perspective To quaint giraffes and quainter wallabies, The nearly human and the faintly monstrous, The outrageously contemporary joke. Trespassing on a no man’s territory, Unlike the moralist one is at a loss Where to be human is not to be at home. In a zoo, you see, one can acquire nothing: Zebras aren’t wishes. Nor is the flea market Exactly the place for those who know what they want. Like far out stations on the Metro (which they are) Somewhere, in heaven perhaps, they correspond, In the heaven of open arms and unpaid bills, Where beer is drunk on the lawn all afternoon And every night we bid, and make, a slam.
Ce qui est beau à Leningrad, c’est Saint Petersbourg.  What fellow traveller returned from the U.S.S.R., Burdened with souvenirs in the form of second thoughts, said That, rephrasing the Slavic platitude as a reactionary epigram? Thence  One must count oneself privileged to have escaped empty-handed,  Frisked in exit by the incompetent customs of the country  Who got everything backwards, inspecting my papers with a glass:  Bourgeois formalism apart, my handwriting looks like a decadent cipher. “Chto eto?” The pocket epic or this wordy verse? “Poezia.” Insisting it scans as prose they confiscate War and Peace: The classic comeback: loved her, hated him, your eponymous warhead In gremium qui saepe se reicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris:  Even apologists for free love must confess this pair legally  Wed, a union no sentimental do-gooder likes to solemnize. V., I’m afraid the authorities took away your name  Which they found in my notebook. Asked who you were,  I said, “Someone I met in a restaurant.” Not so:  You were a pick-up of sorts on Nevsky Prospekt  Where as I puzzled over a plan filched from Intourist  That first evening you appeared eager to be of help.  In exchange for a few verbatim tips on English idiom  (“Tell me, please, is it better, ‘Here you are!’ or ‘There it is!’ ”) you afforded me a smattering of Russian—Dom, dub, tsat, eima dvorets, knigi, mir, ya ne ponemayu,  House—oak—garden—winter-palace—books—world—I don’t understand— And your jealous services as a guide to the environs  When you were “free from class”. Unlike the other touts,  Official and unofficial, who besieged the foreigners’ hotel, you never  Asked for cigarettes or dollars nor offered girls or watches,  But wanted books and talk. Whether you were an agent  I am not absolute. If so, it doesn’t figure. Who sold me “art treasures” to take out, a nickel  Samovar and the biscuit bust of Pushkin, price two rubles,  From that popular Thrift Shop where one bought antiques, the Only place in Leningrad to find silverware, glass, or china, As department stores seemed to stock nothing but plastic gimcracks?  Enough economics—unless I just mention in passing the maids  At the hotel, patriots whom I detected to be helping  Themselves to my dwindling whisky. When I locked it up  One morning, on my return I found the bed unmade. Still there are things I want to ask you, V. Are you in prison or power? Were you really interrogated As you foretold if you were seen with me? Paranoid Melodrama I supposed, yet daily life in never-never land. You warned me one was followed, watched, suspected, bugged, betrayed  As a matter of course, and there were certain places We mustn’t be seen together in public, like divorcées. Out of bounds to you the doldrums of the Europa. Every day you used to suggest some novel rendezvous Where until you materialized no one was in evidence. Dialectics make impossible bedfellows. Are you today the interrogator  You once were, inexhaustible in futile questions of American usage?  Following a call at the single synagogue, where we tapped The anti-semitic party line, you invited me back for A supper of black bread, sausage, and sweet white wine. No English on the stair or in the common hallway You cautioned, but your student’s room itself was an asylum, With an encyclopaedia, your father’s paintings, a dusty grand piano  (“I was used to play.”), and the telephone. “Talk now!” The couple embracing in the entrance, were they also spies? What circuitous routes we pursued in our innocent sight-seeing,  How vast the meander of the stone Hermitage which holds  A pictorial history of pillaged Europe, where the fat, satisfied  Intelligent bust of the Holstein Messalina smirks from its pedestal,  As at Tsarskoe Selo, which the present regime calls Pushkin.  There, amid monumental, autumnal ruin, in a neo-gothic folly, Lunching on lard, I learned the Russian word for cosy,Oiutny: neither Pavlovsk, that meticulously restored memorial to filial resentment Nor Peterhof’s post-war proletarian Renaissance trick pavilions quite qualify.  I go on like a guidebook, there being none such. Nowhere could we find a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary  Or maps less rudimentary than those of a vanished century. Lies appropriately describe this sequestrated Czarist capital founded on water,  Edifice of pure will and an idea, double-glazed window Closed on the West. The past lingers along the Neva Like a revisionist prince: pink, green, ochre, robin’s-egg-blue Italianate confectionery on a Scythian scale. You wanted to know  Why all foreigners are so fascinated by palaces and churches Used as cinemas and baths? Our taste is counter-revolutionary. Just fancy playing Soviet monopoly or enduring social-realist monotony!  And having nothing to read but Lenin and Jack London Unless in samizdat! I am unable to appreciate a solitary Line of Russian verse in translation, from Bogan to Brodski. Although, like Leningrad at the same time fantastic and prosaic,  Your novels form a sort of exotic province of English, I don’t know why, inimitable Pushkin is a noted bore. But who came here to talk about literature? The night  Before leaving I invited you to squander my last vouchers  Somewhere they, and we, would be accepted at face value:  After two helpings of chicken you ordered another, of veal. Russkaya dusha! What if we were brothers? Haven’t men  More in common than their wants, such as language, a  Skeleton key rattled in so many locks? With all utopias, The farther from perfection the better; this future that works  Looks so old-fashioned and unkind. Although the masses may Be content, unhappy, or indifferent, excellence is an individual gesture.  Malice, too, is personal. The destroyer Aurora opposite Intourist’s incongruous  Glass prison, her heroes liquidated, will she ever lift anchor  For the free world? Here, perhaps better dead than read,  Instead of the Concise Oxford Dictionary you wanted, this letter.
The island’s dark tonight. The radio crackles with static, news of a blackout, the voice coming through first loud, then soft, as if a storm were moving to cut all lifelines off. My one-room cabin has a bed, a table, a chair. Living this way, I understand better that scene by an anonymous illuminator: a row of monks eating at a rough table, diagonals of light slicing across the room to fall, as if by accident, on their simple meal. The black and white tiles on the floor a symbol of the formal repetitions of the simplest life, or maybe an oblique allusion to a paradox of theology: the complementary nature of good and evil. Is evil possible here where everyone lives so individually and nature appears to be neutral toward everything but itself? Some mornings I wake too suddenly, the light on the wall brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder for a moment, where am I? I answer myself, my disembodied voice high and far off like what I imagine saints and martyrs heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island. Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee, settling into the simple ceremony of another morning. Outside the sea birds pick the clam flats clean, fly off, returning late in the afternoon looking for more to scavenge. Good days, I swim in the quarry, sun myself on the rocks, and plan a diary. One entry: I feel this place to be a rough approximation of heaven, the heaven of the lost ...
The world bends us to its purpose. In the public gardens, we found a “gazing globe” balanced on a waist-high pedestal, a silver ball a foot in circumference, reflecting sky and ground, ourselves as we stood above it. We stared into its depths, as in a crystal ball, our faces large and wild, arms and legs unnaturally small, as if a spell were on the world, or, finally, we clearly saw the world for what it was: too brightly shining, circular, unadorned. Trees bent toward us, mere shadows of themselves, their shadows more substantial than the trees themselves. The sky at one o’clock a milky white, light-filled, yet without sun or cloud. And beds of tulips rising from the groundswell, each one a little mouth. I knelt beside you on one knee, caught up in walls of air I couldn’t touch or see, the outer world around me wavering, as on a hot summer day. We looked out to the future. Our future selves. You stood dead center in the globe and raised your hand to stop the scene, your palm enlarging until it dwarfed the tallest trees. Then waving goodbye, we walked, as a joke, backward and away, farther and farther away— the globe still gazing on us— leaving ourselves behind to live forever in that silver room, to watch and spy on lovers like ourselves.
Swirl and smash of waves against the legs and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton, come as the fathers of our fathers came, to see the past’s Peep Show. On two good legs, on one, they came, veterans and stay-at-homes of the Great War, all casualties, to stroll the West Pier’s promenade, past bands, flags, and minstrel shows, past Gladys Pawsey in a high-necked bathing costume riding her bicycle off the high board, past Hokey-Pokey and Electric Shocker, to the old Penny Palace, pennies burning hotly in their hands, the worn watery profile of Queen Victoria looking away from it all. I bend to the mutoscope’s lit window to see “What the Butler Saw”: a woman artlessly taking off her clothes in a jerky striptease I can slow down or speed up by turning the handle of the mutoscope. Easily I raise her from darkness— the eye eternally aroused by what it can’t touch— to watch her brief repeating performance that counts for so little. Or so much. I can’t be sure which. Abruptly, THE END shuts down the image, but her story continues as she reverses time’s tawdry sequence to dress and quickly disappear down a maze of narrow streets and alleys filled with the ghostly bodies and bodiless ghosts of causality, the unredeemed and never-to-be-born bearing her along to a flight of shabby stairs, a rented room where she is free as anyone to dream her dreams and smoke a cigarette, smoke from the lit tip spiraling in patternless patterns toward the room’s bare light bulb, the light I see her by harsh, violently unforgiving, as she makes tomorrow into a question of either/or: to leave this room, this vacancy forever, or go on exactly as she has before. Old ghost, your history is nameless and sexual, you are your own enigma, victim or heroine of an act of repetition that, once chosen, will choose you for a lifetime. I peer into the tunneled past, so small, so faraway and fragmentary, and yet, not unconnected to what I am now. Dilapidation upon dilapidation, Brighton is crumbling, fading to sepia tones, as your unfunny burlesque continues past your life, perhaps past mine, the past preserved and persevering, the sentimental past.
1 I count the rays of the jellyfish: twelve in this one, like a clock to tell time by, thirteen in the next, time gone awry. A great wind brought them in, left them here to die, indifferent time measured by whirling moon and sun, by tides in perpetual fall and rise. Englobed, transparent, they litter the beach, creatureless creatures deprived of speech who spawn more like themselves before they die. I peer into each and see a faceless red center, red spokes like a star. They are, and are not, like what we are.2 At noon, in the too bright light, watchful, looking too hard, we saw the scene turn dark and lost the children for a moment, waves crashing around them. Shadow blended with shadow, the sun inside a cloud, and then the children were restored to us, our worst fears a hallucination. All afternoon their castles, poor and proud, rose and fell. Great civilizations were built, came to an end, the children mighty lords, their castles only as small as we are to the stars and starry structures. The day was infinite for them, time stretching to the farthest horizon, the sun their overlord. But how to reconcile these summer days washing away with our need to commemorate, to hold onto? They knew. And so they sang a song tuneless and true, admitting no fixed point, no absolute, words overheard and blurred by great winds blowing in, a rhyme or round for a time such as we live in: The world is made, knocked down, and made again!3 This is the moment of stasis: gulls stall above the burned-out mansion on the bluff, gone for thirty years, and cairns rise up, stone balanced on stone. By evening, the beach is empty, my shadow a long-legged giant leading me past small battlements to the day’s masterpiece: a dripping castle, all towers and crenellation, tall as a child, made by many children, flying three-pointed flags that wave hopefully in the wind. Closer, I see the moat, the courtyard’s secret pool in which, macabrely, red jellyfish float, death and potentiality entwined forever. A crab small as my fingernail, dead, perfect in every detail, with hairlike spinnerets and claws, guards the open castle door from entry as night begins to fall and shadows dark as ink wash in to stain the beach. Shivering, I think, O sentry, who would enter here?4 Traveling once, I stood under the open sky inside a great unfinished cathedral. Stonemasons, there for generations, clung like ants to thin scaffolding, carving griffins and saints, the rising spires and portals dripping like hot wax, and birds flew freely in and out of lacy walls, like angels thrown down from heaven. Gaudy and grand, it was a vision of eternal mind. Its maker, dead for a long time, had left no finished plan, design, but work went on, days turning into years, the century coming to a close. In disbelief, I touched each twisting vine and leaf, marveling at what had been done, and what was yet to be, and wished, as I wish now, O let it never be complete!
I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches Losing what little the frost had left them to hold. I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows, Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold. They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless; Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds. Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering, Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words. Too great for my blundering comfort, your anguish confused me. From a great distance, I saw you standing alone. Frozen and stark, in a black iron circle of silence, I could not pity your pain; I could scarcely pity my own.
I waited and worked To win myself leisure, Till loneliness irked And I turned to raw pleasure. I drank and I gamed, I feasted and wasted, Till, sick and ashamed, The food stood untasted. I searched in the Book For rooted convictions, Till the badgered brain shook With its own contradictions. Then, done with the speech, Of the foolishly lettered, I started to teach Life cannot be bettered: That the warrior fails Whatever his weapon, And nothing avails While time and chance happen. That fools who assure men With lies are respected, While the vision of pure men Is scorned and rejected. That a wise man goes grieving Even in Zion, While any dog living Outroars a dead lion.
You have not conquered me—it is the surge Of love itself that beats against my will; It is the sting of conflict, the old urge That calls me still. It is not you I love—it is the form And shadow of all lovers who have died That gives you all the freshness of a warm And unfamiliar bride. It is your name I breathe, your hands I seek; It will be you when you are gone. And yet the dream, the name I never speak, Is that that lures me on. It is the golden summons, the bright wave Of banners calling me anew; It is all beauty, perilous and grave— It is not you.
In harmony with the rule of irony— which requires that we harbor the enemy on this side of the barricade—the shell of the unborn eagle or pelican, which is made to give protection till the great beaks can harden, is the first thing to take up poison. The mineral case is soft and gibbous as the moon in a lake—an elastic, rubbery, nightmare water that won't break. Elsewhere, also, I see the mockeries of struggle, a softness over people.
All you have to lose is one connection and the mind  uncouples all the way back.  It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars  cannot sustain  life: a crate of  tractor axles,  for example, a dozen dozen  clasp knives,  a hundred  bolts of satin— perhaps you  specialized  more than  you imagined.
Foil'd by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn, We leave the brutal world to take its way, And, Patience! in another life, we say The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne. And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they, Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn? No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing—only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
We were apart; yet, day by day, I bade my heart more constant be. I bade it keep the world away, And grow a home for only thee; Nor fear'd but thy love likewise grew, Like mine, each day, more tried, more true. The fault was grave! I might have known, What far too soon, alas! I learn'd— The heart can bind itself alone, And faith may oft be unreturn'd. Self-sway'd our feelings ebb and swell— Thou lov'st no more;—Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!—and thou, thou lonely heart, Which never yet without remorse Even for a moment didst depart From thy remote and spher{e}d course To haunt the place where passions reign— Back to thy solitude again! Back! with the conscious thrill of shame Which Luna felt, that summer-night, Flash through her pure immortal frame, When she forsook the starry height To hang over Endymion's sleep Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep. Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved How vain a thing is mortal love, Wandering in Heaven, far removed. But thou hast long had place to prove This truth—to prove, and make thine own: "Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone." Or, if not quite alone, yet they Which touch thee are unmating things— Ocean and clouds and night and day; Lorn autumns and triumphant springs; And life, and others' joy and pain, And love, if love, of happier men. Of happier men—for they, at least, Have dream'd two human hearts might blend In one, and were through faith released From isolation without end Prolong'd; nor knew, although not less Alone than thou, their loneliness.
In this lone, open glade I lie, Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand; And at its end, to stay the eye, Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand! Birds here make song, each bird has his, Across the girdling city's hum. How green under the boughs it is! How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come! Sometimes a child will cross the glade To take his nurse his broken toy; Sometimes a thrush flit overhead Deep in her unknown day's employ. Here at my feet what wonders pass, What endless, active life is here! What blowing daisies, fragrant grass! An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear. Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out, And, eased of basket and of rod, Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout. In the huge world, which roars hard by, Be others happy if they can! But in my helpless cradle I Was breathed on by the rural Pan. I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd, Think often, as I hear them rave, That peace has left the upper world And now keeps only in the grave. Yet here is peace for ever new! When I who watch them am away, Still all things in this glade go through The changes of their quiet day. Then to their happy rest they pass! The flowers upclose, the birds are fed, The night comes down upon the grass, The child sleeps warmly in his bed. Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city's jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel with others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb— We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb. When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife.  When Goethe's death was told, we said: Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. Physician of the iron age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Thou ailest here, and here! He look'd on Europe's dying hour Of fitful dream and feverish power; His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring life— He said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. And Wordsworth!—Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! For never has such soothing voice Been to your shadowy world convey'd, Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade Heard the clear song of Orpheus come Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. Wordsworth has gone from us—and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen—on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world. Ah! since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might, Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power? Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear— But who, ah! who, will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly— But who, like him, will put it by? Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, O Rotha, with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.
We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides.  But tasks in hours of insight will'd  Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.  With aching hands and bleeding feet We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.  Not till the hours of light return,  All we have built do we discern.  Then, when the clouds are off the soul, When thou dost bask in Nature's eye, Ask, how she view'd thy self-control, Thy struggling, task'd morality—  Nature, whose free, light, cheerful air,  Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.  And she, whose censure thou dost dread, Whose eye thou wast afraid to seek, See, on her face a glow is spread, A strong emotion on her cheek!  "Ah, child!" she cries, "that strife divine,  Whence was it, for it is not mine?  "There is no effort on my brow— I do not strive, I do not weep; I rush with the swift spheres and glow In joy, and when I will, I sleep.  Yet that severe, that earnest air,  I saw, I felt it once—but where?  "I knew not yet the gauge of time, Nor wore the manacles of space; I felt it in some other clime, I saw it in some other place.  'Twas when the heavenly house I trod,  And lay upon the breast of God."
"Not by the justice that my father spurn'd, Not for the thousands whom my father slew, Altars unfed and temples overturn'd, Cold hearts and thankless tongues, where thanks are due; Fell this dread voice from lips that cannot lie, Stern sentence of the Powers of Destiny.  "I will unfold my sentence and my crime. My crime—that, rapt in reverential awe, I sate obedient, in the fiery prime Of youth, self-govern'd, at the feet of Law; Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things.  "My father loved injustice, and lived long; Crown'd with grey hairs he died, and full of sway. I loved the good he scorn'd, and hated wrong— The Gods declare my recompense to-day. I look'd for life more lasting, rule more high; And when six years are measured, lo, I die!  "Yet surely, O my people, did I deem Man's justice from the all-just Gods was given; A light that from some upper fount did beam, Some better archetype, whose seat was heaven; A light that, shining from the blest abodes, Did shadow somewhat of the life of Gods.  "Mere phantoms of man's self-tormenting heart, Which on the sweets that woo it dares not feed! Vain dreams, which quench our pleasures, then depart When the duped soul, self-master'd, claims its meed; When, on the strenuous just man, Heaven bestows, Crown of his struggling life, an unjust close!  "Seems it so light a thing, then, austere Powers, To spurn man's common lure, life's pleasant things? Seems there no joy in dances crown'd with flowers, Love, free to range, and regal banquetings? Bend ye on these, indeed, an unmoved eye, Not Gods but ghosts, in frozen apathy?  "Or is it that some Force, too wise, too strong, Even for yourselves to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth, and heaven, and men, and Gods along, Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile? And the great powers we serve, themselves may be Slaves of a tyrannous necessity?  "Or in mid-heaven, perhaps, your golden cars, Where earthly voice climbs never, wing their flight, And in wild hunt, through mazy tracts of stars, Sweep in the sounding stillness of the night? Or in deaf ease, on thrones of dazzling sheen, Drinking deep draughts of joy, ye dwell serene?  "Oh, wherefore cheat our youth, if thus it be, Of one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream? Stringing vain words of powers we cannot see, Blind divinations of a will supreme; Lost labour! when the circumambient gloom But hides, if Gods, Gods careless of our doom?  "The rest I give to joy. Even while I speak, My sand runs short; and—as yon star-shot ray, Hemm'd by two banks of cloud, peers pale and weak, Now, as the barrier closes, dies away— Even so do past and future intertwine, Blotting this six years' space, which yet is mine.  "Six years—six little years—six drops of time! Yet suns shall rise, and many moons shall wane, And old men die, and young men pass their prime, And languid pleasure fade and flower again, And the dull Gods behold, ere these are flown, Revels more deep, joy keener than their own.  "Into the silence of the groves and woods I will go forth; though something would I say— Something—yet what, I know not; for the Gods The doom they pass revoke not, nor delay; And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all, And the night waxes, and the shadows fall.  "Ye men of Egypt, ye have heard your king! I go, and I return not. But the will Of the great Gods is plain; and ye must bring Ill deeds, ill passions, zealous to fulfil Their pleasure, to their feet; and reap their praise, The praise of Gods, rich boon! and length of days."  —So spake he, half in anger, half in scorn; And one loud cry of grief and of amaze Broke from his sorrowing people; so he spake, And turning, left them there; and with brief pause, Girt with a throng of revellers, bent his way To the cool region of the groves he loved. There by the river-banks he wander'd on, From palm-grove on to palm-grove, happy trees, Their smooth tops shining sunward, and beneath Burying their unsunn'd stems in grass and flowers; Where in one dream the feverish time of youth Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy Might wander all day long and never tire. Here came the king, holding high feast, at morn, Rose-crown'd; and ever, when the sun went down, A hundred lamps beam'd in the tranquil gloom, From tree to tree all through the twinkling grove, Revealing all the tumult of the feast— Flush'd guests, and golden goblets foam'd with wine; While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead Splinter'd the silver arrows of the moon.  It may be that sometimes his wondering soul From the loud joyful laughter of his lips Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man Who wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape Gliding half hidden through the dusky stems, Would thrust a hand before the lifted bowl, Whispering: A little space, and thou art mine! It may be on that joyless feast his eye Dwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within, Took measure of his soul, and knew its strength, And by that silent knowledge, day by day, Was calm'd, ennobled, comforted, sustain'd. It may be; but not less his brow was smooth, And his clear laugh fled ringing through the gloom, And his mirth quail'd not at the mild reproof Sigh'd out by winter's sad tranquillity; Nor, pall'd with its own fulness, ebb'd and died In the rich languor of long summer-days; Nor wither'd when the palm-tree plumes, that roof'd With their mild dark his grassy banquet-hall, Bent to the cold winds of the showerless spring; No, nor grew dark when autumn brought the clouds.  So six long years he revell'd, night and day. And when the mirth wax'd loudest, with dull sound Sometimes from the grove's centre echoes came, To tell his wondering people of their king; In the still night, across the steaming flats, Mix'd with the murmur of the moving Nile.
Set where the upper streams of Simois flow Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood; And Hector was in Ilium, far below, And fought, and saw it not—but there it stood! It stood, and sun and moonshine rain'd their light On the pure columns of its glen-built hall. Backward and forward roll'd the waves of fight Round Troy—but while this stood, Troy could not fall. So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul. Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air; Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll; We visit it by moments, ah, too rare! We shall renew the battle in the plain To-morrow;—red with blood will Xanthus be; Hector and Ajax will be there again, Helen will come upon the wall to see. Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife, And fluctuate 'twixt blind hopes and blind despairs, And fancy that we put forth all our life, And never know how with the soul it fares. Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.
Hark! ah, the nightingale— The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark!—what pain! O wanderer from a Grecian shore, Still, after many years, in distant lands, Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain— Say, will it never heal? And can this fragrant lawn With its cool trees, and night, And the sweet, tranquil Thames, And moonshine, and the dew, To thy rack'd heart and brain Afford no balm? Dost thou to-night behold, Here, through the moonlight on this English grass, The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild? Dost thou again peruse With hot cheeks and sear'd eyes The too clear web, and thy dumb sister's shame? Dost thou once more assay Thy flight, and feel come over thee, Poor fugitive, the feathery change Once more, and once more seem to make resound With love and hate, triumph and agony, Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale? Listen, Eugenia— How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again—thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!
Strew on her roses, roses,  And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes;  Ah, would that I did too! Her mirth the world required;  She bathed it in smiles of glee. But her heart was tired, tired,  And now they let her be. Her life was turning, turning,  In mazes of heat and sound. But for peace her soul was yearning,  And now peace laps her round. Her cabin'd, ample spirit,  It flutter'd and fail'd for breath. To-night it doth inherit  The vasty hall of death.
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn-evening. The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;—hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play! The lights come out in the street, In the school-room windows;—but cold, Solemn, unlighted, austere, Through the gathering darkness, arise The chapel-walls, in whose bound Thou, my father! art laid. There thou dost lie, in the gloom Of the autumn evening. But ah! That word, gloom, to my mind Brings thee back, in the light Of thy radiant vigour, again; In the gloom of November we pass'd Days not dark at thy side; Seasons impair'd not the ray Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear. Such thou wast! and I stand In the autumn evening, and think Of bygone autumns with thee. Fifteen years have gone round Since thou arosest to tread, In the summer-morning, the road Of death, at a call unforeseen, Sudden. For fifteen years, We who till then in thy shade Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak, have endured Sunshine and rain as we might, Bare, unshaded, alone, Lacking the shelter of thee. O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely afar, In the sounding labour-house vast Of being, is practised that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm! Yes, in some far-shining sphere, Conscious or not of the past, Still thou performest the word Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live— Prompt, unwearied, as here! Still thou upraisest with zeal The humble good from the ground, Sternly repressest the bad! Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse Those who with half-open eyes Tread the border-land dim 'Twixt vice and virtue; reviv'st, Succourest!—this was thy work, This was thy life upon earth. What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?— Most men eddy about Here and there—eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die— Perish;—and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves, In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone. And there are some, whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ah yes! some of us strive Not without action to die Fruitless, but something to snatch From dull oblivion, nor all Glut the devouring grave! We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance!—but it leads A long, steep journey, through sunk Gorges, o'er mountains in snow. Cheerful, with friends, we set forth— Then on the height, comes the storm. Thunder crashes from rock To rock, the cataracts reply, Lightnings dazzle our eyes. Roaring torrents have breach'd The track, the stream-bed descends In the place where the wayfarer once Planted his footstep—the spray Boils o'er its borders! aloft The unseen snow-beds dislodge Their hanging ruin; alas, Havoc is made in our train! Friends, who set forth at our side, Falter, are lost in the storm. We, we only are left! With frowning foreheads, with lips Sternly compress'd, we strain on, On—and at nightfall at last Come to the end of our way, To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks; Where the gaunt and taciturn host Stands on the threshold, the wind Shaking his thin white hairs— Holds his lantern to scan Our storm-beat figures, and asks: Whom in our party we bring? Whom we have left in the snow? Sadly we answer: We bring Only ourselves! we lost Sight of the rest in the storm. Hardly ourselves we fought through, Stripp'd, without friends, as we are. Friends, companions, and train, The avalanche swept from our side. But thou woulds't not alone Be saved, my father! alone Conquer and come to thy goal, Leaving the rest in the wild. We were weary, and we Fearful, and we in our march Fain to drop down and to die. Still thou turnedst, and still Beckonedst the trembler, and still Gavest the weary thy hand. If, in the paths of the world, Stones might have wounded thy feet, Toil or dejection have tried Thy spirit, of that we saw Nothing—to us thou wage still Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! Therefore to thee it was given Many to save with thyself; And, at the end of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. And through thee I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Pure souls honour'd and blest By former ages, who else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends of mankind. Servants of God!—or sons Shall I not call you? Because Not as servants ye knew Your Father's innermost mind, His, who unwillingly sees One of his little ones lost— Yours is the praise, if mankind Hath not as yet in its march Fainted, and fallen, and died! See! In the rocks of the world Marches the host of mankind, A feeble, wavering line. Where are they tending?—A God Marshall'd them, gave them their goal. Ah, but the way is so long! Years they have been in the wild! Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks Rising all round, overawe; Factions divide them, their host Threatens to break, to dissolve. —Ah, keep, keep them combined! Else, of the myriads who fill That army, not one shall arrive; Sole they shall stray; in the rocks Stagger for ever in vain, Die one by one in the waste. Then, in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Ye, like angels, appear, Radiant with ardour divine! Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re-inspire the brave! Order, courage, return. Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God.
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea. And a look of passionate desire O'er the sea and to the stars I send: "Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me, Calm me, ah, compose me to the end! "Ah, once more," I cried, "ye stars, ye waters, On my heart your mighty charm renew; Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, Feel my soul becoming vast like you!" From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven, Over the lit sea's unquiet way, In the rustling night-air came the answer: "Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they. "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see, These demand not that the things without them Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. "And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silver'd roll; For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul. "Bounded by themselves, and unregardful In what state God's other works may be, In their own tasks all their powers pouring, These attain the mighty life you see." O air-born voice! long since, severely clear, A cry like thine in mine own heart I hear: "Resolve to be thyself; and know that he, Who finds himself, loses his misery!"
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality; And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
An Episode AND the first grey of morning fill'd the east, And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream. But all the Tartar camp along the stream Was hush'd, and still the men were plunged in sleep; Sohrab alone, he slept not; all night long He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed; But when the grey dawn stole into his tent, He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword, And took his horseman's cloak, and left his tent, And went abroad into the cold wet fog, Through the dim camp to Peran-Wisa's tent.  Through the black Tartar tents he pass'd, which stood Clustering like bee-hives on the low flat strand Of Oxus, where the summer-floods o'erflow When the sun melts the snows in high Pamere; Through the black tents he pass'd, o'er that low strand, And to a hillock came, a little back From the stream's brink—the spot where first a boat, Crossing the stream in summer, scrapes the land. The men of former times had crown'd the top With a clay fort; but that was fall'n, and now The Tartars built there Peran-Wisa's tent, A dome of laths, and o'er it felts were spread. And Sohrab came there, and went in, and stood Upon the thick piled carpets in the tent, And found the old man sleeping on his bed Of rugs and felts, and near him lay his arms. And Peran-Wisa heard him, though the step Was dull'd; for he slept light, an old man's sleep; And he rose quickly on one arm, and said:—  "Who art thou? for it is not yet clear dawn. Speak! is there news, or any night alarm?"  But Sohrab came to the bedside, and said:— "Thou know'st me, Peran-Wisa! it is I. The sun is not yet risen, and the foe Sleep; but I sleep not; all night long I lie Tossing and wakeful, and I come to thee. For so did King Afrasiab bid me seek Thy counsel, and to heed thee as thy son, In Samarcand, before the army march'd; And I will tell thee what my heart desires. Thou know'st if, since from Ader-baijan first I came among the Tartars and bore arms, I have still served Afrasiab well, and shown, At my boy's years, the courage of a man. This too thou know'st, that while I still bear on The conquering Tartar ensigns through the world, And beat the Persians back on every field, I seek one man, one man, and one alone— Rustum, my father; who I hoped should greet, Should one day greet, upon some well-fought field, His not unworthy, not inglorious son. So I long hoped, but him I never find. Come then, hear now, and grant me what I ask. Let the two armies rest to-day; but I Will challenge forth the bravest Persian lords To meet me, man to man; if I prevail, Rustum will surely hear it; if I fall— Old man, the dead need no one, claim no kin. Dim is the rumour of a common fight, Where host meets host, and many names are sunk; But of a single combat fame speaks clear."  He spoke; and Peran-Wisa took the hand Of the young man in his, and sigh'd, and said:—  "O Sohrab, an unquiet heart is thine! Canst thou not rest among the Tartar chiefs, And share the battle's common chance with us Who love thee, but must press for ever first, In single fight incurring single risk, To find a father thou hast never seen? That were far best, my son, to stay with us Unmurmuring; in our tents, while it is war, And when 'tis truce, then in Afrasiab's towns. But, if this one desire indeed rules all, To seek out Rustum—seek him not through fight! Seek him in peace, and carry to his arms, O Sohrab, carry an unwounded son! But far hence seek him, for he is not here. For now it is not as when I was young, When Rustum was in front of every fray; But now he keeps apart, and sits at home, In Seistan, with Zal, his father old. Whether that his own mighty strength at last Feels the abhorr'd approaches of old age, Or in some quarrel with the Persian King. There go!—Thou wilt not? Yet my heart forebodes Danger or death awaits thee on this field. Fain would I know thee safe and well, though lost To us; fain therefore send thee hence, in peace To seek thy father, not seek single fights In vain;—but who can keep the lion's cub From ravening, and who govern Rustum's son? Go, I will grant thee what thy heart desires."  So said he, and dropp'd Sohrab's hand, and left His bed, and the warm rugs whereon he lay; And o'er his chilly limbs his woollen coat He pass'd, and tied his sandals on his feet, And threw a white cloak round him, and he took In his right hand a ruler's staff, no sword; And on his head he set his sheep-skin cap, Black, glossy, curl'd, the fleece of Kara-Kul; And raised the curtain of his tent, and call'd His herald to his side, and went abroad.  The sun by this had risen, and clear'd the fog From the broad Oxus and the glittering sands. And from their tents the Tartar horsemen filed Into the open plain; so Haman bade— Haman, who next to Peran-Wisa ruled The host, and still was in his lusty prime. From their black tents, long files of horse, they stream'd; As when some grey November morn the files, In marching order spread, of long-neck'd cranes Stream over Casbin and the southern slopes Of Elburz, from the Aralian estuaries, Or some frore Caspian reed-bed, southward bound For the warm Persian sea-board—so they stream'd. The Tartars of the Oxus, the King's guard, First, with black sheep-skin caps and with long spears; Large men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares. Next, the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south, The Tukas, and the lances of Salore, And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands; Light men and on light steeds, who only drink The acrid milk of camels, and their wells. And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came From far, and a more doubtful service own'd; The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes Who roam o'er Kipchak and the northern waste, Kalmucks and unkempt Kuzzaks, tribes who stray Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes, Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere; These all filed out from camp into the plain. And on the other side the Persians form'd;— First a light cloud of horse, Tartars they seem'd, The Ilyats of Khorassan, and behind, The royal troops of Persia, horse and foot, Marshall'd battalions bright in burnish'd steel. But Peran-Wisa with his herald came, Threading the Tartar squadrons to the front, And with his staff kept back the foremost ranks. And when Ferood, who led the Persians, saw That Peran-Wisa kept the Tartars back, He took his spear, and to the front he came, And check'd his ranks, and fix'd them where they stood. And the old Tartar came upon the sand Betwixt the silent hosts, and spake, and said:—  "Ferood, and ye, Persians and Tartars, hear! Let there be truce between the hosts to-day. But choose a champion from the Persian lords To fight our champion Sohrab, man to man."  As, in the country, on a morn in June, When the dew glistens on the pearled ears, A shiver runs through the deep corn for joy— So, when they heard what Peran-Wisa said, A thrill through all the Tartar squadrons ran Of pride and hope for Sohrab, whom they loved.  But as a troop of pedlars, from Cabool, Cross underneath the Indian Caucasus, That vast sky-neighbouring mountain of milk snow; Crossing so high, that, as they mount, they pass Long flocks of travelling birds dead on the snow, Choked by the air, and scarce can they themselves Slake their parch'd throats with sugar'd mulberries— In single file they move, and stop their breath, For fear they should dislodge the o'erhanging snows— So the pale Persians held their breath with fear.  And to Ferood his brother chiefs came up To counsel; Gudurz and Zoarrah came, And Feraburz, who ruled the Persian host Second, and was the uncle of the King; These came and counsell'd, and then Gudurz said:—  "Ferood, shame bids us take their challenge up, Yet champion have we none to match this youth. He has the wild stag's foot, the lion's heart. But Rustum came last night; aloof he sits And sullen, and has pitch'd his tents apart. Him will I seek, and carry to his ear The Tartar challenge, and this young man's name. Haply he will forget his wrath, and fight. Stand forth the while, and take their challenge up."  So spake he; and Ferood stood forth and cried:— "Old man, be it agreed as thou hast said! Let Sohrab arm, and we will find a man."  He spake: and Peran-Wisa turn'd, and strode Back through the opening squadrons to his tent. But through the anxious Persians Gudurz ran, And cross'd the camp which lay behind, and reach'd, Out on the sands beyond it, Rustum's tents. Of scarlet cloth they were, and glittering gay, Just pitch'd; the high pavilion in the midst Was Rustum's, and his men lay camp'd around. And Gudurz enter'd Rustum's tent, and found Rustum; his morning meal was done, but still The table stood before him, charged with food— A side of roasted sheep, and cakes of bread, And dark green melons; and there Rustum sate Listless, and held a falcon on his wrist, And play'd with it; but Gudurz came and stood Before him; and he look'd, and saw him stand, And with a cry sprang up and dropp'd the bird, And greeted Gudurz with both hands, and said:—  "Welcome! these eyes could see no better sight. What news? but sit down first, and eat and drink."  But Gudurz stood in the tent-door, and said:— "Not now! a time will come to eat and drink, But not to-day; to-day has other needs. The armies are drawn out, and stand at gaze; For from the Tartars is a challenge brought To pick a champion from the Persian lords To fight their champion—and thou know'st his name— Sohrab men call him, but his birth is hid. O Rustum, like thy might is this young man's! He has the wild stag's foot, the lion's heart; And he is young, and Iran's chiefs are old, Or else too weak; and all eyes turn to thee. Come down and help us, Rustum, or we lose!''  He spoke; but Rustum answer'd with a smile:— "Go to! if Iran's chiefs are old, then I Am older; if the young are weak, the King Errs strangely; for the King, for Kai Khosroo, Himself is young, and honours younger men, And lets the aged moulder to their graves. Rustum he loves no more, but loves the young— The young may rise at Sohrab's vaunts, not I. For what care I, though all speak Sohrab's fame? For would that I myself had such a son, And not that one slight helpless girl I have— A son so famed, so brave, to send to war, And I to tarry with the snow-hair'd Zal, My father, whom the robber Afghans vex, And clip his borders short, and drive his herds, And he has none to guard his weak old age. There would I go, and hang my armour up, And with my great name fence that weak old man, And spend the goodly treasures I have got, And rest my age, and hear of Sohrab's fame, And leave to death the hosts of thankless kings, And with these slaughterous hands draw sword no more.''  He spoke, and smiled; and Gudurz made reply:— "What then, O Rustum, will men say to this, When Sohrab dares our bravest forth, and seeks Thee most of all, and thou, whom most he seeks, Hidest thy face? Take heed lest men should say: Like some old miser, Rustum hoards his fame, And shuns to peril it with younger men." And, greatly moved, then Rustum made reply:— "O Gudurz, wherefore dost thou say such words? Thou knowest better words than this to say. What is one more, one less, obscure or famed, Valiant or craven, young or old, to me? Are not they mortal, am not I myself? But who for men of nought would do great deeds? Come, thou shalt see how Rustum hoards his fame! But I will fight unknown, and in plain arms; Let not men say of Rustum, he was match'd In single fight with any mortal man."  He spoke, and frown'd; and Gudurz turn'd, and ran Back quickly through the camp in fear and joy— Fear at his wrath, but joy that Rustum came. But Rustum strode to his tent-door, and call'd His followers in, and bade them bring his arms, And clad himself in steel; the arms he chose Were plain, and on his shield was no device, Only his helm was rich, inlaid with gold, And, from the fluted spine atop, a plume Of horsehair waved, a scarlet horsehair plume. So arm'd, he issued forth; and Ruksh, his horse, Follow'd him like a faithful hound at heel— Ruksh, whose renown was noised through all the earth, The horse, whom Rustum on a foray once Did in Bokhara by the river find A colt beneath its dam, and drove him home, And rear'd him; a bright bay, with lofty crest, Dight with a saddle-cloth of broider'd green Crusted with gold, and on the ground were work'd All beasts of chase, all beasts which hunters know. So follow'd, Rustum left his tents, and cross'd The camp, and to the Persian host appear'd. And all the Persians knew him, and with shouts Hail'd; but the Tartars knew not who he was. And dear as the wet diver to the eyes Of his pale wife who waits and weeps on shore, By sandy Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf, Plunging all day in the blue waves, at night, Having made up his tale of precious pearls, Rejoins her in their hut upon the sands— So dear to the pale Persians Rustum came.  And Rustum to the Persian front advanced, And Sohrab arm'd in Haman's tent, and came. And as afield the reapers cut a swath Down through the middle of a rich man's corn, And on each side are squares of standing corn, And in the midst a stubble, short and bare— So on each side were squares of men, with spears Bristling, and in the midst, the open sand. And Rustum came upon the sand, and cast His eyes toward the Tartar tents, and saw Sohrab come forth, and eyed him as he came.  As some rich woman, on a winter's morn, Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge Who with numb blacken'd fingers makes her fire— At cock-crow, on a starlit winter's morn, When the frost flowers the whiten'd window-panes— And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts Of that poor drudge may be; so Rustum eyed The unknown adventurous youth, who from afar Came seeking Rustum, and defying forth All the most valiant chiefs; long he perused His spirited air, and wonder'd who he was. For very young he seem'd, tenderly rear'd; Like some young cypress, tall, and dark, and straight, Which in a queen's secluded garden throws Its slight dark shadow on the moonlit turf, By midnight, to a bubbling fountain's sound— So slender Sohrab seem'd, so softly rear'd. And a deep pity enter'd Rustum's soul As he beheld him coming; and he stood, And beckon'd to him with his hand, and said:—  "O thou young man, the air of Heaven is soft, And warm, and pleasant; but the grave is cold! Heaven's air is better than the cold dead grave. Behold me! I am vast, and clad in iron, And tried; and I have stood on many a field Of blood, and I have fought with many a foe— Never was that field lost, or that foe saved. O Sohrab, wherefore wilt thou rush on death? Be govern'd! quit the Tartar host, and come To Iran, and be as my son to me, And fight beneath my banner till I die! There are no youths in Iran brave as thou."  So he spake, mildly; Sohrab heard his voice, The mighty voice of Rustum, and he saw His giant figure planted on the sand, Sole, like some single tower, which a chief Hath builded on the waste in former years Against the robbers; and he saw that head, Streak'd with its first grey hairs;—hope filled his soul, And he ran forward and embraced his knees, And clasp'd his hand within his own, and said:—  "O, by thy father's head! by thine own soul! Art thou not Rustum? speak! art thou not he?"  But Rustum eyed askance the kneeling youth, And turn'd away, and spake to his own soul:—  "Ah me, I muse what this young fox may mean! False, wily, boastful, are these Tartar boys. For if I now confess this thing he asks, And hide it not, but say: Rustum is here! He will not yield indeed, nor quit our foes, But he will find some pretext not to fight, And praise my fame, and proffer courteous gifts, A belt or sword perhaps, and go his way. And on a feast-tide, in Afrasiab's hall, In Samarcand, he will arise and cry: 'I challenged once, when the two armies camp'd Beside the Oxus, all the Persian lords To cope with me in single fight; but they Shrank, only Rustum dared; then he and I Changed gifts, and went on equal terms away.' So will he speak, perhaps, while men applaud; Then were the chiefs of Iran shamed through me."  And then he turn'd, and sternly spake aloud:— "Rise! wherefore dost thou vainly question thus Of Rustum? I am here, whom thou hast call'd By challenge forth; make good thy vaunt, or yield! Is it with Rustum only thou wouldst fight? Rash boy, men look on Rustum's face and flee! For well I know, that did great Rustum stand Before thy face this day, and were reveal'd, There would be then no talk of fighting more. But being what I am, I tell thee this— Do thou record it in thine inmost soul: Either thou shalt renounce thy vaunt and yield, Or else thy bones shall strew this sand, till winds Bleach them, or Oxus with his summer-floods, Oxus in summer wash them all away."  He spoke; and Sohrab answer'd, on his feet:— "Art thou so fierce? Thou wilt not fright me so! I am no girl, to be made pale by words. Yet this thou hast said well, did Rustum stand Here on this field, there were no fighting then. But Rustum is far hence, and we stand here. Begin! thou art more vast, more dread than I, And thou art proved, I know, and I am young— But yet success sways with the breath of Heaven. And though thou thinkest that thou knowest sure Thy victory, yet thou canst not surely know. For we are all, like swimmers in the sea, Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate, Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall. And whether it will heave us up to land, Or whether it will roll us out to sea, Back out to sea, to the deep waves of death, We know not, and no search will make us know; Only the event will teach us in its hour."  He spoke, and Rustum answer'd not, but hurl'd His spear; down from the shoulder, down it came, As on some partridge in the corn a hawk, That long has tower'd in the airy clouds, Drops like a plummet; Sohrab saw it come, And sprang aside, quick as a flash; the spear Hiss'd, and went quivering down into the sand, Which it sent flying wide;—then Sohrab threw In turn, and full struck Rustum's shield; sharp rang, The iron plates rang sharp, but turn'd the spear. And Rustum seized his club, which none but he Could wield; an unlopp'd trunk it was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up By their dark springs, the wind in winter-time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; but again Sohrab sprang aside, Lithe as the glancing snake, and the club came Thundering to earth, and leapt from Rustum's hand. And Rustum follow'd his own blow, and fell To his knees, and with his fingers clutch'd the sand; And now might Sohrab have unsheathed his sword, And pierced the mighty Rustum while he lay Dizzy, and on his knees, and choked with sand; But he look'd on, and smiled, nor bared his sword, But courteously drew back, and spoke, and said:—  "Thou strik'st too hard! that club of thine will float Upon the summer-floods, and not my bones. But rise, and be not wroth! not wroth am I; No, when I see thee, wrath forsakes my soul. Thou say'st, thou art not Rustum; be it so! Who art thou then, that canst so touch my soul? Boy as I am, I have seen battles too— Have waded foremost in their bloody waves, And heard their hollow roar of dying men; But never was my heart thus touch'd before. Are they from Heaven, these softenings of the heart? O thou old warrior, let us yield to Heaven! Come, plant we here in earth our angry spears, And make a truce, and sit upon this sand, And pledge each other in red wine, like friends, And thou shalt talk to me of Rustum's deeds. There are enough foes in the Persian host, Whom I may meet, and strike, and feel no pang; Champions enough Afrasiab has, whom thou Mayst fight; fight them, when they confront thy spear! But oh, let there be peace 'twixt thee and me!"  He ceased, but while he spake, Rustum had risen, And stood erect, trembling with rage; his club He left to lie, but had regain'd his spear, Whose fiery point now in his mail'd right-hand Blazed bright and baleful, like that autumn-star, The baleful sign of fevers; dust had soil'd His stately crest, and dimm'd his glittering arms. His breast heaved, his lips foam'd, and twice his voice Was choked with rage; at last these words broke way:—  "Girl! nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands! Curl'd minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words! Fight, let me hear thy hateful voice no more! Thou art not in Afrasiab's gardens now With Tartar girls, with whom thou art wont to dance; But on the Oxus-sands, and in the dance Of battle, and with me, who make no play Of war; I fight it out, and hand to hand. Speak not to me of truce, and pledge, and wine! Remember all thy valour; try thy feints And cunning! all the pity I had is gone; Because thou hast shamed me before both the hosts With thy light skipping tricks, and thy girl's wiles."  He spoke, and Sohrab kindled at his taunts, And he too drew his sword; at once they rush'd Together, as two eagles on one prey Come rushing down together from the clouds, One from the east, one from the west; their shields Dash'd with a clang together, and a din Rose, such as that the sinewy woodcutters Make often in the forest's heart at morn, Of hewing axes, crashing trees—such blows Rustum and Sohrab on each other hail'd. And you would say that sun and stars took part In that unnatural conflict; for a cloud Grew suddenly in Heaven, and dark'd the sun Over the fighters' heads; and a wind rose Under their feet, and moaning swept the plain, And in a sandy whirlwind wrapp'd the pair. In gloom they twain were wrapp'd, and they alone; For both the on-looking hosts on either hand Stood in broad daylight, and the sky was pure, And the sun sparkled on the Oxus stream. But in the gloom they fought, with bloodshot eyes And labouring breath; first Rustum struck the shield Which Sohrab held stiff out; the steel-spiked spear Rent the tough plates, but fail'd to reach the skin, And Rustum pluck'd it back with angry groan. Then Sohrab with his sword smote Rustum's helm, Nor clove its steel quite through; but all the crest He shore away, and that proud horsehair plume, Never till now defiled, sank to the dust; And Rustum bow'd his head; but then the gloom Grew blacker, thunder rumbled in the air, And lightnings rent the cloud; and Ruksh, the horse, Who stood at hand, utter'd a dreadful cry;— No horse's cry was that, most like the roar Of some pain'd desert-lion, who all day Hath trail'd the hunter's javelin in his side, And comes at night to die upon the sand. The two hosts heard that cry, and quaked for fear, And Oxus curdled as it cross'd his stream. But Sohrab heard, and quail'd not, but rush'd on, And struck again; and again Rustum bow'd His head; but this time all the blade, like glass, Sprang in a thousand shivers on the helm, And in the hand the hilt remain'd alone. Then Rustum raised his head; his dreadful eyes Glared, and he shook on high his menacing spear, And shouted: Rustum!—Sohrab heard that shout, And shrank amazed; back he recoil'd one step, And scann'd with blinking eyes the advancing form, And then he stood bewilder'd; and he dropp'd His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side. He reel'd, and staggering back, sank to the ground; And then the gloom dispersed, and the wind fell, And the bright sun broke forth, and melted all The cloud; and the two armies saw the pair— Saw Rustum standing, safe upon his feet, And Sohrab, wounded, on the bloody sand.  Then, with a bitter smile, Rustum began:— "Sohrab, thou thoughtest in thy mind to kill A Persian lord this day, and strip his corpse, And bear thy trophies to Afrasiab's tent. Or else that the great Rustum would come down Himself to fight, and that thy wiles would move His heart to take a gift, and let thee go. And then that all the Tartar host would praise Thy courage or thy craft, and spread thy fame, To glad thy father in his weak old age. Fool, thou art slain, and by an unknown man! Dearer to the red jackals shalt thou be Than to thy friends, and to thy father old."  And, with a fearless mien, Sohrab replied:— "Unknown thou art; yet thy fierce vaunt is vain. Thou dost not slay me, proud and boastful man! No! Rustum slays me, and this filial heart. For were I match'd with ten such men as thee, And I were that which till to-day I was, They should be lying here, I standing there. But that belovéd name unnerved my arm— That name, and something, I confess, in thee, Which troubles all my heart, and made my shield Fall; and thy spear transfix'd an unarm'd foe. And now thou boastest, and insult'st my fate. But hear thou this, fierce man, tremble to hear: The mighty Rustum shall avenge my death! My father, whom I seek through all the world, He shall avenge my death, and punish thee!"  As when some hunter in the spring hath found A breeding eagle sitting on her nest, Upon the craggy isle of a hill-lake, And pierced her with an arrow as she rose, And follow'd her to find her where she fell Far off;—anon her mate comes winging back From hunting, and a great way off descries His huddling young left sole; at that, he checks His pinion, and with short uneasy sweeps Circles above his eyry, with loud screams Chiding his mate back to her nest; but she Lies dying, with the arrow in her side, In some far stony gorge out of his ken, A heap of fluttering feathers—never more Shall the lake glass her, flying over it; Never the black and dripping precipices Echo her stormy scream as she sails by— As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his loss, So Rustum knew not his own loss, but stood Over his dying son, and knew him not.  But, with a cold, incredulous voice, he said:— "What prate is this of fathers and revenge? The mighty Rustum never had a son."  And, with a failing voice, Sohrab replied:— "Ah yes, he had! and that lost son am I. Surely the news will one day reach his ear, Reach Rustum, where he sits, and tarries long, Somewhere, I know not where, but far from here; And pierce him like a stab, and make him leap To arms, and cry for vengeance upon thee. Fierce man, bethink thee, for an only son! What will that grief, what will that vengeance be? Oh, could I live, till I that grief had seen! Yet him I pity not so much, but her, My mother, who in Ader-baijan dwells With that old king, her father, who grows grey With age, and rules over the valiant Koords. Her most I pity, who no more will see Sohrab returning from the Tartar camp, With spoils and honour, when the war is done. But a dark rumour will be bruited up, From tribe to tribe, until it reach her ear; And then will that defenceless woman learn That Sohrab will rejoice her sight no more, But that in battle with a nameless foe, By the far-distant Oxus, he is slain."  He spoke; and as he ceased, he wept aloud, Thinking of her he left, and his own death. He spoke; but Rustum listen'd, plunged in thought. Nor did he yet believe it was his son Who spoke, although he call'd back names he knew; For he had had sure tidings that the babe, Which was in Ader-baijan born to him, Had been a puny girl, no boy at all— So that sad mother sent him word, for fear Rustum should seek the boy, to train in arms. And so he deem'd that either Sohrab took, By a false boast, the style of Rustum's son; Or that men gave it him, to swell his fame. So deem'd he; yet he listen'd, plunged in thought And his soul set to grief, as the vast tide Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore At the full moon; tears gather'd in his eyes; For he remember'd his own early youth, And all its bounding rapture; as, at dawn, The shepherd from his mountain-lodge descries A far, bright city, smitten by the sun, Through many rolling clouds—so Rustum saw His youth; saw Sohrab's mother, in her bloom; And that old king, her father, who loved well His wandering guest, and gave him his fair child With joy; and all the pleasant life they led, They three, in that long-distant summer-time— The castle, and the dewy woods, and hunt And hound, and morn on those delightful hills In Ader-baijan. And he saw that Youth, Of age and looks to be his own dear son, Piteous and lovely, lying on the sand, Like some rich hyacinth which by the scythe Of an unskilful gardener has been cut, Mowing the garden grass-plots near its bed, And lies, a fragrant tower of purple bloom, On the mown, dying grass—so Sohrab lay, Lovely in death, upon the common sand. And Rustum gazed on him with grief, and said:—  "O Sohrab, thou indeed art such a son Whom Rustum, wert thou his, might well have loved! Yet here thou errest, Sohrab, or else men Have told thee false—thou art not Rustum's son. For Rustum had no son; one child he had— But one—a girl; who with her mother now Plies some light female task, nor dreams of us— Of us she dreams not, nor of wounds, nor war."  But Sohrab answer'd him in wrath: for now The anguish of the deep-fix'd spear grew fierce, And he desired to draw forth the steel, And let the blood flow free, and so to die— But first he would convince his stubborn foe; And, rising sternly on one arm, he said:—  "Man, who art thou who dost deny my words? Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine. I tell thee, prick'd upon this arm I bear That seal which Rustum to my mother gave, That she might prick it on the babe she bore."  He spoke; and all the blood left Rustum's cheeks, And his knees totter'd, and he smote his hand Against his breast, his heavy mailed hand, That the hard iron corslet clank'd aloud; And to his heart he press'd the other hand, And in a hollow voice he spake, and said:—  "Sohrab, that were a proof which could not lie! If thou show this, then art thou Rustum's son."  Then, with weak hasty fingers, Sohrab loosed His belt, and near the shoulder bared his arm, And show'd a sign in faint vermilion points Prick'd; as a cunning workman, in Pekin, Pricks with vermilion some clear porcelain vase, An emperor's gift—at early morn he paints, And all day long, and, when night comes, the lamp Lights up his studious forehead and thin hands— So delicately prick'd the sign appear'd On Sohrab's arm, the sign of Rustum's seal. It was that griffin, which of old rear'd Zal, Rustum's great father, whom they left to die, A helpless babe, among the mountain-rocks; Him that kind creature found, and rear'd, and loved— Then Rustum took it for his glorious sign. And Sohrab bared that image on his arm, And himself scann'd it long with mournful eyes, And then he touch'd it with his hand and said:—  "How say'st thou? Is that sign the proper sign Of Rustum's son, or of some other man's?"  He spoke; but Rustum gazed, and gazed, and stood Speechless; and then he utter'd one sharp cry: O boy—thy father!—and his voice choked there. And then a dark cloud pass'd before his eyes, And his head swam, and he sank down to earth. But Sohrab crawl'd to where he lay, and cast His arms about his neck, and kiss'd his lips, And with fond faltering fingers stroked his cheeks, Trying to call him back to life; and life Came back to Rustum, and he oped his eyes, And they stood wide with horror; and he seized In both his hands the dust which lay around, And threw it on his head, and smirch'd his hair,— His hair, and face, and beard, and glittering arms; And strong convulsive groanings shook his breast, And his sobs choked him; and he clutch'd his sword, To draw it, and for ever let life out. But Sohrab saw his thoughts, and held his hands And with a soothing voice he spake, and said:—  "Father, forbear! for I but meet to-day The doom which at my birth was written down In Heaven, and thou art Heaven's unconscious hand. Surely my heart cried out that it was thou, When first I saw thee; and thy heart spoke too, I know it! but fate trod those promptings down Under its iron heel; fate, fate engaged The strife, and hurl'd me on my father's spear. But let us speak no more of this! I find My father; let me feel that I have found! Come, sit beside me on this sand, and take My head betwixt thy hands, and kiss my cheeks, And wash them with thy tears, and say: My son! Quick! quick! for number'd are my sands of life, And swift; for like the lightning to this field I came, and like the wind I go away— Sudden, and swift, and like a passing wind. But it was writ in Heaven that this should be."  So said he, and his voice released the heart Of Rustum, and his tears broke forth; he cast His arms round his son's neck, and wept aloud, And kiss'd him. And awe fell on both the hosts, When they saw Rustum's grief; and Ruksh, the horse, With his head bowing to the ground and mane Sweeping the dust, came near, and in mute woe First to the one then to the other moved His head, as if enquiring what their grief Might mean; and from his dark, compassionate eyes, The big warm tears roll'd down, and caked the sand. But Rustum chid him with stern voice, and said:—  "Ruksh, now thou grievest; but, O Ruksh, thy feet Should first have rotted on their nimble joints, Or ere they brought thy master to this field!"  But Sohrab look'd upon the horse and said;— "Is this, then, Ruksh? How often, in past days My mother told me of thee, thou brave steed, My terrible father's terrible horse! and said, That I should one day find thy lord and thee. Come, let me lay my hand upon thy mane! O Ruksh, thou art more fortunate than I; For thou has gone where I shall never go, And snuff'd the breezes of my father's home. And thou hast trod the sands of Seistan, And seen the River of Helmund, and the Lake Of Zirrah; and the aged Zal himself Has often stroked thy neck, and given thee food, Corn in a golden platter soak'd with wine, And said; O Ruksh! bear Rustrum well!—but I Have never known my grandsire's furrow'd face, Nor seen his lofty house in Seistan, Nor slaked my thirst at the clear Helmund stream; But lodged among my father's foes, and seen Afrasiab's cities only, Samarcand, Bokhara, and lone Khiva in the waste, And the black Toorkmun tents; and only drunk The desert rivers, Moorghab and Tejend, Kohik, and where the Kalmuks feed their sheep, The northern Sir; and this great Oxus stream, The yellow Oxus, by whose brink I die."  Then, with a heavy groan, Rustum bewail'd:— "Oh, that its waves were flowing over me! Oh, that I saw its grains of yellow silt Roll, tumbling in the current o'er my head!"  But, with a grave mild voice, Sohrab replied:— "Desire not that, my father! thou must live. For some are born to do great deeds, and live, As some are born to be obscured, and die. Do thou the deeds I die too young to do, And reap a second glory in thine age; Thou art my father, and thy gain is mine. But come! thou seest this great host of men Which follow me; I pray thee, slay not these! Let me entreat for them; what have they done? They follow'd me, my hope, my fame, my star. Let them all cross the Oxus back in peace. But me thou must bear hence, not send with them, But carry me with thee to Seistan, And place me on a bed, and mourn for me, Thou, and the snow-hair'd Zal, and all thy friends. And thou must lay me in that lovely earth, And heap a stately mound above my bones, And plant a far-seen pillar over all. That so the passing horseman on the waste May see my tomb a great way off, and cry: Sohrab, the mighty Rustum's son, lies there, Whom his great father did in ignorance kill! And I be not forgotten in my grave."  And, with a mournful voice, Rustum replied:— "Fear not! as thou hast said, Sohrab, my son, So shall it be; for I will burn my tents, And quit the host, and bear thee hence with me, And carry thee away to Seistan, And place thee on a bed, and mourn for thee, With the snow-headed Zal, and all my friends. And I will lay thee in the lovely earth, And heap a stately mound above thy bones, And plant a far-seen pillar over all, And men shall not forget thee in thy grave. And I will spare thy host; yea, let them go! Let them all cross the Oxus back in peace! What should I do with slaying any more? For would that all whom I have ever slain Might be once more alive; my bitterest foes, And they who were call'd champions in their time, And through whose death I won that fame I have— And I were nothing but a common man, A poor, mean soldier, and without renown, So thou mightest live too, my son, my son! Or rather would that I, even I myself, Might now be lying on this bloody sand, Near death, and by an ignorant stroke of thine, Not thou of mine! and I might die, not thou; And I, not thou, be borne to Seistan; And Zal might weep above my grave, not thine; And say: O son, I weep thee not too sore, For willingly, I know, thou met'st thine end! But now in blood and battles was my youth, And full of blood and battles is my age, And I shall never end this life of blood."  Then, at the point of death, Sohrab replied:— "A life of blood indeed, thou dreadful man! But thou shalt yet have peace; only not now, Not yet! but thou shalt have it on that day, When thou shalt sail in a high-masted ship, Thou and the other peers of Kai Khosroo, Returning home over the salt blue sea, From laying thy dear master in his grave."  And Rustum gazed in Sohrab's face, and said:— "Soon be that day, my son, and deep that sea! Till then, if fate so wills, let me endure."  He spoke; and Sohrab smiled on him, and took The spear, and drew it from his side, and eased His wound's imperious anguish; but the blood Came welling from the open gash, and life Flow'd with the stream;—all down his cold white side The crimson torrent ran, dim now and soil'd, Like the soil'd tissue of white violets Left, freshly gather'd, on their native bank, By children whom their nurses call with haste Indoors from the sun's eye; his head droop'd low, His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay— White, with eyes closed; only when heavy gasps, Deep heavy gasps quivering through all his frame, Convulsed him back to life, he open'd them, And fix'd them feebly on his father's face; Till now all strength was ebb'd, and from his limbs Unwillingly the spirit fled away, Regretting the warm mansion which it left, And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world.  So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead; And the great Rustum drew his horseman's cloak Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son. As those black granite pillars, once high-rear'd By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear His house, now 'mid their broken flights of steps Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side— So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.  And night came down over the solemn waste, And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair, And darken'd all; and a cold fog, with night, Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose, As of a great assembly loosed, and fires Began to twinkle through the fog; for now Both armies moved to camp, and took their meal; The Persians took it on the open sands Southward, the Tartars by the river marge; And Rustum and his son were left alone.  But the majestic river floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon;—he flow'd Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè, Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused With rain, where thick the crocus blows, Past the dark forges long disused, The mule-track from Saint Laurent goes. The bridge is cross'd, and slow we ride, Through forest, up the mountain-side. The autumnal evening darkens round, The wind is up, and drives the rain; While, hark! far down, with strangled sound Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain, Where that wet smoke, among the woods, Over his boiling cauldron broods. Swift rush the spectral vapours white Past limestone scars with ragged pines, Showing—then blotting from our sight!— Halt—through the cloud-drift something shines! High in the valley, wet and drear, The huts of Courrerie appear. Strike leftward! cries our guide; and higher Mounts up the stony forest-way. At last the encircling trees retire; Look! through the showery twilight grey What pointed roofs are these advance?— A palace of the Kings of France? Approach, for what we seek is here! Alight, and sparely sup, and wait For rest in this outbuilding near; Then cross the sward and reach that gate. Knock; pass the wicket! Thou art come To the Carthusians' world-famed home. The silent courts, where night and day Into their stone-carved basins cold The splashing icy fountains play— The humid corridors behold! Where, ghostlike in the deepening night, Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white. The chapel, where no organ's peal Invests the stern and naked prayer— With penitential cries they kneel And wrestle; rising then, with bare And white uplifted faces stand, Passing the Host from hand to hand; Each takes, and then his visage wan Is buried in his cowl once more. The cells!—the suffering Son of Man Upon the wall—the knee-worn floor— And where they sleep, that wooden bed, Which shall their coffin be, when dead! The library, where tract and tome Not to feed priestly pride are there, To hymn the conquering march of Rome, Nor yet to amuse, as ours are! They paint of souls the inner strife, Their drops of blood, their death in life. The garden, overgrown—yet mild, See, fragrant herbs are flowering there! Strong children of the Alpine wild Whose culture is the brethren's care; Of human tasks their only one, And cheerful works beneath the sun. Those halls, too, destined to contain Each its own pilgrim-host of old, From England, Germany, or Spain— All are before me! I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere! —And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb? Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearnt, so much resign'd— I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone— For both were faiths, and both are gone. Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride— I come to shed them at their side. Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control! For the world cries your faith is now But a dead time's exploded dream; My melancholy, sciolists say, Is a pass'd mode, an outworn theme— As if the world had ever had A faith, or sciolists been sad! Ah, if it be pass'd, take away, At least, the restlessness, the pain; Be man henceforth no more a prey To these out-dated stings again! The nobleness of grief is gone Ah, leave us not the fret alone! But—if you cannot give us ease— Last of the race of them who grieve Here leave us to die out with these Last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; Silent—the best are silent now. Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb, Silent they are though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more. Our fathers water'd with their tears This sea of time whereon we sail, Their voices were in all men's ears We pass'd within their puissant hail. Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute, and watch the waves. For what avail'd it, all the noise And outcry of the former men?— Say, have their sons achieved more joys, Say, is life lighter now than then? The sufferers died, they left their pain— The pangs which tortured them remain. What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own? What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze Carried thy lovely wail away, Musical through Italian trees Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay? Inheritors of thy distress Have restless hearts one throb the less? Or are we easier, to have read, O Obermann! the sad, stern page, Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head From the fierce tempest of thine age In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau, Or chalets near the Alpine snow? Ye slumber in your silent grave!— The world, which for an idle day Grace to your mood of sadness gave, Long since hath flung her weeds away. The eternal trifler breaks your spell; But we—we learned your lore too well! Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh, speed those years; But, while we wait, allow our tears! Allow them! We admire with awe The exulting thunder of your race; You give the universe your law, You triumph over time and space! Your pride of life, your tireless powers, We laud them, but they are not ours. We are like children rear'd in shade Beneath some old-world abbey wall, Forgotten in a forest-glade, And secret from the eyes of all. Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves, Their abbey, and its close of graves! But, where the road runs near the stream, Oft through the trees they catch a glance Of passing troops in the sun's beam— Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance! Forth to the world those soldiers fare, To life, to cities, and to war! And through the wood, another way, Faint bugle-notes from far are borne, Where hunters gather, staghounds bay, Round some fair forest-lodge at morn. Gay dames are there, in sylvan green; Laughter and cries—those notes between! The banners flashing through the trees Make their blood dance and chain their eyes; That bugle-music on the breeze Arrests them with a charm'd surprise. Banner by turns and bugle woo: Ye shy recluses, follow too! O children, what do ye reply?— "Action and pleasure, will ye roam Through these secluded dells to cry And call us?—but too late ye come! Too late for us your call ye blow, Whose bent was taken long ago. "Long since we pace this shadow'd nave; We watch those yellow tapers shine, Emblems of hope over the grave, In the high altar's depth divine; The organ carries to our ear Its accents of another sphere. "Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? —Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease; And leave our desert to its peace!"
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!  No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,  Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head.  But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,  And only the white sheep are sometimes seen  Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green. Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest! Here, where the reaper was at work of late— In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves  His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,  Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use—  Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away  The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,  With distant cries of reapers in the corn— All the live murmur of a summer's day. Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be.  Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see  Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;  And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers  Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,  And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers. And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book— Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!  The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,  Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,  One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,  And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood,  And came, as most men deem'd, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more. But once, years after, in the country-lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,  Met him, and of his way of life enquired; Whereat he answer'd, that the gipsy-crew,  His mates, had arts to rule as they desired  The workings of men's brains, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will.  "And I," he said, "the secret of their art,  When fully learn'd, will to the world impart; But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." This said, he left them, and return'd no more.— But rumours hung about the country-side,  That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,  In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,  The same the gipsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;  At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,  On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock'd boors Had found him seated at their entering, But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly. And I myself seem half to know thy looks,  And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace; And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks  I ask if thou hast pass'd their quiet place;  Or in my boat I lie Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer-heats,  'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,  And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats. For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,  Returning home on summer-nights, have met  Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,  Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,  As the punt's rope chops round; And leaning backward in a pensive dream,  And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers  Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream. And then they land, and thou art seen no more!— Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come  To dance around the Fyfield elm in May, Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,  Or cross a stile into the public way.  Oft thou hast given them store Of flowers—the frail-leaf'd, white anemony,  Dark bluebells drench'd with dews of summer eves,  And purple orchises with spotted leaves— But none hath words she can report of thee. And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,  Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames,  To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass,  Have often pass'd thee near Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown;  Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,  Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air— But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone! At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills, Where at her open door the housewife darns,  Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate To watch the threshers in the mossy barns.  Children, who early range these slopes and late  For cresses from the rills, Have known thee eyeing, all an April-day,  The springing pasture and the feeding kine;  And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine, Through the long dewy grass move slow away. In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood— Where most the gipsies by the turf-edged way  Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagg'd and shreds of grey,  Above the forest-ground called Thessaly—  The blackbird, picking food, Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;  So often has he known thee past him stray,  Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall. And once, in winter, on the causeway chill Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,  Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge, Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow,  Thy face tow'rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge?  And thou has climb'd the hill, And gain'd the white brow of the Cumner range;  Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,  The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall— Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange. But what—I dream! Two hundred years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,  And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls  To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy-tribe;  And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid—  Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave  Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave, Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade. —No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men?  'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; 'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,  Exhaust the energy of strongest souls  And numb the elastic powers. Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,  And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,  To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our worn-out life, and are—what we have been. Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so? Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire;  Else wert thou long since number'd with the dead! Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!  The generations of thy peers are fled,  And we ourselves shall go; But thou possessest an immortal lot,  And we imagine thee exempt from age  And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page, Because thou hadst—what we, alas! have not. For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without,  Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,  Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.  O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,  Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,  And each half lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope. Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds,  Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,  Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd;  For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;  Who hesitate and falter life away,  And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day— Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? Yes, we await it!—but it still delays, And then we suffer! and amongst us one,  Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne;  And all his store of sad experience he  Lays bare of wretched days; Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs,  And how the dying spark of hope was fed,  And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes. This for our wisest! and we others pine, And wish the long unhappy dream would end,  And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear; With close-lipp'd patience for our only friend,  Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair—  But none has hope like thine! Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,  Roaming the country-side, a truant boy,  Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;  Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims,  Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife—  Fly hence, our contact fear! Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!  Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern  From her false friend's approach in Hades turn, Wave us away, and keep thy solitude! Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade,  With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver'd branches of the glade—  Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,  On some mild pastoral slope Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales  Freshen thy flowers as in former years  With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, From the dark tingles, to the nightingales! But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife,  Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life,  Like us distracted, and like us unblest.  Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers,  And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;  And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours. Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles! —As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,  Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily,  The fringes of a southward-facing brow  Among the Ægæan Isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come,  Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,  Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine— And knew the intruders on his ancient home, The young light-hearted masters of the waves— And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail;  And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale,  Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,  To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits; and unbent sails  There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,  Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.
How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!  In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;  The village street its haunted mansion lacks,  And from the sign is gone Sibylla's name,  And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks—  Are ye too changed, ye hills?  See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar men  To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!  Here came I often, often, in old days—  Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then. Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,  Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns  The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?  The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,  The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?—  This winter-eve is warm,  Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring,  The tender purple spray on copse and briers!  And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,  She needs not June for beauty's heightening, Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!—  Only, methinks, some loss of habit's power  Befalls me wandering through this upland dim.  Once pass'd I blindfold here, at any hour;  Now seldom come I, since I came with him.  That single elm-tree bright  Against the west—I miss it! is it goner?  We prized it dearly; while it stood, we said,  Our friend, the Gipsy-Scholar, was not dead;  While the tree lived, he in these fields lived on. Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here,  But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;  And with the country-folk acquaintance made  By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.  Here, too, our shepherd-pipes we first assay'd.  Ah me! this many a year  My pipe is lost, my shepherd's holiday!  Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart  Into the world and wave of men depart;  But Thyrsis of his own will went away. It irk'd him to be here, he could not rest.  He loved each simple joy the country yields,  He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,  For that a shadow lour'd on the fields,  Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.  Some life of men unblest  He knew, which made him droop, and fill'd his head.  He went; his piping took a troubled sound  Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;  He could not wait their passing, he is dead. So, some tempestuous morn in early June,  When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,  Before the roses and the longest day—  When garden-walks and all the grassy floor  With blossoms red and white of fallen May  And chestnut-flowers are strewn—  So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,  From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,  Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I! Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?  Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,  Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,  Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,  Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,  And stocks in fragrant blow;  Roses that down the alleys shine afar,  And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,  And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,  And the full moon, and the white evening-star. He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!  What matters it? next year he will return,  And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days,  With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern,  And blue-bells trembling by the forest-ways,  And scent of hay new-mown.  But Thyrsis never more we swains shall see;  See him come back, and cut a smoother reed,  And blow a strain the world at last shall heed—  For Time, not Corydon, hath conquer'd thee! Alack, for Corydon no rival now!—  But when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate,  Some good survivor with his flute would go,  Piping a ditty sad for Bion's fate;  And cross the unpermitted ferry's flow,  And relax Pluto's brow,  And make leap up with joy the beauteous head  Of Proserpine, among whose crowned hair  Are flowers first open'd on Sicilian air,  And flute his friend, like Orpheus, from the dead. O easy access to the hearer's grace  When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine!  For she herself had trod Sicilian fields,  She knew the Dorian water's gush divine,  She knew each lily white which Enna yields  Each rose with blushing face;  She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain.  But ah, of our poor Thames she never heard!  Her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirr'd;  And we should tease her with our plaint in vain!  Well! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be,  Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour  In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp'd hill!  Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?  I know the wood which hides the daffodil,  I know the Fyfield tree,  I know what white, what purple fritillaries  The grassy harvest of the river-fields,  Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields,  And what sedged brooks are Thames's tributaries; I know these slopes; who knows them if not I?—  But many a tingle on the loved hillside,  With thorns once studded, old, white-blossom'd trees,  Where thick the cowslips grew, and far descried  High tower'd the spikes of purple orchises,  Hath since our day put by  The coronals of that forgotten time;  Down each green bank hath gone the ploughboy's team,  And only in the hidden brookside gleam  Primroses, orphans of the flowery prime. Where is the girl, who by the boatman's door,  Above the locks, above the boating throng,  Unmoor'd our skiff when through the Wytham flats,  Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among  And darting swallows and light water-gnats,  We track'd the shy Thames shore?  Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell  Of our boat passing heaved the river-grass,  Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?—  They all are gone, and thou art gone as well! Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night  In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.  I see her veil draw soft across the day,  I feel her slowly chilling breath invade  The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey;  I feel her finger light  Laid pausefully upon life's headlong train; —  The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,  The heart less bounding at emotion new,  And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again. And long the way appears, which seem'd so short  To the less practised eye of sanguine youth;  And high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air,  The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth,  Tops in life's morning-sun so bright and bare!  Unbreachable the fort  Of the long-batter'd world uplifts its wall;  And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows,  And near and real the charm of thy repose,  And night as welcome as a friend would fall. But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss  Of quiet!—Look, adown the dusk hill-side,  A troop of Oxford hunters going home,  As in old days, jovial and talking, ride!  From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come.  Quick! let me fly, and cross  Into yon farther field!—'Tis done; and see,  Back'd by the sunset, which doth glorify  The orange and pale violet evening-sky,  Bare on its lonely ridge, the Tree! the Tree! I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil,  The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,  The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright,  And in the scatter'd farms the lights come out.  I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night,  Yet, happy omen, hail!  Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale  (For there thine earth forgetting eyelids keep  The morningless and unawakening sleep  Under the flowery oleanders pale), Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!—  Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim,  These brambles pale with mist engarlanded,  That lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him;  To a boon southern country he is fled,  And now in happier air,  Wandering with the great Mother's train divine  (And purer or more subtle soul than thee,  I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see)  Within a folding of the Apennine, Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!—  Putting his sickle to the perilous grain  In the hot cornfield of the Phrygian king,  For thee the Lityerses-song again  Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing;  Sings his Sicilian fold,  His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes—  And how a call celestial round him rang,  And heavenward from the fountain-brink he sprang,  And all the marvel of the golden skies. There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here  Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair.  Despair I will not, while I yet descry  'Neath the mild canopy of English air  That lonely tree against the western sky.  Still, still these slopes, 'tis clear,  Our Gipsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee!  Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,  Woods with anemonies in flower till May,  Know him a wanderer still; then why not me? A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,  Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.  This does not come with houses or with gold,  With place, with honour, and a flattering crew;  'Tis not in the world's market bought and sold—  But the smooth-slipping weeks  Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;  Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,  He wends unfollow'd, he must house alone;  Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired. Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wast bound;  Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour!  Men gave thee nothing; but this happy quest,  If men esteem'd thee feeble, gave thee power,  If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest.  And this rude Cumner ground,  Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields,  Here cams't thou in thy jocund youthful time,  Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime!  And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields. What though the music of thy rustic flute  Kept not for long its happy, country tone;  Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note  Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,  Which task'd thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—  It fail'd, and thou wage mute!  Yet hadst thou always visions of our light,  And long with men of care thou couldst not stay,  And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way,  Left human haunt, and on alone till night. Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!  'Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,  Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.  —Then through the great town's harsh, heart-wearying roar,  Let in thy voice a whisper often come,  To chase fatigue and fear: Why faintest thou! I wander'd till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side.
Even in a palace, life may be led well! So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell, Our freedom for a little bread we sell, And drudge under some foolish master's ken Who rates us if we peer outside our pen— Match'd with a palace, is not this a hell? Even in a palace! On his truth sincere, Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came; And when my ill-school'd spirit is aflame Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, I'll stop, and say: "There were no succour here! The aids to noble life are all within."
'Tis death! and peace, indeed, is here,And ease from shame, and rest from fear.There's nothing can dismarble nowThe smoothness of that limpid brow.But is a calm like this, in truth,The crowning end of life and youth,And when this boon rewards the dead,Are all debts paid, has all been said?And is the heart of youth so light,Its step so firm, its eye so bright,Because on its hot brow there blowsA wind of promise and reposeFrom the far grave, to which it goes;Because it hath the hope to come,One day, to harbour in the tomb?Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is oneFor daylight, for the cheerful sun,For feeling nerves and living breath—Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.It dreams a rest, if not more deep,More grateful than this marble sleep;It hears a voice within it tell:Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,But 'tis not what our youth desires.
Song from Abdelazar Love in Fantastic Triumph sat, Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed, For whom Fresh pains he did Create, And strange Tyrannic power he showed; From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire, Which round about, in sport he hurled; But ’twas from mine he took desire Enough to undo the Amorous World. From me he took his sighs and tears, From thee his Pride and Cruelty; From me his Languishments and Fears, And every Killing Dart from thee; Thus thou and I, the God have armed, And set him up a Deity; But my poor Heart alone is harmed, Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.
O Liberty, God-gifted—  Young and immortal maid— In your high hand uplifted,  The torch declares your trade. Its crimson menace, flaming  Upon the sea and shore, Is, trumpet-like, proclaiming  That Law shall be no more. Austere incendiary,  We're blinking in the light; Where is your customary  Grenade of dynamite? Where are your staves and switches  For men of gentle birth? Your mask and dirk for riches?  Your chains for wit and worth? Perhaps, you've brought the halters  You used in the old days, When round religion's altars  You stabled Cromwell's bays? Behind you, unsuspected,  Have you the axe, fair wench, Wherewith you once collected  A poll-tax for the French? America salutes you—  Preparing to "disgorge." Take everything that suits you,  And marry Henry George.
How blest the land that counts among  Her sons so many good and wise, To execute great feats of tongue  When troubles rise. Behold them mounting every stump,  By speech our liberty to guard. Observe their courage—see them jump,  And come down hard! "Walk up, walk up!" each cries aloud,  "And learn from me what you must do To turn aside the thunder cloud,  The earthquake too. "Beware the wiles of yonder quack  Who stuffs the ears of all that pass. I—I alone can show that black  Is white as grass." They shout through all the day and break  The silence of the night as well. They'd make—I wish they'd go and make—  Of Heaven a Hell. A advocates free silver, B  Free trade and C free banking laws. Free board, clothes, lodging would from me  Win warm applause. Lo, D lifts up his voice: "You see  The single tax on land would fall On all alike." More evenly  No tax at all. "With paper money," bellows E,  "We'll all be rich as lords." No doubt— And richest of the lot will be  The chap without. As many "cures" as addle-wits  Who know not what the ailment is! Meanwhile the patient foams and spits  Like a gin fizz. Alas, poor Body Politic,  Your fate is all too clearly read: To be not altogether quick,  Nor very dead. You take your exercise in squirms,  Your rest in fainting fits between. 'Tis plain that your disorder's worms—  Worms fat and lean. Worm Capital, Worm Labor dwell  Within your maw and muscle's scope. Their quarrels make your life a Hell,  Your death a hope. God send you find not such an end  To ills however sharp and huge! God send you convalesce! God send  You vermifuge.
Words shouting, singing, smiling, frowning— Sense lacking. Ah, nothing, more obscure than Browning, Save blacking.
Have but one God: thy knees were sore If bent in prayer to three or four. Adore no images save those The coinage of thy country shows. Take not the Name in vain. Direct Thy swearing unto some effect. Thy hand from Sunday work be held— Work not at all unless compelled. Honor thy parents, and perchance Their wills thy fortunes may advance. Kill not—death liberates thy foe From persecution’s constant woe. Kiss not thy neighbor’s wife. Of course There’s no objection to divorce. To steal were folly, for ’tis plain In cheating there is greater gain. Bear not false witness. Shake your head And say that you have “heard it said.” Who stays to covet ne’er will catch An opportunity to snatch.
I heard an Angel singing When the day was springing Mercy Pity Peace Is the worlds release Thus he sung all day Over the new mown hay Till the sun went down And haycocks looked brown I heard a Devil curse Over the heath & the furze Mercy could be no more If there was nobody poor And pity no more could be If all were as happy as we At his curse the sun went down And the heavens gave a frown Down pourd the heavy rain Over the new reapd grain And Miseries increase Is Mercy Pity Peace
I saw a chapel all of gold That none did dare to enter in And many weeping stood without Weeping mourning worshippingI saw a serpent rise between The white pillars of the door And he forcd & forcd & forcd Down the golden hinges tore And along the pavement sweet Set with pearls and rubies bright All his slimy length he drew Till upon the altar white Vomiting his poison out On the bread & on the wineSo I turnd into a sty And laid me down among the swine
I have no name I am but two days old.— What shall I call thee? I happy am Joy is my name,— Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile. I sing the while Sweet joy befall thee.
Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past, & Future sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy Word, That walk'd among the ancient trees. Calling the lapsed Soul And weeping in the evening dew: That might controll, The starry pole; And fallen fallen light renew! O Earth O Earth return! Arise from out the dewy grass; Night is worn, And the morn Rises from the slumberous mass. Turn away no more: Why wilt thou turn away The starry floor The watry shore Is giv'n thee till the break of day.
Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb; So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again— So I piped, he wept to hear. Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear, So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read— So he vanish'd from my sight. And I pluck'd a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain'd the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear
Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee!He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.
My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child:  But I am black as if bereav'd of light. My mother taught me underneath a tree  And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say.  Look on the rising sun: there God does live  And gives his light, and gives his heat away.  And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning joy in the noonday. And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love,  And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear  The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.  Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice. Thus did my mother say and kissed me,  And thus I say to little English boy.  When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:  Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,  To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.  And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me.
Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; Besides I can tell where I am use'd well, Such usage in heaven will never do well. But if at the Church they would give us some Ale. And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale; We'd sing and we'd pray, all the live-long day; Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray, Then the Parson might preach & drink & sing. And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring: And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children nor fasting nor birch. And God like a father rejoicing to see, His children as pleasant and happy as he: Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel.
I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.  And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear  How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls,  And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls  But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear  And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
The wild winds weep, And the night is a-cold; Come hither, Sleep, And my griefs infold: But lo! the morning peeps Over the eastern steeps, And the rustling birds of dawn The earth do scorn. Lo! to the vault Of paved heaven, With sorrow fraught My notes are driven: They strike the ear of night, Make weep the eyes of day; They make mad the roaring winds, And with tempests play. Like a fiend in a cloud With howling woe, After night I do croud, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increas'd; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain.
Never seek to tell thy love Love that never told can be For the gentle wind does move Silently invisiblyI told my love I told my love I told her all my heart Trembling cold in ghastly fearsAh she doth departSoon as she was gone from me A traveller came by Silently invisibly O was no deny
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.
Silent Silent Night Quench the holy light Of thy torches bright For possessd of Day Thousand spirits stray That sweet joys betray Why should joys be sweet Used with deceit Nor with sorrows meet But an honest joy Does itself destroy For a harlot coy
How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, 'Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow. With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
Memory, hither come, And tune your merry notes; And, while upon the wind, Your music floats, I'll pore upon the stream, Where sighing lovers dream, And fish for fancies as they pass Within the watery glass. I'll drink of the clear stream, And hear the linnet's song; And there I'll lie and dream The day along: And, when night comes, I'll go To places fit for woe, Walking along the darken'd valley, With silent Melancholy.
My silks and fine array, My smiles and languish'd air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have. His face is fair as heav'n, When springing buds unfold; O why to him was't giv'n, Whose heart is wintry cold? His breast is love's all worship'd tomb, Where all love's pilgrims come. Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True love doth pass away!
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Whether on Ida's shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun, that now From ancient melody have ceas'd; Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth; Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea Wand'ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry! How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoy'd in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!
She has no need to fear the fall Of harvest from the laddered reach Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing From the steep beach. Nor hold to pain's effrontery Her body's bulwark, stern and savage, Nor be a glass, where to forsee Another's ravage. What she has gathered, and what lost, She will not find to lose again. She is possessed by time, who once Was loved by men.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations This youth too long has heard the break Of waters in a land of change. He goes to see what suns can make From soil more indurateindurate hardened and strange. He cuts what holds his days together And shuts him in, as lock on lock: The arrowed vane announcing weather, The tripping rackettripping racket either a paradox: light and easy din, or, light and easy motion (as of a dance) of a clock; Seeking, I think, a light that waits Still as a lamp upon a shelf, — A land with hills like rocky gates Where no sea leaps upon itself. But he will find that nothing dares To be enduring, save where, south Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares On beauty with a rusted mouth, — Where something dreadful and another Look quietly upon each other.
Proem. Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie, Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime, And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time. So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence, The sound thereof raps every human sense That men account it no impiety To say thou wert a fleshly Deity. Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date) Thy world of honours to accumulate. ‘Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse, ‘Mine bleating stands before thy royal Hearse. Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdain, T’ accept the tribute of a loyal Brain. Thy clemency did yerst esteem as much The acclamations of the poor, as rich, Which makes me deem, my rudeness is no wrong, Though I resound thy greatness ‘mongst the throng. The Poem. No Phoenix Pen, nor Spenser’s Poetry, No Speed’s, nor Camden’s learned History; Eliza’s works, wars, praise, can e’re compact, The World’s the Theater where she did act. No memories, nor volumes can contain, The nine Olymp’ades of her happy reign, Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise, From all the Kings on earth she won the prize. Nor say I more than truly is her due. Millions will testify that this is true. She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdom lack to play the Rex. Spain’s Monarch sa’s not so, not yet his Host: She taught them better manners to their cost. The Salic Law had not in force now been, If France had ever hop’d for such a Queen. But can you Doctors now this point dispute, She’s argument enough to make you mute, Since first the Sun did run, his ne’er runn’d race, And earth had twice a year, a new old face; Since time was time, and man unmanly man, Come shew me such a Phoenix if you can. Was ever people better rul’d than hers? Was ever Land more happy, freed from stirs? Did ever wealth in England so abound? Her Victories in foreign Coasts resound? Ships more invincible than Spain’s, her foe She rack’t, she sack’d, she sunk his Armadoe. Her stately Troops advanc’d to Lisbon’s wall, Don Anthony in’s right for to install. She frankly help’d Franks’ (brave) distressed King, The States united now her fame do sing. She their Protectrix was, they well do know, Unto our dread Virago, what they owe. Her Nobles sacrific’d their noble blood, Nor men, nor coin she shap’d, to do them good. The rude untamed Irish she did quell, And Tiron bound, before her picture fell. Had ever Prince such Counsellors as she? Her self Minerva caus’d them so to be. Such Soldiers, and such Captains never seen, As were the subjects of our (Pallas) Queen: Her Sea-men through all straits the world did round, Terra incognitæ might know her sound. Her Drake came laded home with Spanish gold, Her Essex took Cadiz, their Herculean hold. But time would fail me, so my wit would too, To tell of half she did, or she could do. Semiramis to her is but obscure; More infamy than fame she did procure. She plac’d her glory but on Babel’s walls, World's wonder for a time, but yet it falls. Fierce Tomris (Cirus’ Heads-man, Sythians’ Queen) Had put her Harness off, had she but seen Our Amazon i’ th’ Camp at Tilbury, (Judging all valour, and all Majesty) Within that Princess to have residence, And prostrate yielded to her Excellence. Dido first Foundress of proud Carthage walls (Who living consummates her Funerals), A great Eliza, but compar’d with ours, How vanisheth her glory, wealth, and powers. Proud profuse Cleopatra, whose wrong name, Instead of glory, prov’d her Country’s shame: Of her what worth in Story’s to be seen, But that she was a rich Ægyptian Queen. Zenobia, potent Empress of the East, And of all these without compare the best (Whom none but great Aurelius could quell) Yet for our Queen is no fit parallel: She was a Phoenix Queen, so shall she be, Her ashes not reviv’d more Phoenix she. Her personal perfections, who would tell, Must dip his Pen i’ th’ Heliconian Well, Which I may not, my pride doth but aspire To read what others write and then admire. Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was treason. But happy England, which had such a Queen, O happy, happy, had those days still been, But happiness lies in a higher sphere. Then wonder not, Eliza moves not here. Full fraught with honour, riches, and with days, She set, she set, like Titan in his rays. No more shall rise or set such glorious Sun, Until the heaven’s great revolution: If then new things, their old form must retain, Eliza shall rule Albian once again. Her Epitaph. Here sleeps T H E Queen, this is the royal bed O’ th’ Damask Rose, sprung from the white and red, Whose sweet perfume fills the all-filling air, This Rose is withered, once so lovely fair: On neither tree did grow such Rose before, The greater was our gain, our loss the more. Another. Here lies the pride of Queens, pattern of Kings: So blaze it fame, here’s feathers for thy wings. Here lies the envy’d, yet unparallel’d Prince, Whose living virtues speak (though dead long since). If many worlds, as that fantastic framed, In every one, be her great glory famed.
I had eight birds hatcht in one nest, Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest. I nurst them up with pain and care, No cost nor labour did I spare Till at the last they felt their wing, Mounted the Trees and learned to sing. Chief of the Brood then took his flight To Regions far and left me quite. My mournful chirps I after send Till he return, or I do end. Leave not thy nest, thy Dame and Sire, Fly back and sing amidst this Quire. My second bird did take her flight And with her mate flew out of sight. Southward they both their course did bend, And Seasons twain they there did spend, Till after blown by Southern gales They Norward steer’d with filled sails. A prettier bird was no where seen, Along the Beach, among the treen. I have a third of colour white On whom I plac’d no small delight, Coupled with mate loving and true, Hath also bid her Dame adieu. And where Aurora first appears, She now hath percht to spend her years. One to the Academy flew To chat among that learned crew. Ambition moves still in his breast That he might chant above the rest, Striving for more than to do well, That nightingales he might excell. My fifth, whose down is yet scarce gone, Is ‘mongst the shrubs and bushes flown And as his wings increase in strength On higher boughs he’ll perch at length. My other three still with me nest Until they’re grown, then as the rest, Or here or there, they’ll take their flight, As is ordain’d, so shall they light. If birds could weep, then would my tears Let others know what are my fears Lest this my brood some harm should catch And be surpris’d for want of watch Whilst pecking corn and void of care They fall un’wares in Fowler’s snare; Or whilst on trees they sit and sing Some untoward boy at them do fling, Or whilst allur’d with bell and glass The net be spread and caught, alas; Or lest by Lime-twigs they be foil’d; Or by some greedy hawks be spoil’d. O would, my young, ye saw my breast And knew what thoughts there sadly rest. Great was my pain when I you bred, Great was my care when I you fed. Long did I keep you soft and warm And with my wings kept off all harm. My cares are more, and fears, than ever, My throbs such now as ‘fore were never. Alas, my birds, you wisdom want Of perils you are ignorant. Oft times in grass, on trees, in flight, Sore accidents on you may light. O to your safety have an eye, So happy may you live and die. Mean while, my days in tunes I’ll spend Till my weak lays with me shall end. In shady woods I’ll sit and sing And things that past, to mind I’ll bring. Once young and pleasant, as are you, But former toys (no joys) adieu! My age I will not once lament But sing, my time so near is spent, And from the top bough take my flight Into a country beyond sight Where old ones instantly grow young And there with seraphims set song. No seasons cold, nor storms they see But spring lasts to eternity. When each of you shall in your nest Among your young ones take your rest, In chirping languages oft them tell You had a Dame that lov’d you well, That did what could be done for young And nurst you up till you were strong And ‘fore she once would let you fly She shew'd you joy and misery, Taught what was good, and what was ill, What would save life, and what would kill. Thus gone, amongst you I may live, And dead, yet speak and counsel give. Farewell, my birds, farewell, adieu, I happy am, if well with you.
To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings, Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun, For my mean Pen are too superior things; Or how they all, or each their dates have run, Let Poets and Historians set these forth. My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth. But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart Great Bartas’ sugar’d lines do but read o’er, Fool, I do grudge the Muses did not part ‘Twixt him and me that over-fluent store. A Bartas can do what a Bartas will But simple I according to my skill. From School-boy’s tongue no Rhet’ric we expect, Nor yet a sweet Consort from broken strings, Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect. My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings, And this to mend, alas, no Art is able, ‘Cause Nature made it so irreparable. Nor can I, like that fluent sweet-tongued Greek Who lisp’d at first, in future times speak plain. By Art he gladly found what he did seek, A full requital of his striving pain. Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure: A weak or wounded brain admits no cure. I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits. A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits. If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance. But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild, Else of our Sex, why feigned they those nine And poesy made Calliope’s own child? So ‘mongst the rest they placed the Arts divine, But this weak knot they will full soon untie. The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie. Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are. Men have precedency and still excel; It is but vain unjustly to wage war. Men can do best, and Women know it well. Preeminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours. And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies, And ever with your prey still catch your praise, If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes, Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bays. This mean and unrefined ore of mine Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.
Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper. In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e'er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e'er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould'ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.
Yes, thou art gone and never more Thy sunny smile shall gladden me; But I may pass the old church door And pace the floor that covers thee; May stand upon the cold, damp stone, And think that frozen lies below The lightest heart that I have known, The kindest I shall ever know. Yet, though I cannot see thee more 'Tis still a comfort to have seen, And though thy transient life is o'er 'Tis sweet to think that thou hast been; To think a soul so near divine, Within a form so angel fair United to a heart like thine Has gladdened once our humble sphere.
There's little joy in life for me,  And little terror in the grave; I 've lived the parting hour to see  Of one I would have died to save. Calmly to watch the failing breath,  Wishing each sigh might be the last; Longing to see the shade of death  O'er those belovèd features cast. The cloud, the stillness that must part  The darling of my life from me; And then to thank God from my heart,  To thank Him well and fervently; Although I knew that we had lost  The hope and glory of our life; And now, benighted, tempest-tossed,  Must bear alone the weary strife.
The night is darkening round me, The wild winds coldly blow; But a tyrant spell has bound me, And I cannot, cannot go. The giant trees are bending Their bare boughs weighed with snow; The storm is fast descending, And yet I cannot go. Clouds beyond clouds above me, Wastes beyond wastes below; But nothing drear can move me; I will not, cannot go.
No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven's glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest, As I Undying Life, have power in Thee Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity, So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality. With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears Though earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And Thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.
O thy bright eyes must answer now, When Reason, with a scornful brow, Is mocking at my overthrow; O thy sweet tongue must plead for me And tell why I have chosen thee! Stern Reason is to judgment come Arrayed in all her forms of gloom: Wilt thou my advocate be dumb? No, radiant angel, speak and say Why I did cast the world away; Why I have persevered to shun The common paths that others run; And on a strange road journeyed on Heedless alike of Wealth and Power— Of Glory's wreath and Pleasure's flower. These once indeed seemed Beings divine, And they perchance heard vows of mine And saw my offerings on their shrine— But, careless gifts are seldom prized, And mine were worthily despised; So with a ready heart I swore To seek their altar-stone no more, And gave my spirit to adore Thee, ever present, phantom thing— My slave, my comrade, and my King! A slave because I rule thee still; Incline thee to my changeful will And make thy influence good or ill— A comrade, for by day and night Thou art my intimate delight— My Darling Pain that wounds and sears And wrings a blessing out from tears By deadening me to real cares; And yet, a king—though prudence well Have taught thy subject to rebel. And am I wrong to worship where Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair, Since my own soul can grant my prayer? Speak, God of Visions, plead for me And tell why I have chosen thee!
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave? Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart forever, ever more? Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring: Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers After such years of change and suffering! Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee, While the world's tide is bearing me along; Other desires and other hopes beset me, Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong! No later light has lightened up my heaven, No second morn has ever shone for me; All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given, All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee. But, when the days of golden dreams had perished, And even Despair was powerless to destroy, Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy. Then did I check the tears of useless passion— Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine; Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten Down to that tomb already more than mine. And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?
" Yes !" I answered you last night ;  " No !" this morning, Sir, I say ! Colours, seen by candle-light,  Will not look the same by day. When the tabors played their best,  Lamps above, and laughs below — Love me sounded like a jest,  Fit for Yes or fit for No ! Call me false, or call me free —  Vow, whatever light may shine, No man on your face shall see  Any grief for change on mine. Yet the sin is on us both —  Time to dance is not to woo — Wooer light makes fickle troth —  Scorn of me recoils on you ! Learn to win a lady's faith  Nobly, as the thing is high ; Bravely, as for life and death —  With a loyal gravity. Lead her from the festive boards,  Point her to the starry skies, Guard her, by your truthful words,  Pure from courtship's flatteries. By your truth she shall be true —  Ever true, as wives of yore — And her Yes, once said to you,  SHALL be Yes for evermore.
I. Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,  And one of them shot in the west by the sea. Dead ! both my boys ! When you sit at the feast  And are wanting a great song for Italy free,  Let none look at me ! II. Yet I was a poetess only last year,  And good at my art, for a woman, men said ; But this woman, this, who is agonized here,  — The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head  For ever instead. III. What art can a woman be good at ? Oh, vain !  What art is she good at, but hurting her breast With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain ?  Ah boys, how you hurt ! you were strong as you pressed,  And I proud, by that test. IV. What art's for a woman ? To hold on her knees  Both darlings ! to feel all their arms round her throat, Cling, strangle a little ! to sew by degrees  And 'broider the long-clothes and neat little coat ;  To dream and to doat. V. To teach them ... It stings there ! I made them indeed  Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt, That a country's a thing men should die for at need. I prated of liberty, rights, and about  The tyrant cast out. VI. And when their eyes flashed ... O my beautiful eyes ! ... I exulted ; nay, let them go forth at the wheels Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise  When one sits quite alone ! Then one weeps, then one kneels !  God, how the house feels ! VII. At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled  With my kisses, — of camp-life and glory, and how They both loved me ; and, soon coming home to be spoiled  In return would fan off every fly from my brow  With their green laurel-bough. VIII. Then was triumph at Turin : Ancona was free !'  And some one came out of the cheers in the street, With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.  My Guido was dead ! I fell down at his feet,  While they cheered in the street. IX. I bore it ; friends soothed me ; my grief looked sublime  As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time  When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained  To the height he had gained. X. And letters still came, shorter, sadder, more strong,  Writ now but in one hand, I was not to faint, — One loved me for two — would be with me ere long :  And Viva l' Italia ! — he died for, our saint,  Who forbids our complaint." XI. My Nanni would add, he was safe, and aware  Of a presence that turned off the balls, — was imprest It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,  And how 'twas impossible, quite dispossessed,  To live on for the rest." XII. On which, without pause, up the telegraph line  Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta : — Shot. Tell his mother. Ah, ah, his, ' their ' mother, — not mine, '  No voice says "My mother" again to me. What !  You think Guido forgot ? XIII. Are souls straight so happy that, dizzy with Heaven,  They drop earth's affections, conceive not of woe ? I think not. Themselves were too lately forgiven  Through THAT Love and Sorrow which reconciled so  The Above and Below. XIV. O Christ of the five wounds, who look'dst through the dark  To the face of Thy mother ! consider, I pray, How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,  Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,  And no last word to say ! XV. Both boys dead ? but that's out of nature. We all  Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one. 'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall ;  And, when Italy 's made, for what end is it done  If we have not a son ? XVI. Ah, ah, ah ! when Gaeta's taken, what then ?  When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of men ?  When the guns of Cavalli with final retort  Have cut the game short ? XVII. When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,  When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and red, When you have your country from mountain to sea,  When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head,  (And I have my Dead) — XVIII. What then ? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low,  And burn your lights faintly ! My country is there, Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow :  My Italy 's THERE, with my brave civic Pair,  To disfranchise despair ! XIX. Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,  And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn ; But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length  Into wail such as this — and we sit on forlorn  When the man-child is born. XX. Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,  And one of them shot in the west by the sea. Both ! both my boys ! If in keeping the feast  You want a great song for your Italy free,  Let none look at me !
I. WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river ? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river. II. He tore out a reed, the great god Pan, From the deep cool bed of the river : The limpid water turbidly ran, And the broken lilies a-dying lay, And the dragon-fly had fled away, Ere he brought it out of the river. III. High on the shore sate the great god Pan, While turbidly flowed the river ; And hacked and hewed as a great god can, With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed, Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed To prove it fresh from the river. IV. He cut it short, did the great god Pan, (How tall it stood in the river !) Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man, Steadily from the outside ring, And notched the poor dry empty thing In holes, as he sate by the river. V. This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan, Laughed while he sate by the river,) The only way, since gods began To make sweet music, they could succeed.' Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed, He blew in power by the river. VI. Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan ! Piercing sweet by the river ! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan ! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river. VII. Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man : The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, — For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.
I. ENOUGH ! we're tired, my heart and I.  We sit beside the headstone thus,  And wish that name were carved for us. The moss reprints more tenderly  The hard types of the mason's knife,  As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life With which we're tired, my heart and I. II. You see we're tired, my heart and I.  We dealt with books, we trusted men,  And in our own blood drenched the pen, As if such colours could not fly.  We walked too straight for fortune's end,  We loved too true to keep a friend ; At last we're tired, my heart and I. III. How tired we feel, my heart and I !  We seem of no use in the world ;  Our fancies hang grey and uncurled About men's eyes indifferently ;  Our voice which thrilled you so, will let  You sleep; our tears are only wet : What do we here, my heart and I ? IV. So tired, so tired, my heart and I !  It was not thus in that old time  When Ralph sat with me 'neath the lime To watch the sunset from the sky.  Dear love, you're looking tired,' he said;  I, smiling at him, shook my head : 'Tis now we're tired, my heart and I. V. So tired, so tired, my heart and I !  Though now none takes me on his arm  To fold me close and kiss me warm Till each quick breath end in a sigh  Of happy languor. Now, alone,  We lean upon this graveyard stone, Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I. VI. Tired out we are, my heart and I.  Suppose the world brought diadems  To tempt us, crusted with loose gems Of powers and pleasures ? Let it try.  We scarcely care to look at even  A pretty child, or God's blue heaven, We feel so tired, my heart and I. VII. Yet who complains ? My heart and I ?  In this abundant earth no doubt  Is little room for things worn out : Disdain them, break them, throw them by  And if before the days grew rough  We once were loved, used, — well enough, I think, we've fared, my heart and I.
MY future will not copy fair my pastOn any leaf but Heaven's. Be fully done,Supernal Will ! I would not fain be oneWho, satisfying thirst and breaking fastUpon the fulness of the heart, at lastSaith no grace after meat. My wine hath runIndeed out of my cup, and there is noneTo gather up the bread of my repastScattered and trampled ! Yet I find some goodIn earth's green herbs, and streams that bubble upClear from the darkling ground, — content untilI sit with angels before better food.Dear Christ ! when thy new vintage fills my cup,This hand shall shake no more, nor that wine spill.
I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair, And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, ... Guess now who holds thee?'—Death,' I said. But there, The silver answer rang ... Not Death, but Love.'
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of my door Of individual life, I shall command The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand Serenely in the sunshine as before, Without the sense of that which I forbore, .. Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes, the tears of two.
The face of all the world is changed, I think, Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink, Was caught up into love, and taught the whole Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole God gave for baptism, I am fain to drink, And praise its sweetness, Sweet, with thee anear. The names of country, heaven, are changed away For where thou art or shalt be, there or here; And this ... this lute and song ... loved yesterday, (The singing angels know) are only dear, Because thy name moves right in what they say.
If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say I love her for her smile ... her look ... her way Of speaking gently, ... for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'— For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,— A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
Beloved, my Beloved, when I think That thou wast in the world a year ago, What time I sate alone here in the snow And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink No moment at thy voice ... but, link by link, Went counting all my chains, as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand ... why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's presence out of sight.
When our two souls stand up erect and strong, Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, Until the lengthening wings break into fire At either curvéd point, — what bitter wrong Can the earth do to us, that we should not long Be here contented ? Think. In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay Rather on earth, Belovèd, — where the unfit Contrarious moods of men recoil away And isolate pure spirits, and permit A place to stand and love in for a day, With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
I lived with visions for my company, Instead of men and women, years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me. But soon their trailing purple was not free Of this world's dust, — their lutes did silent grow, And I myself grew faint and blind below Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come ... to be, Belovèd, what they seemed. Their shining fronts, Their songs, their splendours, (better, yet the same, As river-water hallowed into fonts) Met in thee, and from out thee overcame My soul with satisfaction of all wants — Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white ! — And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, ... he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! — this, ... the paper's light ... Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed As if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine — and so its ink has paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed, If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me? Shall I never miss Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange, When I look up, to drop on a new range Of walls and floors ... another home than this? Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change? That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried, To conquer grief, tries more ... as all things prove; For grief indeed is love and grief beside. Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love. Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.Poetry Out Loud Note: In the print anthology, this poem is titled simply "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." The student may give either title during their recitation.
Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely, As thou pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy— Which is the poison to poison her, prithee? He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here. Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder,—I am not in haste! Better sit thus and observe thy strange things, Than go where men wait me and dance at the King’s. That in the mortar—you call it a gum? Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, Sure to taste sweetly,—is that poison too? Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures, What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures! To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket! Soon, at the King’s, a mere lozenge to give And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live! But to light a pastile, and Elise, with her head And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead! Quick—is it finished? The colour’s too grim! Why not soft like the phial’s, enticing and dim? Let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir, And try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer! What a drop! She’s not little, no minion like me— That’s why she ensnared him: this never will free The soul from those masculine eyes,—say, “no!” To that pulse’s magnificent come-and-go. For only last night, as they whispered, I brought My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall, Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all! Not that I bid you spare her the pain! Let death be felt and the proof remain; Brand, burn up, bite into its grace— He is sure to remember her dying face! Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose; It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close: The delicate droplet, my whole fortune’s fee— If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me? Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will! But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings Ere I know it—next moment I dance at the King’s!
Escape me? Never— Beloved! While I am I, and you are you,  So long as the world contains us both,  Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed! Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed. But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up and begin again,— So the chase takes up one's life, that's all. While, look but once from your farthest bound At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope goes to ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me— Ever Removed!
Just for a handful of silver he left us,  Just for a riband to stick in his coat— Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,  Lost all the others she lets us devote; They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,  So much was theirs who so little allowed: How all our copper had gone for his service!  Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,  Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,  Made him our pattern to live and to die! Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,  Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves! He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,  —He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence;  Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,  Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,  One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,  One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!  There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,  Never glad confident morning again! Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly,  Menace our heart ere we master his own; Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,  Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,  Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep  Half-asleep Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop  As they crop— Was the site once of a city great and gay,  (So they say) Of our country's very capital, its prince  Ages since Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far  Peace or war. Now the country does not even boast a tree,  As you see, To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills  From the hills Intersect and give a name to, (else they run  Into one) Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires  Up like fires O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall  Bounding all Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest  Twelve abreast. And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass  Never was! Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'er-spreads  And embeds Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,  Stock or stone— Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe  Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame  Struck them tame; And that glory and that shame alike, the gold  Bought and sold. Now—the single little turret that remains  On the plains, By the caper overrooted, by the gourd  Overscored, While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks  Through the chinks— Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time  Sprang sublime, And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced  As they raced, And the monarch and his minions and his dames  Viewed the games. And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve  Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece  In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey  Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair  Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul  For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb  Till I come. But he looked upon the city, every side,  Far and wide, All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'  Colonnades, All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then  All the men! When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,  Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace  Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech  Each on each. In one year they sent a million fighters forth  South and North, And they built their gods a brazen pillar high  As the sky Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—  Gold, of course. O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!  Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!  Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!  Love is best.
I Room after room, I hunt the house through We inhabit together. Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her— Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume! As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew: Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather. II Yet the day wears, And door succeeds door; I try the fresh fortune— Range the wide house from the wing to the centre. Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter. Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares? But 'tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore, Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!
I The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. II Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,  And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again?  How strange it seems, and new!  But you were living before that,  And you are living after, And the memory I started at—  My starting moves your laughter!  I crossed a moor, with a name of its own  And a certain use in the world no doubt, Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone  'Mid the blank miles round about:  For there I picked up on the heather  And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—  Well, I forget the rest.
FERRARA That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said “Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not Her husband’s presence only, called that spot Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint Must never hope to reproduce the faint Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough For calling up that spot of joy. She had A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech, Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame This sort of trifling? Even had you skill In speech—which I have not—to make your will Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse— E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet The company below, then. I repeat, The Count your master’s known munificence Is ample warrant that no just pretense Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
All that I know  Of a certain star,  Is, it can throw  (Like the angled spar)  Now a dart of red,  Now a dart of blue,  Till my friends have said  They would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:  They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world?  Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
Never the time and the place  And the loved one all together! This path—how soft to pace!  This May—what magic weather! Where is the loved one's face? In a dream that loved one's face meets mine,  But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine  With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,  With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign! O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man!  Do I hold the Past  Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? This path so soft to pace shall lead Thro' the magic of May to herself indeed! Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers: we Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,— I and she!
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,  The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote  I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm,  The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,  Yet the strong man must go: For the journey is done and the summit attained,  And the barriers fall, Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,  The reward of it all. I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,  The best and the last! I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,  And bade me creep past. No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers  The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears  Of pain, darkness and cold. For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,  The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,  Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,  Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,  And with God be the rest!
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'' Not that, amassing flowers, Youth sighed "Which rose make ours, Which lily leave and then as best recall?" Not that, admiring stars, It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars; Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: Such feasting ended, then As sure an end to men; Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! For thence,—a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. What is he but a brute Whose flesh has soul to suit, Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? To man, propose this test— Thy body at its best, How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? Yet gifts should prove their use: I own the Past profuse Of power each side, perfection every turn: Eyes, ears took in their dole, Brain treasured up the whole; Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?" Not once beat "Praise be Thine! I see the whole design, I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: Perfect I call Thy plan: Thanks that I was a man! Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!" For pleasant is this flesh; Our soul, in its rose-mesh Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; Would we some prize might hold To match those manifold Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! Let us not always say, "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" Therefore I summon age To grant youth's heritage, Life's struggle having so far reached its term: Thence shall I pass, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a god though in the germ. And I shall thereupon Take rest, ere I be gone Once more on my adventure brave and new: Fearless and unperplexed, When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armour to indue. Youth ended, I shall try My gain or loss thereby; Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: And I shall weigh the same, Give life its praise or blame: Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. For note, when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the grey: A whisper from the west Shoots—"Add this to the rest, Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." So, still within this life, Though lifted o'er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, This rage was right i' the main, That acquiescence vain: The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." For more is not reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: Here, work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. As it was better, youth Should strive, through acts uncouth, Toward making, than repose on aught found made: So, better, age, exempt From strife, should know, than tempt Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! Enough now, if the Right And Good and Infinite Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own With knowledge absolute, Subject to no dispute From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? Not on the vulgar mass Called "work," must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. Ay, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— Thou, to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. What though the earlier grooves, Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men; And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I,—to the wheel of life With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
I Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! II Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings. What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings, Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings? III Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call . . . Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival: I was never out of England—it's as if I saw it all. IV Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May? Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say? V Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,— On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head? VI Well, and it was graceful of them—they'd break talk off and afford —She, to bite her mask's black velvet—he, to finger on his sword, While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord? VII What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—"Must we die?" Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! we can but try! VIII "Were you happy?" —"Yes."—"And are you still as happy?"—"Yes. And you?" —"Then, more kisses!"—"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?" Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to! IX So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say! "Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay! "I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!" X Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one, Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun. XI But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve, While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve, In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve. XII Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned: "Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned. "The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned. XIII "Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology, "Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; "Butterflies may dread extinction,—you'll not die, it cannot be! XIV "As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, "Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: "What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? XV "Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
I I wonder do you feel to-day  As I have felt since, hand in hand, We sat down on the grass, to stray  In spirit better through the land, This morn of Rome and May? II For me, I touched a thought, I know,  Has tantalized me many times, (Like turns of thread the spiders throw  Mocking across our path) for rhymes To catch at and let go. III Help me to hold it! First it left  The yellowing fennel, run to seed There, branching from the brickwork's cleft,  Some old tomb's ruin: yonder weed Took up the floating weft, IV Where one small orange cup amassed  Five beetles,—blind and green they grope Among the honey-meal: and last,  Everywhere on the grassy slope I traced it. Hold it fast! V The champaign with its endless fleece  Of feathery grasses everywhere! Silence and passion, joy and peace,  An everlasting wash of air— Rome's ghost since her decease. VI Such life here, through such lengths of hours,  Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers,  Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers! VII How say you? Let us, O my dove,  Let us be unashamed of soul, As earth lies bare to heaven above!  How is it under our control To love or not to love? VIII I would that you were all to me,  You that are just so much, no more. Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!  Where does the fault lie? What the core O' the wound, since wound must be? IX I would I could adopt your will,  See with your eyes, and set my heart Beating by yours, and drink my fill  At your soul's springs,—your part my part In life, for good and ill. X No. I yearn upward, touch you close,  Then stand away. I kiss your cheek, Catch your soul's warmth,—I pluck the rose  And love it more than tongue can speak— Then the good minute goes. XI Already how am I so far  Out of that minute? Must I go Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,  Onward, whenever light winds blow, Fixed by no friendly star? XII Just when I seemed about to learn!  Where is the thread now? Off again! The old trick! Only I discern—  Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.
(As Distinguished by an Italian Person of Quality) Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square; Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!  Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least! There, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect feast; While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more than a beast.  Well now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of a bull Just on a mountain-edge as bare as the creature's skull, Save a mere shag of a bush with hardly a leaf to pull! —I scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's turned wool.  But the city, oh the city—the square with the houses! Why? They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's something to take the eye! Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry; You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who hurries by; Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the sun gets high; And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted properly.  What of a villa? Though winter be over in March by rights, 'Tis May perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights: You've the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze, And the hills over-smoked behind by the faint gray olive-trees.  Is it better in May, I ask you? You've summer all at once; In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April suns. 'Mid the sharp short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well, The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.  Is it ever hot in the square? There's a fountain to spout and splash! In the shade it sings and springs: in the shine such foambows flash On the horses with curling fish-tails, that prance and paddle and pash Round the lady atop in her conch—fifty gazers do not abash, Though all that she wears is some weeds round her waist in a sort of sash.  All the year long at the villa, nothing to see though you linger, Except yon cypress that points like death's lean lifted forefinger. Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix in the corn and mingle, Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it seem a-tingle. Late August or early September, the stunning cicala is shrill, And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the resinous firs on the hill. Enough of the seasons,—I spare you the months of the fever and chill.  Ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed church-bells begin: No sooner the bells leave off than the diligence rattles in: You get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin. By and by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth; Or the Pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath. At the post-office such a scene-picture—the new play, piping hot! And a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot.  Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke's! Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and so, Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome and Cicero, "And moreover," (the sonnet goes rhyming,) "the skirts of Saint Paul has reached, Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart! Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife. No keeping one's haunches still: it's the greatest pleasure in life.  But bless you, it's dear—it's dear! fowls, wine, at double the rate. They have clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil pays passing the gate It's a horror to think of. And so, the villa for me, not the city! Beggars can scarcely be choosers: but still—ah, the pity, the pity! Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and sandals, And the penitents dressed in white shirts a-holding the yellow candles; One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles. And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention of scandals: Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife; Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!
It once might have been, once only:  We lodged in a street together, You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,  I, a lone she-bird of his feather.  Your trade was with sticks and clay,  You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished, Then laughed "They will see some day  Smith made, and Gibson demolished."  My business was song, song, song;  I chirped, cheeped, trilled and twittered, "Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,  And Grisi's existence embittered!"  I earned no more by a warble  Than you by a sketch in plaster; You wanted a piece of marble,  I needed a music-master.  We studied hard in our styles,  Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos, For air looked out on the tiles,  For fun watched each other's windows.  You lounged, like a boy of the South,  Cap and blouse—nay, a bit of beard too; Or you got it, rubbing your mouth  With fingers the clay adhered to.  And I—soon managed to find  Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind  And be safe in my corset-lacing.  No harm! It was not my fault  If you never turned your eye's tail up As I shook upon E in alt,  Or ran the chromatic scale up:  For spring bade the sparrows pair,  And the boys and girls gave guesses, And stalls in our street looked rare  With bulrush and watercresses.  Why did not you pinch a flower  In a pellet of clay and fling it? Why did not I put a power  Of thanks in a look, or sing it?  I did look, sharp as a lynx,  (And yet the memory rankles,) When models arrived, some minx  Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles.  But I think I gave you as good!  "That foreign fellow,—who can know How she pays, in a playful mood,  For his tuning her that piano?"  Could you say so, and never say  "Suppose we join hands and fortunes, And I fetch her from over the way,  Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?"  No, no: you would not be rash,  Nor I rasher and something over: You've to settle yet Gibson's hash,  And Grisi yet lives in clover.  But you meet the Prince at the Board,  I'm queen myself at bals-paré, I've married a rich old lord,  And you're dubbed knight and an R.A.  Each life unfulfilled, you see;  It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free,  Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy.  And nobody calls you a dunce,  And people suppose me clever: This could but have happened once,  And we missed it, lost it for ever.
Who would true Valour see Let him come hither; One here will Constant be, Come Wind, come Weather. There's no Discouragement, Shall make him once Relent, His first avow'd Intent, To be a Pilgrim
XVI. Upon Apparel. God gave us Cloaths to hide our Nakedness, And we by them, do it expose to View. Our Pride, and unclean Minds, to an excess, By our Apparel we to others shew.
LXVI. Upon the Disobedient Child. Children become, while little, our delights, When they grow bigger, they begin to fright's. Their sinful Nature prompts them to rebel, And to delight in Paths that lead to Hell. Their Parents Love, and Care, they overlook, As if Relation had them quite forsook. They take the Counsels of the Wanton's rather, Then the most grave Instructions of a Father. They reckon Parents ought to do for them, Tho they the Fifth Commandement contemn. They snap, and snarl, if Parents them controul, Tho but in things, most hurtful to the Soul. They reckon they are Masters, and that we, Who Parents are, should to them Subject be! If Parents fain would have a hand in chusing, The Children have a heart will in refusing. They'l by wrong doings, under Parents, gather And say, it is no Sin to rob a Father, They'l jostle Parents out of place and Pow'r, They'l make themselves the Head, and them devour. How many Children, by becoming Head, Have brought their Parents to a peice of Bread! Thus they who at the first were Parents Joy, Turn that to Bitterness, themselves destroy.  But Wretched Child, how canst thou thus requite Thy Aged Parents, for that great delight They took in thee, when thou, as helpless lay In their Indulgent Bosoms day by day? Thy Mother, long before she brought thee forth, Took care thou should'st want, neither Food, nor Cloth. Thy Father glad was at his very heart, Had he, to thee, a Portion to impart. Comfort they promised themselves in thee, But thou, it seems, to them a Grief wil't be. How oft! How willingly brake they their Sleep, If thou, their Bantling, didst but whinch or weep. Their Love to thee was such, they could have giv'n, That thou might'st live, almost, their part of Heav'n.  But now, behold, how they rewarded are! For their Indulgent Love, and tender Care, All is forgot, this Love he doth despise, They brought this Bird up to pick out their Eyes.
LXXII. Upon Time and Eternity. Eternity is like unto a Ring. Time, like to Measure, doth it self extend; Measure commences, is a finite thing. The Ring has no beginning, middle, end.
XLV. Upon the Vine-tree. What is the Vine, more than another Tree, Nay most, than it, more tall, more comly be? What Work-man thence will take a Beam or Pin, To make ought which may be delighted in? It's Excellency in it's Fruit doth lie. A fruitless Vine! It is not worth a Fly. Comparison. What are Professors more than other men? Nothing at all. Nay, there's not one in ten, Either for Wealth, or Wit, that may compare, In many things, with some that Carnal are. Good are they, if they mortifie their Sin; But without that they are not worth a Pin.
It was a' for our rightful king That we left fair Scotland's strand; It was a' for our rightful king We e'er saw Irish land, My dear, We e'er saw Irish land. Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain! My love, and native land, fareweel! For I maun cross the main, My dear, For I maun cross the main. He turn'd him right and round about, Upon the Irish shore, He gave his bridle-reins a shake, With, Adieu for evermore, My dear! And adieu for evermore! The soldier frae the war returns, And the merchant frae the main. But I hae parted frae my love, Never to meet again, My dear, Never to meet again. When day is gone and night is come, And a' folk bound to sleep, I think on him that's far awa The lee-lang night, and weep, My dear, The lee-lang night, and weep.
Last May a braw wooer cam down the lang glen, And sair wi' his love he did deave me; I said there was naething I hated like men: The deuce gae wi 'm to believe me, believe me, The deuce gae wi 'm to believe me. He spak o' the darts in my bonie black een, And vow'd for my love he was diein; I said he might die when he liked for Jean: The Lord forgie me for liein, for liein, The Lord forgie me for liein! A weel-stocked mailen, himsel for the laird, And marriage aff-hand, were his proffers: I never loot on that I ken'd it, or car'd, But thought I might hae waur offers, waur offers, But thought I might hae waur offers. But what wad ye think? in a fortnight or less, (The deil tak his taste to gae near her!) He up the lang loan to my black cousin Bess, Guess ye how, the jad! I could bear her, could bear her Guess ye how, the jad! I could bear her. But a' the niest week I fretted wi' care, I gaed to the tryste o' Dalgarnock, And wha but my fine fickle lover was there, I glowr'd as I'd seen a warlock, a warlock. I glowr'd as I'd seen a warlock. But owre my left shoulder I gae him a blink, Lest neibors might say I was saucy; My wooer he caper'd as he'd been in drink, And vow'd I was his dear lassie, dear lassie, And vow'd I was his dear lassie. I spier'd for my cousin fu' couthy and sweet, Gin she had recover'd her hearin, And how her new shoon fit her auld shachl't feet— But, heavens! how he fell a swearin, a swearin, But, heavens! how he fell a swearin. He begg'd, for gudesake, I wad be his wife, Or else I wad kill him wi' sorrow: So e'en to preserve the poor body in life, I think I maun wed him to-morrow, to-morrow, I think I maun wed him to-morrow.
O Mary, at thy window be, It is the wish'd, the trysted hour! Those smiles and glances let me see, That makes the miser's treasure poor: How blythely wad I bide the stoure, A weary slave frae sun to sun, Could I the rich reward secure, The lovely Mary Morison. Yestreen when to the trembling string The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha' To thee my fancy took its wing, I sat, but neither heard nor saw: Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, And yon the toast of a' the town, I sigh'd, and said amang them a', "Ye are na Mary Morison." O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, Wha for thy sake wad gladly die? Or canst thou break that heart of his, Whase only faut is loving thee? If love for love thou wilt na gie At least be pity to me shown: A thought ungentle canna be The thought o' Mary Morison.
O my Luve is like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody That’s sweetly played in tune. So fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only luve! And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my luve, Though it were ten thousand mile.
Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led; Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory! Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour; See approach proud Edward's power— Chains and slavery! Wha will be a traitor knave? Wha can fill a coward's grave! Wha sae base as be a slave? Let him turn and flee! Wha for Scotland's king and law Freedom's sword will strongly draw, Freeman stand, or freeman fa', Let him follow me! By oppression's woes and pains! By your sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!— Let us do or die!
My heart is a-breaking, dear Tittie, Some counsel unto me come len'; To anger them a' is a pity, But what will I do wi' Tam Glen? I'm thinking, wi' sic a braw fellow, In poortith I might mak a fen': What care I in riches to wallow, If I mauna marry Tam Glen? There's Lowrie, the laird o' Dumeller, "Guid-day to you,"—brute! he comes ben: He brags and he blaws o' his siller, But when will he dance like Tam Glen? My minnie does constantly deave me, And bids me beware o' young men; They flatter, she says, to deceive me; But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen? My daddie says, gin I'll forsake him, He'll gie me guid hunder marks ten: But, if it's ordain'd I maun take him, O wha will I get but Tam Glen? Yestreen at the valentines' dealing, My heart to my mou gied a sten: For thrice I drew ane without failing, And thrice it was written, "Tam Glen"! The last Halloween I was waukin My droukit sark-sleeve, as ye ken: His likeness cam up the house staukin, And the very gray breeks o' Tam Glen! Come counsel, dear Tittie, don't tarry; I'll gie ye my bonie black hen, Gif ye will advise me to marry The lad I lo'e dearly, Tam Glen.
When chapman billies leave the street, And drouthy neebors neebors meet, As market-days are wearing late, And folk begin to tak the gate; While we sit bousin, at the nappy, And gettin fou and unco happy, We think na on the lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles, That lie between us and our hame, Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. This truth fand honest Tam o' Shanter, As he frae Ayr ae night did canter: (Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses, For honest men and bonie lasses.) O Tam! had'st thou but been sae wise As taen thy ain wife Kate's advice! She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum, A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum; That frae November till October, Ae market-day thou was na sober; That ilka melder wi' the miller, Thou sat as lang as thou had siller; That ev'ry naig was ca'd a shoe on, The smith and thee gat roarin fou on; That at the Lord's house, ev'n on Sunday, Thou drank wi' Kirkton Jean till Monday. She prophesied, that, late or soon, Thou would be found deep drown'd in Doon; Ot catch'd wi' warlocks in the mirk, By Alloway's auld haunted kirk. Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet, To think how mony counsels sweet, How mony lengthen'd sage advices, The husband frae the wife despises! But to our tale:—Ae market night, Tam had got planted unco right, Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely, Wi' reaming swats that drank divinely; And at his elbow, Souter Johnie, His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony: Tam lo'ed him like a vera brither; They had been fou for weeks thegither. The night drave on wi' sangs and clatter; And ay the ale was growing better: The landlady and Tam grew gracious Wi' secret favours, sweet, and precious: The souter tauld his queerest stories; The landlord's laugh was ready chorus: The storm without might rair and rustle, Tam did na mind the storm a whistle. Care, mad to see a man sae happy, E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy: As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure; Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, O'er a' the ills o' life victorious! But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white—then melts forever; Or like the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form Evanishing amid the storm. Nae man can tether time or tide: The hour approaches Tam maun ride,— That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane That dreary hour he mounts his beast in; And sic a night he taks the road in, As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in. The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last; The rattling show'rs rose on the blast; The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd; Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow'd: That night, a child might understand, The Deil had business on his hand. Weel mounted on his grey mare, Meg,— A better never lifted leg,— Tam skelpit on thro' dub and mire, Despising wind and rain and fire; Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet, Whiles glowrin round wi' prudent cares, Lest bogles catch him unawares. Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh, Whare ghaists and houlets nightly cry. By this time he was cross the ford, Whare in the snaw the chapman smoor'd; And past the birks and meikle stane, Whare drucken Charlie brak's neckbane: And thro' the whins, and by the cairn, Whare hunters fand the murder'd bairn; And near the thorn, aboon the well, Whare Mungo's mither hang'd hersel. Before him Doon pours all his floods; The doubling storm roars thro' the woods; The lightnings flash from pole to pole, Near and more near the thunders roll; When, glimmering thro' the groaning trees, Kirk-Alloway seem'd in a bleeze: Thro' ilka bore the beams were glancing, And loud resounded mirth and dancing. Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou can'st make us scorn! Wi' tippenny we fear nae evil; Wi' usquebae we'll face the devil! The swats sae ream'd in Tammie's noddle, Fair play, he car'd na deils a boddle. But Maggie stood right sair astonish'd, Till, by the heel and hand admonish'd, She ventur'd forward on the light; And, wow! Tam saw an unco sight! Warlocks and witches in a dance; Nae cotillion brent-new frae France, But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels Put life and mettle in their heels. A winnock bunker in the east, There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast: A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large, To gie them music was his charge; He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl, Till roof and rafters a' did dirl.— Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantraip sleight Each in its cauld hand held a light, By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae the rape— Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life bereft— The grey hairs yet stack to the heft; Wi' mair o' horrible and awfu', Which ev'n to name wad be unlawfu'. As Tammie glowr'd, amaz'd and curious, The mirth and fun grew fast and furious: The piper loud and louder blew, The dancers quick and quicker flew; They reel'd, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit Till ilka carlin swat and reekit And coost her duddies to the wark And linket at it in her sark! Now Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans, A' plump and strapping in their teens! Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen, Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!— Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair, I wad hae gien them aff y hurdies, For ae blink o' the bonie burdies! But wither'd beldams, auld and droll, Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, Lowping and flinging on a crummock. I wonder didna turn thy stomach. But Tam ken'd what was what fu' brawlie; There was ae winsom wench and walie, That night enlisted in the core (Lang after ken'd on Carrick shore. For mony a beast to dead she shot, And perish'd mony a bonie boat, And shook baith meikle corn and bear, And kept the country-side in fear); Her cutty sark o' Paisley harn, That while a lassie she had worn, In longitude tho' sorely scanty, It was her best, and she was vauntie. Ah! little ken'd thy reverend grannie, That sark she coft for her wee Nannie, Wi' twa pund Scots ('twas a' her riches), Wad ever grac'd a dance of witches! But here my Muse her wing maun cow'r, Sic flights are far beyond her pow'r; To sing how Nannie lap and flang, (A souple jad she was and strang), And how Tam stood like ane bewitch'd, And thought his very een enrich'd; Even Satan glowr'd and fidg'd fu' fain, And hotch'd and blew wi' might and main: Till first ae caper, syne anither, Tam tint his reason a' thegither, And roars out, "Weel done, Cutty-sark!" And in an instant all was dark: And scarcely had he Maggie rallied, When out the hellish legion sallied. As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke, When plundering herds assail their byke; As open pussie's mortal foes, When, pop! she starts before their nose; As eager runs the market-crowd, When "Catch the thief!" resounds aloud; So Maggie runs, the witches follow, Wi' mony an eldritch skriech and hollo. Ah, Tam! ah, Tam! thou'll get thy fairin! In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin! In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin! Kate soon will be a woefu' woman! Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg, And win the key-stane of the brig: There at them thou thy tail may toss, A running stream they dare na cross. But ere the key-stane she could make, The fient a tail she had to shake! For Nannie far before the rest, Hard upon noble Maggie prest, And flew at Tam wi' furious ettle; But little wist she Maggie's mettle— Ae spring brought aff her master hale But left behind her ain grey tail: The carlin claught her by the rump, And left poor Maggie scarce a stump. Now, wha this tale o' truth shall read, Ilk man and mother's son, take heed, Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd, Or cutty-sarks run in your mind, Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear, Remember Tam o' Shanter's mear.
On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785 Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi’ bickerin brattle! I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee Wi’ murd’ring pattle! I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An’ fellow-mortal! I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen-icker in a thrave ’S a sma’ request: I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, An’ never miss ’t! Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, O’ foggage green! An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin, Baith snell an’ keen! Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, An’ weary Winter comin fast, An’ cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro’ thy cell. That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble, An’ cranreuch cauld! But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!
On Turning One Down with the Plow, in April, 1786 Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem: To spare thee now is past my pow'r, Thou bonie gem. Alas! it's no thy neibor sweet, The bonie lark, companion meet, Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet Wi' spreck'd breast, When upward-springing, blythe, to greet The purpling east. Cauld blew the bitter-biting north Upon thy early, humble birth; Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth Amid the storm, Scarce rear'd above the parent-earth Thy tender form. The flaunting flowers our gardens yield High shelt'ring woods an' wa's maun shield: But thou, beneath the random bield O' clod or stane, Adorns the histie stibble-field Unseen, alane. There, in thy scanty mantle clad, Thy snawie-bosom sun-ward spread, Thou lifts thy unassuming head In humble guise; But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies! Such is the fate of artless maid, Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade! By love's simplicity betray'd And guileless trust; Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid Low i' the dust. Such is the fate of simple bard, On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd! Unskilful he to note the card Of prudent lore, Till billows rage and gales blow hard, And whelm him o'er! Such fate to suffering Worth is giv'n, Who long with wants and woes has striv'n, By human pride or cunning driv'n To mis'ry's brink; Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, He ruin'd sink! Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, That fate is thine—no distant date; Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight Shall be thy doom.
When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r; When Phoebus gies a short-liv'd glow'r, Far south the lift, Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r, Or whirling drift: Ae night the storm the steeples rocked, Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked, While burns, wi' snawy wreeths upchoked, Wild-eddying swirl, Or thro' the mining outlet bocked, Down headlong hurl. List'ning, the doors an' winnocks rattle, I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' winter war, And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scar. Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing! That, in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whare wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing An' close thy e'e? Ev'n you on murd'ring errands toil'd, Lone from your savage homes exil'd, The blood-stain'd roost, and sheep-cote spoil'd My heart forgets, While pityless the tempest wild Sore on you beats.
Huzza! Hodgson, we are going,  Our embargo's off at last; Favourable breezes blowing  Bend the canvass o'er the mast. From aloft the signal's streaming,  Hark! the farewell gun is fir'd; Women screeching, tars blaspheming,  Tell us that our time's expir'd.  Here's a rascal  Come to task all,  Prying from the custom-house;  Trunks unpacking  Cases cracking,  Not a corner for a mouse 'Scapes unsearch'd amid the racket, Ere we sail on board the Packet. Now our boatmen quit their mooring,  And all hands must ply the oar; Baggage from the quay is lowering,  We're impatient—push from shore. "Have a care! that case holds liquor—  Stop the boat—I'm sick—oh Lord!" "Sick, ma'am, damme, you'll be sicker,  Ere you've been an hour on board."  Thus are screaming  Men and women,  Gemmen, ladies, servants, Jacks;  Here entangling,  All are wrangling,  Stuck together close as wax.— Such the genial noise and racket, Ere we reach the Lisbon Packet. Now we've reach'd her, lo! the captain,  Gallant Kidd, commands the crew; Passengers their berths are clapt in,  Some to grumble, some to spew. "Hey day! call you that a cabin?  Why 't is hardly three feet square; Not enough to stow Queen Mab in—  Who the deuce can harbour there?"  "Who, sir? plenty—  Nobles twenty  Did at once my vessel fill."  "Did they? Jesus,  How you squeeze us!  Would to God they did so still: Then I'd 'scape the heat and racket Of the good ship, Lisbon Packet." Fletcher! Murray! Bob! where are you?  Stretch'd along the deck like logs— Bear a hand, you jolly tar, you!  Here's a rope's end for the dogs. Hobhouse muttering fearful curses,  As the hatchway down he rolls, Now his breakfast, now his verses,  Vomits forth—and damns our souls.  "Here's a stanza  On Braganza—  Help!"—"A couplet?"—"No, a cup  Of warm water—"  "What's the matter?"  "Zounds! my liver's coming up; I shall not survive the racket Of this brutal Lisbon Packet." Now at length we're off for Turkey,  Lord knows when we shall come back! Breezes foul and tempests murky  May unship us in a crack. But, since life at most a jest is,  As philosophers allow, Still to laugh by far the best is,  Then laugh on—as I do now.  Laugh at all things,  Great and small things,  Sick or well, at sea or shore;  While we're quaffing,  Let's have laughing—  Who the devil cares for more?— Some good wine! and who would lack it, Ev'n on board the Lisbon Packet?
On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved, Since others it hath ceased to move: Yet though I cannot be beloved, Still let me love! My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; The worm—the canker, and the grief Are mine alone! The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some Volcanic Isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze A funeral pile. The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of Love I cannot share, But wear the chain. But 'tis not thus—and 'tis not here Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now, Where Glory decks the hero's bier, Or binds his brow. The Sword, the Banner, and the Field, Glory and Greece around us see! The Spartan borne upon his shield Was not more free. Awake (not Greece—she is awake!) Awake, my Spirit! Think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake And then strike home! Tread those reviving passions down Unworthy Manhood—unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of beauty be. If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live? The land of honourable Death Is here:—up to the Field, and give Away thy breath! Seek out—less often sought than found— A Soldier's Grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy Ground, And take thy rest.
My hair is grey, but not with years,  Nor grew it white  In a single night, As men's have grown from sudden fears: My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil,  But rusted with a vile repose, For they have been a dungeon's spoil,  And mine has been the fate of those To whom the goodly earth and air Are bann'd, and barr'd—forbidden fare; But this was for my father's faith I suffer'd chains and courted death; That father perish'd at the stake For tenets he would not forsake; And for the same his lineal race In darkness found a dwelling place; We were seven—who now are one,  Six in youth, and one in age, Finish'd as they had begun,  Proud of Persecution's rage; One in fire, and two in field, Their belief with blood have seal'd, Dying as their father died, For the God their foes denied;— Three were in a dungeon cast, Of whom this wreck is left the last.  There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, In Chillon's dungeons deep and old, There are seven columns, massy and grey, Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, A sunbeam which hath lost its way, And through the crevice and the cleft Of the thick wall is fallen and left; Creeping o'er the floor so damp, Like a marsh's meteor lamp: And in each pillar there is a ring,  And in each ring there is a chain; That iron is a cankering thing,  For in these limbs its teeth remain, With marks that will not wear away, Till I have done with this new day, Which now is painful to these eyes, Which have not seen the sun so rise For years—I cannot count them o'er, I lost their long and heavy score When my last brother droop'd and died, And I lay living by his side.  They chain'd us each to a column stone, And we were three—yet, each alone; We could not move a single pace, We could not see each other's face, But with that pale and livid light That made us strangers in our sight: And thus together—yet apart, Fetter'd in hand, but join'd in heart, 'Twas still some solace in the dearth Of the pure elements of earth, To hearken to each other's speech, And each turn comforter to each With some new hope, or legend old, Or song heroically bold; But even these at length grew cold. Our voices took a dreary tone, An echo of the dungeon stone,  A grating sound, not full and free,  As they of yore were wont to be:  It might be fancy—but to me They never sounded like our own.  I was the eldest of the three  And to uphold and cheer the rest  I ought to do—and did my best— And each did well in his degree.  The youngest, whom my father loved, Because our mother's brow was given To him, with eyes as blue as heaven—  For him my soul was sorely moved: And truly might it be distress'd To see such bird in such a nest; For he was beautiful as day—  (When day was beautiful to me  As to young eagles, being free)—  A polar day, which will not see A sunset till its summer's gone,  Its sleepless summer of long light, The snow-clad offspring of the sun:  And thus he was as pure and bright, And in his natural spirit gay, With tears for nought but others' ills, And then they flow'd like mountain rills, Unless he could assuage the woe Which he abhorr'd to view below.  The other was as pure of mind, But form'd to combat with his kind; Strong in his frame, and of a mood Which 'gainst the world in war had stood, And perish'd in the foremost rank  With joy:—but not in chains to pine: His spirit wither'd with their clank,  I saw it silently decline—  And so perchance in sooth did mine: But yet I forced it on to cheer Those relics of a home so dear. He was a hunter of the hills,  Had followed there the deer and wolf;  To him this dungeon was a gulf, And fetter'd feet the worst of ills.  Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls: A thousand feet in depth below Its massy waters meet and flow; Thus much the fathom-line was sent From Chillon's snow-white battlement,  Which round about the wave inthralls: A double dungeon wall and wave Have made—and like a living grave Below the surface of the lake The dark vault lies wherein we lay: We heard it ripple night and day;  Sounding o'er our heads it knock'd; And I have felt the winter's spray Wash through the bars when winds were high And wanton in the happy sky;  And then the very rock hath rock'd,  And I have felt it shake, unshock'd, Because I could have smiled to see The death that would have set me free.  I said my nearer brother pined, I said his mighty heart declined, He loathed and put away his food; It was not that 'twas coarse and rude, For we were used to hunter's fare, And for the like had little care: The milk drawn from the mountain goat Was changed for water from the moat, Our bread was such as captives' tears Have moisten'd many a thousand years, Since man first pent his fellow men Like brutes within an iron den; But what were these to us or him? These wasted not his heart or limb; My brother's soul was of that mould Which in a palace had grown cold, Had his free breathing been denied The range of the steep mountain's side; But why delay the truth?—he died. I saw, and could not hold his head, Nor reach his dying hand—nor dead,— Though hard I strove, but strove in vain, To rend and gnash my bonds in twain. He died—and they unlock'd his chain, And scoop'd for him a shallow grave Even from the cold earth of our cave. I begg'd them, as a boon, to lay His corse in dust whereon the day Might shine—it was a foolish thought, But then within my brain it wrought, That even in death his freeborn breast In such a dungeon could not rest. I might have spared my idle prayer— They coldly laugh'd—and laid him there: The flat and turfless earth above The being we so much did love; His empty chain above it leant, Such Murder's fitting monument!  But he, the favourite and the flower, Most cherish'd since his natal hour, His mother's image in fair face The infant love of all his race His martyr'd father's dearest thought, My latest care, for whom I sought To hoard my life, that his might be Less wretched now, and one day free; He, too, who yet had held untired A spirit natural or inspired— He, too, was struck, and day by day Was wither'd on the stalk away. Oh, God! it is a fearful thing To see the human soul take wing In any shape, in any mood: I've seen it rushing forth in blood, I've seen it on the breaking ocean Strive with a swoln convulsive motion, I've seen the sick and ghastly bed Of Sin delirious with its dread: But these were horrors—this was woe Unmix'd with such—but sure and slow: He faded, and so calm and meek, So softly worn, so sweetly weak, So tearless, yet so tender—kind, And grieved for those he left behind; With all the while a cheek whose bloom Was as a mockery of the tomb Whose tints as gently sunk away As a departing rainbow's ray; An eye of most transparent light, That almost made the dungeon bright; And not a word of murmur—not A groan o'er his untimely lot,— A little talk of better days, A little hope my own to raise, For I was sunk in silence—lost In this last loss, of all the most; And then the sighs he would suppress Of fainting Nature's feebleness, More slowly drawn, grew less and less: I listen'd, but I could not hear; I call'd, for I was wild with fear; I knew 'twas hopeless, but my dread Would not be thus admonishèd; I call'd, and thought I heard a sound— I burst my chain with one strong bound, And rushed to him:—I found him not, I only stirred in this black spot, I only lived, I only drew The accursed breath of dungeon-dew; The last, the sole, the dearest link Between me and the eternal brink, Which bound me to my failing race Was broken in this fatal place. One on the earth, and one beneath— My brothers—both had ceased to breathe: I took that hand which lay so still, Alas! my own was full as chill; I had not strength to stir, or strive, But felt that I was still alive— A frantic feeling, when we know That what we love shall ne'er be so.  I know not why  I could not die, I had no earthly hope—but faith, And that forbade a selfish death.  What next befell me then and there  I know not well—I never knew— First came the loss of light, and air,  And then of darkness too: I had no thought, no feeling—none— Among the stones I stood a stone, And was, scarce conscious what I wist, As shrubless crags within the mist; For all was blank, and bleak, and grey; It was not night—it was not day; It was not even the dungeon-light, So hateful to my heavy sight, But vacancy absorbing space, And fixedness—without a place; There were no stars, no earth, no time, No check, no change, no good, no crime But silence, and a stirless breath Which neither was of life nor death; A sea of stagnant idleness, Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless! A light broke in upon my brain,—  It was the carol of a bird; It ceased, and then it came again,  The sweetest song ear ever heard, And mine was thankful till my eyes Ran over with the glad surprise, And they that moment could not see I was the mate of misery; But then by dull degrees came back My senses to their wonted track; I saw the dungeon walls and floor Close slowly round me as before, I saw the glimmer of the sun Creeping as it before had done, But through the crevice where it came That bird was perch'd, as fond and tame,  And tamer than upon the tree; A lovely bird, with azure wings, And song that said a thousand things,  And seemed to say them all for me! I never saw its like before, I ne'er shall see its likeness more: It seem'd like me to want a mate, But was not half so desolate, And it was come to love me when None lived to love me so again, And cheering from my dungeon's brink, Had brought me back to feel and think. I know not if it late were free,  Or broke its cage to perch on mine, But knowing well captivity,  Sweet bird! I could not wish for thine! Or if it were, in wingèd guise, A visitant from Paradise; For—Heaven forgive that thought! the while Which made me both to weep and smile— I sometimes deem'd that it might be My brother's soul come down to me; But then at last away it flew, And then 'twas mortal well I knew, For he would never thus have flown— And left me twice so doubly lone,— Lone as the corse within its shroud, Lone as a solitary cloud,  A single cloud on a sunny day, While all the rest of heaven is clear, A frown upon the atmosphere, That hath no business to appear  When skies are blue, and earth is gay.  A kind of change came in my fate, My keepers grew compassionate; I know not what had made them so, They were inured to sights of woe, But so it was:—my broken chain With links unfasten'd did remain, And it was liberty to stride Along my cell from side to side, And up and down, and then athwart, And tread it over every part; And round the pillars one by one, Returning where my walk begun, Avoiding only, as I trod, My brothers' graves without a sod; For if I thought with heedless tread My step profaned their lowly bed, My breath came gaspingly and thick, And my crush'd heart felt blind and sick. I made a footing in the wall,  It was not therefrom to escape, For I had buried one and all,  Who loved me in a human shape; And the whole earth would henceforth be A wider prison unto me: No child, no sire, no kin had I, No partner in my misery; I thought of this, and I was glad, For thought of them had made me mad; But I was curious to ascend To my barr'd windows, and to bend Once more, upon the mountains high, The quiet of a loving eye.  I saw them—and they were the same, They were not changed like me in frame; I saw their thousand years of snow On high—their wide long lake below, And the blue Rhone in fullest flow; I heard the torrents leap and gush O'er channell'd rock and broken bush; I saw the white-wall'd distant town, And whiter sails go skimming down; And then there was a little isle, Which in my very face did smile,  The only one in view; A small green isle, it seem'd no more, Scarce broader than my dungeon floor, But in it there were three tall trees, And o'er it blew the mountain breeze, And by it there were waters flowing, And on it there were young flowers growing,  Of gentle breath and hue. The fish swam by the castle wall, And they seem'd joyous each and all; The eagle rode the rising blast, Methought he never flew so fast As then to me he seem'd to fly; And then new tears came in my eye, And I felt troubled—and would fain I had not left my recent chain; And when I did descend again, The darkness of my dim abode Fell on me as a heavy load; It was as is a new-dug grave, Closing o'er one we sought to save,— And yet my glance, too much opprest, Had almost need of such a rest.  It might be months, or years, or days—  I kept no count, I took no note— I had no hope my eyes to raise,  And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free;  I ask'd not why, and reck'd not where; It was at length the same to me, Fetter'd or fetterless to be,  I learn'd to love despair. And thus when they appear'd at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage—and all my own! And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home: With spiders I had friendship made And watch'd them in their sullen trade, Had seen the mice by moonlight play, And why should I feel less than they? We were all inmates of one place, And I, the monarch of each race, Had power to kill—yet, strange to tell! In quiet we had learn'd to dwell; My very chains and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends To make us what we are:—even I Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.
Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless. Titan! to thee the strife was given Between the suffering and the will, Which torture where they cannot kill; And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refus'd thee even the boon to die: The wretched gift Eternity Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack; The fate thou didst so well foresee, But would not to appease him tell; And in thy Silence was his Sentence, And in his Soul a vain repentance, And evil dread so ill dissembled, That in his hand the lightnings trembled. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and a sign To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence: To which his Spirit may oppose Itself—and equal to all woes, And a firm will, and a deep sense, Which even in torture can descry Its own concenter'd recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory.
She walks in beauty, like the night  Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright  Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light  Which heaven to gaudy day denies. One shade the more, one ray the less,  Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress,  Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express,  How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow,  But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below,  A heart whose love is innocent!
So, we'll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we'll go no more a roving By the light of the moon.
There be none of Beauty's daughters  With a magic like thee; And like music on the waters  Is thy sweet voice to me: When, as if its sound were causing The charmed ocean's pausing, The waves lie still and gleaming, And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:  And the midnight moon is weaving  Her bright chain o'er the deep; Whose breast is gently heaving,  As an infant's asleep: So the spirit bows before thee, To listen and adore thee; With a full but soft emotion, Like the swell of Summer's ocean.
Rose-cheek'd Laura, come, Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's Silent music, either other  Sweetly gracing.  Lovely forms do flow From concent divinely framed; Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's  Birth is heavenly.  These dull notes we sing Discords need for helps to grace them; Only beauty purely loving  Knows no discord, But still moves delight, Like clear springs renew'd by flowing, Ever perfect, ever in them-  Selves eternal.
There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies grow; A heav'nly paradise is that place Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.  There cherries grow which none may buy,  Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry. Those cherries fairly do enclose Of orient pearl a double row, Which when her lovely laughter shows, They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow;  Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,  Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry. Her eyes like angels watch them still, Her brows like bended bows do stand, Threat'ning with piercing frowns to kill All that attempt with eye or hand  Those sacred cherries to come nigh,  Till "Cherry ripe" themselves do cry.
Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air, Thrice sit thou mute in this enchanted chair, Then thrice three times tie up this true love's knot, And murmur soft "She will, or she will not."  Go burn these pois'nous weeds in yon blue fire, These screech-owl's feathers and this prickling briar, This cypress gathered at a dead man's grave, That all my fears and cares an end may have.  Then come, you fairies! dance with me a round; Melt her hard heart with your melodious sound. In vain are all the charms I can devise: She hath an art to break them with her eyes.
Know Celia, since thou art so proud,  'Twas I that gave thee thy renown; Thou hadst, in the forgotten crowd  Of common beauties, liv'd unknown, Had not my verse exhal'd thy name, And with it imp'd the wings of fame. That killing power is none of thine,  I gave it to thy voice, and eyes; Thy sweets, thy graces, all are mine;  Thou art my star, shin'st in my skies; Then dart not from thy borrow'd sphere Lightning on him that fix'd thee there. Tempt me with such affrights no more,  Lest what I made, I uncreate; Let fools thy mystic forms adore,  I'll know thee in thy mortal state; Wise poets that wrapp'd Truth in tales, Knew her themselves, through all her veils.
Give me more love or more disdain;  The torrid, or the frozen zone, Bring equal ease unto my pain;  The temperate affords me none; Either extreme, of love, or hate, Is sweeter than a calm estate. Give me a storm; if it be love,  Like Danae in that golden show'r I swim in pleasure; if it prove  Disdain, that torrent will devour My vulture-hopes; and he's possess'd Of heaven, that's but from hell releas'd. Then crown my joys, or cure my pain; Give me more love, or more disdain.
Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose; For in your beauty's orient deep These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither doth stray The golden atoms of the day; For in pure love heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters and keeps warm her note. Ask me no more where those stars light That downwards fall in dead of night; For in your eyes they sit, and there, Fixed become as in their sphere. Ask me no more if east or west The phoenix builds her spicy nest; For unto you at last she flies, And in your fragrant bosom dies.
Now that the winter's gone, the earth hath lost Her snow-white robes, and now no more the frost Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream Upon the silver lake or crystal stream; But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth, And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree The drowsy cuckoo, and the humble-bee. Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring In triumph to the world the youthful Spring. The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array Welcome the coming of the long'd-for May. Now all things smile, only my love doth lour; Nor hath the scalding noonday sun the power To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold Her heart congeal'd, and makes her pity cold. The ox, which lately did for shelter fly Into the stall, doth now securely lie In open fields; and love no more is made By the fireside, but in the cooler shade Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep Under a sycamore, and all things keep Time with the season; only she doth carry June in her eyes, in her heart January.
When thou, poor excommunicate  From all the joys of love, shalt see The full reward and glorious fate  Which my strong faith shall purchase me,  Then curse thine own inconstancy. A fairer hand than thine shall cure  That heart, which thy false oaths did wound; And to my soul, a soul more pure  Than thine shall by Love's hand be bound,  And both with equal glory crown'd. Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain  To Love, as I did once to thee; When all thy tears shall be as vain  As mine were then, for thou shalt be  Damn'd for thy false apostasy.
"The sun was shining on the sea,  Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make  The billows smooth and bright — And this was odd, because it was  The middle of the night. The moon was shining sulkily,  Because she thought the sun Had got no business to be there  After the day was done — "It's very rude of him," she said,  "To come and spoil the fun." The sea was wet as wet could be,  The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because  No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead —  There were no birds to fly. The Walrus and the Carpenter  Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see  Such quantities of sand: If this were only cleared away,'  They said, it would be grand!' If seven maids with seven mops  Swept it for half a year, Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,  That they could get it clear?' I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,  And shed a bitter tear. O Oysters, come and walk with us!'  The Walrus did beseech. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,  Along the briny beach: We cannot do with more than four,  To give a hand to each.' The eldest Oyster looked at him,  But never a word he said: The eldest Oyster winked his eye,  And shook his heavy head — Meaning to say he did not choose  To leave the oyster-bed. But four young Oysters hurried up,  All eager for the treat: Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,  Their shoes were clean and neat — And this was odd, because, you know,  They hadn't any feet. Four other Oysters followed them,  And yet another four; And thick and fast they came at last,  And more, and more, and more — All hopping through the frothy waves,  And scrambling to the shore. The Walrus and the Carpenter  Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock  Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood  And waited in a row. The time has come,' the Walrus said,  To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —  Of cabbages — and kings — And why the sea is boiling hot —  And whether pigs have wings.' But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried,  Before we have our chat; For some of us are out of breath,  And all of us are fat!' No hurry!' said the Carpenter.  They thanked him much for that. A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,  Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides  Are very good indeed — Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,  We can begin to feed.' But not on us!' the Oysters cried,  Turning a little blue. After such kindness, that would be  A dismal thing to do!' The night is fine,' the Walrus said.  Do you admire the view? It was so kind of you to come!  And you are very nice!' The Carpenter said nothing but  Cut us another slice: I wish you were not quite so deaf —  I've had to ask you twice!' It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,  To play them such a trick, After we've brought them out so far,  And made them trot so quick!' The Carpenter said nothing but  The butter's spread too thick!' I weep for you,' the Walrus said:  I deeply sympathize.' With sobs and tears he sorted out  Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief  Before his streaming eyes. O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,  You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?'  But answer came there none — And this was scarcely odd, because  They'd eaten every one."
(excerpt) Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe, That hast this wintres wedres overshake, And driven away the longe nyghtes blake! Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte, Thus syngen smale foules for thy sake:Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,That hast this wintres wedres overshake. Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte, Sith ech of hem recovered hath hys make; Ful blissful mowe they synge when they wake:Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softeThat hast this wintres wedres overshakeAnd driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
(excerpt) From Book I And so bifel, whan comen was the tyme Of Aperil, whan clothed is the mede With newe grene, of lusty Veer the pryme, And swote smellen floures white and rede, In sondry wises shewed, as I rede, The folk of Troie hir observaunces olde, Palladiones feste for to holde. And to the temple, in al hir beste wyse, In general ther wente many a wight, To herknen of Palladion the servyse; And namely, so many a lusty knyght, So many a lady fressh and mayden bright, Ful wel arayed, both meste, mene, and leste, Ye, bothe for the seson and the feste. Among thise othere folk was Criseyda, In widewes habit blak; but natheles, Right as our firste lettre is now an A, In beautee first so stood she, makeles; Hire goodly lokyng gladed al the prees. Nas nevere yet seyn thing to ben preysed derre, Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre As was Criseyde, as folk seyde everichone That hir bihelden in hir blake wede; And yet she stood ful lowe and stille allone, Byhynden other folk, in litel brede, And neigh the dore, ay under shames drede, Simple of atir and debonaire of chere, With ful assured lokyng and manere. This Troilus, as he was wont to gide His yonge knyghtes, lad hem up and doun In thilke large temple on every side, Byholding ay the ladies of the town, Now here, now there; for no devoc{.i}oun Hadde he to non, to reven hym his reste, But gan to preise and lakken whom hym leste. And in his walk ful faste he gan to wayten If knyght or squyer of his compaignie Gan for to syke, or lete his eighen baiten On any womman that he koude espye; He wolde smyle, and holden it folye, And seye him thus, "God woot, she slepeth softe For love of the, whan thou turnest ful ofte! "I have herd told, pardieux, of your lyvynge, Ye loveres, and youre lewed observaunces, And which a labour folk han in wynnynge Of love, and in the kepyng which doutaunces; And whan your preye is lost, woo and penaunces. O veray fooles! nyce and blynde be ye! Ther nys nat oon kan war by other be." And with that word he gan cast up the browe, Ascaunces, "Loo! is this naught wisely spoken?" At which the god of love gan loken rowe Right for despit, and shop for to ben wroken. He kidde anoon his bowe nas naught broken; For sodeynly he hitte him atte fulle; And yet as proud a pekok kan he pulle! O blynde world, O blynde entenc{.i}oun! How often falleth al the effect contraire Of surquidrie and foul presumpc{.i}oun; For kaught is proud, and kaught is debonaire. This Troilus is clomben on the staire, And litel weneth that he moot descenden; But al-day faileth thing that fooles wenden. As proude Bayard gynneth for to skippe Out of the wey, so pryketh hym his corn, Til he a lasshe have of the longe whippe; Than thynketh he, "Though I praunce al byforn First in the trays, ful fat and newe shorn, Yet am I but an hors, and horses lawe I moot endure, and with my feres drawe."
(excerpt) From Book II With this he took his leve, and hom he wente; And lord, so he was glad and wel bygon! Criseyde aroos, no lenger she ne stente, But streght in-to hire closet wente anon, And set hire doun as stylle as any ston, And every word gan up and doun to wynde, That he hadde seyd, as it com hire to mynde; And wex somdel aston ed in hire thought, Right for the newe cas; but whan that she Was ful avysed, tho fond she right nought Of peril, why she ought afered be, For man may love, of possibilite, A womman so, his herte may to-breste, And she naught love ayein, but-if hire leste. But as she sat allone and thought e thus, Ascry aroos at scarmuch al with-oute, And men cryde in the strete, "Se, Troilus Hath right now put to flighte the Grekes route!" With that gan al hire meynee for to shoute, "A! go we see; caste up the latis wyde; For thorugh this strete he moot to paleys ryde; "For other wey is fro the yat e noon Of Dardanus, ther opyn is the cheyne." With that com he and al his folk anoon An esy pas rydynge, in routes tweyne, Right as his happy day was, sooth to seyne, For which, men seyn, may nought distourbed be That shal bityden of necessitee. This Troilus sat on his bay e steede, Al armed, save his hed, ful richely, And wownded was his hors, and gan to blede, On whiche he rood a pas, ful softely, But swych a knyghtly sighte, trewely, As was on hym was nought, withouten faille, To loke on Mars, that god is of bataille. So lik a man of arm es and a knyght He was to seen, fulfilled of heigh prowesse; For bothe he hadde a body and a myght To doon that thing, as wel as hardynesse; And eek to seen hym in his gere hym dresse, So fressh, so yong, so weldy semed he, It was an heven up-on hym for to see. His helm to-hewen was in twenty places, That by a tyssew heng, his bak byhynde; His sheld to-dasshed was with swerdes and maces, In which men myghte many an arwe fyndeThat thirl ed hadde horn and nerf and rynde; And ay the peple cryde, "Here cometh oure joye, And, next his brother, holder up of Troye!" For which he wex a litel reed for shame, Whan he the peple up-on hym herde cryen, That to byholde it was a noble game, How sobreliche he caste doun his ÿen. Cryseÿda gan al his chere aspien, And leet it so softe yn hir herte synke, That to hireself she seyde, "Who yaf me drynke?" For of hire owen thought she wex al reed, Remembryng hire right thus, "Lo, this is he Which that myn uncle swerith he moot be deed, But I on hym have mercy and pitee." And with that thought, for pure ashamed, she Gan in hir hed to pulle, and that as faste, Whil he and all the peple forby paste. And gan to caste and rollen up and doun With-inne hir thought his excellent prowesse, And his estat, and also his renown, His wit, his shap, and eek his gentillesse; But moost hir favour was, for his distresseWas al for hire, and thoughte it was a routheTo sleen swich oon, if that he mente trouthe. Now myghte som envious jangle thus: "This was a sodeyn love; how myght it be That she so lightly loved Troilus Right for the firste syghte; ye, pardee?" Now who-so seith so, mote he never thee! For everything, a gynnyng hath it nedeEr al be wrought, with-outen any drede. For I sey nought that she so sodeynly Yaf hym hire love, but that she gan enclyneTo like him first, and I have told yow whi; And after that, his manhod and his pyneMade love with-inne hire herte for to myne, For which, by proces and by good servyse, He gat hire love, and in no sodeyn wyse.
(excerpt) From Book V The morwen com, and gostly for to speke, This Diomede is come un-to Criseyde; And shortly, lest that ye my tale breke, So wel he for hym-selven spak and seyde, That alle hire sikes soore adown he leyde. And finaly, the sothe for to seyne, He refte hir of the grete of al hire peyne. And after this the storie telleth us That she hym yaf the fair e baye stede, The which he ones wan of Troilus; And ek a broche (and that was litel nede) That Troilus was, she yaf this Diomede. And ek, the bet from sorwe him to releve, She made hym were a pencel of hire sleve. I fynde ek in the stories ell es-where, Whan thorugh the body hurt was DiomedeOf Troilus, tho wepte she many a teer e, Whan that she saugh his wyde wowndes blede; And that she took, to kepen hym, good hede; And for to hele hym of his sorwes smerte, Men seyn, I not, that she yaf hym hire herte. But trew ely, the storie telleth us, Ther made nevere woman moore wo Than she, whan that she falsed Troilus. She seyde, "Allas! for now is clene a-go My name of trouthe in love, for evere-mo! For I have falsed oon the gentilesteThat ever e was, and oon the worthieste! "Allas, of me, un-to the world es ende, Shal neyther been y-writen nor y-songeNo good word, for thise bok es wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge! Thorugh-out the world my belle shal be ronge; And wommen moost wol haten me of alle. Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle! "Thei wol seyn, in as muche as in me is, I have hem don dishonour, weylawey! Al be I nat the firste that dide amys, What helpeth that to don my blame awey? But syn I see ther is no bettr e way, And that to late is now for me to rewe, To Diomede algate I wol be trewe. "But, Troilus, syn I no bettr e may, And syn that thus departen ye and I, Yet prey I God, so yeve yow right good day, As for the gentileste, trewely, That evere I say, to serven feythfully, And best kan ay his lady honour kepe;"— And with that word she brast anon to wepe. "And certes, yow ne haten shal I never e; And frendes love, that shal ye han of me, And my good word, al sholde I lyven evere. And, trewely, I wolde sory be For to seen yow in adversitee. And giltelees, I woot wel, I yow leve; But al shal passe; and thus take I my leve." But trew ely, how longe it was bytwene, That she forsok him for this Diomede, Ther is non auctor telleth it, I wene. Take every man now to his bokes heede; He shal no terme fynden, out of drede. For though that he bigan to wowe hire sone, Er he hire wan, yet was ther more to doone. Ne me ne list this sely womman chyd eForther than the story e wol devyse. Hire name, allas! is publisshed so wydeThat for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffis e. And if I myghte excuse hire any wyse, For she so sory was for hire untrouthe, I-wis, I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe. Go, litel book, go, litel myn trageedy e, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som com�dye! But litel book, no makyng thou nenvie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes, whereas thou seest paceVirgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stac e. And for ther is so gret diversiteeIn Englissh and in writyng of oure tong e, So prey I God that noon myswrite thee, Ne thee mysmetre for defaute of tonge. And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde God I beseche! But yet to purpos of my rather speche.— The wrath, as I bigan yow for to sey e, Of Troilus, the Grekis boughten deere; For thousandes his hondes maden deye, As he that was with-outen any peere, Save Ector, in his tyme, as I kan heere. But weilaway, save only Goddes wille! Despitously hym slough the fierse Achille. And whan that he was slayn in this maner e, His lighte goost ful blisfully is went Up to the holownesse of the eighthe spere, In convers letynge everich element; And ther he saugh, with ful avysement, The erratik sterres, herkenyng armonyeWith sown es fulle of hevenyssh melodie. And doun from thenn es faste he gan avyseThis litel spot of erthe, that with the se Embrac ed is, and fully gan despiseThis wrecched world, and held al vanitee To respect of the pleyn feliciteeThat is in hevene above; and at the last e, Ther he was slayn, his lokyng doun he caste; And in hym-self he lough right at the wo Of hem that wepten for his deth so fast e; And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so The blynde lust, the which that may not laste, And sholden al our herte on heven caste. And forth he wente, shortly for to telle, Ther as Mercúrye sorted hym to dwelle.— Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for lov e, Swich fyn hath al his grete worthynesse; Swich fyn hath his estat reál above, Swich fyn his lust, swich fyn hath his noblesse: Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse! And thus bigan his lovyng of Criseyde, As I have told, and in this wise he deyde. O yong e fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with your age, Repeyreth hoom fro worldly vanytee, And of youre herte up-casteth the visageTo thilk e God that after his ymageYow made, and thynketh al nys but a fair eThis world, that passeth soone as flour es faire. And loveth hym, the which that right for lov eUpon a crois, oure soul es for to beye, First starf, and roos, and sit in hevene above; For he nyl falsen no wight, dar I seye, That wol his herte al holly on him leye. And sin he best to love is, and most meke, What nedeth feynede loves for to seke? Lo here, of payens cors ed olde rites, Lo here, what alle hir goddes may availle; Lo here, thise wrecched worldes appetites; Lo here, the fyn and guerdoun for travailleOf Jove, Appollo, of Mars, of swich rascaill e! Lo here, the forme of olde clerkis specheIn poetrie, if ye hir bok es seche.— O moral Gower, this book I direct eTo the, and to the, philosophical Strod e, To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte, Of youre benignitees and zeles goode. And to that sothfast Crist, that starf on rode, With al myn herte of mercy evere I preye; And to the Lord right thus I speke and seye: Thou oon, and two, and three, eterne on lyv e, That regnest ay in three, and two, and oon, Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive, Us from visible and invisible foon Defende; and to thy mercy, everichon, So make us, Jesus, for thi mercy digne, For love of mayde and moder thyn benigne! Amen.
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest. I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
I hid my love when young till I Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly; I hid my love to my despite Till I could not bear to look at light: I dare not gaze upon her face But left her memory in each place; Where'er I saw a wild flower lie I kissed and bade my love good-bye. I met her in the greenest dells, Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells; The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye, The bee kissed and went singing by, A sunbeam found a passage there, A gold chain round her neck so fair; As secret as the wild bee's song She lay there all the summer long. I hid my love in field and town Till e'en the breeze would knock me down; The bees seemed singing ballads o'er, The fly's bass turned a lion's roar; And even silence found a tongue, To haunt me all the summer long; The riddle nature could not prove Was nothing else but secret love.
Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come, For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom, And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest, And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast; She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair, And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair; I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest, And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast. The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May, The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day, And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast; I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear; I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.
Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,  Precedence takes of rosy fingered Spring; And laughing Joy, with wild flowers prank'd, and crown'd,  A wild and giddy thing, And Health robust, from every care unbound,  Come on the zephyr's wing,  And cheer the toiling clown.  Happy as holiday-enjoying face,  Loud tongued, and "merry as a marriage bell," Thy lightsome step sheds joy in every place;  And where the troubled dwell, Thy witching charms wean them of half their cares;  And from thy sunny spell,  They greet joy unawares.  Then with thy sultry locks all loose and rude,  And mantle laced with gems of garish light, Come as of wont; for I would fain intrude,  And in the world's despite, Share the rude wealth that thy own heart beguiles;  If haply so I might  Win pleasure from thy smiles.  Me not the noise of brawling pleasure cheers,  In nightly revels or in city streets; But joys which soothe, and not distract the ears,  That one at leisure meets In the green woods, and meadows summer-shorn,  Or fields, where bee-fly greets  The ear with mellow horn.  The green-swathed grasshopper, on treble pipe,  Sings there, and dances, in mad-hearted pranks; There bees go courting every flower that's ripe,  On baulks and sunny banks; And droning dragon-fly, on rude bassoon,  Attempts to give God thanks  In no discordant tune.  The speckled thrush, by self-delight embued,  There sings unto himself for joy's amends, And drinks the honey dew of solitude.  There Happiness attends With inbred Joy until the heart o'erflow,  Of which the world's rude friends,  Nought heeding, nothing know.  There the gay river, laughing as it goes,  Plashes with easy wave its flaggy sides, And to the calm of heart, in calmness shows  What pleasure there abides, To trace its sedgy banks, from trouble free:  Spots Solitude provides  To muse, and happy be.  There ruminating 'neath some pleasant bush,  On sweet silk grass I stretch me at mine ease, Where I can pillow on the yielding rush;  And, acting as I please, Drop into pleasant dreams; or musing lie,  Mark the wind-shaken trees,  And cloud-betravelled sky.  There think me how some barter joy for care,  And waste life's summer-health in riot rude, Of nature, nor of nature's sweets aware.  When passions vain intrude, These, by calm musings, softened are and still;  And the heart's better mood  Feels sick of doing ill.  There I can live, and at my leisure seek  Joys far from cold restraints—not fearing pride— Free as the winds, that breathe upon my cheek  Rude health, so long denied. Here poor Integrity can sit at ease,  And list self-satisfied  The song of honey-bees.  The green lane now I traverse, where it goes  Nought guessing, till some sudden turn espies Rude batter'd finger post, that stooping shows  Where the snug mystery lies; And then a mossy spire, with ivy crown,  Cheers up the short surprise,  And shows a peeping town.  I see the wild flowers, in their summer morn  Of beauty, feeding on joy's luscious hours; The gay convolvulus, wreathing round the thorn,  Agape for honey showers; And slender kingcup, burnished with the dew  Of morning's early hours,  Like gold yminted new.  And mark by rustic bridge, o'er shallow stream,  Cow-tending boy, to toil unreconciled, Absorbed as in some vagrant summer dream;  Who now, in gestures wild, Starts dancing to his shadow on the wall,  Feeling self-gratified,  Nor fearing human thrall.  Or thread the sunny valley laced with streams,  Or forests rude, and the o'ershadow'd brims Of simple ponds, where idle shepherd dreams,  Stretching his listless limbs; Or trace hay-scented meadows, smooth and long,  Where joy's wild impulse swims  In one continued song.  I love at early morn, from new mown swath,  To see the startled frog his route pursue; To mark while, leaping o'er the dripping path,  His bright sides scatter dew, The early lark that from its bustle flies,  To hail his matin new;  And watch him to the skies.  To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,  The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn, With earnest heed, and tremulous intent,  Frail brother of the morn, That from the tiny bent's dew-misted leaves  Withdraws his timid horn,  And fearful vision weaves.  Or swallow heed on smoke-tanned chimney top,  Wont to be first unsealing Morning's eye, Ere yet the bee hath gleaned one wayward drop  Of honey on his thigh; To see him seek morn's airy couch to sing,  Until the golden sky  Bepaint his russet wing.  Or sauntering boy by tanning corn to spy,  With clapping noise to startle birds away, And hear him bawl to every passer by  To know the hour of day; While the uncradled breezes, fresh and strong,  With waking blossoms play,  And breathe Æolian song.  I love the south-west wind, or low or loud,  And not the less when sudden drops of rain Moisten my glowing cheek from ebon cloud,  Threatening soft showers again, That over lands new ploughed and meadow grounds,  Summer's sweet breath unchain,  And wake harmonious sounds.  Rich music breathes in Summer's every sound;  And in her harmony of varied greens, Woods, meadows, hedge-rows, corn-fields, all around  Much beauty intervenes, Filling with harmony the ear and eye;  While o'er the mingling scenes  Far spreads the laughing sky.  See, how the wind-enamoured aspen leaves  Turn up their silver lining to the sun! And hark! the rustling noise, that oft deceives,  And makes the sheep-boy run: The sound so mimics fast-approaching showers,  He thinks the rain's begun,  And hastes to sheltering bowers.  But now the evening curdles dank and grey,  Changing her watchet hue for sombre weed; And moping owls, to close the lids of day,  On drowsy wing proceed; While chickering crickets, tremulous and long,  Light's farewell inly heed,  And give it parting song.  The pranking bat its flighty circlet makes;  The glow-worm burnishes its lamp anew; O'er meadows dew-besprent, the beetle wakes  Inquiries ever new, Teazing each passing ear with murmurs vain,  As wanting to pursue  His homeward path again.  Hark! 'tis the melody of distant bells  That on the wind with pleasing hum rebounds By fitful starts, then musically swells  O'er the dim stilly grounds; While on the meadow-bridge the pausing boy  Listens the mellow sounds,  And hums in vacant joy.  Now homeward-bound, the hedger bundles round  His evening faggot, and with every stride His leathern doublet leaves a rustling sound,  Till silly sheep beside His path start tremulous, and once again  Look back dissatisfied,  And scour the dewy plain.  How sweet the soothing calmness that distills  O'er the heart's every sense its opiate dews, In meek-eyed moods and ever balmy trills!  That softens and subdues, With gentle Quiet's bland and sober train,  Which dreamy eve renews  In many a mellow strain!  I love to walk the fields, they are to me  A legacy no evil can destroy; They, like a spell, set every rapture free  That cheer'd me when a boy. Play—pastime—all Time's blotting pen conceal'd,  Comes like a new-born joy,  To greet me in the field.  For Nature's objects ever harmonize  With emulous Taste, that vulgar deed annoys; Which loves in pensive moods to sympathize,  And meet vibrating joys O'er Nature's pleasing things; nor slighting, deems  Pastimes, the Muse employs,  Vain and obtrusive themes.
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLANC, The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone.  Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing—there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven!  Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn.  Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?  And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagg
This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,— Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed May all its agèd boughs o'er-canopy The small round basin, which this jutting stone Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring, Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath, Send up cold waters to the traveller With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance, Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page, As merry and no taller, dances still, Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount. Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss, A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade. Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree. Drink, Pilgrim, here; Here rest! and if thy heart Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound, Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!
Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn?Where may the grave of that good man be?—By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,Under the twigs of a young birch tree!The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year,And whistled and roared in the winter alone,Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.—The Knight's bones are dust,And his good sword rust;—His soul is with the saints, I trust.
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
[Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London] Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge;—that branchless ash, Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone.  Now, my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again The many-steepled tract magnificent Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea, With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hunger'd after Nature, many a year, In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence.  A delight Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad As I myself were there! Nor in this bower, This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight: and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure; No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes 'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good, That we may lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share. My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing (Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory, While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still, Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love,  And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay,  Beside the ruined tower. The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene Had blended with the lights of eve; And she was there, my hope, my joy,  My own dear Genevieve! She leant against the arm{'e}d man, The statue of the arm{'e}d knight; She stood and listened to my lay,  Amid the lingering light. Few sorrows hath she of her own, My hope! my joy! my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing  The songs that make her grieve. I played a soft and doleful air, I sang an old and moving story— An old rude song, that suited well  That ruin wild and hoary. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace; For well she knew, I could not choose  But gaze upon her face. I told her of the Knight that wore Upon his shield a burning brand; And that for ten long years he wooed  The Lady of the Land. I told her how he pined: and ah! The deep, the low, the pleading tone With which I sang another's love,  Interpreted my own. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes, and modest grace; And she forgave me, that I gazed  Too fondly on her face! But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods,  Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once  In green and sunny glade,— There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend,  This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, He leaped amid a murderous band, And saved from outrage worse than death  The Lady of the Land! And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain— And ever strove to expiate  The scorn that crazed his brain;— And that she nursed him in a cave; And how his madness went away, When on the yellow forest-leaves  A dying man he lay;— His dying words—but when I reached That tenderest strain of all the ditty, My faltering voice and pausing harp  Disturbed her soul with pity! All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve; The music and the doleful tale,  The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued,  Subdued and cherished long! She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love, and virgin-shame; And like the murmur of a dream,  I heard her breathe my name. Her bosom heaved—she stepped aside, As conscious of my look she stepped— Then suddenly, with timorous eye  She fled to me and wept. She half enclosed me with her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace; And bending back her head, looked up,  And gazed upon my face. 'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, That I might rather feel, than see,  The swelling of her heart. I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve,  My bright and beauteous Bride.
Like a lone Arab, old and blind,Some caravan had left behind,Who sits beside a ruin'd well,Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;And now he hangs his ag{'e}d head aslant,And listens for a human sound—in vain!And now the aid, which Heaven alone can grant,Upturns his eyeless face from Heaven to gain;—Even thus, in vacant mood, one sultry hour,Resting my eye upon a drooping plant,With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower,I sate upon the couch of camomile;And—whether 'twas a transient sleep, perchance,Flitted across the idle brain, the whileI watch'd the sickly calm with aimless scope,In my own heart; or that, indeed a trance,Turn'd my eye inward—thee, O genial Hope,Love's elder sister! thee did I beholdDrest as a bridesmaid, but all pale and cold,With roseless cheek, all pale and cold and dim, Lie lifeless at my feet!And then came Love, a sylph in bridal trim, And stood beside my seat;She bent, and kiss'd her sister's lips, As she was wont to do;—Alas! 'twas but a chilling breathWoke just enough of life in death To make Hope die anew.
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray With moving lips or bended knees; But silently, by slow degrees, My spirit I to Love compose, In humble trust mine eye-lids close, With reverential resignation No wish conceived, no thought exprest, Only a sense of supplication; A sense o'er all my soul imprest That I am weak, yet not unblest, Since in me, round me, every where Eternal strength and Wisdom are. But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid light, a trampling throng, Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame. So two nights passed: the night's dismay Saddened and stunned the coming day. Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me Distemper's worst calamity. The third night, when my own loud scream Had waked me from the fiendish dream, O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild, I wept as I had been a child; And having thus by tears subdued My anguish to a milder mood, Such punishments, I said, were due To natures deepliest stained with sin,— For aye entempesting anew The unfathomable hell within, The horror of their deeds to view, To know and loathe, yet wish and do! Such griefs with such men well agree, But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? To be loved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.
Written in Germany If I had but two little wings  And were a little feathery bird,  To you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like these are idle things,  And I stay here.  But in my sleep to you I fly:  I'm always with you in my sleep!  The world is all one's own. But then one wakes, and where am I?  All, all alone.  Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids:  So I love to wake ere break of day:  For though my sleep be gone, Yet while 'tis dark, one shuts one's lids,  And still dreams on.
Lines Composed 21st February 1825 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair— The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing— And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live.
Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd With me but roughly since I heard thee last. Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see, The same that oft in childhood solaced me; Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say, "Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!" The meek intelligence of those dear eyes (Blest be the art that can immortalize, The art that baffles time's tyrannic claim To quench it) here shines on me still the same.  Faithful remembrancer of one so dear, Oh welcome guest, though unexpected, here! Who bidd'st me honour with an artless song, Affectionate, a mother lost so long, I will obey, not willingly alone, But gladly, as the precept were her own; And, while that face renews my filial grief, Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief— Shall steep me in Elysian reverie, A momentary dream, that thou art she.  My mother! when I learn'd that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journey just begun? Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unseen, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss— Ah that maternal smile! it answers—Yes. I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away, And, turning from my nurs'ry window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu! But was it such?—It was.—Where thou art gone Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting sound shall pass my lips no more! Thy maidens griev'd themselves at my concern, Oft gave me promise of a quick return. What ardently I wish'd, I long believ'd, And, disappointed still, was still deceiv'd; By disappointment every day beguil'd, Dupe of to-morrow even from a child. Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went, Till, all my stock of infant sorrow spent, I learn'd at last submission to my lot; But, though I less deplor'd thee, ne'er forgot.  Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine have trod my nurs'ry floor; And where the gard'ner Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapt In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capt, 'Tis now become a history little known, That once we call'd the past'ral house our own. Short-liv'd possession! but the record fair That mem'ry keeps of all thy kindness there, Still outlives many a storm that has effac'd A thousand other themes less deeply trac'd. Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, That thou might'st know me safe and warmly laid; Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, The biscuit, or confectionary plum; The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestow'd By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glow'd; All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall, Ne'er roughen'd by those cataracts and brakes That humour interpos'd too often makes; All this still legible in mem'ry's page, And still to be so, to my latest age, Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay Such honours to thee as my numbers may; Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, Not scorn'd in heav'n, though little notic'd here.  Could time, his flight revers'd, restore the hours, When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flow'rs, The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I prick'd them into paper with a pin, (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Would'st softly speak, and stroke my head and smile) Could those few pleasant hours again appear, Might one wish bring them, would I wish them here? I would not trust my heart—the dear delight Seems so to be desir'd, perhaps I might.— But no—what here we call our life is such, So little to be lov'd, and thou so much, That I should ill requite thee to constrain Thy unbound spirit into bonds again.  Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast (The storms all weather'd and the ocean cross'd) Shoots into port at some well-haven'd isle, Where spices breathe and brighter seasons smile, There sits quiescent on the floods that show Her beauteous form reflected clear below, While airs impregnated with incense play Around her, fanning light her streamers gay; So thou, with sails how swift! hast reach'd the shore "Where tempests never beat nor billows roar," And thy lov'd consort on the dang'rous tide Of life, long since, has anchor'd at thy side. But me, scarce hoping to attain that rest, Always from port withheld, always distress'd— Me howling winds drive devious, tempest toss'd, Sails ript, seams op'ning wide, and compass lost, And day by day some current's thwarting force Sets me more distant from a prosp'rous course. But oh the thought, that thou art safe, and he! That thought is joy, arrive what may to me. My boast is not that I deduce my birth From loins enthron'd, and rulers of the earth; But higher far my proud pretensions rise— The son of parents pass'd into the skies. And now, farewell—time, unrevok'd, has run His wonted course, yet what I wish'd is done. By contemplation's help, not sought in vain, I seem t' have liv'd my childhood o'er again; To have renew'd the joys that once were mine, Without the sin of violating thine: And, while the wings of fancy still are free, And I can view this mimic shew of thee, Time has but half succeeded in his theft— Thyself remov'd, thy power to sooth me left.
Oh happy shades—to me unblest!  Friendly to peace, but not to me! How ill the scene that offers rest,  And heart that cannot rest, agree!  This glassy stream, that spreading pine,  Those alders quiv'ring to the breeze, Might sooth a soul less hurt than mine,  And please, if any thing could please.  But fix'd unalterable care  Foregoes not what she feels within, Shows the same sadness ev'rywhere,  And slights the season and the scene.  For all that pleas'd in wood or lawn,  While peace possess'd these silent bow'rs, Her animating smile withdrawn,  Has lost its beauties and its pow'rs.  The saint or moralist should tread  This moss-grown alley, musing, slow; They seek, like me, the secret shade,  But not, like me, to nourish woe!  Me fruitful scenes and prospects waste  Alike admonish not to roam; These tell me of enjoyments past,  And those of sorrows yet to come.
Thy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain, Hears thee, by cruel men and impious, call'd Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th' enthrall'd From exile, public sale, and slav'ry's chain. Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd, Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain! Thou hast achiev'd a part; hast gain'd the ear Of Britain's senate to thy glorious cause; Hope smiles, joy springs, and tho' cold caution pause And weave delay, the better hour is near, That shall remunerate thy toils severe By peace for Afric, fenc'd with British laws.  Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love  From all the just on earth, and all the blest above!
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations It was not Death, for I stood up, And all the Dead, lie down - It was not Night, for all the Bells Put out their TonguesTongues The clappers inside of the bells, for Noon. It was not Frost, for on my Flesh I felt SiroccosSiroccos Hot winds. The Emily Dickinson Lexicon includes definitions from the American Dictionary of the English Language (1844): “A pernicious wind that blows from the south-east in Italy, called the Syrian wind. It is said to resemble the steam from the mouth of an oven.” - crawl - Nor Fire - for just my marble feet Could keep a Chancel,Chancel The section near the altar of a church cool - And yet, it tasted, like them all, The Figures I have seen Set orderly, for Burial Reminded me, of mine - As if my life were shaven, And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key, And ’twas like Midnight, some - When everything that ticked - has stopped - And space stares - all around - Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns, Repeal the Beating Ground - But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool - Without a Chance, or sparspar The top mast of a ship - Or even a Report of Land - To justify - Despair.
Since I am coming to that holy room, Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore, I shall be made thy music; as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think here before. Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown That this is my south-west discovery, Per fretum febris, by these straits to die, I joy, that in these straits I see my west; For, though their currents yield return to none, What shall my west hurt me? As west and east In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the resurrection. Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem? Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar, All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them, Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem. We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place; Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me; As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face, May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace. So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord; By these his thorns, give me his other crown; And as to others' souls I preach'd thy word, Be this my text, my sermon to mine own: "Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down."
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, Which was my sin, though it were done before? Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more. Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won Others to sin, and made my sin their door? Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun A year or two, but wallow'd in, a score? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more. I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore; And, having done that, thou hast done; I fear no more.
I can love both fair and brown, Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays, Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays, Her whom the country formed, and whom the town, Her who believes, and her who tries, Her who still weeps with spongy eyes, And her who is dry cork, and never cries; I can love her, and her, and you, and you, I can love any, so she be not true. Will no other vice content you? Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers? Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others? Or doth a fear that men are true torment you? O we are not, be not you so; Let me, and do you, twenty know. Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go. Must I, who came to travail thorough you, Grow your fixed subject, because you are true? Venus heard me sigh this song, And by love's sweetest part, variety, she swore, She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more. She went, examined, and returned ere long, And said, Alas! some two or three Poor heretics in love there be, Which think to ’stablish dangerous constancy. But I have told them, Since you will be true, You shall be true to them who are false to you.
I am unable, yonder beggar cries, To stand, or move; if he say true, he lies.
Stand still, and I will read to thee A lecture, love, in love's philosophy. These three hours that we have spent, Walking here, two shadows went Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd. But, now the sun is just above our head, We do those shadows tread, And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd. So whilst our infant loves did grow, Disguises did, and shadows, flow From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so. That love has not attain'd the high'st degree, Which is still diligent lest others see. Except our loves at this noon stay, We shall new shadows make the other way. As the first were made to blind Others, these which come behind Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes. If our loves faint, and westwardly decline, To me thou, falsely, thine, And I to thee mine actions shall disguise. The morning shadows wear away, But these grow longer all the day; But oh, love's day is short, if love decay. Love is a growing, or full constant light, And his first minute, after noon, is night.
Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I, Say, where his centric happiness doth lie; I have lov'd, and got, and told, But should I love, get, tell, till I were old, I should not find that hidden mystery. Oh, 'tis imposture all! And as no chemic yet th'elixir got, But glorifies his pregnant pot If by the way to him befall Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal, So, lovers dream a rich and long delight, But get a winter-seeming summer's night. Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day, Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay? Ends love in this, that my man Can be as happy'as I can, if he can Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play? That loving wretch that swears 'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds, Which he in her angelic finds, Would swear as justly that he hears, In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. Hope not for mind in women; at their best Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of love was born. I cannot think that he, who then lov'd most, Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn. But since this god produc'd a destiny, And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be, I must love her, that loves not me. Sure, they which made him god, meant not so much, Nor he in his young godhead practis'd it. But when an even flame two hearts did touch, His office was indulgently to fit Actives to passives. Correspondency Only his subject was; it cannot be Love, till I love her, that loves me. But every modern god will now extend His vast prerogative as far as Jove. To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend, All is the purlieu of the god of love. O! were we waken'd by this tyranny To ungod this child again, it could not be I should love her, who loves not me. Rebel and atheist too, why murmur I, As though I felt the worst that love could do? Love might make me leave loving, or might try A deeper plague, to make her love me too; Which, since she loves before, I'am loth to see. Falsehood is worse than hate; and that must be, If she whom I love, should love me.
If yet I have not all thy love, Dear, I shall never have it all; I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move, Nor can intreat one other tear to fall; And all my treasure, which should purchase thee— Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters—I have spent. Yet no more can be due to me, Than at the bargain made was meant; If then thy gift of love were partial, That some to me, some should to others fall, Dear, I shall never have thee all. Or if then thou gavest me all, All was but all, which thou hadst then; But if in thy heart, since, there be or shall New love created be, by other men, Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears, In sighs, in oaths, and letters, outbid me, This new love may beget new fears, For this love was not vow'd by thee. And yet it was, thy gift being general; The ground, thy heart, is mine; whatever shall Grow there, dear, I should have it all. Yet I would not have all yet, He that hath all can have no more; And since my love doth every day admit New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store; Thou canst not every day give me thy heart, If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it; Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it; But we will have a way more liberal, Than changing hearts, to join them; so we shall Be one, and one another's all.
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world's whole sap is sunk; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph. Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; For I am every dead thing, In whom Love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not. All others, from all things, draw all that's good, Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have; I, by Love's limbec, am the grave Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two chaoses, when we did show Care to aught else; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing the elixir grown; Were I a man, that I were one I needs must know; I should prefer, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest; If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light and body must be here. But I am none; nor will my sun renew. You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun At this time to the Goat is run To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all; Since she enjoys her long night's festival, Let me prepare towards her, and let me call This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
When my grave is broke up again Some second guest to entertain, (For graves have learn'd that woman head, To be to more than one a bed) And he that digs it, spies A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, Will he not let'us alone, And think that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their souls, at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay? If this fall in a time, or land, Where mis-devotion doth command, Then he, that digs us up, will bring Us to the bishop, and the king, To make us relics; then Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I A something else thereby; All women shall adore us, and some men; And since at such time miracles are sought, I would have that age by this paper taught What miracles we harmless lovers wrought. First, we lov'd well and faithfully, Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; Difference of sex no more we knew Than our guardian angels do; Coming and going, we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free; These miracles we did, but now alas, All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids; I must not laugh, nor weep sins and be wise; Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies? Is not our mistress, fair Religion, As worthy of all our souls' devotion As virtue was in the first blinded age? Are not heaven's joys as valiant to assuage Lusts, as earth's honour was to them? Alas, As we do them in means, shall they surpass Us in the end? and shall thy father's spirit Meet blind philosophers in heaven, whose merit Of strict life may be imputed faith, and hear Thee, whom he taught so easy ways and near To follow, damn'd? Oh, if thou dar'st, fear this; This fear great courage and high valour is. Dar'st thou aid mutinous Dutch, and dar'st thou lay Thee in ships' wooden sepulchres, a prey To leaders' rage, to storms, to shot, to dearth? Dar'st thou dive seas, and dungeons of the earth? Hast thou courageous fire to thaw the ice Of frozen North discoveries? and thrice Colder than salamanders, like divine Children in th' oven, fires of Spain and the Line, Whose countries limbecs to our bodies be, Canst thou for gain bear? and must every he Which cries not, "Goddess," to thy mistress, draw Or eat thy poisonous words? Courage of straw! O desperate coward, wilt thou seem bold, and To thy foes and his, who made thee to stand Sentinel in his world's garrison, thus yield, And for forbidden wars leave th' appointed field? Know thy foes: the foul devil, whom thou Strivest to please, for hate, not love, would allow Thee fain his whole realm to be quit; and as The world's all parts wither away and pass, So the world's self, thy other lov'd foe, is In her decrepit wane, and thou loving this, Dost love a wither'd and worn strumpet; last, Flesh (itself's death) and joys which flesh can taste, Thou lovest, and thy fair goodly soul, which doth Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loathe. Seek true religion. O where? Mirreus, Thinking her unhous'd here, and fled from us, Seeks her at Rome; there, because he doth know That she was there a thousand years ago, He loves her rags so, as we here obey The statecloth where the prince sate yesterday. Crantz to such brave loves will not be enthrall'd, But loves her only, who at Geneva is call'd Religion, plain, simple, sullen, young, Contemptuous, yet unhandsome; as among Lecherous humours, there is one that judges No wenches wholesome, but coarse country drudges. Graius stays still at home here, and because Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws, Still new like fashions, bid him think that she Which dwells with us is only perfect, he Embraceth her whom his godfathers will Tender to him, being tender, as wards still Take such wives as their guardians offer, or Pay values. Careless Phrygius doth abhor All, because all cannot be good, as one Knowing some women whores, dares marry none. Graccus loves all as one, and thinks that so As women do in divers countries go In divers habits, yet are still one kind, So doth, so is Religion; and this blind- ness too much light breeds; but unmoved, thou Of force must one, and forc'd, but one allow, And the right; ask thy father which is she, Let him ask his; though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is; Be busy to seek her; believe me this, He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best. To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go, And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so. Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight, Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night. To will implies delay, therefore now do; Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries Are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes. Keep the truth which thou hast found; men do not stand In so ill case, that God hath with his hand Sign'd kings' blank charters to kill whom they hate; Nor are they vicars, but hangmen to fate. Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied To man's laws, by which she shall not be tried At the last day? Oh, will it then boot thee To say a Philip, or a Gregory, A Harry, or a Martin, taught thee this? Is not this excuse for mere contraries Equally strong? Cannot both sides say so? That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know; Those past, her nature and name is chang'd; to be Then humble to her is idolatry. As streams are, power is; those blest flowers that dwell At the rough stream's calm head, thrive and do well, But having left their roots, and themselves given To the stream's tyrannous rage, alas, are driven Through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost Consum'd in going, in the sea are lost. So perish souls, which more choose men's unjust Power from God claim'd, than God himself to trust.
Go and catch a falling star,  Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are,  Or who cleft the devil's foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging,  And find  What wind Serves to advance an honest mind. If thou be'st born to strange sights,  Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights,  Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me, All strange wonders that befell thee,  And swear,  No where Lives a woman true, and fair. If thou find'st one, let me know,  Such a pilgrimage were sweet; Yet do not, I would not go,  Though at next door we might meet; Though she were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter,  Yet she  Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three.Poetry Out Loud Note: In the print anthology, this poem is titled simply "Song." The student may give either title during the recitation.
Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; But since that I Must die at last, 'tis best To use myself in jest Thus by feign'd deaths to die. Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today; He hath no desire nor sense, Nor half so short a way: Then fear not me, But believe that I shall make Speedier journeys, since I take More wings and spurs than he. O how feeble is man's power, That if good fortune fall, Cannot add another hour, Nor a lost hour recall! But come bad chance, And we join to'it our strength, And we teach it art and length, Itself o'er us to'advance. When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind, But sigh'st my soul away; When thou weep'st, unkindly kind, My life's blood doth decay. It cannot be That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st, If in thine my life thou waste, That art the best of me. Let not thy divining heart Forethink me any ill; Destiny may take thy part, And may thy fears fulfil; But think that we Are but turn'd aside to sleep; They who one another keep Alive, ne'er parted be.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations  Busy old fool, unruly sun,  Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?  Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide  Late school boys and sour prenticesprentices apprentices,  Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,the king will ride James I, the king of England at the time of Donne’s writing, had a known passion for riding horses and hunting.  Call country ants to harvest offices, Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.rags of time a figure of speech meaning that such things are passing and immaterial. Donne uses this phrase in one of his sermons.  Thy beams, so reverendreverend worthy of high respect and strong  Why shouldst thou think? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long;  If her eyes have not blinded thine,  Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,  Whether both th' Indias of spice and mineboth th’ Indias of spice and mine the East Indies for spices and the West Indies for gold. In a 1623 letter to Sir Robert Ker, Donne wrote: “Your way into Spain was Eastward, and that is the way to the land of Perfumes and Spices; their way hither is Westward, and that is the way to the land of Gold, and of Mynes.” [John Donne: Selected Prose. Edited by Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy, p. 155]  Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.  She's all states, and all princes, I,  Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemyalchemy figuratively, not the real thing. The speculative practice of alchemy involved a search for chemically turning base metals, such as iron, into highly valuable metals, such as gold..  Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,  In that the world's contracted thus.  Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be  To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.
I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry; But where's that wiseman, that would not be I, If she would not deny? Then as th' earth's inward narrow crooked lanes Do purge sea water's fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains Through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay. Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For he tames it, that fetters it in verse. But when I have done so, Some man, his art and voice to show, Doth set and sing my pain; And, by delighting many, frees again Grief, which verse did restrain. To love and grief tribute of verse belongs, But not of such as pleases when 'tis read. Both are increased by such songs, For both their triumphs so are published, And I, which was two fools, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say The breath goes now, and some say, No: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; 'Twere profanation of our joys To tell the laity our love. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, Though greater far, is innocent. Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it. But we by a love so much refined, That our selves know not what it is, Inter-assured of the mind, Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations    Let me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay hereWhilst I stay here This poem is a valediction, meaning that it is an act of saying goodbye to someone. Donne wrote other poems with “Valediction” in the title, including “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “A Valediction of My Name,” and “Valediction to his Book.” , For thy face coinscoins Makes, as a mint foundry stamps/makes coins. Compare this line with “As Kings do coynes, to which their stamps impart” from Donne’s poem, “Image of her whom I love, more then she.” them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth, For thus they be PregnantPregnant Also meaning: filled with emotion or significance, rich in meaning or implication of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more, When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shorediverse shore On different lands. On a round ballround ball That is, the Earth A workman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, AfricAfric Archaic reference to Africa, used here as two syllables to fit the fixed meter of the line, and an AsiaAsia Pronounced ‘Ay-zee-ay’, rhyming with “lay”, And quickly make that, which was nothingnothing Both the “round ball” and later “each tear” are likened to a zero (“0”), all; So doth each tear Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. O more than moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbearforbear When used as a verb, to avoid or refrain from doing something To teach the sea what it may do too soon; Let not the wind Example find, To do me more harm than it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's deathWhoe’er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other’s death Compare to the lines “When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind, / But sigh’st my soul away” from Donne’s poem, “Song: Sweetest love, I do not go” (lines 25-26).
from An Evening's Love Calm was the even, and clear was the sky, And the new budding flowers did spring, When all alone went Amyntas and I To hear the sweet nightingale sing; I sate, and he laid him down by me; But scarcely his breath he could draw; For when with a fear, he began to draw near, He was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha! He blush'd to himself, and lay still for a while, And his modesty curb'd his desire; But straight I convinc'd all his fear with a smile, Which added new flames to his fire. O Silvia, said he, you are cruel, To keep your poor lover in awe; Then once more he press'd with his hand to my breast, But was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha! I knew 'twas his passion that caus'd all his fear; And therefore I pitied his case: I whisper'd him softly, there's nobody near, And laid my cheek close to his face: But as he grew bolder and bolder, A shepherd came by us and saw; And just as our bliss we began with a kiss, He laugh'd out with A ha ha ha ha!
from Amphitryon Fair Iris I love and hourly I die, But not for a lip nor a languishing eye: She's fickle and false, and there I agree; For I am as false and as fickle as she: We neither believe what either can say; And, neither believing, we neither betray. 'Tis civil to swear and say things, of course; We mean not the taking for better or worse. When present we love, when absent agree; I think not of Iris, nor Iris of me: The legend of love no couple can find So easy to part, or so equally join'd.
Can life be a blessing, Or worth the possessing, Can life be a blessing if love were away? Ah no! though our love all night keep us waking, And though he torment us with cares all the day, Yet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking, There's an hour at the last, there's an hour to repay. In ev'ry possessing, The ravishing blessing, In ev'ry possessing the fruit of our pain, Poor lovers forget long ages of anguish, Whate'er they have suffer'd and done to obtain; 'Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish, When we hope, when we hope to be happy again.
From King Arthur COMUS Your hay it is mow'd, and your corn is reap'd; Your barns will be full, and your hovels heap'd: Come, my boys, come; Come, my boys, come; And merrily roar out Harvest Home. CHORUS Come, my boys, come; Come, my boys, come; And merrily roar out Harvest Home. MAN We ha' cheated the parson, we'll cheat him agen, For why should a blockhead ha' one in ten? One in ten, One in ten, For why should a blockhead ha' one in ten? For prating so long like a book-learn'd sot, Till pudding and dumplin burn to pot, Burn to pot, Burn to pot, Till pudding and dumplin burn to pot. CHORUS Burn to pot, Burn to pot, Till pudding and dumplin burn to pot. We'll toss off our ale till we canno' stand, And Hoigh for the honour of Old England: Old England, Old England, And Hoigh for the honour of Old England. CHORUS Old England, Old England, And Hoigh for the honour of Old England.
A Satire upon the True-blue Protestant Poet T.S. All human things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey: This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long: In prose and verse, was own'd, without dispute Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute. This aged prince now flourishing in peace, And blest with issue of a large increase, Worn out with business, did at length debate To settle the succession of the State: And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit To reign, and wage immortal war with wit; Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he Should only rule, who most resembles me: Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years. Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day: Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye, And seems design'd for thoughtless majesty: Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee, Thou last great prophet of tautology: Even I, a dunce of more renown than they, Was sent before but to prepare thy way; And coarsely clad in Norwich drugget came To teach the nations in thy greater name. My warbling lute, the lute I whilom strung When to King John of Portugal I sung, Was but the prelude to that glorious day, When thou on silver Thames did'st cut thy way, With well tim'd oars before the royal barge, Swell'd with the pride of thy celestial charge; And big with hymn, commander of an host, The like was ne'er in Epsom blankets toss'd. Methinks I see the new Arion sail, The lute still trembling underneath thy nail. At thy well sharpen'd thumb from shore to shore The treble squeaks for fear, the basses roar: Echoes from Pissing-Alley, Shadwell call, And Shadwell they resound from Aston Hall. About thy boat the little fishes throng, As at the morning toast, that floats along. Sometimes as prince of thy harmonious band Thou wield'st thy papers in thy threshing hand. St. Andre's feet ne'er kept more equal time, Not ev'n the feet of thy own Psyche's rhyme: Though they in number as in sense excel; So just, so like tautology they fell, That, pale with envy, Singleton forswore The lute and sword which he in triumph bore And vow'd he ne'er would act Villerius more. Here stopt the good old sire; and wept for joy In silent raptures of the hopeful boy. All arguments, but most his plays, persuade, That for anointed dullness he was made.  Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind, (The fair Augusta much to fears inclin'd) An ancient fabric, rais'd t'inform the sight, There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight: A watch tower once; but now, so fate ordains, Of all the pile an empty name remains. From its old ruins brothel-houses rise, Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys. Where their vast courts, the mother-strumpets keep, And, undisturb'd by watch, in silence sleep. Near these a nursery erects its head, Where queens are form'd, and future heroes bred; Where unfledg'd actors learn to laugh and cry, Where infant punks their tender voices try, And little Maximins the gods defy. Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here, Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear; But gentle Simkin just reception finds Amidst this monument of vanish'd minds: Pure clinches, the suburbian muse affords; And Panton waging harmless war with words. Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known, Ambitiously design'd his Shadwell's throne. For ancient Decker prophesi'd long since, That in this pile should reign a mighty prince, Born for a scourge of wit, and flail of sense: To whom true dullness should some Psyches owe, But worlds of Misers from his pen should flow; Humorists and hypocrites it should produce, Whole Raymond families, and tribes of Bruce.  Now Empress Fame had publisht the renown, Of Shadwell's coronation through the town. Rous'd by report of fame, the nations meet, From near Bun-Hill, and distant Watling-street. No Persian carpets spread th'imperial way, But scatter'd limbs of mangled poets lay: From dusty shops neglected authors come, Martyrs of pies, and reliques of the bum. Much Heywood, Shirley, Ogleby there lay, But loads of Shadwell almost chok'd the way. Bilk'd stationers for yeoman stood prepar'd, And Herringman was Captain of the Guard. The hoary prince in majesty appear'd, High on a throne of his own labours rear'd. At his right hand our young Ascanius sat Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state. His brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace, And lambent dullness play'd around his face. As Hannibal did to the altars come, Sworn by his sire a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true dullness would maintain; And in his father's right, and realm's defence, Ne'er to have peace with wit, nor truce with sense. The king himself the sacred unction made, As king by office, and as priest by trade: In his sinister hand, instead of ball, He plac'd a mighty mug of potent ale; Love's kingdom to his right he did convey, At once his sceptre and his rule of sway; Whose righteous lore the prince had practis'd young, And from whose loins recorded Psyche sprung, His temples last with poppies were o'er spread, That nodding seem'd to consecrate his head: Just at that point of time, if fame not lie, On his left hand twelve reverend owls did fly. So Romulus, 'tis sung, by Tiber's brook, Presage of sway from twice six vultures took. Th'admiring throng loud acclamations make, And omens of his future empire take. The sire then shook the honours of his head, And from his brows damps of oblivion shed Full on the filial dullness: long he stood, Repelling from his breast the raging god; At length burst out in this prophetic mood:  Heavens bless my son, from Ireland let him reign To far Barbadoes on the Western main; Of his dominion may no end be known, And greater than his father's be his throne. Beyond love's kingdom let him stretch his pen; He paus'd, and all the people cry'd Amen. Then thus, continu'd he, my son advance Still in new impudence, new ignorance. Success let other teach, learn thou from me Pangs without birth, and fruitless industry. Let Virtuosos in five years be writ; Yet not one thought accuse thy toil of wit. Let gentle George in triumph tread the stage, Make Dorimant betray, and Loveit rage; Let Cully, Cockwood, Fopling, charm the pit, And in their folly show the writer's wit. Yet still thy fools shall stand in thy defence, And justify their author's want of sense. Let 'em be all by thy own model made Of dullness, and desire no foreign aid: That they to future ages may be known, Not copies drawn, but issue of thy own. Nay let thy men of wit too be the same, All full of thee, and differing but in name; But let no alien Sedley interpose To lard with wit thy hungry Epsom prose. And when false flowers of rhetoric thou would'st cull, Trust Nature, do not labour to be dull; But write thy best, and top; and in each line, Sir Formal's oratory will be thine. Sir Formal, though unsought, attends thy quill, And does thy Northern Dedications fill. Nor let false friends seduce thy mind to fame, By arrogating Jonson's hostile name. Let Father Flecknoe fire thy mind with praise, And Uncle Ogleby thy envy raise. Thou art my blood, where Jonson has no part; What share have we in Nature or in Art? Where did his wit on learning fix a brand, And rail at arts he did not understand? Where made he love in Prince Nicander's vein, Or swept the dust in Psyche's humble strain? Where sold he bargains, whip-stitch, kiss my arse, Promis'd a play and dwindled to a farce? When did his muse from Fletcher scenes purloin, As thou whole Eth'ridge dost transfuse to thine? But so transfus'd as oil on waters flow, His always floats above, thine sinks below. This is thy province, this thy wondrous way, New humours to invent for each new play: This is that boasted bias of thy mind, By which one way, to dullness, 'tis inclin'd, Which makes thy writings lean on one side still, And in all changes that way bends thy will. Nor let thy mountain belly make pretence Of likeness; thine's a tympany of sense. A tun of man in thy large bulk is writ, But sure thou 'rt but a kilderkin of wit. Like mine thy gentle numbers feebly creep, Thy Tragic Muse gives smiles, thy Comic sleep. With whate'er gall thou sett'st thy self to write, Thy inoffensive satires never bite. In thy felonious heart, though venom lies, It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies. Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen iambics, but mild anagram: Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land. There thou may'st wings display and altars raise, And torture one poor word ten thousand ways. Or if thou would'st thy diff'rent talents suit, Set thy own songs, and sing them to thy lute. He said, but his last words were scarcely heard, For Bruce and Longvil had a trap prepar'd, And down they sent the yet declaiming bard. Sinking he left his drugget robe behind, Born upwards by a subterranean wind. The mantle fell to the young prophet's part, With double portion of his father's art.
Why should a foolish marriage vow,  Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now  When passion is decay'd? We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could,  Till our love was lov'd out in us both: But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:  'Twas pleasure first made it an oath. If I have pleasures for a friend,  And farther love in store, What wrong has he whose joys did end,  And who could give no more? 'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,  Or that I should bar him of another: For all we can gain is to give our selves pain,  When neither can hinder the other.
Enter JANUS JANUS Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace, An hundred times the rolling sun Around the radiant belt has run In his revolving race. Behold, behold, the goal in sight, Spread thy fans, and wing thy flight. Enter CHRONOS, with a scythe in his hand, and a great globe on his back, which he sets down at his entrance CHRONOS Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my freight, And leave the world behind. I could not bear Another year The load of human-kind. Enter MOMUS Laughing MOMUS Ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha! well hast thou done, To lay down thy pack, And lighten thy back. The world was a fool, e'er since it begun, And since neither Janus, nor Chronos, nor I, Can hinder the crimes, Or mend the bad times, 'Tis better to laugh than to cry. CHORUS OF ALL THREE 'Tis better to laugh than to cry JANUS Since Momus comes to laugh below, Old Time begin the show, That he may see, in every scene, What changes in this age have been, CHRONOS Then Goddess of the silver bow begin. Horns, or hunting-music within DIANA With horns and with hounds I waken the day, And hie to my woodland walks away; I tuck up my robe, and am buskin'd soon, And tie to my forehead a waxing moon. I course the fleet stag, unkennel the fox, And chase the wild goats o'er summits of rocks, With shouting and hooting we pierce thro' the sky; And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry. CHORUS OF ALL With shouting and hooting, we pierce through the sky, And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry. JANUS Then our age was in its prime, CHRONOS Free from rage, DIANA —And free from crime. MOMUS A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. CHORUS OF ALL Then our age was in its prime, Free from rage, and free from crime, A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. Dance of Diana's attendants MARS Inspire the vocal brass, inspire; The world is past its infant age: Arms and honour, Arms and honour, Set the martial mind on fire, And kindle manly rage. Mars has look'd the sky to red; And peace, the lazy good, is fled. Plenty, peace, and pleasure fly; The sprightly green In woodland-walks, no more is seen; The sprightly green, has drunk the Tyrian dye. CHORUS OF ALL Plenty, peace, |&|c. MARS Sound the trumpet, beat the drum, Through all the world around; Sound a reveille, sound, sound, The warrior god is come. CHORUS OF ALL Sound the trumpet, |&|c. MOMUS Thy sword within the scabbard keep, And let mankind agree; Better the world were fast asleep, Than kept awake by thee. The fools are only thinner, With all our cost and care; But neither side a winner, For things are as they were. CHORUS OF ALL The fools are only, |&|c. Enter VENUS VENUS Calms appear, when storms are past; Love will have his hour at last: Nature is my kindly care; Mars destroys, and I repair; Take me, take me, while you may, Venus comes not ev'ry day. CHORUS OF ALL Take her, take her, |&|c. CHRONOS The world was then so light, I scarcely felt the weight; Joy rul'd the day, and love the night. But since the Queen of Pleasure left the ground, I faint, I lag, And feebly drag The pond'rous Orb around. All, all of a piece throughout; pointing {}} to Diana {}} MOMUS, Thy chase had a beast in view; to Mars Thy wars brought nothing about; to Venus Thy lovers were all untrue. JANUS 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new. CHORUS OF ALL All, all of a piece throughout; Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new.
Stanza 1 From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony This universal frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music's pow'r obey. From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man. Stanza 2 What passion cannot music raise and quell! When Jubal struck the corded shell, His list'ning brethren stood around And wond'ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound: Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot music raise and quell! Stanza 3 The trumpet's loud clangor Excites us to arms With shrill notes of anger And mortal alarms. The double double double beat Of the thund'ring drum Cries, hark the foes come; Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. Stanza 4 The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. Stanza 5 Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depth of pains and height of passion, For the fair, disdainful dame. Stanza 6 But oh! what art can teach What human voice can reach The sacred organ's praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways To mend the choirs above. Stanza 7 Orpheus could lead the savage race; And trees unrooted left their place; Sequacious of the lyre: But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, An angel heard, and straight appear'd Mistaking earth for Heav'n. GRAND CHORUS As from the pow'r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator's praise To all the bless'd above; So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky.
By a dismal cypress lying, Damon cried, all pale and dying, Kind is death that ends my pain, But cruel she I lov'd in vain. The mossy fountains Murmur my trouble, And hollow mountains My groans redouble: Ev'ry nymph mourns me, Thus while I languish; She only scorns me, Who caus'd my anguish. No love returning me, but all hope denying; By a dismal cypress lying, Like a swan, so sung he dying: Kind is death that ends my pain, But cruel she I lov'd in vain.
Ask not the cause why sullen spring  So long delays her flow'rs to bear; Why warbling birds forget to sing,  And winter storms invert the year? Chloris is gone; and Fate provides To make it spring where she resides. Chloris is gone, the cruel fair;  She cast not back a pitying eye: But left her lover in despair,  To sigh, to languish, and to die: Ah, how can those fair eyes endure To give the wounds they will not cure! Great god of Love, why hast thou made  A face that can all hearts command, That all religions can invade,  And change the laws of ev'ry land? Where thou hadst plac'd such pow'r before, Thou shouldst have made her mercy more. When Chloris to the temple comes,  Adoring crowds before her fall; She can restore the dead from tombs,  And ev'ry life but mine recall. I only am by love design'd To be the victim for mankind.
Well then; the promis'd hour is come at last; The present age of wit obscures the past: Strong were our sires; and as they fought they writ, Conqu'ring with force of arms, and dint of wit; Theirs was the giant race, before the Flood; And thus, when Charles return'd, our empire stood. Like Janus he the stubborn soil manur'd, With rules of husbandry the rankness cur'd: Tam'd us to manners, when the stage was rude; And boisterous English wit, with art endu'd. Our age was cultivated thus at length; But what we gained in skill we lost in strength. Our builders were, with want of genius, curst; The second temple was not like the first: Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length; Our beauties equal; but excel our strength. Firm Doric pillars found your solid base: The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space; Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace. In easy dialogue is Fletcher's praise: He mov'd the mind, but had not power to raise. Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please: Yet doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease. In differing talents both adorn'd their age; One for the study, t'other for the stage. But both to Congreve justly shall submit, One match'd in judgment, both o'er-match'd in wit. In him all beauties of this age we see; Etherege's courtship, Southern's purity; The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherly. All this in blooming youth you have achiev'd; Nor are your foil'd contemporaries griev'd; So much the sweetness of your manners move, We cannot envy you because we love. Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw A beardless Consul made against the law, And join his suffrage to the votes of Rome; Though he with Hannibal was overcome. Thus old Romano bow'd to Raphael's fame; And scholar to the youth he taught, became.  Oh that your brows my laurel had sustain'd, Well had I been depos'd, if you had reign'd! The father had descended for the son; For only you are lineal to the throne. Thus when the State one Edward did depose; A greater Edward in his room arose. But now, not I, but poetry is curs'd; For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first. But let 'em not mistake my patron's part; Nor call his charity their own desert. Yet this I prophesy; thou shalt be seen, (Tho' with some short parenthesis between:) High on the throne of wit; and seated there, Not mine (that's little) but thy laurel wear. Thy first attempt an early promise made; That early promise this has more than paid. So bold, yet so judiciously you dare, That your least praise, is to be regular. Time, place, and action, may with pains be wrought, But genius must be born; and never can be taught. This is your portion; this your native store; Heav'n that but once was prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.  Maintain your post: that's all the fame you need; For 'tis impossible you should proceed. Already I am worn with cares and age; And just abandoning th' ungrateful stage: Unprofitably kept at Heav'n's expense, I live a rent-charge on his providence: But you, whom ev'ry muse and grace adorn, Whom I foresee to better fortune born, Be kind to my remains; and oh defend, Against your judgment your departed friend! Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue; But shade those laurels which descend to you: And take for tribute what these lines express: You merit more; nor could my love do less.
Farewell, too little and too lately known, Whom I began to think and call my own; For sure our souls were near ally'd; and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine. One common note on either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorr'd alike: To the same goal did both our studies drive, The last set out the soonest did arrive. Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place, While his young friend perform'd and won the race. O early ripe! to thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more? It might (what nature never gives the young) Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. But satire needs not those, and wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line. A noble error, and but seldom made, When poets are by too much force betray'd. Thy generous fruits, though gather'd ere their prime Still show'd a quickness; and maturing time But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme. Once more, hail and farewell; farewell thou young, But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue; Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound; But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
Excellent In The Two Sister-Arts Of POËsy And Painting: An Ode
Creator Spirit, by whose aid The world's foundations first were laid, Come, visit ev'ry pious mind; Come, pour thy joys on human kind; From sin, and sorrow set us free; And make thy temples worthy Thee.  O, Source of uncreated Light, The Father's promis'd Paraclete! Thrice Holy Fount, thrice Holy Fire, Our hearts with heav'nly love inspire; Come, and thy Sacred Unction bring To sanctify us, while we sing!  Plenteous of grace, descend from high, Rich in thy sev'n-fold energy! Thou strength of his Almighty Hand, Whose pow'r does heav'n and earth command: Proceeding Spirit, our Defence, Who do'st the gift of tongues dispence, And crown'st thy gift with eloquence!  Refine and purge our earthly parts; But, oh, inflame and fire our hearts! Our frailties help, our vice control; Submit the senses to the soul; And when rebellious they are grown, Then, lay thy hand, and hold 'em down.  Chase from our minds th' Infernal Foe; And peace, the fruit of love, bestow; And, lest our feet should step astray, Protect, and guide us in the way.  Make us Eternal Truths receive, And practise, all that we believe: Give us thy self, that we may see The Father and the Son, by thee.  Immortal honour, endless fame, Attend th' Almighty Father's name: The Saviour Son be glorified, Who for lost Man's redemption died: And equal adoration be, Eternal Paraclete, to thee.
from An Evening's Love You charm'd me not with that fair face Though it was all divine: To be another's is the grace, That makes me wish you mine. The Gods and Fortune take their part Who like young monarchs fight; And boldly dare invade that heart Which is another's right. First mad with hope we undertake To pull up every bar; But once possess'd, we faintly make A dull defensive war. Now every friend is turn'd a foe In hope to get our store: And passion makes us cowards grow, Which made us brave before.
I've been list'nin' to them lawyers  In the court house up the street, An' I've come to the conclusion  That I'm most completely beat. Fust one feller riz to argy,  An' he boldly waded in As he dressed the tremblin' pris'ner  In a coat o' deep-dyed sin. Why, he painted him all over  In a hue o' blackest crime, An' he smeared his reputation  With the thickest kind o' grime, Tell I found myself a-wond'rin',  In a misty way and dim, How the Lord had come to fashion  Sich an awful man as him. Then the other lawyer started,  An' with brimmin', tearful eyes, Said his client was a martyr  That was brought to sacrifice. An' he give to that same pris'ner  Every blessed human grace, Tell I saw the light o' virtue  Fairly shinin' from his face. Then I own 'at I was puzzled  How sich things could rightly be; An' this aggervatin' question  Seems to keep a-puzzlin' me. So, will some one please inform me,  An' this mystery unroll— How an angel an' a devil  Can persess the self-same soul?
Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes,  Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee. What you been doin', suh — makin' san' pies?  Look at dat bib — you's es du'ty ez me. Look at dat mouf — dat's merlasses, I bet;  Come hyeah, Maria, an' wipe off his han's. Bees gwine to ketch you an' eat you up yit,  Bein' so sticky an sweet — goodness lan's! Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes,  Who's pappy's darlin' an' who's pappy's chile? Who is it all de day nevah once tries  Fu' to be cross, er once loses dat smile? Whah did you git dem teef? My, you's a scamp!  Whah did dat dimple come f'om in yo' chin? Pappy do' know you — I b'lieves you's a tramp;  Mammy, dis hyeah's some ol' straggler got in! Let's th'ow him outen de do' in de san',  We do' want stragglers a-layin' 'roun' hyeah; Let's gin him 'way to de big buggah-man;  I know he's hidin' erroun' hyeah right neah. Buggah-man, buggah-man, come in de do',  Hyeah's a bad boy you kin have fu' to eat. Mammy an' pappy do' want him no mo',  Swaller him down f'om his haid to his feet! Dah, now, I t'ought dat you'd hug me up close.  Go back, ol' buggah, you sha'n't have dis boy. He ain't no tramp, ner no straggler, of co'se;  He's pappy's pa'dner an' play-mate an' joy. Come to you' pallet now — go to yo' res';  Wisht you could allus know ease an' cleah skies; Wisht you could stay jes' a chile on my breas'—  Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes!
Seen my lady home las' night,  Jump back, honey, jump back. Hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight,  Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh, Seen a light gleam f'om huh eye, An' a smile go flittin' by —  Jump back, honey, jump back. Hyeahd de win' blow thoo de pine,  Jump back, honey, jump back. Mockin'-bird was singin' fine,  Jump back, honey, jump back. An' my hea't was beatin' so, When I reached my lady's do', Dat I could n't ba' to go —  Jump back, honey, jump back. Put my ahm aroun' huh wais',  Jump back, honey, jump back. Raised huh lips an' took a tase,  Jump back, honey, jump back. Love me, honey, love me true? Love me well ez I love you? An' she answe'd, "'Cose I do"—  Jump back, honey, jump back.
Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing;  I look far out into the pregnant night, Where I can hear a solemn booming gun  And catch the gleaming of a random light, That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing. My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing;  For I would hail and check that ship of ships. I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,  My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips, And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing. O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,  O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark! Is there no hope for me? Is there no way  That I may sight and check that speeding bark Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?
Air a-gittin' cool an' coolah, Frost a-comin' in de night, Hicka' nuts an' wa'nuts fallin', Possum keepin' out o' sight. Tu'key struttin' in de ba'nya'd, Nary step so proud ez his; Keep on struttin', Mistah Tu'key, Yo' do' know whut time it is. Cidah press commence a-squeakin' Eatin' apples sto'ed away, Chillun swa'min' 'roun' lak ho'nets, Huntin' aigs ermung de hay. Mistah Tu'key keep on gobblin' At de geese a-flyin' souf, Oomph! dat bird do' know whut's comin'; Ef he did he'd shet his mouf. Pumpkin gittin' good an' yallah Mek me open up my eyes; Seems lak it's a-lookin' at me Jes' a-la'in' dah sayin' "Pies." Tu'key gobbler gwine 'roun' blowin', Gwine 'roun' gibbin' sass an' slack; Keep on talkin', Mistah Tu'key, You ain't seed no almanac. Fa'mer walkin' th'oo de ba'nya'd Seein' how things is comin' on, Sees ef all de fowls is fatt'nin'— Good times comin' sho's you bo'n. Hyeahs dat tu'key gobbler braggin', Den his face break in a smile— Nebbah min', you sassy rascal, He's gwine nab you atter while. Choppin' suet in de kitchen, Stonin' raisins in de hall, Beef a-cookin' fu' de mince meat, Spices groun'—I smell 'em all. Look hyeah, Tu'key, stop dat gobblin', You ain' luned de sense ob feah, You ol' fool, yo' naik's in dangah, Do' you know Thanksgibbin's hyeah?
Wintah, summah, snow er shine,  Hit's all de same to me, Ef only I kin call you mine,  An' keep you by my knee. Ha'dship, frolic, grief er caih,  Content by night an' day, Ef only I kin see you whaih  You wait beside de way. Livin', dyin', smiles er teahs,  My soul will still be free, Ef only thoo de comin' yeahs  You walk de worl' wid me. Bird-song, breeze-wail, chune er moan,  What puny t'ings dey'll be, Ef w'en I's seemin' all erlone,  I knows yo' hea't's wid me.
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while  We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise,  We wear the mask!
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden ...” I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
Thou hast committed — Fornication: but that was in another country, And besides, the wench is dead. (The Jew of Malta)  I Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do— With "I have saved this afternoon for you"; And four wax candles in the darkened room, Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid. We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips. "So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room." —And so the conversation slips Among velleities and carefully caught regrets Through attenuated tones of violins Mingled with remote cornets And begins. "You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!) To find a friend who has these qualities, Who has, and gives Those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you — Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!" Among the winding of the violins And the ariettes Of cracked cornets Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own, Capricious monotone That is at least one definite "false note." — Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance, Admire the monuments, Discuss the late events, Correct our watches by the public clocks. Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks. II Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea. "Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful, after all." The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune Of a broken violin on an August afternoon: "I am always sure that you understand My feelings, always sure that you feel, Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand. You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel. You will go on, and when you have prevailed You can say: at this point many a one has failed. But what have I, but what have I, my friend, To give you, what can you receive from me? Only the friendship and the sympathy Of one about to reach her journey's end. I shall sit here, serving tea to friends ...." I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends For what she has said to me? You will see me any morning in the park Reading the comics and the sporting page. Particularly I remark. An English countess goes upon the stage. A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance, Another bank defaulter has confessed. I keep my countenance, I remain self-possessed Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired Reiterates some worn-out common song With the smell of hyacinths across the garden Recalling things that other people have desired. Are these ideas right or wrong? III The October night comes down; returning as before Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees. "And so you are going abroad; and when do you return? But that's a useless question. You hardly know when you are coming back, You will find so much to learn." My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac. "Perhaps you can write to me." My self-possession flares up for a second; This is as I had reckoned. "I have been wondering frequently of late (But our beginnings never know our ends!) Why we have not developed into friends." I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark Suddenly, his expression in a glass. My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark. "For everybody said so, all our friends, They all were sure our feelings would relate So closely! I myself can hardly understand. We must leave it now to fate. You will write, at any rate. Perhaps it is not too late. I shall sit here, serving tea to friends." And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression ... dance, dance Like a dancing bear, Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance— Well! and what if she should die some afternoon, Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose; Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand With the smoke coming down above the housetops; Doubtful, for quite a while Not knowing what to feel or if I understand Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ... Would she not have the advantage, after all? This music is successful with a "dying fall" Now that we talk of dying— And should I have the right to smile?
I The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.II The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer From the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades That time resumes, One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms.III You tossed a blanket from the bed, You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.IV His soul stretched tight across the skies That fade behind a city block, Or trampled by insistent feet At four and five and six o’clock; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, And evening newspapers, and eyes Assured of certain certainties, The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum, And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium. Half-past one, The street lamp sputtered, The street lamp muttered, The street lamp said, "Regard that woman Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door Which opens on her like a grin. You see the border of her dress Is torn and stained with sand, And you see the corner of her eye Twists like a crooked pin." The memory throws up high and dry A crowd of twisted things; A twisted branch upon the beach Eaten smooth, and polished As if the world gave up The secret of its skeleton, Stiff and white. A broken spring in a factory yard, Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap. Half-past two, The street lamp said, "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter." So the hand of a child, automatic, Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. I could see nothing behind that child's eye. I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles on his back, Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. Half-past three, The lamp sputtered, The lamp muttered in the dark. The lamp hummed: "Regard the moon, La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smoothes the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory. A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, Her hand twists a paper rose, That smells of dust and old Cologne, She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells That cross and cross across her brain." The reminiscence comes Of sunless dry geraniums And dust in crevices, Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms, And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars. The lamp said, "Four o'clock, Here is the number on the door. Memory! You have the key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair, Mount. The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life." The last twist of the knife.
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade'Tis just that some return be made;Sure some return is due from meTo thy cool shadows, and to thee.When thou to birds dost shelter give,Thou music dost from them receive;If travellers beneath thee stayTill storms have worn themselves away,That time in praising thee they spendAnd thy protecting pow'r commend.The shepherd here, from scorching freed,Tunes to thy dancing leaves his reed;Whilst his lov'd nymph, in thanks, bestowsHer flow'ry chaplets on thy boughs.Shall I then only silent be,And no return be made by me?No; let this wish upon thee wait,And still to flourish be thy fate.To future ages may'st thou standUntouch'd by the rash workman's hand,Till that large stock of sap is spent,Which gives thy summer's ornament;Till the fierce winds, that vainly striveTo shock thy greatness whilst alive,Shall on thy lifeless hour attend,Prevent the axe, and grace thy end;Their scatter'd strength together callAnd to the clouds proclaim thy fall;Who then their ev'ning dews may spareWhen thou no longer art their care,But shalt, like ancient heroes, burn,And some bright hearth be made thy urn.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head:"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; I'll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too. I'm going out to fetch the little calf That's standing by the mother. It's so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung. And still the bird revisited her young. A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung. On the bare upland pasture there had spread O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread And straining cables wet with silver dew. A sudden passing bullet shook it dry. The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly, But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
"You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something I should have done by daylight, and indeed, After the ground is frozen, I should have done Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney To make fun of my way of doing things, Or else fun of Orion's having caught me. Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights These forces are obliged to pay respect to?" So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfy a lifelong curiosity About our place among the infinities. "What do you want with one of those blame things?" I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!" "Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything More blameless in the sense of being less A weapon in our human fight," he said. "I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it." There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move, Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years Trying to sell his farm and then not selling, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And bought the telescope with what it came to. He had been heard to say by several: "The best thing that we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's A telescope. Someone in every town Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one. In Littleton it may as well be me." After such loose talk it was no surprise When he did what he did and burned his house down. Mean laughter went about the town that day To let him know we weren't the least imposed on, And he could wait—we'd see to him tomorrow. But the first thing next morning we reflected If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving. Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us, We don't cut off from coming to church suppers, But what we miss we go to him and ask for. He promptly gives it back, that is if still Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of. It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad About his telescope. Beyond the age Of being given one for Christmas gift, He had to take the best way he knew how To find himself in one. Well, all we said was He took a strange thing to be roguish over. Some sympathy was wasted on the house, A good old-timer dating back along; But a house isn't sentient; the house Didn't feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction? Out of a house and so out of a farm At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn To earn a living on the Concord railroad, As under-ticket-agent at a station Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets, Was setting out up track and down, not plants As on a farm, but planets, evening stars That varied in their hue from red to green. He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for stargazing. Often he bid me come and have a look Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, At a star quaking in the other end. I recollect a night of broken clouds And underfoot snow melted down to ice, And melting further in the wind to mud. Bradford and I had out the telescope. We spread our two legs as it spread its three, Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, And standing at our leisure till the day broke, Said some of the best things we ever said. That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter, Because it didn't do a thing but split A star in two or three the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the middle. It's a star-splitter if there ever was one, And ought to do some good if splitting stars 'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?
I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.   The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene.   I looked for him behind an isle of trees; I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.   But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been,—alone,   ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’   But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,   Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.   And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay withering on the ground.   And then he flew as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me.   I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;   But he turned first, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,   A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.   I left my place to know them by their name, Finding them butterfly weed when I came.   The mower in the dew had loved them thus, By leaving them to flourish, not for us,   Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him. But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.   The butterfly and I had lit upon, Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,   That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,   And feel a spirit kindred to my own; So that henceforth I worked no more alone;   But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;   And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.   ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, ‘Whether they work together or apart.’
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.' The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
In vain to me the smiling Mornings shine,  And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire; The birds in vain their amorous descant join;  Or cheerful fields resume their green attire; These ears, alas! for other notes repine,  A different object do these eyes require; My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;  And in my breast the imperfect joys expire. Yet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer,  And new-born pleasure brings to happier men; The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;  To warm their little loves the birds complain; I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,  And weep the more because I weep in vain.
I.1. Awake, Æolian lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take: The laughing flowers, that round them blow, Drink life and fragrance as they flow. Now the rich stream of music winds along Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, Thro' verdant vales, and Ceres' golden reign: Now rolling down the steep amain, Headlong, impetuous, see it pour: The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. I.2. Oh! Sovereign of the willing soul, Parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs, Enchanting shell! the sullen Cares And frantic Passions hear thy soft control. On Thracia's hills the Lord of War, Has curb'd the fury of his car, And dropp'd his thirsty lance at thy command. Perching on the sceptred hand Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king With ruffled plumes and flagging wing: Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie The terror of his beak, and light'nings of his eye. I.3. Thee the voice, the dance, obey, Temper'd to thy warbled lay. O'er Idalia's velvet-green The rosy-crowned Loves are seen On Cytherea's day With antic Sports and blue-ey'd Pleasures, Frisking light in frolic measures; Now pursuing, now retreating, Now in circling troops they meet: To brisk notes in cadence beating Glance their many-twinkling feet. Slow melting strains their Queen's approach declare: Where'er she turns the Graces homage pay. With arms sublime, that float upon the air, In gliding state she wins her easy way: O'er her warm cheek and rising bosom move The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love. II.1. Man's feeble race what ills await, Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain, Disease, and Sorrow's weeping train, And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate! The fond complaint, my song, disprove, And justify the laws of Jove. Say, has he giv'n in vain the heav'nly Muse? Night, and all her sickly dews, Her spectres wan, and birds of boding cry, He gives to range the dreary sky: Till down the eastern cliffs afar Hyperion's march they spy, and glitt'ring shafts of war. II.2. In climes beyond the solar road, Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam, The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom To cheer the shiv'ring native's dull abode. And oft, beneath the od'rous shade Of Chili's boundless forests laid, She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat In loose numbers wildly sweet Their feather-cinctur'd chiefs, and dusky loves. Her track, where'er the goddess roves, Glory pursue, and generous Shame, Th' unconquerable Mind, and Freedom's holy flame. II.3. Woods, that wave o'er Delphi's steep, Isles, that crown th' Ægean deep, Fields, that cool Ilissus laves, Or where Mæander's amber waves In ling'ring Lab'rinths creep, How do your tuneful echoes languish, Mute, but to the voice of Anguish? Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breath'd around: Ev'ry shade and hallow'd Fountain Murmur'd deep a solemn sound: Till the sad Nine in Greece's evil hour Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains. Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power, And coward Vice, that revels in her chains. When Latium had her lofty spirit lost, They sought, O Albion! next thy sea-encircled coast. III.1. Far from the sun and summer-gale, In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid, What time, where lucid Avon stray'd, To him the mighty Mother did unveil Her awful face: the dauntless child Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled. This pencil take (she said) whose colours clear Richly paint the vernal year: Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy! This can unlock the gates of Joy; Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears, Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears. III.2. Nor second he, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of th' Abyss to spy. He pass'd the flaming bounds of Place and Time: The living throne, the sapphire-blaze, Where angels tremble, while they gaze, He saw; but blasted with excess of light, Clos'd his eyes in endless night. Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car, Wide o'er the fields of Glory bear Two coursers of ethereal race, With necks in thunder cloth'd, and long-resounding pace. III.3. Hark, his hands thy lyre explore! Bright-eyed Fancy hovering o'er Scatters from her pictur'd urn Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. But ah! 'tis heard no more— O lyre divine, what daring spirit Wakes thee now? tho' he inherit Nor the pride, nor ample pinion, That the Theban Eagle bear, Sailing with supreme dominion Thro' the azure deep of air: Yet oft before his infant eyes would run Such forms, as glitter in the Muse's ray With orient hues, unborrow'd of the Sun: Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the good how far—but far above the great.
“Percussus sum sicut foenum, et aruit cor meum.” —Ps. ci. Wintertime nighs; But my bereavement-pain It cannot bring again:  Twice no one dies.  Flower-petals flee; But, since it once hath been, No more that severing scene  Can harrow me.  Birds faint in dread: I shall not lose old strength In the lone frost's black length:  Strength long since fled!  Leaves freeze to dun; But friends can not turn cold This season as of old  For him with none.  Tempests may scath; But love can not make smart Again this year his heart  Who no heart hath.  Black is night's cope; But death will not appal One who, past doubtings all,  Waits in unhope.
"Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! "But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. "I shot him dead because — Because he was my foe, Just so: my foe of course he was; That's clear enough; although "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Off-hand like — just as I — Was out of work — had sold his traps — No other reason why. "Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown."
I found me in a great surging space,  At either end a door, And I said: "What is this giddying place,  With no firm-fixéd floor,  That I knew not of before?"  "It is Life," said a mask-clad face. I asked: "But how do I come here,  Who never wished to come; Can the light and air be made more clear,  The floor more quietsome,  And the doors set wide? They numb  Fast-locked, and fill with fear." The mask put on a bleak smile then,  And said, "O vassal-wight, There once complained a goosequill pen  To the scribe of the Infinite  Of the words it had to write  Because they were past its ken."
A Load of brushes and baskets and cradles and chairs  Labours along the street in the rain: With it a man, a woman, a pony with whiteybrown hairs. —  The man foots in front of the horse with a shambling sway  At a slower tread than a funeral train,  While to a dirge-like tune he chants his wares, Swinging a Turk's-head brush (in a drum-major's way  When the bandsmen march and play). A yard from the back of the man is the whiteybrown pony's nose: He mirrors his master in every item of pace and pose:  He stops when the man stops, without being told,  And seems to be eased by a pause; too plainly he's old,  Indeed, not strength enough shows  To steer the disjointed waggon straight,  Which wriggles left and right in a rambling line,  Deflected thus by its own warp and weight,  And pushing the pony with it in each incline.  The woman walks on the pavement verge,  Parallel to the man:  She wears an apron white and wide in span, And carries a like Turk's-head, but more in nursing-wise:  Now and then she joins in his dirge,  But as if her thoughts were on distant things,  The rain clams her apron till it clings. — So, step by step, they move with their merchandize,  And nobody buys.
"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" — "O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she. — "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" — "Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she. — "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,' And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" — "Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she. — "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" — "We never do work when we're ruined," said she. — "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream, And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" — "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. — "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" — "My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be, Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.
I  I heard a small sad sound, And stood awhile among the tombs around: "Wherefore, old friends," said I, "are you distrest,  Now, screened from life's unrest?" II  —"O not at being here; But that our future second death is near; When, with the living, memory of us numbs,  And blank oblivion comes! III  "These, our sped ancestry, Lie here embraced by deeper death than we; Nor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry  With keenest backward eye. IV  "They count as quite forgot; They are as men who have existed not; Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;  It is the second death. V  "We here, as yet, each day Are blest with dear recall; as yet, can say We hold in some soul loved continuance  Of shape and voice and glance. VI  "But what has been will be — First memory, then oblivion's swallowing sea; Like men foregone, shall we merge into those  Whose story no one knows. VII  "For which of us could hope To show in life that world-awakening scope Granted the few whose memory none lets die,  But all men magnify? VIII  "We were but Fortune's sport; Things true, things lovely, things of good report We neither shunned nor sought ... We see our bourne,  And seeing it we mourn."
Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair? May no lines pass, except they do their duty  Not to a true, but painted chair? Is it no verse, except enchanted groves And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines? Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves? Must all be veil'd, while he that reads, divines,  Catching the sense at two removes? Shepherds are honest people; let them sing; Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime; I envy no man's nightingale or spring; Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,  Who plainly say, my God, my King.
Immortal Love, author of this great frame,  Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,  How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name, And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made, While mortal love doth all the title gain!  Which siding with Invention, they together  Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain, (Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither. Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit;  The world is theirs, they two play out the game,  Thou standing by: and though Thy glorious name Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit, Who sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.
Immortal Heat, O let Thy greater flame  Attract the lesser to it; let those fires  Which shall consume the world first make it tame, And kindle in our hearts such true desires. As may consume our lusts, and make Thee way:  Then shall our hearts pant Thee, then shall our brain  All her invention on Thine altar lay, And there in hymns send back Thy fire again. Our eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust,  Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:  Thou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind, Who wert disseized by usurping lust: All knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise, And praise Him Who did make and mend our eyes.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew backLove bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back compare Song of Solomon 5:6. "I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had with drawen himself" (Authorized Version, 1611). "Bade" is past tense of "bid," and in Herbert's time was pronounced like "bad." Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slackslack hesitant. Compare Herbert's use of the word in his poem The Church-Porch: "Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack, / And rots to nothing at the next great thaw." (Perirrhanterium 24, lines 139-140) From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked any thing.If I lacked any thing. echoes a version of Psalm 23, which begins: "The Lorde is my shepehearde: therfore can I lack nothing" (Psalms in the Version of the Great Bible, 1539) A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkindunkind undutiful., ungrateful? Ah my dearAh my dear Hopkins adopts this phrase in "The Windhover". As Norman H. MacKenzie notes, "Hopkins as an undergraduate was strongly attracted to George Herbert, an anglican divine and poet, and traces of that influence can be found throughout his writings"., I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marredmarredto mar: "to do fatal or destructive bodily harm" (OED, 4a) them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serveI will serve compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest.". You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest." So I did sit and eat.So I did sit and eat. compare Luke 12:37. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he commeth, shall find watching: Verily, I say unto you, That he shall gird himself, and make them to sit downe to meat, and will come foorth and serve them." (Authorized Version, 1611) Compare also to the second stanza of Herbert's poem "Faith": "Hungry I was, and had no meat: / I did conceit a most delicious feast; / I had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest."
My God, I heard this day That none doth build a stately habitation  But he that means to dwell therein.  What house more stately hath there been, Or can be, than is man, to whose creation  All things are in decay?  For man is ev'ry thing, And more: he is a tree, yet bears more fruit;  A beast, yet is, or should be, more;  Reason and speech we only bring; Parrots may thank us if they are not mute,  They go upon the score.  Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another,  And all to all the world besides;  Each part may call the furthest brother, For head with foot hath private amity,  And both with moons and tides.  Nothing hath got so far But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;  His eyes dismount the highest star;  He is in little all the sphere; Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they  Find their acquaintance there.  For us the winds do blow, The earth doth rest, heav'n move, and fountains flow.  Nothing we see but means our good,  As our delight, or as our treasure; The whole is either our cupboard of food,  Or cabinet of pleasure.  The stars have us to bed; Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws;  Music and light attend our head;  All things unto our flesh are kind In their descent and being; to our mind  In their ascent and cause.  Each thing is full of duty; Waters united are our navigation;  Distinguished, our habitation;  Below, our drink; above, our meat; Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty?  Then how are all things neat!  More servants wait on man Than he'll take notice of; in ev'ry path  He treads down that which doth befriend him,  When sickness makes him pale and wan. Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath  Another to attend him.  Since then, my God, thou hast So brave a palace built, O dwell in it,  That it may dwell with thee at last!  Till then, afford us so much wit, That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,  And both thy servants be.
MATTHEW xiii I know the ways of learning; both the head And pipes that feed the press, and make it run; What reason hath from nature borrowed, Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun In laws and policy; what the stars conspire, What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire; Both th'old discoveries and the new-found seas, The stock and surplus, cause and history; All these stand open, or I have the keys:  Yet I love thee. I know the ways of honour; what maintains The quick returns of courtesy and wit; In vies of favours whether party gains When glory swells the heart and moldeth it To all expressions both of hand and eye, Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie, And bear the bundle wheresoe'er it goes; How many drams of spirit there must be To sell my life unto my friends or foes:  Yet I love thee. I know the ways of pleasure; the sweet strains The lullings and the relishes of it; The propositions of hot blood and brains; What mirth and music mean; what love and wit Have done these twenty hundred years and more; I know the projects of unbridled store; My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live, And grumble oft that they have more in me Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:  Yet I love thee. I know all these and have them in my hand; Therefore not seeled but with open eyes I fly to thee, and fully understand Both the main sale and the commodities; And at what rate and price I have thy love, With all the circumstances that may move. Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit, But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me Did both conduct and teach me how by it  To climb to thee.
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,  God's breath in man returning to his birth,  The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,  The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,  Exalted manna, gladness of the best,  Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise,  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,  The land of spices; something understood.
The merry World did on a day With his train-bands and mates agree To meet together where I lay, And all in sport to jeer at me.  First Beauty crept into a rose, Which when I pluck'd not, "Sir," said she, "Tell me, I pray, whose hands are those?" But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.  Then Money came, and chinking still, "What tune is this, poor man?" said he; "I heard in music you had skill:" But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.  Then came brave Glory puffing by In silks that whistled, who but he? He scarce allow'd me half an eye: But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.  Then came quick Wit and Conversation, And he would needs a comfort be, And, to be short, make an oration: But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.  Yet when the hour of Thy design To answer these fine things shall come, Speak not at large, say, I am Thine; And then they have their answer home.
Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round! Parents first season us; then schoolmasters Deliver us to laws; they send us boundTo rules of reason, holy messengers,Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow-dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, The sound of glory ringing in our ears, Without, our shame, within, our consciences,Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole array One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes  Gladly engrave thy love in steel,  If what my soul doth feel sometimes,  My soul might ever feel! Although there were some forty heav'ns, or more,  Sometimes I peer above them all;  Sometimes I hardly reach a score;  Sometimes to hell I fall. O rack me not to such a vast extent;  Those distances belong to thee:  The world's too little for thy tent,  A grave too big for me. Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch  A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell?  Will great God measure with a wretch?  Shall he thy stature spell? O let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,  O let me roost and nestle there:  Then of a sinner thou art rid,  And I of hope and fear. Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:  Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor:  This is but tuning of my breast,  To make the music better. Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,  Thy hands made both, and I am there;  Thy power and love, my love and trust,  Make one place ev'rywhere.
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,  For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; Thy root is ever in its grave,  And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; My music shows ye have your closes,  And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season'd timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal,  Then chiefly lives.
Old Parson Beanes hunts six days of the week, And on the seventh, he has his notes to seek. Six days he hollows so much breath away That on the seventh he can nor preach or pray.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair. Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on. But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone! Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."' O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
to a young child Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, youWith your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.  Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Along the field as we came by A year ago, my love and I, The aspen over stile and stone Was talking to itself alone. "Oh who are these that kiss and pass? A country lover and his lass; Two lovers looking to be wed; And time shall put them both to bed, But she shall lie with earth above, And he beside another love." And sure enough beneath the tree There walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heaves Its rainy-sounding silver leaves; And I spell nothing in their stir, But now perhaps they speak to her, And plain for her to understand They talk about a time at hand When I shall sleep with clover clad, And she beside another lad.
From Clee to heaven the beacon burns, The shires have seen it plain, From north and south the sign returns And beacons burn again. Look left, look right, the hills are bright, The dales are light between, Because 'tis fifty years to-night That God has saved the Queen. Now, when the flame they watch not towers About the soil they trod, Lads, we'll remember friends of ours Who shared the work with God. To skies that knit their heartstrings right, To fields that bred them brave, The saviours come not home to-night: Themselves they could not save. It dawns in Asia, tombstones show And Shropshire names are read; And the Nile spills his overflow Beside the Severn's dead. We pledge in peace by farm and town The Queen they served in war, And fire the beacons up and down The land they perished for. "God save the Queen" we living sing, From height to height 'tis heard; And with the rest your voices ring, Lads of the Fifty-third. Oh, God will save her, fear you not: Be you the men you've been, Get you the sons your fathers got, And God will save the Queen.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide. Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
On the idle hill of summer, Sleepy with the flow of streams, Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. Far and near and low and louder On the roads of earth go by, Dear to friends and food for powder, Soldiers marching, all to die. East and west on fields forgotten Bleach the bones of comrades slain, Lovely lads and dead and rotten; None that go return again. Far the calling bugles hollo, High the screaming fife replies, Gay the files of scarlet follow: Woman bore me, I will rise.
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves; The gale, it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves. 'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger When Uricon the city stood: 'Tis the old wind in the old anger, But then it threshed another wood. Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman At yonder heaving hill would stare: The blood that warms an English yeoman, The thoughts that hurt him, they were there. There, like the wind through woods in riot, Through him the gale of life blew high; The tree of man was never quiet: Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I. The gale, it plies the saplings double, It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone: To-day the Roman and his trouble Are ashes under Uricon.
Others, I am not the first, Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too Shiver now, 'tis nothing new. More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their reins in ice and fire Fear contended with desire. Agued once like me were they, But I like them shall win my way Lastly to the bed of mould Where there's neither heat nor cold. But from my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night.
When I watch the living meet, And the moving pageant file Warm and breathing through the street Where I lodge a little while, If the heats of hate and lust In the house of flesh are strong, Let me mind the house of dust Where my sojourn shall be long. In the nation that is not Nothing stands that stood before; There revenges are forgot, And the hater hates no more; Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
I never made a poem, dear friend— I never sat me down, and said, This cunning brain and patient hand Shall fashion something to be read. Men often came to me, and prayed I should indite a fitting verse For fast, or festival, or in Some stately pageant to rehearse. (As if, than Balaam more endowed, I of myself could bless or curse.) Reluctantly I bade them go, Ungladdened by my poet-mite; My heart is not so churlish but Its loves to minister delight. But not a word I breathe is mine To sing, in praise of man or God; My Master calls, at noon or night, I know his whisper and his nod. Yet all my thoyghts to rhythms run, To rhyme, my wisdom and my wit? True, I consume my life in verse, But wouldst thou know how that is writ? 'T is thus—through weary length of days, I bear a thought within my breast That greatens from my growth of soul, And waits, and will not be expressed. It greatens, till its hour has come, Not without pain, it sees the light; 'Twixt smiles and tears I view it o'er, And dare not deem it perfect, quite. These children of my soul I keep Where scarce a mortal man may see, Yet not unconsecrate, dear friend, Baptismal rites they claim of thee.
The shell of objects inwardly consumed Will stand, till some convulsive wind awakes; Such sense hath Fire to waste the heart of things, Nature, such love to hold the form she makes. Thus, wasted joys will show their early bloom, Yet crumble at the breath of a caress; The golden fruitage hides the scathèd bough, Snatch it, thou scatterest wide its emptiness. For pleasure bidden, I went forth last night To where, thick hung, the festal torches gleamed; Here were the flowers, the music, as of old, Almost the very olden time it seemed. For one with cheek unfaded, (though he brings My buried brothers to me, in his look,) Said, Will you dance?' At the accustomed words I gave my hand, the old position took. Sound, gladsome measure! at whose bidding once I felt the flush of pleasure to my brow, While my soul shook the burthen of the flesh, And in its young pride said, Lie lightly thou!' Then, like a gallant swimmer, flinging high My breast against the golden waves of sound, I rode the madd'ning tumult of the dance, Mocking fatigue, that never could be found. Chide not,—it was not vanity, nor sense, (The brutish scorn such vaporous delight,) But Nature, cadencing her joy of strength To the harmonious limits of her right. She gave her impulse to the dancing Hours, To winds that sweep, to stars that noiseless turn; She marked the measure rapid hearts must keep Devised each pace that glancing feet should learn. And sure, that prodigal o'erflow of life, Unvow'd as yet to family or state, Sweet sounds, white garments, flowery coronals Make holy, in the pageant of our fate. Sound, measure! but to stir my heart no more— For, as I moved to join the dizzy race, My youth fell from me; all its blooms were gone, And others showed them, smiling, in my face. Faintly I met the shock of circling forms Linked each to other, Fashion's galley-slaves, Dream-wondering, like an unaccustomed ghost That starts, surprised, to stumble over graves. For graves were 'neath my feet, whose placid masks Smiled out upon my folly mournfully, While all the host of the departed said, Tread lightly—thou art ashes, even as we.'
I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in:Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me,Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kissed me.
We, the Fairies, blithe and antic, Of dimensions not gigantic, Though the moonshine mostly keep us, Oft in orchards frisk and peep us. Stolen sweets are always sweeter, Stolen kisses much completer, Stolen looks are nice in chapels, Stolen, stolen, be your apples. When to bed the world are bobbing, Then's the time for orchard-robbing; Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling, Were it not for stealing, stealing.
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,  Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,  And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands,— Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands  That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme  Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng,  And the void weighs on us; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along  Twixt villages, and think how we shall take  Our own calm journey on for human sake.
Still to be neat, still to be dressed, As you were going to a feast; Still to be powdered, still perfumed; Lady, it is to be presumed, Though art's hid causes are not found, All is not sweet, all is not sound. Give me a look, give me a face, That makes simplicity a grace; Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;Such sweet neglect more taketh me Than all th'adulteries of art. They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage, And if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry." For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much.
Hear me, O God! A broken heart Is my best part. Use still thy rod, That I may prove Therein thy Love. If thou hadst not Been stern to me, But left me free, I had forgot Myself and thee. For sin's so sweet, As minds ill-bent Rarely repent, Until they meet Their punishment. Who more can crave Than thou hast done? That gav'st a Son, To free a slave, First made of nought; With all since bought. Sin, Death, and Hell His glorious name Quite overcame, Yet I rebel And slight the same. But I'll come in Before my loss Me farther toss, As sure to win Under His cross.
I now think Love is rather deaf than blind,  For else it could not be  That she,  Whom I adore so much, should so slight me And cast my love behind. I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,  And every close did meet  In sentence of as subtle feet,  As hath the youngest He That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.  O, but my conscious fears,  That fly my thoughts between,  Tell me that she hath seen  My hundred of gray hairs,  Told seven and forty years  Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace  My mountain belly and my rocky face; And all these through her eyes have stopp'd her ears.
Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I’ll not look for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine; But might I of Jove’s nectar sup, I would not change for thine. I sent thee late a rosy wreath, Not so much honouring thee As giving it a hope, that there It could not withered be. But thou thereon didst only breathe, And sent’st it back to me; Since when it grows, and smells, I swear, Not of itself, but thee.
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; While I confess thy writings to be such As neither man nor muse can praise too much; 'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; For seeliest ignorance on these may light, Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; Or crafty malice might pretend this praise, And think to ruin, where it seem'd to raise. These are, as some infamous bawd or whore Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more? But thou art proof against them, and indeed, Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need. I therefore will begin. Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses, I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses, For if I thought my judgment were of years, I should commit thee surely with thy peers, And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honour thee, I would not seek For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles to us; Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread, And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm! Nature herself was proud of his designs And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines, Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please, But antiquated and deserted lie, As they were not of Nature's family. Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. For though the poet's matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame, Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn; For a good poet's made, as well as born; And such wert thou. Look how the father's face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turned, and true-filed lines; In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza and our James! But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanc'd, and made a constellation there! Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage; Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night, And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
Four Seasons fill the measure of the year; There are four seasons in the mind of man:He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear Takes in all beauty with an easy span:He has his Summer, when luxuriously Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he lovesTo ruminate, and by such dreaming high Is nearest unto heaven: quiet covesHis soul has in its Autumn, when his wings He furleth close; contented so to lookOn mists in idleness—to let fair things Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
(excerpt) BOOK I Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went, No further than to where his feet had stray'd, And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed; While his bow'd head seem'd list'ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. It seem'd no force could wake him from his place; But there came one, who with a kindred hand Touch'd his wide shoulders, after bending low With reverence, though to one who knew it not. She was a Goddess of the infant world; By her in stature the tall Amazon Had stood a pigmy's height; she would have ta'en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck; Or with a finger stay'd Ixion's wheel. Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestal'd haply in a palace court, When sages look'd to Egypt for their lore. But oh! how unlike marble was that face: How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self. There was a listening fear in her regard, As if calamity had but begun; As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder labouring up. One hand she press'd upon that aching spot Where beats the human heart, as if just there, Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain: The other upon Saturn's bended neck She laid, and to the level of his ear Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake In solemn tenour and deep organ tone: Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents; O how frail To that large utterance of the early Gods! "Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King? I have no comfort for thee, no not one: I cannot say, "O wherefore sleepest thou?" For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God; And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house; And thy sharp lightning in unpractis'd hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain. O aching time! O moments big as years! All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Saturn, sleep on:—O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude? Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep." As when, upon a tranced summer-night, Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust Which comes upon the silence, and dies off, As if the ebbing air had but one wave; So came these words and went; the while in tears She touch'd her fair large forehead to the ground, Just where her falling hair might be outspread A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet. One moon, with alteration slow, had shed Her silver seasons four upon the night, And still these two were postured motionless, Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern; The frozen God still couchant on the earth, And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet: Until at length old Saturn lifted up His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone, And all the gloom and sorrow of the place, And that fair kneeling Goddess; and then spake, As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard Shook horrid with such aspen-malady: "O tender spouse of gold Hyperion, Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face; Look up, and let me see our doom in it; Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice Of Saturn; tell me, if this wrinkling brow, Naked and bare of its great diadem, Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power To make me desolate? whence came the strength? How was it nurtur'd to such bursting forth, While Fate seem'd strangled in my nervous grasp? But it is so, and I am smother'd up, And buried from all godlike exercise Of influence benign on planets pale, Of admonitions to the winds and seas, Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in.—I am gone Away from my own bosom: I have left My strong identity, my real self, Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search! Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round Upon all space: space starr'd, and lorn of light; Space region'd with life-air; and barren void; Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell.— Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest A certain shape or shadow, making way With wings or chariot fierce to repossess A heaven he lost erewhile: it must—it must Be of ripe progress—Saturn must be King. Yes, there must be a golden victory; There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival Upon the gold clouds metropolitan, Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir Of strings in hollow shells; and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise Of the sky-children; I will give command: Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?" This passion lifted him upon his feet, And made his hands to struggle in the air, His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat, His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease. He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep; A little time, and then again he snatch'd Utterance thus.—"But cannot I create? Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth Another world, another universe, To overbear and crumble this to nought? Where is another chaos? Where?"—That word Found way unto Olympus, and made quake The rebel three.—Thea was startled up, And in her bearing was a sort of hope, As thus she quick-voic'd spake, yet full of awe. "This cheers our fallen house: come to our friends, O Saturn! come away, and give them heart; I know the covert, from thence came I hither." Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went With backward footing through the shade a space: He follow'd, and she turn'd to lead the way Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest. Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, More sorrow like to this, and such like woe, Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe: The Titans fierce, self-hid, or prison-bound, Groan'd for the old allegiance once more, And listen'd in sharp pain for Saturn's voice. But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept His sov'reignty, and rule, and majesty;— Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire Still sat, still snuff'd the incense, teeming up From man to the sun's God; yet unsecure: For as among us mortals omens drear Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he— Not at dog's howl, or gloom-bird's hated screech, Or the familiar visiting of one Upon the first toll of his passing bell, Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp; But horrors, portion'd to a giant nerve, Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold, And touch'd with shade of bronzed obelisks, Glar'd a blood-red through all its thousand courts, Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries; And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds Flush'd angerly: while sometimes eagle's wings, Unseen before by Gods or wondering men, Darken'd the place; and neighing steeds were heard, Not heard before by Gods or wondering men. Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths Of incense, breath'd aloft from sacred hills, Instead of sweets, his ample palate took Savour of poisonous brass and metal sick: And so, when harbour'd in the sleepy west, After the full completion of fair day,— For rest divine upon exalted couch And slumber in the arms of melody, He pac'd away the pleasant hours of ease With stride colossal, on from hall to hall; While far within each aisle and deep recess, His winged minions in close clusters stood, Amaz'd and full of fear; like anxious men Who on wide plains gather in panting troops, When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers. Even now, while Saturn, rous'd from icy trance, Went step for step with Thea through the woods, Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear, Came slope upon the threshold of the west; Then, as was wont, his palace-door flew ope In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies; And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape, In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye, That inlet to severe magnificence Stood full blown, for the God to enter in. He enter'd, but he enter'd full of wrath; His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels, And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire, That scar'd away the meek ethereal Hours And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared, From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault, Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light, And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades, Until he reach'd the great main cupola; There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot, And from the basements deep to the high towers Jarr'd his own golden region; and before The quavering thunder thereupon had ceas'd, His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb, To this result: "O dreams of day and night! O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain! O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom! O lank-ear'd Phantoms of black-weeded pools! Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why Is my eternal essence thus distraught To see and to behold these horrors new? Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall? Am I to leave this haven of my rest, This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, This calm luxuriance of blissful light, These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes, Of all my lucent empire? It is left Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine. The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry, I cannot see—but darkness, death and darkness. Even here, into my centre of repose, The shady visions come to domineer, Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp.— Fall!—No, by Tellus and her briny robes! Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove, And bid old Saturn take his throne again."— He spake, and ceas'd, the while a heavier threat Held struggle with his throat but came not forth; For as in the theatres of crowded men Hubbub increases more they call out "Hush!" So at Hyperion's words the Phantoms pale Bestirr'd themselves, thrice horrible and cold; And from the mirror'd level where he stood A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh. At this, through all his bulk an agony Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown, Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular Making slow way, with head and neck convuls'd From over-strained might. Releas'd, he fled To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours Before the dawn in season due should blush, He breath'd fierce breath against the sleepy portals, Clear'd them of heavy vapours, burst them wide Suddenly on the ocean's chilly streams. The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode Each day from east to west the heavens through, Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds; Nor therefore veiled quite, blindfold, and hid, But ever and anon the glancing spheres, Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure, Glow'd through, and wrought upon the muffling dark Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep Up to the zenith,—hieroglyphics old Which sages and keen-ey'd astrologers Then living on the earth, with labouring thought Won from the gaze of many centuries: Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge Of stone, or marble swart; their import gone, Their wisdom long since fled.—Two wings this orb Possess'd for glory, two fair argent wings, Ever exalted at the God's approach: And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense Rose, one by one, till all outspreaded were; While still the dazzling globe maintain'd eclipse, Awaiting for Hyperion's command. Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne And bid the day begin, if but for change. He might not:—No, though a primeval God: The sacred seasons might not be disturb'd. Therefore the operations of the dawn Stay'd in their birth, even as here 'tis told. Those silver wings expanded sisterly, Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide Open'd upon the dusk demesnes of night; And the bright Titan, phrenzied with new woes, Unus'd to bend, by hard compulsion bent His spirit to the sorrow of the time; And all along a dismal rack of clouds, Upon the boundaries of day and night, He stretch'd himself in grief and radiance faint. There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars Look'd down on him with pity, and the voice Of Coelus, from the universal space, Thus whisper'd low and solemn in his ear. "O brightest of my children dear, earth-born And sky-engendered, Son of Mysteries All unrevealed even to the powers Which met at thy creating; at whose joys And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft, I, C{oe}lus, wonder, how they came and whence; And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be, Distinct, and visible; symbols divine, Manifestations of that beauteous life Diffus'd unseen throughout eternal space: Of these new-form'd art thou, oh brightest child! Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses! There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion Of son against his sire. I saw him fall, I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne! To me his arms were spread, to me his voice Found way from forth the thunders round his head! Pale wox I, and in vapours hid my face Art thou, too, near such doom? vague fear there is: For I have seen my sons most unlike Gods. Divine ye were created, and divine In sad demeanour, solemn, undisturb'd, Unruffled, like high Gods, ye liv'd and ruled: Now I behold in you fear, hope, and wrath; Actions of rage and passion; even as I see them, on the mortal world beneath, In men who die.—This is the grief, O Son! Sad sign of ruin, sudden dismay, and fall! Yet do thou strive; as thou art capable, As thou canst move about, an evident God; And canst oppose to each malignant hour Ethereal presence:—I am but a voice; My life is but the life of winds and tides, No more than winds and tides can I avail:— But thou canst.—Be thou therefore in the van Of circumstance; yea, seize the arrow's barb Before the tense string murmur.—To the earth! For there thou wilt find Saturn and his woes. Meanwhile I will keep watch on thy bright sun, And of thy seasons be a careful nurse."— Ere half this region-whisper had come down, Hyperion arose, and on the stars Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide Until it ceas'd; and still he kept them wide: And still they were the same bright, patient stars. Then with a slow incline of his broad breast, Like to a diver in the pearly seas, Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore, And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night.
If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd, And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness; Let us find out, if we must be constrain'd, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of poesy; Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd By ear industrious, and attention meet: Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage, let us be Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown; So, if we may not let the Muse be free, She will be bound with garlands of her own.
Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine? Or are fruits of Paradise Sweeter than those dainty pies Of venison? O generous food! Drest as though bold Robin Hood Would, with his maid Marian, Sup and bowse from horn and can.  I have heard that on a day Mine host's sign-board flew away, Nobody knew whither, till An astrologer's old quill To a sheepskin gave the story, Said he saw you in your glory, Underneath a new old sign Sipping beverage divine, And pledging with contented smack The Mermaid in the Zodiac.  Souls of Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;  Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told  That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies  When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes  He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute: Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute, Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay Must I burn through; once more humbly assay The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit. Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion, Begetters of our deep eternal theme, When through the old oak forest I am gone, Let me not wander in a barren dream, But when I am consumed in the fire, Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
TO A FRIEND No! those days are gone away And their hours are old and gray, And their minutes buried all Under the down-trodden pall Of the leaves of many years: Many times have winter's shears, Frozen North, and chilling East, Sounded tempests to the feast Of the forest's whispering fleeces, Since men knew nor rent nor leases. No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz'd to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. On the fairest time of June You may go, with sun or moon, Or the seven stars to light you, Or the polar ray to right you; But you never may behold Little John, or Robin bold; Never one, of all the clan, Thrumming on an empty can Some old hunting ditty, while He doth his green way beguile To fair hostess Merriment, Down beside the pasture Trent; For he left the merry tale Messenger for spicy ale. Gone, the merry morris din; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the "grenè shawe"; All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her—strange! that honey Can't be got without hard money! So it is: yet let us sing, Honour to the old bow-string! Honour to the bugle-horn! Honour to the woods unshorn! Honour to the Lincoln green! Honour to the archer keen! Honour to tight little John, And the horse he rode upon! Honour to bold Robin Hood, Sleeping in the underwood! Honour to maid Marian, And to all the Sherwood-clan! Though their days have hurried by Let us two a burden try.
To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament. Who is more happy, when, with heart's content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair And gentle tale of love and languishment? Returning home at evening, with an ear Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career, He mourns that day so soon has glided by: E'en like the passage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently.
O soft embalmer of the still midnight, Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws Around my bed its lulling charities.Then save me, or the passed day will shineUpon my pillow, breeding many woes,— Save me from curious Conscience, that still lordsIts strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
My shoulders ache beneath my pack (Lie easier, Cross, upon His back). I march with feet that burn and smart (Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart). Men shout at me who may not speak (They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek). I may not lift a hand to clear My eyes of salty drops that sear. (Then shall my fickle soul forget Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?) My rifle hand is stiff and numb (From Thy pierced palm red rivers come). Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me Than all the hosts of land and sea. So let me render back again This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.
I saw where in the shroud did lurk A curious frame of Nature's work. A flow'ret crushed in the bud, A nameless piece of Babyhood, Was in a cradle-coffin lying; Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying; So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb For darker closets of the tomb! She did but ope an eye, and put A clear beam forth, then strait up shut For the long dark: ne'er more to see Through glasses of mortality. Riddle of destiny, who can show What thy short visit meant, or know What thy errand here below? Shall we say, that Nature blind Check'd her hand, and changed her mind, Just when she had exactly wrought A finish'd pattern without fault? Could she flag, or could she tire, Or lack'd she the Promethean fire (With her nine moons' long workings sicken'd) That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, they might supply (Themselves now but cold imagery) The sculptor to make Beauty by. Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry, That babe, or mother, one must die; So in mercy left the stock, And cut the branch; to save the shock Of young years widow'd; and the pain, When Single State comes back again To the lone man who, 'reft of wife, Thenceforward drags a maimed life? The economy of Heaven is dark; And wisest clerks have miss'd the mark, Why Human Buds, like this, should fall, More brief than fly ephemeral, That has his day; while shrivel'd crones Stiffen with age to stocks and stones; And crabbed use the conscience sears In sinners of an hundred years. Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss. Rites, which custom does impose, Silver bells and baby clothes; Coral redder than those lips, Which pale death did late eclipse; Music framed for infants' glee, Whistle never tuned for thee; Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them, Loving hearts were they which gave them. Let not one be missing; nurse, See them laid upon the hearse Of infant slain by doom perverse. Why should kings and nobles have Pictured trophies to their grave; And we, churls, to thee deny Thy pretty toys with thee to lie, A more harmless vanity?
A child's a plaything for an hour;  Its pretty tricks we try For that or for a longer space;  Then tire, and lay it by. But I knew one, that to itself  All seasons could controul; That would have mock'd the sense of pain  Out of a grieved soul. Thou, straggler into loving arms,  Young climber up of knees, When I forget thy thousand ways,  Then life and all shall cease.
There, Robert, you have kill'd that fly — , And should you thousand ages try The life you've taken to supply, You could not do it. You surely must have been devoid Of thought and sense, to have destroy'd A thing which no way you annoy'd — You'll one day rue it. Twas but a fly perhaps you'll say, That's born in April, dies in May; That does but just learn to display His wings one minute, And in the next is vanish'd quite. A bird devours it in his flight — Or come a cold blast in the night, There's no breath in it. The bird but seeks his proper food — And Providence, whose power endu'd That fly with life, when it thinks good, May justly take it. But you have no excuses for't — A life by Nature made so short, Less reason is that you for sport Should shorter make it. A fly a little thing you rate — But, Robert do not estimate A creature's pain by small or great; The greatest being Can have but fibres, nerves, and flesh, And these the smallest ones possess, Although their frame and structure less Escape our seeing.
Version 1 (1921) Yours is the shame and sorrow,  But the disgrace is mine; Your love was dark and thorough, Mine was the love of the sun for a flower  He creates with his shine. I was diligent to explore you,  Blossom you stalk by stalk, Till my fire of creation bore you Shrivelling down in the final dour  Anguish — then I suffered a balk. I knew your pain, and it broke  My fine, craftsman's nerve; Your body quailed at my stroke, And my courage failed to give you the last  Fine torture you did deserve. You are shapely, you are adorned,  But opaque and dull in the flesh, Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast  In a lovely illumined mesh. Like a painted window: the best  Suffering burnt through your flesh, Undrossed it and left it blest With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now  Who shall take you afresh? Now who will burn you free  From your body's terrors and dross, Since the fire has failed in me? What man will stoop in your flesh to plough  The shrieking cross? A mute, nearly beautiful thing  Is your face, that fills me with shame As I see it hardening, Warping the perfect image of God,  And darkening my eternal fame. Version 2 (1928) Yours is the sullen sorrow,  The disgrace is also mine; Your love was intense and thorough, Mine was the love of a growing flower  For the sunshine. You had the power to explore me, Blossom me stalk by stalk; You woke my spirit, you bore me To consciousness, you gave me the dour  Awareness — then I suffered a balk. Body to body I could not  Love you, although I would. We kissed, we kissed though we should not. You yielded, we threw the last cast,  And it was no good. You only endured, and it broke  My craftsman's nerve. No flesh responded to my stroke; So I failed to give you the last  Fine torture you did deserve. You are shapely, you are adorned  But opaque and null in the flesh; Who, had I but pierced with the thorned Full anguish, perhaps had been cast  In a lovely illuinined mesh Like a painted window; the best  Fire passed through your flesh, Undrossed it, and left it blest In clean new awareness. But now  Who shall take you afresh? Now who will burn you free  From your body's deadness and dross? Since the fire has failed in me, What man will stoop in your flesh to plough  The shrieking cross? A mute, nearly beautiful thing  Is your face, that fills me with shame As I see it hardening; I should have been cruel enough to bring  You through the flame.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
There was an old man of Thermopylæ,Who never did anything properly;But they said, "If you choose, To boil eggs in your shoes,You shall never remain in Thermopylæ."
There was an old man on the Border,Who lived in the utmost disorder;He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
There was an old person of Nice,Whose associates were usually Geese.They walked out together, in all sorts of weather.That affable person of Nice!
There was a little turtle. He lived in a box. He swam in a puddle. He climbed on the rocks. He snapped at a mosquito. He snapped at a flea. He snapped at a minnow. And he snapped at me. He caught the mosquito. He caught the flea. He caught the minnow. But he didn't catch me.
Aspasie, trillistos. I heard the trailing garments of the Night Sweep through her marble halls! I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light From the celestial walls! I felt her presence, by its spell of might, Stoop o'er me from above; The calm, majestic presence of the Night, As of the one I love. I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight, The manifold, soft chimes, That fill the haunted chambers of the Night, Like some old poet's rhymes. From the cool cisterns of the midnight air My spirit drank repose; The fountain of perpetual peace flows there, — From those deep cisterns flows. O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear What man has borne before! Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care, And they complain no more. Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer! Descend with broad-winged flight, The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair, The best-beloved Night!
How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down! The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath these leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain's base. The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times. "Blessed be God! for he created Death!" The mourners said, "and Death is rest and peace;" Then added, in the certainty of faith, "And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease." Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake. Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green. How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o'er the sea — that desert desolate — These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind? They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire. All their lives long, with the unleavened bread And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed, And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears. Anathema maranatha! was the cry That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet. Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them through the world where'er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent. For in the background figures vague and vast Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the Past They saw reflected in the coming time. And thus forever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead. But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.
The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep; The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told! The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold To the red rising moon, and loud and deep The nightingale is singing from the steep; It is midsummer, but the air is cold; Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep. Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white, On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name Was writ in water." And was this the meed Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write: "The smoking flax before it burst to flame Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."
Saint Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame! All common things, each day's events, That with the hour begin and end, Our pleasures and our discontents, Are rounds by which we may ascend. The low desire, the base design, That makes another's virtues less; The revel of the ruddy wine, And all occasions of excess; The longing for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart, that brings Irreverence for the dreams of youth; All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds, That have their root in thoughts of ill; Whatever hinders or impedes The action of the nobler will; — All these must first be trampled down Beneath our feet, if we would gain In the bright fields of fair renown The right of eminent domain. We have not wings, we cannot soar; But we have feet to scale and climb By slow degrees, by more and more, The cloudy summits of our time. The mighty pyramids of stone That wedge-like cleave the desert airs, When nearer seen, and better known, Are but gigantic flights of stairs. The distant mountains, that uprear Their solid bastions to the skies, Are crossed by pathways, that appear As we to higher levels rise. The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night. Standing on what too long we bore With shoulders bent and downcast eyes, We may discern — unseen before — A path to higher destinies, Nor deem the irrevocable Past As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last To something nobler we attain.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. He said to his friend, "If the British march By land or sea from the town to-night, Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch Of the North Church tower as a signal light,— One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country folk to be up and to arm." Then he said, "Good night!" and with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay The Somerset, British man-of-war; A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon like a prison bar, And a huge black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection in the tide. Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street, Wanders and watches with eager ears, Till in the silence around him he hears The muster of men at the barrack door, The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet, And the measured tread of the grenadiers, Marching down to their boats on the shore. Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church, By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread, To the belfry-chamber overhead, And startled the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him made Masses and moving shapes of shade, — By the trembling ladder, steep and tall, To the highest window in the wall, Where he paused to listen and look down A moment on the roofs of the town, And the moonlight flowing over all. Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead, In their night-encampment on the hill, Wrapped in silence so deep and still That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread, The watchful night-wind, as it went Creeping along from tent to tent, And seeming to whisper, "All is well!" A moment only he feels the spell Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread Of the lonely belfry and the dead; For suddenly all his thoughts are bent On a shadowy something far away, Where the river widens to meet the bay, — A line of black that bends and floats On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats. Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. Now he patted his horse's side, Now gazed at the landscape far and near, Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the Old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns! A hurry of hoofs in a village street, A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet: That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night; And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight, Kindled the land into flame with its heat. He has left the village and mounted the steep, And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep, Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides; And under the alders, that skirt its edge, Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge, Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides. It was twelve by the village clock, When he crossed the bridge into Medford town. He heard the crowing of the cock, And the barking of the farmer's dog, And felt the damp of the river fog, That rises after the sun goes down. It was one by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington. He saw the gilded weathercock Swim in the moonlight as he passed, And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare, Gaze at him with a spectral glare, As if they already stood aghast At the bloody work they would look upon. It was two by the village clock, When he came to the bridge in Concord town. He heard the bleating of the flock, And the twitter of birds among the trees, And felt the breath of the morning breeze Blowing over the meadows brown. And one was safe and asleep in his bed Who at the bridge would be first to fall, Who that day would be lying dead, Pierced by a British musket-ball. You know the rest. In the books you have read, How the British Regulars fired and fled, — How the farmers gave them ball for ball, From behind each fence and farm-yard wall, Chasing the red-coats down the lane, Then crossing the fields to emerge again Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to fire and load. So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm, — A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo forevermore! For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold How the voluminous billows roll and run, Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled, And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold All its loose-flowing garments into one, Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold. So in majestic cadence rise and fall The mighty undulations of thy song, O sightless bard, England's Mæonides! And ever and anon, high over all Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong, Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis, Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies. Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi. "O Cæsar, we who are about to die Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry In the arena, standing face to face With death and with the Roman populace. O ye familiar scenes,—ye groves of pine, That once were mine and are no longer mine,— Thou river, widening through the meadows green To the vast sea, so near and yet unseen,— Ye halls, in whose seclusion and repose Phantoms of fame, like exhalations, rose And vanished,—we who are about to die, Salute you; earth and air and sea and sky, And the Imperial Sun that scatters down His sovereign splendors upon grove and town. Ye do not answer us! ye do not hear! We are forgotten; and in your austere And calm indifference, ye little care Whether we come or go, or whence or where. What passing generations fill these halls, What passing voices echo from these walls, Ye heed not; we are only as the blast, A moment heard, and then forever past. Not so the teachers who in earlier days Led our bewildered feet through learning's maze; They answer us—alas! what have I said? What greetings come there from the voiceless dead? What salutation, welcome, or reply? What pressure from the hands that lifeless lie? They are no longer here; they all are gone Into the land of shadows,—all save one. Honor and reverence, and the good repute That follows faithful service as its fruit, Be unto him, whom living we salute. The great Italian poet, when he made His dreadful journey to the realms of shade, Met there the old instructor of his youth, And cried in tones of pity and of ruth: "Oh, never from the memory of my heart Your dear, paternal image shall depart, Who while on earth, ere yet by death surprised, Taught me how mortals are immortalized; How grateful am I for that patient care All my life long my language shall declare." To-day we make the poet's words our own, And utter them in plaintive undertone; Nor to the living only be they said, But to the other living called the dead, Whose dear, paternal images appear Not wrapped in gloom, but robed in sunshine here; Whose simple lives, complete and without flaw, Were part and parcel of great Nature's law; Who said not to their Lord, as if afraid, "Here is thy talent in a napkin laid," But labored in their sphere, as men who live In the delight that work alone can give. Peace be to them; eternal peace and rest, And the fulfilment of the great behest: "Ye have been faithful over a few things, Over ten cities shall ye reign as kings." And ye who fill the places we once filled, And follow in the furrows that we tilled, Young men, whose generous hearts are beating high, We who are old, and are about to die, Salute you; hail you; take your hands in ours, And crown you with our welcome as with flowers! How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! Aladdin's Lamp, and Fortunatus' Purse, That holds the treasures of the universe! All possibilities are in its hands, No danger daunts it, and no foe withstands; In its sublime audacity of faith, "Be thou removed!" it to the mountain saith, And with ambitious feet, secure and proud, Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud! As ancient Priam at the Scæan gate Sat on the walls of Troy in regal state With the old men, too old and weak to fight, Chirping like grasshoppers in their delight To see the embattled hosts, with spear and shield, Of Trojans and Achaians in the field; So from the snowy summits of our years We see you in the plain, as each appears, And question of you; asking, "Who is he That towers above the others? Which may be Atreides, Menelaus, Odysseus, Ajax the great, or bold Idomeneus?" Let him not boast who puts his armor on As he who puts it off, the battle done. Study yourselves; and most of all note well Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel. Not every blossom ripens into fruit; Minerva, the inventress of the flute, Flung it aside, when she her face surveyed Distorted in a fountain as she played; The unlucky Marsyas found it, and his fate Was one to make the bravest hesitate. Write on your doors the saying wise and old, "Be bold! be bold!" and everywhere, "Be bold; Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less; Better like Hector in the field to die, Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly. And now, my classmates; ye remaining few That number not the half of those we knew, Ye, against whose familiar names not yet The fatal asterisk of death is set, Ye I salute! The horologe of Time Strikes the half-century with a solemn chime, And summons us together once again, The joy of meeting not unmixed with pain. Where are the others? Voices from the deep Caverns of darkness answer me: "They sleep!" I name no names; instinctively I feel Each at some well-remembered grave will kneel, And from the inscription wipe the weeds and moss, For every heart best knoweth its own loss. I see their scattered gravestones gleaming white Through the pale dusk of the impending night; O'er all alike the impartial sunset throws Its golden lilies mingled with the rose; We give to each a tender thought, and pass Out of the graveyards with their tangled grass, Unto these scenes frequented by our feet When we were young, and life was fresh and sweet. What shall I say to you? What can I say Better than silence is? When I survey This throng of faces turned to meet my own, Friendly and fair, and yet to me unknown, Transformed the very landscape seems to be; It is the same, yet not the same to me. So many memories crowd upon my brain, So many ghosts are in the wooded plain, I fain would steal away, with noiseless tread, As from a house where some one lieth dead. I cannot go;—I pause;—I hesitate; My feet reluctant linger at the gate; As one who struggles in a troubled dream To speak and cannot, to myself I seem. Vanish the dream! Vanish the idle fears! Vanish the rolling mists of fifty years! Whatever time or space may intervene, I will not be a stranger in this scene. Here every doubt, all indecision, ends; Hail, my companions, comrades, classmates, friends! Ah me! the fifty years since last we met Seem to me fifty folios bound and set By Time, the great transcriber, on his shelves, Wherein are written the histories of ourselves. What tragedies, what comedies, are there; What joy and grief, what rapture and despair! What chronicles of triumph and defeat, Of struggle, and temptation, and retreat! What records of regrets, and doubts, and fears! What pages blotted, blistered by our tears! What lovely landscapes on the margin shine, What sweet, angelic faces, what divine And holy images of love and trust, Undimmed by age, unsoiled by damp or dust! Whose hand shall dare to open and explore These volumes, closed and clasped forevermore? Not mine. With reverential feet I pass; I hear a voice that cries, "Alas! alas! Whatever hath been written shall remain, Nor be erased nor written o'er again; The unwritten only still belongs to thee: Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be." As children frightened by a thunder-cloud Are reassured if some one reads aloud A tale of wonder, with enchantment fraught, Or wild adventure, that diverts their thought, Let me endeavor with a tale to chase The gathering shadows of the time and place, And banish what we all too deeply feel Wholly to say, or wholly to conceal. In mediæval Rome, I know not where, There stood an image with its arm in air, And on its lifted finger, shining clear, A golden ring with the device, "Strike here!" Greatly the people wondered, though none guessed The meaning that these words but half expressed, Until a learned clerk, who at noonday With downcast eyes was passing on his way, Paused, and observed the spot, and marked it well, Whereon the shadow of the finger fell; And, coming back at midnight, delved, and found A secret stairway leading underground. Down this he passed into a spacious hall, Lit by a flaming jewel on the wall; And opposite, in threatening attitude, With bow and shaft a brazen statue stood. Upon its forehead, like a coronet, Were these mysterious words of menace set: "That which I am, I am; my fatal aim None can escape, not even yon luminous flame!" Midway the hall was a fair table placed, With cloth of gold, and golden cups enchased With rubies, and the plates and knives were gold, And gold the bread and viands manifold. Around it, silent, motionless, and sad, Were seated gallant knights in armor clad, And ladies beautiful with plume and zone, But they were stone, their hearts within were stone; And the vast hall was filled in every part With silent crowds, stony in face and heart. Long at the scene, bewildered and amazed The trembling clerk in speechless wonder gazed; Then from the table, by his greed made bold, He seized a goblet and a knife of gold, And suddenly from their seats the guests upsprang, The vaulted ceiling with loud clamors rang, The archer sped his arrow, at their call, Shattering the lambent jewel on the wall, And all was dark around and overhead;— Stark on the floor the luckless clerk lay dead! The writer of this legend then records Its ghostly application in these words: The image is the Adversary old, Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold; Our lusts and passions are the downward stair That leads the soul from a diviner air; The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life; Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife; The knights and ladies, all whose flesh and bone By avarice have been hardened into stone; The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf Tempts from his books and from his nobler self. The scholar and the world! The endless strife, The discord in the harmonies of life! The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books; The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! But why, you ask me, should this tale be told To men grown old, or who are growing old? It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years, And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his "Characters of Men." Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past. These are indeed exceptions; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow Into the arctic regions of our lives, Where little else than life itself survives. As the barometer foretells the storm While still the skies are clear, the weather warm So something in us, as old age draws near, Betrays the pressure of the atmosphere. The nimble mercury, ere we are aware, Descends the elastic ladder of the air; The telltale blood in artery and vein Sinks from its higher levels in the brain; Whatever poet, orator, or sage May say of it, old age is still old age. It is the waning, not the crescent moon; The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon; It is not strength, but weakness; not desire, But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire, The burning and consuming element, But that of ashes and of embers spent, In which some living sparks we still discern, Enough to warm, but not enough to burn. What then? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light; Something remains for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear; Not Oedipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode, Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn, But other something, would we but begin; For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Often I think of the beautiful town That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town, And my youth comes back to me. And a verse of a Lapland song Is haunting my memory still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I can see the shadowy lines of its trees, And catch, in sudden gleams, The sheen of the far-surrounding seas, And islands that were the Hesperides Of all my boyish dreams. And the burden of that old song, It murmurs and whispers still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tides tossing free; And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea. And the voice of that wayward song Is singing and saying still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I remember the bulwarks by the shore, And the fort upon the hill; The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar, The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er, And the bugle wild and shrill. And the music of that old song Throbs in my memory still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I remember the sea-fight far away, How it thundered o'er the tide! And the dead captains, as they lay In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay, Where they in battle died. And the sound of that mournful song Goes through me with a thrill: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I can see the breezy dome of groves, The shadows of Deering's Woods; And the friendships old and the early loves Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves In quiet neighborhoods. And the verse of that sweet old song, It flutters and murmurs still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." I remember the gleams and glooms that dart Across the school-boy's brain; The song and the silence in the heart, That in part are prophecies, and in part Are longings wild and vain. And the voice of that fitful song Sings on, and is never still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." There are things of which I may not speak; There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye. And the words of that fatal song Come over me like a chill: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." Strange to me now are the forms I meet When I visit the dear old town; But the native air is pure and sweet, And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street, As they balance up and down, Are singing the beautiful song, Are sighing and whispering still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair, And with joy that is almost pain My heart goes back to wander there, And among the dreams of the days that were, I find my lost youth again. And the strange and beautiful song, The groves are repeating it still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor, Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reassured and comforted By promises of others in their stead, Which, though more splendid, may not please him more; So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
In the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands. Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng: Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold, Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old; And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme, That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime. In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band, Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand; On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days Sat the poet Melchior singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise. Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of Art: Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart; And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone, By a former age commissioned as apostles to our own. In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust, And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust; In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare, Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted air. Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart, Lived and labored Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art; Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand, Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land. Emigravit is the inscription on the tomb-stone where he lies; Dead he is not, but departed, — for the artist never dies. Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair, That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air! Through these streets so broad and stately, these obscure and dismal lanes, Walked of yore the Mastersingers, chanting rude poetic strains. From remote and sunless suburbs came they to the friendly guild, Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in spouts the swallows build. As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme, And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime; Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom. Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft, Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed. But his house is now an ale-house, with a nicely sanded floor, And a garland in the window, and his face above the door; Painted by some humble artist, as in Adam Puschman's song, As the old man gray and dove-like, with his great beard white and long. And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care, Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair. Vanished is the ancient splendor, and before my dreamy eye Wave these mingled shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry. Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard; But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs thy cobbler bard. Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away, As he paced thy streets and court-yards, sang in thought his careless lay: Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil, The nobility of labor, — the long pedigree of toil.
When descends on the Atlantic The gigantic Storm-wind of the equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges The toiling surges, Laden with seaweed from the rocks: From Bermuda's reefs; from edges Of sunken ledges, In some far-off, bright Azore; From Bahama, and the dashing, Silver-flashing Surges of San Salvador; From the tumbling surf, that buries The Orkneyan skerries, Answering the hoarse Hebrides; And from wrecks of ships, and drifting Spars, uplifting On the desolate, rainy seas; — Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless main; Till in sheltered coves, and reaches Of sandy beaches, All have found repose again. So when storms of wild emotion Strike the ocean Of the poet's soul, erelong From each cave and rocky fastness, In its vastness, Floats some fragment of a song: From the far-off isles enchanted, Heaven has planted With the golden fruit of Truth; From the flashing surf, whose vision Gleams Elysian In the tropic clime of Youth; From the strong Will, and the Endeavor That forever Wrestle with the tides of Fate; From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered, Tempest-shattered, Floating waste and desolate; — Ever drifting, drifting, drifting On the shifting Currents of the restless heart; Till at length in books recorded, They, like hoarded Household words, no more depart.
A vision as of crowded city streets, With human life in endless overflow; Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats, Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets; Tolling of bells in turrets, and below Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets! This vision comes to me when I unfold The volume of the Poet paramount, Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone; — Into his hands they put the lyre of gold, And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount, Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.
Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow. Even as our cloudy fancies take Suddenly shape in some divine expression, Even as the troubled heart doth make In the white countenance confession, The troubled sky reveals The grief it feels. This is the poem of the air, Slowly in silent syllables recorded; This is the secret of despair, Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded, Now whispered and revealed To wood and field.
There was a little girl,  Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead.  When she was good,  She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.
The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveller hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls. Darkness settles on roofs and walls, But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls. The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveller to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.
With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas, We sailed for the Hesperides, The land where golden apples grow; But that, ah! that was long ago. How far, since then, the ocean streams Have swept us from that land of dreams, That land of fiction and of truth, The lost Atlantis of our youth! Whither, ah, whither? Are not these The tempest-haunted Orcades, Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar, And wreck and sea-weed line the shore? Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle! Here in thy harbors for a while We lower our sails; a while we rest From the unending, endless quest.
In Ocean's wide domains, Half buried in the sands, Lie skeletons in chains, With shackled feet and hands. Beyond the fall of dews, Deeper than plummet lies, Float ships, with all their crews, No more to sink nor rise. There the black Slave-ship swims, Freighted with human forms, Whose fettered, fleshless limbs Are not the sport of storms. These are the bones of Slaves; They gleam from the abyss; They cry, from yawning waves, "We are the Witnesses!" Within Earth's wide domains Are markets for men's lives; Their necks are galled with chains, Their wrists are cramped with gyves. Dead bodies, that the kite In deserts makes its prey; Murders, that with affright Scare school-boys from their play! All evil thoughts and deeds; Anger, and lust, and pride; The foulest, rankest weeds, That choke Life's groaning tide! These are the woes of Slaves; They glare from the abyss; They cry, from unknown graves, "We are the Witnesses!"
It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr, To bear him company. Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now West, now South. Then up and spake an old Sailòr, Had sailed to the Spanish Main, "I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. "Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!" The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, And a scornful laugh laughed he. Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast. Down came the storm, and smote amain The vessel in its strength; She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, Then leaped her cable's length. "Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow." He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. "O father! I hear the church-bells ring, Oh say, what may it be?" "'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" — And he steered for the open sea. "O father! I hear the sound of guns, Oh say, what may it be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!" "O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he. Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes. Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave On the Lake of Galilee. And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. The breakers were right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck. She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull. Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, Ho! ho! the breakers roared! At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. The salt sea was frozen on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, On the billows fall and rise. Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the Rocks, Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow Rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing Madrigals. And I will make thee beds of Roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle; A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty Lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and Ivy buds, With Coral clasps and Amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love.
Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,  Did after him the world seduce; And from the fields the flow’rs and plants allure,  Where nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos’d within the garden’s square  A dead and standing pool of air; And a more luscious earth for them did knead,  Which stupefied them while it fed. The pink grew then as double as his mind;  The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,  And flow’rs themselves were taught to paint. The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,  And learn’d to interline its cheek; Its onion root they then so high did hold,  That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was search’d, through oceans new,  To find the Marvel of Peru. And yet these rarities might be allow’d,  To man, that sov’reign thing and proud; Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,  Forbidden mixtures there to see. No plant now knew the stock from which it came,  He grafts upon the wild the tame; That the uncertain and adult’rate fruit  Might put the palate in dispute. His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,  Lest any tyrant him out-do; And in the cherry he does nature vex,  To procreate without a sex. ’Tis all enforc’d, the fountain and the grot,  While the sweet fields do lie forgot; Where willing nature does to all dispense  A wild and fragrant innocence; And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,  More by their presence than their skill. Their statues polish’d by some ancient hand,  May to adorn the gardens stand; But howso’ere the figures do excel,  The gods themselves with us do dwell.
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late, And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate; Ye country comets, that portend No war nor prince’s funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass’s fall; Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame To wand’ring mowers shows the way, That in the night have lost their aim, And after foolish fires do stray; Your courteous lights in vain you waste, Since Juliana here is come, For she my mind hath so displac’d That I shall never find my home.
My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spy’d But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo? And in your gaudy May-games meet While I lay trodden under feet? When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought; And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all, Will in one common ruin fall. For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb; For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
The wanton troopers riding by Have shot my fawn, and it will die. Ungentle men! they cannot thrive To kill thee. Thou ne’er didst alive Them any harm, alas, nor could Thy death yet do them any good. I’m sure I never wish’d them ill, Nor do I for all this, nor will; But if my simple pray’rs may yet Prevail with Heaven to forget Thy murder, I will join my tears Rather than fail. But oh, my fears! It cannot die so. Heaven’s King Keeps register of everything, And nothing may we use in vain. Ev’n beasts must be with justice slain, Else men are made their deodands; Though they should wash their guilty hands In this warm life-blood, which doth part From thine, and wound me to the heart, Yet could they not be clean, their stain Is dyed in such a purple grain. There is not such another in The world to offer for their sin. Unconstant Sylvio, when yet I had not found him counterfeit One morning (I remember well) Tied in this silver chain and bell, Gave it to me; nay, and I know What he said then; I’m sure I do. Said he, “Look how your huntsman here Hath taught a fawn to hunt his dear.” But Sylvio soon had me beguil’d, This waxed tame, while he grew wild; And quite regardless of my smart, Left me his fawn, but took his heart. Thenceforth I set myself to play My solitary time away, With this, and very well content Could so mine idle life have spent; For it was full of sport, and light Of foot and heart, and did invite Me to its game; it seem’d to bless Itself in me. How could I less Than love it? Oh, I cannot be Unkind t’ a beast that loveth me. Had it liv’d long, I do not know Whether it too might have done so As Sylvio did; his gifts might be Perhaps as false or more than he. But I am sure, for aught that I Could in so short a time espy, Thy love was far more better then The love of false and cruel men. With sweetest milk and sugar first I it at mine own fingers nurst; And as it grew, so every day It wax’d more white and sweet than they. It had so sweet a breath! And oft I blush’d to see its foot more soft And white, shall I say than my hand? Nay, any lady’s of the land. It is a wond’rous thing how fleet ’Twas on those little silver feet; With what a pretty skipping grace It oft would challenge me the race; And when ’t had left me far away, ’Twould stay, and run again, and stay, For it was nimbler much than hinds, And trod, as on the four winds. I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness; And all the spring time of the year It only loved to be there. Among the beds of lilies I Have sought it oft, where it should lie; Yet could not, till itself would rise, Find it, although before mine eyes; For, in the flaxen lilies’ shade, It like a bank of lilies laid. Upon the roses it would feed Until its lips ev’n seemed to bleed, And then to me ’twould boldly trip And print those roses on my lip. But all its chief delight was still On roses thus itself to fill, And its pure virgin limbs to fold In whitest sheets of lilies cold. Had it liv’d long it would have been Lilies without, roses within. O help, O help! I see it faint, And die as calmly as a saint. See how it weeps! The tears do come, Sad, slowly dropping like a gum. So weeps the wounded balsam, so The holy frankincense doth flow; The brotherless Heliades Melt in such amber tears as these. I in a golden vial will Keep these two crystal tears, and fill It till it do o’erflow with mine, Then place it in Diana’s shrine. Now my sweet fawn is vanish’d to Whither the swans and turtles go, In fair Elysium to endure With milk-white lambs and ermines pure. O do not run too fast, for I Will but bespeak thy grave, and die. First my unhappy statue shall Be cut in marble, and withal Let it be weeping too; but there Th’ engraver sure his art may spare, For I so truly thee bemoan That I shall weep though I be stone; Until my tears, still dropping, wear My breast, themselves engraving there. There at my feet shalt thou be laid, Of purest alabaster made; For I would have thine image be White as I can, though not as thee.
Within this sober frame expect Work of no foreign architect; That unto caves the quarries drew, And forests did to pastures hew; Who of his great design in pain Did for a model vault his brain; Whose columns should so high be rais’d To arch the brows that on them gaz’d. Why should of all things man unrul’d Such unproportion’d dwellings build? The beasts are by their dens exprest, And birds contrive an equal nest; The low roof’d tortoises do dwell In cases fit of tortoise-shell; No creature loves an empty space; Their bodies measure out their place. But he, superfluously spread, Demands more room alive than dead; And in his hollow palace goes Where winds as he themselves may lose. What need of all this marble crust T’impark the wanton mote of dust, That thinks by breadth the world t’unite Though the first builders fail’d in height? But all things are composed here Like nature, orderly and near; In which we the dimensions find Of that more sober age and mind, When larger sized men did stoop To enter at a narrow loop; As practising, in doors so straight, To strain themselves through Heaven’s gate. And surely when the after age Shall hither come in pilgrimage, These sacred places to adore, By Vere and Fairfax trod before, Men will dispute how their extent Within such dwarfish confines went; And some will smile at this, as well As Romulus his bee-like cell. Humility alone designs Those short but admirable lines, By which, ungirt and unconstrain’d, Things greater are in less contain’d. Let others vainly strive t’immure The circle in the quadrature! These holy mathematics can In ev’ry figure equal man. Yet thus the laden house does sweat, And scarce endures the master great, But where he comes the swelling hall Stirs, and the square grows spherical; More by his magnitude distress’d, Then he is by its straightness press’d, And too officiously it slights That in itself which him delights. So honour better lowness bears, Than that unwonted greatness wears; Height with a certain grace does bend, But low things clownishly ascend. And yet what needs there here excuse, Where ev’ry thing does answer use? Where neatness nothing can condemn, Nor pride invent what to contemn? A stately frontispiece of poor Adorns without the open door; Nor less the rooms within commends Daily new furniture of friends. The house was built upon the place Only as for a mark of grace; And for an inn to entertain Its lord a while, but not remain. Him Bishops-Hill, or Denton may, Or Billbrough, better hold than they; But nature here hath been so free As if she said leave this to me. Art would more neatly have defac’d What she had laid so sweetly waste; In fragrant gardens, shady woods, Deep meadows, and transparent floods.
If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
About me young careless feet Linger along the garish street; Above, a hundred shouting signs Shed down their bright fantastic glow Upon the merry crowd and lines Of moving carriages below. Oh wonderful is Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely. Desire naked, linked with Passion, Goes trutting by in brazen fashion; From playhouse, cabaret and inn The rainbow lights of Broadway blaze All gay without, all glad within; As in a dream I stand and gaze At Broadway, shining Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely.
To clasp you now and feel your head close-pressed, Scented and warm against my beating breast; To whisper soft and quivering your name, And drink the passion burning in your frame; To lie at full length, taut, with cheek to cheek, And tease your mouth with kisses till you speak Love words, mad words, dream words, sweet senseless words, Melodious like notes of mating birds; To hear you ask if I shall love always, And myself answer: Till the end of days; To feel your easeful sigh of happiness When on your trembling lips I murmur: Yes; It is so sweet. We know it is not true. What matters it? The night must shed her dew. We know it is not true, but it is sweet— The poem with this music is complete.
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,  Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,  Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs, Set in the window, bringing memories  Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies  In benediction over nun-like hills. My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;  A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,  I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.
Pitch here the tent, while the old horse grazes:  By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage. It's nigh my last above the daisies:  My next leaf'll be man's blank page. Yes, my old girl! and it's no use crying:  Juggler, constable, king, must bow. One that outjuggles all's been spying  Long to have me, and he has me now. We've travelled times to this old common:  Often we've hung our pots in the gorse. We've had a stirring life, old woman!  You, and I, and the old grey horse. Races, and fairs, and royal occasions,  Found us coming to their call: Now they'll miss us at our stations:  There's a Juggler outjuggles all! Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly!  Over the duck-pond the willow shakes. Easy to think that grieving's folly,  When the hand's firm as driven stakes! Ay, when we're strong, and braced, and manful,  Life's a sweet fiddle: but we're a batch Born to become the Great Juggler's han'ful:  Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch. Here's where the lads of the village cricket:  I was a lad not wide from here: Couldn't I whip off the bale from the wicket?  Like an old world those days appear! Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatch'd ale-house—I know them!  They are old friends of my halts, and seem, Somehow, as if kind thanks I owe them:  Juggling don't hinder the heart's esteem. Juggling's no sin, for we must have victual:  Nature allows us to bait for the fool. Holding one's own makes us juggle no little;  But, to increase it, hard juggling's the rule. You that are sneering at my profession,  Haven't you juggled a vast amount? There's the Prime Minister, in one Session,  Juggles more games than my sins'll count. I've murdered insects with mock thunder:  Conscience, for that, in men don't quail. I've made bread from the bump of wonder:  That's my business, and there's my tale. Fashion and rank all praised the professor:  Ay! and I've had my smile from the Queen: Bravo, Jerry! she meant: God bless her!  Ain't this a sermon on that scene? I've studied men from my topsy-turvy  Close, and, I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy:  Most, a dash between the two. But it's a woman, old girl, that makes me  Think more kindly of the race: And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me  When the Great Juggler I must face. We two were married, due and legal:  Honest we've lived since we've been one. Lord! I could then jump like an eagle:  You danced bright as a bit o' the sun. Birds in a May-bush we were! right merry!  All night we kiss'd, we juggled all day. Joy was the heart of Juggling Jerry!  Now from his old girl he's juggled away. It's past parsons to console us:  No, nor no doctor fetch for me: I can die without my bolus;  Two of a trade, lass, never agree! Parson and Doctor!—don't they love rarely  Fighting the devil in other men's fields! Stand up yourself and match him fairly:  Then see how the rascal yields! I, lass, have lived no gipsy, flaunting  Finery while his poor helpmate grubs: Coin I've stored, and you won't be wanting:  You shan't beg from the troughs and tubs. Nobly you've stuck to me, though in his kitchen  Many a Marquis would hail you Cook! Palaces you could have ruled and grown rich in,  But your old Jerry you never forsook. Hand up the chirper! ripe ale winks in it;  Let's have comfort and be at peace. Once a stout draught made me light as a linnet.  Cheer up! the Lord must have his lease. May be—for none see in that black hollow—  It's just a place where we're held in pawn, And, when the Great Juggler makes as to swallow,  It's just the sword-trick—I ain't quite gone! Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty,  Gold-like and warm: it's the prime of May. Better than mortar, brick and putty  Is God's house on a blowing day. Lean me more up the mound; now I feel it:  All the old heath-smells! Ain't it strange? There's the world laughing, as if to conceal it,  But He's by us, juggling the change. I mind it well, by the sea-beach lying,  Once—it's long gone—when two gulls we beheld, Which, as the moon got up, were flying  Down a big wave that sparked and swell'd. Crack, went a gun: one fell: the second  Wheeled round him twice, and was off for new luck: There in the dark her white wing beckon'd:—  Drop me a kiss—I'm the bird dead-struck!
Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,  Couched with her arms behind her golden head, Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,  Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,  Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow, Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:  Then would she hold me and never let me go? Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,  Swift as the swallow along the river's light Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,  Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight. Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,  Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,  Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won! When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,  Tying up her laces, looping up her hair, Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,  More love should I have, and much less care. When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,  Loosening her laces, combing down her curls, Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,  I should miss but one for many boys and girls. Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows  Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon. No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder:  Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon. Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure,  Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less: Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones  Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless. Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping  Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,  Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:  So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,  Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled. Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,  Arm in arm, all against the raying West Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,  Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed. Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking  Whispered the world was; morning light is she. Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;  Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free. Happy happy time, when the white star hovers  Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew, Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,  Threading it with colour, as yewberries the yew. Thicker crowd the shades while the grave East deepens  Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells. Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;  Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells. Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting  Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along, Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter  Chill as a dull face frowning on a song. Ay, but shows the South-West a ripple-feathered bosom  Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset  Rich, deep like love in beauty without end. When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window  Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams, Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily  Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams. When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle  In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May, Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily  Pure from the night, and splendid for the day. Mother of the dews, dark eye-lashed twilight,  Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim, Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark,  Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him. Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet,  Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers. Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever  Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers. All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose;  Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands. My sweet leads: she knows not why, but now she totters,  Eyes the bent anemones, and hangs her hands. Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping,  Coming the rose: and unaware a cry Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour,  Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why. Kerchiefed head and chin she darts between her tulips,  Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain: Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel  She will be; she lifts them, and on she speeds again. Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gateway:  She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth. So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder  Saw I once a white dove, sole light of earth. Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,  Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please. I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones:  O my wild ones! they tell me more than these. You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,  Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they, They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness,  You are of life's, on the banks that line the way. Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,  Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three. Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine  Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me. Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest?  Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes, Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine  Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths. Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades;  Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf; Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow;  Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf: Green-yellow bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle;  Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine: Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens,  Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine. This I may know: her dressing and undressing  Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport Shift from cloud to moonlight; or edging over thunder  Slips a ray of sun; or sweeping into port White sails furl; or on the ocean borders  White sails lean along the waves leaping green. Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight  Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen. Front door and back of the mossed old farmhouse  Open with the morn, and in a breezy link Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard,  Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink. Busy in the grass the early sun of summer  Swarms, and the blackbird's mellow fluting notes Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge:  Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats! Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy  Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school, Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine;  O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool! Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher  Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak. Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,  Said, "I will kiss you": she laughed and leaned her cheek. Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof  Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo. Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway  Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue. Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,  Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly. Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,  Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky. O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful!  O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced! O the treasure-tresses one another over  Nodding! O the girdle slack about the waist! Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet  Quick amid the wheatears: wound about the waist, Gathered, see these brides of Earth one blush of ripeness!  O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced! Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops,  Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow: Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moonrise,  Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow. Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree  Gazes in this whiteness: nightlong could I. Here may life on death or death on life be painted.  Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die! Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber  Where there is no window, read not heaven or her. "When she was a tiny," one aged woman quavers,  Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear. Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:  Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete. Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy  Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet. Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,  Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;  Yet am I the light and living of her eyes. Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming,  Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames.— Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting,  Arms up, she dropped: our souls were in our names. Soon will she lie like a white-frost sunrise.  Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale as rye, Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher,  Felt the girdle loosened, seen the tresses fly. Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset.  Swift with the to-morrow, green-winged Spring! Sing from the South-West, bring her back the truants,  Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing. Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April  Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you, Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,  Youngest green transfused in silver shining through: Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:  Fair as in image my seraph love appears Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids:  Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears. Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,  I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dog-wood,  Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed. Flushing like the dog-wood crimson in October;  Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted white beam:  All seem to know what is for heaven alone.
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.
What links are ours with orbs that are  So resolutely far: The solitary asks, and they Give radiance as from a shield:  Still at the death of day,  The seen, the unrevealed.  Implacable they shine To us who would of Life obtain An answer for the life we strain  To nourish with one sign. Nor can imagination throw The penetrative shaft: we pass The breath of thought, who would divine  If haply they may grow As Earth; have our desire to know; If life comes there to grain from grass, And flowers like ours of toil and pain;  Has passion to beat bar,  Win space from cleaving brain;  The mystic link attain,  Whereby star holds on star. Those visible immortals beam  Allurement to the dream: Ireful at human hungers brook  No question in the look. For ever virgin to our sense, Remote they wane to gaze intense: Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite The beating heart behind the ball of sight:  Till we conceive their heavens hoar,  Those lights they raise but sparkles frore, And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey To that frigidity of brainless ray.  Yet space is given for breath of thought  Beyond our bounds when musing: more  When to that musing love is brought,  And love is asked of love's wherefore.  'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought:  Her gift, her secret, here our tie. And not with her and yonder sky? Bethink you: were it Earth alone Breeds love, would not her region be  The sole delight and throne  Of generous Deity?  To deeper than this ball of sight Appeal the lustrous people of the night. Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails,  It is our ravenous that quails, Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.  The spirit leaps alight,  Doubts not in them is he, The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right:  Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought, To feel it large of the great life they hold:  In them to come, or vaster intervolved, The issues known in us, our unsolved solved:  That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree, Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped. So may we read and little find them cold:  Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped; Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified By day to penetrate black midnight; see, Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we, The specks of dust upon a mound of mould, We who reflect those rays, though low our place,  To them are lastingly allied. So may we read, and little find them cold: Not frosty lamps illumining dead space, Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers. The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours. Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced. Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold  The love that lends her grace  Among the starry fold. Then at new flood of customary morn, Look at her through her showers,  Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face: She wears no more that robe of printed hours; Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.
By this he knew she wept with waking eyes: That, at his hand's light quiver by her head, The strange low sobs that shook their common bed Were called into her with a sharp surprise, And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes, Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes Her giant heart of Memory and Tears Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet Were moveless, looking through their dead black years, By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall. Like sculptured effigies they might be seen Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between; Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
It ended, and the morrow brought the task. Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in By shutting all too zealous for their sin: Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask. But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had! He sickened as at breath of poison-flowers: A languid humour stole among the hours, And if their smiles encountered, he went mad, And raged deep inward, till the light was brown Before his vision, and the world, forgot, Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot. A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown The pit of infamy: and then again He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove To ape the magnanimity of love, And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain.
What soul would bargain for a cure that brings Contempt the nobler agony to kill? Rather let me bear on the bitter ill, And strike this rusty bosom with new stings! It seems there is another veering fit Since on a gold-haired lady's eyeballs pure, I looked with little prospect of a cure, The while her mouth's red bow loosed shafts of wit. Just heaven! can it be true that jealousy Has decked the woman thus? and does her head Swim somewhat for possessions forfeited? Madam, you teach me many things that be. I open an old book, and there I find That "Women still may love whom they deceive." Such love I prize not, madam: by your leave, The game you play at is not to my mind.
In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour, When in the firelight steadily aglow, Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower That eve was left to us: and hushed we sat As lovers to whom Time is whispering. From sudden-opened doors we heard them sing: The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat. Well knew we that Life's greatest treasure lay With us, and of it was our talk. "Ah, yes! Love dies!" I said: I never thought it less. She yearned to me that sentence to unsay. Then when the fire domed blackening, I found Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift:— Now am I haunted by that taste! that sound!
I am not of those miserable males Who sniff at vice and, daring not to snap, Do therefore hope for heaven. I take the hap Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails Propels; but I am helmsman. Am I wrecked, I know the devil has sufficient weight To bear: I lay it not on him, or fate. Besides, he's damned. That man I do suspect A coward, who would burden the poor deuce With what ensues from his own slipperiness. I have just found a wanton-scented tress In an old desk, dusty for lack of use. Of days and nights it is demonstrative, That, like some aged star, gleam luridly. If for those times I must ask charity, Have I not any charity to give?
What may the woman labour to confess? There is about her mouth a nervous twitch. 'Tis something to be told, or hidden:—which? I get a glimpse of hell in this mild guess. She has desires of touch, as if to feel That all the household things are things she knew. She stops before the glass. What sight in view? A face that seems the latest to reveal! For she turns from it hastily, and tossed Irresolute, steals shadow-like to where I stand; and wavering pale before me there, Her tears fall still as oak-leaves after frost. She will not speak. I will not ask. We are League-sundered by the silent gulf between. Yon burly lovers on the village green, Yours is a lower, and a happier star!
Madam would speak with me. So, now it comes: The Deluge or else Fire! She's well, she thanks My husbandship. Our chain on silence clanks. Time leers between, above his twiddling thumbs. Am I quite well? Most excellent in health! The journals, too, I diligently peruse. Vesuvius is expected to give news: Niagara is no noisier. By stealth Our eyes dart scrutinizing snakes. She's glad I'm happy, says her quivering under-lip. "And are not you?" "How can I be?" "Take ship! For happiness is somewhere to be had." "Nowhere for me!" Her voice is barely heard. I am not melted, and make no pretence. With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense. Niagara or Vesuvius is deferred.
Love ere he bleeds, an eagle in high skies, Has earth beneath his wings: from reddened eve He views the rosy dawn. In vain they weave The fatal web below while far he flies. But when the arrow strikes him, there's a change. He moves but in the track of his spent pain, Whose red drops are the links of a harsh chain, Binding him to the ground, with narrow range. A subtle serpent then has Love become. I had the eagle in my bosom erst: Henceforward with the serpent I am cursed. I can interpret where the mouth is dumb. Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth. Perchance my heart may pardon you this deed: But be no coward:—you that made Love bleed, You must bear all the venom of his tooth!
At last we parley: we so strangely dumb In such a close communion! It befell About the sounding of the Matin-bell, And lo! her place was vacant, and the hum Of loneliness was round me. Then I rose, And my disordered brain did guide my foot To that old wood where our first love-salute Was interchanged: the source of many throes! There did I see her, not alone. I moved Toward her, and made proffer of my arm. She took it simply, with no rude alarm; And that disturbing shadow passed reproved. I felt the pained speech coming, and declared My firm belief in her, ere she could speak. A ghastly morning came into her cheek, While with a widening soul on me she stared.
Thus piteously Love closed what he begat: The union of this ever-diverse pair! These two were rapid falcons in a snare, Condemned to do the flitting of the bat. Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers: But they fed not on the advancing hours: Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. Then each applied to each that fatal knife, Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!— In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
They have no song, the sedges dry,  And still they sing. It is within my breast they sing,  As I pass by. Within my breast they touch a string,  They wake a sigh. There is but sound of sedges dry;  In me they sing.
"Heaven bless the babe," they said. "What queer books she must have read!" (Love, by whom I was beguiled, Grant I may not bear a child!) "Little does she guess today What the world may be," they say. (Snow, drift deep and cover Till the spring my murdered lover!)
Listen, children: Your father is dead. From his old coats I'll make you little jackets; I'll make you little trousers From his old pants. There'll be in his pockets Things he used to put there, Keys and pennies Covered with tobacco; Dan shall have the pennies To save in his bank; Anne shall have the keys To make a pretty noise with. Life must go on, And the dead be forgotten; Life must go on, Though good men die; Anne, eat your breakfast; Dan, take your medicine; Life must go on; I forget just why.
I had a little Sorrow,  Born of a little Sin, I found a room all damp with gloom  And shut us all within; And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I, "And, Little Sin, pray God to die, And I upon the floor will lie  And think how bad I've been!" Alas for pious planning —  It mattered not a whit! As far as gloom went in that room,  The lamp might have been lit! My Little Sorrow would not weep, My Little Sin would go to sleep — To save my soul I could not keep  My graceless mind on it! So up I got in anger,  And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair  To please a passing lad. And, "One thing there's no getting by — I've been a wicked girl," said I; "But if I can't be sorry, why,  I might as well be glad!"
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
Sorrow like a ceaseless rain  Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain, — Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane,  Neither stop nor start. People dress and go to town;  I sit in my chair. All my thoughts are slow and brown: Standing up or sitting down Little matters, or what gown  Or what shoes I wear.
To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Hence loathed Melancholy, Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy; Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; There under ebon shades, and low-brow'd rocks, As ragged as thy locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But come thou goddess fair and free, In heav'n yclep'd Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing Mirth, Whom lovely Venus at a birth With two sister Graces more To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore; Or whether (as some sager sing) The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr, with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying, There on beds of violets blue, And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew, Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair, So buxom, blithe, and debonair. Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides. Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe, And in thy right hand lead with thee, The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to come in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweet-briar, or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine; While the cock with lively din, Scatters the rear of darkness thin, And to the stack, or the barn door, Stoutly struts his dames before; Oft list'ning how the hounds and horn Cheerly rouse the slumb'ring morn, From the side of some hoar hill, Through the high wood echoing shrill. Sometime walking, not unseen, By hedge-row elms, on hillocks green, Right against the eastern gate, Where the great Sun begins his state, Rob'd in flames, and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight. While the ploughman near at hand, Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, And the milkmaid singeth blithe, And the mower whets his scythe, And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale. Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landskip round it measures, Russet lawns, and fallows gray, Where the nibbling flocks do stray; Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide. Towers, and battlements it sees Bosom'd high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighbouring eyes. Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes, From betwixt two aged oaks, Where Corydon and Thyrsis met, Are at their savoury dinner set Of herbs, and other country messes, Which the neat-handed Phyllis dresses; And then in haste her bow'r she leaves, With Thestylis to bind the sheaves; Or if the earlier season lead To the tann'd haycock in the mead. Sometimes with secure delight The upland hamlets will invite, When the merry bells ring round, And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth, and many a maid, Dancing in the chequer'd shade; And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday, Till the live-long daylight fail; Then to the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat, How Faery Mab the junkets eat, She was pinch'd and pull'd she said, And he by friar's lanthorn led, Tells how the drudging goblin sweat, To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn That ten day-labourers could not end; Then lies him down, the lubber fiend, And stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And crop-full out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings. Thus done the tales, to bed they creep, By whispering winds soon lull'd asleep. Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men, Where throngs of knights and barons bold, In weeds of peace high triumphs hold, With store of ladies, whose bright eyes Rain influence, and judge the prize Of wit, or arms, while both contend To win her grace, whom all commend. There let Hymen oft appear In saffron robe, with taper clear, And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry; Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild. And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running, Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony; That Orpheus' self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heap'd Elysian flow'rs, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto, to have quite set free His half-regain'd Eurydice. These delights if thou canst give, Mirth, with thee I mean to live.
Hence vain deluding Joys, The brood of Folly without father bred, How little you bested, Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys; Dwell in some idle brain, And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless As the gay motes that people the sunbeams, Or likest hovering dreams, The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train. But hail thou goddess, sage and holy, Hail divinest Melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, O'er-laid with black, staid Wisdom's hue; Black, but such as in esteem, Prince Memnon's sister might beseem, Or that starr'd Ethiop queen that strove To set her beauty's praise above The sea nymphs, and their powers offended. Yet thou art higher far descended, Thee bright-hair'd Vesta long of yore, To solitary Saturn bore; His daughter she (in Saturn's reign, Such mixture was not held a stain) Oft in glimmering bow'rs and glades He met her, and in secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While yet there was no fear of Jove. Come pensive nun, devout and pure, Sober, stedfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train, And sable stole of cypress lawn, Over thy decent shoulders drawn. Come, but keep thy wonted state, With ev'n step, and musing gait, And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes: There held in holy passion still, Forget thyself to marble, till With a sad leaden downward cast, Thou fix them on the earth as fast. And join with thee calm Peace, and Quiet, Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet, And hears the Muses in a ring, Aye round about Jove's altar sing. And add to these retired Leisure, That in trim gardens takes his pleasure; But first, and chiefest, with thee bring Him that yon soars on golden wing, Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne, The cherub Contemplation; And the mute Silence hist along, 'Less Philomel will deign a song, In her sweetest, saddest plight, Smoothing the rugged brow of night, While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke, Gently o'er th' accustom'd oak. Sweet bird that shunn'st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy! Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among, I woo to hear thy even-song; And missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven green, To behold the wand'ring Moon, Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heav'ns wide pathless way; And oft, as if her head she bow'd, Stooping through a fleecy cloud. Oft on a plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound, Over some wide-water'd shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar; Or if the air will not permit, Some still removed place will fit, Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom, Far from all resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bellman's drowsy charm, To bless the doors from nightly harm. Or let my lamp at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely tow'r, Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds, or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook: And of those dæmons that are found In fire, air, flood, or under ground, Whose power hath a true consent With planet, or with element. Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptr'd pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes', or Pelop's line, Or the tale of Troy divine, Or what (though rare) of later age, Ennobled hath the buskin'd stage. But, O sad Virgin, that thy power Might raise Musæus from his bower, Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as, warbled to the string, Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, And made Hell grant what love did seek. Or call up him that left half told The story of Cambuscan bold, Of Camball, and of Algarsife, And who had Canace to wife, That own'd the virtuous ring and glass, And of the wond'rous horse of brass, On which the Tartar king did ride; And if aught else, great bards beside, In sage and solemn tunes have sung, Of tourneys and of trophies hung, Of forests, and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear. Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career, Till civil-suited Morn appear, Not trick'd and frounc'd as she was wont, With the Attic boy to hunt, But kerchief'd in a comely cloud, While rocking winds are piping loud, Or usher'd with a shower still, When the gust hath blown his fill, Ending on the rustling leaves, With minute-drops from off the eaves. And when the Sun begins to fling His flaring beams, me, goddess, bring To arched walks of twilight groves, And shadows brown that Sylvan loves, Of pine, or monumental oak, Where the rude axe with heaved stroke, Was never heard the nymphs to daunt, Or fright them from their hallow'd haunt. There in close covert by some brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from Day's garish eye, While the bee with honied thigh, That at her flow'ry work doth sing, And the waters murmuring With such consort as they keep, Entice the dewy-feather'd sleep; And let some strange mysterious dream, Wave at his wings, in airy stream Of lively portraiture display'd, Softly on my eye-lids laid. And as I wake, sweet music breathe Above, about, or underneath, Sent by some spirit to mortals good, Or th' unseen Genius of the wood. But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voic'd quire below, In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes. And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that Heav'n doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew; Till old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain. These pleasures, Melancholy, give, And I with thee will choose to live.
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his wat'ry bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring; Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain and coy excuse! So may some gentle muse With lucky words favour my destin'd urn, And as he passes turn And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud! For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill; Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd Under the opening eyelids of the morn, We drove afield, and both together heard What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the star that rose at ev'ning bright Toward heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel. Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, Temper'd to th'oaten flute; Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel, From the glad sound would not be absent long; And old Damætas lov'd to hear our song. But O the heavy change now thou art gone, Now thou art gone, and never must return! Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves, With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown, And all their echoes mourn. The willows and the hazel copses green Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. As killing as the canker to the rose, Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear When first the white thorn blows: Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas? For neither were ye playing on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie, Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream. Ay me! I fondly dream Had ye bin there'—for what could that have done? What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her enchanting son, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? Alas! what boots it with incessant care To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? Were it not better done, as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise," Phoebus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears; "Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies, But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed." O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds, That strain I heard was of a higher mood. But now my oat proceeds, And listens to the Herald of the Sea, That came in Neptune's plea. He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon winds, "What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?" And question'd every gust of rugged wings That blows from off each beaked promontory. They knew not of his story; And sage Hippotades their answer brings, That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd; The air was calm, and on the level brine Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd. It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built in th'eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe. "Ah! who hath reft," quoth he, "my dearest pledge?" Last came, and last did go, The Pilot of the Galilean lake; Two massy keys he bore of metals twain (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain). He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake: "How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies' sake Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold? Of other care they little reck'ning make Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast And shove away the worthy bidden guest. Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least That to the faithful herdman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And when they list their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, But, swoll'n with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said, But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more". Return, Alpheus: the dread voice is past That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse, And call the vales and bid them hither cast Their bells and flow'rets of a thousand hues. Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes, That on the green turf suck the honied showers And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears; Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world, Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold: Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth; And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor; So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high Through the dear might of him that walk'd the waves; Where, other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet societies, That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more: Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore, In thy large recompense, and shalt be good To all that wander in that perilous flood. Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills, While the still morn went out with sandals gray; He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay; And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, And now was dropp'd into the western bay; At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise, And all her jealous monarchs with amaze And rumours loud, that daunt remotest kings; Thy firm unshak'n virtue ever brings Victory home, though new rebellions raise Their hydra heads, and the false north displays Her brok'n league, to imp their serpent wings: O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; For what can war but endless war still breed? Till Truth and Right from Violence be freed, And Public Faith clear'd from the shameful brand Of Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed While Avarice and Rapine share the land.
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,  Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!  My hasting days fly on with full career,  But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth  That I to manhood am arriv'd so near;  And inward ripeness doth much less appear,  That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,  It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n  To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n:  All is, if I have grace to use it so  As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs By the known rules of ancient liberty, When straight a barbarous noise environs me Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs: As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny Which after held the sun and moon in fee. But this is got by casting pearl to hogs, That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, And still revolt when truth would set them free. Licence they mean when they cry liberty; For who loves that, must first be wise and good. But from that mark how far they rove we see, For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.
Methought I saw my late espoused saint  Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,  Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,  Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint  Purification in the old Law did save,  And such as yet once more I trust to have  Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;  Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight  Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd So clear as in no face with more delight.  But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,  I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold, Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones; Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piemontese that roll'd Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubl'd to the hills, and they To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway The triple tyrant; that from these may grow A hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear To outward view of blemish or of spot, Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot; Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear Of sun or moon or star throughout the year, Or man or woman. Yet I argue not Against Heav'n's hand or will, not bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask? The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied In liberty's defence, my noble task, Of which all Europe talks from side to side. This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask Content, though blind, had I no better guide.
To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652,On the proposals of certain ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough'd, And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud Hast rear'd God's trophies, and his work pursu'd, While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbru'd, And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath; yet much remains To conquer still: peace hath her victories No less renown'd than war. New foes arise Threat'ning to bind our souls with secular chains: Help us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.
When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.”
To Mr. Lawrence Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen day; what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun. What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? He who of those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
At length, by so much importunity press'd, Take, C——, at once, the inside of my breast; This stupid indiff'rence so often you blame, Is not owing to nature, to fear, or to shame: I am not as cold as a virgin in lead, Nor is Sunday's sermon so strong in my head: I know but too well how time flies along, That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young. But I hate to be cheated, and never will buy Long years of repentance for moments of joy, Oh! was there a man (but where shall I find Good sense and good nature so equally join'd?) Would value his pleasure, contribute to mine; Not meanly would boast, nor would lewdly design; Not over severe, yet not stupidly vain, For I would have the power, tho' not give the pain. No pedant, yet learned; no rake-helly gay, Or laughing, because he has nothing to say; To all my whole sex obliging and free, Yet never be fond of any but me; In public preserve the decorum that's just, And shew in his eyes he is true to his trust; Then rarely approach, and respectfully bow, But not fulsomely pert, nor yet foppishly low. But when the long hours of public are past, And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last, May ev'ry fond pleasure that moment endear; Be banish'd afar both discretion and fear! Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd, He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud. Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live, And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive. And that my delight may be solidly fix'd, Let the friend and the lover be handsomely mix'd; In whose tender bosom my soul may confide, Whose kindness can soothe me, whose counsel can guide. From such a dear lover as here I describe, No danger should fright me, no millions should bribe; But till this astonishing creature I know, As I long have liv'd chaste, I will keep myself so. I never will share with the wanton coquette, Or be caught by a vain affectation of wit. The toasters and songsters may try all their art, But never shall enter the pass of my heart. I loath the lewd rake, the dress'd fopling despise: Before such pursuers the nice virgin flies: And as Ovid has sweetly in parable told, We harden like trees, and like rivers grow cold.
ROXANA from the court retiring late, Sigh'd her soft sorrows at St. JAMES's gate: Such heavy thoughts lay brooding in her breast, Not her own chairmen wth more weight opprest; They groan the cruel load they're doom'd to bear ; She in these gentler sounds express'd her care. " Was it for this, that I these Roses wear, " For this new-set my Jewels for my hair ? " Ah ! Princess ! with what zeal have I pursu'd ! " Almost forgot the duty of a Prude. " Thinking I never cou'd attend too soon, " I've miss'd my prayers, to get me dress'd by noon. " For Thee, ah ! what for Thee did I resign ? " My Pleasures, Passions, all that e'er was mine. " I sacrific'd both Modesty and Ease, " Left Operas, and went to filthy Plays ; " Double entendres shock'd my tender ear, " Yet even this for Thee I chose to bear. " In glowing youth, when nature bids be gay, " And ev'ry joy of life before me lay, " By honour prompted, and by pride restrain'd, " The pleasures of the young my soul disdain'd : " Sermons I sought, and with a mien severe " Censur'd my neighbours, and said daily pray'r. " Alas ! how chang'd! — with the same sermon mien " That once I pray'd, the What-d'ye call't I've seen. " Ah ! cruel Princess, for thy sake I've lost " That reputation which so dear had cost : " I, who avoided ev'ry publick place, " When bloom, and beauty bid me show my face ; " Now near Thee constant ev'ry night abide " With never-failing duty by thy side, " Myself and daughters standing on a row, " To all the foreigners a goodly show ! " Oft had your drawing-room been sadly thin, " And merchants wives close by the chair had been seen ; " Had not I amply fill'd the empty space, " And sav'd your Highness from the dire disgrace. " Yet COQUETILLA's artifice prevails, " When all my merit and my duty fails : " That COQUETILLA, whose deluding airs " Corrupts our virgins, and our youth ensnares ; " So sunk her character, so lost her fame, " Scarce visited before your Highness came ; " Yet for the Bed-chamber 'tis Her you chuse, " When Zeal and Fame and Virtue you refuse. " Ah ! worthy choice ! not one of all your train " Whom censure blasts not, and dishonours stain. " Let the nice hind now suckle dirty pigs, " And the proud pea-hen snatch the cuckoo's eggs ! " Let IRIS leave her paint, and own her age, " And grave SUFFOLKIA wed a giddy page ! " A greater miracle is daily view'd, " A virtuous Princess with a court so lewd. " I know thee, Court ! with all thy treach'rous wiles, " Thy false caresses and undoing smiles ! " Ah ! Princess, learn'd in all the courtly arts " To cheat our hopes, and yet to gain our hearts. " Large lovely bribes are the great statesman's aim ; " And the neglected patriot follows fame. " The Prince is ogled ; some the King pursue ; " But your ROXANA only follows YOU. " Despis'd ROXANA, cease, and try to find " Some other, since the Princess proves unkind : " Perhaps it is not hard to find at court " If not a greater, a more firm support.
SILLIANDER and PATCH. THOU so many favours hast receiv'd, Wondrous to tell, and hard to be believ'd, Oh ! H—— D, to my lays attention lend, Hear how two lovers boastingly contend ; Like thee successful, such their bloomy youth, Renown'd alike for gallantry and truth. St. JAMES's bell had toll'd some wretches in, (As tatter'd riding-hoods alone could sin) The happier sinners now their charms put out, And to their manteaus their complexions suit : The opera queens had finish'd half their faces, And city-dames allready taken places ; Fops of all kinds to see the Lion, run ; The beauties stay till the first act's begun, And beaux step home to put fresh linen on. No well-dress'd youth in coffee-house remain'd, But pensive PATCH, who on the window lean'd ; And SILLIANDER, that alert and gay, First pick'd his teeth, and then began to say. SILLIANDER. Why all these sighs ? ah ! why so pensive grown ? Some cause there is that thus you sit alone. Does hapless passion all this sorrow move ? Or dost thou envy where the ladies love ? PATCH. If, whom they love, my envy must pursue, 'Tis sure, at least, I never envy You. SILLIANDER. No, I'm unhappy, You are in the right, 'Tis You they favour, and 'tis Me they slight. Yet I could tell, but that I hate to boast, A club of ladies where 'tis Me they toast. PATCH. Toasting does seldom any favour prove ; Like us, they never toast the thing they love. A certain Duke one night my health begun ; With chearful pledges round the room it run, Till the young SILVIA press'd to drink it too, Started, and vow'd she knew not what to do : What, drink a fellow's health ! she dy'd with shame : Yet blush'd whenever she pronounc'd my name. SILLIANDER. Ill fates pursue me, may I never find The dice propitious, or the ladies kind, If fair Miss FLIPPY's fan I did not tear, And one from me she condescends to wear. PATCH. Women are always ready to receive ; 'Tis then a favour when the sex will give. A lady (but she is too great to name) Beauteous in person, spotless is her fame, With gentle strugglings let me force this ring ; Another day may give another thing. SILLIANDER. I cou'd say something — see this billet-doux — And as for presents — look upon my shoe — These buckles were not forc'd, nor half a theft, But a young Countess fondly made the gift. PATCH. My Countess is more nice, more artful too, Affects to fly that I may fierce pursue : This snuff-box which I begg'd, she still deny'd, And when I strove to snatch it, seem'd to hide ; She laugh'd and fled, and as I sought to seize, With affectation cramm'd it down her stays : Yet hop'd she did not place it there unseen, I press'd her breasts, and pull'd it from between. SILLIANDER. Last night, as I stood ogling of her Grace, Drinking delicious poison from her face, The soft enchantress did that face decline, Nor ever rais'd her eyes to meet with mine ; With sudden art some secret did pretend, Lean'd cross two chairs to whisper to a friend, While the stiff whalebone with the motion rose, And thousand beauties to my sight expose. PATCH. Early this morn — (but I was ask'd to come) I drank bohea in CÆLIA's dressing-room : Warm from her bed, to me alone within, Her night-gown fasten'd with a single pin ; Her night-cloaths tumbled with resistless grace, And her bright hair play'd careless round her face ; Reaching the kettle, made her gown unpin, She wore no waistcoat, and her shift was thin. SILLIANDER. See TITIANA driving to the park, Hark ! let us follow, 'tis not yet too dark ; In her all beauties of the spring are seen, Her cheeks are rosy, and her mantle green. PATCH. See, TINTORETTA to the opera goes ! Haste, or the crowd will not permit our bows ; In her the glory of the heav'ns we view, Her eyes are star-like, and her mantle blue. SILLIANDER. What colour does in CÆLIA's stockings shine ? Reveal that secret, and the prize is thine. PATCH. What are her garters ! tell me if you can ; I'll freely own thee for the happier man. Thus PATCH continued his heroic strain, While SILLIANDER but contends in vain. After a conquest so important gain'd, Unrival'd PATCH in ev'ry ruelle reign'd.
CARDELIA. THE bassette-table spread, the tallier come, Why stays SMILINDA in the dressing-room ? Rise, pensive nymph ! the tallier stays for you. SMILINDA. Ah ! Madam, since my SHARPER is untrue, I joyless make my once ador'd alpieu. I saw him stand behind OMBRELIA's Chair, And whisper with that soft deluding air, And those feign'd sighs that cheat the list'ng fair — CARDELIA. Is this the cause of your romantic strains ? A mightier grief my heavy heart sustains. As you by love, so I by fortune cross'd, In one bad deal three Septleva's I lost. SMILINDA. Is that a grief which you compare with mine ? With ease the smiles of fortune I resign. Wou'd all my gold in one bad deal were gone, Were lovely SHARPFR mine, and mine alone. CARDELIA. A lover lost, is but a common care, And prudent nymphs against the change prepare. The queen of Clubs thrice lost ! Oh ! who cou'd guess This fatal stroke this unforeseen distress ! SMILINDA. See ! BETTY LOVEIT very à propos ! She all the pains of love and play does know, Deeply experienc'd many years ago. Dear BETTY shall th' important point decide, BETTY, who oft the pains of each has try'd : Impartial, she shall say who suffers most, By cards, ill-usage, or by lovers lost. LOVEIT. Tell, tell your griefs ; attentive will I stay, Tho' time is precious, and I want some tea. CARDELIA. Behold this equipage by MATHERS wrought With fifty guineas (a great pen'orth !) bought ! See on the tooth-pick MARS and CUPID strive, And both the struggling figures seem to liue. Upon the bottom see the Queen's bright face ; A myrtle foliage round the thimble case ; JOVE, JOVE himself does on the scissars shine, The metal and the workmanship divine. SMILINDA. This snuff-box once the pledge of SHARPER's love, When rival beauties for the present strove, (At CORTICELLI's he the raffle won, There first his passion was in public shown ; HAZARDIA blush'd, and turn'd her head aside, A rival's envy all in vain to hide) This snuff-box — on the hinge see diamonds shine ; This snuff-box will I stake, the prize is mine. CARDELIA. Alas ! far lesser losses than I bear, Have made a soldier sigh, a lover swear : But oh ! what makes the disappointment hard, 'Twas my own Lord who drew the fatal card ! — In complaisance I took the Queen he gave, Tho' my own secret wish was for the Knave : The Knave won son ecart that I had chose, And the next pull my septleva I lose. SMILINDA. But ah ! what aggravates the killing smart, The cruel thought that stabs me to the heart, This curs'd OMBRELIA, this undoing fair, By whose vile arts this heavy grief I bear, She, at whose name I shed these spiteful tears, She owes to me, the very charms she wears : An aukward thing when first she came to town, Her shape unfinish'd and her face unknown ; She was my friend, I taught her first to spread Upon her sallow cheeks enlivening red, I introduc'd her to the park and plays, And by my Interest COSINS made her stays ; Ungrateful wretch ! with mimick airs grown pert, She dares to steal my favourite lover's heart. CARDELIA. Wretch that I was ! how often have I swore, When WINNALL tallied, I would punt no more ! I know the bite, yet to my ruin run, And see the folly which I cannot shun. SMILINDA. How many maids have SHARPER's vows deceiv'd ! How many curs'd the moment they believ'd ! Yet, his known falshood could no warning prove : Ah ! what are warnings to a maid in love ! CARDELIA. But of what marble must that breast be form'd, Can gaze on Bassette, and remain unwarm'd ? When kings, queens, knaves are set in decent rank, Expos'd in glorious heaps the tempting bank ! Guineas, half-guineas, all the shining train, The Winner's pleasure and the Loser's pain ; In bright confusion open rouleaus lie, They strike the soul, and glitter in the eye ; Fir'd by the sight, all reason I disdain, My passions rise, and will not bear the rein : Look upon Bassette, you who Reason boast, And see if Reason may not there be lost ! SMILINDA. What more than marble must that breast compose, That listens coldly to my SHARPER's vows ! Then when he trembles, when his blushes rise, When awful Love seems melting in his eyes ! With eager beats his Mechlin cravat moves : He loves, I whisper to myself, He loves ! Such unfeign'd passion in his look appears, I lose all mem'ry of my former fears ; My panting heart confesses all his charms ; I yield at once, and sink into his arms. Think of that moment, you who Prudence boast ! For such a moment, Prudence well were lost. CARDELIA. At the Groom-porter's, batter'd bullies play ; Some Dukes at Marybon bowl time away : But who the bowl or rattling dice compares To Bassette's heavenly joys and pleasing cares ? SMILINDA. Soft SIMPLICETTA doats upon a beau ; PRUDINA likes a man, and laughs at show : Their several graces in my SHARPER meet ; Strong as the footman, as the master sweet. LOVEIT. Cease your contention, which has been too long, I grow impatient, and the tea too strong : Attend, and yield to what I now decide ; The equipage shall grace SMILINDA's side ; The snuff-box to CARDELIA I decree ; So leave complaining, and begin your tea.
FLAVIA. THE wretched FLAVIA on her couch reclin'd, Thus breath'd the anguish of a wounded mind ; A glass revers'd in her right hand she bore, For now she shun'd the face she sought before. ' How am I chang'd ! alas ! how am I grown ' A frightful spectre, to myself unknown ! ' Where's my Complexion ? where the radiant Bloom, ' That promis'd happiness for Years to come ? ' Then with what pleasure I this face survey'd ! ' To look once more, my visits oft delay'd ! ' Charm'd with the view, a fresher red would rise, ' And a new life shot sparkling from my eyes ! ' Ah ! faithless glass, my wonted bloom restore; ' Alas ! I rave, that bloom is now no more ! ' The greatest good the GODS on men bestow, ' Ev'n youth itself, to me is useless now. ' There was a time, (oh ! that I could forget !) ' When opera-tickets pour'd before my feet ; ' And at the ring, where brightest beauties shine, ' The earliest cherries of the spring were mine. ' Witness, O Lilly ; and thou, Motteux, tell ' How much Japan these eyes have made ye sell. ' With what contempt ye you saw me oft despise ' The humble offer of the raffled prize ; ' For at the raffle still the prize I bore, ' With scorn rejected, or with triumph wore ! ' Now beauty's fled, and presents are no more ! ' For me the Patriot has the house forsook, ' And left debates to catch a passing look : ' For me the Soldier has soft verses writ ; ' For me the Beau has aim'd to be a Wit. ' For me the Wit to nonsense was betray'd ; ' The Gamester has for me his dun delay'd, ' And overseen the card, I would have play'd. ' The bold and haughty by success made vain, ' Aw'd by my eyes has trembled to complain: ' The bashful 'squire touch'd by a wish unknown, ' Has dar'd to speak with spirit not his own ; ' Fir'd by one wish, all did alike adore ; ' Now beauty's fled, and lovers are no more! ' As round the room I turn my weeping eyes, ' New unaffected scenes of sorrow rise ! ' Far from my sight that killing picture bear, ' The face disfigure, and the canvas tear ! ' That picture which with pride I us'd to show, ' The lost resemblance but upbraids me now. ' And thou, my toilette! where I oft have sat, ' While hours unheeded pass'd in deep debate, ' How curls should fall, or where a patch to place : ' If blue or scarlet best became my face; ' Now on some happier nymph thy aid bestow ; ' On fairer heads, ye useless jewels glow ! ' No borrow'd lustre can my charms restore ; ' Beauty is fled, and dress is now no more ! ' Ye meaner beauties, I permit ye shine ; ' Go, triumph in the hearts that once were mine ; ' But midst your triumphs with confusion know, ' 'Tis to my ruin all your arms ye owe. ' Would pitying Heav'n restore my wonted mien, ' Ye still might move unthought-of and unseen. ' But oh ! how vain, how wretched is the boast ' Of beauty faded, and of empire lost ! ' What now is left but weeping, to deplore ' My beauty fled, and empire now no more ! ' Ye, cruel Chymists, what with-held your aid ! ' Could no pomatums save a trembling maid ? ' How false and trifling is that art you boast ; ' No art can give me back my beauty lost. ' In tears, surrounded by my friends I lay, ' Mask'd o'er and trembled at the sight of day; ' MIRMILLO came my fortune to deplore, ' (A golden headed cane, well carv'd he bore) ' Cordials, he cried, my spirits must restore : ' Beauty is fled, and spirit is no more ! ' GALEN, the grave ; officious SQUIRT was there, ' With fruitless grief and unavailing care : ' MACHAON too, the great MACHAON, known ' By his red cloak and his superior frown ; ' And why, he cry'd, this grief and this despair ? ' You shall again be well, again be fair ; ' Believe my oath ; (with that an oath he swore) ' False was his oath ; my beauty is no more ! ' Cease, hapless maid, no more thy tale pursue, ' Forsake mankind, and bid the world adieu ! ' Monarchs and beauties rule with equal sway ; ' All strive to serve, and glory to obey : ' Alike unpitied when depos'd they grow ; ' Men mock the idol of their former vow. ' Adieu ! ye parks ! — in some obscure recess, ' Where gentle streams will weep at my distress, ' Where no false friend will in my grief take part, ' And mourn my ruin with a joyful heart ; ' There let me live in some deserted place, ' There hide in shades this lost inglorious face. ' Ye, operas, circles, I no more must view ! ' My toilette, patches, all the world adieu!
The same to me are sombre days and gay. Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright, Because my dearest love is gone away Within my heart is melancholy night. My heart beats low in loneliness, despite That riotous Summer holds the earth in sway. In cerements my spirit is bedight; The same to me are sombre days and gay. Though breezes in the rippling grasses play, And waves dash high and far in glorious might, I thrill no longer to the sparkling day, Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright. Ungraceful seems to me the swallow's flight; As well might Heaven's blue be sullen gray; My soul discerns no beauty in their sight Because my dearest love is gone away. Let roses fling afar their crimson spray, And virgin daisies splash the fields with white, Let bloom the poppy hotly as it may, Within my heart is melancholy night. And this, oh love, my pitiable plight Whenever from my circling arms you stray; This little world of mine has lost its light ... I hope to God, my dear, that you can say The same to me.
There's a place I know where the birds swing low, And wayward vines go roaming, Where the lilacs nod, and a marble god Is pale, in scented gloaming. And at sunset there comes a lady fair Whose eyes are deep with yearning. By an old, old gate does the lady wait Her own true love's returning. But the days go by, and the lilacs die, And trembling birds seek cover; Yet the lady stands, with her long white hands Held out to greet her lover. And it's there she'll stay till the shadowy day A monument they grave her. She will always wait by the same old gate, — The gate her true love gave her.
Under the level winter sky I saw a thousand Christs go by. They sang an idle song and free As they went up to calvary. Careless of eye and coarse of lip, They marched in holiest fellowship. That heaven might heal the world, they gave Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave. With souls unpurged and steadfast breath They supped the sacrament of death. And for each one, far off, apart, Seven swords have rent a woman's heart.
The earth builds on the earth Castles and towers; The earth saith of the earth: All shall be ours. Yea, though they plan and reap  The rye and the corn,  Lo, they were bond to Sleep  Ere they were born.  Yea, though the blind earth sows  For the fruit and the sheaf,  They shall harvest the leaf of the rose  And the dust of the leaf.  Pride of the sword and power  Are theirs at their need  Who shall rule but the root of the flower  The fall of the seed.  They who follow the flesh  In splendour and tears,  They shall rest and clothe them afresh  In the fulness of years.  From the dream of the dust they came  As the dawn set free.  They shall pass as the flower of the flame  Or the foam of the sea. The earth builds on the earth Castles and towers. The earth saith of the earth: All shall be ours.
I shall not go with pain Whether you hold me, whether you forget My little loss and my immortal gain. O flower unseen, O fountain sealed apart! Give me one look, one look remembering yet, Sweet heart. I shall not go with grief, Whether you call me, whether you deny The crowning vintage and the golden sheaf. O, April hopes that blossom but to close! Give me one look, one look and so good-bye, Red rose. I shall not go with sighs, But as full-crowned the warrior leaves the fight, Dawn on his shield and death upon his eyes. O, life so bitter-sweet and heaven so far! Give me one look, one look and so good night, My star.
Now in the West the slender moon lies low, And now Orion glimmers through the trees, Clearing the earth with even pace and slow, And now the stately-moving Pleiades, In that soft infinite darkness overhead Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread. And all the lonelier stars that have their place, Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, And planet-dust upon the edge of space, Look down upon the fretful world, and I Look up to outer vastness unafraid And see the stars which sang when earth was made.
I gave my thoughts a golden peach, A silver citron tree; They clustered dumbly out of reach And would not sing for me. I built my thoughts a roof of rush, A little byre beside; They left my music to the thrush And flew at eveningtide. I went my way and would not care If they should come and go; A thousand birds seemed up in air, My thoughts were singing so.
I have not walked on common ground, Nor drunk of earthly streams; A shining figure, mailed and crowned, Moves softly through my dreams. He makes the air so keen and strange, The stars so fiercely bright; The rocks of time, the tides of change, Are nothing in his sight. Death lays no shadow on his smile; Life is a race fore-run; Look in his face a little while, And life and death are one.
The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispéd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. These were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriac rivers that roll— As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the pole— That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the boreal pole. Our talk had been serious and sober, But our thoughts they were palsied and sere— Our memories were treacherous and sere— For we knew not the month was October, And we marked not the night of the year— (Ah, night of all nights in the year!) We noted not the dim lake of Auber— (Though once we had journeyed down here)— We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. And now, as the night was senescent And star-dials pointed to morn— As the star-dials hinted of morn— At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn— Astarte's bediamonded crescent Distinct with its duplicate horn. And I said—"She is warmer than Dian: She rolls through an ether of sighs— She revels in a region of sighs: She has seen that the tears are not dry on These cheeks, where the worm never dies, And has come past the stars of the Lion To point us the path to the skies— To the Lethean peace of the skies— Come up, in despite of the Lion, To shine on us with her bright eyes— Come up through the lair of the Lion, With love in her luminous eyes." But Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said—"Sadly this star I mistrust— Her pallor I strangely mistrust:— Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger! Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must." In terror she spoke, letting sink her Wings till they trailed in the dust— In agony sobbed, letting sink her Plumes till they trailed in the dust— Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. I replied—"This is nothing but dreaming: Let us on by this tremulous light! Let us bathe in this crystalline light! Its Sybilic splendor is beaming With Hope and in Beauty to-night:— See!—it flickers up the sky through the night! Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming, And be sure it will lead us aright— We safely may trust to a gleaming That cannot but guide us aright, Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night." Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom— And conquered her scruples and gloom: And we passed to the end of the vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb— By the door of a legended tomb; And I said—"What is written, sweet sister, On the door of this legended tomb?" She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume— 'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!" Then my heart it grew ashen and sober As the leaves that were crispèd and sere— As the leaves that were withering and sere, And I cried—"It was surely October On this very night of last year That I journeyed—I journeyed down here— That I brought a dread burden down here— On this night of all nights in the year, Oh, what demon has tempted me here? Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber— This misty mid region of Weir— Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber— In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." Said we, then—the two, then—"Ah, can it Have been that the woodlandish ghouls— The pitiful, the merciful ghouls— To bar up our way and to ban it From the secret that lies in these wolds— From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds— Had drawn up the spectre of a planet From the limbo of lunary souls— This sinfully scintillant planet From the Hell of the planetary souls?"
Ne Rubeam, Pingui donatus Munere (Horace, Epistles II.i.267)  While you, great patron of mankind, sustain The balanc'd world, and open all the main; Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend, At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend; How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal An hour, and not defraud the public weal? Edward and Henry, now the boast of fame, And virtuous Alfred, a more sacred name, After a life of gen'rous toils endur'd, The Gaul subdu'd, or property secur'd, Ambition humbled, mighty cities storm'd, Or laws establish'd, and the world reform'd; Clos'd their long glories with a sigh, to find Th' unwilling gratitude of base mankind! All human virtue, to its latest breath Finds envy never conquer'd, but by death. The great Alcides, ev'ry labour past, Had still this monster to subdue at last. Sure fate of all, beneath whose rising ray Each star of meaner merit fades away! Oppress'd we feel the beam directly beat, Those suns of glory please not till they set. To thee the world its present homage pays, The harvest early, but mature the praise: Great friend of liberty! in kings a name Above all Greek, above all Roman fame: Whose word is truth, as sacred and rever'd, As Heav'n's own oracles from altars heard. Wonder of kings! like whom, to mortal eyes None e'er has risen, and none e'er shall rise. Just in one instance, be it yet confest Your people, Sir, are partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen ; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the Devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be wiser than our sires? In ev'ry public virtue we excel: We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well, And learned Athens to our art must stoop, Could she behold us tumbling through a hoop. If time improve our wit as well as wine, Say at what age a poet grows divine? Shall we, or shall we not, account him so, Who died, perhaps, an hundred years ago? End all dispute; and fix the year precise When British bards begin t'immortalize? "Who lasts a century can have no flaw, I hold that wit a classic, good in law." Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound, Or damn to all eternity at once, At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? "We shall not quarrel for a year or two; By courtesy of England, he may do." Then by the rule that made the horsetail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair, And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe, And estimating authors by the year, Bestow a garland only on a bier. Shakespeare (whom you and ev'ry playhouse bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite. Ben, old and poor, as little seem'd to heed The life to come, in ev'ry poet's creed. Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art, But still I love the language of his heart. "Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? In all debates where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, Of Shakespeare's nature, and of Cowley's wit; How Beaumont's judgment check'd what Fletcher writ; How Shadwell hasty, Wycherley was slow; But, for the passions, Southerne sure and Rowe. These, only these, support the crowded stage, From eldest Heywood down to Cibber's age." All this may be; the people's voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God. To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays, And yet deny the Careless Husband praise, Or say our fathers never broke a rule; Why then, I say, the public is a fool. But let them own, that greater faults than we They had, and greater virtues, I'll agree. Spenser himself affects the obsolete, And Sidney's verse halts ill on Roman feet: Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground, In quibbles, angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine. Not that I'd lop the beauties from his book, Like slashing Bentley with his desp'rate hook, Or damn all Shakespeare, like th' affected fool At court, who hates whate'er he read at school. But for the wits of either Charles's days, The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease; Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more, (Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er) One simile, that solitary shines In the dry desert of a thousand lines, Or lengthen'd thought that gleams through many a page, Has sanctified whole poems for an age. I lose my patience, and I own it too, When works are censur'd, not as bad, but new; While if our elders break all reason's laws, These fools demand not pardon, but applause. On Avon's bank, where flow'rs eternal blow, If I but ask if any weed can grow? One tragic sentence if I dare deride, Which Betterton's grave action dignified, Or well-mouth'd Booth with emphasis proclaims (Though but, perhaps, a muster-roll of names) How will our fathers rise up in a rage, And swear, all shame is lost in George's age! You'd think no fools disgrac'd the former reign, Did not some grave examples yet remain, Who scorn a lad should teach his father skill, And, having once been wrong, will be so still. He, who to seem more deep than you or I, Extols old bards, or Merlin's Prophecy, Mistake him not; he envies, not admires, And to debase the sons, exalts the sires. Had ancient times conspir'd to disallow What then was new, what had been ancient now? Or what remain'd, so worthy to be read By learned critics, of the mighty dead? In days of ease, when now the weary sword Was sheath'd, and luxury with Charles restor'd; In ev'ry taste of foreign courts improv'd, "All, by the King's example, liv'd and lov'd." Then peers grew proud in horsemanship t'excel, Newmarket's glory rose, as Britain's fell; The soldier breath'd the gallantries of France, And ev'ry flow'ry courtier writ romance. Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm, And yielding metal flow'd to human form: Lely on animated canvas stole The sleepy eye, that spoke the melting soul. No wonder then, when all was love and sport, The willing Muses were debauch'd at court: On each enervate string they taught the note To pant or tremble through an eunuch's throat. But Britain, changeful as a child at play, Now calls in princes, and now turns away: Now Whig, now Tory, what we lov'd we hate; Now all for pleasure, now for Church and state; Now for prerogative, and now for laws; Effects unhappy! from a noble cause. Time was, a sober Englishman would knock His servants up, and rise by five o'clock, Instruct his family in ev'ry rule, And send his wife to church, his son to school. To worship like his fathers was his care; To teach their frugal virtues to his heir; To prove that luxury could never hold, And place, on good security, his gold. Now times are chang'd, and one poetic itch Has seiz'd the court and city, poor and rich: Sons, sires, and grandsires, all will wear the bays, Our wives read Milton, and our daughters plays, To theatres, and to rehearsals throng, And all our grace at table is a song. I, who so oft renounce the Muses, lie, Not {-}{-}{-}{-}{-}'s self e'er tells more fibs than I; When sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best friends to rhyme no more; We wake next morning in a raging fit, And call for pen and ink to show our wit. He serv'd a 'prenticeship who sets up shop; Ward tried on puppies and the poor, his drop; Ev'n Radcliffe's doctors travel first to France, Nor dare to practise till they've learn'd to dance. Who builds a bridge that never drove a pile? (Should Ripley venture, all the world would smile) But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man. Yet, Sir, reflect, the mischief is not great; These madmen never hurt the Church or state: Sometimes the folly benefits mankind; And rarely av'rice taints the tuneful mind. Allow him but his plaything of a pen, He ne'er rebels, or plots, like other men: Flight of cashiers, or mobs, he'll never mind; And knows no losses while the Muse is kind. To cheat a friend, or ward, he leaves to Peter; The good man heaps up nothing but mere metre, Enjoys his garden and his book in quiet; And then—a perfect hermit in his diet. Of little use the man you may suppose, Who says in verse what others say in prose: Yet let me show, a poet's of some weight, And (though no soldier) useful to the state. What will a child learn sooner than a song? What better teach a foreigner the tongue? What's long or short, each accent where to place, And speak in public with some sort of grace. I scarce can think him such a worthless thing, Unless he praise some monster of a king; Or virtue or religion turn to sport, To please a lewd, or unbelieving court. Unhappy Dryden!—In all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; And in our own (excuse some courtly stains) No whiter page than Addison remains. He, from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, And sets the passions on the side of truth, Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human virtue in the heart. Let Ireland tell, how wit upheld her cause, Her trade supported, and supplied her laws; And leave on Swift this grateful verse engrav'd, "The rights a court attack'd, a poet sav'd." Behold the hand that wrought a nation's cure, Stretch'd to relieve the idiot and the poor, Proud vice to brand, or injur'd worth adorn, And stretch the ray to ages yet unborn. Not but there are, who merit other palms; Hopkins and Sternhold glad the heart with psalms: The boys and girls whom charity maintains, Implore your help in these pathetic strains: How could devotion touch the country pews, Unless the gods bestow'd a proper Muse? Verse cheers their leisure, verse assists their work, Verse prays for peace, or sings down Pope and Turk. The silenc'd preacher yields to potent strain, And feels that grace his pray'r besought in vain; The blessing thrills through all the lab'ring throng, And Heav'n is won by violence of song. Our rural ancestors, with little blest, Patient of labour when the end was rest, Indulg'd the day that hous'd their annual grain, With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain: The joy their wives, their sons, and servants share, Ease of their toil, and part'ners of their care: The laugh, the jest, attendants on the bowl, Smooth'd ev'ry brow, and open'd ev'ry soul: With growing years the pleasing licence grew, And taunts alternate innocently flew. But times corrupt, and nature, ill-inclin'd, Produc'd the point that left a sting behind; Till friend with friend, and families at strife, Triumphant malice rag'd through private life. Who felt the wrong, or fear'd it, took th' alarm, Appeal'd to law, and justice lent her arm. At length, by wholesome dread of statutes bound, The poets learn'd to please, and not to wound: Most warp'd to flatt'ry's side; but some, more nice, Preserv'd the freedom, and forbore the vice. Hence satire rose, that just the medium hit, And heals with morals what it hurts with wit. We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms; Her arts victorious triumph'd o'er our arms; Britain to soft refinements less a foe, Wit grew polite, and numbers learn'd to flow. Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full-resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine. Though still some traces of our rustic vein And splayfoot verse remain'd, and will remain. Late, very late, correctness grew our care, When the tir'd nation breath'd from civil war. Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire Show'd us that France had something to admire. Not but the tragic spirit was our own, And full in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone: But Otway fail'd to polish or refine, And fluent Shakespeare scarce effac'd a line. Ev'n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art, the art to blot. Some doubt, if equal pains, or equal fire The humbler Muse of comedy require. But in known images of life, I guess The labour greater, as th' indulgence less. Observe how seldom ev'n the best succeed: Tell me if Congreve's fools are fools indeed? What pert, low dialogue has Farqu'ar writ! How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit! The stage how loosely does Astr{ae}ea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed! And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws, To make poor Pinky eat with vast applause! But fill their purse, our poet's work is done, Alike to them, by pathos or by pun. O you! whom vanity's light bark conveys On fame's mad voyage by the wind of praise, With what a shifting gale your course you ply, For ever sunk too low, or borne too high! Who pants for glory finds but short repose, A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows. Farewell the stage! if just as thrives the play, The silly bard grows fat, or falls away. There still remains, to mortify a wit, The many-headed monster of the pit: A senseless, worthless, and unhonour'd crowd; Who, to disturb their betters mighty proud, Clatt'ring their sticks before ten lines are spoke, Call for the farce, the bear, or the black-joke. What dear delight to Britons farce affords! Farce once the taste of mobs, but now of lords; (For taste, eternal wanderer, now flies From heads to ears, and now from ears to eyes.) The play stands still; damn action and discourse, Back fly the scenes, and enter foot and horse; Pageants on pageants, in long order drawn, Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold, and lawn; The champion too! and, to complete the jest, Old Edward's armour beams on Cibber's breast. With laughter sure Democritus had died, Had he beheld an audience gape so wide. Let bear or elephant be e'er so white, The people, sure, the people are the sight! Ah luckless poet! stretch thy lungs and roar, That bear or elephant shall heed thee more; While all its throats the gallery extends, And all the thunder of the pit ascends! Loud as the wolves on Orcas' stormy steep, Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep. Such is the shout, the long-applauding note, At Quin's high plume, or Oldfield's petticoat, Or when from Court a birthday suit bestow'd Sinks the lost actor in the tawdry load. Booth enters—hark! the universal peal! "But has he spoken?" Not a syllable. "What shook the stage, and made the people stare?" Cato's long wig, flow'r'd gown, and lacquer'd chair. Yet lest you think I rally more than teach, Or praise malignly arts I cannot reach, Let me for once presume t'instruct the times, To know the poet from the man of rhymes: 'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains, Can make me feel each passion that he feigns; Enrage, compose, with more than magic art, With pity and with terror tear my heart; And snatch me o'er the earth or thro' the air, To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where. But not this part of the poetic state Alone, deserves the favour of the great: Think of those authors, Sir, who would rely More on a reader's sense, than gazer's eye. Or who shall wander where the Muses sing? Who climb their mountain, or who taste their spring? How shall we fill a library with wit, When Merlin's Cave is half unfurnish'd yet? My Liege! why writers little claim your thought, I guess: and, with their leave, will tell the fault: We poets are (upon a poet's word) Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd: The season, when to come, and when to go, To sing, or cease to sing, we never know; And if we will recite nine hours in ten, You lose your patience, just like other men. Then too we hurt ourselves, when to defend A single verse, we quarrel with a friend; Repeat unask'd; lament, the wit's too fine For vulgar eyes, and point out ev'ry line. But most, when straining with too weak a wing, We needs will write epistles to the king; And from the moment we oblige the town, Expect a place, or pension from the Crown; Or dubb'd historians by express command, T'enroll your triumphs o'er the seas and land, Be call'd to court to plan some work divine, As once for Louis, Boileau and Racine. Yet think, great Sir! (so many virtues shown) Ah think, what poet best may make them known? Or choose at least some minister of grace, Fit to bestow the laureate's weighty place. Charles, to late times to be transmitted fair, Assign'd his figure to Bernini's care; And great Nassau to Kneller's hand decreed To fix him graceful on the bounding steed; So well in paint and stone they judg'd of merit: But kings in wit may want discerning spirit. The hero William, and the martyr Charles, One knighted Blackmore, and one pension'd Quarles; Which made old Ben, and surly Dennis swear, "No Lord's anointed, but a Russian bear." Not with such majesty, such bold relief, The forms august, of king, or conqu'ring chief, E'er swell'd on marble; as in verse have shin'd (In polish'd verse) the manners and the mind. Oh! could I mount on the M{ae}onian wing, Your arms, your actions, your repose to sing! What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought! Your country's peace, how oft, how dearly bought! How barb'rous rage subsided at your word, And nations wonder'd while they dropp'd the sword! How, when you nodded, o'er the land and deep, Peace stole her wing, and wrapp'd the world in sleep; Till earth's extremes your mediation own, And Asia's tyrants tremble at your throne— But verse, alas! your Majesty disdains; And I'm not us'd to panegyric strains: The zeal of fools offends at any time, But most of all, the zeal of fools in rhyme, Besides, a fate attends on all I write, That when I aim at praise, they say I bite. A vile encomium doubly ridicules: There's nothing blackens like the ink of fools; If true, a woeful likeness; and if lies, "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise." Well may he blush, who gives it, or receives; And when I flatter, let my dirty leaves (Like journals, odes, and such forgotten things As Eusden, Philips, Settle, writ of kings) Clothe spice, line trunks, or flutt'ring in a row, Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Soho.
Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos; Sedjuvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis. (Martial, Epigrams 12.84)  What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing—This verse to Caryl, Muse! is due: This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view: Slight is the subject, but not so the praise, If she inspire, and he approve my lays. Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel A well-bred lord t' assault a gentle belle? O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor'd, Could make a gentle belle reject a lord? In tasks so bold, can little men engage, And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage? Sol thro' white curtains shot a tim'rous ray, And op'd those eyes that must eclipse the day; Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake, And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake: Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knock'd the ground, And the press'd watch return'd a silver sound. Belinda still her downy pillow press'd, Her guardian sylph prolong'd the balmy rest: 'Twas he had summon'd to her silent bed The morning dream that hover'd o'er her head; A youth more glitt'ring than a birthnight beau, (That ev'n in slumber caus'd her cheek to glow) Seem'd to her ear his winning lips to lay, And thus in whispers said, or seem'd to say. "Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish'd care Of thousand bright inhabitants of air! If e'er one vision touch'd thy infant thought, Of all the nurse and all the priest have taught, Of airy elves by moonlight shadows seen, The silver token, and the circled green, Or virgins visited by angel pow'rs, With golden crowns and wreaths of heav'nly flow'rs, Hear and believe! thy own importance know, Nor bound thy narrow views to things below. Some secret truths from learned pride conceal'd, To maids alone and children are reveal'd: What tho' no credit doubting wits may give? The fair and innocent shall still believe. Know then, unnumber'd spirits round thee fly, The light militia of the lower sky; These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, Hang o'er the box, and hover round the Ring. Think what an equipage thou hast in air, And view with scorn two pages and a chair. As now your own, our beings were of old, And once inclos'd in woman's beauteous mould; Thence, by a soft transition, we repair From earthly vehicles to these of air. Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled, That all her vanities at once are dead; Succeeding vanities she still regards, And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards. Her joy in gilded chariots, when alive, And love of ombre, after death survive. For when the fair in all their pride expire, To their first elements their souls retire: The sprites of fiery termagants in flame Mount up, and take a Salamander's name. Soft yielding minds to water glide away, And sip with Nymphs, their elemental tea. The graver prude sinks downward to a Gnome, In search of mischief still on earth to roam. The light coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair, And sport and flutter in the fields of air. Know further yet; whoever fair and chaste Rejects mankind, is by some sylph embrac'd: For spirits, freed from mortal laws, with ease Assume what sexes and what shapes they please. What guards the purity of melting maids, In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades, Safe from the treach'rous friend, the daring spark, The glance by day, the whisper in the dark, When kind occasion prompts their warm desires, When music softens, and when dancing fires? 'Tis but their sylph, the wise celestials know, Though honour is the word with men below. Some nymphs there are, too conscious of their face, For life predestin'd to the gnomes' embrace. These swell their prospects and exalt their pride, When offers are disdain'd, and love denied: Then gay ideas crowd the vacant brain, While peers, and dukes, and all their sweeping train, And garters, stars, and coronets appear, And in soft sounds 'Your Grace' salutes their ear. 'Tis these that early taint the female soul, Instruct the eyes of young coquettes to roll, Teach infant cheeks a bidden blush to know, And little hearts to flutter at a beau. Oft, when the world imagine women stray, The Sylphs through mystic mazes guide their way, Thro' all the giddy circle they pursue, And old impertinence expel by new. What tender maid but must a victim fall To one man's treat, but for another's ball? When Florio speaks, what virgin could withstand, If gentle Damon did not squeeze her hand? With varying vanities, from ev'ry part, They shift the moving toyshop of their heart; Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive, Beaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive. This erring mortals levity may call, Oh blind to truth! the Sylphs contrive it all. Of these am I, who thy protection claim, A watchful sprite, and Ariel is my name. Late, as I rang'd the crystal wilds of air, In the clear mirror of thy ruling star I saw, alas! some dread event impend, Ere to the main this morning sun descend, But Heav'n reveals not what, or how, or where: Warn'd by the Sylph, oh pious maid, beware! This to disclose is all thy guardian can. Beware of all, but most beware of man!" He said; when Shock, who thought she slept too long, Leap'd up, and wak'd his mistress with his tongue. 'Twas then, Belinda, if report say true, Thy eyes first open'd on a billet-doux; Wounds, charms, and ardors were no sooner read, But all the vision vanish'd from thy head. And now, unveil'd, the toilet stands display'd, Each silver vase in mystic order laid. First, rob'd in white, the nymph intent adores With head uncover'd, the cosmetic pow'rs. A heav'nly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears; Th' inferior priestess, at her altar's side, Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here The various off'rings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the goddess with the glitt'ring spoil. This casket India's glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise here and elephant unite, Transform'd to combs, the speckled and the white. Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux. Now awful beauty puts on all its arms; The fair each moment rises in her charms, Repairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace, And calls forth all the wonders of her face; Sees by degrees a purer blush arise, And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes. The busy Sylphs surround their darling care; These set the head, and those divide the hair, Some fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown; And Betty's prais'd for labours not her own.
Not with more glories, in th' etherial plain, The sun first rises o'er the purpled main, Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams Launch'd on the bosom of the silver Thames. Fair nymphs, and well-dress'd youths around her shone, But ev'ry eye was fix'd on her alone. On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore. Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose, Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those: Favours to none, to all she smiles extends; Oft she rejects, but never once offends. Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike, And, like the sun, they shine on all alike. Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride, Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide: If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all. This nymph, to the destruction of mankind, Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behind In equal curls, and well conspir'd to deck With shining ringlets the smooth iv'ry neck. Love in these labyrinths his slaves detains, And mighty hearts are held in slender chains. With hairy springes we the birds betray, Slight lines of hair surprise the finney prey, Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, And beauty draws us with a single hair. Th' advent'rous baron the bright locks admir'd; He saw, he wish'd, and to the prize aspir'd. Resolv'd to win, he meditates the way, By force to ravish, or by fraud betray; For when success a lover's toil attends, Few ask, if fraud or force attain'd his ends. For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implor'd Propitious Heav'n, and ev'ry pow'r ador'd, But chiefly love—to love an altar built, Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt. There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves; And all the trophies of his former loves; With tender billet-doux he lights the pyre, And breathes three am'rous sighs to raise the fire. Then prostrate falls, and begs with ardent eyes Soon to obtain, and long possess the prize: The pow'rs gave ear, and granted half his pray'r, The rest, the winds dispers'd in empty air. But now secure the painted vessel glides, The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides, While melting music steals upon the sky, And soften'd sounds along the waters die. Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, Belinda smil'd, and all the world was gay. All but the Sylph—with careful thoughts opprest, Th' impending woe sat heavy on his breast. He summons strait his denizens of air; The lucid squadrons round the sails repair: Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe, That seem'd but zephyrs to the train beneath. Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold, Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold. Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light, Loose to the wind their airy garments flew, Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew; Dipp'd in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes, While ev'ry beam new transient colours flings, Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings. Amid the circle, on the gilded mast, Superior by the head, was Ariel plac'd; His purple pinions op'ning to the sun, He rais'd his azure wand, and thus begun. "Ye Sylphs and Sylphids, to your chief give ear! Fays, Fairies, Genii, Elves, and Dæmons, hear! Ye know the spheres and various tasks assign'd By laws eternal to th' aerial kind. Some in the fields of purest æther play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high, Or roll the planets through the boundless sky. Some less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night, Or suck the mists in grosser air below, Or dip their pinions in the painted bow, Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main, Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain. Others on earth o'er human race preside, Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide: Of these the chief the care of nations own, And guard with arms divine the British throne. "Our humbler province is to tend the fair, Not a less pleasing, though less glorious care. To save the powder from too rude a gale, Nor let th' imprison'd essences exhale, To draw fresh colours from the vernal flow'rs, To steal from rainbows e'er they drop in show'rs A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs, Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs; Nay oft, in dreams, invention we bestow, To change a flounce, or add a furbelow. "This day, black omens threat the brightest fair That e'er deserv'd a watchful spirit's care; Some dire disaster, or by force, or slight, But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night. Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law, Or some frail china jar receive a flaw; Or stain her honour, or her new brocade, Forget her pray'rs, or miss a masquerade; Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball; Or whether Heav'n has doom'd that Shock must fall. Haste, then, ye spirits! to your charge repair: The flutt'ring fan be Zephyretta's care; The drops to thee, Brillante, we consign; And, Momentilla, let the watch be thine; Do thou, Crispissa, tend her fav'rite lock; Ariel himself shall be the guard of Shock. "To fifty chosen Sylphs, of special note, We trust th' important charge, the petticoat: Oft have we known that sev'n-fold fence to fail, Though stiff with hoops, and arm'd with ribs of whale. Form a strong line about the silver bound, And guard the wide circumference around. "Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins, Be stopp'd in vials, or transfix'd with pins; Or plung'd in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedg'd whole ages in a bodkin's eye: Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, While clogg'd he beats his silken wings in vain; Or alum styptics with contracting pow'r Shrink his thin essence like a rivell'd flow'r. Or, as Ixion fix'd, the wretch shall feel The giddy motion of the whirling mill, In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow, And tremble at the sea that froths below!" He spoke; the spirits from the sails descend; Some, orb in orb, around the nymph extend, Some thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair, Some hang upon the pendants of her ear; With beating hearts the dire event they wait, Anxious, and trembling for the birth of fate.
Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs, Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs, There stands a structure of majestic frame, Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its name. Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home; Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea. Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort, To taste awhile the pleasures of a court; In various talk th' instructive hours they pass'd, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At ev'ry word a reputation dies. Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat, With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that. Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day, The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray; The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, And wretches hang that jury-men may dine; The merchant from th' Exchange returns in peace, And the long labours of the toilet cease. Belinda now, whom thirst of fame invites, Burns to encounter two adventrous knights, At ombre singly to decide their doom; And swells her breast with conquests yet to come. Straight the three bands prepare in arms to join, Each band the number of the sacred nine. Soon as she spreads her hand, th' aerial guard Descend, and sit on each important card: First Ariel perch'd upon a Matadore, Then each, according to the rank they bore; For Sylphs, yet mindful of their ancient race, Are, as when women, wondrous fond of place. Behold, four Kings in majesty rever'd, With hoary whiskers and a forky beard; And four fair Queens whose hands sustain a flow'r, Th' expressive emblem of their softer pow'r; Four Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band, Caps on their heads, and halberds in their hand; And parti-colour'd troops, a shining train, Draw forth to combat on the velvet plain. The skilful nymph reviews her force with care: "Let Spades be trumps!" she said, and trumps they were. Now move to war her sable Matadores, In show like leaders of the swarthy Moors. Spadillio first, unconquerable lord! Led off two captive trumps, and swept the board. As many more Manillio forc'd to yield, And march'd a victor from the verdant field. Him Basto follow'd, but his fate more hard Gain'd but one trump and one plebeian card. With his broad sabre next, a chief in years, The hoary Majesty of Spades appears; Puts forth one manly leg, to sight reveal'd; The rest, his many-colour'd robe conceal'd. The rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage, Proves the just victim of his royal rage. Ev'n mighty Pam, that kings and queens o'erthrew And mow'd down armies in the fights of loo, Sad chance of war! now destitute of aid, Falls undistinguish'd by the victor Spade! Thus far both armies to Belinda yield; Now to the baron fate inclines the field. His warlike Amazon her host invades, Th' imperial consort of the crown of Spades. The Club's black tyrant first her victim died, Spite of his haughty mien, and barb'rous pride: What boots the regal circle on his head, His giant limbs, in state unwieldy spread; That long behind he trails his pompous robe, And of all monarchs, only grasps the globe? The baron now his diamonds pours apace; Th' embroider'd King who shows but half his face, And his refulgent Queen, with pow'rs combin'd Of broken troops an easy conquest find. Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, in wild disorder seen, With throngs promiscuous strow the level green. Thus when dispers'd a routed army runs, Of Asia's troops, and Afric's sable sons, With like confusion diff'rent nations fly, Of various habit, and of various dye, The pierc'd battalions disunited fall. In heaps on heaps; one fate o'erwhelms them all. The Knave of Diamonds tries his wily arts, And wins (oh shameful chance!) the Queen of Hearts. At this, the blood the virgin's cheek forsook, A livid paleness spreads o'er all her look; She sees, and trembles at th' approaching ill, Just in the jaws of ruin, and codille. And now (as oft in some distemper'd state) On one nice trick depends the gen'ral fate. An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen Lurk'd in her hand, and mourn'd his captive Queen: He springs to vengeance with an eager pace, And falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace. The nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky; The walls, the woods, and long canals reply. Oh thoughtless mortals! ever blind to fate, Too soon dejected, and too soon elate! Sudden, these honours shall be snatch'd away, And curs'd for ever this victorious day. For lo! the board with cups and spoons is crown'd, The berries crackle, and the mill turns round. On shining altars of Japan they raise The silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze. From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide, While China's earth receives the smoking tide. At once they gratify their scent and taste, And frequent cups prolong the rich repast. Straight hover round the fair her airy band; Some, as she sipp'd, the fuming liquor fann'd, Some o'er her lap their careful plumes display'd, Trembling, and conscious of the rich brocade. Coffee, (which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes) Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain. Ah cease, rash youth! desist ere 'tis too late, Fear the just gods, and think of Scylla's fate! Chang'd to a bird, and sent to flit in air, She dearly pays for Nisus' injur'd hair! But when to mischief mortals bend their will, How soon they find fit instruments of ill! Just then, Clarissa drew with tempting grace A two-edg'd weapon from her shining case; So ladies in romance assist their knight Present the spear, and arm him for the fight. He takes the gift with rev'rence, and extends The little engine on his fingers' ends; This just behind Belinda's neck he spread, As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head. Swift to the lock a thousand sprites repair, A thousand wings, by turns, blow back the hair, And thrice they twitch'd the diamond in her ear, Thrice she look'd back, and thrice the foe drew near. Just in that instant, anxious Ariel sought The close recesses of the virgin's thought; As on the nosegay in her breast reclin'd, He watch'd th' ideas rising in her mind, Sudden he view'd, in spite of all her art, An earthly lover lurking at her heart. Amaz'd, confus'd, he found his pow'r expir'd, Resign'd to fate, and with a sigh retir'd. The peer now spreads the glitt'ring forfex wide, T' inclose the lock; now joins it, to divide. Ev'n then, before the fatal engine clos'd, A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd; Fate urg'd the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain, (But airy substance soon unites again). The meeting points the sacred hair dissever From the fair head, for ever, and for ever! Then flash'd the living lightning from her eyes, And screams of horror rend th' affrighted skies. Not louder shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast, When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last, Or when rich China vessels, fall'n from high, In glitt'ring dust and painted fragments lie! "Let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine," The victor cried, "the glorious prize is mine! While fish in streams, or birds delight in air, Or in a coach and six the British fair, As long at Atalantis shall be read, Or the small pillow grace a lady's bed, While visits shall be paid on solemn days, When num'rous wax-lights in bright order blaze, While nymphs take treats, or assignations give, So long my honour, name, and praise shall live! What time would spare, from steel receives its date, And monuments, like men, submit to fate! Steel could the labour of the gods destroy, And strike to dust th' imperial tow'rs of Troy; Steel could the works of mortal pride confound, And hew triumphal arches to the ground. What wonder then, fair nymph! thy hairs should feel The conqu'ring force of unresisted steel?"
But anxious cares the pensive nymph oppress'd, And secret passions labour'd in her breast. Not youthful kings in battle seiz'd alive, Not scornful virgins who their charms survive, Not ardent lovers robb'd of all their bliss, Not ancient ladies when refus'd a kiss, Not tyrants fierce that unrepenting die, Not Cynthia when her manteau's pinn'd awry, E'er felt such rage, resentment, and despair, As thou, sad virgin! for thy ravish'd hair. For, that sad moment, when the Sylphs withdrew, And Ariel weeping from Belinda flew, Umbriel, a dusky, melancholy sprite, As ever sullied the fair face of light, Down to the central earth, his proper scene, Repair'd to search the gloomy cave of Spleen. Swift on his sooty pinions flits the Gnome, And in a vapour reach'd the dismal dome. No cheerful breeze this sullen region knows, The dreaded East is all the wind that blows. Here, in a grotto, shelter'd close from air, And screen'd in shades from day's detested glare, She sighs for ever on her pensive bed, Pain at her side, and Megrim at her head. Two handmaids wait the throne: alike in place, But diff'ring far in figure and in face. Here stood Ill Nature like an ancient maid, Her wrinkled form in black and white array'd; With store of pray'rs, for mornings, nights, and noons, Her hand is fill'd; her bosom with lampoons. There Affectation, with a sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen, Practis'd to lisp, and hang the head aside, Faints into airs, and languishes with pride, On the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe, Wrapp'd in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease. A constant vapour o'er the palace flies; Strange phantoms, rising as the mists arise; Dreadful, as hermit's dreams in haunted shades, Or bright, as visions of expiring maids. Now glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires, Pale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires: Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes, And crystal domes, and angels in machines. Unnumber'd throngs on ev'ry side are seen Of bodies chang'd to various forms by Spleen. Here living teapots stand, one arm held out, One bent; the handle this, and that the spout: A pipkin there, like Homer's tripod walks; Here sighs a jar, and there a goose pie talks; Men prove with child, as pow'rful fancy works, And maids turn'd bottles, call aloud for corks. Safe pass'd the Gnome through this fantastic band, A branch of healing spleenwort in his hand. Then thus address'd the pow'r: "Hail, wayward Queen! Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen: Parent of vapours and of female wit, Who give th' hysteric, or poetic fit, On various tempers act by various ways, Make some take physic, others scribble plays; Who cause the proud their visits to delay, And send the godly in a pet to pray. A nymph there is, that all thy pow'r disdains, And thousands more in equal mirth maintains. But oh! if e'er thy gnome could spoil a grace, Or raise a pimple on a beauteous face, Like citron waters matrons' cheeks inflame, Or change complexions at a losing game; If e'er with airy horns I planted heads, Or rumpled petticoats, or tumbled beds, Or caus'd suspicion when no soul was rude, Or discompos'd the head-dress of a prude, Or e'er to costive lap-dog gave disease, Which not the tears of brightest eyes could ease: Hear me, and touch Belinda with chagrin; That single act gives half the world the spleen." The goddess with a discontented air Seems to reject him, though she grants his pray'r. A wondrous bag with both her hands she binds, Like that where once Ulysses held the winds; There she collects the force of female lungs, Sighs, sobs, and passions, and the war of tongues. A vial next she fills with fainting fears, Soft sorrows, melting griefs, and flowing tears. The Gnome rejoicing bears her gifts away, Spreads his black wings, and slowly mounts to day. Sunk in Thalestris' arms the nymph he found, Her eyes dejected and her hair unbound. Full o'er their heads the swelling bag he rent, And all the Furies issu'd at the vent. Belinda burns with more than mortal ire, And fierce Thalestris fans the rising fire. "Oh wretched maid!" she spread her hands, and cried, (While Hampton's echoes, "Wretched maid!" replied) "Was it for this you took such constant care The bodkin, comb, and essence to prepare? For this your locks in paper durance bound, For this with tort'ring irons wreath'd around? For this with fillets strain'd your tender head, And bravely bore the double loads of lead? Gods! shall the ravisher display your hair, While the fops envy, and the ladies stare! Honour forbid! at whose unrivall'd shrine Ease, pleasure, virtue, all, our sex resign. Methinks already I your tears survey, Already hear the horrid things they say, Already see you a degraded toast, And all your honour in a whisper lost! How shall I, then, your helpless fame defend? 'Twill then be infamy to seem your friend! And shall this prize, th' inestimable prize, Expos'd through crystal to the gazing eyes, And heighten'd by the diamond's circling rays, On that rapacious hand for ever blaze? Sooner shall grass in Hyde Park Circus grow, And wits take lodgings in the sound of Bow; Sooner let earth, air, sea, to chaos fall, Men, monkeys, lap-dogs, parrots, perish all!" She said; then raging to Sir Plume repairs, And bids her beau demand the precious hairs: (Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, And the nice conduct of a clouded cane) With earnest eyes, and round unthinking face, He first the snuffbox open'd, then the case, And thus broke out—"My Lord, why, what the devil? Z——ds! damn the lock! 'fore Gad, you must be civil! Plague on't! 'tis past a jest—nay prithee, pox! Give her the hair"—he spoke, and rapp'd his box. "It grieves me much," replied the peer again "Who speaks so well should ever speak in vain. But by this lock, this sacred lock I swear, (Which never more shall join its parted hair; Which never more its honours shall renew, Clipp'd from the lovely head where late it grew) That while my nostrils draw the vital air, This hand, which won it, shall for ever wear." He spoke, and speaking, in proud triumph spread The long-contended honours of her head. But Umbriel, hateful gnome! forbears not so; He breaks the vial whence the sorrows flow. Then see! the nymph in beauteous grief appears, Her eyes half-languishing, half-drown'd in tears; On her heav'd bosom hung her drooping head, Which, with a sigh, she rais'd; and thus she said: "For ever curs'd be this detested day, Which snatch'd my best, my fav'rite curl away! Happy! ah ten times happy, had I been, If Hampton Court these eyes had never seen! Yet am not I the first mistaken maid, By love of courts to num'rous ills betray'd. Oh had I rather unadmir'd remain'd In some lone isle, or distant northern land; Where the gilt chariot never marks the way, Where none learn ombre, none e'er taste bohea! There kept my charms conceal'd from mortal eye, Like roses, that in deserts bloom and die. What mov'd my mind with youthful lords to roam? Oh had I stay'd, and said my pray'rs at home! 'Twas this, the morning omens seem'd to tell, Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell; The tott'ring china shook without a wind, Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind! A Sylph too warn'd me of the threats of fate, In mystic visions, now believ'd too late! See the poor remnants of these slighted hairs! My hands shall rend what ev'n thy rapine spares: These, in two sable ringlets taught to break, Once gave new beauties to the snowy neck. The sister-lock now sits uncouth, alone, And in its fellow's fate foresees its own; Uncurl'd it hangs, the fatal shears demands, And tempts once more thy sacrilegious hands. Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!"
She said: the pitying audience melt in tears, But Fate and Jove had stopp'd the Baron's ears. In vain Thalestris with reproach assails, For who can move when fair Belinda fails? Not half so fix'd the Trojan could remain, While Anna begg'd and Dido rag'd in vain. Then grave Clarissa graceful wav'd her fan; Silence ensu'd, and thus the nymph began. "Say, why are beauties prais'd and honour'd most, The wise man's passion, and the vain man's toast? Why deck'd with all that land and sea afford, Why angels call'd, and angel-like ador'd? Why round our coaches crowd the white-glov'd beaux, Why bows the side-box from its inmost rows? How vain are all these glories, all our pains, Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains: That men may say, when we the front-box grace: 'Behold the first in virtue, as in face!' Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day, Charm'd the smallpox, or chas'd old age away; Who would not scorn what housewife's cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly thing of use? To patch, nay ogle, might become a saint, Nor could it sure be such a sin to paint. But since, alas! frail beauty must decay, Curl'd or uncurl'd, since locks will turn to grey, Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade, And she who scorns a man, must die a maid; What then remains but well our pow'r to use, And keep good humour still whate'er we lose? And trust me, dear! good humour can prevail, When airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail. Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul." So spoke the dame, but no applause ensu'd; Belinda frown'd, Thalestris call'd her prude. "To arms, to arms!" the fierce virago cries, And swift as lightning to the combat flies. All side in parties, and begin th' attack; Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack; Heroes' and heroines' shouts confus'dly rise, And bass, and treble voices strike the skies. No common weapons in their hands are found, Like gods they fight, nor dread a mortal wound. So when bold Homer makes the gods engage, And heav'nly breasts with human passions rage; 'Gainst Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes arms; And all Olympus rings with loud alarms. Jove's thunder roars, heav'n trembles all around; Blue Neptune storms, the bellowing deeps resound; Earth shakes her nodding tow'rs, the ground gives way; And the pale ghosts start at the flash of day! Triumphant Umbriel on a sconce's height Clapp'd his glad wings, and sate to view the fight: Propp'd on their bodkin spears, the sprites survey The growing combat, or assist the fray. While through the press enrag'd Thalestris flies, And scatters death around from both her eyes, A beau and witling perish'd in the throng, One died in metaphor, and one in song. "O cruel nymph! a living death I bear," Cried Dapperwit, and sunk beside his chair. A mournful glance Sir Fopling upwards cast, "Those eyes are made so killing"—was his last. Thus on Mæeander's flow'ry margin lies Th' expiring swan, and as he sings he dies. When bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down, Chloe stepp'd in, and kill'd him with a frown; She smil'd to see the doughty hero slain, But at her smile, the beau reviv'd again. Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air, Weighs the men's wits against the lady's hair; The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside. See, fierce Belinda on the baron flies, With more than usual lightning in her eyes, Nor fear'd the chief th' unequal fight to try, Who sought no more than on his foe to die. But this bold lord with manly strength endu'd, She with one finger and a thumb subdu'd: Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew, A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw; The Gnomes direct, to ev'ry atom just, The pungent grains of titillating dust. Sudden, with starting tears each eye o'erflows, And the high dome re-echoes to his nose. "Now meet thy fate", incens'd Belinda cried, And drew a deadly bodkin from her side. (The same, his ancient personage to deck, Her great great grandsire wore about his neck In three seal-rings; which after, melted down, Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown: Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew, The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew; Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs, Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears.) "Boast not my fall," he cried, "insulting foe! Thou by some other shalt be laid as low. Nor think, to die dejects my lofty mind; All that I dread is leaving you benind! Rather than so, ah let me still survive, And burn in Cupid's flames—but burn alive." "Restore the lock!" she cries; and all around "Restore the lock!" the vaulted roofs rebound. Not fierce Othello in so loud a strain Roar'd for the handkerchief that caus'd his pain. But see how oft ambitious aims are cross'd, The chiefs contend 'till all the prize is lost! The lock, obtain'd with guilt, and kept with pain, In ev'ry place is sought, but sought in vain: With such a prize no mortal must be blest, So Heav'n decrees! with Heav'n who can contest? Some thought it mounted to the lunar sphere, Since all things lost on earth are treasur'd there. There hero's wits are kept in pond'rous vases, And beaux' in snuff boxes and tweezercases. There broken vows and deathbed alms are found, And lovers' hearts with ends of riband bound; The courtier's promises, and sick man's prayers, The smiles of harlots, and the tears of heirs, Cages for gnats, and chains to yoke a flea, Dried butterflies, and tomes of casuistry. But trust the Muse—she saw it upward rise, Though mark'd by none but quick, poetic eyes: (So Rome's great founder to the heav'ns withdrew, To Proculus alone confess'd in view) A sudden star, it shot through liquid air, And drew behind a radiant trail of hair. Not Berenice's locks first rose so bright, The heav'ns bespangling with dishevell'd light. The Sylphs behold it kindling as it flies, And pleas'd pursue its progress through the skies. This the beau monde shall from the Mall survey, And hail with music its propitious ray. This the blest lover shall for Venus take, And send up vows from Rosamonda's lake. This Partridge soon shall view in cloudless skies, When next he looks through Galileo's eyes; And hence th' egregious wizard shall foredoom The fate of Louis, and the fall of Rome. Then cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravish'd hair, Which adds new glory to the shining sphere! Not all the tresses that fair head can boast Shall draw such envy as the lock you lost. For, after all the murders of your eye, When, after millions slain, yourself shall die: When those fair suns shall set, as set they must, And all those tresses shall be laid in dust, This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame And 'midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name.
(Life and Contacts) “Vocat aestus in umbram” Nemesianus Ec. IV. E. P. ODE POUR L’ÉLECTION DE SON SÉPULCHRE For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait: “Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year. His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials. Unaffected by “the march of events,” He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesmeDe son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem. II The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the “sculpture” of rhyme. III The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc. Supplants the mousseline of Cos, The pianola “replaces” Sappho’s barbitos. Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel. All things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall reign throughout our days. Even the Christian beauty Defects—after Samothrace; We see to kalon Decreed in the market place. Faun’s flesh is not to us, Nor the saint’s vision. We have the press for wafer; Franchise for circumcision. All men, in law, are equals. Free of Peisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch To rule over us. A bright Apollo, tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon, What god, man, or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon? IV These fought, in any case, and some believing, pro domo, in any case ... Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ... walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies. V There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books. YEUX GLAUQUES Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced “Kings Treasuries”; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused. Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun’s head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers. The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze. The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days. The thin, clear gaze, the same Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin’d face, Questing and passive .... “Ah, poor Jenny’s case” ... Bewildered that a world Shows no surprise At her last maquero’s Adulteries. “SIENA MI FE’, DISFECEMI MAREMMA’” Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones, Engaged in perfecting the catalogue, I found the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog. For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub ... But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed— Tissue preserved—the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed. Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels; Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church. So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood,” M. Verog, out of step with the decade, Detached from his contemporaries, Neglected by the young, Because of these reveries. BRENNEBAUM The sky-like limpid eyes, The circular infant’s face, The stiffness from spats to collar Never relaxing into grace; The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years, Showed only when the daylight fell Level across the face Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable.” MR. NIXON In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer Dangers of delay. “Consider ”Carefully the reviewer. “I was as poor as you are; “When I began I got, of course, “Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr. Nixon, “Follow me, and take a column, “Even if you have to work free. “Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred “I rose in eighteen months; “The hardest nut I had to crack “Was Dr. Dundas. “I never mentioned a man but with the view “Of selling my own works. “The tip’s a good one, as for literature “It gives no man a sinecure.” And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.” * * * * Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me: Don’t kick against the pricks, Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game And died, there’s nothing in it. X Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated, At last from the world’s welter Nature receives him, With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress. The haven from sophistications and contentions Leaks through its thatch; He offers succulent cooking; The door has a creaking latch. XI “Conservatrix of Milésien” Habits of mind and feeling, Possibly. But in Ealing With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen? No, “Milésian” is an exaggeration. No instinct has survived in her Older than those her grandmother Told her would fit her station. XII “Daphne with her thighs in bark Stretches toward me her leafy hands,”— Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room I await The Lady Valentine’s commands, Knowing my coat has never been Of precisely the fashion To stimulate, in her, A durable passion; Doubtful, somewhat, of the value Of well-gowned approbation Of literary effort, But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation: Poetry, her border of ideas, The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending With other strata Where the lower and higher have ending; A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention, A modulation toward the theatre, Also, in the case of revolution, A possible friend and comforter. * * * * Conduct, on the other hand, the soul “Which the highest cultures have nourished” To Fleet St. where Dr. Johnson flourished; Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses. Envoi (1919) Go, dumb-born book,Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:Hadst thou but songAs thou hast subjects known,Then were there cause in thee that should condoneEven my faults that heavy upon me lieAnd build her glories their longevity.Tell her that shedsSuch treasure in the air,Recking naught else but that her graces giveLife to the moment,I would bid them liveAs roses might, in magic amber laid,Red overwrought with orange and all madeOne substance and one colourBraving time.Tell her that goesWith song upon her lipsBut sings not out the song, nor knowsThe maker of it, some other mouth,May be as fair as hers,Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,Siftings on siftings in oblivion,Till change hath broken downAll things save Beauty alone.
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, London has swept about you this score years And bright ships left you this or that in fee: Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else. You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind — with one thought less, each year. Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit Hours, where something might have floated up. And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay. You are a person of some interest, one comes to you And takes strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else That might prove useful and yet never proves, That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, These are your riches, your great store; and yet For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things, Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: In the slow float of differing light and deep, No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, Nothing that's quite your own. Yet this is you.
May I for my own self song's truth reckon, Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days Hardship endured oft. Bitter breast-cares have I abided, Known on my keel many a care's hold, And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted, My feet were by frost benumbed. Chill its chains are; chafing sighs Hew my heart round and hunger begot Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not That he on dry land loveliest liveth, List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea, Weathered the winter, wretched outcast Deprived of my kinsmen; Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew, There I heard naught save the harsh sea And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries, Did for my games the gannet's clamour, Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter, The mews' singing all my mead-drink. Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed With spray on his pinion.  Not any protector May make merry man faring needy. This he little believes, who aye in winsome life Abides 'mid burghers some heavy business, Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft Must bide above brine. Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north, Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now The heart's thought that I on high streams The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone. Moaneth alway my mind's lust That I fare forth, that I afar hence Seek out a foreign fastness. For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst, Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed; Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare Whatever his lord will. He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight Nor any whit else save the wave's slash, Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water. Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries, Fields to fairness, land fares brisker, All this admonisheth man eager of mood, The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks On flood-ways to be far departing. Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying, He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow, The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not — He the prosperous man — what some perform Where wandering them widest draweth. So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock, My mood 'mid the mere-flood, Over the whale's acre, would wander wide. On earth's shelter cometh oft to me, Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer, Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly, O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow My lord deems to me this dead life On loan and on land, I believe not That any earth-weal eternal standeth Save there be somewhat calamitous That, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain. Disease or oldness or sword-hate Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body. And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after — Laud of the living, boasteth some last word, That he will work ere he pass onward, Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice, Daring ado, ... So that all men shall honour him after And his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English, Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast, Delight mid the doughty.  Days little durable, And all arrogance of earthen riches, There come now no kings nor Cæsars Nor gold-giving lords like those gone. Howe'er in mirth most magnified, Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest, Drear all this excellence, delights undurable! Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth. Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low. Earthly glory ageth and seareth. No man at all going the earth's gait, But age fares against him, his face paleth, Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions, Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven, Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth, Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry, Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart, And though he strew the grave with gold, His born brothers, their buried bodies Be an unlikely treasure hoard.
O the Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa; An' he's the goodest man ever you saw! He comes to our house every day, An' waters the horses, an' feeds 'em hay; An' he opens the shed—an' we all ist laugh When he drives out our little old wobble-ly calf; An' nen—ef our hired girl says he can— He milks the cow fer 'Lizabuth Ann.—  Ain't he a' awful good Raggedy Man?  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! W'y, The Raggedy Man—he's ist so good, He splits the kindlin' an' chops the wood; An' nen he spades in our garden, too, An' does most things 'at boys can't do.— He clumbed clean up in our big tree An' shooked a' apple down fer me— An' 'nother 'n', too, fer 'Lizabuth Ann— An' 'nother 'n', too, fer The Raggedy Man.—  Ain't he a' awful kind Raggedy Man?  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' The Raggedy Man one time say he Pick' roast' rambos from a' orchurd-tree, An' et 'em—all ist roast' an' hot!— An' it's so, too!—'cause a corn-crib got Afire one time an' all burn' down On "The Smoot Farm," 'bout four mile from town— On "The Smoot Farm"! Yes—an' the hired han' 'At worked there nen 'uz The Raggedy Man!—  Ain't he the beatin'est Raggedy Man?  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! The Raggedy Man's so good an' kind He'll be our "horsey," an' "haw" an' mind Ever'thing 'at you make him do— An' won't run off—'less you want him to! I drived him wunst way down our lane An' he got skeered, when it 'menced to rain, An' ist rared up an' squealed and run Purt' nigh away!—an' it's all in fun! Nen he skeered ag'in at a' old tin can ...  Whoa! y' old runaway Raggedy Man!  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes, An' tells 'em, ef I be good, sometimes: Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns, an' Elves, An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers the'rselves: An', wite by the pump in our pasture-lot, He showed me the hole 'at the Wunks is got, 'At lives 'way deep in the ground, an' can Turn into me, er 'Lizabuth Ann! Er Ma, er Pa, er The Raggedy Man!  Ain't he a funny old Raggedy Man?  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' wunst, when The Raggedy Man come late, An' pigs ist root' thue the garden-gate, He 'tend like the pigs 'uz bears an' said, "Old Bear-shooter'll shoot 'em dead!" An' race' an' chase' 'em, an' they'd ist run When he pint his hoe at 'em like it's a gun An' go "Bang!—Bang!" nen 'tend he stan' An' load up his gun ag'in! Raggedy Man!  He's an old Bear-shooter Raggedy Man!  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! An' sometimes The Raggedy Man lets on We're little prince-children, an' old King's gone To git more money, an' lef' us there— And Robbers is ist thick ever'where; An' nen—ef we all won't cry, fer shore— The Raggedy Man he'll come and "splore The Castul-halls," an' steal the "gold"— An' steal us, too, an' grab an' hold An' pack us off to his old "Cave"!—An'  Haymow's the "cave" o' The Raggedy Man!—  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man! The Raggedy Man—one time, when he Wuz makin' a little bow-'n'-orry fer me, Says "When you're big like your Pa is, Air you go' to keep a fine store like his— An' be a rich merchunt—an' wear fine clothes?— Er what air you go' to be, goodness knows?" An' nen he laughed at 'Lizabuth Ann, An' I says "'M go' to be a Raggedy Man!—  I'm ist go' to be a nice Raggedy Man!"  Raggedy! Raggedy! Raggedy Man!
They are all gone away,  The House is shut and still, There is nothing more to say. Through broken walls and gray  The winds blow bleak and shrill: They are all gone away. Nor is there one to-day  To speak them good or ill: There is nothing more to say. Why is it then we stray  Around the sunken sill? They are all gone away, And our poor fancy-play  For them is wasted skill: There is nothing more to say. There is ruin and decay  In the House on the Hill: They are all gone away, There is nothing more to say.
The miller's wife had waited long,  The tea was cold, the fire was dead; And there might yet be nothing wrong  In how he went and what he said: "There are no millers any more,"  Was all that she had heard him say; And he had lingered at the door  So long that it seemed yesterday. Sick with a fear that had no form  She knew that she was there at last; And in the mill there was a warm  And mealy fragrance of the past. What else there was would only seem  To say again what he had meant; And what was hanging from a beam  Would not have heeded where she went. And if she thought it followed her,  She may have reasoned in the dark That one way of the few there were  Would hide her and would leave no mark: Black water, smooth above the weir  Like starry velvet in the night, Though ruffled once, would soon appear  The same as ever to the sight.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,  Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born,  And he had reasons. Miniver loved the days of old  When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold  Would set him dancing. Miniver sighed for what was not,  And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,  And Priam’s neighbors. Miniver mourned the ripe renown  That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town,  And Art, a vagrant. Miniver loved the Medici,  Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly  Could he have been one. Miniver cursed the commonplace  And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the mediæval grace  Of iron clothing. Miniver scorned the gold he sought,  But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,  And thought about it. Miniver Cheevy, born too late,  Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate,  And kept on drinking.
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage That held as much as he should ever know On earth again of home, paused warily. The road was his with not a native near; And Eben, having leisure, said aloud, For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon Again, and we may not have many more; The bird is on the wing, the poet says, And you and I have said it here before. Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill, And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood, Since you propose it, I believe I will." Alone, as if enduring to the end A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, He stood there in the middle of the road Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn. Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim. Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child Down tenderly, fearing it may awake, He set the jug down slowly at his feet With trembling care, knowing that most things break; And only when assured that on firm earth It stood, as the uncertain lives of men Assuredly did not, he paced away, And with his hand extended paused again: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this In a long time; and many a change has come To both of us, I fear, since last it was We had a drop together. Welcome home!" Convivially returning with himself, Again he raised the jug up to the light; And with an acquiescent quaver said: "Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might. "Only a very little, Mr. Flood— For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do." So, for the time, apparently it did, And Eben evidently thought so too; For soon amid the silver loneliness Of night he lifted up his voice and sang, Secure, with only two moons listening, Until the whole harmonious landscape rang— "For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out, The last word wavered; and the song being done, He raised again the jug regretfully And shook his head, and was again alone. There was not much that was ahead of him, And there was nothing in the town below— Where strangers would have shut the many doors That many friends had opened long ago.
Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.
There is a drear and lonely tract of hell From all the common gloom removed afar: A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are, Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell. I walked among them and I knew them well: Men I had slandered on life's little star For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar Upon their brows of woe ineffable. But as I went majestic on my way, Into the dark they vanished, one by one, Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day, The dream of all my glory was undone,— And, with a fool's importunate dismay, I heard the dead men singing in the sun.
Since Persia fell at Marathon,  The yellow years have gathered fast: Long centuries have come and gone. And yet (they say) the place will don  A phantom fury of the past, Since Persia fell at Marathon; And as of old, when Helicon  Trembled and swayed with rapture vast (Long centuries have come and gone), This ancient plain, when night comes on,  Shakes to a ghostly battle-blast, Since Persia fell at Marathon. But into soundless Acheron  The glory of Greek shame was cast: Long centuries have come and gone, The suns of Hellas have all shone,  The first has fallen to the last:— Since Persia fell at Marathon, Long centuries have come and gone.
Passing away, saith the World, passing away: Chances, beauty and youth, sapp'd day by day: Thy life never continueth in one stay. Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey That hath won neither laurel nor bay? I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay On my bosom for aye. Then I answer'd: Yea. Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away: With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play, Hearken what the past doth witness and say: Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay: Watch thou and pray. Then I answer'd: Yea. Passing away, saith my God, passing away: Winter passeth after the long delay: New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray. Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day, My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. Then I answer'd: Yea.
Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann'd: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
THE FLESH "Sweet, thou art pale."  "More pale to see, Christ hung upon the cruel tree And bore His Father's wrath for me." "Sweet, thou art sad."  "Beneath a rod More heavy, Christ for my sake trod The winepress of the wrath of God." "Sweet, thou art weary."  "Not so Christ: Whose mighty love of me suffic'd For Strength, Salvation, Eucharist." "Sweet, thou art footsore."  "If I bleed, His feet have bled; yea in my need His Heart once bled for mine indeed." THE WORLD "Sweet, thou art young."  "So He was young Who for my sake in silence hung Upon the Cross with Passion wrung." "Look, thou art fair."  "He was more fair Than men, Who deign'd for me to wear A visage marr'd beyond compare." "And thou hast riches."  "Daily bread: All else is His: Who, living, dead, For me lack'd where to lay His Head." "And life is sweet."  "It was not so To Him, Whose Cup did overflow With mine unutterable woe." THE DEVIL "Thou drinkest deep."  "When Christ would sup He drain'd the dregs from out my cup: So how should I be lifted up?" "Thou shalt win Glory."  "In the skies, Lord Jesus, cover up mine eyes Lest they should look on vanities." "Thou shalt have Knowledge."  "Helpless dust! In Thee, O Lord, I put my trust: Answer Thou for me, Wise and Just." "And Might."—  "Get thee behind me. Lord, Who hast redeem'd and not abhorr'd My soul, oh keep it by Thy Word."
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.
Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,— The finger-points look through like rosy blooms: Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge. 'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:— So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.
Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,  Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,—  With still tears showering and averted face, Inexplicably fill'd with faint alarms: And oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms  I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,—  Against all ills the fortified strong place And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms. And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,  Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away  All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day. Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune; And as soft waters warble to the moon,  Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.
Not in thy body is thy life at all  But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;  Through these she yields thee life that vivifies What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall. Look on thyself without her, and recall  The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise  That liv'd but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs O'er vanish'd hours and hours eventual. Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair  Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show  For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago; Even so much life endures unknown, even where,  'Mid change the changeless night environeth,  Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.
Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee  From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,—  Like multiform circumfluence manifold Of night's flood-tide,—like terrors that agree Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,—  Even such, within some glass dimm'd by our breath,  Our hearts discern wild images of Death, Shadows and shoals that edge eternity. Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar  One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove  Sweeter to glide around, to brood above. Tell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door Or threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor  Hath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?
From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;  From lethargy to fever of the heart;  From faithful life to dream-dower'd days apart; From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;— Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran  Till now. Alas, the soul!—how soon must she  Accept her primal immortality,— The flesh resume its dust whence it began? O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!  O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,  Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath: That when the peace is garner'd in from strife,  The work retriev'd, the will regenerate,  This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!
Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.  Surely the earth, that's wise being very old,  Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,  Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.  We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd, Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky. Now kiss, and think that there are really those,  My own high-bosom'd beauty, who increase  Vain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way!  Through many years they toil; then on a day  They die not,—for their life was death,—but cease; And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.
Watch thou and fear; to-morrow thou shalt die.  Or art thou sure thou shalt have time for death?  Is not the day which God's word promiseth To come man knows not when? In yonder sky, Now while we speak, the sun speeds forth: can I  Or thou assure him of his goal? God's breath  Even at this moment haply quickeneth The air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh Though screen'd and hid, shall walk the daylight here.  And dost thou prate of all that man shall do?  Canst thou, who hast but plagues, presume to be  Glad in his gladness that comes after thee?  Will his strength slay thy worm in Hell? Go to: Cover thy countenance, and watch, and fear.
Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die  Outstretch'd in the sun's warmth upon the shore,  Thou say'st: "Man's measur'd path is all gone o'er: Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh, Man clomb until he touch'd the truth; and I,  Even I, am he whom it was destin'd for."  How should this be? Art thou then so much more Than they who sow'd, that thou shouldst reap thereby? Nay, come up hither. From this wave-wash'd mound  Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me; Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd.  Miles and miles distant though the last line be, And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—  Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;  I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell;  Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between; Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen  Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell  Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, Of ultimate things unutter'd the frail screen. Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart  One moment through thy soul the soft surprise  Of that wing'd Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,— Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart  Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.
Thin are the night-skirts left behind  By daybreak hours that onward creep,  And thin, alas! the shred of sleep That wavers with the spirit's wind: But in half-dreams that shift and roll  And still remember and forget, My soul this hour has drawn your soul  A little nearer yet. Our lives, most dear, are never near,  Our thoughts are never far apart,  Though all that draws us heart to heart Seems fainter now and now more clear. To-night Love claims his full control,  And with desire and with regret My soul this hour has drawn your soul  A little nearer yet. Is there a home where heavy earth  Melts to bright air that breathes no pain,  Where water leaves no thirst again And springing fire is Love's new birth? If faith long bound to one true goal  May there at length its hope beget, My soul that hour shall draw your soul  For ever nearer yet.
Between the hands, between the brows,  Between the lips of Love-Lily, A spirit is born whose birth endows  My blood with fire to burn through me; Who breathes upon my gazing eyes,  Who laughs and murmurs in mine ear, At whose least touch my colour flies,  And whom my life grows faint to hear. Within the voice, within the heart,  Within the mind of Love-Lily, A spirit is born who lifts apart  His tremulous wings and looks at me; Who on my mouth his finger lays,  And shows, while whispering lutes confer, That Eden of Love's watered ways  Whose winds and spirits worship her. Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice,  Kisses and words of Love-Lily,— Oh! bid me with your joy rejoice  Till riotous longing rest in me! Ah! let not hope be still distraught,  But find in her its gracious goal, Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought  Nor Love her body from her soul.
Master of the murmuring courts Where the shapes of sleep convene!— Lo! my spirit here exhorts All the powers of thy demesne For their aid to woo my queen. What reports Yield thy jealous courts unseen? Vaporous, unaccountable, Dreamland lies forlorn of light, Hollow like a breathing shell. Ah! that from all dreams I might Choose one dream and guide its flight! I know well What her sleep should tell to-night. There the dreams are multitudes: Some that will not wait for sleep, Deep within the August woods; Some that hum while rest may steep Weary labour laid a-heap; Interludes, Some, of grievous moods that weep. Poets' fancies all are there: There the elf-girls flood with wings Valleys full of plaintive air; There breathe perfumes; there in rings Whirl the foam-bewildered springs; Siren there Winds her dizzy hair and sings. Thence the one dream mutually Dreamed in bridal unison, Less than waking ecstasy; Half-formed visions that make moan In the house of birth alone; And what we At death's wicket see, unknown. But for mine own sleep, it lies In one gracious form's control, Fair with honourable eyes, Lamps of a translucent soul: O their glance is loftiest dole, Sweet and wise, Wherein Love descries his goal. Reft of her, my dreams are all Clammy trance that fears the sky: Changing footpaths shift and fall; From polluted coverts nigh, Miserable phantoms sigh; Quakes the pall, And the funeral goes by. Master, is it soothly said That, as echoes of man's speech Far in secret clefts are made, So do all men's bodies reach Shadows o'er thy sunken beach,— Shape or shade In those halls pourtrayed of each? Ah! might I, by thy good grace Groping in the windy stair, (Darkness and the breath of space Like loud waters everywhere,) Meeting mine own image there Face to face, Send it from that place to her! Nay, not I; but oh! do thou, Master, from thy shadowkind Call my body's phantom now: Bid it bear its face declin'd Till its flight her slumbers find, And her brow Feel its presence bow like wind. Where in groves the gracile Spring Trembles, with mute orison Confidently strengthening, Water's voice and wind's as one Shed an echo in the sun. Soft as Spring, Master, bid it sing and moan. Song shall tell how glad and strong Is the night she soothes alway; Moan shall grieve with that parched tongue Of the brazen hours of day: Sounds as of the springtide they, Moan and song, While the chill months long for May. Not the prayers which with all leave The world's fluent woes prefer,— Not the praise the world doth give, Dulcet fulsome whisperer;— Let it yield my love to her, And achieve Strength that shall not grieve or err. Wheresoe'er my dreams befall, Both at night-watch, (let it say,) And where round the sundial The reluctant hours of day, Heartless, hopeless of their way, Rest and call;— There her glance doth fall and stay. Suddenly her face is there: So do mounting vapours wreathe Subtle-scented transports where The black firwood sets its teeth. Part the boughs and look beneath,— Lilies share Secret waters there, and breathe. Master, bid my shadow bend Whispering thus till birth of light, Lest new shapes that sleep may send Scatter all its work to flight;— Master, master of the night, Bid it spend Speech, song, prayer, and end aright. Yet, ah me! if at her head There another phantom lean Murmuring o'er the fragrant bed,— Ah! and if my spirit's queen Smile those alien prayers between,— Ah! poor shade! Shall it strive, or fade unseen? How should love's own messenger Strive with love and be love's foe? Master, nay! If thus, in her, Sleep a wedded heart should show,— Silent let mine image go, Its old share Of thy spell-bound air to know. Like a vapour wan and mute, Like a flame, so let it pass; One low sigh across her lute, One dull breath against her glass; And to my sad soul, alas! One salute Cold as when Death's foot shall pass. Then, too, let all hopes of mine, All vain hopes by night and day, Slowly at thy summoning sign Rise up pallid and obey. Dreams, if this is thus, were they:— Be they thine, And to dreamworld pine away. Yet from old time, life, not death, Master, in thy rule is rife: Lo! through thee, with mingling breath, Adam woke beside his wife. O Love bring me so, for strife, Force and faith, Bring me so not death but life! Yea, to Love himself is pour'd This frail song of hope and fear. Thou art Love, of one accord With kind Sleep to bring her near, Still-eyed, deep-eyed, ah how dear. Master, Lord, In her name implor'd, O hear!
This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect  God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she  Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee. Unto God's will she brought devout respect, Profound simplicity of intellect,  And supreme patience. From her mother's knee  Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity; Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect. So held she through her girlhood; as it were  An angel-water'd lily, that near God  Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home, She woke in her white bed, and had no fear  At all,—yet wept till sunshine, and felt aw'd:  Because the fulness of the time was come.
She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:  At length the long-ungranted shade  Of weary eyelids overweigh'd The pain nought else might yet relieve. Our mother, who had lean'd all day  Over the bed from chime to chime,  Then rais'd herself for the first time, And as she sat her down, did pray. Her little work-table was spread  With work to finish. For the glare  Made by her candle, she had care To work some distance from the bed. Without, there was a cold moon up,  Of winter radiance sheer and thin;  The hollow halo it was in Was like an icy crystal cup. Through the small room, with subtle sound  Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove  And redden'd. In its dim alcove The mirror shed a clearness round. I had been sitting up some nights,  And my tired mind felt weak and blank;  Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank The stillness and the broken lights. Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years  Heard in each hour, crept off; and then  The ruffled silence spread again, Like water that a pebble stirs. Our mother rose from where she sat:  Her needles, as she laid them down,  Met lightly, and her silken gown Settled: no other noise than that. "Glory unto the Newly Born!"  So, as said angels, she did say;  Because we were in Christmas Day, Though it would still be long till morn. Just then in the room over us  There was a pushing back of chairs,  As some who had sat unawares So late, now heard the hour, and rose. With anxious softly-stepping haste  Our mother went where Margaret lay,  Fearing the sounds o'erhead—should they Have broken her long watch'd-for rest! She stoop'd an instant, calm, and turn'd;  But suddenly turn'd back again;  And all her features seem'd in pain With woe, and her eyes gaz'd and yearn'd. For my part, I but hid my face,  And held my breath, and spoke no word:  There was none spoken; but I heard The silence for a little space. Our mother bow'd herself and wept:  And both my arms fell, and I said,  "God knows I knew that she was dead." And there, all white, my sister slept. Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn  A little after twelve o'clock  We said, ere the first quarter struck,  "Christ's blessing on the newly born!"
This is her picture as she was:  It seems a thing to wonder on, As though mine image in the glass  Should tarry when myself am gone. I gaze until she seems to stir,— Until mine eyes almost aver  That now, even now, the sweet lips part  To breathe the words of the sweet heart:— And yet the earth is over her. Alas! even such the thin-drawn ray  That makes the prison-depths more rude,— The drip of water night and day  Giving a tongue to solitude. Yet only this, of love's whole prize, Remains; save what in mournful guise  Takes counsel with my soul alone,—  Save what is secret and unknown, Below the earth, above the skies. In painting her I shrin'd her face  Mid mystic trees, where light falls in Hardly at all; a covert place  Where you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name  Not itself knoweth, and old dew,  And your own footsteps meeting you, And all things going as they came. A deep dim wood; and there she stands  As in that wood that day: for so Was the still movement of her hands  And such the pure line's gracious flow. And passing fair the type must seem, Unknown the presence and the dream.  'Tis she: though of herself, alas!  Less than her shadow on the grass Or than her image in the stream. That day we met there, I and she  One with the other all alone; And we were blithe; yet memory  Saddens those hours, as when the moon Looks upon daylight. And with her I stoop'd to drink the spring-water,  Athirst where other waters sprang;  And where the echo is, she sang,— My soul another echo there. But when that hour my soul won strength  For words whose silence wastes and kills, Dull raindrops smote us, and at length  Thunder'd the heat within the hills. That eve I spoke those words again Beside the pelted window-pane;  And there she hearken'd what I said,  With under-glances that survey'd The empty pastures blind with rain. Next day the memories of these things,  Like leaves through which a bird has flown, Still vibrated with Love's warm wings;  Till I must make them all my own And paint this picture. So, 'twixt ease Of talk and sweet long silences,  She stood among the plants in bloom  At windows of a summer room, To feign the shadow of the trees. And as I wrought, while all above  And all around was fragrant air, In the sick burthen of my love  It seem'd each sun-thrill'd blossom there Beat like a heart among the leaves. O heart that never beats nor heaves,  In that one darkness lying still,  What now to thee my love's great will Or the fine web the sunshine weaves? For now doth daylight disavow  Those days,—nought left to see or hear. Only in solemn whispers now  At night-time these things reach mine ear; When the leaf-shadows at a breath Shrink in the road, and all the heath,  Forest and water, far and wide,  In limpid starlight glorified, Lie like the mystery of death. Last night at last I could have slept,  And yet delay'd my sleep till dawn, Still wandering. Then it was I wept:  For unawares I came upon Those glades where once she walk'd with me: And as I stood there suddenly,  All wan with traversing the night,  Upon the desolate verge of light Yearn'd loud the iron-bosom'd sea. Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears  The beating heart of Love's own breast,— Where round the secret of all spheres  All angels lay their wings to rest,— How shall my soul stand rapt and aw'd, When, by the new birth borne abroad  Throughout the music of the suns,  It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God! Here with her face doth memory sit  Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, Till other eyes shall look from it,  Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer: While hopes and aims long lost with her  Stand round her image side by side,  Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre.
What thing unto mine ear  Wouldst thou convey,—what secret thing, O wandering water ever whispering?  Surely thy speech shall be of her. Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer,  What message dost thou bring?  Say, hath not Love leaned low  This hour beside thy far well-head, And there through jealous hollowed fingers said  The thing that most I long to know— Murmuring with curls all dabbled in thy flow  And washed lips rosy red?  He told it to thee there  Where thy voice hath a louder tone; But where it welters to this little moan  His will decrees that I should hear. Now speak: for with the silence is no fear,  And I am all alone.  Shall Time not still endow  One hour with life, and I and she Slake in one kiss the thirst of memory?  Say, streams, lest Love should disavow Thy service, and the bird upon the bough  Sing first to tell it me.  What whisperest thou? Nay, why  Name the dead hours? I mind them well. Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell  With desolate eyes to know them by. That hour must still be born ere it can die  Of that I'd have thee tell.  But hear, before thou speak!  Withhold, I pray, the vain behest That while the maze hath still its bower for quest  My burning heart should cease to seek. Be sure that Love ordained for souls more meek  His roadside dells of rest.  Stream, when this silver thread  In flood-time is a torrent brown, May any bulwark bind thy foaming crown?  Shall not the waters surge and spread And to the crannied boulders of their bed  Still shoot the dead drift down?  Let no rebuke find place  In speech of thine: or it shall prove That thou dost ill expound the words of Love.  Even as thine eddy's rippling race Would blur the perfect image of his face  I will have none thereof.  O learn and understand  That 'gainst the wrongs himself did wreak Love sought her aid; until her shadowy cheek  And eyes beseeching gave command; And compassed in her close compassionate hand  My heart must burn and speak.  For then at last we spoke  What eyes so oft had told to eyes Through that long-lingering silence whose half-sighs  Alone the buried secret broke, Which with snatched hands and lips' reverberate stroke  Then from the heart did rise.  But she is far away  Now; nor the hours of night grown hoar Bring yet to me, long gazing from the door,  The wind-stirred robe of roseate gray And rose-crown of the hour that leads the day  When we shall meet once more.  Dark as thy blinded wave  When brimming midnight floods the glen,— Bright as the laughter of thy runnels when  The dawn yields all the light they crave; Even so these hours to wound and that to save  Are sisters in Love's ken.  Oh sweet her bending grace  Then when I kneel beside her feet; And sweet her eyes' o'erhanging heaven; and sweet  The gathering folds of her embrace; And her fall'n hair at last shed round my face  When breaths and tears shall meet.  Beneath her sheltering hair,  In the warm silence near her breast, Our kisses and our sobs shall sink to rest;  As in some still trance made aware That day and night have wrought to fulness there  And Love has built our nest.  And as in the dim grove,  When the rains cease that hushed them long, 'Mid glistening boughs the song-birds wake to song,—  So from our hearts deep-shrined in love, While the leaves throb beneath, around, above,  The quivering notes shall throng.  Till tenderest words found vain  Draw back to wonder mute and deep, And closed lips in closed arms a silence keep,  Subdued by memory's circling strain,— The wind-rapt sound that the wind brings again  While all the willows weep.  Then by her summoning art  Shall memory conjure back the sere Autumnal Springs, from many a dying year  Born dead; and, bitter to the heart, The very ways where now we walk apart  Who then shall cling so near.  And with each thought new-grown,  Some sweet caress or some sweet name Low-breathed shall let me know her thought the same:  Making me rich with every tone And touch of the dear heaven so long unknown  That filled my dreams with flame.  Pity and love shall burn  In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands; And from the living spirit of love that stands  Between her lips to soothe and yearn, Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn  And loose my spirit's bands.  Oh passing sweet and dear,  Then when the worshipped form and face Are felt at length in darkling close embrace;  Round which so oft the sun shone clear, With mocking light and pitiless atmosphere,  In many an hour and place.  Ah me! with what proud growth  Shall that hour's thirsting race be run; While, for each several sweetness still begun  Afresh, endures love's endless drouth; Sweet hands, sweet hair, sweet cheeks, sweet eyes, sweet mouth,  Each singly wooed and won.  Yet most with the sweet soul  Shall love's espousals then be knit; What time the governing cloud sheds peace from it  O'er tremulous wings that touch the goal, And on the unmeasured height of Love's control  The lustral fires are lit.  Therefore, when breast and cheek  Now part, from long embraces free,— Each on the other gazing shall but see  A self that has no need to speak: All things unsought, yet nothing more to seek,—  One love in unity.  O water wandering past,—  Albeit to thee I speak this thing, O water, thou that wanderest whispering,  Thou keep'st thy counsel to the last. What spell upon thy bosom should Love cast,  Its secret thence to wring?  Nay, must thou hear the tale  Of the past days,—the heavy debt Of life that obdurate time withholds,—ere yet  To win thine ear these prayers prevail, And by thy voice Love's self with high All-hail  Yield up the amulet?  How should all this be told?—  All the sad sum of wayworn days,— Heart's anguish in the impenetrable maze;  And on the waste uncoloured wold The visible burthen of the sun grown cold  And the moon's labouring gaze?  Alas! shall hope be nurs'd  On life's all-succouring breast in vain, And made so perfect only to be slain?  Or shall not rather the sweet thirst Even yet rejoice the heart with warmth dispers'd  And strength grown fair again?  Stands it not by the door!—  Love's Hour—Till she and I shall meet With bodiless form and unapparent feet  That cast no shadow yet before, Though round its head the dawn begins to pour  The breath that makes day sweet?  Its eyes invisible  Watch till the dial's thin-thrown shade Be born,—yea, till the journeying line be laid  Upon the point that wakes the spell, And there in lovelier light than tongue can tell  Its presence stands array'd.  Its soul remembers yet  Those sunless hours that passed it by; And still it hears the night's disconsolate cry,  And feels the branches wringing wet Cast on its brow, that may not once forget,  Dumb tears from the blind sky.  But oh! when now her foot Draws near, for whose sake night and day  Were long in weary longing sighed away,— The hour of Love, 'mid airs grown mute,  Shall sing beside the door, and Love's own lute  Thrill to the passionate lay.  Thou know'st, for Love has told  Within thine ear, O stream, how soon That song shall lift its sweet appointed tune.  O tell me, for my lips are cold, And in my veins the blood is waxing old  Even while I beg the boon.  So, in that hour of sighs  Assuaged, shall we beside this stone Yield thanks for grace; while in thy mirror shown  The twofold image softly lies, Until we kiss, and each in other's eyes  Is imaged all alone.  Still silent? Can no art  Of Love's then move thy pity? Nay, To thee let nothing come that owns his sway:  Let happy lovers have no part With thee; nor even so sad and poor a heart  As thou hast spurned to-day.  To-day? Lo! night is here.  The glen grows heavy with some veil Risen from the earth or fall'n to make earth pale;  And all stands hushed to eye and ear, Until the night-wind shake the shade like fear  And every covert quail.  Ah! by another wave  On other airs the hour must come Which to thy heart, my love, shall call me home.  Between the lips of the low cave Against that night the lapping waters lave,  And the dark lips are dumb.  But there Love's self doth stand,  And with Life's weary wings far flown, And with Death's eyes that make the water moan,  Gathers the water in his hand: And they that drink know nought of sky or land  But only love alone.  O soul-sequestered face  Far off,—O were that night but now! So even beside that stream even I and thou  Through thirsting lips should draw Love's grace, And in the zone of that supreme embrace  Bind aching breast and brow.  O water whispering  Still through the dark into mine ears,— As with mine eyes, is it not now with hers?—  Mine eyes that add to thy cold spring, Wan water, wandering water weltering,  This hidden tide of tears.
I have been here before,  But when or how I cannot tell:  I know the grass beyond the door,  The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.  You have been mine before,—  How long ago I may not know:  But just when at that swallow's soar  Your neck turn'd so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.  Has this been thus before?  And shall not thus time's eddying flight  Still with our lives our love restore  In death's despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?
The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walk'd on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still. Between my knees my forehead was,— My lips, drawn in, said not Alas! My hair was over in the grass, My naked ears heard the day pass. My eyes, wide open, had the run Of some ten weeds to fix upon; Among those few, out of the sun, The woodspurge flower'd, three cups in one. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains to me,— The woodspurge has a cup of three.
THERE are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing—and singing—remember Your song dies and changes And is not here to-morrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago.
I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children join hands And circle round me Singing ghost songs And love to the harvest moon; I am a jack-o'-lantern With terrible teeth And the children know I am fooling.
OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky, And the reckless rain; you put them between walls To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages, To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou. When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare, There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear. He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse, Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house. There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell; And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell; With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done, As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one. Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do, And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou. His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze, Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze. The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool, So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool. In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play. Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? — Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars. And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans, But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means; For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above; But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love — A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true — (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.) Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear; But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear; That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie; That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die. 'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through — "I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew. The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood; And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood. The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash, And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash, And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way; In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm, And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn; But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true, That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew." Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark, And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark. Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew, While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou. These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know. They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so. I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two — The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that's known as Lou.
When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met —All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;Master, I've done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands —Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch.I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk;Threescore years of labor — Thine be the long day's work.And now, Big Master, I'm broken and bent and twisted and scarred,But I've held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou wilt not judge me hard.Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I've played the fool —Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil's tool.I was just like a child with money; I flung it away with a curse,Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot's purse;Then back to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine,I, the worker of workers, everything in my line.Everything hard but headwork (I'd no more brains than a kid),A brute with brute strength to labor, doing as I was bid;Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life;Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife.A brute with brute strength to labor, and they were so far above —Yet I'd gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love.I, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild —Yet how I'd ha' treasured a woman, and the sweet, warm kiss of a child!Well, 'tis Thy world, and Thou knowest. I blaspheme and my ways be rude;But I've lived my life as I found it, and I've done my best to be good;I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams;Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,And the long, long shift is over ... Master, I've earned it — Rest.
I will not wash my face;  I will not brush my hair; I "pig" around the place —  There's nobody to care. Nothing but rock and tree;  Nothing but wood and stone; Oh God, it's hell to be  Alone, alone, alone. Snow-peaks and deep-gashed draws  Corral me in a ring. I feel as if I was  The only living thing On all this blighted earth;  And so I frowst and shrink, And crouching by my hearth,  I hear the thoughts I think. I think of all I miss —  The boys I used to know; The girls I used to kiss;  The coin I used to blow: The bars I used to haunt;  The racket and the row; The beers I didn't want  (I wish I had 'em now). Day after day the same,  Only a little worse; No one to grouch or blame —  Oh, for a loving curse! Oh, in the night I fear,  Haunted by nameless things, Just for a voice to cheer,  Just for a hand that clings! Faintly as from a star  Voices come o'er the line; Voices of ghosts afar,  Not in this world of mine. Lives in whose loom I grope;  Words in whose weft I hear Eager the thrill of hope,  Awful the chill of fear. I'm thinking out aloud;  I reckon that is bad; (The snow is like a shroud) —  Maybe I'm going mad. Say! wouldn't that be tough?  This awful hush that hugs And chokes one is enough  To make a man go "bugs". There's not a thing to do;  I cannot sleep at night; No wonder I'm so blue;  Oh, for a friendly fight! The din and rush of strife;  A music-hall aglow; A crowd, a city, life —  Dear God, I miss it so! Here, you have moped enough!  Brace up and play the game! But say, it's awful tough —  Day after day the same (I've said that twice, I bet).  Well, there's not much to say. I wish I had a pet,  Or something I could play. Cheer up! don't get so glum  And sick of everything; The worst is yet to come;  God help you till the Spring. God shield you from the Fear;  Teach you to laugh, not moan. Ha! ha! it sounds so queer —  Alone, alone, alone.
When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and check'd even by the selfsame sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear their brave state out of memory; Then the conceit of this inconstant stay Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay To change your day of youth to sullied night; And all in war with Time for love of you, As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, And make the earth devour her own sweet brood; Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws, And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood; Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets, And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time, To the wide world and all her fading sweets; But I forbid thee one more heinous crime: O, carve not with the hours my love's fair brow, Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen! Him in thy course untainted do allow For beauty's pattern to succeeding men. Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Let those who are in favour with their stars Of public honour and proud titles boast, Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars, Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most. Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread But as the marigold at the sun's eye, And in themselves their pride lies buried, For at a frown they in their glory die. The painful warrior famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foil'd, Is from the book of honour razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd: Then happy I, that love and am beloved Where I may not remove nor be removed.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;  For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight; Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
If thou survive my well-contented day, When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover, And shalt by fortune once more re-survey These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, Compare them with the bettering of the time, And though they be outstripp'd by every pen, Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme, Exceeded by the height of happier men. O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought: "Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age A dearer birth than this his love had brought, To march in ranks of better equipage: But since he died and poets better prove, Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."
Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace. Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendour on my brow; But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Since every one hath, every one, one shade, And you, but one, can every shadow lend. Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you; On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new. Speak of the spring and foison of the year: The one doth shadow of your beauty show, The other as your bounty doth appear; And you in every blessèd shape we know.  In all external grace you have some part,  But you like none, none you, for constant heart.
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd, Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight, And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow, Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow: And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill. Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;  Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so,  That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,  If thinking on me then should make you woe. O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,  When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay, Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, But let your love even with my life decay, Lest the wise world should look into your moan,  And mock you with me after I am gone.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
They that have power to hurt and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: They rightly do inherit heaven's graces And husband nature's riches from expense; They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer's flower is to the summer sweet Though to itself it only live and die, But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere! And yet this time remov'd was summer's time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime, Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease: Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit; For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away, the very birds are mute; Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express'd Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And, for they look'd but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes; And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. Most true it is that I have look'd on truth Askance and strangely: but, by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love. Now all is done, have what shall have no end! Mine appetite, I never more will grind On newer proof, to try an older friend, A god in love, to whom I am confin'd. Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best, Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu'd To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pity me then and wish I were renew'd; Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection; No bitterness that I will bitter think, Nor double penance, to correct correction. Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye Even that your pity is enough to cure me.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had Past reason hated as a swallowed bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so, Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, [......] these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more. So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And, Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
And like a dying lady, lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky East, A white and shapeless mass.
From the forests and highlands We come, we come; From the river-girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb Listening to my sweet pipings. The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings. Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings. The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves, To the edge of the moist river-lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings. I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven, and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth— And then I chang'd my pipings, Singing how down the vale of Maenalus I pursu'd a maiden and clasp'd a reed. Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed. All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given: Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour: Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance and mutability. Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers' eyes; Thou, that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not—lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard; I saw them not; When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of birds and blossoming, Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy! I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatch'd with me the envious night: They know that never joy illum'd my brow Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express. The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind.
I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low, And the stars are shining bright: I arise from dreams of thee, And a spirit in my feet Hath led me—who knows how? To thy chamber window, Sweet!  The wandering airs they faint On the dark, the silent stream— The Champak odours fail Like sweet thoughts in a dream; The Nightingale's complaint, It dies upon her heart;— As I must on thine, Oh, belovèd as thou art!  Oh lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain On my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast;— Oh! press it to thine own again, Where it will break at last.
(excerpt) I rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepair'd, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean, and this shore More barren than its billows; and yet more Than all, with a remember'd friend I love To ride as then I rode; for the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare, Stripp'd to their depths by the awakening north; And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth Harmonizing with solitude, and sent Into our hearts aëreal merriment. So, as we rode, we talk'd; and the swift thought, Winging itself with laughter, linger'd not, But flew from brain to brain—such glee was ours, Charg'd with light memories of remember'd hours, None slow enough for sadness: till we came Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame. This day had been cheerful but cold, and now The sun was sinking, and the wind also. Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be Talk interrupted with such raillery As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn The thoughts it would extinguish: 'twas forlorn, Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell, The devils held within the dales of Hell Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, All that vain men imagine or believe, Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, We descanted, and I (for ever still Is it not wise to make the best of ill?) Argu'd against despondency, but pride Made my companion take the darker side. The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light. Meanwhile the sun paus'd ere it should alight, Over the horizon of the mountains—Oh, How beautiful is sunset, when the glow Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee, Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy! Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers Of cities they encircle! It was ours To stand on thee, beholding it: and then, Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men Were waiting for us with the gondola. As those who pause on some delightful way Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood Looking upon the evening, and the flood Which lay between the city and the shore, Pav'd with the image of the sky.... The hoar And aëry Alps towards the North appear'd Through mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark rear'd Between the East and West; and half the sky Was roof'd with clouds of rich emblazonry Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew Down the steep West into a wondrous hue Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent Where the swift sun yet paus'd in his descent Among the many-folded hills: they were Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, As seen from Lido thro' the harbour piles, The likeness of a clump of peakèd isles— And then—as if the Earth and Sea had been Dissolv'd into one lake of fire, were seen Those mountains towering as from waves of flame Around the vaporous sun, from which there came The inmost purple spirit of light, and made Their very peaks transparent. "Ere it fade," Said my companion, "I will show you soon A better station"—so, o'er the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark I lean'd, and saw the city, and could mark How from their many isles, in evening's gleam, Its temples and its palaces did seem Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to Heaven. I was about to speak, when—"We are even Now at the point I meant," said Maddalo, And bade the gondolieri cease to row. "Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well If you hear not a deep and heavy bell." I look'd, and saw between us and the sun A building on an island; such a one As age to age might add, for uses vile, A windowless, deform'd and dreary pile; And on the top an open tower, where hung A bell, which in the radiance sway'd and swung; We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue: The broad sun sunk behind it, and it toll'd In strong and black relief. "What we behold Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower," Said Maddalo, "and ever at this hour Those who may cross the water, hear that bell Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell, To vespers." "As much skill as need to pray In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they To their stern Maker," I replied. "O ho! You talk as in years past," said Maddalo. " 'Tis strange men change not. You were ever still Among Christ's flock a perilous infidel, A wolf for the meek lambs—if you can't swim Beware of Providence." I look'd on him, But the gay smile had faded in his eye. "And such," he cried, "is our mortality, And this must be the emblem and the sign Of what should be eternal and divine! And like that black and dreary bell, the soul, Hung in a heaven-illumin'd tower, must toll Our thoughts and our desires to meet below Round the rent heart and pray—as madmen do For what? they know not—till the night of death, As sunset that strange vision, severeth Our memory from itself, and us from all We sought and yet were baffled." I recall The sense of what he said, although I mar The force of his expressions. The broad star Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill, And the black bell became invisible, And the red tower look'd gray, and all between The churches, ships and palaces were seen Huddled in gloom;—into the purple sea The orange hues of heaven sunk silently. We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola Convey'd me to my lodgings by the way.  The following morn was rainy, cold and dim: Ere Maddalo arose, I call'd on him, And whilst I waited with his child I play'd; A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made, A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being, Graceful without design and unforeseeing, With eyes—Oh speak not of her eyes!—which seem Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam With such deep meaning, as we never see But in the human countenance: with me She was a special favourite: I had nurs'd Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first To this bleak world; and she yet seem'd to know On second sight her ancient playfellow, Less chang'd than she was by six months or so; For after her first shyness was worn out We sate there, rolling billiard balls about, When the Count enter'd. Salutations past— "The word you spoke last night might well have cast A darkness on my spirit—if man be The passive thing you say, I should not see Much harm in the religions and old saws (Though I may never own such leaden laws) Which break a teachless nature to the yoke: Mine is another faith"—thus much I spoke And noting he replied not, added: "See This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free; She spends a happy time with little care, While we to such sick thoughts subjected are As came on you last night. It is our will That thus enchains us to permitted ill. We might be otherwise. We might be all We dream of happy, high, majestical. Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek But in our mind? and if we were not weak Should we be less in deed than in desire?" "Ay, if we were not weak—and we aspire How vainly to be strong!" said Maddalo: "You talk Utopia." "It remains to know," I then rejoin'd, "and those who try may find How strong the chains are which our spirit bind; Brittle perchance as straw.... We are assur'd Much may be conquer'd, much may be endur'd, Of what degrades and crushes us. We know That we have power over ourselves to do And suffer—what, we know not till we try; But something nobler than to live and die: So taught those kings of old philosophy Who reign'd, before Religion made men blind; And those who suffer with their suffering kind Yet feel their faith, religion." "My dear friend," Said Maddalo, "my judgement will not bend To your opinion, though I think you might Make such a system refutation-tight As far as words go. I knew one like you Who to this city came some months ago, With whom I argu'd in this sort, and he Is now gone mad—and so he answer'd me— Poor fellow! but if you would like to go We'll visit him, and his wild talk will show How vain are such aspiring theories." "I hope to prove the induction otherwise, And that a want of that true theory, still, Which seeks a 'soul of goodness' in things ill Or in himself or others, has thus bow'd His being. There are some by nature proud, Who patient in all else demand but this— To love and be belov'd with gentleness; And being scorn'd, what wonder if they die Some living death? this is not destiny But man's own wilful ill."  As thus I spoke Servants announc'd the gondola, and we Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea Sail'd to the island where the madhouse stands.
O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb,  Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime?  No more—Oh, never more!  Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight;  Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar, Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight  No more—Oh, never more!
Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of Misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's track; Whilst above, the sunless sky, Big with clouds, hangs heavily, And behind, the tempest fleet Hurries on with lightning feet, Riving sail, and cord, and plank, Till the ship has almost drank Death from the o'er-brimming deep; And sinks down, down, like that sleep When the dreamer seems to be Weltering through eternity; And the dim low line before Of a dark and distant shore Still recedes, as ever still Longing with divided will, But no power to seek or shun, He is ever drifted on O'er the unreposing wave To the haven of the grave. What, if there no friends will greet; What, if there no heart will meet His with love's impatient beat; Wander wheresoe'er he may, Can he dream before that day To find refuge from distress In friendship's smile, in love's caress? Then 'twill wreak him little woe Whether such there be or no: Senseless is the breast and cold Which relenting love would fold; Bloodless are the veins and chill Which the pulse of pain did fill; Every little living nerve That from bitter words did swerve Round the tortur'd lips and brow, Are like sapless leaflets now Frozen upon December's bough. On the beach of a northern sea Which tempests shake eternally, As once the wretch there lay to sleep, Lies a solitary heap, One white skull and seven dry bones, On the margin of the stones, Where a few gray rushes stand, Boundaries of the sea and land: Nor is heard one voice of wail But the sea-mews, as they sail O'er the billows of the gale; Or the whirlwind up and down Howling, like a slaughter'd town, When a king in glory rides Through the pomp of fratricides: Those unburied bones around There is many a mournful sound; There is no lament for him, Like a sunless vapour, dim, Who once cloth'd with life and thought What now moves nor murmurs not. Ay, many flowering islands lie In the waters of wide Agony: To such a one this morn was led My bark, by soft winds piloted: 'Mid the mountains Euganean I stood listening to the paean With which the legion'd rooks did hail The sun's uprise majestical; Gathering round with wings all hoar, Through the dewy mist they soar Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven Bursts, and then, as clouds of even, Fleck'd with fire and azure, lie In the unfathomable sky, So their plumes of purple grain, Starr'd with drops of golden rain, Gleam above the sunlight woods, As in silent multitudes On the morning's fitful gale Through the broken mist they sail, And the vapours cloven and gleaming Follow, down the dark steep streaming, Till all is bright, and clear, and still, Round the solitary hill. Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath Day's azure eyes Ocean's nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destin'd halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half-reclin'd On the level quivering line Of the water crystalline; And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies; As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. Sun-girt City, thou hast been Ocean's child, and then his queen; Now is come a darker day, And thou soon must be his prey, If the power that rais'd thee here Hallow so thy watery bier. A less drear ruin then than now, With thy conquest-branded brow Stooping to the slave of slaves From thy throne, among the waves Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew Flies, as once before it flew, O'er thine isles depopulate, And all is in its ancient state, Save where many a palace gate With green sea-flowers overgrown Like a rock of Ocean's own, Topples o'er the abandon'd sea As the tides change sullenly. The fisher on his watery way, Wandering at the close of day, Will spread his sail and seize his oar Till he pass the gloomy shore, Lest thy dead should, from their sleep Bursting o'er the starlight deep, Lead a rapid masque of death O'er the waters of his path. Those who alone thy towers behold Quivering through a{:e}real gold, As I now behold them here, Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourish'd worms, To the corpse of greatness cling, Murder'd, and now mouldering: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch's hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chain'd like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou and they, Clouds which stain truth's rising day By her sun consum'd away— Earth can spare ye! while like flowers, In the waste of years and hours, From your dust new nations spring With more kindly blossoming. Perish—let there only be Floating o'er thy hearthless sea As the garment of thy sky Clothes the world immortally, One remembrance, more sublime Than the tatter'd pall of time, Which scarce hides thy visage wan: That a tempest-cleaving Swan Of the sons of Albion, Driven from his ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams, Found a nest in thee; and Ocean Welcom'd him with such emotion That its joy grew his, and sprung From his lips like music flung O'er a mighty thunder-fit, Chastening terror: what though yet Poesy's unfailing river, Which through Albion winds forever Lashing with melodious wave Many a sacred Poet's grave, Mourn its latest nursling fled! What though thou with all thy dead Scarce can for this fame repay Aught thine own, oh, rather say Though thy sins and slaveries foul Overcloud a sunlike soul! As the ghost of Homer clings Round Scamander's wasting springs; As divinest Shakespeare's might Fills Avon and the world with light Like omniscient power which he Imag'd 'mid mortality; As the love from Petrarch's urn Yet amid yon hills doth burn, A quenchless lamp by which the heart Sees things unearthly; so thou art, Mighty spirit: so shall be The City that did refuge thee. Lo, the sun floats up the sky Like thought-winged Liberty, Till the universal light Seems to level plain and height; From the sea a mist has spread, And the beams of morn lie dead On the towers of Venice now, Like its glory long ago. By the skirts of that gray cloud Many-domed Padua proud Stands, a peopled solitude, 'Mid the harvest-shining plain, Where the peasant heaps his grain In the garner of his foe, And the milk-white oxen slow With the purple vintage strain, Heap'd upon the creaking wain, That the brutal Celt may swill Drunken sleep with savage will; And the sickle to the sword Lies unchang'd though many a lord, Like a weed whose shade is poison, Overgrows this region's foison, Sheaves of whom are ripe to come To destruction's harvest-home: Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow, Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot's rage, the slave's revenge. Padua, thou within whose walls Those mute guests at festivals, Son and Mother, Death and Sin, Play'd at dice for Ezzelin, Till Death cried, 'I win, I win!' And Sin curs'd to lose the wager, But Death promis'd, to assuage her, That he would petition for Her to be made Vice-Emperor, When the destin'd years were o'er, Over all between the Po And the eastern Alpine snow, Under the mighty Austrian. Sin smil'd so as Sin only can, And since that time, ay, long before, Both have rul'd from shore to shore, That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, As Repentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time. In thine halls the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, It gleams betray'd and to betray: Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame, When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth: Now new fires from antique light Spring beneath the wide world's might; But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by Tyranny. As the Norway woodman quells, In the depth of piny dells, One light flame among the brakes, While the boundless forest shakes, And its mighty trunks are torn By the fire thus lowly born: The spark beneath his feet is dead, He starts to see the flames it fed Howling through the darken'd sky With myriad tongues victoriously, And sinks down in fear: so thou, O Tyranny, beholdest now Light around thee, and thou hearest The loud flames ascend, and fearest: Grovel on the earth; ay, hide In the dust thy purple pride! Noon descends around me now: 'Tis the noon of autumn's glow, When a soft and purple mist Like a vaporous amethyst, Or an air-dissolved star Mingling light and fragrance, far From the curv'd horizon's bound To the point of Heaven's profound, Fills the overflowing sky; And the plains that silent lie Underneath, the leaves unsodden Where the infant Frost has trodden With his morning-winged feet, Whose bright print is gleaming yet; And the red and golden vines, Piercing with their trellis'd lines The rough, dark-skirted wilderness; The dun and bladed grass no less, Pointing from his hoary tower In the windless air; the flower Glimmering at my feet; the line Of the olive-sandall'd Apennine In the south dimly islanded; And the Alps, whose snows are spread High between the clouds and sun; And of living things each one; And my spirit which so long Darken'd this swift stream of song, Interpenetrated lie By the glory of the sky: Be it love, light, harmony, Odour, or the soul of all Which from Heaven like dew doth fall, Or the mind which feeds this verse Peopling the lone universe. Noon descends, and after noon Autumn's evening meets me soon, Leading the infantine moon, And that one star, which to her Almost seems to minister Half the crimson light she brings From the sunset's radiant springs: And the soft dreams of the morn (Which like winged winds had borne To that silent isle, which lies Mid remember'd agonies, The frail bark of this lone being) Pass, to other sufferers fleeing, And its ancient pilot, Pain, Sits beside the helm again. Other flowering isles must be In the sea of Life and Agony: Other spirits float and flee O'er that gulf: even now, perhaps, On some rock the wild wave wraps, With folded wings they waiting sit For my bark, to pilot it To some calm and blooming cove, Where for me, and those I love, May a windless bower be built, Far from passion, pain and guilt, In a dell mid lawny hills, Which the wild sea-murmur fills, And soft sunshine, and the sound Of old forests echoing round, And the light and smell divine Of all flowers that breathe and shine: We may live so happy there, That the Spirits of the Air, Envying us, may even entice To our healing paradise The polluting multitude; But their rage would be subdu'd By that clime divine and calm, And the winds whose wings rain balm On the uplifted soul, and leaves Under which the bright sea heaves; While each breathless interval In their whisperings musical The inspired soul supplies With its own deep melodies, And the love which heals all strife Circling, like the breath of life, All things in that sweet abode With its own mild brotherhood: They, not it, would change; and soon Every sprite beneath the moon Would repent its envy vain, And the earth grow young again.
She left me at the silent time When the moon had ceas'd to climb The azure path of Heaven's steep, And like an albatross asleep, Balanc'd on her wings of light, Hover'd in the purple night, Ere she sought her ocean nest In the chambers of the West. She left me, and I stay'd alone Thinking over every tone Which, though silent to the ear, The enchanted heart could hear, Like notes which die when born, but still Haunt the echoes of the hill; And feeling ever—oh, too much!— The soft vibration of her touch, As if her gentle hand, even now, Lightly trembled on my brow; And thus, although she absent were, Memory gave me all of her That even Fancy dares to claim: Her presence had made weak and tame All passions, and I lived alone In the time which is our own; The past and future were forgot, As they had been, and would be, not. But soon, the guardian angel gone, The daemon reassum'd his throne In my faint heart. I dare not speak My thoughts, but thus disturb'd and weak I sat and saw the vessels glide Over the ocean bright and wide, Like spirit-winged chariots sent O'er some serenest element For ministrations strange and far, As if to some Elysian star Sailed for drink to medicine Such sweet and bitter pain as mine. And the wind that wing'd their flight From the land came fresh and light, And the scent of winged flowers, And the coolness of the hours Of dew, and sweet warmth left by day, Were scatter'd o'er the twinkling bay. And the fisher with his lamp And spear about the low rocks damp Crept, and struck the fish which came To worship the delusive flame. Too happy they, whose pleasure sought Extinguishes all sense and thought Of the regret that pleasure leaves, Destroying life alone, not peace!
The cold earth slept below; Above the cold sky shone; And all around, With a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow The breath of night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon. The wintry hedge was black; The green grass was not seen; The birds did rest On the bare thorn’s breast, Whose roots, beside the pathway track, Had bound their folds o’er many a crack Which the frost had made between. Thine eyes glow’d in the glare Of the moon’s dying light; As a fen-fire’s beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly—so the moon shone there, And it yellow’d the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook in the wind of night. The moon made thy lips pale, beloved; The wind made thy bosom chill; The night did shed On thy dear head Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will.
I The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. II Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear—an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity; Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound— Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! III Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.—I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales! Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone, And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. IV The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil; Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream, And their place is not known. Below, vast caves Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air. V Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind's imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?
I Art thou pale for weariness  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless  Among the stars that have a different birth, —  And ever changing, like a joyless eye  That finds no object worth its constancy? II Thou chosen sister of the Spirit,  That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory— Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.  Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
The flower that smiles to-day To-morrow dies; All that we wish to stay Tempts and then flies. What is this world's delight? Lightning that mocks the night, Brief even as bright. Virtue, how frail it is! Friendship how rare! Love, how it sells poor bliss For proud despair! But we, though soon they fall, Survive their joy, and all Which ours we call. Whilst skies are blue and bright, Whilst flowers are gay, Whilst eyes that change ere night Make glad the day; Whilst yet the calm hours creep, Dream thou—and from thy sleep Then wake to weep.
(excerpt) SCENE.—A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus. Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which Thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair,—these are mine empire:— More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God! Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt? I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm, Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below, Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. Heaven's wingèd hound, polluting from thy lips His beak in poison not his own, tears up My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by, The ghastly people of the realm of dream, Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind: While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. And yet to me welcome is day and night, Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn, Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom —As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim— Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood From these pale feet, which then might trample thee If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven! How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror, Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief, Not exultation, for I hate no more, As then ere misery made me wise. The curse Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, Whose many-voicèd Echoes, through the mist Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost, Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisèd wings Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss, As thunder, louder than your own, made rock The orbèd world! If then my words had power, Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within; although no memory be Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,  Spirit of Delight! Wherefore hast thou left me now  Many a day and night? Many a weary night and day 'Tis since thou are fled away. How shall ever one like me  Win thee back again? With the joyous and the free  Thou wilt scoff at pain. Spirit false! thou hast forgot All but those who need thee not. As a lizard with the shade  Of a trembling leaf, Thou with sorrow art dismay'd;  Even the sighs of grief Reproach thee, that thou art not near, And reproach thou wilt not hear. Let me set my mournful ditty  To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity,  Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay. I love all that thou lovest,  Spirit of Delight! The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,  And the starry night; Autumn evening, and the morn When the golden mists are born. I love snow, and all the forms  Of the radiant frost; I love waves, and winds, and storms,  Everything almost Which is Nature's, and may be Untainted by man's misery. I love tranquil solitude,  And such society As is quiet, wise, and good;  Between thee and me What difference? but thou dost possess The things I seek, not love them less. I love Love—though he has wings,  And like light can flee, But above all other things,  Spirit, I love thee— Thou art love and life! Oh come, Make once more my heart thy home.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light, Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's. I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone,— The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned— Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround— Smiling they live, and call life pleasure; To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan; They might lament—for I am one Whom men love not,—and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.
Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,  Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears!  Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality!  And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;  Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,  Who shall put forth on thee,  Unfathomable Sea?
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead  Is Time long past. A tone which is now forever fled, A hope which is now forever past, A love so sweet it could not last,  Was Time long past.  There were sweet dreams in the night  Of Time long past: And, was it sadness or delight, Each day a shadow onward cast Which made us wish it yet might last—  That Time long past.  There is regret, almost remorse,  For Time long past. 'Tis like a child's belovèd corse A father watches, till at last Beauty is like remembrance, cast  From Time long past.
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task Of glory & of good, the Sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour, & the mask Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. The smokeless altars of the mountain snows Flamed above crimson clouds, & at the birth Of light, the Ocean's orison arose To which the birds tempered their matin lay, All flowers in field or forest which unclose Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day, Swinging their censers in the element, With orient incense lit by the new ray Burned slow & inconsumably, & sent Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air, And in succession due, did Continent, Isle, Ocean, & all things that in them wear The form & character of mortal mould Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear Their portion of the toil which he of old Took as his own & then imposed on them; But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem The cone of night, now they were laid asleep, Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep Of a green Apennine: before me fled The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep Was at my feet, & Heaven above my head When a strange trance over my fancy grew Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread Was so transparent that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn O'er evening hills they glimmer; and I knew That I had felt the freshness of that dawn, Bathed in the same cold dew my brow & hair And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn Under the self same bough, & heard as there The birds, the fountains & the Ocean hold Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air. And then a Vision on my brain was rolled. As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay This was the tenour of my waking dream. Methought I sate beside a public way Thick strewn with summer dust, & a great stream Of people there was hurrying to & fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam, All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know Whither he went, or whence he came, or why He made one of the multitude, yet so Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky One of the million leaves of summer's bier.— Old age & youth, manhood & infancy, Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear, Some flying from the thing they feared & some Seeking the object of another's fear, And others as with steps towards the tomb Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath, And others mournfully within the gloom Of their own shadow walked, and called it death ... And some fled from it as it were a ghost, Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath. But more with motions which each other crost Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw Or birds within the noonday ether lost, Upon that path where flowers never grew; And weary with vain toil & faint for thirst Heard not the fountains whose melodious dew Out of their mossy cells forever burst Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told Of grassy paths, & wood lawns interspersed With overarching elms & caverns cold, And violet banks where sweet dreams brood, but they Pursued their serious folly as of old .... And as I gazed methought that in the way The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June When the South wind shakes the extinguished day.— And a cold glare, intenser than the noon But icy cold, obscured with [[blank]] light The Sun as he the stars. Like the young moon When on the sunlit limits of the night Her white shell trembles amid crimson air And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might Doth, as a herald of its coming, bear The ghost of her dead Mother, whose dim form Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair, So came a chariot on the silent storm Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape So sate within as one whom years deform Beneath a dusky hood & double cape Crouching within the shadow of a tomb, And o'er what seemed the head, a cloud like crape, Was bent a dun & faint etherial gloom Tempering the light; upon the chariot's beam A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume The guidance of that wonder-winged team. The Shapes which drew it in thick lightnings Were lost: I heard alone on the air's soft stream The music of their ever moving wings. All the four faces of that charioteer Had their eyes banded . . . little profit brings Speed in the van & blindness in the rear, Nor then avail the beams that quench the Sun Or that his banded eyes could pierce the sphere Of all that is, has been, or will be done.— So ill was the car guided, but it past With solemn speed majestically on . . . The crowd gave way, & I arose aghast, Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance, And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast The million with fierce song and maniac dance Raging around; such seemed the jubilee As when to greet some conqueror's advance Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea From senatehouse & prison & theatre When Freedom left those who upon the free Had bound a yoke which soon they stooped to bear. Nor wanted here the true similitude Of a triumphal pageant, for where'er The chariot rolled a captive multitude Was driven; althose who had grown old in power Or misery,—all who have their age subdued, By action or by suffering, and whose hour Was drained to its last sand in weal or woe, So that the trunk survived both fruit & flower; All those whose fame or infamy must grow Till the great winter lay the form & name Of their own earth with them forever low, All but the sacred few who could not tame Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon As they had touched the world with living flame Fled back like eagles to their native noon, Of those who put aside the diadem Of earthly thrones or gems, till the last one Were there;—for they of Athens & Jerusalem Were neither mid the mighty captives seen Nor mid the ribald crowd that followed them Or fled before . . Now swift, fierce & obscene The wild dance maddens in the van, & those Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green, Outspeed the chariot & without repose Mix with each other in tempestuous measure To savage music .... Wilder as it grows, They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure, Convulsed & on the rapid whirlwinds spun Of that fierce spirit, whose unholy leisure Was soothed by mischief since the world begun, Throw back their heads & loose their streaming hair, And in their dance round her who dims the Sun Maidens & youths fling their wild arms in air As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now Bending within each other's atmosphere Kindle invisibly; and as they glow Like moths by light attracted & repelled, Oft to new bright destruction come & go. Till like two clouds into one vale impelled That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle And die in rain,—the fiery band which held Their natures, snaps . . . ere the shock cease to tingle One falls and then another in the path Senseless, nor is the desolation single, Yet ere I can say where the chariot hath Past over them; nor other trace I find But as of foam after the Ocean's wrath Is spent upon the desert shore.—Behind, Old men, and women foully disarrayed Shake their grey hair in the insulting wind, Limp in the dance & strain, with limbs decayed, Seeking to reach the light which leaves them still Farther behind & deeper in the shade. But not the less with impotence of will They wheel, though ghastly shadows interpose Round them & round each other, and fulfill Their work and to the dust whence they arose Sink & corruption veils them as they lie And frost in these performs what fire in those. Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry, Half to myself I said, "And what is this? Whose shape is that within the car? & why"- I would have added—"is all here amiss?" But a voice answered . . "Life" . . . I turned & knew (O Heaven have mercy on such wretchedness!) That what I thought was an old root which grew To strange distortion out of the hill side Was indeed one of that deluded crew, And that the grass which methought hung so wide And white, was but his thin discoloured hair, And that the holes it vainly sought to hide Were or had been eyes.—"lf thou canst forbear To join the dance, which I had well forborne," Said the grim Feature, of my thought aware, "I will now tell that which to this deep scorn Led me & my companions, and relate The progress of the pageant since the morn; "If thirst of knowledge doth not thus abate, Follow it even to the night, but I Am weary" . . . Then like one who with the weight Of his own words is staggered, wearily He paused, and ere he could resume, I cried, "First who art thou?" . . . "Before thy memory "I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did, & died, And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit Earth had with purer nutriment supplied "Corruption would not now thus much inherit Of what was once Rousseau—nor this disguise Stained that within which still disdains to wear it.— "If I have been extinguished, yet there rise A thousand beacons from the spark I bore."— "And who are those chained to the car?" "The Wise, "The great, the unforgotten: they who wore Mitres & helms & crowns, or wreathes of light, Signs of thought's empire over thought; their lore "Taught them not this—to know themselves; their might Could not repress the mutiny within, And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night "Caught them ere evening." "Who is he with chin Upon his breast and hands crost on his chain?" "The Child of a fierce hour; he sought to win "The world, and lost all it did contain Of greatness, in its hope destroyed; & more Of fame & peace than Virtue's self can gain "Without the opportunity which bore Him on its eagle's pinion to the peak From which a thousand climbers have before "Fall'n as Napoleon fell."—I felt my cheek Alter to see the great form pass away Whose grasp had left the giant world so weak That every pigmy kicked it as it lay— And much I grieved to think how power & will In opposition rule our mortal day— And why God made irreconcilable Good & the means of good; and for despair I half disdained mine eye's desire to fill With the spent vision of the times that were And scarce have ceased to be . . . "Dost thou behold," Said then my guide, "those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire, "Frederic, & Kant, Catherine, & Leopold, Chained hoary anarch, demagogue & sage Whose name the fresh world thinks already old— "For in the battle Life & they did wage She remained conqueror—I was overcome By my own heart alone, which neither age "Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb Could temper to its object."—"Let them pass"— I cried—"the world & its mysterious doom "Is not so much more glorious than it was That I desire to worship those who drew New figures on its false & fragile glass "As the old faded."—"Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may; We have but thrown, as those before us threw, "Our shadows on it as it past away. But mark, how chained to the triumphal chair The mighty phantoms of an elder day— "All that is mortal of great Plato there Expiates the joy & woe his master knew not; That star that ruled his doom was far too fair— "And Life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not, Conquered the heart by love which gold or pain Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not— "And near [[blank]] walk the [[blank]] twain, The tutor & his pupil, whom Dominion Followed as tame as vulture in a chain.— "The world was darkened beneath either pinion Of him whom from the flock of conquerors Fame singled as her thunderbearing minion; "The other long outlived both woes & wars, Throned in new thoughts of men, and still had kept The jealous keys of truth's eternal doors "If Bacon's spirit [[blank]] had not leapt Like lightning out of darkness; he compelled The Proteus shape of Nature's as it slept "To wake & to unbar the caves that held The treasure of the secrets of its reign— See the great bards of old who inly quelled "The passions which they sung, as by their strain May well be known: their living melody Tempers its own contagion to the vein "Of those who are infected with it—I Have suffered what I wrote, or viler pain!— "And so my words were seeds of misery— Even as the deeds of others."—"Not as theirs," I said—he pointed to a company In which I recognized amid the heirs Of Caesar's crime from him to Constantine, The Anarchs old whose force & murderous snares Had founded many a sceptre bearing line And spread the plague of blood & gold abroad, And Gregory & John and men divine Who rose like shadows between Man & god Till that eclipse, still hanging under Heaven, Was worshipped by the world o'er which they strode For the true Sun it quenched.—"Their power was given But to destroy," replied the leader—"I Am one of those who have created, even "If it be but a world of agony."— "Whence camest thou & whither goest thou? How did thy course begin," I said, "& why? "Mine eyes are sick of this perpetual flow Of people, & my heart of one sad thought.— Speak."—"Whence I came, partly I seem to know, "And how & by what paths I have been brought To this dread pass, methinks even thou mayst guess; Why this should be my mind can compass not; "Whither the conqueror hurries me still less. But follow thou, & from spectator turn Actor or victim in this wretchedness, "And what thou wouldst be taught I then may learn From thee.—Now listen . . . In the April prime When all the forest tops began to burn "With kindling green, touched by the azure clime Of the young year, I found myself asleep Under a mountain which from unknown time "Had yawned into a cavern high & deep, And from it came a gentle rivulet Whose water like clear air in its calm sweep "Bent the soft grass & kept for ever wet The stems of the sweet flowers, and filled the grove With sound which all who hear must needs forget "All pleasure & all pain, all hate & love, Which they had known before that hour of rest: A sleeping mother then would dream not of "The only child who died upon her breast At eventide, a king would mourn no more The crown of which his brow was dispossest "When the sun lingered o'er the Ocean floor To gild his rival's new prosperity.— Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore "Ills, which if ills, can find no cure from thee, The thought of which no other sleep will quell Nor other music blot from memory— "So sweet & deep is the oblivious spell.— Whether my life had been before that sleep The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell "Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep, I know not. I arose & for a space The scene of woods & waters seemed to keep, "Though it was now broad day, a gentle trace Of light diviner than the common Sun Sheds on the common Earth, but all the place "Was filled with many sounds woven into one Oblivious melody, confusing sense Amid the gliding waves & shadows dun; "And as I looked the bright omnipresence Of morning through the orient cavern flowed, And the Sun's image radiantly intense "Burned on the waters of the well that glowed Like gold, and threaded all the forest maze With winding paths of emerald fire—there stood "Amid the sun, as he amid the blaze Of his own glory, on the vibrating Floor of the fountain, paved with flashing rays, "A shape all light, which with one hand did fling Dew on the earth, as if she were the Dawn Whose invisible rain forever seemed to sing "A silver music on the mossy lawn, And still before her on the dusky grass Iris her many coloured scarf had drawn.— "In her right hand she bore a crystal glass Mantling with bright Nepenthe;—the fierce splendour Fell from her as she moved under the mass "Of the deep cavern, & with palms so tender Their tread broke not the mirror of its billow, Glided along the river, and did bend her "Head under the dark boughs, till like a willow Her fair hair swept the bosom of the stream That whispered with delight to be their pillow.— "As one enamoured is upborne in dream O'er lily-paven lakes mid silver mist To wondrous music, so this shape might seem "Partly to tread the waves with feet which kist The dancing foam, partly to glide along The airs that roughened the moist amethyst, "Or the slant morning beams that fell among The trees, or the soft shadows of the trees; And her feet ever to the ceaseless song "Of leaves & winds & waves & birds & bees And falling drops moved in a measure new Yet sweet, as on the summer evening breeze "Up from the lake a shape of golden dew Between two rocks, athwart the rising moon, Moves up the east, where eagle never flew.— "And still her feet, no less than the sweet tune To which they moved, seemed as they moved, to blot The thoughts of him who gazed on them, & soon "All that was seemed as if it had been not, As if the gazer's mind was strewn beneath Her feet like embers, & she, thought by thought, "Trampled its fires into the dust of death, As Day upon the threshold of the east Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath "Of darkness reillumines even the least Of heaven's living eyes—like day she came, Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased "To move, as one between desire and shame Suspended, I said—'If, as it doth seem, Thou comest from the realm without a name, " 'Into this valley of perpetual dream, Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why— Pass not away upon the passing stream.' " 'Arise and quench thy thirst,' was her reply, And as a shut lily, stricken by the wand Of dewy morning's vital alchemy, "I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, And suddenly my brain became as sand "Where the first wave had more than half erased The track of deer on desert Labrador, Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed "Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore Until the second bursts—so on my sight Burst a new Vision never seen before.— "And the fair shape waned in the coming light As veil by veil the silent splendour drops From Lucifer, amid the chrysolite "Of sunrise ere it strike the mountain tops— And as the presence of that fairest planet Although unseen is felt by one who hopes "That his day's path may end as he began it In that star's smile, whose light is like the scent Of a jonquil when evening breezes fan it, "Or the soft note in which his dear lament The Brescian shepherd breathes, or the caress That turned his weary slumber to content.— "So knew I in that light's severe excess The presence of that shape which on the stream Moved, as I moved along the wilderness, "More dimly than a day appearing dream, The ghost of a forgotten form of sleep A light from Heaven whose half extinguished beam "Through the sick day in which we wake to weep Glimmers, forever sought, forever lost.— So did that shape its obscure tenour keep "Beside my path, as silent as a ghost; But the new Vision, and its cold bright car, With savage music, stunning music, crost "The forest, and as if from some dread war Triumphantly returning, the loud million Fiercely extolled the fortune of her star.— "A moving arch of victory the vermilion And green & azure plumes of Iris had Built high over her wind-winged pavilion, "And underneath aetherial glory clad The wilderness, and far before her flew The tempest of the splendour which forbade Shadow to fall from leaf or stone;—the crew Seemed in that light like atomies that dance Within a sunbeam.—Some upon the new "Embroidery of flowers that did enhance The grassy vesture of the desart, played, Forgetful of the chariot's swift advance; "Others stood gazing till within the shade Of the great mountain its light left them dim.— Others outspeeded it, and others made "Circles around it like the clouds that swim Round the high moon in a bright sea of air, And more did follow, with exulting hymn, "The chariot & the captives fettered there, But all like bubbles on an eddying flood Fell into the same track at last & were "Borne onward.—I among the multitude Was swept; me sweetest flowers delayed not long, Me not the shadow nor the solitude, "Me not the falling stream's Lethean song, Me, not the phantom of that early form Which moved upon its motion,—but among "The thickest billows of the living storm I plunged, and bared my bosom to the clime Of that cold light, whose airs too soon deform.— "Before the chariot had begun to climb The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme "Of him whom from the lowest depths of Hell Through every Paradise & through all glory Love led serene, & who returned to tell "In words of hate & awe the wondrous story How all things are transfigured, except Love; For deaf as is a sea which wrath makes hoary "The world can hear not the sweet notes that move The sphere whose light is melody to lovers—- A wonder worthy of his rhyme—the grove "Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers, The earth was grey with phantoms, & the air Was peopled with dim forms, as when there hovers "A flock of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bring ere evening Strange night upon some Indian isle,—thus were "Phantoms diffused around, & some did fling Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves, Behind them, some like eaglets on the wing "Were lost in the white blaze, others like elves Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes Upon the sunny streams & grassy shelves; "And others sate chattering like restless apes On vulgar paws and voluble like fire. Some made a cradle of the ermined capes "Of kingly mantles, some upon the tiar Of pontiffs sate like vultures, others played Within the crown which girt with empire "A baby's or an idiot's brow, & made Their nests in it; the old anatomies Sate hatching their bare brood under the shade "Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes To reassume the delegated power Arrayed in which these worms did monarchize "Who make this earth their charnel.—Others more Humble, like falcons sate upon the fist Of common men, and round their heads did soar, "Or like small gnats & flies, as thick as mist On evening marshes, thronged about the brow Of lawyer, statesman, priest & theorist, "And others like discoloured flakes of snow On fairest bosoms & the sunniest hair Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow "Which they extinguished; for like tears, they were A veil to those from whose faint lids they rained In drops of sorrow.—I became aware "Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained The track in which we moved; after brief space From every form the beauty slowly waned, "From every firmest limb & fairest face The strength & freshness fell like dust, & left The action & the shape without the grace "Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone Desire like a lioness bereft "Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown "In Autumn evening from a popular tree— Each, like himself & like each other were, At first, but soon distorted, seemed to be "Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air; And of this stuff the car's creative ray Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there "As the sun shapes the clouds—thus, on the way Mask after mask fell from the countenance And form of all, and long before the day "Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven's glance The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died, And some grew weary of the ghastly dance "And fell, as I have fallen by the way side, Those soonest from whose forms most shadows past And least of strength & beauty did abide."— "Then, what is Life?" I said . . . the cripple cast His eye upon the car which now had rolled Onward, as if that look must be the last, And answered .... "Happy those for whom the fold Of ...
One word is too often profaned  For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained  For thee to disdain it; One hope is too like despair  For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear  Than that from another.  I can give not what men call love,  But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above  And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star,  Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar  From the sphere of our sorrow?
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!  Bird thou never wert,  That from Heaven, or near it,  Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.  Higher still and higher  From the earth thou springest  Like a cloud of fire;  The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.  In the golden lightning  Of the sunken sun,  O'er which clouds are bright'ning,  Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.  The pale purple even  Melts around thy flight;  Like a star of Heaven,  In the broad day-light Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,  Keen as are the arrows  Of that silver sphere,  Whose intense lamp narrows  In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.  All the earth and air  With thy voice is loud,  As, when night is bare,  From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.  What thou art we know not;  What is most like thee?  From rainbow clouds there flow not  Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.  Like a Poet hidden  In the light of thought,  Singing hymns unbidden,  Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:  Like a high-born maiden  In a palace-tower,  Soothing her love-laden  Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:  Like a glow-worm golden  In a dell of dew,  Scattering unbeholden  Its a{:e}real hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:  Like a rose embower'd  In its own green leaves,  By warm winds deflower'd,  Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:  Sound of vernal showers  On the twinkling grass,  Rain-awaken'd flowers,  All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.  Teach us, Sprite or Bird,  What sweet thoughts are thine:  I have never heard  Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.  Chorus Hymeneal,  Or triumphal chant,  Match'd with thine would be all  But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.  What objects are the fountains  Of thy happy strain?  What fields, or waves, or mountains?  What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?  With thy clear keen joyance  Languor cannot be:  Shadow of annoyance  Never came near thee: Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.  Waking or asleep,  Thou of death must deem  Things more true and deep  Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?  We look before and after,  And pine for what is not:  Our sincerest laughter  With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.  Yet if we could scorn  Hate, and pride, and fear;  If we were things born  Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.  Better than all measures  Of delightful sound,  Better than all treasures  That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!  Teach me half the gladness  That thy brain must know,  Such harmonious madness  From my lips would flow The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
Swiftly walk o'er the western wave,  Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear,—  Swift be thy flight!  Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,  Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out, Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand—  Come, long-sought!  When I arose and saw the dawn,  I sighed for thee; When light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, And the weary Day turned to his rest, Lingering like an unloved guest.  I sighed for thee.  Thy brother Death came, and cried,  Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmured like a noontide bee, Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me?—And I replied,  No, not thee!  Death will come when thou art dead,  Soon, too soon— Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, belovèd Night— Swift be thine approaching flight,  Come soon, soon!
from Certain Sonnets Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust; And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things; Grow rich in that which never taketh rust; Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings. Draw in thy beams and humble all thy might To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light, That doth both shine and give us sight to see. O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide In this small course which birth draws out to death, And think how evil becometh him to slide, Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heav'nly breath. Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see: Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.
Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread; For Love is dead— All love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdain; Worth, as nought worth, rejected, And Faith fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Weep, neighbours, weep; do you not hear it said That Love is dead? His death-bed, peacock's folly; His winding-sheet is shame; His will, false-seeming holy; His sole exec'tor, blame. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Let dirge be sung and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead; Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart, Which epitaph containeth, "Her eyes were once his dart." From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female franzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! Alas, I lie, rage hath this error bred; Love is not dead; Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind, Where she his counsel keepeth, Till due desert she find. Therefore from so vile fancy, To call such wit a franzy, Who Love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us!
My true-love hath my heart and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given: I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a bargain better driven. His heart in me keeps me and him in one; My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides: He loves my heart, for once it was his own; I cherish his because in me it bides. His heart his wound received from my sight; My heart was wounded with his wounded heart; For as from me on him his hurt did light, So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart: Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss, My true love hath my heart and I have his.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. For he rolls upon prank to work it in. For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. For this he performs in ten degrees. For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean. For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended. For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly he washes himself. For sixthly he rolls upon wash. For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat. For eighthly he rubs himself against a post. For ninthly he looks up for his instructions. For tenthly he goes in quest of food. For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour. For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance. For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins. For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger. For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses. For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation. For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat. For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit. For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt. For every family had one cat at least in the bag. For the English Cats are the best in Europe. For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped. For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly. For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. For he is tenacious of his point. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat. For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat. For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music. For he is docile and can learn certain things. For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation. For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment. For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive. For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command. For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom. For he can catch the cork and toss it again. For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser. For the former is afraid of detection. For the latter refuses the charge. For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business. For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly. For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land. For his ears are so acute that they sting again. For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention. For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.
(excerpt) Sweet is the dew that falls betimes, And drops upon the leafy limes;  Sweet Hermon's fragrant air: Sweet is the lily's silver bell, And sweet the wakeful tapers smell  That watch for early pray'r.  Sweet the young nurse with love intense, Which smiles o'er sleeping innocence;  Sweet when the lost arrive: Sweet the musician's ardour beats, While his vague mind's in quest of sweets,  The choicest flow'rs to hive.  Sweeter in all the strains of love, The language of thy turtle dove,  Pair'd to thy swelling chord; Sweeter with ev'ry grace endu'd, The glory of thy gratitude,  Respir'd unto the Lord.  Strong is the horse upon his speed; Strong in pursuit the rapid glede,  Which makes at once his game: Strong the tall ostrich on the ground; Strong thro' the turbulent profound  Shoots xiphias to his aim.  Strong is the lion—like a coal His eye-ball—like a bastion's mole  His chest against the foes: Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail, Strong against tide, th' enormous whale  Emerges as he goes.  But stronger still, in earth and air, And in the sea, the man of pray'r;  And far beneath the tide; And in the seat to faith assign'd, Where ask is have, where seek is find, Where knock is open wide.  Beauteous the fleet before the gale; Beauteous the multitudes in mail,  Rank'd arms and crested heads: Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild, Walk, water, meditated wild,  And all the bloomy beds.  Beauteous the moon full on the lawn; And beauteous, when the veil's withdrawn,  The virgin to her spouse: Beauteous the temple deck'd and fill'd, When to the heav'n of heav'ns they build  Their heart-directed vows.  Beauteous, yea beauteous more than these, The shepherd king upon his knees,  For his momentous trust; With wish of infinite conceit, For man, beast, mute, the small and great,  And prostrate dust to dust.  Precious the bounteous widow's mite; And precious, for extreme delight,  The largess from the churl: Precious the ruby's blushing blaze, And alba's blest imperial rays,  And pure cerulean pearl.  Precious the penitential tear; And precious is the sigh sincere,  Acceptable to God: And precious are the winning flow'rs, In gladsome Israel's feast of bow'rs,  Bound on the hallow'd sod.  More precious that diviner part Of David, ev'n the Lord's own heart,  Great, beautiful, and new: In all things where it was intent, In all extremes, in each event,  Proof—answ'ring true to true.  Glorious the sun in mid career; Glorious th' assembled fires appear;  Glorious the comet's train: Glorious the trumpet and alarm; Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;  Glorious th' enraptur'd main:  Glorious the northern lights a-stream; Glorious the song, when God's the theme;  Glorious the thunder's roar: Glorious hosanna from the den; Glorious the catholic amen;  Glorious the martyr's gore:  Glorious—more glorious is the crown Of Him that brought salvation down  By meekness, call'd thy Son; Thou that stupendous truth believ'd, And now the matchless deed's achiev'd,  Determin'd, dar'd, and done.
Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,  Make thy self flutt'ring wings of thy fast flying  Thought, and fly forth unto my love, wheresoever she be: Whether lying restless in heavy bed, or else  Sitting so cheerless at the cheerful board, or else  Playing alone careless on her heavenly virginals. If in bed, tell her, that my eyes can take no rest:  If at board, tell her, that my mouth can eat no meat:  If at her virginals, tell her, I can hear no mirth. Asked why? say: waking love suffereth no sleep:  Say that raging love doth appal the weak stomach:  Say, that lamenting love marreth the musical. Tell her, that her pleasures were wont to lull me asleep:  Tell her, that her beauty was wont to feed mine eyes:  Tell her, that her sweet tongue was wont to make me mirth. Now do I nightly waste, wanting my kindly rest:  Now do I daily starve, wanting my lively food:  Now do I always die, wanting thy timely mirth. And if I waste, who will bewail my heavy chance?  And if I starve, who will record my cursed end?  And if I die, who will say: "This was Immerito"?
By that he ended had his ghostly sermon, The fox was well induc'd to be a parson, And of the priest eftsoons gan to inquire, How to a benefice he might aspire. "Marry, there" (said the priest) "is art indeed: Much good deep learning one thereout may read; For that the ground-work is, and end of all, How to obtain a beneficial. First, therefore, when ye have in handsome wise Yourself attired, as you can devise, Then to some nobleman yourself apply, Or other great one in the worldes eye, That hath a zealous disposition To God, and so to his religion. There must thou fashion eke a godly zeal, Such as no carpers may contrare reveal; For each thing feigned ought more wary be. There thou must walk in sober gravity, And seem as saint-like as Saint Radegund: Fast much, pray oft, look lowly on the ground, And unto every one do courtesy meek: These looks (nought saying) do a benefice seek, But be thou sure one not to lack or long. And if thee list unto the court to throng, And there to hunt after the hoped prey, Then must thou thee dispose another way: For there thou needs must learn to laugh, to lie, To face, to forge, to scoff, to company, To crouch, to please, to be a beetle-stock Of thy great master's will, to scorn, or mock. So may'st thou chance mock out a benefice, Unless thou canst one conjure by device, Or cast a figure for a bishopric; And if one could, it were but a school trick. These be the ways by which without reward Livings in court be gotten, though full hard; For nothing there is done without a fee: The courtier needs must recompensed be With a benevolence, or have in gage The primitias of your parsonage: Scarce can a bishopric forpass them by, But that it must be gelt in privity. Do not thou therefore seek a living there, But of more private persons seek elsewhere, Whereas thou may'st compound a better penny, Ne let thy learning question'd be of any. For some good gentleman, that hath the right Unto his church for to present a wight, Will cope with thee in reasonable wise; That if the living yearly do arise To forty pound, that then his youngest son Shall twenty have, and twenty thou hast won: Thou hast it won, for it is of frank gift, And he will care for all the rest to shift, Both that the bishop may admit of thee, And that therein thou may'st maintained be. This is the way for one that is unlearn'd Living to get, and not to be discern'd. But they that are great clerks, have nearer ways, For learning sake to living them to raise; Yet many eke of them (God wot) are driven T' accept a benefice in pieces riven. How say'st thou (friend), have I not well discourst Upon this common-place (though plain, not worst)? Better a short tale than a bad long shriving. Needs any more to learn to get a living?" "Now sure, and by my halidom," (quoth he) "Ye a great master are in your degree: Great thanks I yield you for your discipline, And do not doubt but duly to incline My wits thereto, as ye shall shortly hear." The priest him wish'd good speed, and well to fare: So parted they, as either's way them led. But th' ape and fox ere long so well them sped, Through the priest's wholesome counsel lately taught, And through their own fair handling wisely wrought, That they a benefice 'twixt them obtained; And crafty Reynold was a priest ordained, And th' ape his parish clerk procur'd to be. Then made they revel rout and goodly glee; But, ere long time had passed, they so ill Did order their affairs, that th' evil will Of all their parish'ners they had constrain'd; Who to the Ordinary of them complain'd, How foully they their offices abus'd, And them of crimes and heresies accus'd, That pursuivants he often for them sent; But they neglected his commandement. So long persisted obstinate and bold, Till at the length he published to hold A visitation, and them cited thether: Then was high time their wits about to geather. What did they then, but made a composition With their next neighbour priest, for light condition, To whom their living they resigned quite For a few pence, and ran away by night.
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air Sweet breathing Zephyrus did softly play, A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair; When I whose sullen care, Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In prince's court, and expectation vain Of idle hopes, which still do fly away Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain, Walked forth to ease my pain Along the shore of silver streaming Thames, Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems, Was painted all with variable flowers, And all the meads adorned with dainty gems, Fit to deck maidens' bowers, And crown their paramours, Against the bridal day, which is not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. There, in a meadow, by the river's side, A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy, All lovely daughters of the flood thereby, With goodly greenish locks, all loose untied, As each had been a bride; And each one had a little wicker basket, Made of fine twigs, entrailed curiously, In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket, And with fine fingers cropt full featously The tender stalks on high. Of every sort, which in that meadow grew, They gathered some; the violet pallid blue, The little daisy, that at evening closes, The virgin lily, and the primrose true, With store of vermeil roses, To deck their bridegrooms' posies Against the bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. With that, I saw two swans of goodly hue Come softly swimming down along the Lee; Two fairer birds I yet did never see. The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew, Did never whiter shew, Nor Jove himself, when he a swan would be For love of Leda, whiter did appear:Yet Leda was they say as white as he, Yet not so white as these, nor nothing near. So purely white they were, That even the gentle stream, the which them bare, Seemed foul to them, and bade his billows spare To wet their silken feathers, lest they might Soil their fair plumes with water not so fair, And mar their beauties bright, That shone as heaven's light, Against their bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. Eftsoons the nymphs, which now had flowers their fill, Ran all in haste, to see that silver brood, As they came floating on the crystal flood. Whom when they saw, they stood amazed still, Their wondering eyes to fill. Them seemed they never saw a sight so fair, Of fowls so lovely, that they sure did deem Them heavenly born, or to be that same pair Which through the sky draw Venus' silver team; For sure they did not seem To be begot of any earthly seed, But rather angels, or of angels' breed: Yet were they bred of Somers-heat they say, In sweetest season, when each flower and weed The earth did fresh array, So fresh they seemed as day, Even as their bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. Then forth they all out of their baskets drew Great store of flowers, the honour of the field, That to the sense did fragrant odours yield, All which upon those goodly birds they threw, And all the waves did strew, That like old Peneus' waters they did seem, When down along by pleasant Tempe's shore, Scattered with flowers, through Thessaly they stream, That they appear through lilies' plenteous store, Like a bride's chamber floor. Two of those nymphs meanwhile, two garlands bound, Of freshest flowers which in that mead they found, The which presenting all in trim array, Their snowy foreheads therewithal they crowned, Whilst one did sing this lay, Prepared against that day, Against their bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. 'Ye gentle birds, the world's fair ornament, And heaven's glory, whom this happy hour Doth lead unto your lovers' blissful bower, Joy may you have and gentle heart's content Of your love's complement: And let fair Venus, that is queen of love, With her heart-quelling son upon you smile, Whose smile, they say, hath virtue to remove All love's dislike, and friendship's faulty guile For ever to assoil. Let endless peace your steadfast hearts accord, And blessed plenty wait upon your board, And let your bed with pleasures chaste abound, That fruitful issue may to you afford, Which may your foes confound, And make your joys redound Upon your bridal day, which is not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.' So ended she; and all the rest around To her redoubled that her undersong, Which said their bridal day should not be long. And gentle echo from the neighbour ground Their accents did resound. So forth those joyous birds did pass along, Adown the Lee, that to them murmured low, As he would speak, but that he lacked a tongue, Yet did by signs his glad affection show, Making his stream run slow. And all the fowl which in his flood did dwell Gan flock about these twain, that did excel The rest so far as Cynthia doth shend The lesser stars. So they, enranged well, Did on those two attend, And their best service lend, Against their wedding day, which was not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. At length they all to merry London came, To merry London, my most kindly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native source; Though from another place I take my name, An house of ancient fame. There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad aged back do ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride: Next whereunto there stands a stately place, Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace Of that great lord, which therein wont to dwell, Whose want too well now feels my friendless case. But ah, here fits not well Old woes but joys to tell Against the bridal day, which is not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer, Great England's glory, and the world's wide wonder, Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder, And Hercules' two pillars standing near Did make to quake and fear: Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry, That fillest England with thy triumph's fame, Joy have thou of thy noble victory, And endless happiness of thine own name That promiseth the same: That through thy prowess and victorious arms, Thy country may be freed from foreign harms; And great Elisa's glorious name may ring Through all the world, filled with thy wide alarms, Which some brave Muse may sing To ages following, Upon the bridal day, which is not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. From those high towers this noble lord issuing, Like radiant Hesper when his golden hair In th'Ocean billows he hath bathed fair, Descended to the river's open viewing, With a great train ensuing. Above the rest were goodly to be seen Two gentle knights of lovely face and feature Beseeming well the bower of any queen, With gifts of wit and ornaments of nature, Fit for so goodly stature; That like the twins of Jove they seemed in sight, Which deck the baldric of the heavens bright. They two forth pacing to the river's side, Received those two fair birds, their love's delight; Which, at th' appointed tide, Each one did make his bride Against their bridal day, which is not long: Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
THENOT & HOBBINOLL Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete? What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne? Or is thy Bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete? Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne? Or bene thine eyes attempred to the yeare, Quenching the gasping furrowes thirst with rayne? Like April shoure, so stremes the trickling teares Adowne thy cheeke, to quenche thy thristye payne. HOBBINOLL Nor thys, nor that, so muche doeth make me mourne, But for the ladde, whome long I lovd so deare, Nowe loves a lasse, that all his love doth scorne: He plongd in payne, his tressed locks dooth teare. Shepheards delights he dooth them all forsweare, Hys pleasaunt Pipe, whych made us meriment, He wylfully hath broke, and doth forbeare His wonted songs, wherein he all outwent. THENOT What is he for a Ladde, you so lament? Ys love such pinching payne to them, that prove? And hath he skill to make so excellent, Yet hath so little skill to brydle love? HOBBINOLL Colin thou kenst, the Southerne shepheardes boye: Him Love hath wounded with a deadly darte. Whilome on him was all my care and joye, Forcing with gyfts to winne his wanton heart. But now from me hys madding mynd is starte, And woes the Widdowes daughter of the glenne: So nowe fayre Rosalind hath bredde hys smart, So now his frend is chaunged for a frenne. THENOT But if hys ditties bene so trimly dight, I pray thee Hobbinoll, recorde some one: The whiles our flockes doe graze about in sight, And we close shrowded in thys shade alone. HOBBINOLL Contented I: then will I singe his laye Of fayre Elisa, Queene of shepheardes all: Which once he made, as by a spring he laye, And tuned it unto the Waters fall. Ye dayntye Nymphs, that in this blessed Brooke doe bathe your brest, Forsake your watry bowres, and hether looke, at my request: And eke you Virgins, that on Parnasse dwell, Whence floweth Helicon the learned well, Helpe me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in her sexe doth all excell. Of fayre Eliza be your silver song, that blessed wight: The flowre of Virgins, may shee florish long, In princely plight. For shee is Syrinx daughter without spotte, Which Pan the shepheards God of her begot: So sprong her grace Of heavenly race, No mortall blemishe may her blotte. See, where she sits upon the grassie greene, (O seemely sight) Yclad in Scarlot like a mayden Queene, And Ermines white. Upon her head a Cremosin coronet, With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set: Bayleaves betweene, And Primroses greene Embellish the sweete Violet. Tell me, have ye seene her angelick face, Like Ph{oe}be fayre? Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace can you well compare? The Redde rose medled with the White yfere, In either cheeke depeincten lively chere. Her modest eye, Her Majestie, Where have you seene the like, but there? I sawe Ph{oe}bus thrust out his golden hedde, upon her to gaze: But when he sawe, how broade her beames did spredde, it did him amaze. He blusht to see another Sunne belowe, Ne durst againe his fyrye face out showe: Let him, if he dare, His brightnesse compare With hers, to have the overthrowe. Shewe thy selfe Cynthia with thy silver rayes, and be not abasht: When shee the beames of her beauty displayes, O how art thou dasht? But I will not match her with Latonaes seede, Such follie great sorow to Niobe did breede. Now she is a stone, And makes dayly mone, Warning all other to take heede. Pan may be proud, that ever he begot such a Bellibone, And Syrinx rejoyse, that ever was her lot to beare such an one. Soone as my younglings cryen for the dam, To her will I offer a milkwhite Lamb: Shee is my goddesse plaine, And I her shepherds swayne, Albee forswonck and forswatt I am. I see Calliope speede her to the place, where my Goddesse shines: And after her the other Muses trace, with their Violines. Bene they not Bay braunches, which they doe beare, All for Elisa in her hand to weare? So sweetely they play, And sing all the way, That it a heaven is to heare. Lo how finely the graces can it foote to the Instrument: They dauncen deffly, and singen soote, in their meriment. Wants not a fourth grace, to make the daunce even? Let that rowme to my Lady be yeven: She shalbe a grace, To fyll the fourth place, And reigne with the rest in heaven. And whither rennes this bevie of Ladies bright, raunged in a rowe? They bene all Ladyes of the lake behight, that unto her goe. Chloris, that is the chiefest Nymph of al, Of Olive braunches beares a Coronall: Olives bene for peace, When wars doe surcease: Such for a Princesse bene principall. Ye shepheards daughters, that dwell on the greene, hye you there apace: Let none come there, but that Virgins bene, to adorne her grace. And when you come, whereas shee is in place, See, that your rudeness doe not you disgrace: Binde your fillets faste, And gird in your waste, For more finesse, with a tawdrie lace. Bring hether the Pincke and purple Cullambine, With Gelliflowres: Bring Coronations, and Sops in wine, worne of Paramoures. Strowe me the ground with Daffadowndillies, And Cowslips, and Kingcups, and loved Lillies: The pretie Pawnce, And the Chevisaunce, Shall match with the fayre flowre Delice. Now ryse up Elisa, decked as thou art, in royall aray: And now ye daintie Damsells may depart echeone her way, I feare, I have troubled your troupes to longe: Let dame Eliza thanke you for her song. And if you come hether, When Damsines I gether, I will part them all you among. THENOT And was thilk same song of Colins owne making? Ah foolish boy, that is with love yblent: Great pittie is, he be in such taking, For naught caren, that bene so lewdly bent. HOBBINOLL Sicker I hold him, for a greater fon, That loves the thing, he cannot purchase. But let us homeward: for night draweth on, And twincling starres the daylight hence chase. THENOTS EMBLEME O quam te memorem virgo? HOBBINOLLS EMBLEME O dea certe.
PIERCE & CUDDIE Cuddie, for shame hold up thy heavye head, And let us cast with what delight to chace, And weary thys long lingring Phoebus race. Whilome thou wont the shepheards laddes to leade, In rymes, in ridles, and in bydding base: Now they in thee, and thou in sleepe art dead. CUDDY Piers, I have pyped erst so long with payne, That all mine Oten reedes bene rent and wore: And my poore Muse hath spent her spared store, Yet little good hath got, and much lesse gayne, Such pleasaunce makes the Grashopper so poore, And ligge so layd, when Winter doth her straine. The dapper ditties, that I wont devise, To feede youthes fancie, and the flocking fry, Delighten much: what I the bett for thy? They han the pleasure, I a sclender prise. I beate the bush, the byrds to them doe flye: What good thereof to Cuddie can arise? PIERS Cuddie, the prayse is better, then the price, The glory eke much greater then the gayne: O what an honor is it, to restraine The lust of lawlesse youth with good advice: Or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy vaine, Whereto thou list their trayned willes entice. Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame, O how the rurall routes to thee doe cleave: Seemeth thou dost their soule of sence bereave, All as the shepheard, that did fetch his dame From Plutoes balefull bowre withouten leave: His musicks might the hellish hound did tame. CUDDIE So praysen babes the Peacoks spotted traine, And wondren at bright Argus blazing eye: But who rewards him ere the more for thy? Or feedes him once the fuller by a graine? Sike prayse is smoke, that sheddeth in the skye, Sike words bene wynd, and wasten soone in vayne. PIERS Abandon then the base and viler clowne, Lyft up thy selfe out of the lowly dust: And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts. Turne thee to those, that weld the awful crowne, To doubted Knights, whose woundlesse armour rusts, And helmes unbruzed wexen dayly browne. There may thy Muse display her fluttryng wing, And stretch her selfe at large from East to West: Whither thou list in fayre Elisa rest, Or if thee please in bigger notes to sing, Advaunce the worthy whome shee loveth best, That first the white beare to the stake did bring. And when the stubborne stroke of stronger stounds, Has somewhat slackt the tenor of thy string: Of love and lustihed tho mayst thou sing, And carrol lowde, and leade the Myllers rownde, All were Elisa one of thilke same ring. So mought our Cuddies name to Heaven sownde. CUDDYE Indeed the Romish Tityrus, I heare, Through his Mecoenas left his Oaten reede, Whereon he earst had taught his flocks to feede, And laboured lands to yield the timely eare, And eft did sing of warres and deadly drede, So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here. But ah Mecoenas is yclad in claye, And great Augustus long ygoe is dead: And all the worthies liggen wrapt in leade, That matter made for Poets on to play: For ever, who in derring doe were dreade, The loftie verse of hem was loved aye. But after vertue gan for age to stoupe, And mighty manhode brought a bedde of ease: The vaunting Poets found nought worth a pease, To put in preace emong the learned troupe. Tho gan the streames of flowing wittes to cease, And sonnebright honour pend in shamefull coupe. And if that any buddes of Poesie, Yet of the old stocke gan to shoote agayne: Or it mens follies mote be forst to fayne, And rolle with rest in rymes of rybaudrye: Or as it sprong, it wither must agayne: Tom Piper makes us better melodie. PIERS O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place? If nor in Princes pallace thou doe sitt: (And yet is Princes pallace the most fitt) Ne brest of baser birth doth thee embrace. Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit, And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heaven apace. CUDDIE Ah Percy it is all to weake and wanne, So high to sore, and make so large a flight: Her peeced pyneons bene not so in plight, For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne: He, were he not with love so ill bedight, Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne. PIERS Ah fon, for love does teach him climbe so hie, And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre: Such immortall mirrhor, as he doth admire, Would rayse ones mynd above the starry skie. And cause a caytive corage to aspire, For lofty love doth loath a lowly eye. CUDDIE All otherwise the state of Poet stands, For lordly love is such a Tyranne fell: That where he rules, all power he doth expell. The vaunted verse a vacant head demaundes, Ne wont with crabbed care the Muses dwell. Unwisely weaves, that takes two webbes in hand. Who ever casts to compasse weightye prise, And thinks to throwe out thondring words of threate: Let powre in lavish cups and thriftie bitts of meate, For Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise. And when with Wine the braine begins to sweate, The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse. Thou kenst not Percie howe the ryme should rage. O if my temples were distaind with wine, And girt in girlonds of wild Yvie twine, How I could reare the Muse on stately stage, And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine, With queint Bellona in her equipage. But ah my corage cooles ere it be warme, For thy, content us in thys humble shade: Where no such troublous tydes han us assayde, Here we our slender pipes may safely charme. PIERS And when my Gates shall han their bellies layd: Cuddie shall have a Kidde to store his farme. CUDDIES EMBLEME Agitante calescimus illo
Let me thy Properties explain, A rotten Cabin, dropping Rain; Chimnies with Scorn rejecting Smoak; Stools, Tables, Chairs, and Bed-steds broke: Here Elements have lost their Vses, Air ripens not, nor Earth produces: In vain we make poor Sheelah toil, Fire will not roast, nor Water boil. Thro' all the Vallies, Hills, and Plains, The Goddess Want in Triumph reigns; And her chief Officers of State, Sloth, Dirt, and Theft around her wait.
His Grace! impossible! what dead! Of old age too, and in his bed! And could that mighty warrior fall? And so inglorious, after all! Well, since he’s gone, no matter how, The last loud trump must wake him now: And, trust me, as the noise grows stronger, He’d wish to sleep a little longer. And could he be indeed so old As by the newspapers we’re told? Threescore, I think, is pretty high; ’Twas time in conscience he should die This world he cumbered long enough; He burnt his candle to the snuff; And that’s the reason, some folks think, He left behind so great a stink. Behold his funeral appears, Nor widow’s sighs, nor orphan’s tears, Wont at such times each heart to pierce, Attend the progress of his hearse. But what of that, his friends may say, He had those honours in his day. True to his profit and his pride, He made them weep before he died.  Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles raised by breath of kings; Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing’s a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung.
Stella this Day is thirty four, (We won't dispute a Year or more) However Stella, be not troubled, Although thy Size and Years are doubled, Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen The brightest Virgin of the Green, So little is thy Form declin'd Made up so largely in thy Mind. Oh, would it please the Gods to split Thy Beauty, Size, and Years, and Wit, No Age could furnish out a Pair Of Nymphs so gracefull, Wise and fair With half the Lustre of Your Eyes, With half thy Wit, thy Years and Size: And then before it grew too late, How should I beg of gentle Fate, (That either Nymph might have her Swain,) To split my Worship too in twain.
This day, whate'er the Fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me: This day then let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills. To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff. Yet, since from reason may be brought A better and more pleasing thought, Which can, in spite of all decays, Support a few remaining days: From not the gravest of divines Accept for once some serious lines. Although we now can form no more Long schemes of life, as heretofore; Yet you, while time is running fast, Can look with joy on what is past. Were future happiness and pain A mere contrivance of the brain, As atheists argue, to entice And fit their proselytes for vice; (The only comfort they propose, To have companions in their woes;) Grant this the case; yet sure 'tis hard That virtue, styl'd its own reward, And by all sages understood To be the chief of human good, Should, acting, die, nor leave behind Some lasting pleasure in the mind; Which by remembrance will assuage Grief, sickness, poverty, and age; And strongly shoot a radiant dart To shine through life's declining part. Say, Stella, feel you no content, Reflecting on a life well spent? Your skilful hand employ'd to save Despairing wretches from the grave; And then supporting with your store Those whom you dragg'd from death before? So Providence on mortals waits, Preserving what it first creates. Your gen'rous boldness to defend An innocent and absent friend; That courage which can make you just To merit humbled in the dust; The detestation you express For vice in all its glitt'ring dress; That patience under torturing pain, Where stubborn stoics would complain: Must these like empty shadows pass, Or forms reflected from a glass? Or mere chimæras in the mind, That fly, and leave no marks behind? Does not the body thrive and grow By food of twenty years ago? And, had it not been still supplied, It must a thousand times have died. Then who with reason can maintain That no effects of food remain? And is not virtue in mankind The nutriment that feeds the mind; Upheld by each good action past, And still continued by the last? Then, who with reason can pretend That all effects of virtue end? Believe me, Stella, when you show That true contempt for things below, Nor prize your life for other ends, Than merely to oblige your friends; Your former actions claim their part, And join to fortify your heart. For Virtue, in her daily race, Like Janus, bears a double face; Looks back with joy where she has gone And therefore goes with courage on: She at your sickly couch will wait, And guide you to a better state. O then, whatever Heav'n intends, Take pity on your pitying friends! Nor let your ills affect your mind, To fancy they can be unkind. Me, surely me, you ought to spare, Who gladly would your suff'rings share; Or give my scrap of life to you, And think it far beneath your due; You, to whose care so oft I owe That I'm alive to tell you so.
Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons quelque chose, qui ne nous déplaît pas. ["In the hard times of our best friends we find something that doesn't displease us."]  As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew From Nature, I believe 'em true: They argue no corrupted mind In him; the fault is in mankind. This maxim more than all the rest Is thought too base for human breast: "In all distresses of our friends, We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us." If this perhaps your patience move, Let reason and experience prove. We all behold with envious eyes Our equal rais'd above our size. Who would not at a crowded show Stand high himself, keep others low? I love my friend as well as you But would not have him stop my view. Then let him have the higher post: I ask but for an inch at most. If in a battle you should find One, whom you love of all mankind, Had some heroic action done, A champion kill'd, or trophy won; Rather than thus be overtopt, Would you not wish his laurels cropt? Dear honest Ned is in the gout, Lies rack'd with pain, and you without: How patiently you hear him groan! How glad the case is not your own! What poet would not grieve to see His brethren write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in hell. Her end when emulation misses, She turns to envy, stings and hisses: The strongest friendship yields to pride, Unless the odds be on our side. Vain human kind! fantastic race! Thy various follies who can trace? Self-love, ambition, envy, pride, Their empire in our hearts divide. Give others riches, power, and station, 'Tis all on me a usurpation. I have no title to aspire; Yet, when you sink, I seem the higher. In Pope I cannot read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six; It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, "Pox take him and his wit!" Why must I be outdone by Gay In my own hum'rous biting way? Arbuthnot is no more my friend, Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refin'd it first, and show'd its use. St. John, as well as Pultney, knows That I had some repute for prose; And, till they drove me out of date, Could maul a minister of state. If they have mortify'd my pride, And made me throw my pen aside; If with such talents Heav'n has blest 'em, Have I not reason to detest 'em? To all my foes, dear Fortune, send Thy gifts; but never to my friend: I tamely can endure the first, But this with envy makes me burst. Thus much may serve by way of proem: Proceed we therefore to our poem. The time is not remote, when I Must by the course of nature die; When I foresee my special friends Will try to find their private ends: Tho' it is hardly understood Which way my death can do them good, Yet thus, methinks, I hear 'em speak: "See, how the Dean begins to break! Poor gentleman, he droops apace! You plainly find it in his face. That old vertigo in his head Will never leave him till he's dead. Besides, his memory decays: He recollects not what he says; He cannot call his friends to mind: Forgets the place where last he din'd; Plies you with stories o'er and o'er; He told them fifty times before. How does he fancy we can sit To hear his out-of-fashion'd wit? But he takes up with younger folks, Who for his wine will bear his jokes. Faith, he must make his stories shorter, Or change his comrades once a quarter: In half the time he talks them round, There must another set be found. "For poetry he's past his prime: He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decay'd, His fancy sunk, his Muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen;— But there's no talking to some men!" And then their tenderness appears, By adding largely to my years: "He's older than he would be reckon'd And well remembers Charles the Second. "He hardly drinks a pint of wine; And that, I doubt, is no good sign. His stomach too begins to fail: Last year we thought him strong and hale; But now he's quite another thing: I wish he may hold out till spring." Then hug themselves, and reason thus: "It is not yet so bad with us." In such a case, they talk in tropes, And by their fears express their hopes: Some great misfortune to portend, No enemy can match a friend. With all the kindness they profess, The merit of a lucky guess (When daily "How d'ye's" come of course, And servants answer, "Worse and worse!") Would please 'em better, than to tell, That, "God be prais'd, the Dean is well." Then he who prophecy'd the best Approves his foresight to the rest: "You know I always fear'd the worst, And often told you so at first." He'd rather choose that I should die, Than his prediction prove a lie. Not one foretells I shall recover; But all agree to give me over. Yet, should some neighbour feel a pain Just in the parts where I complain, How many a message would he send? What hearty prayers that I should mend? Inquire what regimen I kept, What gave me ease, and how I slept? And more lament when I was dead, Than all the sniv'llers round my bed. My good companions, never fear; For though you may mistake a year, Though your prognostics run too fast, They must be verify'd at last. Behold the fatal day arrive! "How is the Dean?"—"He's just alive." Now the departing prayer is read; "He hardly breathes."—"The Dean is dead." Before the passing-bell begun, The news thro' half the town has run. "O, may we all for death prepare! What has he left? and who's his heir?"— "I know no more than what the news is; 'Tis all bequeath'd to public uses."— "To public use! a perfect whim! What had the public done for him? Mere envy, avarice, and pride: He gave it all—but first he died. And had the Dean, in all the nation, No worthy friend, no poor relation? So ready to do strangers good, Forgetting his own flesh and blood?" Now Grub-Street wits are all employ'd; With elegies the town is cloy'd: Some paragraph in ev'ry paper To curse the Dean or bless the Drapier. The doctors, tender of their fame, Wisely on me lay all the blame: "We must confess his case was nice; But he would never take advice. Had he been rul'd, for aught appears, He might have liv'd these twenty years; For, when we open'd him, we found That all his vital parts were sound." From Dublin soon to London spread, 'Tis told at Court, the Dean is dead. Kind Lady Suffolk in the spleen Runs laughing up to tell the Queen. The Queen, so gracious, mild, and good, Cries, "Is he gone! 'tis time he should. He's dead, you say; why, let him rot: I'm glad the medals were forgot. I promis'd them, I own; but when? I only was the Princess then; But now, as consort of a king, You know, 'tis quite a different thing." Now Chartres, at Sir Robert's levee, Tells with a sneer the tidings heavy: "Why, is he dead without his shoes?" Cries Bob, "I'm sorry for the news: O, were the wretch but living still, And in his place my good friend Will! Or had a mitre on his head, Provided Bolingbroke were dead!" Now Curll his shop from rubbish drains: Three genuine tomes of Swift's remains! And then, to make them pass the glibber, Revis'd by Tibbalds, Moore, and Cibber. He'll treat me as he does my betters, Publish my will, my life, my letters: Revive the libels born to die; Which Pope must bear, as well as I. Here shift the scene, to represent How those I love my death lament. Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay A week, and Arbuthnot a day. St. John himself will scarce forbear To bite his pen, and drop a tear. The rest will give a shrug, and cry, "I'm sorry—but we all must die!" Indifference, clad in Wisdom's guise, All fortitude of mind supplies: For how can stony bowels melt In those who never pity felt? When we are lash'd, they kiss the rod, Resigning to the will of God. The fools, my juniors by a year, Are tortur'd with suspense and fear; Who wisely thought my age a screen, When death approach'd, to stand between: The screen remov'd, their hearts are trembling; They mourn for me without dissembling. My female friends, whose tender hearts Have better learn'd to act their parts, Receive the news in doleful dumps: "The Dean is dead: (and what is trumps?) Then, Lord have mercy on his soul! (Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.) Six deans, they say, must bear the pall: (I wish I knew what king to call.) Madam, your husband will attend The funeral of so good a friend. No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight: And he's engag'd to-morrow night: My Lady Club would take it ill, If he should fail her at quadrille. He lov'd the Dean—(I lead a heart) But dearest friends, they say, must part. His time was come: he ran his race; We hope he's in a better place." Why do we grieve that friends should die? No loss more easy to supply. One year is past; a different scene! No further mention of the Dean; Who now, alas! no more is miss'd, Than if he never did exist. Where's now this fav'rite of Apollo! Departed:—and his works must follow; Must undergo the common fate; His kind of wit is out of date. Some country squire to Lintot goes, Inquires for "Swift in Verse and Prose." Says Lintot, "I have heard the name; He died a year ago."—"The same." He searcheth all his shop in vain. "Sir, you may find them in Duck-lane; I sent them with a load of books, Last Monday to the pastry-cook's. To fancy they could live a year! I find you're but a stranger here. The Dean was famous in his time, And had a kind of knack at rhyme. His way of writing now is past; The town hath got a better taste; I keep no antiquated stuff, But spick and span I have enough. Pray do but give me leave to show 'em; Here's Colley Cibber's birth-day poem. This ode you never yet have seen, By Stephen Duck, upon the Queen. Then here's a letter finely penn'd Against the Craftsman and his friend: It clearly shows that all reflection On ministers is disaffection. Next, here's Sir Robert's vindication, And Mr. Henley's last oration. The hawkers have not got 'em yet: Your honour please to buy a set? "Here's Woolston's tracts, the twelfth edition; 'Tis read by every politician: The country members, when in town, To all their boroughs send them down; You never met a thing so smart; The courtiers have them all by heart: Those maids of honour who can read Are taught to use them for their creed. The rev'rend author's good intention Hath been rewarded with a pension. He doth an honour to his gown, By bravely running priestcraft down: He shows, as sure as God's in Gloucester, That Jesus was a grand imposter; That all his miracles were cheats, Perform'd as jugglers do their feats: The church had never such a writer; A shame he hath not got a mitre!" Suppose me dead; and then suppose A club assembled at the Rose ; Where, from discourse of this and that, I grow the subject of their chat. And while they toss my name about, With favour some, and some without, One, quite indiff'rent in the cause, My character impartial draws: "The Dean, if we believe report, Was never ill receiv'd at Court. As for his works in verse and prose I own myself no judge of those; Nor can I tell what critics thought 'em: But this I know, all people bought 'em. As with a moral view design'd To cure the vices of mankind: His vein, ironically grave, Expos'd the fool, and lash'd the knave. To steal a hint was never known, But what he writ was all his own. "He never thought an honour done him, Because a duke was proud to own him, Would rather slip aside and choose To talk with wits in dirty shoes; Despis'd the fools with stars and garters, So often seen caressing Chartres. He never courted men in station, Nor persons held in admiration; Of no man's greatness was afraid, Because he sought for no man's aid. Though trusted long in great affairs He gave himself no haughty airs: Without regarding private ends, Spent all his credit for his friends; And only chose the wise and good; No flatt'rers; no allies in blood: But succour'd virtue in distress, And seldom fail'd of good success; As numbers in their hearts must own, Who, but for him, had been unknown. "With princes kept a due decorum, But never stood in awe before 'em. He follow'd David's lesson just: 'In princes never put thy trust'; And, would you make him truly sour, Provoke him with a slave in pow'r. The Irish senate if you nam'd, With what impatience he declaim'd! Fair Liberty was all his cry, For her he stood prepar'd to die; For her he boldly stood alone; For her he oft expos'd his own. Two kingdoms, just as faction led, Had set a price upon his head; But not a traitor could be found To sell him for six hundred pound. "Had he but spar'd his tongue and pen He might have rose like other men: But pow'r was never in his thought, And wealth he valu'd not a groat: Ingratitude he often found, And pity'd those who meant the wound: But kept the tenor of his mind, To merit well of human kind: Nor made a sacrifice of those Who still were true, to please his foes. He labour'd many a fruitless hour To reconcile his friends in pow'r; Saw mischief by a faction brewing, While they pursu'd each other's ruin. But, finding vain was all his care, He left the Court in mere despair. "And, oh! how short are human schemes! Here ended all our golden dreams. What St. John's skill in state affairs, What Ormond's valour, Oxford's cares, To save their sinking country lent, Was all destroy'd by one event. Too soon that precious life was ended, On which alone our weal depended. When up a dangerous faction starts, With wrath and vengeance in their hearts; By solemn League and Cov'nant bound, To ruin, slaughter, and confound; To turn religion to a fable, And make the government a Babel; Pervert the law, disgrace the gown, Corrupt the senate, rob the crown; To sacrifice old England's glory, And make her infamous in story: When such a tempest shook the land, How could unguarded Virtue stand? "With horror, grief, despair, the Dean Beheld the dire destructive scene: His friends in exile, or the tower, Himself within the frown of power, Pursu'd by base envenom'd pens, Far to the land of slaves and fens; A servile race in folly nurs'd, Who truckle most when treated worst. "By innocence and resolution, He bore continual persecution, While numbers to preferment rose, Whose merits were, to be his foes; When ev'n his own familiar friends, Intent upon their private ends, Like renegadoes now he feels, Against him lifting up their heels. "The Dean did by his pen defeat An infamous destructive cheat; Taught fools their int'rest how to know, And gave them arms to ward the blow. Envy hath own'd it was his doing, To save that helpless land from ruin; While they who at the steerage stood, And reap'd the profit, sought his blood. "To save them from their evil fate, In him was held a crime of state. A wicked monster on the bench, Whose fury blood could never quench, As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tresilian, Who long all justice had discarded, Nor fear'd he God, nor man regarded, Vow'd on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent; But Heav'n his innocence defends, The grateful people stand his friends. Not strains of law, nor judge's frown, Nor topics brought to please the crown, Nor witness hir'd, nor jury pick'd, Prevail to bring him in convict. "In exile, with a steady heart, He spent his life's declining part; Where folly, pride, and faction sway, Remote from St. John, Pope, and Gay. "His friendships there, to few confin'd, Were always of the middling kind; No fools of rank, a mongrel breed, Who fain would pass for lords indeed: Where titles gave no right or power And peerage is a wither'd flower; He would have held it a disgrace, If such a wretch had known his face. On rural squires, that kingdom's bane, He vented oft his wrath in vain; Biennial squires to market brought; Who sell their souls and votes for nought; The nation stripp'd, go joyful back, To rob the church, their tenants rack, Go snacks with thieves and rapparees, And keep the peace to pick up fees; In ev'ry job to have a share, A jail or barrack to repair; And turn the tax for public roads, Commodious to their own abodes. "Perhaps I may allow, the Dean Had too much satire in his vein; And seem'd determin'd not to starve it, Because no age could more deserve it. Yet malice never was his aim; He lash'd the vice, but spar'd the name; No individual could resent, Where thousands equally were meant. His satire points at no defect, But what all mortals may correct; For he abhorr'd that senseless tribe Who call it humour when they gibe. He spar'd a hump, or crooked nose, Whose owners set not up for beaux. True genuine dulness mov'd his pity, Unless it offer'd to be witty. Those who their ignorance confess'd He ne'er offended with a jest; But laugh'd to hear an idiot quote A verse from Horace, learn'd by rote. "He knew a hundred pleasant stories With all the turns of Whigs and Tories: Was cheerful to his dying day; And friends would let him have his way. "He gave the little wealth he had To build a house for fools and mad; And show'd by one satiric touch, No nation wanted it so much. That kingdom he hath left his debtor, I wish it soon may have a better."
Vicisti, Galilæe. I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep; For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep. Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove; But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love. Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold? I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain. For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath, We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death. O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day! From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say. New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods; They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods. But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof, Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love. I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace, Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease. Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath; And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death; All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire. More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things? Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may? For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears: Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years? Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death. Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May. Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in the end; For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides. O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods! O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods! Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past: Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates, Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits: Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings, And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things, White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled, Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world. The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away; In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey; In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears; With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years: With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour; And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour: And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be; And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea: And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air: And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare. Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods? Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods? All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past; Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last. In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things, Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings. Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod, Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God, Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead. Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned. Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways, And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays. Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wise that ye should not fall. Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all. But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art, Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart, Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white, And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night, And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star, In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun, Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone. Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath; Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death. Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span; A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep. For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.
I Beyond the hollow sunset, ere a star Take heart in heaven from eastward, while the west, Fulfilled of watery resonance and rest, Is as a port with clouds for harbour bar To fold the fleet in of the winds from far That stir no plume now of the bland sea's breast: II Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay Southwestward, far past flight of night and day, Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire, My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way To find the place of souls that I desire. III If any place for any soul there be, Disrobed and disentrammelled; if the might, The fire and force that filled with ardent light The souls whose shadow is half the light we see, Survive and be suppressed not of the night; This hour should show what all day hid from me. IV Night knows not, neither is it shown to day, By sunlight nor by starlight is it shown, Nor to the full moon's eye nor footfall known, Their world's untrodden and unkindled way. Nor is the breath nor music of it blown With sounds of winter or with winds of May. V But here, where light and darkness reconciled Held earth between them as a weanling child Between the balanced hands of death and birth, Even as they held the new-born shape of earth When first life trembled in her limbs and smiled, Here hope might think to find what hope were worth. VI Past Hades, past Elysium, past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook off our temporal coil; VII If yet these twain survive your worldly breath, Joy trampling sorrow, life devouring death, If perfect life possess your life all through And like your words your souls be deathless too, To-night, of all whom night encompasseth, My soul would commune with one soul of you. VIII Above the sunset might I see thine eyes That were above the sundawn in our skies, Son of the songs of morning,—thine that were First lights to lighten that rekindling air Wherethrough men saw the front of England rise And heard thine loudest of the lyre-notes there— IX If yet thy fire have not one spark the less, O Titan, born of her a Titaness, Across the sunrise and the sunset's mark Send of thy lyre one sound, thy fire one spark, To change this face of our unworthiness, Across this hour dividing light from dark. X To change this face of our chill time, that hears No song like thine of all that crowd its ears, Of all its lights that lighten all day long Sees none like thy most fleet and fiery sphere's Outlightening Sirius—in its twilight throng No thunder and no sunrise like thy song. XI Hath not the sea-wind swept the sea-line bare To pave with stainless fire through stainless air A passage for thine heavenlier feet to tread Ungrieved of earthly floor-work? hath it spread No covering splendid as the sun-god's hair To veil or to reveal thy lordlier head? XII Hath not the sunset strewn across the sea A way majestical enough for thee? What hour save this should be thine hour—and mine, If thou have care of any less divine Than thine own soul; if thou take thought of me, Marlowe, as all my soul takes thought of thine? XIII Before the morn's face as before the sun The morning star and evening star are one For all men's lands as England. O, if night Hang hard upon us,—ere our day take flight, Shed thou some comfort from thy day long done On us pale children of the latter light! XIV For surely, brother and master and lord and king, Where'er thy footfall and thy face make spring In all souls' eyes that meet thee wheresoe'er, And have thy soul for sunshine and sweet air— Some late love of thine old live land should cling, Some living love of England, round thee there. XV Here from her shore across her sunniest sea My soul makes question of the sun for thee, And waves and beams make answer. When thy feet Made her ways flowerier and their flowers more sweet With childlike passage of a god to be, Like spray these waves cast off her foemen's fleet. XVI Like foam they flung it from her, and like weed Its wrecks were washed from scornful shoal to shoal, From rock to rock reverberate; and the whole Sea laughed and lightened with a deathless deed That sowed our enemies in her field for seed And made her shores fit harbourage for thy soul. XVII Then in her green south fields, a poor man's child, Thou hadst thy short sweet fill of half-blown joy, That ripens all of us for time to cloy With full-blown pain and passion; ere the wild World caught thee by the fiery heart, and smiled To make so swift end of the godlike boy. XVIII For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod These fields of ours, wert surely like a god. Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red From hallowed windows, over stone and sod, On thine unbowed bright insubmissive head? XIX The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays, Our brother, till the last of English days. No day nor night on English earth shall be For ever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays, But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee Shall come on us like morning from the sea. XX Like sunrise never wholly risen, nor yet Quenched; or like sunset never wholly set, A light to lighten as from living eyes The cold unlit close lids of one that lies Dead, or a ray returned from death's far skies To fire us living lest our lives forget. XXI For in that heaven what light of lights may be, What splendour of what stars, what spheres of flame Sounding, that none may number nor may name, We know not, even thy brethren; yea, not we Whose eyes desire the light that lightened thee, Whose ways and thine are one way and the same. XXII But if the riddles that in sleep we read, And trust them not, be flattering truth indeed, As he that rose our mightiest called them,—he, Much higher than thou as thou much higher than we— There, might we say, all flower of all our seed, All singing souls are as one sounding sea. XXIII All those that here were of thy kind and kin, Beside thee and below thee, full of love, Full-souled for song,—and one alone above Whose only light folds all your glories in— With all birds' notes from nightingale to dove Fill the world whither we too fain would win. XXIV The world that sees in heaven the sovereign light Of sunlike Shakespeare, and the fiery night Whose stars were watched of Webster; and beneath, The twin-souled brethren of the single wreath, Grown in kings' gardens, plucked from pastoral heath, Wrought with all flowers for all men's heart's delight. XXV And that fixed fervour, iron-red like Mars, In the mid moving tide of tenderer stars, That burned on loves and deeds the darkest done, Athwart the incestuous prisoner's bride-house bars; And thine, most highest of all their fires but one, Our morning star, sole risen before the sun. XXVI And one light risen since theirs to run such race Thou hast seen, O Phosphor, from thy pride of place. Thou hast seen Shelley, him that was to thee As light to fire or dawn to lightning; me, Me likewise, O our brother, shalt thou see, And I behold thee, face to glorious face? XXVII You twain the same swift year of manhood swept Down the steep darkness, and our father wept. And from the gleam of Apollonian tears A holier aureole rounds your memories, kept Most fervent-fresh of all the singing spheres, And April-coloured through all months and years. XXVIII You twain fate spared not half your fiery span; The longer date fulfils the lesser man. Ye from beyond the dark dividing date Stand smiling, crowned as gods with foot on fate. For stronger was your blessing than his ban, And earliest whom he struck, he struck too late. XXIX Yet love and loathing, faith and unfaith yet Bind less to greater souls in unison, And one desire that makes three spirits as one Takes great and small as in one spiritual net Woven out of hope toward what shall yet be done Ere hate or love remember or forget. XXX Woven out of faith and hope and love too great To bear the bonds of life and death and fate: Woven out of love and hope and faith too dear To take the print of doubt and change and fear: And interwoven with lines of wrath and hate Blood-red with soils of many a sanguine year. XXXI Who cannot hate, can love not; if he grieve, His tears are barren as the unfruitful rain That rears no harvest from the green sea's plain, And as thorns crackling this man's laugh is vain. Nor can belief touch, kindle, smite, reprieve His heart who has not heart to disbelieve. XXXII But you, most perfect in your hate and love, Our great twin-spirited brethren; you that stand Head by head glittering, hand made fast in hand, And underfoot the fang-drawn worm that strove To wound you living; from so far above, Look love, not scorn, on ours that was your land. XXXIII For love we lack, and help and heat and light To clothe us and to comfort us with might. What help is ours to take or give? but ye— O, more than sunrise to the blind cold sea, That wailed aloud with all her waves all night, Much more, being much more glorious, should you be. XXXIV As fire to frost, as ease to toil, as dew To flowerless fields, as sleep to slackening pain, As hope to souls long weaned from hope again Returning, or as blood revived anew To dry-drawn limbs and every pulseless vein, Even so toward us should no man be but you. XXXV One rose before the sunrise was, and one Before the sunset, lovelier than the sun. And now the heaven is dark and bright and loud With wind and starry drift and moon and cloud, And night's cry rings in straining sheet and shroud, What help is ours if hope like yours be none? XXXVI O well-beloved, our brethren, if ye be, Then are we not forsaken. This kind earth Made fragrant once for all time with your birth, And bright for all men with your love, and worth The clasp and kiss and wedlock of the sea, Were not your mother if not your brethren we. XXXVII Because the days were dark with gods and kings And in time's hand the old hours of time as rods, When force and fear set hope and faith at odds, Ye failed not nor abased your plume-plucked wings; And we that front not more disastrous things, How should we fail in face of kings and gods? XXXVIII For now the deep dense plumes of night are thinned Surely with winnowing of the glimmering wind Whose feet we fledged with morning; and the breath Begins in heaven that sings the dark to death. And all the night wherein men groaned and sinned Sickens at heart to hear what sundawn saith. XXXIX O first-born sons of hope and fairest, ye Whose prows first clove the thought-unsounded sea Whence all the dark dead centuries rose to bar The spirit of man lest truth should make him free, The sunrise and the sunset, seeing one star, Take heart as we to know you that ye are. XL Ye rise not and ye set not; we that say Ye rise and set like hopes that set and rise Look yet but seaward from a land-locked bay; But where at last the sea's line is the sky's And truth and hope one sunlight in your eyes, No sunrise and no sunset marks their day.
Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What hast thou found in thine heart to sing? What wilt thou do when the summer is shed? O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow, Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south, The soft south whither thine heart is set? Shall not the grief of the old time follow? Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth? Hast thou forgotten ere I forget? Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow, Thy way is long to the sun and the south; But I, fulfilled of my heart's desire, Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow, From tawny body and sweet small mouth Feed the heart of the night with fire. I the nightingale all spring through, O swallow, sister, O changing swallow, All spring through till the spring be done, Clothed with the light of the night on the dew, Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow, Take flight and follow and find the sun. Sister, my sister, O soft light swallow, Though all things feast in the spring's guest-chamber, How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet? For where thou fliest I shall not follow, Till life forget and death remember, Till thou remember and I forget. Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow, I know not how thou hast heart to sing. Hast thou the heart? is it all past over? Thy lord the summer is good to follow, And fair the feet of thy lover the spring: But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover? O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow, My heart in me is a molten ember And over my head the waves have met. But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow, Could I forget or thou remember, Couldst thou remember and I forget. O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow, The heart's division divideth us. Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree; But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow To the place of the slaying of Itylus, The feast of Daulis, the Thracian Sea. O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow, I pray thee sing not a little space. Are not the roofs and the lintels wet? The woven web that was plain to follow, The small slain body, the flowerlike face, Can I remember if thou forget? O sister, sister, thy first-begotten! The hands that cling and the feet that follow, The voice of the child's blood crying yet Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten? Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget.
Lors dit en plourant; Hélas trop malheureux homme et mauldict pescheur, oncques ne verrai-je clémence et miséricorde de Dieu. Ores m'en irai-je d'icy et me cacherai dedans le mont Horsel, en requérant de faveur et d'amoureuse merci ma doulce dame Vénus, car pour son amour serai-je bien à tout jamais damné en enfer. Voicy la fin de tous mes faicts d'armes et de toutes mes belles chansons. Hélas, trop belle estoyt la face de ma dame et ses yeulx, et en mauvais jour je vis ces chouses-là . Lors s'en alla tout en gémissant et se retourna chez elle, et là vescut tristement en grand amour près de sa dame. Puis après advint que le pape vit un jour esclater sur son baston force belles fleurs rouges et blanches et maints boutons de feuilles, et ainsi vit-il reverdir toute l'escorce. Ce dont il eut grande crainte et moult s'en esmut, et grande pitié lui prit de ce chevalier qui s'en estoyt départi sans espoir comme un homme misérable et damné. Doncques envoya force messaigers devers luy pour le ramener, disant qu'il aurait de Dieu grace et bonne absolution de son grand pesché d'amour. Mais oncques plus ne le virent; car toujours demeura ce pauvre chevalier auprès de Vénus la haulte et forte déesse ès flancs de la montagne amoureuse. Livre des grandes merveilles d'amour, escript en latin et en françoys par Maistre Antoine Gaget. 1530.  Asleep or waking is it? for her neck, Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; Soft, and stung softly — fairer for a fleck. But though my lips shut sucking on the place, There is no vein at work upon her face; Her eyelids are so peaceable, no doubt Deep sleep has warmed her blood through all its ways. Lo, this is she that was the world's delight; The old grey years were parcels of her might; The strewings of the ways wherein she trod Were the twain seasons of the day and night. Lo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticed All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ, Stained with blood fallen from the feet of God, The feet and hands whereat our souls were priced. Alas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair. But lo her wonderfully woven hair! And thou didst heal us with thy piteous kiss; But see now, Lord; her mouth is lovelier. She is right fair; what hath she done to thee? Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see; Had now thy mother such a lip — like this? Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me. Inside the Horsel here the air is hot; Right little peace one hath for it, God wot; The scented dusty daylight burns the air, And my heart chokes me till I hear it not. Behold, my Venus, my soul's body, lies With my love laid upon her garment-wise, Feeling my love in all her limbs and hair And shed between her eyelids through her eyes. She holds my heart in her sweet open hands Hanging asleep; hard by her head there stands, Crowned with gilt thorns and clothed with flesh like fire, Love, wan as foam blown up the salt burnt sands — Hot as the brackish waifs of yellow spume That shift and steam — loose clots of arid fume From the sea's panting mouth of dry desire; There stands he, like one labouring at a loom. The warp holds fast across; and every thread That makes the woof up has dry specks of red; Always the shuttle cleaves clean through, and he Weaves with the hair of many a ruined head. Love is not glad nor sorry, as I deem; Labouring he dreams, and labours in the dream, Till when the spool is finished, lo I see His web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam. Night falls like fire; the heavy lights run low, And as they drop, my blood and body so Shake as the flame shakes, full of days and hours That sleep not neither weep they as they go. Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea. Ah yet would God that stems and roots were bred Out of my weary body and my head, That sleep were sealed upon me with a seal, And I were as the least of all his dead. Would God my blood were dew to feed the grass, Mine ears made deaf and mine eyes blind as glass, My body broken as a turning wheel, And my mouth stricken ere it saith Alas! Ah God, that love were as a flower or flame, That life were as the naming of a name, That death were not more pitiful than desire, That these things were not one thing and the same! Behold now, surely somewhere there is death: For each man hath some space of years, he saith, A little space of time ere time expire, A little day, a little way of breath. And lo, between the sundawn and the sun, His day's work and his night's work are undone; And lo, between the nightfall and the light, He is not, and none knoweth of such an one. Ah God, that I were as all souls that be, As any herb or leaf of any tree, As men that toil through hours of labouring night, As bones of men under the deep sharp sea. Outside it must be winter among men; For at the gold bars of the gates again I heard all night and all the hours of it The wind's wet wings and fingers drip with rain. Knights gather, riding sharp for cold; I know The ways and woods are strangled with the snow; And with short song the maidens spin and sit Until Christ's birthnight, lily-like, arow. The scent and shadow shed about me make The very soul in all my senses ache; The hot hard night is fed upon my breath, And sleep beholds me from afar awake. Alas, but surely where the hills grow deep, Or where the wild ways of the sea are steep, Or in strange places somewhere there is death, And on death's face the scattered hair of sleep. There lover-like with lips and limbs that meet They lie, they pluck sweet fruit of life and eat; But me the hot and hungry days devour, And in my mouth no fruit of theirs is sweet. No fruit of theirs, but fruit of my desire, For her love's sake whose lips through mine respire; Her eyelids on her eyes like flower on flower, Mine eyelids on mine eyes like fire on fire. So lie we, not as sleep that lies by death, With heavy kisses and with happy breath; Not as man lies by woman, when the bride Laughs low for love's sake and the words he saith. For she lies, laughing low with love; she lies And turns his kisses on her lips to sighs, To sighing sound of lips unsatisfied, And the sweet tears are tender with her eyes. Ah, not as they, but as the souls that were Slain in the old time, having found her fair; Who, sleeping with her lips upon their eyes, Heard sudden serpents hiss across her hair. Their blood runs round the roots of time like rain: She casts them forth and gathers them again; With nerve and bone she weaves and multiplies Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain. Her little chambers drip with flower-like red, Her girdles, and the chaplets of her head, Her armlets and her anklets; with her feet She tramples all that winepress of the dead. Her gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires, With loves burnt out and unassuaged desires; Between her lips the steam of them is sweet, The languor in her ears of many lyres. Her beds are full of perfume and sad sound, Her doors are made with music, and barred round With sighing and with laughter and with tears, With tears whereby strong souls of men are bound. There is the knight Adonis that was slain; With flesh and blood she chains him for a chain; The body and the spirit in her ears Cry, for her lips divide him vein by vein. Yea, all she slayeth; yea, every man save me; Me, love, thy lover that must cleave to thee Till the ending of the days and ways of earth, The shaking of the sources of the sea. Me, most forsaken of all souls that fell; Me, satiated with things insatiable; Me, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth, Yea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell. Alas thy beauty! for thy mouth's sweet sake My soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake As water, as the flesh of men that weep, As their heart's vein whose heart goes nigh to break. Ah God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips Would crush the fruit of death upon my lips; Ah God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep And wring their juice upon me as it drips. There is no change of cheer for many days, But change of chimes high up in the air, that sways Rung by the running fingers of the wind; And singing sorrows heard on hidden ways. Day smiteth day in twain, night sundereth night, And on mine eyes the dark sits as the light; Yea, Lord, thou knowest I know not, having sinned, If heaven be clean or unclean in thy sight. Yea, as if earth were sprinkled over me, Such chafed harsh earth as chokes a sandy sea, Each pore doth yearn, and the dried blood thereof Gasps by sick fits, my heart swims heavily, There is a feverish famine in my veins; Below her bosom, where a crushed grape stains The white and blue, there my lips caught and clove An hour since, and what mark of me remains? I dare not always touch her, lest the kiss Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss, Brief bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin; Nathless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is. Sin, is it sin whereby men's souls are thrust Into the pit? yet had I a good trust To save my soul before it slipped therein, Trod under by the fire-shod feet of lust. For if mine eyes fail and my soul takes breath, I look between the iron sides of death Into sad hell where all sweet love hath end, All but the pain that never finisheth. There are the naked faces of great kings, The singing folk with all their lute-playings; There when one cometh he shall have to friend The grave that covets and the worm that clings. There sit the knights that were so great of hand, The ladies that were queens of fair green land, Grown grey and black now, brought unto the dust, Soiled, without raiment, clad about with sand. There is one end for all of them; they sit Naked and sad, they drink the dregs of it, Trodden as grapes in the wine-press of lust, Trampled and trodden by the fiery feet. I see the marvellous mouth whereby there fell Cities and people whom the gods loved well, Yet for her sake on them the fire gat hold, And for their sakes on her the fire of hell. And softer than the Egyptian lote-leaf is, The queen whose face was worth the world to kiss, Wearing at breast a suckling snake of gold; And large pale lips of strong Semiramis, Curled like a tiger's that curl back to feed; Red only where the last kiss made them bleed; Her hair most thick with many a carven gem, Deep in the mane, great-chested, like a steed. Yea, with red sin the faces of them shine; But in all these there was no sin like mine; No, not in all the strange great sins of them That made the wine-press froth and foam with wine. For I was of Christ's choosing, I God's knight, No blinkard heathen stumbling for scant light; I can well see, for all the dusty days Gone past, the clean great time of goodly fight. I smell the breathing battle sharp with blows, With shriek of shafts and snapping short of bows; The fair pure sword smites out in subtle ways, Sounds and long lights are shed between the rows Of beautiful mailed men; the edged light slips, Most like a snake that takes short breath and dips Sharp from the beautifully bending head, With all its gracious body lithe as lips That curl in touching you; right in this wise My sword doth, seeming fire in mine own eyes, Leaving all colours in them brown and red And flecked with death; then the keen breaths like sighs, The caught-up choked dry laughters following them, When all the fighting face is grown a flame For pleasure, and the pulse that stuns the ears, And the heart's gladness of the goodly game. Let me think yet a little; I do know These things were sweet, but sweet such years ago, Their savour is all turned now into tears; Yea, ten years since, where the blue ripples blow, The blue curled eddies of the blowing Rhine, I felt the sharp wind shaking grass and vine Touch my blood too, and sting me with delight Through all this waste and weary body of mine That never feels clear air; right gladly then I rode alone, a great way off my men, And heard the chiming bridle smite and smite, And gave each rhyme thereof some rhyme again, Till my song shifted to that iron one; Seeing there rode up between me and the sun Some certain of my foe's men, for his three White wolves across their painted coats did run. The first red-bearded, with square cheeks — alack, I made my knave's blood turn his beard to black; The slaying of him was a joy to see: Perchance too, when at night he came not back, Some woman fell a-weeping, whom this thief Would beat when he had drunken; yet small grief Hath any for the ridding of such knaves; Yea, if one wept, I doubt her teen was brief. This bitter love is sorrow in all lands, Draining of eyelids, wringing of drenched hands, Sighing of hearts and filling up of graves; A sign across the head of the world he stands, An one that hath a plague-mark on his brows; Dust and spilt blood do track him to his house Down under earth; sweet smells of lip and cheek, Like a sweet snake's breath made more poisonous With chewing of some perfumed deadly grass, Are shed all round his passage if he pass, And their quenched savour leaves the whole soul weak, Sick with keen guessing whence the perfume was. As one who hidden in deep sedge and reeds Smells the rare scent made where a panther feeds, And tracking ever slotwise the warm smell Is snapped upon by the sweet mouth and bleeds, His head far down the hot sweet throat of her — So one tracks love, whose breath is deadlier, And lo, one springe and you are fast in hell, Fast as the gin's grip of a wayfarer. I think now, as the heavy hours decease One after one, and bitter thoughts increase One upon one, of all sweet finished things; The breaking of the battle; the long peace Wherein we sat clothed softly, each man's hair Crowned with green leaves beneath white hoods of vair; The sounds of sharp spears at great tourneyings, And noise of singing in the late sweet air. I sang of love too, knowing nought thereof; "Sweeter," I said, "the little laugh of love Than tears out of the eyes of Magdalen, Or any fallen feather of the Dove. "The broken little laugh that spoils a kiss, The ache of purple pulses, and the bliss Of blinded eyelids that expand again — Love draws them open with those lips of his, "Lips that cling hard till the kissed face has grown Of one same fire and colour with their own; Then ere one sleep, appeased with sacrifice, Where his lips wounded, there his lips atone." I sang these things long since and knew them not; "Lo, here is love, or there is love, God wot, This man and that finds favour in his eyes," I said, "but I, what guerdon have I got? "The dust of praise that is blown everywhere In all men's faces with the common air; The bay-leaf that wants chafing to be sweet Before they wind it in a singer's hair." So that one dawn I rode forth sorrowing; I had no hope but of some evil thing, And so rode slowly past the windy wheat And past the vineyard and the water-spring, Up to the Horsel. A great elder-tree Held back its heaps of flowers to let me see The ripe tall grass, and one that walked therein, Naked, with hair shed over to the knee. She walked between the blossom and the grass; I knew the beauty of her, what she was, The beauty of her body and her sin, And in my flesh the sin of hers, alas! Alas! for sorrow is all the end of this. O sad kissed mouth, how sorrowful it is! O breast whereat some suckling sorrow clings, Red with the bitter blossom of a kiss! Ah, with blind lips I felt for you, and found About my neck your hands and hair enwound, The hands that stifle and the hair that stings, I felt them fasten sharply without sound. Yea, for my sin I had great store of bliss: Rise up, make answer for me, let thy kiss Seal my lips hard from speaking of my sin, Lest one go mad to hear how sweet it is. Yet I waxed faint with fume of barren bowers, And murmuring of the heavy-headed hours; And let the dove's beak fret and peck within My lips in vain, and Love shed fruitless flowers. So that God looked upon me when your hands Were hot about me; yea, God brake my bands To save my soul alive, and I came forth Like a man blind and naked in strange lands That hears men laugh and weep, and knows not whence Nor wherefore, but is broken in his sense; Howbeit I met folk riding from the north Towards Rome, to purge them of their souls' offence, And rode with them, and spake to none; the day Stunned me like lights upon some wizard way, And ate like fire mine eyes and mine eyesight; So rode I, hearing all these chant and pray, And marvelled; till before us rose and fell White cursed hills, like outer skirts of hell Seen where men's eyes look through the day to night, Like a jagged shell's lips, harsh, untunable, Blown in between by devils' wrangling breath; Nathless we won well past that hell and death, Down to the sweet land where all airs are good, Even unto Rome where God's grace tarrieth. Then came each man and worshipped at his knees Who in the Lord God's likeness bears the keys To bind or loose, and called on Christ's shed blood, And so the sweet-souled father gave him ease. But when I came I fell down at his feet, Saying, "Father, though the Lord's blood be right sweet, The spot it takes not off the panther's skin, Nor shall an Ethiop's stain be bleached with it. "Lo, I have sinned and have spat out at God, Wherefore his hand is heavier and his rod More sharp because of mine exceeding sin, And all his raiment redder than bright blood "Before mine eyes; yea, for my sake I wot The heat of hell is waxen seven times hot Through my great sin." Then spake he some sweet word, Giving me cheer; which thing availed me not; Yea, scarce I wist if such indeed were said; For when I ceased — lo, as one newly dead Who hears a great cry out of hell, I heard The crying of his voice across my head. "Until this dry shred staff, that hath no whit Of leaf nor bark, bear blossom and smell sweet, Seek thou not any mercy in God's sight, For so long shalt thou be cast out from it." Yea, what if dried-up stems wax red and green, Shall that thing be which is not nor has been? Yea, what if sapless bark wax green and white, Shall any good fruit grow upon my sin? Nay, though sweet fruit were plucked of a dry tree, And though men drew sweet waters of the sea, There should not grow sweet leaves on this dead stem, This waste wan body and shaken soul of me. Yea, though God search it warily enough, There is not one sound thing in all thereof; Though he search all my veins through, searching them He shall find nothing whole therein but love. For I came home right heavy, with small cheer, And lo my love, mine own soul's heart, more dear Than mine own soul, more beautiful than God, Who hath my being between the hands of her — Fair still, but fair for no man saving me, As when she came out of the naked sea Making the foam as fire whereon she trod, And as the inner flower of fire was she. Yea, she laid hold upon me, and her mouth Clove unto mine as soul to body doth, And, laughing, made her lips luxurious; Her hair had smells of all the sunburnt south, Strange spice and flower, strange savour of crushed fruit, And perfume the swart kings tread underfoot For pleasure when their minds wax amorous, Charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. And I forgot fear and all weary things, All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings, Feeling her face with all her eager hair Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings To the body and to the raiment, burning them; As after death I know that such-like flame Shall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care, Albeit I burn then, having felt the same? Ah love, there is no better life than this; To have known love, how bitter a thing it is, And afterward be cast out of God's sight; Yea, these that know not, shall they have such bliss High up in barren heaven before his face As we twain in the heavy-hearted place, Remembering love and all the dead delight, And all that time was sweet with for a space? For till the thunder in the trumpet be, Soul may divide from body, but not we One from another; I hold thee with my hand, I let mine eyes have all their will of thee, I seal myself upon thee with my might, Abiding alway out of all men's sight Until God loosen over sea and land The thunder of the trumpets of the night.
Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear; Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, And over all old things and all things dear. She loves not you nor me as all we love her. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, She would not hear. Let us rise up and part; she will not know. Let us go seaward as the great winds go, Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so, And all the world is bitter as a tear. And how these things are, though ye strove to show, She would not know. Let us go home and hence; she will not weep. We gave love many dreams and days to keep, Flowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow, Saying 'If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.' All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow; And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep, She would not weep. Let us go hence and rest; she will not love. She shall not hear us if we sing hereof, Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep. Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough. Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep; And though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love. Let us give up, go down; she will not care. Though all the stars made gold of all the air, And the sea moving saw before it move One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair; Though all those waves went over us, and drove Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair, She would not care. Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she, She too, remembering days and words that were, Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, She would not see.
Back to the flower-town, side by side, The bright months bring, New-born, the bridegroom and the bride, Freedom and spring. The sweet land laughs from sea to sea, Filled full of sun; All things come back to her, being free; All things but one. In many a tender wheaten plot Flowers that were dead Live, and old suns revive; but not That holier head. By this white wandering waste of sea, Far north, I hear One face shall never turn to me As once this year: Shall never smile and turn and rest On mine as there, Nor one most sacred hand be prest Upon my hair. I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before; The youngest to the oldest singer That England bore. I found him whom I shall not find Till all grief end, In holiest age our mightiest mind, Father and friend. But thou, if anything endure, If hope there be, O spirit that man's life left pure, Man's death set free, Not with disdain of days that were Look earthward now; Let dreams revive the reverend hair, The imperial brow; Come back in sleep, for in the life Where thou art not We find none like thee. Time and strife And the world's lot Move thee no more; but love at least And reverent heart May move thee, royal and released, Soul, as thou art. And thou, his Florence, to thy trust Receive and keep, Keep safe his dedicated dust, His sacred sleep. So shall thy lovers, come from far, Mix with thy name As morning-star with evening-star His faultless fame.
I Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight, The ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight; The breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed Such wonders and glories of blossomlike snow or of frost that outlightens all flowers till it fade That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night, Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made, March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite. II And now that the rage of thy rapture is satiate with revel and ravin and spoil of the snow, And the branches it brightened are broken, and shattered the tree-tops that only thy wrath could lay low, How should not thy lovers rejoice in thee, leader and lord of the year that exults to be born So strong in thy strength and so glad of thy gladness whose laughter puts winter and sorrow to scorn? Thou hast shaken the snows from thy wings, and the frost on thy forehead is molten: thy lips are aglow As a lover's that kindle with kissing, and earth, with her raiment and tresses yet wasted and torn, Takes breath as she smiles in the grasp of thy passion to feel through her spirit the sense of thee flow. III Fain, fain would we see but again for an hour what the wind and the sun have dispelled and consumed, Those full deep swan-soft feathers of snow with whose luminous burden the branches implumed Hung heavily, curved as a half-bent bow, and fledged not as birds are, but petalled as flowers, Each tree-top and branchlet a pinnacle jewelled and carved, or a fountain that shines as it showers, But fixed as a fountain is fixed not, and wrought not to last till by time or by tempest entombed, As a pinnacle carven and gilded of men: for the date of its doom is no more than an hour's, One hour of the sun's when the warm wind wakes him to wither the snow-flowers that froze as they bloomed. IV As the sunshine quenches the snowshine; as April subdues thee, and yields up his kingdom to May; So time overcomes the regret that is born of delight as it passes in passion away, And leaves but a dream for desire to rejoice in or mourn for with tears or thanksgivings; but thou, Bright god that art gone from us, maddest and gladdest of months, to what goal hast thou gone from us now? For somewhere surely the storm of thy laughter that lightens, the beat of thy wings that play, Must flame as a fire through the world, and the heavens that we know not rejoice in thee: surely thy brow Hath lost not its radiance of empire, thy spirit the joy that impelled it on quest as for prey. V Are thy feet on the ways of the limitless waters, thy wings on the winds of the waste north sea? Are the fires of the false north dawn over heavens where summer is stormful and strong like thee Now bright in the sight of thine eyes? are the bastions of icebergs assailed by the blast of thy breath? Is it March with the wild north world when April is waning? the word that the changed year saith, Is it echoed to northward with rapture of passion reiterate from spirits triumphant as we Whose hearts were uplift at the blast of thy clarions as men's rearisen from a sleep that was death And kindled to life that was one with the world's and with thine? hast thou set not the whole world free? VI For the breath of thy lips is freedom, and freedom's the sense of thy spirit, the sound of thy song, Glad god of the north-east wind, whose heart is as high as the hands of thy kingdom are strong, Thy kingdom whose empire is terror and joy, twin-featured and fruitful of births divine, Days lit with the flame of the lamps of the flowers, and nights that are drunken with dew for wine, And sleep not for joy of the stars that deepen and quicken, a denser and fierier throng, And the world that thy breath bade whiten and tremble rejoices at heart as they strengthen and shine, And earth gives thanks for the glory bequeathed her, and knows of thy reign that it wrought not wrong. VII Thy spirit is quenched not, albeit we behold not thy face in the crown of the steep sky's arch, And the bold first buds of the whin wax golden, and witness arise of the thorn and the larch: Wild April, enkindled to laughter and storm by the kiss of the wildest of winds that blow, Calls loud on his brother for witness; his hands that were laden with blossom are sprinkled with snow, And his lips breathe winter, and laugh, and relent; and the live woods feel not the frost's flame parch; For the flame of the spring that consumes not but quickens is felt at the heart of the forest aglow, And the sparks that enkindled and fed it were strewn from the hands of the gods of the winds of March.
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine, These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat? Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation, Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past; Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation, Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast? Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror, Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death: Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error, Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses— "Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be, While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod; Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby, As they grope through the grave-yard of creeds, under skies growing green at a groan for the grimness of God. Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer: Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things; Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her, Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.
Who is your lady of love, O ye that pass Singing? and is it for sorrow of that which was That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be? For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing. — Our lady of love by you is unbeholden; For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden Treasure of hair, nor face nor form; but we That love, we know her more fair than anything. — Is she a queen, having great gifts to give? — Yea, these; that whoso hath seen her shall not live Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain, Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears; And when she bids die he shall surely die. And he shall leave all things under the sky And go forth naked under sun and rain And work and wait and watch out all his years. — Hath she on earth no place of habitation? — Age to age calling, nation answering nation, Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say; For if she be not in the spirit of men, For if in the inward soul she hath no place, In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face, In vain their mouths make much of her; for they Cry with vain tongues, till the heart lives again. — O ye that follow, and have ye no repentance? For on your brows is written a mortal sentence, An hieroglyph of sorrow, a fiery sign, That in your lives ye shall not pause or rest, Nor have the sure sweet common love, nor keep Friends and safe days, nor joy of life nor sleep. — These have we not, who have one thing, the divine Face and clear eyes of faith and fruitful breast. — And ye shall die before your thrones be won. — Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun Shall move and shine without us, and we lie Dead; but if she too move on earth and live, But if the old world with all the old irons rent Laugh and give thanks, shall we be not content? Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die, Life being so little and death so good to give. — And these men shall forget you.—Yea, but we Shall be a part of the earth and the ancient sea, And heaven-high air august, and awful fire, And all things good; and no man's heart shall beat But somewhat in it of our blood once shed Shall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead Blood of men slain and the old same life's desire Plants in their fiery footprints our fresh feet. — But ye that might be clothed with all things pleasant, Ye are foolish that put off the fair soft present, That clothe yourselves with the cold future air; When mother and father and tender sister and brother And the old live love that was shall be as ye, Dust, and no fruit of loving life shall be. — She shall be yet who is more than all these were, Than sister or wife or father unto us or mother. — Is this worth life, is this, to win for wages? Lo, the dead mouths of the awful grey-grown ages, The venerable, in the past that is their prison, In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave, Laugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said, How many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead: Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen? —Not we but she, who is tender and swift to save. — Are ye not weary and faint not by the way, Seeing night by night devoured of day by day, Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire? Sleepless: and ye too, when shall ye too sleep? — We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet, And surely more than all things sleep were sweet, Than all things save the inexorable desire Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep. — Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow? Is this so sure where all men's hopes are hollow. Even this your dream, that by much tribulation Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight? — Nay, though our life were blind, our death were fruitless, Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless; But man to man, nation would turn to nation, And the old life live, and the old great world be great. — Pass on then and pass by us and let us be, For what light think ye after life to see? And if the world fare better will ye know? And if man triumph who shall seek you and say? — Enough of light is this for one life's span, That all men born are mortal, but not man: And we men bring death lives by night to sow, That man may reap and eat and live by day.
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere, With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought, That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear A roundel is wrought. Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught— Love, laughter, or mourning—remembrance of rapture or fear— That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought. As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught, So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear, A roundel is wrought.
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids, Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather, Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron Stood and beheld me. Then to me so lying awake a vision Came without sleep over the seas and touched me, Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too, Full of the vision, Saw the white implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled Shine as fire of sunset on western waters; Saw the reluctant Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her, Looking always, looking with necks reverted, Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder Shone Mitylene; Heard the flying feet of the Loves behind her Make a sudden thunder upon the waters, As the thunder flung from the strong unclosing Wings of a great wind. So the goddess fled from her place, with awful Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her; While behind a clamour of singing women Severed the twilight. Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish, Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; Fear was upon them, While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent, None endured the sound of her song for weeping; Laurel by laurel, Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead, Round her woven tresses and ashen temples White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer, Ravaged with kisses, Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever. Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song. Yea, by her name too Called her, saying, "Turn to me, O my Sappho;" Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not Tears for laughter darken immortal eyelids, Heard not about her Fearful fitful wings of the doves departing, Saw not how the bosom of Aphrodite Shook with weeping, saw not her shaken raiment, Saw not her hands wrung; Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings, Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen, Fairer than all men; Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers, Full of songs and kisses and little whispers, Full of music; only beheld among them Soar, as a bird soars Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel, Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders, Clothed with the wind's wings. Then rejoiced she, laughing with love, and scattered Roses, awful roses of holy blossom; Then the Loves thronged sadly with hidden faces Round Aphrodite, Then the Muses, stricken at heart, were silent; Yea, the gods waxed pale; such a song was that song. All reluctant, all with a fresh repulsion, Fled from before her. All withdrew long since, and the land was barren, Full of fruitless women and music only. Now perchance, when winds are assuaged at sunset, Lulled at the dewfall, By the grey sea-side, unassuaged, unheard of, Unbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight, Ghosts of outcast women return lamenting, Purged not in Lethe, Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven, Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity, Hearing, to hear them.
I The clearest eyes in all the world they read With sense more keen and spirit of sight more true Than burns and thrills in sunrise, when the dew Flames, and absorbs the glory round it shed, As they the light of ages quick and dead, Closed now, forsake us: yet the shaft that slew Can slay not one of all the works we knew, Nor death discrown that many-laurelled head. The works of words whose life seems lightning wrought, And moulded of unconquerable thought, And quickened with imperishable flame, Stand fast and shine and smile, assured that nought May fade of all their myriad-moulded fame, Nor England's memory clasp not Browning's name. II Death, what hast thou to do with one for whom Time is not lord, but servant? What least part Of all the fire that fed his living heart, Of all the light more keen that sundawn's bloom That lit and led his spirit, strong as doom And bright as hope, can aught thy breath may dart Quench? Nay, thou knowest he knew thee what thou art, A shadow born of terror's barren womb, That brings not forth save shadows. What art thou, To dream, albeit thou breathe upon his brow, That power on him is given thee,—that thy breath Can make him less than love acclaims him now, And hears all time sound back the word it saith? What part hast thou then in his glory, Death? III A graceless doom it seems that bids us grieve: Venice and winter, hand in deadly hand, Have slain the lover of her sunbright strand And singer of a stormbright Christmas Eve. A graceless guerdon we that loved receive For all our love, from that the dearest land Love worshipped ever. Blithe and soft and bland, Too fair for storm to scathe or fire to cleave, Shone on our dreams and memories evermore The domes, the towers, the mountains and the shore That gird or guard thee, Venice: cold and black Seems now the face we loved as he of yore. We have given thee love—no stint, no stay, no lack: What gift, what gift is this thou hast given us back? IV But he—to him, who knows what gift is thine, Death? Hardly may we think or hope, when we Pass likewise thither where to-night is he, Beyond the irremeable outer seas that shine And darken round such dreams as half divine Some sunlit harbour in that starless sea Where gleams no ship to windward or to lee, To read with him the secret of thy shrine. There too, as here, may song, delight, and love, The nightingale, the sea-bird, and the dove, Fulfil with joy the splendour of the sky Till all beneath wax bright as all above: But none of all that search the heavens, and try The sun, may match the sovereign eagle's eye. V Among the wondrous ways of men and time He went as one that ever found and sought And bore in hand the lamp-like spirit of thought To illume with instance of its fire sublime The dusk of many a cloudlike age and clime. No spirit in shape of light and darkness wrought, No faith, no fear, no dream, no rapture, nought That blooms in wisdom, nought that burns in crime, No virtue girt and armed and helmed with light, No love more lovely than the snows are white, No serpent sleeping in some dead soul's tomb, No song-bird singing from some live soul's height, But he might hear, interpret, or illume With sense invasive as the dawn of doom. VI What secret thing of splendour or of shade Surmised in all those wandering ways wherein Man, led of love and life and death and sin, Strays, climbs, or cowers, allured, absorbed, afraid, Might not the strong and sunlike sense invade Of that full soul that had for aim to win Light, silent over time's dark toil and din, Life, at whose touch death fades as dead things fade? O spirit of man, what mystery moves in thee That he might know not of in spirit, and see The heart within the heart that seems to strive, The life within the life that seems to be, And hear, through all thy storms that whirl and drive, The living sound of all men's souls alive? VII He held no dream worth waking: so he said, He who stands now on death's triumphal steep, Awakened out of life wherein we sleep And dream of what he knows and sees, being dead. But never death for him was dark or dread: "Look forth" he bade the soul, and fear not. Weep, All ye that trust not in his truth, and keep Vain memory's vision of a vanished head As all that lives of all that once was he Save that which lightens from his word: but we, Who, seeing the sunset-coloured waters roll, Yet know the sun subdued not of the sea, Nor weep nor doubt that still the spirit is whole, And life and death but shadows of the soul.
I saw my soul at rest upon a day As a bird sleeping in the nest of night, Among soft leaves that give the starlight way To touch its wings but not its eyes with light; So that it knew as one in visions may, And knew not as men waking, of delight. This was the measure of my soul's delight; It had no power of joy to fly by day, Nor part in the large lordship of the light; But in a secret moon-beholden way Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night, And all the love and life that sleepers may. But such life's triumph as men waking may It might not have to feed its faint delight Between the stars by night and sun by day, Shut up with green leaves and a little light; Because its way was as a lost star's way, A world's not wholly known of day or night. All loves and dreams and sounds and gleams of night Made it all music that such minstrels may, And all they had they gave it of delight; But in the full face of the fire of day What place shall be for any starry light, What part of heaven in all the wide sun's way? Yet the soul woke not, sleeping by the way, Watched as a nursling of the large-eyed night, And sought no strength nor knowledge of the day, Nor closer touch conclusive of delight, Nor mightier joy nor truer than dreamers may, Nor more of song than they, nor more of light. For who sleeps once and sees the secret light Whereby sleep shows the soul a fairer way Between the rise and rest of day and night, Shall care no more to fare as all men may, But be his place of pain or of delight, There shall he dwell, beholding night as day. Song, have thy day and take thy fill of light Before the night be fallen across thy way; Sing while he may, man hath no long delight.
NOVEMBER 4, 1889 Somno mollior unda I Dawn is dim on the dark soft water, Soft and passionate, dark and sweet. Love's own self was the deep sea's daughter, Fair and flawless from face to feet, Hailed of all when the world was golden, Loved of lovers whose names beholden Thrill men's eyes as with light of olden Days more glad than their flight was fleet. So they sang: but for men that love her, Souls that hear not her word in vain, Earth beside her and heaven above her Seem but shadows that wax and wane. Softer than sleep's are the sea's caresses, Kinder than love's that betrays and blesses, Blither than spring's when her flowerful tresses Shake forth sunlight and shine with rain. All the strength of the waves that perish Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs, Sighs for love of the life they cherish, Laughs to know that it lives and dies, Dies for joy of its life, and lives Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives — Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives Change that bids it subside and rise. II Hard and heavy, remote but nearing, Sunless hangs the severe sky's weight, Cloud on cloud, though the wind be veering Heaped on high to the sundawn's gate. Dawn and even and noon are one, Veiled with vapour and void of sun; Nought in sight or in fancied hearing Now less mighty than time or fate. The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer, Pale and sweet as a dream's delight, As a dream's where darkness and light seem dimmer, Touched by dawn or subdued by night. The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad, Swings the rollers to westward, clad With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer, Lures and lulls him with dreams of light. Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder, Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud, Fill the world of the skies whereunder Heaves and quivers and pants aloud All the world of the waters, hoary Now, but clothed with its own live glory, That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder With light more living and word more proud. III Far off westward, whither sets the sounding strife, Strife more sweet than peace, of shoreless waves whose glee Scorns the shore and loves the wind that leaves them free, Strange as sleep and pale as death and fair as life, Shifts the moonlight-coloured sunshine on the sea. Toward the sunset's goal the sunless waters crowd, Fast as autumn days toward winter: yet it seems Here that autumn wanes not, here that woods and streams Lose not heart and change not likeness, chilled and bowed, Warped and wrinkled: here the days are fair as dreams. IV O russet-robed November, What ails thee so to smile? Chill August, pale September, Endured a woful while, And fell as falls an ember From forth a flameless pile: But golden-girt November Bids all she looks on smile. The lustrous foliage, waning As wanes the morning moon, Here falling, here refraining, Outbraves the pride of June With statelier semblance, feigning No fear lest death be soon: As though the woods thus waning Should wax to meet the moon. As though, when fields lie stricken By grey December's breath, These lordlier growths that sicken And die for fear of death Should feel the sense requicken That hears what springtide saith And thrills for love, spring-stricken And pierced with April's breath. The keen white-winged north-easter That stings and spurs thy sea Doth yet but feed and feast her With glowing sense of glee: Calm chained her, storm released her, And storm's glad voice was he: South-wester or north-easter, Thy winds rejoice the sea. V A dream, a dream is it all — the season, The sky, the water, the wind, the shore? A day-born dream of divine unreason, A marvel moulded of sleep — no more? For the cloudlike wave that my limbs while cleaving Feel as in slumber beneath them heaving Soothes the sense as to slumber, leaving Sense of nought that was known of yore. A purer passion, a lordlier leisure, A peace more happy than lives on land, Fulfils with pulse of diviner pleasure The dreaming head and the steering hand. I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow, The deep soft swell of the full broad billow, And close mine eyes for delight past measure, And wish the wheel of the world would stand. The wild-winged hour that we fain would capture Falls as from heaven that its light feet clomb, So brief, so soft, and so full the rapture Was felt that soothed me with sense of home. To sleep, to swim, and to dream, for ever — Such joy the vision of man saw never; For here too soon will a dark day sever The sea-bird's wing from the sea-wave's foam. A dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer At once and brighter than dreams that flee, The moment's joy of the seaward swimmer Abides, remembered as truth may be. Not all the joy and not all the glory Must fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary; For there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer, And here to south of them swells the sea.
I Stately, kindly, lordly friend, Condescend Here to sit by me, and turn Glorious eyes that smile and burn, Golden eyes, love's lustrous meed, On the golden page I read. All your wondrous wealth of hair, Dark and fair, Silken-shaggy, soft and bright As the clouds and beams of night, Pays my reverent hand's caress Back with friendlier gentleness. Dogs may fawn on all and some As they come; You, a friend of loftier mind, Answer friends alone in kind. Just your foot upon my hand Softly bids it understand. Morning round this silent sweet Garden-seat Sheds its wealth of gathering light, Thrills the gradual clouds with might, Changes woodland, orchard, heath, Lawn, and garden there beneath. Fair and dim they gleamed below: Now they glow Deep as even your sunbright eyes, Fair as even the wakening skies. Can it not or can it be Now that you give thanks to see? May not you rejoice as I, Seeing the sky Change to heaven revealed, and bid Earth reveal the heaven it hid All night long from stars and moon, Now the sun sets all in tune? What within you wakes with day Who can say? All too little may we tell, Friends who like each other well, What might haply, if we might, Bid us read our lives aright. II Wild on woodland ways your sires Flashed like fires: Fair as flame and fierce and fleet As with wings on wingless feet Shone and sprang your mother, free, Bright and brave as wind or sea. Free and proud and glad as they, Here to-day Rests or roams their radiant child, Vanquished not, but reconciled, Free from curb of aught above Save the lovely curb of love. Love through dreams of souls divine Fain would shine Round a dawn whose light and song Then should right our mutual wrong — Speak, and seal the love-lit law Sweet Assisi's seer foresaw. Dreams were theirs; yet haply may Dawn a day When such friends and fellows born, Seeing our earth as fair at morn, May for wiser love's sake see More of heaven's deep heart than we.
Before our lives divide for ever, While time is with us and hands are free, (Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea) I will say no word that a man might say Whose whole life's love goes down in a day; For this could never have been; and never, Though the gods and the years relent, shall be. Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn? Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed forborne? Though joy be done with and grief be vain, Time shall not sever us wholly in twain; Earth is not spoilt for a single shower; But the rain has ruined the ungrown corn. It will grow not again, this fruit of my heart, Smitten with sunbeams, ruined with rain. The singing seasons divide and depart, Winter and summer depart in twain. It will grow not again, it is ruined at root, The bloodlike blossom, the dull red fruit; Though the heart yet sickens, the lips yet smart, With sullen savour of poisonous pain. I have given no man of my fruit to eat; I trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine. Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet, This wild new growth of the corn and vine, This wine and bread without lees or leaven, We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven, Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet, One splendid spirit, your soul and mine. In the change of years, in the coil of things, In the clamour and rumour of life to be, We, drinking love at the furthest springs, Covered with love as a covering tree, We had grown as gods, as the gods above, Filled from the heart to the lips with love, Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, O love, my love, had you loved but me! We had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved As the moon moves, loving the world; and seen Grief collapse as a thing disproved, Death consume as a thing unclean. Twain halves of a perfect heart, made fast Soul to soul while the years fell past; Had you loved me once, as you have not loved; Had the chance been with us that has not been. I have put my days and dreams out of mind, Days that are over, dreams that are done. Though we seek life through, we shall surely find There is none of them clear to us now, not one. But clear are these things; the grass and the sand, Where, sure as the eyes reach, ever at hand, With lips wide open and face burnt blind, The strong sea-daisies feast on the sun. The low downs lean to the sea; the stream, One loose thin pulseless tremulous vein, Rapid and vivid and dumb as a dream, Works downward, sick of the sun and the rain; No wind is rough with the rank rare flowers; The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours, Shudders and shines as the grey winds gleam, Turning her smile to a fugitive pain. Mother of loves that are swift to fade, Mother of mutable winds and hours. A barren mother, a mother-maid, Cold and clean as her faint salt flowers. I would we twain were even as she, Lost in the night and the light of the sea, Where faint sounds falter and wan beams wade, Break, and are broken, and shed into showers. The loves and hours of the life of a man, They are swift and sad, being born of the sea. Hours that rejoice and regret for a span, Born with a man's breath, mortal as he; Loves that are lost ere they come to birth, Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth. I lose what I long for, save what I can, My love, my love, and no love for me! It is not much that a man can save On the sands of life, in the straits of time, Who swims in sight of the great third wave That never a swimmer shall cross or climb. Some waif washed up with the strays and spars That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars; Weed from the water, grass from a grave, A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme. There will no man do for your sake, I think, What I would have done for the least word said. I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink, Broken it up for your daily bread: Body for body and blood for blood, As the flow of the full sea risen to flood That yearns and trembles before it sink, I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead. Yea, hope at highest and all her fruit, And time at fullest and all his dower, I had given you surely, and life to boot, Were we once made one for a single hour. But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart, Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart; And deep in one is the bitter root, And sweet for one is the lifelong flower. To have died if you cared I should die for you, clung To my life if you bade me, played my part As it pleased you — these were the thoughts that stung, The dreams that smote with a keener dart Than shafts of love or arrows of death; These were but as fire is, dust, or breath, Or poisonous foam on the tender tongue Of the little snakes that eat my heart. I wish we were dead together to-day, Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight, Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay, Out of the world's way, out of the light, Out of the ages of worldly weather, Forgotten of all men altogether, As the world's first dead, taken wholly away, Made one with death, filled full of the night. How we should slumber, how we should sleep, Far in the dark with the dreams and the dews! And dreaming, grow to each other, and weep, Laugh low, live softly, murmur and muse; Yea, and it may be, struck through by the dream, Feel the dust quicken and quiver, and seem Alive as of old to the lips, and leap Spirit to spirit as lovers use. Sick dreams and sad of a dull delight; For what shall it profit when men are dead To have dreamed, to have loved with the whole soul's might, To have looked for day when the day was fled? Let come what will, there is one thing worth, To have had fair love in the life upon earth: To have held love safe till the day grew night, While skies had colour and lips were red. Would I lose you now? would I take you then, If I lose you now that my heart has need? And come what may after death to men, What thing worth this will the dead years breed? Lose life, lose all; but at least I know, O sweet life's love, having loved you so, Had I reached you on earth, I should lose not again, In death nor life, nor in dream or deed. Yea, I know this well: were you once sealed mine, Mine in the blood's beat, mine in the breath, Mixed into me as honey in wine, Not time, that sayeth and gainsayeth, Nor all strong things had severed us then; Not wrath of gods, nor wisdom of men, Nor all things earthly, nor all divine, Nor joy nor sorrow, nor life nor death. I had grown pure as the dawn and the dew, You had grown strong as the sun or the sea. But none shall triumph a whole life through: For death is one, and the fates are three. At the door of life, by the gate of breath, There are worse things waiting for men than death; Death could not sever my soul and you, As these have severed your soul from me. You have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you, Life sweet as perfume and pure as prayer. But will it not one day in heaven repent you? Will they solace you wholly, the days that were? Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss, Meet mine, and see where the great love is, And tremble and turn and be changed? Content you; The gate is strait; I shall not be there. But you, had you chosen, had you stretched hand, Had you seen good such a thing were done, I too might have stood with the souls that stand In the sun's sight, clothed with the light of the sun; But who now on earth need care how I live? Have the high gods anything left to give, Save dust and laurels and gold and sand? Which gifts are goodly; but I will none. O all fair lovers about the world, There is none of you, none, that shall comfort me. My thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled Round and round in a gulf of the sea; And still, through the sound and the straining stream, Through the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream, The bright fine lips so cruelly curled, And strange swift eyes where the soul sits free. Free, without pity, withheld from woe, Ignorant; fair as the eyes are fair. Would I have you change now, change at a blow, Startled and stricken, awake and aware? Yea, if I could, would I have you see My very love of you filling me, And know my soul to the quick, as I know The likeness and look of your throat and hair? I shall not change you. Nay, though I might, Would I change my sweet one love with a word? I had rather your hair should change in a night, Clear now as the plume of a black bright bird; Your face fail suddenly, cease, turn grey, Die as a leaf that dies in a day. I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard. Far off it walks, in a bleak blown space, Full of the sound of the sorrow of years. I have woven a veil for the weeping face, Whose lips have drunken the wine of tears; I have found a way for the failing feet, A place for slumber and sorrow to meet; There is no rumour about the place, Nor light, nor any that sees or hears. I have hidden my soul out of sight, and said "Let none take pity upon thee, none Comfort thy crying: for lo, thou art dead, Lie still now, safe out of sight of the sun. Have I not built thee a grave, and wrought Thy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought, With soft spun verses and tears unshed, And sweet light visions of things undone? "I have given thee garments and balm and myrrh, And gold, and beautiful burial things. But thou, be at peace now, make no stir; Is not thy grave as a royal king's? Fret not thyself though the end were sore; Sleep, be patient, vex me no more. Sleep; what hast thou to do with her? The eyes that weep, with the mouth that sings?" Where the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten, The cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by, The misconceived and the misbegotten, I would find a sin to do ere I die, Sure to dissolve and destroy me all through, That would set you higher in heaven, serve you And leave you happy, when clean forgotten, As a dead man out of mind, am I. Your lithe hands draw me, your face burns through me, I am swift to follow you, keen to see; But love lacks might to redeem or undo me; As I have been, I know I shall surely be; "What should such fellows as I do?" Nay, My part were worse if I chose to play; For the worst is this after all; if they knew me, Not a soul upon earth would pity me. And I play not for pity of these; but you, If you saw with your soul what man am I, You would praise me at least that my soul all through Clove to you, loathing the lives that lie; The souls and lips that are bought and sold, The smiles of silver and kisses of gold, The lapdog loves that whine as they chew, The little lovers that curse and cry. There are fairer women, I hear; that may be; But I, that I love you and find you fair, Who are more than fair in my eyes if they be, Do the high gods know or the great gods care? Though the swords in my heart for one were seven, Should the iron hollow of doubtful heaven, That knows not itself whether night-time or day be, Reverberate words and a foolish prayer? I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea. I will go down to her, I and none other, Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me; Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast: O fair white mother, in days long past Born without sister, born without brother, Set free my soul as thy soul is free. O fair green-girdled mother of mine, Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain, Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine, Thy large embraces are keen like pain. Save me and hide me with all thy waves, Find me one grave of thy thousand graves, Those pure cold populous graves of thine Wrought without hand in a world without stain. I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, Change as the winds change, veer in the tide; My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside; Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were, Filled full with life to the eyes and hair, As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips With splendid summer and perfume and pride. This woven raiment of nights and days, Were it once cast off and unwound from me, Naked and glad would I walk in thy ways, Alive and aware of thy ways and thee; Clear of the whole world, hidden at home, Clothed with the green and crowned with the foam, A pulse of the life of thy straits and bays, A vein in the heart of the streams of the sea. Fair mother, fed with the lives of men, Thou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say. Thou hast taken, and shalt not render again; Thou art full of thy dead, and cold as they. But death is the worst that comes of thee; Thou art fed with our dead, O mother, O sea, But when hast thou fed on our hearts? or when, Having given us love, hast thou taken away? O tender-hearted, O perfect lover, Thy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart. The hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover, Shall they not vanish away and apart? But thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth; Thou art strong for death and fruitful of birth; Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover; From the first thou wert; in the end thou art. And grief shall endure not for ever, I know. As things that are not shall these things be; We shall live through seasons of sun and of snow, And none be grievous as this to me. We shall hear, as one in a trance that hears, The sound of time, the rhyme of the years; Wrecked hope and passionate pain will grow As tender things of a spring-tide sea. Sea-fruit that swings in the waves that hiss, Drowned gold and purple and royal rings. And all time past, was it all for this? Times unforgotten, and treasures of things? Swift years of liking and sweet long laughter, That wist not well of the years thereafter Till love woke, smitten at heart by a kiss, With lips that trembled and trailing wings? There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she. And finding life for her love's sake fail, Being fain to see her, he bade set sail, Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold, And praised God, seeing; and so died he. Died, praising God for his gift and grace: For she bowed down to him weeping, and said "Live;" and her tears were shed on his face Or ever the life in his face was shed. The sharp tears fell through her hair, and stung Once, and her close lips touched him and clung Once, and grew one with his lips for a space; And so drew back, and the man was dead. O brother, the gods were good to you. Sleep, and be glad while the world endures. Be well content as the years wear through; Give thanks for life, and the loves and lures; Give thanks for life, O brother, and death, For the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath, For gifts she gave you, gracious and few, Tears and kisses, that lady of yours. Rest, and be glad of the gods; but I, How shall I praise them, or how take rest? There is not room under all the sky For me that know not of worst or best, Dream or desire of the days before, Sweet things or bitterness, any more. Love will not come to me now though I die, As love came close to you, breast to breast. I shall never be friends again with roses; I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes, As a wave of the sea turned back by song. There are sounds where the soul's delight takes fire, Face to face with its own desire; A delight that rebels, a desire that reposes; I shall hate sweet music my whole life long. The pulse of war and passion of wonder, The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine, The stars that sing and the loves that thunder, The music burning at heart like wine, An armed archangel whose hands raise up All senses mixed in the spirit's cup Till flesh and spirit are molten in sunder — These things are over, and no more mine. These were a part of the playing I heard Once, ere my love and my heart were at strife; Love that sings and hath wings as a bird, Balm of the wound and heft of the knife. Fairer than earth is the sea, and sleep Than overwatching of eyes that weep, Now time has done with his one sweet word, The wine and leaven of lovely life. I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, Fill the days of my daily breath With fugitive things not good to treasure, Do as the world doth, say as it saith; But if we had loved each other — O sweet, Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet, The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure To feel you tread it to dust and death — Ah, had I not taken my life up and given All that life gives and the years let go, The wine and honey, the balm and leaven, The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low? Come life, come death, not a word be said; Should I lose you living, and vex you dead? I never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven, If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?
TWINKLE, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are ! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the trav'ller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often thro' my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. 'Tis your bright and tiny spark, Lights the trav'ller in the dark : Tho' I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Dagonet, the fool, whom Gawain in his mood Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round, At Camelot, high above the yellowing woods, Danced like a wither'd leaf before the hall. And toward him from the hall, with harp in hand, And from the crown thereof a carcanet Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday, Came Tristram, saying, "Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?" For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once Far down beneath a winding wall of rock Heard a child wail. A stump of oak half-dead. From roots like some black coil of carven snakes, Clutch'd at the crag, and started thro' mid air Bearing an eagle's nest: and thro' the tree Rush'd ever a rainy wind, and thro' the wind Pierced ever a child's cry: and crag and tree Scaling, Sir Lancelot from the perilous nest, This ruby necklace thrice around her neck, And all unscarr'd from beak or talon, brought A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took, Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen But coldly acquiescing, in her white arms Received, and after loved it tenderly, And named it Nestling; so forgot herself A moment, and her cares; till that young life Being smitten in mid heaven with mortal cold Past from her; and in time the carcanet Vext her with plaintive memories of the child: So she, delivering it to Arthur, said, "Take thou the jewels of this dead innocence, And make them, an thou wilt, a tourney-prize." To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne Dead nestling, and this honour after death, Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn, And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear." "Would rather you had let them fall," she cried, "Plunge and be lost—ill-fated as they were, A bitterness to me!—ye look amazed, Not knowing they were lost as soon as given— Slid from my hands, when I was leaning out Above the river—that unhappy child Past in her barge: but rosier luck will go With these rich jewels, seeing that they came Not from the skeleton of a brother-slayer, But the sweet body of a maiden babe. Perchance—who knows?—the purest of thy knights May win them for the purest of my maids." She ended, and the cry of a great jousts With trumpet-blowings ran on all the ways From Camelot in among the faded fields To furthest towers; and everywhere the knights Arm'd for a day of glory before the King. But on the hither side of that loud morn Into the hall stagger'd, his visage ribb'd From ear to ear with dogwhip-weals, his nose Bridge-broken, one eye out, and one hand off, And one with shatter'd fingers dangling lame, A churl, to whom indignantly the King, "My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil beast Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend? Man was it who marr'd heaven's image in thee thus?" Then, sputtering thro' the hedge of splinter'd teeth, Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump Pitch-blacken'd sawing the air, said the maim'd churl, "He took them and he drave them to his tower— Some hold he was a table-knight of thine— A hundred goodly ones—the Red Knight, he— Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower; And when I call'd upon thy name as one That doest right by gentle and by churl, Maim'd me and maul'd, and would outright have slain, Save that he sware me to a message, saying, 'Tell thou the King and all his liars, that I Have founded my Round Table in the North, And whatsoever his own knights have sworn My knights have sworn the counter to it—and say My tower is full of harlots, like his court, But mine are worthier, seeing they profess To be none other than themselves—and say My knights are all adulterers like his own, But mine are truer, seeing they profess To be none other; and say his hour is come, The heathen are upon him, his long lance Broken, and his Excalibur a straw.' " Then Arthur turn'd to Kay the seneschal, "Take thou my churl, and tend him curiously Like a king's heir, till all his hurts be whole. The heathen—but that ever-climbing wave, Hurl'd back again so often in empty foam, Hath lain for years at rest—and renegades, Thieves, bandits, leavings of confusion, whom The wholesome realm is purged of otherwhere, Friends, thro' your manhood and your fealty,—now Make their last head like Satan in the North. My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds, Move with me toward their quelling, which achieved, The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore. But thou, Sir Lancelot, sitting in my place Enchair'd to-morrow, arbitrate the field; For wherefore shouldst thou care to mingle with it Only to yield my Queen her own again? Speak, Lancelot, thou art silent: is it well?" Thereto Sir Lancelot answer'd, "It is well: Yet better if the King abide, and leave The leading of his younger knights to me. Else, for the King has will'd it, it is well." Then Arthur rose and Lancelot follow'd him, And while they stood without the doors, the King Turn'd to him saying, "Is it then so well? Or mine the blame that oft I seem as he Of whom was written, 'A sound is in his ears'? The foot that loiters, bidden go,—the glance That only seems half-loyal to command,— A manner somewhat fall'n from reverence— Or have I dream'd the bearing of our knights Tells of a manhood ever less and lower? Or whence the fear lest this my realm, uprear'd, By noble deeds at one with noble vows, From flat confusion and brute violences, Reel back into the beast, and be no more?" He spoke, and taking all his younger knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turn'd North by the gate. In her high bower the Queen, Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme Of bygone Merlin, "Where is he who knows? From the great deep to the great deep he goes." But when the morning of a tournament, By these in earnest those in mockery call'd The Tournament of the Dead Innocence, Brake with a wet wind blowing, Lancelot, Round whose sick head all night, like birds of prey, The words of Arthur flying shriek'd, arose, And down a streetway hung with folds of pure White samite, and by fountains running wine, Where children sat in white with cups of gold, Moved to the lists, and there, with slow sad steps Ascending, fill'd his double-dragon'd chair. He glanced and saw the stately galleries, Dame, damsel, each thro' worship of their Queen White-robed in honour of the stainless child, And some with scatter'd jewels, like a bank Of maiden snow mingled with sparks of fire. He look'd but once, and vail'd his eyes again. The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began: And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, When all the goodlier guests are past away, Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists. He saw the laws that ruled the tournament Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down Before his throne of arbitration cursed The dead babe and the follies of the King; And once the laces of a helmet crack'd, And show'd him, like a vermin in its hole, Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard The voice that billow'd round the barriers roar An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight, But newly-enter'd, taller than the rest, And armour'd all in forest green, whereon There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, With ever-scattering berries, and on shield A spear, a harp, a bugle—Tristram—late From overseas in Brittany return'd, And marriage with a princess of that realm, Isolt the White—Sir Tristram of the Woods— Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain His own against him, and now yearn'd to shake The burthen off his heart in one full shock With Tristram ev'n to death: his strong hands gript And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, Until he groan'd for wrath—so many of those, That ware their ladies' colours on the casque, Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds, And there with gibes and flickering mockeries Stood, while he mutter'd, "Craven crests! O shame! What faith have these in whom they sware to love? The glory of our Round Table is no more." So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems, Not speaking other word than "Hast thou won? Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand Wherewith thou takest this, is red!" to whom Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot's languorous mood, Made answer, "Ay, but wherefore toss me this Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound? Let be thy fair Queen's fantasy. Strength of heart And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, Are winners in this pastime of our King. My hand—belike the lance hath dript upon it— No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world; Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine." And Tristram round the gallery made his horse Caracole; then bow'd his homage, bluntly saying, "Fair damsels, each to him who worships each Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold This day my Queen of Beauty is not here." And most of these were mute, some anger'd, one Murmuring, "All courtesy is dead," and one, "The glory of our Round Table is no more." Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day Went glooming down in wet and weariness: But under her black brows a swarthy one Laugh'd shrilly, crying, "Praise the patient saints, Our one white day of Innocence hath past, Tho' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. The snowdrop only, flowering thro' the year, Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide. Come—let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen's And Lancelot's, at this night's solemnity With all the kindlier colours of the field." So dame and damsel glitter'd at the feast Variously gay: for he that tells the tale Liken'd them, saying, as when an hour of cold Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows, And all the purple slopes of mountain flowers Pass under white, till the warm hour returns With veer of wind, and all are flowers again; So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colours, the live grass, Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced About the revels, and with mirth so loud Beyond all use, that, half-amazed, the Queen, And wroth at Tristram and the lawless jousts, Brake up their sports, then slowly to her bower Parted, and in her bosom pain was lord. And little Dagonet on the morrow morn, High over all the yellowing Autumn-tide, Danced like a wither'd leaf before the hall. Then Tristram saying, "Why skip ye so, Sir Fool?" Wheel'd round on either heel, Dagonet replied, "Belike for lack of wiser company; Or being fool, and seeing too much wit Makes the world rotten, why, belike I skip To know myself the wisest knight of all." "Ay, fool," said Tristram, "but 'tis eating dry To dance without a catch, a roundelay To dance to." Then he twangled on his harp, And while he twangled little Dagonet stood Quiet as any water-sodden log Stay'd in the wandering warble of a brook; But when the twangling ended, skipt again; And being ask'd, "Why skipt ye not, Sir Fool?" Made answer, "I had liefer twenty years Skip to the broken music of my brains Than any broken music thou canst make." Then Tristram, waiting for the quip to come, "Good now, what music have I broken, fool?" And little Dagonet, skipping, "Arthur, the King's; For when thou playest that air with Queen Isolt, Thou makest broken music with thy bride, Her daintier namesake down in Brittany— And so thou breakest Arthur's music, too." "Save for that broken music in thy brains, Sir Fool," said Tristram, "I would break thy head. Fool, I came late, the heathen wars were o'er, The life had flown, we sware but by the shell— I am but a fool to reason with a fool— Come, thou art crabb'd and sour: but lean me down, Sir Dagonet, one of thy long asses' ears, And harken if my music be not true. "'Free love—free field—we love but while we may: The woods are hush'd, their music is no more: The leaf is dead, the yearning past away: New leaf, new life—the days of frost are o'er: New life, new love, to suit the newer day: New loves are sweet as those that went before: Free love—free field—we love but while we may.' "Ye might have moved slow-measure to my tune, Not stood stockstill. I made it in the woods, And heard it ring as true as tested gold." But Dagonet with one foot poised in his hand, "Friend, did ye mark that fountain yesterday Made to run wine?—but this had run itself All out like a long life to a sour end— And them that round it sat with golden cups To hand the wine to whosoever came— The twelve small damosels white as Innocence, In honour of poor Innocence the babe, Who left the gems which Innocence the Queen Lent to the King, and Innocence the King Gave for a prize—and one of those white slips Handed her cup and piped, the pretty one, 'Drink, drink, Sir Fool,' and thereupon I drank, Spat—pish—the cup was gold, the draught was mud." And Tristram, "Was it muddier than thy gibes? Is all the laughter gone dead out of thee?— Not marking how the knighthood mock thee, fool— 'Fear God: honour the King—his one true knight— Sole follower of the vows'—for here be they Who knew thee swine enow before I came, Smuttier than blasted grain: but when the King Had made thee fool, thy vanity so shot up It frighted all free fool from out thy heart; Which left thee less than fool, and less than swine, A naked aught—yet swine I hold thee still, For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine." And little Dagonet mincing with his feet, "Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck In lieu of hers, I'll hold thou hast some touch Of music, since I care not for thy pearls. Swine? I have wallow'd, I have wash'd—the world Is flesh and shadow—I have had my day. The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind Hath foul'd me—an I wallow'd, then I wash'd— I have had my day and my philosophies— And thank the Lord I am King Arthur's fool. Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese Troop'd round a Paynim harper once, who thrumm'd On such a wire as musically as thou Some such fine song—but never a king's fool." And Tristram, "Then were swine, goats, asses, geese The wiser fools, seeing thy Paynim bard Had such a mastery of his mystery That he could harp his wife up out of hell." Then Dagonet, turning on the ball of his foot, "And whither harp'st thou thine? down! and thyself Down! and two more: a helpful harper thou, That harpest downward! Dost thou know the star We call the harp of Arthur up in heaven?" And Tristram, "Ay, Sir Fool, for when our King Was victor wellnigh day by day, the knights, Glorying in each new glory, set his name High on all hills, and in the signs of heaven." And Dagonet answer'd, "Ay, and when the land Was freed, and the Queen false, ye set yourself To babble about him, all to show your wit— And whether he were King by courtesy, Or King by right—and so went harping down The black king's highway, got so far, and grew So witty that we play'd at ducks and drakes With Arthur's vows on the great lake of fire. Tuwhoo! do ye see it? do ye see the star?" "Nay, fool," said Tristram, "not in open day." And Dagonet, "Nay, nor will: I see it and hear. It makes a silent music up in heaven, And I, and Arthur and the angels hear, And then we skip." "Lo, fool," he said, "ye talk Fool's treason: is the King thy brother fool?" Then little Dagonet clapt his hands and shrill'd, "Ay, ay, my brother fool, the king of fools! Conceits himself as God that he can make Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs, And men from beasts—Long live the king of fools!" And down the city Dagonet danced away; But thro' the slowly-mellowing avenues And solitary passes of the wood Rode Tristram toward Lyonnesse and the west. Before him fled the face of Queen Isolt With ruby-circled neck, but evermore Past, as a rustle or twitter in the wood Made dull his inner, keen his outer eye For all that walk'd, or crept, or perch'd, or flew. Anon the face, as, when a gust hath blown, Unruffling waters re-collect the shape Of one that in them sees himself, return'd; But at the slot or fewmets of a deer, Or ev'n a fall'n feather, vanish'd again. So on for all that day from lawn to lawn Thro' many a league-long bower he rode. At length A lodge of intertwisted beechen-boughs Furze-cramm'd, and bracken-rooft, the which himself Built for a summer day with Queen Isolt Against a shower, dark in the golden grove Appearing, sent his fancy back to where She lived a moon in that low lodge with him: Till Mark her lord had past, the Cornish King, With six or seven, when Tristram was away, And snatch'd her thence; yet dreading worse than shame Her warrior Tristram, spake not any word, But bode his hour, devising wretchedness. And now that desert lodge to Tristram lookt So sweet, that halting, in he past, and sank Down on a drift of foliage random-blown; But could not rest for musing how to smoothe And sleek his marriage over to the Queen. Perchance in lone Tintagil far from all The tonguesters of the court she had not heard. But then what folly had sent him overseas After she left him lonely here? a name? Was it the name of one in Brittany, Isolt, the daughter of the King? "Isolt Of the white hands" they call'd her: the sweet name Allured him first, and then the maid herself, Who served him well with those white hands of hers, And loved him well, until himself had thought He loved her also, wedded easily, But left her all as easily, and return'd. The black-blue Irish hair and Irish eyes Had drawn him home—what marvel? then he laid His brows upon the drifted leaf and dream'd. He seem'd to pace the strand of Brittany Between Isolt of Britain and his bride, And show'd them both the ruby-chain, and both Began to struggle for it, till his Queen Graspt it so hard, that all her hand was red. Then cried the Breton, "Look, her hand is red! These be no rubies, this is frozen blood, And melts within her hand—her hand is hot With ill desires, but this I gave thee, look, Is all as cool and white as any flower." Follow'd a rush of eagle's wings, and then A whimpering of the spirit of the child, Because the twain had spoil'd her carcanet. He dream'd; but Arthur with a hundred spears Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh Glared on a huge machicolated tower That stood with open doors, whereout was roll'd A roar of riot, as from men secure Amid their marshes, ruffians at their ease Among their harlot-brides, an evil song. "Lo there," said one of Arthur's youth, for there, High on a grim dead tree before the tower, A goodly brother of the Table Round Swung by the neck: and on the boughs a shield Showing a shower of blood in a field noir, And therebeside a horn, inflamed the knights At that dishonour done the gilded spur, Till each would clash the shield, and blow the horn. But Arthur waved them back. Alone he rode. Then at the dry harsh roar of the great horn, That sent the face of all the marsh aloft An ever upward-rushing storm and cloud Of shriek and plume, the Red Knight heard, and all, Even to tipmost lance and topmost helm, In blood-red armour sallying, howl'd to the King, "The teeth of Hell flay bare and gnash thee flat!— Lo! art thou not that eunuch-hearted King Who fain had clipt free manhood from the world— The woman-worshipper? Yea, God's curse, and I! Slain was the brother of my paramour By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too, Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell, And stings itself to everlasting death, To hang whatever knight of thine I fought And tumbled. Art thou King?—Look to thy life!" He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. And Arthur deign'd not use of word or sword, But let the drunkard, as he stretch'd from horse To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing; thus he fell Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch'd him, roar'd And shouted and leapt down upon the fall'n; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Thro' open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement stream'd with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush'd The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea. So all the ways were safe from shore to shore, But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord. Then, out of Tristram waking, the red dream Fled with a shout, and that low lodge return'd, Mid-forest, and the wind among the boughs. He whistled his good warhorse left to graze Among the forest greens, vaulted upon him, And rode beneath an ever-showering leaf, Till one lone woman, weeping near a cross, Stay'd him. "Why weep ye?" "Lord," she said, "my man Hath left me or is dead"; whereon he thought— "What, if she hate me now? I would not this. What, if she love me still? I would not that. I know not what I would"—but said to her, "Yet weep not thou, lest, if thy mate return, He find thy favour changed and love thee not"— Then pressing day by day thro' Lyonnesse Last in a roky hollow, belling, heard The hounds of Mark, and felt the goodly hounds Yelp at his heart, but turning, past and gain'd Tintagil, half in sea, and high on land, A crown of towers. Down in a casement sat, A low sea-sunset glorying round her hair And glossy-throated grace, Isolt the Queen. And when she heard the feet of Tristram grind The spiring stone that scaled about her tower, Flush'd, started, met him at the doors, and there Belted his body with her white embrace, Crying aloud, "Not Mark—not Mark, my soul! The footstep flutter'd me at first: not he: Catlike thro' his own castle steals my Mark, But warrior-wise thou stridest thro' his halls Who hates thee, as I him—ev'n to the death. My soul, I felt my hatred for my Mark Quicken within me, and knew that thou wert nigh." To whom Sir Tristram smiling, "I am here. Let be thy Mark, seeing he is not thine." And drawing somewhat backward she replied, "Can he be wrong'd who is not ev'n his own, But save for dread of thee had beaten me, Scratch'd, bitten, blinded, marr'd me somehow—Mark? What rights are his that dare not strike for them? Not lift a hand—not, tho' he found me thus! But harken! have ye met him? hence he went To-day for three days' hunting—as he said— And so returns belike within an hour. Mark's way, my soul!—but eat not thou with Mark, Because he hates thee even more than fears; Nor drink: and when thou passest any wood Close vizor, lest an arrow from the bush Should leave me all alone with Mark and hell. My God, the measure of my hate for Mark Is as the measure of my love for thee.'' So, pluck'd one way by hate and one by love, Drain'd of her force, again she sat, and spake To Tristram, as he knelt before her, saying, "O hunter, and O blower of the horn, Harper, and thou hast been a rover too, For, ere I mated with my shambling king, Ye twain had fallen out about the bride Of one—his name is out of me—the prize, If prize she were—(what marvel—she could see)— Thine, friend; and ever since my craven seeks To wreck thee villainously: but, O Sir Knight, What dame or damsel have ye kneel'd to last?" And Tristram, "Last to my Queen Paramount, Here now to my Queen Paramount of love And loveliness—ay, lovelier than when first Her light feet fell on our rough Lyonnesse, Sailing from Ireland." Softly laugh'd Isolt; "Flatter me not, for hath not our great Queen My dole of beauty trebled?" and he said, "Her beauty is her beauty, and thine thine, And thine is more to me—soft, gracious, kind— Save when thy Mark is kindled on thy lips Most gracious; but she, haughty ev'n to him, Lancelot; for I have seen him wan enow To make one doubt if ever the great Queen Have yielded him her love." To whom Isolt, "Ah then, false hunter and false harper, thou Who brakest thro' the scruple of my bond, Calling me thy white hind, and saying to me That Guinevere had sinn'd against the highest, And I—misyoked with such a want of man— That I could hardly sin against the lowest." He answer'd, "O my soul, be comforted! If this be sweet, to sin in leading-strings, If here be comfort, and if ours be sin, Crown'd warrant had we for the crowning sin That made us happy: but how ye greet me—fear And fault and doubt—no word of that fond tale— Thy deep heart-yearnings, thy sweet memories Of Tristram in that year he was away." And, saddening on the sudden, spake Isolt, "I had forgotten all in my strong joy To see thee—yearnings?—ay! for, hour by hour, Here in the never-ended afternoon, O sweeter than all memories of thee, Deeper than any yearnings after thee Seem'd those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas, Watch'd from this tower. Isolt of Britain dash'd Before Isolt of Brittany on the strand, Would that have chill'd her bride-kiss? Wedded her? Fought in her father's battles? wounded there? The King was all fulfill'd with gratefulness, And she, my namesake of the hands, that heal'd Thy hurt and heart with unguent and caress— Well—can I wish her any huger wrong Than having known thee? her too hast thou left To pine and waste in those sweet memories. O were I not my Mark's, by whom all men Are noble, I should hate thee more than love." And Tristram, fondling her light hands, replied, "Grace, Queen, for being loved: she loved me well. Did I love her? the name at least I loved. Isolt?—I fought his battles, for Isolt! The night was dark; the true star set. Isolt! The name was ruler of the dark—Isolt? Care not for her! patient, and prayerful, meek, Pale-blooded, she will yield herself to God." And Isolt answer'd, "Yea, and why not I? Mine is the larger need, who am not meek, Pale-blooded, prayerful. Let me tell thee now. Here one black, mute midsummer night I sat, Lonely, but musing on thee, wondering where, Murmuring a light song I had heard thee sing, And once or twice I spake thy name aloud. Then flash'd a levin-brand; and near me stood, In fuming sulphur blue and green, a fiend— Mark's way to steal behind one in the dark— For there was Mark: 'He has wedded her,' he said, Not said, but hiss'd it: then this crown of towers So shook to such a roar of all the sky, That here in utter dark I swoon'd away, And woke again in utter dark, and cried, 'I will flee hence and give myself to God'— And thou wert lying in thy new leman's arms." Then Tristram, ever dallying with her hand, "May God be with thee, sweet, when old and gray, And past desire!" a saying that anger'd her. "'May God be with thee, sweet, when thou art old, And sweet no more to me!' I need Him now. For when had Lancelot utter'd aught so gross Ev'n to the swineherd's malkin in the mast? The greater man, the greater courtesy. Far other was the Tristram, Arthur's knight! But thou, thro' ever harrying thy wild beasts— Save that to touch a harp, tilt with a lance Becomes thee well—art grown wild beast thyself. How darest thou, if lover, push me even In fancy from thy side, and set me far In the gray distance, half a life away, Her to be loved no more? Unsay it, unswear! Flatter me rather, seeing me so weak, Broken with Mark and hate and solitude, Thy marriage and mine own, that I should suck Lies like sweet wines: lie to me: I believe. Will ye not lie? not swear, as there ye kneel, And solemnly as when ye sware to him, The man of men, our King—My God, the power Was once in vows when men believed the King! They lied not then, who sware, and thro' their vows The King prevailing made his realm:—I say, Swear to me thou wilt love me ev'n when old, Gray-hair'd, and past desire, and in despair." Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down, "Vows! did you keep the vow you made to Mark More than I mine? Lied, say ye? Nay, but learnt, The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself— My knighthood taught me this—ay, being snapt— We run more counter to the soul thereof Than had we never sworn. I swear no more. I swore to the great King, and am forsworn. For once—ev'n to the height—I honour'd him. 'Man, is he man at all?' methought, when first I rode from our rough Lyonnesse, and beheld That victor of the Pagan throned in hall— His hair, a sun that ray'd from off a brow Like hillsnow high in heaven, the steel-blue eyes, The golden beard that clothed his lips with light— Moreover, that weird legend of his birth, With Merlin's mystic babble about his end Amazed me; then his foot was on a stool Shaped as a dragon; he seem'd to me no man, But Michaël trampling Satan; so I sware, Being amazed: but this went by—The vows! O ay—the wholesome madness of an hour— They served their use, their time; for every knight Believed himself a greater than himself, And every follower eyed him as a God; Till he, being lifted up beyond himself, Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done, And so the realm was made; but then their vows— First mainly thro' that sullying of our Queen— Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence Had Arthur right to bind them to himself? Dropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep? They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord To bind them by inviolable vows, Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: For feel this arm of mine—the tide within Red with free chase and heather-scented air, Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure As any maiden child? lock up my tongue From uttering freely what I freely hear? Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it. And worldling of the world am I, and know The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour Woos his own end; we are not angels here Nor shall be: vows—I am woodman of the woods, And hear the garnet-headed yaffingale Mock them: my soul, we love but while we may; And therefore is my love so large for thee, Seeing it is not bounded save by love." Here ending, he moved toward her, and she said, "Good: an I turn'd away my love for thee To some one thrice as courteous as thyself— For courtesy wins woman all as well As valour may, but he that closes both Is perfect, he is Lancelot—taller indeed, Rosier and comelier, thou—but say I loved This knightliest of all knights, and cast thee back Thine own small saw, 'We love but while we may,' Well then, what answer?" He that while she spake, Mindful of what he brought to adorn her with, The jewels, had let one finger lightly touch The warm white apple of her throat, replied, "Press this a little closer, sweet, until— Come, I am hunger'd and half-anger'd—meat, Wine, wine—and I will love thee to the death, And out beyond into the dream to come." So then, when both were brought to full accord, She rose, and set before him all he will'd; And after these had comforted the blood With meats and wines, and satiated their hearts— Now talking of their woodland paradise, The deer, the dews, the fern, the founts, the lawns; Now mocking at the much ungainliness, And craven shifts, and long crane legs of Mark— Then Tristram laughing caught the harp, and sang: "Ay, ay, O ay—the winds that bend the brier! A star in heaven, a star within the mere! Ay, ay, O ay—a star was my desire, And one was far apart, and one was near: Ay, ay, O ay—the winds that bow the grass! And one was water and one star was fire, And one will ever shine and one will pass. Ay, ay, O ay—the winds that move the mere." Then in the light's last glimmer Tristram show'd And swung the ruby carcanet. She cried, "The collar of some Order, which our King Hath newly founded, all for thee, my soul, For thee, to yield thee grace beyond thy peers." "Not so, my Queen," he said, "but the red fruit Grown on a magic oak-tree in mid-heaven, And won by Tristram as a tourney-prize, And hither brought by Tristram for his last Love-offering and peace-offering unto thee." He spoke, he turn'd, then, flinging round her neck, Claspt it, and cried "Thine Order, O my Queen!" But, while he bow'd to kiss the jewell'd throat, Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd, Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek— "Mark's way," said Mark, and clove him thro' the brain. That night came Arthur home, and while he climb'd, All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom, The stairway to the hall, and look'd and saw The great Queen's bower was dark,—about his feet A voice clung sobbing till he question'd it, "What art thou?" and the voice about his feet Sent up an answer, sobbing, "I am thy fool, And I shall never make thee smile again."
That story which the bold Sir Bedivere, First made and latest left of all the knights, Told, when the man was no more than a voice In the white winter of his age, to those With whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds. For on their march to westward, Bedivere, Who slowly paced among the slumbering host, Heard in his tent the moanings of the King: "I found Him in the shining of the stars, I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields, But in His ways with men I find Him not. I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. O me! for why is all around us here As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would, Till the High God behold it from beyond, And enter it, and make it beautiful? Or else as if the world were wholly fair, But that these eyes of men are dense and dim, And have not power to see it as it is: Perchance, because we see not to the close;— For I, being simple, thought to work His will, And have but stricken with the sword in vain; And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm Reels back into the beast, and is no more. My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death: Nay—God my Christ—I pass but shall not die." Then, ere that last weird battle in the west, There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling, "Hollow, hollow all delight! Hail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind, And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight." And fainter onward, like wild birds that change Their season in the night and wail their way From cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream Shrill'd; but in going mingled with dim cries Far in the moonlit haze among the hills, As of some lonely city sack'd by night, When all is lost, and wife and child with wail Pass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call'd, "Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind, Thine, Gawain, was the voice—are these dim cries Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?" This heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake: "O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man; And care not thou for dreams from him, but rise— I hear the steps of Modred in the west, And with him many of thy people, and knights Once thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown Than heathen, spitting at their vows and thee. Right well in heart they know thee for the King. Arise, go forth and conquer as of old." Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Far other is this battle in the west Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth, And brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome, Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall, And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine To war against my people and my knights. The king who fights his people fights himself. And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke That strikes them dead is as my death to me. Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way Thro' this blind haze, which ever since I saw One lying in the dust at Almesbury, Hath folded in the passes of the world." Then rose the King and moved his host by night, And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league, Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse— A land of old upheaven from the abyss By fire, to sink into the abyss again; Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, And the long mountains ended in a coast Of ever-shifting sand, and far away The phantom circle of a moaning sea. There the pursuer could pursue no more, And he that fled no further fly the King; And there, that day when the great light of heaven Burn'd at his lowest in the rolling year, On the waste sand by the waste sea they closed. Nor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight Like this last, dim, weird battle of the west. A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea: Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle; and in the mist Was many a noble deed, many a base, And chance and craft and strength in single fights, And ever and anon with host to host Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn, Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and shrieks After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist; And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights, Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs In that close mist, and cryings for the light, Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead. Last, as by some one deathbed after wail Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore, Save for some whisper of the seething seas, A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field Of battle: but no man was moving there; Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Brake in among dead faces, to and fro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome, And rolling far along the gloomy shores The voice of days of old and days to be. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere, And whiter than the mist that all day long Had held the field of battle was the King: "Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world, And wastes the narrow realm whereon we move, And beats upon the faces of the dead, My dead, as tho' they had not died for me?— O Bedivere, for on my heart hath fall'n Confusion, till I know not what I am, Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King. Behold, I seem but King among the dead." Then spake the bold Sir Bedivere: "My King, King everywhere! and so the dead have kings, There also will I worship thee as King. Yet still thy life is whole, and still I live Who love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought The heathen back among us, yonder stands, Modred, unharm'd, the traitor of thine house." Then spake the King: "My house hath been my doom. But call not thou this traitor of my house Who hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me. My house are rather they who sware my vows, Yea, even while they brake them, own'd me King. And well for thee, saying in my dark hour, When all the purport of my throne hath fail'd, That quick or dead thou hottest me for King. King am I, whatsoever be their cry; And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see Yet, ere I pass." And uttering this the King Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege Hard on that helm which many a heathen sword Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow, Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell. So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fall'n in Lyonnesse about their lord, King Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land: On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "The sequel of to-day unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep They sleep—the men I loved. I think that we Shall never more, at any future time, Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, Walking about the gardens and the halls Of Camelot, as in the days that were. I perish by this people which I made,— Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more; but, let what will be, be, I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm That without help I cannot last till morn. Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how In those old days, one summer noon, an arm Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, Holding the sword—and how I row'd across And took it, and have worn it, like a king; And, wheresoever I am sung or told In aftertime, this also shall be known: But now delay not: take Excalibur, And fling him far into the middle mere: Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word." To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere: "It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm— A little thing may harm a wounded man; Yet I thy hest will all perform at full, Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word." So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept, And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake. There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long That both his eyes were dazzled as he stood, This way and that dividing the swift mind, In act to throw: but at the last it seem'd Better to leave Excalibur conceal'd There in the many-knotted waterflags, That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. So strode he back slow to the wounded King. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Hast thou perform'd my mission which I gave? What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag." To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale: "Thou hast betray'd thy nature and thy name, Not rendering true answer, as beseem'd Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight: For surer sign had follow'd, either hand Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again, As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word." Then went Sir Bedivere the second time Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, Counting the dewy pebbles, fix'd in thought; But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, How curiously and strangely chased, he smote His palms together, and he cried aloud: "And if indeed I cast the brand away, Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, Should thus be lost for ever from the earth, Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt? But were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, Saying, 'King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: "What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?' And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds." To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath: "Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, Laid widow'd of the power in his eye That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence: But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands." Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges, lightly, plunged Among the bulrush beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the Northern Sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere. And lightly went the other to the King. Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath: "Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die, Not tho' I live three lives of mortal men, So great a miracle as yonder hilt. Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him; But when I look'd again, behold an arm, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, That caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere." And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: "My end draws nigh; 'tis time that I were gone. Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, And bear me to the margin; yet I fear My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die." So saying, from the pavement he half rose, Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm, And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere Remorsefully regarded thro' his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words; Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. But, as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels— And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon. Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge, Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms, Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these Three Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmur'd Arthur, "Place me in the barge." So to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she, that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And call'd him by his name, complaining loud, And dropping bitter tears against a brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the wither'd moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls— That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the daïs-throne—were parch'd with dust Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. So like a shatter'd column lay the King; Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot thro' the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: "Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole Round Table is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world, And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds." And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seëst—if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)— To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away. But when that moan had past for evermore, The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn Amazed him, and he groan'd, The King is gone.'' And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, "From the great deep to the great deep he goes." Whereat he slowly turn'd and slowly clomb The last hard footstep of that iron crag; Thence mark'd the black hull moving yet, and cried, "He passes to be King among the dead, And after healing of his grievous wound He comes again; but—if he come no more— O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat, Who shriek'd and wail'd, the three whereat we gazed On that high day, when, clothed with living light, They stood before his throne in silence, friends Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?" Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint As from beyond the limit of the world, Like the last echo born of a great cry, Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice Around a king returning from his wars. Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb Ev'n to the highest he could climb, and saw, Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King, Down that long water opening on the deep Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go From less to less and vanish into light. And the new sun rose bringing the new year.
Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud; Turn thy wild wheel thro' sunshine, storm, and cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate. Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; With that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. Smile and we smile, the lords of many lands; Frown and we smile, the lords of our own hands; For man is man and master of his fate. Turn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd; Thy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud; Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just. Thou seemest human and divine, The highest, holiest manhood, thou. Our wills are ours, we know not how, Our wills are ours, to make them thine. Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. We are fools and slight; We mock thee when we do not fear: But help thy foolish ones to bear; Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. Forgive what seem'd my sin in me, What seem'd my worth since I began; For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee. Forgive my grief for one removed, Thy creature, whom I found so fair. I trust he lives in thee, and there I find him worthier to be loved. Forgive these wild and wandering cries, Confusions of a wasted youth; Forgive them where they fail in truth, And in thy wisdom make me wise.
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. The seasons bring the flower again, And bring the firstling to the flock; And in the dusk of thee, the clock Beats out the little lives of men. O not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee.
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,  O Priestess in the vaults of Death,  O sweet and bitter in a breath, What whispers from thy lying lip? "The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;  A web is wov'n across the sky;  From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying sun: "And all the phantom, Nature, stands—  With all the music in her tone,  A hollow echo of my own,— A hollow form with empty hands." And shall I take a thing so blind,  Embrace her as my natural good;  Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind?
I sometimes hold it half a sin  To put in words the grief I feel;  For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain,  A use in measured language lies;  The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,  Like coarsest clothes against the cold;  But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.
Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more— Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.
Calm is the morn without a sound, Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only thro' the faded leaf The chestnut pattering to the ground: Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on these dews that drench the furze. And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold: Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main: Calm and deep peace in this wide air, These leaves that redden to the fall; And in my heart, if calm at all, If any calm, a calm despair: Calm on the seas, and silver sleep, And waves that sway themselves in rest, And dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep.
To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day: The last red leaf is whirl'd away, The rooks are blown about the skies; The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd, The cattle huddled on the lea; And wildly dash'd on tower and tree The sunbeam strikes along the world: And but for fancies, which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir That makes the barren branches loud; And but for fear it is not so, The wild unrest that lives in woe Would dote and pore on yonder cloud That rises upward always higher, And onward drags a labouring breast, And topples round the dreary west, A looming bastion fringed with fire.
The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well, Thro' four sweet years arose and fell, From flower to flower, from snow to snow: And we with singing cheer'd the way, And, crown'd with all the season lent, From April on to April went, And glad at heart from May to May: But where the path we walk'd began To slant the fifth autumnal slope, As we descended following Hope, There sat the Shadow fear'd of man; Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold, And wrapt thee formless in the fold, And dull'd the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow, tho' I walk in haste, And think, that somewhere in the waste The Shadow sits and waits for me.
I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage, That never knew the summer woods: I envy not the beast that takes His license in the field of time, Unfetter'd by the sense of crime, To whom a conscience never wakes; Nor, what may count itself as blest, The heart that never plighted troth But stagnates in the weeds of sloth; Nor any want-begotten rest. I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
With trembling fingers did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth; A rainy cloud possess'd the earth, And sadly fell our Christmas-eve. At our old pastimes in the hall We gambol'd, making vain pretence Of gladness, with an awful sense Of one mute Shadow watching all. We paused: the winds were in the beech: We heard them sweep the winter land; And in a circle hand-in-hand Sat silent, looking each at each. Then echo-like our voices rang; We sung, tho' every eye was dim, A merry song we sang with him Last year: impetuously we sang: We ceased: a gentler feeling crept Upon us: surely rest is meet: "They rest," we said, "their sleep is sweet," And silence follow'd, and we wept. Our voices took a higher range; Once more we sang: "They do not die Nor lose their mortal sympathy, Nor change to us, although they change; "Rapt from the fickle and the frail With gather'd power, yet the same, Pierces the keen seraphic flame From orb to orb, from veil to veil." Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, Draw forth the cheerful day from night: O Father, touch the east, and light The light that shone when Hope was born.
Old warder of these buried bones,  And answering now my random stroke  With fruitful cloud and living smoke, Dark yew, that graspest at the stones And dippest toward the dreamless head,  To thee too comes the golden hour  When flower is feeling after flower; But Sorrow—fixt upon the dead, And darkening the dark graves of men,—  What whisper'd from her lying lips?  Thy gloom is kindled at the tips, And passes into gloom again.
How fares it with the happy dead? For here the man is more and more; But he forgets the days before God shut the doorways of his head. The days have vanish'd, tone and tint, And yet perhaps the hoarding sense Gives out at times (he knows not whence) A little flash, a mystic hint; And in the long harmonious years (If Death so taste Lethean springs), May some dim touch of earthly things Surprise thee ranging with thy peers. If such a dreamy touch should fall, O turn thee round, resolve the doubt; My guardian angel will speak out In that high place, and tell thee all.
The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that "this is I": But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of "I," and "me," And finds "I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch." So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined. This use may lie in blood and breath Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of Death.
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final end of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy'd, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another's gain. Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life; That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear, I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
When on my bed the moonlight falls, I know that in thy place of rest By that broad water of the west, There comes a glory on the walls: Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name, And o'er the number of thy years. The mystic glory swims away; From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray: And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, And in the dark church like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again, And howlest, issuing out of night, With blasts that blow the poplar white, And lash with storm the streaming pane? Day, when my crown'd estate begun To pine in that reverse of doom, Which sicken'd every living bloom, And blurr'd the splendour of the sun; Who usherest in the dolorous hour With thy quick tears that make the rose Pull sideways, and the daisy close Her crimson fringes to the shower; Who might'st have heaved a windless flame Up the deep East, or, whispering, play'd A chequer-work of beam and shade Along the hills, yet look'd the same. As wan, as chill, as wild as now; Day, mark'd as with some hideous crime, When the dark hand struck down thro' time, And cancell'd nature's best: but thou, Lift as thou may'st thy burthen'd brows Thro' clouds that drench the morning star, And whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar, And sow the sky with flying boughs, And up thy vault with roaring sound Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day; Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray, And hide thy shame beneath the ground.
Again at Christmas did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth; The silent snow possess'd the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: The yule-log sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost. As in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic picture's breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind. Who show'd a token of distress? No single tear, no mark of pain: O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less? O last regret, regret can die! Noimixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry.
I wage not any feud with Death For changes wrought on form and face; No lower life that earth's embrace May breed with him, can fright my faith. Eternal process moving on, From state to state the spirit walks; And these are but the shatter'd stalks, Or ruin'd chrysalis of one. Nor blame I Death, because he bare The use of virtue out of earth: I know transplanted human worth Will bloom to profit, otherwhere. For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart; He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.
Dip down upon the northern shore O sweet new-year delaying long; Thou doest expectant nature wrong; Delaying long, delay no more. What stays thee from the clouded noons, Thy sweetness from its proper place? Can trouble live with April days, Or sadness in the summer moons? Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire, The little speed well's darling blue, Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew, Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire. O thou new-year, delaying long, Delayest the sorrow in my blood, That longs to burst a frozen bud And flood a fresher throat with song.
By night we linger'd on the lawn, For underfoot the herb was dry; And genial warmth; and o'er the sky The silvery haze of summer drawn; And calm that let the tapers burn Unwavering: not a cricket chirr'd: The brook alone far-off was heard, And on the board the fluttering urn: And bats went round in fragrant skies, And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes And woolly breasts and beaded eyes; While now we sang old songs that peal'd From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease, The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field. But when those others, one by one, Withdrew themselves from me and night, And in the house light after light Went out, and I was all alone, A hunger seized my heart; I read Of that glad year which once had been, In those fall'n leaves which kept their green, The noble letters of the dead: And strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words, and strange Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell On doubts that drive the coward back, And keen thro' wordy snares to track Suggestion to her inmost cell. So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past, And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd About empyreal heights of thought, And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world, Æonian music measuring out The steps of Time—the shocks of Chance— The blows of Death. At length my trance Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt. Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame In matter-moulded forms of speech, Or ev'n for intellect to reach Thro' memory that which I became: Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease, The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees Laid their dark arms about the field: And suck'd from out the distant gloom A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore, And fluctuate all the still perfume, And gathering freshlier overhead, Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said "The dawn, the dawn," and died away; And East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day.
You say, but with no touch of scorn, Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes Are tender over drowning flies, You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. I know not: one indeed I knew In many a subtle question versed, Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first, But ever strove to make it true: Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind, He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them: thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own; And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone, But in the darkness and the cloud, As over Sinaï's peaks of old, While Israel made their gods of gold, Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again, So loud with voices of the birds, So thick with lowings of the herds, Day, when I lost the flower of men; Who tremblest thro' thy darkling red On yon swoll'n brook that bubbles fast By meadows breathing of the past, And woodlands holy to the dead; Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves A song that slights the coming care, And Autumn laying here and there A fiery finger on the leaves; Who wakenest with thy balmy breath To myriads on the genial earth, Memories of bridal, or of birth, And unto myriads more, of death. O wheresoever those may be, Betwixt the slumber of the poles, To-day they count as kindred souls; They know me not, but mourn with me.
To-night ungather'd let us leave This laurel, let this holly stand: We live within the stranger's land, And strangely falls our Christmas-eve. Our father's dust is left alone And silent under other snows: There in due time the woodbine blows, The violet comes, but we are gone. No more shall wayward grief abuse The genial hour with mask and mime; For change of place, like growth of time, Has broke the bond of dying use. Let cares that petty shadows cast, By which our lives are chiefly proved, A little spare the night I loved, And hold it solemn to the past. But let no footstep beat the floor, Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm; For who would keep an ancient form Thro' which the spirit breathes no more? Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown; No dance, no motion, save alone What lightens in the lucid east Of rising worlds by yonder wood. Long sleeps the summer in the seed; Run out your measured arcs, and lead The closing cycle rich in good.
Is it, then, regret for buried time That keenlier in sweet April wakes, And meets the year, and gives and takes The colours of the crescent prime? Not all: the songs, the stirring air, The life re-orient out of dust, Cry thro' the sense to hearten trust In that which made the world so fair. Not all regret: the face will shine Upon me, while I muse alone; And that dear voice, I once have known, Still speak to me of me and mine: Yet less of sorrow lives in me For days of happy commune dead; Less yearning for the friendship fled, Than some strong bond which is to be.
Contemplate all this work of Time, The giant labouring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying Nature's earth and lime; But trust that those we call the dead Are breathers of an ampler day For ever nobler ends. They say, The solid earth whereon we tread In tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man; Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race, And of himself in higher place, If so he type this work of time Within himself, from more to more; Or, crown'd with attributes of woe Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore, But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.
Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun And ready, thou, to die with him, Thou watchest all things ever dim And dimmer, and a glory done: The team is loosen'd from the wain, The boat is drawn upon the shore; Thou listenest to the closing door, And life is darken'd in the brain. Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night, By thee the world's great work is heard Beginning, and the wakeful bird; Behind thee comes the greater light: The market boat is on the stream, And voices hail it from the brink; Thou hear'st the village hammer clink, And see'st the moving of the team. Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name For what is one, the first, the last, Thou, like my present and my past, Thy place is changed; thou art the same.
That which we dare invoke to bless; Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt; He, They, One, All; within, without; The Power in darkness whom we guess; I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun: If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice, "Believe no more," And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep, A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd, "I have felt." No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro' nature, moulding men.
Love is and was my Lord and King, And in his presence I attend To hear the tidings of my friend, Which every hour his couriers bring. Love is and was my King and Lord, And will be, tho' as yet I keep Within his court on earth, and sleep Encompass'd by his faithful guard, And hear at times a sentinel Who moves about from place to place, And whispers to the worlds of space, In the deep night, that all is well.
All along the valley, stream that flashest white,Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night,All along the valley, where thy waters flow,I walk'd with one I loved two and thirty years ago.All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day,The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away;For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed,Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead,And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree,The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.
Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; The yellow-leaved waterlily The green-sheathed daffodilly Tremble in the water chilly Round about Shalott. Willows whiten, aspens shiver. The sunbeam showers break and quiver In the stream that runneth ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls, and four gray towers Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. Underneath the bearded barley, The reaper, reaping late and early, Hears her ever chanting cheerly, Like an angel, singing clearly, O'er the stream of Camelot. Piling the sheaves in furrows airy, Beneath the moon, the reaper weary Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy, Lady of Shalott.' The little isle is all inrail'd With a rose-fence, and overtrail'd With roses: by the marge unhail'd The shallop flitteth silken sail'd, Skimming down to Camelot. A pearl garland winds her head: She leaneth on a velvet bed, Full royally apparelled, The Lady of Shalott. Part II No time hath she to sport and play: A charmed web she weaves alway. A curse is on her, if she stay Her weaving, either night or day, To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be; Therefore she weaveth steadily, Therefore no other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott. She lives with little joy or fear. Over the water, running near, The sheepbell tinkles in her ear. Before her hangs a mirror clear, Reflecting tower'd Camelot. And as the mazy web she whirls, She sees the surly village churls, And the red cloaks of market girls Pass onward from Shalott. Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd lad, Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad, Goes by to tower'd Camelot: And sometimes thro' the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott. But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often thro' the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, came from Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead Came two young lovers lately wed; 'I am half sick of shadows,' said The Lady of Shalott. Part III A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, And flam'd upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd To a lady in his shield, That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott. The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy. The bridle bells rang merrily As he rode down from Camelot: And from his blazon'd baldric slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armour rung, Beside remote Shalott. All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn'd like one burning flame together, As he rode down from Camelot. As often thro' the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over green Shalott. His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd; On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode; From underneath his helmet flow'd His coal-black curls as on he rode, As he rode down from Camelot. From the bank and from the river He flash'd into the crystal mirror, 'Tirra lirra, tirra lirra:' Sang Sir Lancelot. She left the web, she left the loom She made three paces thro' the room She saw the water-flower bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; 'The curse is come upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott. Part IV In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower'd Camelot; Outside the isle a shallow boat Beneath a willow lay afloat, Below the carven stern she wrote, The Lady of Shalott. A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight, All raimented in snowy white That loosely flew (her zone in sight Clasp'd with one blinding diamond bright) Her wide eyes fix'd on Camelot, Though the squally east-wind keenly Blew, with folded arms serenely By the water stood the queenly Lady of Shalott. With a steady stony glance— Like some bold seer in a trance, Beholding all his own mischance, Mute, with a glassy countenance— She look'd down to Camelot. It was the closing of the day: She loos'd the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott. As when to sailors while they roam, By creeks and outfalls far from home, Rising and dropping with the foam, From dying swans wild warblings come, Blown shoreward; so to Camelot Still as the boathead wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her chanting her deathsong, The Lady of Shalott. A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy, She chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her eyes were darken'd wholly, And her smooth face sharpen'd slowly, Turn'd to tower'd Camelot: For ere she reach'd upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott. Under tower and balcony, By garden wall and gallery, A pale, pale corpse she floated by, Deadcold, between the houses high, Dead into tower'd Camelot. Knight and burgher, lord and dame, To the planked wharfage came: Below the stern they read her name, The Lady of Shalott. They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest. There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest, The wellfed wits at Camelot. 'The web was woven curiously, The charm is broken utterly, Draw near and fear not,—this is I, The Lady of Shalott.'
Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Round an island there below, The island of Shalott. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro' the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. By the margin, willow veil'd, Slide the heavy barges trail'd By slow horses; and unhail'd The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd Skimming down to Camelot: But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shalott? Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower'd Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers " 'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott." Part II There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott. And moving thro' a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear. There she sees the highway near Winding down to Camelot: There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-churls, And the red cloaks of market girls, Pass onward from Shalott. Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad, Goes by to tower'd Camelot; And sometimes thro' the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott. But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often thro' the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed: "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott. Part III A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd To a lady in his shield, That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott. The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy. The bridle bells rang merrily As he rode down to Camelot: And from his blazon'd baldric slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armour rung, Beside remote Shalott. All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn'd like one burning flame together, As he rode down to Camelot. As often thro' the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over still Shalott. His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd; On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode; From underneath his helmet flow'd His coal-black curls as on he rode, As he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river He flash'd into the crystal mirror, "Tirra lirra," by the river Sang Sir Lancelot. She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott. Part IV In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower'd Camelot; Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott. And down the river's dim expanse Like some bold seër in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance— With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott. Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right— The leaves upon her falling light— Thro' the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darken'd wholly, Turn'd to tower'd Camelot. For ere she reach'd upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott. Under tower and balcony, By garden-wall and gallery, A gleaming shape she floated by, Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot. Out upon the wharfs they came, Knight and burgher, lord and dame, And round the prow they read her name, The Lady of Shalott. Who is this? and what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they cross'd themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott."
Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill! Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light had we: for that we do repent; And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light: so late! and dark and chill the night! O, let us in, that we may find the light! Too late, too late: ye cannot enter now. Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? O, let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet! No, no, too late! ye cannot enter now."
Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn: Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn. 'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call, Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall; Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts, And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts. Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time; When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed; When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed: When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see; Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.— In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast; In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest; In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove; In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young, And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light, As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night. And she turn'd—her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs— All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes— Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong"; Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long." Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight. Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the Spring. Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips. O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more! O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore! Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung, Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue! Is it well to wish thee happy?—having known me—to decline On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine! Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay. As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine. Go to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine. It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought: Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought. He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand— Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand! Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace, Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace. Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth! Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule! Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool! Well—'t is well that I should bluster!—Hadst thou less unworthy proved— Would to God—for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved. Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit? I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root. Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home. Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind? Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind? I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move; Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love. Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore? No—she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore. Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof. Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall. Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep, To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep. Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years, And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears; And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain. Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again. Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry. 'T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry. Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest. Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast. O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due. Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two. O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part, With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart. "They were dangerous guides the feelings—she herself was not exempt— Truly, she herself had suffer'd"—Perish in thy self-contempt! Overlive it—lower yet—be happy! wherefore should I care? I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair. What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these? Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys. Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow. I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do? I had been content to perish, falling on the foeman's ground, When the ranks are roll'd in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound. But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels, And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels. Can I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page. Hide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age! Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife, When I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life; Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn, Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn; And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then, Underneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men: Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do: For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law. So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry, Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye; Eye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint: Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point: Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire. Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's? Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest. Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn, They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn: Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string? I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing. Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain— Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain: Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine— Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat; Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd,— I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward. Or to burst all links of habit—there to wander far away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag; Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree— Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space; I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books— Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild, But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains! Mated with a squalid savage—what to me were sun or clime? I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time— I that rather held it better men should perish one by one, Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon! Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun: Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun. O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set. Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet. Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall! Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall. Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt, Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow; For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
"Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem. A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse. The charmed sunset linger'd low adown In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale Was seen far inland, and the yellow down Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale And meadow, set with slender galingale; A land where all things always seem'd the same! And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came. Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them, And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, And music in his ears his beating heart did make. They sat them down upon the yellow sand, Between the sun and moon upon the shore; And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. Then some one said, "We will return no more"; And all at once they sang, "Our island home Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam." CHORIC SONG I There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep." II Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan, Still from one sorrow to another thrown: Nor ever fold our wings, And cease from wanderings, Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm; Nor harken what the inner spirit sings, "There is no joy but calm!" Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? III Lo! in the middle of the wood, The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud With winds upon the branch, and there Grows green and broad, and takes no care, Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow Falls, and floats adown the air. Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light, The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. All its allotted length of days The flower ripens in its place, Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. IV Hateful is the dark-blue sky, Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea. Death is the end of life; ah, why Should life all labour be? Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. V How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to seem Falling asleep in a half-dream! To dream and dream, like yonder amber light, Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height; To hear each other's whisper'd speech; Eating the Lotos day by day, To watch the crisping ripples on the beach, And tender curving lines of creamy spray; To lend our hearts and spirits wholly To the influence of mild-minded melancholy; To muse and brood and live again in memory, With those old faces of our infancy Heap'd over with a mound of grass, Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass! VI Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, And dear the last embraces of our wives And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change: For surely now our household hearths are cold, Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange: And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy. Or else the island princes over-bold Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings Before them of the ten years' war in Troy, And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things. Is there confusion in the little isle? Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile: 'Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labour unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars. VII But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) With half-dropt eyelid still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill— To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine— To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine! Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine. VIII The Lotos blooms below the barren peak: The Lotos blows by every winding creek: All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone: Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown. We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil; Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.
"Mariana in the Moated Grange" (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
With one black shadow at its feet,  The house thro' all the level shines, Close-latticed to the brooding heat,  And silent in its dusty vines: A faint-blue ridge upon the right,  An empty river-bed before,  And shallows on a distant shore, In glaring sand and inlets bright.  But "Aye Mary," made she moan,  And "Aye Mary," night and morn,  And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone,  To live forgotten, and love forlorn." She, as her carol sadder grew,  From brow and bosom slowly down Thro' rosy taper fingers drew  Her streaming curls of deepest brown To left and right, and made appear,  Still-lighted in a secret shrine,  Her melancholy eyes divine, The home of woe without a tear.  And "Aye Mary," was her moan,  "Madonna, sad is night and morn;"  And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone,  To live forgotten, and love forlorn." Till all the crimson changed, and past  Into deep orange o'er the sea, Low on her knees herself she cast,  Before Our Lady murmur'd she: Complaining, "Mother, give me grace  To help me of my weary load."  And on the liquid mirror glow'd The clear perfection of her face.  "Is this the form," she made her moan,  "That won his praises night and morn?"  And "Ah," she said, "but I wake alone,  I sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn." Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat,  Nor any cloud would cross the vault, But day increased from heat to heat,  On stony drought and steaming salt; Till now at noon she slept again,  And seem'd knee-deep in mountain grass,  And heard her native breezes pass, And runlets babbling down the glen.  She breathed in sleep a lower moan,  And murmuring, as at night and morn  She thought, "My spirit is here alone,  Walks forgotten, and is forlorn." Dreaming, she knew it was a dream:  She felt he was and was not there. She woke: the babble of the stream  Fell, and, without, the steady glare Shrank one sick willow sere and small.  The river-bed was dusty-white;  And all the furnace of the light Struck up against the blinding wall.  She whisper'd, with a stifled moan  More inward than at night or morn,  "Sweet Mother, let me not here alone  Live forgotten and die forlorn." And, rising, from her bosom drew  Old letters, breathing of her worth, For "Love", they said, "must needs be true,  To what is loveliest upon earth." An image seem'd to pass the door,  To look at her with slight, and say,  "But now thy beauty flows away, So be alone for evermore."  "O cruel heart," she changed her tone,  "And cruel love, whose end is scorn,  Is this the end to be left alone,  To live forgotten, and die forlorn?" But sometimes in the falling day  An image seem'd to pass the door, To look into her eyes and say,  "But thou shalt be alone no more." And flaming downward over all  From heat to heat the day decreased,  And slowly rounded to the east The one black shadow from the wall.  "The day to night," she made her moan,  "The day to night, the night to morn,  And day and night I am left alone  To live forgotten, and love forlorn." At eve a dry cicala sung,  There came a sound as of the sea; Backward the lattice-blind she flung,  And lean'd upon the balcony. There all in spaces rosy-bright  Large Hesper glitter'd on her tears,  And deepening thro' the silent spheres Heaven over Heaven rose the night.  And weeping then she made her moan,  "The night comes on that knows not morn,  When I shall cease to be all alone,  To live forgotten, and love forlorn."
A Monodrama Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves In a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, To faint in his light, and to die. All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon. I said to the lily, "There is but one With whom she has heart to be gay. When will the dancers leave her alone? She is weary of dance and play." Now half to the setting moon are gone, And half to the rising day; Low on the sand and loud on the stone The last wheel echoes away. I said to the rose, "The brief night goes In babble and revel and wine. O young lord-lover, what sighs are those, For one that will never be thine? But mine, but mine," so I sware to the rose, "For ever and ever, mine." And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clash'd in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all; From the meadow your walks have left so sweet That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewel-print of your feet In violets blue as your eyes, To the woody hollows in which we meet And the valleys of Paradise. The slender acacia would not shake One long milk-bloom on the tree; The white lake-blossom fell into the lake As the pimpernel dozed on the lea; But the rose was awake all night for your sake, Knowing your promise to me; The lilies and roses were all awake, They sigh'd for the dawn and thee. Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, Come hither, the dances are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, To the flowers, and be their sun. There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;" And the white rose weeps, "She is late;" The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;" And the lily whispers, "I wait." She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead, Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.
A Monodrama O that 'twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again! When I was wont to meet her In the silent woody places By the home that gave me birth, We stood tranced in long embraces Mixt with kisses sweeter sweeter Than anything on earth. A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee: Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be. It leads me forth at evening, It lightly winds and steals In a cold white robe before me, When all my spirit reels At the shouts, the leagues of lights, And the roaring of the wheels. Half the night I waste in sighs, Half in dreams I sorrow after The delight of early skies; In a wakeful doze I sorrow For the hand, the lips, the eyes, For the meeting of the morrow, The delight of happy laughter, The delight of low replies. 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, And a dewy splendour falls On the little flower that clings To the turrets and the walls; 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, And the light and shadow fleet; She is walking in the meadow, And the woodland echo rings; In a moment we shall meet; She is singing in the meadow, And the rivulet at her feet Ripples on in light and shadow To the ballad that she sings. So I hear her sing as of old, My bird with the shining head, My own dove with the tender eye? But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry, There is some one dying or dead, And a sullen thunder is roll'd; For a tumult shakes the city, And I wake, my dream is fled; In the shuddering dawn, behold, Without knowledge, without pity, By the curtains of my bed That abiding phantom cold. Get thee hence, nor come again, Mix not memory with doubt, Pass, thou deathlike type of pain, Pass and cease to move about! 'Tis the blot upon the brain That will show itself without. Then I rise, the eave-drops fall, And the yellow vapours choke The great city sounding wide; The day comes, a dull red ball Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke On the misty river-tide. Thro' the hubbub of the market I steal, a wasted frame; It crosses here, it crosses there, Thro' all that crowd confused and loud, The shadow still the same; And on my heavy eyelids My anguish hangs like shame. Alas for her that met me, That heard me softly call, Came glimmering thro' the laurels At the quiet evenfall, In the garden by the turrets Of the old manorial hall. Would the happy spirit descend From the realms of light and song, In the chamber or the street, As she looks among the blest, Should I fear to greet my friend Or to say "Forgive the wrong," Or to ask her, "Take me, sweet, To the regions of thy rest"? But the broad light glares and beats, And the shadow flits and fleets And will not let me be; And I loathe the squares and streets, And the faces that one meets, Hearts with no love for me: Always I long to creep Into some still cavern deep, There to weep, and weep, and weep My whole soul out to thee.
(Alcaics) O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages;Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset—Me rather all that bowery loneliness,The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,Where some refulgent sunset of IndiaStreams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods Whisper in odorous heights of even.
So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea; Until King Arthur's table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord, King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep, The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him, Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land. On one side lay the ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "The sequel of to-day unsolders all The goodliest fellowship of famous knights Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep They sleep—the men I loved. I think that we Shall never more, at any future time, Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, Walking about the gardens and the halls Of Camelot, as in the days that were. I perish by this people which I made,— Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again To rule once more—but let what will be, be, I am so deeply smitten thro' the helm That without help I cannot last till morn. Thou therefore take my brand Excalibur, Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how In those old days, one summer noon, an arm Rose up from out the bosom of the lake, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, Holding the sword—and how I row'd across And took it, and have worn it, like a king: And, wheresoever I am sung or told In aftertime, this also shall be known: But now delay not: take Excalibur, And fling him far into the middle mere: Watch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word." To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere: "It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus, Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm. A little thing may harm a wounded man. Yet I thy hest will all perform at full, Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word." So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake. There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work Of subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long That both his eyes were dazzled, as he stood, This way and that dividing the swift mind, In act to throw: but at the last it seem'd Better to leave Excalibur conceal'd There in the many-knotted water-flags, That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. So strode he back slow to the wounded King. Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere: "Hast thou perform'd my mission which I gave? What is it thou hast seen, or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag." To whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale: "Thou hast betray'd thy nature and thy name, Not rendering true answer, as beseem'd Thy fealty, nor like a noble knight: For surer sign had follow'd, either hand, Or voice, or else a motion of the mere. This is a shameful thing for men to lie. Yet now, I charge thee, quickly go again As thou art lief and dear, and do the thing I bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word." Then went Sir Bedivere the second time Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, Counting the dewy pebbles, fixed in thought; But when he saw the wonder of the hilt, How curiously and strangely chased, he smote His palms together, and he cried aloud, "And if indeed I cast the brand away, Surely a precious thing, one worthy note, Should thus be lost forever from the earth, Which might have pleased the eyes of many men. What good should follow this, if this were done? What harm, undone? deep harm to disobey, Seeing obedience is the bond of rule. Were it well to obey then, if a king demand An act unprofitable, against himself? The King is sick, and knows not what he does. What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt? but were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, Saying, 'King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake; Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: "What is it thou hast seen, or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds." To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath: "Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue, Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me! Authority forgets a dying king, Laid widow'd of the power in his eye That bow'd the will. I see thee what thou art, For thou, the latest-left of all my knights, In whom should meet the offices of all, Thou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt; Either from lust of gold, or like a girl Valuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes. Yet, for a man may fail in duty twice, And the third time may prosper, get thee hence: But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands." Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran, And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword, And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere. And lightly went the other to the King. Then spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath: "Now see I by thine eyes that this is done. Speak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems Should blind my purpose, for I never saw, Nor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die, Not tho' I live three lives of mortal men, So great a miracle as yonder hilt. Then with both hands I flung him, wheeling him; But when I look'd again, behold an arm, Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, That caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the mere." And answer made King Arthur, breathing hard: "My end draws nigh; 't is time that I were gone. Make broad thy shoulders to receive my weight, And bear me to the margin; yet I fear My wound hath taken cold, and I shall die." So saying, from the pavement he half rose, Slowly, with pain, reclining on his arm, And looking wistfully with wide blue eyes As in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere Remorsefully regarded thro' his tears, And would have spoken, but he found not words, Then took with care, and kneeling on one knee, O'er both his shoulders drew the languid hands, And rising bore him thro' the place of tombs. But, as he walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd Larger than human on the frozen hills. He heard the deep behind him, and a cry Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels— And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon. Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these Three Queens with crowns of gold—and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmur'd Arthur, "Place me in the barge," And to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And call'd him by his name, complaining loud And dropping bitter tears against his brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the wither'd moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls— That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the daïs-throne—were parch'd with dust; Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. So like a shatter'd column lay the King; Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, From spur to plume a star of tournament, Shot thro' the lists at Camelot, and charged Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere: "Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go? Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes? For now I see the true old times are dead, When every morning brought a noble chance, And every chance brought out a noble knight. Such times have been not since the light that led The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh. But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved Which was an image of the mighty world; And I, the last, go forth companionless, And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds." And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me? I have lived my life, and that which I have done May He within Himself make pure! but thou, If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seëst—if indeed I go— (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound." So said he, and the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away.
Wheer 'asta beän saw long and meä liggin' 'ere aloän? Noorse? thoort nowt o' a noorse: whoy, Doctor's abeän an' agoän; Says that I moänt 'a naw moor aäle; but I beänt a fool; Git ma my aäle, fur I beänt a-gawin' to breäk my rule.  Doctors, they knaws nowt, fur a says what 's nawways true; Naw soort o' koind o' use to saäy the things that a do. I 've 'ed my point o' aäle ivry noight sin' I beän 'ere. An' I 've 'ed my quart ivry market-noight for foorty year.  Parson 's a beän loikewoise, an' a sittin' ere o' my bed. "The amoighty 's a taäkin o' you to 'isén, my friend," a said, An' a towd ma my sins, an' s toithe were due, an' I gied it in hond; I done moy duty boy 'um, as I 'a done boy the lond.  Larn'd a ma' beä. I reckons I 'annot sa mooch to larn. But a cast oop, thot a did, 'bout Bessy Marris's barne. Thaw a knaws I hallus voäted wi' Squoire an' choorch an' staäte, An' i' the woost o' toimes I wur niver agin the raäte.  An' I hallus coom'd to 's choorch afoor moy Sally wur deäd, An' 'eard 'um a bummin' awaäy loike a buzzard-clock ower me 'eäd, An' I niver knaw'd whot a meän'd but a thowt ä 'ad summut to saäy. An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I coom'd awaäy.  Bessy Marris's barne! tha knaws she laäid it to meä. Mowt a beän, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, sheä. 'Siver, I kep 'um, I kep 'um, my lass, tha mun understond; I done moy duty boy 'um, as I 'a done boy the lond.  But Parson a cooms an' a goäs, an' a says it easy an' freeä: "The amoighty 's taäkin o' you to 'issén, my friend," says 'eä. I weänt saäy men be loiars, thaw summun said it in 'aäste; But 'e reäds wonn sarmin a weeäk, an' I 'a stubb'd Thurnaby waäste.  D' ya moind the waäste, my lass? naw, naw, tha was not born then; Theer wur a boggle in it, I often 'eärd 'um mysén; Moäst loike a butter-bump, fur I 'eärd 'um about an' about, But I stubb'd 'um oop wi' the lot, an' raäved an' rembled 'um out.  Keäper's it wur; fo' they fun 'um theer a-laäid of is' faäce Down i' the woild 'enemies afoor I coom'd to the plaäce. Noäks or Thimbleby—toäner 'ed shot 'um as dead as a naäil. Noäks wur 'ang'd for it opp at 'soize—but git ma my aäle.  Dubbut looök at the waäaste; theer warn't not feeäd for a cow; Nowt at all but bracken an' fuzz, an' looök at it now— Warn't worth nowt a haäcre, an' now theer 's lots o' feeäd, Fourscoor yows upon it, an' some on it down i' seeäd.  Nobbut a bit on it 's left, an' I meän'd to 'a stubb'd it at fall, Done it ta-year I meän'd, an' runn'd plow thruff it an' all, If godamoighty an' parson 'ud nobbut let ma aloän,— Meä, wi haäte hoonderd haäcre o' Squoire's, an' lond o' my oän.  Do godamoighty knaw what a's doing a-taäkin' o' meä? I beänt wonn as saws 'ere a beän an yonder a peä; An' Squoire 'ull be sa mad an' all—a' dear, a' dear! And I 'a managed for Squoire coom Michaelmas thutty year.  A mowt 'a taäen owd Joänes, as 'ant not a 'aäpoth o' sense, Or a mowt a' taäen young Robins—a niver mended a fence: But godamoighty a moost taäke meä an' taäke ma now, Wi' aäf the cows to cauve an' Thurnaby hoälms to plow!  Looök 'ow quoloty smoiles when they seeäs ma a passin' boy, Says to thessén, naw doubt, "What a man a beä sewer-loy!" Fur they knaws what I beän to Squoire sin' fust a coom'd to the 'All; I done moy duty by Squoire an' I done moy duty boy hall.  Squoire 's i' Lunnon, an' summun I reckons 'ull 'a to wroite, For whoa 's to howd the lond ater meä that muddles ma quoit; Sartin-sewer I beä, thot a weänt niver give it to Joänes, Naw, nor a moänt to Robins—a niver rembles the stoäns.  But summun 'ull come ater meä mayhap wi' 'is kittle o' steäm Huzzin' an' maazin' the blessed feälds wi' the Divil's oän teäm. Sin' I mun doy I mun doy, thaw loife they says is sweet, But sin' I mun doy I mun doy, for I couldn abeär to see it.  What atta stannin' theer fur, an' doesn bring me the aäle? Doctor 's a 'toättler, lass, an a's hallus i' the owd taäle; I weänt breäk rules fur Doctor, a knaws naw moor nor a floy; Git ma my aäle, I tell tha, an' if I mun doy I mun doy.
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy? Proputty, proputty, proputty—that's what I 'ears 'em saäy. Proputty, proputty, proputty—Sam, thou's an ass for thy paaïns: Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs, nor in all thy braaïns.  Woä—theer's a craw to pluck wi' tha, Sam; yon 's parson's 'ouse— Dosn't thou knaw that a man mun be eäther a man or a mouse? Time to think on it then; for thou'll be twenty to weeäk. Proputty, proputty—woä then, woä—let ma 'ear mysén speäk.  Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as been a'talkin' o' thee; Thou's beän talkin' to muther, an' she beän a tellin' it me. Thou'll not marry for munny—thou's sweet upo' parson's lass— Noä—thou 'll marry for luvv—an' we boäth of us thinks tha an ass.  Seeä'd her todaäy goä by—Saäint's-daäy—they was ringing the bells. She's a beauty, thou thinks—an' soä is scoors o' gells, Them as 'as munny an' all—wot's a beauty?—the flower as blaws. But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws.  Do'ant be stunt; taäke time. I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad. Warn't I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad? But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often 'as towd ma this: "Doänt thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!"  An' I went wheer munny war; an' thy muther coom to 'and, Wi' lots o' munny laaïd by, an' a nicetish bit o' land. Maäybe she warn't a beauty—I niver giv it a thowt— But warn't she as good to cuddle an' kiss as a lass as 'ant nowt?  Parson's lass 'ant nowt, an' she weänt 'a nowt when 'e 's deäd, Mun be a guvness, lad, or summut, and addle her breäd. Why? for 'e 's nobbut a curate, an' weänt niver get hissén clear, An' 'e maäde the bed as 'e ligs on afoor 'e coom'd to the shere.  An' thin 'e coom'd to the parish wi' lots o' Varsity debt, Stook to his taäil thy did, an' 'e 'ant got shut on 'em yet. An' 'e ligs on 'is back i' the grip, wi' noän to lend 'im a shuvv, Woorse nor a far-welter'd yowe: fur, Sammy, 'e married for luvv.  Luvv? what's luvv? thou can luvv thy lass an' 'er munny too, Maäkin' 'em goä togither, as they've good right to do. Couldn I luvv thy muther by cause 'o 'er munny laaïd by? Naäy—fur I luvv'd 'er a vast sight moor fur it: reäson why.  Ay, an' thy muther says thou wants to marry the lass, Cooms of a gentleman burn: an' we boäth on us thinks tha an ass. Woä then, proputty, wiltha?—an ass as near as mays nowt— Woä then, wiltha? dangtha!—the bees is as fell as owt.  Breäk me a bit o' the esh for his 'eäd, lad, out o' the fence! Gentleman burn! what's gentleman burn? is it shillins an' pence? Proputty, proputty's ivrything 'ere, an', Sammy, I'm blest If it isn't the saäme oop yonder, fur them as 'as it 's the best.  Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steäls, Them as 'as coats to their backs an' taäkes their regular meäls, Noä, but it 's them as niver knaws wheer a meäl's to be 'ad. Taäke my word for it Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.  Them or thir feythers, tha sees, mun 'a beän a laäzy lot, Fur work mun 'a gone to the gittin' whiniver munny was got. Feyther 'ad ammost nowt; leastways 'is munny was 'id. But 'e tued an' moil'd issén dead, an' 'e died a good un, 'e did.  Looök thou theer wheer Wrigglesby beck cooms out by the 'ill! Feyther run oop to the farm, an' I runs oop to the mill; An' I 'll run oop to the brig, an' that thou 'll live to see; And if thou marries a good un I 'll leäve the land to thee.  Thim's my noätions, Sammy, wheerby I means to stick; But if thou marries a bad un, I 'll leäve the land to Dick.— Coom oop, proputty, proputty—that's what I 'ears 'im saäy— Proputty, proputty, proputty—canter an' canter awaäy.
As thro' the land at eve we went, And pluck'd the ripen'd ears,We fell out, my wife and I,O we fell out I know not why, And kiss'd again with tears.And blessings on the falling out That all the more endears,When we fall out with those we love And kiss again with tears!For when we came where lies the child We lost in other years,There above the little grave,O there above the little grave, We kiss'd again with tears.
Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee? Ask me no more. Ask me no more: what answer should I give? I love not hollow cheek or faded eye: Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; Ask me no more. Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.
Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?But cease to move so near the Heavens, and ceaseTo glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;And come, for Love is of the valley, come,For Love is of the valley, come thou downAnd find him; by the happy threshold, he,Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,Or red with spirted purple of the vats,Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walkWith Death and Morning on the silver horns,Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,That huddling slant in furrow-cloven fallsTo roll the torrent out of dusky doors:But follow; let the torrent dance thee downTo find him in the valley; let the wildLean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leaveThe monstrous ledges there to slope, and spillTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,That like a broken purpose waste in air:So waste not thou; but come; for all the valesAwait thee; azure pillars of the hearthArise to thee; the children call, and IThy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn,The moan of doves in immemorial elms,And murmuring of innumerable bees.
Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swoon'd nor utter'd cry: All her maidens, watching, said, "She must weep or she will die." Then they praised him, soft and low, Call'd him worthy to be loved, Truest friend and noblest foe; Yet she neither spoke nor moved. Stole a maiden from her place, Lightly to the warrior stepped, Took the face-cloth from the face; Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee— Like summer tempest came her tears— "Sweet my child, I live for thee."
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font. The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.  Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.  Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.  Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake. So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me.
O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee. O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each, That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and tender is the North. O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill, And cheep and twitter twenty million loves. O were I thou that she might take me in, And lay me on her bosom, and her heart Would rock the snowy cradle till I died. Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, Delaying as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown: Say to her, I do but wanton in the South, But in the North long since my nest is made. O tell her, brief is life but love is long, And brief the sun of summer in the North, And brief the moon of beauty in the South. O Swallow, flying from the golden woods, Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine, And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.
Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: the seed, The little seed they laugh'd at in the dark, Has risen and cleft the soil, and grown a bulk Of spanless girth, that lays on every side A thousand arms and rushes to the Sun. Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they came; The leaves were wet with women's tears: they heard A noise of songs they would not understand: They mark'd it with the red cross to the fall, And would have strown it, and are fall'n themselves. Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they came, The woodmen with their axes: lo the tree! But we will make it faggots for the hearth, And shape it plank and beam for roof and floor, And boats and bridges for the use of men. Our enemies have fall'n, have fall'n: they struck; With their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew There dwelt an iron nature in the grain: The glittering axe was broken in their arms, Their arms were shatter'd to the shoulder blade. Our enemies have fall'n, but this shall grow A night of Summer from the heat, a breadth Of Autumn, dropping fruits of power; and roll'd With music in the growing breeze of Time, The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs Shall move the stony bases of the world.
Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps. Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; Rest, rest, on mother's breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Silver sails all out of the west Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more!
The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. O love, they die in yon rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
Thy voice is heard thro' rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands;Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands:A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee;The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free In the silken sail of infancy, The tide of time flow'd back with me,  The forward-flowing tide of time; And many a sheeny summer-morn, Adown the Tigris I was borne, By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold, High-walled gardens green and old; True Mussulman was I and sworn,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Anight my shallop, rustling thro' The low and bloomed foliage, drove The fragrant, glistening deeps, and clove The citron-shadows in the blue: By garden porches on the brim, The costly doors flung open wide, Gold glittering thro' lamplight dim, And broider'd sofas on each side:  In sooth it was a goodly time,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Often, where clear-stemm'd platans guard The outlet, did I turn away The boat-head down a broad canal From the main river sluiced, where all The sloping of the moon-lit sward Was damask-work, and deep inlay Of braided blooms unmown, which crept Adown to where the water slept.  A goodly place, a goodly time,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. A motion from the river won Ridged the smooth level, bearing on My shallop thro' the star-strown calm, Until another night in night I enter'd, from the clearer light, Imbower'd vaults of pillar'd palm, Imprisoning sweets, which, as they clomb Heavenward, were stay'd beneath the dome  Of hollow boughs.—A goodly time,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Still onward; and the clear canal Is rounded to as clear a lake. From the green rivage many a fall Of diamond rillets musical, Thro' little crystal arches low Down from the central fountain's flow Fall'n silver-chiming, seem'd to shake The sparkling flints beneath the prow.  A goodly place, a goodly time,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Above thro' many a bowery turn A walk with vary-colour'd shells Wander'd engrain'd. On either side All round about the fragrant marge From fluted vase, and brazen urn In order, eastern flowers large, Some dropping low their crimson bells Half-closed, and others studded wide  With disks and tiars, fed the time  With odour in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Far off, and where the lemon-grove In closest coverture upsprung, The living airs of middle night Died round the bulbul as he sung; Not he: but something which possess'd The darkness of the world, delight, Life, anguish, death, immortal love, Ceasing not, mingled, unrepress'd,  Apart from place, withholding time,  But flattering the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Black the garden-bowers and grots Slumber'd: the solemn palms were ranged Above, unwoo'd of summer wind: A sudden splendour from behind Flush'd all the leaves with rich gold-green, And, flowing rapidly between Their interspaces, counterchanged The level lake with diamond-plots  Of dark and bright. A lovely time,  For it was in the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Dark-blue the deep sphere overhead, Distinct with vivid stars inlaid, Grew darker from that under-flame: So, leaping lightly from the boat, With silver anchor left afloat, In marvel whence that glory came Upon me, as in sleep I sank In cool soft turf upon the bank,  Entranced with that place and time,  So worthy of the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Thence thro' the garden I was drawn— A realm of pleasance, many a mound, And many a shadow-chequer'd lawn Full of the city's stilly sound, And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round The stately cedar, tamarisks, Thick rosaries of scented thorn, Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks  Graven with emblems of the time,  In honour of the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. With dazed vision unawares From the long alley's latticed shade Emerged, I came upon the great Pavilion of the Caliphat. Right to the carven cedarn doors, Flung inward over spangled floors, Broad-based flights of marble stairs Ran up with golden balustrade,  After the fashion of the time,  And humour of the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. The fourscore windows all alight As with the quintessence of flame, A million tapers flaring bright From twisted silvers look'd to shame The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream'd Upon the mooned domes aloof In inmost Bagdat, till there seem'd Hundreds of crescents on the roof  Of night new-risen, that marvellous time,  To celebrate the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Then stole I up, and trancedly Gazed on the Persian girl alone, Serene with argent-lidded eyes Amorous, and lashes like to rays Of darkness, and a brow of pearl Tressed with redolent ebony, In many a dark delicious curl, Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone;  The sweetest lady of the time,  Well worthy of the golden prime  Of good Haroun Alraschid. Six columns, three on either side, Pure silver, underpropt a rich Throne of the massive ore, from which Down-droop'd, in many a floating fold, Engarlanded and diaper'd With inwrought flowers, a cloth of gold. Thereon, his deep eye laughter-stirr'd With merriment of kingly pride,  Sole star of all that place and time,  I saw him—in his golden prime,  THE GOOD HAROUN ALRASCHID!
Deep on the convent-roof the snows  Are sparkling to the moon: My breath to heaven like vapour goes;  May my soul follow soon! The shadows of the convent-towers  Slant down the snowy sward, Still creeping with the creeping hours  That lead me to my Lord: Make Thou my spirit pure and clear  As are the frosty skies, Or this first snowdrop of the year  That in my bosom lies. As these white robes are soil'd and dark,  To yonder shining ground; As this pale taper's earthly spark,  To yonder argent round; So shows my soul before the Lamb,  My spirit before Thee; So in mine earthly house I am,  To that I hope to be. Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,  Thro' all yon starlight keen, Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,  In raiment white and clean. He lifts me to the golden doors;  The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors,  And strows her lights below, And deepens on and up! the gates  Roll back, and far within For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,  To make me pure of sin. The sabbaths of Eternity,  One sabbath deep and wide— A light upon the shining sea—  The Bridegroom with his bride!
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn. Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man— So glorious in his beauty and thy choice, Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd To his great heart none other than a God! I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men, who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me, And tho' they could not end me, left me maim'd To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love, Thy beauty, make amends, tho' even now, Close over us, the silver star, thy guide, Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all? A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes A glimpse of that dark world where I was born. Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, And bosom beating with a heart renew'd. Thy cheek begins to redden thro' the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of fire. Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful In silence, then before thine answer given Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek. Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears, And make me tremble lest a saying learnt, In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true? 'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.' Ay me! ay me! with what another heart In days far-off, and with what other eyes I used to watch—if I be he that watch'd— The lucid outline forming round thee; saw The dim curls kindle into sunny rings; Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay, Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm With kisses balmier than half-opening buds Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet, Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing, While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. Yet hold me not for ever in thine East: How can my nature longer mix with thine? Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam Floats up from those dim fields about the homes Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
Roman Virgil, thou that singest  Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Rome arising,  wars, and filial faith, and Dido's pyre; Landscape-lover, lord of language  more than he that sang the "Works and Days," All the chosen coin of fancy  flashing out from many a golden phrase; Thou that singest wheat and woodland,  tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses  often flowering in a lonely word; Poet of the happy Tityrus  piping underneath his beechen bowers; Poet of the poet-satyr  whom the laughing shepherd bound with flowers; Chanter of the Pollio, glorying  in the blissful years again to be, Summers of the snakeless meadow,  unlaborious earth and oarless sea; Thou that seëst Universal  Nature moved by Universal Mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness  at the doubtful doom of human kind; Light among the vanish'd ages;  star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows,  kings and realms that pass to rise no more; Now thy Forum roars no longer,  fallen every purple Cæsar's dome— Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm  sound forever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd,  and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island  sunder'd once from all the human race, I salute thee, Mantovano,  I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure  ever moulded by the lips of man.
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. This is my son, mine own Telemachus, To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil This labour, by slow prudence to make mild A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees Subdue them to the useful and the good. Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere Of common duties, decent not to fail In offices of tenderness, and pay Meet adoration to my household gods, When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.Some view our sable race with scornful eye,"Their colour is a diabolic die."Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
On Death's domain intent I fix my eyes, Where human nature in vast ruin lies, With pensive mind I search the drear abode, Where the great conqu'ror has his spoils bestow'd; There there the offspring of six thousand years In endless numbers to my view appears: Whole kingdoms in his gloomy den are thrust, And nations mix with their primeval dust: Insatiate still he gluts the ample tomb; His is the present, his the age to come See here a brother, here a sister spread, And a sweet daughter mingled with the dead. But, Madam, let your grief be laid aside, And let the fountain of your tears be dry'd, In vain they flow to wet the dusty plain, Your sighs are wafted to the skies in vain, Your pains they witness, but they can no more, While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore. The glowing stars and silver queen of light At last must perish in the gloom of night: Resign thy friends to that Almighty hand, Which gave them life, and bow to his command; Thine Avis give without a murm'ring heart, Though half thy soul be fated to depart. To shining guards consign thine infant care To waft triumphant through the seas of air: Her soul enlarg'd to heav'nly pleasure springs, She feeds on truth and uncreated things. Methinks I hear her in the realms above, And leaning forward with a filial love, Invite you there to share immortal bliss Unknown, untasted in a state like this. With tow'ring hopes, and growing grace arise, And seek beatitude beyond the skies.
I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.
1 I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 2 The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count. 3 I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons. This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love, He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face, He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him, When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other. 4 I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. 5 This is the female form, A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it, Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed, Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable, Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day. This the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman, This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again. Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul. The female contains all qualities and tempers them, She is in her place and moves with perfect balance, She is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active, She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters. As I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see. 6 The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place, He too is all qualities, he is action and power, The flush of the known universe is in him, Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well, The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him, The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul, Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself, Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here, (Where else does he strike soundings except here?) The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, Each has his or her place in the procession. (All is a procession, The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.) Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant? Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight? Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts, For you only, and not for him and her? 7 A man’s body at auction, (For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,) I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen look on this wonder, Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it, For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d. In this head the all-baffling brain, In it and below it the makings of heroes. Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve, They shall be stript that you may see them. Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet. Within there runs blood, The same old blood! the same red-running blood! There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations, (Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?) This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments. How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? (Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?) 8 A woman’s body at auction, She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers. Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth? If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face. Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body? For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves. 9 O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!
A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;  But O heart! heart! heart!  O the bleeding drops of red,  Where on the deck my Captain lies,  Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;  Here Captain! dear father!  This arm beneath your head!  It is some dream that on the deck,  You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!  But I with mournful tread,  Walk the deck my Captain lies,  Fallen cold and dead.
On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky. Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades. From the beach the child holding the hand of her father, Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all, Watching, silently weeps. Weep not, child, Weep not, my darling, With these kisses let me remove your tears, The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition, Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge, They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again, The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure, The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine. Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter? Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars? Something there is, (With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper, I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,) Something there is more immortal even than the stars, (Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter Longer than sun or any revolving satellite, Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running, Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering, Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering, On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting, Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing, (That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?) Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending, Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting, Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering, A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting, That savage trinity warily watching.
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead?4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.5 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.6  A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, And here you are the mothers’ laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.7 Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.) Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted, For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, For me children and the begetters of children. Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.8 The little one sleeps in its cradle, I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill, I peeringly view them from the top. The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor, The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls, The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs, The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital, The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall, The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd, The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes, What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits, What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes, What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum, Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips, I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart.9 The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready, The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon, The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged, The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.10 Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee, In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game, Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side. The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud, My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck. The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me, I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time; You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle. I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north, I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.11 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass’d all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.12 The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down. Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil, Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire. From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements, The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms, Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure, They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.13 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses, the block swags underneath on its tied-over chain, The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois’d on one leg on the string-piece, His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band, His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead, The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs. I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there, I go with the team also. In me the caresser of life wherever moving, backward as well as forward sluing, To niches aside and junior bending, not a person or object missing, Absorbing all to myself and for this song. Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my distant and day-long ramble, They rise together, they slowly circle around. I believe in those wing’d purposes, And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional, And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else, And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me, And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.14 The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation, The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close, Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky. The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog, The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats, The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings, I see in them and myself the same old law. The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, They scorn the best I can do to relate them. I am enamour’d of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me, Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns, Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me, Not asking the sky to come down to my good will, Scattering it freely forever.15 The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready, The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;) The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;) The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee, As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle, The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other, The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale, The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways, As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers, The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots, The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child, The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill, The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold, The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread, The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him, The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions, The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!) The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray, The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;) The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly, The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;) The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries, On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms, The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold, The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle, As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change, The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar, In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers; Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!) Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground; Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw, Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.16 I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine, One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same, A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian, A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye; At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland, At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking, At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch, Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,) Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat, A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest, A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons, Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest. I resist any thing better than my own diversity, Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, And am not stuck up, and am in my place. (The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place, The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)17 These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe.18 With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail’d! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!19 This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited, The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited; There shall be no difference between them and the rest. This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair, This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning, This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again. Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has. Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.20 Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you? All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, Else it were time lost listening to me. I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth. Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d, I wear my hat as I please indoors or out. Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious? Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close, I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night. I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, I see that the elementary laws never apologize, (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.) I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait. My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.21 I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. I chant the chant of dilation or pride, We have had ducking and deprecating about enough, I show that size is only development. Have you outstript the rest? are you the President? It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on. I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom’d night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! Still nodding night—mad naked summer night. Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow’d earth—rich apple-blossom’d earth! Smile, for your lover comes. Prodigal, you have given me love—therefore I to you give love! O unspeakable passionate love.22 You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. Sea of stretch’d ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms. I am he attesting sympathy, (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?) I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent, My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown. Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified? I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance, Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine, Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start. This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, There is no better than it and now. What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder, The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.23 Endless unfolding of words of ages! And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse. A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. I accept Reality and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing. Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration! Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac, This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar of the old cartouches, These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas. This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician. Gentlemen, to you the first honors always! Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling, I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling. Less the reminders of properties told my words, And more the reminders they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication, And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully equipt, And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire.24 Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index. I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d. I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! Firm masculine colter it shall be you! Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you! You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you! Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you! Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you. I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish, Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be, A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows, The air tastes good to my palate. Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding, Scooting obliquely high and low. Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs, Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven. The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction, The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head, The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!25 Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me. We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak. My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then? Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation, Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded? Waiting in gloom, protected by frost, The dirt receding before my prophetical screams, I underlying causes to balance them at last, My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things, Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.) My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am, Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me, I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you. Writing and talk do not prove me, I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face, With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.26 Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals, I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice, I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night, Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals, The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick, The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence, The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters, The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights, The steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars, The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two, (They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.) I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,) I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast. I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music—this suits me. A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me, The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full. I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?) The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them, It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick’d by the indolent waves, I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath, Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death, At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call Being.27 To be in any form, what is that? (Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,) If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell, I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy, To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.28 Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity, Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself, On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, Depriving me of my best as for a purpose, Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, Deluding my confusion with the calm of the sunlight and pasture-fields, Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away, They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me, No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger, Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while, Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me. The sentries desert every other part of me, They have left me helpless to a red marauder, They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me. I am given up by traitors, I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor, I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there. You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat, Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.29 Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch! Did it make you ache so, leaving me? Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan, Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward. Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital, Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.30 All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?) Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so, Only what nobody denies is so.) A minute and a drop of me settle my brain, I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps, And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman, And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other, And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific, And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.31 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, But call any thing back again when I desire it. In vain the speeding or shyness, In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach, In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder’d bones, In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes, In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low, In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky, In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs, In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods, In vain the razor-bill’d auk sails far north to Labrador, I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.32 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession. I wonder where they get those tokens, Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them? Myself moving forward then and now and forever, Gathering and showing more always and with velocity, Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them, Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers, Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms. A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving. His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return. I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion, Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them? Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.33 Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at, What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass, What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed, And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning. My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, I am afoot with my vision. By the city’s quadrangular houses—in log huts, camping with lumbermen, Along the ruts of the turnpike, along the dry gulch and rivulet bed, Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests, Prospecting, gold-digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase, Scorch’d ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river, Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter, Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish, Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou, Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tail; Over the growing sugar, over the yellow-flower’d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field, Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender shoots from the gutters, Over the western persimmon, over the long-leav’d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax, Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest, Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze; Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs, Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush, Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot, Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve, where the great gold-bug drops through the dark, Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow, Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their hides, Where the cheese-cloth hangs in the kitchen, where andirons straddle the hearth-slab, where cobwebs fall in festoons from the rafters; Where trip-hammers crash, where the press is whirling its cylinders, Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes under its ribs, Where the pear-shaped balloon is floating aloft, (floating in it myself and looking composedly down,) Where the life-car is drawn on the slip-noose, where the heat hatches pale-green eggs in the dented sand, Where the she-whale swims with her calf and never forsakes it, Where the steam-ship trails hind-ways its long pennant of smoke, Where the fin of the shark cuts like a black chip out of the water, Where the half-burn’d brig is riding on unknown currents, Where shells grow to her slimy deck, where the dead are corrupting below; Where the dense-starr’d flag is borne at the head of the regiments, Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island, Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance, Upon a door-step, upon the horse-block of hard wood outside, Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or jigs or a good game of base-ball, At he-festivals, with blackguard gibes, ironical license, bull-dances, drinking, laughter, At the cider-mill tasting the sweets of the brown mash, sucking the juice through a straw, At apple-peelings wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find, At musters, beach-parties, friendly bees, huskings, house-raisings; Where the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps, Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel, Where the bull advances to do his masculine work, where the stud to the mare, where the cock is treading the hen, Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks, Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie, Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near, Where the humming-bird shimmers, where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding, Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore, where she laughs her near-human laugh, Where bee-hives range on a gray bench in the garden half hid by the high weeds, Where band-neck’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out, Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery, Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees, Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs, Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon, Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well, Through patches of citrons and cucumbers with silver-wired leaves, Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs, Through the gymnasium, through the curtain’d saloon, through the office or public hall; Pleas’d with the native and pleas’d with the foreign, pleas’d with the new and old, Pleas’d with the homely woman as well as the handsome, Pleas’d with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously, Pleas’d with the tune of the choir of the whitewash’d church, Pleas’d with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress’d seriously at the camp-meeting; Looking in at the shop-windows of Broadway the whole forenoon, flatting the flesh of my nose on the thick plate glass, Wandering the same afternoon with my face turn’d up to the clouds, or down a lane or along the beach, My right and left arms round the sides of two friends, and I in the middle; Coming home with the silent and dark-cheek’d bush-boy, (behind me he rides at the drape of the day,) Far from the settlements studying the print of animals’ feet, or the moccasin print, By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient, Nigh the coffin’d corpse when all is still, examining with a candle; Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any, Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him, Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while, Walking the old hills of Judæa with the beautiful gentle God by my side, Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars, Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles, Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest, Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads. I visit the orchards of spheres and look at the product, And look at quintillions ripen’d and look at quintillions green. I fly those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul, My course runs below the soundings of plummets. I help myself to material and immaterial, No guard can shut me off, no law prevent me. I anchor my ship for a little while only, My messengers continually cruise away or bring their returns to me. I go hunting polar furs and the seal, leaping chasms with a pike-pointed staff, clinging to topples of brittle and blue. I ascend to the foretruck, I take my place late at night in the crow’s-nest, We sail the arctic sea, it is plenty light enough, Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty, The enormous masses of ice pass me and I pass them, the scenery is plain in all directions, The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them, We are approaching some great battle-field in which we are soon to be engaged, We pass the colossal outposts of the encampment, we pass with still feet and caution, Or we are entering by the suburbs some vast and ruin’d city, The blocks and fallen architecture more than all the living cities of the globe. I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires, I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself, I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips. My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs, They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drown’d. I understand the large hearts of heroes, The courage of present times and all times, How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm, How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights, And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you; How he follow’d with them and tack’d with them three days and would not give it up, How he saved the drifting company at last, How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves, How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men; All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there. The disdain and calmness of martyrs, The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on, The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat, The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am. I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin, I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks. Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken, Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades, I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels, They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth. I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake, Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy, White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps, The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. Distant and dead resuscitate, They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself. I am an old artillerist, I tell of my fort’s bombardment, I am there again. Again the long roll of the drummers, Again the attacking cannon, mortars, Again to my listening ears the cannon responsive. I take part, I see and hear the whole, The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim’d shots, The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip, Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs, The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion, The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand, He gasps through the clot Mind not me—mind—the entrenchments.34 Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth, (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,) ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks, Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance, Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone, They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war. They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, Not a single one over thirty years of age. The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer, The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight. None obey’d the command to kneel, Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight, A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together, The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there, Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away, These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets, A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him, The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood. At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies; That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.35 Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us. We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d, My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain,We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast, Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment’s cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.36 Stretch’d and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining, Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable.37 You laggards there on guard! look to your arms! In at the conquer’d doors they crowd! I am possess’d! Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain. For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night. Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side, (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.) Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced. Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp, My face is ash-color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat. Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them, I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.38 Enough! enough! enough! Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back! Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d head, slumbers, dreams, gaping, I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake. That I could forget the mockers and insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers! That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning. I remember now, I resume the overstaid fraction, The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves, Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me. I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession, Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines, Our swift ordinances on their way over the whole earth, The blossoms we wear in our hats the growth of thousands of years. Eleves, I salute you! come forward! Continue your annotations, continue your questionings.39 The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it? Is he some Southwesterner rais’d out-doors? is he Kanadian? Is he from the Mississippi country? Iowa, Oregon, California? The mountains? prairie-life, bush-life? or sailor from the sea? Wherever he goes men and women accept and desire him, They desire he should like them, touch them, speak to them, stay with them. Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naiveté, Slow-stepping feet, common features, common modes and emanations, They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers, They are wafted with the odor of his body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes.40 Flaunt of the sunshine I need not your bask—lie over! You light surfaces only, I force surfaces and depths also. Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands, Say, old top-knot, what do you want? Man or woman, I might tell how I like you, but cannot, And might tell what it is in me and what it is in you, but cannot, And might tell that pining I have, that pulse of my nights and days. Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself. You there, impotent, loose in the knees, Open your scarf’d chops till I blow grit within you, Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets, I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare, And any thing I have I bestow. I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me, You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you. To cotton-field drudge or cleaner of privies I lean, On his right cheek I put the family kiss, And in my soul I swear I never will deny him. On women fit for conception I start bigger and nimbler babes. (This day I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.) To any one dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door. Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, Let the physician and the priest go home. I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will, O despairer, here is my neck, By God, you shall not go down! hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up, Every room of the house do I fill with an arm’d force, Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. Sleep—I and they keep guard all night, Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you, I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself, And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.41 I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs, And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help. I heard what was said of the universe, Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all? Magnifying and applying come I, Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image, Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more, Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days, (They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,) Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see, Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house, Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel, Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation, Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars, Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames; By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born, Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists, The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come, Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery; What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then, The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough, Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d, The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes, The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious; By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator, Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.42 A call in the midst of the crowd, My own voice, orotund sweeping and final. Come my children, Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates, Now the performer launches his nerve, he has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within. Easily written loose-finger’d chords—I feel the thrum of your climax and close. My head slues round on my neck, Music rolls, but not from the organ, Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine. Ever the hard unsunk ground, Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides, Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real, Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts, Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth, Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life, Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death. Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking, To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning, Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going, Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate. The little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats, I am aware who they are, (they are positively not worms or fleas,) I acknowledge the duplicates of myself, the weakest and shallowest is deathless with me, What I do and say the same waits for them, Every thought that flounders in me the same flounders in them. I know perfectly well my own egotism, Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less, And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself. Not words of routine this song of mine, But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer bring; This printed and bound book—but the printer and the printing-office boy? The well-taken photographs—but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms? The black ship mail’d with iron, her mighty guns in her turrets—but the pluck of the captain and engineers? In the houses the dishes and fare and furniture—but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes? The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way? The saints and sages in history—but you yourself? Sermons, creeds, theology—but the fathomless human brain, And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?43 I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over, My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern, Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, Making a fetich of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist, Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits. One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey. Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded, Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, dishearten’d, atheistical, I know every one of you, I know the sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief. How the flukes splash! How they contort rapid as lightning, with spasms and spouts of blood! Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers, I take my place among you as much as among any, The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail. Each who passes is consider’d, each who stops is consider’d, not a single one can it fail. It cannot fail the young man who died and was buried, Nor the young woman who died and was put by his side, Nor the little child that peep’d in at the door, and then drew back and was never seen again, Nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall, Nor him in the poor house tubercled by rum and the bad disorder, Nor the numberless slaughter’d and wreck’d, nor the brutish koboo call’d the ordure of humanity, Nor the sacs merely floating with open mouths for food to slip in, Nor any thing in the earth, or down in the oldest graves of the earth, Nor any thing in the myriads of spheres, nor the myriads of myriads that inhabit them, Nor the present, nor the least wisp that is known.44 It is time to explain myself—let us stand up. What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any. Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister? I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me, All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation, (What have I to do with lamentation?) I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount. Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. Long I was hugg’d close—long and long. Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me. Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it. For it the nebula cohered to an orb, The long slow strata piled to rest it on, Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care. All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me, Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.45 O span of youth! ever-push’d elasticity! O manhood, balanced, florid and full. My lovers suffocate me, Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush, Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine. Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days! Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself, And the dark hush promulges as much as any. I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward. My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels, He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them. There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient, They are but parts, any thing is but a part. See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain, The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms, The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.46 I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again. This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself. Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence. Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.47 I am the teacher of athletes, He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right, Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts, First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo, Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers, And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun. I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me? I follow you whoever you are from the present hour, My words itch at your ears till you understand them. I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat, (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you, Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.) I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house, And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air. If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore, The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key, The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words. No shutter’d room or school can commune with me, But roughs and little children better than they. The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well, The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day, The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice, In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them. The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine, On the night ere the pending battle many seek me, and I do not fail them, On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me. My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket, The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon, The young mother and old mother comprehend me, The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are, They and all would resume what I have told them.48 I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever.49 And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me. To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes, I see the elder-hand pressing receiving supporting, I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors, And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape. And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons. And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven, O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions, If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing? Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the black stems that decay in the muck, Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs. I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night, I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected, And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.50 There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes, I sleep—I sleep long. I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.51 The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?52 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Vigil strange I kept on the field one night; When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day, One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget, One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground, Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle, Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way, Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,) Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind, Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading, Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night, But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed, Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands, Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word, Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier, As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole, Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death, I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,) Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d, My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form, Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet, And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited, Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim, Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,) Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d, I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And buried him where he fell.
The world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf, Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water, Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom, The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray, Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do, The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere, The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
Oh, black Persian cat! Was not your life already cursed with offspring? We took you for rest to that old Yankee farm, — so lonely and with so many field mice in the long grass — and you return to us in this condition —! Oh, black Persian cat.
I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral — for you have it over a troop of artists— unless one should scour the world — you have the ground sense necessary. See! the hearse leads. I begin with a design for a hearse. For Christ's sake not black — nor white either — and not polished! Let it be weathered — like a farm wagon — with gilt wheels (this could be applied fresh at small expense) or no wheels at all: a rough dray to drag over the ground. Knock the glass out! My God-glass, my townspeople! For what purpose? Is it for the dead to look out or for us to see how well he is housed or to see the flowers or the lack of them — or what? To keep the rain and snow from him? He will have a heavier rain soon: pebbles and dirt and what not. Let there be no glass — and no upholstery phew! and no little brass rollers and small easy wheels on the bottom — my townspeople what are you thinking of? A rough plain hearse then with gilt wheels and no top at all. On this the coffin lies by its own weight. No wreathes please — especially no hot house flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes — a few books perhaps — God knows what! You realize how we are about these things my townspeople — something will be found — anything even flowers if he had come to that. So much for the hearse. For heaven's sake though see to the driver! Take off the silk hat! In fact that's no place at all for him — up there unceremoniously dragging our friend out to his own dignity! Bring him down — bring him down! Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride on the wagon at all — damn him — the undertaker's understrapper! Let him hold the reins and walk at the side and inconspicuously too! Then briefly as to yourselves: Walk behind — as they do in France, seventh class, or if you ride Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly — to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut grief in? What — from us? We who have perhaps nothing to lose? Share with us share with us — it will be money in your pockets. Go now I think you are ready.
All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.
I travelled among unknown men,  In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then  What love I bore to thee. 'Tis past, that melancholy dream!  Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem  To love thee more and more. Among thy mountains did I feel  The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel  Beside an English fire. Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,  The bowers where Lucy played; And thine too is the last green field  That Lucy's eyes surveyed.
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought: For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe! Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought! And giv'st to forms and images a breath And everlasting motion! not in vain, By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up our human soul; Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man; But with high objects, with enduring things, With life and nature; purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear,—until we recognise A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.  Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me With stinted kindness. In November days, When vapours rolling down the valleys made A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights, When, by the margin of the trembling lake, Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went In solitude, such intercourse was mine: Mine was it in the fields both day and night, And by the waters, all the summer long. And in the frosty season, when the sun Was set, and, visible for many a mile, The cottage-windows through the twilight blazed, I heeded not the summons: happy time It was indeed for all of us; for me It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud The village-clock tolled six—I wheeled about, Proud and exulting like an untired horse That cares not for his home.—All shod with steel We hissed along the polished ice, in games Confederate, imitative of the chase And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn, The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare. So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far-distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away.  Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star; Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.
Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned—Albeit labouring for a scanty bandOf white-robed Scholars only—this immenseAnd glorious Work of fine intelligence!Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the loreOf nicely-calculated less or more;So deemed the man who fashioned for the senseThese lofty pillars, spread that branching roofSelf-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,Where light and shade repose, where music dwellsLingering—and wandering on as loth to die;Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proofThat they were born for immortality.
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea; Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.
It is not to be thought of that the FloodOf British freedom, which, to the open seaOf the world's praise, from dark antiquityHath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"Roused though it be full often to a moodWhich spurns the check of salutary bands,That this most famous Stream in bogs and sandsShould perish; and to evil and to goodBe lost for ever. In our halls is hungArmoury of the invincible Knights of old:We must be free or die, who speak the tongueThat Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals holdWhich Milton held.—In every thing we are sprungOf Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
"With sacrifice before the rising morn Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required: Celestial pity I again implore;— Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!" So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the Suppliant heavenward lifts her hands; While, like the sun emerging from a cloud, Her countenance brightens—and her eye expands; Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows; As she expects the issue in repose. O terror! what hath she perceived?—O joy! What doth she look on?—whom doth she behold? Her Hero slain upon the beach of Troy? His vital presence? his corporeal mould? It is—if sense deceive her not—'tis He! And a God leads him, wingèd Mercury! Mild Hermes spake—and touched her with his wand That calms all fear; "Such grace hath crowned thy prayer, Laodamía! that at Jove's command Thy husband walks the paths of upper air: He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space; Accept the gift, behold him face to face!" Forth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp; Again that consummation she essayed; But unsubstantial Form eludes her grasp As often as that eager grasp was made. The Phantom parts—but parts to re-unite, And re-assume his place before her sight. "Protesiláus, lo! thy guide is gone! Confirm, I pray, the vision with thy voice: This is our palace,—yonder is thy throne; Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice. Not to appal me have the gods bestowed This precious boon; and blest a sad abode." "Great Jove, Laodamía! doth not leave His gifts imperfect:—Spectre though I be, I am not sent to scare thee or deceive; But in reward of thy fidelity. And something also did my worth obtain; For fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain. "Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold That the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand Should die; but me the threat could not withhold: A generous cause a victim did demand; And forth I leapt upon the sandy plain; A self-devoted chief—by Hector slain." "Supreme of Heroes—bravest, noblest, best! Thy matchless courage I bewail no more, Which then, when tens of thousands were deprest By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore; Thou found'st—and I forgive thee—here thou art— A nobler counsellor than my poor heart. "But thou, though capable of sternest deed, Wert kind as resolute, and good as brave; And he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed Thou should'st elude the malice of the grave: Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair As when their breath enriched Thessalian air. "No spectre greets me,—no vain Shadow this; Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side! Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss To me, this day a second time thy bride!" Jove frowned in heaven: the conscious Parcæ threw Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue. "This visage tells thee that my doom is past: Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys Of sense were able to return as fast And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Those raptures duly—-Erebus disdains: Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains. "Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn When I depart, for brief is my sojourn—" "Ah wherefore?—Did not Hercules by force Wrest from the guardian monster of the tomb Alcestis, a reanimated corse, Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom? Medea's spells dispersed the weight of years, And Æson stood a youth 'mid youthful peers. "The Gods to us are merciful—and they Yet further may relent: for mightier far Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distrest, And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. "But if thou goest, I follow—" "Peace!" he said,— She looked upon him and was calmed and cheered; The ghastly colour from his lips had fled; In his deportment, shape, and mien, appeared Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place. He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel In worlds whose course is equable and pure; No fears to beat away—no strife to heal— The past unsighed for, and the future sure; Spake of heroic arts in graver mood Revived, with finer harmony pursued; Of all that is most beauteous—imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. Yet there the Soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue.—"Ill," said he, "The end of man's existence I discerned, Who from ignoble games and revelry Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight, While tears were thy best pastime, day and night; "And while my youthful peers before my eyes (Each hero following his peculiar bent) Prepared themselves for glorious enterprise By martial sports,—or, seated in the tent, Chieftains and kings in council were detained; What time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained. "The wished-for wind was given:—I then revolved The oracle, upon the silent sea; And, if no worthier led the way, resolved That, of a thousand vessels, mine should be The foremost prow in pressing to the strand,— Mine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand. "Yet bitter, oft-times bitter, was the pang When of thy loss I thought, belovèd Wife! On thee too fondly did my memory hang, And on the joys we shared in mortal life,— The paths which we had trod—these fountains, flowers: My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers. "But should suspense permit the Foe to cry, 'Behold they tremble!—haughty their array, Yet of their numbers no one dares to die?' In soul I swept the indignity away: Old frailties then recurred:—but lofty thought, In act embodied, my deliverance wrought. "And Thou, though strong in love, art all too weak In reason, in self-government too slow; I counsel thee by fortitude to seek Our blest re-union in the shades below. The invisible world with thee hath sympathised; Be thy affections raised and solemnised. "Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend— Seeking a higher object. Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end; For this the passion to excess was driven— That self might be annulled: her bondage prove The fetters of a dream opposed to love.— Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes re-appears! Round the dear Shade she would have clung—'tis vain: The hours are past—too brief had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse She lay. Thus, all in vain exhorted and reproved, She perished; and, as for a wilful crime, By the just Gods whom no weak pity moved, Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, Apart from happy Ghosts, that gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers. —Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, As fondly he believes.—Upon the side Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained) A knot of spiry trees for ages grew From out the tomb of him for whom she died; And ever, when such stature they had gained That Ilium's walls were subject to their view, The trees' tall summits withered at the sight; A constant interchange of growth and blight!
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenOf stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,Have forfeited their ancient English dowerOf inward happiness. We are selfish men;Oh! raise us up, return to us again;And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,So didst thou travel on life's common way,In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heartThe lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyesTo pace the ground, if path be there or none,While a fair region round the traveller liesWhich he forbears again to look upon;Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene,The work of Fancy, or some happy toneOf meditation, slipping in betweenThe beauty coming and the beauty gone.If Thought and Love desert us, from that dayLet us break off all commerce with the Muse:With Thought and Love companions of our way,Whate'er the senses take or may refuse,The Mind's internal heaven shall shed her dewsOf inspiration on the humblest lay.
From low to high doth dissolution climb, And sink from high to low, along a scale Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail; A musical but melancholy chime, Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care. Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear The longest date do melt like frosty rime, That in the morning whitened hill and plain And is no more; drop like the tower sublime Of yesterday, which royally did wear His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of Time.
Another year!—another deadly blow!Another mighty Empire overthrown!And We are left, or shall be left, alone;The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.'Tis well! from this day forward we shall knowThat in ourselves our safety must be sought;That by our own right hands it must be wrought;That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low.O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer!We shall exult, if they who rule the landBe men who hold its many blessings dear,Wise, upright, valiant; not a servile band,Who are to judge of danger which they fear,And honour which they do not understand.
—It seems a day(I speak of one from many singled out)One of those heavenly days that cannot die;When, in the eagerness of boyish hope,I left our cottage-threshold, sallying forthWith a huge wallet o'er my shoulders slung,A nutting-crook in hand; and turned my stepsTow'rd some far-distant wood, a Figure quaint,Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weedsWhich for that service had been husbanded,By exhortation of my frugal Dame—Motley accoutrement, of power to smileAt thorns, and brakes, and brambles,—and, in truth,More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks,Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,Forcing my way, I came to one dear nookUnvisited, where not a broken boughDrooped with its withered leaves, ungracious signOf devastation; but the hazels roseTall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,A virgin scene!—A little while I stood,Breathing with such suppression of the heartAs joy delights in; and, with wise restraintVoluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyedThe banquet;—or beneath the trees I sateAmong the flowers, and with the flowers I played;A temper known to those, who, after longAnd weary expectation, have been blestWith sudden happiness beyond all hope.Perhaps it was a bower beneath whose leavesThe violets of five seasons re-appearAnd fade, unseen by any human eye;Where fairy water-breaks do murmur onFor ever; and I saw the sparkling foam,And—with my cheek on one of those green stonesThat, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees,Lay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep—I heard the murmur, and the murmuring sound,In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to payTribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,And on the vacant air. Then up I rose,And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crashAnd merciless ravage: and the shady nookOf hazels, and the green and mossy bower,Deformed and sullied, patiently gave upTheir quiet being: and, unless I nowConfound my present feelings with the past;Ere from the mutilated bower I turnedExulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,I felt a sense of pain when I beheldThe silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.—Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shadesIn gentleness of heart; with gentle handTouch—for there is a spirit in the woods.
A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,Nor of the setting sun's pathetic lightEngendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height:Spirits of Power, assembled there, complainFor kindred Power departing from their sight;While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain,Saddens his voice again, and yet again.Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the mightOf the whole world's good wishes with him goes;Blessings and prayers in nobler retinueThan sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows,Follow this wondrous Potentate. Be true,Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,Wafting your Charge to soft Parthenope!
Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;And was the safeguard of the west: the worthOf Venice did not fall below her birth,Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.She was a maiden City, bright and free;No guile seduced, no force could violate;And, when she took unto herself a Mate,She must espouse the everlasting Sea.And what if she had seen those glories fade,Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;Yet shall some tribute of regret be paidWhen her long life hath reached its final day:Men are we, and must grieve when even the ShadeOf that which once was great is passed away.
The power of Armies is a visible thing,Formal and circumscribed in time and space;But who the limits of that power shall traceWhich a brave People into light can bringOr hide, at will,—for freedom combatingBy just revenge inflamed? No foot may chase,No eye can follow, to a fatal placeThat power, that spirit, whether on the wingLike the strong wind, or sleeping like the windWithin its awful caves.—From year to yearSprings this indigenous produce far and near;No craft this subtle element can bind,Rising like water from the soil, to findIn every nook a lip that it may cheer.
A poet!—He hath put his heart to school,Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staffWhich art hath lodged within his hand—must laughBy precept only, and shed tears by rule.Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff,And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,In fear that else, when Critics grave and coolHave killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph.How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?Because the lovely little flower is freeDown to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;And so the grandeur of the Forest-treeComes not by casting in a formal mould,But from its own divine vitality.
There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. All things that love the sun are out of doors; The sky rejoices in the morning's birth; The grass is bright with rain-drops;—on the moors The hare is running races in her mirth; And with her feet she from the plashy earth Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun, Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. I was a Traveller then upon the moor; I saw the hare that raced about with joy; I heard the woods and distant waters roar; Or heard them not, as happy as a boy: The pleasant season did my heart employ: My old remembrances went from me wholly; And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy. But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might Of joys in minds that can no further go, As high as we have mounted in delight In our dejection do we sink as low; To me that morning did it happen so; And fears and fancies thick upon me came; Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name. I heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky; And I bethought me of the playful hare: Even such a happy Child of earth am I; Even as these blissful creatures do I fare; Far from the world I walk, and from all care; But there may come another day to me— Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty. My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, As if life's business were a summer mood; As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith, still rich in genial good; But how can He expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. Now, whether it were by peculiar grace, A leading from above, a something given, Yet it befell that, in this lonely place, When I with these untoward thoughts had striven, Beside a pool bare to the eye of heaven I saw a Man before me unawares: The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs. As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie Couched on the bald top of an eminence; Wonder to all who do the same espy, By what means it could thither come, and whence; So that it seems a thing endued with sense: Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself; Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead, Nor all asleep—in his extreme old age: His body was bent double, feet and head Coming together in life's pilgrimage; As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage Of sickness felt by him in times long past, A more than human weight upon his frame had cast. Himself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face, Upon a long grey staff of shaven wood: And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, Upon the margin of that moorish flood Motionless as a cloud the old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call, And moveth all together, if it move at all. At length, himself unsettling, he the pond Stirred with his staff, and fixedly did look Upon the muddy water, which he conned, As if he had been reading in a book: And now a stranger's privilege I took; And, drawing to his side, to him did say, "This morning gives us promise of a glorious day." A gentle answer did the old Man make, In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew: And him with further words I thus bespake, "What occupation do you there pursue? This is a lonesome place for one like you." Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes. His words came feebly, from a feeble chest, But each in solemn order followed each, With something of a lofty utterance drest— Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary men; a stately speech; Such as grave Livers do in Scotland use, Religious men, who give to God and man their dues. He told, that to these waters he had come To gather leeches, being old and poor: Employment hazardous and wearisome! And he had many hardships to endure: From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor; Housing, with God's good help, by choice or chance; And in this way he gained an honest maintenance. The old Man still stood talking by my side; But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide; And the whole body of the Man did seem Like one whom I had met with in a dream; Or like a man from some far region sent, To give me human strength, by apt admonishment. My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills; And hope that is unwilling to be fed; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; And mighty Poets in their misery dead. —Perplexed, and longing to be comforted, My question eagerly did I renew, "How is it that you live, and what is it you do?" He with a smile did then his words repeat; And said that, gathering leeches, far and wide He travelled; stirring thus about his feet The waters of the pools where they abide. "Once I could meet with them on every side; But they have dwindled long by slow decay; Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may." While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old Man's shape, and speech—all troubled me: In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently. While I these thoughts within myself pursued, He, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed. And soon with this he other matter blended, Cheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind, But stately in the main; and, when he ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit Man so firm a mind. "God," said I, "be my help and stay secure; I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!"
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camöens soothed an exile's grief; The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!
Departing summer hath assumed An aspect tenderly illumed, The gentlest look of spring; That calls from yonder leafy shade Unfaded, yet prepared to fade, A timely carolling. No faint and hesitating trill, Such tribute as to winter chill The lonely redbreast pays! Clear, loud, and lively is the din, From social warblers gathering in Their harvest of sweet lays. Nor doth the example fail to cheer Me, conscious that my leaf is sere, And yellow on the bough:— Fall, rosy garlands, from my head! Ye myrtle wreaths, your fragrance shed Around a younger brow! Yet will I temperately rejoice; Wide is the range, and free the choice Of undiscordant themes; Which, haply, kindred souls may prize Not less than vernal ecstasies, And passion's feverish dreams. For deathless powers to verse belong, And they like Demi-gods are strong On whom the Muses smile; But some their function have disclaimed, Best pleased with what is aptliest framed To enervate and defile. Not such the initiatory strains Committed to the silent plains In Britain's earliest dawn: Trembled the groves, the stars grew pale, While all-too-daringly the veil Of nature was withdrawn! Nor such the spirit-stirring note When the live chords Alcæus smote, Inflamed by sense of wrong; Woe! woe to Tyrants! from the lyre Broke threateningly, in sparkles dire Of fierce vindictive song. And not unhallowed was the page By wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage The pangs of vain pursuit; Love listening while the Lesbian Maid With finest touch of passion swayed Her own Æolian lute. O ye, who patiently explore The wreck of Herculanean lore, What rapture! could ye seize Some Theban fragment, or unroll One precious, tender-hearted scroll Of pure Simonides. That were, indeed, a genuine birth Of poesy; a bursting forth Of genius from the dust: What Horace gloried to behold, What Maro loved, shall we enfold? Can haughty Time be just!
She dwelt among the untrodden ways  Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise  And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone  Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one  Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know  When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh,  The difference to me!
She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin-liberty; A countenance in which did meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A Creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine; A Being breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller between life and death; The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; A perfect Woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light.
In the sweet shire of Cardigan, Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall, An old Man dwells, a little man,— 'Tis said he once was tall. For five-and-thirty years he lived A running huntsman merry; And still the centre of his cheek Is red as a ripe cherry. No man like him the horn could sound, And hill and valley rang with glee When Echo bandied, round and round The halloo of Simon Lee. In those proud days, he little cared For husbandry or tillage; To blither tasks did Simon rouse The sleepers of the village. He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the chase was done, He reeled, and was stone-blind. And still there's something in the world At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out, He dearly loves their voices! But, oh the heavy change!—bereft Of health, strength, friends, and kindred, see! Old Simon to the world is left In liveried poverty. His Master's dead—and no one now Dwells in the Hall of Ivor; Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor. And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry. One prop he has, and only one, His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village Common. Beside their moss-grown hut of clay, Not twenty paces from the door, A scrap of land they have, but they Are poorest of the poor. This scrap of land he from the heath Enclosed when he was stronger; But what to them avails the land Which he can till no longer? Oft, working by her Husband's side, Ruth does what Simon cannot do; For she, with scanty cause for pride, Is stouter of the two. And, though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them, 'Tis little, very little—all That they can do between them. Few months of life has he in store As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more Do his weak ankles swell. My gentle Reader, I perceive, How patiently you've waited, And now I fear that you expect Some tale will be related. O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it. One summer-day I chanced to see This old Man doing all he could To unearth the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock tottered in his hand; So vain was his endeavour, That at the root of the old tree He might have worked for ever. "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool," to him I said; And at the word right gladly he Received my proffered aid. I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I severed, At which the poor old Man so long And vainly had endeavoured. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. —I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning.
—Brook and roadWere fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,And with them did we journey several hoursAt a slow step. The immeasurable heightOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,The stationary blasts of waterfalls,And in the narrow rent, at every turn,Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,Black drizzling crags that spake by the waysideAs if a voice were in them, the sick sightAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—Were all like workings of one mind, the featuresOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree,Characters of the great Apocalypse,The types and symbols of Eternity,Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides. Will no one tell me what she sings?— Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again? Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;— I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.
High in the breathless Hall the Minstrel sate, And Emont's murmur mingled with the Song.— The words of ancient time I thus translate, A festal strain that hath been silent long:—  "From town to town, from tower to tower,  The red rose is a gladsome flower.  Her thirty years of winter past,  The red rose is revived at last;  She lifts her head for endless spring,  For everlasting blossoming:  Both roses flourish, red and white:  In love and sisterly delight  The two that were at strife are blended,  And all old troubles now are ended.—  Joy! joy to both! but most to her  Who is the flower of Lancaster!  Behold her how She smiles to-day  On this great throng, this bright array!  Fair greeting doth she send to all  From every corner of the hall;  But chiefly from above the board  Where sits in state our rightful Lord,  A Clifford to his own restored!  "They came with banner, spear, and shield;  And it was proved in Bosworth-field.  Not long the Avenger was withstood—  Earth helped him with the cry of blood:  St. George was for us, and the might  Of blessed Angels crowned the right.  Loud voice the Land has uttered forth,  We loudest in the faithful north:  Our fields rejoice, our mountains ring,  Our streams proclaim a welcoming;  Our strong-abodes and castles see  The glory of their loyalty.  "How glad is Skipton at this hour—  Though lonely, a deserted Tower;  Knight, squire, and yeoman, page and groom,  We have them at the feast of Brough'm.  How glad Pendragon—though the sleep  Of years be on her!—She shall reap  A taste of this great pleasure, viewing  As in a dream her own renewing.  Rejoiced is Brough, right glad, I deem,  Beside her little humble stream;  And she that keepeth watch and ward  Her statelier Eden's course to guard;  They both are happy at this hour,  Though each is but a lonely Tower:—  But here is perfect joy and pride  For one fair House by Emont's side,  This day, distinguished without peer,  To see her Master and to cheer—  Him, and his Lady-mother dear!  "Oh! it was a time forlorn  When the fatherless was born—  Give her wings that she may fly,  Or she sees her infant die!  Swords that are with slaughter wild  Hunt the Mother and the Child.  Who will take them from the light?  —Yonder is a man in sight—  Yonder is a house—but where?  No, they must not enter there.  To the caves, and to the brooks,  To the clouds of heaven she looks;  She is speechless, but her eyes  Pray in ghostly agonies.  Blissful Mary, Mother mild,  Maid and Mother undefiled,  Save a Mother and her Child!  "Now who is he that bounds with joy  On Carrock's side, a Shepherd-boy?  No thoughts hath he but thoughts that pass  Light as the wind along the grass.  Can this be He who hither came  In secret, like a smothered flame?  O'er whom such thankful tears were shed  For shelter, and a poor man's bread!  God loves the Child; and God hath willed  That those dear words should be fulfilled,  The Lady's words, when forced away  The last she to her Babe did say:  "My own, my own, thy fellow-guest  I may not be; but rest thee, rest,  For lowly shepherd's life is best!"  "Alas! when evil men are strong  No life is good, no pleasure long.  The Boy must part from Mosedale's groves,  And leave Blencathara's rugged coves,  And quit the flowers that summer brings  To Glenderamakin's lofty springs;  Must vanish, and his careless cheer  Be turned to heaviness and fear.  —Give Sir Lancelot Threlkeld praise!  Hear it, good man, old in days!  Thou tree of covert and of rest  For this young Bird that is distrest;  Among thy branches safe he lay,  And he was free to sport and play,  When falcons were abroad for prey.  "A recreant harp, that sings of fear  And heaviness in Clifford's ear!  I said, when evil men are strong,  No life is good, no pleasure long,  A weak and cowardly untruth!  Our Clifford was a happy Youth,  And thankful through a weary time,  That brought him up to manhood's prime.  —Again he wanders forth at will,  And tends a flock from hill to hill:  His garb is humble; ne'er was seen  Such garb with such a noble mien;  Among the shepherd-grooms no mate  Hath he, a Child of strength and state!  Yet lacks not friends for simple glee,  Nor yet for higher sympathy.  To his side the fallow-deer  Came and rested without fear;  The eagle, lord of land and sea,  Stooped down to pay him fealty;  And both the undying fish that swim  Through Bowscale-tarn did wait on him;  The pair were servants of his eye  In their immortality;  And glancing, gleaming, dark or bright,  Moved to and fro, for his delight.  He knew the rocks which Angels haunt  Upon the mountains visitant;  He hath kenned them taking wing:  And into caves where Faeries sing  He hath entered; and been told  By Voices how men lived of old.  Among the heavens his eye can see  The face of thing that is to be;  And, if that men report him right,  His tongue could whisper words of might.  —Now another day is come,  Fitter hope, and nobler doom;  He hath thrown aside his crook,  And hath buried deep his book;  Armour rusting in his halls  On the blood of Clifford calls,—  'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance—  Bear me to the heart of France,  Is the longing of the Shield—  Tell thy name, thou trembling field;  Field of death, where'er thou be,  Groan thou with our victory!  Happy day, and mighty hour,  When our Shepherd, in his power,  Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,  To his ancestors restored  Like a re-appearing Star,  Like a glory from afar  First shall head the flock of war!" Alas! the impassioned minstrel did not know How, by Heaven's grace, this Clifford's heart was framed: How he, long forced in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills. In him the savage virtue of the Race, Revenge and all ferocious thoughts were dead: Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place The wisdom which adversity had bred. Glad were the vales, and every cottage-hearth; The Shepherd-lord was honoured more and more; And, ages after he was laid in earth, "The good Lord Clifford" was the name he bore.
I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,As being past away.—Vain sympathies!For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,I see what was, and is, and will abide;Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;The Form remains, the Function never dies;While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,We Men, who in our morn of youth defiedThe elements, must vanish;—be it so!Enough, if something from our hands have powerTo live, and act, and serve the future hour;And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,We feel that we are greater than we know.
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.
There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs And islands of Winander! many a time, At evening, when the earliest stars began To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone, Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake; And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him.—And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill: Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake.  This boy was taken from his mates, and died In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. Pre-eminent in beauty is the vale Where he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs Upon a slope above the village-school; And through that churchyard when my way has led On summer-evenings, I believe that there A long half-hour together I have stood Mute—looking at the grave in which he lies!
Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own. "Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain. "She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. "The floating clouds their state shall lend To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see Even in the motions of the Storm Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form By silent sympathy. "The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face. "And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy dell." Thus Nature spake—The work was done— How soon my Lucy's race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be.
(At Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond) Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower Of beauty is thy earthly dower! Twice seven consenting years have shed Their utmost bounty on thy head: And these grey rocks; that household lawn; Those trees, a veil just half withdrawn; This fall of water that doth make A murmur near the silent lake; This little bay; a quiet road That holds in shelter thy Abode— In truth together do ye seem Like something fashioned in a dream; Such Forms as from their covert peep When earthly cares are laid asleep! But, O fair Creature! in the light Of common day, so heavenly bright, I bless Thee, Vision as thou art, I bless thee with a human heart; God shield thee to thy latest years! Thee, neither know I, nor thy peers; And yet my eyes are filled with tears.  With earnest feeling I shall pray For thee when I am far away: For never saw I mien, or face, In which more plainly I could trace Benignity and home-bred sense Ripening in perfect innocence. Here scattered, like a random seed, Remote from men, Thou dost not need The embarrassed look of shy distress, And maidenly shamefacedness: Thou wear'st upon thy forehead clear The freedom of a Mountaineer: A face with gladness overspread! Soft smiles, by human kindness bred! And seemliness complete, that sways Thy courtesies, about thee plays; With no restraint, but such as springs From quick and eager visitings Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach Of thy few words of English speech: A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife That gives thy gestures grace and life! So have I, not unmoved in mind, Seen birds of tempest-loving kind— Thus beating up against the wind.  What hand but would a garland cull For thee who art so beautiful? O happy pleasure! here to dwell Beside thee in some heathy dell; Adopt your homely ways, and dress, A Shepherd, thou a Shepherdess! But I could frame a wish for thee More like a grave reality: Thou art to me but as a wave Of the wild sea; and I would have Some claim upon thee, if I could, Though but of common neighbourhood. What joy to hear thee, and to see! Thy elder Brother I would be, Thy Father—anything to thee!  Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace Hath led me to this lonely place. Joy have I had; and going hence I bear away my recompense. In spots like these it is we prize Our Memory, feel that she hath eyes: Then, why should I be loth to stir? I feel this place was made for her; To give new pleasure like the past, Continued long as life shall last. Nor am I loth, though pleased at heart, Sweet Highland Girl! from thee to part; For I, methinks, till I grow old, As fair before me shall behold, As I do now, the cabin small, The lake, the bay, the waterfall; And thee, the spirit of them all!
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground? Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will, Those quivering wings composed, that music still! Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; A privacy of glorious light is thine; Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood Of harmony, with instinct more divine; Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!
O blithe New-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice. O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice? While I am lying on the grass Thy twofold shout I hear; From hill to hill it seems to pass, At once far off, and near. Though babbling only to the Vale Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours. Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; The same whom in my school-boy days I listened to; that Cry Which made me look a thousand ways In bush, and tree, and sky. To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou wert still a hope, a love; Still longed for, never seen. And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. O blessèd Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home for Thee!
Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrostWith the least shade of thought to sin allied.Woman! above all women glorified,Our tainted nature's solitary boast;Purer than foam on central ocean tost;Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewnWith fancied roses, than the unblemished moonBefore her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,As to a visible Power, in which did blendAll that was mixed and reconciled in theeOf mother's love with maiden purity,Of high with low, celestial with terrene!
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
O Friend! I know not which way I must lookFor comfort, being, as I am, opprest,To think that now our life is only drestFor show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,Or groom! — We must run glittering like a brookIn the open sunshine, or we are unblest:The wealthiest man among us is the best:No grandeur now in nature or in bookDelights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,This is idolatry; and these we adore:Plain living and high thinking are no more:The homely beauty of the good old causeIs gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,And pure religion breathing household laws.
The gallant Youth, who may have gained,  Or seeks, a "winsome Marrow," Was but an Infant in the lap  When first I looked on Yarrow; Once more, by Newark's Castle-gate  Long left without a warder, I stood, looked, listened, and with Thee,  Great Minstrel of the Border! Grave thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day,  Their dignity installing In gentle bosoms, while sere leaves  Were on the bough, or falling; But breezes played, and sunshine gleamed-  The forest to embolden; Reddened the fiery hues, and shot  Transparence through the golden. For busy thoughts the Stream flowed on  In foamy agitation; And slept in many a crystal pool  For quiet contemplation: No public and no private care  The freeborn mind enthralling, We made a day of happy hours,  Our happy days recalling. Brisk Youth appeared, the Morn of youth,  With freaks of graceful folly,- Life's temperate Noon, her sober Eve,  Her Night not melancholy; Past, present, future, all appeared  In harmony united, Like guests that meet, and some from far,  By cordial love invited. And if, as Yarrow, through the woods  And down the meadow ranging, Did meet us with unaltered face,  Though we were changed and changing; If, then, some natural shadows spread  Our inward prospect over, The soul's deep valley was not slow  Its brightness to recover. Eternal blessings on the Muse,  And her divine employment! The blameless Muse, who trains her Sons  For hope and calm enjoyment; Albeit sickness, lingering yet,  Has o'er their pillow brooded; And Care waylays their steps-a Sprite  Not easily eluded. For thee, O Scott! compelled to change  Green Eildon-hill and Cheviot For warm Vesuvio's vine-clad slopes;  And leave thy Tweed and Tiviot For mild Sorrento's breezy waves;  May classic Fancy, linking With native Fancy her fresh aid,  Preserve thy heart from sinking! Oh! while they minister to thee,  Each vying with the other, May Health return to mellow Age  With Strength, her venturous brother; And Tiber, and each brook and rill  Renowned in song and story, With unimagined beauty shine,  Nor lose one ray of glory! For Thou, upon a hundred streams,  By tales of love and sorrow, Of faithful love, undaunted truth  Hast shed the power of Yarrow; And streams unknown, hills yet unseen,  Wherever they invite Thee, At parent Nature's grateful call,  With gladness must requite Thee. A gracious welcome shall be thine,  Such looks of love and honour As thy own Yarrow gave to me  When first I gazed upon her; Beheld what I had feared to see,  Unwilling to surrender Dreams treasured up from early days,  The holy and the tender. And what, for this frail world, were all  That mortals do or suffer, Did no responsive harp, no pen,  Memorial tribute offer? Yea, what were mighty Nature's self?  Her features, could they win us, Unhelped by the poetic voice  That hourly speaks within us? Nor deem that localized Romance  Plays false with our affections; Unsanctifies our tears-made sport  For fanciful dejections: Ah, no! the visions of the past  Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is-our changeful Life,  With friends and kindred dealing. Bear witness, Ye, whose thoughts that day  In Yarrow's groves were centred; Who through the silent portal arch  Of mouldering Newark entered; And clomb the winding stair that once  Too timidly was mounted By the "last Minstrel,"(not the last!)  Ere he his Tale recounted. Flow on for ever, Yarrow Stream!  Fulfil thy pensive duty, Well pleased that future Bards should chant  For simple hearts thy beauty; To dream-light dear while yet unseen,  Dear to the common sunshine, And dearer still, as now I feel,  To memory's shadowy moonshine!
From Stirling castle we had seenThe mazy Forth unravelled;Had trod the banks of Clyde, and Tay,And with the Tweed had travelled;And when we came to Clovenford,Then said my "winsome Marrow ,""Whate'er betide, we'll turn aside,And see the Braes of Yarrow.""Let Yarrow folk, frae Selkirk town,Who have been buying, selling,Go back to Yarrow, 'tis their own;Each maiden to her dwelling!On Yarrow's banks let her herons feed,Hares couch, and rabbits burrow!But we will downward with the TweedNor turn aside to Yarrow."There's Galla Water, Leader Haughs,Both lying right before us;And Dryborough, where with chiming TweedThe lintwhites sing in chorus;There's pleasant Tiviot-dale, a landMade blithe with plough and harrow:Why throw away a needful dayTo go in search of Yarrow?"What's Yarrow but a river bare,That glides the dark hills under?There are a thousand such elsewhereAs worthy of your wonder."—Strange words they seemed of slight and scorn;My True-love sighed for sorrow;And looked me in the face, to thinkI thus could speak of Yarrow!"Oh! green," said I, "are Yarrow's holms,And sweet is Yarrow flowing!Fair hangs the apple frae the rock,But we will leave it growing.O'er hilly path, and open Strath,We'll wander Scotland thorough;But, though so near, we will not turnInto the dale of Yarrow."Let beeves and home-bred kine partakeThe sweets of Burn-mill meadow,The swan on still St. Mary's LakeFloat double, swan and shadow!We will not see them; will not go,To-day, nor yet to-morrow;Enough if in our hearts we knowThere's such a place as Yarrow."Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!It must, or we shall rue it:We have a vision of our own;Ah! why should we undo it?The treasured dreams of times long past,We'll keep them, winsome Marrow!For when we'er there, although 'tis fair,'Twill be another Yarrow!"If Care with freezing years should come,And wandering seem but folly,—Should we be loth to stir from home,And yet be melancholy;Should life be dull, and spirits low,'Twill soothe us in our sorrow,That earth has something yet to show,The bonny holms of Yarrow!"
I abide and abide and better abide, And after the old proverb, the happy day; And ever my lady to me doth say, "Let me alone and I will provide." I abide and abide and tarry the tide, And with abiding speed well ye may. Thus do I abide I wot alway, Nother obtaining nor yet denied. Ay me! this long abiding Seemeth to me, as who sayeth, A prolonging of a dying death, Or a refusing of a desir'd thing. Much were it better for to be plain Than to say "abide" and yet shall not obtain.
I find no peace, and all my war is done. I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice. I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise; And nought I have, and all the world I season. That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise— Nor letteth me live nor die at my device, And yet of death it giveth me occasion. Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain. I desire to perish, and yet I ask health. I love another, and thus I hate myself. I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain; Likewise displeaseth me both life and death, And my delight is causer of this strife.
Tagus, farewell! that westward with thy streamsTurns up the grains of gold already triedWith spur and sail, for I go seek the ThamesGainward the sun that shewth her wealthy pride,And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams,Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side.My king, my country, alone for whome I live,Of mighty love the wings for this me give.
Is it possible That so high debate, So sharp, so sore, and of such rate, Should end so soon and was begun so late? Is it possible? Is it possible So cruel intent, So hasty heat and so soon spent, From love to hate, and thence for to relent? Is it possible? Is it possible That any may find Within one heart so diverse mind, To change or turn as weather and wind? Is it possible? Is it possible To spy it in an eye That turns as oft as chance on die, The truth whereof can any try? Is it possible? It is possible For to turn so oft, To bring that lowest which was most aloft, And to fall highest yet to light soft: It is possible. All is possible Whoso list believe. Trust therefore first, and after preve, As men wed ladies by licence and leave. All is possible.
The longë love that in my thought doth harbour And in mine hert doth keep his residence, Into my face presseth with bold pretence And therein campeth, spreading his banner. She that me learneth to love and suffer And will that my trust and lustës negligence Be rayned by reason, shame, and reverence, With his hardiness taketh displeasure. Wherewithall unto the hert's forest he fleeth, Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry, And there him hideth and not appeareth. What may I do when my master feareth But in the field with him to live and die? For good is the life ending faithfully.
Madam, withouten many words Once I am sure ye will or no ...And if ye will, then leave your bourds And use your wit and show it so,And with a beck ye shall me call; And if of one that burneth alwayYe have any pity at all, Answer him fair with & {.} or nay.If it be &, {.} I shall be fain; If it be nay, friends as before;Ye shall another man obtain, And I mine own and yours no more.
My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness,Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine en'my, alas,That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;And every owre a thought in readiness,As though that death were light in such a case.An endless wind doth tear the sail apaceOf forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,Hath done the weared cords great hinderance;Wreathèd with error and eke with ignorance.The stars be hid that led me to this pain;Drownèd is Reason that should me comfort,And I remain despairing of the port.
My lute awake! perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, And end that I have now begun; For when this song is sung and past, My lute be still, for I have done. As to be heard where ear is none, As lead to grave in marble stone, My song may pierce her heart as soon; Should we then sigh or sing or moan? No, no, my lute, for I have done. The rocks do not so cruelly Repulse the waves continually, As she my suit and affection; So that I am past remedy, Whereby my lute and I have done. Proud of the spoil that thou hast got Of simple hearts thorough Love's shot, By whom, unkind, thou hast them won, Think not he hath his bow forgot, Although my lute and I have done. Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain That makest but game on earnest pain. Think not alone under the sun Unquit to cause thy lovers plain, Although my lute and I have done. Perchance thee lie wethered and old The winter nights that are so cold, Plaining in vain unto the moon; Thy wishes then dare not be told; Care then who list, for I have done. And then may chance thee to repent The time that thou hast lost and spent To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon; Then shalt thou know beauty but lent, And wish and want as I have done. Now cease, my lute; this is the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, And ended is that we begun. Now is this song both sung and past: My lute be still, for I have done.
Mine own John Poynz, since ye delight to knowThe cause why that homeward I me draw,And flee the press of courts, whereso they go,Rather than to live thrall under the aweOf lordly looks, wrappèd within my cloak,To will and lust learning to set a law:It is not for because I scorn or mockThe power of them, to whom fortune hath lentCharge over us, of right, to strike the stroke.But true it is that I have always meantLess to esteem them than the common sort,Of outward things that judge in their intentWithout regard what doth inward resort.I grant sometime that of glory the fireDoth twyche my heart. Me list not to reportBlame by honour, and honour to desire.But how may I this honour now attain,That cannot dye the colour black a liar?My Poynz, I cannot from me tune to feign,To cloak the truth for praise without desertOf them that list all vice for to retain.I cannot honour them that sets their partWith Venus and Bacchus all their life long;Nor hold my peace of them although I smart.I cannot crouch nor kneel to do so great a wrong,To worship them, like God on earth alone,That are as wolves these sely lambs among.I cannot with my word complain and moan,And suffer nought, nor smart without complaint,Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.I cannot speak and look like a saint,Use willes for wit, and make deceit a pleasure,And call craft counsel, for profit still to paint.I cannot wrest the law to fill the cofferWith innocent blood to feed myself fat,And do most hurt where most help I offer.I am not he that can allow the stateOf him Caesar, and damn Cato to die,That with his death did scape out of the gateFrom Caesar's hands (if Livy do not lie)And would not live where liberty was lost;So did his heart the common weal apply.I am not he such eloquence to boastTo make the crow singing as the swan;Nor call the liond of cowardes beasts the mostThat cannot take a mouse as the cat can;And he that dieth for hunger of the goldCall him Alexander; and say that PanPasseth Apollo in music many fold;Praise Sir Thopias for a noble tale,And scorn the story that the Knight told;Praise him for counsel that is drunk of ale;Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway,Frown when he frowneth and groan when is pale;On others' lust to hang both night and day:None of these points would ever frame in me.My wit is nought—I cannot learn the way.And much the less of things that greater be,That asken help of colours of deviceTo join the mean with each extremity,With the nearest virtue to cloak alway the vice;And as to purpose, likewise it shall fallTo press the virtue that it may not rise;As drunkenness good fellowship to call;The friendly foe with his double faceSay he is gentle and courteous therewithal;And say that favel hath a goodly graceIn eloquence; and cruelty to nameZeal of justice and change in time and place;And he that suffer'th offence without blameCall him pitiful; and him true and plainThat raileth reckless to every man's shame.Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;The lecher a lover; and tyrannyTo be the right of a prince's reign.I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!This is the cause that I could never yetHang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,And in foul weather at my book to sit;In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:In lusty leas at liberty I walk.And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.No force for that, for it is ordered so,That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.I am not now in France to judge the wine,With saffry sauce the delicates to feel;Nor yet in Spain, where one must him inclineRather than to be, outwardly to seem:I meddle not with wits that be so fine.Nor Flanders' cheer letteth not my sight to deemOf black and white; nor taketh my wit awayWith beastliness; they beasts do so esteem.Nor I am not where Christ is given in preyFor money, poison, and treason at Rome—A common practice used night and day:But here I am in Kent and ChristendomAmong the Muses where I read and rhyme;Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithall sweetly did me kiss And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?” It was no dream: I lay broad waking. But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also, to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Unstable dream, according to the place,Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.By tasted sweetness make me not to rueThe sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.By good respect in such a dangerous caseThou broughtest not her into this tossing mewBut madest my sprite live, my care to renew,My body in tempest her succour to embrace.The body dead, the sprite had his desire,Painless was th'one, th'other in delight.Why then, alas, did it not keep it right,Returning, to leap into the fire? And where it was at wish, it could not remain, Such mocks of dreams they turn to deadly pain.
What needeth these threnning words and wasted wind?All this cannot make me restore my prey.To rob your good, iwis, is not my mind,Nor causeless your fair hand did I display.Let love be judge or else whom next we meetThat may both hear what you and I can say:She took from me an heart, and I a glove from her.Let us see now if th'one be worth th'other.
What should I say, Since faith is dead, And truth away From you is fled? Should I be led With doubleness? Nay, nay, mistress! I promised you, And you promised me, To be as true As I would be. But since I see Your double heart, Farewell my part! Though for to take It is not my mind, But to forsake [One so unkind] And as I find, So will I trust: Farewell, unjust! Can ye say nay? But you said That I alway Should be obeyed? And thus betrayed Or that I wiste— Farewell, unkissed.
"Come and hire me," I cried, while in the morning I was walking on the stone-paved road. Sword in hand, the King came in his chariot. He held my hand and said, "I will hire you with my power." But his power counted for nought, and he went away in his chariot. In the heat of the midday the houses stood with shut doors. I wandered along the crooked lane. An old man came out with his bag of gold. He pondered and said, "I will hire you with my money." He weighed his coins one by one, but I turned away. It was evening. The garden hedge was all aflower. The fair maid came out and said, "I will hire you with a smile." Her smile paled and melted into tears, and she went back alone into the dark. The sun glistened on the sand, and the sea waves broke waywardly. A child sat playing with shells. He raised his head and seemed to know me, and said, "I hire you with nothing." From thenceforward that bargain struck in child's play made me a free man.
Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all the morning. I smile at your play with that little bit of a broken twig. I am busy with my accounts, adding up figures by the hour. Perhaps you glance at me and think, "What a stupid game to spoil your morning with!" Child, I have forgotten the art of being absorbed in sticks and mud-pies. I seek out costly playthings, and gather lumps of gold and silver. With whatever you find you create your glad games, I spend both my time and my strength over things I never can obtain. In my frail canoe I struggle to cross the sea of desire, and forget that I too am playing a game.
Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryne As fer as cercled is the mapamounde, For as the cristal glorious ye shyne, And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde. Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocounde That at a revel whan that I see you daunce, It is an oynement unto my wounde, Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce. For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne, Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde; Your semy voys that ye so smal out twyne Maketh my thoght in joy and blis habounde. So curtaysly I go with love bounde That to myself I sey in my penaunce, "Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde, Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce." Nas neuer pyk walwed in galauntyne As I in love am walwed and ywounde, For which ful ofte I of myself devyne That I am trew Tristam the secounde. My love may not refreyde nor affounde, I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce. Do what you lyst, I wyl your thral be founde, Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers - Untouched by Morning -  and untouched by noon - Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,  Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone -  Grand go the Years,  In the Crescent above them - Worlds scoop their Arcs -  and Firmaments - row - Diadems - drop - And Doges surrender - Soundless as Dots,  On a Disk of Snow.
Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit - Life!
I Who e're while the happy Garden sung, By one mans disobedience lost, now sing Recover'd Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri'd Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd In all his wiles, defeated and repuls't, And Eden rais'd in the wast Wilderness. Thou Spirit who ledst this glorious Eremite Into the Desert, his Victorious Field Against the Spiritual Foe, and broughtst him thence By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire, As thou art wont, my prompted Song else mute, And bear through highth or depth of natures bounds With prosperous wing full summ'd to tell of deeds Above Heroic, though in secret done, And unrecorded left through many an Age, Worthy t'have not remain'd so long unsung. Now had the great Proclaimer with a voice More awful then the sound of Trumpet, cri'd Repentance, and Heavens Kingdom nigh at hand To all Baptiz'd: to his great Baptism flock'd With aw the Regions round, and with them came From Nazareth the Son of Joseph deem'd To the flood Jordan, came as then obscure, Unmarkt, unknown; but him the Baptist soon Descri'd, divinely warn'd, and witness bore As to his worthier, and would have resign'd To him his Heavenly Office, nor was long His witness unconfirm'd: on him baptiz'd Heaven open'd, and in likeness of a Dove The Spirit descended, while the Fathers voice From Heav'n pronounc'd him his beloved Son. That heard the Adversary, who roving still About the world, at that assembly fam'd Would not be last, and with the voice divine Nigh Thunder-struck, th' exalted man, to whom Such high attest was giv'n, a while survey'd With wonder, then with envy fraught and rage Flies to his place, nor rests, but in mid air To Councel summons all his mighty Peers, Within thick Clouds and dark ten-fold involv'd, A gloomy Consistory; and them amidst With looks agast and sad he thus bespake. O ancient Powers of Air and this wide world, For much more willingly I mention Air, This our old Conquest, then remember Hell Our hated habitation; well ye know How many Ages, as the years of men, This Universe we have possest, and rul'd In manner at our will th' affairs of Earth, Since Adam and his facil consort Eve Lost Paradise deceiv'd by me, though since With dread attending when that fatal wound Shall be inflicted by the Seed of Eve Upon my head, long the decrees of Heav'n Delay, for longest time to him is short; And now too soon for us the circling hours This dreaded time have compast, wherein we Must bide the stroak of that long threatn'd wound, At least if so we can, and by the head Broken be not intended all our power To be infring'd, our freedom and our being. In this fair Empire won of Earth and Air; For this ill news I bring, the Womans seed Destin'd to this, is late of woman born, His birth to our just fear gave no small cause, But his growth now to youths full flowr, displaying All vertue, grace and wisdom to atchieve Things highest, greatest, multiplies my fear. Before him a great Prophet, to proclaim His coming, is sent Harbinger, who all Invites, and in the Consecrated stream Pretends to wash off sin, and fit them so Purified to receive him pure, or rather To do him honour as their King; all come, And he himself among them was baptiz'd, Not thence to be more pure, but to receive The testimony of Heaven, that who he is Thenceforth the Nations may not doubt; I saw The Prophet do him reverence, on him rising Out of the water, Heav'n above the Clouds Unfold her Crystal Dores, thence on his head A perfect Dove descend, what e're it meant, And out of Heav'n the Sov'raign voice I heard, This is my Son belov'd, in him am pleas'd. His Mother then is mortal, but his Sire, He who obtains the Monarchy of Heav'n, And what will he not do to advance his Son? His first-begot we know, and sore have felt, When his fierce thunder drove us to the deep; Who this is we must learn, for man he seems In all his lineaments, though in his face The glimpses of his Fathers glory shine. Ye see our danger on the utmost edge Of hazard, which admits no long debate, But must with something sudden be oppos'd, Not force, but well couch't fraud, well woven snares, E're in the head of Nations he appear Their King, their Leader, and Supream on Earth. I, when no other durst, sole undertook The dismal expedition to find out And ruine Adam, and the exploit perform'd Successfully; a calmer voyage now Will waft me; and the way found prosperous once Induces best to hope of like success. He ended, and his words impression left Of much amazement to th' infernal Crew, Distracted and surpriz'd with deep dismay At these sad tidings; but no time was then For long indulgence to their fears or grief: Unanimous they all commit the care And management of this main enterprize To him their great Dictator, whose attempt At first against mankind so well had thriv'd In Adam's overthrow, and led thir march From Hell's deep-vaulted Den to dwell in light, Regents and Potentates, and Kings, yea gods Of many a pleasant Realm and Province wide. So to the Coast of Jordan he directs His easie steps; girded with snaky wiles, Where he might likeliest find this new-declar'd, This man of men, attested Son of God, Temptation and all guile on him to try; So to subvert whom he suspected rais'd To end his Raign on Earth so long enjoy'd: But contrary unweeting he fulfill'd The purpos'd Counsel pre-ordain'd and fixt Of the most High, who in full frequence bright Of Angels, thus to Gabriel smiling spake. Gabriel this day by proof thou shalt behold, Thou and all Angels conversant on Earth With man or mens affairs, how I begin To verifie that solemn message late, On which I sent thee to the Virgin pure In Galilee, that she should bear a Son Great in Renown, and call'd the Son of God; Then toldst her doubting how these things could be To her a Virgin, that on her should come The Holy Ghost, and the power of the highest O're-shadow her: this man born and now up-grown, To shew him worthy of his birth divine And high prediction, henceforth I expose To Satan; let him tempt and now assay His utmost subtilty, because he boasts And vaunts of his great cunning to the throng Of his Apostasie; he might have learnt Less over-weening, since he fail'd in Job, Whose constant perseverance overcame Whate're his cruel malice could invent. He now shall know I can produce a man Of female Seed, far abler to resist All his sollicitations, and at length All his vast force, and drive him back to Hell, Winning by Conquest what the first man lost By fallacy surpriz'd. But first I mean To exercise him in the Wilderness, There he shall first lay down the rudiments Of his great warfare, e're I send him forth To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: His weakness shall o'recome Satanic strength And all the world, and mass of sinful flesh; That all the Angels and Ætherial Powers, They now, and men hereafter may discern, From what consummate vertue I have chose This perfect Man, by merit call'd my Son, To earn Salvation for the Sons of men. So spake the Eternal Father, and all Heaven Admiring stood a space, then into Hymns Burst forth, and in Celestial measures mov'd, Circling the Throne and Singing, while the hand Sung with the voice, and this the argument. Victory and Triumph to the Son of God Now entring his great duel, not of arms, But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles. The Father knows the Son; therefore secure Ventures his filial Vertue, though untri'd, Against whate're may tempt, whate're seduce, Allure, or terrifie, or undermine. Be frustrate all ye stratagems of Hell, And devilish machinations come to nought. So they in Heav'n their Odes and Vigils tun'd: Mean while the Son of God, who yet some days Lodg'd in Bethabara where John baptiz'd, Musing and much revolving in his brest, How best the mighty work he might begin Of Saviour to mankind, and which way first Publish his God-like office now mature, One day forth walk'd alone, the Spirit leading; And his deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude, till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entred now the bordering Desert wild, And with dark shades and rocks environ'd round, His holy Meditations thus persu'd. O what a multitude of thoughts at once Awakn'd in me swarm, while I consider What from within I feel my self, and hear What from without comes often to my ears, Ill sorting with my present state compar'd. When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing, all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do What might be publick good; my self I thought Born to that end, born to promote all truth, All righteous things: therefore above my years, The Law of God I read, and found it sweet, Made it my whole delight, and in it grew To such perfection, that e're yet my age Had measur'd twice six years, at our great Feast I went into the Temple, there to hear The Teachers of our Law, and to propose What might improve my knowledge or their own; And was admir'd by all, yet this not all To which my Spirit aspir'd, victorious deeds Flam'd in my heart, heroic acts, one while To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Then to subdue and quell o're all the earth Brute violence and proud Tyrannick pow'r, Till truth were freed, and equity restor'd: Yet held it more humane, more heavenly first By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make perswasion do the work of fear; At least to try, and teach the erring Soul Not wilfully mis-doing, but unware Misled; the stubborn only to destroy. These growing thoughts my Mother soon perceiving By words at times cast forth inly rejoyc'd, And said to me apart, high are thy thoughts O Son, but nourish them and let them soar To what highth sacred vertue and true worth Can raise them, though above example high; By matchless Deeds express thy matchless Sire. For know, thou art no Son of mortal man, Though men esteem thee low of Parentage, Thy Father is the Eternal King, who rules All Heaven and Earth, Angels and Sons of men, A messenger from God fore-told thy birth Conceiv'd in me a Virgin, he fore-told Thou shouldst be great and sit on David's Throne, And of thy Kingdom there should be no end. At thy Nativity a glorious Quire Of Angels in the fields of Bethlehem sung To Shepherds watching at their folds by night, And told them the Messiah now was born, Where they might see him, and to thee they came; Directed to the Manger where thou lais't, For in the Inn was left no better room: A Star, not seen before in Heaven appearing Guided the Wise Men thither from the East, To honour thee with Incense, Myrrh, and Gold, By whose bright course led on they found the place, Affirming it thy Star new grav'n in Heaven, By which they knew thee King of Israel born. Just Simeon and Prophetic Anna, warn'd By Vision, found thee in the Temple, and spake Before the Altar and the vested Priest, Like things of thee to all that present stood. This having heard, strait I again revolv'd The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am; this chiefly, that my way must lie Through many a hard assay even to the death, E're I the promis'd Kingdom can attain, Or work Redemption for mankind, whose sins Full weight must be transferr'd upon my head. Yet neither thus disheartn'd or dismay'd, The time prefixt I waited, when behold The Baptist, (of whose birth I oft had heard, Not knew by sight) now come, who was to come Before Messiah and his way prepare. I as all others to his Baptism came, Which I believ'd was from above; but he Strait knew me, and with loudest voice proclaim'd Me him (for it was shew'n him so from Heaven) Me him whose Harbinger he was; and first Refus'd on me his Baptism to confer, As much his greater, and was hardly won; But as I rose out of the laving stream, Heaven open'd her eternal doors, from whence The Spirit descended on me like a Dove, And last the sum of all, my Father's voice, Audibly heard from Heav'n, pronounc'd me his, Me his beloved Son, in whom alone He was well pleas'd; by which I knew the time Now full, that I no more should live obscure, But openly begin, as best becomes The Authority which I deriv'd from Heaven. And now by some strong motion I am led Into this Wilderness, to what intent I learn not yet, perhaps I need not know; For what concerns my knowledge God reveals. So spake our Morning Star then in his rise, And looking round on every side beheld A pathless Desert, dusk with horrid shades; The way he came not having mark'd, return Was difficult, by humane steps untrod; And he still on was led, but with such thoughts Accompanied of things past and to come Lodg'd in his breast, as well might recommend Such Solitude before choicest Society. Full forty days he pass'd, whether on hill Sometimes, anon in shady vale, each night Under the covert of some ancient Oak, Or Cedar, to defend him from the dew, Or harbour'd in one Cave, is not reveal'd; Nor tasted humane food, nor hunger felt Till those days ended, hunger'd then at last Among wild Beasts: they at his sight grew mild, Nor sleeping him nor waking harm'd, his walk The fiery Serpent fled, and noxious Worm, The Lion and fierce Tiger glar'd aloof. But now an aged man in Rural weeds, Following, as seem'd, the quest of some stray Ewe, Or wither'd sticks to gather; which might serve Against a Winters day when winds blow keen, To warm him wet return'd from field at Eve, He saw approach, who first with curious eye Perus'd him, then with words thus utt'red spake. Sir, what ill chance hath brought thee to this place So far from path or road of men, who pass In Troop or Caravan, for single none Durst ever, who return'd, and dropt not here His Carcass, pin'd with hunger and with droughth? I ask the rather, and the more admire, For that to me thou seem'st the man, whom late Our new baptizing Prophet at the Ford Of Jordan honour'd so, and call'd thee Son Of God; I saw and heard, for we sometimes Who dwell this wild, constrain'd by want, come forth To Town or Village nigh (nighest is far) Where ought we hear, and curious are to hear, What happ'ns new; Fame also finds us out. To whom the Son of God. Who brought me hither Will bring me hence, no other Guide I seek. By Miracle he may, reply'd the Swain, What other way I see not, for we here Live on tough roots and stubs, to thirst inur'd More then the Camel, and to drink go far, Men to much misery and hardship born; But if thou be the Son of God, Command That out of these hard stones be made thee bread; So shalt thou save thy self and us relieve With Food, whereof we wretched seldom taste. He ended, and the Son of God reply'd. Think'st thou such force in Bread? is it not written (For I discern thee other then thou seem'st) Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word Proceeding from the mouth of God; who fed Our Fathers here with Manna; in the Mount Moses was forty days, nor eat nor drank, And forty days Eliah without food Wandred this barren waste, the same I now. Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust, Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art? Whom thus answer'd th' Arch Fiend now undisguis'd. 'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate, Who leagu'd with millions more in rash revolt Kept not my happy Station, but was driv'n With them from bliss to the bottomless deep, Yet to that hideous place not so confin'd By rigour unconniving, but that oft Leaving my dolorous Prison I enjoy Large liberty to round this Globe of Earth, Or range in th' Air, nor from the Heav'n of Heav'ns Hath he excluded my resort sometimes. I came among the Sons of God, when he Gave up into my hands Uzzean Job To prove him, and illustrate his high worth; And when to all his Angels he propos'd To draw the proud King Ahab into fraud That he might fall in Ramoth, they demuring, I undertook that office, and the tongues Of all his flattering Prophets glibb'd with lyes To his destruction, as I had in charge. For what he bids I do; though I have lost Much lustre of my native brightness, lost To be belov'd of God, I have not lost To love, at least contemplate and admire What I see excellent in good, or fair, Or vertuous, I should so have lost all sense. What can be then less in me then desire To see thee and approach thee, whom I know Declar'd the Son of God, to hear attent Thy wisdom, and behold thy God-like deeds? Men generally think me much a foe To all mankind: why should I? they to me Never did wrong or violence, by them I lost not what I lost, rather by them I gain'd what I have gain'd, and with them dwell Copartner in these Regions of the World, If not disposer; lend them oft my aid, Oft my advice by presages and signs, And answers, oracles, portents and dreams, Whereby they may direct their future life. Envy they say excites me, thus to gain Companions of my misery and wo. At first it may be; but long since with wo Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof, That fellowship in pain divides not smart, Nor lightens aught each mans peculiar load. Small consolation then, were Man adjoyn'd: This wounds me most (what can it less) that Man, Man fall'n shall be restor'd, I never more. To whom our Saviour sternly thus reply'd. Deservedly thou griev'st, compos'd of lyes From the beginning, and in lies wilt end; Who boast'st release from Hell, and leave to come Into the Heav'n of Heavens; thou com'st indeed, As a poor miserable captive thrall, Comes to the place where he before had sat Among the Prime in Splendour, now depos'd, Ejected, emptyed, gaz'd, unpityed, shun'd, A spectacle of ruin or of scorn To all the Host of Heaven; the happy place Imparts to thee no happiness, no joy, Rather inflames thy torment, representing Lost bliss, to thee no more communicable, So never more in Hell then when in Heaven. But thou art serviceable to Heaven's King. Wilt thou impute to obedience what thy fear Extorts, or pleasure to do ill excites? What but thy malice mov'd thee to misdeem Of righteous Job, then cruelly to afflict him With all inflictions, but his patience won? The other service was thy chosen task, To be a lyer in four hundred mouths; For lying is thy sustenance, thy food. Yet thou pretend'st to truth; all Oracles By thee are giv'n, and what confest more true Among the Nations? that hath been thy craft, By mixing somewhat true to vent more lyes. But what have been thy answers, what but dark Ambiguous and with double sense deluding, Which they who ask'd have seldom understood, And not well understood as good not known? Who ever by consulting at thy shrine Return'd the wiser, or the more instruct To flye or follow what concern'd him most, And run not sooner to his fatal snare? For God hath justly giv'n the Nations up To thy Delusions; justly, since they fell Idolatrous, but when his purpose is Among them to declare his Providence To thee not known, whence hast thou then thy truth, But from him or his Angels President In every Province, who themselves disdaining To approach thy Temples, give thee in command What to the smallest tittle thou shalt say To thy Adorers; thou with trembling fear, Or like a Fawning Parasite obey'st; Then to thy self ascrib'st the truth fore-told. But this thy glory shall be soon retrench'd; No more shalt thou by oracling abuse The Gentiles; henceforth Oracles are ceast, And thou no more with Pomp and Sacrifice Shalt be enquir'd at Delphos or elsewhere, At least in vain, for they shall find thee mute. God hath now sent his living Oracle Into the World, to teach his final will, And sends his Spirit of Truth henceforth to dwell In pious Hearts, an inward Oracle To all truth requisite for men to know. So spake our Saviour; but the subtle Fiend, Though inly stung with anger and disdain, Dissembl'd, and this Answer smooth return'd. Sharply thou hast insisted on rebuke, And urg'd me hard with doings, which not will But misery hath rested from me; where Easily canst thou find one miserable, And not inforc'd oft-times to part from truth; If it may stand him more in stead to lye, Say and unsay, feign, flatter, or abjure? But thou art plac't above me, thou art Lord; From thee I can and must submiss endure Check or reproof, and glad to scape so quit. Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discourst, pleasing to th' ear, And tuneable as Silvan Pipe or Song; What wonder then if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire Vertue, who follow not her lore: permit me To hear thee when I come (since no man comes) And talk at least, though I despair to attain. Thy Father, who is holy, wise and pure, Suffers the Hypocrite or Atheous Priest To tread his Sacred Courts, and minister About his Altar, handling holy things, Praying or vowing, and vouchsaf'd his voice To Balaam Reprobate, a Prophet yet Inspir'd; disdain not such access to me. To whom our Saviour with unalter'd brow. Thy coming hither, though I know thy scope, I bid not or forbid; do as thou find'st Permission from above; thou canst not more. He added not; and Satan bowing low His gray dissimulation, disappear'd Into thin Air diffus'd: for now began Night with her sullen wing to double-shade The Desert, Fowls in thir clay nests were couch't; And now wild Beasts came forth the woods to roam.
MEan while the new-baptiz'd, who yet remain'd At Jordan with the Baptist, and had seen Him whom they heard so late expresly call'd Jesus Messiah Son of God declar'd, And on that high Authority had believ'd, And with him talkt, and with him lodg'd, I mean Andrew and Simon, famous after known With others though in Holy Writ not nam'd, Now missing him thir joy so lately found, So lately found, and so abruptly gone, Began to doubt, and doubted many days, And as the days increas'd, increas'd thir doubt: Sometimes they thought he might be only shewn, And for a time caught up to God, as once Moses was in the Mount, and missing long; And the great Thisbite who on fiery wheels Rode up to Heaven, yet once again to come. Therefore as those young Prophets then with care Sought lost Eliah, so in each place these Nigh to Bethabara; in Jerico The City of Palms, Ænon, and Salem Old, Machærus and each Town or City wall'd On this side the broad lake Genezaret, Or in Perea, but return'd in vain. Then on the bank of Jordan, by a Creek: Where winds with Reeds, and Osiers whisp'ring play Plain Fishermen, no greater men them call, Close in a Cottage low together got Thir unexpected loss and plaints out breath'd. Alas, from what high hope to what relapse Unlook'd for are we fall'n, our eyes beheld Messiah certainly now come, so long Expected of our Fathers; we have heard His words, his wisdom full of grace and truth, Now, now, for sure, deliverance is at hand, The Kingdom shall to Israel be restor'd: Thus we rejoyc'd, but soon our joy is turn'd Into perplexity and new amaze: For whither is he gone, what accident Hath rapt him from us? will he now retire After appearance, and again prolong Our expectation? God of Israel, Send thy Messiah forth, the time is come; Behold the Kings of the Earth how they oppress Thy chosen, to what highth thir pow'r unjust They have exalted, and behind them cast All fear of thee, arise and vindicate Thy Glory, free thy people from thir yoke, But let us wait; thus far he hath perform'd, Sent his Anointed, and to us reveal'd him, By his great Prophet, pointed at and shown, In publick, and with him we have convers'd; Let us be glad of this, and all our fears Lay on his Providence; he will not fail Nor will withdraw him now, nor will recall, Mock us with his blest sight, then snatch him hence, Soon we shall see our hope, our joy return. Thus they out of their plaints new hope resume To find whom at the first they found unsought: But to his Mother Mary, when she saw Others return'd from Baptism, not her Son, Nor left at Jordan, tydings of him none; Within her brest, though calm; her brest though pure, Motherly cares and fears got head, and rais'd Some troubl'd thoughts, which she in sighs thus clad. O what avails me now that honour high To have conceiv'd of God, or that salute Hale highly favour'd, among women blest; While I to sorrows am no less advanc't, And fears as eminent, above the lot Of other women, by the birth I bore, In such a season born when scarce a Shed Could be obtain'd to shelter him or me From the bleak air; a Stable was our warmth, A Manger his, yet soon enforc't to flye Thence into Egypt, till the Murd'rous King Were dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? no, But trouble, as old Simeon plain fore-told, That to the fall and rising he should be Of many in Israel, and to a sign Spoken against, that through my very Soul A sword shall pierce, this is my favour'd lot, My Exaltation to Afflictions high; Afflicted I may be, it seems, and blest; I will not argue that, nor will repine. But where delays he now? some great intent Conceals him: when twelve years he scarce had seen, I lost him, but so found, as well I saw He could not lose himself; but went about His Father's business; what he meant I mus'd, Since understand; much more his absence now Thus long to some great purpose he obscures. But I to wait with patience am inur'd; My heart hath been a store-house long of things And sayings laid up, portending strange events. Thus Mary pondering oft, and oft to mind Recalling what remarkably had pass'd Since first her Salutation heard, with thoughts Meekly compos'd awaited the fulfilling: The while her Son tracing the Desert wild, Sole but with holiest Meditations fed, Into himself descended, and at once All his great work to come before him set; How to begin, how to accomplish best His end of being on Earth, and mission high: For Satan with slye preface to return Had left him vacant, and with speed was gon Up to the middle Region of thick Air, Where all his Potentates in Council sate; There without sign of boast, or sign of joy, Sollicitous and blank he thus began. Princes, Heavens antient Sons, Æthereal Thrones, Demonian Spirits now, from the Element Each of his reign allotted, rightlier call'd, Powers of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth beneath, So may we hold our place and these mild seats Without new trouble; such an Enemy Is ris'n to invade us, who no less Threat'ns then our expulsion down to Hell; I, as I undertook, and with the vote Consenting in full frequence was impowr'd, Have found him, view'd him, tasted him, but find Far other labour to be undergon Then when I dealt with Adam first of Men, Though Adam by his Wives allurement fell, However to this Man inferior far, If he be Man by Mothers side at least, With more then humane gifts from Heaven adorn'd, Perfections absolute, Graces divine, And amplitude of mind to greatest Deeds. Therefore I am return'd, lest confidence Of my success with Eve in Paradise Deceive ye to perswasion over-sure Of like succeeding here; I summon all Rather to be in readiness, with hand Or counsel to assist; lest I who erst Thought none my equal, now be over-match'd. So spake the old Serpent doubting, and from all With clamour was assur'd thir utmost aid At his command; when from amidst them rose Belial the dissolutest Spirit that fell, The sensuallest, and after Asmodai The fleshliest Incubus, and thus advis'd. Set women in his eye and in his walk, Among daughters of men the fairest found; Many are in each Region passing fair As the noon Skie; more like to Goddesses Then Mortal Creatures, graceful and discreet, Expert in amorous Arts, enchanting tongues Perswasive, Virgin majesty with mild And sweet allay'd, yet terrible to approach, Skill'd to retire, and in retiring draw Hearts after them tangl'd in Amorous Nets. Such object hath the power to soft'n and tame Severest temper, smooth the rugged'st brow, Enerve, and with voluptuous hope dissolve, Draw out with credulous desire, and lead At will the manliest, resolutest brest, As the Magnetic hardest Iron draws. Women, when nothing else, beguil'd the heart Of wisest Solomon, and made him build, And made him bow to the Gods of his Wives. To whom quick answer Satan thus return'd. Belial, in much uneven scale thou weigh'st All others by thy self; because of old Thou thy self doat'st on womankind, admiring Thir shape, thir colour, and attractive grace, None are, thou think'st, but taken with such toys. Before the Flood thou with thy lusty Crew, False titl'd Sons of God, roaming the Earth Cast wanton eyes on the daughters of men, And coupl'd with them, and begot a race. Have we not seen, or by relation heard, In Courts and Regal Chambers how thou lurk'st, In Wood or Grove by mossie Fountain side, In Valley or Green Meadow to way-lay Some beauty rare, Calisto, Clymene, Daphne, or Semele, Antiopa, Or Amymone, Syrinx, many more Too long, then lay'st thy scapes on names ador'd, Apollo, Neptune, Jupiter, or Pan, Satyr, or Fawn, or Silvan? But these haunts Delight not all; among the Sons of Men, How many have with a smile made small account Of beauty and her lures, easily scorn'd All her assaults, on worthier things intent? Remember that Pellean Conquerour, A youth, how all the Beauties of the East He slightly view'd, and slightly over-pass'd; How hee sirnam'd of Africa dismiss'd In his prime youth the fair Iberian maid. For Solomon he liv'd at ease, and full Of honour, wealth, high fare, aim'd not beyond Higher design then to enjoy his State; Thence to the bait of Women lay expos'd; But he whom we attempt is wiser far Then Solomon, of more exalted mind, Made and set wholly on the accomplishment Of greatest things; what woman will you find, Though of this Age the wonder and the fame, On whom his leisure will vouchsafe an eye Of fond desire? or should she confident, As sitting Queen ador'd on Beauties Throne, Descend with all her winning charms begirt To enamour, as the Zone of Venus once Wrought that effect on Jove, so Fables tell; How would one look from his Majestick brow Seated as on the top of Vertues hill, Discount'nance her despis'd, and put to rout All her array; her female pride deject, Or turn to reverent awe? for Beauty stands In the admiration only of weak minds Led captive; cease to admire, and all her Plumes Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy, At every sudden slighting quite abasht: Therefore with manlier objects we must try His constancy, with such as have more shew Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise; Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck'd; Or that which only seems to satisfie Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond; And now I know he hungers where no food Is to be found, in the wide Wilderness; The rest commit to me, I shall let pass No advantage, and his strength as oft assay. He ceas'd, and heard thir grant in loud acclaim; Then forthwith to him takes a chosen band Of Spirits likest to himself in guile To be at hand, and at his beck appear, If cause were to unfold some active Scene Of various persons each to know his part; Then to the Desert takes with these his flight; Where still from shade to shade the Son of God After forty days fasting had remain'd, Now hungring first, and to himself thus said. Where will this end? four times ten days I have pass'd Wandring this woody maze, and humane food Nor tasted, nor had appetite; that Fast To Vertue I impute not, or count part Of what I suffer here; if Nature need not, Or God support Nature without repast Though needing, what praise is it to endure? But now I feel I hunger, which declares, Nature hath need of what she asks; yet God Can satisfie that need some other way, Though hunger still remain: so it remain Without this bodies wasting, I content me, And from the sting of Famine fear no harm, Nor mind it, fed with better thoughts that feed Mee hungring more to do my Fathers will. It was the hour of night, when thus the Son Commun'd in silent walk, then laid him down Under the hospitable covert nigh Of Trees thick interwoven; there he slept, And dream'd, as appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, Natures refreshment sweet; Him thought, he by the Brook of Cherith stood And saw the Ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing Even and Morn, Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought: He saw the Prophet also how he fled Into the Desert, and how there he slept Under a Juniper; then how awakt, He found his Supper on the coals prepar'd, And by the Angel was bid rise and eat, And eat the second time after repose, The strength whereof suffic'd him forty days; Sometimes that with Elijah he partook, Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. Thus wore out night, and now the Herald Lark Left his ground-nest, high towring to descry The morns approach, and greet her with his Song: As lightly from his grassy Couch up rose Our Saviour, and found all was but a dream, Fasting he went to sleep, and fasting wak'd. Up to a hill anon his steps he rear'd, From whose high top to ken the prospect round, If Cottage were in view, Sheep-cote or Herd; But Cottage, Herd or Sheep-cote none he saw, Only in a bottom saw a pleasant Grove, With chaunt of tuneful Birds resounding loud; Thither he bent his way, determin'd there To rest at noon, and entr'd soon the shade High rooft and walks beneath, and alleys brown That open'd in the midst a woody Scene, Natures own work it seem'd (Nature taught Art) And to a Superstitious eye the haunt Of Wood-Gods and Wood-Nymphs; he view'd it round, When suddenly a man before him stood, Not rustic as before, but seemlier clad, As one in City, or Court, or Palace bred, And with fair speech these words to him address'd. With granted leave officious I return, But much more wonder that the Son of God In this wild solitude so long should bide Of all things destitute, and well I know, Not without hunger. Others of some note, As story tells, have trod this Wilderness; The Fugitive Bond-woman with her Son Out cast Nebaioth, yet found he relief By a providing Angel; all the race Of Israel here had famish'd, had not God Rain'd from Heaven Manna, and that Prophet bold Native of Thebes wandring here was fed Twice by a voice inviting him to eat. Of thee these forty days none hath regard, Forty and more deserted here indeed. To whom thus Jesus; what conclud'st thou hence? They all had need, I as thou seest have none. How hast thou hunger then? Satan reply'd, Tell me if Food were now before thee set, Would'st thou not eat? Thereafter as I like The giver, answer'd Jesus. Why should that Cause thy refusal, said the subtle Fiend, Hast thou not right to all Created things, Owe not all Creatures by just right to thee Duty and Service, nor to stay till bid, But tender all their power? nor mention I Meats by the Law unclean, or offer'd first To Idols, those young Daniel could refuse; Nor proffer'd by an Enemy, though who Would scruple that, with want opprest? behold Nature asham'd, or better to express, Troubl'd that thou shouldst hunger, hath purvey'd From all the Elements her choicest store To treat thee as beseems, and as her Lord With honour, only deign to sit and eat. He spake no dream, for as his words had end, Our Saviour lifting up his eyes beheld In ample space under the broadest shade A Table richly spred, in regal mode, With dishes pill'd, and meats of noblest sort And savour, Beasts of chase, or Fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boyl'd, Gris-amber-steam'd; all Fish from Sea or Shore, Freshet, or purling Brook, of shell or fin, And exquisitest name, for which was drain'd Pontus and Lucrine Bay, and Afric Coast. Alas how simple, to these Cates compar'd, Was that crude Apple that diverted Eve! And at a stately side-board by the wine That fragrant smell diffus'd, in order stood Tall stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hew Then Ganymed or Hylas, distant more Under the Trees now trip'd, now solemn stood Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, And Ladies of th' Hesperides, that seem'd Fairer then feign'd of old, or fabl'd since Of Fairy Damsels met in Forest wide By Knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore, And all the while Harmonious Airs were heard Of chiming strings, or charming pipes and winds Of gentlest gale Arabian odors fann'd From their soft wings, and Flora's earliest smells. Such was the Splendour, and the Tempter now His invitation earnestly renew'd. What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat? These are not Fruits forbidden, no interdict Defends the touching of these viands pure, Thir taste no knowledge works, at least of evil, But life preserves, destroys life's enemy, Hunger, with sweet restorative delight. All these are Spirits of Air, and Woods, and Springs, Thy gentle Ministers, who come to pay Thee homage, and acknowledge thee thir Lord: What doubt'st thou Son of God? sit down and eat. To whom thus Jesus temperately reply'd: Said'st thou not that to all things I had right? And who withholds my pow'r that right to use? Shall I receive by gift what of my own, When and where likes me best, I can command? I can at will, doubt not, as soon as thou, Command a Table in this Wilderness, And call swift flights of Angels ministrant Array'd in Glory on my cup to attend: Why shouldst thou then obtrude this diligence, In vain, where no acceptance it can find, And with my hunger what has thou to do? Thy pompous Delicacies I contemn, And count thy specious gifts no gifts but guiles. To whom thus answer'd Satan malecontent: That I have also power to give thou seest, If of that pow'r I bring thee voluntary What I might have bestow'd on whom I pleas'd, And rather opportunely in this place Chose to impart to thy apparent need, Why shouldst thou not accept it? but I see What I can do or offer is suspect; Of these things others quickly will dispose Whose pains have earn'd the far fet spoil. With that Both Table and Provision vanish'd quite With sound of Harpies wings, and Talons heard; Only the importune Tempter still remain'd, And with these words his temptation pursu'd. By hunger, that each other Creature tames, Thou art not to be harm'd, therefore not mov'd; Thy temperance invincible besides, For no allurement yields to appetite, And all thy heart is set on high designs, High actions; but wherewith to be atchiev'd? Great acts require great means of enterprise, Thou art unknown, unfriended, low of birth, A Carpenter thy Father known, thy self Bred up in poverty and streights at home; Lost in a Desert here and hunger-bit: Which way or from what hope dost thou aspire To greatness? whence Authority deriv'st, What Followers, what Retinue canst thou gain, Or at thy heels the dizzy Multitude, Longer then thou canst feed them on thy cost? Money brings Honour, Friends, Conquest, and Realms; What rais'd Antipater the Edomite, And his Son Herod plac'd on Juda's Throne; (Thy throne) but gold that got him puissant friends? Therefore, if at great things thou wouldst arrive, Get Riches first, get Wealth, and Treasure heap, Not difficult, if thou hearken to me, Riches are mine, Fortune is in my hand; They whom I favour thrive in wealth amain, While Virtue, Valour, Wisdom sit in want. To whom thus Jesus patiently reply'd; Yet Wealth without these three is impotent, To gain dominion or to keep it gain'd. Witness those antient Empires of the Earth, In highth of all thir flowing wealth dissolv'd: But men endu'd with these have oft attain'd In lowest poverty to highest deeds; Gideon and Jephtha, and the Shepherd lad, Whose off-spring on the Throne of Juda sat So many Ages, and shall yet regain That seat, and reign in Israel without end. Among the Heathen, (for throughout the World To me is not unknown what hath been done Worthy of Memorial) canst thou not remember Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus? For I esteem those names of men so poor Who could do mighty things, and could contemn Riches though offer'd from the hand of Kings. And what in me seems wanting, but that I May also in this poverty as soon Accomplish what they did, perhaps and more? Extol not Riches then, the toyl of Fools, The wise mans cumbrance if not snare, more apt To slacken Virtue, and abate her edge, Then prompt her to do aught may merit praise. What if with like aversion I reject Riches and Realms; yet not for that a Crown, Golden in shew, is but a wreath of thorns, Brings dangers, troubles, cares, and sleepless nights To him who wears the Regal Diadem, When on his shoulders each mans burden lies; For therein stands the office of a King, His Honour, Vertue, Merit and chief Praise, That for the Publick all this weight he bears. Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King; Which every wise and vertuous man attains: And who attains not, ill aspires to rule Cities of men or head-strong Multitudes, Subject himself to Anarchy within, Or lawless passions in him which he serves. But to guide Nations in the way of truth By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part, That other o're the body only reigns, And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight. Besides to give a Kingdom hath been thought Greater and nobler done, and to lay down Far more magnanimous, then to assume. Riches are needless then, both for themselves, And for thy reason why they should be sought, To gain a Scepter, oftest better miss't.
SO spake the Son of God, and Satan stood A while as mute confounded what to say, What to reply, confuted and convinc't Of his weak arguing, and fallacious drift; At length collecting all his Serpent wiles, With soothing words renew'd, him thus accosts. I see thou know'st what is of use to know, What best to say canst say, to do canst do; Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart Conteins of good, wise, just, the perfect shape. Should Kings and Nations from thy mouth consult, Thy Counsel would be as the Oracle Urim and Thummim, those oraculous gems On Aaron's breast: or tongue of Seers old Infallible; or wert thou sought to deeds That might require th' array of war, thy skill Of conduct would be such, that all the world Could not sustain thy Prowess, or subsist In battel, though against thy few in arms. These God-like Vertues wherefore dost thou hide? Affecting private life, or more obscure In savage Wilderness, wherefore deprive All Earth her wonder at thy acts, thy self The fame and glory, glory the reward That sole excites to high attempts the flame Of most erected Spirits, most temper'd pure Ætherial, who all pleasures else despise, All treasures and all gain esteem as dross, And dignities and powers all but the highest? Thy years are ripe, and over-ripe, the Son Of Macedonian Philip had e're these Won Asia and the Throne of Cyrus held At his dispose, young Scipio had brought down The Carthaginian pride, young Pompey quell'd The Pontic King and in triumph had rode. Yet years, and to ripe years judgment mature, Quench not the thirst of glory, but augment. Great Julius, whom now all the world admires The more he grew in years, the more inflam'd With glory, wept that he had liv'd so long Inglorious: but thou yet art not too late. To whom our Saviour calmly thus reply'd. Thou neither dost perswade me to seek wealth For Empires sake, nor Empire to affect For glories sake by all thy argument. For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The peoples praise, if always praise unmixt? And what the people but a herd confus'd, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol Things vulgar, & well weigh'd, scarce worth the praise, They praise and they admire they know not what; And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extoll'd, To live upon thir tongues and be thir talk, Of whom to be disprais'd were no small praise? His lot who dares be singularly good. Th' intelligent among them and the wise Are few, and glory scarce of few is rais'd. This is true glory and renown, when God Looking on the Earth, with approbation marks The just man, and divulges him through Heaven To all his Angels, who with true applause Recount his praises; thus he did to Job, When to extend his fame through Heaven & Earth, As thou to thy reproach mayst well remember, He ask'd thee, hast thou seen my servant Job? Famous he was in Heaven, on Earth less known; Where glory is false glory, attributed To things not glorious, men not worthy of fame. They err who count it glorious to subdue By Conquest far and wide, to over-run Large Countries, and in field great Battels win, Great Cities by assault: what do these Worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceable Nations, neighbouring, or remote, Made Captive, yet deserving freedom more Then those thir Conquerours, who leave behind Nothing but ruin wheresoe're they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy, Then swell with pride, and must be titl'd Gods, Great Benefactors of mankind, Deliverers, Worship't with Temple, Priest and Sacrifice; One is the Son of Jove, of Mars the other, Till Conquerour Death discover them scarce men, Rowling in brutish vices, and deform'd, Violent or shameful death thir due reward. But if there be in glory aught of good, It may by means far different be attain'd Without ambition, war, or violence; By deeds of peace, by wisdom eminent, By patience, temperance; I mention still Him whom thy wrongs with Saintly patience born, Made famous in a Land and times obscure; Who names not now with honour patient Job? Poor Socrates (who next more memorable?) By what he taught and suffer'd for so doing, For truths sake suffering death unjust, lives now Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours. Yet if for fame and glory aught be done, Aught suffer'd; if young African for fame His wasted Country freed from Punic rage, The deed becomes unprais'd, the man at least, And loses, though but verbal, his reward. Shall I seek glory then, as vain men seek Oft not deserv'd? I seek not mine, but his Who sent me, and thereby witness whence I am. To whom the Tempter murmuring thus reply'd. Think not so slight of glory; therein least Resembling thy great Father: he seeks glory, And for his glory all things made, all things Orders and governs, nor content in Heaven By all his Angels glorifi'd, requires Glory from men, from all men good or bad, Wise or unwise, no difference, no exemption; Above all Sacrifice, or hallow'd gift Glory he requires, and glory he receives Promiscuous from all Nations, Jew, or Greek, Or Barbarous, nor exception hath declar'd; From us his foes pronounc't glory he exacts. To whom our Saviour fervently reply'd. And reason; since his word all things produc'd, Though chiefly not for glory as prime end, But to shew forth his goodness, and impart His good communicable to every soul Freely; of whom what could he less expect Then glory and benediction, that is thanks, The slightest, easiest, readiest recompence From them who could return him nothing else, And not returning that would likeliest render Contempt instead, dishonour, obloquy? Hard recompence, unsutable return For so much good, so much beneficence. But why should man seek glory? who of his own Hath nothing, and to whom nothing belongs But condemnation, ignominy, and shame? Who for so many benefits receiv'd Turn'd recreant to God, ingrate and false, And so of all true good himself despoil'd, Yet, sacrilegious, to himself would take That which to God alone of right belongs; Yet so much bounty is in God, such grace, That who advance his glory, not thir own, Them he himself to glory will advance. So spake the Son of God; and here again Satan had not to answer, but stood struck With guilt of his own sin, for he himself Insatiable of glory had lost all, Yet of another Plea bethought him soon. Of glory as thou wilt, said he, so deem, Worth or not worth the seeking, let it pass: But to a Kingdom thou art born, ordain'd To sit upon thy Father David's Throne; By Mothers side thy Father, though thy right Be now in powerful hands, that will not part Easily from possession won with arms; Judæa now and all the promis'd land Reduc't a Province under Roman yoke, Obeys Tiberius; nor is always rul'd With temperate sway; oft have they violated The Temple, oft the Law with foul affronts, Abominations rather, as did once Antiochus: and think'st thou to regain Thy right by sitting still or thus retiring? So did not Machabeus: he indeed Retir'd unto the Desert, but with arms; And o're a mighty King so oft prevail'd, That by strong hand his Family obtain'd, Though Priests, the Crown, and David's Throne usurp'd, With Modin and her Suburbs once content. If Kingdom move thee not, let move thee Zeal, And Duty; Zeal and Duty are not slow; But on Occasions forelock watchful wait. They themselves rather are occasion best, Zeal of thy Fathers house, Duty to free Thy Country from her Heathen servitude; So shalt thou best fullfil, best verifie The Prophets old, who sung thy endless raign, The happier raign the sooner it begins, Raign then; what canst thou better do the while? To whom our Saviour answer thus return'd. All things are best fullfil'd in their due time, And time there is for all things, Truth hath said: If of my raign Prophetic Writ hath told, That it shall never end, so when begin The Father in his purpose hath decreed, He in whose hand all times and seasons roul. What if he hath decreed that I shall first Be try'd in humble state, and things adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence, Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting Without distrust or doubt, that he may know What I can suffer, how obey? who best Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first Well hath obey'd; just tryal e're I merit My exaltation without change or end. But what concerns it thee when I begin My everlasting Kingdom, why art thou Sollicitous, what moves thy inquisition? Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, And my promotion will be thy destruction? To whom the Tempter inly rackt reply'd. Let that come when it comes; all hope is lost Of my reception into grace; what worse? For where no hope is left, is left no fear; If there be worse, the expectation more Of worse torments me then the feeling can. I would be at the worst; worst is my Port, My harbour and my ultimate repose, The end I would attain, my final good. My error was my error and my crime My crime; whatever for it self condemn'd, And will alike be punish'd; whether thou Raign or raign not; though to that gentle brow Willingly I could flye, and hope thy raign, From that placid aspect and meek regard, Rather then aggravate my evil state, Would stand between me and thy Fathers ire, (Whose ire I dread more then the fire of Hell) A shelter and a kind of shading cool Interposition, as a summers cloud. If I then to the worst that can be hast, Why move thy feet so slow to what is best, Happiest both to thy self and all the world, That thou who worthiest art should'st be thir King? Perhaps thou linger'st in deep thoughts detain'd Of the enterprize so hazardous and high; No wonder, for though in thee be united What of perfection can in man be found, Or human nature can receive, consider Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent At home, scarce view'd the Gallilean Towns, And once a year Jerusalem, few days Short sojourn; and what thence could'st thou observe? The world thou hast not seen, much less her glory, Empires, and Monarchs, and thir radiant Courts, Best school of best experience, quickest in sight In all things that to greatest actions lead. The wisest, unexperienc't, will be ever Timorous and loth, with novice modesty, (As he who seeking Asses found a Kingdom) Irresolute, unhardy, unadventrous: But I will bring thee where thou soon shalt quit Those rudiments, and see before thine eyes The Monarchies of the Earth, thir pomp and state, Sufficient introduction to inform Thee, of thy self so apt, in regal Arts, And regal Mysteries; that thou may'st know How best their opposition to withstand. With that (such power was giv'n him then) he took The Son of God up to a Mountain high. It was a Mountain at whose verdant feet A spatious plain out stretch't in circuit wide Lay pleasant; from his side two rivers flow'd, Th' one winding, the other strait and left between Fair Champain with less rivers interveind, Then meeting joyn'd thir tribute to the Sea: Fertil of corn the glebe, of oyl and wine, With herds the pastures throng'd, with flocks the hills, Huge Cities and high towr'd, that well might seem The seats of mightiest Monarchs, and so large The Prospect was, that here and there was room For barren desert fountainless and dry. To this high mountain top the Tempter brought Our Saviour, and new train of words began. Well have we speeded, and o're hill and dale, Forest and field, and flood, Temples and Towers Cut shorter many a league; here thou behold'st Assyria and her Empires antient bounds, Araxes and the Caspian lake, thence on As far as Indus East, Euphrates West, And oft beyond; to South the Persian Bay, And inaccessible the Arabian drouth: Here Ninevee, of length within her wall Several days journey, built by Ninus old, Of that first golden Monarchy the seat, And seat of Salmanassar, whose success Israel in long captivity still mourns; There Babylon the wonder of all tongues, As antient, but rebuilt by him who twice Judah and all thy Father David's house Led captive, and Jerusalem laid waste, Till Cyrus set them free; Persepolis His City there thou seest, and Bactra there; Ecbatana her structure vast there shews, And Hecatompylos her hunderd gates, There Susa by Choaspes, amber stream, The drink of none but Kings; of later fame Built by Emathian, or by Parthian hands, The great Seleucia, Nisibis, and there Artaxata, Teredon, Tesiphon, Turning with easie eye thou may'st behold. All these the Parthian, now some Ages past, By great Arsaces led, who founded first That Empire, under his dominion holds From the luxurious Kings of Antioch won. And just in time thou com'st to have a view Of his great power; for now the Parthian King In Ctesiphon hath gather'd all his Host Against the Scythian, whose incursions wild Have wasted Sogdiana; to her aid He marches now in hast; see, though from far, His thousands, in what martial equipage They issue forth, Steel Bows, and Shafts their arms Of equal dread in flight, or in pursuit; All Horsemen, in which fight they most excel; See how in warlike muster they appear, In Rhombs and wedges, and half moons, and wings. He look't and saw what numbers numberless The City gates out powr'd, light armed Troops In coats of Mail and military pride; In Mail thir horses clad, yet fleet and strong, Prauncing their riders bore, the flower and choice Of many Provinces from bound to bound; From Arachosia, from Candaor East, And Margiana to the Hyrcanian cliffs Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales, From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains Of Adiabene, Media, and the South Of Susiana to Balsara's hav'n. He saw them in thir forms of battell rang'd, How quick they wheel'd, and flying behind them shot Sharp sleet of arrowie showers against the face Of thir pursuers, and overcame by flight; The field all iron cast a gleaming brown, Nor wanted clouds of foot, nor on each horn, Cuirassiers all in steel for standing fight; Chariots or Elephants endorst with Towers Of Archers, nor of labouring Pioners A multitude with Spades and Axes arm'd To lay hills plain, fell woods, or valleys fill, Or where plain was raise hill, or over-lay With bridges rivers proud, as with a yoke; Mules after these, Camels and Dromedaries, And Waggons fraught with Utensils of war. Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp, When Agrican with all his Northern powers Besieg'd Albracca, as Romances tell; The City of Gallaphrone, from thence to win The fairest of her Sex Angelica His daughter, sought by many Prowest Knights, Both Paynim, and the Peers of Charlemane. Such and so numerous was thir Chivalrie; At sight whereof the Fiend yet more presum'd, And to our Saviour thus his words renew'd. That thou may'st know I seek not to engage Thy Vertue, and not every way secure On no slight grounds thy safety; hear, and mark To what end I have brought thee hither and shewn All this fair sight; thy Kingdom though foretold By Prophet or by Angel, unless thou Endeavour, as thy Father David did, Thou never shalt obtain; prediction still In all things, and all men, supposes means, Without means us'd, what it predicts revokes. But say thou wer't possess'd of David's Throne By free consent of all, none opposite, Samaritan or Jew; how could'st thou hope Long to enjoy it quiet and secure, Between two such enclosing enemies Roman and Parthian? therefore one of these Thou must make sure thy own, the Parthian first By my advice, as nearer and of late Found able by invasion to annoy Thy country, and captive lead away her Kings Antigonus, and old Hyrcanus bound, Maugre the Roman: it shall be my task To render thee the Parthian at dispose; Chuse which thou wilt by conquest or by league. By him thou shalt regain, without him not, That which alone can truly reinstall thee In David's royal seat, his true Successour, Deliverance of thy brethren, those ten Tribes Whose off-spring in his Territory yet serve In Habor, and among the Medes dispers't, Ten Sons of Jacob, two of Joseph lost Thus long from Israel; serving as of old Thir Fathers in the land of Egypt serv'd, This offer sets before thee to deliver. These if from servitude thou shalt restore To thir inheritance, then, nor till then, Thou on the Throne of David in full glory, From Egypt to Euphrates and beyond Shalt raign, and Rome or Caesar not need fear. To whom our Saviour answer'd thus unmov'd. Much ostentation vain of fleshly arm, And fragile arms, much instrument of war Long in preparing, soon to nothing brought, Before mine eyes thou hast set; and in my ear Vented much policy, and projects deep Of enemies, of aids, battels and leagues, Plausible to the world, to me worth naught. Means I must use thou say'st, prediction else Will unpredict and fail me of the Throne: My time I told thee, (and that time for thee Were better farthest off) is not yet come,; When that comes think not thou to find me slack On my part aught endeavouring, or to need Thy politic maxims, or that cumbersome Luggage of war there shewn me, argument Of human weakness rather then of strength. My brethren, as thou call'st them; those Ten Tribes I must deliver, if I mean to raign David's true heir, and his full Scepter sway To just extent over all Israel's Sons; But whence to thee this zeal, where was it then For Israel, or for David, or his Throne, When thou stood'st up his Tempter to the pride Of numbring Israel, which cost the lives Of threescore and ten thousand Israelites By three days Pestilence? such was thy zeal To Israel then, the same that now to me. As for those captive Tribes, themselves were they Who wrought their own captivity, fell off From God to worship Calves, the Deities Of Egypt, Baal next and Ashtaroth, And all the Idolatries of Heathen round, Besides thir other worse then heathenish crimes; Nor in the land of their captivity Humbled themselves, or penitent besought The God of their fore-fathers; but so dy'd Impenitent, and left a race behind Like to themselves, distinguishable scarce From Gentils, but by Circumcision vain, And God with Idols in their worship joyn'd. Should I of these the liberty regard, Who freed, as to their antient Patrimony, Unhumbl'd, unrepentant, unreform'd, Headlong would follow; and to thir Gods perhaps Of Bethel and of Dan? no, let them serve Thir enemies, who serve Idols with God. Yet he at length, time to himself best known, Remembring Abraham by some wond'rous call May bring them back repentant and sincere, And at their passing cleave the Assyrian flood, While to their native land with joy they hast, As the Red Sea and Jordan once he cleft, When to the promis'd land thir Fathers pass'd; To his due time and providence I leave them. So spake Israel's true King, and to the Fiend Made answer meet, that made void all his wiles. So fares it when with truth falshood contends.
PErplex'd and troubl'd at his bad success The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply, Discover'd in his fraud, thrown from his hope, So oft, and the perswasive Rhetoric That sleek't his tongue, and won so much on Eve, So little here, nay lost; but Eve was Eve, This far his over-match, who self deceiv'd And rash, before-hand had no better weigh'd The strength he was to cope with, or his own: But as a man who had been matchless held In cunning, over-reach't where least he thought, To salve his credit, and for very spight Still will be tempting him who foyls him still, And never cease, though to his shame the more; Or as a swarm of flies in vintage time, About the wine-press where sweet moust is powr'd, Beat off, returns as oft with humming sound; Or surging waves against a solid rock, Though all to shivers dash't, the assault renew, Vain battry, and in froth or bubbles end; So Satan, whom repulse upon repulse Met ever; and to shameful silence brought, Yet gives not o're though desperate of success, And his vain importunity pursues. He brought our Saviour to the western side Of that high mountain, whence he might behold Another plain, long but in bredth not wide; Wash'd by the Southern Sea, and on the North To equal length back'd with a ridge of hills That screen'd the fruits of the earth and seats of men From cold Septentrion blasts, thence in the midst Divided by a river, of whose banks On each side an Imperial City stood, With Towers and Temples proudly elevate On seven small Hills, with Palaces adorn'd, Porches and Theatres, Baths, Aqueducts, Statues and Trophees, and Triumphal Arcs, Gardens and Groves presented to his eyes, Above the highth of Mountains interpos'd. By what strange Parallax or Optic skill Of vision multiplyed through air, or glass Of Telescope, were curious to enquire: And now the Tempter thus his silence broke. The City which thou seest no other deem Then great and glorious Rome, Queen of the Earth So far renown'd, and with the spoils enricht Of Nations; there the Capitol thou seest Above the rest lifting his stately head On the Tarpeian rock, her Cittadel Impregnable, and there Mount Palatine The Imperial Palace, compass huge, and high The Structure, skill of noblest Architects, With gilded battlements, conspicuous far, Turrets and Terrases, and glittering Spires. Many a fair Edifice besides, more like Houses of Gods (so well I have dispos'd My Aerie Microscope) thou may'st behold Outside and inside both, pillars and roofs Carv'd work, the hand of fam'd Artificers In Cedar, Marble, Ivory or Gold. Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see What conflux issuing forth, or entring in, Pretors, Proconsuls to thir Provinces Hasting or on return, in robes of State; Lictors and rods the ensigns of thir power, Legions and Cohorts, turmes of horse and wings: Or Embassies from Regions far remote In various habits on the Appian road, Or on the Æmilian, some from farthest South, Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, Meroe Nilotic Isle, and more to West, The Realm of Bocchus to the Black-moor Sea; From the Asian Kings and Parthian among these, From India and the golden Chersoness, And utmost Indian Isle Taprobane, Dusk faces with white silken Turbants wreath'd: From Gallia, Gades, and the Brittish West, Germans and Scythians, and Sarmatians North Beyond Danubius to the Tauric Pool. All Nations now to Rome obedience pay, To Rome's great Emperour, whose wide domain In ample Territory, wealth and power, Civility of Manners, Arts, and Arms, And long Renown thou justly may'st prefer Before the Parthian; these two Thrones except, The rest are barbarous, and scarce worth the sight, Shar'd among petty Kings too far remov'd; These having shewn thee, I have shewn thee all The Kingdoms of the world, and all thir glory. This Emperour hath no Son, and now is old, Old, and lascivious, and from Rome retir'd To Capreæ an Island small but strong On the Campanian shore, with purpose there His horrid lusts in private to enjoy, Committing to a wicked Favourite All publick cares, and yet of him suspicious, Hated of all, and hating; with what ease Indu'd with Regal Vertues as thou art, Appearing, and beginning noble deeds, Might'st thou expel this monster from his Throne Now made a stye, and in his place ascending A victor, people free from servile yoke? And with my help thou may'st; to me the power Is given, and by that right I give it thee. Aim therefore at no less then all the world, Aim at the highest, without the highest attain'd Will be for thee no sitting, or not long On David's Throne, be propheci'd what will. To whom the Son of God unmov'd reply'd. Nor doth this grandeur and majestic show Of luxury, though call'd magnificence, More then of arms before, allure mine eye, Much less my mind; though thou should'st add to tell Thir sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts On Cittron tables or Atlantic stone; (For I have also heard, perhaps have read) Their wines of Setia, Cales, and Falerne, Chios and Creet, and how they quaff in Gold, Crystal and Myrrhine cups imboss'd with Gems And studs of Pearl, to me should'st tell who thirst And hunger still: then Embassies thou shew'st From Nations far and nigh; what honour that, But tedious wast of time to sit and hear So many hollow complements and lies, Outlandish flatteries? then proceed'st to talk Of the Emperour, how easily subdu'd, How gloriously; I shall, thou say'st, expel A brutish monster: what if I withal Expel a Devil who first made him such? Let his tormenter Conscience find him out, For him I was not sent, nor yet to free That people victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal, who once just, Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquer'd well, But govern ill the Nations under yoke, Peeling thir Provinces, exhausted all By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown Of triumph that insulting vanity; Then cruel, by thir sports to blood enur'd Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts expos'd, Luxurious by thir wealth, and greedier still, And from the daily Scene effeminate. What wise and valiant man would seek to free These thus degenerate, by themselves enslav'd, Or could of inward slaves make outward free? Know therefore when my season comes to sit On David's Throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and over-shadowing all the Earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All Monarchies besides throughout the world, And of my Kingdom there shall be no end: Means there shall be to this, but what the means, Is not for thee to know, nor me to tell. To whom the Tempter impudent repli'd. I see all offers made by me how slight Thou valu'st, because offer'd, and reject'st: Nothing will please the difficult and nice, Or nothing more then still to contradict: On the other side know also thou, that I On what I offer set as high esteem, Nor what I part with mean to give for naught; All these which in a moment thou behold'st, The Kingdoms of the world to thee I give; For giv'n to me, I give to whom I please, No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else, On this condition, if thou wilt fall down, And worship me as thy superior Lord, Easily done, and hold them all of me; For what can less so great a gift deserve? Whom thus our Saviour answer'd with disdain. I never lik'd thy talk, thy offers less, Now both abhor, since thou hast dar'd to utter The abominable terms, impious condition; But I endure the time, till which expir'd, Thou hast permission on me. It is written The first of all Commandments, Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God, and only him shalt serve; And dar'st thou to the Son of God propound To worship thee accurst, now more accurst For this attempt bolder then that on Eve, And more blasphemous? which expect to rue. The Kingdoms of the world to thee were giv'n, Permitted rather, and by thee usurp't, Other donation none thou canst produce: If given, by whom but by the King of Kings, God over all supreme? if giv'n to thee, By thee how fairly is the Giver now Repaid? But gratitude in thee is lost Long since. Wert thou so void of fear or shame, As offer them to me the Son of God, To me my own, on such abhorred pact, That I fall down and worship thee as God? Get thee behind me; plain thou now appear'st That Evil one, Satan for ever damn'd. To whom the Fiend with fear abasht reply'd. Be not so sore offended, Son of God; Though Sons of God both Angels are and Men, If I to try whether in higher sort Then these thou bear'st that title, have propos'd What both from Men and Angels I receive, Tetrarchs of fire, air, flood, and on the earth Nations besides from all the quarter'd winds, God of this world invok't and world beneath; Who then thou art, whose coming is foretold To me so fatal, me it most concerns. The tryal hath indamag'd thee no way, Rather more honour left and more esteem; Me naught advantag'd, missing what I aim'd. Therefore let pass, as they are transitory, The Kingdoms of this world; I shall no more Advise thee, gain them as thou canst, or not. And thou thy self seem'st otherwise inclin'd Then to a worldly Crown, addicted more To contemplation and profound dispute, As by that early action may be judg'd, When slipping from thy Mothers eye thou went'st Alone into the Temple; there was found Among the gravest Rabbies disputant On points and questions fitting Moses Chair, Teaching not taught; the childhood shews the man, As morning shews the day. Be famous then By wisdom; as thy Empire must extend, So let extend thy mind o're all the world, In knowledge, all things in it comprehend, All knowledge is not couch't in Moses Law, The Pentateuch or what the Prophets wrote, The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach To admiration, led by Natures light; And with the Gentiles much thou must converse, Ruling them by perswasion as thou mean'st, Without thir learning how wilt thou with them, Or they with thee hold conversation meet? How wilt thou reason with them, how refute Thir Idolisms, Traditions, Paradoxes? Error by his own arms is best evinc't. Look once more e're we leave this specular Mount Westward, much nearer by Southwest, behold Where on the Ægean shore a City stands Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil, Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts And Eloquence, native to famous wits Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, City or Suburban, studious walks and shades; See there the Olive Grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic Bird Trills her thick-warbl'd notes the summer long, There flowrie hill Hymettus with the sound Of Bees industrious murmur oft invites To studious musing; there Ilissus rouls His whispering stream; within the walls then view The schools of antient Sages; his who bred Great Alexander to subdue the world, Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next: There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power Of harmony in tones and numbers hit By voice or hand, and various-measur'd verse, Æolian charms and Dorian Lyric Odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call'd, Whose Poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd In brief sententious precepts, while they treat Of fate, and chance, and change in human life; High actions, and high passions best describing: Thence to the famous Orators repair, Those antient, whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will that fierce Democratie, Shook the Arsenal and fulmin'd over Greece, To Macedon, and Artaxerxes Throne; To sage Philosophy next lend thine ear, From Heaven descended to the low-rooft house Of Socrates, see there his Tenement, Whom well inspir'd the Oracle pronounc'd Wisest of men; from whose mouth issu'd forth Mellifluous streams that water'd all the schools Of Academics old and new, with those Sirnam'd Peripatetics, and the Sect Epicurean, and the Stoic severe; These here revolve, or, as thou lik'st, at home, Till time mature thee to a Kingdom's waight; These rules will render thee a King compleat Within thy self, much more with Empire joyn'd. To whom our Saviour sagely thus repli'd. Think not but that I know these things, or think I know them not; not therefore am I short Of knowing what I aught: he who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light, No other doctrine needs, though granted true; But these are false, or little else but dreams, Conjectures, fancies, built on nothing firm. The first and wisest of them all profess'd To know this only, that he nothing knew; The next to fabling fell and smooth conceits, A third sort doubted all things, though plain sence; Others in vertue plac'd felicity, But vertue joyn'd with riches and long life, In corporal pleasure he, and careless ease, The Stoic last in Philosophic pride, By him call'd vertue; and his vertuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer, As fearing God nor man, contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life, Which when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can, For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, Or subtle shifts conviction to evade. Alas what can they teach, and not mislead; Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, And how the world began, and how man fell Degraded by himself, on grace depending? Much of the Soul they talk, but all awrie, And in themselves seek vertue, and to themselves All glory arrogate, to God give none, Rather accuse him under usual names, Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite Of mortal things. Who therefore seeks in these True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, An empty cloud. However many books Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek) Uncertain and unsettl'd still remains, Deep verst in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge; As Children gathering pibles on the shore. Or if I would delight my private hours With Music or with Poem, where so soon As in our native Language can I find That solace? All our Law and Story strew'd With Hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscrib'd, Our Hebrew Songs and Harps in Babylon, That pleas'd so well our Victors ear, declare That rather Greece from us these Arts deriv'd; Ill imitated, while they loudest sing The vices of thir Deities, and thir own In Fable, Hymn, or Song, so personating Thir Gods ridiculous, and themselves past shame. Remove their swelling Epithetes thick laid As varnish on a Harlots cheek, the rest, Thin sown with aught of profit or delight, Will far be found unworthy to compare With Sion's songs, to all true tasts excelling, Where God is prais'd aright, and Godlike men, The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints; Such are from God inspir'd, not such from thee; Unless where moral vertue is express't By light of Nature not in all quite lost. Thir Orators thou then extoll'st, as those The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed, And lovers of thir Country, as may seem; But herein to our Prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In thir majestic unaffected stile Then all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat; These only with our Law best form a King. So spake the Son of God; but Satan now Quite at a loss, for all his darts were spent, Thus to our Saviour with stern brow reply'd. Since neither wealth, nor honour, arms nor arts, Kingdom nor Empire pleases thee, nor aught By me propos'd in life contemplative, Or active, tended on by glory, or fame, What dost thou in this World? the Wilderness For thee is fittest place, I found thee there, And thither will return thee, yet remember What I foretell thee, soon thou shalt have cause To wish thou never hadst rejected thus Nicely or cautiously my offer'd aid, Which would have set thee in short time with ease On David's Throne; or Throne of all the world, Now at full age, fulness of time, thy season, When Prophesies of thee are best fullfill'd. Now contrary, if I read aught in Heaven, Or Heav'n write aught of Fate, by what the Stars Voluminous, or single characters, In their conjunction met, give me to spell, Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate, Attends thee, scorns, reproaches, injuries, Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death, A Kingdom they portend thee, but what Kingdom, Real or Allegoric I discern not, Nor when, eternal sure, as without end, Without beginning; for no date prefixt Directs me in the Starry Rubric set. So saying he took (for still he knew his power Not yet expir'd) and to the Wilderness Brought back the Son of God, and left him there, Feigning to disappear. Darkness now rose, As day-light sunk, and brought in lowring night Her shadowy off-spring unsubstantial both, Privation meer of light and absent day. Our Saviour meek and with untroubl'd mind After his aerie jaunt, though hurried sore, Hungry and cold betook him to his rest, Wherever, under some concourse of shades Whose branching arms thick intertwind might shield From dews and damps of night his shelter'd head, But shelter'd slept in vain, for at his head The Tempter watch'd, and soon with ugly dreams Disturb'd his sleep; and either Tropic now Gan thunder, and both ends of Heav'n, the Clouds From many a horrid rift abortive pour'd Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruine reconcil'd: nor slept the winds Within thir stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vext Wilderness, whose tallest Pines, Though rooted deep as high, and sturdiest Oaks Bow'd their Stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts, Or torn up sheer: ill wast thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God, yet only stoodst Unshaken; nor yet staid the terror there, Infernal Ghosts, and Hellish Furies, round Environ'd thee, some howl'd, some yell'd, some shriek'd, Some bent at thee thir fiery darts, while thou Sat'st unappall'd in calm and sinless peace. Thus pass'd the night so foul till morning fair Came forth with Pilgrim steps in amice gray; Who with her radiant finger still'd the roar Of thunder, chas'd the clouds, and laid the winds, And grisly Spectres, which the Fiend had rais'd To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire. And now the Sun with more effectual beams Had chear'd the face of Earth, and dry'd the wet From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds Who all things now behold more fresh and green, After a night of storm so ruinous, Clear'd up their choicest notes in bush and spray To gratulate the sweet return of morn; Nor yet amidst this joy and brightest morn Was absent, after all his mischief done, The Prince of darkness, glad would also seem Of this fair change, and to our Saviour came, Yet with no new device, they all were spent, Rather by this his last affront resolv'd, Desperate of better course, to vent his rage, And mad despight to be so oft repell'd. Him walking on a Sunny hill he found, Back'd on the North and West by a thick wood, Out of the wood he starts in wonted shape; And in a careless mood thus to him said. Fair morning yet betides thee Son of God, After a dismal night; I heard the rack As Earth and Skie would mingle; but my self Was distant; and these flaws, though mortals fear them As dangerous to the pillard frame of Heaven, Or to the Earths dark basis underneath, Are to the main as inconsiderable, And harmless, if not wholsom, as a sneeze To mans less universe, and soon are gone; Yet as being oft times noxious where they light On man, beast, plant, wastful and turbulent, Like turbulencies in the affairs of men, Over whose heads they rore, and seem to point, They oft fore-signifie and threaten ill: This Tempest at this Desert most was bent; Of men at thee, for only thou here dwell'st. Did I not tell thee, if thou didst reject The perfet season offer'd with my aid To win thy destin'd seat, but wilt prolong All to the push of Fate, persue thy way Of gaining David's Throne no man knows when, For both the when and how is no where told, Thou shalt be what thou art ordain'd, no doubt; For Angels have proclaim'd it, but concealing The time and means: each act is rightliest done, Not when it must, but when it may be best. If thou observe not this, be sure to find, What I foretold thee, many a hard assay Of dangers, and adversities and pains, E're thou of Israel's Scepter get fast hold; Whereof this ominous night that clos'd thee round, So many terrors, voices, prodigies May warn thee, as a sure fore-going sign. So talk'd he, while the Son of God went on And staid not, but in brief him answer'd thus. Mee worse then wet thou find'st not; other harm Those terrors which thou speak'st of, did me none; I never fear'd they could, though noising loud And threatning nigh; what they can do as signs Betok'ning, or ill boding, I contemn As false portents, not sent from God, but thee; Who knowing I shall raign past thy preventing, Obtrud'st thy offer'd aid, that I accepting At least might seem to hold all power of thee, Ambitious spirit, and wouldst be thought my God, And storm'st refus'd, thinking to terrifie Mee to thy will; desist, thou art discern'd And toil'st in vain, nor me in vain molest. To whom the Fiend now swoln with rage reply'd: Then hear, O Son of David, Virgin-born; For Son of God to me is yet in doubt, Of the Messiah I have heard foretold By all the Prophets; of thy birth at length Announc't by Gabriel with the first I knew, And of the Angelic Song in Bethlehem field, On thy birth-night, that sung thee Saviour born. From that time seldom have I ceas'd to eye Thy infancy, thy childhood, and thy youth, Thy manhood last, though yet in private bred; Till at the Ford of Jordan whither all Flock'd to the Baptist, I among the rest, Though not to be Baptiz'd, by voice from Heav'n Heard thee pronounc'd the Son of God belov'd. Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view And narrower Scrutiny, that I might learn In what degree or meaning thou art call'd The Son of God, which bears no single sence; The Son of God I also am, or was, And if I was, I am; relation stands; All men are Sons of God; yet thee I thought In some respect far higher so declar'd. Therefore I watch'd thy footsteps from that hour, And follow'd thee still on to this wast wild; Where by all best conjectures I collect Thou art to be my fatal enemy. Good reason then, if I before-hand seek To understand my Adversary, who And what he is; his wisdom, power, intent, By parl, or composition, truce, or league To win him, or win from him what I can. And opportunity I here have had To try thee, sift thee, and confess have found thee Proof against all temptation as a rock Of Adamant, and as a Center, firm To the utmost of meer man both wise and good, Not more; for Honours, Riches, Kingdoms, Glory Have been before contemn'd, and may agen: Therefore to know what more thou art then man, Worth naming Son of God by voice from Heav'n, Another method I must now begin. So saying he caught him up, and without wing Of Hippogrif bore through the Air sublime Over the Wilderness and o're the Plain; Till underneath them fair Jerusalem, The holy City lifted high her Towers, And higher yet the glorious Temple rear'd Her pile, far off appearing like a Mount Of Alabaster, top't with Golden Spires: There on the highest Pinacle he set The Son of God; and added thus in scorn: There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright Will ask thee skill; I to thy Fathers house Have brought thee, and highest plac't, highest is best, Now shew thy Progeny; if not to stand, Cast thy self down; safely if Son of God: For it is written, He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands They shall up lift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. To whom thus Jesus: also it is written, Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood. But Satan smitten with amazement fell As when Earths Son Antæus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Joves Alcides, and oft foil'd still rose, Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joyn'd, Throttl'd at length in the Air, expir'd and fell; So after many a foil the Tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall. And as that Theban Monster that propos'd Her riddle, and him, who solv'd it not, devour'd; That once found out and solv'd, for grief and spight Cast her self headlong from th' Ismenian steep, So strook with dread and anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his hop't success, Ruin, and desperation, and dismay, Who durst so proudly tempt the Son of God. So Satan fell and strait a fiery Globe Of Angels on full sail of wing flew nigh, Who on their plumy Vans receiv'd him soft From his uneasie station, and upbore As on a floating couch through the blithe Air, Then in a flowry valley set him down On a green bank, and set before him spred A table of Celestial Food, Divine, Ambrosial, Fruits fetcht from the tree of life, And from the fount of life Ambrosial drink, That soon refresh'd him wearied, and repair'd What hunger, if aught hunger had impair'd, Or thirst, and as he fed, Angelic Quires Sung Heavenly Anthems of his victory Over temptation, and the Tempter proud. True Image of the Father whether thron'd In the bosom of bliss, and light of light Conceiving, or remote from Heaven, enshrin'd In fleshly Tabernacle, and human form, Wandring the Wilderness, whatever place, Habit, or state, or motion, still expressing The Son of God, with Godlike force indu'd Against th' Attempter of thy Fathers Throne, And Thief of Paradise; him long of old Thou didst debel, and down from Heav'n cast With all his Army, now thou hast aveng'd Supplanted Adam, and by vanquishing Temptation, hast regain'd lost Paradise, And frustrated the conquest fraudulent: He never more henceforth will dare set foot In Paradise to tempt; his snares are broke: For though that seat of earthly bliss be fail'd, A fairer Paradise is founded now For Adam and his chosen Sons, whom thou A Saviour art come down to re-install. Where they shall dwell secure, when time shall be Of Tempter and Temptation without fear. But thou, Infernal Serpent, shalt not long Rule in the Clouds; like an Autumnal Star Or Lightning thou shalt fall from Heav'n trod down Under his feet: for proof, e're this thou feel'st Thy wound, yet not thy last and deadliest wound By this repulse receiv'd, and hold'st in Hell No triumph; in all her gates Abaddon rues Thy bold attempt; hereafter learn with awe To dread the Son of God: he all unarm'd Shall chase thee with the terror of his voice From thy Demoniac holds, possession foul, Thee and thy Legions, yelling they shall flye, And beg to hide them in a herd of Swine, Lest he command them down into the deep Bound, and to torment sent before thir time. Hail Son of the most High, heir of both worlds, Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work Now enter, and begin to save mankind. Thus they the Son of God our Saviour meek Sung Victor, and from Heavenly Feast refresht Brought on his way with joy; hee unobserv'd Home to his Mothers house private return'd.
There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!— Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard.
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Come see the north wind's masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate, A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.
It hain't no use to grumble and complane;  It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.— When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,  W'y rain's my choice. Men ginerly, to all intents—  Although they're apt to grumble some— Puts most theyr trust in Providence,  And takes things as they come—  That is, the commonality  Of men that's lived as long as me  Has watched the world enugh to learn  They're not the boss of this concern. With some, of course, it's different—  I've saw young men that knowed it all, And didn't like the way things went  On this terrestchul ball;—  But all the same, the rain, some way,  Rained jest as hard on picnic day;  Er, when they railly wanted it,  It mayby wouldn't rain a bit! In this existunce, dry and wet  Will overtake the best of men— Some little skift o' clouds'll shet  The sun off now and then.—  And mayby, whilse you're wundern who  You've fool-like lent your umbrell' to,  And want it—out'll pop the sun,  And you'll be glad you hain't got none! It aggervates the farmers, too—  They's too much wet, er too much sun, Er work, er waitin' round to do  Before the plowin' 's done:  And mayby, like as not, the wheat,  Jest as it's lookin' hard to beat,  Will ketch the storm—and jest about  The time the corn's a-jintin' out. These-here cy-clones a-foolin' round—  And back'ard crops!—and wind and rain!— And yit the corn that's wallerd down  May elbow up again!—  They hain't no sense, as I can see,  Fer mortuls, sech as us, to be  A-faultin' Natchur's wise intents,  And lockin' horns with Providence! It hain't no use to grumble and complane;  It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.— When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,  W'y, rain's my choice.
I know that he told that I snared his soul With a snare which bled him to death. And all the men loved him, And most of the women pitied him. But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes, And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions. And the rhythm of Wordsworth's "Ode" runs in your ears, While he goes about from morning till night Repeating bits of that common thing; "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" And then, suppose: You are a woman well endowed, And the only man with whom the law and morality Permit you to have the marital relation Is the very man that fills you with disgust Every time you think of it—while you think of it Every time you see him? That's why I drove him away from home To live with his dog in a dingy room Back of his office.
Maurice, weep not, I am not here under this pine tree. The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass, The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls, But thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous In the blest Nirvana of eternal light! Go to the good heart that is my husband, Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love: i Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him Wrought out my destiny i that through the flesh I won spirit, and through spirit, peace. There is no marriage in heaven, But there is love.
I would have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Peniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes i Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things, And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life!
I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker, Smiter with whips and swords; I, hater of the breakers of the law; I, legalist, inexorable and bitter, Driving the jury to hang the madman, Barry Holden, Was made as one dead by light too bright for eyes, And woke to face a Truth with bloody brow: Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor's hand Against my boy's head as he entered life Made him an idiot. I turned to books of science To care for him. That's how the world of those whose minds are sick Became my work in life, and all my world. Poor ruined boy! You were, at last, the potter And I and all my deeds of charity The vessels of your hand.
Rich, honored by my fellow citizens, The father of many children, born of a noble mother, All raised there In the great mansion-house, at the edge of town. Note the cedar tree on the lawn! I sent all the boys to Ann Arbor, all the girls to Rockford, The while my life went on, getting more riches and honors— Resting under my cedar tree at evening. The years went on. I sent the girls to Europe; I dowered them when married. I gave the boys money to start in business. They were strong children, promising as apples Before the bitten places show. But John fled the country in disgrace. Jenny died in child-birth— I sat under my cedar tree. Harry killed himself after a debauch, Susan was divorced— I sat under my cedar tree. Paul was invalided from over-study, Mary became a recluse at home for love of a man— I sat under my cedar tree. All were gone, or broken-winged or devoured by life— I sat under my cedar tree. My mate, the mother of them, was taken— I sat under my cedar tree Till ninety years were tolled. O maternal Earth, which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!
Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown Who lies here with no stone to mark the place. As a boy reckless and wanton, Wandering with gun in hand through the forest Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield, I shot a hawk perched on the top Of a dead tree. He fell with guttural cry At my feet, his wing broken. Then I put him in a cage Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me When I offered him food. Daily I search the realms of Hades For the soul of the hawk, That I may offer him the friendship Of one whom life wounded and caged.
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army, And he drew six dollars a month as a pension, And stood on the corner talking politics, Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs; And I supported the family by washing, Learning the secrets of all the people From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts. For things that are new grow old at length, They’re replaced with better or none at all: People are prospering or falling back. And rents and patches widen with time; No thread or needle can pace decay, And there are stains that baffle soap, And there are colors that run in spite of you, Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress. Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets The laundress, Life, knows all about it. And I, who went to all the funerals Held in Spoon River, swear I never Saw a dead face without thinking it looked Like something washed and ironed.
I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk: One, the house I built on the hill, With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate; The other, the lake-front in Chicago, Where the railroad keeps a switching yard, With whistling engines and crunching wheels, And smoke and soot thrown over the city, And the crash of cars along the boulevard, i A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty. I helped to give this heritage To generations yet unborn, with my vote In the House of Representatives, And the lure of the thing was to be at rest From the never-ending fright of need, And to give my daughters gentle breeding, And a sense of security in life. But, you see, though I had the mansion house And traveling passes and local distinction, I could hear the whispers, whispers, whispers, Wherever I went, and my daughters grew up With a look as if some one were about to strike them; And they married madly, helter-skelter, Just to get out and have a change. And what was the whole of the business worth? Why, it wasn't worth a damn!
When I died, the circulating library Which I built up for Spoon River, And managed for the good of inquiring minds, Was sold at auction on the public square, As if to destroy the last vestige Of my memory and influence. For those of you who could not see the virtue Of knowing Volney's "Ruins" as well as Butler's "Analogy" And "Faust" as well as "Evangeline," Were really the power in the village, And often you asked me, "What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?" I am out of your way now, Spoon River, Choose your own good and call it good. For I could never make you see That no one knows what is good Who knows not what is evil; And no one knows what is true Who knows not what is false.
You may think, passer-by, that Fate Is a pit-fall outside of yourself, Around which you may walk by the use of foresight And wisdom. Thus you believe, viewing the lives of other men, As one who in God-like fashion bends over an anthill, Seeing how their difficulties could be avoided. But pass on into life: In time you shall see Fate approach you In the shape of your own image in the mirror; Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth, And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest, And you shall know that guest, And read the authentic message of his eyes.
They brought me ambrotypes Of the old pioneers to enlarge. And sometimes one sat for me i Some one who was in being When giant hands from the womb of the world Tore the republic. What was it in their eyes? i For I could never fathom That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids, And the serene sorrow of their eyes. It was like a pool of water, Amid oak trees at the edge of a forest, Where the leaves fall, As you hear the crow of a cock From a far-off farm house, seen near the hills Where the third generation lives, and the strong men And the strong women are gone and forgotten. And these grand-children and great grand-children Of the pioneers! Truly did my camera record their faces, too, With so much of the old strength gone, And the old faith gone, And the old mastery of life gone, And the old courage gone, Which labors and loves and suffers and sings Under the sun!
I went to the dances at Chandlerville, And played snap-out at Winchester. One time we changed partners, Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, And then I found Davis. We were married and lived together for seventy years, Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, Eight of whom we lost Ere I had reached the age of sixty. I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, I made the garden, and for holiday Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, And many a flower and medicinal weed — Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, And passed to a sweet repose. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you — It takes life to love Life.
My mother groand! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud; Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my fathers hands: Striving against my swaddling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mothers breast.
I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I waterd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night. Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole, When the night had veild the pole; In the morning glad I see; My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Strephon kissed me in the spring,  Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me  And never kissed at all. Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,  Robin's lost in play, But the kiss in Colin's eyes  Haunts me night and day.
With the man I love who loves me not,  I walked in the street-lamps' flare; We watched the world go home that night  In a flood through Union Square. I leaned to catch the words he said  That were light as a snowflake falling; Ah well that he never leaned to hear  The words my heart was calling. And on we walked and on we walked  Past the fiery lights of the picture shows — Where the girls with thirsty eyes go by  On the errand each man knows. And on we walked and on we walked,  At the door at last we said good-bye; I knew by his smile he had not heard  My heart's unuttered cry. With the man I love who loves me not  I walked in the street-lamps' flare — But oh, the girls who ask for love  In the lights of Union Square.
When I am dead and over me bright April  Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,  I shall not care. I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful  When rain bends down the bough, And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted  Than you are now.
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten for ever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old. If anyone asks, say it was forgotten Long and long ago, As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall In a long forgotten snow.
Warm summer sun, Shine kindly here,Warm southern wind, Blow softly here.Green sod above, Lie light, lie light.Good night, dear heart, Good night, good night.
Here is the House to hold me — cradle of all the race; Here is my lord and my love, here are my children dear — Here is the House enclosing, the dear-loved dwelling place; Why should I ever weary for aught that I find not here? Here for the hours of the day and the hours of the night; Bound with the bands of Duty, rivetted tight; Duty older than Adam — Duty that saw Acceptance utter and hopeless in the eyes of the serving squaw. Food and the serving of food — that is my daylong care; What and when we shall eat, what and how we shall wear; Soiling and cleaning of things — that is my task in the main — Soil them and clean them and soil them — soil them and clean them again. To work at my trade by the dozen and never a trade to know; To plan like a Chinese puzzle — fitting and changing so; To think of a thousand details, each in a thousand ways; For my own immediate people and a possible love and praise. My mind is trodden in circles, tiresome, narrow and hard, Useful, commonplace, private — simply a small back-yard; And I the Mother of Nations! — Blind their struggle and vain! — I cover the earth with my children — each with a housewife's brain.
A Sestina You who are happy in a thousand homes, Or overworked therein, to a dumb peace; Whose souls are wholly centered in the life Of that small group you personally love; Who told you that you need not know or care About the sin and sorrow of the world? Do you believe the sorrow of the world Does not concern you in your little homes? — That you are licensed to avoid the care And toil for human progress, human peace, And the enlargement of our power of love Until it covers every field of life? The one first duty of all human life Is to promote the progress of the world In righteousness, in wisdom, truth and love; And you ignore it, hidden in your homes, Content to keep them in uncertain peace, Content to leave all else without your care. Yet you are mothers! And a mother's care Is the first step toward friendly human life. Life where all nations in untroubled peace Unite to raise the standard of the world And make the happiness we seek in homes Spread everywhere in strong and fruitful love. You are content to keep that mighty love In its first steps forever; the crude care Of animals for mate and young and homes, Instead of pouring it abroad in life, Its mighty current feeding all the world Till every human child can grow in peace. You cannot keep your small domestic peace Your little pool of undeveloped love, While the neglected, starved, unmothered world Struggles and fights for lack of mother's care, And its tempestuous, bitter, broken life Beats in upon you in your selfish homes. We all may have our homes in joy and peace When woman's life, in its rich power of love Is joined with man's to care for all the world.
There was once a little animal,  No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered  Over Tertiary rocks. They called him Eohippus,  And they called him very small, And they thought him of no value --  When they thought of him at all; For the lumpish old Dinoceras  And Coryphodon so slow Were the heavy aristocracy  In days of long ago. Said the little Eohippus,  “I am going to be a horse! And on my middle finger-nails  To run my earthly course! I’m going to have a flowing tail!  I’m going to have a mane! I’m going to stand fourteen hands high  On the psychozoic plain!” The Coryphodon was horrified,  The Dinoceras was shocked; And they chased young Eohippus,  But he skipped away and mocked. Then they laughed enormous laughter,  And they groaned enormous groans. And they bade young Eohippus  Go view his father’s bones. Said they, “You always were as small  And mean as now we see, And that’s conclusive evidence  That you’re always going to be. What! Be a great, tall, handsome beast,  With hoofs to gallop on? Why! You’d have to change your nature! Said the Loxolophodon. They considered him disposed of,  And retired with gait serene; That was the way they argued  In “the early Eocene”. There was once an Anthropoidal Ape,  Far smarter than the rest, And everything that they could do  He always did the best; So they naturally disliked him  And they gave him shoulders cool, And when they had to mention him  They said he was a fool. Cried this pretentious Ape one day,  “I’m going to be a man! And stand upright, and hunt, and fight,  And conquer all I can! I’m going to cut down forest trees,  To make my houses higher! I’m going to kill the Mastodon!  I’m going to make a fire!” Loud screamed the Anthropoidal Apes  With laughter wild and gay; They tried to catch that boastful one,  But he always got away. So they yelled at him in chorus,  Which he minded not a whit; And they pelted him with cocoanuts,  Which didn’t seem to hit. And then they gave him reasons  Which they thought of much avail, To prove how his preposterous  Attempt was sure to fail. Said the sages, “In the first place,  The thing cannot be done! And, second, if it could be,  It would not be any fun! And, third, and most conclusive,  And admitting no reply, You would have to change your nature!  We should like to see you try!” They chuckled then triumphantly,  These lean and hairy shapes, For these things passed as arguments  With the Anthropoidal Apes. There was once a Neolithic Man,  An enterprising wight, Who made his chopping implements  Unusually bright. Unusually clever he,  Unusually brave, And he drew delightful Mammoths  On the borders of his cave. To his Neolithic neighbours,  Who were startled and surprised, Said he, “My friends, in course of time,  We shall be civilized! We are going to live in cities!  We are going to fight in wars! We are going to eat three times a day  Without the natural cause! We are going to turn life upside down  About a thing called gold! We are going to want the earth, and take  As much as we can hold! We are going to wear great piles of stuff  Outside our proper skins! We are going to have Diseases!  And Accomplishments!! And Sins!!!” Then they all rose up in fury  Against their boastful friend, For prehistoric patience  Cometh quickly to an end. Said one, “This is chimerical!  Utopian! Absurd!” Said another, “What a stupid life!  Too dull, upon my word!” Cried all, Before such things can come,  You idiotic child, You must alter Human Nature!”  And they all sat back and smiled. Thought they, “An answer to that last  It will be hard to find!” It was a clinching argument  To the Neolithic Mind!
Are you content, you pretty three-years’ wife?  Are you content and satisfied to live  On what your loving husband loves to give,  And give to him your life? Are you content with work, — to toil alone,  To clean things dirty and to soil things clean;  To be a kitchen-maid, be called a queen, —  Queen of a cook-stove throne? Are you content to reign in that small space --  A wooden palace and a yard-fenced land --  With other queens abundant on each hand,  Each fastened in her place? Are you content to rear your children so?  Untaught yourself, untrained, perplexed, distressed,  Are you so sure your way is always best?  That you can always know? Have you forgotten how you used to long  In days of ardent girlhood, to be great,  To help the groaning world, to serve the state,  To be so wise — so strong? And are you quite convinced this is the way,  The only way a woman’s duty lies --  Knowing all women so have shut their eyes?  Seeing the world to-day? Having no dream of life in fuller store?  Of growing to be more than that you are?  Doing the things you know do better far,  Yet doing others - more? Losing no love, but finding as you grew  That as you entered upon nobler life  You so became a richer, sweeter wife,  A wiser mother too? What holds you? Ah, my dear, it is your throne,  Your paltry queenship in that narrow place,  Your antique labours, your restricted space,  Your working all alone! Be not deceived! ‘Tis not your wifely bond  That holds you, nor the mother’s royal power,  But selfish, slavish service hour by hour --  A life with no beyond!
The American public is patient,  The American public is slow, The American public will stand as much  As any public I know. We submit to be killed by our railroads,  We submit to be fooled by our press, We can stand as much government scandal  As any folks going, I guess, We can bear bad air in the subway,  We can bear quick death in the street, But we are a little particular  About the things we eat. It is not so much that it kills us --  We are used to being killed; But we like to know what fills us  When we pay for being filled When we pay the Beef Trust prices,  As we must, or go without, It is not that we grudge the money  But we grudge the horrid doubt. Is it ham or trichinosis?  Can a label command belief? Is it pork we have purchased, or poison?  Is it tuberculosis or beef? There is really a choice of diseases,  To any one, little or big; And no man really pleases  To die of a long dead pig. We take our risks as we’re able,  On elevator and train, But to sit in peace at the table  And to be seized with sudden pain When we are at home and happy -- Is really against the grain. And besides admitting the poison,  Admitting we all must die, Accepting the second-hand sickness  From a cholera-smitten stye; Patiently bearing the murder,  Amiable, meek, inert, — We do rise up and remonstrate  Against the Packingtown dirt. Let there be death in the dinner,  Subtle and unforeseen, But O, Mr. Packer, in packing our death,  Won’t you please to pack it clean!
(After Kipling) When the traveller in the pasture meets the he-bull in his pride, He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside; But the milch cow, thus accosted, pins the traveller to the rail -- For the female of the species is deadlier than the male. When Nag, the raging stallion, meets a careless man on foot, He will sometimes not destroy him, even if the man don’t shoot; But the mare, if he should meet one, makes the bravest cowboy pale -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. When our first colonial settlers met the Hurons and Choctaws, They were burned and scalped and slaughtered by the fury-breathing squaws; ‘Twas the women, not the warriors, who in war-paint took the trail -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say As to women, lest in speaking he should give himself away; But when he meets a woman -- see him tremble and turn pale -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male Lay your money on the hen-fight! On the dog-fight fought by shes! On the gory Ladies Prize-fight -- there are none so fierce as these! See small girls each other pounding, while their peaceful brothers wail -- For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. So in history they tell us how all China shrieked and ran Before the wholesale slaughter dealt by Mrs. Genghis Khan. And Attila, the Scourge of God, who made all Europe quail, Was a female of the species and more deadly than the male. Red war with all its million dead is due to female rage, The names of women murderers monopolize the page, The pranks of a Napoleon are nothing to the tale Of destruction wrought by females, far more deadly than the male. In the baleful female infant this ferocity we spy, It glares in bloodshot fury from the maiden’s dewy eye, But the really deadly female, when you see her at her best, Has two babies at her petticoat and a suckling at her breast. Yet hold! there is Another! A monster even worse! The Terror of Humanity! Creation’s direst curse! Before whom men in thousands must tremble, shrink and fail -- A sanguinary Grandma -- more deadly than the male!
Infinity, when all things it beheldIn Nothing, and of Nothing all did build,Upon what Base was fixt the Lath whereinHe turn
Thou sorrow, venom Elfe: Is this thy play, To spin a web out of thyselfe To Catch a Fly? For Why? I saw a pettish wasp Fall foule therein: Whom yet thy Whorle pins did not clasp Lest he should fling His sting. But as affraid, remote Didst stand hereat, And with thy little fingers stroke And gently tap His back. Thus gently him didst treate Lest he should pet, And in a froppish, aspish heate Should greatly fret Thy net. Whereas the silly Fly, Caught by its leg Thou by the throate tookst hastily And 'hinde the head Bite Dead. This goes to pot, that not Nature doth call. Strive not above what strength hath got, Lest in the brawle Thou fall. This Frey seems thus to us. Hells Spider gets His intrails spun to whip Cords thus And wove to nets And sets. To tangle Adams race In's stratigems To their Destructions, spoil'd, made base By venom things, Damn'd Sins. But mighty, Gracious Lord Communicate Thy Grace to breake the Cord, afford Us Glorys Gate And State. We'l Nightingaile sing like When pearcht on high In Glories Cage, thy glory, bright, And thankfully, For joy.
Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.  Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee. Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate  And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.  My Conversation make to be thy Reele  And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele. Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:  And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills: Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.  Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.  Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,  All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise. Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,  Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill  My wayes with glory and thee glorify.  Then mine apparell shall display before yee  That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.
A Curious Knot God made in Paradise, And drew it out inamled neatly Fresh. It was the True-Love Knot, more sweet than spice And set with all the flowres of Graces dress. Its Weddens Knot, that ne're can be unti'de. No Alexanders Sword can it divide. The slips here planted, gay and glorious grow: Unless an Hellish breath do sindge their Plumes. Here Primrose, Cowslips, Roses, Lilies blow With Violets and Pinkes that voide perfumes. Whose beautious leaves ore laid with Hony Dew. And Chanting birds Cherp out sweet Musick true. When in this Knot I planted was, my Stock Soon knotted, and a manly flower out brake. And after it my branch again did knot Brought out another Flowre its sweet breath’d mate. One knot gave one tother the tothers place. Whence Checkling smiles fought in each others face. But oh! a glorious hand from glory came Guarded with Angells, soon did Crop this flowere Which almost tore the root up of the same At that unlookt for, Dolesome, darksome houre. In Pray're to Christ perfum'de it did ascend, And Angells bright did it to heaven tend. But pausing on't, this sweet perfum'd my thought, Christ would in Glory have a Flowre, Choice, Prime, And having Choice, chose this my branch forth brought. Lord, take't. I thanke thee, thou takst ought of mine, It is my pledg in glory, part of mee Is now in it, Lord, glorifi'de with thee. But praying ore my branch, my branch did sprout And bore another manly flower, and gay And after that another, sweet brake out, The which the former hand soon got away. But oh! the tortures, Vomit, screechings, groans, And six weeks fever would pierce hearts like stones. Griefe o're doth flow: and nature fault would finde Were not thy Will, my Spell, Charm, Joy, and Gem: That as I said, I say, take, Lord, they're thine. I piecemeale pass to Glory bright in them. In joy, may I sweet Flowers for Glory breed, Whether thou getst them green, or lets them seed.
I kening through Astronomy Divine  The Worlds bright Battlement, wherein I spy A Golden Path my Pensill cannot line,  From that bright Throne unto my Threshold ly.  And while my puzzled thoughts about it pore  I finde the Bread of Life in't at my doore. When that this Bird of Paradise put in  This Wicker Cage (my Corps) to tweedle praise Had peckt the Fruite forbad: and so did fling  Away its Food; and lost its golden dayes;  It fell into Celestiall Famine sore:  And never could attain a morsell more. Alas! alas! Poore Bird, what wilt thou doe?  The Creatures field no food for Souls e're gave. And if thou knock at Angells dores they show  An Empty Barrell: they no soul bread have.  Alas! Poore Bird, the Worlds White Loafe is done  And cannot yield thee here the smallest Crumb. In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run  Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son  Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.  Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands  Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands. Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,  Which from his Table came, and to thine goeth? Doth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take.  Come Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe?  Its Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take  And Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake. What Grace is this knead in this Loafe? This thing  Souls are but petty things it to admire. Yee Angells, help: This fill would to the brim  Heav'ns whelm'd-down Chrystall meele Bowle, yea and higher.  This Bread of Life dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry.  Eate, Eate me, Soul, and thou shalt never dy.
Listen. . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.
With swiftGreat sweep of herMagnificent arm my painClanged back the doors that shut my soulFrom life.
These beThree silent things:The falling snow. . the hourBefore the dawn. . the mouth of oneJust dead.
Well andIf day on dayFollows, and weary yearOn year. . and ever days and years. .Well?
Seen on a Night in November How frail Above the bulk Of crashing water hangs, Autumnal, evanescent, wan, The moon.
Written in A Moment of Exasperation How can you lie so still? All day I watch And never a blade of all the green sod moves To show where restlessly you toss and turn, And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees Stiffened and aching from their long disuse; I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth To take its freedom of the midnight hour. Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones? The very worms must scorn you where you lie, A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk, Meek habitants of unresented graves. Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest." I'll not be patient! I will not lie still! There is a brown road runs between the pines, And further on the purple woodlands lie, And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom; And I would walk the road and I would be Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds. My eyes may follow but my feet are held. Recumbent as you others must I too Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod? And if the many sayings of the wise Teach of submission I will not submit But with a spirit all unreconciled Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars. Better it is to walk, to run, to dance, Better it is to laugh and leap and sing, To know the open skies of dawn and night, To move untrammeled down the flaming noon, And I will clamour it through weary days Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp, Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips Of resignation, sister to defeat. I'll not be patient. I will not lie still. And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; "Yes, yes . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are." And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.
In the cold I will rise, I will batheIn waters of ice; myselfWill shiver, and shrive myself,Alone in the dawn, and anointForehead and feet and hands;I will shutter the windows from light,I will place in their sockets the fourTall candles and set them a-flameIn the grey of the dawn; and myselfWill lay myself straight in my bed,And draw the sheet under my chin.
The poet pursues his beautiful theme; The preacher his golden beatitude;  And I run after a vanishing dream—  The glittering, will-o’-the-wispish gleam Of the properly scholarly attitude— The highly desirable, the very advisable, The hardly acquirable, properly scholarly attitude.  I envy the savage without any clothes, Who lives in a tropical latitude;  It’s little of general culture he knows.  But then he escapes the worrisome woes Of the properly scholarly attitude— The unceasingly sighed over, wept over, cried over, The futilely died over, properly scholarly attitude.  I work and I work till I nearly am dead, And could say what the watchman said—that I could!  But still, with a sigh and a shake of the head,  “You don’t understand,” it is ruthlessly said, “The properly scholarly attitude— The aye to be sought for, wrought for and fought for, The ne’er to be caught for, properly scholarly attitude—”  I really am sometimes tempted to say That it’s merely a glittering platitude;  That people have just fallen into the way,  When lacking a subject, to tell of the sway Of the properly scholarly attitude— The easily preachable, spread-eagle speechable, In practice unreachable, properly scholarly attitude.
Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows.
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied  By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links  Were made so loose and wide,  Methinks,  For milder weather. A bunch of violets without their roots,  And sorrel intermixed, Encircled by a wisp of straw  Once coiled about their shoots,  The law  By which I'm fixed. A nosegay which Time clutched from out  Those fair Elysian fields, With weeds and broken stems, in haste,  Doth make the rabble rout  That waste  The day he yields. And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,  Drinking my juices up, With no root in the land  To keep my branches green,  But stand  In a bare cup. Some tender buds were left upon my stem  In mimicry of life, But ah! the children will not know,  Till time has withered them,  The woe  With which they're rife. But now I see I was not plucked for naught,  And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive,  But by a kind hand brought  Alive  To a strange place. That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,  And by another year, Such as God knows, with freer air,  More fruits and fairer flowers  Will bear,  While I droop here.
A dreadful darkness closes in  On my bewildered mind; O let me suffer and not sin,  Be tortured yet resigned. Through all this world of whelming mist Still let me look to Thee, And give me courage to resist The Tempter till he flee. Weary I am — O give me strength And leave me not to faint; Say Thou wilt comfort me at legnth And pity my complaint. I've begged to serve Thee heart and soul, To sacrifice to Thee No niggard portion, but the whole Of my identity. I hoped amid the brave and strong My portioned task might lie, To toil amid the labouring throng With purpose pure and high. But Thou hast fixed another part, And Thou hast fixed it well; I said so with my bleeding heart When first the anguish fell.For Thou hast taken my delight, And hope of life away,And bid me watch the painful night And wait the weary day. The hope and delight were Thine; I bless Thee for their loan; I gave Thee while I deemed them mine Too little thanks, I own. Shall I with joy Thy blessings share And not endure their loss? Or hope the martyr's crown to wear And cast away the cross? These weary hours will not be lost, These days of passive misery, These nights of darkness anguish tost If I can fix my heart on Thee. Weak and weary though I lie, Crushed with sorrow, worn with pain, Still I may lift to Heaven mine eye, And strive and labour not in vain, That inward strife against the sins That ever wait on suffering; To watch and strike where first begins Each ill that would corruption bring, That secret labour to sustain With humble patience every blow, To gather fortitude from pain, And hope and holiness from woe. Thus let me serve Thee from my heart, Whatever be my written fate, Whether thus early to depart Or yet a while to wait. If Thou shouldst bring me back to life More humbled I should be; More wise, more strengthened for the strife, More apt to lean on Thee. Should Death be standing at the gate Thus should I keep my vow; But, Lord, whate'er my future fate So let me serve Thee now.
Shall earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Since passion may not fire thee Shall Nature cease to bow? Thy mind is ever moving In regions dark to thee; Recall its useless roving— Come back and dwell with me. I know my mountain breezes Enchant and soothe thee still— I know my sunshine pleases Despite thy wayward will. When day with evening blending Sinks from the summer sky, I’ve seen thy spirit bending In fond idolatry. I’ve watched thee every hour; I know my mighty sway, I know my magic power To drive thy griefs away. Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet none would ask a heaven More like this earth than thine. Then let my winds caress thee; Thy comrade let me be— Since nought beside can bless thee, Return and dwell with me.
The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied, She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare, And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair, Murmuring how she loved me — she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, And give herself to me for ever. But passion sometimes would prevail, Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: So, she was come through wind and rain. Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshipped me; surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do. That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain. As a shut bud that holds a bee, I warily oped her lids: again Laughed the blue eyes without a stain. And I untightened next the tress About her neck; her cheek once more Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss: I propped her head up as before, Only, this time my shoulder bore Her head, which droops upon it still: The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And I, its love, am gained instead! Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!
Nay but you, who do not love her,  Is she not pure gold, my mistress? Holds earth aught—speak truth—above her?  Aught like this tress, see, and this tress, And this last fairest tress of all, So fair, see, ere I let it fall? Because, you spend your lives in praising;  To praise, you search the wide world over: Then why not witness, calmly gazing,  If earth holds aught—speak truth—above her? Above this tress, and this, I touch But cannot praise, I love so much!
I That was I, you heard last night,  When there rose no moon at all, Nor, to pierce the strained and tight  Tent of heaven, a planet small: Life was dead and so was light.  II Not a twinkle from the fly,  Not a glimmer from the worm; When the crickets stopped their cry,  When the owls forbore a term, You heard music; that was I.  III Earth turned in her sleep with pain,  Sultrily suspired for proof: In at heaven and out again,  Lightning! —- where it broke the roof, Bloodlike, some few drops of rain.  IV What they could my words expressed,  O my love, my all, my one! Singing helped the verses best,  And when singing's best was done, To my lute I left the rest.  V So wore night; the East was gray,  White the broad-faced hemlock-flowers: There would be another day;  Ere its first of heavy hours Found me, I had passed away.  VI What became of all the hopes,  Words and song and lute as well? Say, this struck you —- "When life gropes  Feebly for the path where fell Light last on the evening slopes,  VII "One friend in that path shall be,  To secure my step from wrong; One to count night day for me,  Patient through the watches long, Serving most with none to see."  VIII Never say —- as something bodes —-  "So, the worst has yet a worse! When life halts 'neath double loads,  Better the taskmaster's curse Than such music on the roads!  IX "When no moon succeeds the sun,  Nor can pierce the midnight's tent Any star, the smallest one,  While some drops, where lightning rent, Show the final storm begun —-  X "When the fire-fly hides its spot,  When the garden-voices fail In the darkness thick and hot, —-  Shall another voice avail, That shape be where these are not?  XI "Has some plague a longer lease,  Proffering its help uncouth? Can't one even die in peace?  As one shuts one's eyes on youth, Is that face the last one sees?"  XII Oh how dark your villa was,  Windows fast and obdurate! How the garden grudged me grass  Where I stood —- the iron gate Ground its teeth to let me pass!
We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,  lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us. The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last  under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars. Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time our love like a knife between us defining the boundaries that we can never cross  nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,  cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths  and the dark wound closed in behind us. Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,  gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,  the rooms where we had come together bombd. But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt  over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,  you pass with ease into the destructive world.  There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,  falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore  and within the indestructible night I am alone.
Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine. Not too close, wait. See the green blurs stitching the leaves? Here at the edge of the millennium I don’t imagine you’d call them anything as archaic as angels. But aren’t they agents of a sort, and secret, dissolving and solidifying, spying from their constantly shifting perches of air, always nervous of us, risking only a stab in a bell of petals? Don’t look so stunned, lay your pack in the needles and catch a breath. I know, you thought you knew me, and now to hear me talk this way ... I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending to love people and the cities where people can’t love themselves. This is what the quiet accomplishes, and the water trusting the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees. Small wonder the angels are said to despise us. Still, without them how do we account for our meanness? Look at that, what else can promenade in the air? And how easily they’re alarmed, revving off into the mist.
We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing,  the fences of our own backyards, and have stood  amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, hundreds,  every limb of the dead oak feathered black, and I cut the engine, let the river grab the jon boat  and pull it toward the tree. The black leaves shined, the pink fruit blossomed  red, ugly as a human heart. Then, as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time  its soft countenance, the raw fleshy jowls wrinkled and generous, like the faces of the very old  who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, slow, on the pull of the river,  reluctant, looking back at their roost,  calling them what I'd never called them, what they are, those dwarfed transfiguring angels, who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle crushed on the shoulder of the road, who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost, with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their color is a diabolic dye.” Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”      The mother bending over a baby named Shug chuckles, “Gimme some sugar,” just to preface a flurry of kisses sweet as sugar cane. Later, when she stirs a spoonful of Domino into her coffee, who’s to tell the story how a ten-foot-tall reed from the Old World, on being brought to the New, was raised and cropped so cooks could sweeten whatever tasted bitter? Or how grade-A granulated began as a thick black syrup boiled for hours in an iron vat until it was refined to pure, white crystal. When I was a child whose payoff for obeying orders was red-and-white-striped candy canes, I knew that sugar was love. The first time someone called me “sweetheart,” I knew sugar was love. And when I tasted my slice of the wedding cake, iced white and washed down with sweet champagne, don’t you know sugar was love. One day Evelina who worked for us showed up with her son Bubba and laughed, “Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet nature, but even so we raised a little Cain, and Daddy told her not to bring him back. He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people. She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working. And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke. Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five, insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle. Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned if any lyrics come out of them, baby. Black-and-white negatives from a picture history of the sugar trade develop in my dreams, a dozen able-bodied slaves hacking forward through a field of cane. Sweat trickles down from forehead into eye as they sheave up stalks and cart them to the mill where grinding iron rollers will express a thin sucrose solution that, when not refined, goes from blackstrap molasses on into rum, a demon conveniently negotiable for slaves. The master under the impression he owned these useful properties naturally never thought of offering them a piece of the wedding cake, the big white house that bubbling brown sugar built and paid for, unnaturally processed by Domino. Phillis Wheatley said the sweet Christ was brought here from Asia Minor to redeem an African child and maybe her master’s soul as well. She wrote as she lived, a model of refinement, yes, but black as Abel racing through the canebrake, demon bloodhounds baying in pursuit, until at last his brother caught him, expressed his rage, and rode back home to dinner. Tell it to Fats Domino, to those who live on Sugar Hill, tell it to unsuspecting Shug as soon as she is old enough to hear it. One day Evelina’s son waved goodbye and climbed on board a northbound train, black angels guiding him invisibly. In class he quoted a sentence from Jean Toomer: “Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.” My father died last fall at eighty-one. Love’s bitter, child, as often as it’s sweet. Mm-mm, I sure do have the blues today: Baby, will you give me some sugar?
Arp might have done a version in white marble, the model held aloft, in approximate awe: this tough cross-section oval of tusk, dense and cool as fossil cranium— preliminary bloodshed condonable if Inupiat hunters on King Island may follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky, echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater. Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so? Netted incisions black as an etching saw a way to scratch in living infinitives known since the Miocene to have animated the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump, and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc, salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... Farther along the bone conveyor belt a small ringed seal will never not be swimming, part-time landlubber, who may feel overshadowed by the donor walrus ahead. And by his scribal tusk, which stands in direct correspondence to the draftsman’s burin, skillful enough to score their tapeloop ostinato, no harp sonata, but, instead, the humpback whale’s yearning bassoon (still audible if you cup the keepsake to your ear and let it sound the depths).
The snow is deep on the ground.  Always the light falls Softly down on the hair of my belovèd. This is a good world. The war has failed. God shall not forget us. Who made the snow waits where love is. Only a few go mad. The sky moves in its whiteness Like the withered hand of an old king.  God shall not forget us. Who made the sky knows of our love. The snow is beautiful on the ground.  And always the lights of heaven glow  Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
The sleds of the children Move down the right slope. To the left, hazed in the tumbling air,  A thousand lights smudge Within the branches of the old forest,  Like colored moons in a well of milk. The sleds of the children Make no sound on the hard-packed snow.  Their bright cries are not heard  On that strange hill. The youngest are wrapped In cloth of gold, and their scarfs  Have been dipped in blood.  All the others, from the son  Of Tegos, who is the Bishop Of Black Church—near Tarn, On to the daughter of the least slut,  Are garbed in love's shining dress;  Naked little eels, they flash Across the amazed ice. And behind each sled There trots a man with his sex Held like a whip in his snaking hand. But no one sees the giant horse That climbs the steps which stretch forth  Between the calling lights and that hill  Straight up to the throne of God.  He is taller than the highest tree And his flanks steam under the cold moon.  The beat of his heart shakes the sky  And his reaching muzzle snuffles  At the most ancient star. * The innocent alone approach evil  Without fear; in their appointed flame  They acknowledge all living things.  The only evil is doubt; the only good  Is not death, but life. To be is to love.  This I thought as I stood while the snow  Fell in that bitter place, and the riders  Rode their motionless sleds into a nowhere  Of sleep. Ah, God, we can walk so easily,  Bed with women, do every business  That houses and roads are for, scratch  Our shanks and lug candles through These caves; but, God, we can't believe,  We can't believe in anything. Because nothing is pure enough. Because nothing will ever happen To make us good in our own sight.  Because nothing is evil enough. * I squat on my heels, raise my head  To the moon, and howl. I dig my nails into my sides, And laugh when the snow turns red.  As I bend to drink, I laugh at everything that anyone loves. All your damn horses climbing to heaven
We must be slow and delicate; return the policeman's stare with some esteem,  remember this is not a shadow play of doves and geese but this is now the time to write it down, record the words— I mean we should have left some pride of youth and not forget the destiny of men  who say goodbye to the wives and homes  they've read about at breakfast in a restaurant:  "My love."—without regret or bitterness  obtain the measure of the stride we make,  the latest song has chosen a theme of love  delivering us from all evil—destroy. . . ? why no. . . this too is fanciful. . . funny how  hard it is to be slow and delicate in this,  this thing of framing words to mark this grave  I mean nothing short of blood in every street  on earth can fitly voice the loss of these.
Wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait. Wait.  Wait.  Wait.   W a i t.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.   Wait.  Wait.  Wait.  NOW.
Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had  to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The  order arrived three minutes of. I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I  did it. Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right.  No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in  early childhood: I did it, I shaved him. Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town;  then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country;  then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an- other)—In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to  burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And  I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing  of any kind whatever. Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew  it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I). . . Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the  way it was when you started. Well. . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks,  I didn't want any job that bad.
1 I reached heaven and it was syrupy. It was oppressively sweet. Croaking substances stuck to my knees. Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest. I grabbed him and pasted him on my head.  I found God a gigantic fly paper. I stayed out of his way. I walked where everything smelled of burnt chocolate.  Meanwhile St. Michael was busy with his sword  hacking away at my hair. I found Dante standing naked in a blob of honey.  Bears were licking his thighs. I snatched St. Michael’s sword and quartered myself in a great circular adhesive.  My torso fell upon an elastic equilibrium. As though shot from a sling my torso whizzed at God fly paper. My legs sank into some unimaginable sog. My head, though weighed with the weight of St. Michael,  did not fall. Fine strands of multi-colored gum suspended it there. My spirit stopped by my snared torso. I pulled! I yanked! Rolled it left to right! It bruised! It softened! It could not free! The struggle of an Eternity! An Eternity of pulls! of yanks! Went back to my head, St. Michael had sucked dry my brainpan! Skull! My skull! Only skull in heaven! Went to my legs. St. Peter was polishing his sandals with my knees!  I pounced upon him! Pummeled his face in sugar in honey in marmalade!  Under each arm I fled with my legs! The police of heaven were in hot pursuit! I hid within the sop of St. Francis. Gasping in the confectionery of his gentility  I wept, caressing my intimidated legs. 2 They caught me. They took my legs away. They sentenced me in the firmament of an ass. The prison of an Eternity! An Eternity of labor! of hee-haws! Burdened with the soiled raiment of saints I schemed escape. Lugging ampullae its daily fill I schemed escape. I schemed climbing impossible mountains. I schemed under the Virgin’s whip. I schemed to the sound of celestial joy. I schemed to the sound of earth, the wail of infants,  the groans of men,  the thud of coffins.  I schemed escape. God was busy switching the spheres from hand to hand.  The time had come. I cracked my jaws.  Broke my legs. Sagged belly-flat on plow on pitchfork on scythe. My spirit leaked from the wounds. A whole spirit pooled. I rose from the carcass of my torment.  I stood in the brink of heaven. And I swear that Great Territory did quake  when I fell, free.
There’s a truth limits man A truth prevents his going any farther  The world is changing The world knows it’s changing Heavy is the sorrow of the day The old have the look of doom The young mistake their fate in that look  That is truth But it isn’t all truth Life has meaning And I do not know the meaning  Even when I felt it were meaningless I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning It wasn’t all frolic poesy There were dues to pay  Summoning Death and God  I’d a wild dare to tackle Them Death proved meaningless without Life Yes the world is changing  But Death remains the same  It takes man away from Life  The only meaning he knows  And usually it is a sad business  This Death I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy I am able to contradict my beliefs  I am able able Because I want to know the meaning of everything Yet sit I like a brokenness  Moaning: Oh what responsibility  I put on thee Gregory Death and God Hard hard it’s hard I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God  Life is a century  Death an instant
Inside the starboard window of his room in a boat at sea, the piece of earth he's scraped from a dead gull’s leg  sprouts eighty different species, green  under bell glass. By the sunlight  of the oil lamp he makes rain  as the wind picks up toward Chiloe,  Port Famine, Concepcion, and then Galapagos. Here he finds shipwrecked sailors’ epitaphs cut into the shell of an old tortoise  who’s tame enough to ride, too huge to slaughter. Here the birds are fearless. He can catch them with his hands, let them  perch on his finger before he breaks their necks and wraps them in his shirt and sets their eggs on branches drifting from the shoreline, island to island.  Now everywhere he meets himself. He’s tired, and half the world from home.  But his mind has entered the morning  the way all the animals kept in his cabin in jars along the wall grow  smaller in sequence until the window opens on the sea,  so that what he’ll remember are the wasted spaces, the desert rock spread out for miles  as if the earth were flat again,  dangerous at the horizon, where the stones, piled, shine against lava black. Dew pools in the evenings. A few pale leaves appear.
Am I a character in the dreams of the god Hermes the messenger?  Certainly many of my dreams  have nothing to do with the  common life around me. There  are never any automobiles or  airplanes in them. These  dreams belong to an age in  the distant past, to a time  perhaps when nothing was  written down, to the time of memory. I chose Hermes not out of  vanity but because from what  I’ve read about him he had a  pretty good time, was not  just a drunkard on Olympus.  In his traipsings delivering  divine messages he must have  met some pretty girls who  gave him pleasure. We know  that he invented the lyre  for the benefit of poets,  and Lucian relates in his Dialogues of the Dead that  he was the god of sleep and dreams. My dreams are not frightening,  they are not nightmares. But  their irrationality puzzles me. What is Hermes trying to tell me? Is he playing a game  with me? Last Monday night  I dreamt about a school for  young children who had heads  but no bodies. Last night it  was a cow that was galloping  in our meadow like a horse.  Another night, and this one  was a bit scary, I swam across  the lake with my head under  water, I didn’t have to breathe air. What is the message of these  dreams? Into what kind of world  is Hermes leading me? It’s not  the world described daily in the New York Times. A world of  shadows? A kind of levitation? How can I pray to Hermes to lay  off these senseless fantasies, tell him that I want real dreams  such as my shrink can explicate. I’ve looked up lustration in the dictionary. Its definition is not encouraging: “a prefatory  ceremony, performed as a preliminary  to entering a holy place.” That’s too impersonal. I want a man-to-man  talk with Hermes, telling him to  stop infesting my nights with his nonsense.
a sentimental curator has placed  two fragments of bronze Grecian   heads together boy and girl so that the faces black- ened by the three thousand years of   desert sand & sun seem to be whispering something  that the Gurgan lion & the wing-  ed dog of Azerbaijan must not hear but I have heard  them as I hear you now half way   around the world so simply & so quietly more like a child than like a woman making   love say to me in that soft lost near and distant voice  I’m happy now I’m happy oh don’t   move don’t go away.
Life kept rolling her over  like a piece of driftwood in the surf of an angry sea  she was intelligent and beau- tiful and well-off she made  friends easily yet she wasn’t able to put the pieces to- gether into any recognizable shape she wasn’t sure who  she wanted to be so she ended up being no one in par- ticular she made herself al- most invisible she was the  person you loved so much who really wasn’t there at all.
How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a love cave around her face. Return and return again. How when the lamplight was lowered she pressed against him, twining her fingers in his. Return and return again. How their legs swam together like dolphins and their toes played like little tunnies. Return and return again. How she sat beside him cross-legged, telling him stories of her childhood. Return and return again. How she closed her eyes when his were open, how they breathed together, breathing each other. Return and return again. How they fell into slumber, their bodies curled together like two spoons. Return and return again. How they went together to Otherwhere, the fairest land they had ever seen. Return and return again. O best of all nights, return and return again.
Catullus is my master and I mix  a little acid and a bit of honey   in his bowl love is my subject & the lack of love  which lack is what makes evil a   poet must strike Catullus could rub words so hard  together their friction burned a   heat that warms us now 2000 years away I roll the  words around my mouth & count the   letters in each line thus eye and ear contend in- side the poem and draw its move-  ment tight Milton thought rhyme was vulgar I agree  yet sometimes if it’s hidden in   the line a rhyme will richen tone the thing I most  despise is quote poetic unquote   diction I prefer to build with plain brown bricks of common talk American talk then   set 1 Roman stone among them for a key I know Ca- tullus knew a poem is like a blow   an impact strik- ing where you least expect this I  believe and yet with me a poem   is finally just  a natural thing.
(for Vanessa) Melissa and I were sitting  by the little lake in Green  Park in London playing  “swapping minds.” It’s an old game that came down from  the Lowlands. It was a fine  day so we had brought  a little picnic. Melissa  makes wonderful pâté, as good as anything from Fortnum  & Masson. Yummy. And we had  a half bottle of Chardonnay  between us. Here is how the game of  “swapping minds” goes. It’s  not a child’s game, it’s  very intellectual, or should  I say psychological. Just  imagine Melissa and I are  talking. She says something  to me, “James why are you  always so arrogant?” But,  obviously that’s not what  she is thinking. To answer  her I must try to imagine  what she was thinking when  she asked that. I must swap  minds with her. I ventured the following:  “Melissa, you have the most lovely white skin in England,  you must be careful  not to get sunburned.Melissa: “James, why do you  pretend you are Scots when  you’re really of Irish descent?”James: “Melissa, are you  remembering the handsome  Russian boy you met in the  Hermitage on your trip to  Russia and he took you to have  an ice cream with him?”Melissa: “James, did the other boys in school tease  you because you were so bad  at games?”James: “Do you really love  me or are you just flirting?”Melissa: “I’m sorry, James,  but the response is in your  mind, not in mine.” That was the end of the  “swapping game” for that  day, and such a happy day  it was, there in Green Park,  watching the ducks on the  pond.
This Earth the king said Looking at the ground;This England. But we drive A Sunday paradise Of parkway, trees flow into trees and the grass  Like water by the very asphalt crown And summit of things In the flow of traffic The family cars, in the dim Sound of the living The noise of increase to which we owe What we possess. We cannot reconcile ourselves.  No one is reconciled, tho we spring From the ground together— And we saw the seed, The minuscule Sequoia seed In the museum by the tremendous slab  Of the tree. And imagined the seed  In soil and the growth quickened So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing  Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green  Needles of a redwood until the tree  Stood in the room without soil— How much of the earth's Crust has lived The seed’s violence! The shock is metaphysical. For the wood weathers. Drift wood And the foot print in the forest grow older. This is not our time, not what we mean, it is a time Passing, the curl at the cutwater, The enormous prow Outside in the weather. In that breeze,  The sense of that passage, Is desertion, Betrayal, that we are not innocent Of loneliness as Pierrot, Pierrette chattering  Unaware tho we imagine nothing Beyond the streets of the living— A sap in the limbs. Mary, Mary, we turn to the children As they will turn to the children Wanting so much to have created happiness  As if a stem to the leaves— —we had camped in scrub, A scrub of the past, the fringes of towns Neither towns nor forest, nothing ours. And Linda five,  Maybe six when the mare grazing  In the meadow came to her.  ‘Horse,’ she said, whispering  By the roadside With the cars passing. Little girl welcomed, Learning welcome. The rest is— Whatever—whatever—remote Mechanics, endurance,  The piers of the city In the sea. Here are whole buildings Razed, whole blocks  Of a city gone Among old streets And the old boroughs, ourselves Among these streets where Petra beat A washpan out her window gathering A crowd like a rescue. Relief, As they said it, The Relief. Petra Decisive suddenly among her children  In those crumbling bedrooms, Petra,  Petra—. And how imagine it? or imagine  Coughlin in the streets, Pelley and the Silver Shirts? The medieval sense seems innocent, the very Ceremony of innocence that was drowned.  It was not. But how imagine it Of streets boarded and vacant where no time will hatch  Now chairs and walls, Floors, roofs, the joists and beams, The woodwork, window sills In sun in a great weight of brick.
The householder issuing to the street Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff  Exterior. ‘Peninsula Low lying in the bay And wooded—’ Native now Are the welder and the welder’s arc In the subway’s iron circuits: We have not escaped each other, Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles  Painfully in the new depths  Of the subway, and painfully  We shift our eyes. The bare rails  And black walls contain Labor before her birth, her twisted Precarious birth and the men  Laborious, burly—She sits  Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly,  Deliberately she sees An anchor’s blunt fluke sink  Thru coins and coin machines,  The ancient iron and the voltage In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep Harbors into harbor sand.
I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses. Difficult to approach the water below the pier Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier A steel wall: tons in the water, Width. The hand for holding, Legs for walking, The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air! Become the realm of nations. My love, my love, We are endangered Totally at last. Look Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space  Which is viviparous: Place of the mind And eye. Which can destroy us,  Re-arrange itself, assert Its own stone chain reaction.
I dreamed myself of their people, I am of their people,  I thought they watched me that I watched them  that they watched the sun and the clouds for the cities  are no longer mine image images of existence (or song of myself?) and the roads for the light  in the rear-view mirror is not  death but the light of other lives tho if I stumble on a rock I speak  of rock if I am to say anything anything  if I am to tell of myself splendor of the roads secrecy of paths for a word like a glass sphere encloses  the word opening  and opening myself and I am sick  for a moment with fear let the magic infants speak we who have brought steel and stone again  and again into the cities in that word blind word must speak  and speak the magic infants’ speech driving  northward the populist north slowly in the sunrise the lapping of shallow  waters tongues of the inlets glisten like fur in the low tides all that childhood envied the sounds  of the ocean over the flatlands poems piers foolhardy structures and the lives the ingenious  lives the winds squall from the grazing  ranches’ wandering fences young workmen’s loneliness on the structures has touched  and touched the heavy tools tools  in our hands in the clamorous country birth- light savage light of the landscape magic page the magic  infants speak
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones  In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,  And start their silent swinging, one by one.  Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,  And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.  His belly close to ground. I see the blade,  Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold, Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old, And cotton, scarce as any southern snow, Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow, Failed in its function as the autumn rake; Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take All water from the streams; dead birds were found In wells a hundred feet below the ground— Such was the season when the flower bloomed. Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed Significance. Superstition saw Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year.
Now you hear what the house has to say.  Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,  the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,  and voices mounting in an endless drone of small complaints like the sounds of a family  that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore. But now you must listen to the things you own,  all that you’ve worked for these past years,  the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,  the moving parts about to come undone,  and twisting in the sheets remember all the faces you could not bring yourself to love. How many voices have escaped you until now,  the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,  the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark.  The terrible clarity this moment brings,  the useless insight, the unbroken dark.
And in the end, all that is really left Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable— That somehow we deserved something better.  That somewhere along the line things Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s  In charge, which certainly would have set  Everything straight between us and the world, Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.  Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.  Or sent by mistake to an old address  Whose new tenant put it on her dresser  With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting  To give it to the landlord to forward.  And we still wait like children who have sent  Two weeks’ allowance far away  To answer an enticing advertisement  From a crumbling, yellow magazine, Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,  Checking the postbox with impatient faith  Even on days when mail is never brought.
Your jewel box of white balsa strips and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes  stands open where you keep it shelved  in the bathroom. Morning and evening  I see you comb its seawrack tangle of shell,  stone, wood, glass, metal, bone, seed  for the bracelet, earring, necklace, brooch  or ring you need. Here's brass from Nepal,  a bangle of African ivory and chased silver  for your wrist, a twist of polished sandalwood seeds, deep scarlet, gleaming like the fossil tears of some long-gone exotic bird with ruby crest, sapphire claws. Adriatic  blue, this lapis lazuli disc will brighten  the pale of your throat, and on this small  alabaster seal-ring the phantom of light  inscribes a woman tilting an amphora, clear  as day, almost as old as Alexander. To the  ebony velvet brim of your hat you'll pin  a perfect oval of abalone, a dark-whorled  underwater sheen to lead us to work  this foggy February morning. We'll leave  your nest of brightness in the bathroom  between the mirror and the laundry-basket  where my dirty shirts sprawl like drunks amongst your skirts and blouses. Lace- work frills and rainbow silk pastels, your panties  foam over the plastic brim, and on the shower-rail  your beige and talc-white bras dangle by one strap  like the skinned Wicklow rabbits I remember  hanging from hooks outside the victuallers'  big windows. We've been domesticated strangely,  love, according to our lights: when you walk by me now, naked and not quite dry  from the shower, I flatten my two hands  on your wet flank, and wonder at the tall  column of flesh you are, catching the faint  morning light that polishes you pale as  alabaster. You're warm, and stay a moment  still like that, as though we were two planets  pausing in their separate orbits, pendant, on the point of crossing. For one pulse-stroke  they take stock of their bodies before returning to the journey. Dressed,  you select a string of chipped amber to hang round your neck, a pair of star-shaped  earrings, a simple ring of jet-black lustrous onyx. Going down the stairs and  out to the fogbound street, you light my way.
A spear of zinc light wounds stone and water, stripping the scarlet fuchsia bells and yellow buttercups of any discretion, so they confess their end in this  luminous declaration that they are no more than shortlived absolutes in living colour, bright eyes  open against the dark. A light in which everything is exact-edged, flat, no bulk or heft to it, yet  decisively itself in outline: islands, the matte grey sea, and miles away the fine glowing line of the horizon  that like desire will be the last to go. The mountain's immense green and brown triangle reflects on itself  in lakewater, doubling its shape and colour there, its stillness something drastic, an aspect of dread—as if  a lover tried to remember that loved other body by looking in the mirror. Almost at random, shadows  fall across the small roads—which can never follow their own bent, but always take the grain of the hill,  turning to its every tilt and inclination—and evening starts to seep into hedges and hung washing: it is  the brown colour of a bat's wing, and silent as a bat is. Even your own family now would have to be streaked with it, their faces by degrees bleeding away in the gather-dark, whole patches of them blackening  like zones of a map thrown on smouldering embers.
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples draw the young men's rooster eyes where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,  breathing fire, holding for dear life. Green almonds in their shells: she knifes them open one at a time and  hands him a slick teardrop, cool white  tasting cool white. Nothing compares with such austerities, although  the skull's honeycomb of bone will break their hearts, who need hearts  like a bird's wishbone, to bend, unbend at every feathery beat—wishbone hearts, or something fleet and light as an ostrich's  leg-bone, bearing him to where, panicked  with grief, he can bury his head in sand.Papyrus light: a scarf with black parrots on it  lifts in the breeze, and a real rare bird is about to fly—his head in the clouds, his life  shrouded in daylight he keeps breaking.
A fly wounds the water but the wound  soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter  overhead, dropping now and then toward  the outward-radiating evidence of food. The green haze on the trees changes  into leaves, and what looks like smoke  floating over the neighbor’s barn  is only apple blossoms. But sometimes what looks like disaster is disaster: the day comes at last, and the men struggle with the casket  just clearing the pews.
For Donald Clark Drugged and drowsy but not asleep I heard my blind roommate's daughter  helping her with her meal: “What's that? Squash?” “No. It's spinach.” Back from a brain-scan, she dozed  to the sound of the Soaps: adultery,  amnesia, shady business deals,  and long, white hospital halls....  No separation between life and art. I heard two nurses whispering: Mr. Malcomson had died. An hour later one of them came to say  that a private room was free. A chill spring breeze perturbed the plastic drape.  I lay back on the new bed,  and had a vision of souls stacked up like pelts under my soul, which was ill— so heavy with grief it kept the others from rising. No varicolored tubes serpentined beneath the covers;  I had the vital signs of a healthy,  early-middle-aged woman. There was nothing to cut or dress,  remove or replace. A week of stupor. Sun and moon rose and set over the small enclosed  court, the trees.... The doctor’s face appeared and disappeared over the foot of the bed. By slow degrees  the outlandish sadness waned. Restored to my living room I looked at the tables, chairs, and pictures  with something like delight,  only pale, faint—as from a great height. I let the phone ring; the mail  accrued unopened on the table in the hall.
Rebuked, she turned and ran uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner  arsonist, held a match to her brain.  She observed her life: against her will  it survived the unwavering flame. The barn was empty of animals.  Only a swallow tilted near the beams, and bats hung from the rafters the roof sagged between. Her breath became steady where, years past, the farmer cooled  the big tin amphoræ of milk. The stone trough was still filled with water: she watched it  and received its calm. So it is when we retreat in anger:  we think we burn alone and there is no balm. Then water enters, though it makes  no sound.
It is always the dispossessed— someone driving a huge rusted Dodge  that’s burning oil, and must cost  twenty-five dollars to fill. Today before seven I saw, through the morning fog, his car leave the road,  turning into the field. It must be his day off, I thought, or he’s out of work and drinking, or getting stoned.  Or maybe as much as anything he wanted to see where the lane through the hay goes. It goes to the bluff overlooking  the lake, where we’ve cleared  brush, swept the slippery oak leaves from the path, and tried to destroy  the poison ivy that runs over the scrubby, sandy knolls. Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear  gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car  needing a new muffler backs out to the road, headlights withdrawing  from the lowest branches of the pines. Next day I find beer cans, crushed;  sometimes a few fish too small  to bother cleaning and left on the moss to die; or the leaking  latex trace of outdoor love.... Once I found the canvas sling chairs  broken up and burned. Whoever laid the fire gathered stones  to contain it, like a boy pursuing a merit badge, who has a dream of work,  and proper reward for work.
Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving  up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing  as a woman takes up her needles  and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned  in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den.  Let the wind die down. Let the shed  go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop  in the oats, to air in the lung  let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t  be afraid. God does not leave us  comfortless, so let evening come.
Searching for pillowcases trimmed  with lace that my mother-in-law once made, I open the chest of drawers  upstairs to find that mice have chewed the blue and white linen  dishtowels to make their nest, and bedded themselves among embroidered dresser scarves  and fingertip towels. Tufts of fibers, droppings like black  caraway seeds, and the stains of birth  and afterbirth give off the strong  unforgettable attar of mouse that permeates an old farmhouse  on humid summer days. A couple of hickory nuts roll around as I lift out the linens, while a hail of black sunflower shells falls on the pillowcases, yellow with age, but intact. I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun  to dry. There’s almost no one left who knows how to crochet lace....  The bright-eyed squatters are not here.  They’ve scuttled out to the fields  for summer, as they scuttled in for winter—along the wall, from chair  to skirted chair, making themselves  flat and scarce while the cat dozed with her paws in the air, and we read the mail or evening paper, unaware.
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.breaking. / When In A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), the line between these two lines reads: "and smell the iron and velvet bloom of heat." While this line was deleted, the version in A Ballad of Remembrance is still a sonnet. There are other variants between both versions; mostly relating to where the line breaks. When breaking. / When In A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), the line between these two lines reads:"and smell the iron and velvet bloom of heat." While this line was deleted, the version in A Ballad of Remembrance is still a sonnet. There are other variants between both versions; mostly relating to where the line breaks. the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him,who had who had In A Ballad of Remembrance: who’d driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austereaustere Grave, sober; and lacking adornment and lonely offices?
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Nobody heard him, the dead man,  But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought  And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larkinglarking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around. And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,  They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always  (Still the dead one lay moaning)  I was much too far out all my life  And not waving but drowning.
1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished  as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch. If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby.  All you can eat for a buck at the diner is cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee.  Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs in the war and walked with a limp at parade time.  Until it burned, the old depot was a disco. A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines.  Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge. If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome  than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains. 2. GRAVEYARD Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare  off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets  lean on their guns. The score is one to one.  Everybody’s nervous but the inmates, who joke around—they jostle, they hassle  the team of boys in trouble and their dads.  It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump. The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no one can recall the last time they got one  over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose.  And the warden springs for drinks all around— something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds  of soda pop poured over ice into each one’s cup, until the cup overflows. 3. COUNCIL MEETING The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s to build another fast-food burger shack on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek,  or to permit the conservationist well-to-do citizenry to keep their green  space and thus assure long, unsullied views  from their redwood decks, picture windows,  and backyards chemically rich as golf greens. The paper’s rife with spats, accusations,  pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises  flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too,  but want it five miles away where people don’t care about egrets, willows, good views.  Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call  out for pizza, somebody brew some tea.  Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe. 4. CHARMING The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself. Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang.  Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make  mushrooms out of plywood for the yard, and the corner grocery’s specialty this week is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread  for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh each morning at the small patisserie across the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me.  Legend has it that the five chipped divots  in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar— are what remains of the town’s last bad man. His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now  Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.
It is to Emerson I have turned now, damp February, for he has written of the moral harmony of nature. The key to every man is his thought. But Emerson, half angel, suffers his dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life suffer from the warfare between the force & delicacy of her soul & the weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th, 1832, of an evening strange with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin. —Emerson looking in, clutching his key. Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing as if stunned by persistent cold wind or leaning over, as from rough breath. I have brought my little one, bundled and gloved, to the lonely place to let her run, hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened along the ground hard from a winter drought. I have come out for the first time in weeks still full of fever, insomnia-fogged, to track her flags of breath where she’s dying to vanish on the hillsides of bramble and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal, one or two sparrows, something with yellow— scatter in small explosions of ice. Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased by the physical crunch of the ground, damp from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot, that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath too rocky to cultivate, covered thick with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled, —that half of him for whom nature was thought. Kate has found things to deepen her horror for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick bramble, or the bramble itself enough to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood- colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa. What does she see when she looks at such things? I do not know what is so wrong with me that my body has erupted, system by system, sick unto itself. I do not know what I have done, nor what she thinks when she turns toward her ill father. How did Emerson behold of his Ellen, un- embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands? Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own natures. Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night with his journal, the awful natural fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been deeper sacrifice than a sacrament. Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down like light snow on the beautiful hills? Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . . —His other half worried by the wording.
Always the caravan of sound made us halt  to admire the swinging and the swift go-by  of beasts with enormous hooves and heads  beating the earth or reared against the sky. Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see what has become of the colossal forms: everything happened at the instant of passing: the hoof-beat, the whinny, the bells on the harness,  the creak of the wheels, the monkey’s fandango  in double time over the elephant’s back. When the marching was over and we were free to go on  there was never before us a dungfall or a track on the road-sands of any kind: only the motion of footprints being made crossing and recrossing in the trampled mind.
There is no age, this darkness and decay Is by a radiant spirit cast aside, Young with the ageless youth that yesterday Bent to the yoke of flesh immortal pride. What though in time of thunder and black cloud The Spirit of the Innermost recedes Into the depths of Being, stormy browed, Obscured by a long life of dreams and deeds— There is no age—the swiftly passing hour That measures out our days of pilgrimage And breaks the heart of every summer flower, Shall find again the child’s soul in the sage. There is no age, for youth is the divine; And the white radiance of the timeless soul Burns like a silver lamp in that dark shrine That is the tired pilgrim’s ultimate goal.
I was the child that passed long hours away Chopping red beetroot in the hay-piled barn; Now must I spend the wind-blown April day Minding great looms and tying knots in yarn. Once long ago I tramped through rain and slush In brown waves breaking up the stubborn soil, I wove and wove the twilight’s purple hush To fold about the furrowed heart of toil. Strange fires and frosts burnt out the seasons’ dross, I watched slow Powers the woven cloth reveal, While God stood counting out His gain and loss, And Day and Night pushed on the heavy wheel. Held close against the breast of living Powers A little pulse, yet near the heart of strife, I followed the slow plough for hours and hours Minding through sun and shower the loom of life. The big winds, harsh and clear and strong and salt, Blew through my soul and all the world rang true, In all things born I knew no stain or fault, My heart was soft to every flower that grew. The cabbages in my small garden patch Were rooted in the earth’s heart; wings unseen Throbbed in the silence under the dark thatch, And brave birds sang long ere the boughs were green.
The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea, And there is traffic in it and many a horse and cart, But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me, And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart. A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o’er the hill, And there is glory in it and terror on the wind, But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way, Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal, But the Little Waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray, And the Little Waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.
Deep in the soul there throbs the secret pain Of one homesick for dear familiar things, When Spring winds rock the waves of sunlit rain And on the grass there falls the shadow of wings. How should one bend one’s dreams to the dark clay Where carven beauty mixed with madness dwells? And men who fear to die fear not to slay, And Life has built herself ten thousand hells. No wave that breaks in music on the shore Can purify the tiger’s bloodstained den, The worms that crawl about the dark world’s core Cry out aloud against the deeds of men. Alas, the peace of these still hours and deep Is but a dream that wanders from afar, And the great Dreamer, turning in His sleep, Smothers in darkness all our little star. Yet in the gentle spirit of the wise Light flashes out through many a simple thing, The tired ploughman, with impassive eyes, Knows in his heart that he was once a king. He sees in dreams the crown long lost and dear, That glittered on a fallen spirit’s brow, A shattered gleam from some far shining sphere Has dazed the eyes of him who drives the plough. The long brown furrows of the broken soil Lead in straight lines unto the sunset's gates; On high green hills, beyond the reach of toil, The vision of the twilight broods and waits. The silence folded in about the heart Whispers strange longings to the broken soul, That lingers in a lonely place apart, Stretching vain hands to clasp the secret whole.
The darkness draws me, kindly angels weep Forlorn beyond receding rings of light, The torrents of the earth’s desires sweep My soul through twilight downward into night. Once more the light grows dim, the vision fades, Myself seems to myself a distant goal, I grope among the bodies’ drowsy shades, Once more the Old Illusion rocks my soul. Once more the Manifold in shadowy streams Of falling waters murmurs in my ears, The One Voice drowns amid the roar of dreams That crowd the narrow pathway of the years. I go to seek the starshine on the,waves, To count the dewdrops on the grassy hill, I go to gather flowers that grow on graves, The world’s wall closes round my prisoned will. Yea, for the sake of the wild western wind The sphered spirit scorns her flame-built throne, Because of primroses, time out of mind, The Lonely turns away from the Alone. Who once has loved the cornfield’s rustling sheaves, Who once has heard the gentle Irish rain Murmur low music in the growing leaves, Though he were god, comes back to earth again. Oh Earth! green wind-swept Eirinn, I would break The tower of my soul’s initiate pride For a gray field and a star-haunted lake, And those wet winds that roam the country side. I who have seen am glad to close my eyes, I who have soared am weary of my wings, I seek no more the secret of the wise, Safe among shadowy, unreal human things. Blind to the gleam of those wild violet rays That burn beyond the rainbow's circle dim, Bound by dark nights and driven by pale days, The sightless slave of Time’s imperious whim; Deaf to the flowing tide of dreams divine That surge outside the closed gates of birth, The rhythms of eternity, too fine To touch with music the dull ears of earth— I go to seek with humble care and toil The dreams I left undreamed, the deeds undone, To sow the seed and break the stubborn soil, Knowing no brightness whiter than the sun. Content in winter if the fire burns clear And cottage walls keep out the creeping damp, Hugging the Old Illusion warm and dear, The Silence and the Wise Book and the Lamp.
(A Reincarnation Phantasy) This was the story never told By one who cared not for the world’s gold. One of the idle and wise, A beggar with unfathomable eyes. One who had nothing but dreams to give To men who are eager to labour and live. For the world in its wisdom deep and dim Had taken all pleasure and treasure from him. This was the story his soul could tell, Immortal and unfathomable. There was no record in his brain, He did not know he should live again. But there was one who read the whole, Buried deep in a dead man’s soul. “In the days of Atlantis, under the wave, I was a slave, the child of a slave. When the towers of Atlantis fell, I died and was born again in hell. From that sorrowful prison I did escape And hid myself in a hero’s shape. But few years had I of love or joy, A Trojan I fell at the Siege of Troy. I came again in a little while, An Israelite slave on the banks of the Nile. Then did I comfort my grief-laden heart. With the magic lore and Egyptian art. Fain was I to become Osiris then, But soon I came back to the world of men. By the Ganges I was an outcast born, A wanderer and a child of scorn. By the Waters of Babylon I wept, My harp amongst the willows slept. In the land of Greece I opened my eyes, To reap the fields of Plotinus the Wise. When the great light shattered the world’s closed bars, I was a shepherd who gazed at the stars. For lives that were lonely, obscure, apart, I thank the Hidden One, in my heart, That always and always under the sun I went forth to battle and never won. A slayer of men, I was doomed to abide, For ever and aye, on the losing side. Whenever. I dream of the wonderful goal, I thank the hidden God in my soul That though I have always been meanly born, A tiller of earth and a reaper of corn, Whenever through ages past and gone The light divine for a moment shone, Whenever piercing laborious night A ray fell straight from the Light of Light, Whenever amid fierce, lightning and storm The divine moved in a human form, Whenever the earth in her cyclic course Shook at the touch of an unknown force, Whenever the cloud of dull years grew thin And a great star called to the light within, I have braved storm and labour and sun To stand at the side that Holy One. No matter how humble my birth has been, There are few who have seen what I have seen. Mine the shepherd’s star and the reaper’s reward, And the dream of him who fell by the sword. One thing I have learned the long years through, To know the false words from the true. The slave who toiled on the banks of the Nile With wisdom gladdened his long exile. From Buddha at eve by the Ganges’ side An outcast learnt the worth of the world’s pride. To the tired reaper, when day was done, Did Plotinus unveil the hidden sun. Amongst the stars, on a Syrian night, A ragged shepherd found the Light of Light. From dream to dream, o’er valley and hill, I followed the Lord Christ's wandering will. Kings there are who would barter a throne For the long day’s toil and the light unknown, The deed of the strong and the word of the wise, And the night under cold and starry skies— The white light of dawn on the hillside shed On Him who had nowhere to lay His head. Behold there are kings who would change with me, For the love of the ancient mystery. Shepherd and reaper and slave I have been, There are few who have seen what I have seen. I have been a gipsy since those days, And lived again in the wild wood ways. Wise with the lore of those hidden things, Learnt from Lord Christ in His wanderings, Beggar and reaper and shepherd and slave, I am one who rests not in any grave; I will follow each stormy light divine, And the secret of all things shall be mine. These things have I seen, would you bid me mourn That I was never an Emperor born?”
Lo, in my soul there lies a hidden lake, High in the mountains, fed by rain and snow, The sudden thundering avalanche divine, And the bright waters’ everlasting flow, Far from the highways’ dusty glare and heat. Dearer it is and holier, for Christ’s sake, Than his own windy lake in Palestine, For there the little boats put out to sea Without him, and no fisher hears his call, Yea, on the desolate shores of Galilee No man again shall see his shadow fall. Yet here the very voice of the one Light Haunts with sharp ecstasy each little wind That stirs still waters on a moonlit night, And sings through high trees growing in the mind, And makes a gentle rustling in the wheat. . . . Yea, in the white dawn on this happy shore, With the lake water washing at his feet, He stands alive and radiant evermore, Whose presence makes the very East wind kind, And turns to heaven the soul’s green-lit retreat.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
After the steaming bodies swept through the hungry streets of swollen cities; after the vast pink spawning of family poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies; after the gamble of latex and diaphragms and pills; I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge of Increase and Multiply, made affirmation: Yes, deliver us from complicity. And after the precision of scalpels, I woke to a landscape of sunshine where the catbird mates for life and maps trace out no alibis—stepped into a morning of naked truth, where acts mean what they really are: the purity of loving for the sake of love.
1 “must represent the governess  for, of course, the creature itself  could not inspire such terror.” staring at me fixedly, no  trace of recognition. “when the window opened of its own accord.  In the big walnut tree were six or seven wolves ... strained attention. They were white.”  (The fear of cloudy skies.) like strangers! After five years Misgiving. Misdoubt.2 (The fear that one is dreaming.) The moon was shining, suddenly  everything around me appeared  (The fear of) unfamiliar. Wild vista inside or near the home. (Dread of bearing a monster.) If I failed to overlook the torn cushions, three teapots side by side,  strewn towels, socks, papers— both foreign and stale. 3 when I saw the frame was rotten,  crumbling away from the glass, in spots, in other places still attached  with huge globs of putty. The doctor forced me to repeat the word.  Chimera. Cold feet. scared and unreal looking at buildings.  The thin Victorians with scaly paint,  their flimsy backporches linked by skeletal stairways.4 After five years (The fear that you are not at home.) I was sitting in the alcove where I never sit  when I noticed a single eye, crudely drawn in pencil,  in a corner near the floor. The paint was blistering— beneath it I saw white.5 Sparrows settle on the sagging wires.  (Fear of sights not turned to words.) Horrific. Grisly.  “Rumplestiltskin!” Not my expression. Not my net of veins  beneath thin skin. (A morbid dread of throbbing.)  Of its own accord
There were distinctive dips and shivers in the various foliage, syncopated, almost cadenced in the way that once made him invent “understanding.”  * Now the boss could say “parameters” and mean something like “I’ll pinch.” By repeating the gesture exactly the woman awakened an excited suspicion in the infant. When he awakened she was just returning from one of her little trips. It’s common to confuse the distance with flirtation: that expectant solemnity which seems to invite a kiss.  * He stroked her carapace with his claw. They had developed a code in which each word appeared to refer to some abdicated function. Thus, in a department store, Petite Impressions might neighbor Town Square. But he exaggerated it by mincing words like “micturition,” setting scenes in which the dainty lover would pretend to leave.  * Was it sadness or fear? He still wasn’t back. The act of identification, she recognized, was always a pleasure, but this lasting difference between sense and recognition made her unhappy or afraid. Once she was rewarded by the beams of headlights flitting in play.
The doll told me  to exist. It said, “Hypnotize yourself.” It said time would be  transfixed.  * Now the optimist sees an oak  shiver and a girl whiz by  on a bicycle with a sense of pleasurable  suspense. She budgets herself  with leafy prestidigitation. I too am a segmentalist.  * But I’ve dropped  more than an armful of groceries or books downstairs into a train station. An acquaintance says  she colors her hair so people will help her  when this happens. To refute her argument,  I must wake up and remember my hair’s  already dyed.  * As a mentalist,  I must suffer lapses then repeat myself  in a blind trial. I must write  punchlines only I  can hear and only after  I’ve passed on
1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand. That it represents the true direction of the wind. Beach grass, tousled phragmite. Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing. An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery. The cranberry bushes biting down to survive. And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic. And the earless roaring in the shape of a sphere. A baritone wind, tuned to the breath of the clouds. Pushing sand that made a hilly prison of time. For wind and water both move inland. Abrading scrub — the stunted, the dwarfed, the bantam. A fine sandpaper, an eraser as wide as the horizon. Itself made of galaxies, billions against the grain. Sand: the mortal infinitude of a single rock.   2. Walking in the Drowning Forest Pitch pine, thirty-five-foot oaks to their necks in sand. That the ocean signals the lighthouse. Gull feathers call to the fox that left them behind. Impressions of deer feet, dog feet and gull claws. The piping plover in seclusion. Somewhere the blind owl to be healed at sunset. Here is artistry beyond self-flattery. A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain. A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense. To which the crab comes sideways. With which the sunken ship shares its secrets. From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one. He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar. He knows, who has worn the whitecaps. Who has slipped from the ferry or leaped from the bridge. To be spoken of, though no one knows.
The Israeli Navy, sailing to the end of the world, stocked with grain and books black with God’s verse, turned back, rather than sail on the Sabbath. Six days, was the consensus, was enough for anyone. So the world, it was concluded, was three days wide in each direction, allowing three days back. And Saturdays were given over to keeping close, while Sundays the Navy, all decked out in white and many-colored skullcaps, would sail furiously, trying to go off the deep end. Yo-ho-ho, would say the sailors, for six days. While on the shore their women moaned. For years, their boats were slow, and all show. And they turned into families on the only land they knew.
Ethics without faith, excuse me, is the butter and not the bread. You can’t nourish them all, the dead pile up at the hospital doors. And even they are not so numerous as the mothers come in maternity. The Provider knows his faults— love of architecture and repair— but will not fall into them for long: he can’t afford the adolescent luxury, the fellowship of the future looks greedily toward his family. The black keys fit black cylinders in the locks in holes in the night. He had a skeleton key once, a rubber arm and complete confidence. Now, as head of the family, he is inevitably on the wrong side looking out.
Such a book must contain— it always does!—a disclaimer. I make no such. For here I have collected all the best— the lily from the field among them, forget-me-nots and mint weed, a rose for whoever expected it, and a buttercup for the children to make their noses yellow. Here is clover for the lucky to roll in, and milkweed to clatter, a daisy for one judgment, and a violet for when he loves you or if he loves you not and why not. Those who sniff and say no, These are the wrong ones (and there always are such people!)— let them go elsewhere, and quickly! For you and I, who have made it this far, are made happy by occasions requiring orchids, or queenly arrangements and even a bird-of-paradise, but happier still by the flowers of circumstance, cattails of our youth, field grass and bulrush. I have included the devil’s paintbrush but only as a peacock among barn fowl.
1 One man held the huge pig down and the other stuck an ice pick into the jugular, which is when we started to pay attention. The blood rose ten feet with force while the sow swam on its back as if to cut its own neck. Its fatty back smacked the slippery cement while the assassins shuffled to keep their balance, and the bloody fountain rose and fell back and rose less and less high, until the red plume reentered the pig at the neck, and the belly collapsed and the pig face went dull.2 I knew the pig was the butcher’s, whose game lived mainly behind our garage. Sometimes turkeys, always roosters and sheep. Once the windmill turned two days without stopping. The butcher would walk in his apron straight for the victim. The others would scratch and babble and get in the way. Then the butcher would lead the animal to the back door of his shop, stopping to kill it on a stump. It was always evening, after closing. The sea breeze would be rising, cloaking the hour in brine.3 The pig we saw slaughtered was more than twice anything shut up in the patch we trespassed to make havoc. Since the butcher was Italian, not Jewish, that would be his pig. Like the barber who carried a cigar box of bets to the stationery store, like the Greek who made sweets and hid Greek illegals, immigrant “submarines,” the butcher had a business, his business, by which he took from our hands the cleaver and serrated knife for the guts, and gave us back in butcher paper and outer layers of brown wrapping our lives for their cries.4 Hung up to drain, the great pig, hacked into portions, looked like a puzzle we could put together in the freezer to make a picture of a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things when we looked.
The heavy, wet, guttural small-plane engine fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness about where the airport should be. I take a lot for granted, not pleased to be living under the phlegm- soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets and live elsewhere in Clean Zones, but figuring the air is full of sorrows. I don’t blame the quick use of the entire earth on the boozy pilot come down to get a dose of cobalt for his cancer. He’s got a little life left, if he doesn’t have to take all day to reach it. With the black patches inside him, and the scars and the streaks and the sick stomach, his life is more and more like that of the lowliest child chimney sweep in the mind of the great insensible, William Blake. William Blake, the repeated one, Blake, half mad, half remembered, who knew his anatomy, down to the little-observed muscle in the shoulder that lifts the wing. The little London chimney sweeper reaches up and reaches down. In his back, every vertebra is separated from the long hours of stretching. With one deep, tired breath, the lungs go black. By the Holiday Company crane, adding a level to the hospital, on the highest land in the county, heavy sits the pure-white Air Care helicopter, with its bulging eye. It has kept many going, a good buy, something. Now someone I know says Blake in anger, angry for his brother in the factory and his sister on the ward, but tonight I have no more anger than the muscle that lifts my knee when I walk. Another pleads with the ocean that the words for suffering and trouble take place in a sound that will be all sounds and in the tidal roll of all our lives and every event, but I am silent by water, and am less to such power than a failed lung. And I think it is only a clever trick to know that one thing may be contained in another. Hence, Blake in the sweep, one in the ground in one in the air, myself in the clinic for runaway cells, now and later.
As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water is how a man may change and still hour by hour continue in his job. There in the mirror he appears to be on fire but here at the office he is dust. So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains, he stands easily on the pavement and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others, and life stands on the brink. It rains or it doesn’t, or it rains and it rains again. But let it go on raining for forty days and nights or let the sun bake the ground for as long, and it isn’t life, just life, anymore, it’s living. In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days, it sometimes happens that a man has changed so slowly that he slips away before anyone notices and lives and dies before anyone can find out.
Of the sleeves, I remember their weight, like wet wool, on my arms, and the empty ends which hung past my hands. Of the body of the shirt, I remember the large buttons and larger buttonholes, which made a rack of wheels down my chest and could not be quickly unbuttoned. Of the collar, I remember its thickness without starch, by which it lay against my clavicle without moving. Of my trousers, the same—heavy, bulky, slow to give for a leg, a crowded feeling, a molasses to walk in. Of my boots, I remember the brittle soles, of a material that had not been made love to by any natural substance, and the laces: ropes to make prisoners of my feet. Of the helmet, I remember the webbed, inner liner, a brittle plastic underwear on which wobbled the crushing steel pot then strapped at the chin. Of the mortar, I remember the mortar plate, heavy enough to kill by weight, which I carried by rope. Of the machine gun, I remember the way it fit behind my head and across my shoulder blades as I carried it, or, to be precise, as it rode me. Of tactics, I remember the likelihood of shooting the wrong man, the weight of the rifle bolt, the difficulty of loading while prone, the shock of noise. For earplugs, some used cigarette filters or toilet paper. I don’t hear well now, for a man of my age, and the doctor says my ears were damaged and asks if I was in the Army, and of course I was but then a wounded eardrum wasn’t much in the scheme.
Speciously individual like a solid piece of spit floating in a cuspidor I dream of free bravery but am a social being. I should do something to get out of here but float around in the culture wondering what it will grow.
I wanted the gold, and I sought it;  I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;  I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it—   Came out with a fortune last fall,—  Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,  And somehow the gold isn’t all. No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)  It’s the cussedest land that I know, From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it  To the deep, deathlike valleys below. Some say God was tired when He made it;  Some say it’s a fine land to shun; Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it  For no land on earth—and I’m one. You come to get rich (damned good reason);  You feel like an exile at first; You hate it like hell for a season,  And then you are worse than the worst. It grips you like some kinds of sinning;  It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it’s been since the beginning;  It seems it will be to the end. I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow  That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim; I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow  In crimson and gold, and grow dim, Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,  And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop; And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,  With the peace o’ the world piled on top. The summer—no sweeter was ever;  The sunshiny woods all athrill; The grayling aleap in the river,  The bighorn asleep on the hill. The strong life that never knows harness;  The wilds where the caribou call; The freshness, the freedom, the farness—  O God! how I’m stuck on it all. The winter! the brightness that blinds you,  The white land locked tight as a drum, The cold fear that follows and finds you,  The silence that bludgeons you dumb. The snows that are older than history,  The woods where the weird shadows slant; The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,  I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t. There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,  And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless,  And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons;  There are valleys unpeopled and still; There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,  And I want to go back—and I will. They’re making my money diminish;  I’m sick of the taste of champagne. Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish  I’ll pike to the Yukon again. I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;  It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before; And it’s better than this by a damsite—  So me for the Yukon once more. There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;  It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting  So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,  It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,  It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
I haled me a woman from the street,  Shameless, but, oh, so fair! I bade her sit in the model’s seat  And I painted her sitting there. I hid all trace of her heart unclean;  I painted a babe at her breast; I painted her as she might have been  If the Worst had been the Best. She laughed at my picture and went away.  Then came, with a knowing nod, A connoisseur, and I heard him say;  “’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.” So I painted a halo round her hair,  And I sold her and took my fee, And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,  Where you and all may see.
It’s fine to have a blow-out in a fancy restaurant, With terrapin and canvas-back and all the wine you want; To enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass, Smoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass. It’s bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill, But it’s quite another matter when you  Pay the bill. It’s great to go out every night on fun or pleasure bent; To wear your glad rags always and to never save a cent; To drift along regardless, have a good time every trip; To hit the high spots sometimes, and to let your chances slip; To know you’re acting foolish, yet to go on fooling still, Till Nature calls a show-down, and you  Pay the bill. Time has got a little bill — get wise while yet you may, For the debit side’s increasing in a most alarming way; The things you had no right to do, the things you should have done, They’re all put down; it’s up to you to pay for every one. So eat, drink and be merry, have a good time if you will, But God help you when the time comes, and you  Foot the bill.
I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,  A-purpose to revisit the old claim. I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,  And the lads who once were with me in the game. Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day  Can show a dozen colors in his poke; And me, I’m still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,  And I’m looking for a grub-stake, and I’m broke. I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;  The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me; But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,  Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see. There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,  And turning round a bend I heard a roar, And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan  Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore. It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;  It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs; Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;  It glared around with fierce electric eyes. Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;  It looked like some great monster in the gloom. With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,  And I sighed: “Ah, old-time miner, here’s your doom!” The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;  The holes you digged are water to the brim; Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls  Are deathly now and mouldering and dim. The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;  The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold. But there’s a little army that they’ll never put to rout —  The men who simply live to seek the gold. The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack,  Or in what lawless land the quest began; The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,  The restless buccaneer of pick and pan. On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,  You will find us, changed in face but still the same; And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth —  It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game. For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,  Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,  And you feel that you could follow it to hell. You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;  You’d follow it in solitude and pain; And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,”  You’re lief to rise and follow it again. Yet look you, if I find the stuff it’s just like so much dirt;  I fling it to the four winds like a child. It’s wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,  Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild. Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent —  There’s a city, there’s an army (hear them shout). There’s the gold in millions, millions, but I haven’t got a cent;  And oh, it’s me, it’s me that found it out. It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go  To lands of dread and death disprized of man; But oh, I’ve known a glory that their hearts will never know,  When I picked the first big nugget from my pan. It’s still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more  To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast; That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before —  My dream that will uplift me to the last. Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;  It’s just a little matter of degree. My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain;  It’s life and love and wife and home to me. And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail;  I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call; I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,  To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all. Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky  There’s a lowering land no white man ever struck; There’s gold, there’s gold in millions, and I’ll find it if I die.  And I’m going there once more to try my luck. Maybe I’ll fail — what matter? It’s a mandate, it’s a vow;  And when in lands of dreariness and dread You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,  You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;  You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod; You will find the claim I’m seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it;  But I’ve sought the last Recorder, and He’s — God.
Just think! some night the stars will gleam  Upon a cold, grey stone, And trace a name with silver beam,  And lo! ’twill be your own. That night is speeding on to greet  Your epitaphic rhyme. Your life is but a little beat  Within the heart of Time. A little gain, a little pain,  A laugh, lest you may moan; A little blame, a little fame,  A star-gleam on a stone.
There were two brothers, John and James, And when the town went up in flames, To save the house of James dashed John, Then turned, and lo! his own was gone. And when the great World War began, To volunteer John promptly ran; And while he learned live bombs to lob, James stayed at home and—sneaked his job. John came home with a missing limb; That didn’t seem to worry him; But oh, it set his brain awhirl To find that James had—sneaked his girl! Time passed. John tried his grief to drown; To-day James owns one-half the town; His army contracts riches yield; And John? Well, search the Potter’s Field.
Lone amid the café’s cheer, Sad of heart am I to-night; Dolefully I drink my beer, But no single line I write. There’s the wretched rent to pay, Yet I glower at pen and ink: Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,It is later than you think!  Hello! there’s a pregnant phrase. Bravo! let me write it down; Hold it with a hopeful gaze, Gauge it with a fretful frown; Tune it to my lyric lyre ...  Ah! upon starvation’s brink, How the words are dark and dire: It is later than you think. Weigh them well .... Behold yon band, Students drinking by the door, Madly merry, bock in hand, Saucers stacked to mark their score. Get you gone, you jolly scamps; Let your parting glasses clink; Seek your long neglected lamps: It is later than you think. Look again: yon dainty blonde, All allure and golden grace, Oh so willing to respond Should you turn a smiling face. Play your part, poor pretty doll; Feast and frolic, pose and prink; There’s the Morgue to end it all, And it’s later than you think. Yon’s a playwright — mark his face, Puffed and purple, tense and tired; Pasha-like he holds his place, Hated, envied and admired. How you gobble life, my friend; Wine, and woman soft and pink! Well, each tether has its end: Sir, it’s later than you think. See yon living scarecrow pass With a wild and wolfish stare At each empty absinthe glass, As if he saw Heaven there. Poor damned wretch, to end your pain There is still the Greater Drink. Yonder waits the sanguine Seine ... It is later than you think. Lastly, you who read; aye, you Who this very line may scan: Think of all you planned to do ...  Have you done the best you can? See! the tavern lights are low; Black’s the night, and how you shrink! God! and is it time to go? Ah! the clock is always slow; It is later than you think; Sadly later than you think; Far, far later than you think.
There once was a Square, such a square little Square, And he loved a trim Triangle; But she was a flirt and around her skirt Vainly she made him dangle. Oh he wanted to wed and he had no dread Of domestic woes and wrangles; For he thought that his fate was to procreate Cute little Squares and Triangles. Now it happened one day on that geometric way There swaggered a big bold Cube, With a haughty stare and he made that Square Have the air of a perfect boob; To his solid spell the Triangle fell, And she thrilled with love’s sweet sickness, For she took delight in his breadth and height—  But how she adored his thickness! So that poor little Square just died of despair, For his love he could not strangle; While the bold Cube led to the bridal bed That cute and acute Triangle. The Square’s sad lot she has long forgot, And his passionate pretensions ... For she dotes on her kids—Oh such cute Pyramids In a world of three dimensions.
It’s my belief that every man  Should do his share of work, And in our economic plan  No citizen should shirk. That in return each one should get  His meed of fold and food, And feel that all his toil and sweat  Is for the common good. It’s my belief that every chap  Should have an equal start, And there should be no handicap  To hinder his depart; That there be fairness in the fight,  And justice in the race, And every lad should have the right  To win his proper place. It’s my belief that people should  Be neither rich nor poor; That none should suffer servitude,  And all should be secure. That wealth is loot, and rank is rot,  And foul is class and clan; That to succeed a man may not  Exploit his brother man. It’s my belief that heritage  And usury are wrong; That each should win a worthy wage  And sing an honest song .... Not one like this — for though I rue  The wrong of life, I flout it. Alas! I’m not prepared to do  A goddam thing about it.
Falling in love with a mustache is like saying you can fall in love with the way a man polishes his shoes  which,  of course,  is one of the things that turns on  my tuned-up engine  those trim buckled boots  (I feel like an advertisement  for men’s fashions  when I think of your ankles) Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face and I find myself a bad moralist, a failing aesthetician, a sad poet, wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles that make a man’s body have so much substance, that makes a woman lean and yearn in that direction that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day in your presence the pool of wax under a burning candle the foam from a waterfall You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson She is the rain, waits in it for you, finds blood spotting her legs from the long ride.
I walk the purple carpet into your eye carrying the silver butter server but a truck rumbles by,  leaving its black tire prints on my foot and old images the sound of banging screen doors on hot  afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on  the sink flicker, as reflections on the metal surface. Come in, you said, inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the old songs that line your hands, inside eyes that change like a snowflake every second, inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel, inside the whiskers of a cat, inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you grind the pigments with your teeth, painting with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth. You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside the veins where my small feet touch bottom. You must reach inside and pull me like a silver bullet from your arm.
My sister in her well-tailored silk blouse hands me the photo of my father in naval uniform and white hat. I say, “Oh, this is the one which Mama used to have on her dresser.” My sister controls her face and furtively looks at my mother, a sad rag bag of a woman, lumpy and sagging everywhere, like a mattress at the Salvation Army, though with no holes or tears, and says, “No.” I look again, and see that my father is wearing a wedding ring, which he never did when he lived with my mother. And that there is a legend on it, “To my dearest wife,  Love  Chief” And I realize the photo must have belonged to his second wife, whom he left our mother to marry. My mother says, with her face as still as the whole unpopulated part of the state of North Dakota, “May I see it too?” She looks at it. I look at my tailored sister and my own blue-jeaned self. Have we wanted to hurt our mother, sharing these pictures on this, one of the few days I ever visit or spend with family? For her face is curiously haunted, not now with her usual viperish bitterness, but with something so deep it could not be spoken. I turn away and say I must go on, as I have a dinner engagement with friends. But I drive all the way to Pasadena from Whittier, thinking of my mother’s face; how I could never love her; how my father could not love her either. Yet knowing I have inherited the rag-bag body, stony face with bulldog jaws. I drive, thinking of that face. Jeffers’ California Medea who inspired me to poetry. I killed my children, but there as I am changing lanes on the freeway, necessarily glancing in the rearview mirror, I see the face, not even a ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved’s wallet. How I hate my destiny.
hey music and me only white, hair a flutter of fall leaves circling my perfect line of a nose, no lips, no behind, hey white me and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes so i take them off and wake up dancing.
mary is an old woman without shoes. she doesn’t believe it. not when her belly starts to bubble and leave the print of a finger where no man touches. not when the snow in her hair melts away. not when the stranger she used to wait for appears dressed in lights at her kitchen table. she is an old woman and doesn’t believe it. when Something drops onto her toes one night she calls it a fox but she feeds it.
i would sit in the center of the world, the Black Hills hooped around me and dream of my dancing horse. my wife was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter i called They Are Afraid Of Her. i was afraid of nothing except Black Buffalo Woman. my love for her i wore instead of feathers. i did not dance i dreamed. i am dreaming now across the worlds. my medicine is strong. my medicine is strong in the Black basket of these fingers. i come again through this Black Buffalo woman. hear me; the hoop of the world is breaking. fire burns in the four directions. the dreamers are running away from the hills. i have seen it. i am crazy horse.
they thought the field was wasting and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and piled them into a barn they say that the rocks were shaped some of them scratched with triangles and other forms they must have been trying to invent some new language they say the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and some few were used for the state house crops refused to grow i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity and pointed toward the river i say that after that collection no pillow in the big house dreamed i say that somewhere under here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now too and refuses to talk about slavery i say that at the masters table only one plate is set for supper i say no seed can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken wild berries warm a field of bones bloom how you must i say
All things fall away: store fronts on the west, ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers. The diminishing neighborhood sprawls under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm, the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted. Inside the cottage a bay window translates the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled as the house turns slowly beneath the drift of tree branch and sun. We have come to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets over the fat reading chair and the piano’s mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s blur of black notes. Among a turmoil of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom we imagine a flourish of light, her husband loosening the sash of her white silk robe, his beard brushing the back of her neck.Amores, the art of love, of words lifting like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost risen to music. We lock the heavy door and walk away from the silence, the lone hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house.
As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern, you watch the late-afternoon drunks coming and going, sunlight breaking through the smoky dark as the door opens and closes, and it’s the future flashing ahead like the taillights of a semi as you drop over a rise in the road on your way to Amarillo,bright lights and blonde-haired women, as Billy used to say, slumped over his beer like a snail, make a real man out of you
I am so young that I am still in love with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings, submarines powered by baking soda,  whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,  not even them. Nobody can hear them. Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering  on our front door shouting, and my father in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in  trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow  pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry,
There is a wall of which the stones Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones. And wrongfully this evil wall Denies what all men made for all, And shamelessly this wall surrounds Our homesteads and our native grounds. But I will gather and I will ride, And I will summon a countryside, And many a man shall hear my halloa Who never had thought the horn to follow; And many a man shall ride with me Who never had thought on earth to see High Justice in her armoury. When we find them where they stand, A mile of men on either hand, I mean to charge from right away And force the flanks of their array, And press them inward from the plains, And drive them clamouring down the lanes, And gallop and harry and have them down, And carry the gates and hold the town. Then shall I rest me from my ride With my great anger satisfied. Only, before I eat and drink, When I have killed them all, I think That I will batter their carven names, And slit the pictures in their frames, And burn for scent their cedar door, And melt the gold their women wore, And hack their horses at the knees, And hew to death their timber trees, And plough their gardens deep and through— And all these things I mean to do For fear perhaps my little son Should break his hands, as I have done.
Remote and ineffectual Don That dared attack my Chesterton,  With that poor weapon, half-impelled,  Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,  Unworthy for a tilt with men— Your quavering and corroded pen;  Don poor at Bed and worse at Table, Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;  Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,  Don nervous, Don of crudities;  Don clerical, Don ordinary, Don self-absorbed and solitary;  Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;  Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;  Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,  Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic; Don hypocritical, Don bad, Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad;  Don (since a man must make an end),  Don that shall never be my friend. * * * Don different from those regal Dons!  With hearts of gold and lungs of bronze,  Who shout and bang and roar and bawl  The Absolute across the hall,  Or sail in amply billowing gown  Enormous through the Sacred Town,  Bearing from College to their homes  Deep cargoes of gigantic tomes;  Dons admirable! Dons of Might!  Uprising on my inward sight  Compact of ancient tales, and port  And sleep—and learning of a sort.  Dons English, worthy of the land;  Dons rooted; Dons that understand.  Good Dons perpetual that remain  A landmark, walling in the plain— The horizon of my memories—  Like large and comfortable trees. * * * Don very much apart from these, Thou scapegoat Don, thou Don devoted,  Don to thine own damnation quoted,  Perplexed to find thy trivial name  Reared in my verse to lasting shame.  Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,  Repulsive Don—Don past all bearing. Don of the cold and doubtful breath,  Don despicable, Don of death;  Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;  Don evil; Don that serves the devil.  Don ugly—that makes fifty lines.  There is a Canon which confines  A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse  If written in Iambic Verse To fifty lines. I never cut; I far prefer to end it—but Believe me I shall soon return. My fires are banked, but still they burn  To write some more about the Don  That dared attack my Chesterton.
D: The Dreadful Dinotherium he  Will have to do his best for D.  The early world observed with awe  His back, indented like a saw. His look was gay, his voice was strong;  His tail was neither short nor long;  His trunk, or elongated nose, Was not so large as some suppose;  His teeth, as all the world allows,  Were graminivorous, like a cow's. He therefore should have wished to pass  Long peaceful nights upon the Grass,  But being mad the brute preferred To roost in branches, like a bird.1 A creature heavier than a whale,  You see at once, could hardly fail To suffer badly when he slid And tumbled (as he always did). His fossil, therefore, comes to light All broken up: and serve him right. MORALIf you were born to walk the ground,Remain there; do not fool around. E stands for Egg.  MORALThe Moral of this verse Is applicable to the Young. Be terse. K for the Klondyke, a Country of Gold,  Where the winters are often excessively cold; Where the lawn every morning is covered with rime,  And skating continues for years at a time.  Do you think that a Climate can conquer the grit  Of the Sons of the West? Not a bit! Not a bit!  When the weather looks nippy, the bold Pioneers  Put on two pairs of Stockings and cover their ears,  And roam through the drear Hyperborean dales  With a vast apparatus of Buckets and Pails;  Or wander through wild Hyperborean glades With Hoes, Hammers, Pickaxes, Mattocks and Spades.  There are some who give rise to exuberant mirth  By turning up nothing but bushels of earth,  While those who have little cause excellent fun  By attempting to pilfer from those who have none.  At times the reward they will get for their pains  Is to strike very tempting auriferous veins;  Or, a shaft being sunk for some miles in the ground,  Not infrequently nuggets of value are found.  They bring us the gold when their labours are ended,  And we—after thanking them prettily—spend it. MORALJust you work for Humanity, never you mind  If Humanity seems to have left you behind.
Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. Of Sarah Byng the tale is told How when the child was twelve years old She could not read or write a line. Her sister Jane, though barely nine, Could spout the Catechism through And parts of Matthew Arnold too, While little Bill who came between Was quite unnaturally keen On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine. But not so Sarah! Not so Sal! She was a most uncultured girl Who didn't care a pinch of snuff For any literary stuff And gave the classics all a miss. Observe the consequence of this! As she was walking home one day, Upon the fields across her way A gate, securely padlocked, stood, And by its side a piece of wood On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL Alas! The young illiterate Went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate! Now happily the Bull that day Was rather in the mood for play Than goring people through and through As Bulls so very often do; He tossed her lightly with his horns Into a prickly hedge of thorns, And stood by laughing while she strode And pushed and struggled to the road. The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone A long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, And leaves a padlocked gate alone. Moreover she has wisely grown Confirmed in her instinctive guess That literature breeds distress.
Then the day passed into the evening, a sovereign, darkening blue. And the twenty-six lost miners, if living at all, knew nothing of the hour: not the languid canter of light, or the wind curled through the hedgerows. Not pain. Not rage. If living at all then just this: a worm of black water at the lower back. At the lungs two tablets of air. What is it like there? the broadcaster asked, his voice and the slow reply cast down through the time zones of America. A stillness. All of the families asleep in the fire station. And the mineworks pale on the landscape. What else? Nothing. Blue lights of police cars. What else? Nothing. Nothing? ...The thrum of the crickets. A thousand files on a thousand scrapers. A thousand taut membranes called mirrors amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body, so in tune with the dusk's warmth it slows when a cloud passes over. Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness when the earth flared and collapsed. Before that May. After that darkness. On the larch bud. On the fire station. On shale and the grind-steps of magma. On the gold straining in its seam bed. On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud. On the leaves, on the meadow grass, on the wickerwork of shrubs: dark cape of desire.
A little candlewax on the thumbnail, liquid at first, slipping, then stalled to an ice-hood. Another layer, another, and the child lies back, his thumb a hummock, his small knuckle buckled with cracks. No snow yet, but the last white meadows of switchwort and saxifrage mimic it. Already the bears brush back through the dwarf willows—Hubbart Point, Cape Henrietta Maria, the bay's deep arc flattening, lessening as land extends through the fast-ice and the seam of open leads stretches, withdraws. They have come for the pack floes, for the slow rafting. And repeat on their white faces, the boy thinks, the low strokes of the borealis: violet mouths, madder blue at the eyelids. Perhaps he will walk to the shoreline—no shore, of course, just miles of land-fast ice stretched over water, stretched out to water, the line where each begins a filament, a vapor. By then the bears will be sailors, or, far to the north, stalled in their waxy sleep. He yawns, looks down at his slipper, his floormat of braided fleece. By then the lights will be thicker, greens and magentas flashing, rolling in at times like fog. To go where nothing lives. He turns, settles. To extend a little breath out over that ice—the white, cumbersome bodies migrating in reverse with the others, dragging between them a lifeline, plump and intricate, like a net, like purse seiners dragging a cork net, its great arc spiraling, tighter, tighter, now green in those lights, now blue, now pink as the boy's ear, where all night a line of cold traces the rim, the lobe, circles down, chills, and recedes.
Snow everywhere, like the salt electrons jump from, as gas snaps and the tube hisses with light. I am holding just now the hooked underbeak of the great flamingo: cool glass, a little dusting of phosphor. Just off through the tree-line, the New Year waits with its bells, as in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, stretched thirty feet up to the promenade deck, the back-kneed, S-necked mate waits with its own ringing, its soft, rattle-whistle of argon. What a pair they will make: ice-pink tubeworks north and south on the ballroom floor. And below: foxscarves, carnations, the pull and push of the long trombones. Flamingos! And now the moon pressing back through the tree-line. Close your eyes. Let us say we are children together, ten, perhaps twelve. I see neon: a steadfast landscape of DEPOT, HEIDELBERG, VACANCY. And you? Women in cardigans? A certain leaf tree? Perhaps the gleam of your dress shoe as you welcome the New Year. The ballroom is thick with smoke and laughter. Two birds, of course, north and south. Then the catch in your breath as an uncle explains the impact of vapor and salt, how a light that has never been curls up through the century—swank, incredibly still.Our times, he laughs, and in from the thin roadways all the WELCOMES, the PALMISTS and EXITS, all the boneworks blown to their plush, just bearable tones curl up to a wing and S-neck. High above you, cupped left, right on the ballroom floor, that ice-pink, still parenthesis. Then foxscarves. The flick of the black shoes.
Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin. No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge. Do they fly through God's body and come out singing? Do they swing like children from the hinges of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards? Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors? What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, their diet of unfiltered divine light? What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall these tall presences can look over and see hell? If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole in a river and would the hole float along endlessly filled with the silent letters of every angelic word? If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume the appearance of the regular mailman and whistle up the driveway reading the postcards? No, the medieval theologians control the court. The only question you ever hear is about the little dance floor on the head of a pin where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly. It is designed to make us think in millions, billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one: one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background. She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
I thought about his death for so many hours, tangled there in the wires of the night, that it came to have a body and dimensions, more than a voice shaking over the telephone or the black obituary boldface of name and dates. His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs, windows and shutters which are the motionless wings of windows. His death had a head and clothes, the white shirt and baggy trousers of death. His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index, and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read. His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled and locked, had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past. His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams. It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor you could not lie down on in the middle of the night. In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code. The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe. Even this morning would be an improvement over the present. I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks. As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess.
I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title. It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now so immediately the poem has my attention, like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve. And I like the first couple of stanzas, the way they establish this mode of self-pointing that runs through the whole poem and tells us that words are food thrown down on the ground for other words to eat. I can almost taste the tail of the snake in its own mouth, if you know what I mean. But what I’m not sure about is the voice, which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans, but other times seems standoffish, professorial in the worst sense of the word like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face. But maybe that’s just what it wants to do. What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas, especially the fourth one. I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges which gives me a very clear picture. And I really like how this drawbridge operator just appears out of the blue with his feet up on the iron railing and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging— a hook in the slow industrial canal below. I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s. Maybe it’s just me, but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem. I mean how can the evening bump into the stars? And what’s an obbligato of snow? Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets. At that point I’m lost. I need help. The other thing that throws me off, and maybe this is just me, is the way the scene keeps shifting around. First, we’re in this big aerodrome and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles, which makes me think this could be a dream. Then he takes us into his garden, the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose, though that’s nice, the coiling hose, but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be. The rain and the mint green light, that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper? Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery? There’s something about death going on here. In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here is really two poems, or three, or four, or possibly none. But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite. This is where the poem wins me back, especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse. I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before, but I still love the details he uses when he’s describing where he lives. The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard, the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can, the spool of thread for a table. I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work night after night collecting all these things while the people in the house were fast asleep, and that gives me a very strong feeling, a very powerful sense of something. But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that. Maybe that was just me. Maybe that’s just the way I read it.
In the dining room there is a brown fish hanging on the wall who swims along in his frame while we are eating dinner. He swims in candlelight for all to see, as if he has been swimming forever, even in the darkness of the ink before someone thought to draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream and the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand. No wonder he continues his swimming deep into the night, long after we have blown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed. No wonder I find him in the pale morning light, still swimming, still looking out at me with his one, small, spellbound eye.
All you have to do is listen to the way a man sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people and notice how intent he is on making his point even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver, and you will know why the women in science fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine when the men from earth arrive in their rocket, why they are always standing in a semicircle with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart, their breasts protected by hard metal disks.
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
You’re still there in the spectral impress,  the plied afterimage grid of trucks and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked  on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s  gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief, and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest  on silver rails, flare into the coming dark, while everywhere your hungry light still tries  to reconstruct itself, charm the space in and around the looseknit ironworks,  winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past the dark. From here, two years away, I see  in your middle distance a trestle stretched between two brownstones, the whole scene  droning deep: the train tears through the gap, ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares  that flick past like old sluggish film, each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact,  and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up  around those strangers abiding in the glass.
Snarls, bread trucks, yeast breathing inside huddled bags, and sleepers completing lives behind their gray windows. A whistle on the phonewires, feathers, twitches, whistling down to the hot loaves. Reeds everywhere, pulse, flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs. An answer. Radio news and breathers behind our windows, birds’ new voices changing,changed, to the unforgiving hunger screech of immigrants.
The View The plain’s hatching now after rainless months. A dust devil rips through a peach orchard down there, a seam snuffed by falling dust-fruit. Behind the vine rows’ shriveled abundance a low fire runs ragged by the ditch, flaying the pale sod. The voided skins wave. September, thirsting, sings our Hosannah, shrieks red poverties to old heaven’s eye. * * *1944 You want February? Snow and sleet came down hard, heaven’s post-Christmas gift to freeze our eyelids shut. Walking the icy ground, our shoes all shot with holes, we did the Alexander’s Army Ragtime Dance, stomping snow off bones safely packed in newspapers. From down below, we must have looked crazy happy, dancing like Hollywood Indians, though who had anything to eat? We dreamed lard. So the wolves came, not straight into town, not into the piazza, but near the outcrop behind the church. God’s design, the best, the way they study the tired world makes them next to human, or more. They’re waiting while they move. I’d worship that expectancy. If I could talk to one, just a few minutes, he’d teach me hunger’s secrets. So one awful night I wrapped my legs and feet, stuffed more papers inside my pants and shirt, then danced my way behind the church. Faint gray writing on the snow. Skin and bones, sneezes, frost feathers, drifting away. Two of them walked back, canny bigshot archbishop warrior types. They said: The moon’s blue, we know you want secrets, help, advice, news from this side. Our truth is: Forget likenesses, live inside your carbon soul, the moon’s black and blue, in the soul’s time the world’s one winter together. * * *Renunciation The snowy poplar seeds are everywhere, balling against curbs and car wheels, sifting through gates, doorways, kitchen windows, snagged by white blossoms shaken loose from the nodding horse-chestnut leaves. We stand in their shadows—our springtime’s dark. The debris scrapes our cheeks, clings an instant to our lashes, chokes the soft breath before tumbling off the near precipice. We want divine uncertainty. O give us the Judas tree’s blood shadows, make us sick with rank pear blossoms, blind us with earth’s random pieces engorged with broom’s milky fallen-sun flesh.
From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge, walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded, in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders, simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money, in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water, held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura, souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements, then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses. So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant? The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory? Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance, she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her. A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds. She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election, I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself or the green undeveloped space she occupied, welded into her grid by traffic noise. Okay! A word for me? A go-ahead? Okay! Smeared by the wind and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place. She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money, running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake. The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl, blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child, staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves.Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet, his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money. The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.
"NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM." Into my backyard’s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,  Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.  From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,  neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,  laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,  in the middle of my world, my certain place, not stump roots  on the cold Atlantic floor of mountains I’d imagined,  one week every summer, from the hot Wildwood boardwalk.  But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying  “O Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?” The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk tingling in my ears with dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea.  The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty,  blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes,  mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from clothesline.  Missile tracks horned across the ceiling. In the ribcage,  stooped beggars crowded, kicking spongy gouts of something;  deeper in the tunnel, toward the tail, in files winding out of sight,  shaved heads, men and women in pajamas. Spear carriers paced the walls.  Into my vaulted space came words not really words: shades, images  with a worldly shape of meaning, but beyond me, aloof and hysterical.  The silence wrapped me like a prickly woolen sleeve knit  by my women’s voices, shouting, out there, unrecoverable, dense,  while their horny hands plucked and the sweaty men teased,  stuffing tacky down inside their headscarves. Inside, blood cells combed my walls, unfinished patterns seeped through  as picturegrams that glided across the whale’s belly. A still life  with ginger jar and pomegranates. A flayed, ripening Christ. An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one  in Giotto’s Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier’s ear.  Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things.  Kettles steamed, tin basins quivered with guts, my dear hell’s bloodglyphs  in things, in me. I’d not be whole in and of the world again.  Quills cracked when Charlie put me down. In my backyard, in my head,  women sang under a pier to the unformed sea, an unvoiced song  I’d heard inside the monster, breezing now through clotheslines.  Men scrubbed their hands at the spigot, the women sighing.  Flies left charcoal scrawls on the air and grazed old stains;  they lighted on my arms, not waiting, but constant, my familiars,  until their manic newsiness went away. Then, in that twilight,  slow, shadowless lightning bugs appeared, going on and off.
There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing  from the need that created it. The lost children distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone  it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat. The children fuse colors because they don’t want to  separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut each other in the neck and gut, don’t care  which one of them will end up later in surgery. And drugged sons pretending to be costumes, well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either. Why does a wild child confuse a moon  with a hole in his skin? One was born soaked in gin. His first sip was from a bottle of denial. What can “leave me alone” mean after that?  The system is settled, dimensions fixed. Another one’s hand feels like a starfish. Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika. But they all dig the way the pepper is rosy in the vodka.  It’s verbocity that creates jokers. Brick and grit are the candy and frosting where volunteers and teachers write cards that go: “Donate books that say NOT and NO and poets who say Urn instead of Oh.” How do the children convert their troubles  into hip-hop? Dunno—but it’s wonderful.
"Such a palmer ne'er was seene, Lesse Love himselfe had palmer beene." Never too late. Pilgrim feet, pray whither bound? Pilgrim eyes, pray whither bent? Sandal-shod and travel-gowned, Lo, I seek the way they went Late who passed toward Holy Land. Pilgrim, it was long ago; None remains who saw that band; Grass and forest overgrow Every path their footing wore. Men are wise; they seek no more Roads that lead to Holy Land. Proud his look, as who should say: I shall find where lies the way. Pilgrim, thou art fair of face, Staff and scrip are not for thee; Gentle pilgrim, of thy grace, Leave thy quest, and bide with me. Love shall serve thee, joy shall bless; Thou wert made for tenderness: God's green world is fair and sweet; Not o'er sea and Eastern strand, But where friend and lover meet Lies the way to Holy Land. Low his voice, his lashes wet: One day if God will—not yet. Pilgrim, pardon me and heed. Men of old who took that way Went for fame of goodly deed, Or, if sooth the stories say, Sandalled priest, or knight in selle, Flying each in pain and hate, Harassed by stout fiends of hell, Sought his crime to expiate. Prithee, Pilgrim, go not hence; Clear thy brow, and white thy hand, What shouldst thou with penitence? Wherefore seek to Holy Land? Stern the whisper on his lip: Sin and shame are in my scrip. Pilgrim, pass, since it must be; Take thy staff, and have thy will; Prayer and love shall follow thee; I will watch thee o'er the hill. What thy fortune God doth know; By what paths thy feet must go. Far and dim the distance lies, Yet my spirit prophesies: Not in vigil lone and late, Bowed upon the tropic sand, But within the city gate, In the struggle of the street, Suddenly thine eyes shall meet His whose look is Holy Land. Smiled the pilgrim, sad and sage: Long must be my pilgrimage.
“I have heard (but not believed) the spirits of the dead May walk again.” Winter’s Tale If spirits walk, Love, when the night climbs slow The slant footpath where we were wont to go,  Be sure that I shall take the self-same way  To the hill-crest, and shoreward, down the gray, Sheer, gravelled slope, where vetches straggling grow. Look for me not when gusts of winter blow, When at thy pane beat hands of sleet and snow;  I would not come thy dear eyes to affray,  If spirits walk. But when, in June, the pines are whispering low, And when their breath plays with thy bright hair so  As some one's fingers once were used to play—  That hour when birds leave song, and children pray, Keep the old tryst, sweetheart, and thou shalt know  If spirits walk.
“O Love, thou art winged and swift,  Yet stay with me evermore!” And I guarded my house with bolt and bar  Lest Love fly forth at the door. Without, in the world, ’t was cold,  While Love and I together Laughed and sang by my red hearth-fire,  Nor knew it was winter weather. Sweet Love would lull me to sleep,  In his tireless arm caressed; His shadowing wings and burning eyes  Like night and stars wrought rest. And ever the beat of Love’s heart  As a chime rang at my ear; And ever Love’s bending, beautiful face  Covered me close from fear. Was it long ere I waked alone?  A snow-drift whitened the floor; I saw spent ashes upon my hearth  And Death in my open door.
The leaves talked in the twilight, dear;  Hearken the tale they told: How in some far-off place and year,  Before the world grew old, I was a dreaming forest tree,  You were a wild, sweet bird Who sheltered at the heart of me  Because the north wind stirred; How, when the chiding gale was still,  When peace fell soft on fear, You stayed one golden hour to fill  My dream with singing, dear. To-night the self-same songs are sung  The first green forest heard; My heart and the gray world grow young—  To shelter you, my bird.
All night I dreamed of roses,  Wild tangle by the sea, And shadowy garden closes.  Dream-led I met with thee. Around thee swayed the roses,  Beyond thee sang the sea; The shadowy garden closes  Were Paradise to me. O Love, ’mid the dream-roses  Abide to heal, to save! The world that day discloses  Narrows to one white grave.
Mown meadows skirt the standing wheat; I linger, for the hay is sweet, New-cut and curing in the sun. Like furrows, straight, the windrows run, Fallen, gallant ranks that tossed and bent When, yesterday, the west wind went A-rioting through grass and grain. To-day no least breath stirs the plain; Only the hot air, quivering, yields Illusive motion to the fields Where not the slenderest tassel swings. Across the wheat flash sky-blue wings; A goldfinch dangles from a tall, Full-flowered yellow mullein; all The world seems turning blue and gold. Unstartled, since, even from of old, Beauty has brought keen sense of her, I feel the withering grasses stir; Along the edges of the wheat, I hear the rustle of her feet: And yet I know the whole sea lies, And half the earth, between our eyes.
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle  I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied  Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose  That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht  Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.
(For George Reston Malloch) There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch.  Like the sauls o’ the damned are they, And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig Is birlin’ the lee-lang day. O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods, And Licht like a bird i’ the haun’, But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch  As the deil’s ain hert are thrawn. The winds ’ud pu’ them up by the roots, Tho’ it broke the warl’ asunder, But they rin richt doon thro’ the boddom o’ Hell,  And nane kens hoo fer under! There’s no’ a licht that the Heavens let loose  Can calm them a hanlawhile, Nor frae their ancient amplefeyst Sall God’s ain sel’ them wile.
(To William and Flora Johnstone) Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear   Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again,   Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t.
(In Memoriam: Charles Doughty, 1843-1926) Under no hanging heaven-rooted tree,  Though full of mammuks’ nests,  Bone of old Britain we bury thee  But heeding your unspoken hests  Naught not coeval with the Earth  And indispensable till its end With what whom you despised may deem the dearth  Of your last resting-place dare blend.  Where nature is content with little so are you So be it the little to which all else is due. Nor in vain mimicry of the powers That lifted up the mountains shall we raise  A stone less of nature’s shaping than of ours  To mark the unfrequented place.  You were not filial to all else Save to the Dust, the mother of all men,  And where you lie no other sign needs tells  (Unless a gaunt shape resembles you again  In some momentary effect of light on rock)  But your family likeness to all her stock. Flowers may be strewn upon the grave   Of easy come easy go. Fitly only some earthquake or tidal wave  O’er you its red rose or its white may throw But naught else smaller than darkness and light  —Both here, though of no man’s bringing!— And as any past time had been in your sight  Were you now from your bed upspringing,  Now or a billion years hence, you would see  Scant difference, eyed like eternity. How should we have anything to give you  In death who had nothing in life, Attempting in our sand-riddles to sieve you Who were with nothing, but the sheer elements rife?  Anchor of truth, facile as granite you lie, A plug suspended in England’s false dreams.  Your worth will be seen by and by, Like God’s purpose in what men deem their schemes,  Nothing ephemeral can seek what lies in this ground  Since nothing can be sought but the found. The poem that would praise you must be Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown, crowded With dark incipient crystal growths, we see; Or a glimpse of Petavius may have endowed it With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped inclusions surrounded   By the broad reaction rims it needs. I have seen it in dreams and know how it abounded —Ah! would I could find in me like seeds!— As the north-easterly garden in the lunation grows, A spectacle not one man in ten millions knows. I belong to a different country than yours And none of my travels have been in the same lands  Save where Arzachel or Langrenus allures Such spirits as ours, and the Straight Wall stands, But crossing shear planes extruded in long lines of ridges,  Torsion cylinders, crater rings, and circular seas And ultra-basic xenoliths that make men look midges  Belong to my quarter as well, and with ease I too can work in bright green and all the curious interference  Colours that under crossed nicols have a mottled appearance. Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned  On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme,  Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind  Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem  From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey  In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls;  Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array  Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals And demolitions and entrenchments of weather  As any turn of my eyes brings together. I know how on turning to noble hills And stark deserts happily still preserved  For men whom no gregariousness fills With the loneliness for which they are nerved —The lonely at-one-ment with all worth while— I can feel as if the landscape and I Became each other and see my smile In the corners of the vastest contours lie And share the gladness and peace you knew, —The supreme human serenity that was you! I have seen Silence lift his head And Song, like his double, lift yours, And know, while nearly all that seems living is dead,  You were always consubstantial with all that endures. Would it were on Earth! Not since Ezekiel has that faw sun ringed  A worthier head; red as Adam you stood In the desert, the horizon with vultures black-winged,  And sang and died in this still greater solitude  Where I sit by your skull whose emptiness is worth  The sum of almost all the full heads now on Earth —By your roomy skull where most men might well spend  Longer than you did in Arabia, friend!
(To James H. Whyte) All is lithogenesis—or lochia, Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, Stones blacker than any in the Caaba, Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,  Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,  Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,  Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,  I study you glout and gloss, but have No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again  From optik to haptik and like a blind man run  My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,  Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear, An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,  Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,  Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad  What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?  What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,  Pillar of creation engouled in me? What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,  Every energumen an Endymion yet? All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,  But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?  What Cabirian song from this catasta comes? Deep conviction or preference can seldom  Find direct terms in which to express itself.  Today on this shingle shelf I understand this pensive reluctance so well,  This not discommendable obstinacy, These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,  These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be  Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion,  Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.  The inward gates of a bird are always open.  It does not know how to shut them. That is the secret of its song, But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful. I look at these stones and know little about them,  But I know their gates are open too, Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be, That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer  Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,  Though through them no man can see, No man nor anything more recently born than themselves  And that is everything else on the Earth. I too lying here have dismissed all else. Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,  From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight  Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.  I would scorn to cry to any easier audience Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response. I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is;  I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does;  Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me  As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones.  I must begin with these stones as the world began. Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran?   To a bird, and to myself, a man?  And what if I do, and further? I shall only have gone a little way to go back again  And be like a fleeting deceit of development, Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed  All but all of evolution, unmoved by it, (Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?)  As the essential life of mankind in the mass Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.
(To John Gawsworth) The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.
I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo. It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds. Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue. Children rode around and around on pastel trains. I read the labels stuck on every cage the way people at museums do, art being less interesting than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map, laminated with a stain to tell where in the world the animals had been taken from. Rhinos waited for rain in the rhino-colored dirt, too grief-struck to move their wrinkles, their horns too weak to ever be hacked off by poachers for aphrodisiacs. Five white ducks agitated the chalky waters of a duck pond with invisible orange feet while a little girl in pink ruffles tossed pork rinds at their disconsolate backs. This wasn’t my life! I’d meant to look with the wise tough eye of exile, I wanted not to anthropomorphize, not to equate, for instance, the lemur’s displacement with my displacement. The arched aviary flashed with extravagance, plumage so exuberant, so implausible, it seemed cartoonish, and the birdsongs unintelligible, babble, all their various languages unravelling— no bird can get its song sung right, separated from models of its own species. For weeks I hadn’t written a sentence, for two days I hadn’t spoken to an animate thing. I couldn’t relate to a giraffe— I couldn’t look one in the face. I’d have said, if anyone had asked, I’d been mugged by the Gulf climate. In a great barren space, I watched a pair of elephants swaying together, a rhythm too familiar to be mistaken, too exclusive. My eyes sweated to see the bull, his masterful trunk swinging, enter their barn of concrete blocks, to watch his obedient wife follow. I missed the bitter tinny Boston smell of first snow, the huddling in a cold bus tunnel. At the House of Nocturnal Mammals, I stepped into a furtive world of bats, averted my eyes at the gloomy dioramas, passed glassed-in booths of lurking rodents— had I known I’d find what I came for at last?How did we get here, dear sloth, my soul, my sister? Clinging to a tree-limb with your three-toed feet, your eyes closed tight, you calm my idleness, my immigrant isolation. But a tiny tamarin monkey who shares your ersatz rainforest runs at you, teasing, until you move one slow, dripping, hairy arm, then the other, the other, the other, pulling your tear-soaked body, its too-few vertebrae, its inferior allotment of muscles along the dead branch, going almost nowhere slowly as is humanly possible, nudged by the bright orange primate taunting, nipping, itching at you all the time, like ambition.
He reminds me of someone I used to know, but who? Before class, he comes to my office to shmooze, a thousand thousand pointless interesting speculations. Irrepressible boy, his assignments are rarely completed, or actually started. This week, instead of research in the stacks, he’s performing with a reggae band that didn’t exist last week. Kids danced to his music and stripped, he tells me gleefully, high spirit of the street festival. He’s the singer, of course— why ask if he studied an instrument? On the brink of graduating with an engineering degree (not, it turned out, his forte), he switched to English, his second language. It’s hard to swallow the bravura of his academic escapes or tell if the dark eyes laugh with his face. Once, he brought me a tiny persimmon he’d picked on campus; once, a poem about an elderly friend in New Delhi who left him volumes of Tagore and memories of avuncular conversation. My encouragement makes him skittish— it doesn’t suit his jubilant histrionics of despair. And I remember myself shrinking from enthusiasm or praise, the prospect of effort-drudgery. Success—a threat. A future, we figure, of revision—yet what can the future be but revision and repair? Now, on the brink again, graduation’s postponed, the brilliant thesis on Walker Percy unwritten. “I’ll drive to New Orleans and soak it up and write my paper in a weekend,” he announces in the Honors office. And, “I want to be a bum in daytime and a reggae star at night!” What could I give him from my life or art that matters, how share the desperate slumber of my early years, the flashes of inspiration and passion in a life on hold? If I didn’t fool myself or anyone, no one could touch me, or tell me much . . . This gloomy Houston Monday, he appears at my door, so sunny I wouldn’t dare to wake him now, or say it matters if he wakes at all. “Write a poem about me!” he commands, and so I do.
On the telephone, friends mistake us now when we first say hello—not after. And that oddly optimistic lilt we share nourishes my hopes: we do sound happy. . . . Last night, in my dream’s crib, a one-day infant girl. I wasn’t totally unprepared— there was the crib, and cotton kimonos, not just a padded dresser drawer. And then, I knew I could drive to the store for the tiny, funny clothes my daughter wears. I was in a familiar room and leaned over the rail, crooningHello, and the smiling baby— she’d be too young for speech, I know, or smiles— gurgled back at me, Hullo. —If I could begin again, I’d hold her longer, closer! Maybe that way, when night opens into morning, and all my windows gape at the heartbreaking street, my dreams wouldn’t pierce so, I wouldn’t hold my breath at the parts of my life still in hiding, my childhood’s white house where I lunged toward the flowers of love as if I were courting death. . . . Over the crib, a mobile was spinning, bright birds going nowhere, primary colors, primary as mothering once seemed. . . . Later, I wonder why I dreamt that dream, yearning for what I’ve had, and have why it was my mother’s room, the blonde moderne bedroom set hidden under years of junk—a spare room’s the nicest way to put it, though now all her crowded rooms are spare—
of these long scorching days but today my daughter is truly exasperating—Stop it! I shout—or I’ll— and I twist her little pinked arm slowly, calibrating my ferocity—You can’t hurt me you can’t hurt me! She’s so defiant, glowering, glaring at me— but frightened, her eyes bright with tears—See, I’m not even crying! I see. But it’s the angel of extermination I see, shining in his black trappings, and turning ecstatically toward him, a little Jewish girl tempts him to play his game of massacre.  —after Vittorio Sereni
This face had no use for light, took none of it, Grew cavernous against stars, bore into noon A dark of midnight by its own resources. Yet where it lay in sleep, where the pillows held it With the blind plaster over it and the four walls Keeping the night carefully, it was undone. Sixty-watt light, squared to a window frame, Across a well of air, across wind and window Leaped and made shine the dark face in its sleep.
Simplicity so graven hurts the sense. The monumental and the simple break And the great tablets shatter down in deed. Every year the quick particular jig Of unresolved event moves in the mind, And there's the trick simplicity has to win.
To this man, to his boned shoulders Came the descent of pain. All kinds, Cruel, blind, dear, horrid, hallowed, Rained, again, again. To this small white blind boned face, Wherever it was, Descended The blows of pain, it took as it were blinded, As it were made for this. We were there. We uneasy Did not know if it were. Knew neither The reason nor the man nor whether To share, or to beware.
One rat across the floor and quick to floor's a breeze, But two a whisper of a human tongue. One is a breath, two voice; And one a dream, but more are dreamed too long. Two are the portent which we may believe at length, And two the tribe we recognize as true. Two are the total, they saying and they saying, So we must ponder what we are to do. For every scuttle of motion in the corner of the eye Some thought of thought is asked in us indeed, But of two, more: there we have likeness moving, And there knowledge therefore, and therefore creed.
When I think of my kindness which is tentative and quiet And of yours which is intense and free, I am in elaboration of knowledge impatient Of even the patientest immobility. I think of my kind, which is the human fortune To live in the world and make war among its friends, And of my version, which is to be moderately peaceful, And of your version; and must make amends By my slow word to your wish which is mobile, Active and moving in its generous sphere. This is the natural and the supernatural Of humankind of which I grow aware.
After her pills the girl slept and counted Pellet on pellet the regress of life. Dead to the world, the world's count yet counted Pellet on pill the antinomies of life. Refused to turn, the way's back, she counted Her several stones across the mire of life. And stones away and sticks away she counted To keep herself out of the country of life. Lost tally. How the sheep return to home Is the story she will retrieve And the only story believe Of one and one the sheep returning home To take the shapes of life, Coming and being counted.
Imagine for a moment the still life of our meals, meat followed by yellow cheese, grapes pale against the blue armor of fish. Imagine a thin woman before bread was invented, playing a harp of wheat in the field. There is a stone, and behind her the bones of the last killed, the black bird on her shoulder that a century later will fly with trained and murderous intent. They are not very hungry because cuisine has not yet been invented. Nor has falconry, nor the science of imagination. All they have is the pure impulse to eat, which is not enough to keep them alive and this little moment before the woman redeems the sprouted seeds at her feet and gathers the olives falling from the trees for her recipes. Imagine. Out in the fields this very moment they are rolling the apples to press, the lamb turns in a regular aura of smoke. See, the woman looks once behind her before picking up the stone, looks back once at the beasts, the trees, that sky above the white stream where small creatures live and die looking upon each other as food.
When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall— though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks. Cranked up, then down in my bed— I told the nurses jokes, newly precocious, but too old at twelve to be anything but a patient. I slouched in my robe among the other child-guests of St. Joseph, the parrot-eyed scald masks, the waterheads and harelips, the fat girl with the plastic shunt. The old crippled nun on her wheeled platform dispensed her half-witted blessings, then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys sliding by my numbered door. Gone told me I'd go away too— orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard: the blank windows curtained one by one. I could not abide that yearning face calling me home. Like the Gauls, in my penciled translations: I saw Caesar was my home. Through the streets of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable. In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator— I imagined pain not as pain but the flickering light embedded in the headboard, the end of the snake-wire uncoiling from the nurses' station. The painkiller winked in its paper cup, its bleak chirp meant respect should be paid for the way I too wielded oblivion, staring at the wall till six, gifts unopened in her lap, the early dark deepening between us.
—for Lynne McMahon In her bedroom, she set a convex mirror on a stand, so that when the visitor  looked in expecting to see the familiar line of lip and brow,  what appeared instead was the head up-ended— the mouth a talking wound—  above the eyes, upside down, fluttering, like the eyes in the skull of a calf slung on the blood-hook— or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low in the bone cage about to be born Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse. Gem green paint restored from old scrapings. Here and there, a trifling, a lightening beyond the author's original intent, which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish. From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color. The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk with its single blossom: old black hat she wore like pharaoh gazing down the Nile-green Nile.  That's her: the flat drainboard of a face set so fiercely against the previous owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug. The simpleton's request: a picture of her young— So the trees walk up burning, the birds speak Latin for the dull-witted, drenched palette the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond where their handfuls of ash drifted down  and over the great mown meadow next door where the Rodmell August Fair is on. My daughter astride a steam engine, bored as any child with the past. Later makes an X (her favorite letter) with two sticks held up to the window of the great writer's garden study. But the mirror standing in the air a glass knot tying and retying itself would repolarize, and she, drawing near, reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face drawn downward by gravity, sorrow, lit upward by the flame of age— could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic! Across the green from the bedroom window she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters— "and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look.  Vanessa, pregnant, laughing, crosses the garden. Two women walk among the hollyhocks with shears. The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands. Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands.  Annie's white sweater catches on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms, unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic. The wind, up from the South Downs, blew the two women across the garden, their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters. One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl. Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall. She sat at this table eating mutton and bread. He was talking about the socialist initiative and she turned away: someone was knocking at the window. It was the French photographer we surprised on our way out, shooting the forbidden interior through the dark glass.
1. THE SACRIFICE On this tile the knife like a sickle-moon hangs in the painted air as if it had learned a dance of its own, the way the boy has  among the vivid  breakable flowers,  the way Abraham has  among the boulders,  his two feet heavy  as stones. 2. NEAR SINAI God's hand here is the size of a tiny cloud,  and the wordless tablets  he holds out curve like the temple doors.  Moses, reaching up must see on their empty surface  laws chiseled in his mind  by the persistent wind  of the desert, by wind  in the bulrushes. 3. THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT We know by the halos  that circle these heads  like rings around planets  that the small donkey has carried his burden  away from the thunder  of the Old Testament  into the lightning of the New. 4. AT THE ARMENIAN TILE SHOP Under the bright glazes  Esau watches Jacob,  Cain watches Abel. With the same heavy eyes the tilemaker's Arab assistant  watches me, all of us wondering  why for every pair  there is just one  blessing.
On nights when the moon seems impenetrable— a locked porthole to space; when the householder bars his windows  and doors, and his dog lies until dawn, one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps  with her rosy knees sealed tightly together,  on such nights the safecracker sets to work.  Axe . . . Chisel . . . Nitroglycerin . . . Within the vault lie forty thousand  tons of gold; the heaped up spoils  of Ali Baba's cave; the secrets of the molecule.  He sands his fingertips to feel the subtle vibrations of wheel lining up, just so, with wheel.  His toolmarks are his fingerprints.  And now a crack appears on the side  of the egg, a single fault line, and within: the golden yolk just waiting. A kind of wind . . . a door flies open . . . a glitter  of forsythia forced out of the branch.  With smoothest fingertips you touch  the locked cage of my ribs . . . just so.  My knees fall open. And Cleopatra smiles,  whose own Egyptians first invented the lock.
There is far too much of the suburban classes  Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses.  Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie  Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye.  Now I have a plan which I will enfold  (There’s this to be said for them, they do as they’re told)  Then tell them their country’s in mortal peril  They believed it before and again will not cavil  Put it in caption form firm and slick If they see it in print it is bound to stick:  ‘Your King and your Country need you Dead’ You see the idea? Well, let it spread. Have a suitable drug under string and label  Free for every Registered Reader’s table. For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic  I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic:  Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won’t hurt  And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.
My life is vile  I hate it so  I’ll wait awhile   And then I’ll go.  Why wait at all?  Hope springs alive,  Good may befall   I yet may thrive. It is because I can’t make up my mind  If God is good, impotent or unkind.
The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a  Not entirely negligible part In consolidating at the very start The position of the Early Christian Church. Initiatory rites are always bloody And the lions, it appears From contemporary art, made a study Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy Liturgically sacrificial hue And if the Christians felt a little blue— Well people being eaten often do. Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying, A state of things which must be satisfying. My point which up to this has been obscured is that it was the lions who procured By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone The martyrdoms on which the Church has grown. I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked  As if the part the lions played was being overlooked. By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten  And so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.
Tender only to one  Tender and true  The petals swing  To my fingering Is it you, or you, or you? Tender only to one I do not know his name And the friends who fall  To the petals’ call May think my love to blame. Tender only to one  This petal holds a clue  The face it shows But too well knows  Who I am tender to. Tender only to one, Last petal’s latest breath Cries out aloud From the icy shroud His name, his name is Death.
In the flame of the flickering fire  The sins of my soul are few And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed  With a solitary view. But the eye of eternal consciousness  Must blink as a bat blinks bright Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled On the brink of eternal night. Oh feed to the golden fish his egg Where he floats in his captive bowl, To the cat his kind from the womb born blind,  And to the Lord my soul.
In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,  Whither and why I know not nor do I care. And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,  And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye, And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,  I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going, I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock  And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in?  He could have hid in the house. It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong  (But often we all do wrong) As the truth is I think he was already stuck  With Kubla Khan. He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,  I shall never write another word of it, When along comes the Person from Porlock And takes the blame for it. It was not right, it was wrong,  But often we all do wrong. * May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?  Why, Porson, didn’t you know? He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill So had a long way to go, He wasn’t much in the social sense Though his grandmother was a Warlock,  One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy  And nothing to do with Porlock, And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said  And had a cat named Flo,  And had a cat named Flo. I long for the Person from Porlock To bring my thoughts to an end, I am becoming impatient to see him I think of him as a friend, Often I look out of the window Often I run to the gate I think, He will come this evening, I think it is rather late. I am hungry to be interrupted For ever and ever amen O Person from Porlock come quickly And bring my thoughts to an end. * I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock  To break up everything and throw it away Because then there will be nothing to keep them  And they need not stay. * Why do they grumble so much? He comes like a benison They should be glad he has not forgotten them They might have had to go on. * These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,  I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant, Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting  To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting With various mixtures of human character which goes best,  All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.  There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
Was he married, did he try To support as he grew less fond of them  Wife and family? No, He never suffered such a blow. Did he feel pointless, feeble and distrait,  Unwanted by everyone and in the way? From his cradle he was purposeful,  His bent strong and his mind full. Did he love people very much  Yet find them die one day? He did not love in the human way. Did he ask how long it would go on, Wonder if Death could be counted on for an end? He did not feel like this,  He had a future of bliss. Did he never feel strong  Pain for being wrong? He was not wrong, he was right,  He suffered from others’, not his own, spite. But there is no suffering like having made a mistake Because of being of an inferior make. He was not inferior,  He was superior. He knew then that power corrupts but some must govern? His thoughts were different. Did he lack friends? Worse, Think it was for his fault, not theirs? He did not lack friends, He had disciples he moulded to his ends.  Did he feel over-handicapped sometimes, yet must draw even? How could he feel like this? He was the King of Heaven.  ...find a sudden brightness one day in everything Because a mood had been conquered, or a sin? I tell you, he did not sin.  Do only human beings suffer from the irritation I have mentioned? learn too that being comical  Does not ameliorate the desperation?  Only human beings feel this, It is because they are so mixed.  All human beings should have a medal,  A god cannot carry it, he is not able.  A god is Man’s doll, you ass, He makes him up like this on purpose. He might have made him up worse. He often has, in the past. To choose a god of love, as he did and does,  Is a little move then? Yes, it is.  A larger one will be when men Love love and hate hate but do not deify them? It will be a larger one.
Why is the word pretty so underrated? In November the leaf is pretty when it falls  The stream grows deep in the woods after rain  And in the pretty pool the pike stalks He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too,  The prey escapes with an underwater flash  But not for long, the great fish has him now  The pike is a fish who always has his prey And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils  As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between  The land and water. Not ‘torn’, he does not mind. The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty The lake water below him rustles with ice There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist  All this is pretty, it could not be prettier. Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes  It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough,  Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier  A field in the evening, tilting up. The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late  The sky is lighter than the hill field All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary  Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty. And it is careless, and that is always pretty This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless,  As Nature is always careless and indifferent Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty. So a person can come along like a thief—pretty!— Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel,  Lick the icicle broken from the bank And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty. Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you’ll be able  Very soon not even to cry pretty And so be delivered entirely from humanity  This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.
IV. The Fireflies I have climbed blind the way down through the trees  (How faint the phosphorescence of the stones)  On nights when not a light showed on the bay  And nothing marked the line of sky and sea— Only the beating of the heart defined A space of being in the faceless dark, The foot that found and won the path from blindness,  The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark.  The soundless revolution of the stars  Brings back the fireflies and each constellation,  And we are here half-shielded from that height  Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far  Incandescence where the single star Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time. Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme  With consonances unforeseen, and, gone,  Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun.  We wait now on the absence of our dead,  Sharing the middle world of moving lights  Where fireflies taking torches to the rose  Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches,  Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow  Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go.  The adagio of lights is gathering Across the sway and counter-lines as bay  And sky, contrary in motion, swerve  Against each other's patternings, while these  Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both,  Trusting to neither empty space nor seas  The burden of their weightless circlings. We,  Knowing no more of death than other men  Who make the last submission and return,  Savour the good wine of a summer's night  Fronting the islands and the harbour bar,  Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it,  Equal, in their arrivals and their goings,  With the order and the beauty of star on star.
When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight, And when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials, And when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street,  In all the dizzy buildings, The elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages,  Then the children of the city, Leaving the monkey-houses  of their office-buildings and apartments, With the greatest difficulty open their mouths, and sing: “Queen among the cities of the Earth: New York!  Rich as a cake, common as a doughnut, Expensive as a fur and crazy as cocaine, We love to hear you shake Your big face like a shining bank Letting the mad world know you’re full of dimes! ”This is your night to make maraccas out of all that metal money Paris is in the prison-house, and London dies of cancer.  This is the time for you to whirl, Queen of our hopped-up peace, And let the excitement of your somewhat crippled congas  Supersede the waltzes of more shining Capitals that have been bombed. “Meanwhile we, your children, Weeping in our seasick zoo of windows while you dance,  Will gobble aspirins, And try to keep our cage from caving in. All the while our minds will fill with these petitions,  Flowering quietly in between our gongs of pulse.  These will have to serve as prayers: “ ‘O lock us in the safe jails of thy movies! Confine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylums  Of the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!  Sentence us for life to the penitentiaries of thy bars and nightclubs, And leave us stupefied forever by the blue, objective lights  That fill the pale infirmaries of thy restaurants, And the clinics of thy schools and offices, And the operating-rooms of thy dance-halls. “ ‘But never give us any explanations, even when we ask,  Why all our food tastes of iodoform, And even the freshest flowers smell of funerals. No, never let us look about us long enough to wonder  Which of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,  And which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on the Daily Mirror, Are still alive, and which are dead.’ ”
(From Crossportion’s Pastoral) The bottom of the sea has come  And builded in my noiseless room  The fishes’ and the mermaids’ home, Whose it is most, most hell to be  Out of the heavy-hanging sea And in the thin, thin changeable air Or unroom sleep some other where;  But play their coral violins  Where waters most lock music in: The bottom of my room, the sea. Full of voiceless curtaindeep There mermaid somnambules come sleep  Where fluted half-lights show the way, And there, there lost orchestras play  And down the many quarterlights come  To the dim mirth of my aquadrome:  The bottom of my sea, the room.
I Swing by starwhite bones and Lights tick in the middle. Blue and white steel Black and white People hurrying along the wall.  ”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“ Curve behind the sun again  Towers full of ice. Rich  Glass houses, “Here, Have a little of my blood,”  Rich people!” Wheat in towers. Meat on ice. Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.  Baseball between these sudden tracks.  Yell past the red street— Have you any water to drink, City?  Rich glass buildings, give us milk!  Give us coffee! Give us rum! There are huge clouds all over the sky. River smells of gasoline. Cars after cars after cars, and then A little yellow street goes by without a murmur. There came a man (”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)  Who offered to sell us his bones. Swing by starwhite buildings and  Lights come to life with a sound  Of bugs under the dead rib. Miles of it. Still the same city.  II Do you know where you are going?  Do you know whom you must meet? Fortune, perhaps, or good news  Or the doctor, or the ladies  In the long bookstore, The angry man in the milkbar  The drunkard under the clock.  Fortune, perhaps, or wonder  Or, perhaps, death. In any case, our tracks Are aimed at a working horizon. The buildings, turning twice about the sun,  Settle in their respective positions. Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City  Consents to be recognized. III Then people come out into the light of afternoon,  Covered all over with black powder, And begin to attack one another with statements  Or to ignore one another with horror. Customs have not changed. Young men full of coffee and Old women with medicine under their skin Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour. Everywhere there is optimism without love And pessimism without understanding, They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts  Cannot agree to be at peace With their own images, shadowing them in windows  From store to store. IV Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds  And savage ferns, The brown-eyed daughters of ravens, Sing in the lucky doors While night comes down the street like the millennium  Wrapping the houses in dark feathers Soothing the town with a sign Healing the strong wings of sunstroke. Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies Off my Kentucky collarbone. The claws of the treacherous stars  Renegade drums of wood Endure the heavenward protest.  Their music heaves and hides.  Rain and foam and oil Make sabbaths for our wounds.  (Come, come, let all come home!) The summer sighs, and runs. My broken bird is under the whole town,  My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving  And there are real fountains under the floor. V Branches baptize our faces with silver Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.  Winds at last possess our empty country There, there under the moon  In parabolas of milk and iron  The ghosts of historical men  (Figures of sorrow and dust) Weep along the hills like turpentine.  And seas of flowering tobacco Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.
1. Now you are all here you might as well know this is America we do what we like. 2. Be spontaneous it is the right way. 3. Mothers you have met before still defy comprehension. 4. Our scene is foggy we are asking you to clarify. 5. Explains geomoetry of life. Where? At Catholic Worker. 6. Very glad you came. With our mouths full of cornflakes we were expecting an emergency. 7. Cynics declare you are in Greece. 8. Better get back quick before the place is all used up. 9. The night court: the mumbling judge: confused. 10. Well-wishers are there to meet you head on. 11. For the journal: soldiers, harbingers of change. 12. You came just in time, the score is even. 13. None of the machines has yet been broken. 14. Come on we know you have seen Popes. 15. People have been a little self-conscious around here in the emergency. 16. Who cares what the cynics declare. But you have been in Greece.
Heartworn happiness, fine line that winds among the tapestry’s old blacks and blues, bright hair blazing in the theater, red hair raving in the bar—as now the little leaves shoot veils of gold across the trees’ bones, shroud of spring, ghost of summer, shadblow snow, blood- russet spoor spilled prodigal on last year’s leaves . . . When your yellows, greens, and yellow-greens, your ochres and your umbers have evolved nearly to hemlock blackness, cypress blackness, when the woods are rife with soddenness (unfolded ferns, skunk cabbage by the stream, barberry by the trunks, and bitter watercress inside the druid pool) will your thin, still-glinting thread insist to catch the eye in filigreed titrations stitched along among beneath the branches, in the branches where it lives all winter, occulted fire, brief constant fleeting gold . . .
The barroom mirror lit up with our wives  has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills Japanese subcompact, little lives asleep behind us, heading for the hills in utter darkness through invisible countryside we know by heart by light;  but woods that are humane and hospitable  often turn eerie on a moonless night. Our talk is quiet: the week’s triumphs, failings,  gossip, memories—but largely fears. In our brief repertoire of poses ailing’s primary, and more so with the years now every step seems haunted by the future,  not only ours, but all that they will face: a stricter world, with scarceness for a teacher,  bad air, bad water, no untrammeled space or so it seems to us, after the Fall, but for the young the world is always new.  Maybe that’s what dates us worst of all and saves them: What we’ll miss they never knew. We’re old enough now to be old enough, to know what loss is—not just hair and breath;  each has eyeballed reality by now: a rift, a failure, or a major death. They landed on us; we were not consulted,  although our darkest yearnings aren’t so deep.  Let’s tick off the short wish list of adulthood:  sleep, honor, sleep, love, riches, sleep, and sleep . . . and camaraderie, that warms the blood,  the mildest, most forgiving form of love.  In an uncertain world a certain good is one who’ll laugh off what you’re leery of. That’s why we’re out here, racing with the clock  through cold and darkness: so that, glass in hand,  we’ll face our half-life, padded for the shock  by a few old souls who understand. Now the odometer, uncompromising,  shows all its nines’ tails hanging in the air.  Now an entire row of moons is rising,  rising, rising, risen—we are there: Total Maturity. The trick is how to amortize remorse, desire, and dread.  Eyes ahead, companions: Life is Now.  The serious years are opening ahead.
FOR B. Somewhere ahead I see you watching something out your window, what I don’t know. You’re tall, not on your tiptoes, green, no longer yellow, no longer little, little one, but the changeless changing seasons are still with us. Summer’s back, so beautiful it always reeks of ending, and now its breeze is stirring in your room commanding the lawn, trying to wake you to say the day is wasting, but you’re north of childhood now and out of here, and I’ve gone south.
Now that the ticket to eternity has your name on it, we are here to pay the awkward tribute post-modernity allows to those who think they think your way but hear you only faintly, filtered through a gauze of echoes, sounding in a voice that could be counterfeit; and yet the noise seems to expand our notion of the true. An ivory forehead, landscape drunk on light, mother-of-pearl that flashes in the night: intimations of the miracle when the null steps forward as the all— these were signals, sparks that spattered from the anvil of illusions where you learned the music of a generation burned by an old myth: the end that will not come. There is no other myth. This sun-drenched yard proves it, freighted with the waiting dead, where votive plastic hyacinths relay the promise of one more technicolor day —the promise that is vouchsafed to you, scribe, and your dictator, while your names get blurred with all the others, like your hardest word dissolving in the language of the tribe.
You were in bed. You heard your mother working in the kitchen. It was still light, the birds were bickering, the waterfall behind the house was falling. Its rushing lulled you, you loved the moment you lay in, and you counted the time from this instant to this, and put it away to be lived on another night, your wedding night or some other night that needed all the luck, all the saved-up minutes you could bring it. Later you filled bottles in the stream and dated them and stored them in a cupboard. Months after, you retrieved them to stare at what time had done. You were eight, but already you knew it was working on you, each minute you passed through was gone. You didn’t want to give up your old clothes. You’d watch your mother wrap your dresses in a box for another girl and know that where their stripes and buttons went what you’d lived in them followed. But those minutes in bed, minutes of utter safety, you heard the water falling and didn’t want it to fall. You wanted to keep it, you saved yourself that minute. I don’t know if you still have it or if you’ve had to spend it on you or on me. But I know you still save minutes I used to think went unwatched into our account in time that allows no withdrawals. You hold onto the slippers and letters, things that are leaving, things we’ve left, evidence we’re judged unfairly by. You have the picture, you and Pam in blue fishing in the stream below the pool, staring back at the camera half-abashed. Your jacket is still in the closet. You never wear it, you don’t even remember when you did, but it’s here to testify the picture doesn’t lie —though the color’s different, your hair is shorter now, and the water in the pool is long gone downstream.
This high up, the face eroding; the red cedar slopes over. An accident chooses a stranger. Each rain unplugs roots which thin out like a hand. Above the river, heat lightning flicks silently and the sound holds, coiled in air. Some nights you are here dangling a Valpolicella bottle, staring down at the flat water that slides by with its mouth full of starlight. It is always quiet when we finish the wine. While you were a living man how many pictures were done of you. Serious as an angel, lacing up your boots. Ice blows into my fields.
I’ll know the time to leave the room where I’ve been growing hair from my face, drinking dark beers when the light in the lake bums out. That’s when fish turn on their music. They lie in a blue current waiting for the moon to pass over, and the fishermen with their lanterns know this as they spill a can of sweet corn and wonder if they spoke what they were just thinking. I clear my way through the fog as music will break through static. The frogs strike up, a window goes out in the Home for Elders. Don’t you wonder why it is built far from anywhere, as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting; blind driveways to lost roads. As for my own parents, they did not grow old. What I know: dinners without conversation, stars that shine for anyone. I know my time is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve. I want to say don’t feel sorry for men, those who leave women smouldering like cigarettes, those who are fond of burials. War is a habit of mind, I swear by my mother’s gender. Tonight sticks in the leaves are slick as pilot snakes. Wherever I part branches no one is in a boat, no one has stirred a wake. Not jackknifing off the dock, it’s hauling myself back up that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink. Don’t wake the cottonmouths. Summertime. If you were here and you remembered to stash your smokes in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine we’d fall quiet now as pollen on water, I would tell you the true story of Urashima and the turtle.
—for Pilar Coover    Me, when I think of you I see Alley cats in your kitchen, God weeping at your openings, Individual acts of imagination, never Culligan men under Floorboards slipping hallucinogens into your water. Let me say I have imagined you Undressing guests before mirrors To let their dragonfly bodies Escape from human shells.
The loop of rusty cable incises its shadow on the stucco wall. My father smiles shyly and takes one of my cigarettes, holding it awkwardly at first, as if it were a dart, while the yard slowly swings across the wide sill of daylight. Then it is a young man’s quick hand that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall, his white shirt open at the throat, where the skin is weathered, and he chats and daydreams, something he never does. Smoking his cigarette, he is even younger than I am, a brother who begins to guess, amazed, that what he will do will turn out to be this. He recalls the house he had when I was born, leaning against it now after work, the pale stucco of memory, 1947. Baby bottles stand near the sink inside. The new wire of the telephone, dozing in a coil, waits for the first call. The years are smoke.
for Maxine Kumin A cylinder of maple set in place, feet spread apart— and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer but honed like an axe, draws a semicircle overhead and strikes through the two new halves to leave the steel head sunk a half-inch in the block and the ash handle rigid in the air. A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits the butt end, and the blade rolls out of the cut. The half-logs are still rocking on the flagstones. So much less than what we have been persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood might have sufficed, but it is what we have been taught to disown and forget. Yet just such hardship is what saves. For if the stacked cords speak of felled trees, of countless five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill till the blood is wrung from your back and snowbound warmth must seem so far off you would rather freeze, yet each thin tongue torn from the grain when log-halves were sundered at one stroke will sing in the stove. To remind you of hands. Of how mere touch is song in the silence where hands live—the song of muddy bark, the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down, and the song of one hand over another, two of us holding the last length of the log in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw keeps ripping through hickory.
If faith is a tree that sorrow grows and women, repentant or not, are swamps, a man who comes for solace here  will be up to his knees and slow getting out. A name can turn on anyone.  But say that a woman washes the dust from a stranger’s feet and sits quite dry-eyed in front of her mirror at night. The candle flame moves with her breath, as does the hand of the painter, who sees in the flame  his chance for virtuosity. She lets him leave her shoulder bare. Bedlam’s distilled from a Mary too, St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, shelter  for all the afflicted and weak of mind. The donors conceived of as magi  no doubt. The mad and the newborn serve equally well for show.  A whore with a heart, the rich with a conscience, the keepers of language  and hospitals badly embarrassed at times by their charge. The mirror refuses the candle, you see. And tears on another’s behalf are not the mirrors he’s pleased to regard. Who loves his ironies buxom and grave  must hate the foolish water of her eyes.
The ones too broke or wise to get parts from a dealer come here where the mud is red and eternal. Eight front ends are stacked on girders he salvaged too. Ask for Bruce, he said on the phone, and doesn’t crack a smile when you show up. Twenty-four fifty if we find one, sister.Bruce, it says on his coveralls, and Bruce on the ones his helper wears. The routine’s so good they’re keeping it. The taillight you can have. Except for the traffic, the wrong parts of Baltimore aren’t so bad: each house pulling its straightest face, the curbs and stoops lined up like a man inverting his pockets to show he’s got nothing to hide. Construction sites gone aimless and the detours feeling more like home. You know where to find a cheap lunch. Up front, a woman hears the list through twice before, as to a sweet and original prompting, she picks fried trout. Likewise the oyster shucker, pretending you’ve asked for a straw with your beer. He searches the counter above which reigns a picture of Washington Stokes, retired, who cleaned fish to order for fifty-nine years. A girl on a schedule deserves what she gets, and sometimes gets it kindly, earned or no. Untouched by heat of sun or city police, the fair-haired accommodate best by having everything to learn. But here comes your beer without a straw, as though good nature were common as thirst. Here’s Washington Stokes, who would understand the strategy that lets the fool go free.
Love the drill, confound the dentist. Love the fever that carries me home. Meat of exile. Salt of grief. This much, indifferent affliction might yield. But how when the table is God’s own board and grace must be said in company? If hatred were honey, as even the psalmist persuaded himself, then Agatha might be holding her breasts on the plate for reproach. The plate is decidedly ornamental, and who shall say that pity’s not, at this remove? Her gown would be stiff with embroidery whatever the shape of the body beneath. Perhaps in heaven God can’t hide his face. So the wounded are given these gowns to wear and duties that teach them the leverage of pain. Agatha listens with special regard to the barren, the dry, to those with tumors where milk should be, to those who nurse for hire. Let me swell, let me not swell. Remember the child, how its fingers go blind as it sucks. Bartholomew, flayed, intervenes for the tanners. Catherine for millers, whose wheels are of stone. Sebastian protects the arrowsmiths, and John the chandlers, because he was boiled in oil. We borrow our light where we can, here’s begging the pardon of tallow and wick. And if, as we’ve tried to extract from the prospect, we’ll each have a sign to be known by at last— a knife, a floursack, a hammer, a pot— the saints can stay, the earth won’t entirely have given us up.
In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,  at her  expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied French Braids, for all  the mornings afterward of Hush  and Just stand still, to make some small amends for every reg-  iment-  ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss, I did as I was told for once,  gave up  my map, let Emma lead us through the woods “by instinct,” as the drunkard knew  the natural  prince. We had no towels, we had no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels  call them here, and I  am summer’s dullest hand at un- premeditated moves. But when  the coppice of sheltering boxwood  disclosed its path and posted rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed  poor excuse.  The ladies in their lumpy variety lay on their public half-acre of lawn,  the water  lay in dappled shade, while Emma in her underwear and I  in an ill-  fitting borrowed suit availed us of the breast stroke and a modified  crawl.  She’s eight now. She will rather die than do this in a year or two  and lobbies,  even as we swim, to be allowed to cut her hair. I do, dear girl, I will  give up  this honey-colored metric of augmented thirds, but not (shall we climb  on the raft  for a while?) not yet.
If you’re fond of road-blocks, this one can’t be beat: A big tree in the middle of the street.
(FOR HANUKKAH) Light the first of eight tonight— the farthest candle to the right. Light the first and second, too, when tomorrow's day is through. Then light three, and then light four— every dusk one candle more Till all eight burn bright and high, honoring a day gone by When the Temple was restored, rescued from the Syrian lord, And an eight-day feast proclaimed— The Festival of Lights—well named To celebrate the joyous day when we regained the right to pray to our one God in our own way.
When the earth is turned in spring The worms are fat as anything. And birds come flying all around To eat the worms right off the ground. They like the worms just as much as I Like bread and milk and apple pie. And once, when I was very young, I put a worm right on my tongue. I didn't like the taste a bit, And so I didn't swallow it. But oh, it makes my Mother squirm Because she thinks I ate that worm!
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes; Now, although the room grows chilly, I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy.
How awkward when playing with glue To suddenly find out that you  Have stuck nice and tight  Your left hand to your right In a permanent how-do-you-do!
I don’t understand why everyone stares When I take off my clothes and dance down the stairs. Or when I stick carrots in both of my ears, Then dye my hair green and go shopping at Sears. I just love to dress up and do goofy things. If I were an angel, I’d tie-dye my wings! Why can’t folks accept me the way that I am? So what if I’m different and don’t act like them? I’m not going to change and be someone I’m not. I like who I am, and I’m all that I’ve got.
Last night when I was sound asleep, My little brother Keith Tiptoed into my bedroom And pulled out all my teeth. You’d think that I would be upset And jump and spit and swear. You’d think that I would tackle Keith And pull out all his hair. But no! I’m glad he did it. So what if people stare. Now, thanks to the Tooth Fairy, I’ll be a millionaire!
Michael O’Toole hated going to school, He wanted to stay home and play. So lied to his dad and said he felt bad And stayed home from school one day. The very next day he decided to say That his stomach felt a bit queasy. He groaned and he winced ’til his dad was convinced, And he said to himself, “This is easy!” At the end of the week, his dad kissed his cheek And said, “Son, you’ve missed too much school.” “But still I feel funny, and my nose is all runny,” Said the mischievous Michael O’Toole. Each day he’d complain of a new ache or pain, But his doctor could find nothing wrong. He said it was best to let Michael rest, Until he felt healthy and strong. Michael O’Toole never did get to school, So he never learned how to write— Or to read or to spell or do anything well, Which is sad, for he’s really quite bright. And now that he’s grown, he sits home alone ’Cause there’s nothing he knows how to do. Don't be a fool and stay home from school, Or the same thing could happen to you!
Don’t tell me the cat ate your math sheet, And your spelling words went down the drain, And you couldn’t decipher your homework, Because it was soaked in the rain. Don’t tell me you slaved for hours On the project that’s due today, And you would have had it finished If your snake hadn’t run away. Don’t tell me you lost your eraser, And your worksheets and pencils, too, And your papers are stuck together With a great big glob of glue. I’m tired of all your excuses; They are really a terrible bore. Besides, I forgot my own work, At home in my study drawer.
This little piggy went to market, This little piggy stayed home, This little piggy had roast beef, This little piggy had none. This little piggy went ... Wee, wee, wee, all the way home!
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
Hush little baby, don't say a word, Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird won't sing, Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond ring turns to brass, Papa's gonna buy you a looking glass. And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa's gonna buy you a billy goat. And if that billy goat won't pull, Papa's gonna buy you a cart and bull. And if that cart and bull turn over, Papa's gonna buy you a dog named Rover. And if that dog named Rover won't bark, Papa's gonna buy you a horse and cart. And if that horse and cart fall down, You'll still be the sweetest little baby in town!
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king's horses and all the king's men Couldn't put Humpty together again.
Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow; And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go. It followed her to school one day, Which was against the rule; It made the children laugh and play To see a lamb at school. And so the teacher turned it out, But still it lingered near, And waited patiently about Till Mary did appear. Why does the lamb love Mary so? The eager children cry; Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know, The teacher did reply.
Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine lady upon a white horse; Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, She shall have music wherever she goes.
Yankee Doodle went to town, A-riding on a pony; Stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells And pretty maids all in a row.
Ladybird, ladybird, Fly away home, Your house is on fire And your children all gone; All except one And that's little Ann, And she has crept under The warming pan.
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man, Bake me a cake, as fast as you can; Pat it, prick it, and mark it with B, Put it in the oven for baby and me.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn't know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread; And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep, And can't tell where to find them; Leave them alone, and they'll come home, Bringing their tails behind them. Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep, And dreamt she heard them bleating; But when she awoke, she found it a joke, For they were still all fleeting. Then up she took her little crook, Determined for to find them; She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed, For they'd left their tails behind them. It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray Into a meadow hard by, There she espied their tails, side by side, All hung on a tree to dry. She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye, And over the hillocks she raced; And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should, That each tail be properly placed.
The three little kittens, they lost their mittens, And they began to cry, "Oh, mother dear, we sadly fear, That we have lost our mittens." "What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens! Then you shall have no pie." "Meow, meow, meow." "Then you shall have no pie." The three little kittens, they found their mittens, And they began to cry, "Oh, mother dear, see here, see here, For we have found our mittens." "Put on your mittens, you silly kittens, And you shall have some pie." "Purr, purr, purr, Oh, let us have some pie." The three little kittens put on their mittens, And soon ate up the pie, "Oh, mother dear, we greatly fear, That we have soiled our mittens." "What, soiled your mittens, you naughty kittens!" Then they began to sigh, "Meow, meow, meow," Then they began to sigh. The three little kittens, they washed their mittens, And hung them out to dry, "Oh, mother dear, do you not hear, That we have washed our mittens?" "What, washed your mittens, then you're good kittens, But I smell a rat close by." "Meow, meow, meow, We smell a rat close by."
Polly, put the kettle on, Polly, put the kettle on, Polly, put the kettle on, We'll all have tea. Sukey, take it off again, Sukey, take it off again, Sukey, take it off again, They've all gone away.
Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot Nine days old.
Ring around the rosy, Pocket full of posy, Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down!
Little boy blue, Come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, The cow's in the corn. But where is the boy Who looks after the sheep? He's under a haystack, Fast asleep.
Little Jack Horner Sat in the corner, Eating a Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, "What a good boy am I!"
Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water; Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. Up Jack got, and home did trot, As fast as he could caper, To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob With vinegar and brown paper.
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candlestick.
If sunlight fell like snowflakes, gleaming yellow and so bright, we could build a sunman, we could have a sunball fight, we could watch the sunflakes drifting in the sky. We could go sleighing in the middle of July through sundrifts and sunbanks, we could ride a sunmobile, and we could touch sunflakes— I wonder how they'd feel.
If you catch a firefly  and keep it in a jar You may find that  you have lost A tiny star. If you let it go then,  back into the night, You may see it  once again Star bright.
I left my head somewhere today. Put it down for just a minute. Under the table? On a chair? Wish I were able to say where. Everything I need is in it!
I made a sand castle. In rolled the sea.  "All sand castles  belong to me—  to me," said the sea. I dug sand tunnels. In flowed the sea.  "All sand tunnels  belong to me—  to me," said the sea. I saw my sand pail floating free. I ran and snatched it from the sea.  "My sand pail  belongs to me—  to ME!"
The monsters in my closet Like to sleep the day away. So when I get home from school, I let them out to play. When Mom calls me for supper, I give them each a broom. First they put my toys away, And then they clean my room. The Mummy hates to vacuum. So if he starts to whine, I kick his rear and tell him, “Trade jobs with Frankenstein.” Wolfman used to fold my clothes. I’ll give him one more chance— Last time he wasn’t careful And left furballs in my pants. When my room is nice and neat, I bring them up some food. But Dracula wants to drink my blood— I think that’s pretty rude. When it’s time to go to bed, I hug them all goodnight. They jump back in my closet, While I turn out the light. I’ve taken care of monsters For as long as I recall, But the monsters in my closet Are the nicest ones of all!
We shall not all sleep,   but we shall all be changed. Two nights he came to me, mute,  on fire, no dream. I woke to find  the window embered and fog filling  the willows. The third time he was milder and early, his gray form all ash. He said to me at bedside, kneeling,  “You must say your life to save it.”  Midnight, hoarfrost. I was not yet ten and didn’t know what to make of so brief a bedtime story. His features were simple and familiar—the smile,  both eyes shut in bliss, I guessed,  head and torso echoing an antique  keyhole. From sleep’s icy edge  I asked, “How?” But he was gone,  the room all hazed. The air smelled  of struck matches, scuppernong,  a copperhead’s musk. What next?  The moon was new in the budding bird cherry and Venus startling overhead.  Dizzy for water, I followed  my flashlight down the stairs  where the black mantel clock  was bonging. Beside it sat the twin  of my herald, a stone bookend  from Kildare and no more able to speak or take wing than a weathercock. His closed eyes told me, “Look  inside,” but I ached to see him blaze  again and say aloud how change  could shake me to a shining. “But  I must be the key,” I thought, and stepped over the sparkling threshold. My nightshirt floated ghostly across the scalded lawn, under the arbor,  beside the barn, my soles not troubled  by white grass crackling all the way to the well shed, the burning that must have been coming from me.
Nostrums? Lordy, I have seen them all. Alcohol’s the favorite. Many a quack’s panacea bottled in a cellar and hawked from door to door is thriving still. Bindweed’s supposed to heal a bruise. Cherokee remedies still survive, and slave recipes—hyssop, juniper, chives. Waitress, freshen this elixir, if you please. One day a hefty woman who works a loom down at Pepperell Mills sauntered in with no appointment and perched herself prim as an English queen in the waiting room. What happened next? For a prolapsed uterus, folk medicine recommends inserting an Irish potato. It works, if you can stand the weight, my friends. Well, she’d relied on that specific since winter. We’d hit, you understand, July, and her complaint, not one bit shy, was, Leaves in my virginia. Not beatific, no, but she was composed, no maniac, and it made some sense. What better place than a protected pocket, warm and moist? But the spud had sprouted, sent runners amok. You never know in these flatland burley counties if your manual skills will bloom as sawbones or private gardener. Deftly, I removed the obstruction and took it home. I’ve raised a whole colony in my window box, and bake, fry, or boil, I’m proud as hell of this year’s crop. The woman paid her bill with eggs and applejack. Life is a paradox. Now I’ve got to rush back and tend my flock. Got appointments at four—a pregnant lady, a leg to set, twins to inspect for chicken pox, and Marvin with his routine emergency. I guess you could say my practice is thriving. Drop by, and I’ll fry you up some shallot hash browns in Margie’s seasoned skillet, a flavor I can promise is sure to revive any ailing soul. Where do I get my onions? Don’t ask. The whole sweet world is a garden.
Down here we say we dare defend our rights, our state motto. I’d back Charlton Heston for any office in the land. A Christian, he speaks right up. He’s got his head on straight, and people listen. Even on the screen of a honky-tonk TV he still looks like a hero, and he wouldn’t let freaks take over our country. If it takes firepower to keep us free, I say stock up. Keep your powder dry. Everything is dangerous these days. Life sucks. We suck too. Disaster is coming. Even God’s gone spleenish. Bless the common man against the government. They lie. They grind us up. Winchesters might be our last resort. Hellfire preachers say we best prepare for a dark event, but maybe Charlie Heston could keep death off our backs and tone down Jehovah’s wrath. Sweet Jesus—and this is the gospel truth— is pissed off at our newfangled unfaith. He’s coming back, and he’s armed to the teeth.
I’ve caught fish everwhichaway they can be. On the Chattahoochee River I’ve used nets, gigs, trot lines, and bare hands. Even electricity. One day Braleigh and me caught so many that two-ended punt boat nearly went under. We were boys and didn’t know any better. Catfish were plentiful as water for all we could figure. That was back then. We’d wrap the copper pipe and drop it in, then use the telephone battery to make a wet cell of that whole muddy dogleg of the river. The small channel cats would rise, then recover, but big whites and blues would float, belly up, and we’d haul ’em in, fill the boat to the oarlocks with fresh fish to eat or sell. Their backs shined so bright it was a wonder. But let me tell you this: it was also a danger. If you caught the coil wrong or touched iron binding on that old craft with a live wire, it was enough to knock you on your ass. A man could get killed just trying to catch fish. Of course, such a method was a sin against Jesus and man, fish and fresh water, but we didn’t savvy. We were just free as gnats for the summer, a little enterprising and a little hungry. Besides, we hadn’t heard of sport or mercy. That was a cooter’s age ago. That was then.
If it’s true that Johnny Weismuller stole his Tarzan yell from the Alpine yodel, did Hank Williams in the back seat of his Cadillac dream the ululation of Bedouin women welcoming the horsemen back from war? When I was a boy only a fool would fake a country sound, and my father made his voice over to ring as simple as Jack Parr’s Midwest porkless, yamless, no-cornbread-or-cracklin’ patter. He didn’t want to be from Butts County, Georgia, and hated farm chores and coveralls. Football got him out. The FBI gave him a way to travel under cover, but I have heard him, years later, after choir practice and the church social, sit back with a Pall Mall and follow Eight-Finger Fleming’s banjo frail. He’d hold that smoke deep, his ash glowing till his throat was bathed in tar, and then he’d cut loose and scroll it out, a yodel to make Roy Rogers blush. It was no hymn, I’ll tell you. We had a brick split-level in the suburbs, and the radio station of choice adored Perry Como’s croon. My mother adopted words like boocoo and oodles to mask her peach-orchard drawl. An uncle might tell a farmer’s daughter joke, the rake fleeing the cocked shotgun stopping on a hill to yodel, “Andyouroldladytoo,” but nobody could say ain’t or you’uns or I’ll get to it directly
I like it quiet like this, Alton. I like to think. I love the way spring light falls easy, soft. This morning I was driving the cruiser, savoring gold pollen everywhere out in the south of the county. Real nice, seeing forsythia and daffodils, ditch irises, and a few Cherokee roses opening white. It was a blue day, and I had a Tampa Jewel, just counting cows, seeing an April breeze in the catkins and new leaves, the radio off. I know that’s hardly right, but curse any citizen who’d grudge me an hour’s peace. Then I started seeing this marksmanship in the caution signs, the yellow diamonds that warn of deer or curves ahead, a steep grade—there’s one of those. Four circles and a jagged hole, likely a thirty-eight slug, smack in the center neater than Willard cleaves meat at the joint. A dozen and more. I got mad because I get paid to protect what the county commission declares holy— the park with its petting zoo, the rebel sentry on the square, and all the highway signs— and here’s all indications that some felon has no respect, some felon who can shoot. I admit my feelings were mixed, that right indignation at the broken law, but envy of his eye for centers. Mind you, I saw nary a rip on the fringes or a near miss. Bull’s-eyes, every sign I saw. A fool is what I feel, you understand, cause I motored over to Pig Burton’s store near The Bottle and asked him—he was stacking feed sacks on Robert Ring’s vehicle— who the hell was the target king of Beat Three. Pig always has his hands in every pie; he’d know if some individual had been hauling off all the turkey shoot prizes. I know I should know, too, but a sheriff’s got beaucoup chores to do, mostly idiot paperwork. I’ve lost touch since the last bond vote hired me four new deputies, all dirt-dumb. Well, old Pig has that laugh he can’t hold back, and he points his finger pistol-like at Robert, who’s got a shamed look on his face. “Pow,” he says at me or Bob, looking back and forth, just “Pow.” Seems Bob’s boy Earl, the one that ain’t got the sense of a chicken under that cowlick red as a rooster comb, is known to have sneaked Bob’s Colt a week before and shot every yellow sign he could till his pa ran him down and whacked him good, then locked him in the fall-down curing shed overnight—he’s a hard man, but he loves that boy. I remember once ... but how the hell can any half-wit you wouldn’t trust to milk hit the bull by the eye first time he ever gets loose with a handgun? “It’s easy,” says Bob, less shamed than afraid now he’ll have to pay for fresh metal—his people have always been tight—but he’s showing a grin I don’t like. “Real easy. He just cuts loose from the hip, five short feet back, sometimes maybe six, and comes back later to paint the target circles wheresomever his bullet hits. He aims that paintbrush right smart.” Blessed if I don’t feel the fool for being full dumbstruck at a trick Earl’s not bright enough to see as a joke. But I didn’t write it up nor charge a soul, just ground my cigar in the dirt and helped myself to a Dr. Pepper, made believe it didn’t mean a thing, but all day I’ve been riding, listening to crime reports on state radio— robbery at the mall, attempted rape maybe, wrecks on the bypass and a set fire in Brill’s deer woods. It gets to be too much. I shouldn’t even take the time to sit here watching this dark space where folks have been dancing all evening, hearing the quiet after all those raucous songs, but Alton, don’t you see, the feeble boy’s right, or half right, at least? It all comes to the same, whether you get what you want in the end or want what you get. The law works that way: each law makes more crime, but it’s not my job to say. Warm up my cup just one last time. I’ve got to circle Ampex once more before I turn it home. God, this dark feels right, no matter what flowers out there shed spring light. The dark is what hits me as holy. I’m calling it a day. Catch you later. Night.
No he is not an urn singer nor does he carry on rapport with negative forces within extinction he is the brush fire singer who projects from his heart the sound of insidious subduction  of blank anomaly as posture of opaque density as ash he distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer  from flesh & habit & drought the performer part poltergeist & Orisha part broken in-cellular dove part glance from floating Mongol bastions where the spires are butane where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis because he allegedly embodies a green necrotic umber more like a vertical flash or a farad posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace therefore his sound a dazed simoom in a gauntlet a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms because he gives off the odour of storms this universal Orisha like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness  out of de-productive hydrogen sums out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet yes he sings at a certain pitch which has evolved beyond the potter’s field beyond a tragic hummingbird’s cirrhosis surmounting primeval flaw surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless  he intones without impact his synodic revelations no longer of the law  of measured palpable destinations because he sings in such a silence that even the Rishis can’t ignore as though the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness  perpetually convinces like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an  intangible solar candle such power can never be confusedly re-traced  because it adumbrates & blazes like a glossary of suns so that each viral drill each forge casts a feeling which in-saturates a pressure bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity like a subjective skill corroded & advanced he sings beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus  where blood shifts beyond the magnet of volume where the nerves no longer resonate  inside an octagonal maze stung at its source by piranhas
I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters. Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano. Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once. Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist’s powders and unguents. And when John Keats looked at you in a collection of pots it was poetry at first sight: quotable beautiful teleological concatenations of thoughts. It’s the proverbial dog of a poem, though: slobbering panting and bright-eyed like a loquacious thug or a spokesperson embattled on behalf of a sociopolitical thesis* to which he has not had access owing to the need-to-know basis. And he never says which pot. Just an oasis of tease in a sea of tilth, kind of a concrete catachresis bopping along with timbrels, irrepressible as Count Basie, fabulous I mean classic I mean vout, keeping the buckwheat in and the weevils out while the rest of us get and spend and ache and earn and go to the Bruce Springsteen concert and take our turn lining up at the Metropolitan to look at the Macedonian gold krater and promising ourselves to read up seriously.
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story:  I had fallen, or the bus had started up when I had one foot in the air. I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,  the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out  into the air, the clear child gazing about her in the air as I plunged to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,  the bus skidding to a stop, the driver jumping out, my daughter laughingDo it again. I have never done it  again, I have been very careful. I have kept an eye on that nice young mother who lightly leapt off the moving vehicle onto the stopped street, her life in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.
As the guests arrive at our son’s party  they gather in the living room— short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins. Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming. One says to anotherHow old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So? They eye each other, seeing themselves  tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their  throats a lot, a room of small bankers, they fold their arms and frown. I could beat youup, a seven says to a six, the midnight cake, round and heavy as a turret behind them on the table. My son, freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,  chest narrow as the balsa keel of a  model boat, long hands cool and thin as the day they guided him  out of me, speaks up as a host for the sake of the group.We could easily kill a two-year-old, he says in his clear voice. The other  men agree, they clear their throats like Generals, they relax and get down to  playing war, celebrating my son’s life.
At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,  my mother potters around her house.  Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one  there, no one to tell what to do, she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,  fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly  throws out her arms and screams—high notes  lying here and there on the carpets  like bodies touched by a downed wire, she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through  the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.  I feel, now, that I do not know her, and for all my staring, I have not seen her —like the song she sang, when we were small, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,  how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,  for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body, Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests, Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods, Crashing through trees, dying out, Settling like a white mist over everything.
Always behind my back I hear The spastic clicking of jerked knees And other automatic reactions Tracking me through the years to where Time’s winged chariot is double Parked near the eternity frontier And in such moments I want to participate In human life less and less But when I do the obligatory double take And glance behind me into the dark green future All I see stretching out are vast Arizona republics of more
Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; nor will the tranquil rustling of the lyric, drowned out by the heavy, dull coagulation of persons in cities, where a uniformity of occupations breeds cravings for sensation which hourly visual communication of instant intelligence gratifies like crazy, likely survive this age.
Nice spring day off big white cloud At Inspiration Point escaping time wars Poet takes book & wine bottle up into Mist Mountains Since only available agenda is rhyming with silence Seeking window of opportunity on a wall I disguise what I have to say by sounding Chinese Such as stars are now darker and farther away They take deeper drinks because space is Drying out afraid to think own thoughts Administered citizen achieving condition of robot In public mind things not so good these days Nor in wrong run will it matter to Tu Fu
Don’t hurt the radio for Against all Solid testimony machines Have feelings Too Brush past it lightly With a fine regard For allowing its molecules To remain 100% intact Machines can think like Wittgenstein And the radio’s a machine Thinking softly to itself Of the Midnight Flower As her tawny parts unfold In slow motion the boat Rocks on the ocean As her tawny parts unfold The radio does something mental To itself singingly As her tawny parts unfold Inside its wires And steal away its heart Two minutes after eleven The color dream communicates itself The ink falls on the paper as if magically The scalp falls away A pain is felt Deep in the radio I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair And do my dance for the radio It’s my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio And while remaining motionless elsewise Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible While uttering a horrible and foreign word Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx And placing it on the blue chair The blue chair isn’t here So I can’t do that trick at the present time The radio is thinking a few licks of its own Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow’s grammar Beautiful spas of seltzery coition Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker The radio says Edwardian farmers from Minnesota march on the Mafia Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips The radio fears foul play It turns impersonal A piggy bank was smashed A victim was found naked Radio how can you tell me this In such a chipper tone Your structure of voices is a friend The best kind The kind one can turn on or off Whenever one wants to But that is wrong I know For you will intensely to continue And in a deeper way You do Hours go by And I watch you As you diligently apply A series of audible frequencies To tiny receptors Located inside my cranium Resulting in much pleasure for someone Who looks like me Although he is seated about two inches to my left And the both of us Are listening to your every word With a weird misapprehension It’s the last of the tenth And Harmon Killebrew is up With a man aboard He blasts a game-winning home run The 559th of his career But no one cares Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping To be replayed in 212 years Heaven must be like this, radio To not care about anything Because it’s all being taped for replay much later Heaven must be like this For as her tawny parts unfold The small lights swim roseate As if of sepals were the tarp made As it is invisibly unrolled And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of Georgia  Only through your voice
The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God Takes over all of a sudden In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators. It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted, That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch. We can take it from there. We can take it to Easy Street. But when things get tough on Easy Street What then? Is it time for realism? And who are these guys on the bus Who glide in golden hats past us On their way to Kansas City?
This old house lodges no ghosts! Those swaggering specters who found their way Across the Atlantic Were left behind With their old European grudges In the farmhouses of New England And Pennsylvania Like so much jettisoned baggage Too heavy To lug over the Piedmont. The flatlands are inhospitable To phantoms. Here Shadows are sharp and arbitrary Not mazy, obscure, Cowering in corners Behind scary old boots in a cupboard Or muffled in empty coats, deserted By long-dead cousins (Who appear now and then But only in photographs Already rusting at the edges)— Setting out in the creaking wagon Tight-lipped, alert to move on, The old settlers had no room For illusions. Their dangers were real. Now in the spare square house Their great-grandchildren Tidy away the past Until the polished surfaces Reflect not apparitions, pinched, Parched, craving, unsatisfied, But only their own faces.
Travel is a vanishing act Only to those who are left behind. What the traveler knows Is that he accompanies himself, Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked, Stolen, or lost, or mistaken. So one took, past outposts of empire, “Calmly as if in the British Museum,” Not only her Victorian skirts, Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith In the civilizing mission of women, Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor; Another, friend of witch-doctors, Living on native chop, Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes, Heralded her astonishing arrival Under shivering stars By calling, “It’s only me!” A third, Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate That a woman could travel as easily as a man, Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears And only once permitted a tribal chieftain To stroke her long, golden hair.
I have a friend who’s not well dressed. He wears no hat. He wears no vest. Upon his back he wears no shirt, so you can see there’s lots of dirt. He wears no shoes upon his feet. He wears no pants upon his seat. In fact, he doesn’t wear a stitch, so he can scratch if there’s an itch. I hope that you don’t find him rude— my dog is happy in the nude.
I open the box of my favorite postcards  and turn them over looking for de Chirico  because I remember seeing you standing  facing a wall no wider than a column where  to your left was a hall going straight back into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down  to where you stood alone and where the room  opened out on your right to an auditorium  full of people who had just heard you read  and were now listening to the other poet.  I was looking for the de Chirico because of  the places, the empty places. The word  “boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side  of the fountains in Paris where the water  blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.  It was dark then too and I was alone.  Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t  somebody find me all those years? The form  of love was purity. An art. An architecture.  Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue  and the statue with its front turned away  from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,  hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones  and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking  for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes  full of caring and something remote. His eyes are loving and empty, but not with  nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because  he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap  statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene  and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men  with smudges for mouths, backed by water,  each held still by the impossibility of what  art can accomplish. A broken river god, only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.  The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.
I would like to decorate this silence,  but my house grows only cleaner and more plain. The glass chimes I hung  over the register ring a little when the heat goes on. I waited too long to drink my tea.  It was not hot. It was only warm.
It was a picture I had after the war. A bombed English church. I was too young  to know the word English or war, but I knew the picture. The ruined city still seemed noble.  The cathedral with its roof blown off was not less godly. The church was the same  plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out  of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.  All our desire for love or children  is treated like rags by the enemy. I knew so much and sang anyway.  Like a bird who will sing until it is brought down. When they take  away the trees, the child picks up a stick  and says, this is a tree, this the house and the family. As we might. Through a door  of what had been a house, into the field  of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting  its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.
Titled after Satie I. Three pears ripen On the ledge. Weeks pass. They are a marriage. The middle one’s the conversation The other two are having. He is their condition. Three wings without birds, Three feelings. How can they help themselves? They can’t. How can they stay like that? They can. II. The pears are consulting. Business is bad this year, D’Anjou, Bartlett. They are psychiatrists, Patient and slick. Hunger reaches the hard stem. It will get rid of them. III. The pears are old women; They are the same. Slight rouge, Green braille dresses, They blush in unison. They will stay young. They will not ripen. In the new world, Ripeness is nothing.
Often visitors there, saddened by lack of trees, go out to a promontory. Then, backed by the banded sunset, the trail of the Conquistadores, the father puts on the camera, the leather albatross, and has the children imitate saguaros. One at a time they stand there smiling, fingers up like the tines of a fork while the stately saguaro goes on being entered by wrens, diseases, and sunlight. The mother sits on a rock, arms folded across her breasts. To her the cactus looks scared, its needles like hair in cartoons. With its arms in preacher or waltz position, it gives the impression of great effort in every direction, like the mother. Thousands of these gray-green cacti cross the valley: nature repeating itself, children repeating nature, father repeating children and mother watching. Later, the children think the cactus was moral, had something to teach them, some survival technique or just regular beauty. But what else could it do? The only protection against death was to love solitude.
The problem of time. Of there not being  enough of it. My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem  which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes.  Numbers hung in the math book  like motel coathangers. The Lean  Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges,  bubbly earth tones in the center.  The latest thing they’re saying is lack  of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there  with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers  dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough  it’s not even an issue, time falls away into 'the curve' which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book,  soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave) The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing  they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face  lived for months in my dresser, no arrows for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio  nose (before the lie) left in the center; the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself; (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia) I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room:  Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be  like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrow- and-a-half when I started thinking about it; now  there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought  I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller  archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet.  Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .  Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. . Push us out in the boat and leave time here—  (because: where in the plan was it written,  You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water,  even the caterpillar will hurry past you? Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark  from being ruined. Opened  the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning  gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:)  “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed  into a fourth dimension  but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why  didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne. . . At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice  I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws  and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew. . . I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat,  you were happy there; the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out  onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond,  whichever one is eternal
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth, Tiny explosions at the waterlines, And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood. It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter. Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books. Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast! Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood, Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight. Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor. Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn; We know that our master has left us for the day.
The bleached wood massed in bone piles,  we pulled it from dark beach and built  fire in a fenced clearing. The posts’ blunt stubs sank down, they circled and were roofed by milled  lumber dragged at one time to the coast.  We slept there. Each morning the minus tide— weeds flowed it like hair swimming.  The starfish gripped rock, pastel,  rough. Fish bones lay in sun. Each noon the milk fog sank from cloud cover, came in  our clothes and held them  tighter on us. Sea stacks  stood and disappeared. They came back when the sun scrubbed out the inlet. We went down to piles to get mussels, I made my shirt a bowl of mussel stones, carted them to our grate where they smoked apart.  I pulled the mussel lip bodies out, chewed their squeak. We went up the path for fresh water, berries.  Hardly speaking, thinking. During low tide we crossed  to the island, climbed its wet summit. The redfoots  and pelicans dropped for fish.  Oclets so silent fell toward water with linked feet. Jacynthe said little. Long since we had spoken Nova Scotia,Michigan, and knew beauty in saying nothing.  She told me about her mother who would come at them with bread knives then  stop herself, her face emptied. I told her about me, never lied. At night at times the moon floated.  We sat with arms tight  watching flames spit, snap.  On stone and sand picking up wood shaped like a body, like a gull. I ran barefoot not only on beach but harsh gravels  up through the woods. I shit easy, covered my dropping.  Some nights, no fires, we watched sea pucker and get stabbed  by the beacon circling on Tatoosh. 2 I stripped and spread on the sea lip, stretched  to the slap of the foam  and the vast red dulce.  Jacynthe gripped the earth  in her fists, opened— the boil of the tide  shuffled into her. The beach revolved, headlands behind us put their pines in the sun. Gulls turned a strong sky. Their pained wings held, they bit water quick, lifted.  Their looping eyes continually  measure the distance from us,  bare women who do not touch. Rocks drowsed, holes filled with suds from a distance. A deep laugh bounced in my flesh  and sprayed her. 3 Flies crawled us, Jacynthe crawled. With her palms she spread my calves, she moved my heels from each other.  A woman’s mouth is not different, sand moved wild beneath me, her long hair wiped my legs, with women  there is sucking, the water slops our bodies. We come clean, our clits beat like twins to the loons rising up. We are awake. Snails sprinkle our gulps.  Fish die in our grips, there is  sand in the anus of dancing.  Tatoosh Island hardens in the distance. We see its empty stones  sticking out of the sea again.  Jacynthe holds tinder under fire to cook the night’s wood.If we had men I would make  milk in me simply.
I take off my shirt, I show you. I shaved the hair out under my arms. I roll up my pants, I scraped off the hair  on my legs with a knife, getting white. My hair is the color of chopped maples.  My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.  (Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills) Skin polished as a Ming bowl showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds  of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet. In the night I come to you and it seems a shame  to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man. You recognize strangers, think you lived through destruction. You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory. You want to know what I know?  Your own hands are lying.
in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee
He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him almost breakfastless. "I have called — I hope I do not err — I am looking for a purchaser Of some score volumes of the works Of eminent divines I own, — Left by my father — though it irks My patience to offer them." And she smiles As if necessity were unknown; "But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles I have wished, as I am fond of art, To make my rooms a little smart, And these old books are so in the way." And lightly still she laughs to him, As if to sell were a mere gay whim, And that, to be frank, Life were indeed To her not vinegar and gall, But fresh and honey-like; and Need No household skeleton at all.
little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don't be afraid look the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine, the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads, put up your little arms and i'll give them all to you to hold every finger shall have its ring and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy then when you're quite dressed you'll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they'll stare! oh but you'll be very proud and my little sister and i will take hands and looking up at our beautiful tree we'll dance and sing "Noel Noel"
Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee;  And the elves also,  Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. No Will-o'-th'-Wisp mis-light thee, Nor snake or slow-worm bite thee;  But on, on thy way,  Not making a stay, Since ghost there's none to affright thee. Let not the dark thee cumber; What though the moon does slumber?  The stars of the night  Will lend thee their light, Like tapers clear without number. Then Julia let me woo thee, Thus, thus to come unto me;  And when I shall meet  Thy silv'ry feet, My soul I'll pour into thee.
Lord, Thou hast given me a cell Wherein to dwell, A little house, whose humble roof Is weather-proof: Under the spars of which I lie Both soft, and dry; Where Thou my chamber for to ward Hast set a guard Of harmless thoughts, to watch and keep Me, while I sleep. Low is my porch, as is my fate, Both void of state; And yet the threshold of my door Is worn by th' poor, Who thither come and freely get Good words, or meat. Like as my parlour, so my hall And kitchen's small; A little buttery, and therein A little bin, Which keeps my little loaf of bread Unchipp'd, unflead; Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar Make me a fire, Close by whose living coal I sit, And glow like it. Lord, I confess too, when I dine, The pulse is Thine, And all those other bits, that be There plac'd by Thee; The worts, the purslain, and the mess Of water-cress, Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent; And my content Makes those, and my beloved beet, To be more sweet. 'Tis Thou that crown'st my glittering hearth With guiltless mirth; And giv'st me wassail-bowls to drink, Spic'd to the brink. Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand That soils my land; And giv'st me, for my bushel sown, Twice ten for one; Thou mak'st my teeming hen to lay Her egg each day; Besides my healthful ewes to bear Me twins each year; The while the conduits of my kine Run cream, for wine. All these, and better, Thou dost send Me, to this end, That I should render, for my part, A thankful heart, Which, fir'd with incense, I resign, As wholly Thine; But the acceptance, that must be, My Christ, by Thee.
Bid me to live, and I will live  Thy protestant to be; Or bid me love, and I will give  A loving heart to thee. A heart as soft, a heart as kind,  A heart as sound and free, As in the whole world thou canst find,  That heart I'll give to thee. Bid that heart stay, and it will stay,  To honour thy decree; Or bid it languish quite away,  And 't shall do so for thee. Bid me to weep, and I will weep,  While I have eyes to see; And having none, yet I will keep  A heart to weep for thee. Bid me despair, and I'll despair,  Under that cypress tree; Or bid me die, and I will dare  E'en death, to die for thee. Thou art my life, my love, my heart,  The very eyes of me; And hast command of every part,  To live and die for thee.
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquefaction of her clothes. Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see That brave vibration each way free, O how that glittering taketh me!
I have lost, and lately, these Many dainty mistresses: Stately Julia, prime of all; Sappho next, a principal; Smooth Anthea, for a skin White, and heaven-like crystalline; Sweet Electra, and the choice Myrrha, for the lute, and voice; Next, Corinna, for her wit, And the graceful use of it; With Perilla; all are gone; Only Herrick's left alone For to number sorrow by Their departures hence, and die.
Be the mistress of my choice, Clean in manners, clear in voice; Be she witty, more than wise, Pure enough, though not precise; Be she showing in her dress, Like a civil wilderness, That the curious may detect Order in a sweet neglect; Be she rolling in her eye, Tempting all the passers by; And each ringlet of her hair, An enchantment, or a snare, For to catch the lookers on; But herself held fast by none. Let her Lucrece all day be, Thais in the night, to me. Be she such, as neither will Famish me, nor overfill.
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . . He did a lazy sway. . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can’t be satisfied— I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.” And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Old Meg she was a Gipsy, And liv'd upon the Moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors. Her apples were swart blackberries, Her currants pods o' broom; Her wine was dew of the wild white rose, Her book a churchyard tomb. Her Brothers were the craggy hills, Her Sisters larchen trees— Alone with her great family She liv'd as she did please. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the Moon. But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew She wove, and she would sing. And with her fingers old and brown She plaited Mats o' Rushes, And gave them to the Cottagers She met among the Bushes. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere— She died full long agone!
She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile Mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself In his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris, The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like domed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love — Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.
When did you start your tricks Monsieur? What do you stand on such high legs for? Why this length of shredded shank You exaltation? Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory In sluggish Venice. You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. How can you put so much devilry Into that translucent phantom shred Of a frail corpus? Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, A nothingness. Yet what an aura surrounds you; Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power To deaden my attention in your direction. But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air In circles and evasions, enveloping me, Ghoul on wings Winged Victory. Settle, and stand on long thin shanks Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, You speck. I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air Having read my thoughts against you. Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. Man or mosquito. You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. Now then! It is your trump It is your hateful little trump You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. They say you can't help it. If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion, Obscenely ecstasied Sucking live blood My blood. Such silence, such suspended transport, Such gorging, Such obscenity of trespass. You stagger As well as you may. Only your accursed hairy frailty Your own imponderable weightlessness Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. Away with a pæan of derision You winged blood-drop. Can I not overtake you? Are you one too many for me Winged Victory? Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!
Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.
I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise in extremis. Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell — And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Agelong, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.
There are four men mowing down by the Isar; I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I Am sorry for what's in store. The first man out of the four that's mowing Is mine, I claim him once and for all; Though it's sorry I am, on his young feet, knowing None of the trouble he's led to stall. As he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts His head as proud as a deer that looks Shoulder-deep out of the corn; and wipes His scythe-blade bright, unhooks The scythe-stone and over the stubble to me. Lad, thou hast gotten a child in me, Laddie, a man thou'lt ha'e to be, Yea, though I'm sorry for thee.
I The angels guide him now, And watch his curly head, And lead him in their games, The little boy we led. II He cannot come to harm, He knows more than we know, His light is brighter far Than daytime here below. III His path leads on and on, Through pleasant lawns and flowers, His brown eyes open wide At grass more green than ours. IV With playmates like himself, The shining boy will sing, Exploring wondrous woods, Sweet with eternal spring. V Yet, he is lost to us, Far is his path of gold, Far does the city seem, Lonely our hearts and old.
Two old crows sat on a fence rail. Two old crows sat on a fence rail, Thinking of effect and cause, Of weeds and flowers, And nature's laws. One of them muttered, one of them stuttered, One of them stuttered, one of them muttered. Each of them thought far more than he uttered. One crow asked the other crow a riddle. One crow asked the other crow a riddle: The muttering crow Asked the stuttering crow, “Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle? Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?” “Bee-cause,” said the other crow, “Bee-cause, B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.” Just then a bee flew close to their rail:— “Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.” And those two black crows Turned pale, And away those crows did sail. Why? B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause. B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause. “Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.”
It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .”
Out of the winds' and the waves' riot, Out of the loud foam, He has put in to a great quiet And a still home. Here he may lie at ease and wonder Why the old ship waits, And hark for the surge and the strong thunder Of the full Straits, And look for the fishing fleet at morning, Shadows like lost souls, Slide through the fog where the seal's warning Betrays the shoals, And watch for the deep-sea liner climbing Out of the bright West, With a salmon-sky and her wake shining Like a tern's breast, — And never know he is done for ever With the old sea's pride, Borne from the fight and the full endeavour On an ebb tide.
(from The Tempest) Full fathom five thy father lies;
(from Cymbeline) Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With every thing that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise.
(from Twelfth Night) O Mistress mine where are you roaming? O stay and hear, your true love's coming, That can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers' meeting, Every wise man's son doth know. What is love, 'tis not hereafter, Present mirth, hath present laughter: What's to come, is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me sweet and twenty: Youth's a stuff will not endure.
(from Henry VIII) Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing:To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die.
(from Measure for Measure) Take, oh take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn, And those eyes: the breake of day, Lights that do mislead the Morn; But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.
(from As You Like It) Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And turn his merry noteUnto the sweet bird's throat,Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see No enemyBut winter and rough weather.
I Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna: Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. II In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned— A cymbal crashed, And roaring horns. III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. IV Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
From breakfast on through all the day At home among my friends I stay, But every night I go abroad Afar into the land of Nod. All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do — All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams. The strangest things are there for me, Both things to eat and things to see, And many frightening sights abroad Till morning in the land of Nod. Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear.
When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great, And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.
As from the house your mother sees You playing round the garden trees, So you may see, if you will look Through the windows of this book, Another child, far, far away, And in another garden, play. But do not think you can at all, By knocking on the window, call That child to hear you. He intent Is all on his play-business bent. He does not hear; he will not look, Nor yet be lured out of this book. For, long ago, the truth to say, He has grown up and gone away, And it is but a child of air That lingers in the garden there.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations "I grant you ample leavegrant you ample leave In other words, to let you express your grand opinion To use the hoaryhoary Ancient, worthy of respect for its age formula 'I am' Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, 'I' Will be no more a datumdatum A single piece of data or information than the words You link false inferencefalse inference In philosophy and logic, an inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. Inferences are typically evaluated to be valid or invalid. with, the 'Since' & 'so' That, true or not, make up the atom-whirlatom-whirl The orbital paths of electrons around the nucleus. Resolve your 'Ego'‘Ego’ Latin for “I”., it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I' Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe. Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong You make it weaver of the etherial lightetherial light Heavenly light, Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time — Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark, The core, the centre of your consciousness, That notes your bubble-worldbubble-world : sense, pleasure, pain, What are they but a shifting otherness, Phantasmal fluxPhantasmal flux A fantastic, ghostlike stream or flow of moments? —"
The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. For view there are the houses opposite Cutting the sky with one long line of wall Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch Monotony of surface & of form Without a break to hang a guess upon. No bird can make a shadow as it flies, For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung By thickest canvass, where the golden rays Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye Or rest a little on the lap of life. All hurry on & look upon the ground, Or glance unmarking at the passers by The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages All closed, in multiplied identity. The world seems one huge prison-house & court Where men are punished at the slightest cost, With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.
There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core And it sticks in the deep Back bone And no Smile that ever was smild But only one Smile alone That betwixt the Cradle & Grave It only once Smild can be But when it once is Smild Theres an end to all Misery
Today I’m thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul,  who orders us, Be perfect. He could have said, Touch your elbow to your ears, except that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck,  you might could manage it. The death inside  the flawed hard currency of what we touch  bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw,  that deathward plunge that’s locked inside all form,  till what seems solid floats away, dissolves,  and these poor bastard things, no longer things,  drift back to pure idea. And when, at last,  we let them go we start to pity them, attend their needs: I almost have to think to keep my own heart beating through the night.  I have a wife and four pink boys. I spin  on all this stupid metaphysic now because last afternoon we visited some friends in town. After the pecan pie, I drank until my forehead smacked the table,  and woke to find my shirt crusted with blood.  When Mary didn’t yell at me, I knew  she finally understood that I was gone,  dissolving back. As we rode home, I tried  to say, I’m sorry, Hon. The carriage bucked  across the mud-dried ruts and I shut up. And she, in August heat, just sat, head cocked  as if for chills hidden in the hot, damp breeze,  as if they were a sound, time merely distance.  O Death, I know exactly where it is— your sting. And, Grave, I know your victory. That night, around the tents, the boys caught fireflies,  pinched them in half, and smeared them on their nails,  then ran through pine-dark woods, waving their hands.  All I could hear was laughter, shouts. And all that I could see for each one of my sons were ten blurs of faint, artificial light, never too far apart, and trembling. Like fairies, magic, sprites, they ran and shouted, “I’m not real! I’m not real!” The whole world fell  away from me—perhaps I was still drunk— as on the night Titania told dazed Bottom, “Put off your human grossness so, and like an airy spirit go.” But even then the night could not hold long against the light,  and light destroys roots, fog, lies, orchids, night,  dawn stars, the moon, delusions, and most magic.  And light sends into hiding owls, fireflies, and bats, whom for their unerring blunder, I adore the most of all night fliers. But owls, hid in a hickory, will hoot all day, and even the moon persists, like my hangover,  some days till almost noon, drifting above the harsh, bright, murderous morning light—so blue,  so valuable, so much like currency that if the moon were my blue coin, I’d never spend it.
Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood  memory. I was cycling with a male friend, through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way  stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,  a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,  hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.  My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way stop!”  The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,  “You fucking niggers!” And sped off. My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.  We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.  We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon  between two fields of almost-ripened wheat  bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace  when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.  We stopped, closed ranks, made fists. It was the same truck. It pulled over. A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:  greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably  a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful  of martial arts techniques. “What did you say back there!” he shouted.  My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way stop.  You went through it.” “And what did I say?” the white guy asked.  “You said: ‘You fucking niggers.’” The afternoon froze. “Well,” said the white guy, shoving his hands into his pockets and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,  “I just want to say I’m sorry.” He climbed back into his truck and drove away.
How like the sky she bends above her child, One with the great horizon of her pain! No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild, No weeping cloud, no momentary rain, Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief, That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb. She stoops in pity above the labouring earth, Knowing how fond, how brief Is all its hope, past, present, and to come, She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth. Through that fair face the whole dark universe Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro’ one white flower; And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse The gods, but cannot die before their hour, Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head Bows over all earth’s graves. It was her cry Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways With children’s blood ran red. Her silence towers to Silences on high; And, in her face, the whole earth’s anguish prays. It is the pity, the pity of human love That strains her face, upturned to meet the doom, And her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove Frozen upon its nest, ne’er to resume Its happy breathing o’er the golden brace That she must shield till death. Death, death alone Can break the anguished horror of that spell. The sorrow on her face Is sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone; She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell. Ah, yet, her woman’s love, so vast, so tender, Her woman’s body, hurt by every dart, Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slender Soft frightened child beneath her mighty heart. She is all one mute immortal cry, one brief Infinite pang of such victorious pain That she transcends the heavens and bows them down! The majesty of grief Is hers, and her dominion must remain Eternal. Grief alone can wear that crown.
Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,  And ransack heaven before our moment fails. Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,  We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails. It is not time that makes eternity.  Love and an hour may quite out-span the years, And give us more to hear and more to see  Than life can wash away with all its tears. Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky  Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this; But we shall ride the lightning ere we die  And seize our brief infinitude of bliss, With time to spare for all that heaven can tell, While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.
It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.
All cities are open in the hot season. Northward or southward the summer gives out Few telephone numbers but no one in our house sleeps. Southward that river carries its flood The dying winter, the spring’s nostalgia: Wisconsin’s dead grass beached at Baton Rouge. Carries the vegetable loves of the young blonde Going for water by the dikes of Winnetka or Louisville, Carries its obscure music and its strange humour, Its own disturbing life, its peculiar ideas of movement. Two thousand miles, moving from the secret north It crowds the country apart: at last reaching The lynch-dreaming, the demon-haunted, the murderous virgin South Makes its own bargains and says change in its own fashion. And where the Gulf choirs out its blue hosannas Carries the drowned men’s bones and its buried life: It is an enormous bell, rung through the country’s midnight. * * * Beyond the corrosive ironies of prairies, Midnight savannas, open vowels of the flat country, The moonstruck waters of the Kansas bays Where the Dakotas bell and nuzzle at the north coast, The nay-saying desolation where the mind is lost In the mean acres and the wind comes down for a thousand miles Smelling of the stars’ high pastures, and speaking a strange language— There is the direct action of mountains, a revolution, A revelation in stone, the solid decrees of past history, A soviet of language not yet cooled nor understood clearly: The voices from underground, the granite vocables. There shall that voice crying for justice be heard, But the local colorist, broken on cliffs of laughter, At the late dew point of pity collect only the irony of serene stars. * * * Here all questions are mooted. All battles joined. No one in our house sleeps. And the Idealist hunting in the high latitudes of unreason, By mummy rivers, on the open minds of curst lakes Mirrors his permanent address; yet suffers from visions Of spring break-up, the open river of history. On this the Dreamer sweats in his sound-proof tower: All towns are taken in the hot season. How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi? His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction, Whose blood and guts are filing system for A single index of the head or heart’s statistics. Living in one time, he shall have no history. How shall he love change who lives in a static world? His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and the narrows of Vicksburg. But kissed unconscious between Medicine Bow and Tombstone He shall love at the precipice brink who would love these mountains. Whom this land loves shall be a holy wanderer, The eyes burned slick with distances between Kennebunkport and Denver, minted of transcience. For him shall that river run in circles and The Tetons seismically skipping to their ancient compelling music Send embassies of young sierras to nibble from his hand. His leaves familiar with the constant wind, Give, then, the soils and waters to command. Latitudinal desires scatter his seed, And in political climates sprout new freedom. But curst is the water-wingless foreigner from Boston, Stumping the country as others no better have done, Frightened of earthquake, aware of the rising waters, Calling out “O Love, Love,” but finding none.
Miami Beach: wartime Imagine or remember how the road at last led us Over bridges like prepositions, linking a drawl of islands. The coast curved away like a question mark, listening slyly And shyly whispered the insomniac Atlantic. But we were uncertain of both question and answer, Stiff and confused and bemused in expendable khaki, Seeing with innocent eyes, the walls gleaming, And the alabaster city of a rich man’s dream. Borne by the offshore wind, an exciting rumor, The legend of tropic islands, caresses the coast like hysteria, Bringing a sound like bells rung under sea; And brings the infected banker and others whose tenure Is equally uncertain, equally certain: the simple And perfect faces of women—like the moon Whose radiance is disturbing and quite as impersonal: Not to be warmed by and never ample. They linger awhile in the dazzling sepulchral city, Delicately exploring their romantic diseases, The gangster, the capitalist and their proteg
Called out of dream by the pitch and screech, I awoke to see my mother’s hair set free of its pincurls, springing out into the still and hurtling air above the front seat and just as suddenly gone. The space around us twisted, and in the instant before the crash I heard the bubbling of the chickens, the homely racket they make at all speeds, signifying calm, resignation, oblivion. And I listened. All through the slash and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass, I listened, and what came was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail of wreckage, severed hoses and lives, a storm of loose feathers, and in the final whirl approximating calm, the cluck and fracas of the birds. I crawled on hands and knees where a window should have been and rose uneven in November dusk. Wind blew a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along the shoulder. One thin stream of blood oozed, flocked in feathers. This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles around Missouri, and as far as I could see, no light flickered through the timber, no mail box leaned the flag of itself toward pavement, no cars seemed ever likely to come along. So I walked, circled the darkening disaster my life had come to, and cried. I cried for my family there, knotted in the snarl of metal and glass; for the farmer, looking dead, half in and half out of his windshield; and for myself, ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris, glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles, my arm hung loose at the elbow and whispering its prophecies of pain. Around and around the tilted car and the steaming truck, around the heap of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks of chicken and straw. Through an hour of loneliness and fear I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night, the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me, the chickens followed my lead, some fully upright, pecking the dim pavement for suet or seed, some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings fluttering in the effort. The faintest light turned their feathers phosphorescent, and as I watched they came on, as though they believed me some savior, some highwayman or commando come to save them the last night of their clucking lives. This, they must have believed, was the end they’d always heard of, this the rendering more efficient than the axe, the execution more anonymous than a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying, and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck of hard laughter. And we walked to the cadence their clucking called, a small boy towing a cloud around a scene of death, coming round and round like a dream, or a mountain road, like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.
(for Douglas, at one) Archaic, his gestures hieratic, just like Caesar or Sappho or Mary’s Jesus or Ann’s Mary or Jane  Austen once, or me or your mother’s you the sudden baby surges to his feet  and sways, head forward, chin high,  arms akimbo, hands dangling idle,  elbows up, as if winged. The features of his face stand out  amazed, all eyes as his aped posture  sustains him aloft  a step a step a rush  and he walks, Young Anyone, his lifted point of view  far beyond the calendar. What time is it? Firm in time  he is out of date— like a cellarer for altar wines  tasting many summers in one glass, or like a grandmother in whose womb her granddaughter once slept in egg inside grandma’s unborn daughter’s  folded ovaries.
I don’t know what to say to you, neighbor, as you shovel snow from your part of our street  neat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for  chance to find words; now, by chance, we meet. We took our boys to the same kindergarten,  thirteen years ago when our husbands went. Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in  to separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent,  but your boy killed himself, six days dead. My boy washed your wall when the police were done.  He says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head,  “I told him it was great he had that gun,” and shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you.  You have a path to clear, and so you do.
How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it,  As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case,  To particular places solely for its own sake?  Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon  And the undeviating bald salt dome?  Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled  Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight  Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed  Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends  The invisibly fine spray more than once? I have seen that it takes in every detail I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders. I have listed for it the comings and goings Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described. I have named the chartreuse stripe And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax  And the multiple eye. I have sketched The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks  And their crevices, between the holly lip  And its concept of itself. And if not for its sake, why would I go Out into the night alone and stare deliberately  Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more? I have cherished it. I have named it.  By my own solicitations  I have proof of its presence.
An end is always punishment for a beginning. If you’re Catholic, sadness is punishment for happiness, you become the bug you squash if you’re Hindu, a flinty space opens in your head after a long night of laughter and wine. For waking there are dreams, from French poetry, English poetry, for light fire although sometimes fire must be punished by light which is why psychotherapy had to be invented. A father may say nothing to a son for years. A wife may keep something small folded deep in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in resembling the terrible things we believe about ourselves, a rock comes loose from a ledge, the baby just cries and cries. Doll in a chair, windshield wipers, staring off into the city lights. For years you may be unable to hear the word monkey without a stab in the heart because she called you that the summer she thought she loved you and you thought you loved someone else and everyone loved your salad dressing. And the daffodils come up in the spring and the snow covers the road in winter and the water covers the deep trenches in the sea where all the time the inner stuff of this earth surges up which is how the continents are made and broken.
Is everything a field of energy caused by human projection? From the crib bars hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed  desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts surrounds the soccer field of what if. Sometimes it seems like a world where no one  knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes  both directions. How about a polymer that contracts in response to electrical charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor? King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone who has traveled here knows the discrepancies between idea and fact. The idea is the worm  in the tequila and the next day is the fact.  In between may be the sacred—real blood  from the wooden virgin’s eyes, and the hoax— landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas are best sprung from actions like the children  of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette,  another nightmares and SUVs. There’s considerable wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams,  waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened  nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head:  good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea. The stranded whale, guided out of the cove  by tugboats, turns and swims back in.  The violinist will not let go her violin  which is 200 years old and still on the train thus she is dragged down the track. By what manner is the soul joined to the body?  Answer: an arm connecting a violin to a violinist. According to Freud, there are no accidents. Astrologists and Presbyterians agree for different reasons.  You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake.  You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop. Human consciousness: is it the projector or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits  and spray the grass so everything dies but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka what he thinks. Sometimes they give you  a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest  is your problem. In one version, the beggar turns out to be a king and grants the poor couple a castle and a moat and two  silver horses said to be sired by the wind. That was before dentistry, which might have been  a better gift. You did not want to get sick  in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries. So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master  of the short story. After the kiss from whom  he will never know, the lieutenant, going home, touches a bush in which birds are singing.
Like everyone, I wanted my animal to be the hawk. I thought I wanted the strength to eat the eyes first then tear into the fuse box of the chest and soar away. I needed help because I still cowered under the shadow of my father, a man who inspected picture tubes five out of seven nights, who woke to breakfast on burnt roast except the two weeks he’d sleep on a Jersey beach and throw me into the gasoline-sheened waves. I loved him dying indebted not knowing to what, thinking his pension would be enough, released not knowing from what, gumming at something I was afraid to get close enough to hear, afraid of what I was co-signing. So maybe the elephant. The elephant knows when one of its own is suffering up to six miles away. Charges across the desert cognizant of the futility. How can I be forgiven when I don’t know what I need forgiving for? Sometimes the urges are too extreme: to slap on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal is the tiger. Or shark. Or centipede. But I know I’m smaller than that, filling notebooks with clumsy versions of one plaint, one pheromonal call, clamoring over a crumb that I think is the world, baffled by the splotch of one of my own crushed kind, almost sweet, a sort of tar, following a trail of one or two molecules, leaving a trail of one or two molecules.
Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind. Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them. Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you—  these must burn away before you’ll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
He did not fall then, blind upon a road, nor did his lifelong palsy disappear. He heard no voice, save the familiar, ceaseless, self-interrogation of the sore perplexed. The kettle steamed and whistled. A heavy truck downshifted near the square. He heard a child calling, and heard a mourning dove intone its one dull call. For all of that, his wits remained quite dim. He breathed and spoke the words he read. If what had been long dead then came alive, that resurrection was by all appearances metaphorical. The miracle arrived without display. He held a book, and as he read he found the very thing he’d sought. Just that. A life with little hurt but one, the lucky gift of a raveled book, a kettle slow to heat, and time enough therefore to lift the book and find in one slight passage the very wish he dared not ask aloud, until, that is, he spoke the words he read.
A little loam and topsoil is a lot. —Heather McHugh A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours, endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi- rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it, whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may never come to be much of a garden, once we rip the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers. —Milosz And the few willing to listen demanded that we confess on television. So we kept our sins to ourselves, and they became less troubling. The halt and the lame arranged to have their hips replaced. Lepers coated their sores with a neutral foundation, avoided strong light. The hungry ate at grand buffets and grew huge, though they remained hungry. Prisoners became indistinguishable from the few who visited them. Widows remarried and became strangers to their kin. The orphans finally grew up and learned to fend for themselves. Even the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut. Only the poor—who are with us always—only they continued in the hope.
Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze of these skeletal figures affects the disposition of those grinning candies one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November, though here, each face is troublingly familiar, exhibits the style adopted just as one declines any further style—nectar one sips just as he draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns in that city finally how to enjoy a confection, even if a genuine taste for this circumstance has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself whose sugars and oils now avail a composure which promises never to end, nor to alter.
Magdalen’s Epistle Of Love’s discrete occasions, we observe sufficient catalogue, a likely-sounding lexicon pronounced so as to implicate a wealth of difference, where reclines instead a common element, itself quite like those elements partaken at the table served by Jesus on the night he was betrayed—like those in that the bread was breakable, the wine was red and wet, and met the tongue with bright, intoxicating sweetness, quite like ... wine. None of what I write arrives to compromise that sacrament, the mystery of spirit graved in what is commonplace and plain— the broken, brittle crust, the cup. Quite otherwise, I choose instead to bear again the news that each, each was still itself, substantial in the simplest sense. By now, you will have learned of Magdalen, a name recalled for having won a touch of favor from the one we call the son of man, and what you’ve heard is true enough. I met him first as, mute, he scribbled in the dust to shame some village hypocrites toward leaving me unbloodied, if ill-disposed to taking up again a prior circumstance. I met him in the house of one who was a Pharisee and not prepared to suffer quietly my handling of the master’s feet. Much later, in the garden when, having died and risen, he spoke as to a maid and asked me why I wept. When, at any meeting with the Christ, was I not weeping? For what? I only speculate —brief inability to speak, a weak and giddy troubling near the throat, a wash of gratitude. And early on, I think, some slight abiding sense of shame, a sop I have inferred more recently to do without. Lush poverty! I think that this is what I’m called to say, this mild exhortation that one should still abide all love’s embarrassments, and so resist the new temptation—dangerous, inexpedient mask—of shame. And, well, perhaps one other thing: I have received some little bit about the glib divisions which so lately have occurred to you as right, as necessary, fit That the body is something less than honorable, say, in its ... appetites? That the spirit is something pure, and—if all goes well— potentially unencumbered by the body’s bawdy tastes. This disposition, then, has led to a banal and pious lack of charity, and, worse, has led more than a few to attempt some soul-preserving severance—harsh mortifications, manglings, all manner of ritual excision lately undertaken to prevent the body’s claim upon the heart, or mind, or (blasphemy!) spirit— whatever name you fix upon the supposéd bodiless. I fear that you presume—dissectingthe person unto something less complex. I think that you forget you are not Greek. I think that you forget the very issue which induced the Christ to take on flesh. All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved—the one, or many, endless array whose aspects turn to face the one who calls, the one whose choice it was one day to lift my own bruised body from the dust, where, it seems to me, I must have met my death, thereafter, this subsequent life and late disinclination toward simple reductions in the name of Jesus, whose image I work daily to retain. I have kissed his feet. I have looked long into the trouble of his face, and met, in that intersection, the sacred place—where body and spirit both abide, both yield, in mutual obsession. Yes, if you’ll recall your Hebrew word. just long enough to glimpse in its dense figure power to produce you’ll see as well the damage Greek has wrought upon your tongue, stolen from your sense of what is holy, wholly good, fully animal—the body which he now prepares.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations A silver LuciferLunar Baedeker...Lucifer A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Another modern poem with “Baedeker” in the title is T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919). Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperiesPerisPeris “In Persian myth, an elf or fairy, male or female, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from Paradise till their penance is accomplished” (Century Dictionary) in liveryin livery Dressed for their job prepareLetheLethe River of forgetfulness in Hades for posthumous parvenuesparvenues Those who have recently come into wealth Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoriainfusoria Class of protozoa; “so called because found in infusions of decaying animal or vegetable matter” (OED) from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdaysdoomsdays The end of the world or Judgment Day, usually in the singular  Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorousphosphorous “Phosphorous” (with a capital “P”) is Venus, the morning star, archaically referred to as Lucifer, mentioned in the first line of this poem. the eye-white sky-lightwhite-light districtwhite-light district Possible alternative to red-light district. The term appears in Theodore Dreiser's book A Hoosier Holiday (1916). of lunar lusts  StellectricStellectric A word formed from “stellar” (star) and “electric” signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carrousel” Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams  browse on NecropolisNecropolis Literally: a city of corpses  From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed OdalisquesOdalisques “Female slaves or concubines in an Eastern harem” (OED) and ornithologists observe the flight of ErosEros God of Love in Greek mythology; also, the name of an asteroid, discovered in 1898 obsolete And “Immortality” mildews ...  in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,  Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.  Down the ravine behind the empty house,  The cowbells follow one another  Into the distances of the afternoon.  To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines,  The droppings of last year’s horses  Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.  A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
I will grieve alone, As I strolled alone, years ago, down along The Ohio shore. I hid in the hobo jungle weeds Upstream from the sewer main, Pondering, gazing. I saw, down river, At Twenty-third and Water Streets By the vinegar works, The doors open in early evening. Swinging their purses, the women Poured down the long street to the river And into the river. I do not know how it was They could drown every evening. What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, Drying their wings? For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia, Has only two shores: The one in hell, the other In Bridgeport, Ohio. And nobody would commit suicide, only To find beyond death Bridgeport, Ohio.
Ach, in den Armen hab ich sie alle verloren, du nur, du wirst immer wieder geboren .... —Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge The twilight falls; I soften the dusting feathers,  And clean again. The house has lain and moldered for three days.  The windows smeared with rain, the curtains torn,  The mice come in, The kitchen blown with cold. I keep the house, and say no words. It is true I am as twisted as the cactus That gnarls and turns beside the milky light,  That cuts the fingers easily and means nothing,  For all the pain that shoots along the hand.  I dust the feathers down the yellow thorns,  I light the stove. The gas curls round the iron fretwork. the flame Floats above the lace, And bounces like a dancer stayed on air. Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom  And catches on my breath; Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire Writhes like a naked girl;  Turns up its face, like her. She came to me in rain. I did not know her, I did not know my name  After she left to bed her children down, To phone her husband they were gone asleep.  And she, lying, a pure fire, in the feathers,  Dancing above the ironwork of her bed,  Roaring, and singeing nothing. She had not wound her arms about me then,  She had not dared. I only took her coat, and smiled to hear How she had left her purse and her umbrella  In the theater, how she was sopping cold With the fall rain; and mine was the one light  In the neighborhood. She came to my gas fire And lay before it, sprawled, her pure bare shoulders  Folded in a doze, a clear, cold curve of stone. I only leaned above the hair, Turned back the quilt, arranged the feet, the arms,  And kissed the sleeping shoulder, lightly, like the rain;  And when she woke to wear her weathered clothes,  I sent her home. She floated, a blue blossom, over the street. And when she came again, It was not long before she turned to me, And let her shawl slide down her neck and shoulder,  Let her hair fall. And when she came again, It did not rain. Her husband came to pluck her like an apple,  As the drunken farmer lurches against the tree,  Grips the green globe not long beyond its bloom,  And tears the skin, brutally, out of the bark,  Leaves the whole bough broken, The orchard torn with many footprints, The fence swung wide On a raw hinge. And now it is said of me That my love is nothing because I have borne no children,  Or because I have fathered none; That I twisted the twig in my hands And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed; That I lay across the fire, And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain. But I have turned away, and drawn myself  Upright to walk along the room alone.  Across the dark the spines of cactus plants  Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure,  Indifferent to the words the children chalk  Against my house and down the garden walls.  They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff,  A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,  smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea  Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,  Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again. I keep the house and say no words, the evening  Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees.  I light the fire and see the blossom dance  On air alone; I will not douse that flame,  That searing flower; I will burn in it. I will not banish love to empty rain. For I know that I am asked to hate myself  For their sweet sake Who sow the world with child. I am given to burn on the dark fire they make  With their sly voices. But I have burned already down to bone.  There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made.  Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise  Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue  Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.
to John Logan 1 I wonder how many old men last winter Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled  The Mississippi shore Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming Of suicide in the river. The police remove their cadavers by daybreak  And turn them in somewhere. Where? How does the city keep lists of its fathers  Who have no names? By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water  So beautifully slow. And I wish my brothers good luck And a warm grave.  2 The Chippewa young men Stab one another shrieking Jesus Christ. Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault.  High school backfields search under benches  Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich  Raw bacon without eyes. The Walker Art Center crowd stare At the Guthrie Theater.  3 Tall Negro girls from Chicago Listen to light songs. They know when the supposed patron Is a plainclothesman. A cop’s palm Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs  Of a light bulb. The soul of a cop’s eyes Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs  Of Juárez, Mexico.  4 The legless beggars are gone, carried away By white birds. The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted And sown with lime. The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses  Huddle together dreaming in a desolation Of dry groins. I think of poor men astonished to waken  Exposed in broad daylight by the blade  Of a strange plough.  5 All over the walls of comb cells Automobiles perfumed and blindered  Consent with a mutter of high good humor  To take their two naps a day. Without sound windows glide back Into dusk. The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier Tower not quite toppling. There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn To sell me my death.  6 But I could not bear To allow my poor brother my body to die In Minneapolis. The old man Walt Whitman our countryman Is now in America our country Dead. But he was not buried in Minneapolis At least. And no more may I be Please God.  7 I want to be lifted up By some great white bird unknown to the police, And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden  Modest and golden as one last corn grain, Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives  Of the unnamed poor.
Varus, varus, gib mir meine Legionen wieder Quick on my feet in those Novembers of my loneliness, I tossed a short pass, Almost the instant I got the ball, right over the head Of Barrel Terry before he knocked me cold. When I woke, I found myself crying out Latin conjugations, and the new snow falling At the edge of a green field. Lemoyne Crone had caught the pass, while I lay Unconscious and raging Alone with the fire ghost of Catullus, the contemptuous graces tossing Garlands and hendecasyllabics over the head Of Cornelius Nepos the mastodon, The huge volume. At the edges of Southeast Asia this afternoon The quarterbacks and the lines are beginning to fall, A spring snow, And terrified young men Quick on their feet Lob one another’s skulls across Wings of strange birds that are burning Themselves alive.
From an epigram by Plato When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes Its own garlands. My dead are the secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean. One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.
Eugen Boissevain died in the autumn of 1949. I had wondered already, at the time of our visit, what would happen to Edna [Millay] if he should die first. —Edmund Wilson   1 She cleaned house, and then lay down long On the long stair. On one of those cold white wings That the strange fowl provide for us like one hillside of the sea, That cautery of snow that blinds us, Pitiless light, One winter afternoon Fair near the place where she sank down with one wing broken, Three friends and I were caught Stalk still in the light. Five of the lights. Why should they care for our eyes? Five deer stood there. They looked back, a good minute. They knew us, all right: Four chemical accidents of horror pausing Between one suicide or another On the passing wing Of an angel that cared no more for our biology, our pity, and our pain Than we care. Why should any mere multitude of the angels care To lay one blind white plume down On this outermost limit of something that is probably no more Than an aphid, An aphid which is one of the angels whose wings toss the black pears Of tears down on the secret shores Of the seas in the corner Of a poet’s closed eye. Why should five deer Gaze back at us? They gazed back at us. Afraid, and yet they stood there, More alive than we four, in their terror, In their good time. We had a dog. We could have got other dogs. Two or three dogs could have taken turns running and dragging down Those fleet lights, whose tails must look as mysterious as the Stars in Los Angeles. We are men. It doesn’t even satisfy us To kill one another. We are a smear of obscenity On the lake whose only peace Is a hole where the moon Abandoned us, that poor Girl who can’t leave us alone. If I were the moon I would shrink into a sand grain In the corner of the poet’s eye, While there’s still room. We are men. We are capable of anything. We could have killed every one of those deer. The very moon of lovers tore herself with the agony of a wounded tigress Out of our side. We can kill anything. We can kill our own bodies. Those deer on the hillside have no idea what in hell We are except murderers. They know that much, and don’t think They don’t. Man’s heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead Horse dung. I have no use for the human creature. He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind. I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry. I have no use.  2 But We didn’t set dogs on the deer, Even though we know, As well as you know, We could have got away with it, Because Who cares?  3 Boissevain, who was he? Was he human? I doubt it, From what I know Of men. Who was he, Hobbling with his dry eyes Along in the rain? I think he must have fallen down like the plumes of new snow, I think he must have fallen into the grass, I think he Must surely have grown around Her wings, gathering and being gathered, Leaf, string, anything she could use To build her still home of songs Within sound of water.  4 By God, come to that, I would have married her too, If I’d got the chance, and she’d let me. Think of that. Being alive with a girl Who could turn into a laurel tree Whenever she felt like it. Think of that.  5 Outside my window just now I can hear a small waterfall rippling antiphonally down over The stones of my poem.
Near the dry river’s water-mark we found  Your brother Minnegan, Flopped like a fish against the muddy ground. Beany, the kid whose yellow hair turns green, Told me to find you, even in the rain,  And tell you he was drowned. I hid behind the chassis on the bank,  The wreck of someone’s Ford: I was afraid to come and wake you drunk: You told me once the waking up was hard, The daylight beating at you like a board.  Blood in my stomach sank. Beside, you told him never to go out  Along the river-side Drinking and singing, clattering about. You might have thrown a rock at me and cried I was to blame, I let him fall in the road  And pitch down on his side. Well, I’ll get hell enough when I get home  For coming up this far, Leaving the note, and running as I came. I’ll go and tell my father where you are. You’d better go find Minnegan before  Policemen hear and come. Beany went home, and I got sick and ran,  You old son of a bitch. You better hurry down to Minnegan; He’s drunk or dying now, I don’t know which, Rolled in the roots and garbage like a fish,  The poor old man.
It is all right. All they do Is go in by dividing One rib from another. I wouldn’t Lie to you. It hurts Like nothing I know. All they do Is burn their way in with a wire. It forks in and out a little like the tongue Of that frightened garter snake we caught At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny So long ago. I would lie to you If I could. But the only way I can get you to come up Out of the suckhole, the south face Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you What you know: You come up after dark, you poise alone With me on the shore. I lead you back to this world. Three lady doctors in Wheeling open Their offices at night. I don’t have to call them, they are always there. But they only have to put the knife once Under your breast. Then they hang their contraption. And you bear it. It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t Jiggle the needle. It might stab your heart, you see. The blade hangs in your lung and the tube Keeps it draining. That way they only have to stab you Once. Oh Jenny. I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy And disastrous place. I Didn’t, I can’t bear it Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring, Muse of black sand, Alone. I don’t blame you, I know The place where you lie. I admit everything. But look at me. How can I live without you? Come up to me, love, Out of the river, or I will Come down to you.
On the warm Sunday afternoons And every evening in the Spring and Summer When the night hurries the late home-corner And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes Float from the open windows and jar Against the voices of children and the hum of a car; When the city noises commingle and melt With a restless something half-seen, half-felt— I see them always there, Upon the low, smooth wall before the church; That row of little girls who sit and stare Like sparrows on a granite perch. They come in twittering couples or walk alone To their gray bough of stone, Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five— But always they sit there on the narrow coping Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping To see more than what is merely moving and alive. . . They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet. . . Before the quiet church that smells of death They sit. And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath And reaches out and plucks them by the hand And calls them boldly, whispering to each In some strange speech They tremble to but cannot understand. It thrills and troubles them, as one by one, The days run off like water through a sieve; While, with a gaze as candid as the sun, Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive, They come and sit,— A part of life and yet apart from it.
Green miles of leafy peace are spread Over these ranks, unseen and serried; Screening the trenches with their dead And living men already buried. The rains beat down, the torrents flow Into each cold and huddling cave; And over them the beet-fields grow, A fortress gentle as a grave.“Morose, impatient, sick at heart, With rasping nerves and twitching muscles, We cannot even sleep; we start With every twig that snaps or rustles. Sought always by an unseen foe Over our heads the bullets fly; But more than these, we fear the snow, The silent shrapnel of the sky. “Yonder our colonel stalks and grieves, Meeting the storm with thoughts more stormy; But we, we sit and watch the leaves Fall down, a torn and crumpled army. We mourn for every leaf that lies, As though it were a comrade slain; Each was a shelter from the eyes Of every prying aeroplane. . . ”
Why are the things that have no death The ones with neither sight nor breath! Eternity is thrust upon A bit of earth, a senseless stone. A grain of dust, a casual clod Receives the greatest gift of God. A pebble in the roadway lies— It never dies. The grass our fathers cut away Is growing on their graves today; The tiniest brooks that scarcely flow Eternally will come and go. There is no kind of death to kill The sands that lie so meek and still. . . . But Man is great and strong and wise— And so he dies.
In party outfits, two by two or one by one (I was expected to go along as well), They step up the steep gangplank, hands on Metal railing. The river, youthful also In midnight blue with sunset-tinted wavelets, Lets them borrow its broad back For an evening’s unhurried round trip, Which won’t interrupt old river habits for long. Not the chop and churn of big propellers As the rocking stern heaves off and wheels fanwise Into the current, nor a short blast from the stack, Not the up-tempo drumbeat of the black-tie combo Nor an answering fusillade of popped corks, not geysers Of laughter pitched flagpole high among flailing Limbs out on the polished floor nor the mixed Babble of sideline comment over bubbling glasses Can shake that seamless imperturbability. . . . When the springy net of sparkles has shrunk and faded Out of sight, the last rough throb been coaxed From the tenor sax’s frog-in-the-throat, the final Needling tremolo of the clarinet been wrapped up In distance, suddenly it is strange to be here In lilac afterglow with trout-leap and mayfly. . . . Strange, too, how our part of the river continues To trundle along its tonnages of water and motion. The unused ticket spins to the ground. As much as any person not two people can I miss the jaunt, for just this one hour of dusk. . . . Then, a veiled echo, my name called as I turn To answer, eyes adjusting to where we are At the pivot of night, the cusp of light. Light enough to feel our way back to the grove Of alders along the curving path beside the river; Light enough to recognize my life when I see it, Going in its direction, more or less at the same pace.
Standing at the baggage passing time: Austin Texas airport—my ride hasn’t come yet. My former wife is making websites from her home, one son’s seldom seen, the other one and his wife have a boy and girl of their own. My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town so she can get to high school. My mother ninety-six still lives alone and she’s in town too, always gets her sanity back just barely in time. My former former wife has become a unique poet; most of my work, such as it is is done. Full moon was October second this year, I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine owl hoots and rattling antlers, Castor and Pollux rising strong —it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts! that even our present night sky slips away, not that I’ll see it. Or maybe I will, much later, some far time walking the spirit path in the sky, that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the “narrow painful passageway of the Bardo” squeeze your little skull and there you are again waiting for your ride    (October 5, 2001)
I went into the Maverick Bar  In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon  backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay  by the pool tables, A waitress asked us  where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play  “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”  And with the next song,  a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances   in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods  and the bars of Madras, Oregon.  That short-haired joy and roughness—  America—your stupidity.  I could almost love you again. We left—onto the freeway shoulders—  under the tough old stars— In the shadow of bluffs  I came back to myself, To the real work, to  “What is to be done.”
He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek  He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands  He cries out, rises up and stands Facing toward the torrent and the mountain  Raises up both hands and shouts three times!    VI 69, Kai at Sawmill Lake
You would extend the mind beyond the act, Furious, bending, suffering in thin And unpoetic dicta; you have been Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact. As metal singing hard, with firmness racked, You formulate our passion; and behind In some harsh moment nowise of the mind Lie the old meanings your advance has packed. No man can hold existence in the head. I, too, have known the anguish of the right Amid this net of mathematic dearth, And the brain throbbing like a ship at night: Have faced with old unmitigated dread The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.
From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. Gray windows at my back, the massy frame Dull with the blackness that has not a name; But down below, the garden is still young, Of five years’ growth, perhaps, and terrace-hung, Drop by slow drop of seeping concrete walls. Such are the bastions of our pastorals! Here are no palms! They once lined country ways, Where old white houses glared down dusty days, With small round towers, blunt-headed through small trees. Those towers are now the hiving place of bees. The palms were coarse; their leaves hung thick with dust; The roads were muffled deep. But now deep rust Has fastened on the wheels that labored then. Peace to all such, and to all sleeping men! I lived my childhood there, a passive dream In the expanse of that recessive scheme. Slow air, slow fire! O deep delay of Time! That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. On these rocks now no burning ashes drift; Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench; The yellow blossoms of acacia drench The dawn with pollen; and, with waxen green, The long leaves of the eucalypti screen The closer hills from view—lithe, tall, and fine, And nobly clad with youth, they bend and shine. The small dark pool, jutting with living rock, Trembles at every atmospheric shock, Blurred to its depth with the cold living ooze. From cloudy caves, heavy with summer dews, The shyest and most tremulous beings stir, The pulsing of their fins a lucent blur, That, like illusion, glances off the view. The pulsing mouths, like metronomes, are true, This is my father’s house, no homestead here That I shall live in, but a shining sphere Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise, My father’s phantasy of Paradise; Which melts upon his death, which he attained With loss of heart for every step he gained. Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window chair. His friends, hard shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic faces wait for death. Below the garden the hills fold away. Deep in the valley, a mist fine as spray, Ready to shatter into spinning light, Conceals the city at the edge of night. The city, on the tremendous valley floor, Draws its dream deeper for an instant more, Superb on solid loam, and breathing deep, Poised for a moment at the edge of sleep. Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.
Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I came, I, sometime living, sometime with a name, Creeping by iron ways across the bare Wastes of Wyoming, turning in despair, Changing and turning, till the fall of night, Then throbbing motionless with iron might. Four days and nights! Small stations by the way, Sunk far past midnight! Nothing one can say Names the compassion they stir in the heart. Obscure men shift and cry, and we depart. And I remembered with the early sun That foul-mouthed barber back in Pendleton, The sprawling streets, the icy station bench, The Round-up pennants, the latrinal stench. These towns are cold by day, the flesh of vice Raw and decisive, and the will precise; At night the turbulence of drink and mud, Blue glare of gas, the dances dripping blood, Fists thudding murder in the shadowy air, Exhausted whores, sunk to a changeless stare. Alive in empty fact alone, extreme, They make each fact a mortuary dream. Once when the train paused in an empty place, I met the unmoved landscape face to face; Smoothing abysses that no stream could slake, Deep in its black gulch crept the heavy Snake, The sound diffused, and so intently firm, It seemed the silence, having change nor term. Beyond the river, gray volcanic stone In rolling hills: the river moved alone. And when we started, charged with mass, and slow, We hung against it in an awful flow. Thus I proceeded until early night, And, when I read the station’s name aright, Descended—at the bidding of a word! I slept the night out where the thought occurred, Then rose to view the dwelling where I lay. Outside, the bare land stretching far away; The frame house, new, fortuitous, and bright, Pointing the presence of the morning light; A train’s far screaming, clean as shining steel Planing the distance for the gliding heel. Through shrinking frost, autumnal grass uncurled, In naked sunlight, on a naked world.
Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years Strengthen affections; meet, Later, the dull arrears Of age, and be discreet. The angry blood burns low. Some friend of lesser mind Discerns you not; but so Your solitude’s defined. Write little; do it well. Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch.
The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet’s only bliss Is in cold certitude— Laurel, archaic, rude.
I was the patriarch of the shining land, Of the blond summer and metallic grain;  Men vanished at the motion of my hand, And when I beckoned they would come again. The earth grew dense with grain at my desire; The shade was deepened at the springs and streams;  Moving in dust that clung like pillared fire,  The gathering herds grew heavy in my dreams. Across the mountains, naked from the heights,  Down to the valley broken settlers came,  And in my houses feasted through the nights,  Rebuilt their sinews and assumed a name. In my clear rivers my own men discerned  The motive for the ruin and the crime— Gold heavier than earth, a wealth unearned,  Loot, for two decades, from the heart of Time. Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense,  Preanimate, inimitable, still, Real, but an evil with no human sense,  Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will. Grained by alchemic change, the human kind  Turned from themselves to rivers and to rocks;  With dynamite broke metal unrefined; Measured their moods by geologic shocks. With knives they dug the metal out of stone;  Turned rivers back, for gold through ages piled,  Drove knives to hearts, and faced the gold alone;  Valley and river ruined and reviled; Reviled and ruined me, my servant slew,  Strangled him from the figtree by my door.  When they had done what fury bade them do,  I was a cursing beggar, stripped and sore. What end impersonal, what breathless age,  Incontinent of quiet and of years, What calm catastrophe will yet assuage  This final drouth of penitential tears?
The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.
In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It’s two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it’s baby lima beans. It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You’d be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.
Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or, having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. These are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons, lovers, and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. They come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse’s neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right— though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It’s no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.
She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history. * To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. * In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry? * You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal. * She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history. * My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed. * He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple. She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes. They both kept their promises. * The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice. * Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare. * What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room? What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever. * The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage. Though a woman could, according to the law. * He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife. She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood. They both kept their promises.
In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal. At the moment only I can do it and so I raise the magic fork over the plate of beef fried rice and plunge it into your heart. There is a faint pop, a sizzle and through your own split head you rise up glowing; the ceiling opens a voice sings Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing you hang suspended above the city in blue tights and a red cape, your eyes flashing in unison. The other diners regard you some with awe, some only with bordom: they cannot decide if you are a new weapon or only a new advertisement. As for me, I continue eating; I liked you better the way you were, but you were always ambitious.
i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears  the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we  touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe  warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars,  in turn I will surrender this aerial photograph  (your vulnerable sections marked in red)  I have found so useful See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured iii Here there are no armies  here there is no money It is cold and getting colder, We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving  is the only war we can afford, stay walking with me, there is almost  time / if we can only  make it as far as the (possibly) last summer
In Tunis we try to discuss divorce And dying but give up to lounge With rug merchants under a plum tree. From its corner the lamb’s severed head Watches the flies drink from its eyes And its fat disappear into the fire. The light rinses the edge of your sandal, The two wasps that ornament the blur Of screened window. My grandmother Would have loved a night like this. In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart With its china rolling through Cook Street’s Stony yard one summer when I was always Thirsty, and she moved like a figure On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart, Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut My hair with the straight razor. I was a week out of the hospital. Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed With stitches of surgical thread. The scalpel came so close it gave My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died. Years later I can still see the skin Flutter on the inside of my left breast And my heart limps like a great uncle Who, because he was a Jew and lame, Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes. He became a friend asking a favor Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.
Outside the window the McGill smelter sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper, on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim, while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted, when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length; it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy. The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine. Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas, my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy, glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton. In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports. A new planet bloomed above us; in its light the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates. The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot; we could have anything we wanted.
This was the winter mother told time by my heart ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest. This was the fifties & we were living on nothing & what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse, what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists & each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass, what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman, into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming & brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,” & hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.
That was not the summer of aspic and cold veal. It was so hot the car seat stung my thighs and the rearview mirror swam with mirage. In the back seat the leather grip was noosed by twine. We were not poor but we had the troubles of the poor. She who had been that soft snore beside the Nytol, open-mouthed, was gone, somewhere, somewhere there was a bay, there was a boat, there was a scold in mother’s mouth. What I remember best is the way everything came and went in the window of my brief attention. At the wake I was beguiled by the chromium yellow lemon pies. The grandfather clock’s pendant of unaffordable gold told the quarter hour. The hearse rolled forward over the O’s of its own surprise.
The city had such pretty clotheslines. Women aired their intimate apparel in the emery haze: membranes of lingerie— pearl, ruby, copper slips— their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind. And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent of baking, a sensual net over a few yards of North Troy. The city had Niagara Mohawk bearing down with power and light and members of the Local shifting on the line. They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid, synthetics that won’t vent. They pieced the tropics into housecoats when big prints were the rage. Dacron gardens twisted on the line over lots of Queen Anne’s lace. Sackdresses dyed the sun as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass against the leading of the tenements, the warehouse holding medical supplies. I waited for my bus by that window of trusses in Caucasian beige, trying to forget the pathological inside. I was thinking of being alive. I was waiting to open the amber envelopes of mail at home. Just as food service workers, counter women, maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo their perms from the delicate insect meshes required by The Board of Health. Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route. She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes— milk crates of orange industrial lace the cartons could drip through. Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning put their veins up and sawed their nails to dust on files from the plant. All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper. Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called garnet cloth. It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed their larval curls and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs. It was yesterday—twenty years after my father’s death, I found something he had kept. A packet of lightning- cut sanding discs, still sealed. I guess he meant to open the finish, strip the paint stalled on some grain and groom the primal gold. The discs are the rough size of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle and label Best Before. The old cellophane was tough. But I ripped until I touched their harsh done crust.
Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints (1893). John Gray’s translation of Verlaine John Gray’s translation of Verlaine The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints (1893). & Baudelaire’s Baudelaire’s French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) butcher in 1861 shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe.tripe Cow’s stomach, prepared for human consumption  He thought himself a clever man and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,  gazed briefly at what Tennyson called at what Tennyson called Not an actual phrase by Tennyson. Possibly a play on “Hateful is the dark-blue sky”, from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters”  “the sweet blue sky.” It was a warm day. What clouds there were were made of sugar tinged with blood. They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages  new settings of the songsMoravian Moravian Could refer to either a person from Moravia, a region of the Czech Republic, or a member of the Moravian Church. virgins sang on wedding days.  The poet is a monarch of the clouds The poet is a monarch of the clouds Translation from Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros”: “Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées” (line 13) & Swinburne Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. on his northern coast “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale”: “trod by no tropic feet”.  composed that lovely elegy elegy A melancholy poem that laments a person’s death but ends in consolation. See more in the Glossary of Poetic Terms.  and then found out Baudelaire was still alive found out Baudelaire was still alive Baudelaire died August 31, 1867, but his death was erroneously reported four months earlier, in April of 1867. According to Swinburne biographer Edmund Gosse, “Baudelaire came to life again, and Swinburne was on the point of tearing up his elegy. However, Baudelaire died some months later, and, after a delay of eleven years, “Ave atque Vale” was at length included in the volume of 1878.” Read “Ave Atque Vale” here.  whom he had lodged dreamily in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” “deep division of prodigious breasts.” A direct quotation from Swinburne’s poem “Ave Atque Vale”   Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.   He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, An allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover”   over spring afternoons in the nineteenth centurywhile Marx in the library while Marx in the library Karl Marx (1818-1883), political economist, researched works in the reading room of the British Museum in London for his major publication, Das Kapital gloom studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit Tilsit A town in what was East Prussia, now named Sovetsk, Russia. Marx mentions the 1807 Peace Treaties of Tilsit in his 1870 correspondence with Friedrich Engels.  and that gentle man BakuninBakunin Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian anarchist who participated in the Czech Rebellion of 1848. Bakunin met Karl Marx in Paris, and later Bakunin’s anarchist faction would clash with Marx’s socialist faction at a congress of the International Working Men’s Association, and Marx’s leadership prevailed and Bakunin and his men were expelled from the association. Bakunin had stood for violent overthrow, while Marx believed that existing political systems should be reformed into socialism. Compare to these lines from Larry Levis’ poem “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans”: “And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold” , home after fingerfucking the countess,  applies his numb hands to the making of bombs.
1 A French scholar says he affected the Chinese manner.  When he took his friends into the countryside  To look at blossoms, they all saw Chinese blossoms.  He dressed accordingly and wept for the wild geese of Shosho. 2 One year after making love through the short midsummer night He walked home at dawn and noticed that the river Oi  Had sunk two feet. The following year was better.  He saw bubbles of crab-froth among the river reeds.
for my father, 1922-1944 Your face did not rot like the others—the co-pilot,  for example, I saw him yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter,  the poor ignorant people, stare as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job.  But your face did not rot like the others—it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening,  down from your compulsive orbiting, I would touch you,  read your face as Dallas,  your hoodlum gunner, now, with the blistered eyes, reads  his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested scholar touches an original page.  However frightening, I would  discover you, and I would not turn you in; I would not make  you face your wife, or Dallas,  or the co-pilot, Jim. You could return to your crazy  orbiting, and I would not try  to fully understand what it means to you. All I know  is this: when I see you,  as I have seen you at least once every year of my life,  spin across the wilds of the sky  like a tiny, African god, I feel dead. I feel as if I were  the residue of a stranger’s life,  that I should pursue you. My head cocked toward the sky,  I cannot get off the ground,  and, you, passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling  to tell me that you are doing  well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune  placed these worlds in us.
My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way, did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other. I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now. Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July, but fireworks any time? There are people like that, you know. They’re like people who like orchestra music, listen to it any time of day. Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them. Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats, shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene, the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first one at the scene of a bad accident. Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas? I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me, did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep. Do you know that I have never understood what they meant by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They should have called it something like “the grudging notch.” But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say? “It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.” You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story, but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much. Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon? I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.
My beloved little billiard balls, my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums, you owe your beauty to your mother, who resembled a cyclindrical corned beef with all the trimmings, may God rest her forsaken soul, for it is all of us she forsook; and I shall never forget her sputtering embers, and then the little mound. Yes, my little rum runners, she had defective tear ducts and could weep only iced tea. She had petticoats beneath her eyelids. And in her last years she found ball bearings in her beehive puddings, she swore allegiance to Abyssinia. What should I have done? I played the piano and scrambled eggs. I had to navigate carefully around her brain’s avalanche lest even a decent finale be forfeited. And her beauty still evermore. You see, as she was dying, I led each of you to her side, one by one she scorched you with her radiance. And she is ever with us in our acetylene leisure. But you are beautiful, and I, a slave to a heap of cinders.
She was in terrible pain the whole day, as she had been for months: a slipped disc, and there is nothing more painful. She herself was a nurse’s aide, also a poet just beginning to make a name for her nom de plume. As with most things in life, it happened when she was changing channels on her television. The lucky man, on the other hand, was smiling for the first time in his life, and it was fake. He was an aspiring philosopher of dubious potential, very serious, but somehow lacking in essential depth. He could have been an adequate undertaker. It was not the first time for either of them. It was a civil service, with no music, few flowers. Still, there was a slow and erratic tide of champagne—corks shot clear into the trees. And flashcubes, instant photos, some blurred and some too revealing, cake slices that aren’t what they were meant to be. The bride slept through much of it, and never did we figure out who was on whose team. I think the groom meant it in the end when he said, “We never thought anyone would come.” We were not the first to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows, it may all turn out for the best. And who really cares about such special days, they are not what we live for.
A vagabond is a newcomer in a heap of trouble. He’s an eyeball at a peephole that should be electrocuted. He’s a leper in a textile mill and likely to be beheaded, I mean, given a liverwurst sandwich on the break by the brook where the loaves are sliced. But he oughtn’t meddle with the powder puffs on the golf links— they have their own goats to tame, dirigibles to situate. He can act like an imbecile if the climate is propitious, a magnate of kidnap paradising around the oily depot, or a speck from a distant nebula wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper .... Well, if it’s permitted, then let’s regulate him, let’s testify against his thimble, and moderate his gloves before they sew an apron. The local minister is thinking of moving to Holland, exchanging his old ballads for some lingerie. “Zatso!” says the vagabond. Homeless, like wheat that tattletales on the sermon, like wages swigged. “Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond. The minister reels under the weight of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have jutted into his kernel, disturbed his terminal core. Slowly, and with trifling dignity, the minister removes from his lapel his last campaign button:Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire.
Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back.  No one believes in his own life anymore. The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings.  They sing songs, and their fingers blear. And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot  And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more, Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind, Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.
The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ... At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.
Her first child belongs to the crows and his days go circling the yellow-black fields summers and into the falls. He scans  the horizon, mouth in a sticky O, like a spirit caged to infinite space.Winged One, she calls, Winged One, come here. Receding, he pulls off his straw hat and waves, showing his tuft  of obsidian hair. He’s not coming back just yet. She remembers how crows are small black rivers  like stairways leading to rooms that can’t be rooms, only the hallways of space.  And then, how she watched him last night in the ruined farmhouse across the road  where only a chimney and staircase are left jutting up to the vacant precincts of moonlight.  He was stepping so lightly then, who at sixteen forgets his own name, and shits himself  like the mindless, fear-mad prey of barn owls. He belonged to the crows and stood for hours on the stairway’s precipice, weaving a dance like crows in flight, until his brother,  with rope and fists, carried him struggling down.
... in which generally the patient has the sense of having lost contact with things, or of everything having undergone a subtle but all-encompassing change, reality revealed as never before, though eerie in some ineffable way. —Louis Sass Or gallery. Or strange askew museum. Or painting of a hotel bed with some cheap print above the headboard. (Palm tree or a sleigh pulling Xmas trees.) Or the day two-dimensional, subzero as I run the beach along the frozen lake. The waves lathed to Hokusai spirals. Cold gallery, every inch of wall space covered, park benches derbied by snow. House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. House for battered women. House of the servants of His Godhead Reverend Moon Who plots in some Seoul penthouse His glorious death and resurrection. Ten minutes ago I left you to the laying on of hands. Maria talking fast in glottal Polish, and the physical therapist, hugely blonde, lifting your legs, white cocoons of the casts. First up, then to the sides, the hospital bed in the living room hulking, whirring as it moves along with you. To talk of this and you directly, though I can’t. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. Legs not working, hands not working, tongue encased in plaster. The tongue going numb with the hands. Why my friend Dave loves jazz: to hammer and obliterate the words, nullify too the wordlessness. “Blue Train” on my Walkman as the Moonies leave from house to van, lugging crates of silken flowers. Blue pills that didn’t work. Then my month of yellow pills. To not metamorphose to my father writhing as the charges surge from temples down the spine, a dog’s twitching legs in sleep. To mollify with acronyms: ECT, Odysseuses and Tristans of PDR, yellow Prozac, sky blue Zoloft. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. The day two-dimensional. (Past and present and to dwell in neither.) Truth-taking stare. Height and width, no depth. On a screen the paramedics ease you from car to ambulance, having labored with a crowbar at the door, and I push again through the crowd on Thorndale. This is my husband. Please let him come with me.
How long it must have been, the girl’s hair,  cascading down her shoulders almost to her waist,   light brown and heavy as brocade: the story I’m remembering of N’s, remembering as my own   hair’s washed and cut, the salt-and-pepper   cuneiform to frill my barber’s smock. Arts and Science is expanding. The wall  to the empty shop next door pulled down   and a dozen workmen slink improbably on scaffolds butting the dusty ceiling,   cacophony and plastic tarps, the whirr  of drills that mingles with the dryers’ jittery hums, the scissors’ flash,  veronicas of clicks, the coloring, the curling,   the antique cash register, melodious with its chime. And best,  the liquid gurgle of hands massaging scalps   the row of sinks, twelve hands and six wet scalps in a line. I’m next, and leaning back (let me wash it in this big tin basin,   battered and shiny like the moon)
The jaunty crop-haired graying  Women in grocery stores,  Their clothes boyish and neat,  New mittens or clean sneakers, Clean hands, hips not bad still,  Buying ice cream, steaks, soda,  Fresh melons and soap—or the big  Balding young men in work shoes And green work pants, beer belly  And white T-shirt, the porky walk  Back to the truck, polite; possible  To feel briefly like Jesus, A gust of diffuse tenderness  Crossing the dark spaces To where the dry self burrows  Or nests, something that stirs, Watching the kinds of people  On the street for a while— But how love falters and flags  When anyone’s difficult eyes come Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique  Soul, its need unlovable: my friend  In his divorced schoolteacher  Apartment, his own unsuspected Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closet— Not, he says, that she wasn’t  Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing My rock radio sing my self-pity: “The Angels Wished Him Dead”—all  The hideous, sudden stare of self,  Soul showing through like the lizard Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze  Of a robin busy on the lawn. In the movies, when the sensitive  Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns Trying to rescue the thrashing  Anti-semitic bully, swimming across  The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth:Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather  Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf courses, parking lots,  Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops, Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we  All dream it, the dark wind crossing  The wide spaces between us.
I back the car over a soft, large object; hair appears on my chest in dreams. The paperboy comes to collect with a pit bull. Call Grandmother and she says, Well you know death is death and none other. In the mornings we’re in the dark; even at the end of June the zucchini keep on the sill. Ring Grandmother for advice and she says, O you know I used to grow so many things. Then there’s the frequent bleeding, the tender nipples, and the rot under the floormat. If I’m not seeing a cold-eyed doctor it is another gouging mechanic. Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs and Eileen Briscoe’s elms the house keeps cool. Well. Then. You say Grandmother let me just ask you this: How does a body rise up again and rinse her mouth from the tap. And how does a body put in a plum tree or lie again on top of another body or string a trellis. Or go on drying the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile. Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes, how does the cat continue to lick itself from toenail to tailhole. And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body. And she says, Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.
If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper. If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet. Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking. Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book. Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others. If this is Wednesday, meet Moss at the house at noon. Pick B up first, call sitter about Friday evening. If she prefers, can bring B to her (hope she keeps the apartment warmer this year). Need coat hooks and picture hangers for office. Should take car in for air filter, oil change. F said one of back tires low. Don’t forget car payment, late last two months in a row. If this is Wednesday, there’s a demo on the green at 11. Took B to his first down at Quonset Point in August. Blue skies. Boston collective provided good grub for all. Long column of denims and flannel shirts. Smell of patchouli made me so wistful, wanted to buy a woodstove, prop my feet up, share a J and a pot of Constant Comment with a friend. Maybe some zucchini bread. Meet with honors students from 1 to 4. At the community college I tried to incite them to poetry. Convince them this line of work, beat the bejesus out of a gig as gizzard splitter at the processing plant or cleaning up after a leak at the germ warfare center. Be all you can be, wrap rubber band around your trigger finger until it drops off. Swim at 10:00 before picking up B, before demo on the green, and before meeting moss, if it isn’t too crowded. Only three old women talking about their daughters-in-law last Wednesday at 10:00. Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived. Keep an eye out for a new yellow blanket. Left B’s on the plane, though he seems over it already. Left most recent issue of Z in the seat. That will make a few businessmen boil. I liked the man who sat next to me, he was sweet to B. Hated flying, said he never let all of his weight down. Need to get books in the mail today. Make time pass in line at the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked. Fellow in the good-preacher-blue-suit, probably has a cold, hard bottom. Call N for green tomato recipe. Have to get used to the Yankee growing season. If this is Wednesday, N goes in hospital today. Find out how long after marrow transplant before can visit. Mother said she read in paper that Pete was granted a divorce. His third. My highschool boyfriend. Meanest thing I could have done, I did to him, returning a long-saved-for engagement ring in a Band-Aid box, while he was stationed in Da Nang. Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice. No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange. This week only; bargain on laid paper at East Side Copy Shop. Woman picking her nose at the stoplight. Shouldn’t look, only privacy we have anymore in the car. Isn’t that the woman from the colloquium last fall, who told me she was a stand-up environmentalist. What a wonderful trade, I said, because the evidence of planetary wrongdoing is overwhelming. Because because because of the horrible things we do. If this is Wednesday, meet F at Health Department at 10:45 for AIDS test. If this is Wednesday, it’s trash night.
Is the woman in the pool of light really reading or just staring at what is written Is the man walking in the soft rain naked or is it the rain that makes his shirt transparent The boy in the iron cot is he asleep or still fingering the springs underneath Did you honestly believe three lives could be complete The bottle of green liquid on the sill is it real The bottle on the peeling sill is it filled with green Or is the liquid an illusion of fullness How summer’s children turn into fish and rain softens men How the elements of summer nights bid us to get down with each other on the unplaned floor And this feels painfully beautiful whether or not it will change the world one drop
An early sadness for the future (as in dreams of myself young and sad) accompanies my departure towards a conventional story: a town of girls a New York City dormitory. And so a trail proceeds from our house on the top of the hill down the back way of former army barracks and past the borrowed church (ours had no tank)  where I was baptized reasoning “it must be true” out of the love I had for my mother. And Tony’s house there across the street from it  absolutely in the Mexican gully in dreams of which he and I still fight armed enemies  he stepped on a land mine in Nam when I remind my brother, twenty years after  his face contorts he knows the look of that death  a week before he himself dies blood-tinged ruddy-winged, but that’s another  dream-site the Needles Cemetery inelegant  unbeautiful and dear and dry. See how many loves, how much thus sadness  in the future begins to haunt that walk down that hill towards the highway away to the dormitory as I go to New York to sever love’s connections  and make the “real ones” generated by actual mating by beauty and clothes the black wool suit with its three button jacket  the oddly puffed-sleeved orange sweater  and an orange and midnight- blue paisley waistless dress. New trail there, Brett knows my future love though I don’t hitchhikes with him to California years before I catch up to the poets in Iowa City that will be in ’69, my brother  hasn’t yet signed up for Nam then  when he gives me rattles off a rattler which I keep in my wooden India box I still have until they stink. I can’t keep track of the track there’s nothing but  sidetrails of love and sadness so love is all that makes my people act they go to war for love  you know, of who and what you are  like I was baptized by the cruellest-lipped prissiest-mouthed man in the world  for love, but I could just have gone swimming walked back up love’s hill back up at the house you can get to the pool barefoot if you can find enough  bush or telephone-pole shadows.  We’d all swim together I’d tread water dreaming of the future  but a wilder larger eye birdlike  distant holds the pool in its pupil  anyone’s that too, and hold the enlarging  water sad how not be why don’t the smart girls in New York know this why don’t you or I know what we know the eye and the water both enlarge still why don’t  smart girls in Paris, yes larger but will never flood the containing eye, but why not  and sometimes it does when you or your own are the news.
No eye that sees could fail to remark you:  like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and  flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But what leaf, this time of year, is so pale,  the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just  enough green to become the green that means loss and more loss, approaching? Give up  the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost  gets forgotten: that was the thought that I woke to, those words in my head. I rose,  I did not dress, I left no particular body  sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw you, strange sign, at once transparent and  impossible to entirely see through. and how  still: the still of being unmoved, and then the still of no longer being able to be  moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve  found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my own.... If I look at you now, as from above,  and see the diva when she is caught in mid- triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if set at last free of the green sheath that has— how many nights?—held her, it is not  without remembering another I once saw: like you, except that something, a bird, some  wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it;  and like the diva, but now broken, splayed and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her.  I remember the hands, and—how small they  seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.
for Erin, for others There are places in this world where  you can stand somewhere holy and be thinking If it’s holy then why don’t I feel it, something, and while waiting, like it will any moment happen and  maybe this is it, a man accosts you, half in his tongue, half in yours, he  asks if maybe you are wanting to get high, all the time his damaged finger  twitching idly like on purpose at a leash that holds an animal you can’t  quite put your finger on at first, until you ask him, ask the man, and then  he tells you it’s a weasel and, of course, it is, you’ve seen them, you  remember now, you say Of course, a weasel. There are men inside the world who, never  mind how much they tell you that they’re trying, can’t persuade you that it isn’t  you, it’s life, it’s life in general where it hurts, a fear, of everything, of nothing, when if only they would name it maybe then you’d stay, you all the  time aware it’s you that’s talking, so who’s going anywhere but here, beside them,  otherwise why come, why keep on coming, when you can’t get to believing what  they tell you any more than you believed the drugs the other man was offering  wouldn’t harm you. Still, you think, you took them and you’re still alive, enough  to take the hand, that wants, that promises to take you to where damage is  a word, that’s all, like yes, so Yes you say, I’ll come, you tell him Show me.
—shored by trees at its far ending, as is the way in moral tales: whether trees as trees actually,  for their shadow and what  inside of it hides, threatens, calls to; or as ever-wavering conscience,  cloaked now, and called Chorus; or, between these, whatever falls upon the rippling and measurable,  but none to measure it, thin fabric of this stands for. A kind of meadow, and then  trees—many, assembled, a wood therefore. Through the wood  the worn path, emblematic of Much Trespass: Halt. Who goes there?  A kind of meadow, where it ends  begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway  darkness you were expecting perhaps  the stag to step forward, to make of its twelve-pointed antlers the branching foreground to a backdrop  all branches; or you wanted the usual bird to break cover at that angle  at which wings catch entirely what light’s left, so that for once the bird isn’t miracle  at all, but the simplicity of patience and a good hand assembling: first  the thin bones, now in careful  rows the feathers, like fretwork, now the brush, for the laying-on  of sheen.... As is always the way, you tell yourself, inpoems—Yes, always,  until you have gone there,  and gone there, “into the field,” vowing Only until there’s nothing moreI want—thinking it, wrongly, a thing attainable, any real end to wanting, and that it is close, and that  it is likely, how will you not this time catch hold of it: flashing,  flesh at once lit and lightless, a way out, the one dappled way, back—
Less the shadow than you a stag, sudden, through it.  Less the stag breaking cover than the antlers, with which  crowned. Less the antlers as trees leafless, to either side of the stag’s head, than— between them—the vision that must  mean, surely, rescue. Less the rescue. More, always, the ache  toward it. When I think of death, the gleam of the world darkening, dark, gathering me  now in, it is lately as one more of many other nights  figured with the inevitably  black car, again the stranger’s strange room entered not for prayer  but for striking prayer’s attitude, the body kneeling, bending, until it finds  the muscled patterns that  predictably, given strain and release, flesh assumes.  When I think of desire, it is in the same way that I do God: as parable, any steep and blue water, things that are always  there, they only wait to be sounded. And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps  should ask pardon. My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling,  and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they  are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.
—for Frank Espada The beer company did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans, so my father joined the picket line at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,  amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.  But the cops brandished nightsticks and handcuffs to protect the beer, and my father disappeared. In 1964, I had never tasted beer, and no one told me about the picket signs  torn in two by the cops of brewery. I knew what dead was: dead was a cat  overrun with parasites and dumped  in the hallway incinerator. I knew my father was dead. I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy  who did not hear the question in school.  I sat studying his framed photograph  like a mirror, my darker face. Days later, he appeared in the doorway  grinning with his gilded tooth. Not dead, though I would come to learn  that sometimes Puerto Ricans die  in jail, with bruises no one can explain  swelling their eyes shut. I would learn too that “boycott” is not a boy’s haircut, that I could sketch a picket line  on the blank side of a leaflet. That day my father returned from the netherworld easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,  and the brewery cops could only watch  in drunken disappointment. I searched my father’s hands for a sign of the miracle.
—Barrio René Cisneros Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982 This was the dictator’s land before the revolution. Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis, his army brooding in camps on the border, and the congregation of the landless stipples the earth with a thousand shacks, every weatherbeaten carpenter planting a fistful of nails. Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua, the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag, hoisted by a procession so silent that even their feet seemed to leave no sound on the gravel. He was eighteen, with the border patrol, when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army took aim at the back of his head. I dig because yesterday I saw four walls of photographs: the faces of volunteers in high school uniforms who taught campesinos to read, bringing an alphabet sandwiched in notebooks to places where the mist never rises from the trees. All dead, by malaria or the greedy river or the dictator’s army swarming the illiterate villages like a sky full of corn-plundering birds. I dig because today, in this barrio without plumbing, I saw a woman wearing a yellow dress climb into a barrel of water to wash herself and the dress at the same time, her cupped hands spilling. I dig because today I stopped digging to drink an orange soda. In a country with no glass, the boy kept the treasured bottle and poured the liquid into a plastic bag full of ice, then poked a hole with a straw. I dig because today my shovel struck a clay bowl centuries old, the art of ancient fingers moist with this same earth, perfect but for one crack in the lip. I dig because I have hauled garbage and pumped gas and cut paper and sold encyclopedias door to door. I dig, digging until the passport in my back pocket saturates with dirt, because here I work for nothing and for everything.
My name is Johnson— Madam Alberta K. The Madam stands for business.  I’m smart that way. I had a HAIR-DRESSING PARLOR  Before The depression put The prices lower. Then I had a BARBECUE STAND  Till I got mixed up  With a no-good man. Cause I had a insurance  The WPA Said, We can’t use you  Wealthy that way. I said, DON’T WORRY ’BOUT ME! Just like the song, You WPA folks take care of yourself— And I’ll get along. I do cooking, Day’s work, too! Alberta K. Johnson—Madam to you.
I was so sick last night I Didn’t hardly know my mind. So sick last night I Didn’t know my mind. I drunk some bad licker that Almost made me blind. Had a dream last night I Thought I was in hell. I drempt last night I Thought I was in hell. Woke up and looked around me— Babe, your mouth was open like a well. I said, Baby! Baby! Please don’t snore so loud. Baby! Please! Please don’t snore so loud. You jest a little bit o’ woman but you Sound like a great big crowd.
The instructor said, Go home and write  a page tonight.  And let that page come out of you—  Then, it will be true.
White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross, The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun. Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young, In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes. Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. Love-light of Spain—hurrah! Death-light of Africa! Don John of Austria Is riding to the sea. Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees, His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas. He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees, And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. Giants and the Genii, Multiplex of wing and eye, Whose strong obedience broke the sky When Solomon was king. They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn, From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn; They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be; On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl, Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl; They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,— They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide, And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest, For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west. We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done, But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago: It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth, Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.” For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) Sudden and still—hurrah! Bolt from Iberia! Don John of Austria Is gone by Alcalar. St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north (Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift. He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone; The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone; The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee, But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, Trumpet that sayeth ha! Domino gloria!  Don John of Austria Is shouting to the ships. King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.) The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin, And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day, And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work, But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk. Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed— Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid Gun upon gun, ha! ha! Gun upon gun, hurrah! Don John of Austria Has loosed the cannonade. The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year, The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear. He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon. And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign— (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop, Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.Vivat Hispania! Domino Gloria!
I cut a staff in a churchyard copse, I clad myself in ragged things, I set a feather in my cap That fell out of an angel’s wings. I filled my wallet with white stones, I took three foxgloves in my hand, I slung my shoes across my back, And so I went to fairyland. But lo, within that ancient place Science had reared her iron crown, And the great cloud of steam went up That telleth where she takes a town. But cowled with smoke and starred with lamps, That strange land’s light was still its own; The word that witched the woods and hills Spoke in the iron and the stone. Not Nature’s hand had ever curved That mute unearthly porter’s spine. Like sleeping dragon’s sudden eyes The signals leered along the line. The chimneys thronging crooked or straight Were fingers signalling the sky; The dog that strayed across the street Seemed four-legged by monstrosity. ‘In vain,’ I cried, ‘though you too touch The new time’s desecrating hand, Through all the noises of a town I hear the heart of fairyland.’ I read the name above a door, Then through my spirit pealed and passed: ‘This is the town of thine own home, And thou hast looked on it at last.’
Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes Of old old men is figured your undoing; Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going. Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house Long unused, damp as cellars without wine; They are the future of us all, when we Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine Of a siren’s diminuendo. They have no past But egg husks shattered to a rubbish heap By memory’s looting. Do not follow them To their camp pitched in a cranny, do not keep To the road for them, a weary weary yard Will bring you in; that beckoning host ahead, Inn-keeper Death, has but to lift his hat To topple the oldster in the dust. Read, Poor old man, the sensual moral; sleep Narrow in your bed, wear no More so bright a rose in your lapel; The spell of the world is loosed, it is time to go.
Up, up, slender  As an eel’s  Child, weaving Through water, our lonely Pipefish seeks out his dinner,  Scanty at best; he blinks  Cut-diamond eyes—snap—he  Grabs morsels so small Only a lens pinpoints them, But he ranges all over  That plastic preserve—dorsal  Fin tremulous—snap—and  Another çedilla Of brine shrimp’s gone ... We talk on of poetry, of love,  Of grammar; he looks  At a living comma— Snap—sizzling about In his two-gallon Caribbean And grazes on umlauts for breakfast.  His pug nosed, yellow  Mate, aproned in gloom,  Fed rarely, slumped, Went deadwhite, as we argued on; That rudder fin, round as a  Pizza cutter, at the  End of his two inch  Fluent stick self, lets his eyes Pilot his mouth—snap ... Does his kind remember? Can our kind forget?
“Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.” —Boileau  Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless And solitary as Dickens said, but They have something to say: that there is more Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest. The most nearly hindered—is when you pull Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge Sucking them back under the black mud, full Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells, Minnows scattering like superstitions, The surf dragging, and every power Life permits them holding out, holding on For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first. Before they will, but still we gather them, Even if our hands are bloody as meat, For a lunch Queen Victoria preferred: “A barrel of Wellfleet oysters, points down” Could last across the ocean, all the way To Windsor, wakening a widow’s taste. We ate them this afternoon, out of their Armor that was formidably grooved, though It proved our own reversal wiser still: Keep the bones and stones inside, or never Leave the sea. “He was a brave man,” Swift said, “Who first eat one.” Even now, precedent Of centuries is not always enough. Driving the knife into muscles that mould The valves so close to being impartial. Surrender, when it comes—and it must come: Lavish after that first grudging release Back there in the sea, the giving over Of despair, this time—makes me speculate. Like Oscar and oysters, I feel “always Slightly immortal when in the sea”: what Happens now we are out? Is the risk worth While for a potential pearl? No, what we’re Really after is the moment of release, The turn and tear of the blade that tightens, Tortures, ultimately tells. When you spread The shells, something always sticks to the wrong One, and a few drops of liquor dribble Into the sand. Scrape it off: in the full Half, as well as a Fautrier, a Zen Garden, and the smell of herring brine that Ferenczi said we remember from the womb, Lunch is served, in shiny stoneware sockets, Blue milk in the sea’s filthiest cup. More Easily an emblem for the inner man Than dinner, sundered, for the stomach. We Take them queasily, wonder as we gulp When it is—then, now, tomorrow—they’re dead.
Her red dress & hat  tease the sky’s level- headed blue. Outside a country depot,  she could be a harlot or saint on Sunday morning. We know  Hopper could slant light till it falls on our faces. She waits  for a tall blues singer whose twelve-string is hours out of hock,  for a pullman porter with a pigskin wallet bulging with greenbacks,  who stepped out of Porgy at intermission. This is paradise made of pigment  & tissue, where apples ripen into rage & lust. In a quick glance,  beyond skincolor, she’s his muse, his wife— the same curves  to her stance, the same breasts beneath summer cloth.
The sun slides down behind brick dust, today’s angle of life. Everything melts, even when backbones are I-beams braced for impact. Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone shaped into dry air white soundsystem of loose metal under every footstep. Wrecking crews, men unable to catch sparrows without breaking wings into splinters. Blues-horn mercy. Bloodlines. Nothing but the white odor of absence. The big iron ball swings, keeping time to pigeons cooing in eaves as black feathers float on to blueprint parking lots.
Beauty, I’ve seen you pressed hard against the windowpane. But the ugliness was unsolved in the heart & mouth. I’ve seen the quick-draw artist crouch among the chrysanthemums. Do I need to say more? Everything isn’t ha-ha in this valley. The striptease on stage at the Blue Movie is your sweet little Sara Lee. An argument of eyes cut through the metaphor, & I hear someone crying among crystal trees & confetti. The sack of bones in the magnolia, What’s more true than that? Before you can see her long pretty legs, look into her unlit eyes. A song of B-flat breath staggers on death row. Real men, voices that limp behind the one-way glass wall. I’ve seen the legless beggar chopped down to his four wheels.
In the day’s mirror you see a tall black man.  Fingers of gold cattail tremble, then you witness the rope dangling from a limb of white oak. It’s come to this. You yell his direction, the wind taking  your voice away. You holler his mama’s name  & he glances up at the red sky.  You can almost  touch what he’s thinking,  reaching for his hand across the river. The noose pendulous over his head,  you can feel him  grow inside you,  straining to hoist himself,  climbing a ladder  of air, your feet  in his shoes.
First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill— its window the moon’s reflection & silent season reaching into red sunlight hills. You must know the hard science of building walls that sway with summer storms. Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak rooted to ancient ground where the door’s constructed last, just wide enough for two lovers to enter on hands & knees. You must dance the weaverbird’s song for mending water & light with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain untortured by bushels of thorns.
Using the gun mounts for monkey bars, children skin the cat, pulling themselves through, suspended in doorways of abandoned helicopters in graveyards. With arms spread-eagled they imitate vultures landing in fields. Their play is silent as distant rain, the volume turned down on the 6 o’clock news, except for the boy with American eyes who keeps singing rat-a-tat-tat, hugging a broken machine gun.
Forgive me, soldier. Forgive my right hand for pointing you to the flawless tree line now outlined in my brain. There was so much bloodsky at daybreak in Pleiku, but I won’t say those infernal guns blinded me on that hill. Mistakes piled up men like clouds pushed to the dark side. Sometimes I try to retrace them, running fingers down the map telling less than a woman’s body— we followed the grid coordinates in some battalion commander’s mind. If I could make my mouth unsay those orders, I’d holler: Don’t move a muscle. Stay put, keep your fucking head down, soldier. Ambush. Gutsmoke. Last night while making love I cried out, Hit the dirt! I’ve tried to swallow my tongue. You were a greenhorn, so fearless, even foolish, & when I said go, Henry, you went dancing on a red string of bullets from that tree line as it moved from a low cloud.
Drunken laughter escapes Behind the fence woven With honeysuckle, up to where  I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy,  Carson, is beside him. In the time  It takes to turn & watch a woman  Tiptoe & pull a sheer blouse off  The clothesline, to see her sun-lit  Dress ride up peasant legs Like the last image of mercy, three  Are drinking from the Mason jar. That’s the oak we planted The day before I left town,  As if father & son Needed staking down to earth.  If anything could now plumb  Distance, that tree comes close,  Recounting lost friends As they turn into mist. The woman stands in a kitchen  Folding a man’s trousers— Her chin tucked to hold The cuffs straight. I’m lonely as those storytellers  In my father’s backyard I shall join soon. Alone As they are, tilting back heads  To let the burning ease down.  The names of women melt In their mouths like hot mints, As if we didn’t know Old Man Pagget’s  Stoopdown is doctored with  Slivers of Red Devil Lye.
All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures.  2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone.  3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon, and one by one I would hear out my sins, hear they are not important—that I am part of this rain drumming its long fingers, and of the roadside stone refusing to blink, and of the coyote nailed to the fence with its long grin. And when there are no messages the dead lie still— their hands crossed so strangely like knives and forks after supper.  4. I stay up late listening. My feet tap the floor, they begin a tiny dance which will outlive me. They turn away from this poem. It is almost Spring.
Applying to Heavy Equipment School I marched farther into the Great Plains And refused to come out. I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest. Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted And lay on their sides. You came with a little water and went away. The glass is still on the table, And the paper, And the burned scaffolds.  * You were bent over the sink, washing your stockings. I came up behind you like the night sky behind the town. You stood frowning at your knuckles And did not speak.  * At night I lie still, like Bolivia. My furnaces turn blue. My forests go dark. You are a low range of hills, a Paraguay. Now the clouds cover us both. It is raining and the movie houses are open.
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying  Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where  I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years. Outside the vineyards vanished under rain, And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath  When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang  Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess, Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.  Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish. I hated high school then, & on weekends drove A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring  I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone.  Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing, And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then. I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,  The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection  Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind  Of solitude the world usually allows  Only to kings & criminals who are extinct, Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin  Each autumn, & made that little hell of days— The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders  Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.  The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared. And the girls I tried to talk to after class Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,  With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.  Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road. A life like that? It seemed to go on forever— Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor  Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October  Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness  Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.  And then the first ice hung like spider lattices  Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One, And then the first dark entering the trees— And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,  The way they always seemed afraid of something,  And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.
“Prince Jesus, crush those bastards ...” —Francois Villon, Grand Testament   It is the unremarkable that will last, As in Brueghel’s camouflage, where the wren’s withheld, While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other birds?) Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds, Their last vision obscured by wings, then broken, entered. I cannot tell whether their blood spurts, or just spills, Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered. The twittering they hear is the final trespass.  ~ And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple Shouting insults at each other just beyond Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble, The quiet flowing into things then, spreading its wake From the child’s toy left out on a lawn To the broken treatise of jet-trails drifting above—seem Keel scrapes on the shores of some enlarging mistake, A wrong so wide no one can speak of it now in the town That once had seemed, like its supporting factories That manufactured poems & weaponry, Like such a good idea. And wasn’t it everyone’s? Wasn’t the sad pleasure of assembly lines a replica Of the wren’s perfect, camouflaged self-sufficiency, And of its refusal even to be pretty, Surviving in a plumage dull enough to blend in with A hemline of smoke, sky, & a serene indifference?  ~ The dead wren I found on a gravel drive One morning, all beige above and off-white Underneath, the body lighter, no more than a vacant tent Of oily feathers stretched, blent, & lacquered shut Against the world—was a world I couldn’t touch. And in its skull a snow of lice had set up such An altar, the congregation spreading from the tongue To round, bare sills that had been its eyes, I let It drop, my hand changed for a moment By a thing so common it was never once distracted from The nothing all wrens meant, the one feather on the road. No feeding in the wake of cavalry or kings changed it. Even in the end it swerved away, & made the abrupt Riddle all things come to seem ... irrelevant: The tucked claws clutched emptiness like a stick. And if Death whispered as always in the language of curling Leaves, or a later one that makes us stranger, “Don’t you come near me motherfucker”; If the tang of metal in slang made the New World fertile, Still ... as they resumed their quarrel in the quiet air, I could hear the species cheep in what they said ... Until their voices rose. Until the sound of a slap erased A world, & the woman, in a music stripped of all prayer, Began sobbing, & the man become bystander cried O Jesus. In the sky, the first stars were already faint And timeless, but what could they matter to that boy, blent To no choir, who saw at last the clean wings of indifferent Hunger, & despair? Around him the other petty thieves, With arms outstretched, & eyes pecked out by birds, reclined, Fastened forever to scaffolds which gradually would cover An Empire’s hills & line its roads as far As anyone escaping in a cart could see, his swerving mind On the dark brimming up in everything, the reins Going slack in his hand as the cart slows, & stops, And the horse sees its own breath go out Onto the cold air, & gazes after the off-white plume, And seems amazed by it, by its breath, by everything. But the man slumped behind it, dangling a lost nail Between his lips, only stares at the swishing tail, At each white breath going out, thinning, & then vanishing, For he has grown tired of amazing things.
Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him. —Genesis.  Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans  Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,  The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world.  Who made him dead to rapture and despair,  A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?  Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; To feel the passion of Eternity? Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf  There is no shape more terrible than this— More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed— More filled with signs and portents for the soul— More fraught with danger to the universe. What gulfs between him and the seraphim!  Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him  Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song,  The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;  Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,  Plundered, profaned and disinherited,  Cries protest to the Judges of the World,  A protest that is also prophecy. O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,  is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ? How will you ever straighten up this shape;  Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light;  Rebuild in it the music and the dream;  Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the Future reckon with this Man?  How answer his brute question in that hour  When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb Terror shall reply to God  After the silence of the centuries?
Alone I list  In the leafy tryst; Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep— Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:  No footfall of a wind along the pass  Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass.  Yonder the wandering weeds,  Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white;  Yonder are plumy reeds, Dusking the border of the clear lagoon;   Far off the silver clifts Hang in ethereal light below the moon;   Far off the ocean lifts, Tossing its billows in the misty beam,  And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream: I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken: This is the valley: here the branches darken   The silver-lighted stream.    Hark—  That rapture in the leafy dark! Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing,  Waking the upland and the valley under?  What carols, like the blazon of a king,  Fill all the dawn with wonder?  Oh, hush,  It is the thrush,  In the deep and woody glen! Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung,  When the old Earth was young;  That rapture rang, When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again!  Carol, my king,  On your bough aswing! Thou art not of these evil days— Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth:  Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth— How to find God upon these hungry ways;  Tell of the golden prime, When bird and beast could make a man their friend ; When men beheld swift deities descend,  Before the race was left alone with Time,  Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end;  Before great Pan was dead,  Before the naiads fled; When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold, With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold,   Startled the still dawn— Shone in upon the mountains and were gone,  Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old. Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways,  Before the weird earth-hunger of these days,  When there was rippling mirth,   When justice was on Earth, And light and grandeur of the Golden Age;   When never a heart was sad, When all from king to herdsman had   A penny for a wage. Ah, that old time has faded to a dream— The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream;  Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let  The exiled race not utterly forget;  Publish thy revelation on the lawns— Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns;  Sometime, in some sweet year, These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear.  But hark again,  From the secret glen, That voice of rapture and ethereal youth   Now laden with despair.  Forbear, O bird, forbear: Is life not terrible enough forsooth?   Cease, cease the mystic song— No more, no more, the passion and the pain:  It wakes my life to fret against the chain;  It makes me think of all the agéd wrong— Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all— Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall.   Ah, ah, that voice again! It makes me think of all these restless men  Called into time—their progress and their goal;  And now, oh now, it sends into my soul  Dreams of a love that might have been for me— That might have been—and now can never be.  Tell me no more of these—  Tell me of trancéd trees; (The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare)  Show me the leafy home of the wild bees;  Show me the snowy summits dim in air;  Tell me of things afar In valleys silent under moon and star:  Dim hollows hushed with night, The lofty cedars misty in the light,  Wild clusters of the vine,  Wild odors of the pine, The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon— High places where on quiet afternoon A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream  Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream.  Ha, now  He springs from the bough,  It flickers—he is lost!  Out of the copse he sprang; This is the floating briar where he tossed:  The leaves are yet atremble where he sang   Here a long vista opens—look!  This is the way he took, Through the pale poplars by the pond:  Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond.   Ho, there he goes  Through the alder close! He leaves me here behind him in his flight,  And yet my heart goes with him out of sight!  What whispered spell  Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell? I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream— Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on the fading stream.  Lead on—you know the way  Lead on to Arcady, O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim;  Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim;  By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome, Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam.  I follow where you lead, Down winding paths, across the flowery mead,  Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows, Up water-courses scented by the rose.  I follow the wandering voice—  I follow, I rejoice, I fade away into the Age of Gold— We two together lost in forest old.- O ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn,  Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod!  O souls that are weary and are heavy laden, Here is the peace of God ! Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way: Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray;  From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run,  With sudden apprehension of the sun;  A light wind stirs The filmy tops of delicate dim firs, And on the river border blows, Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose.   Sing out, O throstle, sing:  I follow on, my king: Lead me forever through the crimson dawn— Till the world ends, lead me on! Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now,  Upspringing from the bough, Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground,  Without a sound He drops into a valley and is gone!
There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,  Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.  Around were heaps of ruins piled between  The Burn o’ Sorrow and the Water o’ Care;  And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls One pillar rose up dark against the moon.  There was a nameless Presence everywhere;  In the gray soil there was a purple stain,  And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with blood— Blood of a vast unknown Calamity.  It was the mark of some ancestral grief— Grief that began before the ancient Flood.
Once Phidias stood, with hammer in his hand, Carving Minerva from the breathing stone,  Tracing with love the winding of a hair,  A single hair upon her head, whereon  A youth of Athens cried, “O Phidias,  Why do you dally on a hidden hair?  When she is lifted to the lofty front Of the Parthenon, no human eye will see.” And Phidias thundered on him: “Silence, slave: Men will not see, but the Immortals will!”
For all your days prepare,  And meet them ever alike: When you are the anvil, bear—  When you are the hammer, strike.
The moon shears up on Tahoe now: A panther leaps to a tamarack bough. She crouches, hugging the crooked limb: She hears the nearing steps of him Who sent the little puff of smoke That stretched her mate beneath the oak. Her eyes burn beryl, two yellow balls, As Fate counts out his last footfalls. A sudden spring, a demon cry, Carnivorous laughter to the sky. Her teeth are fastened in his throat (The moon rides in her silver boat.) And now one scream of long delight Across the caverns of the night!
We knew.  Anne to come.   Anne to come.   Be new.  Be new too.  Anne to come   Anne to come   Be new  Be new too.  And anew.  Anne to come.   Anne anew.  Anne do come.  Anne do come too, to come and to come not to come and as to and new, and new too.   Anne do come.   Anne knew.  Anne to come.   Anne anew.  Anne to come.   And as new.  Anne to come to come too.  Half of it.  Was she  Windows  Was she  Or mine  Was she  Or as she  For she or she or sure.   Enable her to say.   And enable her to say.  Or half way.  Sitting down.  Half sitting down.  And another way.  Their ships  And please.  As the other side.  And another side  Incoming   Favorable and be fought.  Adds to it.  In half.  Take the place of take the place of take the place of taking  place.  Take the place of in places.  Take the place of taken in place of places.  Take the place of it, she takes it in the place of it. In the way  of arches architecture.  Who has seen shown  You do.  Hoodoo.  If can in countenance to countenance a countenance as in as  seen.  Change it.  Not nearly so much.  He had.   She had.   Had she.  He had nearly very nearly as much.  She had very nearly as much as had had.  Had she.   She had.  Loose loosen, Loose losten to losten, to lose.  Many.  If a little if as little if as little as that.  If as little as that, if it is as little as that that is if it is very nearly all of it, her dear her dear does not mention a ball at all.  Actually.  As to this.  Actually as to this.  High or do you do it.  Actually as to this high or do you do it.   Not how do you do it.  Actually as to this.  Not having been or not having been nor having been or not having been.   Interrupted.  All of this makes it unanxiously.  Feel so.  Add to it.  As add to it.   He.  He.  As add to it.   As add to it.   As he  As he as add to it.  He.  As he  Add to it.   Not so far.   Constantly as seen.  Not as far as to mean.  I mean I mean.  Constantly.   As far.  So far.  Forbore.  He forbore.   To forbear.  Their forbears.  Plainly.  In so far.   Instance.  For instance.  In so far.
I do.   Victim.  Sales   Met   Wipe   Her   Less.  Was a disappointment  We say it.  Study nature.   Or  Who   Towering.  Mispronounced  Spelling.  She   Was   Astonishing  To  No   One   For   Fun  Study from nature.   I  Am   Pleased  Thoroughly  I  Am   Thoroughly  Pleased.  By.   It.  It is very likely.  They said so.  Oh.  I want.   To do.  What  Is  Later  To  Be  Refined.  By   Turning.  Of turning around.  I will wait.
I caught a bird which made a ball And they thought better of it. But it is all of which they taught That they were in a hurry yet In a kind of a way they meant it best That they should change in and on account But they must not stare when they manage Whatever they are occasionally liable to do It is often easy to pursue them once in a while And in a way there is no repose They like it as well as they ever did But it is very often just by the time That they are able to separate In which case in effect they could Not only be very often present perfectly In each way whichever they chose. All of this never matters in authority But this which they need as they are alike Or in an especial case they will fulfill Not only what they have at their instigation Made for it as a decision in its entirety Made that they minded as well as blinded Lengthened for them welcome in repose But which they open as a chance But made it be perfectly their allowance All which they antagonise as once for all Kindly have it joined as they mind
Why can pansies be their aid or paths.  He said paths she had said paths All like to do their best with half of the time  A sweeter sweetener came and came in time  Tell him what happened then only to go He nervous as you add only not only as they angry were  Be kind to half the time that they shall say It is undoubtedly of them for them for every one any one  They thought quietly that Sunday any day she might not come In half a way of coining that they wish it Let it be only known as please which they can underrate  They try once to destroy once to destroy as often Better have it changed to pigeons now if the room smokes  Not only if it does but happens to happens to have the room smoke all the time. In their way not in their way it can be all arranged Not now we are waiting. I have read that they wish if land is there  Land is there if they wish land is there  Yes hardly if they wish land is there It is no thought of enterprise there trying  Might they claim as well as reclaim.  Did she mean that she had nothing.  We say he and I that we do not cry Because we have just seen him and called him back He meant to go away Once now I will tell all which they tell lightly. How were we when we met. All of which nobody not we know  But it is so. They cannot be allied They can be close and chosen.  Once in a while they wait. He likes it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies.
She need not be selfish but he may add  They like my way it is partly mine In which case for them to foil or not please  Come which they may they may in June.  Not having all made plenty by their wish  In their array all which they plan Should they be called covered by which  It is fortunately their stay that they may  In which and because it suits them to fan Not only not with clover but with may it matter  That not only at a distance and with nearly  That they ran for which they will not only plan  But may be rain can be caught by the hills  Just as well as they can with what they have  And they may have it not only because of this  But because they may be here. Or is it at all likely that they arrange what they like. Nohody knows just why they are or are not anxious  While they sit and watch the horse which rests Not because he is tired but because they are waiting To say will they wait with them in their way  Only to say it relieves them that they go away  This is what they feel when they like it Most of them do or which It is very often their need not to be either Just why they are after all made quickly faster  Just as they might do. It is what they did say when they mentioned it  Or this. It is very well to go up and down and look more  Than they could please that they see where  It is better that they are there
Should they may be they might if they delight In why they must see it be there not only necessarily  But which they might in which they might  For which they might delight if they look there  And they see there that they look there To see it be there which it is if it is Which may be where where it is If they do not occasion it to be different From what it is. In one direction there is the sun and the moon In the other direction there are cumulus clouds and the sky  In the other direction there is why They look at what they see They look very long while they talk along And they may be said to see that at which they look  Whenever there is no chance of its not being warmer  Than if they wish which they were. They see that they have what is there may there  Be there also what is to be there if they may care  They care for it of course they care for it.  Now only think three times roses green and blue  And vegetables and pumpkins and pansies too Which they like as they are very likely not to be  Reminded that it is more than ever necessary That they should never be surprised at any one time At just what they have been given by taking what they have  Which they are very careful not to add with  As they may easily indulge in the fragrance  Not only of which but by which they know  That they tell them so.
I think very well of Susan but I do not know her name  I think very well of Ellen but which is not the same  I think very well of Paul I tell him not to do so I think very well of Francis Charles but do I do so I think very well of Thomas but I do not not do so I think very well of not very well of William  I think very well of any very well of him  I think very well of him. It is remarkable how quickly they learn But if they learn and it is very remarkable how quickly they learn It makes not only but by and by  And they may not only be not here  But not there Which after all makes no difference After all this does not make any does not make any difference I add added it to it. I could rather be rather be here.
There may be pink with white or white with rose Or there may be white with rose and pink with mauve Or even there may be white with yellow and yellow with blue Or even if even it is rose with white and blue And so there is no yellow there but by accident.
Suzanna socked me Sunday, she socked me Monday, too, she also socked me Tuesday, I was turning black and blue. She socked me double Wednesday, and Thursday even more, but when she socked me Friday, she began to get me sore. “Enough’s enough,” I yelled at her, “I hate it when you hit me!” “Well, then I won’t” Suzanna said— that Saturday, she bit me.
I found a four-leaf clover and was happy with my find, but with time to think it over, I’ve entirely changed my mind. I concealed it in my pocket, safe inside a paper pad, soon, much swifter than a rocket, my good fortune turned to bad.  I smashed my fingers in a door,  I dropped a dozen eggs,  I slipped and tumbled to the floor,  a dog nipped both my legs,  my ring slid down the bathtub drain,  my pen leaked on my shirt,  I barked my shin, I missed my train,  I sat on my dessert. I broke my brand-new glasses, and I couldn’t find my keys, I stepped in spilled molasses, and was stung by angry bees. When the kitten ripped the curtain, and the toast burst into flame, I was absolutely certain that the clover was to blame.  I buried it discreetly  in the middle of a field,  now my luck has changed completely,  and my wounds have almost healed.  If I ever find another,  I will simply let it be,  or I’ll give it to my brother—  he deserves it more than me.
Shed a tear for Twickham Tweer who ate uncommon meals, who often peeled bananas and then only ate the peels, who emptied jars of marmalade and only ate the jars, and only ate the wrappers off of chocolate candy bars. When Twickham cooked a chicken he would only eat the bones, he discarded scoops of ice cream though he always ate the cones, he’d boil a small potato but he’d only eat the skin, and pass up canned asparagus to gobble down the tin. He sometimes dined on apple cores and bags of peanut shells, on cottage cheese containers, cellophane from caramels, but Twickham Tweer passed on last year, that odd and novel man, when he fried an egg one morning and then ate the frying pan.
the place of consequence, the station of his embrace. Or else I’m not son enough to see the innocence and the spiritual fiddlings in the uneven floorboards and joists, in the guttural speech of the pipes, in the limp and the lack of heat. All we need, all we really need is light! And let there be a roof with no leaks. Oh father landlord, fill up all our breaches. He gives himself to the cracks; into the chinks my father lowers his bone, the do-it-yourself funeral. He holds the wires in his teeth. He strips the insulation back. If it’s black, it’s juiceless; if it’s red, elegiac.
Not even the cops who can do anything could do this— work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this, in a truck that wasn’t even our own, part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love, vomit and shit and the stains of pissing another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin, better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.
An obituary has more news than this day, brilliant, acid yellow and silver off the water at land’s end. The disparate prismatic things blind you as they fin their way across the surface of the water. This light cannot inform you of your dying. Fish of lustrous nothing, fish of desire, fish whose push and syllable can make things happen, fish whose ecstatic hunger is no longer news, and fish whose mouth zeroes the multitudes, the hosts who wait for their analogies and something nice to eat, the billions the waves commemorate in their breaking down to their knees on the shore, their cloacal sound. Now how can I stay singular? How can even ore part die when I split and split like the smallest animal in the ocean until I’m famous in my dismemberment, splendid in my hunger, and anonymous— so that naming one is like naming one runnel the sea, or one drop of blood the intoxicating passion? I keep the multitudes in mind when I hear daily that one has murdered another. A news more silver than given, more light than anything captured. And I hold them all in mind—the fulgence, the data, and the death, or else I lose it, that package of slippery fish, that don’t die exactly but smell in a heaven so low we can hear the moans and feel the circles and bite in each cell.
Miss Bliss, once I thought I was endless since father was perpetual in his grade school of seedlings in cups, the overly loved pets, and recess while mother was the lipsticked dancing girl on the Steel Pier who would outstep Hitler. I was insufferable when I rolled the Volkswagen bus two times and lived with the snow chains like costumed jewels slung over me and the spare rolled away as in a folktale. The pact I made in the spinning instant said in my language of American boy, Put up or shut up, to God, the State Trooper who was kind and spoke of service and punishment and giving yourself away. Now, I’m alive through the agency of iron and contract work and appeals to the fallen—angel and dusk— but wet-winged and still without you, Miss Bliss, who took me inside where there was an ocean before which we were children. That calm, that fear, that witness of the two-thirds of everything else.
Is this the world, Miss Bliss? Stacks of ingots on the docks where my brother works? Work and things on the threshold of raw and radiated. Bananas gassed in shacks to ripen by the forklifts. Ships of foreign port. Ships of car parts and dyes. The beef-stripping business. Things, Miss Bliss, and work. Flavors translated from Costa Rica, volatile oils, seized cargoes, incensed loads, cracked coal. After a week the exposed skin around his wrists was blue, vein color, the color of the world. Labor, and the union of the senses to deliver us from our geography. Everywhere is here. When the stevedores break for lunch, one is responsible for the pot-luck of cold meats, the deep dish, leftovers from the wedding, while one is responsible for inviting the office women. These men set the table with the pomp of the late Elizabeth: linen, gilt plates, a taster, and a trumpeted summons. They force the choice bits on each other. They talk about blood and Solomon’s operation. They talk about Lily’s kids and the dead as they come hack to speak to Lonnie in his sleep. And they talk about food they could not eat, the boss, and a dream of playing lead before they switch on the TV with its loud prophecies of soap. They eat deeply in gratitude. The pot scraped with a spoon, that sound. The world’s a word, and a lever. The ghosts at the banquet want something, Miss Bliss. From one world I come to you with two blue wrists, my brother’s rage against the living the world owes, and everything I do that’s duplicate. My cells split. They can’t be true. I smoke. I turn out a little verse. I make a small sacrifice. I throw what cannot be eaten away. I throw it on the ground. Here, some things you can’t eat.
Hirto corde gigni quosdam homines proditur, neque alios fortioris esse industriae, sicut Aristomenen Messenium qui trecentos occidit Lacedaemonios ... —Plinii, Naturalis Historia XI. Ixx. The guards sleep they breathe uneven Conversation with the Trees the sharp cicadas And knots of pine the flames Have stirred to talk: their light Shows him rolling in his bonds As if he dragged his bones Again beyond a tall And ghosted mist of blood; He took three hundred lives And will not give his own for capture Even. The smell of searing Hemp and flesh startles As the scream of birds— Should wake the guards of men Or dead. The fire flares and frames A running giant his wrists Caught between his thighs; A burned and awkward god. Once he tried the foxes’ Paths out of the shattered quarry. No way now. One may Kill his hundreds; still No way. How can he live Without his heart. Throw him To the ground and prepare knives! Do they by their hate Or wonder break the breast He shut to fear? Mock Or pray as they cut flesh Crush ribs and lay all open To the alien chill of air? No scream tears From him; the tiny veins Along his eyelid swell And pools of sweat gather at its corners. But they do not see his Slowly swinging eyes. They watch his heart; its brown Hair is whorled and dry.
1 At focus in the national Park’s ellipse a marker Draws tight the guys of Miles, opposite the national Obelisk with its restless oval Peoples who shall be Deeply drawn to its Austerities: or For a moment try the mystery Of the god-like eye, before Our long climb down past relic Schoolboy names and states And one foolish man Climbs up, his death high In his elliptic face. 2 A double highway little Used in early spring Goes to the end of the land Where Washington’s chandeliers Are kept, his beds and chairs, His roped-off relic kitchen Spits, his pans; his floors Are worn underneath the dead Pilgrims’ feet; outside The not-so-visited tomb; And over the field and fence His legendary river: And so I walk although The day is cold for this; I eat a thin slice Of bread and one remarkable Egg perfectly shaped, A perfect oriental por- Celain sheen of white. Suddenly the lost Ghosts of his life Broke from the trees and from the cold Mud pools where he played A boy and set as a man The sand glint of his boot, The flick of his coat on the weeds; His wheels click in the single road.
There were bees about. From the start I thought The day was apt to hurt. There is a high Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids Were dropping from the top of it like schools Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls. I knew the holiday was hot. I saw The August sun teeming in the bodies Logged along the beach and felt the yearning In the brightly covered parts turning each To each. For lunch I bit the olive meat: A yellow jacket stung me on the tongue. I knelt to spoon and suck the healing sea ... A little girl was digging up canals With her toes, her arm hanging in a cast As white as the belly of a dead fish Whose dead eye looked at her with me, as she Opened her grotesque system to the sea ... I walked away; now quietly I heard A child moaning from a low mound of sand, Abandoned by his friend. The child was tricked, Trapped upon his knees in a shallow pit. (The older ones will say you can get out.) I dug him up. His legs would not unbend. I lifted him and held him in my arms As he wept. Oh I was gnarled as a witch Or warlock by his naked weight, was slowed In the sand to a thief’s gait. When his strength Flowed, he ran, and I rested by the sea ... A girl was there. I saw her drop her hair, Let it fall from the doffed cap to her breasts Tanned and swollen over wine red woolen. A boy, his body blackened by the sun, Rose out of the sand stripping down his limbs With graceful hands. He took his gear and walked Toward the girl in the brown hair and wine And then past me; he brushed her with the soft, Brilliant monster he lugged into the sea ... By this tide I raised a small cairn of stone Light and smooth and clean, and cast the shadow Of a stick in a perfect line along The sand. My own shadow followed then, until I felt the cold swirling at the groin.
1 Against the low, New York State mountain background, a smokestack sticks up and gives out its snakelike wisp. Thin, stripped win- ter birches pick up the vertical lines. Last night we five watched the white, painted upright bars of steel in an ancient, New York jail called Herkimer (named for a general who lost an arm). Cops threw us against the car. Their marks grow gaudy over me. They burgeon beneath my clothes. I know I give my wound too much thought and time. Gallows loomed outside our sorry solitary cells. “You are in the oldest of our New York jails,” they said. “And we’ve been in books. It’s here they had one of Dreiser’s characters arraigned.” The last one of our company to be hanged we found had chopped her husband up and fed him to the hungry swine. They nudged the wan- ing warmth of his flesh. Each gave him a rooting touch, translating his dregs into the hopes of pigs. And now with their spirited wish and with his round, astonished face, her changed soul still floats about over their small farm near this little New York town. 2 The door bangs shut in the absolute dark. Toilets flush with a great force, and I can hear the old, gentle drunk, my neighbor in the tank, hawk his phlegm and fart. In the early day we line up easily as a cliché for our bread and bowls of gruel. We listen, timeless, for the courthouse bell, play rummy the whole day long and “shoot the moon,” go to bed and jack off to calm down, and scowl harshly, unmanned, at those who were once our friends. The prison of our skins now rises outside and drops in vertical lines before our very eyes. 3 Outdoors again, now we can walk to the Erie Locks (“Highest Lift Locks in the World!”) The old iron bridge has a good bed— cobbles made of wood. Things pass through this town everywhere for it was built in opposite tiers. Two levels of roads on either side the Canal, then two terraces of tracks and higher ranks of beds: roads where trucks lumber awkwardly above the town— like those heavy golden cherubim that try to wing about in the old, Baroque church. The little town—with its Gothic brick bank, Victorian homes with gingerbread frieze and its blasted factories (collapsed, roofs roll- ing back from walls like the lids of eyes)— has died and given up its substance like a hollow duct, smokestack or a pen through which the living stuff flows on. 4 So we walk the long, dead-end track along the shallow, frozen lake where the canal forms a fork (this time of year the locks don’t work). And now and again we look back, for the troopers haunt the five of us out the ledges toward The Locks. (We know they want to hose our bellies and our backs. Or—as they said— “Play the Mambo” on our heads.) We do not yet feel quite free— though the blue and yellow, newly painted posts for ships bloom gaily in the cold, and the bulbs about their bases bulge for spring. Soon the great, iron gates will open out and the first woman-shaped ship, mammoth, silent, will float toward us like a god come back to make us feel only half afraid. Until then, though my friends will be gone from this dry channel of snow and stone, I’ll stay here among the monuments of sheer, brown and gray rock where you can read the names of lovers, sailors and of kids etched in chalk, and in this winter air still keep one hand over my aching ear.Buffalo, March 1967
My first best friend is Awful Ann— she socked me in the eye. My second best is Sneaky Sam— he tried to swipe my pie. My third best friend is Max the Rat— he trampled on my toes. My fourth best friend is Nasty Nell— She almost broke my nose. My fifth best friend is Ted the Toad— he kicked me in the knee. My sixth best friend is Grumpy Gail— she's always mean to me. My seventh best is Monster Moe— he often plays too rough. That's all the friends I've got right now— I think I've got enough.
It's noisy, noisy overhead, the birds are winging south, and every bird is opening a noisy, noisy mouth. They fill the air with loud complaint, they honk and quack and squawk— they do not feel like flying, but it's much too far to walk.
I’m fond of frogs, and every day I treat them with affection. I join them at the FROG CAFE— We love the Croaking Section.
A wolf is at the Laundromat, it's not a wary stare-wolf, it's short and fat, it tips its hat, unlike a scary glare-wolf. It combs its hair, it clips its toes, it is a fairly rare wolf, that's only there to clean its clothes— it is a wash-and-wear-wolf.
I wave good-bye when butter flies and cheer a boxing match, I've often watched my pillow fight, I've sewn a cabbage patch, I like to dance at basket balls or lead a rubber band, I've marvelled at a spelling bee, I've helped a peanut stand. It's possible a pencil points, but does a lemon drop? Does coffee break or chocolate kiss, and will a soda pop? I share my milk with drinking straws, my meals with chewing gum, and should I see my pocket change, I'll hear my kettle drum. It makes me sad when lettuce leaves, I laugh when dinner rolls, I wonder if the kitchen sinks and if a salad bowls, I've listened to a diamond ring, I've waved a football fan, and if a chimney sweeps the floor, I'm sure the garbage can.
My frog is a frog that is hopelessly hoarse, my frog is a frog with a reason, of course, my frog is a frog that cannot croak a note, my frog is a frog with a frog in its throat.
If not for the cat, And the scarcity of cheese, I could be content.
One marriage, three children, the usual hero-to-hump tale of jobs in alternating altitudes, stories of unrequited joy. Fresh identities, dramas unseen. Too much of dawn going dark, making for a rich meal of dread, when contemplating love above the brim. You also should talk about dealings with heavy weather and one-night agonies, as if descending permanently into a single distinction. It boils to skin and plain whim, or any fabrication sufficient to implicate the act. Just then, something glimpsed from a taxi careening through Paris, afterimages of a lost father’s face becomes a tree in the park, tall, rustling with allusions, or was it simply cool air stealing across your face— that isolation again?
Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers ~ In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods ~ Kicked back in the classic toilet scene ~ With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket ~ Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks ~ It’s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean ~ Because life’s road is only one night in a bad motel ~ Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win ~ You could name all the provinces of Canada ~ And simultaneously scour the Social Register ~ For the names of those sad and silly girls you wanted to get right ~ You relished autumn leaves and ignited inglorious schemes ~ Deconstructing the idea of prep-school Friday sunsets ~ In lavish October, stealing among faculty hors d’oeuvres and sherry ~ All the while creating your own hooligan oeuvre ~ With your others off to Yale, Colgate, Brown ~ Night after night, alone in L.A. ~ Seeking better quotas, vistas, cushion, heroin ~ And that last tricky exit to the Santa Monica Freeway ~ In one more borrowed car with one more borrowed fiction ~ Oh yes, you must have been laughing ~ And spitting back at the boldface of Pacific wind ~ Cruising the left coast on sheer gall ~ But mostly, at 3 a.m., in the local playground, Harry ~ You played solitary ball ~ And dreamed of final seconds in a distant game ~ You drove to the sacred bucket with a fury ~ Slick crossover dribble, and then burst to the pull-up jumper ~ No harm, no foul, nothing but net. ~ But all alone, in the heart of West Hollywood, Harry, ~ You jerk, you bricked the last shot.
According to local belief, Squaw Island—which is situated in the midst of the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York—was home for a band of prostitutes who serviced workers from the Erie Canal, circa 1840. Today, Squaw Island is a municipal refuse dump for the city of Buffalo.    1 Slime burlap on timbers riverside, yea More captive berths to consider: boundaries Set by familar propositions Of comfort and flatbottom mud. We men Haul up some miracle of a ditch To what’s called Squaw Island. And such remains the canalman’s trade At last. Harsh ways, we tell you, Woman, your eyes and rapture averted To the long boats pulled in tandem To your door. How could we see then How it was always us alone— Unknown stations in need of poor launch? 2 If they could sing or even listen A little, we’d be lost deep in the pitch And rumble of real lives, primed To unload a pledge or two of return. One day, under the shadow of hawks, We locked in the long grass As if slugs. The aftermath was quick Parting, forever maybe, then back To our stories of the packet boat Whacking through tangle reeds And the stoop-backed Irish turning mythic In this, a speechless country, Almost mysterious as perfume itself. 3 Captivated at Little Falls, gone clean By Weedsport, pressing toward Those vainglorious times up in Lowertown Where we’d stroll the day, liquor In hand, waiting a turn at the Locks. It should be allowed as how girls Were not forgotten, either. Sure In any faint light setting off-island, You see the hair’s worn from their legs By woolen trousers. Odd why Such standard gossip keeps us Huddled around cigar smoke and fun, Ever shuffling, ready again to move soon. 4 After miles of stumps and clear-cut skies, More stumps. And the deadly matter Of building country in the calm of summer Burdens like a search for much worse. Thinking through a warm afternoon rain, Thinking of getting there, downwater Toward neglect for glory’s sake And other never-lasting bounty, A blessing, it seems, becomes this— All passages so unworldly hot As to be bitter, our own massive bones Sweating. O Motherly touch and need, What have we to do with thee? 5 Just nervous, and the skirtless brides Seem just the same. At the taking Of shore, there’s care for the prize Portraiture of a girl at sixteen in your vest, Driving you mad, and on. It’s a gravity In the blood, unchangeable as the waif You are, a dwarf among dwarfs, no force. They tell you they understand. So half The time so drunk as to see, you wear Your life like a bandanna. That’s all Nobody’s business. That’s all the secret There is. But to any woman’s edges, Rubbed soft as landscape, you are less. 6 Kissing that last sure drop of sweat From a heavy lip, tongues wag easy In this good composted land Amid mire and flesh, a threat of snow. We rise from a hut born To game and holiday, knowing barely Ourselves. None of us escape The terrible progress we make Suffering yet another pleasure. Sad, say, the ways we loved like stones— No courting dance, no feathers Or gesture. But then nobody asked For more than favors or strange luck. 7 They watch for clouds. Any muster Could ruin business, however damp Already the shining caves that bristle Like pearl in moonlight. Beneath their belts The sources of circumstance and invention Turn nightfall to a wash. Lacking A westerly push toward Erie, the hide Tingles for a pressure, a sign, If only the whine of a full day’s water Lost to Niagara. In fair time, The swell might thicken and warm As soup in the casual hands Of a visitor aging to unwelcome weathers. 8 So it’s Buffalo: gutspill and sideshow, Crusade of rascals swaggering Up Front Street. Lovey, it all passes forth— The heart’s infirmities, our grinding Labors .... Who hasn’t spent a life Making civilization right and not Gone wrong? Soon there’ll be other empires, Then farther west, further refinements Of the breed. We conclude here, A rainy frontier, end of a pity. What’s more? Ah, dreaming, we’d scheme of strangers Above our sorry place, wise builders erecting Able love some hundred years hence! 9 Like a hatch of horseflies streaming Into gray light, we’ve grown free to cross The flushing river on abundant piping Of sludge. Where’s the barrelhouse, The waste of laughter and bile that releases? Instead there’s a world piled on bedrock, A history failing its horizons, Properties of muck increased by modern Wealth. We’re where the lost bodies Of unshared spheres intertwine As a distant rescue from style and form, From tales left squalid in the telling: Now just a vigilance, faith’s fallen banner ....
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear And twenty-nine in each leap year.
Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled among the tanned intruders, licking their hands. Pools of iridescent shellfish lay open in the restaurant window, a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs, their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements. The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled in its slime. Many and ingenious are the postures of death. But look! There, in a corner, beneath a willowware plate, a lone crab clicked its claws, creeping over a casket of walleyed fish, through a valley of oysters keeping their counsel, only to shift warily under the shadow of a wine bottle. Which saint, O saints, watches over the saintly crab? The man of forks and spears, the man of arrows? In the Ca’ d’Oro, the stiffened Sebastian takes each arrow through his flesh like a skewer. He wears a little napkin around his middle. Saint, watch over the fragile boat of the runaway crab. Let him steal his way back to the green lagoon, go floating down the Grand Canal on his own motoscafo. Let him take second life, a later martyrdom. Let him wave his bent claws in a mockery of farewell, lest we eat in his hollow shell his captive meat.
Comes sarcastic November in mummy garb, hauling,same old same old what laid bare what totaled. Sees thru the estimated costs, stench collisions, inanimate dregs, remembers the bruised figures, their numerology as stars. Up up, down down is how she counts as the hunters begin to hunt. This is the plot of erasure, this the lavender bath. Truth be known, the dark won by a landslide. Yet friends in far January await news of the front, cycling up the snow-clad hills. They are to be exhumed from the grail of the keeper, he who heralds what’s here. To them, send dreams that pop open when breathed on and ask them to complete this sentence:If God is in the details, then ...  But in the end there was only a chair covered in velvet and the sibling, dark as a forest, turned into words. There were the stamps with monsters and the stamps with flowers, there was a dumpster of old paint. Even the egalitarian whimsy of the gold rush is in partial view: harbor’s sleek hulls, willow disintegrating in drapery and nonce. What others did taking us to task in the field, into archival maps along a bank. What is it they wanted? Among strangers, beyond the stamina of pictures —the dancer on stage, his ruined feet, as they would flail crops  when the spring comes, and flood, and tassels  rise, as my head—
She holds a conversation with her ornaments, stray or contingent, heaped in patches darkly and then loosened onto the table to be consumed. Collect me, they seem to ask, into an assembly; construe us like any morning onto any day. Bring us forward notch by notch into a paradigm of comfort to be clasped: any cup will do. Any dance? Take a seed and blow it toward the curtain which, like a bright shield hugging breasts into radiance, is seen and spoken of and desired. Will any silence fit? So many columns of air are held upright in inebriated passage, so many paper stacks brittle under the weight of what was news to attentive readers as zones of holy strangers feed through tunnels their imported cares. Stare at us, they seem to say, we are windows propped up against the sky, quotations of light waiting to sail into your aperture, calling because because and now now now. And the good body is pulled over the original rapacious body like a huge sock, its cornucopia of sour wind and dust emptied into the firmament.
Wash of cold riverin a glacial land,Ionian water,chill, snow-ribbed sand,drift of rare flowers,clear, with delicate shell-like leaf enclosingfrozen lily-leaf,camellia texture,colder than a rose;wind-flowerthat keeps the breathof the north-wind—these and none other;intimate thoughts and kindreach out to sharethe treasure of my mind,intimate hands and deardrawn garden-ward and sea-wardall the sheer rapturethat I would taketo mould a clearand frigid statue;rare, of pure texture,beautiful space and line,marble to graceyour inaccessible shrine.
What could have been the big to-do that caused him to push me aside on that platform? Was a woman who knew there must be some good even inside an ass like him on board that train? Charity? Frances? His last chance in a ratty string of last chances? Jane? Surely in all of us is some good. Better love thy neighbor, buddy, lest she shove back. Maybe I should. It's probably just a cruddy downtown interview leading to some cheap-tie, careerist, dull cul-de-sac he's speeding to. Can he catch up with his soul? Really, what was the freaking crisis? Did he need to know before me if the lights searching the crowd's eyes were those of our train, or maybe the train of who he might have been, the person his own-heart-numbing, me-shoving anxiety about being prevents him from ever becoming? How has his thoughtlessness defiled who I was before he shoved me? How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled, hanging back, as though he might have loved me?
The leaves had fallen in that sullen place,  but none around him knew just where they were.  The sky revealed no sun. A ragged blur  remained where each man's face had been a face.  Two angels soon crept forth with trays of bread,  circling among the lost like prison guards.  Love is not love, unless its will affords  forgiveness for the words that are not said.  Still he could not believe that this was Hell,  that others sent before him did not know;  yet, once his name and memory grew faint,  it was no worse, perhaps, than a cheap motel.  It is the love of failure makes a saint.  He stood up then, but did not try to go.
1. THE GARDEN Poco sostenuto in A major The laving tide of inarticulate air. Vivace in A major The iris people dance. 2. THE POOL Allegretto in A minor Cool-hearted dim familiar of the dove. 3. THE BIRDS Presto in F major I keep a frequent tryst. Presto meno assai The blossom-powdered orangeitree. 4. TO THE MOON Allegro con brio in A major Moon that shone on Babylon. TO MOZART What junipers are these, inlaid With flame of the pomegranate tree? The god of gardens must have made This still unrumored place for thee To rest from immortality, And dream within the splendid shade Some more elusive symphony Than orchestra has ever played.
I have seen the proudest stars That wander on through space, Even the sun and moon, But not your face. I have heard the violin, The winds and waves rejoice in endless minstrelsy, Yet not your voice. I have touched the trillium, Pale flower of the land, Coral, anemone, And not your hand. I have kissed the shining feet Of Twilight lover-wise, Opened the gates of Dawn— Oh not your eyes! I have dreamed unwonted things, Visions that witches brew, Spoken with images, Never with you.
I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker,Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek,Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek,Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker,Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek,Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak.I am she that is terribly fashioned, the creatureWrought in God's perilous mood, in His unsafe hour.The morning star was mute, beholding my feature,Seeing the rapture I was, the shame, and the power,Scared at my manifold meaning; he heard me call"O fairest among ten thousand, acceptable brother!"And he answered not, for doubt; till he saw me crawlAnd whisper down to the secret worm, "O mother,Be not wroth in the ancient house; thy daughter forgets not at all!"I am the Woman, flëer away,Soft withdrawer back from the maddened mate,Lurer inward and down to the gates of dayAnd crier there in the gate,"What shall I give for thee, wild one, say!The long, slow rapture and patient anguish of life,Or art thou minded a swifter way?Ask if thou canst, the gold, but oh if thou must,Good is the shining dross, lovely the dust!Look at me, I am the Woman, harlot and heavenly wife;Tell me thy price, be unashamed; I will assuredly pay!"I am also the Mother: of two that I boreI comfort and feed the slayer, feed and comfort the slain.Did they number my daughters and sons? I am mother of more!Many a head they marked not, here in my bosom has lain,Babbling with unborn lips in a tongue to be,Far, incredible matters, all familiar to me.Still would the man come whispering, "Wife!" but many a time my breastTook him not as a husband: I soothed him and laid him to restEven as the babe of my body, and knew him for such.My mouth is open to speak, that was dumb too much!I say to you I am the Mother; and under the swordWhich flamed each way to harry us forth from the Lord,I saw Him young at the portal, weeping and staying the rod,And I, even I was His mother, and I yearned as the mother of God.I am also the Spirit. The Sisters laughedWhen I sat with them dumb in the portals, over my lamp,Half asleep in the doors: for my gown was raughtOff at the shoulder to shield from the wind and the rainThe wick I tended against the mysterious hourWhen the Silent City of Being should ring with song,As the Lord came in with Life to the marriage bower."Look!" laughed the elder Sisters; and crimson with shameI hid my breast away from the rosy flame."Ah!" cried the leaning Sisters, pointing, doing me wrong,"Do you see?" laughed the wanton Sisters, "She will get her lover ere long!"And it was but a little while till unto my needHe was given indeed,And we walked where waxing world after world went by;And I said to my lover, "Let us begone,"Oh, let us begone, and try"Which of them all the fairest to dwell in is,"Which is the place for us, our desirable clime!"But he said, "They are only the huts and the little villages,Pleasant to go and lodge in rudely over the vintage—time!"Scornfully spake he, being unwise,Being flushed at heart because of our walking together.But I was mute with passionate prophecies;My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,While universe drifted by after still universe.Then I cried, "Alas, we must hasten and lodge therein,One after one, and in every star that they shed!A dark and a weary thing is come on our head—To search obedience out in the bosom of sin,To listen deep for love when thunders the curse;For O my love, behold where the Lord hath plantedIn every star in the midst His dangerous Tree!Still I must pluck thereof and bring unto thee,Saying, "The coolness for which all night we have panted;Taste of the goodly thing, I have tasted first!"Bringing us noway coolness, but burning thirst,Giving us noway peace, but implacable strife,Loosing upon us the wounding joy and the wasting sorrow of life!I am the Woman, ark of the Law and sacred arm to upbear it,Heathen trumpet to overthrow and idolatrous sword to shear it:Yea, she whose arm was round the neck of the morning star at song,Is she who kneeleth now in the dust and cries at the secret door,"Open to me, 0 sleeping mother! The gate is heavy and strong."Open to me, I am come at last; be wroth with thy child no more."Let me lie down with thee there in the dark, and be slothful with thee as before!"
On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery. You also, our first great, Had tried all ways; Tested and pried and worked in many fashions, And this much gives me heart to play the game. Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong, And much of little moment, and some few Perfect as Dürer! "In the Studio" and these two portraits,* if I had my choice I And then these sketches in the mood of Greece? You had your searches, your uncertainties, And this is good to know—for us, I mean, Who bear the brunt of our America And try to wrench her impulse into art. You were not always sure, not always set To hiding night or tuning "symphonies"; Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried And stretched and tampered with the media. You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts Show us there's chance at least of winning through. * "Brown and Gold—de Race." "Grenat et Or—Le Pettt Cardinal."
A STUDY IN AN EMOTION "'Tis but a vague, invarious delight. As gold that rains about some buried king. As the fine flakes, When tourists frolicking Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes And start to inspect some further pyramid; As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath Their transitory step and merriment, Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus Gains yet another crust Of useless riches for the occupant, So I, the fires that lit once dreams Now over and spent, Lie dead within four walls And so now love Rains down and so enriches some stiff case, And strews a mind with precious metaphors, And so the space Of my still consciousness Is full of gilded snow, The which, no cat has eyes enough To see the brightness of."
The ancient songs Pass deathward mournfully. Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths, Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings— Symbols of ancient songs Mournfully passing Down to the great white surges, Watched of none - - Save the frail sea-birds And the lithe pale girls, Daughters of Okeanos. And the songs pass From the green land Which lies upon the waves as a leaf On the flowers of hyacinth; And they pass from the waters, The manifold winds and the dim moon, And they come, Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk, To the quiet level lands That she keeps for us all, That she wrought for us all for sleep In the silver days of the earth's dawning— Proserpine, daughter of Zeus. And we turn from the Kuprian's breasts, And we turn from thee, Phoibos Apollon, And we turn from the music of old And the hills that we loved and the meads, And we turn from the fiery day, And the lips that were over-sweet; For silently Brushing the fields with red-shod feet, With purple robe Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame, Death, Thou hast come upon us. And of all the ancient songs Passing to the swallow-blue halls By the dark streams of Persephone, This only remains: That in the end we turn to thee, Death, That we turn to thee, singing One last song. O Death, Thou art an healing wind That blowest over white flowers A-tremble with dew; Thou art a wind flowing Over long leagues of lonely sea; Thou art the dusk and the fragrance; Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling; Thou art the pale peace of one Satiate with old desires; Thou art the silence of beauty, And we look no more for the morning; We yearn no more for the sun, Since with thy white hands, Death, Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets, The slim colorless poppies Which in thy garden alone Softly thou gatherest. And silently; And with slow feet approaching; And with bowed head and unlit eyes, We kneel before thee: And thou, leaning towards us, Caressingly layest upon us Flowers from thy thin cold hands, And, smiling as a chaste woman Knowing love in her heart, Thou sealest our eyes And the illimitable quietude Comes gently upon us.
Pótuia, pótuia White grave goddess, Pity my sadness, O silence of Paros. I am not of these about thy feet, These garments and decorum; I am thy brother, Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee, And thou hearest me not. I have whispered thee in thy solitudes Of our loves in Phrygia, The far ecstasy of burning noons When the fragile pipes Ceased in the cypress shade, And the brown fingers of the shepherd Moved over slim shoulders; And only the cicada sang. I have told thee of the hills And the lisp of reeds And the sun upon thy breasts, And thou hearest me not, Pótuia, pótuia Thou hearest me not.
I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy boughs Of the divers-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water-lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white color of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.
Within this narrow cell that I call "me", I was imprisoned ere the worlds began, And all the worlds must run, as first they ran, In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free. I beat my hands against the walls and find It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!
Great soldier of the fighting clan,  Across Port Arthur's frowning face of stone  You drew the battle sword of old Japan,  And struck the White Tsar from his Asian throne.  Once more the samurai sword  Struck to the carved hilt in your loyal hand,  That not alone your heaven-descended lord  Should meanly wander in the spirit land.  Your own proud way, O eastern star,  Grandly at last you followed. Out it leads  To that high heaven where all the heroes are,  Lovers of death for causes and for creeds.
Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead, (It was so strange to me that they should weep!) Tall candles burned about me in the dark, And a great crucifix was on my breast, And a great silence filled the lonesome room. I heard one whisper, "Lo! the dawn is breaking, And he has lost the wonder of the day." Another came whom I had loved on earth, And kissed my brow and brushed my dampened hair. Softly she spoke: "Oh that he should not see The April that his spirit bathed in! Birds Are singing in the orchard, and the grass That soon will cover him is growing green. The daisies whiten on the emerald hills, And the immortal magic that he loved Wakens again—and he has fallen asleep." Another said: "Last night I saw the moon Like a tremendous lantern shine in heaven, And I could only think of him-and sob. For I remembered evenings wonderful When he was faint with Life's sad loveliness, And watched the silver ribbons wandering far Along the shore, and out upon the sea. Oh, I remembered how he loved the world, The sighing ocean and the flaming stars, The everlasting glamour God has given— -His tapestries that wrap the earth's wide room. I minded me of mornings filled with rain When he would sit and listen to the sound As if it were lost music from the spheres. He loved the crocus and the hawthorn-hedge, He loved the shining gold of buttercups, And the low droning of the drowsy bees That boomed across the meadows. He was glad At dawn or sundown; glad when Autumn came With her worn livery and scarlet crown, And glad when Winter rocked the earth to rest. Strange that he sleeps today when Life is young, And the wild banners of the Spring are blowing With green inscriptions of the old delight." I heard them whisper in the quiet room. I longed to open then my sealèd eyes, And tell them of the glory that was mine. There was no darkness where my spirit flew, There was no night beyond the teeming world. Their April was like winter where I roamed; Their flowers were like stones where now I fared. Earth's day! it was as if I had not known What sunlight meant! . . Yea, even as they grieved For all that I had lost in their pale place, I swung beyond the borders of the sky, And floated through the clouds, myself the air, Myself the ether, yet a matchless being Whom God had snatched from penury and pain To draw across the barricades of heaven. I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon; In flight on flight I touched the highest star; I plunged to regions where the Spring is born, Myself (I asked not how) the April wind, Myself the elements that are of God. Up flowery stairways of eternity I whirled in wonder and untrammeled joy, An atom, yet a portion of His dream— His dream that knows no end. . . . I was the rain, I was the dawn, I was the purple east, I was the moonlight on enchanted nights, (Yet time was lost to me); I was a flower For one to pluck who loved me; I was bliss, And rapture, splendid moments of delight; And I was prayer, and solitude, and hope; And always, always, always I was love. I tore asunder flimsy doors of time, And through the windows of my soul's new sight I saw beyond the ultimate bounds of space. I was all things that I had loved on earth— The very moonbeam in that quiet room, The very sunlight one had dreamed I lost, The soul of the returning April grass, The spirit of the evening and the dawn, The perfume in unnumbered hawthorn-blooms. There was no shadow on my perfect peace, No knowledge that was hidden from my heart. I learned what music meant; I read the years; I found where rainbows hide, where tears begin; I trod the precincts of things yet unborn. Yea, while I found all wisdom (being dead), They grieved for me. . I should have grieved for them!
I. AUBADE The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face, Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place. While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the far world edge,  No leaflet stirred of the leaves that climb to garland thy window ledge. Yet the vine had quivered from root to tip, and opened its flowers again, If only the low moon's light had glanced on a moving casement pane. Warm was the wind that entered in where the barrier stood ajar, And the curtain shook with its gentle breath, white as young lilies are; But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw the folds aside, (I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to set the casement wide. Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his five sweet notes a bird, And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thought thou hadst surely heard. But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand throats awake, Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon, for thy sake? Nay—bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait no more Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at the open door! II. NOCTURNE My darling, come!—The wings of the dark have wafted the sunset away, And there's room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay.  A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering moon looks up From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in its cup. The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom—elder, viburnum, rose;  The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that sighs of love as it goes. The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the greater ones abide, With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside. The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower of the elder gleams, Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest dreams. Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south, That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy sweeter mouth. Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and have naught to see? Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say nothing of thee and me? —My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are guiding her way; There is room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay!
I have known great gold Sorrows: Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully Through the slow-pacing morrows: I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing Dim endless voices cried of suffering Vibrant and far in broken litany: Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air-— All things most tragical, most fair, Have still encompassed me . . . I dance where in the screaming market-place The dusty world that watches buys and sells, With painted merriment upon my face, Whirling my bells, Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery. I have known great gold Sorrows . . . Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones, If it shall make them merry, and forget That grief shall rise and set With the unchanging, unforgetting suns Of their relentless morrows?
The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces,  Begging of Life for Joy! I saw the little daughters of the poor,  Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay,  Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled  A hideous flushed beggar at the door,  Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed,  Complacent in his profitable mask.  They mocked his horror, but they gave to him  From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in  To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts  Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand  Covered by darkness, to the luring voice  Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings,  Of silks, of feathers, bought—so cheap!—with just  Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant  For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life:  (A frock of satin for an hour's shame,  A coat of fur for two days' servitude;  “And the clothes last,” the thought runs on, within  The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days;  “Who cares or knows after the hour is done?”) —Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy!  The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible,  Complacent in the marketable mask  That earned his comforts—and they gave to him! But ah, the little painted, wistful faces  Questioning Life for Joy!
Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor bred, with one Who were it proved he lies Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbors' eyes; Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering side by side, And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
Tell me, Was Venus more beautiful Than you are, When she topped The crinkled waves, Drifting shoreward On her plaited shell? Was Botticelli’s vision Fairer than mine; And were the painted rosebuds  He tossed his lady Of better worth Than the words I blow about you To cover your too great loveliness  As with a gauze Of misted silver? For me, You stand poised In the blue and buoyant air, Cinctured by bright winds, Treading the sunlight. And the waves which precede you  Ripple and stir The sands at my feet.
We passed old farmer Boothby in the field. Rugged and straight he stood; his body steeled With stubbornness and age. We met his eyes That never flinched or turned to compromise, And “Luck,” he cried, “good luck!”—and waved an arm, Knotted and sailor-like, such as no farm In all of Maine could boast of; and away He turned again to pitch his new-cut hay... We walked on leisurely until a bend Showed him once more, now working toward the end Of one great path; wearing his eighty years Like banners lifted in a wind of cheers. Then we turned off abruptly—took the road Cutting the village, the one with the commanding View of the river. And we strode More briskly now to the long pier that showed Where the frail boats were kept at Indian Landing. In the canoe we stepped; our paddles dipped Leisurely downwards, and the slim bark slipped More on than in the water. Smoothly then We shot its nose against the rippling current, Feeling the rising river’s half-deterrent Pull on the paddle as we turned the blade To keep from swerving round; while we delayed To watch the curious wave-eaten locks; Or pass, with lazy turns, the picnic-rocks.... Blue eels flew under us, and fishes darted A thousand ways; the once broad channel shrunk. And over us the wise and noble-hearted Twilight leaned down; the sunset mists were parted,— And we, with thoughts on tiptoe, slunk Down the green, twisting alleys of the Kennebunk,Motionless in the meadows The trees, the rocks, the cows... And quiet dripped from the shadows Like rain from heavy boughs. The tree-toads started ringing Their ceaseless silver bells; A land-locked breeze came swinging Its censer of earthy smells. The river’s tiny cañon Stretched into dusky lands; Like a dark and silent companion Evening held out her hands. Hushed were the dawn’s bravados; Loud noon was a silenced cry— And quiet slipped from the shadows As stars slip out of the sky...
The great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough  Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight  In the wind's sad sough. The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me  Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why  They ever should be.
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle But Gregory's Wood and one bare hill Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind, Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed; And for an hour I have walked and prayed Because of the great gloom that is in my mind. I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour, And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come Dancing to a frenzied drum Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. May she be granted beauty, and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass; for such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness, and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull, And later had much trouble from a fool; While that great Queen that rose out of the spray, Being fatherless, could have her way, Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man. It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone. In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned By those that are not entirely beautiful. Yet many, that have played the fool For beauty's very self, has charm made wise; And many a poor man that has roved, Loved and thought himself beloved, From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. May she become a flourishing hidden tree, That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound; Nor but in merriment begin a chase, Nor but in merriment a quarrel. Oh, may she live like some green laurel Rooted in one dear perpetual place. My mind, because the minds that I have loved, The sort of beauty that I have approved, Prosper but little, has dried up of late, Yet knows that to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief. If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf. An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind? Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is heaven's will, She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's accustomed, ceremonious; For arrogance and hatred are the wares Peddled in the thoroughfares. How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
O Carib Isle! The tarantula rattling at the lily’s foot Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand  Near the coral beach—nor zigzag fiddle crabs  Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert And anagrammatize your name)—No, nothing here  Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts  In wrinkled shadows—mourns.  And yet suppose I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,  Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave  Squared off so carefully. Then To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names  Deliberate, gainsay death’s brittle crypt. Meanwhile  The wind that knots itself in one great death— Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath. But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush? What man, or What Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?  His Carib mathematics web the eyes’ baked lenses! Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost  Sieved upward, white and black along the air  Until it meets the blue’s comedian host. Let not the pilgrim see himself again For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin  Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes; —Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!  And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again! Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,  Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant. You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet  Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.
All our roads go nowhere. Maps are curled To keep the pavement definitely On the world. All our footsteps, set to make Metric advance, Lapse into arcs in deference To circumstance. All our journeys nearing Space Skirt it with care, Shying at the distances Present in air. Blithely travel-stained and worn, Erect and sure, All our travels go forth, Making down the roads of Earth Endless detour.
The difficulty to think at the end of day,  When the shapeless shadow covers the sun  And nothing is left except light on your fur— There was the cat slopping its milk all day,  Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk  And August the most peaceful month. To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,  Without that monument of cat,  The cat forgotten in the moon; And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,  In which everything is meant for you  And nothing need be explained; Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself; And east rushes west and west rushes down, No matter. The grass is full And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,  The whole of the wideness of night is for you,  A self that touches all edges, You become a self that fills the four corners of night. The red cat hides away in the fur-light And there you are humped high, humped up, You are humped higher and higher, black as stone— You sit with your head like a carving in space  And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum. In mid-September The entering boys, identified by hats, Wander in a maze of mannered brick Where boxwood and magnolia brood And columns with imperious stance Like rows of ante-bellum girls Eye them, outlanders. In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace, Under the arch, and lofty banister, Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass; The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet” And visitors on tiptoe leave For the raw North, the unfinished West, As the young, detecting an advantage, Practice a face. Where, on their separate hill, the colleges, Like manor houses of an older law, Gaze down embankments on a land in fee, The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate, Ring out the English name like coin, Humor the snob and lure the lout. Within the precincts of this world Poise is a club. But on the neighboring range, misty and high, The past is absolute: some luckless race Dull with inbreeding and conformity Wears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad For charity or jail. The scholar Sanctions their obsolete disease; The gentleman revolts with shame At his ancestor. And the true nobleman, once a democrat, Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad; This school he held his art and epitaph. But now it takes from him his name, Falls open like a dishonest look, And shows us, rotted and endowed, Its senile pleasure.
Europe: 1944 as regarded from a great distance Impersonal the aim Where giant movements tend; Each man appears the same; Friend vanishes from friend. In the long path of lead That changes place like light No shape of hand or head Means anything tonight. Only the common will For which explosion spoke; And stiff on field and hill The dark blood of the folk.
We came so trustingly, for love, but these  Lowlands, flatlands, near beneath the sea  Point with their cautionary bones of sand  To exorcize, submerge us; we stay free  Only as mermaids glittering in the waves:  Mermaids of the imagination, young  A spring ago, who know our loveliness  Banished, like fireflies at winter’s breath,  Because none saw; these vines about our necks  We placed in welcome once, but now as wreath  Against the scalpel cold; still cold creeps in  To grow like ivy over our chilling bodies  Into our blood. Now in our diamond dress  We wive only the sequins of the sea.  The lowlands have rejected us. They lie  Athwart the whispering waters like a scar  On a mirage of glass; the dooming land,  Where nothing can take root but frost, has won.  And what of warmth and what of joy? They are  Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun  Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance  And balance, all goes under; underneath  The land’s gray wave we falter and fall back  To hibernate within the caves of death.
Robed in dungeon black, in mourning For themselves they pass, repace The dark linoleum corridors Of humid wards, sure in the grace Of self-denial. Blown by duty, Jet sails borne by a high wind, Only the face and hands creep through The shapeless clothing, to remind One that a woman lives within The wrappings of this strange cocoon. Her hands reach from these veils of death To harvest a child from the raw womb. The metal scales of paradox Tip here then there. What can the nun Think of the butchery of birth, Mastery of the flesh, this one Vigorous mystery? Rude life From the volcano rolls and pours, Tragic, regenerate, wild. Sad, The unborn wait behind closed doors.
mon semblable, mon frère (1) Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction In that perspective of the action Which pictures us inhabiting the end Of everything with death for only friend. Not that we love death, Not truly, not the fluttering breath, The obscene shudder of the finished act— What the doe feels when the ultimate fact Tears at her bowels with its jaws. Our taste is for the opulent pause Before the end comes. If the end is certain All of us are players at the final curtain: All of us, silence for a time deferred, Find time before us for one sad last word. Victim, rebel, convert, stoic— Every role but the heroic— We turn our tragic faces to the stalls To wince our moment till the curtain falls. (2) A world ends when its metaphor has died. An age becomes an age, all else beside, When sensuous poets in their pride invent Emblems for the soul’s consent That speak the meanings men will never know But man-imagined images can show: It perishes when those images, though seen, No longer mean. (3) A world was ended when the womb Where girl held God became the tomb Where God lies buried in a man: Botticelli’s image neither speaks nor can To our kind. His star-guided stranger Teaches no longer, by the child, the manger, The meaning of the beckoning skies. Sophocles, when his reverent actors rise To play the king with bleeding eyes, No longer shows us on the stage advance God’s purpose in the terrible fatality of chance. No woman living, when the girl and swan Embrace in verses, feels upon Her breast the awful thunder of that breast Where God, made beast, is by the blood confessed. Empty as conch shell by the waters cast The metaphor still sounds but cannot tell, And we, like parasite crabs, put on the shell And drag it at the sea’s edge up and down. This is the destiny we say we own. (4) But are we sure The age that dies upon its metaphor Among these Roman heads, these mediaeval towers, Is ours?— Or ours the ending of that story? The meanings in a man that quarry Images from blinded eyes And white birds and the turning skies To make a world of were not spent with these Abandoned presences. The journey of our history has not ceased: Earth turns us still toward the rising east, The metaphor still struggles in the stone, The allegory of the flesh and bone Still stares into the summer grass That is its glass, The ignorant blood Still knocks at silence to be understood. Poets, deserted by the world before, Turn round into the actual air: Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!
Four feet up, under the bruise-blue Fingered hat-felt, the eyes begin. The sly brim  Slips over the sky, street after street, and nobody  Knows, to stop it. It will cover The whole world, if there is time. Fifty years’  Start in gray the eyes have; you will never  Catch up to where they are, too clever  And always walking, the legs not long but  The boots big with wide smiles of darkness  Going round and round at their tops, climbing.  They are almost to the knees already, where  There should have been ankles to stop them.  So must keep walking all the time, hurry, for  The black sea is down where the toes are  And swallows and swallows all. A big coat Can help save you. But eyes push you down; never  Meet eyes. There are hands in hands, and love  Follows its furs into shut doors; who Shall be killed first? Do not look up there: The wind is blowing the building-tops, and a hand  Is sneaking the whole sky another way, but  It will not escape. Do not look up. God is  On High. He can see you. You will die.
We who must act as handmaidens To our own goddess, turn too fast, Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse Gliding below her lake or sea, Are left, long-staring after her, Narcissists by necessity; Or water-carriers of our young Till waters burst, and white streams flow Artesian, from the lifted breast: Cupbearers then, to tiny gods, Imperious table-pounders, who Are final arbiters of thirst. Fasten the blouse, and mount the steps From kitchen taps to Royal Barge, Assume the trident, don the crown, Command the Water Music now That men bestow on Virgin Queens; Or goddessing above the waist, Appear as swan on Thames or Charles Where iridescent foam conceals The paddle-stroke beneath the glide: Immortal feathers preened in poems! Not our true, intimate nature, stained By labor, and the casual tide. Masters of civilization, you Who moved to riverbank from cave, Putting up tents, and deities, Though every rivulet wander through The final, unpolluted glades To cinder-bank and culvert-lip, And all the pretty chatterers Still round the pebbles as they pass Lightly over their watercourse, And even the calm rivers flow, We have, while springs and skies renew, Dry wells, dead seas, and lingering drouth. Water itself is not enough. Harness her turbulence to work For man: fill his reflecting pools. Drained for his cofferdams, or stored In reservoirs for his personal use: Turn switches! Let the fountains play! And yet these buccaneers still kneel Trembling at the water's verge: “Cool River-Goddess, sweet ravine, Spirit of pool and shade, inspire!” So he needs poultice for his flesh. So he needs water for his fire. We rose in mists and died in clouds Or sank below the trammeled soil To silent conduits underground, Joining the blindfish, and the mole. A gleam of silver in the shale: Lost murmur! Subterranean moan! So flows in dark caves, dries away, What would have brimmed from bank to bank, Kissing the fields you turned to stone, Under the boughs your axes broke. And you blame streams for thinning out, plundered by man’s insatiate want? Rejoice when a faint music rises Out of a brackish clump of weeds, Out of the marsh at ocean-side, Out of the oil-stained river’s gleam, By the long causeways and gray piers Your civilizing lusts have made. Discover the deserted beach Where ghosts of curlews safely wade: Here the warm shallows lave your feet Like tawny hair of magdalens. Here, if you care, and lie full-length, Is water deep enough to drown.
The Pool Players.  Seven at the Golden Shovel.  We real cool. We   Left school. We  Lurk late. We  Strike straight. We  Sing sin. We   Thin gin. We  Jazz June. We   Die soon.
The river brought down dead horses, dead men  and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why  had he and this junk come down to us so  from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke  between me and a man  named Alexander, whom all of you ba-bas will hear of as a god.”
Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
1. Today they cut down the oak. Strong men climbed with ropes in the brittle tree. The exhaust of a gasoline saw was blue in the branches. The oak had been dead a year. I remember the great sails of its branches rolling out green, a hundred and twenty feet up, and acorns thick on the lawn. Nine cities of squirrels lived in that tree. Yet I was happy that it was coming down. "Let it come down!" I kept saying to myself with a joy that was strange to me. Though the oak was the shade of old summers, I loved the guttural saw.  2. By night a bare trunk stands up fifteen feet and cords of firewood press on the twiggy frozen grass of the yard. One man works every afternoon for a week to cut the trunk gradually down. Bluish stains spread through the wood and make it harder to cut. He says they are the nails of a trapper who dried his pelts on the oak when badgers dug in the lawn. Near the ground he hacks for two days, knuckles scraping the stiff snow. His chain saw breaks three teeth. He cannot make the trunk smooth. He leaves one night after dark.  3. Roots stiffen under the ground and the frozen street, coiled around pipes and wires. The stump is a platform of blond wood in the gray winter. It is nearly level with the snow that covers the little garden around it. It is a door into the underground of old summers, but if I bend down to it, I am lost in crags and buttes of a harsh landscape that goes on forever. When snow melts the wood darkens into the ground; rain and thawed snow move deeply into the stump, backwards along the disused tunnels.  4. The edges of the trunk turn black. In the middle there is a pale overlay, like a wash of chalk on darkness. The desert of the winter has moved inside. I do not step on it now; I am used to it, like a rock, or a bush that does not grow. There is a sailing ship beached in the cove of a small island where the warm water is turquoise. The hulk leans over, full of rain and sand, and shore flowers grow from it. Then it is under full sail in the Atlantic, on a blue day, heading for the island. She has planted sweet alyssum in the holes where the wood was rotten. It grows thick, it bulges like flowers contending from a tight vase. Now the stump sinks downward into its roots with a cargo of rain and white blossoms that last into October.
What is the head  a. Ash What are the eyes  a. The wells have fallen in and have  Inhabitants What are the feet  a. Thumbs left after the auction No what are the feet  a. Under them the impossible road is moving  Down which the broken necked mice push  Balls of blood with their noses What is the tongue  a. The black coat that fell off the wall  With sleeves trying to say something What are the hands  a. Paid No what are the hands  a. Climbing back down the museum wall  To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will  Have left a message What is the silence  a. As though it had a right to more Who are the compatriots  a. They make the stars of bone
Flags of all sorts. The literary life. Each time we dreamt we’d done  the gentlemanly thing, covering our causes in closets full of bones to remove ourselves forever  from dearest possibilities, the old weapons re-injured us,  the old armies conscripted us,  and we gave in to getting even,  a little less like us if a lot less like others. Many, thus, gained fame in the way of great plunderers,  retiring to the university to cultivate grand plunder-gardens  in the service of literature,  the young and no more wars.  Their continuing tributes  make them our greatest saviors,  whose many fortunes are followed  by the many who have not one.
The only relics left are those long spangled seconds our school clock chipped out when you crossed the social hall and we found each other alive, by our glances never to accept our town's ways, torture for advancement, nor ever again be prisoners by choice. Now I learn you died serving among the natives of Garden City, Kansas, part of a Peace Corps before governments thought of it. Ruth, over the horizon your friends eat foreign chaff and have addresses like titles, but for you the crows and hawks patrol the old river. May they never forsake you, nor you need monuments other than this I make, and the one I hear clocks chip in that world we found.
I know a little what it is like, once here at high tide Stranded, for them to be so attached to the bottom’s Sarcophagus lids, up to their brown green gold wine Bottle necks in the prevailing booze, riding, as far As we can see, like a picnic on a blanket. Whatever plucks them from below the red horizon Like snapped pulleys and ropes for the pyramidal effort Of the moon, they come in, they come through the breakers, Heaps of hair, writing across the beach a collapsed Script, signers of a huge independence. Melville thought them pure, bitter, seeing the fog-sized Flies dancing stiff and renaissance above. But I Have eaten nori and dulse, and to have gone deep Before being cast out leaves hardly a taste of loneliness. And I take in their iodine.
She was in love with the same danger everybody is. Dangerous as it is to love a stranger, she was in love. With that same danger an adulteress risks a husband’s anger. Stealthily death enters a house: she was in love with that danger. Everybody is dangerous.
This is what you changed me to: a greypink vegetable with slug eyes, buttock incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip, a skin you stuff so you may feed in your turn, a stinking wart of flesh, a large tuber of blood which munches and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile I have the sky, which is only half caged, I have my weed corners, I keep myself busy, singing my song of roots and noses, my song of dung. Madame, this song offends you, these grunts which you find oppressively sexual, mistaking simple greed for lust. I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn.
When you hear me singing you get the rifle down and the flashlight, aiming for my brain, but you always miss and when you set out the poison I piss on it to warn the others. You think: That one’s too clever, she’s dangerous,
Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation:  Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient.  Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper  With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress  At table, barely capable but very vague. Mistaken praise and blame degrade profane and sacred  Places so strange you may not even know their names. Vacant the gymnasium where words once played naked  Amazing games that always used to end in mate. Better, then, the effort than preterite perfection,  I guess. Indeed, I envy the eminent dead The special effects I am ready to inherit  Less than their sentiments and impenitent sense Of aesthetic gesture. Unpleasant and pretentious,  The Western hemisphere has plenty to forget. The mess men might yet make of themselves, given present  Events! Are many content to accept the best? Precious as sex is, flesh, perenially wretched,  Begs the bread of heaven, blessing nevertheless The unexpected sender’s address on a letter.  Every breathless sentence says not yet to death. The past cannot matter except as an abstraction,  A flattering caricature of happy lands Wherein many a grand, imaginary castle  In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last, A vast palace that adrastic phantoms inhabit.  Maps of madness, characteristically blank, Ask vatic questions, exact a magic answer:  The family photograph album at a glance, Granny, Dad, Aunt Sally, that dissatisfied madame  Who manages passion’s incalculable acts, Paris, everyman’s romantic trash and tarry—  Abracadabra, and the vanished cast comes back! If civilization isn’t a silly gimmick,  Is it the wit to wish, the will to make it stick? The mathematical vision which built this system  Figures the width of a minute within an inch. Primitive physics, a sophisticated fiction,  Insists that in principle everything is fixed. Visitors picnic amid pretty Chichèn Itzá  With its sacrificial pit, artificial hills And cricket pitch wherein the winner is the victim.  To think an instinct like iniquity exists! Hidden riches fill big individual middens;  In the Wizard’s Pyramid little lizards live. Specious sweets we reach for eagerly with Eve’s evil  Greed recede like the fleeting details of a dream. It seems that we have been a brief season in Eden:  Chic unreal estates where immediately green Trees repeated in completely meaningless series  Briefly yield to the weaker tyranny of weeds Even as we seek relief in a secret clearing.  Prehistory can be too recent; need we read These steles’ queried speech? Here undefeated peoples  Experienced deceit; here scenes of deepest grief Teach us to weep the cheap and easy tears of reason;  Here the sea of being sleeps, a period peace. Frustration, fuss, and lust are love’s unlucky colours.  Thunderstruck, the muscular monuments look dumb. Judged by the numbers that once flourished in the jungle  In hundreds of miles of dull undercover scrub, Unless somebody was insufferably ugly  Mistrust of one another must be in the blood. Unsuccess in a dozen tough struggles instructs us  Justice is a mother-fucker. Suffering’s fun For a month, but in a millenium no wonder  One becomes somewhat disgusted. Unsubtle skull, The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to.  Insulted by a touch, one mutters, “Summer sucks.” Undone by the siesta and by sudden showers,  Is it uncomfortable in the hungry South? Now cowed by Kulkulkan’s geometrical scowl,  Now wowed by the classic brown faces in a crowd, You falter at mounds memorial to a thousand  Bleeding hearts in a single holiday cut out, Submitted to the sun, insatiable flesh-flower  Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, Confounded by our sound of pronounceable vowels.  Myths, as the guidebook says, are handed down by mouth. Though mood and voice and person, gender, tense, and number  Predicate a verb, its cases explain a noun: Proper noun or pronoun, indubitably human,  Whose beautiful excuse is usually youth Doomed to the brutal usufructu of the future,  Consumed by the illusions of jejune amours. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour,  Tuned to the influential movements of the moon Whose smooth, translucent route through roofless rooms illumines  From dewy moonrise unto lunar afternoonTulum and its improvements, tumulus and ruins,  Poorly reproduced, a too crudely stupid view. Who knew nude truth from rumour, amusement from music  Soon would prove a fool. Beauty, useless, is a wound. On and off; the impossible is honour’s motto,  Monotony the awful drawback of my song. What was lost was often all we had got in common,  Our quasi-comic quandary depended onQu’en dirai-je? chronic, colossal hypochondry,  Neurotic complication or hypnotic calm. Gods begotten of loss, not bronze nor terra cotta,  Haunt the province of law, of cause and conscious wrong. Following the Long Count a lot has been forgotten:  Positive nonsense, fraud, false plots and hollow talk, Soporific concepts toppled by fall or conquest,  The cosmos as a model watch that wants to stop. At any moment the doors of the soul may open  And those reproachful ghosts invoked from the remote Coasts of tomorrow begin to impose the order  Of bone and trophy, home and the odour of smoke. O mornings that broke on the slopes of cold volcanos,  Almost frozen, golden and old-rose, like a scroll Slowly unfolded, or a brocade robe thrown over  The throne of the mountains, cloaking their cones in snow! Hope, an emotion swollen by every omen,  No psychotrope, only a semiprecious stone, Topaz or opal, adorns the close of the strophe.  Woe wrote these notes in a code also known as prose. Ode: this leafy, streamless land where coy waters loiter  Under the embroidered soil, subterfluous coin Of another culture destroyed by lack of moisture,  Spoiled by the unavoidable poison of choice. Archaeological lawyers exploit the foibles  Of a royalty that in time joined hoi polloi: History’s unemployed, geography’s anointed,  Unlike the orchids of the forests, spin and toil. Imperfectly convinced of final disappointment,  Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Pen poised for the pointless impressions of those voices  That boil up like bubbles on the face of the void, Finally I try to define why divine silence  Underlies the tidy designs of paradise. Priceless as the insights of the inspired psyche,  Blind, violent as a geyser, right as a rhyme, Fine ideas likely to undermine the idle  Mind divided between the types of fire and ice, “Highly stylized” politely describes the bright eyesores  Shining like diamonds or rhinestones in the night sky, Lifelike, provided life survives its vital cycle  And the tireless indictment of time’s diatribe, While mankind, sightless, frightened, like a child in twilight,  Dies of the devices it was enlightened by.  Amazing games that always used to end in mate! Precious as sex is, flesh, perennially wretched,  In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last. The mathematical vision which built this system  Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, (The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to!)  Briefly yields to the weaker tyranny of weeds. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour:  Monotony, the awful drawback of my song, Slowly unfolded, like a brocade robe thrown over.  Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Finally I tried to define why divine silence ...
Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of a tree. The words themselves are a delight to learn, You might be in a foreign land of terms Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome, Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves— Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform— And their venation—palmate and parallel— And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate. Sufficiently provided, you may now Go forth to the forests and the shady streets To see how the chaos of experience Answers to catalogue and category. Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree May differ among themselves more than they do From other species, so you have to find, All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.” Example, the catalpa in the book Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three Around the stem; the one in front of you But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost; Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt. It may be weeks before you see an elm Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids, A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape. Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says, Little by little, you do start to learn; And learn as well, maybe, what language does And how it does it, cutting across the world Not always at the joints, competing with Experience while cooperating with Experience, and keeping an obstinate Intransigence, uncanny, of its own. Think finally about the secret will Pretending obedience to Nature, but Invidiously distinguishing everywhere, Dividing up the world to conquer it, And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.
Alone with our madness and favorite flower We see that there really is nothing left to write about. Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things In the same way, repeating the same things over and over For love to continue and be gradually different. Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally And the color of the day put in Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting. Only then can the chronic inattention Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
She dances to the wheeze of my lungs. Were she taller, or had she both hind legs, she would lick my aching knees. There’s nothing like practice I firmly believe. Practice makes the heart grow fond. When the graft heals, you’ve apples on a cherry tree, delicious domestic freaks. I had a splendid grandmother, I might have made her up. She wore cotton dresses, usually blue, and glasses with thin gold frames and plastic cushions for the nose. The plastic was slightly pink, intended to blend with the flesh. She never raised her voice. Her knuckles enlarged, her goiter enlarged. There are ways within ways. A man will go down displaying himself in a nursing home. The mystery left, and there’s more than when we began, has nothing to do with reticence, or safety.
1 Lord, what are the sins I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks, the workless days, the scotch bottles thrown across the fence  and into the woods, the cruelty of silence, the cruelty of lies, the jealousy, the indifference? What are these on the scale of sin  or failure that they should follow me through the streets of Columbus,  the moon-streaked fields between Benevolence and Cuthbert where dwarfed cotton sparkles like pearls on the shoulders of the road. What are these that they should find me half-lost,  sick and sleepless behind the wheel of this U-Haul truck parked in a field  on Georgia 45 a few miles north of Damascus, some makeshift rest stop for eighteen wheelers where the long white arms of oaks slap across trailers and headlights glare all night through a wall of pines? 2 What was I thinking, Lord? That for once I'd be in the driver's seat, a firm grip  on direction? So the jon boat muscled up the ramp, the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley  chained for so long to the back fence,  the scarred desk, the bookcases and books,  the mattress and box springs, a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair of three-way speakers, everything mine I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. But on the road from one state to another, what is left behind nags back through the distance,  a last word rising to a scream, a salad bowl shattering against a kitchen cabinet, china barbs spiking my heel, blood trailed across the cream linoleum  like the bedsheet that morning long ago just before I watched the future miscarried. Jesus, could the irony be that suffering forms a stronger bond than love? 3 Now the sun streaks the windshield with yellow and orange, heavy beads  of light drawing highways in the dew-cover. I roll down the window and breathe the pine-air, the after-scent of rain, and the far-off smell of asphalt and diesel fumes. But mostly pine and rain as though the world really could be clean again. Somewhere behind me, miles behind me on a two-lane that streaks across  west Georgia, light is falling through the windows of my half-empty house. Lord, why am I thinking about this? And why should I care  so long after everything has fallen to pain that the woman sleeping there should be sleeping alone?  Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded  before he can see? Lord, is it possible to fall  toward grace? Could I be moved to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved?
The social instincts ... naturally lead to the golden rule. —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man 1 Holding her steady, into the pitch and roll, in raw Midwestern hands ten thousand tons of winter wheat for the fall of Rome, still swallowing the hunger of the war: the binnacle glows like an open fire, east-southeast and steady, Anderssen, the Viking mate, belaboring me for contraband, my little book of Einstein, that “Commie Jew.” (So much for the social instincts, pacifism, humanism, the frail and noble causes.) I speak my piece for western civ: light bends ... stars warp ... mass converts ... “Pipe dreams,” says the Dane, “pipe dreams.” “Well, mate, remember, those Jewish dreams made nightmares out of Hiroshima, and blew us out of uniform, alive.” He stomps down off the bridge; some day he’ll fire me off his rusty liberty: I read too much. The ocean tugs and wrestles with ten thousand deadweight tons of charity, trembling on degrees and minutes. Anderssen steams back in with coffee, to contest the stars with Einstein, full ahead. We haven’t come to Darwin.  2 Freezing on the flying bridge, staring at the night for nothing, running lights of freighters lost in a blur of blowing snow, we hold on through the midnight watch, waiting out the bells. With Einstein in our wake, the tricks are easier: liberty churns on, ten knots an hour, toward Rome. One starry night we ride at last with Darwin on the Beagle: endless ocean, sea sickness, revelations of Toxodon and Megalonyx—a voyage old as the Eocene, the watery death of Genesis. The going gets rough again, the threat of all those bones churning the heavy swells: Anderssen, a true believer, skeptical, and Darwin trapped in a savage earthquake, the heave of coastal strata conjuring the wreck of England, lofty houses gone, government in chaos, violence and pillage through the land, and afterward, fossils gleaming white along the raw ridges. “Limeys.” Anderssen puts his benediction to empire: “Stupid Limeys.” After that we breathe a bit and watch the stars and tell sad stories of the death of tribes, the bones, the countless bones: we talk about the war, we talk about extinction.  3 Okinawa, Iwo Jima: slouching toward Tokyo, the only good Jap is a dead Jap. We must get the bomb, Einstein writes to F.D.R., waking from the dreams of peace, the noble causes: get it first, before the Nazis do. (The only good Nazi is an extinct Nazi.) At the death of Hiroshima, all day long we celebrate extinction, chugalugging free beer down at the px, teen- age kids in khaki puking pints of three-point-two in honor of the fire: no more island-hopping now to the murderous heart of empire. Later, in the luxury of peace, the bad dreams come. “Certainly,” Darwin broods, “no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated extermination of its inhabitants.”  4 Off somewhere to starboard, the Canaries, Palma, Tenerife: sunrise backlights the rugged peaks, as Darwin, twenty-two years old, gazes at the clouds along the foothills. Longitudes ease westward; it’s my birthday: twenty-two years old as Tenerife falls into the sunset, I’m as greedy for the old world as Darwin for the new, Bahia, Desire, the palms and crimson flowers of the Mediterranean, clear water dancing with mines. Ahead of us a tanker burns; the war will never end.  5 “You talk a lot,” says the melancholy Dane. “You sure you’re not Jewish yourself? You got a funny name.” “Well, mate, I’m pure Celtic on one side, pure Orphan on the other: therefore half of anything at all—Jewish, Danish, what you will: a problem, isn’t it, for Hitler, say, or the Klan, or even Gregor Mendel, sweating out the summer in his pea patch?” The fact is, I know those ancestors floating through my sleep:an animal that breathed water, had a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, undoubtedly hermaphrodite
Through the orange glow of taillights,  I crossed the dirt road, entered the half-mile of darkness and owl screech,  tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed the yellow beam of Billy Parker's flashlight  down the slick needle-hill, half crawling, half sliding and kicking  for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls  of scrub brush and leaf mold until I jumped the mud bank, walked  the ankle-deep creek, the last patch of pine, the gully,  and knelt at the highway stretching  in front of Billy Parker's house, spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked  under a maple not fifty feet from the window where Billy Parker rocked  in and out of view, studying in the bad light of a table lamp  the fine print of his Allstate policy.  I cut the flashlight, checked up  and down the highway. Behind me  the screech growing distant, fading  into woods, but coming on a network of tree frogs signaling along the creek. Only that, and the quiet  of my heels coming down on asphalt  as I crossed the two-lane and stood at the weedy edge of Billy Parker's yard,  stood in the lamp glare of the living room  where plans were being made to make me rich  and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard,  of all the lures on a K-Mart wall,  of reels and graphite rods, coolers of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers,  and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair,  studying his coverage, his bank account,  his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring  in the maternity ward of the Cobb General Hospital. For all  of this, I crouched in the shadow of fender and maple, popped the door  on the Camaro, and found in the faint house-light drifting through the passenger's window the stripped wires hanging below the dash.  I took the driver's seat, kicked the clutch, then eased again as I remembered the glove box and the pint of Seagram's Billy Parker  had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm  the tree frogs went off in the woods.  I drank until they hushed and I could hear through cricket chatter  the rockers on Billy Parker's chair  grinding ridges into his living room floor,  worry working on him like hard time.  Then a wind working in river grass,  a red current slicing around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift  pulling against an anchor as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro,  grappled for the wires hanging in darkness between my knees,  saw through the tinted windshield  by a sudden white moon rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank two counties away, a place to jump and roll  on the soft shoulder of the gravel road,  a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.
Out of heaven, to bless the high places, it falls on the penthouses, drizzling at first, then a pelting allegro, and Dick and Jane skip to the terrace and go boogieing through the azaleas, while mommy and daddy come running with pots and pans, glasses, and basins and try to hold all of it up there, but no use, it’s too much, it keeps coming, and pours off the edges, down limestone to the pitchers and pails on the ground, where delirious residents catch it, and bucket brigades get it moving inside, until bathtubs are brimful, but still it keeps coming, that shower of silver in alleys and gutters, all pouring downhill to the sleazy red brick, and the barefoot people who romp in it, laughing, but never take thought for tomorrow, all spinning in a pleasure they catch for a moment; so when Providence turns off the spigot and the sky goes as dry as a prairie, then daddy looks down from the penthouse, down to the streets, to the gutters, and his heart goes out to his neighbors, to the little folk thirsty for laughter, and he prays in his boundless compassion: on behalf of the world and its people he demands of his God, give me more.
As our daughter approaches graduation and  puberty at the same time, at her own, calm, deliberate, serious rate, she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her  hands, thrust out her hipbones, chantI’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming  open around her, a chrysalis cracking and  letting her out, it falls behind her and  joins the other husks on the ground, 7th grade, 6th grade, the magenta rind of 5th grade, the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,  3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of 1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and  kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.  The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a  cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her  jerky sexy child’s joke dance of self, self, her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, while her  two dark eyes shine above her body like a good mother and a  good father who look down and love everything their baby does, the way she  lives their love.
for Richard Hugo You hear the roadhouse before you see it,  Its four-beat country tunes Amplified like surf through the woods,  Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk,  Setting beards of moss dancing On dim, indeterminate trees That border two-lane blacktop. Docked tonight, you reveal the badge Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin  Where cap shades face, babyhood Pallor above the sun-blackened jaw  Bulging uneasy with a concrete grin  And some inevitable need to weep.  Don’t you think we live and breathe  In the meantime, in lockstep With dawn, sunset, brawling dawn?  Even now, you await secrets worse  Than the few known ways a seized sky  Will come to survive your pity. But on another far field, celebrated  For its arrivals and evictions, you learn  To be beautiful, never leading A sensible life, playing ball in the early dark,  Fighting for a taste of the sweet spot,  In this uncut land, this straight-edged air.  Whadya want to know that isn’t yet a mystery  Somewhere, a confidential stumble, heat  Lightning, a first-rate backseat turndown?  So it is that later you track high above  Familiar tamarack and ash, beginning  The next inaccuracy alone, and again,  Remembering that everything east of you Has already happened, on the same cold ground, In a swarm of time, finally spiked home  To your surprise, nails flung to the air. And us all thumbs to the hot hammer-licks  You hear from the roadhouse before you see it.
You wept in your mother's arms and I knew that from then on I was to forget myself. Listening to your sobs, I was resolved against my will to do well by us and so I said, without thinking, in great panic, To do wrong in one's own judgment, though others thrive by it, is the right road to blessedness. Not to submit to error is in itself wrong and pride. Standing beside you, I took an oath to make your life simpler by complicating mine and what I always thought would happen did: I was lifted up in joy.
He sits at the table, cloudlight of March One tone with his hair, gray-silver on silver. Midday fare in Vermont is basic enough. In West Newbury, eggs and toast will do— Though our doctor’s had his sips of wine as well. “Just don’t be fooled. They’re not as nice as you Think they are. Live here a few more winters, You’ll get to know them clearer, and vice-versa.” Three years now, and we’re still finding our way; Newcomers need a guide to show them the ropes, And he has been explaining township and county Almost from the sunstruck day we met him That very first July in this old house. “I’ll cite an instance of community Spirit at work, North Country justice— A case I just happened to be involved in. No, please—all right, if you are having one.” He holds his glass aloft and then lets fall A silence that has grown familiar to us From other stories told on other days, The will to recount building its head of steam. “Well, now, you have to know about the victim. His name was Charlie Deudon, no doubt Canuck Stock some generations back, but he Nor no one else could tell you—if they cared. Deudons had been dirt farmers here as long As anybody knew. They never starved But never had a dime to spare, either. Charlie resolved to change the Deudon luck. And that’s just what he did. Or almost did. . . . He’d graduated two classes ahead of mine; We knew each other, naturally, but not On terms of friendship. Fact is, he had no friends, And only one girlfriend, whom he married Day after Commencement, June of ‘32. And then he set to work and never stopped Again, until they made him stop for good.” A wisp of a smile, half irony, half Bereavement plays about his guileless face— Red cheeks, blue eyes, a beardless Santa Claus; Whose bag contains (apart from instruments Of healing) stories, parables and proverbs, Painkillers, too, for when all else fails. “What kind of work had all that hard work been?” “Oh, farming, like his elders, only better. All the modern improvements, fancy feed And fertilizers, plus machinery— He was the first in these parts to milk His herd in any way but as ‘twas done Since Adam’s boys first broke ground with a plow. And anything machines couldn’t handle, Charlie did himself, from dawn to midnight. He never wasted a word or spilled a drop Of milk or drank a drop of beer or liquor. He was unnatural. And he made that farm Into a showplace, a kind of 4-H model. He made good money, yes, but not a dollar Would he spend unnecessarily. Do you get the picture? They hated him, The boys that hung around the package store. The most they ever got from tightfist Charlie Deudon was a nod out from under his cap. (His trademark—a baseball cap striped white and red.) They envied him for getting his hay in first; And there was more. A boy that he had hired, By the name of Carroll Giddens, was their buddy. Likeable fellow, regulation issue, The sort that knocks back a pint or a fifth In half a shake and tells off-color stories Till he’s got them choked to death with laughing. ‘Course the wisecracks they loved best were those About poor Charlie and his gold-plated farm. . . . Just one more case of what’s been often said By commentators on democracy— How it helps everyone keep modest.” Teasing mischief has crept into his voice. A self-taught anthropologist as well As teller of tales, he has other frames Of reference to place around events Local or international. He knows That things can stand for more than what they are; Indeed, says standing for things is why we’re here, And quotes chapter and verse to prove his point. “Think of the worldwide scapegoat ritual. In halfway civilized societies An animal’s the one relieved from life Duty, am I right? A fellow tribesman Will do in a pinch, if animals are lacking, Or if communal fears get screwed too tight. . . . Anyhow, it was clear that something more Than common envy stirred up the lynch law. Their own failure’s what they wanted dead.” Seconds pass in silence as he stares At something—perhaps a knothole in the pine Floorboard. He looks up, eyebrows raised, And twirls the glass stem between stubby fingers. A coil of rope hung on the wall, we see, Has made him pause and heave experienced sighs. “Here. Have another. So: was Charlie punished?” “I’m going to tell you—better me than others. You see, I was involved—no, no, no, Not in the deed, Lord, no, just as a witness. It happened this way—hope you’re not squeamish. Charlie had this boy to help with chores, The one named Carroll. Married, two kids, I think. Not too reliable. But so few are; Nor could you call his wages generous. His buddies must have stood him drinks, is all I can say. He’d a skinful half the time— Was certainly drunk that Christmas Eve morning. No reason to doubt what Charlie told his wife. Charlie’d been up to help at six with the milking, And Carroll, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, was there Loading a pair of milk cans into the barrow. He took a slip and the whole business spilled. Wooden handle clipped him in the side, And he fell, too, right in the puddle of milk. And started laughing. Charlie, you can guess, Didn’t join in; he told him to get on home. ‘What about the milk?’ ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘You’re drunk.’ ‘But what about the milk?’ asks Carroll. ‘Comes out of next week’s paycheck,’ Charlie says. And then the trouble starts, with Carroll swearing And yelping, till Charlie gives him a little tap And goes indoors. By then Carroll could tell The barrow handle had cracked a rib or two. He drove into town to see his doctor—that Wasn’t me—and word went out that Charlie Had roughed up his innocent assistant. That’s all they needed, Carroll’s friends. About Time that stuck-up bastard got his due, He’s gone too far this time, but we’ll show him,
In the warming house, children lace their skates,  bending, choked, over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river.  December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys’  hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy  with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep  playing, slamming the round black puck until it’s dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn’t music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever?
The wallful of quoted passages from his work, with the requisite specimens pinned next to their literary cameo appearances, was too good a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn’t, why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered and the “flies,” as I heard a buff call them, stood at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read and look, you could be happy a month in that small room. One of the Nabokov photos I’d never seen: he’s writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel apartment in Montreux. The picture’s mostly of his back and the small wedge of face that shows brims with indifference to anything not on the page. The window’s shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light over the page, too far away for us to read. We also liked the chest of specimen drawers labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians, “Genitalia,” wherein languished in phials the thousands he examined for his monograph on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues. And there in the center of the room a carillon of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been three hundred of them. Amanda’s Blue was there, and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),  a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak, an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak, the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida: in the series Nabokov did on this beauty he noted for each specimen the altitude at which it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say, “and much, much more.” The stilled belle of the tower was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt it’s an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita,  The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues flew by, and we improvised a path through cars and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow to wherever we went next. I must have been mute, or whatever I said won from silence nothing it mourned to lose. I was back in that small room, vast by love of each flickering detail, each genital dusting to nothing, the turn, like a worm’s or caterpillar’s, of each phrase. I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled over a stopped sewer grate and thought— wouldn’t you know it—about love and art: you can be ruined (“rurnt,” as we said in south- western Ohio) by a book or improved by a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop, septic with a rage not for order but for the love the senses bear for what they do, for detail that’s never annexed, like a reluctant crumb to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence. You can be bead after bead on perception’s rosary. This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core: just as you’re having what you wanted most, you want it more and more until that’s more than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.
Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best— throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso— maybe a splash of water on the face, a palmful of vitamins— but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso, dictionary and atlas open on the rug, the typewriter waiting for the key of the head, a cello on the radio, and, if necessary, the windows— trees fifty, a hundred years old out there, heavy clouds on the way and the lawn steaming like a horse in the early morning.
A car is idling on the cliff. Its top is down. Its headlights throw A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow On the pale air. On the shore, so far Below that the waves' push and drag Is dwindled to a hush—a kind Of oceanic idle—the sea Among the boulders plays a blind- Fold game of hide and seek, Or capture the flag. The flag Swells and sways. The car Is empty. A Friday, the first week Of June. Nineteen fifty-three. A car's idling on the cliff, But surely it won't be long before Somebody stops to investigate And things begin to happen fast: Men, troops of men will come, Arrive with blazing lights, a blast Of sirens, followed by still more Men. Though not a soul's in sight, The peace of the end of the late Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light Even so to bathe the heavens from Horizon to shore in a deep And delicate blue—will not keep. Confronted with such an overload Of questions (most beginning, Why would she... So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three), Attention will come to fix upon This odd last thing she did: leaving The car running, the headlights on. She stopped—it will transpire—to fill The tank a mere two miles down the road. (Just sixteen, the kid at the station will Quote her as saying, "What a pity You have to work today! It's not right... What weather! Goodness, what a night It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.") Was there a change of plan? Why the stop for gas? Possibly She'd not yet made up her mind? Or Had made it up but not yet settled On a place? Or could it be she knew Where she was headed, what she would do— And wanted to make sure the car ran For hours afterward? Might the car not be, Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse- In-reverse, meant to direct one not Away from but toward the shore And its broken boulders, there to spot The bobbing white flag of a blouse? Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands") That will muddle the town for three days, Until a Professor E. H. Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show, Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds" As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid It's not our bailiwick. Missing Persons, yes; missing poems, no." (What's truly tragic's never allowed To stand alone for long, of course. At each moment there's a crowd Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass At every wake who, angling a loud Necktie in the chip dip, Airs his problems with intestinal gas, Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well, Wade sent the Leader another briefword: "Decades of service to the Bard now force Me to amend the girl's little slip. 'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .") Yet none of her unshakeable entourage —Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue, And a yearning young grease-monkey—are Alerted yet. Still the empty car Idles, idles on the cliff, and night Isn't falling so much as day Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether She's found or not, her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw, The first stars easing through the blue, Engine and ocean breathing together.
I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—they’re so much more beautiful than anything he might be saying, though I’m no longer in a position really to judge, having stopped listening some time ago. He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop and can therefore get along fine without my attention. He started in reading poems about his childhood— barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers, that sort of stuff—the loss of innocence he keeps talking about between poems, which I can relate to, especially under these circumstances. Now he’s on to science, a poem about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying to imagine himself turning into hydrogen. Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining myself sliding up his wife’s fluid, rhythmic, lusciously curved, black- stockinged legs, imagining them arched around my shoulders, wrapped around my back. My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her! He will, no doubt, once she leaves him, leaves him for another poet, perhaps, the observant, uninnocent one, who knows a poem when it sits down in a room with him.
In 1963 the morning probably seemed harmless enough to sign on the dotted line as the insurance man talked to my parents for over an hour around a coffee table about our future. This roof wasn't designed to withstand meteors he told my father, who back then had a brush haircut that made his ears stick out, his moods still full of passion, still willing to listen, my mother with her beehive hairdo, smiling back at him, all three of them wanting so much to make the fine print of the world work. They laughed and smoked, and after they led the man politely to the door, my parents returned to the living room and danced in the afternoon light, the phonograph playing Frank Sinatra, the green Buick's payments up to date, five-hundred dollars safely in the bank— later that evening, his infallible common sense ready to protect us from a burst pipe or dry rot, my father waded up to his ankles in water, a V of sweat on the back of his shirt. Something loomed deeper than any basement on our block, larger than he was, a fear he could not admit was unsolvable with a monkey wrench or a handshake and a little money down.
Bing Crosby died in Spain while playing golf with Franco but who could care less, and at this writing only a few of my dear ones are gone—ah I could make a sad list—the swifts, as if to prove a point, fly into the light and make a mockery out of our darkness. They scream for food but in the world of shadows they only make a quick motion; I have studied them—the whiter the wall is—the barer the bulb— the more they scream, the more they dip down. I have made my two hands into a shape and I have darkened the wall to see what it looks like—I have shortened my two broken fingers to make the small tail and twisted the knuckles sideways so when they come in to eat one shadow overtakes the other, that way I can live in the darkness with Franco's poisonous head and Crosby's ears, who fainted, a thousand to one, behind a number two club, though no swift died for him, well, for them, digging for clubs. I watch the birds every night; they fly in a great circle, much larger than what I can see, their dipping is what I dreaded in front of my plain white wall—I say it for the nine hundred Americans who died in Spain. I thought I'd have to wait forever to do them a tiny justice and listen to their songs and die a little from the foolhardy mournful words, flying down one air current or another and doing the sides of buildings and tops of trees, the low-lying straggling dogwood, the full-bodied huge red maple, my dear ones.
is doing her usual for comic relief.  She doesn’t  see why she should get on the boat, etc., etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread.  Even God  has had one or two great deadpan lines:Who told you (this was back at the start—  the teeth  of the tautology had just snapped shut) Whotold you you were naked? The world  was so new  that death hadn’t been till this minute required. What makes you think (the  ground  withers under their feet) we were told?  The woman’s disobedience is good for  plot,  as also for restoring plot to human scale: three hundred cubits by fifty  by what?  What’s that in inches exactly? Whereas all obstinate wife is common coin.  In  the beginning was nothing and then a flaw in the nothing, a sort of mistake that amplified, the  nothing  mistranscribed (it takes such discipline to keep the prospect clean) and now the lion  whelps,  the beetle rolls its ball of dung, and Noah with no more than a primitive double-  entry audit  is supposed to make it right. We find the Creator in an awkward bind.  Washed back  to oblivion? Think again. The housewife at her laundry tub has got a better grip.   Which may  be why we’ve tried to find her laughable, she’s such an unhappy reminder of what  understanding  costs. Ask the boy who cannot, though God know’s he’s tried, he swears  each bar  of melting soap will be his last, who cannot turn the water off when once he’s turned it on.  His hands  are raw. His body seems like filth to him.Who told you (the pharmacopoeia has  changed,  the malady’s still the same) Who told youyou were food for worms?  What  makes you think (the furrow, the fruit)I had to be told?
proceeds by chance and necessity becomes nonrandom through randomness builds complexity from simplicity nurtures consciousness unconsciously evolves purposelessly creatures who demand purpose and discover natural selection
You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing a letter in these circumstances. I thought it strange too—the first time. But there's a misconception I was laboring under, and you are too, viz. that the imagination in your vicinity is free and powerful. After all, you say, you've been creating yourself all along imaginatively. You imagine yourself playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or writing a poem and then it becomes true. But you still have to do it, you have to exert yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man. I can deluge Congress with letters telling every one of those mendacious sons of bitches exactly what he or she is, in maybe about half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist proclivities, when you imagine bliss you still must struggle to get there. By the way the Buddha has his place across town on Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a lot better than he used to. He always carries a jumping jack with him everywhere just for contemplation, but he doesn't make it jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest, cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air, so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree. Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any fucking thing I want. Speaking of which there's this dazzling young Naomi who wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee last winter, and I think this is the moment for me to go and pay her my respects. Don't go way. I'll be right back.
What vegetable leviathan extends beneath the dinner table, an unseen, monstrous green that pulls the chair out from under our faith   in appearances: see a mere tuft of leaf on the plate like a wing, but if it flies away, it undoubtedly will disturb the continental drift   asleep under the salad plate, the hidden world we forget as we reach for the smaller fork— (and now, mouth full, don't speak: politely   chew your leaf of firmament that's torn and tossed up in vinegar here as we'll be tossed before its vast root maybe someday or any moment).
A flashlight rolls over the walls of a cave, searching, until the transducer comes to a halt low on my still-flat belly. The doctor says, "There's definitely a kid in there." Easy for her to say—she sees this all day. But it took us years to get to this point. Years in the dark. Months of nothing and never. Her expert eye interprets the grainy screen, which I can't stop reaching toward, pretending to point to features but really just longing to touch the image, as if it were somehow more there than in me, this tiny, blurry, leaping bison or bear, something from Altamira or Lascaux, from the hand of an ancestor— the first art we know.
At San Raffaele Arcangelo One angel got it all wrong. She plopped into this sad century feet first in her dark clothes. There wasn't much water that winter—just a few puddles really— to break her fall. Mud-splattered, she rose and shook like a canine. It didn't take long to see her soaked wings as a backdrop to all the nonmagic to which we were accustomed, or to see what passed for history as a forgetting of sorts. (Was that one or two wars?) Strange how, as she limped down a dim vicolo, some willful disc hovered above her more florid than a sky—how the putrid puddles with their last reflections could neither correct nor register that light.
Survival is the final offer that arrives at the eleventh hour just when pain to the tenth power would kill you with another ninth degree. By then, relief strikes you brief as an eighth note; you wear doom proudly; it's your seventh seal. But life whispers through your sixth sense of what might await you in some fifth dimension where miracle is saved for the fourth quarter. Tricked, you sigh and rise on the third day. You know better, but with no second thought, risk that first step—absurd as first love at first sight— as if you were back at ground zero, as if it cost nothing, as if this were not the last laugh.
Minutes before the rain begins I always waken, listening to the world hold its breath, as if a phone had rung once in a far room or a door had creaked in the darkness. Perhaps the genes of some forebear startle in me, some tribal warrior keeping watch on a crag beside a loch, miserable in the cold, though I think it is a woman's waiting I have come to know, a Loyalist hiding in the woods, muffling the coughing of her child against her linen skirts, her dark head bent over his, her fear spent somewhere else in time, leaving only this waiting, and I hope she escaped with her child, and I suppose she did. If not, I wouldn't be lying here awake, alive, listening for the rain to begin so that she can run, the sound of her footsteps lost, the sight of them blotted away on the path.
Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts— such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life? No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud cover to a single runway at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.
Lately, the weather aches; the air is short of breath, and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed. Day by day, the sun bores the sky, until the moon begins its tiresome disappearing act, making the oceans yawn. Even the seasons change with a throb of weariness— bud, bloom, leaf, fall. If it would help, I would paint my house silver or sell it or buy a red convertible. I would, but who am I to try to cheer up the self-indulgent universe.
It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped  like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure,  what's the big difference,"  as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,  slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins  are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says,  "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart  as, say, son and daughter." She gives me a quizzical look as though  I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?" That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now,  like the ones in the sea at Port Said,  or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild.  "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a ball," my mother says.   "That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...." "And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches  into a polka, twirling my mother  around and around like the happiest top,  and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us,"  and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end,  pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, wordless, confusing, crowding out everything else.
Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul Has the weight of a swallow, what less Has the weight of a sip? You equal This riddle, unposed in your dish As a hand at rest in a lap. Held to, You hold back what can't be Prevented, what's no more palatable For that: the unfine; formerly, our future.
(Too sound of mind) The paper table cloth was tastefully bleak, The misty morning light shone on his cheek, And made him look alone and masculine. He talked of Seneca and bad translations, Of modern critics' lightweight observations; A bread crumb rested sweetly on his chin. Behind him, through the glass, the ocean's heave Uncurled against the sand, beside his sleeve, As Eros aimed his toxic javelin. I ducked out of the way, to no avail; It glanced my flesh, injecting quite a cocktail That blurred my sight and caused my head to spin— Never mind the coffee we were drinking, Whatever I said was not what I was thinking. I wanted to become his mandolin, And lie across his lap, a dainty lute, And sing to him and feed him ripened fruit, While light upon the sea turned opaline. Instead, this conversation about art And formal education—God, he's smart! Such rationality should be a sin. The hour was up, he had to run, of course; A handshake and a peck of shy remorse— Outside, the sea was gray and dull as tin; It ruled the shore with tedious discipline.
According to Lin Yutang, both Po Chuyi and Su Tungpo "desperately admired" Tao Yuanming, a poet of nature who wrote a single love poem, a poem thought by Chinese dilettantes to be the one "blemish in a white jade." Can a poet be faulted for calling a womancarelessly perfect in beauty? He chose to long for her by envying the candle that glowed upon her beautiful face, the shadow that followed in her every move. Yet the nature poet Tao Yuanming, at home with the sudden turning of seasons, now feared the shadow in darkness, a discarded fan that once stirred her hair, feared the candle at dawn. At last believed that for beauty he had lived in vain.
is that you can never see the one you're wearing, that no one believes the lies they tell, that they grow to be more famous than you, that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it. That we use them to create dogs in our own image. That the dogs in their mortarboards and baseball caps and veils crush our hubris with their unconcern. That Norma Desmond's flirty cocktail hat flung aside left a cowlick that doomed her. That two old ladies catfighting in Hutzler's Better Dresses both wore flowered straw. Of my grandmother the amateur hatmaker, this legend: that the holdup man at the Mercantile turned to say Madam I love your hat before he shot the teller dead who'd giggled at her homemade velvet roses. O happy tragedy of hats! That they make us mimic classic gestures, inspiring pleasure first, then pity and then fear. See how we tip them, hold them prettily against the wind or pull them off and mop our sweaty brows like our beloved foolish dead in photographs. Like farmers plowing under the ancient sun.
Amongst dogs are listeners and singers. My big dog sang with me so purely, puckering her ruffled lips into an O, beginning with small, swallowing sounds like Coltrane musing, then rising to power and resonance, gulping air to continue— her passion and sense of flawless form— singing not with me, but for the art of dogs. We joined in many fine songs—"Stardust," "Naima," "The Trout," "My Rosary," "Perdido." She was a great master and died young, leaving me with unrelieved grief, her talents known to only a few. Now I have a small dog who does not sing, but listens with discernment, requiring skill and spirit in my falsetto voice. I sing her name and words of loveandante, con brio, vivace, adagio. Sometimes she is so moved she turns to place a paw across her snout, closes her eyes, sighing like a girl I held and danced with years ago. But I am a pretender to dog music. The true strains rise only from the rich, red chambers of a canine heart, these melodies best when the moon is up, listeners and singers together or apart, beyond friendship and anger, far from any human imposter— ballads of long nights lifting to starlight, songs of bones, turds, conquests, hunts, smells, rankings, things settled long before our birth.
Miss A, who graduated six years back, has air-expressed me an imposing stack of forms in furtherance of her heart's desire: a Ph.D. Not wishing to deny her, I dredge around for something laudatory to say that won't be simply a tall story; in fact, I search for memories of her, and draw a blank—or say, at best a blur. Was hers the class in that ungodly room whose creaking door slammed with a sonic boom, whose radiators twangled for the first ten minutes, and then hissed, and (this was worst) subsided with a long, regretful sigh? Yes, there, as every Wednesday we would try to overlook cacophony and bring our wits to bear on some distinguished thing some poet sometime wrote, Miss A would sit calm in a middle row and ponder it. Blonde, I believe, and quiet (so many are). A dutiful note-taker. Not a star. Roundheads and Cavaliers received their due notice from her before the term was through. She wrote a paper on . . . could it have been "Milton's Idea of Original Sin"? Or was it "Deathbed Imagery in Donne"? Whichever, it was likely not much fun for her. It wasn't bad, though I've seen better. But I can hardly say that in a letter like this one, now refusing to take shape even as wispy memories escape the reach of certitude. Try as I may, I cannot render palpable Miss A, who, with five hundred classmates, left few traces when she decamped. Those mortarboard-crowned faces, multitudes, beaming, ardent to improve a world advancing dumbly in its groove, crossing the stage that day—to be consigned to a cold-storage portion of the mind . . . What could be sadder? (She remembered me.) The transcript says I gave Miss A a B.
January Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now, they will leaf out in April. And I must be as patient as the trees— a winter resolution I break all over again, as the cold presses its sharp blade against my throat.February After endless hibernation on the windowsill, the orchid blooms— embroidered purple stitches up and down a slender stem. Outside, snow melts midair to rain. Abbreviated month. Every kind of weather.March When the Earl King came to steal away the child in Goethe’s poem, the father said don’t be afraid, it’s just the wind. . . As if it weren’t the wind that blows away the tender fragments of this world— leftover leaves in the corners of the garden, a Lenten Rose that thought it safe to bloom so early.April In the pastel blur of the garden, the cherry and redbud shake rain from their delicate shoulders, as petals of pink dogwood wash down the ditches in dreamlike rivers of color.May May apple, daffodil, hyacinth, lily, and by the front porch steps every billowing shade of purple and lavender lilac, my mother’s favorite flower, sweet breath drifting through the open windows: perfume of memory—conduit of spring.June The June bug on the screen door whirs like a small, ugly machine, and a chorus of frogs and crickets drones like Musak at all the windows. What we don’t quite see comforts us. Blink of lightning, grumble of thunder—just the heat clearing its throat.July Tonight the fireflies light their brief candles in all the trees of summer— color of moonflakes, color of fluorescent lace where the ocean drags its torn hem over the dark sand.August Barefoot and sun-dazed, I bite into this ripe peach of a month, gathering children into my arms in all their sandy glory, heaping my table each night with nothing but corn and tomatoes.September Their summer romance over, the lovers still cling to each other the way the green leaves cling to their trees in the strange heat of September, as if this time there will be no autumn.October How suddenly the woods have turned again. I feel like Daphne, standing with my arms outstretched to the season, overtaken by color, crowned with the hammered gold of leaves.November  These anonymous leaves, their wet bodies pressed against the window or falling past— I count them in my sleep, absolving gravity, absolving even death who knows as I do the imperatives of the season.December The white dove of winter sheds its first fine feathers; they melt as they touch the warm ground like notes of a once familiar music; the earth shivers and turns towards the solstice.
A recent piece in PRAVDA gives the library books checked out by Stalin between April and December, 1926. Much has been made of their oddity... Robert Conquest I THE ESSENCE OF HYPNOSIS (Paris: LeGrande, 1902)
Leo bends over his desk Gazing at a memorandum While Stuart stands beside him With a smile, saying, "Leo, the order for those desks Came in today From Youngstown Needle and Thread!" C. Loth Inc., there you are Like Balboa the conqueror Of those who want to buy office furniture Or bar fixtures In nineteen forty in Cincinnati, Ohio! Secretaries pound out Invoices on antique typewriters— Dactyllographs And fingernail biters. I am sitting on a desk Looking at my daddy Who is proud of but feels unsure about Some aspects of his little laddie. I will go on to explore Deep and/or nonsensical themes While my father's on the dark hardwood floor Hit by a couple of Ohio sunbeams. Kenny, he says, some day you'll work in the store. But I felt "never more" or "never ever" Harvard was far away World War Two was distant Psychoanalysis was extremely expensive All of these saved me from you. C. Loth you made my father happy I saw his face shining He laughed a lot, working in you He said to Miss Ritter His secretary "Ritt, this is my boy, Kenny!" "Hello there Kenny," she said My heart in an uproar I loved you but couldn't think Of staying with you I can see the virtues now That could come from being in you A sense of balance Compromise and acceptance— Not isolated moments of brilliance Like a girl without a shoe, But someone that you Care for every day— Need for customers and the economy Don't go away. There were little pamphlets Distributed in you About success in business Each about eight to twelve pages long One whole series of them All ended with the words "P.S. He got the job" One a story about a boy who said, "I swept up the street, Sir, Before you got up." Or "There were five hundred extra catalogues So I took them to people in the city who have a dog"— P.S. He got the job. I didn't get the job I didn't think that I could do the job I thought I might go crazy in the job Staying in you You whom I could love But not be part of The secretaries clicked Their Smith Coronas closed at five p.m. And took the streetcars to Kentucky then And I left too.
On some fundless expedition,  you discover it beneath  a pyracantha bush  carved from the hip bone  of a long-extinct herbivore  that walked the plains on legs  a story tall. An ocarina of bone  drilled and shaped laboriously  with tools too soft to be efficient  by one primitive musician  spending night after night  squatting by the fire.  No instrument of percussion:  place this against your lips,  fill it from your lungs to sound  a note winding double helix, solo  and thready calling to the pack.
For a tree, you're the worst kind  of friend, remembering everything.  Pale-skinned, slightly brailled, blank  page of pre-adolescence. The way  the smallest knife-slice would darken  with time, rise and widen.  mark was here. Left his.  But these are the digs you're used to,  sufferer of mere presence,  scratched years, scratched loves  we wanted to write on the world  and couldn't trust to an eardrum.  (I scarred you myself long ago with  my own jack-knife, jill-name.  You took her as the morning  unsteamed around me. Took us  as we had to be taken, in.) Old relief,  new reminder, I was young, what could  I have written? Didn't care then, had  to see it scraped out, big letters beneath  your erotic nubs and crotches. O beech,  it's no big riddle: we fell in the forest,  you heard. Quiet, in your own way.  In your own way, spreading the word.
Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,  and I keep expecting some enormous  black-and-white B-movie Cyclops  to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean  and drag me from my kitchen  to the deep cave that flickered  into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless  between my older brothers, pumped up  on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,  I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This  is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is  that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood.  I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine—Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral,  the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies  when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead  were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air  they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me  under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older  I would know better, and now  they’re dead, and I’m older,  and I know better.
Of course they are empty shells, without hope of animation. Of course they are artifacts. Even if my sister and I should wear some, or if we give others away, they will always be your clothes without you, as we will always be your daughters without you.
from the cliff's edge,  kicking her feet in panic and despair  as the circle of light contracts and blackness  takes the screen. And that  is how we leave her, hanging—though we know  she will be rescued, only to descend  into fresh harm, the story flowing on,  disaster and reprieve—systole, diastole—split  rhythm of a heart that hungers  only to go on. So why is this like my mother,  caged in a railed bed, each breath,  a fresh installment in a tortured tale  of capture and release? Nine days  she dangled, stubborn,  over the abyss, the soft clay crumbling  beneath her fingertips, until she dropped  with a little bird cry of surprise  into the swift river below.  Here metaphor collapses, for there was no love  to rescue her, no small boat  waiting with a net to fish her out,  although the water carried her,  and it was April when we buried her  among the weeping cherries and the waving  flags and in the final fade, a heron  breasted the far junipers  to gain the tremulous air and swim away.
Wake me in South Galway, or better yet  In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.  Improvise a hearse—one of those decrepit  Postal vans would suit me down to the ground—  A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash  Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash  With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone  On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.  Once you've got in off the road at Newquay  Push aside some barstools and situate me  Up in front by the door where the musicians sit,  Their table crowded with pints and a blue teapot,  A pouch of Drum, some rolling papers and tin  Whistles. Ask Charlie Piggott to play a tune  That sounds like loss and Guinness, turf smoke and rain,  While Brenda dips in among the punters like a hedge-wren.  Will I hear it? Maybe not. But I hear it now.  The smoke of the music fills my nostrils, I feel the attuned  Box and fiddle in harness, pulling the plough  Of the melody, turning the bog-dark, root-tangled ground.  Even the ceramic collie on the windowsill  Cocks an ear as the tune lifts and the taut sail  Of the Galway hooker trills wildly in its frame on the wall,  Rippling to the salt pulse and seabreeze of a West Clare reel.  Many a night, two octaves of one tune,  We sat here side by side, your body awake  To a jig or slide, me mending the drift of a line  As the music found a path to my notebook.  Lost in its lilt and plunge I would disappear  Into the heathery freedom of a slow air  Or walk out under the powerful stars to clear  My head of thought and breathe their cooled-down fire.  When my own session ends, let me leave like that,  Porous to the wind that blows off the ocean.  Goodbye to the company and step into the night  Completed and one-off, like a well-played tune—  Beyond the purified essence of hearth fires  Rising from the life of the parish, past smoke and stars,  Released from everything I've done and known.  I won't go willingly, it's true, but I'll be gone.
If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day.
John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard, he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it into the mounded deeps of the city dump. Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want to hurt his family with. Do you have yours? I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister, on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient— tensed, sat up, and unloosed such confessional invective that it seemed the walls and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit, her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs. Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol? Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around with the downward dance of naked canceled checks, handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts, smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead. Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying,that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk, and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk, in his throat, in the community air, in the room across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . . hidden in the trace of rundown aura still around him as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv? I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious his life-chalk held a story not yet written, not confessed yet for this storyniverous planet. And when I remembered my mother’s own last days . . . the way a person is a narrative, the strength of which is either revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures: flowered mounds like reefs of coral, bees as globular as whole yolks. In her room, my mother disappeared a breath at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that. The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice. The bursting spores. Those opened-up cicada husks abandoned on the patio —the small, brown, unlocked luggage that’s completed its work in this world.
Two wandering across the porcelain  Siberia, one alone on the window sill,  four across the ceiling's senseless field  of pale yellow, one negotiating folds  in a towel: tiny, bronze-colored, antennae  'strongly elbowed,' crawling over Antony and Cleopatra, face down, unsurprised,  one dead in the mountainous bar of soap.  Sub-family Formicinae (a single  segment behind the thorax), the sickle  moons of their abdomens, one trapped in bubbles  (I soak in the tub); with no clear purpose  they come in by the baseboard, do not bite,  crush bloodless beneath a finger. Peterson's calls them 'social creatures,' yet what grim  society: identical pilgrims,  seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path  only three seconds to touch another's  face, some hoisting the papery carcasses  of their dead in their jaws, which open and close  like the clasp of a necklace. 'Mating occurs  in flight'— what better way? Weightless, reckless  rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum  passion spiraling near the kumquat,  and then the queen sheds her wings, plants  the pearl-like larvae in their cribs of sand:  more anvil-headed, creeping attentions  to follow cracks in the tile, the lip of the tub,  and one starting across the mirror now, doubled.
That child was dangerous. That just-born Newly washed and silent baby Wrapped in deerskin and held warm Against the side of its mother could understand The language of birds and animals Even when asleep. It knew why Bluejay Was scolding the bushes, what Hawk was explaining To the wind on the cliffside, what Bittern had found out While standing alone in marsh grass. It knew What the screams of Fox and the whistling of Otter Were telling the forest. That child knew The language of Fire As it gnawed at sticks like Beaver And what Water said all day and all night At the creek's mouth. As its small fingers Closed around Stone, it held what Stone was saying. It knew what Bear Mother whispered to herself Under the snow. It could not tell Anyone what it knew. It would laugh Or cry out or startle or suddenly stare At nothing, but had no way To repeat what it was hearing, what it wanted most Not to remember. It had no way to know Why it would fall under a spell And lie still as if not breathing, Having grown afraid Of what it could understand. That child would learn To sit and crawl and stand and begin Putting one foot forward and following it With the other, would learn to put one word It could barely remember slightly ahead Of the other and then walk and speak And finally run and chatter, And all the Tillamook would know that child Had forgotten everything and at last could listen Only to people and was safe now.
For James Richardson Gerard, juke-step Jerry, little wrestler, soul-mess  of sinew and mind-sight, fired spark, joyed Jesuit,  grief-clog too, but a Pan-flute in every Ave, you half-nelson  the syntax dandies, ram them to canvas, sit upon and pin  the god-fops, minions of ghost tomes, trite chimes,  though you walk among them, too, jig and roar  of black-robed stroll in golden-grove and choral iambs.  You were, yes, that falcon flight, the labor, soar, and  dive, but buzzard nose for carrion, too, sniffed your own,  knew, alone, the rot, rope-knot or buckle of roots under-on  rock, your gowned back to roses, rosaries, but eyes a song gone  up, too, sickly little wings stuck in God-glue air: how long?  You sang one dialectic flight, sir—the only kind. How high  can the swallow swoop, how low the falcon grieve, relieve,  in fall till pinions hold him, there, to kill? Light-  weight, mutt, heaver of iron, scrap,feather: I believe  the hurt, believe you saw what you saw.
unwavering noon, self-minus  sun flake on the levels of gold there are names for these things: rose, brick, plate glass the annunciation of the sparrow  a gene for anxiety add hope, fear, greed, desire no rest but the shade  to which a sun implodes perhaps on other worlds others walk streets  muse on the weather psyches built, say, on a double sun of unwavering noon the balm of such congruence  •  thick, white, stick bicyclists painted on the esplanade to Chambers glinting Jersey cars  helicopter blades under a ledge of cloud alien first descent past the Trade Towers  drifting in on the flyway to LaGuardia landscape, local, locale: the man-made made man trying to open to something like days' unraveling waves • blue pulled toward fire out toward the skyscraper lights ancient mausoleums  upheavals from personal terror dark pier jut into dark water turquoise, indigo, aqua, lapis; under the molten, under the bruise of night blood in your lips as a man I violated the boundary of your mouth I say this because in the phantasmagoria  I was woman and man in another story you turn men to stone though here, out of narrative, poignant at Morton Street against the twilight • incomprehensible rain under sun heap-leached haze-gold fused into evening  water's green-grey dense pliance shadowed face that bends to the shadows to drink and be salvaged tiered buildings like vast Titanics  yellow truck-trailer's anonymous corpse conjoined to the numberless a boy swept from the rocks at the Verrazano stanchion  tomb cold draining past Liberty it need not cohere but how could it not?  without context, for which all are accountable this is for you of the future: one was here who is gone, into the eigen levels
My notebook has remained blank for months thanks to the light you shower around me. I have no use for my pen, which lies languorously without grief. Nothing is better than to live a storyless life that needs no writing for meaning— when I am gone, let others say they lost a happy man, though no one can tell how happy I was.
After the Fourth of July On this night of the mid- summer festival of fire, where liquid explosives look like the arch and ache of the willow tree so near your grave, on this night of the awaiting mid- wife who lulled you in- to this world, the light all violet because the Earth and stars inclined toward each other, she also sleeps, she who was your first deliverer, guiding you out of your mother—her bluing skin no small sign of the future cyanosis of her spirit for no small journey was it to this country to bring you to birth in this torch song heat and an anthem of a free nation's conception of combustions: rosins, petroleum, tallow, arsenic and worse, as you, too, fell from the sky of her body with me a microscopic egg inside— half the composition that made up my own toss and tumble to this crash of ground I sit over and bless while you lie under, under the willow, under this world that no midwife nor wavelength can under- standably reach. So I stand in this over- determined fire forced out like bullets upon a target— the pulled trigger releasing the hammer that strikes the impacted mixture— hailstorm and hymn of memories. And the outstretched womb involutes and the abdominal wall tightens and inside all abandoned encasements the night over the day darkens.
I happen in  from another unremarkable  Tuesday in the realm  of gratuitous sound, but here,  I can hear again  the quiet voices of the ontological,  the clink of ice cubes  in uplifted glasses,  the scrape of chairs,  the mournful lowing of floorboards,  the long history of blood  retold in my ears.  I scuffle to the bar, thoughts  drowned  by my suddenly thunderous  presence in this world,  and the silence flowing  from the neon jukebox,  the silence going down  smooth as the shot  of loneliness that would  naturally follow  a Billie Holiday song  if one were playing—  —while everywhere hands  are fluttering like sheets  in winds of gossip,  hollering above last call  for one more round.
I call and hear your voice  on the answering machine  weeks after your death,  a fledgling ghost still longing  for human messages.  Shall I leave one, telling  how the fabric of our lives  has been ripped before  but that this sudden tear will not  be mended soon or easily?  In your emptying house, others  roll up rugs, pack books,  drink coffee at your antique table,  and listen to messages left  on a machine haunted  by the timbre of your voice,  more palpable than photographs  or fingerprints. On this first day  of this first fall without you,  ashamed and resisting  but compelled, I dial again  the number I know by heart,  thankful in a diminished world  for the accidental mercy of machines,  then listen and hang up.
Did they enjoy this, those honorary ancestors  Of ours, whom we may not speak of as Indians now,  But, rather, as Native Americans? Did they, that is,  Have the opportunity to take in such views?  For there were no roads then, slicing through  The hills, opening vistas like this. Astonishing!  Unless, perhaps, they were upon the Delaware,  A kind of road itself. But, otherwise, would not  The land itself have been an inconvenience,  The changing leaves an oracle of cruelties  To come and not, as for the tourists on a bus,  A postcard to sweep up at a glance and then  Go home to the similar view they own—  One stately maple, or two, intensely orange?  Only the birds, may be, might have known  These colors, the sudden shift of gears from green  To ocher, umber, brightest yellow, deepest red,  The colors of the gleeful dead. For birds can fly  Above the trees and see what we see from a bus.  But is there gladness in their flight? Might it  Not as well be night? And Indians (forgive the word),  Did they delight more than a bird? Were there  Esthetes then as now, before the ax,  The ox, the plow? I must believe there were—  And why? Because they traded all Manhattan  For a handful of ceramic beads. They knew,  As we, that a glint of pure bright blue  Is worth a whole October day, or two.
Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.
It's been two thousand years now that, with a wounded leg, the god's amazing loves have dragged along. He has aged. Soon he won't be noticed except from way up in a plane in the markings of wheat that yield the trace of an ancient sanctuary. He solicits a language of caresses, open pasture, available bodies, and the words refuse, and this elsewhere is already in his death except for a slender purple flower under the sun. He can still act the god all around, evening's worn heart. He guesses the flower will slip fragile from one century to the next with its prayer.
often  when he was advancing  feeling his way in the night  he was doubtful rebelled  wanted to climb back up  to the old light  but a force held him  enjoined him  to pursue  to venture  once more  once again  into the thickest darkness  of his shadow  one day  at the height of his distress  emptied of all force  driven to see that  the inaccessible would not yield  he admitted that he must  renounce it  to his great surprise  without his having  to take a single step  he crossed the threshold  came into the light
Les plantes et les planètes Au même ciel obáissent ; Du même soleil les bêtes Et les hommes se nourrissent ; Et le mátal dans la mine Couve l'astre minuscule, Soufre dont la fleur si fine Vit en chaque corpuscule. Naines ou gáantes sont Poudre et bran jetás loin Qui sans chute ou frein s'en vont Aux quatre mondes sans coin Ni angle, d'anges peuplás, Mais d'autres disent que non, Dont les mondes envolás Seraient comme d'un canon, Par qui par hasard tirá, L'expansive consáquence, Et d'aucune intelligence Le fruit de quel grain tirá.    [Plants and planets]  Plants and planets Obey the same heaven; As beasts and men Are nourished by the same sun; And the metal in the mine Warms minute stars, Sulphurous flowers so delicate They live in every corpuscule. Dwarves and giants are Powder and dust thrown far Without fall or check whirl To the four cornerless, angleless Worlds, peopled with angels, But others say not at all. Their worlds seem Fired from a cannon, Fired by whom by chance, This expanding consequence, The fruit of some grapeshot Without any intelligence.
You should have heard the soldiers’ feet wounding the swirls that the accordion waltz left on the pavement like a mower’s swath once the parade had passed you should have kissed the soldiers’ feet pulled out of their boots and licked the ankles and climbed as far as the khaki seven and a half millimeters thick would allow you should have shaken their belly like a carpet it was grand illusion day when they escape their deep knowledge and pretend to look for handsome successors but it would be better to look for the heart and put an alarm clock in its place that could play reveille like a puppet but wouldn’t serve coffee in bed you should have rummaged under their false teeth to hunt for hidden diamonds with lively fingers hunt for them everywhere not find them even in the creases of their nakedness. Joy of being a child of the sovereign people of lending a hand to institutions and seeing one’s name inscribed on the slate of urinals in letters of coal tar for a single flag that one has become flapping its boredom at the angles of two streets that the wind stirs unless it’s first the wind of trumpets all love to the winds
The street I walk along I often see As if I'd long since left the moving surface Of the world for the endless other side that disperses Us all some day without return but free Of care. I apply myself so well to this fragile proceeding That very quickly my gaze ceases to be Part of the cloudy clump of hope and memory I'll have given my name to. But for this to succeed, A feeling of absolute happiness has to make Itself felt, as if from outside me, so much That at that moment the very street has a hunch That it, the entire city, and its uncertain space Have become one with the mobile but faithful pattern Of phrases written by our steps when we move about. I no longer know who's walking and marking out The ground, bit by bit, to the corner. My gaze then patterns Itself on tomorrow's unknown eyes, which will shine When from the roofs, posthumous and vague, mine glow, And my invisible trace on the asphalt below Might guide the élan of hardier passersby. Will they know what I sometimes suspect: what appears To be the distracted gaze with which we see The world is the world itself?—It sees and hears Itself through the thin transparency of our screens.
Parmi beaucoup de poèmes  Il y en avait un  Dont je ne parvenais pas à me souvenir  Sinon que je l'avais composé Autrefois  En descendant cette rue  Du côté des numéros pairs de cette rue  Baignée d'une matinée limpide  Une rue de petites boutiques persistantes  Entre la Seine sinistrée et l'hôpital  Un poème écrit avec mes pieds  Comme je compose toujours les poèmes En silence et dans ma tête et en marchant  Mais je ne me souviens de rien  Que de la rue de la lumière et du hasard  Qui avait fait entrer dans ce poème  Le mot "respect"  Que je n'ai pas l'habitude de faire vibrer  Dans les pages mentales de la poésie Au-delà de lui il n'y a rien  Et ce mot ce mot qui ne bouge pas  Atteste la cessation de la rue  Comme un arbre oublié de l'espace  Among Many Poems Among many poems  There was one  Which I couldn't remember  Except having made it up  Long ago  While going down that street  On the even-numbered side of that street  Bathed in a limpid morning  A street of little shops still lasting  Between the hospital and the wounded Seine  A poem written with my feet  As I always make up my poems  In silence and in my head while walking  But I remember nothing  Except the street the light and the chance  That had caused the entry in the poem  Of the word "respect"  That I don't usually set resounding  In poetry's mental pages  Beyond it there is nothing  And this word this unmoving word  Awaits the ending of the street  Like a tree space has forgotten
In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery  where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.  Then, all day, I think of him rising up  to give me that look  of knowing disapproval  while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
From the point of view of all time,  these recent changes signal  more a return to nature  than a departure, than degradation.  In the beginning, after all,  there was boiling rock.  Then waters arranging their bodies  around an era of softer forms:  lichen, grassland, swaying treetops.  Then creatures, movingly fleshed,  treading pathways that hardened.  Then pavement hardening  and cities, monumental.  Soon mostly rock again,  and radiant. More and more like moon.  Soon, sooner than is being thought,  there will be even more light.  The creatures will have stopped  being able to move  or be moved.  And the rock will boil.
It's the other ones, who soon enough return to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest to their own deaths—in their gaiety and everyday distraction, they're so open and unguarded . . . anything could enter them; could claim them. It's the ones who weep incessantly that are saved for now, the ones who have taken a little of it into their systems: this is how inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult, a job: it requires time to complete. And the tears?—the salt of the folk saying, that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers and keeps a bird from flying; keeps it stationed in this world.
National Museum of Scotland On the ground floor called "Beginnings," a fertility stone is displayed in the diamond-hard blue halogen, a line etching of an erection with two equal circles, as one sees in graffitti in the Underground. The stone is attributed to the Picts, of whom history says little, besides the Latin picti, painted people, tattooed. When set side by side with Latin engravings and Roman military hardware, the artifact makes them seem pitiful. In the museum you rise through time, the text written in first person plural as if all who enter are complicitous with the articles of defiance, Robert the Bruce, the long unveering heredity of defeat, the room of thumbscrews and "The Maiden" for severing heretical heads of witches, upward to the Reformation, then the rout of the Highlanders and the exile of the Bonnie Prince, until the museum seems like a deep well where the fertility stone of the painted people rests at its bottom, universal hieroglyph on which someone made a wish.
Where two streams joined, we met  By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock  With only the intent of watching  Water flow beneath unwinding water.   Facing up-stream, she held a flower  To the sun as I leaned back and found  An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there  As if someone had left it by intent  As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water  Swirling upon stone and thus  Transform the accident of meeting her— Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand— Into stark fact as obdurate as rock.   Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead  I just found here!" Would she have thought  "An accident, that's credible," Or feared that my intent was sinister,  And that the implication of the arrowhead,  Unlike the radiant white flower or  The two streams merging into faster water,  Casting up colored spume,  Had been contrived by me, certain as rock  That forms by geologic laws?   She had to know an arrowhead  Is humanly designed with the intent to kill,  Though now it's harmless as a flower  Decorating someone's hair,  Or water organized into a garden fountain.  An arrowhead can now be used  As an adornment for a necklace  Like a flower in a painting where a stream  Leaps past a light-reflecting rock  With nothing in a brush-stroke left to accident.   And so our accidental meeting on the rock  Flowed by, a flower cast upon the water  With intent unknown, and all  That's left now is the arrowhead.
I, as sinned against as sinning,  take small pleasure from the winning  of our decades-long guerrilla war.  For from my job I've wanted more  than victory over one who'd tried  to punish me before he died,  and now, neither of us dead,  we haunt these halls in constant dread  of drifting past the other's life  while long-term memory is rife  with slights that sting like paper cuts.  We've occupied our separate ruts  yet simmered in a single rage.  We've grown absurd in middle age  together, and should seek wisdom now  together, by ending this row.  I therefore decommission you  as constant flagship of my rue.  Below the threshold of my hate  you now my good regard may rate.  For I have let my anger pass.  But, while you're down there, kiss my ass.
Thank you but  not just at the moment  I know you will say  I have said that before  I know you have been  there all along somewhere  in another time zone  I studied once  those beautiful instructions  when I was young and  far from here  they seemed distant then  they seem distant now  from everything I remember  I hope they stayed with you  when the noose started to tighten  and you could say no more  and after wisdom  and the days of iron  the eyes started from your head  I know the words  must have been set down  partly for yourself  unjustly condemned after  a good life  I know the design  of the world is beyond  our comprehension  thank you  but grief is selfish and in  the present when  the stars do not seem to move  I was not listening  I know it is not  sensible to expect  fortune to grant her  gifts forever  I know
Go home. It's never what you think it is,  The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist.  Nothing is true, my dear, not even this  Rumor of passion you'll doubtless insist  On perceiving in my glance. Please just  Go. Home is never what you think it is.  Meaning lies in meaning's absence. The mist  Is always almost just about to lift.  Nothing is truer. Dear, not even this  Candle can explain its searing twist  Of flame mounted on cool amethyst.  Go on home—not where you think it is,  But where you would expect its comfort least,  In still-black stars our century will miss  Seeing. Nothingness is not as true as this  Faith we grind up with denial: grist  To the midnight mill; morning's catalyst.  Come, let's go home, wherever you think it is.  Nothing is true, my dear. Not even this.
Piraeus Archeological Museum On the journey to the mundane afterlife,  You travel equipped to carry on your trade:  A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs,  The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper,  Wax tablets bound into a little book.  Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara,  Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box.  Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed  Into a pure Pythagorean music.  The beeswax, frangible with centuries,  Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence.  I think you were a poet of perfection  Who fled still weighing one word with another,  Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.
In a hut far from the village Li Hua bends over his canvas like an insect. He is so deliberate, each stroke is a spider's legs fighting the current. There is a war in his veins, a battle of desires. He is jealous of Li Po whose pictures glide like the moon over dark water. I do not wish to disturb him as he tries to make art in this time of death, so I will wait, like a fly on the tip of a stick, until he is finished.
A man steps out of sunlight, sunlight that streams like grace, still gaping at blue sky staked across the emptiness of space, into a history where shadows assume a human face. A man slips into silence that began as a cry, still trailing music although reduced to the sigh of an accordion as it folds into its case.
I wanted to go to military school and march, I wanted to grow up and be composed and expert with a rifle, with tactics and fighting, to be safe and courageous among men in barracks and on the battlefield. I wanted to see my arms hairy and corded with muscle at the end of rolled up khaki sleeves. I wanted to flex my feet in boots and look down at the the dust of battles dimming the leather surfaces, the blood slick on the rim of the soles. I wanted the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, the grime on my face, the washed-out hollow love for my comrades found in the foxholes, the sad understanding, the requiems of late afternoons walking away from the burial site with the widow as she cradled the triangulated flag like a plowblade in her arms.
Han-Shan sits on a flat stone  In his garden and plays the flute,  Mimicking the birds singing among  The gourd vines or from the top  Of the blue pine tree.  Or he constructs a new trellis  For the rambling rose over his front  Gate or works at the great loom in his porch,  Weaving his own coverlets.  Sometimes, he paints drinking gourds  To hang at his cold spring.  His poems, delicate but strong,  Paper the ceiling above his bed,  So he can lie and read  His own masterpieces.  No man, he avers, can catch  Such fish in one basket.
Because someone thirsty enough  to trust Old Testament wisdom  followed the deepening greens  and found a spring, silver  in the shadow of blue ridges,  I can kneel beneath  this spill of willow  limbs a century later  and drink water  risen from roots  to enter the evening  through a spout, the way  Cherokee stories say the first  people were born,  washing into the world  of such trees whose bark,  like the water I cup  to my parched mouth,  tastes leafy and sweet  and has the power,  the old ones say, to heal.
Do nothing and everything will be done, that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked around talking 2,500 years ago and now his books practically grow on trees they're so popular and if he were alive today beautiful women would rush up to him like waves lapping at the shores of his wisdom. That's the way it is, I guess: humbling. But if I could just unclench my fists, empty out my eyes, turn my mind into a prayer flag for the wind to play with, we could be brothers, him the older one who's seen and not done it all and me still unlearning, both of us slung low in our hammocks, our hats tipped forwards, hands folded neatly, like bamboo huts, above our hearts.
Small floater, you stay above the fray,  a wink at nothing's nod, a raised brow  watching p's and q's, a selfless mote  between I and m, a little horn of plenty  spilling plurals, disdaining the bottom line.  Unlike your twin relatives—groupies of wit  and wisdom, hangers on in the smallest talk— you work alone, dark of a crescent moon.  Laboring in obscurity, you never ask why,  never exclaim, never tell anyone where to go.  Caught up between extremes, you are both  a turning away and a stepping forth,  a loss and an addition. You are the urge  to possess everything, and the sure sign  that something is missing.
Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light,  the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar. Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce, Reeds rustle and bow their heads, Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women For faded, forgotten things. And always the black birds in the trees, Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart.  _________ Swallow pure as a penknife  slick through the insected air. Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a short straw. Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue,  mud purse and middle arch, Home sweet home. Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water. At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone, No moan from the blue lupin. The shadows of afternoon  begin to gather their dark robes And unlid their crystal eyes. Minute by minute, step by slow step, Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward midnight.  _________ I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one, Just big enough for a word. And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it. I can't remember the word right now, But it will come back to me when the northwest wind  blows down off Mt. Caribou The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is. Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in. Insects fall back inside their voices, Little fanfares and muted repeats, Inadequate language of sorrow,  inadequate language of silted joy, As ours is. The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg.  _________ At times the world falls away from us  with all its disguises, And we are left with ourselves As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still moving, The empty distance, the heart Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave, Nothing touching, nothing close. A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall. In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms, Their wings blackened by somebody's dream. The rain stops, the robin resumes his post.  A whisper Out of the clouds and here comes the sun. A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post.  _________ The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position, Count out the morning's meters—  bird song and squirrel bark, creek run, The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation. I put on my lavish robes And walk at random among the day's  dactyls and anapests, A widening caesura with each step. I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a holder of place, An overnight interruption  in somebody else's narrative. What is it that causes this? What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping my eyes  fixed to the ground? Whatever the answer, it will start  the wolf pack down from the mountain, The raven down from the tree.  _________ Time gnaws on our necks like a dog  gnaws on a stew bone. It whittles us down with its white teeth, It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road. That's one way of putting it. Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another. We slide it between our teeth on the black water,  ready for what's next. The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up At the edge of the timber. Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard.  Slow lopes of tall grasses Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind. In wingbeats and increments, The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree.  _________ The intermittent fugues of the creek,  saying yes, saying no, Master music of sunlight And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks, Lull us and take our breath away.  Our lips form fine words, But nothing comes out. Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out. After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of dusk. Enormous silence of stones. Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing. Monotonous psalm of underbrush  and smudged flowers. After the twilight, darkness. After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that.  _________ The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them, St. Thomas's hand  returning repeatedly to the wound, Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep, Asking for everything, and then some. Already the melancholy of their arrival Swells like a sunrise and daydream  over the eastern ridge line. Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon, Image follows image, clouds Reveal themselves,  and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things. Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods, Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable With one eye closed, then with the other.  _________ One star and a black voyage,  drifting mists to wish on, Bullbats and their lullabye— Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills. Small sounds and the close of day, As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the meadow And walked in its shadows quietly. The mouth inside me with its gold teeth Begins to open. No words appear on its lips,  no syllables bubble along its tongue. Night mouth, silent mouth. Like drugged birds in the trees,  angels with damp foreheads settle down. Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.
Pale gold and crumbling with crust  mottled dark, almost bronze,  pieces of honeycomb lie on a plate.  Flecked with the pale paper  of hive, their hexagonal cells  leak into the deepening pool  of amber. On your lips,  against palate, tooth and tongue,  the viscous sugar squeezes  from its chambers, sears sweetness  into your throat until you chew  pulp and wax from a blue city  of bees. Between your teeth  is the blown flower and the flower's  seed. Passport pages stamped  and turning. Death's officious hum.  Both the candle and its anther  of flame. Your own yellow hunger.  Never say you can't take  this world into your mouth.
How exhilarating it was to march  along the great boulevards  in the sunflash of trumpets  and under all the waving flags— the flag of ambition, the flag of love.  So many of us streaming along— all of humanity, really— moving in perfect step,  yet each lost in the room of a private dream.  How stimulating the scenery of the world,  the rows of roadside trees,  the huge curtain of the sky.  How endless it seemed until we veered  off the broad turnpike  into a pasture of high grass,  headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.  Generation after generation,  we keep shouldering forward  until we step off the lip into space.  And I should not have to remind you  that little time is given here  to rest on a wayside bench,  to stop and bend to the wildflowers,  or to study a bird on a branch— not when the young  are always shoving from behind,  not when the old keep tugging us forward,  pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.
We speak of the pain of childbirth, referring,  of course, to the mother, but what is pain  to the mother, the one through whose body  the course unwinds? She understands already  what kind of world she must return to,  how it daily hones its many edges  against human skin, unlike the child whose  untried limbs inch toward it, pressing now  so firmly against her he feels for the first time  the pinch of bone against bone and is seared  by the friction. Isn't he the one  on whom the real burden falls, the one  to whom resilience means nothing yet? His  tender skin like a small measure of cloth  unfolding before the blade under which  he will, for a lifetime, bruise  and heal: Crush of the long descent, grip  of the steadying hands, brush of breath  against cheek, even the constant barrage  of the microscopic, the tiny plink-plink  of the dust motes knocking against him  before custom makes him numb to it. No wonder  the startled mouth cries out,  each pore suddenly hungry  in the withering, nourishing light.
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there—and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.
And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place . . . T. S. Eliot The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond and drove little waves toward us, brisk, purposeful waves that vanished at our feet, such energy thwarted by so little elevation. The wind was endless, seamless, old as the earth.  Insects came to regard us with favor. I felt them alight, felt their minute footfalls. I was a challenge, an Everest . . . And you, whom I have heard breathe all night, sigh through the water of sleep with vestigial gills . . . A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent, while higher up two bullet-shaped jets dragged their roars behind them on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little. Perhaps it was necessary. All our years together— and not just together. Surely by now we have the same blood type, the same myopia. Sometimes I think we’re the same sex, the one in the middle of man and woman, born of both as every child is. The waves came to us, one each heartbeat, and lay themselves at our feet. The swelling goes down. The fever cools. There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago bear and beaver, fox and partridge den and nest and hunt and are hunted. I wish I had the means to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild. But then where would we live? I wanted that hour with you all winter— I thought of it while I worked, before I slept and when I woke, a time when the tangled would straighten, when contrition would become benediction: the positive hour, shining like mica. At last the wind brought it to us across the pond, then took it up again, every last minute.
Because the ostracized experience the world  in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it  clearly yet with such anger and longing  that they sometimes enlarge what they see,  she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.  She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.  How startling, though, no one knew about her past,  the scandal with Percy, the tragic early deaths,  yet sad that her Frankenstein had become  just a name, like Dracula or Satan, something  that stood for a kind of scariness, good for a laugh.  She found herself welcome everywhere.  People would tell her about Brigantine Castle,  turned into a house of horror. They thought  she'd be pleased that her monster roamed  its dark corridors, making children scream.  They lamented the day it was razed.  Thus Mary Shelley found herself accepted  by those who had no monster in them — the most frightening people alive, she thought.  Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned  his creation, set him loose without guidance  or a name? Didn't they know what it feels like  to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are?  She was amazed now that people believed  you could shop for everything you might need.  She loved that in the dunes you could almost hide.  At the computer store she asked an expert  if there was such a thing as too much knowledge,  or going too far? He directed her to a website  where he thought the answers were.  Yet Mary Shelley realized that the pain she felt  all her life was gone. Could her children, dead so young,  be alive somewhere, too? She couldn't know  that only her famous mother had such a chance.  She was almost ready to praise this awful world.
What became of the dear strands of hair pressed against the perspiration of your lover's brow after lovemaking as you gazed into the world of those eyes, now only yours? What became of any afternoon that was so vivid you forgot the present was up to its old trick of pretending it would be there always? What became of the one who believed so deeply in this moment he memorized everything in it and left it for you?
Though there's no such thing as a "self," I missed it— the fiction of it and how I felt believing in it mildly  like a book an old love sent with an inscription  in his hand, whatever it meant,  After such knowledge, what forgiveness . . . —the script of it like the way my self felt  learning German words by chance—Mitgefühl, Unheimlichkeit—and the trailing off that happened  because I knew only the feelings, abstract  and international, like ghosts or connotations  lacking a grammar, a place to go:  this was the way my self felt when it started  falling apart: each piece of it clipped  from a garden vaguely remembered  by somebody unrecognizable— such a strange bouquet that somebody sent  to nobody else, a syntax of blossoms.
There are, of course, theories about the wide-eyed, drop-jawed fascination children have for them, about how, before he's learned his own phone number or address, a five-year-old can carry like a few small stones the Latin tonnage of those names, the prefixes and preferences for leaf or meat. My son recites the syllables I stumble over now, sets up figures as I did years ago in his prehistory. Here is the green ski slope of a brontosaur's back, there a triceratops in full gladiator gear. From the arm of a chair a pterodactyl surveys the dark primeval carpet. Each has disappeared from time to time, excavated finally from beneath a cabinet or the sofa cushions, only to be buried again among its kind in the deep toy chest, the closed lid snug as earth. The next time they're brought out to roam the living room another bone's been found somewhere, a tooth or fragment of an eggshell dusted off, brushing away some long-held notion about their life-span or intelligence, warm blood or cold. On the floor they face off as if debating the latest find, what part of which one of them has been discovered this time. Or else they stand abreast in one long row, side by scaly side, waiting to fall like dominoes, my son's tossed tennis ball a neon yellow asteroid, his shadow a dark cloud when he stands, his fervor for them cooling so slowly he can't feel it— the speed of glaciers, maybe, how one age slides into the next.
Offshore, the Apocalypse stays contained to one island and its church. Venice's ruler's out wedding himself to the ocean while I'm ankle deep in the Adriatic, eyes raised to a book unencumbered by words: A Bible that reads from East to West. Guidebooks want only to see it as ceiling—the Basilica San Marco, where Christ's hands open on wounds embedded with rubies, and priests hold back the sea with brooms. I'm taking on incense, bowing at altars dragged out of Constantinople, sloshing across marble sacked from Jerusalem. Offshore, the sea's a bride bought with a fist full of diamonds the Doge throws into the deep— a sign of his true and perpetual dominion. Then why does walking into this church mean stepping into the ocean? The sea is a dog— Priests throw in bones just to placate it. The year's nearly 2000, but the millennium already hit once on the island Torcello, a kind of plague the Venetians contained. 999 years, and the dead still crawl from dirt towards their radiant bodies, they still gather up missing limbs: arms, legs, hands sharks and beasts keep regurgitating. We do what we know— But Christ never wanted to manage resurrections in Venice. Underdressed in the flesh from dead civilizations, he moves among us in Byzantine skin. I'm getting close to this God worshiped only by tourists. He picks at the wounds on his crucified body, the injury scabbed over with jewels.
As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them—I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect machine from 1948, at the latest, and made of shining plastic with the numbers sharp and clear and slightly magnified in that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely small and yet his tiny brain alert for he is the one who will crow and not that broken buzzing relic, though time is different now and dawn is different too, you were up all night and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting to see what direction you should face and if you were born in time or was it wasted and what the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.
A famous battle happened in this valley.   You never understood the nature poem.  Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   seem separate, unrelated, follow this  silence to its edge and you will hear   the history of air: the crispness of a fern  or the upward cut and turn around of   a fieldfare or thrush written on it.  The other history is silent: The estuary   is over there. The issue was decided here:  Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   Then one king and one dead tradition.  Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   wait for language, for a different truth:  When you see the silk of the willow   and the wider edge of the river turn  and grow dark and then darker, then   you will know that the nature poem  is not the action nor its end: it is   this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet,   on the steering wheel shaft: it is  an aftermath, an overlay and even in   its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with   sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen  And as I write valley straw, metal   blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.  Silence spreads slowly from these words   to those ilex trees half in, half out  of shadows falling on the shallow ford   of the south bank beside Yellow Island  as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   begins to be complete: what we see  is what the poem says:   evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and whin bushes and a change of weather   about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are   for this moment free of one another.
The year I was born the atomic bomb went off.  Here I'd just begun, and someone  found the switch to turn off the world.  In the furnace-light, in the central solar fire  of that heat lamp, the future got very finite,  and it was possible to imagine time-travelers  failing to arrive, because there was no future.  Inside the great dark clock in the hall,  heavy brass cylinders descended.  Tick-tock, the chimes changed their tune  one phrase at a time. The bomb became  a film star, its glamorous globe of smoke  searing the faces of men in beach chairs.  Someone threw up every day at school.  No time to worry about collective death,  when life itself was permeated by ordeals.  And so we grew up, beneath an umbrella of acceptance.  In bio we learned there were particles  cruising through us like whales through archipelagoes,  and in civics that if Hitler had gotten the bomb  he'd have used it on the inferior races,  and all this time love was etching its scars  on our skins like maps. The heavens  remained pure, except for little white slits  on the perfect blue skin that planes cut  in the icy upper air, like needles sewing.  From one, a tiny seed might fall  that would make a sun on earth.  And so the century passed, with me still in it,  books waiting on the shelves to become cinders,  what we felt locked up inside, waiting to be read,  down the long corridor of time. I was born  the year the bomb exploded. Twice  whole cities were charred like cities in the Bible,  but we didn't look back. We went on thinking  we could go on, our shapes the same,  darkened now against a background lit by fire.  Forgive me for doubting you're there,  Citizens, on your holodecks with earth wallpaper— a shadow-toned ancestor with poorly pressed pants,  protected like a child from knowing the future.
Adjectives continue their downward spiral, with adverbs likely to follow. Wisdom, grace, and beauty can be had three for a dollar, as they head for a recession. Diaphanous, filigree, pearlescent, and love are now available at wholesale prices. Verbs are still blue-chip investments, but not many are willing to sell. The image market is still strong, but only for those rated AA or higher. Beware of cheap imitations sold by the side of the road. Only the most conservative consider rhyme a good option, but its success in certain circles warrants a brief mention. The ongoing search for fresh metaphor has caused concern among environmental activists, who warn that both the moon and the sea have measurably diminished since the dawn of the Romantic era. Latter-day prosodists are having to settle for menial positions in poultry plants, where an aptitude for repetitive rhythms is considered a valuable trait. The outlook for the future remains uncertain, and troubled times may lie ahead. Supply will continue to outpace demand, and the best of the lot will remain unread.
Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or  walking the dog, he would recall some incident  from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree  in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's  swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face  he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast  and his body electric; memories to look at with  curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with  nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And  although he had no sense of being on a journey,  such memories made him realize how far he had  traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he  would look back on the person he was now, this  person who seemed so substantial. These images, it  was like looking at a book of old photographs,  recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and  perhaps recalling the story of an older second  cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in  Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was  becoming like such a person, that the day might  arrive when he would look back on his present self  as on a distant relative who had drifted off into  uncharted lands.
Christmas trees lined like war refugees,  a fallen army made to stand in their greens.  Cut down at the foot, on their last leg,  they pull themselves up, arms raised.  We drop them like wood;  tied, they are driven through the streets,  dragged through the door, cornered  in a room, given a single blanket,  only water to drink, surrounded by joy.  Forced to wear a gaudy gold star,  to surrender their pride,  they do their best to look alive.
In the cards and at the bend in the road we never saw you in the womb and in the crossfire in the numbers whatever you had your hand in which was everything we were told never to put our faith in you to bow to you humbly after all because in the end there was nothing else we could do but not to believe in you still we might coax you with pebbles kept warm in the hand or coins or the relics of vanished animals observances rituals not binding upon you who make no promises we might do such things only not to neglect you and risk your disfavor oh you who are never the same who are secret as the day when it comes you whom we explain as often as we can without understanding
I do not understand the poets who tell me  that I should not personify. Every morning  the willow auditions for a new role  outside my bedroom window—today she is  Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle,  lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts.  Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me  I cannot say, "The zinnias are counting on their  fingers," or "The dog is practicing her geometry,"  even though every day I watch her using  the yard's big maple as the apex of a triangle  from which she bisects the circumference  of the lawn until she finds the place where  the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped  the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane.  She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling  her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working  the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention,  her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping,  yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist,  by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, "There!  There!" But instead of following my outstretched  arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is  now lounging under a canopy of leaves,  catching its breath, charting its next escape,  she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips,  confident that I—who can bring her home  from across the field with a word, who  can speak for the willow and the zinnia—  can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.
Their authority did not unfold  from ironed white shirts and thin ties  or from the funereal seriousness that struck  their acne-splashed faces but because  they stood heir to our native faith in light.  So we followed the thin white waver  of beams they pointed down aisles  to seats we never thought of refusing.  It was the first job I wanted,  especially after birthday outings  far from home showed me the glowing  outfits worn by big-city ushers, their get-ups  a blend of doorman and military dictator,  as gaudy and fine as the plots  of movies my Saturdays were swallowed by.  None of us knew, as they took us  into the artificial light of the cinema,  that they walked the path of the pin setter,  the blacksmith or elevator operator,  professions reduced to curiosity  by wandering time. Only in the quick steps  of floor salesmen, the slim backs of hostesses  bringing us to our tables, do they remain,  the artful flutters of their flashlights lost  in dark we are left to find our own way through.
Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.
1. THE PLAGIARIST Careless of his debts, he never credits submissions to the magazine he edits. 2. THE TAXIDERMIST Her father's dead at last, the lout— but now he's all she writes about. 3. THE ASSASSIN His verse means less to the world of letters than the bad reviews he gives his betters.
The day had finally come when everything there seemed misplaced or out of place as an ex's box of things. The unused beside the irreplaceable, the easy- to-assemble uncomplicated now by disuse. Some hand of randomness leaving behind its lampshades stained like ancient maps, its ladders still climbing upward, and enough old tools to restart a world. Every drawer filled with the other half of things. Everything care embraced, and held once as new, left too ragged for another winter to wear. Its ring of keys dangling by a nail for rooms left long ago. And whatever I said I'd never forget found, just as it seemed completely forgot—all its letters beginning with Dear....
Everything is half here,  like the marble head  of the Roman emperor  and the lean torso  of his favorite.  The way the funnel cloud  which doesn't seem  to touch ground does—  flips a few cars, a semi—  we learn to walk miles  above our bodies.  The pig farms dissolve,  then the small hills.  As in dreams fraught  with irrevocable gestures,  the ruined set seems larger,  a charred palace the gaze  tunnels through  and through. How well  we remember the stage—  the actors gliding about  like petite sails, the balustrade  cooling our palms.  Not wings or singing,  but a darkness fast as blood.  It ended at our fingertips:  the fence gave way  to the forest.  The world began.
To George Herbert Aspiration's breath, millennial trance,  two-pointed ladder propped in a void;  busy buzzard claws, verbs on a leash,  slow blush of brain damage on a plate.  Stunned journey of dust. A holey sock.  Grind of an afternoon's axles, abandoned  juggernaut in a field; inhabited interval  with a pencil stub, curved strips of silence:  postbox for the inner ear. Tarantula's footstep,  a weight of light: inadvertent sky in the skull.  Wishbone couture: promiscuous secret,  peepshow in the street. Paraphrase of planets.  Ocean in a tablespoon. Ordinary in the ordinary:  nothing come of anything, matter unpossessed.
The sun is high, the seaside air is sharp,  And salty light reveals the Mayan School.  The Irish hope their names are on the harp,  We see the sheep's advertisement for wool,  Boulders are here, to throw against a tarp,  From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule.  Perceval seizes it and mounts it, then  The blood-dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again.  Fateful connections that we make to things  Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives!  How sidewise news of light from darkness springs,  How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives  And make the honey while the queen bee sings  Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives—  How long ago I saw the misted pine trees  And hoped, no matter how, to get them into poetry!  Stendhal, at fifty, gazing as it happened  On Rome from the Janiculum, decided  That one way he could give his life a stipend  Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter  And get to know himself. Here he had ripened  Accomplished, loved, and lived, was a great writer  But never had explored in true detail  His childhood and his growing up. So he set sail  Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard But in five hundred pages scarcely got  Beyond his seventeenth year, for it is hard  To take into account what happens here  And fit it all onto an index card.  Even one moment of it is too hot,  Complex and cannibalistically connected  To every other, which is what might be expected.  Sterne's hero has a greater problem, never  Getting much past his birth. I've had a third one.  My autobiography, if I should ever  Start out to write it, quickly seems a burden  An I-will-do-that-the-next-time endeavor.  Whatever life I do write's an absurd one  As if some crazy person with a knife  Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life.  In any case a life that's hardly possible  In the conditions that we really live in,  Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible  Mountainy places where love is a given  And misery, if there, infinitesimal,  Are quite the norm. Here none by pain is driven  That is not curable by the romanza  That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza.  Whatever, then, I see at this late stage of  My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant  Of that great book I've strained to write one page of  Yet always hoping my page was significant.  Be it or not, for me and for the ages  I leave it as it is. Yet as a figurant  Who has not stopped, I'm writing in addition  More lines to clarify my present disposition.  One person in a million finds out something  Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge.  Newton, Copernicus, Einstein are cunning.  The rest of us just rise and go to college  With no more hope to come home with the bunting  Than a stray dachshund going through the village.  However, what a treat our small successes  Of present and of past, at various addresses!  To be in all those places where I tarried  Too little or too late or bright and early  To love again the first woman I married  To marvel at such things as melancholy,  Sophistication, drums, a baby carriage,  A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully—  How my desire when young to be a poet  Made me attentive and oblivious every moment!  Do you remember Oceanview the Fair?  The heights above the river? The canoes?  The place we beached them and the grass was bare?  Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce?  The crooked line of pantry shelves, with pear  And cherry jam? And Pancho, with his noose?  Do you remember Full and Half and Empty?  Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry?  Do you remember thought, and talking plainly?  Michel and I went walking after Chartres  Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly  By giving us an insight into Barthes.  Michel said he was capable of feigning  Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part,  Like this cathedral's artificial forces  That press a kind of artless thought into our faces.  And yet— The moor is dark beneath the moon.  The porcupine turns over on its belly  And new conceptions rap at the cocoon.  Civilization, dealing with us fairly,  For once, releases its Erectheion  Of understanding, which consoles us, nearly.  Later we study certain characteristics  That may give us a better chance with the statistics.  How much I'd like to live the whole thing over,  But making some corrections as I go!  To be a better husband and a father,  Be with my babies on a sled in snow.  By twenty I'd have understood my mother  And by compassion found a way to know  What separates the what-I-started-out-as  From what-I-sometimes-wished-I-was-when-in-the-mountains.  To be once more the one who what was worthy  Of courtship courted—it was quite as stressful  As trying to, er, as they say, give birth to  A poem and as often unsuccessful,  But it was nice to be sublime and flirty  With radiant girls, and, in some strange way, restful.  I could be everything I wasn't usually—  And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually!  In poems the same problem or a similar.  Desire of course not only to do old things  But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors  And of the melancholy finch be co-finch  In singing songs with such a broad parameter  That seamstresses would stare, forget to sew things,  Astronauts quit the sky, athletes the stadium  To hear them, and the rest of what they hear be tedium.  Such wild desires, I think it's recognizable  Are part and parcel of the Human Image  And in a way, I'd say, no less predictable  Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach.  Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible,  All pre-determined, what about the language  That teases me each morning with its leanings  Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings?  Are you, O particles, O atoms, nominatives  Like Percevals and Stendhals, set in motion  By some Ordaining Will that is definitive?  Is this invading chill and high emotion,  This tendency to know one is regenerative,  Is this, all, tidal take-home like the ocean?  Be what you may, my thanks for your society  Through the long life I've had, your jokes and your variety,  The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature  That I can live with, and the strength you've shared with me  In arms and legs—and for your part in literature,  What can I say? It is as if life stared at me  And kissed my lips and left it as a signature.  Thank you for that, and thank you for preparing me  For love itself, and friendship, its co-agent.  Thank you for being this, and for its inspiration.
If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra To honor the memory of someone who never met her, A man who may have come to the town she lived in Looking for work and never found it. Picture him taking a stroll one morning, After a month of grief with the want ads, To refresh himself in the park before moving on. Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother, Then still a girl, will be destined to step on When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can. For you to burn a candle for him You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one, Just deep enough to keep her at home The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen, Who is soon to become her dearest friend, Whose brother George, thirty years later, Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store Doesn't go under in the Great Depression And his son, your father, is able to stay in school Where his love of learning is fanned into flames, A love he labors, later, to kindle in you. How grateful you are for your father's efforts Is shown by the candles you've burned for him. But today, for a change, why not a candle For the man whose name is unknown to you? Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home With friends and family or alone on the road, On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside And hold his hand, the very hand It's time for you to imagine holding.
The land is full of what was lost. What's hidden  Rises to the surface after rain  In new-ploughed fields, and fields stubbled again:  The clay shards, foot and lip, that heaped the midden,  And here and there a blade or flakes of blade,  A patient art, knapped from a core of flint,  Most broken, few as coins new from the mint,  Perfect, shot through time as through a glade.  You cannot help but think how they were lost:  The quarry, fletched shaft in its flank, the blood  Whose trail soon vanished in the antlered wood,  Not just the meat, but what the weapon cost—  O hapless hunter, though your aim was true—  The wounded hart, spooked, fleeting in its fear—  And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year  Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.
In the beginning, a word, move;  then a plan and then the reasons,  which I do not remember exactly.  I remember clearly only the clothes  we were given for the journey  and the last, silent meal we ate.  We left the place as lightly as we  had come, so many years before.  From a sunlit state of innocence  where white sheets were hung  to dry like clouds over paradise;  from eucalyptus-scented earth,  a red house with a yard swung  between dreaming hills, pillaged  by raccoons, framed with lilies  like trumpets of the archangels,  we moved: into history, a river  slowed by many bends, a village  of peacocks with a hundred eyes;  a low house among fields, with  an iron stove, a winter shrine;  a fireplace blackened by time,  the fragile bones of a sparrow  frozen in the shape of its flight.  When father played his trombone  in the attic, schoolchildren tittered  in the street. In the late afternoon,  the cows assembled at the gate,  witless, waiting for a farmer's son.  Home, the children conjugated  verbs, found variables and drew  diagrams of the human heart.  Evenings, the round kitchen table,  lit by a low Dutch lamp, summoned  poets, players, horsethieves, to glasses  of jenever. An incense of gossip rose  slowly, blackening the walls. Outside,  horses pawed the darkness, breathing  delicate feathers of ice. We courted  the favors of spiders, mice and moles.  Our words grew small and porous as  fossiled bones, our gestures groaned  with the cold. The will-less world of  water, wood and stone taught us when  to yield. When it came time to move  along again, we were four strangers  waving at each other, in slow motion,  across a deafening expanse of ocean.
The dance shoes, seduction  and coercion, owned by male feet,  roam floors that beg for chandeliers.  In search of flat-footed beauty  and a bed, where ever they might be,  the handsome conversation attracts  female followers trading on the smiles  of curves. The next steps are dizzying  and leave dresses dipped and hung over  with a purse and heart opened at  their tops. The wallflowers can't say  when the tango with the rag doll began,  but witnesses toasted a conga line  of would-be brides that transcend  a retirement community in Florida,  each giving up their precious moments  on Earth to fandango's flimflam.
I hope you'll pardon the informality of this letter, postmarked Olympia (Greece, not Washington), its task not simple: crossing lines you've crossed, time, mortality, to find you, who spent a lifetime crossing lines out, twisting, polishing them to shine cool and lustrous as the statue I fell in love with yesterday. I'm sure you saw him too, that perfect Hermes by Praxitelis, full lips, hips contrapposto. I wished to draw him down, latter-day Pygmalion, and embrace him. Or barring Eros (and the guards) I'd trace his face, the supple muscle of the marble. I had a student who resembled him— yes, Angelos—arrogant and beautiful. I never touched him though he touches me in dreams. Eros dangles his perfection in our faces like one-armed Hermes with his promise of the grapes. I was certain I'd dream of him last night. Instead I dreamed another in the growing chain of others with whom it ended not quite right. But the thirst was perfect, if its price pain and shattered crystal, spilling wine, all part and parcel of our imperfect lives. Then Art startles out of heartache, marble or page. You learned this long ago. Now I too see the wildest things require the strongest cages, the panther's double bars, or the seeds, bloodysweet and bitter, in the pomegranate's rind. Love held tight in a sonnet.
Forgiving the living is hard  enough, shrugging away all the wounds  delivered with kisses and curses,  the thousand and one petty slights  that bled me to an albino shade,  that shadow me even in dreams.  But the dead are altogether  another matter, not easily to be  enlightened and quite beyond regretting  anything (as far as we can tell)  and most likely indifferent to  our common currency of tears.  And so it is that pissing on your grave  doesn't please me as much as it ought to.  Now that you have passed beyond  all blaming and shaming, what can I do  but rise and proclaim sincere admiration  when my turn comes around to speak?
They grow up together  but they aren't even fraternal  twins, they quarrel a lot  about where to go and what  to do, the body complains  about having to carry  the soul everywhere as if  it were some helpless cripple,  and the soul snipes that it can go  places the body never dreamed of,  then they quarrel over which one of them  does the dreaming, but the truth is,  they can't live without each other and  they both know it, anima, animosity,  the diaphragm pumps like a bellows  and the soul pulls out all the stops—  sings at the top of its lungs, laughs  at its little jokes, it would like  to think it has the upper hand  and can leave whenever it wants—  but only as long as it knows  the door will be unlocked  when it sneaks back home before  the sun comes up, and when the body  says where have you been, the soul  says, with a smirk, I was at the end  of my tether
A reflection on my students They are so beautiful, and so very young  they seem almost to glitter with perfection,  these creatures that I briefly move among.  I never get to stay with them for long,  but even so, I view them with affection:  they are so beautiful, and so very young.  Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung,  they're expert in the art of introspection,  these creatures that I briefly move among—  And if their words don't quite trip off the tongue  consistently, with just the right inflection,  they remain beautiful. And very young.  Still, I have to tell myself it's wrong  to think of them as anything but fiction,  these creatures that I briefly move among—  Because, like me, they're traveling headlong  in that familiar, vertical direction  that coarsens beautiful, blackmails young—  the two delusions we all move among.
Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown— however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I've striven undulant, erosive, blown— or lying flat as glass for your falling clear down: I can't swallow you. So why have I felt I've reached you—as two reflected stars, surfaced, lie near—as if the sky's close element is one in me, where starfish cleave to stones—if you're so far? I've touched you, I know, but my rush subsides; our meetings only leave desire's fleeting trace. Every place I touch you changes shape. Shore, lie down— undo. I'll fill your thirsty bones with blue. I'll flood your every cave and we'll be one.
Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling And walls and floor are rearranging You and themselves into a different world, You must hold still, must wait for them To settle down in unpredictable ways, To bring their wars, shuddering, To an end, and only then should you begin Numbly to feel what freedom may be left To your feet or knees, to your elbows Or clenched fingers. Where you used to walk Or lean or lie down or fix your attention At a whim or stomp your foot Or slump in a chair, you'll find a new Architecturally unsound floor-plan To contend with, if you can move At all. Now you may remember others Who were somewhere near you before This breakdown of circumstances. Caught by surprise Like you, they may be waiting separately At their own levels, inside their own portions Of your incoherent flat. They may be thinking Of you, as you are of them, and wondering Whether some common passageway, no matter How crooked or narrow, might still exist Between you, through which you might share the absence Of food and water and the cold comfort Of daylight. They may be expecting you To arrive at any moment, to crawl through dust And fire to their rescue as they find their bodies Growing more stiff, assuming even more Unusual attitudes at every turn Of a second hand, at every sound Of a bell or an alarm, at every pounding Of a door or a heart, so if you can't reach them Now and they can't reach you, remember, please Remember, whatever you say, Whatever you hear or keep to yourself, whatever You scream or whisper, will need to make Some kind of sense, perhaps for days and days.
In the beginning we could hear their swords cutting jewels  From the protected orchard while our children heard fine teeth  Dragging along empty granary floors. Between us and them  Stands the great wound, swallowing all tears, all voices.  Transfixed or transformed by this pain? We never know because  Who can slip through the gate without throwing a shadow  Toward both the past and present? Fire, flood, famine—  All we've wished upon them a thousand times, still they inch  Back and taunt us with their persistence. We track them down  To a quick end. More come. And the old memories grow new.  The future seems already written with a pen of iron. The book  Unreadable, immense. The enemy has become our masterpiece.
There will be no deafening noise. No hornblow of thunder.  The small plants of the earth will not tremble on the hillside as grace is prepared.  The sky will neither drown us in its plenty, nor the ground crack and consume feet in its hunger.  No, bodies will not, in their last rags of flesh, creep from under the earth, and with breath once torn from them, choke and expel the old mud of the world.  Adam and Eve, incredulous, will not embrace again in their poverty, not knowing whether to shield themselves, or to emerge shameless from the past's shadow, astonished to again greet Terra Firma.  The book of the world, encrusted with deep-sea pearls and the blood of the lamb, will not open up its pages in which all deeds have been inscribed.  And the totality of history will not roll back together, all events fusing, once and for all, into the great blazing sphere of time.  None will sit on the right hand. There will be no right hand.  And the figure of sorrow and grace, with his staff upright, its purple pennant caught in that final wind, will not be there to greet us, with the mercy of justice in his eyes.  No, never judgment. Just the abyss into which all acts are thrown down, and the terrible white silence in which judgment either endures or burns.
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,  shot with pristine light,  not this sulphurous haze,  the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.  Many have pictured a river here,  but no one mentioned all the boats,  their benches crowded with naked passengers,  each bent over a writing tablet.  I knew I would not always be a child  with a model train and a model tunnel,  and I knew I would not live forever,  jumping all day through the hoop of myself.  I had heard about the journey to the other side  and the clink of the final coin  in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,  but how could anyone have guessed  that as soon as we arrived  we would be asked to describe this place  and to include as much detail as possible—  not just the water, he insists,  rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,  not simply the shackles, but the rusty,  iron, ankle-shredding shackles—  and that our next assignment would be  to jot down, off the tops of our heads,  our thoughts and feelings about being dead,  not really an assignment,  the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—  think of it more as an exercise, he groans,  think of writing as a process,  a never-ending, infernal process,  and now the boats have become jammed together,  bow against stern, stern locked to bow,  and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.
Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. Emily Dickinson It wasn't bliss. What was bliss but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours in patter, moving through whole days touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite housekeeping in a charmed world. And yet there was always more of the same, all that happiness, the aimless Being There. So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor, lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror. He was off cataloging the universe, probably, pretending he could organize what was clearly someone else's chaos. That's when she found the tree, the dark, crabbed branches bearing up such speechless bounty, she knew without being told this was forbidden. It wasn't a question of ownership— who could lay claim to such maddening perfection? And there was no voice in her head, no whispered intelligence lurking in the leaves—just an ache that grew until she knew she'd already lost everything except desire, the red heft of it warming her outstretched palm.
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat  Saying to me as we walked across the Yard  Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said  You are not wearing overcoat. He said,  You should do as I say not do as I do.  Just how American it was and how late Forties it was  Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me  In his New York apartment sitting on chair  Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.  Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.  Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.  Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.  Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.  Why don't you ask him?  Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.  Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.  Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.  Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening  I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.  Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying  But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.
For longer than by now I can believe  I assumed that you had nothing to do  with each other I thought you had arrived   whenever that had been  more solitary than single snowflakes  with no acquaintance or understanding  running among you guiding your footsteps   somewhere ahead of me  in your own time oh white lakes on the maps  that I copied and gaps on the paper  for the names that were to appear in them   sometimes a doorway or  window sometimes an eye sometimes waking  without knowing the place in the whole night  I might have guessed from the order in which   you turned up before me  and from the way I kept looking at you  as though I recognized something in you  that you were all words out of one language   tracks of the same creature
In winter all the singing is in the tops of the trees where the wind-bird with its white eyes shoves and pushes among the branches. Like any of us he wants to go to sleep, but he's restless— he has an idea, and slowly it unfolds from under his beating wings as long as he stays awake. But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last. So, it's over. In the pine-crown he makes his nest, he's done all he can. I don't know the name of this bird, I only imagine his glittering beak tucked in a white wing while the clouds— which he has summoned from the north— which he has taught to be mild, and silent— thicken, and begin to fall into the world below like stars, or the feathers of some unimaginable bird that loves us, that is asleep now, and silent— that has turned itself into snow.
Easter was the old North Goddess of the dawn. She rises daily in the East And yearly in spring for the great Paschal candle of the sun. Her name lingers like a spot Of gravy in the figured vestment Of the language of the Britains. Her totem the randy bunny. Our very Thursdays and Wednesdays Are stained by syllables of thunder And Woden's frenzy. O my fellow-patriots loyal to this Our modern world of high heels, Vaccination, brain surgery— May they pass over us, the old Jovial raptors, Apollonian flayers, Embodiments. Egg-hunt, Crucifixion. Supper of encrypted Dishes: bitter, unrisen, a platter Compass of martyrdom, Ground-up apples and walnuts In sweet wine to embody mortar Of affliction, babies for bricks. Legible traces of the species That devises the angel of death Sailing over our doorpost Smeared with sacrifice.
Map of terror and pleasure, ardent junk, passionate congress filled with the arguments of chemicals, Echo chamber for the fanatical cries of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles death has grown a beard on, labyrinth of desire, playing field of impulse, factory where decay's silent armies clock in, philosopher-clown blowing a horn at each epiphany. Washed by the rough nurse of morning, wheeled into the ward of the afternoon, feeds, grateful, on the rich broth of dusk. Reads the erratic cards of dreams, turns on the rack of insomnia, steals the two-bit grace of sleep. Loses its name in foreign embraces, forges a passport to the country of tenderness, gestures like a child at the thing that it wants, opaque from its own breath on the glass.
My son's been learning time: big hand  and little, powers of sixty  and of twenty-four, the slow semaphore  of days. He's brought home paper plates  from kindergarten, arrows pointing  at his favorite hours. So far  the face of every clock has smiled.  And before we read to sleep each night  he crosses off another square  on the calendar above his bed,  counting down to Christmas or to nothing  in particular, sometimes just a line  he draws uphill or down, check marks  like the ones his teacher leaves  on sheets he's filled with capitals  and lower cases, other times a pair  of thick lines like the crossed bones  on a pirate's flag, an X  as if to mark the treasure buried  in some ordinary week,  no day yet a cross to bear.
Day and night, the lake dreams of sky. A privacy as old as the mountains And her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars, So little trespass. An airplane once Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find A face. Having lived with such strict beauty She comes to know how the sun is nothing But itself and the path it throws; the moon A riddled stone. If only a hand Would tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk Pass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below— How she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves Her, as it sings all the way down the mountain.
Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort  of stopgap doorstop for those  quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.
As a boy he played alone in the fields  behind our block, six frame houses  holding six immigrant families,  the parents speaking only gibberish  to their neighbors. Without the kids  they couldn't say "Good morning" and be  understood. Little wonder  he learned early to speak to himself,  to tell no one what truly mattered.  How much can matter to a kid  of seven? Everything. The whole world  can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks  out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses  of August and pretends he's grown up,  someone complete in himself without  the need for anyone, a warrior  from the ancient places our fathers  fled years before, those magic places:  Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea,  Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon,  the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston.  In the damp grass he recites the names  over and over in a hushed voice  while the sun climbs into the locust tree  to waken the houses. The husbands leave  for work, the women return to bed, the kids  bend to porridge and milk. He advances  slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god,  while beneath him the earth holds its breath.
There is a heaviness between us, Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours. What ash has it come to purify? What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds? God of my fathers, but not of mine, You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one. There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt. What figure of earth and clay would it have me become? Sunday again, January thaw back big time. The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes. Nothing is bothering them—and their nicotine dreams— This afternoon. Everything's weightless, As insubstantial as smoke. Nothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all. There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window Above a cobblestone Paris street. A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance. One of them's you, the other is me. Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net Right under the swan-diving body. Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net. Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man. One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat, Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors. Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed. And unshedable. Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us. Such distance. Ungraspable. Ash and its disappearance— Unbearable absence of being, Tonto, then taken back.
Rent a flatbed with a winch. With the right leverage anything can be hoisted, driven off. Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, then the hauler with his enormous truck. A leveler or a lawyer does the rest; experts always are willing to help. The structure was old, rotten in spots. Hadn't it already begun to implode? Believe you've just sped the process up. Photographs, toys, the things that break your heart—let's trust they would have been removed, perhaps are safe with the children who soon will have children of their own. It's over. It's time for loss to build its tower in the yard where you are merely a spectator now. Admit you'd like to find something discarded or damaged, even gone, and lift it back into the world.
For Carol Rigolot    When deeds splay before us  precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.
I make the drive, walk the corporate walk,  To do what I must and give what I got.  I turn the chrome knob and I fill my slot.  I talk and I joke, a regular guy  I input and output and rarely ask why.  It's pasta and wine at home in my flat.  It's voice mail and e-mail, then feed the stray cat.  Sometimes I go out and chat up the girls.  Some want to tango, some manage a smile.  Some come home and have safe sex for a while.  My sweet IRA, my 401-k,  Let me buy tickets to games, to a play—  I go with the gang and don't get involved.  I fly to St. Croix and stare at the sea.  I travel first class. No day-tripper me.  My stocks are diverse to ride out the storm.  I buy what is solid, hew to the norm.  My portfolio teaches how I should vote.  I'm cautious in style, suspicious of trend.  When weather turns foul I always come in.  This is my choice, my new BoBo life.  A two-career marriage, the tension, the strife—  It didn't last long. We parted as pals.  She got the condo. I got the car.  She's a savvy, cool chick. She'll go really far.  My folks live upstate, where I misspent my youth.  They're tight with their money and long in the tooth.  When I visit it's hard with so little to say.  They miss me, they claim. They worry. They pray.  But they seem relieved when I drive away.
As the light goes, go.  Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from  convention's good graces: learn, or someone  will have you filing files or writing writs,  demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge  door to door; someone might even drop  your lovely life into a factory and have you  derusting rings on the coolant-spouting  turntable of a vertical lathe.  It's best for everyone that what you know  is generally thought of as general knowledge.  You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars,  in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms  where it whispers like a ribbon untying;  you can even find it in schools. But be careful:  it's dangerous, inescapable and exact  down to every atom of everything there is,  to every name each thing goes by and every  law each thing obeys. And the best part is,  you always know more than you know.
Aren't you glad at least that the earthworms Under the grass are ignorant, as they eat the earth, Of the good they confer on us, that their silence Isn't a silent reproof for our bad manners, Our never casting earthward a crumb of thanks For their keeping the soil from packing so tight That no root, however determined, could pierce it? Imagine if they suspected how much we owe them, How the weight of our debt would crush us Even if they enjoyed keeping the grass alive, The garden flowers and vegetables, the clover, And wanted nothing that we could give them, Not even the merest nod of acknowledgment. A debt to angels would be easy in comparison, Bright, weightless creatures of cloud, who serve An even brighter and lighter master. Lucky for us they don't know what they're doing, These puny anonymous creatures of dark and damp Who eat simply to live, with no more sense of mission Than nature feels in providing for our survival. Better save our gratitude for a friend Who gives us more than we can give in return And never hints she's waiting for reciprocity. "If I had nickel, I'd give it to you," The lover says, who, having nothing available In the solid, indicative world, scrapes up A coin or two in the world of the subjunctive. "A nickel with a hole drilled in the top So you can fasten it to your bracelet, a charm To protect you against your enemies." For his sake, she'd wear it, not for her own, So he might believe she's safe as she saunters Home across the field at night, the moon above her, Below her the loam, compressed by the soles of her loafers, And the tunneling earthworms, tireless, silent, As they persist, oblivious, in their service.
A stay of execution: one last day, your day, old Everydog, then, as they say, or as we say (a new trick to avoid finalities implicit in destroyed), you have to be put down, or put to sleep— the very dog who, once, would fight to keep from putting down, despite our shouts, a shoe until he gnawed it to the sole, and who would sit up, through our sleepless nights, to bark away some menace looming in the dark. Can you pick up the sense of all this talk? Or do you still just listen for a walk, or else, the ultimate reward, a car?— My God, tomorrow's ride . . . Well, here we are, right now. You stare at me and wag your tail. I stare back, dog-like, big and dumb. Words fail. No more commands, ignore my monologue, go wander off. Good dog. You're a good dog. And you could never master, anyway, the execution, as it were, of Stay
Trust that there is a tiger, muscular  Tasmanian, and sly, which has never been  seen and never will be seen by any human  eye. Trust that thirty thousand sword-  fish will never near a ship, that far  from cameras or cars elephant herds live  long elephant lives. Believe that bees  by the billions find unidentified flowers  on unmapped marshes and mountains. Safe  in caves of contentment, bears sleep.  Through vast canyons, horses run while slowly  snakes stretch beyond their skins in the sun.  I must trust all this to be true, though  the few birds at my feeder watch the window  with small flutters of fear, so like my own.
Was it because at last I cleaned the window that he threw himself against the glass? I thought, poor crow— he doesn't know the evergreens and blue sky are behind him. I turned back to my page but whumpp— the bird attacked the glass again. His long claws scuffled at the pane and I yelled "Crow! Go away!" Again his body slapped the glass, again and then again, and then at last he caught my eye— oh, prophet, terrified.
For Fred I could pick anything and think of you— This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page. I could choose any hero, any cause or age And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart, Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart As standing in silver stirrups will allow— There you'll be, with furrowed brow And chain mail glinting, to set me free: One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy. This post-postmodern age is all business: compact disks And faxes, a do-it-now-and-take-no-risks Event. Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast, Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host Of daydreams: awkward reminiscences Of teenage crushes on worthless boys Whose only talent was to kiss you senseless. They all had sissy names—Marcel, Percy, Dewey; Were thin as licorice and as chewy, Sweet with a dark and hollow center. Floyd's Cussing up a storm. You're bunkered in your Aerie, I'm perched in mine (Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors): We're content, but fall short of the Divine. Still, it's embarrassing, this happiness— Who's satisfied simply with what's good for us, When has the ordinary ever been news? And yet, because nothing else will do To keep me from melancholy (call it blues), I fill this stolen time with you.
It may be esoteric and perverse  That I consult Pythagoras to hear  A music tuning in the universe.  My interest in his math of star and sphere  Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve.  They don't add up. But if I rack and toil  More in ether than a mortal coil,  It is to comprehend how you revolve,  By formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring.  Dear son and daughter, if I seem to range  It is to chart the numbers spiraling  Between my life and yours until the strange  And seamless beauty of equations click  Solutions for the heart's arithmetic.
Geneticist as driver, down the gene codes in, let's say, a topless coupe and you keep expecting bends, real tyre-testers on tight mountain passes, but instead it's dead straight, highway as runway, helix unravelled as vista, as vanishing point. Keep your foot down. This is a finite desert. You move too fast to read it, the order of the rocks, the cacti, roadside weeds, a blur to you. Every hour or so, you pass a shack which passes for a motel here: tidy faded rooms with TVs on for company, the owner pacing out his empty parking lot. And after each motel you hit a sandstorm thick as fog, but agony. Somewhere out there are remnants of our evolution, genes for how to fly south, sense a storm, hunt at night, how to harden your flesh into hide or scales. These are the miles of dead code. Every desert has them. You are on a mission to discover why the human heart still slows when divers break the surface, why mermaids still swim in our dreams.
A history of some sort, one that made us,  a war and what the war had meant, or since  meaning eludes war, what it did to the look  of the trees and the sides of the buildings,  most of which survived, only to be torn down  later to widen the street or put up a new  office complex. There it was on the shelf.  I was there only a moment, but still,  I wanted to know what happened to the man  in the photograph wearing a flat cap  standing outside the important building  cheering. He was there. He was part of that  moment, one of the first into the streets  when the turn of events came, the declaration  or pronouncement, words that would change  the look of everything he smiled on, words  that may have cost him his life. Here it is  in a book I found on a shelf. The person  who lives here bought it at a library  stock reduction sale. No one had read it.  It looked interesting thirty years ago.  It was practically new, the back uncracked.  But the person did what those before her had,  put it up on a shelf and never found  a way back to it. The history sits there,  unread, unbelievable, somebody else's.  Even I have only looked at the pictures,  at the man smiling between the cold pages.  Maybe ending the world as he knew it  was ok. Maybe it was the only way.  Maybe the world has to come to an end  in the first place to be the world. And the man?  He has to smile, though he knows so little  of what's coming, even looking right at it.  As we do, who still haven't read the book.
Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible. Coming out of the woods, whispering Happily Ever After. Even in that light— stars with the skeletons of animals and old friends— visible to the eye behind the one always left open on the east side of the house, downhill. Where the coffee trees and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie, buried themselves in leaves and left to the sputtering wind of memory. & if that's not enough (he says to himself in the voice of a black-and-white actor whose name is a moth that keeps avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue) to bring you home, well, there it is again, already exhausted by your efforts to make it comfortable enough to stay. Impatient, already headed back down into the woods, whispering Once Upon A Time . . .
I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light! The cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened, blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred— and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.
Protestants pray for grace, Scientists look to space. Jews find truth in the Torah, New Agers, in each other's aura. Catholics are blessed by a Pope, Yaquis enlightened by dope. Maoris use ritual chants, Navahos get up and dance. Muslims bow daily to Allah, Norsemen aspire to Valhalla. Feminists swear by a She, Quakers swear not, silently. Confucians kowtow to ancestors, Hare Krishnas, to airport investors. Hindus revere Lord Brahma, Richard Gere, the Dalai Lama. Baptists believe in the Ark, Physicists, in the quark. Moonies obey Reverend Sun, Mormons say Brigham's the one. Daoists extol yang and yin, Sufis transcend in a spin. Shintos seek peace where it's grassy, Rastas, in Haile Selassie. When we meet in the Afterlife, We can laugh at sectarian strife. But meanwhile back to the wars, 'Cause my God's better than yours.
Whatever it may be, we may suppose  it is not love, for love must leave its trace  like contraband seized and displayed in rows;  is not sufficient reason to erase  the careful lives we have so far lived through—  there is no call for us to undermine  the walls we've built; no need to think anew  of all the chains and choices that define  us still. And yet for all our fine intent  a single touch ignites the night and tries  resolve past all resisting. What we meant  before we mean again; fidelities  have yet been known to shift and come undone  and all good reasons fail us, one by one.
When you are already here you appear to be only a name that tells of you whether you are present or not and for now it seems as though you are still summer still the high familiar endless summer yet with a glint of bronze in the chill mornings and the late yellow petals of the mullein fluttering on the stalks that lean over their broken shadows across the cracked ground but they all know that you have come the seed heads of the sage the whispering birds with nowhere to hide you to keep you for later you who fly with them you who are neither before nor after you who arrive with blue plums that have fallen through the night perfect in the dew
After Heinrich I. F. Biber I What’s unseen may not exist— Or so those secret powers insist That prowl past nightfall, Enabled by the brain’s blacklist To fester out of sight, So we streak from bad to worse, Through an expanding universe And see no evil. On my rounds like a night nurse Or sentry on qui vive, I make, through murkier hours, my way Where the sun patrolled all day Toward stone-blind midnight To poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray At what’s hushed up and hidden. Lacking all leave or protocol, Things, one by one, hear my footfall, Blank out their faces, Dodge between trees, find cracks in walls Or lock down offices. Still, though scuttling forces flee Just as far stars recede from me To outmost boundaries, I stalk through ruins and debris, Graveyard and underground. Led by their helmetlantern’s light Miners inch through anthracite; I’m the unblinking mole That sniffs out what gets lost or might Slip down the world’s black hole. II (ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns) What’s obscene?—just our obsessed, Incessant itch and interest In things found frightful: In bestial tortures, rape, incest; In ripe forbidden fruit Dangling, lush, just out of reach; Dim cellars nailed up under each Towering success, The loser’s envy that will teach A fierce vindictiveness, The victors’ high court that insures Pardon for winners and procures Little that’s needed But all we lust for. What endures?— Exponential greed And trash containers overflowing With shredded memos, records showing What, who, when, why ’Til there’s no sure way of knowing What’s clear to every eye: The heart’s delight in hatred, runny As the gold drip from combs of honey; The rectal intercourse Of power politics and money That slimes both goal and source. What’s obscured?—what’s abscessed. After inspection, I’d suggest It’s time we got our head Rewired. I plan to just get pissed, Shitfaced and brain-dead.
Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night's one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.
After George Herbert This tiny ruin in my eye, small flaw in the fabric, little speck of blood in the egg, deep chip in the windshield, north star, polestar, floater that doesn't float, spot where my hand is not, even when I'm looking at my hand, little piton that nails every rock I see, no matter if the picture turns to sand, or sand to sea, I embrace you, piece of absence that reminds me what I will be, all dark some day unless God rescues me, oh speck that might teach me yet to see.
Put an ear to the light at fall of dark and you will hear nothing. This pale luminescence that drifts in upon them makes a blue bole of their caves, a scare of their scything tails. They tell in the bubbling dark of images that come in upon them when light spreads like an oil slick and sea fans that once were their refuge turn away. Now there is no dark dark enough for their silver tails, scatter of color (like coins massively piling in the lap of a miser) that was, in the day, their pride.How hugely here we belong. This is their song in the silting drift of the reef. They have never seen the moon nor the black scut of night, stars spread like plankton in their beastly infinities.
There is one mind in all of us, one soul,   who parches the soil in some nations  but in others hides perpetually behind a veil;   he spills light everywhere, here he spilled  some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended.   He is in charge of darkness also, also  in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination.   People fucking do so by flicking him  off and on, off and on, with their eyelids   as they ascertain their love's sincerity.  He makes the stars disappear, but he makes   small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars,  in the ommatea of skyscrapers or in the eyes   of sighing lovers bored with one another.  Onto the surface of the world he stamps   all plants and animals. They are not gods  but it is he who made us worshippers of every   bramble toad, black chive we find.  In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes   a clock-like tick-tick when he flies, but he  is not a god. The only god is the sun,   our mind, master of all crickets and clocks.
You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after. Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat— not objectively present at all— and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow: to know if the distance between two things can be leapt. The piano, that good servant, has none of you in her at all, she lends herself to what asks; this has been my ambition as well. Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot whose water comes from far-off mountain springs. Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow, coldly delicious. For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind, not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes. Judgment decrees what remains— the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says, and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children. The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments— judged beetles especially loved by God, “because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender: I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever carries the quail. Yet however much I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you: you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth. When I have erased you from me entirely, disrobed of your measuring adjectives, stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns, when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter— not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter— then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not. As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk, find it sweet.
has crawled out of the ocean to carry us from sleep, like sleep, the gray of outer Sunset portending the gray of inner Sunset. And so on. On the N, one should invent intricate fictions for the lives of the passengers: time is a game. Soon we will be underground. But first, the long lush green of Duboce Park, the happiness of dogs! Good-bye now to their owners eyeing one another. Good-bye to the park's locked men's room, where once a man was found dead, his penis shoved into his own mouth. The world continues, the engine of the world the letter N.
Down in the blue-green water at nightfall some selving shapes float fluorescing, trance-dancing, trembling to the rhythm of theodoxical marching- music that they hear over the mere noise of the breaking tide. Above, stars in certain places; along the shore roads, cars carrying people on uncertain errands, sordid and sacred and all the kinds in between. Halogen-lit, a woman gets down from her all-wheel-drive velocipede, enters through an obeying door a cyclopean store to buy unintelligent fresh fish and other objects whether formerly alive or formerly dead, she comes out again, a poor man calls to her, selling his no-news- paper; the disastrous head- lines smile and nod, they announce the plans of steel patriots and undertakers, ad-men and fallen vice-generals, doping their stolen crusades. But the woman has learned, as I have learned, as all of us must keep learning if we are to be good subjects, how to make of a newspaper the mask of a locust, calmly put it on, and begin once more to eat everything up.
Before my first communion, I clung to doubt   as Satan spider-like stalked   the orb of dark surrounding Eden  for a wormhole into paradise.   God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb,   injected by my dad’s smart shoot.  They swapped sighs until   I came, smaller than a bite of burger.   Quietly, I grew till my lungs were done  then the Lord sailed a soul   like a lit arrow to inhabit me.   Maybe that piercing  made me howl at birth,   or the masked creatures whose scalpel   cut a lightning bolt to free me.  I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed   and hauled around. Time-lapse photos show   my fingers grow past crayon outlines,  my feet come to fill spike heels.   Eventually, I lurched out   to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed,  and sulk around. Christ always stood   to one side with a glass of water.   I swatted the sap away.  When my thirst got great enough to ask,   a clear stream welled up inside,   some jade wave buoyed me forward,  and I found myself upright   in the instant, with a garden   inside my own ribs aflourish.  There, the arbor leafs.   The vines push out plump grapes.   You are loved, someone said. Take that   and eat it.
I see you shuffle up Washington Street whenever I am driving much too fast: you, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack from the slit of your pumpkin mouth, humped over like the eel-man or geek, the dummy paid to sweep out gutters, drown the cats. Where are you going now? Though someday you'll turn your gaze upon my shadow in this tinted glass I know for now you only look ahead at sidewalks cracked & paved with trash but what are you slouching toward—knee-locked, hippity, a hitch in your zombie walk, Bighead?
Each morning in the little white cabin  by the river they woke to a raccoon  clawing under the floorboards or banging  in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.  Instead they said it was a perfect day  to pick blueberries on the hill, or that  a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.  They were beginning to speak not in meat  but in the brown paper the butcher wraps  around it. Brown paper around dirty  magazines. Like dirty magazines, they  only traced the contour of substance: silk  over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over  bone. What's under bone? Marrow? Their forks so  small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell  dolls from animals because the latter  are made of meat. Many eat it, also.  Lions are interesting. Lions don't eat  the flesh of their kills right away, but first  lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched  nearly white. White as the little cabin  by the river they stayed in that summer.  White as the raccoon covered in ashes,  his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.
Daddy goes. Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare into rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow-gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard-cranking and -shifting and backfiring like a gun in his tittie-tan El Camino and parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands and Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine-leaning Vicki against her WIDE-GLIDE Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and LuckyStrike-smoking and Kool only sometimes and penny-pitching and dog-racing and bet-losing cocksuckmotherfuck and pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shootin' the shit and chewin' the fat and just jawin' who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me and whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods.
The generator hums like a distant ding an sich.  It's early evening, and time, like the dog it is,   is hungry for food,  And will be fed, don't doubt it, will be fed, my small one.  The forest begins to gather its silences in.  The meadow regroups and hunkers down   for its cleft feet.  Something is wringing the rag of sunlight   inexorably out and hanging.  Something is making the reeds bend and cover their heads.  Something is licking the shadows up,  And stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in.  Something is inching its way into our hearts,   scratching its blue nails against the wall there.  Should we let it in?   Should we greet it as it deserves,  Hands on our ears, mouths open?  Or should we bring it a chair to sit on, and offer it meat?  Should we turn on the radio,   should we clap our hands and dance  The Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance?   I think we should, love, I think we should.
joy in the day's being done, however  clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists,  the packages nestling together,  no one home waiting for dinner, for  you, no one impatient for your touch  or kind words to salve what nightly  rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling  that one is really as alone as one had feared.  One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy  to see over the strip mall darkening  right on schedule a neon-proof pink  sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth,  cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up  and lit as if by a match struck somewhere  in the throat much deeper down.
I try to think of the cup of a hand,  of legs in a tangle, and not the thistle  though even it, purpled, spiking away,  wants to be admired, wants to say, whistle  a little for me. O every little thing wants  to be loved, wants to be marked by the cry  that brings desire to it, even blue-eyed fly  to the bloated hiss of death. To love is to be remiss:  the horse alone in the wide flat field nods  its head as if the bridle and bit were missed  or mocked; the cow slung with the unmilked weight  of her tremendous teats shoots a look back over her shoulder  at O lonesome me. I want to say to her need  as if crooning could be enough,  sweet, sweet mama . . . truth be told,  the thousand lisping bees to the milkweeds' honey  terrifies me. When the stink of slurry season  is over and the greened fields are slathered, fecund,  overtall foxgloves tip with the weight of their fruit.  Then I dream a little dream of you  and me, curled like two grubs on the top of a leaf  wind-driven and scudding along the lake's surface.  All night we glide to its blue harbor  and back again. The fattened slack of us  singing O darlin' darlin' darlin'.
Sleep, she will not linger: She turns her moon-cold shoulder. With no ring on her finger, You cannot hope to hold her. She turns her moon-cold shoulder And tosses off the cover. You cannot hope to hold her: She has another lover. She tosses off the cover And lays the darkness bare. She has another lover. Her heart is otherwhere. She lays the darkness bare. You slowly realize Her heart is otherwhere. There's distance in her eyes. You slowly realize That she will never linger, With distance in her eyes And no ring on her finger.
Late August was a pressure drop,  rain, a sob in the body,  a handful of air  with a dream in it,  summer was desperate  to paradise itself with blackberry  drupelets and swarms, everything  polychromed, glazed, sprinkler caps  gushing, the stars like sweat  on a boxer's skin. A voice  from the day says  Tax cuts  for the rich or scratch  what itches or it's a sax  from Bitches Brew,  and I'm a fool  for these horns  and hues, this maudlin  light. It's a currency of feeling  in unremembered March.  There's a war on and snow in the   city  where we've made our desire stop  and start. In the dying school of Bruce  I'm the student who still believes  in the bad taste of the beautiful  and the sadness of songs  made in the ratio  of bruise for bruise.
What a fuckup you are.  What dumbshit you do.  Your father's voice  still whispers in you,    despite the joys  that sweeten each day.  Your Genius it isn't  until, dying away,    it worms back through  the sparkling dream  where you drown him  in an inch-deep stream:    your knee in his back,  your strength on his skull,  it begins singing  praise for your skill.
Ghost I house In this old flat— Your outpost— My aftermath
Foreplay of obscene graffiti carved into trees—foot-long boners gouge the bark. Beaks and snouts on a restroom mirror. Slick lips. Succulent lips. I go out among them sometimes. So sweet how they pucker up out of pity. A practiced pathos in a saloon of woodsmen whose axes wait in trucks out back. Lips full of yawn or yes. Lips thick with God-spit and God-suck. Chapped lips, bloody lips. Pierced or tattooed, they pout into view—here to give, willy-nilly, what's been too long held in the body. Something passes across tongues. It sayeth not a name; it taketh everyone's turn. Mute lips of a swift unbuttoner. Mouths fording frothy streams, vaporous bogs. I stumble forth in their midst. Maybe I am out of bread or in a bad place with a book. The streets have an attendant caress. Moon lapping rumor. Fat lip approaches hare lip. There go pasty lips. All are readied as if for a race or to be plucked like rare moths by bright wings from the air. Betty's lips and Bobby's and Bucky's just before the collision and the siren's red wail. Laddy, keep a light on. I may have to come ashore some distance from where I set in.
In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929 Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts outside to the yard and question the sky, longing to have the fight settled, thinking I can't go on like this, and finally I say all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put the smoldering thing out. Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls, tells me they've found melanoma, complains that the hospital is cold, I say God. God, I say as my heart turns inside out. Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck, wipe its face, set it down on the lawn, and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire again, which—though they say it doesn't exist—can send you straight to the burn unit. Oh, we have only so many words to think with. Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone, but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be. You don't want to talk, so you pull out the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up and a voice you love whispers hello.
Not Delft or delphinium, not Wedgewood among the knickknacks, not wide-eyed chicory evangelizing in the devil strip—  But way on down in the moonless  octave below midnight, honey,  way down where you can't tell cerulean from teal. Not Mason jars of moonshine, not waverings of silk, not the long-legged hunger of a heron or the peacock's iridescent id—  But Delilahs of darkness, darling,  and the muscle of the mind  giving in. Not sullen snow slumped against the garden, not the first instinct of flame, not small, stoic ponds, or the cold derangement of a jealous sea—  But bluer than the lips of Lazarus, baby,  before Sweet Jesus himself could figure out  what else in the world to do but weep.
Just then, encountering my ruddy face in the grand piano's cold black craquelure, it conjured the jack-o'-lantern moon dipping up over the roofs of the Tenderloin. Only when I have done with the myths— the inner spill that triggers us to flame, breasts so sensitive a moment's touch will call down fever; the dark sea-lane between limbic squall and the heart's harbour— will I picture you, just beyond innocence, lying stripped by a thrown-wide window, letting the cool breeze covet your ardour.
It was winter, near freezing, I'd walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird. It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. It isn't mine to give. I can't coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.
Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom; though they speak with more than just the season's tongue— the colours that they blaze from the dark loam all have something of the jealous tang of the dead about them. What do we know of their part in this, those secret brothers of the harrow, invigorators of the soil—oiling the dirt so liberally with their essence, their black marrow? But here's the question. Are the flower and fruit held out to us in love, or merely thrust up at us, their masters, like a fist? Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots, granting to us in their great largesse this hybrid thing—part brute force, part mute kiss?
When he had suckled there, he began  to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,  but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet  milk she could not keep from filling her,  from pouring into his ravenous mouth,  and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy  feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was  huge, towering above her, the landscape,  his shadow stealing the color from the fields,  even the flowers going gray. And they came  like ants, one behind the next, to worship  him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was  his hunger they admired most of all.  So they brought him slaughtered beasts:  goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own  kin whose hunger was a kind of shame  to them, a shrinkage; even as his was  beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent.    The day came when they had nothing left  to offer him, having denuded themselves  of all in order to enlarge him, in whose  shadow they dreamed of light: and that  is when the thought began to move, small  at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally,  it broke out into words, so loud they thought  it must be prophecy: they would kill him,  and all they had lost in his name would return,  renewed and fresh with the dew of morning.  Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons.    And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now  at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain,  which never ends, who is the father of that?  And who are we who speak, as if the world  were our diorama—its little figures moved  by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers,  spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history  under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity  that no one any longer wants to see,  excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds  on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace,  who sows darkness like a desert storm,  who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,who touches the hills, and they smoke.
Never mind thick night! Darkness move quick! Madness engulf me like Jacob's coat; colors tighten like sickness 'round me throat. Wha it is do already can't tek back but it still got me a wash me hand til they sour and callus, de visions plaguing de dark a me mind like locust. Me conscience no business dem days when me could grin up and skin teet 1 inna company of great men who smile up smile up wid me an looking fava 2 inna secret eyes an backdoor smiles. I know say woman like me plain wicked an conniving: stinkin' wid ambition, smilin' close against you skin, seeking confession wid de devil. Now so, me lay up inna bed wid death a-write me love letter. Got me a crave colors to soothe me spirit; red never could please me, purple grind like a grater on me cheek, orange sting like a ledda on me hot skin, and white—mek me breast feel weight down wid milk, got me head swirling like inna hurricane. I chew down me bitter nails til I taste de poison1 be insincere; 2 special treatment
Twilight folds over houses on our street;  its hazy gold is gilding our front lawns,  delineating asphalt and concrete  driveways with shadows. Evening is coming on,  quietly, like a second drink, the beers  men hold while rising from their plastic chairs  to stand above their sprinklers, and approve.  Soon the fireflies will rise in lucent droves—  for now, however, everything seems content  to settle into archetypal grooves:  the toddler's portraits chalked out on cement,  mothers in windows, finishing the dishes.  Chuck Connelly's cigarette has burned to ashes;  he talks politics to Roger in the drive.  "It's all someone can do just to survive,"  he says, and nods—both nod—and pops another  beer from the cooler. "No rain. Would you believe—"  says Chuck, checking the paper for the weather.  At least a man can keep his yard in shape.  Somewhere beyond this plotted cityscape  their sons drive back and forth in borrowed cars:  how small their city seems now, and how far  away they feel from last year, when they rode  their bikes to other neighborhoods, to score  a smoke or cop a feel in some girl's bed.  They tune the radio to this summer's song  and cruise into the yet-to-exhale lung  of August night. Nothing to do but this.  These are the times they'd never dream they'll miss—  the hour spent chasing a party long burned out,  graphic imagined intercourse with Denise.  This is all they can even think about,  and thankfully, since what good would it do  to choke on madeleines of temps perdu when so much time is set aside for that?  Not that their fathers weaken with regret  as nighttime settles in—no, their wives  are on the phone, the cooler has Labatt  to spare; at nine the Giants play the Braves.  There may be something to romanticize  about their own first cars, the truths and lies  they told their friends about some summer fling,  but what good is it now, when anything  recalled is two parts true and one part false?  When no one can remember just who sang  that song that everybody loved? What else?  It doesn't come to mind. The sprinkler spits  in metronome; they're out of cigarettes.  Roger folds up his chair, calls it a day.  The stars come out in cosmic disarray,  and windows flash with television blues.  The husbands come to bed, nothing to say  but 'night . Two hours late—with some excuse—  their sons come home, too full of songs and girls  to notice dew perfect its muted pearls  or countless crickets singing for a mate.
Minnesota  snapping turtles  clutched by little cities  are wet busts of moonstone  wreathed in scum,  the gray self sugared,  half a lot  of granite  phlegm stopped  upon a chaise longue,  that incoming  pod of him  dunked,  thorny hooves aswim.  Lichen licked him,  then he quivered  in the stem,  and didactic stoicism stitched  him tight with  a neat twine.  Even when  tapped on the back  by a barefoot tricyclist  with a bulging wheaten midriff,  he does not respond  except that  a flagellant paddling worm  nested in  the necropolis  of his nape twists  in disgust  under the skin,  keeping all the grim social hate  safe  in him.
I have a perfect life. It isn't much, But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive And happy in a vague way: no disappointments On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt; Looking forward in anticipation, looking back In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day. I heed the promptings of my inner voice, And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake Security of someone in the grip of a delusion, In denial, climbing ever taller towers Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom With a secret smile, while all the while Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful And strong becomes an object of indifference Reaching out to no one, as later middle age Turns old, and the strength is gone. Right now the moments yield to me sweet Feelings of contentment, but the human Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name To be forgotten soon, as the things I know Turn into unfamiliar faces In a strange room, leaving merely A blank space, like a hole left in the wake Of a perfect life, which closes over.
The number of corners in the soul can't compare with the universe's dimensions folded neatly into swans. In the soul's space, one word on a thousand pieces of paper the size of cookie fortunes falls from the heavens. At last, the oracular answer, you cry, pawing at the scraps that twirl like seed-pod helicopters. Alas, the window to your soul needs a good scrubbing, so the letters doodle into indecipherables just like every answer that has rained down through history, and you realize, in your little smog of thought that death will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand cranes unfolding themselves and returning to the trees.
In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany
When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when  the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike  When the old year died and the sand walked into  the sea with the neap tide  When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints  clotted and hesitated in the clay When the worry of this undone song unsung so long  so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free
You that I loved all my life long, you are not the one. You that I followed, my line or path or way, that I followed singing, and you earth and air of the world the way went through, and you who stood around it so it could be the way, you forests and cities, you deer and opossums struck by the lonely hunter and left decaying, you paralyzed obese ones who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler and observed me, your bald dog barking, as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line, you are not the one. But you are the one, you that I loved all my life long, you I still love so in my dying mind I grasp me loving you when we are gone. You are the one, you path or way or line that winds beside the house where she and I live on, still longing though long gone for the health of all forests and cities, and one day to visit them, one day be rich and free enough to go and see the restricted wonders of the earth. And you are the one, old ladies fated from birth to ugliness, obesity and dearth, who sat beside my path one day as I flashed by. And you are the one, all tumble-down shacks in disregarded hills and animals the car on the road kills and leaves stinking in the sun.
Featherweight lawn chair, cooler for a footrest, and me a squatter on the landlord's dock where baitstealers teased a thousand times a day until rowdy boats and summer scared them deep. Day and night I snoozed on the porch beneath a filthy orbit of fanblades to the opera of my neighbors fighting and reconciling in the glow of stolen wattage. I saw them swimming once. Maybe naked, judging from their skittish talk, but the water smeared their bodies' pale particulars. It was just me and the Tickfaw River. Me with the taste of a tin can in my mouth, feeling no pain, lighting a cigarette backwards, the Tickfaw tricking me closer and closer with echoes and music out of nowhere. Is it funny that I was too lit to notice twenty-five orange yards of extension cord stretching from my outlet, over the driveway shells, to feed the hungry plug of their deep freezer? Mother would have pitched a fit if she discovered the stash of whiskey in the woodpile, and my father wasn't laughing if he looked down from his company of stars.
Something has to give. We stand above it all. Below, the buildings' tall but tiny narrative. The water's always near, you say. And so are you, for now. It has to do. There's little left to fear. A wind so cold, one might forget that winter's gone. The city lights are on for us, to us, tonight.
People, don't ask me again where my shoes are. The valley I walked through was frozen to me as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc talisman—I'm fine, people. Don't stare at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card— card among cards, card of my number and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of the system, in the beast's belly and up to here, people, with your pity. People, what is wrong with you? I don't care what the sign on your door says. I will go to another door. I will knock and rattle and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere, will put a pancake in my hand. You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies of the blooming stump, I bend over you, taste you, keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning of what you may one day dream an end to. The new century peeled me bone-bare like a first song inside a warbler—that bird, people,  who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Keep this in mind. Do you think the fox won't find your nest? That the egg of you will endure the famine? You, you people born of moons with no mother-planets, you who are back-lit, who have no fathers in heaven, hear now the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned. From your alley. From your car up on blocks. From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple and move out into the studded green lightning. Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dogs of hell not to bust free? Or that because your youth's been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you? If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn— do not confuse me with dawn. Now people, about the shoes: the shoes have no doubt entered the sea and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis. I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least I have something to say. I lay myself down in a pencil of night—no chiseled tip yet, but the marks already forming in the lead.
Sleepless in the cold dark, I look through the closed dim door be- fore me, which be- comes an abyss into which my memories have fallen past laughter or horror, passion or hard work—my memories of our past laughter, horror, passion, hard work. An ache of be- ing. An ache of being, over love. An ache of being over love. Like projections on the screen of the heavy window curtains, flashing lights of a slow-scraping after- midnight snowplow for a moment pulse in this room.
"They won't attack us here in the Indian graveyard." I love that moment. And I love the moment when I climb into your warm you-smelling bed-dent after you've risen. And sunflowers, once a whole field and I almost crashed, the next year all pumpkins! Crop rotation, I love you. Dividing words between syl- lables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter- section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD of some guy with 15 different guitars in his shack with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy! Mexican animal crackers! But only to be identified by what you love is a malformation just as embryonic chickens grow very strange in zero gravity. I hate those experiments on animals, varnished bats, blinded rabbits, cows with windows in their flanks but obviously I'm fascinated. Perhaps it was my early exposure to Frankenstein. I love Frankenstein! Arrgh, he replies to everything, fire particularly sets him off, something the villagers quickly pick up. Fucking villagers. All their shouting's making conversation impossible and now there's grit in my lettuce which I hate but kinda like in clams as one bespeaks poor hygiene and the other the sea. I hate what we're doing to the sea, dragging huge chains across the bottom, bleaching reefs. Either you're a rubber/ gasoline salesman or like me, you'd like to duct tape the vice president's mouth to the exhaust pipe of an SUV and I hate feeling like that. I would rather concentrate on the rapidity of your ideograms, how only a biochemical or two keeps me from becoming the world's biggest lightning bug.
Egg-white house, old ache in the rafters, small as a button but yearning for zero: a sparrow parts the chimney and veers for my face. I wanted my nevers again, my immaculate touch-down to the durable granite of love too heavy to move: this gift, implacable bird's-eye sorrow reared from the original fairy tale's page— I don't like it. I offered no signature, my nature altered, and I'm over my hurricane. Rocking room to room, this bird threatens my gravity, threaded through like a pearl from the evening's stem. Didn't I break all eighty-eight bones of my compass, my wingspan spun from my awkwardness? This bird returns to the shell with monstrous wings, wings clumsy as shovels in a fist of dirt. It's covered with ashes, sloughing off cloud—caught in my hair, brown tumor bulged upside down on the floor to meet the applause: this blessing's too unwieldy. But open one door, one terriblegoodbye, hello—the sparrow flings like a shout for the trees.
The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? You ever seen that kind of black-headed? Blue shine all in it like a crow.
Sheets entangle him Naked on his bed Like a toppled mast Slack sails bedeck At sea, no ballast For that even keel He cannot keep— No steering wheel As he falls asleep
The stars are Although I do not sing About them— The sky and the trees Are indifferent To whom they please The rose is unmoved By my nose And the garland in your hair Although your eyes be lakes, dies Why sigh for a star Better bay at the moon Better bay at the moon . . . Oh moon, moon, moon
The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs on the peg over hers, and he's inside. She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on, buys herself a minute looking for two matching cups for the lime-flower tea, not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze. She talks a wall around her, twists the string tighter around the tea bag in her spoon. But every conversation has to break somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa he sits, warming his hands around the cup he hasn't tasted yet, and listens on with such an exasperating show of patience it's almost a relief to hear him ask it: If you're not using your body right now maybe you'd let me borrow it for a while?
Open the window and you want to fly out, though you never actually do— I think I see you, still there on the ledge, where I've left you. How pulled-awake and flung can one life be? Again I thought, It will end. Again I promised and clung. I learned there that to cling was in my nature. I think I see you, though you flash quickly through the shutter. I think I hear you, though I sleep. Remember this as a bolero, a finite flaring— both the tulip tree burning in full bloom and the weeping silver birch.
My father in the aluminum stern, cursing  another fouled blood-knot: all the shits  and fucks as integral to the art of fishing  as the bait-fish, little silver smelts  I sewed like a manual transmission,  the same inbred order and precision  needling the leader through the ass,  out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril  and back down—suffering as my father suffered  the bastard no-see-ums and the guttering Johnson  the obligatory dud, orange egg-pearls  ballooning from its bust underside, hundreds of duds  like every shit-luck setback that drove us on,  fed by the huge image of everything  we'd never caught, moving in joint blindness  under Munsungun.   And whatever it was  it was the fight that delivered us—a tension  like a sequestered muscle, the line  spooling, unspooling, the holy-shit-  litany pulled from our awed mouths  contracting with distance until a whole  silence surfaced, the viscid, slapping body  absorbing and reflecting raw light  like the bit of cornea above a pupil.  And then his tremendous, decent hands  brandishing an oar-butt; the brilliant lace  of the gills, their crumpled hinge flaring  in bilge water; and the line, whipping  and shuttling, feeding invisibly back,  moving on on Munsungun, sons  survived by the same damn hunt they heired.
You can't even buy a soda. You can only see these things, see a mother steer her son to the car, his head cocked licking his ice cream. Earlier, driving, trying to keep between two cornfields, I couldn't see myself into a map, couldn't be anywhere in it, though I knew all the patient states between us. Pigeons sit high on a mill's peaked roof, spaced even as beads. They can stand that close to each other, but looking at them you wouldn't know it. Would you.
My father drummed darkness Through the underbrush Until lightning struck I take after him Clouds crowd the sky Around me as I run Downhill on a high— I am my mother's son Born long ago In the storm's eye
Of your fate Fast asleep On the bed you made Dream away Wake up late
Taut with longing You must become The god you sought— The only one
—After Robert Pinsky Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener  Of the sealed passageways, so that  Sunlight entering the nose can once again  Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose  Soft hiss sounds like another human being  But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being,  Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber  Of my childhood — as Freud said,  Why are you always sick, Louise? his cigar  Confusing mist with smoke, interfering  With healing—Embodied  Summoner of these ghosts, white plastic tub with your elegant  Clear tub, the water sanitized by boiling,  Sterile, odorless,  In my mother’s absence  Run by me, the one machine  I understand: what  Would life be if we could not buy  Objects to care for us  And bear them home, away from the druggists’ pity,  If we could not carry in our own arms  Alms, alchemy, to the safety of our bedrooms,  If there were no more  Sounds in the night, continuous  Hush, hush of warm steam, not  Like human breath though regular, if there were nothing in the world  More hopeful than the self,  Soothing it, wishing it well.
A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template It begins with unspecified “you” and “we”  raising fists of defiance to the void,  the morning we opened the obituary,  a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed.  These crocodile tears shed in rhyme,  in an age too commercial to care,  recall how we met the first time  and the feisty old trooper you were,   you were,  what a feisty old trooper you were:  the snook you cocked at convention;  writing only when the muse was near  your solitary published collection,  Parnassus—A Calling Not a Career,  we reviewed and/or said we admired:  its allusions to myth, its classical power  we found “inspiring” if not “inspired”  and “important” as a euphemism for “dour,”   for “dour,”  important to find euphemisms for “dour”;  your committee work; your taste in shoes;  your alcoholism and/or love for jazz;  your appetite for social issues  that none of the young crowd has;  your impatience with those smart alecks  who expect to have and eat their cake,  and some daringly inverted syntax  the occasional end-rhyme to make,   to make,  occasionally an end-rhyme you’d make;  your insistence upon a thing called “craft”  (perhaps you meant margarine);  how establishment critics originally laughed  at your pamphlets from the Slovene;  how you very nearly popped your clogs  as we fought to get your name cleared;  you were our stag set upon by dogs,  indestructible in duffel coat and/or beard,   your beard,  the indescribable duffel coat and/or beard;  your years of silence and/or second wife  whose whereabouts remain uncertain;  a paean to your flowering late in life  in some council flat in Suburbiton  and your dab hand with a hoover  seasoned with the odd gratuitous clue  (much as we champion your oeuvre)  that we’re better writers than you,   than you,  we’re better writers than you;  the valedictions when last we met—  “Shut the door, comrades, adieu”—  however innocuous when said,  now seem prophetic: you knew;  your despair and/or your courage;  a warning for our planet and times  culminating with a rhetorical flourish  that pans out along these lines,   these lines,  that pads out along these lines:  Something something something world,  something something something grope.  Something something something unfurled,  something something something hope.  Something something something dark,  something something something night.  Something something something lark,  something something something light.
It’s like being lost  in the forest, hungry, with a  plump live chicken in your cradling  arms: you want to savage the bird,  but you also want the eggs.  You go weak on your legs.  What’s worse, what you need  most is the companionship,  but you’re too hungry to know that.  That is something you only know after  you’ve been lost a lot and always,  eventually, alit upon  your bird; consumed her  before you’d realized what  a friend she’d been, letting you  sleep-in late on the forest floor  though she herself awoke  at the moment of dawn  and thought of long-lost  rooster voices quaking  the golden straw. She  looks over at you, sleeping,  and what can I tell you, she loves  you, but like a friend.  Eventually, when lost  in a forest with a friendly chicken  you make a point of emerging  from the woods together,  triumphant; her, fat with bugs,  you, lean with berries.  Still, while you yet wander,  you can not resist telling her  your joke:  Guy sees a pig with three legs,  asks the farmer, What gives?  Farmer says, That pig woke my family from a fire, got us all out.  Says the guy, And lost the leg thereby?  Nope, says the farmer,  Still had all four when he took a bullet for me when I had my little struggle with the law.  Guy nods, So that’s where he lost his paw? Farmer shakes  it off, says, Nah, we fixed him up.  A pause, guy says, So how’d he lose the leg? Farmer says, Well, hell,  a pig like that you don’t eat all at once.  Chicken squints. Doesn’t think  it’s funny.
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known. I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.
Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this  barnacled pod so pales  next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales  that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss  except that there  was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells  silently, sans the heraldry of bells,  neatly, sans an astrological affair,  and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—  an encrusted school of twenty-four  Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door  and barely half-alive.  Oh, you can bet  I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in  there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din  of all things oceanwise and wet,  but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite,  salt-water-logged spirals,  every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial  mollusks shut tight—  no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps,  no coral corpus,  no porpoise purpose  except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps.  A fine Christmas gift indeed, this  obscure migration,  this half-dead conch confederation  which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish—  a fine set of unwrappable presents  and no receipt by which I could redeem them.  I lifted one up by its stem  and thought of how, by increments,  all twenty-four  must have lugged those preassembled bodies here  sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,  to my drasty stretch of shore.  And, no other explanation being offered for the situation,  I thought that I might understand  how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land  was a sort of evolutionary one—  misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late,  a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy  demonstration of how history,  even in the world of the invertebrate,  repeats itself—breaker  crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War  coming after Gulf War.  O Maker,  there is so much slug inside these shells,  here, at the end of December,  at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.  Miracles sell well,  but Lord, it can be numbing  to a people who cannot  tell between a second nature and a second thought,  a second chance, or a second coming.
Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed, held on under ten tons of polar ice, established themselves in dense salts and acids, survived eating metal ions. They are more committed than oblivion, more prolific than stars. Far too ancient for scripture, each one bears in its one cell one text— the first whit of alpha, the first jot of bearing, beneath the riling sun the first nourishing of self. Too lavish for saints, too trifling for baptism, they have existed throughout never gaining girth enough to hold a firm hope of salvation. Too meager in heart for compassion, too lean for tears, less in substance than sacrifice, not one has ever carried a cross anywhere. And not one of their trillions has ever been given a tombstone. I’ve never noticed a lessening of light in the ceasing of any one of them. They are more mutable than mere breathing and vanishing, more mysterious than resurrection, too minimal for death.
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.  So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?  And how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.  And should I then presume?  And how should I begin? Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;  That is not it, at all.” And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say:  “That is not it at all,  That is not what I meant, at all.” No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool. I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Some species can crack pavement with their shoots  to get their share of sun some species lay  a purple froth of eggs and leave it there  to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti  some species though you stomp them in the carpet  have already stashed away the families  that will inherit every floor at midnight  But others don’t go forth and multiply  as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo  their keepers watching in despair or those  endangered species numbered individually  and mapped from perch to oblivious perch  For weeks the world it seemed was plagued  with babies forests dwindling into cradles  rows of women hissing for an obstetrician  babies no one could feed babies received  by accident like misdirected mail  from God so many babies people hired  women to hold them babies babies everywhere  but not a one to name When we got home  the local news showed us a mother with  quintuplets she was suckling them in shifts  a mountain of sheets universally admired  a goddess of fertility her smile  could persuade the skies to rain Her litter  slept ointment-eyed in pink wool caps while Dad  ran his hand through his hair thinking maybe  of money as he stood surveying his  crowded living room his wealth of heartbeats  Pizza and pop that night and there unasked inside  the bottlecap was Sorry—Try Again you set it down and did not speak of it  the moon flanked by her brood of stars that night  a chaste distracted kiss goodnight that night  your body quiet having spilled its secret  your palms flat on your belly holding holding  Forgive me if I had no words that night  but I was wondering in the silence still  begetting silence whether to console you  if I consoled you it would make the loss  your loss and so we laid beside ourselves  a while because I had no words until  our bodies folded shut our bodies closed  around hope like a book preserving petals  a book we did not open till the morning when  we found hope dry and brittle but intact
With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird  watched my grandfather during the Great Depression  use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields  knowing this world is just one pig after another  in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,  shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope  terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup  of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer-  blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking  and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly  until he died more naturally of cancer  too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters,  masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers  the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls  is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction  so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy  his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus,  the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird  is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart,  I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.
I Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen  sniffing Mrs. Yapp’s squab pies. His hunger  makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp  twenty years ago when she was a bouncing Evelina  and I delight to see them there, Comstock and Mrs. Yapp,  in the creaking steaming kitchen of darkly scarred wood  beside the great black doubtless clang of the stove  being human, in 1836, in the sure conviction  that the human had better be fed. The pies bubble up—  apples, bacon, onions, brown sugar and breast of pigeon—  “A cork’s no good without the bottle, Mrs. Yapp!”  She grins and kicks his shin and I turn the page.  II It’s actually not a very good novel—  over-invested in local color... And the same may be said about thee and me,  in 2036, by the Supreme Kakutani.  III Oh, once there was a lad named Marky  who loved on his bread excessive cheese;  oh, to write bright comments in a book’s margins was for him quite larky  and his daughter referred to an elephant when she heard him sneeze.  Ah, he felt the human mattered keenly, all un-cut and un-dried,  though to the gods our tumult may seem a paltry flap—  it was a human, after all, wrote Hardy’s “Hap”... This Marky lived a while, my braves, a while and then he died!  Honor the cork of Comstock and the pies of Mrs. Yapp.
Never the bark and abalone mask cracked by storms of a mastering god, never the gods’ favored glamour, never the pelagic messenger bearing orchards in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom or valor or cunning, much less hunger demanding vigilance, industry, invention, or the instinct to claim some small rise above the plain and from there to assert the song of another day ending; lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked in the clamorous public of the flock so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals, faces shining with oils of their many miles, where it hops and scratches below the baggage carousel and lights too high, too bright for any real illumination, looking more like a fumbled punch line than a stowaway whose revelation recalls how lightly we once traveled.
Finally, I gave up on obeisance, and refused to welcome either retribution or the tease of sunny days. As for the can’t-be- seen, the sum-of-all-details, the One—oh, when it came to salvation I was only sure I needed to be spared someone else’s version of it. The small prayers I devised had in them the hard sounds of split and frost. I wanted them to speak as if it made sense to speak to what isn’t there in the beaconless dark. I wanted them to startle by how little they asked.
I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powder- bitterness, the red combustion, my life, sinceanemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.
Beginning on a line by Silvio Rodríguez How will it taste—the beer the gravedigger  will drink after bestowing your dirt coat?  What will he say—you keeled the outrigger  too south, & when the breakers rolled, no boats  heard your Mayday? & will he ask his friends  at the bar—if someone calls a Mayday  & there is no one at the other end  of any radio, did Kevin A.  González really exist? O second  person, what would you do without you? Where  would Kevin A. González hide? Our bond  is over. The red of the rockets’ glare  has faded. Your grave has been dug. Gone too  are the days when I tried to speak through you.
Here comes the wise man in the story of sick times,  telling you how to find the passage of satisfaction.  He is many million years old and has been walking  many thousand miles, more miles, more lengths of road  than the shrunk-up earth of these days possesses,  to find you. He has a veda from before creation  to sing you and, lo and behold, it is about you,  it means everything to you. Though they’ve made a rope  out of rough, heavy smoke, like a whale-thick hawser  for a steamer of dead star, and pulled it through you  from throat to crotch, from ear to ear, and hag-tied  your hands and feet with the ends, though each of them  has your own face molten with leprosy,  though your brain makes the sound of crowded trains  colliding in Kashmir and a stadium that roars hosanna,  it is still possible now, in the next moment, to know God.  That is, not die in confusion. But maybe, then, this guru  is too soon. Maybe he hasn’t come from far enough.  Maybe he’s still much too young. Maybe he’s never  asked himself clearly what happens when someone like you  hears that a lightning-opened living fig tree or a mountain  and a blue sky can be lived in and sets out  on the long road never moving from his realm in pain.
At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.  They coined the motto Each one Teach one. In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners  Address them always as “Profesor.”  Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I  Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say. Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination  That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.” The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost  Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups. “The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not Worship our ancestors: we consult them.”  Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving  Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.  Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2005  Still nothing finished among the descendants.  I support the War, says the comic, it’s just the Troops  I’m against: can’t stand those Young People.  Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.  Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.  After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror  Said she just couldn’t vote to convict a pastor.  Who do you write for? I write for dead people:  For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.  “The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back.”  But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper  And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.  Old Aegyptius said Whoever has called this Assembly,  For whatever reason—it is a good in itself.  O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth. There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real. Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear  Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.  No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:  Otherwise he would not have written those poems.  I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.  Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.  Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,  In Afghanistan. In Guantánamo he was isolated.  Our enemies “disassemble” says the President.  Not that anyone at all couldn’t mis-speak.  The profesores created nicknames for torture devices:  The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.  Not that those who behead the helpless in the name  Of God or tradition don’t also write poetry.  Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.  Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.  What could your children boast about you? What  Will your father say, down among the shades?  The Sangomo told Marvin, “You are crushed by some Weight. Only your own Ancestors can help you.”
We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. —James Deetz 1 Yes. So we must reconnect ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,” and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet, chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth, hominy pottage, also squirell. Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash of white meat [cheese] and a motley collation of eel leavings, a fine samp, and a roast Fowl. Worshipp first, then after—butter Biskuits! David Ignatow: “seeking transcendence but loving bread” 2 And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction, as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics” and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated “reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope. In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread that resurrect the goddess and allow her to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell. We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing. “A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake: An Analysis” ... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot, in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620, a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped their spirits that night, from three fat Geese and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes. 3 And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink, untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,” reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information, not the paper”... everything e-storaged now. A thousand years of pages, pffft: dismissiveness as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes, easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge, occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation of native archeological remains,” and we mean human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin. I died. And I was stolen into a land of strangers—of not-the-People. I floated all day, many days. And here the ribs of my cage were empty: always I was hungry, for the things that People need. But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil, of the People; and I was restless, I had no one for between my legs, and no drum in my chest. There was much war from this: the People desired me back, they said “this one is part of many-ones,” and after words and words, their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered. 4 “When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa. There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper. Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter. Cheerfull Winter. Oceanus Hopkins. Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich. Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field. Pandora Sparrow. Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule? And who could wish to let go of this life when faced by Countenance Bountie?


The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.
We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so many people live in fear these days they drove up all four of them in a small car nice boy they said beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I was outside digging up the garden no one home I said what are you selling anyway I'm not interested I said well you have a nice day they said here's our card there's a phone number you can call anytime any other houses down this road anyone else live here we'd like to talk to them about living in fear
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.  Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,  Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes  And putting things away. And remembering ... Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
I  The spider expects the cold of winter. When the shadows fall in long Autumn He congeals in a nest of paper, prepares The least and minimal existence, Obedient to nature. No other course Is his; no other availed him when In high summer he spun and furled The gaudy catches. I am that spider, Caught in nature, summer and winter. You are the symbol of the seasons too.   II  Now to expatiate and temporize This artful brag. I never saw so quieting A sight as the dawn, dew-clenched foot- Wide web hung on summer barn-eaves, spangled. It moves to zephyrs that is tough as steel. I never saw so finely-legged a creature Walk so accurate a stretch as he, Proud, capable, patient, confident. To the eye he gave close penetration Into real myth, the myth of you, of me.   III  Yet, by moving eyesight off from this There is another dimension. Near the barn, Down meadow to shingle, no place for spiders, The sea in large blue breathes in brainstorm tides, Pirates itself away to ancient Spain, Pirouettes past Purgatory to Paradise. Do I feed deeper on a spider, A close-hauled view upon windless meaning, Or deeper a day or dance or doom bestride On ocean’s long reach, on parables of God?
The accumulation of reefs piling up one over the others like thoughts of the sky increasing as the head rises unto horizons of wet December days perforated with idle motions of gulls . . . and our feelings.   I’ve been wondering about what you mean, standing in the spray of shadows before an ocean abandoned for winter, silent as a barque of blond hair.   and the way the clouds are bending, the way they “react” to your position, where your hands close over your breasts like an eyelid approving the opening of “an evening’s light.”   parasites attach themselves to the moss covering your feet, blind Cubans tossing pearls across the jetty, and the sound of blood fixes our eyes on the red waves.    it is a shark!   and our love is that rusted bottle . . . pointing north, the direction which we turn, conjuring up our silver knives and spoons and erasing messages in the sand, where you wrote   “freezing in the arctic of our dreams,” and I said “yes” delaying the cold medium for a time while you continued to “cultivate our possessions”   as the moon probably “continued” to cradle. tan below the slant of all those wasted trees while the scent carried us back to where we were:   dancing like the children of great diplomats with our lean bodies draped in bedsheets and leather flags while the orchestra made sounds   which we thought was the sky, but was only a series of words, dying in the thick falsetto of mist. for what can anyone create from all these things:   the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves burning in the hollow brick oven, oceans which generalize tears, it is known to us   in immediate gestures, like candle drippings on a silk floor. what are we going to do with anything? besides pick it up gently and lay it on the breath   of still another morning, mornings which are always remaining behind for one thing or another shivering in our faces of pride and blooming attitude.   in the draught of winter air my horse is screaming you are welcoming the new day with your hair leaning against the sand, feet dive like otters in the frost   and the sudden blue seems to abandon as you leap. O to make everything summer! soldiers move along lines like wet motions in the violent shade’s reappearance.   but what if your shadow no longer extends to my sleeping? and your youth dissolves in my hand like a tongue, as the squandered oceans and skies will dissolve into a single plane   (so I’ll move along that plane) unnoticed and gray as a drift of skulls over the cool Atlantic where I am standing now, defining you in perhaps, the only word I can.   as other words are appearing, so cunningly, on the lips of the many strips of light. like naked bodies stretched out along the only beach that remained, brown and perfect below the descending of tides.
Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort  of stopgap doorstop for those  quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.
Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.












The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.
We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so many people live in fear these days they drove up all four of them in a small car nice boy they said beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I was outside digging up the garden no one home I said what are you selling anyway I'm not interested I said well you have a nice day they said here's our card there's a phone number you can call anytime any other houses down this road anyone else live here we'd like to talk to them about living in fear


Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort  of stopgap doorstop for those  quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.
Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.